Ecclesiastes – Pen and Fire

Son of a warrior-king and his stolen wife,
bloodlines of sin and grace,
who’s God is untamed by man:
choosing Jacob over Esau,
the weak to shame the strong,
the wild branches grafted in.

Your renown sailed from Tyre to Sheba,
author of proverbs and poetry
architect of the temple
hands callused with ink and the cedars of Lebanon
labors of a heart wholly true—
yet how swift to fall from truth.

Wisdom cries aloud in the street
but you threw her off like a scandal
to embrace a harem and their gods
the ark, the cherubim, the Shekinah glory
forgotten, lost as the smoke of burnt offerings,
the blood blackened
the flame vanquished.

You spared a child from the knife,
yet carved a kingdom in two.

Your words taught men through ages,
but a bitter life taught you:
time is a splinter in the plane of eternity
and there is nothing new under the sun.
You did not need to know what a small blue orb
we spin on, to know it is all chasing wind
—wealth, wisdom, women—
the Preacher preaches,
but we are as deaf as a once-wise king.

What good is it to gain the world?
a Savior echoed, centuries later.

Son of a warrior-king and his stolen wife,
bookends of mercy mark your days,
who’s God is untamed by man:
you built Him a house,
though He built your bones,
you filled the Holy Place with sacred things,
and He tore the curtain.

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth.

I look around and wonder what we are, really. A mortal yarn that spins its life away with each second, each breath. A small beating, blood-colored muscle surrounded by a fragile cage of bones. Thump, thump. A frail fleshly body that houses an eternal weight of glory, made to worship and chase and love with an undimmed blaze that we have canned and isolated like preservatives with a shelf life. Here’s a candle for your career. A brief, colorful firework for your love story. A lamp for your Sunday religion, if you want it.

We have learned to make filters that cover our brokenness. What, I wonder, would we find, if we tore the layers away? Where is the raw, bleeding heart buried in the rubble?

A splintering world can’t be bandaged by human hands and machines. I want to shake you, when I see you drawing maps in the dark and sprinting through a maze with a cliff at the finish line. What good are these bits and bytes, these Babel-like structures, these soaring speeches if we all come to dust and ashes?

Still our hearts love these glints of gold, gleaming in the dull iron landscape of existence. Oh, how we live for that bright and elusive tomorrow, forgetting that all tomorrows will end in the grave. I suppose we must forget – because we are not human without hope. Hope that there is more, that the glimmers in the gray are not liars, but angels. Hope that we simultaneously cling to and crush because we love and hate holiness.

Before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

The mad world spins on. But on the other side of the veil, glory dawns like a sunrise. And in the still, quiet moments, it calls to us.

The stone was rolled away. And He is not silent.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Tag: Ecclesiastes

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