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Fall Asleep to Ecclesiastes _ When You Have Everything but Still Feel Nothing · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: There is a question that arrives uninvited, not in the
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  Speaker 1: busy hours, not when the calendar is full and the
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  Speaker 1: noise of the day gives you somewhere to put your attention.
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  Speaker 1: It arrives in the quiet, in the gap between putting
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  Speaker 1: down your phone and falling asleep, in the particular stillness
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  Speaker 1: of three in the morning, when the house is dark
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  Speaker 1: and there is nothing left to distract you from the
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  Speaker 1: thing you have been avoiding since breakfast. The question is simple,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: and it is the most unsettling question a human being
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  Speaker 1: can ask. Is any of this actually going somewhere? You
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  Speaker 1: have probably felt it, the strange flatness that arrives at
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  Speaker 1: the moments that were supposed to feel like rival. The
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  Speaker 1: promotion you worked toward for years, and the morning after
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  Speaker 1: the announcement you woke up and something was missing that
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  Speaker 1: you had expected to be there. The relationship, the achievement,
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  Speaker 1: the number in the account that finally crossed the threshold
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  Speaker 1: you had set for yourself, and the feeling of enough
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  Speaker 1: of finally of you can rest now somehow did not
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  Speaker 1: show up with everything else. To night, we are going
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  Speaker 1: to sit with the one book in all of scripture
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  Speaker 1: that takes that feeling seriously. Not the book that tells
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  Speaker 1: you to be more grateful, Not the book that offers
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  Speaker 1: a plan for finding purpose. The book written by a
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  Speaker 1: king remembered across thirty centuries for extraordinary wisdom, who spent
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  Speaker 1: the better part of a lifetime running the most thorough
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  Speaker 1: experiment available to a human being, trying everything the ancient
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  Speaker 1: world could offer, and then sat down and told the
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  Speaker 1: truth about what he found. The Book of Ecclesiastes. His
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: first word after the title, after the introduction, is a
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  Speaker 1: single Hebrew word, repeated for emphasis. Hebel. Hebel havalim, vanity
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  Speaker 1: of vanities. We will spend this entire night unpacking what
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  Speaker 1: he meant, but I will tell you now what he
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  Speaker 1: did not mean. He did not mean that your life
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  Speaker 1: is poor, pointless. He did not mean that nothing matters.
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  Speaker 1: He was not a nihilist sitting in the ruins of
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  Speaker 1: his own disappointment telling you to give up. He was
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  Speaker 1: a man who had looked more honestly at the human
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  Speaker 1: condition than almost any one before or since. And what
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  Speaker 1: he found at the end of his looking was not emptiness.
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  Speaker 1: It was something he almost missed, something that had been
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  Speaker 1: there the whole time. Patient and unchanged while he searched
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  Speaker 1: everywhere else to night, we go looking for it together.
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  Speaker 1: Settle in, let the day release its grip. You do
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  Speaker 1: not need to solve anything in the next few hours.
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  Speaker 1: Just listen and let one of the oldest honest voices
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  Speaker 1: in all of wisdom literature say the things your soul
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  Speaker 1: has needed someone to say for a very long time.
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  Speaker 1: Chapter one, The man who called us into the room.
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  Speaker 1: Picture a city in the full heat of the day,
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  Speaker 1: not the quiet of evening that we usually imagine around Solomon,
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  Speaker 1: not the Lamplet's study or the contemplative solitude of a
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  Speaker 1: man writing in the small hours, the middle of the afternoon,
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  Speaker 1: Jerusalem at its most alive, merchants calling from their stalls,
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  Speaker 1: the sound of construction carrying across the roof tops, the
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  Speaker 1: smell of bread and dust, and the dry summer heat
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  Speaker 1: pressing down on everything. And in the middle of all
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  Speaker 1: of it, a man standing at the highest point he
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  Speaker 1: can find, not retreating from the noise, standing in the
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  Speaker 1: center of it, calling. This is the image the opening
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  Speaker 1: of Ecclesiastes actually gives us, if we read it in
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  Speaker 1: the original Hebrew. The word that most English Bibles translate
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  Speaker 1: as preacher or teacher or the philosopher is the Hebrew
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  Speaker 1: word cohellete and Quoheleet does not describe a man alone
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  Speaker 1: in a study with his thoughts. It comes from the
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  Speaker 1: root kahal, which means to gather, to assemble, to call
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  Speaker 1: people together from wherever they are scattered, and bring them
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  Speaker 1: into one place because something important needs to be said.
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  Speaker 1: Corhelet is a gatherer, a convener, some one who has
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  Speaker 1: seen something so significant, so urgent, that he cannot keep
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  Speaker 1: it to himself. He has pulled every one he can
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  Speaker 1: find into the same room, and now, in the silence
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  Speaker 1: that follows the gathering, he is about to speak. The
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  Speaker 1: man doing this is Solomon. His story begins with one
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  Speaker 1: of the most remarkable moments in the recorded history of
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  Speaker 1: human spirituality. He was newly crowned young the son of
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  Speaker 1: the great warrior King David, who had spent his entire
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  Speaker 1: reign fighting for Israel's survival. The wars were over, the
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  Speaker 1: kingdom was intact, and this young man, who had watched
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  Speaker 1: his father navigate a life of extraordinary achievement and extraordinary
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  Speaker 1: failure in almost equal measure, was trying to figure out
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  Speaker 1: what to do with the peace his father had purchased
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  Speaker 1: at such cost. God appeared to Solomon at a place
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  Speaker 1: called Gibeon in a dream, and he asked him a
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  Speaker 1: question no human being has ever been asked before or since.
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  Speaker 1: Ask what shall I give you? An open offer, no conditions,
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  Speaker 1: no sealing, ask for anything. Solomon could have asked for
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  Speaker 1: military dominance over every neighboring nation. He could have asked
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  Speaker 1: for a life long enough to complete every project he
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  Speaker 1: could imagine. He could have asked for the kind of
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  Speaker 1: financial security that would have made his kingdom invulnerable to
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  Speaker 1: economic pressure for generations. Any of those requests would have
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  Speaker 1: made practical sense for a young king surrounded by rivals
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  Speaker 1: and uncertainty. Instead, he asked for a lev shomir, a
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  Speaker 1: listening heart. The Hebrew carries within it the image of
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  Speaker 1: a heart that is genuinely open, genuinely receptive, genuinely oriented
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  Speaker 1: towards something beyond itself. Not just intelligence, though intelligence is
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  Speaker 1: part of it. The wisdom to tell the difference between
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  Speaker 1: what is true and what only appears to be true,
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  Speaker 1: The ability to lead his people well, to see clearly
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  Speaker 1: in a world designed to confuse, to govern with the
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  Speaker 1: kind of judgment that actually serves the people it is
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  Speaker 1: supposed to serve, rather than the person exercising it. The
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  Speaker 1: ancient text tells us that God was moved by this answer,
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  Speaker 1: so moved that he gave Solomon not only what he
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  Speaker 1: asked for, but everything he did not ask for as well.
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  Speaker 1: For a season, Solomon walked in that gift in a
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  Speaker 1: way that took the breath away from every one who
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  Speaker 1: witnessed it. His judgments became legendary. The Queen of Sheba,
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  Speaker 1: ruler of a kingdom stretching across what we now call
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  Speaker 1: Ethiopia and Yemen, heard the reports from traveling merchants and
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  Speaker 1: diplomats and did not believe them. So she made the
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  Speaker 1: journey herself months through desert and mountain with a caravan
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  Speaker 1: loaded with gold and spices and precious stones, determined to
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  Speaker 1: discover whether the stories were true or simply the kind
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  Speaker 1: of reputation that powerful men construct around themselves. When she
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  Speaker 1: finally sat before Solomon and tested him with every hard
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  Speaker 1: question she had spent the journey preparing, the ancient account
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  Speaker 1: says simply that there was nothing he could not explain.
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  Speaker 1: There was no question that exceeded him. The half had
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  Speaker 1: not been told to her. The reality exceeded the reports
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  Speaker 1: a king remembered across thirty centuries for extraordinary wisdom. But
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  Speaker 1: here is what we need to understand before we go
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  Speaker 1: any further into this book. The Solomon who writes Ecclesiastes
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  Speaker 1: is not the young king at Gibeon. He is not
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  Speaker 1: the man in the full radiance of that early gift,
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  Speaker 1: making judgments that left the people of Israel standing in awe.
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  Speaker 1: He is not the Solomon at the dedication of the temple,
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  Speaker 1: arms raised the presence of God, filling that place so
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  Speaker 1: completely that the priests could not stand to minister in it.
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  Speaker 1: The Solomon who writes Ecclesiastes is the man at the
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  Speaker 1: other end of a very long road. He accumulated over
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  Speaker 1: the decades of his reign, seven hundred wives and three
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  Speaker 1: hundred concubines, many of them from surrounding nations whose gods
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  Speaker 1: he was never supposed to honor. Those relationships pulled at
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  Speaker 1: him slowly and consistently over many years. He built places
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  Speaker 1: of worship for foreign gods on the hills around Jerusalem.
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  Speaker 1: He allowed practices in his kingdom that directly contradicted everything
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  Speaker 1: he had been given his extraordinary mind to uphold, not
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  Speaker 1: in one dramatic moment of rebellion, not in a single
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  Speaker 1: catastrophic decision that everyone could point to afterward and say, there,
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  Speaker 1: that is where it went wrong, In the slow, almost
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  Speaker 1: invisible drift that happens when a life grows comfortable enough
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  Speaker 1: that the need for something greater than itself stops feeling urgent,
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  Speaker 1: When the gift becomes in the mind of the one
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  Speaker 1: who holds it simply his own, when the wisdom that
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  Speaker 1: was supposed to keep him oriented toward God gradually becomes
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  Speaker 1: the thing he trusts instead of God. He is writing
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  Speaker 1: from the other side of that drift. And this is
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  Speaker 1: what makes Ecclesiastes unlike almost anything else in the ancient world.
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  Speaker 1: Not that it is dark, though it is honest about darkness.
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  Speaker 1: Not that it asks difficult questions, though it asks the
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  Speaker 1: most difficult questions available to a human mind. But that
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  Speaker 1: it is written by someone who has genuinely lived every
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  Speaker 1: road he is about to describe to you. He is
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  Speaker 1: not theorizing about whether pleasure satisfies. He tried it systematically
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  Speaker 1: with unlimited resources, and he knows what the morning after
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  Speaker 1: feels like. He is not speculating about whether wisdom alone
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  Speaker 1: can anchor a human life. He had more of it
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  Speaker 1: than any one alive in his generation, and he watched
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  Speaker 1: it slowly become the thing that pulled him away from
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  Speaker 1: its source. He is not guessing about whether achievement and
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  Speaker 1: legacy provide the lasting significance that human beings crave. He
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  Speaker 1: built more than any king of his era, and he
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  Speaker 1: sat in what he had built and felt the questions
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  Speaker 1: still unanswered beneath the gold and cedar. The ancient rabbis
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  Speaker 1: debated for centuries whether Ecclesiastes belonged in the sacred Scriptures
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  Speaker 1: at all. Some found it too questioning, too willing to
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  Speaker 1: sit with discomfort rather than moving quickly toward resolution, too
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  Speaker 1: honest about the parts of human experience that religious writing
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  Speaker 1: usually tidies up before presenting to the public. But the
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  Speaker 1: majority held firm, and their reasoning is worth carrying with
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  Speaker 1: us as we begin. They said, Ecclesiastes belongs precisely because
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  Speaker 1: it tells the truth, because there are people in every generation,
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  Speaker 1: in every culture, in every era of expanding wealth and
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  Speaker 1: knowledge and human achievement, who have stood exactly where Solomon
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  Speaker 1: stands in this book, who have done what they were
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  Speaker 1: supposed to do and still felt the hollow place at
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  Speaker 1: the center, who have asked the honest questions and been
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  Speaker 1: offered reassurance that did not reach the actual wound. Those
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  Speaker 1: people needed to know their experience was real, that the
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  Speaker 1: Scripture was not asking them to pretend otherwise, that the
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  Speaker 1: most honest question a human being can ask is not
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  Speaker 1: a sign of failure, but the beginning of the only
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  Speaker 1: search worth completing. Ecclesiastes is the book for the person
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  Speaker 1: who is tired of being told to feel better before
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  Speaker 1: they have been allowed to feel. It is the book
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  Speaker 1: for the person who has been chasing something just out
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  Speaker 1: of reach for long enough that they have started to
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  Speaker 1: wonder whether the thing they are chasing actually exists. It
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  Speaker 1: is the book for the honest soul sitting in the
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  Speaker 1: dark who has finally stopped performing contentment and is ready
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  Speaker 1: at last to ask the real question. Quohellet has gathered us,
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  Speaker 1: the room has gone quiet, and what he is about
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  Speaker 1: to say has been waiting a very long time to
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  Speaker 1: find the right moment to reach you. That moment is
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  Speaker 1: to night. Chapter two, hebbel the word that changes everything.
