Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do.
- Ecclesiastes 9:7
I always found this passage in Ecclesiastes to be both comforting and a little maddening. After writing about all the ways he tried looking for joy—only to find everything “meaningless under the sun”—the human author of Ecclesiastes basically ends with an “oh well, everyone dies, life is meaningless, better enjoy it while you can.”
It seems a weird deduction at first - other philosophers have come across the same observations and come to much more depressing conclusions (Nietzsche, anyone?).
This was a man who didn’t dwell on the possibility of an afterlife. In his words, “the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them” (Ecclesiastes 9:1). In essence - no one knows what happens after death, so let’s not worry about that and focus on what we do know.
It’s an interesting position to take, isn’t it? But that is the crux of faith. We have only so many clues, and only so much understanding. We know that there are things in reality that are outside of our ability to perceive - frequencies and colors and sounds that are too high or too low, too far or too close, too large or too small for the human senses. Thank God for technology, that allows us to experience at least some of that hidden universe. But at the end of the day, all we can do is live according to what we believe, and try to make as much sense of what we can perceive as possible.
Friend, what is it that you believe? What keeps you getting up in the mornings and going to bed at night? Is your life lived with gladness, with a joyful heart?
