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27 April 2008
Beyond Nirvana (The Liberation of Meaningless.)
This place that I’m supposed to be/
it’s not a chair or a desk in front of a mirror/
Can’t you see, man/ it’s not here, or there, or anywhere
But in speaking distance with God/
and where can you go that’s too far?
‘Cause I can worship Him anywhere…
- Plankeye, ‘Bicycle.’
There’s no better way to ruin a book than to read the last few pages first. Which would, of course, explain why it took me so long to appreciate Ecclesiastes. To steal a line from Switchfoot, I’m just like everyone else my age… I don’t wanna read the book, I’ll watch the movie. So the Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes goes something like this: ‘Everything is meaningless, except for serving God, so that’s what you should do.’ It’s almost like a rainy-day-realization that you can’t go outside and play, so you might as well stay inside do your homework. Hard to find a less exciting message than that.
The Teacher is right, though. His logic is impeccable and utterly inescapable. There is no denying the fate of the rich man. I’ve never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. Store it up for your children and they may squander it, but even if they don’t, they can’t take it with them any more than you can. So health is not an answer. Rounding out the ‘obviously not the answer’ category is immortality. Despite what the drug reps will tell you, survival is a fight you’re going to lose. The global mortality rate is holding rock solid at 100% with a standard deviation of zero. The rich man may buy off Cerberus for a bit and the healthy man may outrun him for a time, but you can’t escape the inevitable. Health and wealth are meaningless. But we already knew that (or at least should have.)
Perhaps legacies, then. Make a great name for yourself and become known amongst the nations for your great deeds. Known, though, is a tricky word. Do you remember the names of the one-hit-wonders of last year, much less the who’s who of the last hundred years? Say you make it to the history books. For a time, schoolchildren may have to learn the school-board-approved version of the things you did. Soon enough, though, you will be consigned to increasingly arcane texts, becoming one more data point in some grad student’s thesis about psychoanalysis or geographic determinism or some other sort of nonsense. Whatever echoes remain of your name will be inevitably consumed by eternity and entropy, whether in dramatic Alexandrian purges, not-quite-as-exciting computer crashes or not-exciting-at-all library budget cuts.
You yourself will be lost long before your name slips into the void of cultural amnesia. Even before your children pass away, the children of a hundred factions will be re-defining you in their image. The more famous you were, the worse they will squabble over your legacy; a rich man’s estate sale is always well attended, and a great man’s name is portioned out even at his death. They don’t make statues of you. They make statues of themselves in your image. And by the time they make statues of you, everyone who actually knew you won’t be around to argue with them about who you really were.
Consider C.S. Lewis, the legendary scholar of Christianity. Christendom’s factions seem to have a peculiar fancy for re-inventing Lewis into themselves. To an Evangelical, he becomes an intellectual version of Billy Graham, preaching the four spiritual laws in academic language. To a Catholic, he was just on the verge of a conversion his whole life; really, if he was born today he would have been (the same logic fits Martin Luther remarkably well.) To an American, he becomes an American, despite the fact that he was offered many trips to the States and steadfastly refused on all occasions (of course, his opinion of one specific American seemed remarkably high in his later days.) To a socially progressive Upper East Side preacher, he becomes a social progressive, in spite of Lewis’ remarkably Hobbesian views on politics, his support of the draft, his ambivalence toward animal rights and his open hostility toward Marxists. The real Lewis, if such a concept is even useful for the vast majority of us who never knew him, was a devout practitioner of mid-twentieth-century Anglicanism, which is distinctly different even from early-twenty-first-century Anglicanism, much less contemporary Evangelicalism or Catholicism. Knowledge of the husband Lewis passed away with Joy Gresham decades ago, knowledge of the father Lewis will pass away with Douglas Gresham in the hopefully-distant future. Lewis sets the bar very high indeed, but the point still holds: meaningless, meaningless, says the Teacher.
