What Can We Learn From Job’s Suffering? — Augustine on Patient Endurance
⏱ 14 min read
You have lost more than the manageable version of loss. Not one bad season but three bad seasons stacked, not one grief but the kind of compounding griefs that arrive within months of each other and leave you, by the end of the year, sitting in a quieter house than the one you lived in twelve months ago. A diagnosis followed by a job ending followed by a parent’s death; or an estrangement followed by a financial collapse followed by a faith that has gone strange to you; or the slow loss of a marriage on top of the slow loss of a body on top of the slow loss of a future you had counted on. And the inside of you, when the third loss arrives, no longer sounds like the women in the trial-and-hope devotionals. The inside of you sounds like a man sitting on an ash-heap with broken pieces of pottery, scraping his sores, with three friends who do not know what to say.
That is the inside of Job. The book named for him is the longest sustained meditation in scripture on what happens to a soul that has lost everything and is still trying to be honest with God about it. What can we learn from Job in the Bible is, in part, this: the suffering did not require him to understand it before he worshipped through it. He worshipped first. He understood — or stopped needing to understand — much later. Augustine, who wrote Confessions across the long pastoral grief of his middle years, returned to the patient endurance of Job so often that the vocabulary of waiting on God under loss shapes whole books of his Confessions. This is the slow reading of two passages from that book. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Job was probably a chieftain in the land of Uz, somewhere east of Israel, in the time of the patriarchs. The book opens with a portrait of his prosperity — seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred she-asses, a household so substantial that the narrator calls him the greatest of all the men of the east. By the end of chapter one and the early verses of chapter two, all of it is gone. The oxen and asses, taken by raiders. The sheep, struck by fire from heaven. The camels, taken by another band. The sons and daughters, killed in a single afternoon when the house they were gathered in collapsed in a windstorm. And then, after a short interval, Job’s own body — covered with sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
His response to the first round, before the body was touched, is the verse most people remember. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. It is the patient-Job verse the sermons quote. The longer book that follows is the harder, less-quoted reality: forty more chapters of Job sitting on the ash-heap, sometimes blessing, sometimes lamenting, sometimes accusing, sometimes silent, in a conversation that lasts months and ends only when God Himself speaks out of the whirlwind.
What the suffering actually was
The suffering Job was carrying was not, finally, the suffering of the loss itself. It was the suffering of the theological loss — the discovery that the framework he had been using to explain the world no longer worked. Job’s friends offered him the framework as a consolation: suffering comes from sin, repent of the sin, restoration follows. Job knew the framework was wrong because he knew, in the honest interior accounting only the sufferer can do, that he had not sinned in a way that warranted what had happened. The framework’s failure was the deeper suffering. He had lost the children; he had also lost the model of the universe that would have explained why he had lost them.
You will recognise the texture. The first loss is the actual loss. The second loss, which arrives weeks later, is the loss of the story you had been telling about how the universe worked. The story collapses. The friends arrive with the old story. The friends mean well. The story does not fit the actual shape of what has happened to you, and the inability of the story to fit the shape is its own quiet grief on top of the original one.
Augustine, sitting in Milan in his thirties after years of his own piling losses — the death of a close friend, the slow grief of leaving the mistress who had been his partner for fifteen years, the death of his mother Monica in the harbour town of Ostia — wrote one of the most often-quoted sentences in Confessions:
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it twice.
The phrase that does the work for the sufferer is Thou madest us for Thyself. Augustine is not offering a consolation to the grief. He is offering a relocation of where the grief was always pointing. The losses Job suffered — the children, the herds, the body — were unbearable in part because each of them had become a small for-Thyself in his life. The children were what life had been for. The herds were what work had been for. The body was what the days had been for. The losses dismantled the for. Augustine, gently and devastatingly, would say: the for was always meant to be God Himself. The other things were good gifts; they were never the for. The restlessness Job felt at the loss was, in part, the soul’s slow, painful re-discovery that no created thing — even a child, even a body, even a life — is the for the heart was made for.
