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How many times have you heard someone say, if I had money, I would do things my way? Little they know it's so hhard to find, One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind…
The singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley sang the lines from this old blues number in the final few concerts before his life was tragically cut short when he swam too far into a river, was caught up in strong currents and drowned. His recording of the song was replayed publicly at his funeral. Successful in his own time, and a relatively wealthy man too, his words must have run deep with the mourners there for the sombre occasion. Many of them would have been successful and wealthy, but did any have a satisfied mind?
As a Christian, I tend to compare the sentiments of society around me with the view of the world as depicted in the Bible. Again and again I am struck by the simple fact that the revelations and outbursts of even our most brilliant and forward-thinking social commentators are simply re-hashed renditions of old truths – old Biblical truths about the nature of humanity. And in particular for me, one book in the Bible has stood out lately as being very much an ancient text for these post-modern times.
That book is Ecclesiastes. It is a Bible book with a rather cumbersome title, with just twelve chapters stuffed haphazardly between Proverbs and Song of Songs in the Old Testament and with no extensive theology or narrative. It is certainly one of the less well thumbed areas of many Christians’ Bibles. Nonetheless, Ecclesiastes is an invaluable place to start if, like me, you often find yourself scratching your head trying to find clues as to what humanity is up to in our twenty-first century world. Jeff Buckley, if he had ever cared to look at chapter 2 of Ecclesiastes, would have found the author discovering identical truths about wealth and satisfaction some 2500 years earlier.
In fact, Ecclesiastes does have the feel of a blues album about it. In its historical setting the text fits into a stream of ‘pessimism literature’ present in the Near Eastern Wisdom writings of the time. Rather than talking directly of God, the book places the human under the microscope and questions the value in his or her earthly pursuits. With wit, poeticism and polemic the writer of Ecclesiastes (probably the Israelite king Solomon) paints a stark and brutal canvas of the futility of human existence. ‘Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless’ is the books opening tirade and the argument flows straight from these first principles. ‘What has will be done again… there is nothing new under the sun’ suggests the writer in a brilliant poetical stanza which reads more like bleak grunge lyrics than Bible prose. Without too much of a mental leap we have already arrived at our post-modern western culture. That is, a time and place without recourse to objective truth in which it is impossible to find a coherent story for human existence.
And yet, most Western people spend their time in pursuit of wealth, fame and advancement in the hope of attaining ‘meaning’. The public frenzy surrounding Big Brother, Pop Idol and Fame Academy tapped straig ht into a youthful idealism that if only we could get money/be on stage/be adored by fans or whatever then we would have ‘arrived’. Life would be made. Here again, however, the writer of Ecclesiastes has been there, do ne that and got the T-shirt. In a personal experiment in hedonism the writer tells us that:
‘I undertook great projects: I built houses… I made gardens and parks… I bought male and female slaves… I amassed silver and gold for myself… I acquired men and women singers, a harem… I was greater by far than anyone’.
However, in every area of life – be it in sex, sport, entertainment, wealth, politics, career or academia - the writer found nothing of substance:
‘Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had doen... nothing was gained under the sun'.As a kind of combined Branson Gates McCartney Clinton entrepreneurial mogul this ancient writer, like many people of wealth today, concludes much the same thing as the Buckley song quoted at the start of this article does – satisfaction is not found in wealth. I recently read that the Chief Executive of the JJB Sports company committed suicide despite being one of the hundred wealthiest men in the UK. He left a wife and children and his suicide note spoke of his deep unhappiness at being a failure, of not having achieved anything.
Ultimately, the futility of our running the rat race, reaching for the stars, or making a million is summed up curtly by the writer: ‘I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me’. The failure of twenty-first century Britain to realise this truth – that death will overtake everyone and our personal empires cannot be taken with us - is evidenced in our society at large. We try and cheat ageing (by buying cosmetics), we maintain ignorance (by not listening to those that show us contentment is not found in being at the top) and we avoid reality (by marginalising those near to death and by silencing any talk of death for its own sake). The now imprisoned property tycoon Nicholas Van Hoogstraten explained on a TV programme a few months back that he had built a crypt for himself at his Sussex mansion. In his crypt he has put many expensive works of art and historical artefacts that he had collected. He wanted them vaulted near his ultimate resting place so nobody could get their hands on his wealth. Evidently, Van Hoogstraten is a man concerned by death but with no realistic solution as to how it may be overcome or as to how his wealth might be preserved for the after-life.
Death is the final insult, the twenty-first century man or woman’s complete undoing. Death is our morbid destiny just as it has been over the millennia for every human being – a point made repeatedly by the writer of Ecclesiastes. Death casts a shadow over our best achievements, slaps us in the face and says, ‘it doesn’t count for squat if you can’t take it with you’. And whereas society falls silent on what to do about it, the writer of the Ecclesiastes leaves us with, amidst the stormy clouds, some silver linings to contemplate.
Whilst doing my History course I read the post-modernist Keith Jenkins’ Re-thinking History. At one point, on the same page that Jenkins says ‘there is no truth’ he suggests that we live in a society where ‘we live with the idea of God’s absence.’ Whilst the writer of Ecclesiastes may agree that ‘everything is meaningless’ he does not reject God, and consequently he opens up the prospect for hope. In fact, it is in acknowledging God that we find the only possible road out of our human predicament. ‘A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This… is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man.’ Britain needs to hear this, like the passengers on the Titanic needed life-boats. The writer of Ecclesiastes shared a very similar post-modern world-view to our own and his endless pursuits mirror ours today. However, his drive to find meaning took him one crucial step further. He looked in the last place many of us would expect to look. He looked to God.
But what about this question of death? Does the Grim Reaper still hold sway? Although the writer of Ecclesiastes may not have known it fully at the time, his book does contain ‘advanced echoes’ (to coin one theologian) on God’s final word on this subject. This was to come a few centuries later in Jesus Christ, the person Christians believe was both God and human, the one and only person in history to overcome the predicament of our sobering mortality. Consequently, for Christians death has been defeated and we can finally have a good night’s rest with a satisfied mind. With good news like that, perhaps it’s time we put our guitar away, shut up playing the blues, and said a big thanks to our Creator God.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005