All is Vanity

Monday, June 5, 2006 -- Week of Proper 4 (Boniface)

For Today's Prayer in the Octave of Prayer for General Convention
go to our Home Page www.stpaulsfay.org and click the link at the top of the page.

"Morning Reflections" is a brief thought about the scripture readings from the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer according to the practice found in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church.

Morning Prayer begins on p. 80 of the Book of Common Prayer.
Evening Prayer begins on p. 117

An online resource for praying the Daily Office is found at www.missionstclare.com
Another form of the office from Phyllis Tickle's "Divine Hours" is available on our partner web site www.ExploreFaith.org at this link -- http://explorefaith.org/prayer/fixed/index.html


Today's Readings for the Daily Office (p. 969)
Psalms 41, 52 (morning) // 44 (afternoon)
Ecclesiastes 2:1-15
Galatians 1:1-17
Matthew 13:44-52


I was in my twenties. Baby-faced, earnest and sincere, but in over my head. I was training as a chaplain in a hospital in New York City. Making my rounds I quietly went into a room where a man lay unresponsive. He was a large man, tall and distinguished looking. I figured him to be in his late 50's. There was no one in the room with him and nothing on my printout that identified him other than by name. He lay on his back, alive but expressionless. Not having anyone I could speak to and not wanting to presume too much, I prayed silently by him and left.

He was like that the next day as well. I wondered briefly, who is he. But I moved on. There were so many others to see.

The third day I started to enter his room, there was a woman outside. She was crying. It was a particular kind of lost crying that contains so much grief. She was very beautiful; a mature woman with dark eyes. It took her a moment to focus on me, a child standing in front of her in a clerical collar. "Do you know what happens? Where is he? Do you know anything about strokes? What happens when the mind disappears? That man is one of the most brilliant men in the world. Known and respected internationally. There is so much inside of his brain. Where is it? Does that knowledge go somewhere?" She looked at me, realizing her folly of asking a child such questions. "Why?" she moaned. "This is so wrong." Her last words were a fierce accusation.

The Teacher of Ecclesiastes opens his treatise with three experiments. We read of the first two today. In the first experiment he successfully pursues pleasure, riches and extravagance. No human exceeded his experience of pleasure. Yet, though he had everything his heart desired, "all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun."

His second experiment was to become wise. Wisdom is better than folly. And though he becomes a person of unexcelled wisdom, he realizes he will be as forgotten and ephemeral as the fool. Same result: "all is vanity and a chasing after wind."

His eventual modest message will be that it is good to enjoy life, its moderate pleasures and learnings, but always remember that you will die. All you have will disappear and go to another, maybe a fool. All you know will disappear into nothing. And you will be forgotten. So for now, enjoy as you may.

Paul is in a different place. He too has experienced frustration, the vanity of chasing after wind. For him, that vanity was his earlier life when he was trying to measure up, trying to earn life or prove himself by learning and by following the divine law perfectly. He found that life only left him anxious -- a kind of performance anxiety. For him freedom came through a gift. He was saved when he accepted the unmerited and unqualified gift of grace through Jesus. God loves me. All is forgiven. That's that. And the resurrection of Jesus promises something more beyond.

I knew that Paul stuff when I faced the grieved woman outside the room of the silent brilliant man. I didn't know what to say, though. It felt "so wrong" to me as well. All I could do was to share her grief.

A few minutes later she looked again at this naive child wearing a collar. "You believe there's something after we die, don't you?" "I do," I nodded. She silently shook her head as if to say, it seems so impossible, so far-fetched. "He didn't," she nodded in the direction of the bed. "All that brilliance. Gone. How can it be?"

Lowell
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The Rev. Lowell Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas