Reflection on Pessimistic book of Ecclesiastes, (so contrary to witnesses of early Quakers)

Ecclesiastes 1
New International Version

"Everything Is Meaningless
1 The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:

2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

Other skeptical thinkers for 2,500 human years have claimed similar hopelessness.
OR
have suggested illusionary images of Death...

Such as that each of us billions of humans when we die are like
billions of waves that roll in on the Pacific Ocean tide...

BUT a series of waves of the tide of the ocean are TOTALY Non-sentient, NOT Aware,
Don't have deep life experiences and stories, Don't have a keen sense of MORAL REALISM, OUGHT, the IDEAL.

A wave or dead leaf are only physical objects.
Lifeless.

Billions of the waves and leaves can come and go--and except brief impersonal life in the case of a leaf, NOTHING LIVES NOW

ALL is LOST!!!!!!!

HOWEVER in the case of all humans
(and maybe a few other cases of higher animals?
ALL MEANINGFULLNESS
of humans is
LOST:-(

Our bodies mean zilch!

BUT to LOSE OUGHT, AWARENESS,
Our Stories and all that we have learned in 78+ years,
HOW Despairing, How Absurd.
......

So, that's why billions of humans, including Quakers hope for AFTER LIFE.

Otherwise, we as a species are in reality, a ZERO, Nilhism. :-((

All the facts of Life say, No existence after Our Brain ceases.

Just reflecting on all of this, seems so impossible to imagine or understand!
How can
Each of us PERSONS
be ONLY " mere breath, mere vapor" as the Teacher claims.

Most of my consciousness, every moment, thinks I won't become ZERO!

But I was with my dad when he died. A ccouple of hours later, the attendents came into our living room, rolled
his stark lifeless body onto a sheet, picked up the roll of bones and skin and hauled it out.

BUT Billions going back at least a million years experienced this same anguish, same absurd irrational
and No longer EXIST--),
were only transient vapor
like the Teacher of the Old Testamen/Jewwish Bible claimS.

My last gasp for MEANING and HOPE is that G_D--U.R. is far more AWARE
than any intelligent physical species in the vast Cosmos.
!
And that G_D
Is EVERLASTING INTELLIGENT PROCESS who will carry billions
of brief intelligent moral individual lives in its memory!

I know this is a 'hail, mary'-Hope (very unlikely based on all known science :-(


IF the TEACHER
is correct, then I agree with the philosopher Albert Camus that REALITY IS
ABSURD!!

IF Reality and Life came about by CHANCE or DETERMINISM

Camus stated that he Rebels against this Reality
and
EMBRACE OUGHT (that which is NOT subjective, NOT relative like most atheists and anti-human nihilists Claim.


In the HOPE of the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

seaquaker@gmail.com
http://infiniteoceanoflightandlove.blogspot.com/
Writing Websites: http://psalmsyawpshowls.com
http://seaquaker.com

The Worst of Years and ONE again

The Worst of Years

Too long ago, back when we were hopeful teenagers, aspiring adolescents with the great world and the beckoning future before us all, and longed-for love in our hearts, a song came on the radio, one of impassioned reminisce, of missed regret, of measured pleasure, even past hope.

The popular tune wasn’t my style and the theme wasn’t Christ-like, but its haunting melody and a few lines did stick with many of us.

“When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls…”*

Yes, I remember a few of my first dates, and a rural Nebraska girl:-).
Anyway the song’s chorus then says, “It was a very good year”
and the final lines end with “But now the days grow short in the autumn of the year…”

Not much like my life at all—not in its worldview, ethics, or ending.

But all in reverse…

This last year has been “It was a very sadistic year…” or “It was a very worst of years.”
Sometimes for most humans a year hurricanes in like that—a real lethal tsunami/tornado
or other natural disaster, a devastating death or grievous disease, a broken relationship,
lost communion, a descent into hades, tragic times where one reaches so low,
plummets to such an abyss, that an individual wishes he had never been born.*

George Fox experienced such a deep despair at one point of time in his life—called it the “ocean of darkness.”

We all (at least most of us, except the relentlessly ‘sunshine’ few) eventually face what Ecclesiastes says,
“…before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain,3 in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed,

4 and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— 5 they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man
is going to his eternal home,

and the mourners go about the streets— 6 before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7 and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

8 ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Everything is meaningless!’"
Ecclesiastes 12

Not the most hopeful meditation is this during the Christmas season, is it?

No Yuletide cheer, that’s for sure.

But then the original Christmas was no summer picnic: A king slaughtering innocent infants, a baby being born
in an animal trough, living in an occupied country under ruthless soldiers, living below the poverty line…

Before we can consider any Good News, we do need to face the darkness of the ocean of existence.

Any thoughts on all that is wrong, tragic, senseless, meaningless, and damnable about this life?

