Main news for 23 November 2024

Ecclesiastes was well read in the traditional books of sages of his time. He speaks the language of those very aphorisms from which the Book of Proverbs was composed, sometimes repeating them directly, sometimes paraphrasing. But for him the wholeness of the path comes first. In spiritual life there are no scales on which one could place good and evil deeds in order to see which outweighs which. And such weighing itself, even if it were possible, would decide nothing. God is not a judge in an earthly sense, and still less a policeman.

God knows perfectly well, without any scales, what we are worth and what we deserve. But fortunately for us, He repays us not according to our merits, but according to His love. And yet the issue is not only in Him, but in us too. Ecclesiastes cannot fail to understand this: after all, he was where God's eternity meets the created world. He listened and heard that apophatic silence behind which the Presence is hidden and through which it is revealed. Therefore Ecclesiastes could not fail to understand that any noise, especially inner noise, will drown out God. Will make Him fall silent.

God will not shout over us; He will simply wait until we fall silent. Unlike us, He has all eternity in His hands; He can wait. Wait until we learn to correspond not to His fullness, which is impossible for us in principle, but to His Presence. Until we learn to live with it and in it. Learn to live? But all the writings of the wise are precisely about this, about learning to live... And then the requirement of blamelessness that so often sounds in collections of aphorisms from which the books of the wise are composed becomes all the more understandable to Ecclesiastes.

A person is not sinless, but does he give his sins power over himself? If not, his heart is on the right side; if so, on the left. Here it is no longer a matter of religious formalism, and not even of moral blamelessness. The question is whether a spoonful of tar will poison a large barrel of honey. One fly is enough to spoil precious aromatic oil. One small sin, even one thought of sin to which a person turns the whole fullness of his attention, is enough to lose that very Presence. So perhaps earthly wisdom is not only earthly? There is something to think about...