Enjoy and Consider

I am not sure whether this post is a reflection on what I learned in 2020, or a prayer for 2021. Perhaps a bit of both. But it is my first official "rumination" of 2021. 

Lately my prayers have been bringing me back to Ecclesiastes. In my opinion, that book of the Bible is the most underestimated of all and least explored by scholars and ordinary people alike. 

The choice of the word “vanity” by the translators of this extraordinary book into English is unfortunate. There is a reason for it and the confusion goes all the way back to the late fourth century, when St. Jerome translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, in what came to be called the Vulgate. Jerome chose the Latin word, vanitas, for the Hebrew word, hevel. 

But the writer of Ecclesiastes isn’t talking about vanity in the same way that we use the word to talk about someone staring at himself in a mirror or as Carly Simon intended when she sang “you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.”  So let's forget about vanitas for a moment and focus on the Hebrew word: hevel. Literally it means vapor or mist or breath. (Think of a kid with the croup and running a vaporizer in her bedroom; that mist coming out is hevel.) 

The thing about vapor is that you can see it, but you can’t grasp it. Why? Because it’s not graspable. It’s more air than water. So we might more accurately try to hear that second verse of the very first chapter of Ecclesiastes in this way: vapor of vapors, says the Teacher, vapor of vapors. All is vapor. (Now admit it: that has very different implications than "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...")

The writer insists that life is sometimes (and maybe even most of the time) like vapor. Ungraspable. Uncontrollable. We try to convince ourselves that it is otherwise and that the world we inhabit fits into a predictable Newtonian model where there is a cause for every effect. We sometimes assume that if we can influence the right causes then we will get the effects we desire. If we do “a” and “b,” then “c” will surely follow. 

Sometimes we plan our careers like that: if we go to this college and major in this subject then the next thing is we will find the right job that will lead us to the next right job. The problem is that the world isn’t always like that. Sometimes you do everything you are supposed to do and yet the result comes out of the blue for good or ill. Maybe you train hard to be a horseshoe maker and you are the best one in town, but then someone comes along and invents an automobile. (Damn it!) Or you get trained to work on the auto lines in Detroit but then the company moves overseas and now you are 42 years old with a couple of kids and you are out of work because of larger macroeconomic forces that you can barely understand, let alone control. All is vapor and a striving after wind. 

If you do “a” and “b,” then “c” is supposed to follow. But the world does not always work like that. So you eat more fiber and you reduce the saturated fats in your diet and you faithfully build in thirty minutes four times a week to get cardio-vascular exercise. You do everything your doctor tells you to do. It’s supposed to follow, then, that you will live to be ninety or a hundred, right? Except there you are, sitting in the doc’s office and before she opens her mouth to tell you the results of the tests you know what she is going to say. “How long do I have?” you ask with a trembling voice.

Life is not always fair.  In fact, sometimes life is brutally unfair. That is not an excuse to avoid hard work in school or to stop listening to our doctors. It just means that there are no guarantees. Sometimes the world is insanely unpredictable. It's like vapor, like mist. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, says the Teacher.  

Usually in English translations the writer is called “the Teacher” or in some translations, “the Preacher.” But here, too, it helps to go back to the Hebrew, which is Qoheleth: literally, “the Gatherer.” The irony here is clearly intentional. The Gatherer was taught in school that wisdom was like a commodity, something you could gather and control and use and manipulate. He once believed that. But what he has discovered in his life is that Wisdom, too, is more like vapor; it is simply not gatherable. Qoheleth seems to have been raised by parents and teachers who put a lot of stock in the Book of Proverbs, which is pretty good stuff about learning how to navigate your way in the world. It’s common sense, really. Mind your “p’s” and “q’s.” Look both ways before you cross the street. Honor your mother and father. Remember the meaning of the story of Pinocchio and choose your friends wisely. Because one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. All that good stuff. There is a reason we get cliches; because over time they seem to reveal truth. At least most of the time. Just not all of the time. 

