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The Hedge, the Leviathan, and the Mystery of Suffering

The Hedge, the Leviathan, and the Mystery of Suffering

Last updated on: June 29, 2026 at 1:13 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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The Hedge, the Leviathan, and the Mystery of Suffering 2026-06-29T13:13:25-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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a hedge of roses growing on a fence

image via Pixabay

I met the man as Adrienne and I were running out of the house to run errands, before we had to pick up Michael from work.

He was walking in front of the house with a group of people I didn’t know, and he slowed down when I came out. I thought he was just going to say “hello” and move on, but he stopped.

“Hello! I’m just out here with my church, prayin’ over the neighborhood,” he said pleasantly. “We do it every Friday night.”

In Steubenville, the Catholics are called Frannies, because of Franciscan University. Frannies tend to be middle or upper class. They speak with a neutral American accent and careful diction. The Protestants are called Townies. They speak with a harsh and scratchy, Pittsburgh-flavored northern Appalachian accent. Townies say things like “yunz” and “ain’t,” and swap out the i-n-g at the ends of verbs for an n-sound. By his speech, man was a Townie. Even though Catholics also take prayerful walks around LaBelle, asking for a blessing on the neighborhood, I would have known he attended the local white Evangelical Protestant church even if he hadn’t said the name of it next.

“It’s a ministry of such-and-such church just down that way.”

Glancing at Adrienne, who was smiling impishly at me from the other side of the car, I said I knew the place.

The man asked if there was anything I wanted prayed for.

“Well, I guess you could pray for our finances. You know it’s hard for the whole country right now.”

I didn’t expect that he would pray right there in the street. Standing at a respectful distance, the man reached his hand out over me and said a standard Evangelical invocation, addressing “Father God” in Jesus’s name and asking a “hedge of protection” around my pocketbook in that syncopated, Protestant staccato. I thanked him very much as he went on his way.

Adrienne didn’t start with the teenage eye rolling until we were both in the car.

“You shouldn’t make fun of other people’s religion,” I scolded, smiling a little in spite of myself. “He was trying to be nice. He WAS being nice! That was kind of him. For all I know, God will listen. We sure could use it.”

Adrienne goes to the public school, where the teachers are of many different faiths but a lot of the students are a certain stripe of Evangelical Protestant, so we’ve had talks about their theology. At choir practice recently, a gaggle of sopranos were all squeaking about the Rapture and getting “left behind,” which is why Adrienne and I had a talk about the fact that the Rapture, which isn’t in the Bible. Neither is Sola Scriptura or the Prosperity Gospel, and we talked about that as well. This time, I wasn’t sure whether a “hedge of protection” was in the Bible or not.

“It’s one of those things Protestants say and Catholics never do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the Bible. I don’t remember where it comes from. I once read a Greek myth of a man who was supposed to give a gift to a powerful male god, but he took one look at Aphrodite and gave it to her instead because she was so beautiful. Later, when he was in danger, she sent down a hedge of roses to grow up around him so he wouldn’t get killed. But I’m sure that’s not what the man was talking about. Sometimes I call that horrible tall scrubby grass at the Haunted House next door a hedge of protection. People are afraid to cross the yard and bother us, in case of ticks.”

Adrienne said she planned to mow the Haunted House’s yard as well as our own the next time we borrow the mower from Jimmy the Mechanic. She was tired of looking at those horrible weeds. I laughed this time, at the idea of mowing a hedge of protection and ruining all our good luck. We got to the grocery store just then. I privately wished for a miraculous buffer of rose bushes around our finances as we did, but I didn’t get one. Everything in town is getting more expensive by the day. Every month we have to use more and more of Michael’s paycheck to staunch what we owe to the Cash App and the credit card from LAST month. This is the kind of tightness that’s happening to families all over the country. Frustrated as I am, I’m grateful it’s not worse.

I looked up “hedge of protection” when we got home. It IS in the Bible, for the record. It’s from Job.

In the King James translation, God has a hedge of protection around Job, to shield him from misfortune, but then the devil gets permission to remove it and all the calamities begin. Some versions refer to the boundary as a wall instead of a hedge, but I am a gardener, so I like “hedge” much better.

Of course, the Book of Job isn’t about a man who was carefully protected by God; it’s about exactly what happened when the man wasn’t protected anymore. Job loses his children, his wealth, and his health all over the course of a day or two. His wife is kept alive, so that she can criticize him. And then his friends get in on the act, insisting that he must have done something terrible to earn so much agony. Job keeps insisting on his innocence. The men keep quoting boring poetry to him, which is surely the worst of his tribulations. And then, of course, God Godself shows up. God recites poetry right back to Job and his accusers, asking if they’d ever caught a Leviathan. Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

If creation is that complicated, God seems to be asking, how much more, the creator? How, then, could we hope to understand why things happen the way that they do?

The meaning of the Book of Job is not that you ought to pray for a hedge. The meaning of the book is that suffering cannot be explained to the human ear– not even by God. Suffering is a mystery. It doesn’t happen as a punishment for sin. It just happens. You mustn’t judge someone who’s had a run of bad luck, because the bad luck doesn’t mean anything.

You’re in the wrong place if you expect me to insert a snide comment at Protestants here, and tell you how Catholicism is far superior. Remember, I live in Steubenville. Catholics don’t use the term “hedge of protection,” but they certainly believe in the Prosperity Gospel. And I maintain that the gentleman I met this weekend was being kind. You ought to pray for your neighbors. You ought to go ahead and ask for the material things you need. Somehow, sometimes, you even get them. It’s just that there’s a deeper mystery.

Sometimes, you do get exactly what you pray for, and you ought to keep asking just in case. But there are times when the blessing doesn’t get there.

You are in danger, and a barrier of roses doesn’t spring up around you as a gift from the deity you’ve honored. You live a righteous life, and the devil still mows down your protective wall. A stranger shows up and prays with you, and your day still goes on as un-miraculously as it did before. I’m not going to be silly and claim that every time you’re stuck like that, God comes through with something even better than you expected. Sometimes nothing good happens. Sometimes, life is terrible, and I can’t make that reality go away. But God is still there.

My journey in Christianity has been all about finding God here with me when nothing is going right. And I have found God here: here, in LaBelle were nothing is very good, in Steubenville where things are often atrocious, in tragedy and anxiety and my whole life falling apart. I’ve found God as I’ve begun to build back a life I like as well.

Have you ever caught a Leviathan?

You couldn’t possibly, and you don’t have to.

You don’t have to catch God and make God do your bidding either. God is already here.

Perhaps we’ll mow that hedge next door this week, when the rain stops, and go right on living our lives.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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