Life Saturation Part III: The Teacher’s Experiment

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
    vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
 What does man gain by all the toil
    at which he toils under the sun?

~Ecclesiastes 1:2-3

Jane Eyre has been my favorite book for many years. Besides perfectly blending the genres of romance and mystery, it is a beautiful portrait of virtue in the face of temptation and it has beauty, wisdom, and wit filling every page. 

Charlotte Bronte constructs two very interesting characters in the course of her narrative. The first is Edward Rochester who, when faced with disappointment as a youth, turns to a life of wild pleasure-seeking in order to redeem some semblance of a happy life. This conspicuously flawed hero, though acknowledging his depravity freely, remains unwilling and unable to believe that integrity is possible after so many wrongs and resigns himself to directionless living by pursuing what pleasures he can. 

The second character is much more complex because, from all outward appearances, he is an upright man with well-ordered principles. St. John Rivers is a man of the church, full of zeal and passion with a heart set on missionary work in India. He is ascetic in nature, denying himself marriage to the woman he admires in favor of the glorious work to which he feels called. But when faced with delays and the duties of home and family, he languishes. The ordinary frightens him and he is overrun with discontent until he is finally able to become a martyr on the mission field. 

Our busyness often takes the form of either Edward Rochester or St. John Rivers. The Rochesters among us forget the sufficiency of eternity and expend all of our energy striving after the ephemeral and physical world around us by saturating our days with adventures, experiences, and pleasures. All the while, the St. Johns among us forget the sufficiency of grace and strive hour after hour to please God with great and meaningful work.

The conflict and exhaustion that these two mindsets bring is prevalent in the book of Ecclesiastes. This book has always intrigued me for its brutal honesty and accuracy in describing the deep sensations of futility and worthlessness that plague both the play and work of man. This cycle of waking, working, sleeping, and watching our efforts continually undone before our very eyes can give even the most devout optimist a pause to consider what the purpose is of our daily striving. 

In a desperate attempt to find meaning, we continually fill our lives with things that we think will bring significance. We are each hoping to leave a legacy that has eternal worth. For God “has put eternity into man’s heart.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

We often feel prevented from following these ambitions by lack of resources, time, health, or power. However, Ecclesiastes is fascinating because we are presented with a character, simply called “The Teacher,” who, in fact, has all of these things in abundance. Recognizing his unique position, he sets out on a mission to follow every conceivable attempt of man to find worth and meaning in the short time appointed to humanity. His question: with what can I fill my life that is worthwhile and lasting? His findings shame both the Rochesters and the St. John Rivers within our hearts. 

The St. John Rivers

During my brief study of religions in my Worldviews class at school, I was struck by a similarity that showed up like a red thread throughout all of the religions that I encountered, tying them bizarrely together. This thread was none other than mankind’s insatiable urge to achieve his salvation through effort and action. In almost every religion, man stands before a cavernous gulf, his salvation perched on the other side, and only he can build the bridge to his destination.

In Theravada Buddhism, his cravings and desires stand between him and enlightenment and he must follow the steps of the “Eightfold Path”. Leaning neither to the right nor to the left he must, in the words of the Buddha, “work out [his] own liberation.”1 In Hinduism, the cycle of rebirth stands between a man and liberation. To escape the cycle, man must embark on a journey along the paths of knowledge, action, or devotion and in so doing will work their way to Moksha.2 In Judaism, the large gulf between man and God must be crossed by following the Torah or the law, and by living a life of complete obedience to God.3 In Islam, Paradise lies on the other side of the gulf, and believers must practice a life of submission to Allah by means of the five pillars.4 

Christianity is the only religion I know of that sets its hopes and faith on a person rather than a path. Jesus Christ is the self-professed Way, and no action or inaction can take away from the salvation of the person clinging to Him. 