If not a name, then perhaps a cause. Invest yourself in something great, something beyond yourself. We’ll be Enjolras of Les Miserables, waving the flag atop the barricades, shouting, ‘Let others rise to take our place, until the Earth is free!’ There is, of course, a slight problem. Just as the rich man must pass his wealth to his children, the revolutionary must eventually pass the cause down to his followers. As the sins of the parents bloom in their children, the compromises of the revolutionary undermine the revolution in time. The more compromises there are, the less time it takes… just ask Robespierre. Even the best considered cause will come apart in time. In the name of women’s rights, Elisabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony outlawed abortion in several states, a practice they saw as exploitative and hurtful toward women. In the name of women’s rights, the second wave of feminism systematically eradicated those same laws only a few decades later. You never know what future generations will do in the name of your cause. Unfortunately, you won’t be around to set them straight.
What is true for a cause is true for a culture and a country. The parents make wise decisions and find prosperity, which endows their children with a sense of entitlement and isolates them from the consequences of their poor decisions for a time. By the time the children experience the logical outcomes of their choices, the fortune is squandered. Perhaps it was this tendency of things to veer from their intended purpose that inspired the framers’ dour predictions about the long-term viability of their newborn country. It is honorable, no doubt, to give your life for your country. But it is still not an answer. Veterans Day is no longer celebrated in Carthage, Sumer, or Songhai. People don’t last forever, and neither do peoples. This too is meaningless.
What about living legacies? Family is perhaps the most beautiful thing under the sun. That said, I do not remember the names of my great-great-grandparents. I only have a vague sense of where my relatives lived five centuries ago. I have no knowledge whatsoever of any ancestors beyond two millennia ago, save Adam and Noah. Even if I had scrolls tracing my lineage back to the Garden of Eden, it wouldn’t give me an answer. I would just have another chronicle of human fallenness passing from generation to generation; even the children of Abraham fall away. Some things are more meaningless than others, but moth and rust take their due here too. Even children are meaningless.
One meaningless thing remains. Saving the world. There’s a hundred different flavors of this one, each of them uniquely matched to a flavor of workaholism. The researcher that needs to find the cure. The general that needs to win the war. The minister that needs to reach the world. If you don’t do it, who will? It’s almost as if the world needs you, as if God needs you. You are Atlas, and the weight of the world rests upon your shoulders. But how many times has Atlas shrugged, tripped, or straight-up fallen on his face? The world survived each time. Ultimately, though, saving this world is a doomed endeavor: the Earth‘s not going to last forever and nothing we can do will change that. So if you fail or if you succeed, you still haven’t changed any of the fundamental variables. Saving the world is the biggest meaningless of all, because it’s the easiest to lose yourself inside of.
Consider Esther. Hers is a ‘save the world’ story if there ever was one. The fate of an entire people, the people of the promised Messiah no less, hinges upon this one young woman. Only her brave and well-chosen words can hold back the might of the Persian Empire…Hadassah, the lobbyist-queen upon whom so much rests. It’s almost easy to forget who is writing the story. Her uncle Mordecai does not forget. Rather than filling his niece’s head with a bunch of nonsense about how much she’s needed, He assures her that God will work salvation for Israel regardless of her choices. He tells her instead of the great role God has set out for her in His great drama of salvation, and invites her to take part. This is the key. Jesus has already saved the world, and nothing we can possibly do will add or subtract in the least from His salvation. God may set out a role for us in His great drama, but it is the role of actor, never director. He blesses us by inviting us to participate in His story. He does not need us in order for that story to be told. It is the pinnacle of human pride to think that the omnipotent God needs our cooperation to accomplish His plan; it is the apex of human arrogance to imagine that the will of the Most High could be thwarted by our failures. We are not Atlas, but neither are we afflicted with Atlas‘ curse. The sooner we realize this, the lighter our burden will become. Meaningless is a freeing word.
Solomon, wisest one, tell me what you have found/
under the sun/
He answered, get over the sun, where life is hidden.
