Australian Bushfires, Cormac McCarthy, and Job

I've spent the last few days working on a seminar paper that is a reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in light of the Book of Job. The task involved reading a very dark and depressing novel as well as a troubling biblical text. I finished it today at the school and thought, Well at the least the world is not as dark as McCarthy or Job seem to think; reading their struggles in the cold and dark make the world look brighter.

Then I came home to find that a my wife had been on the phone with a friend who had lost a baby and with another friend living in Australia where bushfires have killed over a 100 people, destroyed over 1ooo homes, and completely wiped out several towns and villages.

Margaret Avison, in her poem "Confrontation and Resolution, in Job," writes:

Hard-won are the words
we need to truly
converse with someone close
and yet mysterious to us.
(Avison 126)

I thought these words while I sat with my wife, unable to say them as comfort. I thought of all the words I put together carefully in my seminar. I thought afterwards of the ariel shots of the bushfires I looked up online. I read a section from McCarthy's novel again:

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The night dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle." (McCarthy 273)

And, here, now, I don't want to be too dark or gloomy but I think I have to go back and rework my seminar. Because Job and McCarthy aren't just there to show us, by stark constrast, how different our world is from theirs, but how their world is our world - and that there is an incarnate presence of grace herein. McCarthy's protagonist, in the midst of a burned highway (that very well could be a description of highways in Australia), looks up at his son and sees something holy in his child. Job cried out from an ash heap, screaming "I know my Redeemer lives!" Even though his world had been destroyed.

And, curiously, I just received Comment magazine in the mail: the Signs of Hope issue. And I read the bit by Cal Seerveld: "My own hope is a plodding, quiet, steady awareness of God's providing enduring grace through thick and thin en route during my life" (25). And I'm not quite sure what to make of all this coming in a whirlwind all in a day but it has.

I think I will feel Job's gravity more tomorrow when I deliver the seminar... and, I hope, God's grace. Right now my prayers are with a grieving family close by and with those in Australia who are beyond grief.