Ecclesiastes Chapter Two

Well, I was planning on spending a day on each chapter of Ecclesiastes, but then I went to the library yesterday to return an overdue book. I of course then went and looked for other books to check out, and my eyes fell on a little yellow book in the Christian section. I picked up and started laughing, because the book is called The Search For Satisfaction: Looking For Something New Under The Sun. When I read the title, I knew it was going to be on Ecclesiastes. God certainly does have a sense of humor.

I started reading the book last night, and it's pretty good so far. The author, David McKinley, is a pastor at a church in Dallas they we used to go to for concerts when my wife and I lived there. It's called Prestonwood Baptist, but most people called it either "Prestonworld" or "the Baptidome", because it was a huge church.

Anyway, McKinley talks in the second chapter of his book (which is still about the first chapter) about a Satisfaction With Life test and scale that some psychologist developed. You are supposed to take the below five statements, and put a number next to it corresponding to these feelings: 1- strongly disagree, 2 - disagree, 3 - slightly disagree, 4 - neither agree nor disagree, 5 - slightly agree, 6 - agree, 7 - strongly agree:

_____ In most ways, my life is close to my ideal.

_____ The conditions of my life are excellent.

_____ I am satisfied with my life.

_____ So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

_____ If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

The scale then goes: 35-31---extremely satisfied; 26-30---satisfied; 21-25---slightly satisfied, 20---neutral, 15-19---slightly dissatisfied, 10-14---dissatisfied, 5-9---extremely dissatisfied.

McKinley then gives "Five Myths Of Satisfaction" that he gets from Ecclesiastes. In other words, Solomon developed his own test of satisfaction, things that he tried in order to be satisfied, and found that they failed:

Search #1: Progress
Search #2: Excess
Search #3: Success
Search #4: Possessions
Search #5: Impression (leaving a legacy)

I'm sure we all go through these searches in our lives; for some of us, these searches last several years; for others they may be shorter, but we repeat them over and over again.

I'm excited to continue on in the second chapter of Ecclesiastes, as well as this book I found in the library and Philip Yancey's thoughts on Ecclesiastes tomorrow. But for now, I leave a Yancey quote.

The whole tone of Ecclesiastes reflects the tenor of King Solomon's time, when Israel reached its zenith as a nation. And there's the rub. How can the bleak despair of Ecclesiastes issue from the era of Israel's Golden Age, when things were going so well? The days of slavery in Egypt might produce such a gloomy volume, I reasoned, but not the glory days of Solomon and his royal successors...curiously, I learned, existential despair, whether in the Teacher or in Camus, tends to sprout from the soil of excess...despair arises out of circumstances of plenty rather than deprivation. Indeed, I did not find alienation and despair in the grim, three-volume Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn; I found rage, a passion for justice, and a defiant will to survive...existential despair did not germinate in the hell holes of Auschwitz or Siberia but rather in the cafes of Paris, the coffee shops of Copenhagen, the luxury palaces of Beverly Hills.

EDIT: I changed this to Ecclesiastes Chapter 2, because the Search For Satisfaction book actually numbered this chapter wrongly - it's supposed to say chapter two!