My very own Leviathan
Posted on 25 November 2011, 4:58
I’m flying out to New York today to stay until next week, so on the tube out to Heathrow I read some chapters from the book of Job, as I’m sure everyone does.
It could be worse. A few years ago, I was flying out of La Paz, Bolivia, one of the highest airports in the world, and as the plane lumbered endlessly down the runway to the point where all the passengers lost hope that we would ever leave the ground, I caught sight of a man a couple of rows in front, head bowed over a book. Reassuringly, he was reading the words of the funeral service. I wonder if that comes as standard on Bolivian planes.
The book of Job was the first book of the Bible I ever read for myself as a teenager and I’ve ever since been a fan of its crackling final chapters, where God puts on a display of his powers for Job that is reminiscent of the ‘ignore the man behind the curtain’ scene in The Wizard of Oz.
I don’t really approve of the chapters (Job 38-42) as in them God makes Job shut up about his suffering by bullying him into submission, but the poetry remains intensely beautiful and I find the overall point, that we humans should be properly awed in the face of mystery and immensity, a good thing to ponder. Especially when boarding a plane weighing hundreds of tons which will shortly launch itself and me into nothing more than thin air.
So, on the tube, reading the King James version on my iPhone, God asks Job (and me) his series of impossible questions.
Can I lift up my voice to the clouds and bring forth rain? Have I entered into the treasures of the snow? Do I know the path to the houses of light and darkness? Can I command lightnings that they may go and say to me, ‘here we are’? Have I given the horse its strength and clothed its neck with thunder? Have the gates of death been opened to me?
Well, no. And in these moments of quiet before flying, I can only bow to the truth that my life, which in an everyday light seems to be in my control, is actually held by powers much bigger than me. I must use all my human skill to understand them, but in the end, I have to accept my place at the atomic level of everything that is.
At the airport, at Gate 19, I enter my own Leviathan. It’s not like Job’s monster, whose nostrils poured forth smoke and whose face was like doors no one could open. My Leviathan has broad wings and a round belly, and hundreds of tiny windows, and wheels on which, impossibly, it rolls and runs and throws itself into the sky. It’s no less mysterious to me than Job’s fabulous creature as it rides high above the Atlantic deep.
‘He maketh a path to shine after him,’ says God about Job’s Leviathan. As does mine, all the way to JFK.
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