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  Speaker 1: Before we go a single step further into this book,
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  Speaker 1: we need to stop at the first real thing, Solomon says,
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  Speaker 1: not the title, not the introduction, the first word of
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  Speaker 1: his own voice, because if we misunderstand this word, we
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  Speaker 1: will misunderstand everything that follows. We will spend this entire
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  Speaker 1: night hearing something Solomon never said, and missing the thing
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  Speaker 1: he actually said, which is far more interesting and far
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  Speaker 1: more useful than what most people assume he meant. The
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  Speaker 1: word is heble. It appears in the second verse, Vanity
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  Speaker 1: of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity.
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  Speaker 1: Most English translations reach for the word vanity, and it
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  Speaker 1: is not wrong exactly, but it carries freight from the
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  Speaker 1: wrong direction. When a modern English speaker hears vanity, they
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  Speaker 1: think of self absorption of a person too impressed with
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  Speaker 1: themselves to notice anything beyond their own reflection. Or they
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  Speaker 1: hear it in the philosophical sense as a synonym for meaninglessness,
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  Speaker 1: for the nihilist conclusion that nothing matters and effort is wasted.
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  Speaker 1: Solomon means neither of those things. Hebble, in its most
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  Speaker 1: literal form means breath. The thin cloud that forms in
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  Speaker 1: front of your face on a cold morning and disappears
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  Speaker 1: before you can reach your hand out to touch it.
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  Speaker 1: The wisp of smoke that rises from a candle in
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  Speaker 1: the moment after you blow it out, real and visible
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  Speaker 1: for a few seconds, and then simply gone. The vapor
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  Speaker 1: that lifts from a cup of tea and vanishes into
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  Speaker 1: the air of the room before you have finished watching it.
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  Speaker 1: He bell is not nothing. This is crucial. Hebbl is
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  Speaker 1: something entirely real. You can see it, You can experience
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  Speaker 1: it for a moment. It is undeniably present, but it
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  Speaker 1: does not stay. It passes through your hands, no matter
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  Speaker 1: how tightly you close them around it. When Solomon opens
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  Speaker 1: his book with hebbel Havalim, vanity of vanities, he is
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  Speaker 1: not saying life is pointless. He is saying life is passing.
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  Speaker 1: He is saying that every experience, every achievement, every form
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  Speaker 1: of satisfaction or wisdom or pleasure that a human being
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  Speaker 1: can accumulate in a single lifetime, passes through us, the
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  Speaker 1: way breath passes through cold air, real while it lasts
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  Speaker 1: gone before we fully grasp it. This is a completely
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  Speaker 1: different claim from meaninglessness, and the difference matters enormously for
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  Speaker 1: how we read everything that follows a book about meaninglessess
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  Speaker 1: is a dead end. It leads nowhere. If Solomon was
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  Speaker 1: saying that life is fundamentally pointless, Ecclesiastes would be the
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  Speaker 1: longest philosophical suicide note ever written, and there would be
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  Speaker 1: nothing to learn from it except how to make peace
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  Speaker 1: with despair. But a book about the fleeting nature of
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  Speaker 1: everything temporary is quietly pointing somewhere. Because if everything under
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  Speaker 1: the sun behaves like Hebl, if everything visible and measurable
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  Speaker 1: and achievable within a human lifetime is real but passing,
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  Speaker 1: then the existence of the fleeting implies the existence of
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  Speaker 1: something that is not fleeting. The vapor implies a warmth
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  Speaker 1: that produced it. The breath implies a living body behind it.
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  Speaker 1: Solomon is not announcing an ending. He is asking a question.
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  Speaker 1: He is asking whether there is anything in this world
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  Speaker 1: or beyond it that does not behave like Hebbl, Whether
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  Speaker 1: there is anything that stays when you reach for it,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Whether the longing at the center of human explace variance,
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  Speaker 1: the longing that all the hebbel things temporarily ease and
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  Speaker 1: then leave untouched, is pointing towards something real. He does
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  Speaker 1: not answer the question, yet he is going to take
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  Speaker 1: us through every road he traveled first, every place where
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  Speaker 1: he hoped the answer might be waiting, every dead end
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  Speaker 1: he found instead. But the question itself is not despairing.
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  Speaker 1: A person who asks whether anything is permanent has not
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: yet given up on permanence. He begins with the grand
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  Speaker 1: cycles of the natural world, and he describes them in
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  Speaker 1: language so precise and so quietly devastating that it has
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  Speaker 1: outlasted every empire that existed when he wrote it. The
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  Speaker 1: sun rises and the sun sets, he says, and hurries
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  Speaker 1: to its place, and rises again. The wind blows south
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  Speaker 1: and turns north, circling and circling, returning on its circuits.
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  Speaker 1: Rivers run to the sea, and the sea is never full,
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  Speaker 1: and the rivers run again from the place to which
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  Speaker 1: they flow. One generation passes and another comes, and the
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  Speaker 1: earth remains forever. Read this too quickly, and it sounds
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  Speaker 1: like a depressed man staring at the horizon, defeated by
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  Speaker 1: the indifference of a universe that keeps going without noticing him.
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  Speaker 1: But read it carefully, and something else begins to emerge.
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  Speaker 1: Solomon is noticing that the natural world operates in rhythms, patterns,
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  Speaker 1: cycles that have been running since before any human being
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  Speaker 1: arrived and will continue long after every human being alive
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  Speaker 1: today is gone. And in that observation he is placing
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  Speaker 1: the individual human life in its actual context, which is
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  Speaker 1: much larger than the context we usually give it. In
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  Speaker 1: the ordinary run of a day, it is easy to
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  Speaker 1: feel that your concerns are the most important thing happening.
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  Speaker 1: The unresolved situation you are lying awake about tonight feels
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  Speaker 1: like the sail around which everything else orbits. The universe
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  Speaker 1: does not correct this feeling gently. It simply continues. The
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  Speaker 1: sun rises without asking whether you slept. The river runs
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  Speaker 1: without consulting your agenda. There is something initially deflating about this,
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  Speaker 1: and then, if you stay with it long enough, something
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  Speaker 1: surprisingly freeing. If the sun does not need you to rise,
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  Speaker 1: then you are not responsible for making it rise. If
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: the river does not need your management, then you are
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  Speaker 1: not responsible for keeping it running. The universe is going
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  Speaker 1: to keep cycling regardless, and in that fact, there is
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  Speaker 1: a peculiar relief available if you are willing to receive it.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Solomon then asks the question that most people avoid asking,
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  Speaker 1: because once it is asked, it cannot be unasked. Is
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: there anything new under the sun? And his answer, which
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: shocked his original audience and continues to unsettle every generation
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: that in counters. It is no. Everything that seems unprecedented
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: has an ancestor somewhere in the long human story. Every
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: discovery that feels like it changes everything has a shape
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: that has appeared before in different materials. There is no
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  Speaker 1: remembrance of former things, he adds, nor will there be
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  Speaker 1: any remembrance of things that are to come among those
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  Speaker 1: who come after. I want to tell you about a
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: man named Thomas. He lived in Chicago in nineteen ninety four,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: a year when it seemed like the entire world was
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: being reinvented. The technology was new, the economy was expanding,
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  Speaker 1: the sense of historical momentum was intoxicating. Thomas was thirty
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  Speaker 1: two years old, successful by every measure his peers used
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  Speaker 1: to measure success, and he was lying awake most nights
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  Speaker 1: with a feeling he could not name. He had everything
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: he had worked toward, and the everything felt thinner than
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  Speaker 1: it looked. He started reading, not the business books stacked
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: on his bedside table, older things, and one evening he
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: opened Ecclesiastes, almost by accident, and read the words that
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  Speaker 1: had been waiting a very long time to find him.
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  Speaker 1: One generation passes and another comes. He said later that
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  Speaker 1: he felt reading those words simultaneously very small and very understood.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Small because the universe was clearly much larger than his
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  Speaker 1: personal situation. Understood because some one had written down in
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  Speaker 1: a sacred text the exact feeling that had been following
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  Speaker 1: him from room to room for years, and he had
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  Speaker 1: never been able to name it. That is what hebel
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  Speaker 1: does when you let it land. It does not tell
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  Speaker 1: you your life is worthless. It tells you your life
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  Speaker 1: is the size it actually is, which is smaller than
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  Speaker 1: you feared and more precious than you realized. Because Hebbel
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  Speaker 1: is not nothing. Breath on a cold morning is one
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  Speaker 1: of the most beautiful things a human being can witness.
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  Speaker 1: The steam rising from a cup of tea is real
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: and warm and present for as long as it lasts.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: The fact that it does not last forever does not
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: make it less real. While it is here, it makes
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: it more worth noticing. Solomon is asking you to notice it,
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: to stop rushing past the fleeting things in pursuit of
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: the permanent things, and to realize that the fleeting things
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: are the texture of your actual life. The actual moments
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: that have been given to you, and they are worth
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: your full attention for as long as they last. But
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: he is also asking whether the longing for something permanent
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: is itself evidence of something, Whether the ache for what
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: does not fade is pointing towards something that does not fade.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: That is the question Ecclesiastes is actually asking, and it
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: is the question we are going to carry with us
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: through every chapter of this long and honest book. The
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: vapor is real, and the longing for what produced it
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: is more real. Still, we are just beginning to look
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: chapter three, the Great experiment, what happens when you try everything?
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: Solomon does not philosophize from a distance. This is one
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: of the things that separates Ecclesiastes from every other piece
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: of ancient wisdom literature, and from most modern writing about
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: the meaning of life as well. The philosophers who came
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: after him, the Greeks and the Stoics and the existentialists,
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: constructed their arguments primarily from reason. They thought their way
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: toward conclusions. Their authority came from the quality of their thinking.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Solomon's authority comes from something different. It comes from the
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: fact that he actually did it. Every road he is
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: about to describe to you. He walked not as a
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: thought experiment, not as a theoretical exercise, to illustrate a
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: philosophical point, with his actual body, his actual days, his
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: actual resources, over the actual course of a real human life.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: He is not telling you what he imagines it would
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: feel like to have everything and still be unsatisfied. He
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: is telling you what it felt like from the inside
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: on the morning after. He opens this section with the
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: methodical language of some one who approaches life the way
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: a careful observer approaches an investigation. I applied my heart
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: to seek and to search out by wisdom all that
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: is done under heaven. I gave my heart to no
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: wisdom and to no madness, and folly applied my heart
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: gave my heart. This is not passive observation. This is
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: full engagement. He is not watching from behind glass. He
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: is the subject of his own inquiry, and he has
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: designed it with the same thoroughness that his remarkable mind
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: brought to everything he undertook. The experiment falls into three phases,
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: and each one is more illuminating than the last. The
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: first thing he tests is wisdom itself. It seems like
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: the obvious starting point. Wisdom was the original gift, the
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: thing that made Solomon who he was. If anything is
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: going to provide the lasting profit, the genuine gain that
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: justifies all the effort of a human life, surely it
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: begins here. He pursued it to its outer limits. He
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: learned more than any person of his generation had learned.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: He studied the natural world, the patterns of human behavior,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: the mechanics of how power operates across generations, the ways
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: that small decisions accumulate into the shape of entire civilizations.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: He became, by every available measure, the most comprehensively knowledgeable
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: person alive in his world. And then he wrote a
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: sentence that has stopped readers cold for three thousand years.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: In much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: knowledge increases sorrow. More wisdom, more grief, more knowledge, more sorrow.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: This is not the conclusion of a man who has
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: become cynical about learning. It is the honest observation of
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: a man who has learned enough to see clearly. Because wisdom,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: once you have enough of it, does not make the
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: world simpler, It makes it more visible. And a world
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: seen clearly is a world in which the suffering of
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: others becomes more present, the injustice becomes more undeniable, the
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: gap between what is and what should be becomes more painful,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: rather than less. The person who understands very little about
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: the world can move through it with relative ease. They
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: see the surface, they accept the simple explanations. They do
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: not lie awake at night troubled by the implications of
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: what they have observed. But the person who has looked deeply,
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: who understands enough of history to see the patterns repeating
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: in real time, who can trace the mechanics of how
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: systems cause harm to real peace people with real faces.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: That person carries a weight that ignorance does not have
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: to carry. Solomon had been given a mind that saw
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: further and deeper than any one around him, and what
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: that mind showed him when he looked honestly at the
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: world was not a picture that brought him peace. Wisdom
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: failed the test, not because wisdom is bad, but because
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: wisdom alone, unanchored to something larger than itself, cannot carry
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: the weight of what it reveals. A light that illuminates
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: a room you cannot fix is not the same as
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: a solution. So Solomon moved to the second phase. If
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: the life of the mind does not provide lasting satisfaction,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: perhaps the life of the senses will. He turned to
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: pleasure with the same methodical thoroughness he had brought to wisdom.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: I said in my heart, Come now, I will test
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: you with pleasure. Enjoy yourself. He built gardens and parks,
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: and pools of water to irrigate forests of growing trees.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: He gathered silver and gold and the cultural treasures of
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: other kingdoms. He brought singers and musicians into his court.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: He surrounded himself with everything that the esthetic life of
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: the ancient world could offer. He denied himself nothing that
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: his eyes desired, and he was uniquely positioned to run
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: this test. Honestly, most people who chase pleasure are chasing
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: it with limited access, which means they can always maintain
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: the fantasy that if they just had more, if the
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: experience were just more complete, the satisfaction would finally arrive
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: and stay. Solomon had no such excuse. He could not
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: tell himself he had not gone far enough. He had
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: gone all the way. Think about what it would feel
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: like to wake up every morning in the most beautiful
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: palace ever constructed. In your part of the world, with
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: every form of sensory pleasure available on request, with the
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: resources to pursue any experience you could image, sage, and
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: to discover morning after morning that the feeling that was
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: supposed to be there when you arrived is simply not there.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Not that the pleasures were not real they were, not
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: that the beauty was not genuine. It was, but the
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: feeling of enough of Finally of you can rest now
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: that feeling did not come with any of it. I
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: considered all that my hands had done, and the toil
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: I had expended in doing it, he writes, and behold