- Shane & Shane, ‘Under the Sun.’
I am hardly a disciple of Siddhartha Gautama. He does have this much right, though: in order to achieve any sort of enlightenment, we need to get over all the things that we think are so important…and we ourselves are foremost amongst those things. You’re not going to find your answers in any of the meaningless things under the sun. So get over the sun. Start by getting over yourself. Like some petty Soviet bureaucrat awarding himself medals, like some silly popularity contest of a student council election, we invest our self worth in baubles. Isaiah mocked the idolater of the ancient world, cooking his dinner on half a piece of wood, and prostrating himself before an idol made from the other half. Are we any less foolish? On one piece of paper, we write a resume and ask it to tell us who we are; the next piece of paper we use to wipe ourselves after using the bathroom. The emperor has no clothes, but neither do any of his subjects. So long as we assess each other’s merit on the basis of these trinkets, we collude in the charade. So we weigh ourselves down with rules and regulations, success and ambition, and a hundred other empty things that we’ve decided are important. Every hiccup on our path toward proving ourselves becomes a referendum on who we are as a person. Thus, we willingly lock ourselves inside a prison of our own contrived self-image. Meaningless is the word by which we escape all the weight we have piled upon our own shoulders. Meaningless tears down the walls of our castles of identity. Meaningless teaches us to get over ourselves.
And here is where the Teacher departs from the Eightfold Path. Buddhism teaches that the man who has many cares has many heartaches, whereas the man with few cares has few heartaches. The Teacher teaches that there is a time for heartache, along with a time for happiness. Gautama seeks nothing and finds it, stripping away the self and becoming one with the universe. The Teacher seeks the Lord and finds Him, losing himself in the vastness of His universe. Instead of fading into one forever chord, the Teacher discovers the majesty of the symphony of God; ten thousand dancing interwoven melodies, new voices forever added to an eternally growing perfect harmony. He discovers a world real and thick and substantial, a world that sticks to you like peanut butter to bread, a world so different from the watery transient nothing that we mistake for life as it slips through our clenched fists.
It’s like a man who climbs a mountain hoping to find a great treasure. Reaching the summit, he finds out that there isn’t anything on top. Disappointed, the man sits down, and realizes all at once that he has just discovered the best view of his life. His desire for an answer propelled him up the slope, and perhaps he will find it there, if only because he brought it with him. He won’t find it until he stops, but he may need to climb the peak to find a good stopping place. And this is well and good... most of us need some sort of mountain in order to find ourselves in the ascent. Our problem isn’t generally in the climbing. It’s the sitting down part. As soon as we discover there is no treasure, we run as fast as we can to the next mountain to repeat the process again. Or we give up and head back down the mountain, head held low and eyes blind to the beauty around us. Our expectations cut us off from the joy around us. We have our ideas about how the universe should run, and we get angry when things don’t follow our little plan. So our ancient enemy of pride resurfaces once again. We would rather live in our suffocating little worlds than open our eyes to the vastness of God’s universe. The first step toward understanding that vastness is realizing your own insignificance.
Meaningless sets us free. Everything you’ve ever done is meaningless. Everything you’ll ever do and anything you could ever hope to do is meaningless. You’re not God. God doesn’t expect you to be Him. He only expects you to be you. Once you figure that out, you realize it’s actually a pretty good deal. You don’t need to run the company. In fact, you get to be executive vice president of doing things you love. The Teacher isn’t standing there with a somber face, lecturing you about responsible investment strategies. He’s telling you to live life like you are dying, because you are.
Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of your meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days.
Be happy, young man, while you are young, let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know for all these things, God will bring you into judgment.
- The Teacher, Ecclesiastes.
