Kincora Hostel
Mile 407
Not long ago, I remembered a critic saying that Hurt, as sung by Johnny Cash, was the song sung by God to Christ on Gethsemane. The funny thing about this memory is that it is a false one. I later went to the critic's article and found no such comment. I probably liked the article so much that I associated it with an idea I had about the song. Not unusual at those times when I could hear the fuses in my mind blowing.
This interpretation of "Hurt" casts an interesting light on the book of Job as well. Just because God is testing you does not mean that he is going to stop. If God is making you hurt, there is no guarantee that it is ever going to stop, or even that God will ever repay you for your efforts. "I will let you down . .", he sings.
As with most things, this complicates the relationship between God and The Adversary. The origins of the word Satan (as I remember, since I can not look it up on the Internet at this time) is related to the root for Titan- as well as other culture's elder gods-, from "tester" in Indo-European (literally, the anvil of earth against which sky-gods smash things to see if they break). Satan tests Job's faith by bringing hardships; how does the God of "Hurt" challenge Christ's faith in his own fate? And if the Satan of Job is challenging faith at the behest of Jehovah, who is the God of "Hurt" working for?
In full-blown Gnostic wackiness, the God of Hurt is working for himself, trying to subvert the universal personal salvation that Christ represents. By downplaying the meaning of existence, i.e., by reducing all existence to himself, the God of Hurt wants to make personal salvation irrelevant. Ah, gnostic weirdness. Esoteric religions can suck you in, like all good conspiracy theories.
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