What if Everything You Ever Wanted wasn’t Enough?

Reflection by Susan Burnore
January 2, 2011
Today’s topic reminds me of when I met Helene Johnson. I had just started coming to Northwest, my first exposure to Unitarian Universalism, and the very first topic for a discussion group I attended was the Meaning of Life. I thought, “Hooray! I just found the UUs and they’re already going to tell me the meaning of Life!” About 20 of us were seated in a circle as the leader began. He had only said a few sentences when Helene waved her hand and said, “You have to be careful the way you speak to this group. We have several people who are God Fearing.” Well, I hadn’t been a Unitarian long, but this was not what I expected her to say! After a moment, I realized that she didn’t say God-fearing, she said Hard of Hearing! I decided to get hearing aids…
As you might expect, that seminar didn’t really answer my questions about the Meaning of Life. But I did eventually find some help in this little book, “When Everything You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” by Rabbi Harold Kushner. It is based on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which Jewish tradition holds was written by King Solomon. Kushner’s earlier book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”, was based on Job. It was enormously helpful to me at a difficult time in my life, so I checked out this newer one a few years ago.
Ecclesiastes is a little like the Hamlet of the Bible. I’ll tell you why. Years ago I went to see a movie of Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Mel Gibson. Mel was very popular then, so there were quite a few young people in the audience. After the show, I heard two teenage girls talking. “Hamlet’s a pretty good play, I guess, but there are too may clichés!” To be or not to be, Get thee to a nunnery, Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – puh-lease!
Reading Ecclesiastes for the first time is a lot like that: Lots of familiar phrases:
– There is nothing new under the sun.
– All is vanity.
– The sun also rises.
– To every thing there is a season.
Quoted often by everyone from Hemingway to Simon and Garfunkel. Perhaps because the real topic of Ecclesiastes is the meaning of life. Its story is pretty simple, really. A powerful man, referred to as The Teacher, writing in his middle age, explains that he has tried several paths to a meaningful life, and all have disappointed him.
As a young man, being young, he first pursued pleasure. He did it all, enjoyed it all. But this wasn’t enough to make him happy.
Then he turned to the gathering of wealth, and he was successful, becoming the wealthiest man in the land, but still not happy. No surprise there. Tabloids teach us that lesson about the miserable rich and famous every day.
Next he sought wisdom. Ecclesiastes finds that focusing all his energy on learning about life is a false virtue. He realizes that studying is not the same as experiencing.
Finally he tries being pious and righteous – he tries to learn and follow every one of God’s commandments. He never tells us why this did not work…but he writes at one point of seeing scoundrels receiving glorious funerals, while virtuous, humble people diekd forgotten and unattended.
And in that complaint, we see the real crux of the man’s anger and his fear. The anger comes from seeing that Life isn’t fair. No matter what he did, it was clear to him that he was still going to die and nothing he accomplished could guarantee that he would be remembered or rewarded.
Kushner says that expecting life to be fair because you’ve followed the rules is like expecting a raging bull not to try to kill you just because you’re a vegetarian. It just doesn’t work that way.
So the unfairness of life is the source of his anger. Neither Ecclesiastes nor Kushner has much more to say about that, since the unfairness of life is something that simply must be accepted.
The book is mainly about his fear – his fear of dying. Kushner sees that what he feared above all was not death so much as oblivion. There’s nothing so scary about having no future. If it’s over, it’s over. But not having a past? Not leaving a mark? Not having lived when you had the chance? Kushner says that Ecclesiastes is a “man desperately afraid of dying before he has learned how to live.”
He’s not the only one. Psychologist Carl Jung is often cited as saying:
Among all my patients in the second half of life, that is over thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did no regain his religious outlook.
The first time I read that quote I was working on a masters in counseling and Carl Jung was one of my idols. I figured I was in pretty big trouble because I was right then in the process of ‘losing my religion’ as my grandmother called it. I was coming to grips with the fact that I just didn’t believe the dogma I’d grown up with, even though I still loved my church and most of its principles. If I lost my religious outlook, was I in danger of becoming emotionally ill as Jung implied? Where would I turn for help in finding meaning? How would I face my own fear of death?
I struggled mightily with those questions over the next 20 years, but I can finally say that I’m pretty settled on my own answers for now.
First, I may have lost that religion, but I have acquired a secure religious outlook. Kushner says it well for me – “Authentic religion does not want obedient people. It wants authentic people, people of integrity…Living with integrity means finding out who you are and being that person all the time.” Nobody can do that All the time. But my religious outlook helps me challenge and ultimately lose the false, unauthentic parts of myself – the parts concerned about things that don’t really matter.
For my second question, about help in finding meaning – some of the same texts and people I looked to before still guide me. I’m still learning from Ecclesiastes and I’m still learning from my mother. She’s wandering deep in the fog of Alzheimer’s now. But every time I see her, I learn about the joy of living in the moment, and see the endurance of love and kindness even in the midst of devastating illness.
And this church gives me the opportunity to learn from people like Peg Gary and Bill Cox. What could be better than that!
And my last question, Ecclesiastes’ big question – how would I face my fear of death. My previous church answered that one pretty neatly for me – I didn’t have to worry about death because I was going to have eternal life. But when those beliefs fell away, what’s to comfort me when I think about dying?
It’s the same answer that Ecclesiastes and Rabbi Kushner and Peg and Bill come up with. Live fully now. Give my heart now. Be kind now. Don’t worry about the payoff – it’s the doing, the experiencing that matters.
Ecclesiastes says:
Go, eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy…Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life… Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no doing, no learning, no wisdom in the grave, where you are going.
Kushner writes:
Can you stop and close your eyes and remember something that happed for only a moment, many years ago? It may have been a view of a spectacular landscape, or a conversation that made you feel loved. (For Peg, experiencing that meteor shower among her animals.) In a sense it did not last very long, but in another sense it has lasted all those years and is still going on. That is the only kind of eternity this world grants us.
A final story about that kind of eternity. I reconnected this summer with an old friend, Dudley Freeman. We were in the same class from first grade through graduation. When we got together for the first time in over 30 years, to discuss our 40 year high school reunion, he said he wanted to tell me about something that happened when we were kids. Dudley and I both came from very poor families, but his was truly destitute and dysfunctional. He missed a lot of school, never had decent clothes, and had trouble making friends. And his name was Dudley, poor thing. One day in the 2nd grade, we were in the playground, and our teacher sent the two of us on an errand to the Principal’s office. Dudley clearly remembers walking up the long staircase into the school building together. Remembers that I started talking to him and asked him how he liked school. He said no other child had ever talked to him like that. That he usually felt invisible, but that I made him feel like a real person.
Now I was a bratty kid like most others, and I certainly don’t remember that conversation. But Dudley does to this day after more than 50 years. That little seven-year-old girl that I was achieved a kind of immortality that day. The only kind of eternity this world grants us.
And for me, it is enough.