The Search for Meaning, Pt 2: Accepting the Inevitable
The Search for Meaning, Pt 2: Accepting the Inevitable
The Search for Meaning:
Facing the Inevitable
Stephen Van Kuiken
Community Congregational U.C.C.
Pullman, WA
July 3, 2022
Ancient Witness: Ecclesiastes 3:1 9, 7:15 18
When I decided to do this series of sermons on the book of Ecclesiastes, I had no idea how
appropriate it would be, based on the out-of-control direction taken by the right-wing majority of
the Supreme Court and their extreme actions not only regarding reproductive rights, but also
prayer in schools, gerrymandering, gun control and the ability of the Environmental Protection
Agency to protect our earth and humanity from global warming. Indeed, this radical shift, it
seems to me, threatens democracy itself.
And so the theme of Ecclesiastes is: “We’re doomed! Everything is futile!” And it seems to
match the mood of many of us right now. The forces of wealth and greed and authoritarianism
seem so strong, and catastrophe is looming in our young nation s future. “What s the point?”
asks the Teacher.
Years ago, Billy Joel recorded a song in which he sang that “only the good die young.” For the
rest of the song he tries to convince a Catholic girl that since this is true, it was a waste of time
for her to be “good.” And although Ecclesiastes would find that Billy Joel’s conclusion is also
empty, futile and chasing after the wind, he would agree with the first premise.
The traditional Jewish teaching has been that virtue is rewarded in this life, and vice is punished.
Proverbs 8:6 represents this traditional view: “Right will protect the blameless life, but sin
overturns the wicked.” Ecclesiastes writes that this is just not true! The good do die young; they
are not protected from bad things any more than those who are evil. “There are righteous people
who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked,” writes the Teacher, “and there are
wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous.” (8:4) “There are
righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong
their life in their evil-doing.” (7:15) There are certain things that are inevitable, and we must
learn to accept them. “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be
counted.” (1:15)
There are certain things that are inevitable; there is an equilibrium and a balance to life that must
be accepted. Here’s what you can count on, he says: “There s a time to be born, and a time to
die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” (3:2,4) There’s
a time to get serious and work, and there’s a time to have fun and be happy.
Life has its limits, its ambiguity, its joy and its pain. Certain things are inevitable. Ecclesiastes is
arguing that we need to embrace life and that this cannot be done selectively; life is a package
deal. And we should be grateful for the whole thing. Brother David Stendl-Rast said that it s not
that happiness leads to gratefulness, but gratefulness leads to happiness.
As the author of the 23rd Psalm understood so many years ago, God does not save us from death.
We will all inevitably die one day. God saves us from the shadow of death, from letting our
lives be paralyzed by the fear of death.
The problem for Ecclesiastes is not that we all experience suffering, no matter how good we are.
The problem is that we do not embrace life, that we settle for a pale, lifeless, non-adventurous
middle ground. The problem lies in not accepting the seasons of change and in settling for a
drab, colorless, unchanging world. The problem is that we live in reasonless worlds and jobs and
churches and families of emotional flatness No one really mourns and no one really dances
Dallas Willard wrote, “It is the act and discipline of faith to seize the season and embrace it for
what it is, including the season of enjoyment.” This is what we are called to do to-seize and
embrace the season for what it is.
It’s a real problem when we cannot fully enjoy the pleasures of this world. In C. S. Lewis’
Screwtape Letters, the devilish Uncle Screwtape is chiding his protege, Wormwood, for allowing
his ‘patient’ to read a book he really enjoyed and take a walk in the country that filled him with
joy.
In other words, you allowed him two real positive pleasures. Were you so ignorant as
not to see the danger of this? The one who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing
in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about
it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You
should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really
likes in favor of the best people, the right food, and important books.
The second reason why we don’t seize the seasons the way that Ecclesiastes would like is
because of the very human fear of pain.
Somehow, we believe that in order for life to be good, we have to avoid pain. And the danger
here is that we will become so good at not feeling pain that we will learn not to feel anything,
including joy, happiness and reverence. We will become emotionally anesthetized, learning to
live our whole lives within a very narrow emotional range. And so what we are left with is
monotony, one gray day after another. We become practiced in the art of not feeling too much.
