Eternity in Our Hearts

God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
-- The Teacher (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

If you have ever taken in a breathtaking vista in the Sierra Nevadas or swam in the clear blue waters of the Yucatan, you can identify with the Teacher of Ecclesiastes, who sees with dazzling clarity the beauty in the created world. One can detect in Ecclesiastes a longing, expressed by C. S. Lewis as "drippings of grace," those hints of transcendence he experienced when listening to music, visiting a beautiful cathedral, or reading Greek myths. We all feel that longing sometimes: in sex, in beauty, in music, in nature, in love.

Where did this sense of beauty and pleasure come from? The Teacher's answer is clear: A good and loving God naturally would want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment.

An encounter with beauty or an experience of intense joy may cause us for a moment to forget our true mortal state, but only momentarily. Every bride walks the aisle believing in a new life of bliss and every parent of a newborn leaves the hospital full of joy; yet we know that half of all marriages end in divorce and perhaps a third of all children will suffer abuse at their parents' hands. We can't shed our mortality.

A person may sense eternity in their heart and never turn to the God who placed it there. For those who continue to live "under the sun" the Teacher of Ecclesiastes has a simple message: you will surely fail to find what satisfies. "Is that all there is?" asked Peggy Lee in her own Sixties' version of Ecclesiastes. You may fail by chasing wealth, success, or sex, or you may fail by dropping out, giving up, and yielding to addiction. The Teacher says he pursued both paths. Ecclesiastes recounts the decadence of the richest, wisest, most talented person of the world in his time, serving as the perfect allegory for what can happen when we lose sight of the Giver whose good gifts we enjoy.

Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger. If we start chasing pleasure as an end in itself, along the way we may lose sight of the One who gave such good gifts as sexual drive, taste buds, and the capacity to appreciate beauty. In that event, Ecclesiastes tells it, wholesale devotion to pleasure will paradoxically lead to a state of utter despair.

Despair descends as we abuse God's good gifts; they seem no longer gifts, no longer good. We turn nudity to pornography, wine into alcoholism, food into gluttony, and human diversity into racism and prejudice.

The Teacher's words endure as a work of great truth because it presents both sides of life on this planet: the promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and the haunting realization that those pleasures ultimately do not satisfy. God's tantalizing world is too big for us. Made for another home, made for eternity, we finally realize that nothing this side of timeless Paradise will quiet the rumors of discontent.