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: was nothing to be gained under the sun. Striving after wind.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: You can picture it exactly, a person running with their
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: arms outstretched towards something real and present, something you can
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: feel on your face, something that is unmistakably there, and
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: yet you cannot hold it. The faster you run toward it,
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: the faster it moves away, the harder you reach, the
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: more clearly you feel the absence of anything solid in
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: your hands. Pleasure failed the test. The third phase is
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: the most personally painful. Solomon turned to his work to
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: the great projects of his reign, the buildings and the infrastructure,
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: and the administrative achievements that had defined his Eraror. He
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: had built the Temple in Jerusalem, a structure of such
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: extraordinary beauty and spiritual significance that it would stand as
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: the center of an entire civilization's religious life for four centuries.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: He had constructed palaces and fortifications, and managed the most
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: sophisticated economy in the region. If wisdom did not satisfy,
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: and pleasure did not satisfy, perhaps the legacy of meaningful
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: work would. But then a question arrived, uninvited and devastating.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: I hated all my toil in which I toil under
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: man who comes after me, and who knows whether he
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: will be wise or of fool. Yet he will be
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: master of all for which I toiled and used my
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: wisdom under the sun. His son, re Hobaum would inherit everything,
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: and Solomon, who could read human nature with unusual accuracy,
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: had real reasons to question whether his son would steward
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: that inheritance. Wisely, History would eventually confirm those fears with
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: a specificity that is almost painful to read Rehoboam took
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: the kingdom. Solomon had spent a lifetime building and managed
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: to fracture it almost immediately through a combination of arrogance
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: and the kind of counsel that only someone who has
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: never been accountable for real consequences could offer. Solomon did
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: not know the details, but he knew enough, and the
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: knowing poisoned whatever satisfaction he might have taken in what
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: he had built. Because what is the point of constructing
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: something magnificent if the person who inherits it may not
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: be able to keep it? What is the point of
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: planting a guard arden if someone else will decide whether
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: it is maintained or abandoned. Three roads wisdom, pleasure work,
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: each tested with the full resources of one of the
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: most capable kings of the ancient world, each one failing
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: to provide what he was looking for. But here is
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: something this chapter contains that is easy to miss in
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: the weight of the disappointment. Even in the middle of
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: declaring the experiment of failure, Solomon pauses and says something
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: unexpectedly gentle. There is nothing better for a person than
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: of God. From the hand of God. He is not
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: retracting everything he just said. He is making a distinction
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: that changes the entire frame. The problem was never with
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: pleasure itself. The problem was with what he demanded from it.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: Pleasure received as a gift is entirely different from pleasure
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: persons as a solution. A shared meal with someone you
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: love is a genuine good. The beauty of a well
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: crafted thing is real. The satisfaction of work done with
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: integrity is real. But when you grip those things too tightly,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: when you demand that they carry the full weight of
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: your need for meaning and permanence and the feeling of
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: finally enough, they collapse under the pressure. Not because they
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: are weak, because that weight was never theirs to carry.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: Received lightly as the gift they are, they are among
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: the best things available to a human being. Solomon is
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: not telling you to stop enjoying your life. He is
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: telling you to stop demanding that your enjoyment save it.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: The experiment revealed what does not work. But in the
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: space between the lines, something else is already taking shape.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: A different kind of search, not for the thing that
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: finally satisfies on its own terms, but for the one
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: whose hand is already extended, offering the ordinary gifts of
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: an ordinary day, asking only that you receive them as
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: what they are. We are not there yet, Solomon has
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: more ground to cover, but the shape of the answer
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: is beginning to appear at the edges of even this
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: most difficult chapter. Chapter four, A Time for Everything, the
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: poem that tells the truth about your life. There is
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: a moment in the Book of Ecclesiastes where the tone shifts,
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: not dramatically, not with any announcement or change of scene,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: but if you are paying attention, you feel it. The
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: relentless questioning, the exhausted inventory of everything that has failed
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: to satisfy, pauses for a breath, and into that pause
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Solomon places what has become one of the most recognized
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: pieces of writing in any language in the history of
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: the world. To everything, there is a season and a
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: time for every purpose under heaven. You have heard these
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: words before, perhaps at a funeral, spoken by some one
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: reaching for language large enough to hold a loss that
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: exceeded language, Perhaps in a song from decades ago that
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: you still know by heart, without being able to explain
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: exactly why. Perhaps on a card some one sent you
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: during a difficult year, when the world had turned in
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: a direction you did not choose, and you needed something
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: to tell you that even this had a place in
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: a larger pattern. But most people who know these words
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: do not know what Solomon is actually doing with them,
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: And what he is doing is more challenging and ultimately
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: more beautiful than the surface reading suggests. He lists fourteen
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: pairs of opposites. A time to be borne and a
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: time to die, a time to plant and a time
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: a time to tear down and a time to build,
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: a time to weep and a time to laugh, a
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: time to mourn and a time time to dance. A
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: a time to embrace and a time to refrain. A
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: time to search and a time to give up, a
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: time to keep and a time to throw away, a
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: time to tear and a time to mend, a time
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: to be silent and a time to speak, a time
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: to love and a time to hate, a time for
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: war and a time for peace. Read through that list
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: and notice what Solomon does not do. He does not
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: tell us which times are good and which are bad.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: He does not suggest that the times of laughing are
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: more legitimate than the times of weeping, or that the
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: times of building deserve more space in a human life
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: than the times of tearing down. He places them side
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: by side, with the same weight, the same quiet acknowledgment
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: that both belong, that both are real, that both are
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: part of the pattern rather than interruptions to it. This
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: is a genuine, radical thing to say. In every human culture,
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: in every era of history, there is a powerful instinct
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: to sought experience into the acceptable and the unacceptable, the
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: emotions we are permitted to feel in public and the
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: ones we are expected to resolve privately and quickly, The
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: seasons of life we celebrate, and the ones we endure
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: in silence, hoping no one notices how long we have
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: been in them, and wondering privately whether something is wrong
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: with us for still being here. Solomon refuses to sort.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: He says there is a time for all of it.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: The tearing down is as much a part of the
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: design as the building up. The weeping has its season
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: just as genuinely as the laughter does, and the person
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: who spends their season of mourning desperately trying to manufacture
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: dancing before the morning has run its course. Is not
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: being resilient. They are working against the rhythm that makes
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: a human life coherent. There is a time for the
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: thing you are in right now, whatever it is, even
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: if it is hard, even if it is not what
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: you would have chosen, even if you have been in
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: it longer than you expected, and you cannot yet see
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: where the next season begins. But Solomon does not stop
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: with the comfort of the poem, because the poem is
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: not actually about the seasons themselves. It is about the
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: question the seasons raise. He writes, immediately after the full
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: list of fourteen pairs, what gain has the worker from
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: his toil? The same question he opened the book with
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: the same restlessness, returning like the river returning to its source.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: But now in the context of the poem, the question
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: has a new dimension. If everything has its time, if
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: the seasons are real and move according to a pattern,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: then who established the pattern? Who decided that there would
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: be a time for birth and a time for death,
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: a time for war and a time for peace, And
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: that these opposites would not cancel each other out, but
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: would together constitute the shape of something that could be
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: called a life. And then Solomon writes the sentence that
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: I believe is the most important in the entire chapter.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: also set eternity in the human heart. Yet no one
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: Take that apart slowly, because each piece is carrying more
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: weight than it appears. He has made everything beautiful in
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: its time, not just the pleasant things, everything, the seasons
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: of loss as well as the seasons of gain, the
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: times of silence as well as the times of music.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: There is a beauty specific to each season that cannot
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: be experienced in any other. The beauty of a winter
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: morning is different from the beauty of a summer afternoon,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: and neither is less real. But the next phrase is
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: where the ch chapter opens into something much larger. He
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: has set eternity in the human heart. The Hebrew word
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: translated as eternity here is olam. It is one of
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: the richest words in the Hebrew language. It can mean
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: eternity in the temporal sense, time stretching in both directions
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: without limit, but it also carries the sense of something hidden,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: something that lies beyond the visible horizon of ordinary experience,
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: something that cannot be fully seen from where you are standing,
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: but whose presence you can feel pressing against the edges
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: of what you can see. What Solomon is saying is
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: this God placed inside every human being an awareness of
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: something beyond the temporal, a sense that there is more
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: to reality than what can be measured and touched and verified.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: An intuition that the visible world, as real and beautiful
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: as it is, is not the complete story. That there
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: is a dimension to existence that exceeds the boundaries of
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: a single human lifetime, and here is the precise and
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: painful beauty of it. He set this awareness in the
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: human heart, and then he adds, yet no one can
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: fathom what God has done from beginning to end. We
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: were made to sense the infinite, but we were not
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: given the capacity to fully comprehend it. We can feel
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: the weight of eternity pressing against the edges of our experience.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: We can feel that our lives are part of something larger.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: We can feel that the seasons are moving according to
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: a design, but we cannot step back far enough to
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: see the whole picture. We are standing inside the tapestry
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: able to see the threads immediately around us, unable to
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: see the full pattern they are part of. I want
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: to tell you about a woman named Claire. She was
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: fifty three years old, a high school teacher for twenty
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: seven years, and she had spent the better part of
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: a decade sitting with students during some of the hardest
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: seasons of them young lives. She had been in the
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: room when they received news they were not ready for.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: She had watched them navigate losses she could not fix.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: She had learned, slowly, and at some personal cost, to
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: stop trying to rush them out of their hard seasons
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: and simply to be present within those seasons with them.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: One afternoon, a student asked her a question she did
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: not expect. He said, do you ever feel like there
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: is something you are supposed to understand about your life
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: but you cannot quite get to it, Like it is
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: right there but you cannot see it from where you
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: are standing. She said yes, She said she felt that
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: almost every day. He said, how do you live with that?
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: She thought for a long moment, and then she said,
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: I think that not being able to see it fully
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: is part of the design. I think we were made
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: to sense it without being able to complete it ourselves.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: And I think that is not a mistake. She had
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: not been reading Ecclesiastes that week, but she had a
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: through twenty seven years of sitting with people in their
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: hard seasons, at something very close to what Solomon wrote
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: three thousand years before her. He has set eternity in
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: the human heart, that ache. You feel, that persistent sense
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: that there is something more, that the visible world is
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: not quite the whole story, that your life is connected
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: to something larger than the immediate circumstances. You can see.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: That is not a malfunction. It is not a symptom
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: of anxiety that can be solved with the right system.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: It is evidence, evidence of what you were made for,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: evidence that the one who set it there knew exactly
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: what he was doing. You were made to sense something
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: you cannot yet fully see, and the sensing itself, the
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: ache itself, the longing itself, is one of the most
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: significant things about you. Solomon then draws a conclusion from
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: this recognition that surprises most readers who expect the chapter
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: to end in frustration. I perceive that there is nothing
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: better for them than to be joyful and to do
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: good as long as they live. Also that every one
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: This is God's gift to man. The awareness of eternity
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: does not make the present moment smaller, It makes it
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: more precious. If this life is not the whole story,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: if the visible world is pointing towards something beyond itself,
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: then every genuine moment of joy in the present, every
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: shared meal, every piece of work done with care, every
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: act of kindness that seems too small to register in
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: the grand sweep of things, every one of those moments
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: is participating in something real, something that connects to the
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: larger pattern. Even when you cannot see how, the present
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: moment is not diminished by the existence of eternity, it
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: is dignified by it. There is a time for the
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: season you are in. You do not need to understand
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: the whole pattern to trust that the pattern is real.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: You do not need to see the full tapestry to
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: know that the thread you are living right now is
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: part of something being woven by hands more capable than yours.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: He is making everything beautiful in its time, including the
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: season that brought you to this room to night. Let
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: the seasons be what they are. Rest is beautiful in
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: its season, and this right now is your season for Rest.
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: Chapter five the dark chapters Oppression Injustice, and the Courage
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: of honest witness. There is a kind of religious writing
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: that cannot look at darkness directly. It acknowledges that suffering
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: exists briefly before redirecting as quickly as possible toward the
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: comfort and the promise and the reason for hope. It
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: treats the hardest questions like guests who must be greeted
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: politely at the door and then shown efficiently to toward
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: the exit before they make themselves too comfortable. It offers
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: reassurance before the wound has been fully seen, which means
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: the reassurance, however well intentioned, does not actually reach the
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: place that needs it. Ecclesiastes is not that kind of writing.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: Beginning in the latter part of chapter three and moving
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: through chapter four, Solomon turns his gaze toward the darkest
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: territories of human experience, and he does not look away.