These things are mostly true. Of course it is better to study hard and you are more likely to succeed than if you don’t. And it is surely true that one should choose one’s friends wisely, because they influence the situations we find ourselves in and the choices we make. And it is also true that people who care for their bodies do live longer, as a rule. And I hope it's true that what goes around comes around. 

And yet...

None of these proverbial truths represent quite the whole truth and therein lies the danger. Because when bad stuff happens we often spend all of our time trying to find the cause and maybe even blaming the victim. This is where Qoheleth comes in. Proverbial wisdom is mostly true, but because life is more like vapor, it is not always true. Sometimes shit just happens. I had a class once at Princeton Seminary on wisdom literature and that is what the distinguished professor said about Qoheleth. Shit happens! Sometimes you choose the best friends and life still unravels. Sometimes you end up in the wrong crowd and that’s where you learn the most important of life lessons. 

I like to picture Qoheleth as a crusty old guy about my age. (I'll turn 58 in a couple of months.) If I were making Ecclesiastes into a film I’d convince someone like Jack Nicholson or maybe Clint Eastwood to play the lead and the film would open with him sitting at a bar and sipping on a scotch as he delivers those first lines:  Vapor of vapors, it's all vapor. Can you hear those famous voices? They need to be called in to to be lectors whenever we read from this great book...or at the very least the ordinary person reading the text needs to channel their inner Nicholson or Eastwood!

Qoheleth says that we will all face good days and bad days, but here is the thing: we cannot control which will happen when. So he offers two words of advice that summarize well the entire book: enjoy and consider. When life is good, then be sure you aren’t too busy to miss it. Enjoy. And when life is a mess, then stop and consider. Ask the question, what can I learn here? 

This is the verse I am taking from 2020 into 2021 and thanks to any reader who has made it this far! It's Chapter 7, Verse 14a.  It reads like this in the New Revised Standard (NRSV) translation: 

In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other...

It is because life is not controllable or graspable—because it is more like vapor—that this is what we can do. In a year like 2020, for sure. But also in the days that lie ahead. It's not about what we "resolve" to do. It's about what comes our way, one day at a time. There will be good days ahead, and truth be told there were good days in 2020, even if it was mostly a hard challenging year. There were moments to enjoy. And shame on us if we were in too much of a funk about the hard stuff to enjoy them! 

And, for sure, there will be some pretty shitty days, too. That's the correct theological term. That's how you say it in Greek and Hebrew. Shit does happen. But - and usually in hindsight - those shitty days are also opportunities to learn and grow and to see. In Hebrew, that's what consider means. It means to look And to look again. It's a word that Jesus of Nazareth loved. Consider the lilies of the field, he said. Consider the birds of the air. Pay attention. 

Good days: enjoy. Soak it all in! Bad days: consider, look, and pay attention. As that most familiar of Qoheleth's sayings puts it, there is a time and a season for everything: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what has been planted. One needs to learn how to tell time like that and learn to go with the flow, so if it is a time to be born then focus on birth. And if it is a time to die, then try to die well. The problem is that we forget how to tell time and sometimes try to force our own agendas "out of time."  We spend all winter yearning for spring except that spring comes and it's raining all the time because of those famous April showers. So we start dreaming about those long summer days, except that when summer comes it turns out to be too hot, so we can't wait until fall. As a distant cousin of Qoheleth once put it: the secret to life is enjoying the passage of time. We do that not by making every day sunny, but by learning how to tell time. And then enjoy and consider. 

For me, as a bit of a control freak by temperament and by training, there is tremendous freedom in recognizing the great vanity of thinking we were ever in control in the first place. From that place, good news can be discovered. One of the discoveries that can come from that place is something perhaps like the Serenity Prayer attributed to Reinhold Niehbur, who perhaps in some small measure was indebted to Qoheleth, and certainly to Jesus: 

            God grant me the serenity
            to accept the things I cannot change;
            courage to change the things I can;
            and wisdom to know the difference.

            Living one day at a time; 

            Enjoying one moment at a time;
            Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
            Taking, as Christ did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
            Trusting that God will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
            That I may be reasonably happy in this life
            and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.