Everything is meaningless or at least really disappointing

Whenever I read Ecclesiastes, I feel sorry for Solomon, the wisest man who'd lived up until that point, according to lore and tradition.

I mean, he has anything and everything you could want and he still found it to be just so-so at best on many occasions.

It would be like a person who won the lottery everyday and never had to worry about resources - that's roughly the same as what Solomon's situation was.

He had all the food, houses, servants, music/musicians, military support, entertainment, books, women/sexual partners in the world he could want and then some. 

And he still found it to be, "Meh". 

When he was young, God told him he could have anything he wanted and he asked for wisdom. And God gave it to him.

I don't know that his wisdom was exceptionally deep, mysterious, or wise by the standards we think of today - it was just basic, profoundly true things that no one we know of had seen, acknowledged and recorded before - and it blew people away.

I try to think through his stuff every now and then and try to come up with a way of thinking about it and explaining it to other people - and now of days, I'd say one thing that Solomon is trying to say is that it is all relative.  

Everything is relative - money, work, leisure, pleasure, etc - everything we have and experience has been around and will be around again - we will come and go and others will follow us.

Solomon struggles with what to do with this awareness.  You could curse all the situations or just throw yourself into pleasure and enjoyment - but it all ends the same, one way or the other.

At the end of the long writing, he comes to the conclusion that you ought to live life with the awareness of the fact that you are a created being and that there is an impact, good and bad, to everything that goes on - live humbly knowing there is a much larger story you're living in and understanding it all is beyond you.

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That's some tough stuff to think about. It's amazing to see this ancient writing still having relevance today.

Working through some of the material on deconstruction and rebuilding, I ran across some things I jotted down a few months back when I was exploring all the directions everything in my mind and soul were going or appeared to be going.

One big thing was how everything that I was pursuing, valuing, using as motivations to go forward in life through tough times - all of that became meaningless.  Well, for the most part.  But in substantial ways.

I was reminded that we value a lot things in life because they make sense and are "given value" in the context of our life, community, dreams, hopes, etc.  

But once that context is shaken, a lot of the things we valued aren't as valuable anymore.  Or at minimum, they are reordered with a more appropriate, realistic, and starkly-contrasting view of things.

You can come to a point where nothing has taste, meaning, or relevance - everything that was isn't as important anymore.

You realize that even if you could go back in time and move pieces and people around, you no longer would or care because those pieces and people have a very different meaning and definition and there's no going back.  

You see that the king has no clothes and never did.  You see that many things that were so important at your core level were, relatively speaking, a vapor or wisp of smoke that came and went.

And it's at those moments, when your history, your people, your possessions, your image, and more - all that goes down the toilet and you realize that a lot of what you lived for was a misguided thing at best.

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Then you have to decide what's worth going forward with and for. 

You shuffle through the pieces of what was and re-stack things into piles.  This pile might have some salvageable things, that pile is trash, those piles over there need to be sorted into smaller piles so we can begin to know what's in them, etc.

This process - which was a big part of the deconstruction - was extremely disorienting at times.  It's like there are time that the very ground you're standing on is ripped out from underneath you and you can't even stand there anymore because there's no there there.  

Something new has to hold you up. And you don't know quite what that is or is going to be yet.

Some of the things that were torn away were random and seemed so disconnected, but were likely all the same ball of wax.  

I remember the passing away of the idea that God wants us to get together in a room and sing to him. Or to each other. The whole concept of "worship" and "worship services" took an acid bath.  

The reality of how socially constructed most of our religious experiences are was a cold slap.  The clarity of how we projected our inherited ideas of "church" back into ancient scriptures, written for their own occasions and purposes, was almost blinding.

I remember the good feels I used to look forward to receiving from some people or groups vanishing retroactively in the realization of how little common ground we had over very important things.

Those people are still valuable people, loved by God, etc.  Those experiences were instrumental in a lot of good things happening including bringing me to a point when I realized that I saw them differently and only "good" for a purpose that I'd now not pursue.

So many things were "good" because the people and the perceived common ground that we shared made them "good".

Sometimes God wakes you up a different perception. It's unsettling, but necessary. 

I'm guessing there are things that he can show us ONLY IF we are ready to let go of some things that we once held to be unchangeable and untouchable.

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I can imagine some people who first read Solomon's words and thought to themselves - "Are you crazy?!".

Now I kind of get a little more of what he must have been aiming at with his "wisdom". 

Ecclesiastes and Proverbs contain some gold - pure and amazing gold - but they also contain the blazing fire that is required to get gold pure.

I'm grateful to God for his gifts.  At times I don't like the way he gives them.  

But I know we can trust him, if it doesn't make sense at the moment.

I know now that a part of the reward of being with God is just being along for the ride.