In the West, we invest so much of who we are into what we do. Because of this, when the Teacher says ‘meaningless,’ we hear ‘worthless.’ But he doesn’t say worthless, and there’s a world of difference between the two. We enjoy a tremendous number of things we know to be meaningless. Moving pieces around on a chessboard isn’t going to somehow reveal the meaning of life or change the world. Knowing this, people still enjoy playing the game. I spent last weekend out on Santa Rosa Sound, desperately trying to hang onto a tube behind my friend’s boat. Absolutely meaningless. I had a great time nonetheless. And certainly not worthless. It was a good weekend and I would do it again. Here’s the thing: if you think water tubing, or work, or whatever else will tell you who you are, you will forever be disappointed. None of those things made you, and only your Creator can tell you who you are. Once you abandon that expectation, you might find out you actually love the things you’re doing. Meaningless is simply a direction sign… it tells you where you won’t find meaning. Meaningless teaches us not to ask things questions they can’t answer. Whatever you’re doing is meaningless. It’s not worthless…so enjoy it.
Think of it this way: God’s given you the keys to a sports car. It’s not a rental…He doesn’t expect you to bring it back. In fact, He promises that in about eighty years, it will break down. If you drive it foolishly, or if you don’t maintain it, it will probably break sooner. It’s a nice car, but it won’t last forever, so you might as well have some fun with it. Of course, God gave you the car in a spirit of respect and love, and He expects you’ll honor His gift accordingly, but that’s all He asks. And it’s not really that much. So pursue joy with all your heart, pursue it under God’s skies with the rational reckless abandon of someone truly in love with life.
It almost seems like license, like an excuse to abandon all responsibility. But it is quite the opposite. A five course meal is far more enjoyable than a really big bowl of ice cream. A loving physical relationship within the bounds of marriage is much more satisfying than any number of random hook-ups. A workout after a full day of work is much more fulfilling than a day sitting on my couch playing XBox. Theologians talk about liberating constraint, the idea that rules set us free to use things as they were intended. The immutable laws of physics allow me to push eighty tons of metal across the skies. Were it not for gravity and aerodynamics, I could not enjoy flying. It is the same for the rest of God’s laws. Joy can be found thickest in the center of His will, in accordance with His guidelines. This is the heart of the matter: humanity was made to enjoy God. He invites us to be part of His work, not because He needs us, but because He wants us to participate in the joy of His story.
I think of a couple good friends of mine who’ve been blessed with a two-year-old daughter. Whenever they clean up the house, they invite their child to take part (invite in the volun-told sense of the word.) In actual terms, they don’t need their child’s help to get the cleaning done. In fact, more often than not the kid makes more of a mess in her attempts to clean. They invite the child to participate because they want to include her in what they are doing. It is for her joy that they ask her to take part, not because they need her. So it is with God. The Ancient of Days is more than capable of writing history on His own. He doesn’t need our paltry contributions to bring about His plan. More often than not, our efforts to help seem to get in the way. But He invites us to participate nonetheless. He sets out our role in His plan for our joy, not for His needs. We are neither able nor asked to bear this world’s destiny on our shoulders. Instead, He spots us as we press against just a little more weight than we can lift. So we live and learn and grow, more and more into His image, which is where we were always meant to be. And there is no more joy than in the place where you are meant to be.
"I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure."
- Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire.
Winner of Olympic gold, The Flying Scotsman didn’t run because God needed him to run. He ran because God made him to run and because he loved running. His heart set free, Liddell felt God most deeply when he was doing what he was made to do. Running didn’t tell him who he was. God told him who he was, and then God set him free to run. Free to run, he ran all the way to China where he served as a missionary. Martyred twenty years later in a Japanese internment camp, Liddell’s last words perfectly express the freedom the Teacher speaks of, “it’s complete surrender.” Nothing under the sun will tell us who we are. Once we find who we are in Christ, He will set us free to follow our heart after all the completely worthwhile meaningless things under His sun. There is nothing more than that. So this is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commands, for in loving Him and loving others you will find more love than you can imagine. In that love, enjoy every meaningless day of this life He has given you under the sun - all of your beautiful, amazing, astonishing, magnificent and utterly meaningless days.
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