Five days into the year, I feel like I may have taken on an even more difficult task. It’s one thing to talk hope and redemption in the waning days of a holiday season, but the cold light of January is a sobering view. Add to that wildfires in Australia and rumors and rumbles of war, and I find myself sitting here on a chilly Twelfth Night morning wondering if such a project seems Pollyanna.
The world is a place of brokenness. And sometimes that brokenness appears even more pronounced, particularly when the fears and anxieties of what might be play upon our hearts and minds. What does this wildfire summer in Australia bode for the coming seasons here in the north? How far and how fast do the current tensions with Iran escalate?
Is it foolish to go looking for hope and beauty in such a climate?
I’ve been reading this week (guided by Sara Arthur’s wonderful Light After Light) a passage from Ecclesiastes. If it’s been a while for you, this is one of those dissenting opinions in the canon of Scripture. Vanity of vanities, as the old KJV reads. Breath, say the newer translations, and chasing after the breeze. The Teacher, it seems, might agree that this task is foolish.
But, perhaps not. The Teacher seems to be reminding me that it’s always been like this. There have been greedy bosses and folks just out for themselves. There have been oppressed who are not rescued and oppressors who go unpunished.
Yet, that doesn’t mean we don’t look for truth, love, and beauty. In fact, we should all the more; because, the brokenness is the way of the world. Notice, and this is one of the things I love about this book, there’s no sense at all of denying what is happening. The Teacher is not a person with their head buried in the sand. The world is presented as it is, but it is accepted. The Teacher acknowledges that there will be sorrows, but he does so to point us away from despair. Because, I am finding, it is only in taking and acknowledging the broken places all around us that we can see where there is also mending.
This does not mean we leave the world as we found it. Seeing the cuts and breaks in Creation should always drive us to help heal and mend. But, if we cannot see some of the healing already occurring, how can we hold onto enough hope to do our part?