Faithfulness to Ourselves (Ecclesiastes 1; Luke 19:11-18)

‘All is vanity…There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of thins that are to come with those that shall come after.’ The words of the Ecclesiastes is like swimming in a painful sea. But arriving to this experience of melancholic despair as Christians, we can add something vital. We can read the ‘unfulfilled Passion’ of the Ecclesiastes as our Christian Creed. At the heart of life, as a focal point, there is our Christ. He is ‘our memory’, whose remembrance holds all things together. Without this remembrance of the Sacred − our life indeed loses purpose. Is not this painful truth echoing in the inaccessible depths of the memory-chips of our computers and gadgets? ‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’
 
From our Christian faith stems something more; something active. ‘That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.’ In contrast to the inertia and unchangeable fate that the Ecclesiastes states we have hope in our world. By grace, the return to Life is possible. Indeed, ‘by grace alone’ we can ‘return life to Life’.
 
‘For in much wisdom is much grief’: Christian faith here states something important about the ‘psychology of the soul’. God is the ultimate companion of the soul! Even more, we need Him as our partner to whom we can continuously tell our story. The human being is balanced in as  much he/she can share where he/she is. On a daily bases. Without this, our soul, and through our individual soul, our culture falls into depression.
 
’Jesus’ parable of the lazy (passive) steward is the ultimate expression that our world should never be seen as a Beckettian ‘endless Endgame’. ‘Lord, thy pound hath gained ten pounds. And he said unto him, Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities…. And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin… And he said unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant….Take from him the bound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds. For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.  No, there is no excuse. However ‘absurd’ our idle or unchangeable our world seems − it is not so. We should approach our world as it is: as the Kingdom of God. When we have faith, we know that it is transformable!