(If the long slow work of sitting with a loss whose framework has collapsed has been your shape, what does the Bible say about purpose walks Augustine on the restless heart in companion to this passage. And if the loss has begun to question even the basic categories of meaning, what does the Bible say about heaven walks Augustine on the eternal city, while what does the Bible say about demons walks Augustine on the adversary — the figure who, in Job’s own opening chapters, requested the right to test him.)
This is the part that is hardest for the sufferer to hear, because it sounds, on first reading, like a correction. You should have been loving God more and the children less. That is not what Augustine is saying, and not what the book of Job concludes. The children were rightly loved. The body was rightly enjoyed. The herds were rightly tended. The point is not that Job was wrong to have loved them; the point is that the love of them was always, underneath, supposed to be a small participation in the love of God, and a loss that strips the participation reveals what was under it the whole time. The losses are dismantling. The dismantling is also — and this is the slow consolation — the uncovering of the for. Job at the end of the book has been uncovered. The losses did the uncovering.
The second passage: the long-suffering quiet
“These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the phrase holdest Thy peace. Augustine is naming the most difficult thing about Job’s experience, and about yours: the silence of God during the worst of the suffering. The book of Job runs to chapter thirty-eight before God speaks. That is thirty-seven chapters of friends, accusations, defenses, laments, theological arguments, and the slow internal disintegration of a man on an ash-heap — and the silence above all of it. The silence is not absence. Augustine is precise: Thou seest. The seeing is constant. The speaking is held back. The holding-back is not abandonment; it is, in Augustine’s vocabulary, long-suffering.
Long-suffering is a word that has gone slightly thin in modern Christian usage. It does not mean willing to put up with annoyance. It means, more strictly, the willingness to remain in a long suffering alongside the one who is suffering. God’s long-suffering, in Augustine’s reading, is not the patience of a distant judge waiting for sinners to repent. It is the patience of a Father who is present in the silence, seeing every part of the suffering, withholding the speech because the suffering has not yet finished its work. The silence is not God’s distance. The silence is, in some hard-to-receive way, God’s with-ness in a form the sufferer cannot yet hear.
For Job on the ash-heap, the silence was the part that ached most. The losses he could lament. The body he could scrape with the potsherd. The friends he could argue with. The silence was the thing that did not give him anything to push against. Augustine, who sat through his own long stretches of divine silence, names what was true underneath: Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace. The seeing is the consolation hidden in the silence. The peace is held not because nothing is being given but because the speaking has not yet ripened. When it ripens — at the end of chapter thirty-seven, when the whirlwind begins — what comes out of God’s mouth is not an explanation of the suffering but the largeness of the One who has been holding His peace all along. Job is not given an answer. He is given a presence. The presence is the answer the soul needed; the explanation it had been asking for turns out to have been the wrong request.
A pause, here, for the body
The teaching has a body to it. The long-suffering soul holds its waiting in the diaphragm and the lower jaw — the small chronic tightness of a woman who has been holding her body in a braced for the next bad news posture for months. Pause now.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let your jaw release — not by trying to relax it, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold it set. Put one hand lightly on your diaphragm, just below the lower ribs. Take one slow inhale. Notice whether the diaphragm moves under your hand, or whether the breath rises only into the upper chest. If the diaphragm has been held still — which is common for the woman who has been carrying a long suffering — let it begin to move with the next inhale, by a small amount. The breath does not have to be deep. It has only to find the diaphragm again.
That small re-finding of the diaphragm under your hand is the body’s translation of long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. The body that has been bracing for further bad news has stopped breathing into the lower belly because the breath has been held in the upper chest, ready to react. The long-suffering soul that begins to receive God’s silence as with-ness rather than absence begins, slowly, to breathe into the diaphragm again. The breath is not the consolation. The breath is the body’s acknowledgment that the bracing can stop, that the silence is being held by a Father who sees, that the peace held by Him is not the same as the peace withheld from her.
