08/02/2022 – “If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion, with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world do you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions.” Peter Kreeft – “Christianity for the Modern Pagans.”
This is my 2nd post on David Gibson’s book: “Living Life DRAWKCAB”. The first was this just this past Saturday, 07/31/22.
Note, this is our 2nd book on Ecclesiastes, the first: “Three Philosophies of Life” by Peter Kreeft with three posts you can search on date: 07/10/21; 07/15/21; and 07/25/21. It was a whirlwind tour for me, perhaps not so much for brother Lenny who recommended it. Here were the three philosophies:
- Ecclesiastes: Life is Vanity
- Job: “Life as Suffering”
- Song of Songs: “Life as Love”
We enjoyed this book! “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak. This quote headlines chapter 10 here in Gibson’s book.
So, old friends will have to bear with me on an old story from me:
We were told by visiting missionaries to our sponsoring home church that Prague, Czech Republic had the highest rate of atheism in the entire world. I just saw the other day, a stat that reported that 55% of the population self reported as “atheists.” Well, our missionaries grabbed my attention when they said that seemingly the most popular question from residents was: “So, tell me about this God I don’t believe in!” I wanted to say: “Are you kidding me? Here, I have trouble organizing small men’s bible study in the church and in Prague, we don’t even have enough people on the ground to answer that question?
Quo Vadis? Latin to English translation: Where are you going? Specifically, where are you going if you die today? Brothers, that is the rhinoceros in the middle of the room. So, right up front in chapter 1 – “Let’s Pretend”: “If we won’t live forever, or even long enough to make a lasting difference in the world, how then should we live?”
Point: Stop thinking that meaning and happiness and satisfaction reside in novelty. What is new is not really new, and what feels new will soon feel old.
I would like to share with you some excerpts from “Living Life DRAWKCAB”:
“C.S. Lewis captured the essence of this point in his book: The Screwtape Letters. A senior devil, Screwtape, is writing to his junior evil nephew, Wormword, with advice on how to get Christians to turn away from the Enemy. (God). Screwtape counsels Wormwood on humanity’s constant desire to experience something new:
‘ The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage and inconstancy in friendship.’ …
To want infinite change — in other words, to ‘gain’ something — is to want to escape the confines of ordinary existence and somehow arrive in a world where, on the one hand, repetition does not occur and, on the other, permanence for our lives does. But neither is possible. As we search for something new under the sun, so we are searching for absolute novelty, and it does not exist: ‘The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns.’ “
Chapter Two – Bursting the Bubble:
“To be a believer is to be a stranger and a misfit. We have no permanent roots in this world and no sense of real belonging here. We are traveling through. Or are we?
People who follow Jesus often lose sight of the world to come. We become resident Christians rather than nomadic Christians. We become fully integrated in this world rather than viewing ourselves as passing through, and we do this by living as if our greatest treasures are the here and now. We display our sense of permanence by our lifestyle choices: the homes we live in , the money we spend, the churches we build, the investments we pursue, and the prioritites that we live for. We hold the good things of this world too tightly and lavish our affections on them too freely. We strive and strain for the same kinds of gain as everyone else around us.
Jesus knew this would always be the temptation for his disciples. He warns us:
‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasure on earht, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matt. 6: 19-21)
… This is the main message of Ecclesiastes in a nutshell: life in God’s world is gift, not gain... Instead of using these gifts as means to a greater end of securing ultimate gain in the world, we take the time to live inside the gifts themselves and see the hand of God in them…
But the Preacher’s whoel point in this section is to show us that the world cannot be leveraged to suit me,, and life is meant to be enjoyed not mastered.” (pgs. 36 – 47)
“Questions for Discussion or Personal Reflection:
- What is the motivation for getting up each morning?
- What do the lives of people you know reveal about what they think will make them happy?
- How would you describe ‘true joy’ to a friend who knows nothing of this? (Jimmy insert: The Great Commission)
- What strategies do you think people you know, including yourslef, use to avoid facing the reality of death?
- What do you make of the idea that death can give us the perspective we need to begin to enjoy life?
Thoughts?
Soli Deo Gloria!