For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.  (Ecclesiastes 32:1-2)

 These familiar words come from one of the strangest books in the Bible.  The book of Ecclesiastes marches out-of-step with everything around it.  We have the Psalms … hymns of praise and wisdom … favorites of many.  The Psalms embody a bold confidence in God with praises to match.  We have Proverbs - wisdom sayings, catch phrases, instructions for life.  The Proverbs, sometimes just a collection of verses, teach us how to live.  We have the Song of Solomon - beautiful allegorical love poetry.  For Jews, this is about how much God loves Israel.  Catholics interpret it as how much God loves the church. 

 And we have the prophets - offering words of hope to an oppressed people.  Israel is in exile and the prophets offer words of hope and promise.  God’s gift: the great turn-around of fortunes!  And in the middle of all this is Ecclesiastes whispering words of discouragement.  "Vanity of vanities," says the teacher. "All is vain."  "There is nothing worth anything, under the sun."  Now that’s a real downer!

 One commentary suggests that what we have here are two kinds of paths to spiritualities.  The Psalmist, for example, represents a path of revelation.  There is no question with the Psalmist; faith just falls upon him: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;"  "Make a joyful noise to the Lord … For the Lord is good;"  "The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in."

 Like fingers of a concert pianist, dancing over the keyboard, the Psalmist just names countless epiphanies of life.  Not so with the writer of Ecclesiastes; this is a path of reason and reflection.  Life has to be tested to see what is good.  So the writer of Ecclesiastes seeks satisfaction in wealth and material goods.  He accumulates vast holdings, but finds no final satisfaction in owning a lot of stuff.  What good is wealth, he concludes, since life will be claimed of us and who knows if the ones coming after us are wise or foolish.  There is no final satisfaction, or happiness, to be gained in wealth. 

 So the writer of Ecclesiastes seeks satisfaction in knowledge.  He learns everything he can possibly know of wisdom and knowledge.  He understands the workings of the universe, the ways of people.  In much knowledge, there is much vexation, he concludes.  There is no final comfort, or satisfaction, in knowledge, for to know is to know how much we really don’t know and can never know.

 Perhaps in pleasure this writer seeks to enjoy his life. Taste the goodness of life.  Wines, excellent cuisine, fine musicians … all the luxuries of living.  And here too satisfaction is never satisfied. It always wants more.  So he concludes: "Vanity of vanity. All is vain."

 The sun goes down and sits in the west, only to return to the east.  All rivers flow into the sea, and yet the sea is never filled.

Round and round it goes, and there is no end. No sense of completion.  I would suggest that we all take the time, with passionate curiosity, to read Ecclesiastes.  Brace your mood for it … it’s a real downer but it will drive home a fundamental truth we all must eventually face.  There is a deep angst about life, a low, almost inaudible monotone of despair.

 We anesthetize ourselves to it when we are having fun, or are intensely engaged in some project, or compulsively find ourselves spinning in a rut.  But once in a while we’ll all slip into that melancholy mood when we wonder what life is about. What really matters? Why are we here?  And it is to this that the message of resurrection-living speaks.  Resurrection is not an anomaly of history to be remembered once a year, nor a one-time experience we have at the moment of our own death.

 But resurrection-living is a way of facing life, every day.    

Indeed, it is this that religion itself addresses.  Shortly after we are born, as the legend goes, an angel shows up in our room, late at night.  This angel is careful to come when no only else is around.  For what the angel says to us is only for our hearing.

The angel whispers in a language that only we can understand.

The angel says it enough so we can know it, and then instructs us to forget, so we can learn it.  What the angel gives us is our script, our destiny, our purpose, our reason for being. 

