Found this picture under the heading “Houses that Might As Well Be Haunted”
There have been many responses to the blogs on Ecclesiastes 12 and concepts of home. The responses are not on the blog itself but usually text messages, or emails which I still find interesting. People so “at home” with face book and twitter will not respond to the blog in the blog itself. They don’t “feel at home” on this platform. That has been on my mind lately as I see the changes that have to take place as we grow older and our concepts of “home” change and the “homes” we have change as well. Soon that attachment to “home” itself is transformed into something like Paul’s desire to “be at home with Lord”.
But back to the Ecclesiastes 12 discussion. Because many people see it as a physical and psychological exposition of the human house and “tent that we live in” the physical aspect overtakes the general feeling of Ecclesiastes that “everything is vanity” which can mean meaningless, and if you are the really cranky type “absurd”. All is absurdity. So if we go with the physical realm there are myriads of absurdities – the young man who is addicted to running and has a body fat ratio ridiculously low who dies of a heart attack at mile five of a ten mile run; the deaf Aunt who saves her money to afford five thousand dollars worth of hearing aids and who dies two days later of a stroke; the child whose mother had to be on bed rest for months to bring it into the world and dies 3 hours after being born; the middle aged man who survives a complicated stomach surgery to choke to death on a hospital lunch; all this is absurdity. We may be alone in this house because each house is different. Your ailments are different than mine and one of the interesting things that we encounter is the need to find people that share our infirmities to steel ourselves that we are not alone.
But my sense that the haunted house of Ecclesiastes represents the end of all things shows the same absurdity. All the production and prodigious energy of humanity to achieve or to destroy; to love or to hate; all comes to an end at the end, and this too is an absurdity. This is the basis of nihilism and fatalism and determinism and all the other “isms” that dog or life together. We are not alone in this haunted house. All humanity shares it.
There is also a religious dimension to the haunted house that comes to light in Jesus preaching. In this hosue we may be alone but it is inhabited by many, in fact they may be legion. This house is at the height of absurdity and yet we see it all around us. The tale is told in Matthew 24. We’ll get to it as the week progresses.
