Job's children

"Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" wrapped up today, with a festival of student creative projects. I was touched by several which mourn Job's lost family, who vanish as collateral damage in most tellings. (Students may have been responding to a scene of burial in Diane Glancy's Island of the Innocent.) 

Especially exquisite was a hand-printed booklet with a "Liturgy for Sleep and Survival," the prayers Jehorah, wife of Job, said each night for each of her lost children as if nothing had happened, tucking each child into bed as she had the night before, and the night before, and the night before that. Each prayer is a kind of dance evoking the personality of the child, the movements described like ritual instructions, and often illustrated with a long exposure of the artist performing it. Here are a few:

What a pleasure, what a privilege, to be able to teach such students.