"Look at the wild things"
Offering for July 7, 2026
Dear Reader,
In last week’s newsletter, I transcribed a portion of my notes from a slow re-read of theologian Catherine Keller’s interpretation of Job, including her argument that the Old Testament tragedy is actually comedy. In the newsletter, I complained about not being able to access a full essay I’d referenced—on comedy, by playwright Christopher Fry—because it was behind a paywall, and someone sent me the full version (thank you so much again). So I got to read all of Fry’s three-and-a-half pages, and it felt at least a little comedic that from outside the walled garden I imagined the place bigger than it turned out to be. Or, more than three-and-a-half pages at least. But it’s a beautiful short piece of writing nonetheless, and I’m grateful to have been let inside.
Fry wrote that the difference between comedy and tragedy was that of intuition and experience. The intuition of comedy may not expose the founding conditions of existence in the same way experiencing tragedy does, but for Fry that did not make it less important. Comedy had special value, especially when “being realistic” meant rejecting all that was not quantifiable, or where pressure prevailed to attend to catastrophe only. Joy, of course, matters too. And the joy of “unmortifying” oneself, the task of Fry’s comedic characters, was not about being naive or dismissively bright-siding, but a “hard-won maturity of delight…active patience declaring the solvency of good.” Which leads us back to the story of Job, which Fry argues “is the great reservoir of comedy.”
The obvious problem with the interpretation that Job’s patience is proof that good always prevails if we are steadfast is that there’s no actual correlation between redemption and patience. Redemption—whatever that is—often seems more up to chance; it happens for some and not others, and much of the time is not for lack of trying or endurance when it does not. In some contexts, like when you are grieving the death of a loved one, or experiencing the aftermath of a traumatic event, or both, the ideal of redemption is pushed past the limits of its coherence. As theologian Shelly Rambo has written in her book Spirit and Trauma:
“If redemption is depicted as a happy or victorious ending in which life wins out over death, or in which death is somehow concluded/ended, such a depiction runs the risk of glossing over a more mixed experience of death and life1.”
So, for me it is always a relief when a reader of Job is less interested in his happy ending than the story’s many other interesting details. Keller is interested in the relational shift that unfolds between Job and God, for example, as Job calls God down to earth in his torment and forces an interaction that, prior to that, had been somewhat detached. Keller also wants to mind how the story is comedy, and to do so cites people like philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote that for something to make us laugh it has to be “close at hand,” and that “all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity.”
So much of Job’s lamentation unfolds in this gap that he’d never questioned before, between him and God. He’d assumed his many blessings to be the workings of an all-powerful God, so when his world filled with curses it all stopped adding up. Job demanded an explanation, but God was nowhere to be found. And he wondered, in the way that C.S. Lewis wondered after Joy Davidman died:
“…where is God?…go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence...There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean?”
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