Vanity of Vanities

Lately I’ve been rereading the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. It’s one of my favorites and a book that can easily be misunderstood. Anything that begins like this could be (mis)construed as, well, as positively depressing:

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!

What profit have we from all the toil which we toil at under the sun?

One generation departs and another generation comes, but the world forever stays.

The sun rises and the sun sets; then it presses on to the place where it rises.

Shifting south, then north, back and forth shifts the wind, constantly shifting its course.

All rivers flow to the sea, yet never does the sea become full.

To the place where they flow, the rivers continue to flow.

All things are wearisome, too wearisome for words.

The eye is not satisfied by seeing nor has the ear enough of hearing.

What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done.

Nothing is new under the sun!

Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us.

There is no remembrance of past generations; nor will future generations be remembered by those who come after them. (Ecclesiastes 1:1-11)

Sounds pretty grim, but Qoheleth (“the Preacher”) didn’t intend to depress his readers. Instead he wanted to share wisdom, that is, the way to life a good life—at mid-life or at any other age. Simply stated, his message is, “Please grow up and stop taking yourself so seriously.”

Qoheleth tried all the fun things of life. He got rich, he built fabulous homes and other projects, he pursued wisdom, he collected fine wine and spirits, ate the best foods, and had more girlfriends than Elvis and the Beatles. It’s all “vanity” he says.

The Hebrew word translated “vanity” is hebel. It literally means a breath or a breeze. If you put out your hand and blow you can feel the hebel.  Hebel is real and recognizable—even pleasant—but it’s insubstantial, momentary, and ultimately profitless.

“The eye is not satisfied by seeing nor has the ear enough of hearing” and enough is never enough. After all, he writes, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money; nor he who loves wealth with gain: this too is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 5:10).

So stop taking yourself, your projects, and your successes (or failures) so seriously. Instead relax and enjoy life. How? Seven times in the course of the book, Qoheleth tells us how. Here’s the fifth instance:

So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 8:15).

Life and all it contains is God’s gift. Enjoy it as much as you are able to (keeping legality and morality in mind). Work hard and enjoy your work, but don’t expect too much out of work. That is, work to live; don’t live to work. Because as the (I’m happy to say) no longer ubiquitous T-shirt has it, “Life is good! J”

Also Ecclesiastes is good and much more in depth than this blog entry. Why not sit down and give it a read? Let me know what you think.

Career--Take 2

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Flocks of people in their 50s and 60s are putting aside thoughts of a comfortable retirement and heading to theological school, where they've become the fastest growing age group in recent years."

Baby boomers, Marc Freedman of Encore.org told the Journal, are "turning to careers in which meaning and purpose are front and center."

On the one hand, I have a problem with this. Medicine, law, business, investment banking, teaching, lawn care, homemaking computer programming, and any other legitimate vocation can be careers where meaning and purpose are front and center. I have friends in all these callings who find great spiritual and emotional fulfillment. And I ministers and others in the "helping professions" for whom meaning and purpose are not front and center. They're just going through the motions.

Meaning and purpose are not inherent in any vocation, but are characteristics we bring--or don't bring--to everything we do.

On the other hand, this is great news. That baby boomers are (1) getting increasingly serious about their faith and (2) putting their gifts and experience into work that will last well past "retirement age" is wonderful.

My friend Fr. Robert Cook is in the midst of just such a second career. He spent his first career as a criminal defense lawyer, seeing to it that those accused of federal crimes were treated as fairly as possible. It was a nobel and good career in which he was respected and successful. Then in his mid-fifties, he discerned a call to the priesthood, went to seminary and was ordained in 2000. He pastored a church until 2005 when he was asked to be the founding president of Wyoming Catholic College. By that time he was in his sixties. Can you imagine founding a college from the ground up in your sixties? Oh, his partner was Dr. Robert Carlson, a long-time college professor who was even older than Fr. Cook.

Now, as Fr. Cook has entered his seventies, he's stepping down as college president, but not retiring. There's more to accomplish and no one begins a second career in mid-life unless he plans to die in the saddle. More power to him and hurray that his tribe is increasing.

(N.B. In the name of full disclosure: my son, Jon, is Dean of Students at Wyoming Catholic College.)

Flourishing Through Business

My friend, Chuck Stetson, is an inspiration to me. Not only does he run his own venture capital business, but he keeps starting nonprofits to serve the public good. And while I suppose he could retire, it's just not going to happen. He sees far too much that needs to be done to quit or even slow down.

