09/02/2026
Death of a Child By Robert R. Barr
The Word of God to Us:
[A messenger] came and said [to Job], "Your sons and daughters... are dead. ..."
Then Job . .. said, ".. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." [Job 1:18-21]
Meditation:
The night we were told that our first child, Katharine, was dying. and I was sitting beside her just watching her breathe, just watching her sleep . .. a terrible thought occurred to me.
I had tried to imagine not having her. But I had found that impossible. Life without Katie was literally inconceivable for me.
We're all born to die, of course, I reasoned. But not like this! Not like this! Katie is too young!
But that was not the "terrible thought I've said I had.
After I had tried unsuccessfully to imagine Katie gone, I decided to try to reconcile myself to this terrible impending trial by praying.
And the first thing that came to mind in this vein was what Job had said when he had lost his children: "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away." Might I not be able to bring myself to this attitude?
And I prayed those same words within myself.
But when I tried to go on with "Blessed be the name of the Lord," I had the awful thought I said I had. After praying, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away," I screamed inwardly: "The Lord is an Indian giver!"
Now I ask you: Is that any way to talk? I don't mean about God, I mean about Indians. I now confess my awful thought publicly on this page, and I ask forgiveness of Native Americans, as well as of all other persons who read this, for my insulting, and untrue, racist thought. Of course (and I know the reader is already thinking this) it's not a very good way to talk about God either. And for the same two reasons: it's insulting to God, and it's untrue.God does not take back gifts. This is ... "theologically impossible."
Carl Jung, the founder of depth psychology and Freud's great co-pioneer in the discovery of the unconscious part of our minds, observed: This prayer of Job's - attempting to justify God's taking back a gift! - is surely, at least on an unconscious level, insincere. It's wishful thinking, Jung points out. Job knows there's something wrong somewhere, somehow. But he doesn't want God to know he suspects it's something wrong with God! So he forces a kind of silly grin and simpers, "The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD".
Think about it for a moment. If a human being did that - gave a gift,
and then took it back - we would be absolutely disgusted! Well, then, why is it suddenly all right for God to do?
The answer to this question is very simple. It isn't all right for God to do.
Why does God do it, then?
The answer to this question is just as simple. God doesn't.
No, when the eternal God, who has promised us a perfect existence, gives a gift ... that gift is forever. And this includes, especially, the gift of persons.
If a person whom I have lost is necessary to my perfect existence .. then I am guaranteed the return of that lost person, in virtue of the divine promise to fulfill my being utterly.
(Here, just parenthetically ... I have had a foretaste - just the faintest glimmer - of what it will be to receive once more, in the next life, someone whom I love and have lost in this life. As it happened, Katie did not die. This time. I got her back. In this life.
For the time being.)
The notion that God could give a gift and then take it back - and especially the notion that this is all right for God to do! - is a superstition. Divided up into syllables, the word "super-stition" means a "sur-vival." a residue, a leftover, a holdover. And this supersitious belief that God might take back a gift is precisely that: a holdover from earlier times, when God or gods were conceived "anthropomorphically" _ as mere superhumans, thus freighted with all of our human pettiness, vindictiveness, and selfishness. In fact - after all, they were superhuman - some gods were worse than we!
Perish the blasphemous thought, then, that it is God who has taken this child whom you mourn. No, it is disease or an accident or Some other evil that has taken this child. God is good and only gives - never takes.
I had not learned, the night I sat at Katie's bedside, what I know now: that Job was not being honest, or at least he was not being honest with himself. I thought that Job's prayer was in the Bible because it was a good prayer to say. Now I know I was wrong. Job's thought - that God takes back gifts, and that this is all right - is in the Bible for our faith reflection. And it is our reflective faculty, in the light of faith, that we have tried to exercise during this meditation.
No, the Lord gives indeed, but does not take away. God, my Best Friend, is all good. God has promised me a perfect existence, and I know with the certitude of divine faith that God will keep that promise.
And if my perfect existence, or the perfect existence of those who love this child who has died, requires her presence - then I can be absolutely certain that God will bestow that presence. And nothing will ever take it away again.
