Re-reading Job: Entertaining Spiritualities of Suffering

What does it mean to "entertain suffering," that is to hold, maintain and keep suffering as a guest with a certain amount of hospitality? This essay considers what can be learned about the spiritual significance of suffering from reading the book of Job as "an entertainment," a sustained exercise in holding fast to suffering. Both within the book of Job itself and throughout the long commentary tradition that emerged from it, one often senses a refusal or unwillingness to entertain suffering, an impulse to couch it in mitigating theological or spiritual language. This essay asks instead what it might mean to learn to become hospitable to suffering.