I tormented your father Job.
I was jealous of his trust that the ways of that God of Abraham and Jacob though unexplained are always just.
Your father doubted yet never once cursed God and came to consider his fortunes restored – just in ways different from what had gone before.
I was banished from the company of heaven to wander like a goat through the deserts of Canaan and then this way and that way upon the face of the whole earth.
I have been beside each one of you three daughters of Job – sometimes a lizard on the ceiling of your laboratory, sometimes a snake in your pages of research.
I have tempted you to find the causes of suffering though they are multiple, unyielding.
Some tell of a Behemoth in the Persian marshes, imagine a Leviathan in the Syrian sea, but you, you watch how the wind withdraws and advances, how the severed tree sprouts new branches; concerned with the eagle, even ostrich and lark you have opened up your own hearts; and you have studied your enemies, like the Chaldean armies who would burn your markets, tear down your temples, pillage your vineyards and palaces.
You have studied well, daughters of Job, this is your beauty and it's given me faith.
Now look up with me at Orion and Pleiades, notice that even death has observable places, stitches on the ruffled blanket of time.
Tomorrow our children could be refugees washed up on a foreign coast of Edom but we must believe in the possibility of welcome, that as hands push through sand, as eyelids open, sunlight will pattern the calmness of the ocean as it did in those moments we may never understand when the majesty of all this life first began!
Now, like your father Job, I do not curse God for I know that the universe, elaborate and complex, is not ruled by his whim but by cause and effect and yet, even through the closing eyelids of dusk, there is nowhere so dark that God's love cannot find us.