And His Grief Was Very Great

Psalm 140, 142 • Psalm 141, 143: 1-11 (12)
Job 2:1-13 • Acts 9:1-9 • John 6:27-40

Recently, while participating in a small play reading group, reading Archibald MacLeish's mid-century hit, J.B. – a modern retelling of the story of one of our readings for today, Job – my mind fell back sixty years to my first semester at Franklin and Marshall College, to our homecoming weekend, when my friend Peter Noble was killed in a car crash. Another student had been driving and had tried to pass coming up a small hill on one of those winding Lancaster County two-lane highways and had smashed the car headlong into an oncoming truck. In those days before seat belts, Peter and the driver died instantly. A third student had managed to leap into the back seat and survive, with bones shattered all over his body. By my junior year this survivor was finally deemed well enough to come back to school, and I felt lucky to get to know him.

That homecoming weekend and the week that followed were the most miserable time of my four years at F & M, and equally miserable for many others. Wrapped up in my grief, I was unfriendly and sullen with my date , and I never called her again. Looking back, I can only excuse myself in the words of the Psalm 143, “My spirit was overwhelmed within me,” and I apologize, sixty years late, to her and to God. But something good happened. The college organized a memorial service, and Peter's rabbi came down from New York to preach. With him came Peter's parents. The rabbi summarized and read from the book of Job and explained the same lesson that Job learned from God: we were never going to get any explanation for our loss, but that God was great, he was with Peter still, and he was with us now. We didn't get an answer from the rabbi – no more than Job got from God –, but his compassion, and the love and compassion he conveyed from God, eased our grief.

It has taken me sixty years to realize what a sacrifice and a kindness it was for Peter's parents to come all that way to share their grief with us confused boys. Late, very late, I express my gratitude to that good rabbi and those good parents of Peter Noble.

Written by John Tabb DuVal

John requests prayers for his wife, Kay, who by this time will have undergone surgeries on August 7 and August 14, both of which were postponed from mid-March because of the Covid-19 shutdown.