 Each person has a unique destiny, a special purpose that only we can do.  We will remain restless until we find it.  Martin Buber, the famous Jewish scholar, speaks about this angel’s mission.   [Found in his work, The Way of Man: the Teachings of Hasidism, 1995, and quoted in Mysteries of the Kabbalah, by Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin, p. 13.]  I’ve modified his quote to accommodate inclusive language, something not yet current in Martin Buber’s world: Each person born into this world represents something new, something which did not exist before, something original and unique. It is the duty of every person to appreciate that he or she is unique in the world through his or her own character and that there has never been anyone like him or her, since if thee were, there would be no reason for such a person to be born. The very first task of every person is to fulfill this unique opportunity, which is without precedent and never can be repeated. It’s the idea which Rabbi Zusya expressed shortly before his death: "In the next world, no one will ask me, "Why were you not Moses." I might be asked, "Why was I not Zusya?" 

Last Thursday, Connie and I went over to Mt. Diablo and drove to the summit.  It was a beautiful day; the warmest of springtime.  Bright sun, cloudless sky, wild flowers, and what a view!  We could look clear across the state to the Sierras, and the other way to San Francisco and the Golden Gate – small in the distance.  We went to a place called "Rock City," several acres of an outcropping of huge sandstone boulders – caves carved in the rocks and narrow passage ways.  According to our literature, this was a sacred place for the Miwok, a place of hiding, hunting, and many a vision quest.  And what made our day: we saw a bobcat cross the road in front of us.

 A day everyone enjoyed EXCEPT one little boy we overheard on top of Mt. Diablo.  He was there with his grandfather – tourists, perhaps.  On the peak, through a telescope, the grandfather was explaining to him all the sights - a navel ship’s graveyard to the north - Mt. Shasta, perhaps over the horizon - cities and waterways and bridges.  This preteen boy obviously wanted to be somewhere else, playing a video game or doing something exciting with a friend.  So the grandfather sternly scolded the boy.  "We may not get back up here for another ten years, so enjoy yourself!"

 I’ve thought a lot about that comment.  There are a lot of things we can achieve by that kind of discipline but fun and human happiness is not one of them.  Perhaps all of us carry that "grandfatherly" injunction in our minds.  In the struggle to make life work, to find the elixir, to claim final meaning, we will continue until we wear ourselves out.  And then we collapse and discover the peace that has been there all along.

 There is a Hasidic story told about the Baal Shem Tav, the famous "Master of the Good Name" who founded Hasidism.

[Paraphrased from Mysteries of the Kabbalah, by Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin, pp. 113-14.]  The Baal Shem Tav came to a distant village and to an innkeeper.  It was the end of the Day of Atonement, when the prayers had ceased.  The Baal Shem Tav asked the innkeeper how he prayed on Yom Kippur.  The innkeeper was embarrassed, for he had skipped the services and now, he had to answer to the most famous of Rabbis.  He begging for forgiveness, since he didn’t pray with his congregation.

 "Tell me what happened," said the Baal Shem Tav.  The innkeeper explained: He and his family started to go to the services.  Then he couldn’t remember if he had locked the cellar door.  His family went on, but he returned, and there was a customer waiting.  He served that customer, and then another showed up.  Soon the time was gone and he couldn’t get to the services.  He went into his closet to pray.

 His problem was: he didn’t know how to pray. He didn’t have his prayer book.  His heart was heavy for this was the holist day of the year.  So what he did was to recite the alphabet … A, B, C, D … Aleph, Beth, Gamel, Daleth.  "God, these are the letters now you put together the right words."  The Ball Shem Tav said, of all the prayers lifted up at Yom Kipper, this was among the holiest. 

 This story has meaning at several levels.  At one level, it speaks to the sacredness of the Hebrew alphabet.  Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet represents an archetype of consciousness, symbolized by the object that each letter represents.  They arrange to form not only the structures of our consciousness, but reality itself.  And hence, words carry a Creative Force.

This is a bit foreign to our Western way of thinking but something being discovered in the field of linguistics.

 At another level, it speaks to how we surrender to the mystery.

How we let go to what we don’t understand and trust to a higher power to put the words together and keep things in order.  Trusting God with our life and destiny, not trying to manipulate things or tell the universe what to do, is the only way to remove the angst of the Ecclesiastes writer, and the only way to master the art of resurrection-living.