His latest effort is Flourishing Through Business, an e-learning effort that "covers what colleges and business schools with rare exception don't teach."

The first course, "Flourishing Through Business 101" looks at things like "the common sense practice of putting the customer first, followed by the vendors, employees and then shareholders, priorities that are rarely being taught today at our schools, colleges, or even business schools. Greed is not good and almost always ends badly."

For anyone--regardless of age--interested, this first course is offered free of charge through the summer. So if you're interested, now is the time to try it out. Or to encourage young people you know to try it out. Maybe even encourage them to try it out with you. That way you can discuss what you've learned.

I say that in large measure because of something Chuck learned in preparing Flourishing Through Business. "Adults take note,"says Stetson, "our focus groups tell us high school and college students want to network with adults and discuss these issues. As adults we have an opportunity to mentor not only our own children, but also the young people joining our businesses from college." Not to mention members of the youth group at church, college students home on break, and who knows how many others.

Ordinary Time

Sunday was Pentecost, the last day of the Easter Season. And so today, Monday, we find ourselves back in the workaday rhythm of “Ordinary Time."

Ordinary Time means it’s we’re not in the extraordinary times of feasting the Church celebrates: Christmas and Easter with their respective periods preparation of fasting—Advent and Lent. And so we will be in Ordinary Time until Advent begins on December 1 this year.

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus understood why Ordinary Time is called “ordinary,” but he hated the term. Time, particularly time from a Christian point of view, he said, was never ordinary. Each day is an extraordinary gift. As Neuhaus’ friend George Weigel wrote:

For he insisted that there was nothing “ordinary” about the times of our lives, for those lives were all being lived in the time after the Resurrection. We were living, he insisted, in the time when the horizon of our hope has been made secure: for God made clear his answer to the worst that human beings could do by raising Christ from the dead and by Christ's exaltation at the right hand of the Father—and in all of that we learned our true destiny. This time, our time, is the time of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the time in which our energies are woven into the tapestry of Providence, in ways we never fully understand. And, for über-energetic Richard John Neuhaus, there was nothing in the least ordinary about it.

 And while I fully understand and agree with Fr. Neuhaus, this year, I find the switch back to Ordinary Time somehow comforting. It is, after all, in ordinary days and weeks that our lives unfold as something extraordinary. Ordinary time is getting up, making coffee, having breakfast, getting to work, caring for the people in our lives—spouses, family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors—reading, learning, praying, and, when day is done, putting our heads down to sleep in preparation for the next ordinary day.

It can all become drudgery if we let it or we can look for—and occasionally catch a glimpse of—something beyond the daily, something noble, something good, something fully and satisfyingly human.

So here’s to Ordinary Time. May we discover in the ordinary weeks of our lives the truly remarkable. 

Hardwired to Connect

I can't resist just one more blog post about Rod Dreher's book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, the story of the life and early death of cancer of Rod's sister.

Reflecting on Ruthie's life and death in the little town of Starhill, Louisiana and on the fact that like it or not suffering and death comes into every family and every life, Dreher writes:

The insurance company, if you're lucky enough to have insurance, pays your doctor and pharmacists, but it will not cook for you when you're too sick to cook for yourself and your kind. Nor will it clean your house, pick your kids up from school, or take them shopping when you're too weak to get out of bed. A bureaucrat from the state or the insurance company won't come sit with you, and pray with you, and tell you she loves you. It won't be the government or your insurer who allows you to die in peace, if it comes to that, because it can assure you that your spouse and children will not be left behind to face the world alone.

Only your family and your community can do that. 

In 2003, the Institute for American Values produce a report entitled "Hardwired to Connect" that addressed "the rising rates of mental problems and emotional distress among U.S. children and adolescents." Their solution is to encourage what they called "authoritative communities."

Authoritative communities are groups that live out the types of connectedness that our children increasingly lack. They are groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life. Renewing and building them is the key to improving the lives of U.S. children and adolescents.

Let me go further to say that renewing, building, and participating in such communities, places that are small enough that we know and are known--families, churches, clubs, small groups, towns--is the key to improving all of our lives regardless of our ages.

Keeping Isolation at Bay

While I was in Florida this week cleaning out my mother’s house, I heard the rest of a story that I thought I already knew.

