Job and Ezekiel

Lets just pretend for a moment that we are blindly ignorant, that we have no sense of reason and that there is no path to life for meaning. We are just robots functioning, moving from point A to point B, in a lifeless gesture of existence. We are fed, famous, financed and fondled. Everything that is necessary for a happy and successful life is already demonstrating in our lives and there is no cause for concern. This is the life of Job up until the question/doubt moment. But the plot thickens and Job, harkens to doubt, questioning his righteousness and forcing his awareness to rise up (or go deeper introspectively---which ever suits you). It is this moment that alters his experience.
As children, maybe up until the age of six, we really don’t have a sense of need. Our parents have supplied us with those things that have given us the ability to have a high sense of satisfaction and security (though we might now know this at this age). We go on about our days with our ritualistic performances, playing, bathing, eating, sleeping, and feeling secure in our family unit. (Can you see any resemblance to Job?) A young consciousness, obeying the ritual and sacramental laws just as the child obeys the order and directives of the parents (up to a certain age). Then all of a sudden, what is it in the child that pushes him/her into that stage of inquiry? Or that stage that appears to be rebellious? Is it anger? Not usually. Is it self-esteem? Not typically at the age. Is it hatred? Life has been good up to now. So what is it?
Well, Bildad offers us a key: “the great desire of the partially awakened intellect to contend and strive for that which appears right to it…” But hasn’t the child felt fulfilled, satisfied? Something shifted. “the judgments and decisions are being founded more in outer appearances than in Truth.” The child is starting to have more thoughts of its own, seeking desires that can no longer be satisfied with the status of the norm that the parents provide. There is a longing for deeper satisfaction, something internal is rising up to meet normality and questioning its relevance. So what happens?
Satan happens. The state of mind of the child has shifted away form the parents and has begun to believe in its own sufficiency independent of its creative source---the parents! This Satanic event is common place within each of us just as it was with Job. The desire to move beyond the status quo and to create or achieve greater, whether that be in consciousness or in effect (same thing right?) the puffed up sense of ego steps forward. But something typically happens at this stage…the temptation has a foe!
Zopar shows us where we have limited thoughts. Here we have our own doubts and how those doubts are propelled by imaginary reasoning. This opponent we face is enraged (just like our parents get at this point when we seek our independence) and hostile, quick to point our every flaw the error of the child’s ways, however, as reasonable as Zopar may be, the child cannot understand his faults while the parent is pointing to what is wrong.
Why does Job act this way? What course of reasoning does he take? He points to stars, and speaks of the heavens and of the power of God. Here is what is most important is that something has awoken with him. He cannot see the Truth as of yet, but he starts to get some awareness (which is why he begins to tell his friends how they cannot know his pain). He has “a faint awareness of the Truth that God is always brooding over the earth and bringing about the fulfilling of the natural processes” and this is what begins to bring him some satisfaction and his mind begins to move away from his condition.
But does he recant?
Only after he sees the light and believes that others may suffer if he comes into his enlightenment. His saving grace is that he loses his self-pity and calls for God to be graceful and merciful to his friends (those thoughts about himself that compelled him to doubt---his three friends).
The story is really about us having compassion and demanding that forgiveness be enforced within the individual consciousness. It is about growing into the right-full stage of seeing that no suffering should be imposed by us or by our thoughts toward any one thing. It is Keren-happuch! We are using the “elevating power of light” seeing “spiritual beauty”, and knowing the “Truth”, that all Life is “a beautiful soul expressing in a beautiful character.”
For me this is great in the intellect, but it is more difficult to practice. I find the ways of Job a continual process for me as I move towards greater revelation of what ministry holds for me and what I hold for it in my consciousness. Being a minister is a huge call, and is something that calls me to compassion and integrity, to being that center for Spirit to emanate and express through meunencumbered. I seek for Jobs daughters to have a larger expression in my consciousness so that I may be “refined and established in the true Christ righteousness.”

Ezekiel is a crazy discourse of constant “on this day the Lord said that to me.”
This Lord that I sense here is really the same battle that Job was having. Job had all the despair and nothing changes here except for the receiver. Who is God mad at? Why all this judgment and destruction? What is the purpose of the foretelling of doom?
I find myself unable to understand much of what is in Ezekiel because it is scattered and is not timelined in a reasonable fashion. But I can look up the words, the names. What do I find?
It all deals with the errors of thought! Darkened consciousness not yet brought to the light. Desires! Woah! I always thought God is in favor of our desires…that it brought pleasure to the soul of man to express God through our desires. These people were destroyed for their desires. They weren’t worshiping correctly. But if God is an unconditionally loving God, would it really need our recognition? No it must be some petty egotistical, miniscule proto-power incapable of knowing anything other than itself. (just a play on words there but maybe you can find the simile).
We serve our thoughts about a thing. The message is the petty desires of the flesh, and those of the argumentative mind (the mind that wants to argue for its limitation), is what leads us astray (out of our sense of wholeness and completeness). It really doesn’t matter what we think, or what we desire, it only matters what we think about those things and those thoughts that really determine if we are serving God or serving man’s image of himself/herself. I know we talked about this in class, “whom will you serve today?” I believe the follow up to that would be, “Man cannot serve two masters, either he will love the one and hate the other…” and I believe that Ezekiel is really trying to tell us to get with the program.
So to move away from the metaphysics of it and to move toward the relevance for me is, “Am I all the way in or all the way out?” There is no half-stepping to ministry! The power of God within me is that capable success, that wisdom to provide, that energy to ensure, and that love to always deliver the light where there appears to be darkness.
I get that our bodies must be well maintained and that our minds must be filled with the Spirit of the Divine, and the ongoing practice of meditation and prayer, mixed with a vision for a world that works for everyone, is mandatory. I see the importance of always testing the word that I hear against some sacred text to find its validity, and that all there really needs to be is imagination to create the new.
I can’t say as yet that I can imagine what ministry I may proceed with, but what I can say is that I am quite certain God has some genius within us all, and that we all possess some gift that the world has been waiting for, and when we give it, we shall rebuild the temple and re-establish the Holy City.