Looking for Meaning in Life with Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes is a book that is in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and is a book that many might be surprised to find in the Bible at all. Jewish people would probably not be surprised at all, but I think many Christians would. Because, the writer of this book (an old wisdom teacher) looks at his life and the way things are on earth and explains how it really depressed him to reflect on it all. He notices the injustice, the arbitrariness, and the fleeting nature of life itself. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he writes. Yes, that is a refrain in this Biblical book.

In Ecclesiastes, we don't find any belief in life after death. He doesn't take consolation in a heaven or a coming kingdom of God. No, Ecclesiastes is a little like Bob Marley, who sang: "if you know what your life is worth, then you will look for yours on earth . . ."

And, that is what Ecclesiastes is left to do: find the meaning and joy and energy to live right in the midst of life itself. And, he seems to be having a hard time finding anything but more scenes of injustice and hopelessness, until something happens to him. Something that can only be described as a very earthy mystery. He was looking for a great philosophical answer that would make sense of all of life, but what he found when he wasn't trying was the power and goodness of life itself. Ecclesiastes finds his salvation from despair in eating and drinking and working and enjoying his life with the wife he loves.

I imagine the old wisdom teacher returning home one night when he had come to his senses, and he sees his old wife for the first time in years - he really sees her as she is, and he is filled with thanksgiving that she has remained with him and is still with him as he smells supper cooking over the fire. And, he looks over at her and says: "why don't we try a cup of that wine your brother has made?" And, his mind stops reflecting, and he starts living in the moment: smelling the food cooking, asking his wife what has been going on since he was gone, and really listening as he sips along on what turns out to be a very good bottle of wine.

Sometimes I wonder whether thinking and talking about heaven the way we do in Christianity does more good or more harm. I tend to think of the coming kingdom of God, a linear, historical conception, rather than "heaven," a spacial non-historical concept. But, whatever we religious people think about when we think about life beyond the grave or beyond this age, it seems to me that we are left just like everyone else to find meaning in the midst of life. Now, I have this hunch that if you think rightly about heaven/kingdom of God, it opens the present to you. Notice the way Jesus embraces and enhances life on earth and celebrates the coming of God's kingdom (the life to come). If you think wrongly about it, it alienates you from the present life. Notice the way those who "have" so often teach those who "don't have" to take heart because they will get theirs in heaven. True faith enlivens, awakens a person, whereas false religion deadens, falsifies a person.

I really like the analysis of the alienating and liberating potential of religion by Thomas Berger in the "Sacred Canopy." Berger was one of the pioneers in the field of the sociology of knowledge. He and Peter Luckman also wrote a book called the "Social Construction of Reality." I was deeply influenced by Barth's criticism of religion, and the criticism of Liberation Theology, and then Berger's book gave me a way of understanding it that took it even farther and deeper.

And, there are many non-religious false views on life that just plain kill the souls of thousands upon thousands. But, I have to say that I have seen people who have no expressed religious beliefs who do seem to find something deeply meaningful and joyful in the midst of life. And, it seems to me that those who rejoice in the created universe and experience the power and goodness of life and celebrate it . . . well, it seems to me that they are returning the kind of thanks that the Creator of all appreciates whether they are religious or not.

Our religion, if it is true, will push us beyond religion to a new language, a new community, a new hope. Our religion, if it is true, will unite us with the One in whom all things live and move and have their being.