Ray Waddle's Journal

I’ve been going to church for more than 40 years and I still haven’t heard a sermon about the strangest book in the Bible.

It sits there moody and mysterious, a surprising voice of dissent and consolation, nestled in the Old Testament between Proverbs and the Song of Solomon and virtually ignored in our daily marketplace of busy spirituality. Yet these days are ripe for it. New year 2003, smelling of war and other fearful dangers, would do well to pack this book for the journey — the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes was a teacher of uncommon poetry and weariness also. “All is vanity!” the book famously declares. The writer has a healthy fear of God and a candid distrust of human nature. He doesn’t bother to hide his feelings.

The book is full of jarring themes — spiritual exhaustion, the opaque mysteries of God’s will, the wisdom of humility, and, not least, our duty to enjoy life’s simple pleasures (food, drink and work, notably). Ecclesiastes is an unusual ambassador of the religious life, testifying to spiritual emotions felt at street-level, moods that sneak up on a person on slow weekday afternoons or lonely evenings, when “All is vanity” smacks of plausibility, and God’s relation to the world might seem indeed unknowable. All these themes make Ecclesiastes the odd man out in Scripture. That explains the strange silence about Ecclesiastes in religious life. Organized faith isn’t terribly comfortable with it. Rabbis say the book is philosophically too inconsistent. Christian ministers say it lacks the good news of redemption.

There’s only one problem with these arguments: Ecclesiastes is in the Holy Bible, touched by the sanctity of God’s Word. Somehow Somehow it got into the biblical canon. Ecclesiastes’ words, not ours, are found in ancient Scripture. It must be there for a reason.

It boasts some famous passages:

• “There is nothing new under the sun.”

• “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . ”

• “All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.”

Nevertheless, Ecclesiastes is too ornery and unpredictable to be assured a slot in religious prime time. It goes against every pious claim to know the mind of God. Ecclesiastes is a telegrammed rebuke to human grandiosity, declaring:

• “God is in his heaven; therefore let your words be few.”

• “God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end.”

• “It is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.”

If you’re a baby boomer, chances are you first got wind of biblical Ecclesiastes not through Sunday school but a ’60s pop song, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” a #1 hit single in 1965 that quotes from Ecclesiastes. The times were angry and uncertain — a hot war in Vietnam, cold war everywhere else, with racial agonies and generational despair at home. Optimists at the time thought Ecclesiastes had blessed us with a wisdom that the world would surely embrace, sooner the better.

Nearly 40 years later, contradiction, not wisdom, has the upper hand. It’s a time of glittering consumerism, but also drought, disease and devastation. The USA is an economic colossus built on cheap oil from a faraway region that resents us. Our uncontested superpower status has yielded not security at home but ungodly worry of insecurity.

The darkness after 9/11 provided a new, terrible opening on the spirit of Ecclesiastes. A season of fear and emptiness, dread of mass destruction, no sense that the horror will end — such thoughts drove many back to Scripture, back to the Gospels, the Psalms. Ecclesiastes waits there too, proclaiming that even spiritual discouragement has its moment in the sovereign God’s world.

Even so, all is not a meltdown of pessimism. Ecclesiastes carries along on paradoxical passions. He is skeptical of the human grasp of truth, but he also affirms the goodness of God and earthly life. Weariness is balanced by a striving for wisdom. The book’s message might boil down to this:

• Everything passes on earth.

• But God knows all, judges all.

• So keep the commandments.

• And enjoy the world: We have a duty to be happy.

In a time of world religious tensions almost medieval in intensity, many people are quoting Holy Writ. But no one, it seems, is citing Ecclesiastes, who values religious habits of humility over arrogance, and pragmatic good-will actions over blood-lusting doctrinal hatreds. May Ecclesiastes enter and refresh the weary world’s conversation in 2003.

(Ray Waddle, formerly religion editor at The Tennessean, is a writer in Nashville. His book of meditations on each of the Psalms will be published by Upper Room Books early next year.)