[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Turn, Turn, Turn

"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven."

It was Pete Seeger, if I recall correctly, who put together the song "Turn, 
Turn, Turn", based on the beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes. It was a hit 
back when I was a girl, and it still turns up -- as so much music from that 
time does -- in the supermarket background music (pandering to Boomers, 
perhaps?) It was a mindworm this morning, the tune settling down in my 
head, replaying itself on an endless loop. And it sent me back to look at 
Ecclesiastes.

It's a short book, not quite seven pages in my battered paperback New 
Revised Standard Version -- short, but dense.  And enigmatic. Full of 
cynicism and something pretty close to despair: the writer has looked upon 
life as he (probably not she) sees it, "under the sun", and it's nothing 
but a puff of wind. There's little out there but injustice; get used to it. 
That's just the way things are. It's not what we do that determines what 
befalls us; it's just sheer luck.

There's cynicism in this book, and despair, but there's also a sort of 
repressed anger. This is the way the world is, he keeps saying, but 
underneath, there's a sense that while this is the way the world is, the 
world is not as the world should be.

I wondered why the book made it into the canon in the first place; it seems 
so contradictory to everything theology says about the meaningfulness of 
life, about hope, trust, love, joy.  Insofar as God gets mentioned, it's a 
remote, indifferent God who must be obeyed as a matter of duty, who is 
clearly not at work in this world -- or if God is at work, God's a 
capricious, untrustworthy deity.

Why Ecclesiastes?  For the same reason that the Tanakh, the Jewish 
Scriptures, pulled in the other Wisdom books: Job, with its God-wrangling; 
Psalms, with their odd mixture of joy and despair, anger and humility; 
Proverbs, with its conventional worldly wisdom; the Song of Songs, with its 
fragrant eroticism. These are the books that bring the whole human 
condition right into the presence of God.  Ecclesiastes' weary cynicism 
says nothing about God; it says an awful lot about what it's like to live 
as a thinking, sensitive being in a world as badly broken as this world 
often is. It's as though by including Ecclesiastes, the wise souls who put 
the Tanakh together reached out to pull in those who have wandered off into 
dry and dusty lands, because they knew how common is this condition.  I've 
spent much time in those lands myself, so I should know.

I thought of Paul, joyously crowing that the foolishness of God is wiser 
than the wisdom of humankind, and I went to hang out laundry on the line -- 
always a healthy occupation, and one that would have benefited 
Ecclesiastes's author no end. It's a beautiful day, not yet hot, with a 
fine  light breeze. As I pinned out towels and dishcloths, I could hear the 
shouts of kids playing soccer in the nearby park. If you take the long, 
broad, intelligent view, this world can be a really discouraging place. If 
you just stand in the moment and be open to whatever it brings, it's 
remarkable what beauty is out there.