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: He does not soften what he sees. He does not
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: reach for the resolution before the reality has been fully acknowledged.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: He does something that takes a particular kind of courage
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: in a person of faith, because it requires trusting that
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: honesty and hope are not enemies, that you can look
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: at the full darkness and still arrive somewhere worth going.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: He begins in the court room again, I saw all
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: the oppressions that are done under the sun, and behold
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: to comfort them. On the side of their oppressors, there
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: was power, and there was no one to comfort them.
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: He is describing injustice at the structural level, not the
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: kind that results from a single bad actor making a
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: single bad decision that can be corrected once the actor
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: is removed. The kind that is built into the architecture
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: of how power operates, where those with resources have advocates
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: and access and multiple layers of protection, and those without
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: resources have tears, and the particular loneliness of suffering that
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: no one in a position to help is adequately present
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: to witness. He had seen this in his own kingdom.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: For all his legendary wisdom in individual judgments, he also
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: governed a system, and systems, even those administered with genuine care,
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: carry weights and pressures that fall hardest on the people
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: with the least capacity to absorb them. He knew this
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: not from theory, but from the accumulated evidence of years
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: of watching how power actually moves through human arrangements, and
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: he does not explain it away. He does not offer
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: a tidy theological account of why this happens in a
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: world he created and governs. He simply says, I saw this.
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: It is real, and something in me broke at the
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: sight of it. The tears of the oppressed, and they
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: had no one to comfort them. That sentence deserves to
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: land before we move past it, not to be absorbed
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: quickly and filed away under things we already knew. There
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: are people alive to night for whom that sentence is
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: not ancient poetry about a distant culture, but a description
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: of their present experience, who are living under the weight
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: of circumstances and systems that are grinding them down, and
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: who feel precisely that particular loneliness, the loneliness of pain
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: that no one is adequately present to acknowledge, of tears
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: that have been falling long enough that the person has
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: almost stopped it, expecting anyone to notice. Solomon noticed three
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: thousand years before their particular lives. He wrote their experience
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: into the permanent record of human testimony. He refused to
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: let it be invisible. And then he says something that
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: has troubled readers ever since. I thought the dead who
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: are already dead more fortunate than the living who are
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: still alive. But better than both is he who has
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: that are done under the sun. This sentence has generated
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: more anxious commentary than almost anything else in Ecclesiastes. Readers
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: and scholars have worked very hard to explain it away,
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: to find interpretations that soften it into something more comfortable
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: to sit with. I think that effort misses the point.
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: Solomon is not prescribing anything here. He is not recommending
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: a course of action. He is doing something far more
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: pastorally significant. He is giving language to an experience that
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: people in extremity have always had, the experience of being
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: pressed far enough by the weight of suffering that the
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: mind goes to places it would never go in ordinary circumstances.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: He is acknowledging that human beings in real pain sometimes
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: think these thoughts, and he is refusing to pretend they
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: do not. In doing so, he is saying to everyone
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: who has ever been in that dark place. Your experience
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: is real, it has been witnessed. The most honest voice
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: in the Wisdom tradition did not ask you to perform
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: an equanimity you do not feel. He sat down in
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: the darkness beside you and told you that what you
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: are feeling makes a certain kind of sense given what
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: you are living through. That is not endorsement. That is presence,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: and genuine presence in the darkness is sometimes the only
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: thing that can begin to move someone toward the light.
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: I want to tell you about a man named James.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: He was forty one years old, a pastor in a
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: small congregation in the Midwest, and he had spent fifteen
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: years telling other people about hope. He was good at it,
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: he believed what he said. And then his son was
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: diagnosed with a degenerative condition that had no treatment and
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: a trajectory that was as clear and as terrible as
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: any prognosis he had ever sat with another family through.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: For the first several months, he kept preaching hope. He
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: kept saying the things he had always said because they
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: were true, and because he did not know what else
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: to do. And privately, in the hours after the house
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: went quiet. He was going to places in his mind
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: that he had never expected to go, thinking thoughts he
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: was ashamed to think, feeling the weight of a universe
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: that was not arranging itself the way he had spent
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: fifteen years telling people it would. One evening he opened Ecclesiastes,
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: almost by accident, and he read the verse about the
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: tears of the oppressed with no one to comfort them,
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: and then the verse about the dead being more fortunate
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: than the living. He said later that he wept for
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: the first time in months, not because the verse solved anything,
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: because it told him he was not crazy. Because someone
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: had written down in a sacred text the thought he
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: had been most ashamed of, and the sky had not fallen,
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: and the text had kept going, and so apparently could he.
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: That is what the dark chapters of Ecclesiastes do for
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: the person who is actually in the dark. They do
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: not rescue. They witness, and witnessing, genuine witnessing, is its
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: own form of mercy. Solomon does not stay in the darkness.
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: He moves still in chapter four, towards something that functions
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: like a hand reaching through the shadows. Two are better
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: than one because they have a good reward for their toil.
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: But woe to him who is alone when he falls
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: and has not another to lift him up. After the
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: weight of the observation about oppression, after the honest, acknowledgment
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: of what it feels like to be ground down with
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: no comforter, Solomon turns to the most ordinary and most
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: profound of all human realities. We were not designed to
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: carry things alone. He does not dress this observation in
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: theological language. He does not make it into a doctrine.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: He states it with the plainness of something so obviously
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: true that elaboration would only diminish it. One person falls,
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: another person lifts them, no argument required, no complex prescription,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: the most basic human act of presence and assistance. He
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: continues again, If two lie together, they keep warm, But
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: how can one keep warm alone? And though a man
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: might prevail against one who is alone, too, will withstand
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: him A threefold cord is not quickly broken. He is
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: describing friendship and community in the most practical possible terms,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: not the idealized version of relationship that sounds beautiful in
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: a ceremony but evaporates under the sustained pressure of actual difficulty,
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: the kind that keeps you warm on a cold night,
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: the kind that stands beside you when something is trying
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: to knock you down, the kind where the connection between
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: people creates a strength that none of them possesses alone.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: And then Solomon offers an observation about the particular loneliness
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: of achievement that cuts across three thousand years with the
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: precision of something written yesterday. There was one person with
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: no other either son or brother. Yet there was no
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: end to all his toil, and his eyes were never
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: satisfied with riches, so that he never asked for whom
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure? This also
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: is vanity and an unhappy business. He is describing someone
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: who has built everything and has no one to share
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: it with, who has sacricf the relationships and the ordinary
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: pleasures and the time that cannot be recovered, and who
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: arrives at the summit of their particular mountain to discover
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: that the view is extraordinary and there is no one
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: standing beside them to see it. The work was real,
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: the achievement was real, but the person forgot to answer
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: the question that gives the achievement somewhere to land. For
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: whom am I doing this? And in the absence of
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: a genuine answer to that question, even the summit feels
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: like hebel In chapter five, Solomon shifts to a different territory,
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: the inner life of religious practice, and here he does
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: something that requires a particular kind of courage, because he
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: is turning the honest gaze he has directed at the
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: world outside and pointing it inward. Guard your steps when
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: you go to the House of God. To draw near
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools,
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: for they do not know that they are doing evil.
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: This is solemon warning against the kind of worship that
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: is performance, rather than presence, where the ritual is completed
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: and the words are spoken and the appropriate gestures are made,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: but the heart is somewhere else, entirely, where the appearance
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: of devotion stands in for the reality of it, so
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: smoothly and for so long that the person offering the
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: performance has almost forgotten the difference. Be not rash with
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: a word before God. For God is in heaven and
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few,
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: Let your words be few. In a religious tradition that
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: has always had a great many words available, this is
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: a bracing correction. The distance between God and a human
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: being is not closed by eloquence or volume. It is
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: approached in honesty, in the willingness to come as you
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: actually are, with the actual contents of your actual life life,
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: rather than the version of yourself you have decided is
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: more appropriate to present. And then Solomon makes a point
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: about vows and promises that is simple enough to overlook
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: and important enough to cost you significantly if you do.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: When you vow a vow to God, do not delay
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: paying it, for He has no pleasure in fools. Pay
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: what you vow. It is better that you should not
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: vow than that you should vow and not pay. Better
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: to make no promise than to make a promise you
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: will not keep. Better to be honest about your limitations
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: in advance than to make commitments in a season of
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: enthusiasm that you will abandon when the enthusiasm fades and
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: the cost of keeping them becomes real. This is wisdom
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: about the integrity of the inner life, the gap between
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: what we say and what we actually do, and the quiet,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: cumulative damage that gap causes in a life that is
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: trying to be oriented towards something real. The dark chapters
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: of Ecclesiastes are not not a detour from the main
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: argument of the book. They are the main argument made
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: visible in its hardest forms. A book that only shows
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: us the beautiful seasons, that only acknowledges the times of
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: laughing and building, while treating the other times as obstacles
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: to be overcome quickly is a book that cannot help
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: us when we are in the seasons it refused to acknowledge.
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: It has not earned the right to speak to the
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: full range of human experience because it only agreed to
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: look at part of it. Solomon earns that right because
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: he looked at all of it. The tears of the
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: oppressed are real. The loneliness of the person who built
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: everything and has no one to share it with is real.
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: The emptiness of religious performance is real. The dark thoughts
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: that arrive when suffering presses long enough are real. He
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: has named all of it without flinching, without rushing to
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: the resolution before the reality has been fully honored. Quohelat
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: gathered us into this room not to perform hope but
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: to tell the truth, and the truth, fully witnessed, fully
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: named turns out to be the only ground from which
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: real hope can actually grow. Whatever darkness you carried into
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: this room to night, it is somewhere in this book
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: it has been seen. And the voice that is speaking
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: to you from these pages is the voice of someone
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: who looked at the full weight of human suffering and
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: kept writing because the story was not over, and neither
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: is yours. Chapter six, Money, Reputation, and the hunger that
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: never introduces itself. Honestly, there is a particular kind of
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: hunger that never announces itself for what it is. It
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: does not arrive at your door and say I am
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: here to become the organizing principle of your life. I
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: am here to move into the center of your days
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: and rearrange everything else around myself. I am here to
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: become the thing you trust most. When the lights go
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: out and the performance is over and it is just
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: you and the question you have been avoiding, it arrives
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: speaking the language of responsibility, of prudence, of the reasonable
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: desire to provide for the people who depend on you,
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: and to build something that justifies the years you are
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: putting into it. It looks like wisdom from the outside,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: it feels like wisdom from the inside, And by the
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: time you recognize it for what it is, it has
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: already moved into a room it was never supposed to occupy.
