|
 A few years ago Canadian writer Mike Mason (author of The Mystery of Marriage, The Gospel According to Job, etc.) launched what he called "an experiment in joy": he made up his mind to be joyful in the Lord every day for ninety days. A moody person by nature, for him this was a radical experiment that changed his life. Throughout the ninety days he kept a journal, which eventually became a book on joy entitled Champagne for the Soul.
What follows is part of a series of ten excerpts from that book (now in a new edition by Regent College Publishing, available through Amazon.ca).
Be here now
I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better
for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.
Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days
of the life God has given him under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 8:15 For such a notoriously gloomy book, the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes has a great deal to say about happiness. Indeed a careful study of this book shows that happiness is its central theme. In various ways the author keeps saying, There is nothing better for men than to be happy (3:12).
If we find Ecclesiastes gloomy, it's because the writer rubs our nose in the great enemy of happiness, ennui. Call it angst, world-weariness, or a sense of futility, this is the condition that overtakes the person who has everything except happiness, the been-everywhere-done-everything sort who is now sick of living.
This is the story of Ecclesiastes. After trying it all money, women, drink, power, ambitious projects, all the worldly pleasures including even the gathering of wisdom the author admits, I hated life (2:17), and he sums up everything with his favorite word: Meaningless! Meaningless! (1:2)
Continue article >>
|
 To this writer, life is meaningless not in the sense of being devoid of meaning, but in the sense that its meaning cannot be fully deciphered: No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it (8:17). In this book even happiness itself is meaningless. Open your eyes and look around at this world of pain, and then try to justify being happy. It can't be done. Joy is not rational; its mystery cannot be plumbed; no philosophy leads there. Some circumstances may hold reasonable grounds for joy, but to rejoice alwaysthis is beyond reason, beyond understanding.
What to say, then, to the person overcome by meaninglessness and the tedium of life? Is it still possible to rekindle joy? The writer of Ecclesiastes says yes, but he doesn't say how. Rather than explaining how to be happy, he simply cries out: Be happy! Stop trying to figure it all out, and just enjoy what's under your nose. Better what the eye sees than the roving of the appetite (6:9). It's not what you look at that matters, but how you see. You've tried everything else, now try enjoying your life exactly as it is.
Of course the profound simplicity of this message is lost on our sophisticated minds. We cannot grasp it until we enter into the mystery of meaninglessness. Ecclesiastes cuts the ground from under all those who would meaningfully plan or scheme for happiness, as if it were something we could obtain if only we were good enough or careful enough. The apostle James scorns those who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow (James 4:13-14). Don't we approach happiness the same way? We tell ourselves, Tomorrow I'll do such-and-such and it will make me happy, or, After I finish work today, then I can relax and be happy.
Nonsense. Be happy now! If you can't find happiness in the present moment, you never will. Joy isn't around some corner. It's here.
November 15/2007
|
