We’ve all felt it – the rather flat feeling that follows a particularly enjoyable time – a wonderful holiday perhaps, an event that we had long looked forward to but is now in the past, or some other pleasurable occasion that, once over, reminds us that nothing good lasts forever.
In his poem ‘Dry Salvages’, T.S. Eliot touches on similar themes when he describes how we have experiences but miss their meaning – referring to how the things that we can, and should, enjoy in life reveal the ongoing sadness that lies beneath them all. Things aren’t as they should be and even those things that are turn out to be only temporary – just as our current health serves as a reminder that our death is not as far away as we would perhaps like.
All of which might suggest that it would be foolish to make the pursuit of happiness our ultimate goal – because, if we do, our endeavours will always end in tears.
But be that as it may, we nonetheless keep trying to obtain the unobtainable, denying the futility of our quest whilst at the same time creating a constant stream of amusements to distract ourselves from what deep down we all know to be true – that life in this fallen world isn’t all it’s made out to be. For most of us it is, at best, ordinary, whilst for many others it consists of nothing but one impossible sadness after another.
No wonder then that the writer of Ecclesiastes suggests that the dead are better off than those who are still alive – but better off still are those who have yet to be born. For they have yet to experience the evil that is done under the sun which daily results in fresh forms of often unfathomable and seemingly pointless misery for those who are promised only a place in the ground when their time on earth inevitably comes to an end. [Ecclesiastes 4:2-3]
But that’s not all – because the author of the book which makes up part of the Bible’s wisdom literature, goes on to write that the day of death is better than the day of birth, that it is better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting, and that sorrow is better than laughter for by it the face of the heart is made glad. [Ecclesiastes 7:1-3]
But how can such counterintuitive things be part of the scriptures which so many rightly claim to contain wonderfully good news?
Well perhaps the answer lies in realising that death teaches us something that all of us need to come to terms with. That we are not the masters of our fate and, no matter who we are and what we achieve during our all too short lives, we all end up the same.
Dead.
Our lives then are temporary and the pleasures we experience, however real and good, are only ever transient. And so whilst appropriately enjoying what we can we would do well to focus our minds on pursuing what’s genuinely important – which is not so much happiness as becoming the people we were created to be and developing the character for which we would like to be remembered.
Voltaire once said that the best is the enemy of the good – and those of us who are killing ourselves trying to be perfect might understand where he’s coming from. But having recognised the brevity of our lives, perhaps recognising our ordinariness is good for us too – freeing us up to do what we can without imagining that we are something more than we are.
Because knowing that we can’t solve all our problems would of course be beneficial for us too – enabling us to stop our anxious minds from constantly agonising over how we can put right what we are unable to correct and instead accept that what life sometimes throws at us is both difficult and unavoidable. For without advocating a fatalistic passivity, being content with what we have is very often better than constantly worrying about what we think we want.
But we shouldn’t conclude that all we can now look forward to is spending our days nihilistically eating and drinking in the light of our impending demise. Because the writer of Ecclesiastes elsewhere speaks of how God has put eternity into the heart of man. [Ecclesiastes 3:11].
Here then is a glimmer of hope since his assertion suggests that there is more to life than what we manage to cram into the three score years and ten that some might be fortunate to be given.
And given that scripture is very clear that God’s plan for all his people is to make them more like Christ, perhaps the trials we experience are not simply things we have to endure, but things God can use for our good, forming in us the character of the one who, on the cross, endured suffering unimaginably worse than that experienced by any of us.
Because, as a result of his sacrifice, Jesus has reconciled us to God and, in so doing, guaranteed for us what we could never obtain for ourselves – not just fleeting happiness, but fullness of joy and pleasures for evermore that can only be experienced in his presence. [Psalm 16:11]
We will though have to wait patiently – perhaps for a lifetime – before that sure and certain hope is fully realised. But because Christ has defeated death, it is nonetheless something that we can look forward to now with absolute confidence, sustaining us in our sadness until the day that really is coming when our every tear will be wiped away and death will be no more. [Revelation 21:4]
And so the desire for happiness isn’t perhaps foolish after all. It’s just that we need first to be made ready for the happiness that will be provided for us. And when God has completed the good work he has begun in making us ready, not only will the wait have been worth it – we will see that the pain we have experienced along the way was worth it too.
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To read ‘T.S. Eliot, Jesus, and the paradox of the Christian life’, click here.
Some musings 