--
Now that life’s been stated in all of its negativity, here is a poem on Jesus’ birth,
the hope in which many of us live to counter the overwhelming ocean of darkness:


One


So awe fulled the birthing
of God's presence, new cauled
in humble manger's destiny,

The base and apex of
a starred cave's presents
of all future festivals

Yet abandoned, forsaken to
the crowned world's nails,
every man's cursedness;

Farthest reach of faith
this Apocalypso dancer
crosses the Cosmos,

Morning us night-less;
he compassions Earth
ever peopling Heaven,

Emptying the pitiless bottom
zeroing Apollyon
into ever's Now

Beloved one, Isa, Eashoa, Jesus
child of the masses
point man for us all.


First published in The Green Silk Journal,
also in the book collections Psalms, Yawps, and Howls,
and selah river
--

*The American novelist John Steinbeck wrote he wished during all of his life that he “had never been born”!
Yes, really, he speaks of this in one of his writing notebooks.

When I first read his statement, at the age of about 47, I was flabbergasted. It’s true, by that time I had had some very bad tragic years, but I never ever wished I hadn’t ever been born. Later as I aged and went through the loss of all hope, I did at times “wish I had never been born.”
Very devastating hopeless outlook.

Thank God, for the hopefulness of some thinkers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Zinn.

*"It Was a Very Good Year" lyrics by songwriter Ervin Drake


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Part #2: Receding for God

Once a career, but twice in diapers, however the second time around often leads down to dementia and always to demise, where we humans lose all our learning and skills and achievement so diligently accomplished. Gone with the leaving...barren winter approaching, white and none.

But why? All that work gone and us receding physically, and worst of all mentally…So despairing like Poe spoke of in his hauntingly powerful meditation on loss and death.*

What a tragic losing, often, pathetic, indeed absurd lessening…
Again, for what purpose?

There seems none. Over 2,500 years ago, Qoheleth, (“Gatherer”) in the pessimistic Jewish book of Ecclesiastes (“Qoheleth”) concluded, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, “Vapor of vapor, all is vapor” (a more literal translation of the Hebrew). Sometimes this seems more accurate than the hopefulness of Paul’s Philippians’’ “Rejoice always.”

In the end, Life will leave us breathless...all our accomplishments a transient vapor.

Without serious doubt this is why biblical faith and vision brings hope to many of us in the midst of this life’s worst, when Jesus speaks of God’s everlasting love for all of us, every single human, every last one, and that we can have trust in God’s promise to bring us into glory. Revelation 21; 3-4 “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

But the glorious future isn't now. This week I asked my wife about her great grandparents. She knew nothing of them. Not a single story, not a memorable moment, nothing, gone like a vapor vanished in the past. Same for my relatives. Gone with the wind, with the morning's vapor, with the transient breath.*

True, we do have a genealogy book in the garage stacks of her father’s family going back hundreds of years, but all that’s left in that volume here in this present now are the squiggles of meaningless names covering many pages—begetting/begatting one to boredom.

Gone forever (except in the Mind of God) are their vivid stories, their unique contributions, deep inner thoughts and special reflections, their fun times, and shared moments, those time of communion with loved ones and God.

So what of Life in these the olden years (nothing golden there—unless its fools’ gold)? And for what purpose does God have us here when we seem good for nothing, unable to accomplish the most basic of our own needs, let alone achieve new goals? And all past accomplishments a dissipated vapor?

We are created in God’s image but with the onset of dementia, where is that beauty of form and creativity and achievement any longer?

For everyone time lessens, and we recede.

Every several days when I pass down the line/hall in the convalescent home (isn’t that an irony of words?), there lined down against the wall in wheelchairs sit hunched over old codgers* and old maids with slack jaws and vacant eyes. I say, “Hi” and wave but most don’t register or respond. They’re physically present but absent. No one home:-(

Are they immersed in memories or only vegetating like shriveled potatoes, long past their prime in the musty cellar of life?

But then one dumpy lady—looking a little like sallow clay in her countenance--suddenly brightens, her whole face going aglow and responds, “Hello.”

And my own dark mood lightens/brightens. She’s brought hope, showing how even in her final receding, she can still—however small and brief—-bring help to another passing her way, a momentary communion. "Where 2 or 3 are gathered..."*

And maybe that’s in the last analysis, the one hope we can rejoice in no matter how hard our lot in life, no matter how far down toward the last negation we fail, there is the spiritual communion of a fleeting moment, the beauty of a vapor, however brief.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

--


*A Dream within a Dream

by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-

You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-

How few! Yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?


* Codger
The origin of codger seems to lie in the complex links between cadger and codger (not as a contraction of 'coffin-dodger', as one of my more inventive correspondents has suggested). In some parts of England the two words were used interchangeably, whereas in other regions they were separate words, one meaning 'beggar' and the other 'eccentric/grotesque fellow'. The latter meaning is the one used in an early example of 'old codger', David Garrick's farce Bon Ton, 1775: "My Lord's servants call you an old out-of-fashion'd Codger."

