This is a lovely rendition of Ecclesiastes for the modern reader, though I do wonder if 'lovely' should be associated with such bleakness. There is no love without our attendant surrender. As a result, only disappointment opens onto love and only disappointment is capable of grace. To be capable of love, we must love things for what they are, not for what we had hoped they would be. To be capable of love and not just obedience, we must be capable of responding with grace to whatever is given. I've seen this, clear as day: power corrupts and then it really tries to fix its own corruption with more injustice. The message to work hard while remembering that you can't control the outcome holds the beauty of real truth, all the more so when held up against the concept I keep bumping up against amongst even educated people that whatever you ask the universe for it is bound to give.Ĭhapter 5: Fools don't realize how much truth their noise concealsĪnd this, which feels desperately applicable today.Ĭhapter 8: just as violence can't save you from the horror of war, wickedness can't save the wicked. And for all my personal and inconsistent idealism, I found this strangely beautiful. I had to hear it in their sardonic tones. I felt compelled to read this aloud, the text reminding me of certain of my friends who, our dinners finished and the waiter hovering in hopes of clearing the table, might hold forth for ages on all the ways the world is failing and will fail. I look forward to spending a Sunday soon with Miller's companion book discussing Romans ( Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans). To further quote Miller on why these two books should be viewed as companions: "These books are two sides of the same coin: grace on one face, hopelessness on the other." Miller has modernized two different books, one from the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes) and one from the New Testament (Epistle to the Romans) to teach something old in a new way and to connect the idea that there "is no love without out attendant surrender". There is something that feels right about reading scripture that doesn't deal with platitudes or provide easy answers. But there is something both beautiful and affirming about reading something that says: THIS IS LIFE. They aren't they wrestle with big issues and their answers aren't always the ones we hope for, or the ones we expect. They avoid easy classification and aren't built billboards or bumper sticker evangelism. They are books that deal with very modern issues. I'm a big fan of the Wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon). This book, essentially, is a paraphrase/modernization/interpretation of Ecclesiastes. Miller's little books are just about the right size to be read (if not fully digested) in an hour or two, quietly sitting on a pew. I've used this space to read big books (Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy) and regular books (Peck's Science the Key to Theology: Volume One: Preliminaries). Part of my Sunday, pew-reading diversion. Miller provides a sharp, contemporary paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, continuing to work in the same vein as the popular "Grace is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans" (2015).
Before we can find hope in Christ, we must give up hope in everything else." Hopelessness is crucial to a consecrated life.
As Paul insists, in order to become Christian, we must first learn to be hopeless. It is an anvil against which our hearts must be hammered.īut the cost of avoidance is high.
#Book of mormon scripture space in time happy despair full#
Ecclesiastes is a hard book full of hard sayings. It sees such bone-deep hopelessness as the only cure for what ails us. Insisting on life’s futility, the world’s capriciousness, and God’s inscrutability, it deliberately cultivates despair. It refuses to abet our hunger for clean narratives and happy endings. Ecclesiastes is gloomy, skeptical, and irreverent.
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