Daily Lesson for June 10, 2016

Today's Daily a lesson comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 12 verses 1 through 3 and 6 through

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, 3 in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent . . .6 before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7 and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

Things fall apart.

This is the primal lesson Qoheleth, the wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes, is trying to impart to the succeeding generation.  Things fall apart, bodies age, days dim, and heirlooms break.  They who have come to terms with the raw fact of this matter are prepared for the loss of all things.  They who are not prepared are stunned when mortality enters and robs them of someone or something very special.  The shock of loss is too much.  The grief overwhelms them. But the one who has come to terms with the passing away of all things -- even the passing away of heaven and earth -- has already entered into the grief.  They have already smelled the feint, decaying dust in the beams of their parents' home.

The Buddhist teaching is that life is suffering and therefore the person who wishes to minimize suffering must minimize attachment. Detachment from all things is the prescription for relieving the pain of life's losses.

But Qoheleth has no confidence in detachment. He knows that humans simply have to make attachments to the old house and those in it.  To be human is to be tethered to the silver cord and have our hearts in the golden of which he writes. There is no way around attachment. To be human is to be attached.

What Qoheleth then prescribes is not detachment, but memory.  "Remember your Creator," he says. And in so doing he reminds us then that we are creation -- dust, and to dust we shall return.

And the one who can remember this can endure any loss -- not because he is detached -- but because he knows all his earthly attachments are temporal and will eventually pass away.

He is free to make attachments, free even to love, and free also to let go.

He is free indeed.