Reel Life

Utter futility!—said Kohelet—utter futility!  All is futile!  Ecclesiastes 1:1-2  JPS

Utter futility – bavel bavalim.  Literally, “vapor of vapors.”  “Utter senselessness” translates Michael Fox in the JPS commentary.  “Ecclesiastes is a strange and disquieting book.  It gives voice to an experience not usually thought of as religious: the pain and frustration engendered by an unblinking gaze at life’s absurdities and injustices.”[1]  Quite the opposite of our usual predilection for positive religion.  “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” doesn’t come with a footnote, which might read, “but you’ll have to suffer and tolerate all kinds of injustice before you’ll understand it.”  No, we’d rather just have the good news.  “I’m saved!  I’m going to heaven.”  The rest doesn’t matter—until the market crashes, the bombs fall, the storm hits, the masses revolt, or any number of other human misery events that happen on a daily basis.  Then what?  Do you just wait for “pie in the sky bye and bye”?  Is your real goal to have the “reel” life of Hollywood?  The movie life where the bad guys are defeated and “happily ever after” is the final scene?

“Western personality is a work of art, and history is its stage.  The Twentieth century is not the Age of Anxiety but the Age of Hollywood.  The pagan cult of personality has reawakened and dominates all art, all thought.  It is morally empty but ritually profound.  We worship it by the power of the western eye.  Movie screen and television screen are its sacred precincts.”[2]

Isn’t that true?  Oh, Camille wrote those words twenty-five years ago.  Today we need to add that our sacred precincts are Tik-Toc, Facebook, Google, and Instagram.  We aren’t really human anymore.  We are digital projections of fantasy lives.  We have become our own avatars.

But not Kohelet.  The reason I like him is because he isn’t bent on “goodness” and 900 friends on my social media page.  He doesn’t shy away from life’s crushing insanity.  He’s brutally observant.  He would be at home sitting with the children under the bridge in Jakarta because their lives are the real portrait of this world, the portrait of what daily survival means for 95% of the world.  The majority we don’t want to see.  And when we do, well, then we commit suicide just like Kevin Carter did after he photographed this reality:

“Reel” life is a lie.  Somewhere along the path God will have to confront us all with that lie.  The Messiah didn’t come in order to have a “wonderful plan.”  The call is to suffer for the sake of the Kingdom.  Take off those Pollyanna glasses and do something about it.

Topical Index: bavel bavalim, injustice, suffering, Ecclesiastes 1:1-2

[1] Michael J. Fox, The JPS Bible Commentary: Ecclesiastes (JPS, 2004), p. ix.

[2] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 32.