Answers and Questions

The Sunday morning services at the large Baptist church in D.C. that for a time I attended as a child always ended with one of the church elders, a tall and very dignified gentleman, sonorously intoning the following words, which are the concluding lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Though they had heard these lines many times before, the congregation always listened intently, as if the words were thundering down from the sky and slicing straight through the roof in a shower of splinters and shingles:

And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

At first, at age 11 or so, I didn't know what to make of it, the way that all the grown-ups stopped being "happy" and what-not and sat still for this, especially when I noticed that that part of the program happened every Sunday with absolutely no variation. A little later I thought that it was pretentious, though that word hadn't yet entered my vocabulary -- I was aware of the concept but would have had trouble expressing it. Then, taking into account the fact that that little observance took only a moment, and that it meant that the services were finally over, and that it had to be really meaningful since it happened at such an important point in the proceedings and no one ever stopped the distinguished deacon from doing it, I decided that, all in all, it was pretty cool.

Not much more time passed, however, before the meaning of those words became an important part of my anatomy.

I think my dabbling in organized religion for the short time in my early years that it lasted was in the simplistic belief and a hope that there were simple answers to the huge number of complex questions that I could see existence offering. And that little sub-ritual every Sunday morning reinforced that belief and that hope.

Is it likely that King Solomon, who I presume was the author of those lines, harbored the same yearning for simple, easily expressed and easily understood answers and a belief that they were obtainable?

Ecclesiastes strikes me as being the work of a weary old man who was trying to put an end to the "making of many books," at least as far as he was concerned. He appears to be presenting the chief answers that he had been able to come up with, in response to the questions that so many of his subjects and he himself had been posing through his many years.

Compared to many other books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is brief, and it is heavily concentrated. Nearly every verse is quotable, and at the book's end King Solomon summed up everything in just those three verses, and never mind that he had already summed them up once before, and still more concisely, as early as the second verse of the first chapter, when he said, simply: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

This late in the afternoon I can still hear questions being hurled at me every day, though I lead a very simple life with hardly anyone in it, in person daily, except my wife. No one but me asks these questions of me. I come up with some answers now and then, and I keep thinking that the answers to everything are all quite simple -- or should be.

One of these days I may stop wondering if that's a delusion.

On the other hand, maybe the later stages of life involve gradually reclaiming a precious object that has been lost since childhood -- a transparent orb that the events of adulthood cover with so much grime and muck that it becomes unrecognizable and loses all its powers, and not till years later does all that gradually wash off again -- not a crystal ball in which events are foretold but one in which the facts of life can be seen better than ever before, and all the Answers consist of that clarity itself.