Men who had fallen on hard times and had resorted to any means possible to keep body and soul together were often those who were too old to find work. A cadger was likely to be a grizzled character wanting to borrow or steal from you; a codger was a peculiar and unfashionable chap, and both were likely to be old. 'Old codger' is most likely to be the linguistic merging of all those images.
David Garrick's farce Bon Ton, 1775: "My Lord's servants call you an old out-of-fashion'd Codger."
Urban Dictionary

*Nothing like throwing a heavy-handed allusion into the mix;-)

*“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” ESV

Part 2: The Abyss of Meaninglessness

Ecclesiastes 1:2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." (NIV version) and Ecclesiastes 1:14, 17-18 I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is futility and striving after the wind...to know wisdom...is also striving after the wind. Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge, increasing pain.

Rather totally pessimistic about everything, isn't the Speaker?

But there is some superficial truth, I suppose to his nihilism. When I was a young Christian fundamentalist growing up in a small village in Nebraska--before I had gone to several universities, read extensively, suffered tragedy, lived in various places in the world, met humans with totally contrary worldviews, etc.--I didn't understand this hopeless wail.

I thought I understood life and God and the world. However, I was ensconced in much illusion and some delusion, though I didn't know it.

So I was happy and productive and filled with hopes and dreams. Aren't most kids, before the harsh realities of life wear us down?

But even after some very tough times, I still wouldn't have identified with the Speaker's utter feeling of futility, because I had a secure foundation in my faith in Christ.

My faith in God gave me a deep spiritual life. Thank God, I didn't live on the surface of life chasing after this world's glitter or, worse, its glut.

But then tragedies came...

And the worst one of all is when I discovered at 17 years of age that most Christian leaders for 1,700 years (beginning with Augustine) had claimed that God doesn't love most people, that infants are "in essence, evil," etc.

I battled against this horrific version of Christianity for most 50 years, until I finally realized to my deepest self that Christianity can't be true, that the Good News version I heard as a kid and young teen was a delusionary aberration.

Well, you get the point...


And now at 62, after doing spiritual battle against Augustinian-Reformed theology, and for so many years against inner failings and testings, and destructive worldviews, trying to help others caught in confusion and dysfunction and sin, and grieving over unanswered prayers, and experiencing deep heartache, I, too, understand what the Speaker means when he finds even wisdom to be a striving after the wind.

And what do we do, when even more and more modern Quakers are supporting Augustinian-Reformed thinkers or at the opposite extreme, claiming that there is no Ultimate Meaning or Purpose to existence?

Why do so many leading Christians now and in the past adamantly support theological determinism which claims the vast majority of us humans are preordained to eternal torment/damnation?

And why are so many modern Friends, exactly contrary, denying that God even exists?

It's so much like the horrific wall in Herman Melville's conundrummed short story, "Bartleby."

And then there are the everyday heartaches, trials, and tribulations...

And when a certain political figure, President Barrack Obama, is elected on the theme of hope, but then reverses many of his solemn pledges and ideals.

And when the natural world heaves, and the striving of hurricane winds and drought and disease and more disasters kill millions.

Yet the vast majority of leading Muslim, Christian, and New Age thinkers claim God planned and foreordained all that evil!

Even most Atheists, too, claim that all horrific human choices for slaughter and rape and rapine, and all natural disasters were determined at the moment of the Big Bang!
We humans are only "illusions," "wet robots," "puppets," etc.

So much nihilism in human philosophy.

No doubt, someone will point out that this is the way life has always been--tragic, brief, and short.

And, no doubt, the person is correct. That is why Ecclesiastes came to be written by a Jew living about 250 B.C., because so many of the promises of God in the Torah and the Prophets and in Proverbs and the Psalms hadn't come true.

Where had the Psalmist been hiding that he could claim, "I have been young and now I am old, Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken Or his descendants begging bread (Psalm 37:25)?

So sometimes, like millions of others at present, or in the past, I too drown in the abyss of meaninglessness, plummet for days down into the bottomless pit of despair.

If as the Speaker emphasizes through most of the book, we only have this life, we then are only like a live dog versus billions of dead lions and dead dogs who have gone before us.

Is not this life then a senseless striving after the wind?

An emptiness and meaninglessness like a transient vapor--here and then gone?

This is where Paul's statement in the New Testament shocked contradictorily and was life-saving: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Philippians 1:21) until I realized finally that it can't be true.

As I teen, I loved the first part of that verse. Jesus was my ideal, my hero, my best friend.

As for the latter part, I couldn't see Paul's view at all. But now many years later, past innumerable struggles and heartaches, I can see how, for Paul who suffered much, that Heaven did beckon.

But now I realize that there is no afterlife, that religion is mostly delusion.

Thankfully, however, I do hope in God yet--that despite all those tragic details which I briefly explained.

I do hope with all of my brief finite self, that there is Meaning and Purpose in our existence even though we humans don't know what it is beyond seeking to live compassionately and to support human rights and justice...

To seek the Good, the True, the Reasonable, and the Beautiful

in the Light,


Daniel Wilcox