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: Solomon knew this hunger with an intimacy that very few
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: human beings have ever been positioned to know. He had
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: felt it move through him, he had watched it move
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: through everyone who came near him, And in these chapters
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: he turns to face it with the precision of someone
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: who has lived the diagnosis from the inside and can
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: describe it from a place of hard won clarity. He
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: opens with an observation that some almost clinical in its exactness.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: There is an evil that I have seen under the sun,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: and it lies heavy on mankind, a man to whom
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: nothing of all that he desires. Yet God does not
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: give him power to enjoy them. But a stranger enjoys them.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: This is vanity. It is a grievous evil. Notice what
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: Solomon is not describing. He is not describing the tragedy
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: of the person who cannot afford what they need. He
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: is describing something stranger and in some ways more unsettling.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: The person who has everything, who has been given by
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: any fair external measure, more than they could ever reasonably need,
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: and who cannot enjoy it. The inability to enjoy what
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: you have is one of the most common and least
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: discussed forms of human suffering. It generates no sympathy from
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: the outside. It attracts no charitable concern from the outside.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: The person living it looks like they have nothing to
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: complain about, and they know it, which makes the experience
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: more isolating, rather than less. They have the house, and
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: the career, and the recognition and the financial security that
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: millions of people are working toward, and inside there is
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: a persistent absence, a flatness at the moments that were
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: supposed to feel like a rival, a quiet but relentless
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: awareness that the feeling of enough has not come with
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: the things that were supposed to bring it. Solomon calls
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: this a grievous evil, not a personality quirk, not a
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: problem that could be corrected with a daily gratitude practice.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: A grievous evil. Something has gone genuinely wrong, not in
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: the circumstances in the relationship between the person and the
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: circumstances in what the person has demanded from the circumstances
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: that the circumstances were never designed to provide. He who
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: who loves wealth with his income. The love of money,
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: not the possession of money, not the enjoyment of what
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: money makes possible. The love of it, the orientation of
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: the heart toward it as the primary source of security
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: and significance, and the answer to the question of whether
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: you are going to be all right. That orientation, Solomon says,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: with the authority of someone who tested this personally with
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: unlimited resources, does not satisfy. It increases appetite rather than
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: satisfying it. The more you have, the more you need,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: not because your actual needs have expanded, but because the
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: thing you are trying to manufacture with wealth is not
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: a financial feeling at all. It is a spiritual one,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: and financial solutions do not reach spiritual problems. They approximate
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: the feeling for a while, convincingly enough that you keep
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: pursuing them, but the approximation always begins to dissolve before
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: the next acquisition arrives to temporarily replace it. He adds
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: something that is almost gently comic in its precision. When
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: goods increase, they who eat them increase, And what advantage
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: has their owner but to see them with his eyes.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: The more you accumulate, the more infrastructure appears to help
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: you manage what you have accumulated. And what do you
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: actually possess in the end, the knowledge that it is there,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: the ability to look at it. But the sweet sleep
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: of the person who worked honestly with their hands to
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: day and lies down to night without running calculations in
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: the dark. That sleep the wealthy person cannot find sweet
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: or much. But the full stomach of the rich will
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: not let him sleep. There is a man somewhere to night,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: in a modest house who is going to fall asleep, quickly,
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: sleep soundly, and wake up to morrow without a signifyvgant
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: portion of the night having been spent in financial anxiety.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: And there is a man in a considerably larger house
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: who is lying awake right now, checking his phone, running numbers,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: worrying about what he might lose. And of these two,
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: by the measure that actually matters in the dark at
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: three in the morning, which one is richer. Solomon then
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: turns to reputation, to the hunger for recognition that runs
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: beneath the surface of human ambition with almost the same
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: force as the hunger for financial security, and that is
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: even more difficult to name honestly because it presents itself
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: so convincingly as a concern for legacy and meaning. He writes,
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: a good name is better than precious ointment. The good name,
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: the legacy, the way people speak about you when you
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: are no longer in the room, the sense that what
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: you did with your time actually mattered and will continue
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: to matter after you are gone. Solomon understood this hunger intimately.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: He had a name remembered across thirty centuries. People crossed
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: deserts to sit in the same room as him. If
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: a sufficiently famous reputation could satisfy the hunger for significance,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: Solomon would have been the most satisfied person in the
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: ancient world. He was not. I want to tell you
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: about a woman named Margaret. She had spent thirty years
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: building a career in publishing that was, by the metrics
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: her industry used, genuinely impressive. She had discovered authors whose
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: books had changed the way people thought about important things.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: She had a reputation that carried real weight in rooms
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: that mattered to her, And at fifty eight years old,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: sitting in her apartment on an ordinary Tuesday evening, with
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: nothing particular demanding her attention, she found herself unable to
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: remember why any of it had felt so urgent. Not
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: because the work had not been real. It had not
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: because it had not mattered. It had mattered to the
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: writers whose careers had helped shape and to the readers
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: whose lives had been touched by the books she had championed.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: But somewhere in the accumulation of the career and the
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: reputation and the recognition, she had lost track of something
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: she could not quite name, something that had been present
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: at the beginning, before the reputation was large enough to
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: become its own concern, before the name carried enough weight
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: that maintaining it became a project running alongside the actual work.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: She said, she felt like she had spent thirty years
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: building a house to live in and had forgotten to
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: actually live in it. Solomon would have recognized her exactly,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: the person who works so hard at constructing the reputation
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: that they have no time left to live the life
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: the reputation was supposed to represent. He closes this section
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: with an observation so ancient and so current that it
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: sounds like it was written this morning as he came
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: from his mother's womb. He shall go again naked as
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: he may carry away in his hand. You arrived with nothing,
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: You will leave with nothing. Every accumulated thing in between
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: is borrowed. The house, the career, the reputation, the carefully
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: constructed version of yourself that you present to the world.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: All of it will be handed over when you go,
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: and the people who receive it will do with it
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: what they choose. This is not meant to make the
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: accumulation feel pointless. It is meant to change your relationship
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: with what you are accumulating, to loosen the grip, to
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: shift the center of gravity away from the things you
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: are building and back toward the life you are living
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: inside them. Because what the hunger for wealth and reputation
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: is actually searching for is not wealth or reputation. It
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: is security and significance, the deep and unshakable knowledge that
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: you matter, that you are held, that your life has weight,
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: in something that does not fluctuate with much markets or
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: public opinion, or the particular mood of the people whose
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: approval you have been tracking. And those things, genuine security
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: and genuine significance, are not available for purchase. They cannot
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: be achieved by building the account to a sufficient size
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: or the reputation to a sufficient reach. They are received.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: They come from outside the economy of earning and deserving.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: They come, as Solomon has already told us, from the
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: hand of God. The idol of wealth and the idol
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: of reputation both promise to give you what only God
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: can give, and both deliver something that looks like the
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: real thing until the moment you hold it up to
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: the light. In that moment, you see that what you
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: are holding is not the thing itself, but a very
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: convincing imitation, and that the difference between the imitation and
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: the thing, which seemed negligible when you were working toward it,
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: turns out to be everything. Solomon has held it up
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: to the light. He is telling you what he saw,
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: not to leave you empty handed, to point you toward
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: the hands that are already holding something real. The hunger
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: is genuine, what it is actually hungry for is real.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: You have simply been looking in the places that offer
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: very convincing imitations, but not the actual thing. The actual
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: thing has been waiting with the patience of something that
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: is not in a hurry because it is not going anywhere.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: You do not have to figure out tonight exactly what
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: that means. You only need to rest in the knowledge
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: that the hunger you have been feeling is not a malfunction.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: It is a signal, and signals point somewhere. Let that
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: be enough for tonight. The hands that hold something real
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: are also the hands that are holding you right now,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: in this room, in this hour rest. You are already
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: closer than you think. Chapter seven Wisdom worth keeping the
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: art of seeing what is actually there. Something shifts in
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: the middle of Ecclesiastes. Not a dramatic shift, not the
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: kind that announces itself with a change of scene or
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: a new character entering the story. Something quieter, The relentless
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: dismantling of false foundations, the careful and honest removal of
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: every insufficient answer, begins to give way to something else,
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: the first clear outlines of a different way of seeing.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: Not comfort exactly, not yet, but the kind of practical
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: unromantic wisdom that does not promise more than it can deliver,
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: and precisely because of that restraint, delivers something real. This
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: is Solomon at his most useful. Not the philosopher standing
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: at the outer edges of the human experience, mapping what
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: he finds there, but the observer, standing in the middle
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: of ordinary life and noticing with the precision of someone
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: who has been paying very close attention for a very
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: long time, what actually works and what only appears to
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: He begins with a pair of comparisons that catch most
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: readers off guard. Better is the end of a thing
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: than the proud in spirit. We live in a culture
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: that celebrates beginnings, the launch, the announcement, the first chapter,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: the opening night, the moment when something new and full
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: of potential is introduced to the world. There is genuine
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: excitement in beginnings, and Solomon is not dismissing it, but
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: he says the end is better, because the end is
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: where the truth lives. Any project, any relationship, any commitment
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: can look promising at its beginning. The beginning is all potential,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: all possibility, all the things it might become. But the
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: end is what it actually became, and the distance between
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: the beginning and the end. The long, unglamorous middle that
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: no one photographs and few people acknowledge, is where character
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: is formed, where the difference between the person who stays
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: and the person who leaves when things get difficult becomes visible,
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: where the shape of a life is actually determined. Better
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: is the end, not because endings are pleasant, but because
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: they are honest, and patient in spirit is better than
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: proud in spirit. The proud person needs the beginning, needs
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: the launch and the announcement and the recognition that comes
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: with starting something visible and new. The patient person is
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: willing to do the long work of the middle, the
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: work that no one is watching, because they understand that
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: the end is where value is actually created, and that
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: arriving there requires something the proud person finds genuinely difficult,
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: staying when staying is hard. I want to tell you
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: about a woman named Caroline. She had been teaching piano
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: for twenty two years in a small town in Oregon,
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: not performing, not recording, teaching week after week, the same
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: living room, the same upright piano. A rotating series of
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: children ranging from genuinely gifted to genuinely indifferent, most of
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: them somewhere in between. A former student called her one evening,
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: now in his late thirties, to tell her that he
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: had started playing again, that the pieces she had taught
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: him as a child had come back to him in
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: a difficult season of his life and had carried him
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: through something he could not have named, That he had
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: thought of her, that he had wanted her to know.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: She said later that she had spent twenty two years
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: wondering whether the work mattered, whether the patience required to
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: sit with a child through the same measure thirty times
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: in an afternoon, was building something real, whether anyone would
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: remember any of it? Better, is the end of a
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: thing than its beginning? She had lived in the middle
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: for twenty two years without being able to see the end.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: The call was the end, arriving twenty years after the beginning,
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: and it carried a weight that no beginning ever could.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: Solomon then makes an observation about nostalgia that is one
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: of the most practically useful things in the entire book.
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: Say not why were the former days better than these?
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: Do not ask why the old days were better. It
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: is not wisdom that prompts the question. He is diagnosing
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: one of the most persistent and most quietly damaging of
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: all human habits of mind, the conviction that some past
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: era represented a peak of human experience, that the present
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: can only fail to measure up to, that the direction
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: of travel is always downward from some earlier, cleaner, simpler time,
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: that things were better before, whenever before happens to be
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: for you. Solomon had studied history more thoroughly than anyone
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: in his worlds. He had read the records of previous
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: generations with the attention of a scholar and the resources
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: of a king. And what he found was not a
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: golden age waiting to be recovered. He found the same struggles,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: the same injustices, the same cycles of loss and rebuilding,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: played out by different people with different tools in different centuries.
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: The nostalgia for better days is almost always a nostalgia
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: for a younger self, for the period of your own
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: life when you had not yet accumulated the particular losses
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: and disappointments of the present. It is real grief in
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: a convincing disguise. But when we mistake it for evidence
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: that the world has genuinely declined. When we use it
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: to justify our disengagement from the present moment. When we
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: spend our actual energy mourning a past that was never
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: quite as pure as memory has made it, we are
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: not being wise. We are avoiding the only life we
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: actually have. The days you are living are the days
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: you have to work with. They are also in ways
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: you may not yet be able to see, being woven
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: into something not despite their difficulties through them. He follows
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: this with something that initially sounds like a theological problem,
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: but is actually a council of realism that most religious
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: writing avoids. In my vain life, I have seen everything.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness,
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: in his evil doing. He is acknowledging directly what every
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: one who has lived long enough already knows but rarely
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: says aloud in a context like this one, that the
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: universe does not operate according to a simple transactional system
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: where virtue is reliably rewarded and vice is reliably punished
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: within the visible time frame of a single human life.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: That good people suffer things they did not earn, that
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: people who operate without integrity sometime times thrive for a
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: very long time in ways that seem to confirm the
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: worst possible conclusions about how reality actually works. Solomon does
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: not explain this away. He does not offer a tidy
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: resolution that makes the discomfort disappear. He simply witnesses it
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: clearly and without flinching, because witnessing what is true is
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: always the beginning of genuine wisdom, even when what is
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: true is inconvenient. But he also warns against the reaction
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: that many people have to this observation, the reaction of
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: abandoning virtue because virtue does not appear to pay. Be
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise?
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: be a fool? Why should you die before your time?
