“Everything just makes you tired. Not a soul is able to talk about it. An eye is not full with its seeing. An ear isn’t filled with its hearing” (Ecclesiastes 1.8).
Sounds about right, doesn’t it? If you’re year has been like ours, these words from the author of Ecclesiastes may echo what your soul, because it’s too tired, cannot find the words to say. Because, it seems, nothing is ever done.
It’s enough to make you want to fall onto the couch as this month of Thanksgiving begins, find something mindless to watch, and repeat these words of the Teacher as a mantra as you try to come up with that one thankful thing to share at the holiday table.
It can be tempting to wonder if the Teacher, our nameless writer who penned these words, needs to go back on his Wellbutrin or, perhaps, get back into their exercise routine. But, in a way no other book of the Bible does, Ecclesiastes looks straight at reality and refuses to look away or gloss over what it sees. Despite a whole section of Amazon’s book section being devoted to putting on a good face and being cheerful, the Teacher simply tells it like it is.
And while this seems like it would draw us away from gratitude, these words want to take us to a place of authenticity. This is not the not-stressed-but-blessed sort of thinking that suffuses much pop theology, this is living the life before us with all its flaws and frustrations and fatigue.
It’s a path, it turns out, to a means of true gratitude. Rather than expending energy that is already precious to us trying to put a rosy glow on everything, we choose instead to accept reality as it is. We choose to live within the mounds of work that will never get done, the stream of projects that won’t end, and that tired feeling that never seems to leave us no longer how long we sleep.
Because, it’s in this choice that we find the energy to notice everything around us that calls us to gratitude. Everything from the smell of our morning coffee, to the leaves rustling in the wind across the porch, to the softness of the pillow beneath our head. None of them cover up or deny the reality of the busy lives we live. Instead, they exist alongside them.
Maybe we are so tired we can’t even find the words to express it. Maybe our eyes have grown weary from looking at a screen and our ears from listening to just one more meeting. Our fatigue and weariness is real and shouldn’t be denied. But so is the sunlight through the rust-colored foliage that offers our weary eyes beauty. And the cool, autumn breeze that brings the music of rustling leaves to our ringing ears.
The small, subtle hints of the Divine in our lives which remind us that God’s work is not done.
Christ, through you all things were made and have their being. Thank you for sustaining us through each and every day of this year. Thank you for the subtle ways you remind us that you are near.