Ecclesiastes: Meditating in a Charnel Ground

 I was really touched by Ecclesiastes this week. Partly because I was reading, at the same time, a novel called The Correspondent. It is about a woman coming to terms with the decline of age, and making an effort to put to rights the unresolved issues in her life. It seems like the author of Ecclesiastes is also looking back at his life from old age, but he doesn't have the satisfaction of resolving issues.  He, instead, sees all his efforts as meaningless because as soon as he dies, they will pass onto another. 

I think back to the book of Job.  In the book, Job is stripped of all his worldly possessions and even his health.  Then in the end it is all returned to him double fold. One way to look at the Job story is that it is an allegory of aging.  Do we not all begin to lose everything as we age.  Our children grow up and move away, our job ends when we retire, and we begin to lose our vitality. Eventually friends and family members of our own generation begin to die. My mother had 13 siblings and half siblings, and she has seen all of them pass away except one. Eventually when you die, you lose all your worldly possessions.  They are left behind for others to deal with or dispose of at their whim. 

There is a practice in Buddhism called Meditating in a Charnel Ground. In this practice a person pictures their own end of life.  They picture themself declining in health and beauty. They picture themselves dying and their body slowing rotting away.  It the practice is sometimes even done in the places where very devout Buddhists take their bodies and lay them out in the wilderness for wild animals to consume, or in a bone house made of human remains.  The idea is that only by confronting your ultimate demise can you live your current life fully present. 

I think that is the function that Ecclesiastes plays in the Jewish Bible.  It is a way for religious Jews to confront their own mortality. It is not surprising that they choose King Solomon as their example of a person who has risen to the heights of wealth and power as their protagonists. The writer observes that even he, perhaps the greatest of all Israelite rulers, loses everything at death.  All he did, all he accomplished is left behind.  His kingdom is broken apart at his death, and even his beautiful temple is eventually ravished and destroyed.  All his great wisdom could not change the cycle of seasons, and the whims of weather. If King Solomon couldn't create anything of lasting value, than who could?  

Is there value in meditating in a Charnel Ground, or, in the case of King Solomon, realizing that everything you ever accomplished in life is fleeting and has no lasting impact? When I was younger I thought Ecclesiastes was pretty depressing, but now that I am older I find it a little bit freeing.  It is tempting as we age to try to hang onto things.  I mourned when I had to end my career. I am dismayed sometimes when I look in the mirror and see the lines on my face and my yellow teeth.  This week I as I thought about Ecclesiastes I reached a point where I just accepted that from this time forward (and actually for some time in the past) my life will be a series of letting go.  I have already let go of my good eyesight (age 40) and good hearing (age 50).  I just accept that fact that my feet always hurt at the end of the day and  so do my hips. If I can let go of those things without mourning them, I can live my life freer and happier.  Buddhists believe that grasping, i.e. trying to hold onto things, is a cause of suffering. If in old age we mourn everything we lose, we will spend our whole time mourning. It is better to accept that we will eventually lose everything, and agree with ourselves that when it is time to let something go, we just let it go. We enjoy what we have while we have it, but when it is taken away, we let it drift off like the mist in the wind. 

I also think, like the author of The Correspondent, that the best way to spend our declining years is strengthening our relationships. Are their rifts in my friendships or family relationships that I can and should mend? Are their holes in my relationship with God that need to be filled?  In the end, relationships with man and God are the only things that we carry on to the next life. That being so, why don't we spend our time on those instead of clinging to everything else?