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: This passage has confused readers across many centuries. Is Solomon
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: recommending moderation in righteousness. Is he suggesting that being too
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: devoted is somehow dangerous? He is not. He is warning
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: against a specific and recognizable corruption of virtue, the kind
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: that turns goodness into performance, the kind that becomes so
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: focused on its own righteousness that it loses the humanity
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: it was supposed to express. The person who is overly righteous,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: in Solomon's sense, is not the deeply devoted person. It
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: is the person whose devotion has curdled into self righteousness,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: whose religion has become a mechanism for judgment rather than
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: a source of genuine life, who has polished the exterior
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: so thoroughly that they have lost access to their own interior.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: And he pairs this with a warning against the opposite mistake,
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: the fashionable cynicism that dresses itself as sophistication and treats
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: the casual abandonment of virtue as a form of liberation
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: from naive belief. Both extremes are forms of folly. Both
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: miss the actual path. The actual path is honest, humble,
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: persistent engagement with what is true and good, without requiring
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: the engagement to be seen, without requiring the results to
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: arrive on a timetable you find satisfying. He then arrives
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: at one of the most freeing sentences in the entire book.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: does good and never sins. Not one, not Solomon, Not
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: the most admired person in your life, not the person
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: you most wish you were more like Everyone who has
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: ever lived has the full complexity of the human condition
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: operating inside them, the capacity for genuine good and the
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: capacity for genuine failure, the mixed motives and the imperfect execution,
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: and the gap between who they intend to be and
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: who they actually are on any given day. This is
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: not a council of despair. It is a counsel of honesty,
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: and it is an invitation. If you have been waiting
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: until you are good enough to approach God, waiting until
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: you have sufficiently resolved the parts of yourself you are
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: most ashamed of, waiting until your life looks more like
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: what a faithful person's life is supposed to look like
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: from the outside. Solomon is telling you tonight that you
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: have been waiting for something that will not arrive on
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: that schedule. No one is good enough. The righteous man
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: on earth, who does good and never sins does not exist.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: And that is not a disqualification from the search. It
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: is the starting point of it. You begin not from
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: a rival, but from honesty, from the acknowledgment of exactly
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: where you actually are. And that acknowledgment, offered honestly and
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: without performance, turns out to be closer to the beginning
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: of wisdom than any amount of managed respectability. He closes
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: this section with words that are as honest as anything
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: he has written. I have tested all this by wisdom,
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: I said, I will be wise. But it was far
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: from me. That which is is far off and deep,
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: very deep. Who can find it out? Even a man
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: remembered across thirty centuries for extraordinary wisdom looked at the
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: full scope of what there is to understand and said,
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: it is far from me, deep, very deep, who can
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: find it out? This is not the resignation of a
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: man who has given up. It is the honesty of
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: a man who has pursued understanding further than anyone else
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: in his world, and has arrived at the genuine edge
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: of what human wisdom alone can reach. And at that edge,
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: instead of pretending he can see further than he can,
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: he simply names where the edge is. The wisdom worth
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: keeping is not the wisdom that makes you appear to
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: have everything figured out. It is the wisdom that tells
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: you the truth about yourself and about the world, honestly
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: and without flattery, and then points toward the only found
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: that can actually bear the weight of a human life.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: That foundation is not your own righteousness, not your accumulated understanding,
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: not the reputation you have built, or the wisdom you
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: have gathered. Solomon has been systematically and patiently clearing the
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: ground of everything that is not it for seven chapters.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: Now we are almost to what it is. Rest into
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: Night's wisdom. You do not have to have it all together.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: Caroline sat in that living room for twenty two years
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: without being able to see the end. Solomon arrived at
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: the edge of what human wisdom can reach and kept writing.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: You can keep going too. The edge of what you
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: can understand on your own is not the end of
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: the story. It is the place where the real story begins.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: Chapter eight, Death, the appointment everyone keeps, and what the honest,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: acknowledgment of it sets free. There is a conversation that
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: our culture has decided not to have, not because the
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: subject lacks importance, precisely because it has too much, because
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: it reaches past every defense system we have constructed, past
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: the productivity and the plans and the carefully curated presentation
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: of a life that is going well, and touches something
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: so fundamental and so unavoidable, and so permanently unresolved by
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: anything the world has offered us that the easiest response,
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: the response most people choose without quite deciding to choose it,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: is simply not to look. We have built an entire
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: civilization organized partly around not looking. We have separated the
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: dying from the living in ways that previous generations never
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: did and probably could not have imagined. We have handed
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: the physical process of death over to professionals, so that
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: many people today will move through their entire lives without
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: ever being present in the room where someone they love
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: takes a last breath. We have developed an elaborate vocabulary
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: for talking around the subject without talking about it directly,
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: words and phrases that soften the edges of the word
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: itself until what remains is almost comfortable to say in
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: polite company. Solomon does not soften the edges. In chapter nine,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: he turns to face death with the same unblinking honesty
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: he has brought to wisdom and pleasure and work and
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: injustice and the limits of human understanding. And what he
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: finds there in the full, honest, acknowledgment of mortality is
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: not the despair you might expect. It is something else,
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: entirely something that most people who avoid the subject never
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: discover is waiting on the other side of it. Clarity,
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: the specific and remarkable clarity that arrives when you stop
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: averting your eyes and let the truth land completely. He
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: opens with an observation that cuts across the comfortable religious
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: assumption that faithfulness insulates you from the common difficulties of
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: human existence. The same event happens to the righteous and
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: who does not sacrifice. As the good one is, so
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: is the sinner. The same event. He is talking about death,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: and he is saying, plainly and without apology, that death
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: is the one experience that erases every distinction. Human beings
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: have constructed the faithful and the unfaithful, the generous and
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: the selfish, the person who spent their life in genuine
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: devotion and the person who spent it in studied indifference,
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: the builder and the destroyer. All of them arrive at
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: the same appointment. This is the great equalizer, the one
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: reality that cannot be negotiated with. Regardless of what you
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: bring to the table. You can build monuments, you can
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: leave an extraordinary legacy. You can write books that outlast empires,
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: but you will die. Every one you love will die.
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: And the most honest thing you can say about that
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: is simply that it is true. Solomon is not saying
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: this to generate despair. He is saying it because the honest,
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: acknowledgment of this fact is the necessary foundation for understanding
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: how to actually live. You cannot figure out how to
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: use your time well if you are pretending you have
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: unlimited time. You cannot understand what actually matters, if you
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: are using the illusion of permanence to avoid the question.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: He then writes a sentence that has been both misunderstood
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: as nihilism and correctly understood as realism by readers across
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: three thousand years. For the living know that they will die,
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: But the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward,
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: for the memory of them is forgotten. Solomon is writing
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: from within the limits of what is visible under the sun.
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: He is making an observation about the observable world, not
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: a comprehen tensive theological claim about what lies beyond it.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: In the world we can see and touch and verify,
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: the dead are no longer participating their voices have stopped.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: Their presence in the ongoing story of the living has ended,
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: and the precision of that observation is in service of
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: what comes next, which surprises almost every reader who reaches
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: it expecting more darkness. Go eat your bread with joy,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: and drink your wine with a merry heart. For God
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: has already approved what you do. Let your garments be
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: days of your vain life that He has given you
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: under the sun, because that is your portion in life,
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: From the full, honest, acknowledgment of death comes not paralysis,
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: but urgency, Not the urgency of anxiety, but the urgency
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: of a tension, the invitation to actually live the life
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: you have been given, rather than spending it in the
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: comfortable suspension of someone who has not yet decided to arrive.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: Eat with joy, drink with a merry heart. Let your
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: garments be white, which in the ancient Near East was
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: the dress of a person celebrating rather than mourning. Do
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: not let the oil be lacking, which was the preparation
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: of someone who is present and ready, rather than withdrawn,
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: enjoy life with the person you love. These are not
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: the words of a man who has been defeated by
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: the reality of death. They are the words of a
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: man who has looked at death honestly enough to understand
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: that the alternative to death is life, and who has
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: concluded that life, when seen clearly in the light of
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: its own finitude, is not diminished, but made more vivid,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: more worthy of full attention, more precious in every ordinary
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: moment than it appears to the person who is still
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: pretending there will always be more time later. I want
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: to tell you about a woman named Ruth. She was
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: sixty seven years old, and she had received a diagnosis
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: eight months earlier that had reorganized her entire relationship with time.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: Not a death sentence with a precise timetable, an uncertainty
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: with a weight, a medical reality that had made the
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: future something she could no longer take for granted, with
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: the comfortable vagueness that most people, without realizing it, use
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: as a substitute for actually living. She said something in
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: conversation with her daughter that her daughter wrote down and
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: has carried with her ever since. She said that for
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: the first forty years of her life, she had been
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: living in a kind of waiting room, not unhappily, not
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: with any conscious sense of holding back, but with the
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: pervasive background assumption that the real living was slightly ahead
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: of her, that when the next thing resolved itself, she
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: would arrive at a fullness she had been approaching but
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: not quite reaching. The diagnosis ended the waiting room. It
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: did not end her life. It ended the waiting. She
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: started eating her meals more slowly. She started watching sunsets
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: instead of glancing at them. She started saying the things
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: she had been meaning to say to people she loved,
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: not because she was dying imminently, but because she had
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: stopped assuming that saying them could wait. She told her
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: daughter that the eight months since the diagnosis had felt
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: more fully lived than the previous twenty years combined, not
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: because they were easier, because she had finally stopped waiting
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: to arrive and had started being present in the life
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: that had been available to her the whole time. Solomon
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: would have recognized her immediately. Whatever your hand finds to do,
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: do it with all your might, For there is no
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: work or thought, or knowledge or wisdom in the grave
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: to which you are going, do it with all your might,
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: not with the reserve effort of someone who is saving
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: their best for later, not with the managed engagement of
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: someone who is keeping something in reserve for circumstances that
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: seem more deserving of full effort, with all of it.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: Because the grave is coming not as a threat, but
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: as a fact, and the question is simply what you
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: will have done with your hands before you get there.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: He follows this with an observation that is one of
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: the most important reframings of failure available in any ancient text.
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: I saw that under the sun the race is not
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: favor to those with knowledge. But time and chance happen
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: to them all. Time and chance happen to them all.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: This is Solomon dismantling the meritocratic fantasy that every generation
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: reconstructs in its own image, the belief that outcomes are
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: primarily a function of the quality of the effort, that
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: the talented and the diligent and the virtuous will arrive
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: where they deserve to arrive, and that if you have
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: not arrived, it is primarily because you have not yet
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: tried hard enough. He is not saying talent and diligence
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: do not matter. He is saying they do not guarantee
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: outcomes because time and chance operate in the same world
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: as talent and diligence, and they do not ask permission
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: before they intervene. The fastest runner can trip, the strongest
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: army can be undone by weather or supply lines, or
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: the decision of a single soldier in a moment of chaos.
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: This is not fatalism. It is realism, and the counsel
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: it offers is not passivity but humility. If outcomes are
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: not entirely within your control, then the measure of a
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: life cannot be its outcomes alone. It must also include
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: something about how the life was lived, the integrity of
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: the effort, the faithfulness of the showing up, the quality
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: of presence in each day, regardardless of whether the results
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: match the investment. He adds an observation that carries its
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: full weight without any elaboration. There was found in a
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: small city a poor wise man, and he, by his wisdom,
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man.
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: A man of wisdom saves an entire city, and no
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: one remembers him because he was poor, because he had
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: no social standing that would cause the people who benefited
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: from his wisdom to feel an obligation to honor him afterward.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: Solomon is not telling us this to generate cynicism about wisdom.
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: He is telling us because the person who pursues wisdom
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: in order to be remembered by the people their wisdom
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: serves has already misunderstood what wisdom is. For The poor
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: man saved the city because he saw what needed to
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: be done, and he did it with everything he had.
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: His reward was not recognition. His reward was a city
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: still standing, and by a measure that the social hierarchies
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: of the visible world cannot see or record. That was enough.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: We are moving toward the answer now, not quickly. Solomon
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: has never been in a hurry to skip the honest
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: ground that leads there. But we are moving. Whatever your
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: hand finds to do today, do it with all your might,
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: and when the doing is done, rest with all your
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: might too. Both are worth doing fully. This is your
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: time for rest, and rest, as Solomon has told us,
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: is among the genuine gifts. Receive it. Chapter nine, the
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: ant the Fool, the Risk, and the letter Solomon wrote
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: to his younger self. If you have been listening carefully
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: through the previous chapters, you have noticed that Solomon moves
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: between two registers throughout this book. The first is the
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: register of the philosopher, the long view, the honest reckoning
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: with the las d and uncomfortable realities of human existence,
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: death and injustice, and the limits of human wisdom, and
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: the hebble nature of everything temporary examined with the full
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: weight of intellectual and emotional seriousness. The second is the
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: register of the grandfather, the man who has been around
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: long enough to notice the small, specific, entirely practical patterns
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: that determine whether a human life goes well or poorly
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: in the ordinary run of days. Not the grand questions,
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: but the daily ones. How you handle a fool, what
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: you do with the morning before the day has told
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: you what it intends, whether you plant or keep watching
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: the wind. In these chapters Solomon moves decisively into the
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: second register, and what he produces is some of the
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: most practically useful council in the entire book. He opens
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: chapter ten with an image so small and so precise
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: that it almost seems out of place after everything that
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: has come before. Dead flies make the perfumer's ointment give
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: off a stench, So a little folly outweighs wisdom and
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: honor dead flies in perfume. Something carefully crafted, something that
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: required skill and the finest available ingredients and patient work
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: over time, and a single dead fly, something tiny and
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: weightless and entirely insignificant on its own, falls into it
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: and ruins the whole thing, not partially. The stench of
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: one small dead thing overwhelms the fragrance of an entire
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: batch of something valuable. Solomon is making an observation about
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: character and reputation that is as accurate as anything he
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: has written. The accumulation of wisdom and integrity across decades
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: of faithful living can be damaged seriously and sometimes permanently,
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: by a single act of folly at the wrong moment.
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: The trusted person who makes one decision that betrays everything
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: they stood for. The relationship built over years that is
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: broken in a single conversation spoken in anger. The reputation
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: constructed over a career that is compromised by one choice
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: made quickly in a moment of weakness. The ratio is
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: genuinely unfair. It takes far longer to build trust than
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: to lose it. One dead fly can ruin the perfume.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: This is not a council of paralysis. It is a
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: council of care. The quiet, consistent, unglamorous vigilance that keeps
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: you from ruining in one moment what you built over many,
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: the discipline of not putting yourself in situations where a
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: moment of weakness becomes the thing you are most known for.
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: Solomon then describes the behavior of fools with a specificity
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: that is almost affectionate in its precision. Even when the
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: fool walks on the road, he lacks sense, and he
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: says to every one that he is a fool. The
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: fool does not need to announce his folly. It announces
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: itself in the small decisions and the reflexive responses, and
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: the way he handles ordinary situations that carry no obvious weight.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: Wisdom is not primarily about the dramatic moments. It is
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: about what you reveal when nothing particularly important seems to
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: be happening. And then a piece of practical counsel about
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: authority and conflict that is useful in every era and
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: every kind of human relationship that involves any imbalance of power.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: If the anger of the ruler rises against you, do
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: not leave your place for calmness will lay great offenses
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: to rest. Stay calm not because the authority above you
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: is always right, not because the injustice does not matter,
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: but because the response that feels most satisfying in the
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: immediate moment, the one that makes sure every one knows
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: exactly what you think and how wrong the situation is,
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: almost always makes things worse rather than better. The imposed response,
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: the one that costs you something in the short term,
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: is usually the one that actually moves the situation toward resolution.
