Weeping at Night, Waiting for Light

I have been reflecting on these things this week, the penultimate week in the Christian season of Lent, the forty days of sober reflection and repentance leading to Easter. It has been a week in which all the hardness of life has, once again, come crashing into my consciousness. On 12 March, the president pardoned […]

I have been reflecting on these things this week, the penultimate week in the Christian season of Lent, the forty days of sober reflection and repentance leading to Easter. It has been a week in which all the hardness of life has, once again, come crashing into my consciousness. On 12 March, the president pardoned one of Nigeria’s most corrupt politicians. Last Sunday, a pastor in my church told of an EYN (Ekklesiar Yan’Uwa Nigeria) church Gwaza in Gav, Borno State that had been attacked the previous Sunday, 10 March. The pastor’s son was killed, and the church looted and burned. Yet the attacks in Borno are so frequent that it didn’t even make national news. The attack comes after a February EYN report posted on the Church of the Brethren website that shows that at least 14 EYN churches have been burnt and at least 137 EYN church members killed since 2009. This data represents only a fraction of others killed by terrorism in the region: both Muslim and Christians. After church, I received word that a brilliant, funny, and sweet former schoolmate of mine had been killed in a freak accident the day before. She had finished her PhD and married only a few years earlier. The news left our extended network of schoolmates and relations devastated. This personal tragedy was followed up on Monday by gut-wrenching news of the bombs in the Kano car park, which AP reports left over 41 dead, and attacks on schools in Maiduguri, killing several teachers and wounding several students. This school invasion follows another attack on a Kano primary school on 12 March.
I have whole series of articles lined up for this column, on literature, libraries, and reading culture.  But this week, it seems only appropriate to mourn, once again, so many senseless deaths, so much needless violence, to cry out as the Biblical character Job did, “Where then is my hope? […]I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer,” (17:15, 30:20) to cry out like Jesus did on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).
There has been so much tragedy over the past year that I think most of us have become numb. We step over the bodies and keep going. But every once in a while something touches you, the death of someone you know, the news of children targeted and attacked. In these times, the evil of this world envelops you in its horror, and you just want to lie down and let the tears empty you.
It is in this time that I look for scriptures that remind me how humans survive. The beauty of the Bible for me is that it is a document that spans a history of thousands of years, and encompasses dozens of genres. The books within record the sufferings of humans throughout time. The fall into despair in the darkness of night and the release into joy in the light of the morning is an archetype found over and over again in the Bible. It’s ok to cry, it’s ok to groan, we have been doing it for millennia. 
The biblical book of Job is written in the form much like a play that tells the story of a good man who loses his wealth, his ten children, even his own health. Finally, he is plagued by “comforters” who insist all of his suffering must be his own fault. As he questions God, he begins to see human life in the context of eternity.
“There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths. When daylight is gone, the murderer rises up and kills the poor and needy; in the night he steals forth like a thief. […] For all of them, deep darkness is their morning; they make friends with the terrors of darkness.”
Yet such evil men “are foam on the surface of the water; […]The womb forgets them, the worm feasts on them; evil men are no longer remembered but are broken like a tree. They prey on the barren and childless woman, and to the widow show no kindness. But God drags away the mighty by his power; though they become established, they have no assurance of life. He may let them rest in a feeling of security, but his eyes are on their ways. For a little while they are exalted, and then they are gone; they are brought low and gathered up like all the others; they are cut off like heads of grain” (24:13-24)
Job comes to trust that, in time, God will “redeem” his suffering, even when he does not understand: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another.” (19:25-27). While he cannot control what happens to him, he acknowledges that “The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.’” (28: 12-28)
The lessons Job learns are repeated throughout the Bible. King Solomon writes “Since no man knows the future, who can tell him what is to come? No man has power over the wind to contain it; so no one has power over the day of his death” (Ecclesiastes 8:7-8) He laments “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless,” yet like Job he concludes “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (11:8, 13-14). Although we may never completely understand why we suffer, we keep doing what we know is right, knowing that, as Martin Luther King once said, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
The prophet Jeremiah writes “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him” (Lamentations 3:19-24)  King David writes: “weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
Christians believe that the cycle of death and resurrection found throughout the Bible was embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In that moment nearly two thousand years ago, the entire universe was “surprised by joy” as C.S. Lewis puts it: overcoming death with life, conquering night with day. It is this hope then that I remember when the days are their darkest. The morning will come. We do not know when, but we wait, pray, hope.