And this is the problem that Ecclesiastes is talking about. He is saying that when we protect
ourselves against the danger of loss by teaching ourselves not to care too much, by not letting
anyone get too close to us, we lose part of our soul. We let ourselves become less human, less
alive. When we protect ourselves from disappointment by not wanting to be happy, we diminish
our souls. The Teacher is saying that to be alive is to feel pain, and to hide from pain is to make
ourselves less alive.
Harold Kushner talked about when he officiated at funerals, often bereaved relatives in the front
row were uncomfortable, knowing that they ought to feel something–grief, pain–but they
didn’t feel anything because they had never learned to let themselves feel. They never learned the
language of emotions. And he said that so often there would be an old woman crying at the
top of her voice, “Why? Why did this have to happen? He was so good!” And there would be a
forty-year-old man in a three-piece suit who would become very uncomfortable and say, “Can’t
somebody make her shut up? Can’t somebody give her a sedative?” The fact is, said Kushner,
the old woman is the only one in the room who is in her right mind. She knows that something
painful has happened to her, and she is responding to it. The rest of us are too numb, too
inarticulate in language of grief, to know what is happening to us.
And it is this life of numbness, of shallowness of feeling, that is a living death, says Ecclesiastes.
And so then, so often we have this quest to feel more alive, to fill our lives with anything to bring
us above our emotional flatness. But these alone are all dead ends and chasing after the wind,
says the Teacher. Entertainment is not a substitute for feeling the depth of life.
One of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grim is entitled, “The Tale of the One Who Went
Forth to Learn Fear.”
It is about a young boy who, no matter what he does, never feels afraid. He feels
incomplete without the emotional dimensions of fear. So he goes out and has many hair
raising adventures, encountering ghosts and witches and fire-breathing dragons, but
never feels even a shudder. In his last adventure, he frees a castle from a wicked spell,
and in gratitude the king gives him his daughter in marriage. The hero tells his bride
that, although he is fond of her, he is not sure he can marry her until he completes his
mission of learning to feel fear. On their wedding night (at least in the version the
Brothers Grim tell to children), his wife pulls back the covers and throws a bucket of cold
water full of little fish over him. He cries out, O my dear wife, now I know what it is to
shudder, and he is happy. ( 99, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough Kushner)
To be truly and authentically human, we must accept the inevitable. We must be ready to accept
and feel pain or we will never fully know joy. We must be able to shudder. We must put away
the lie that we can live pain-free lives and make room in our hearts for the tragic view of life. To
fully embrace life is to embrace it in all of its changes and seasons.
It can be said that Jesus lived his life like this. He loved others deeply and passionately, and this
love gave him much joy. It also motivated him to bring healing and to confront injustice. But it
also opened him up to great pain and grief, from which he did not shrink. And it was said about
Jesus that he was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
There’s a traditional Buddhist story about embracing the fullness of life. A distraught mother
came to the Buddha with her dead baby in her arms, and she pleaded that it might be restored to
life. He listened compassionately to her, then sent her to fetch a mustard seed from a house
where none had died. She sought for long, in vain, and then returned, and told him of her failure.
“My sister, thou hast found,” the master said, “Searching for what none finds–the bitter balm I
had to give thee.”
The bitter balm that Buddha had to give the unfortunate woman was the understanding that no
one avoids sorrow, pain or death. Paradoxically, finding out that these things are inevitable
made her feel better, not worse. Previously she felt cruelly singled out by fate, which made her
suffer unbearably. Although some painful sorrow remained, the woman joined Buddha s order
of monks, vowing to spend her life helping others resolve their needless suffering.
In his classic book, The Prophet, Gibran wrote:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with
your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain
Together they come, and when one sits along with you at your board, remember
that the other is asleep upon your bed.
“Fear not that life shall come to an end,” wrote John Henry Newman, “but rather that is shall
never have a beginning.” This means embracing life and accepting the inevitable. It also means
that pain does not have the last word. We will surprise ourselves by our ability to endure. And
we will find the pain cannot blot out the love and tenderness of others. Like cracks of light,
God’s grace will still reach us and warm us. This, too, is inevitable!
Just as drops of water over aeons wear down gigantic mountains and form huge canyons, so does
God s eternal presence persist. And so when we seize and embrace the seasons of life, we also
accept God s inevitable, unstoppable love.