"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Everything is meaningless!" – Ecclesiastes 12:8

Today's Scripture Reading (December 21, 2022): Ecclesiastes 12

Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl spent some time reflecting on the concept of the meaning of life and the high cost of living a life without meaning. He wrote, "This striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man" (Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning). I have often wondered what someone like Frankl found meaningful during his stay at various Nazi concentration camps. Or was this search for meaning paused during those moments of pure survival in the camps, and the meaning that the camps exerted on his life was only found in moments of retrospection after the danger had passed and the camps were a distant memory? But in the summation of his remembered experiences from the war, Frankl decided that meaning comes to us in three main ways. The first is in the doing of a deed. We find meaning in the things that we do. Maybe that is why so many of us find meaning in the jobs that we undertake during our lives. Frankl said that a second way of finding meaning in life is by experiencing a value; finding beauty through art or receiving love through a relationship brings meaning into our lives. The final way of finding meaning is through suffering, the very experiences that Frankl had experienced in the Nazi concentration camps. Even there, Frankl decided that he had discovered meaning in his life.

Qoheleth returns to the very place he started and declares once more that everything is meaningless. In fact, it is more than meaningless. After examining everything "under the sun," he decides that everything we experience is the pinnacle of meaninglessness. Qoheleth would have disagreed with Frankl and his search for meaning. There is no meaning in our actions because they don't change anything under the sun. Nothing that we do can make us ultimately different from anyone else. We will all suffer the same ultimate fate, and none of us will get to escape that fate. There is no meaning in the things we value because everything will, at some point in the future, dissolve into dust. There is not even any point in suffering; it just adds to the meaninglessness of our lives. As the end of Qoheleth's life draws near, he sees everything he possibly believed brought meaning as being worse than meaningless because the hope he once possessed had dissolved away.

The only experience that throughout Qoheleth's search for meaning he found meaningful was God. Eternity and the existence of an eternal God were the only things that could bring meaning to Qoheleth's reality, and by extension, to his alter ego, King Solomon. Without God, everything would remain meaningless, with no hope that we would find anything positive in our search for hope "under the sun."

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 1 Kings 12