Eternal Return

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:  Ecclesiastes 3:1  NIV

Time – Mircea Eliade helped us recognize the “myth of eternal return” in the ancient world.  Tomorrow is the Western celebration of that pagan ritual, an annual homage to the ancient idea of the circle of life (as Disney later adopted it).  Other civilizations had different ways of counting.  The Aztecs, for example, had a 27,000 year cycle.  That doesn’t lend itself to many parties, but at least some lucky fools were around for the event.  One of the fundamental differences between these pagan temporary cycles and the Hebrew festivals is the fact that even though Hebrew festivals are annual, they are not repetitions of the primordial event.  In Hebrew thought, the world is going somewhere, not just around and around forever.  It might take a long time to get to the eschatological goal (as we well know after 2000 years of waiting for the Messiah’s return), but when it happens it won’t put us back in the Garden to begin again.  The past is finished.  It’s the memory of the past that lives on in the ritual in anticipation of a coming event, not a repeat performance.

But today is still the “end of the days” for most Westerners.  We reflect.  We remember.  We resolve—and we hope for something better in the next tour around the sun.  At least I do.  This coming year, if God permits, I will see the end of three-quarters of a century on this earth.  I will be much closer to the exit than the entry.  I will pause long enough to ask myself if I’ve really done anything significant, if I’ve made a difference, if I have time to finish all those unfinished items from seventy-five years of trying.  I’ll be a bit sad when I think of my many, many mistakes.  Perhaps I’ll feel a bit of grace that I’m still here after all those sins.  Perhaps I’ll feel some comfort knowing that it won’t go on forever.  Perhaps I’ll have regrets (of that I’m sure) and tears (also sure) about those I didn’t love enough, those who left me behind, those I never truly told goodbye.

Qohelet recognized that there is a time for all this, and much more.  Our translation doesn’t quite capture his insight.  We use the word “time” and we think like Greeks—some extension of existence in an arbitrarily fixed box, like a day, a month, a year.  But Qohelet’s word is zĕmān, not an indeterminate sequence but rather an appointed moment.  An appointed moment of birth—and death.  An appointed moment to laugh—and cry.  To kill—and heal.  To sow—and reap.  All appointed.  And that begs the question, “Who makes the appointments?”  “Who sets the time when all these things happen in our lives?”  Of course, the answer is God.  He engineers living.  He decides when and where.  We don’t really have too much to say about it.  Really!  I know of no one who decided when to be born.  Maybe “the Teacher” is right.  Maybe it’s not really up to us at all.  At least that’s what his poem seems to imply.  God orchestrates.  We play.  The end.

But not quite.  You see, the Bible also emphasizes humanity’s choice in some of these “appointed” times.  As the rabbis said, “God is sovereign; men are responsible.”   How that can be true isn’t really explained.  It’s just an ontological fact of existence.  So, today I have some comfort in the fact that somehow (and I don’t know how) God is working out His plan in my apparently random and certainly confused life journey.  Behind it all is His invisible hand.  That’s comforting.  And then, instantly, I realize that for most of my actual living, I made choices—choices that resulted in tears and fears, joy and grief, success and failure, helping and hurting—all somehow part of the road that got me here today—in order to reflect and remember that there’s a subplot to this brief time I will spend with you; a subplot that I won’t get to read until I leave.

The pages I write are really nothing more than a diary of my journey.  I explore.  I discover.  I feel.  I share.  And I write about it because I have to.  Now this daily process is who I am, perhaps who I have always been.  There’s a time for all this, an appointed time.  So far that appointed time has covered many years.  Someday it will also end.  On that day I am pretty sure I will cry.  It’s been an agonizingly wonderful journey.  Thanks for joining me.

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