Sweet Caroline

The sunbeams off the lake streamed through my sister’s veil, as she danced. Near sunset that kind of light is Rumplestiltskin, spinning everything into gold, and this evening did not disappoint. The watery light lit her dress, the twinkling decorations, the smiles on friends’ faces, and our father’s red-white hair.

Very light blond, he calls it now, but that’s clearly a subterfuge.

My sister picked “Sweet Caroline” for her father-daughter dance. Not because it’s a great song, exactly, but because Dad had it as part of his beloved Neil Diamond cassette tape collection when we were young. It brought back road trips spent hitting intentionally terrible notes on Cracklin Rosie, riding the oddly comforting melody of Song Sung Blue, and singing out the promise of Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.

Every time the song came to the chorus, the whole lodge full of guests sang along:

Sweet Caroline (BOM BOM BOM)

Good times never seemed so good…

I’d be inclined (BOM BOM BOM)

To believe they never would…

Dad stomped his feet on every BOM BOM BOM, and Mom quietly remarked to me that he was going to need a whole bottle of Tylenol to get him back into shape after dancing like that. It was joy, pure joy, and then the contingency of this beauty stabbed me in the heart.

Someday, Dad won’t be here to dance to Neil Diamond. This moment is glory, but it can’t last. We’re given these sunlit slices of heaven, but while I hold in my heart the promise of resurrection, for now those slices fade away as the sun goes down.

That’s life, though. We’re all, what, one phone call away from devastation? One car wreck? One diagnosis? One unanticipated email?

I had the honor of presiding at the wedding. I used a service that my sister and I wrote together, stocked with timeworn phrases and words we weighed and found apt:

As Christ has loved you, love one another…

Wear these rings seriously, and with good humor, and with great expectation…

This is also a time for each of us to reflect internally on our own covenants of love…

With God’s help, loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know,

I am yours forevermore.

Before the couple on hewn benches were embodied stories of spouses who were living out their promise to support each other in sickness and in health and all the rest, stories of broken and beautiful relationships of all sorts, stories of children raised and children lost and children flown, stories of loneliness and nights of weeping and sometimes, triumph in the end.

These are stories of the joy a person can know only when they’ve stared down sorrow, when they’ve made their peace with the places in their own soul that will always be tender in response. And there they were, despite all that grief, to celebrate this new couple starting out on the humble path of marriage.

I’ll admit, the sight of so much love made my tongue slow on some of the phrases.

Joy has this sneaky way of reminding me how close we live to the edge of disaster. It breaks my heart wide open, so that I know on a cellular level the worth of what I’m celebrating- and the pain that I’d feel were it to be lost.

Job was a man, you know, who knew from suffering. He had ten children, all of whom were taken from him in one day. He also lost sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys, and his own good health, but let’s do him the service of believing that the children are what he’d grieve the most.

Ten children, gone in a day.

All of this, of course, is narrative setup for considering the question of suffering. Job is totally innocent, but still pain and sorrow rise over him like a flood. How can a just God let this happen?

Job’s friends, after sitting with him quietly for a week, present him with the absolute best theological explanations for his suffering. They’re air-tight arguments regarding God’s goodness and justice and wisdom. Job, in turn, curses the day he was born, blames God for all the evil in the world, and demands an opportunity to face the Almighty Creator in court to prove his innocence.

God does show up for his in-person audience with Job, unlikely as that might seem, but he doesn’t have any interest in answering the age-old question: why do bad things happen to good people?

Rather, God takes Job on a tour of the mystery and wonder of creation: the laying of earth’s foundation, the storehouses of snow and hail, the chains of Pleiades and Orion’s belt. God ignores Job’s predicament entirely, offering him instead the chance to marvel at the mountain goats and the wild donkeys and the soaring eagle, and even the ostrich about whom it is said: God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense. Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider.

Job never gets an answer to the question of why good people suffer. What he’s given instead, though, is achingly precious: the invitation to enjoy the world anyhow.

In other words, Job’s story asks us to develop the wisdom to change the question. Why do we suffer? is a question with no good answer, and it leads to despair. The wise ask, instead, how do we continue living in the face of suffering?

God wraps up his visit to Job by saying that Job had been righteous, even though he said terrible things about God in his pain, and that Job’s friends needed to apologize, even though they were saying things that you could flip a few pages over and find right in the book of Proverbs.

Then, the odd little ethical experiment is over, and Job has a choice to make. He can let his experience of suffering turn him inward, refusing risks and playing it safe in order to ensure that he never experiences pain like that again.

Or, Job can acknowledge the reality of suffering but choose to live anyhow.

“The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part,” we read at the end of the book. “He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. And he also had seven sons and three daughters.”

How much courage did it take, for Job to have children again? Ten children torn from him, and here he holds the eleventh and twelfth and thirteenth in his trembling arms. Imagine the tenderness with which he would press his lips to their downy heads, knowing so deeply that they could be gone in a heartbeat.

Nothing forced Job to open himself again to so much pain. But Job saw God face to face in the midst of his own suffering, and he saw from the constellations in the sky to the silly ostrich running wild just how gracious the world is, and in light of that beauty he chose not to close himself off from love. That’s what wisdom looks like, in practice.

And when I hurt, hurting runs off my shoulders

How can I hurt when I’m holding you…

There on the edge of Lake Ontario, we had a moment of joy- one perhaps not unlike the parties that Job’s children used to throw. Everyone was beautiful, and everyone was singing, and yes, tomorrow it could all slip away. Next week, it could be gone.

Eventually, it will be gone, of course. The waters may rise, reclaiming the beach and the lodge and the little clearing by the lake where my sister and her husband made their vows. In any case, our children and great-grandchildren will no more remember my sister’s magical dance than I can remember our own great-grandmother’s wedding day.

What do we do, Friends, facing the assurance of loss? How do we live?

We put on music, and we proclaim with our voices and our souls and our bodies that love is always stronger, and we pass this bold jubilation to the next generation. We sing louder. We dance harder. We love better, and we hold each other close.

The joy of the Lord is our strength. In the face of suffering, we dance on.

Julie Rudd is a recorded minister in Wilmington Yearly Meeting and pastor of Wilmington Friends Meeting. She lives in Wilmington with one husband, one dog, three cats, seven chickens, and innumerable half-finished crochet projects.

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