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional is built around this kind of slow daily un-bracing. One page each evening, a short verse, room for the honest sentence, no demand to produce the praise the dry season cannot honestly give yet. The woman who has been on the ash-heap for months does not need a journal that asks her to bless the Lord she has been struggling to feel. She needs a journal that holds her in proximity to His seeing while she waits for the whirlwind to speak.
The third passage: trembled for fear, kindled with hope
“I trembled for fear, and again kindled with hope, and with rejoicing in Thy mercy, O Father; and all issued forth both by mine eyes and voice, when Thy good Spirit turning unto us, said, O ye sons of men, how long slow of heart?”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it three times.
This is the most piercing of the three passages, because of the verbs in sequence — trembled, kindled, rejoicing, issued forth. Augustine is describing the slow oscillation of a soul who has been long in the silence and is beginning, at last, to hear the Spirit turn back toward her. The trembling is not gone. The fear is not gone. Beside them — not replacing them — a kindling has begun. Hope is kindled: a small flame at first, easily extinguished by a draft, that lives next to the fear rather than displacing it. Augustine is careful: he does not say the fear left and the hope came. He says I trembled and again kindled with hope. Both are present. The trembling and the kindling coexist.
For Job at the moment the whirlwind begins, this is exactly the inner experience the text implies but does not state. The friends have stopped speaking. The ash is cold. The voice begins — Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? — and Job, who has spent thirty-seven chapters demanding to be heard, is given a Speaker who does not answer the question Job asked but instead fills the room. The trembling does not go. The fear does not go. Something kindles beside them. The Spirit turning unto us. The slow rising of a hope that does not have to make sense of the suffering before it can quietly come back.
All issued forth both by mine eyes and voice. Augustine is naming the physical sign of the kindling — tears and speech. The sufferer who has been silent for a long stretch finds, at the moment the kindling begins, that the body resumes its outflow. Tears come, after the long dryness. Words come, after the long muteness. Job at the end of the book speaks his final, smaller sentence: I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. The repentance is not for sins he had committed; it is the smaller, deeper repentance of a soul who has met the One it had been arguing with, and discovered that the One is larger than the argument and gentler than the framework had implied. The kindling has reached the eye. The dust and ashes are no longer the symbol of his loss; they are the seat from which he sees.
What patient endurance actually is
What can we learn from Job in the Bible, taken across the full arc, is not a model of stoic suffering. The stoic-Job reading misses what the book is doing. Job is not patient because he does not feel the loss. Job is patient because he refuses to leave the ash-heap until God speaks. The patience is the staying. The patience is the chapter after chapter of I will speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God. The patience is the willingness to remain in the place of the suffering, without the explanation, until the One who sees decides to speak.
This is the slow gift the book of Job offers the modern woman who is several losses into a season she did not choose. You do not have to feel patient to be patient. The patience is not a feeling. It is the staying — the choosing not to leave the relationship with God just because the silence is long. The bargain Job’s wife offered him — curse God, and die — is the exit. The book is about the woman who does not take the exit. She remains. The remaining is the patience. The remaining is what eventually, in His timing, opens to the whirlwind speaking.
And what is in the whirlwind is not the answer to her question. What is in the whirlwind is the One whose presence is larger than the question. The relocation is the gift. The question was the wrong size. The presence is the right size. The patient endurance Augustine writes about, with eight centuries of pastoral reading of Job behind him, is the slow standing in the relationship until the relationship enlarges the questioner past the question. Job at the end has not been given his framework back. He has been given something larger than the framework — a God whose largeness re-orders what he had been asking for.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the long-suffering heart in proximity to the One who sees and holds His peace, until the whirlwind speaks and the kindling rises beside the trembling.
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional carries Augustine’s slow vocabulary — long-suffering and plenteous in mercy, holding His peace while seeing, the kindling beside the trembling — into a daily companion built for the woman whose losses are, at last, ready to be held by a presence larger than the framework.
