Of Being and Time

Nearly 25 years ago when I was a university student and $2 meals were quite appealing, I was enjoying a vegetarian dinner at Gopal's, the restaurant run by the Krishna Consciousness movement -- the Hare Krishnas as we might commonly refer to them. Sitting at the same table as me was the South Pacific head of the Krishna Consciousness movement. As we chatted it became clear that the Hare Krishnas had done a good job of accommodating themselves to the life cycles we observe -- life and death, happiness and pain, peace and conflict. They were a living embodiment of Ecclesiastes 3, our fascinating study for this week. I asked my newfound friend what he believed to be the origin of conflict, pain and death, and he responded that he believed that these cycles that included conflict, pain and death had always existed. And they always would. It was the unchanging nature of the universe, according to this Krishna Consciousness devotee.

How did I view the same cycles as a Christ Consciousness devotee, if you'll pardon the term? Was my youthful search for peace and happiness one of accommodating myself to the eternal cyclical reality of peace and conflict, happiness and pain, life and death? Or, was God's intention for Alister Hunt that he would one day experience ever-increasing spirals of life, planting, healing, building, laughing, dancing (strike that), gathering, embracing, seeking, mending, loving, and experiencing peace?

This reminds me of Mark Twain's fascinating and somewhat irreverent short story, 'Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. The captain arrives in heaven, collects his harp and wings and is assigned to a cloud bank. He lasts less than a day before ditching the harp, cloud and wings in favor of smoking a pipe in the shade of a rock in the meadow. Then he learns that heaven has happiness and sadness, ease and pain, etc.

Captain Stormfield's friend explains heaven to him as follows:

" ... there's plenty of pain here - but it don't kill.
There's plenty of suffering here, but it don't last. You see,
happiness ain't a THING IN ITSELF - it's only a CONTRAST with
something that ain't pleasant. That's all it is. There ain't a
thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self - it's only
so by contrast with the other thing. And so, as soon as the
novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't
happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh. Well,
there's plenty of pain and suffering in heaven - consequently
there's plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness."

Do we need a knowledge of evil to appreciate good? Do we need to accept suffering to appreciate happiness? Conflict to appreciate peace? Or is God's ultimate reality for us one of Yang and no Yin, to (mis)use concepts from Chinese metaphysics?

Now I'm going to take a wild guess that many of us don't believe that "man's fate is like that of the animals" (v19), and that there is more to life than accommodating ourselves to the polar opposites that are currently the temporal experience of us all.

However, during this life it is not a bad thing to know how to accommodate ourselves to the cycles and rhythms of life. Can I suggest that prayerfully contemplating Ecclesiastes 3 this week will probably do more for us than Buddhism, Yoga, chanting, transcendental meditation, and firewalking combined. There is a lot you can read and study this week about how this chapter has been interpreted through two thousand years of Christianity. But I encourage you to clear away the mental clutter of others' thoughts and contemplate what each verse says to you. Perhaps write it out. It is not often that we get a study where we are our greatest study resource. But this is it.