A woman was extremely ill and dying. Hospice had been called in and the nurse visited several times a week. During one visit, the woman’s husband excused himself and went into the bathroom. Suddenly there was a gunshot. The Hospice nurse ran to the bathroom, opened the door, and found him dead on the floor. Suicide among seniors in retirement areas is a big problem.

The rest of the story is that his wife was furious with him not because he committed suicide, but because he hadn’t killed her before he killed himself. That was the plan to which they agreed and he welched on the deal, committing suicide rather than committing a murder/suicide. It breaks my heart.

I can’t begin to fathom the pain in the lives of those two people that would have driven them to such a gruesome agreement. Besides age and illness, there must have been enormous spiritual and relational pain in their lives. If you live long enough, my elderly friends tell me, you look around and realize that all your old friends are dead. If you have no younger friends, you have no friends. And family… well, families are complicated. Isolation comes upon us so easily in our culture.

While away from home, I finished reading Rod Dreher’s book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, the story of his sister’s life and death from cancer at an early age. Ruthie lived in the small town in which she and Rod ( and their parents and grandparents and…)grew up. Rod moved out as soon as he was able, living in multiple cities building a career. Then after Ruthie’s death, all he was missing began to come into focus. He wrote:

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come to you—and it will—you want to be in a place where you know, and are known.  You want—no, you need—to be able to say as Mike [Ruthie’s husband] did, “We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.”

I pray for the man who committed suicide and the angry wife he left behind—and the nurse who is, I’m sure, still traumatized months later. And I pray for others who are so desperately isolated.

And I pray for myself and my friends and family. Isolation will sneak up on us if we’re not careful. The goal, as Rod Dreher suggests, is to keep it at bay.

"Be Reconciled If You Can"

I got off the flight from Washington to Tampa less than an hour ago. I'm meeting my brother and my son at my mom's house. She died just about a year ago and the house has finally sold. We need to sort, save, sell, or give away everything left in it. Lots of memories there.

On the flight I was (providentially?) reading Rod Dreher's new book The Little way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. In it Dreher tells the story of the life and death from cancer of his sister Ruthie.

They were both small town southern kids, but while Rod though that happiness was Starhill, Louisiana in the rear view mirror, Ruthie flourished there. She married her highschool sweetheart, they built a house, and had three girls, while he worked as a fireman and she taught middle school.

When the news came that Ruthie was ill--possibly seriously ill--Rod made plans to fly back home from Philadelphia where he and his family were living on the next available plane. But before he left, he posted this to his blog:

To be sure, I'm not at odds with my stricken family member, but let me beg something of you: right now, on this very day, ask forgiveness of those you've offended, and offer it to those who have offended you. Be reconciled, if you can. Don't live as if you have all the time in the world, because you don't. None of us do.

Change your life. Repent. Love. It's urgent. You have no idea how urgent until you get a phone call like the one I received this morning.

I'm not sure there's anything else to say, except that he's right. Don't wait for the phone call. Do it now.

And here I am in Florida with family.

Toward a Grandchild Friendly Culture

Last Saturday Dottie and I attended the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview’s annual Wilberforce Award banquet. Named for William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the great British Christian, politician, abolitionist, and social reformer, “the Wilberforce Award recognizes courageous leaders who are making an impact on the social ills of the day, showing perseverance and selflessness in combating injustice and making a positive change in the values and character of society.”

This year the honor went to Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “In recognition of Dolan's efforts on behalf of life, traditional marriage and religious liberty in America….”

“The human project,” Dolan said in his acceptance speech, “is about babies. A man and a woman are made for babies. Culture is all about babies. Our lives are at their best when centered not upon ourselves, but upon babies.”

He then went on to comment, “Culture is simply humanity’s best effort to protect the baby, the mother, the father. Culture’s purpose is to embrace, nurture, and protect the baby, the mother, the dad and to see that this precious infant has the embrace of the community to grow in age and wisdom until—guess what?—the baby is an adult, can tenderly and faithfully love a spouse, have his or her own baby, and the sacred cycle begins again.”

Many of us around the age of sixty or older already have grandbabies. The truth of "the sacred cycle" is in front of our eyes at least via FaceTime and, when we're lucky, asleep in our arms or holding our hand crossing the street.

This is culture at it's best. It's culture worth building even as the culture in which we live becomes increasingly less child-friendly. And it's our responsibility to fight that trend. Our grandchildren are counting on us.