We talk about how hard it is to let go … to let go of a lifetime of stuff we’ve accumulated … to let go of control or at least the illusion that we have some … to let go of hurt … to let go of painful and debilitating memories … to let go of the way things used to be … to let go of our expectations of ourselves and of each other … it is hard to let go.
But sometimes it’s hard to hold on …it’s hard to hold on to hope when we fear it might just be denial … it’s hard to hold on to love when we fear it might just break our hearts again .. it’s hard to hold on to honesty in a seas of lies. It’s hard to hold on to compassion in an ocean of selfishness. It’s hard to hold onto forgiveness in a culture of vengeance. It’s hard to hold onto peace when turbulence is our primary experience.
So we understand that disillusioned anonymous philosopher whose voice still cries in the wilderness from the wisdom literature of ancient Israel. Perhaps it was by pretending that he was King Solomon, Israel’s second favorite king of all time … the son of David, their most beloved king of all time … perhaps it was by impersonating the king that his voice was preserved in the tradition so that we still hear it.
There was a time in my life … early in my vocation … when this ancient voice was the one that most resonated with me in the entire Bible …in a time in my life when the tectonic plates of my world were colliding … when the ground under me seemed like dust … I didn’t gravitate to a Jesus who loved his friends and his enemies … I was drawn to the despair of teacher who’d concluded that everything he’d been told, everything he been taught to teach just didn’t hold water … I was struck by the honesty in his search.
It’s ironic that he passed his writing off as Solomon’s, the great iconic king of ancient Israel’s heyday … because he was actually a great critic of the dominant narrative and prevailing wisdom of his day … he was anything but the mouthpiece for established wisdom … he was the minority voice taking on the party line of his tradition. The prevailing wisdom of his day, of his tradition was … you get what you deserve and you deserve what you get. Good is rewarded and evil is punished. The good guys aways win in the end. The bad guys get what’s coming to them eventually. “God is in his heaven and all is well with the world.”
The only problem for the writer of Ecclesiastes was that he found no evidence to support that dominant narrative and he felt betrayed by his leaders, betrayed by his teachers, betrayed by his tradition … perhaps even betrayed by life. Without a script for “justice in the end” there was no sense of meaning in the middle. And so we hear the voice of his despair again and again … and he keeps trying to ‘hold life like a face between his palms and love it.’ And his writing is this tug of war between a rant and a refrain … the rant despairing that life is meaningless because there will be no great reckoning … there won’t be that twist in the plot that resolves all the tensions with a tidy ending … and the refrain he offers again and again is then the best we can do is “to eat with gladness, drink with joy, enjoy your life with those you love, and do whatever you find to do, with all your might.” (Eccl 9:7-10)
If he’d lived by the ocean, he would have had algae and sea plants to teach him about holdfasts. He would have had the wisdom of other species to inform his search for meaning. I wish he’d had a grandfather to teach him to listen to the prayers of trees and rocks and seas…. I wish he’d had the gift of a song like Scott Kearn’s (Hold Fast) to help him keep holding on … I wish he could have received the wisdom of the natural world to support his search for meaning in the midst of his paradigm shift … amid his grief and loss … when his world was turned upside down or rightside up … I wished he had the companionship of the other voices we’ve heard this morning.
Then he might have known he was on to something in those brief refrains that punctuate his lament … those refrains of eat, drink and be merry … that finding joy in the pain and pleasures of life isn’t just a response to fatalism … it’s not just about ekeing out what joy we can from the ride since we’re all doomed to crash …it’s about knowing what ducks know without knowing … “that we must love life before loving its meaning” … that we must love life and some meaning many grow from that love. If our love of life disappears no meaning can console us. (Kathleen Dean Moore)
Our deep struggle for meaning requires us to let go of illusions and delusions … to let go of hurts and slights … to let go of grudges and grievances … to let go of anger and hate … but also to hold on … to love life even when we have no stomach for it … to hold life like a face between our palms and say, yes, I will take you and I will love you again … to keep falling in love with life as long as there is life to love.
And when we forget, there is always a tree, a rock, a cloud, a blop of kelp, a voice at the other end of the phone, a smile from a stranger, the song of a bird, the sound of laughter to remind us that we even when we feel like there is nothing we can hold onto, we are held fast in our connection to all that is … we are tethered to life … and … by a long and deep love.
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