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: He then moves to a series of observations about action
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: and risk that together form one of the most practically
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: important passages in the entire book. Whoever watches the wind
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: will not sow, and whoever looks at the clouds will
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: not reap. If you plant only when the conditions are perfect,
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: you will never plant. If you harvest only when the
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: weather guarantees a smooth operation, you will never harvest. The
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: conditions are never perfect, the wind never fully stops, the
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: clouds never clear to a standard that removes all uncertainty
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: from the outcome, and the person who waits for that
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: standard to be met is not being careful. They are
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: being afraid, and they are calling it careful. I want
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: to tell you about a man named Daniel. He had
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: been carrying the same idea for nine years, a project
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: that he genuinely belie would matter, that he had the
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: skills and the knowledge to pursue, that he had thought
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: through carefully and revised repeatedly, and discussed with people whose
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: judgment he trusted. He had a note book full of
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: plans and a file on his computer with enough preliminary
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: work to fill a small volume. And every time he
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: considered actually starting, the wind was blowing from the wrong direction,
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: the timing was not quite right. There was something else
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: that needed to resolve first. The conditions would be better
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: in the spring, or after the next year at work,
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: or when the children were a little older, or when
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: he felt more prepared. Nine years he opened Ecclesiastes one evening,
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: looking for something else entirely, and read the sentence about
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: the wind and the clouds, and he stopped. He said
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: later that he sat with that sentence for a long time,
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: not because it resolved anything, because it named exactly what
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: he had been doing for nine years. And year he
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: used the precise word for it, that he had been
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: working very hard to avoid. He had been watching the wind.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: He sent the first email toward the project the following morning,
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: not because the wind had stopped. The wind was still blowing.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: He sent it because he finally understood that the wind
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: was always going to be blowing and the cloud cover
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: was never going to clear to the standard he had
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: been holding out for, and that the harvest he imagined
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: was only available to someone willing to plant in imperfect conditions.
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: Solomon reinforces this with an image taken directly from the
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: natural world. If clouds are full of rain, they empty
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: themselves on the earth, And if a tree falls to
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: the south or to the north, in the place where
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: the tree falls there it will lie. Clouds do not
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: consult a committee before releasing their rain. They release when
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: they are full, because releasing when they are full is
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: what they are for. The tree falls in the direction
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: gravity takes it and comes to rest where it lands
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: without negotiating about the outcome. Nature acts. Nature does not
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: conduct extended internal deliberations about whether the circumstances are sufficiently favorable.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: In the morning, sow your seed, and at evening withhold
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: not your hand, for you do not know which will
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: prosper this or that, or whether both alike will be good.
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: So in the morning, keep working in the evening, not
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: because you know which effort will produce fruit. You do not.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: Solomon has been absolutely clear about this time, and chance
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: happen to all, and the outcomes are not fully within
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: your control. But you sow anyway. You work in the morning,
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: and you keep working in the evening because the only
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: way to find out which seed prospers is to plant them,
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: and the only way to plant them is to stop
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: watching the wind. And then Solomon turns to address the
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: young directly, and something in the register shifts again. It
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: becomes personal in a way that everything before it has
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: been building toward. Rejoice, o young man, in your youth,
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: and let your heart cheer you in the days of
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: the sight of your eyes. But know that for all
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: these things God will bring you into judgment. Rejoice in
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: your youth, not as consolation, as a genuine invitation. The
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: energy and the possibility and the particular openness of the
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: early chapters of a life are real goods. They are
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: worth celebrating. They are worth inhabiting fully, rather than rushing
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: through on the way to a later stage that seems
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: more serious, but with two things attached. The first is accountability.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: God will bring you into judgment, not as a threat
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: designed to dampen the joy of being young, as a
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: reality that, taken seriously, shapes what you actually do with
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: your freedom. The second is realism. Youth passes faster than
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: it feels like it is passing. Remove vexation from your
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: heart and put away pain from your body. For youth
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: and the dawn of life are vanity, heeble, real and fleeting,
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: not meaningless passing. Use it well, not anxiously, not with
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: the crushing weight of trying to extract maximum value from
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: every moment, but with the awareness that this season has
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: a length and you do not know what that length is.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: And then the sentence that serves as the bridge between
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: this chapter and what follows, Remember also your Creator in
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: the days of your youth, before the evil days come
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: and the years draw near, of which you will say
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: I have no pleasure in them, Remember your Creator in
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: the days of your strength and your clarity and your energy.
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: In the season when the choice is most fullier available
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: to you, and the habit is easiest to form before
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: the drift has carried you far enough that finding your
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: way back requires more effort than you expected. Solomon is
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: writing the letter he wished he had received when he
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: was young, before the drift, before the altars on the hills,
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: before the great experiment that proved at enormous personal cost.
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: What might have been learned more gently if he had
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: simply stayed close to the one who made him. He
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: is not writing it to condemn anyone for the distance
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: they have already traveled in the wrong direction. He is
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: writing it as an act of love, the specific aching
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: love of a person who took the long road and
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: wants desperately to give some one at the beginning of
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: the journey the directions that would have saved years of wandering.
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: And if you are not young by any conventional measure,
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: if the dawn of life is well behind you, and
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: the evil days solomon mentions have already arrived in some form.
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: Hear this too, the invitation and does not expire. The
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: creator being remembered is not keeping a strict window for
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: when remembering is still valid. The return is always available
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: and It begins where every honest return begins, exactly where
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: you are. So in the morning work in the evening.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: You do not know which will prosper. But the one
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: who knows is not withholding that knowledge out of indifference.
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: Begin the seed knows how to grow from here. Chapter ten,
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: Remember your creator, the poem the body writes as it ages.
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: There is a poem hidden inside the final chapter of Ecclesiastes,
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: not announced as poetry, not set apart in any way
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: that would signal to the casual reader that something different
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: is happening. It arrives in the form of quiet, sequential observations,
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: and you could read through it without noticing the extraordinary
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: thing Solomon has done. But the ancient readers who encountered
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: this text in its original Hebrew, who knew its literary
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: forms the way you know the shape of a familiar
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: song before the first note is fully sounded, they recognized
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: it immediately. They recognized a poem about the human body
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: growing old, not stated plainly, but not listed, like a
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: medical inventory of failing systems, veiled in some of the
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: most precise and tender imagery. Solomon ever produced a series
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: of pictures drawn from the natural world and from daily
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: life in an ancient household, each one a portrait of
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: a different form of physical diminishment, each one observed with
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: such accuracy that once you see what he is describing,
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: you cannot encounter these verses again without seeing it. He
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: opens with the invitation we heard at the close of
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: the last chapter, now repeated with a different weight, the
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: weight of some one who has run out of time.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: To be indirect remember your creator in the days of
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: your youth, before the evil days come, and the years
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: draw near, of which you will say, I have no
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: pleasure in them, before the evil days come. He uses
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: the word evil, not in a moral sense, but in
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: the sense of difficult, hard, the kind of days that
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: take more than they give, the days of limitation and
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: physical diminishment, and the slow accumulation of losses that have
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: no recovery. Most young people cannot fully imagine those days.
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: The body in youth is largely invisible in the best sense.
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: You do not think about your knees when you climb stairs.
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: You do not think about your eyes when you read
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: in ordinary light. The body simply does what you ask
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: it to do, without requesting acknowledgment or accommodation. Solomon is saying,
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: in those days when the body is simply working and
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: you do not have to think about it, remember your creator,
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: not because you cannot remember him in the hut days,
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: but because the practice formed in the easy days is
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: the one that holds when the hard days come. And
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: now the poem begins before the sun and the light
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: and the moon and the stars are darkened, and the
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: clouds return after the rain. He is describing the gradual
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: dimming of the eyes. The world that was once sharp
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: and fully lit begins in age to lose some of
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: its definition. The fine print requires more light. The faces
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: at the far end of a room take longer to
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: resolve into recognition. The light that was once simply and
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: effortlessly there begins to feel less certain, and the clouds
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: return after the rain. In the seasons of ancient Judea,
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: a rain storm was followed by clearing, But Solomon is
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: describing something different, the kind of weather that does not
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: fully clear. Where one front passes and before the sky
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: has completely opened, another has already appeared at the horizon,
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: the relentless overcast, a body that no longer bounces back
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: the way it once did, Where recovery takes longer than
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: it used to, and the windows of full health grow
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: narrower with each year. He continues in the day when
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: the keepers of the house tremble and the strong men
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few,
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: and those who look through the windows are dimmed. The
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: keepers of the house are the arms and hands, the
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: limbs that manage the body's daily life. They tremble where
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: they once moved without thought. The strong men are the legs,
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: the pillars that once carried you effortlessly up hills and
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: stood without complaint through long days. They bend under the
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: accumulated weight of years. The grinders are the teeth. Those
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: who look through the windows are the eyes. Solomon is
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: building a complete and entirely honest portrait of what the
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: body becomes in time, not one person's body, every body
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: that lives long enough, the universal human experience of the
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: slow inheritance of physical limitation, described in language so precise
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: and so gently observant that you feel he has watched
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: this happen, perhaps in his own body, perhaps in the
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: bodies of those he loved. He is not writing about
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: aging with contempt. There is no disgust here, no impatience
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: with the slow process of a body becoming something other
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: than what it was. There is only honest, careful, compassionate witnessing,
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: And by giving this experience a place in sacred literature,
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: by treating the aging of the human body as something
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: worthy of poetry rather than something to be managed quietly
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: and without public acknowledgment, Solomon is saying something that deserves
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: to be heard in every era. Growing old is not
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: a failure. Losing the capacities of youth is not a defeat.
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: It is a season, one of the seasons that the
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: poem in chapter four already told us, has its own
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: time and its own form of beauty that is specific
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: to it and cannot be accessed in any other. He
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: adds more images. And the doors on the street are
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: shut when the sound of the grinding is low, and
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: one rises up at the sound of a bird, and
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: all the daughters of song are brought low, The doors
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: are the lips. The grinding going low is the silence
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: of a mouth that can no longer do what it
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: once did. One rises at the sound of a bird
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: describes the light and easily interrupted sleep of old age,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: the disappearance of the deep unconscious rest that youth moves
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: through without noticing or appreciating. The daughters of song being
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: brought low is the voice which in aging loses the
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: range and the fullness it once had without effort. They
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: in the way. The fear of heights in old age,
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: the reasonable caution around staircases and uneven ground, and the
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: simple movements that once carried no particular a risk, but
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: now carry the possibility of a fall that could change everything.
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: The almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home,
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: and the mourners go about the streets. The almond tree
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: in early blossom is white, the color of the hair
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: that age places on the head of the one who
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: has lived long. The grasshopper dragging itself along is the
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: slow and careful movement of a body that no longer
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: covers ground with the ease it once did. Desire fails,
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: and not only particular physical desires. The appetite for the
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: next thing, the energy that makes a person lean forward
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: into tomorrow with curiosity and engagement, that too dims as
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: the weight of accumulated years grows heavier, and man is
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: going to his eternal home. There it is the destination
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: of every road every body has ever traveled, not as
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: a threat, not as a verdict pronounounced with the coldness
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: of a judicial sentence, as a fact so fundamental that
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: every other fact in the poem is a commentary on it.
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: You are going to your eternal home. The mourners will
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: go about the streets, because the loss of someone who
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: was present and known and loved is always felt as
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: loss by those who remain. I want to tell you
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: about a man named Arthur. He was seventy nine years old,
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: and he had been a carpenter for fifty one years.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: His hands, which had framed houses and built furniture and
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: repaired more things than he could count, had developed a
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: tremor in his late seventies that made the fine work impossible.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: He had put down his tools for the last time
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: on an afternoon in November, and he had stood in
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: his workshop afterward for a long time, without quite being
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: able to leave. His granddaughter visited him a few weeks
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: later and found him sitting at the kitchen table with
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: his hands folded in front of him. Looking at them.
