Ancient Israel’s King Solomon, reputed to be the wisest monarch of his time, once lamented that there was “Nothing new under the sun,” and “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
That’s the familiar literary recitation from Ecclesiastes I, anyway. The Message paraphrase might make a bit more sense in the 21st Century: “There’s nothing to anything — it’s all smoke . . . the sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again — the same old round.”
Live long enough, and it is inevitable to nod and sigh in agreement with the jaded king of old.
Still, I turn back to that initial King James Version phrase, “Nothing new UNDER the sun.”
I believe your perspective must take flight, ABOVE the sun, to grasp truth, and hope.
Keep your gaze in front of you, or more likely, at your feet, despairing at the path your are on, and like Henry David Thoreau, you will find yourself one of those characters who live their lives in ‘quiet desperation.”
In his work, “Walden,” Thoreau — though of an existential, not religious worldview — urges looking above the sun, too, in the sense of climbing beyond the mundane to the true treasures of living.
Rather than being resigned to our “present low and primitive condition,” he writes about the almost metaphysical ecstasy of “the spring of springs arousing them” and the yearning to “rise to a higher and more ethereal life.”
I am reminded, anew, that it is time again to look above the sun.
Time to see, taste, touch and hear beauty, to cherish and embrace family and friends, and to let my faith in God carry me beyond mere sunrises and sunsets to other, eternal realms — whether experienced within the next breath or heartbeat, or in the passage of eons to come.
And, it's a journey best experienced hand-in-hand. Don't be afraid to reach out.