Yet the instinct of the St. John within us is so ingrained that we need a constant reminder that we cannot earn grace through labor, volunteer efforts, prayer, study, or sacrifice. St. John for all  his love and devotion to Christ, forgets the sufficiency of grace to save him, and he forgets the sufficiency of God’s sovereignty to achieve His purpose with or without the efforts of His people. He forgets, in short, that it is “not the strength of [his] faith but the object of [his] faith that actually saves [him].”5

The tragedy of St. John is that he does not realize that the work of staying at home and ministering to a wife and family, of caring for humble parishioners, and even of enjoying the quiet comforts of a chair by the fire can hold just as much dignity and eternal worth as the work of a mighty man who sacrifices health and home abroad. Certainly both are needful, but neither is greater than the other, and neither can garner favor with God. 

A friend of mine once said that the Catholic church that he grew up in “mourned their religion.” I cannot think of a better way to describe the St. John in us. We try to fill our lives with great and meaningful tasks, never stop working, and deny ourselves pleasures. We despair of life and mourn our religion because it holds no joy. We measure the strength of our faith by the number of hours prayed, the hungry mouths fed, and the temptations overcome instead of relying on Christ, the object of our faith. 

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes attempts a life of toil and of wisdom. His words are coated in mournful exhaustion as he says “I hated all my toil in which I toil under sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me…so I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun…What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 2:18-23) As the sun rises and sets, he finds his work but a meaningless sorrow, and nothing but a striving after the wind. 

The Edward Rochester

The Teacher attempts another experiment, guided by wisdom, in the pages of Ecclesiastes. He says to himself “Come now, I will test you with pleasure, enjoy yourself.” (Ecclesiastes 2:1)It is an experiment that most of us would gladly try, and one that the Rochesters among us strive for as a rule. The teacher builds palaces and plants gardens. He is waited on night and day, and lacks no good food or drink. He surrounds himself with riches, entertainment, wine, and beautiful women. But at the end of his indulgence, he throws up his hands for again “all was vanity and striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 2:1-11)

The Rochesters in us are restless souls. We feel the end of our short lives looming over us like a dark cloud and we strive for all of the excitement and beauty that we can attain. While the St. Johns cannot stop working, the Rochesters cannot settle to a job. With one hand they fitfully earn money while with the other they write bucket lists. Instead of despairing of life, they are submerged in life. Their joy is completely shackled to the excitement of the weekend, and they live for the next road trip, the next vacation, and even the next movie night. The necessary work in between is simply mundane and irritating. 

The great tragedy of Rochester is that he could not see beyond the transient. When robbed of conjugal felicity, he sought wrongful pleasure desperately, believing that he owed it to himself and forgetting that 80 years of suffering is short when compared with eternity. But we are not owed pleasure or comfort in this world, and both Rochester and The Teacher prove that excitement, adventure, and beauty will never fully satisfy.

The answer to this conundrum, it seems, does not lie in trying to find a happy medium between cluttering our lives with meaningless work and saturating it with pleasure. Instead, we should be fleeing from both mindsets. There is nothing wrong with work or pleasure, but we place burdens on ourselves that we were never meant to bear. The St. Johns among us bear the burden of the responsibility of our own standing before God while the Mr. Rochesters bear the burden of the terror of death without experiencing life. Instead, we should be fleeing to the One whose burden is light (Matthew 11:30), and fixing our eyes “not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18)

This higher aim that we flee to is Christ, who relieves us with blissful finality of the impossible task of crossing the gulf between humanity and God, and at whose right hand are “pleasures forevermore.” (Psalm 16:11)

1. The World's Religions by William Young, Ch. 4, Theravada Buddhism-The Middle Way.

2. The World's Religions by William Young, Ch. 3, Hinduism-Many Paths to the Summit.

3. The World's Religions by William Young, Ch. 10, Judaism-The Way of the Torah.

4. The World's Religions by William Young, Ch. 12, Islam-The Way of Submission to Allah.

5. Timothy J. Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism