The Scarlet Letter
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
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"Zophar the Naamathite enters upon the scene after Job had denied his guilt with a vehemence which seemed to demand a more direct rebuke from his listeners; but Zophar is hardly fitted to do it, for, with intellectual gifts of a high order, he has a bluntness of speech which will rouse the worst feelings in Job. He is just the man to take a hammer and hit a nail on the head, but the last person to do a delicate piece of moral surgery--probe a sensitive conscience, remove the source of irritation and tenderly bind up the wound." That’s what Minos Devine said.
Many of us respect the Zophar types among us but very few have any real affection for them. There’s always the thought nibbling at the edges of our minds that he might come after us one day and if he did we’d find it hard to bear. We like our critics to be gentle. In fact, we don’t like our critics much at all. We could well live without them. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said he liked criticism of his work when it took the form of three hundred pages of closely reasoned and well argued adulation.
But like them or not we need them because some of us all the time and (I suppose) all of us some of the time will just not pay attention to people who "almost say something." If it is bitter medicine we must take then we ought to take it in one big spoonful—down the hatch, no sipping the foul-tasting but healing concoction. We will shout no hurrahs for blunt people like that that relish their work but we may live long enough to thank God for them, that someone had the courage to take us by the lapels and make us hear life or death, disease or health instruction.
I confess I lack that healthier capacity to confront. I must be forced into confronting or I tend to try to dodge the obligation. When it comes down to it I do it, you understand, but it’s a serious challenge for me. I have a friend who is very good at it and can minister to people in that way without exulting in the pain it often generates in the person rebuked. There were times when someone I knew needed to be chastised and I was unable to do it that I enlisted my colleague’s assistance (I can assure you it was all quite proper). It was most often because I was close to the person and was his or her chief source of affirmation. Sternness from me would have seemed to them to be a physical assault on their person and I couldn’t do it. But they would have expected it from my friend so it wouldn’t have been so traumatic and they would have given heed. At least this is how I excused myself and most of the time I believed I was doing what was best for them. But I had my moments of doubt, regarding myself as gutless and feeling guilty as well.
Then I read Paul Tournier, the famous European psychologist, a man I respected deeply, confessing the very same thing. He too had a colleague whose temperament and giftedness enabled him to speak very sternly without being "over the top" and Tournier would call on him for assistance. That consoled and assured me. It might have meant that there were two gutless people in the world but while I could think that of me I couldn’t think it of Tournier. Even as I express these thoughts I think how self-serving my "scheming" might have been since it meant that Jim (me) was protecting himself ("Jim is such a gentle person, isn’t he?" they would say of me). And they might have thought of my friend as a hard man ("—— is always telling someone off, isn’t he?"). But I’m willing to live with the inner tension because I think God uses our differing temperaments for different jobs. Maybe even in the spiritual and emotional we should know not to use a scalpel to open a packing case or a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