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: She asked him what he was thinking. He said he
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: was thinking about all the things those hands had made,
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: all the wood that had passed through them, all the
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: mornings he had driven to a job site in the
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: dark and come home in the evening with sawdust still
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: in his hair, all the small repairs done for neighbors
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: who could not afford to pay him, and the furniture
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: built for children who were now grown and had children
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: of their own. He said he was thinking that the
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: hands were slower now, but the work was still there,
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: still real, still standing in houses across three counties, still
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: holding food on tables where families ate together. He said,
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: I did not waste them. Solomon wrote this poem for Arthur,
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: for everyone who has stood at the kitchen table, looking
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: at their hands and taking stock of what they were
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: used for, For everyone in the season where the keepers
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: of the house are beginning to tremble and the strong
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: men are beginning to bend. The body is not the
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: whole story. It never was, and the diminishment of the
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: bodied does not diminish the life that was lived inside it.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: Solomon then completes the poem with images of finality that
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: are among the most beautiful he ever produced. Before the
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken,
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: or the picture is shattered at the fountain, or the
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: God who gave it. The silver cord is the thread
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: of life itself. When it snaps, the connection between the
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: person and the world ends. The golden bowl is the skull,
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: the precious and irreplaceable vessel that carries the mind. When
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: it breaks, what it carried is no longer here. The
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: picture at the fountain is the heart, drawing life up
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: continuously from its source. The wheel at the cistern is
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: the mechanism that keeps the circulation of life moving. When
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: these things fail, they fail finally, and what follows is
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: the oldest and most honest of all things theological statements
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: about the human body. The dust returns to the earth
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: as it was, and the spirit returns to God who
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: gave it. You are borrowed. The body you inhabit was
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: formed from the earth and will return to it. But
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: the spirit the thing that makes you irreducibly yourself, rather
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: than a collection of processes that came from somewhere else.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: It was given, and when the silver cord snaps and
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: the golden bowl breaks, it goes back to the one
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: who gave it. This is offered not as a resolution
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: to the problem of mortality, but as a fact, a
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: quietly extraordinary fact that changes the weight of everything the
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: poem has been describing. The dust is real, and the
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: returning of the dust is real. But the spirit goes
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: back to God. And then, with the quiet authority of
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: a man who has finally said what he came to say,
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: Solomon returns to the words that opened the book, Vanity
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: of vanities, says the preacher. All is vanity, the same words,
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: the same Hebrew hebel havlim. But now, after everything we
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: have walked through together, these words carry a weight they
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 1: could not have carried at the beginning. We know now
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: what he means by hebbel real and fleeting, beautiful in
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: its season, and gone when the season ends. We know
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: that the existence of the fleeting implies something that is
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: not fleeting. We know that the vapor implies a warmth
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: that produced it. The dust will return, and the spirit
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: goes back to God. Rest now in the honesty of
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: this poem let. The image of Arthur at his kitchen table,
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: looking at hands that built things still standing across three counties,
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: sit beside the image of the silver cord and the
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: golden bowl. Both are true. The diminishment is real, and
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: so is the life that was lived inside it. You
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: are on loan. The life in you is borrowed and precious,
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: and the one who lent it to you has not
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: lost track of it for a single moment of the
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: time it has been in your hands. The dust will
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: return and the spirit goes back to God. That is
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: enough for to night. Chapter eleven the final answer, Fear God,
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: keep his commandments, and why this is the beginning, not
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: the end. We have arrived, after everything, after the great
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: experiment in wisdom and pleasure and work, after the Poem
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: of the Seasons, after the dark chapters that refuse to
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: look away, after the reckoning with death and the Letter
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: to the Young, and the poem of a Body that
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: the years are slowly returning to dust. After eleven chapters
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: of one of the most relentlessly honest books in the
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: history of human literature, we have arrived at the answer,
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: and it arrives not with a flourish not with the
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: drama you might expect at the end of a journey
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: this long and this demanding. It arrives in two sentences,
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: plain and direct, without ornamentation, without qualification. Fear God and
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 1: keep his commandments, for this is the whole of man.
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: secret thing, whether good or evil. That is it. That
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: is the conclusion. And before we say anything else about it,
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: we need to sit with the most honest response most
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: people have when they read it for the first time. Disappointment.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: All of that, the reader thinks, all of that searching
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: and dismantling and honest reckoning, And the answer is keep
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: the commandments. After eleven chapters of the most searching wisdom
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: in the ancient world, the conclusion sounds like it belongs
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: on the first page of a children's religious primer. I
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: want to say something directly to that disappointment, because the disappointment,
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: and if you feel it, is telling you something true
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: about what you were hoping for. You were hoping, perhaps
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: for a philosophical resolution, a framework sophisticated enough to match
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: the sophistication of the questions, an answer that felt as
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: complex and layered as the journey that produced it. But
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: Solomon's conclusion is not simple because he ran out of ideas.
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: It is direct because he followed the questions all the
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: way to the end and found that the end is
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 1: not a philosophy, It is a relationship. Fear God. We
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: have been over this word before, back at the very
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: beginning of our journey, and it bears returning to now
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: that we know everything that came between. The Hebrew word
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: is yra, not terror, Not the cowering of a small
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: person before an angry authority, the overwhelming awareness of standing
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: before something so much greater than yourself that your own
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: smallness becomes not crushing, but clarify, the posture of a
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: soul that has stopped pretending to be the largest thing
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: in the room and discovered in that honesty a freedom
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: it had not expected. When Solomon says fear God, he
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: is saying, orient yourself rightly, stop placing your ultimate trust
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: in the things we have spent eleven chapters discovering cannot
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: bear that trust. Not wisdom, which increases grief, Not pleasure,
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: which satisfies temporarily and then intensifies the appetite, Not work,
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: which can be undone by a fool who inherits it.
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: Not wealth, which sprouts wings and flies, Not reputation, which
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: is built on what other people think of you to
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: day and is therefore only as stable as what other
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: people think of you to day. Place your ultimate trust
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: in the one who made you, who established the rhythms
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: and the seasons, who set eternity in your heart, because
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: he intended you for something that exceeds the visible who
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: sees every deed and every secret thing, and keep his commandments,
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: Not as a checklist that, if completed correctly and sufficiently,
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: will obligate God to deliver the outcomes you are hoping for,
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: as the natural expression of a life that has genuinely
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: turned toward God. As what happens daily and imperfectly and
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: honestly in the choices of a person who has stopped
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: organizing their life around the things that cannot hold, and
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: has started organizing it around the one who can. This
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: is the whole of man. The Hebrew word translated here
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: as whole is coal, and coal does not mean the
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: complete list of religious obligations. It means everything, the entirety,
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: not one aspect of human existence or another, but all
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: of it together, Your work and your rest, your speaking
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: and your silence, your times of building and your times
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: of tearing down, your relationships and your solitude, your public life,
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: and the one only you and God can see, all
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: of it oriented toward God, all of it lived in
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: the light of the one who made you and knows
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: you completely, and holds every deed in his sight, whether
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: any one else ever witnessed it or not, God will
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: good or evil. This has been read as a threat
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: for a very long time. I want to offer a
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: different reading. Not to soften it, because the verse is
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: not soft, but to hear what Solomon is actually doing
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: with it. Think about what he has been documenting across
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: eleven chapters, the tears of the oppressed with no one
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: to comfort them, the poor wise man who saved a
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: city and was not remembered, the faithful person who suffered
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: things they did not deserve, while the person who operated
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: without integrity prolonged their life. In comme the gap visible
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: in every generation between what faithfulness costs and what the
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: visible world offers in return. If there is no judgment,
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: if the visible world is the complete story, if time
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: and chance are the final word on every human life.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: Then every act of faithfulness performed without witness was simply wasted.
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: Then the integrity of the person who chose the honest,
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: hard path when the easy, dishonest one was available was
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: simply foolish. Then the tears of the oppressed are simply
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: the tears of the oppressed, and nothing more. But if
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: God will bring every deed into judgment, then nothing is wasted.
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: Not the small kindness that no one witnessed, Not the
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: choice made in private at personal cost, when no one
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: who could have rewarded it was watching. Not the faithfulness
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: that continued past the point where any reasonable external assessment
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: would have recommended stopping. Not Arthur's hands building things across
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: three counties that are still standing, Not Caroline's twenty two
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: years in a living room with a piano. Not the
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: mending done in the dark that no one saw and
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: no one recorded. Every secret thing, everything done in the
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: rooms where only God can see, Everything that passed without
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: a witness who could record it. Everything that will never
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: appear in any account of your life that another human
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: being might compile. It has been seen, it is held,
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: it will be accounted for. I want to be honest
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: about something before we close this chapter. Solomon's conclusion does
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: not answer every question this book raised. It does not
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: resolve the problem of suffering in a way that makes
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 1: the suffering feel less real. It does not tell us
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: why the righteous perish in their righteousness, or why the
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: wicked prolong their lives, or why time and chance intervene
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: in ways that seem indifferent to the quality of the
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: effort that preceded them. It does is something different, and
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: something I would argue more valuable. It tells us where
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: to stand, not what to conclude about every circumstance that
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: exceeds our understanding, but what to orient toward while living
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: through those circumstances. Fear God, keep his commandments, Trust that
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: the accounting is real even when you cannot see it.
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: Live with the full attention and the full integrity that
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: a life before the eyes of God deserves. Not because
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: you will always see the reward in the visible time frame,
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: but because the reward is real, and the judgment is real,
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: and the one who holds all of it is trustworthy
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: in a way that nothing under the sun has ever
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: quite managed to be. Solomon did not arrive at this
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: conclusion by avoiding the hard questions. He arrived at it
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: by following them faithfully to the end, by refusing to
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: accept insufficient answers even when they were comforting, by testing
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: every alternative and documenting honestly what he found. He earned
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: this conclusion, and he offers it to you not as
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: a platitude, but as the most honest thing a man
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 1: can say after looking at the full scope of human
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: experience with clear eyes and an unwilling heart. Fear God,
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: keep his commandments. This is the whole of man. The
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: long search is complete. The honest witness has said what
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: he came to say, and the answer he arrived at
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: after everything is not a philosophy, you understand. It is
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 1: an orientation you choose. That choosing is available to you
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 1: right now, in whatever room you are resting in, in
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 1: whatever chapter of your story you are living through, in
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: whatever distance you have traveled from the place where that
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: orientation felt most natural. The creator being remembered has been
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: patient with every detour. The one who holds every secret
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: deed has already seen every moment of the journey that
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 1: brought you here, and he is still here. That is
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 1: the final answer, And it turns out it was always
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: also the first one cohalt has finished speaking, The gathering
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: is over. The room has gone quiet, in the way
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: that rooms go quiet only after something important has been said.
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: The silence that follows not from lack of things to speak,
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 1: but from the recognition that what needed to be said
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: has been said, and what needs to happen now is
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: something other than more words. You have walked the whole
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: road with him tonight. You began, perhaps as a tired person,
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: settling into the dark, carrying whatever the day had left behind,
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: The unresolved situation, the question that has been following you
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: from room to room, the flatness at moments that were
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: supposed to feel like a rival, the three in the
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 1: morning awareness that something you have been reaching for has
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: not quite closed the distance, no matter how long you
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: have been reaching. And you have traveled through the whole
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: of Ecclesiastes, through the great experiment that proved what Solomon
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: already suspected, Through the Poem of the Seasons that told
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: you your hard chapters have a time and a place
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: in the pattern, Through the dark chapters that sat beside
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 1: you in the darkness without rushing you toward the light.
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: Through the reckoning with death that became unexpectedly an invitation
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: to actually live through the Letter to the Young and
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 1: the poem of the Body Aging, and the final answer
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: that arrived in two plain sentences after eleven chapters of
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 1: the most honest searching the ancient world produced. Here is
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: what I want to leave you with. The ache you
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: have been feeling, the one that every heeble thing temporarily
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: eases and then leaves untouched, is not a malfunction. It
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: is not evidence that something has gone wrong with you.
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: It is not a problem that the right achievement, or
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 1: the right relationship, or the right amount in the account
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: will eventually resolve. It is a compass built into you
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 1: before you had language to describe it, pointing with the
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: consistency of something designed by very capable hands towards something
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: it was made to point toward. Thomas in Chicago read
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: about one generation passing and another coming, and felt for
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: the first time simultaneously small and understood. Claire in her
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: class room, talked to a student about sensing what you
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 1: cannot complete and named it as design rather than deficiency.
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: James the Pastor found a verse that told him he
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 1: was not crazy. In the darkest season of his life,
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 1: Ruth stepped out of the waiting room and into the
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: life that had been available to her all along. Daniel
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 1: stopped watching the wind and sent the e mail. Margaret
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 1: put down the reputation and looked for the house she
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: had forgotten to live. Caroline received a phone call twenty
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 1: years after the beginning and learned that patient work in
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 1: a small room had reached further than she knew. Arthur
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: sat at his kitchen table, looking at hands that were
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: slower now but had not been wasted. Their stories are
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: not separate from yours. They are versions of it. They
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 1: are the same search, run in different rooms with different materials,
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 1: arriving at the same recognition. The dust will return to
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 1: the earth that is real, and the spirit returns to
• 2:12:34
  Speaker 1: God who gave it, that is also real. And the
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 1: guard it returns to has been present for every chapter
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 1: of the journey that brought it there, the beautiful chapters
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: and the difficult ones, the seasons of building and the
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: seasons of tearing down, the times of laughing and the
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: times of weeping. That Solomon told us both belong fear God,
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: keep his commandments. This is the whole of man, not
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 1: the end of the search. The beginning of living, as
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: though the search has found something real which it has sleep.
• 2:13:10
  Speaker 1: Now the heavil things of today will pass with the night.
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 1: The sun will rise again tomorrow without asking your permission,
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 1: and the river will run to the sea, and another
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: day will be given that you did not earn and
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 1: cannot keep, and can only inhabit as fully as you
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: are able inhabit it fully. Kuehelt gathered us into this
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: room to tell the truth. He has told it, and
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: the truth all the way to the very end of
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: it is not despair. The truth is that the ache
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: you feel is a compass, and the compass is pointing
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 1: somewhere real, and the one it is pointing toward has
• 2:13:47
  Speaker 1: been waiting for you with the patience of something that
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 1: is not in a hurry, because it is not going anywhere.
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: He has been here the whole time. And tomorrow, when
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: you wake, you will wake into a day held by
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 1: the same hands that have been holding every day of
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: this long and honest book. Go and rest, you are
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: already home.