Howling between the lightning,
lost in the storm of my endless night,
I seek your name oh God!
I don’t want your light blinds me
in the middle of the horror,
because I need light to go on …
Is what I have learned from you, not useful to live?
I feel that my faith falters, God,
that bad people live better than me..
If life is hell
and the honest lives in tears,
What is the merit of
someone that is clean, pure, who fights in your name,
What for?…
God, today infamy leads the way
and love kills in your name all what you’ve kissed…
Following you and loving you are giving advantage
for succumbing to evil.
I do not want to leave you,
Then show only once
that the traitor does not live with impunity,
Show me a flower
that has been born
from the effort to following you,
To don’t hate the world that hates me;
because I won’t learn how to steal…
And then on my knees,
drawing blood on the pebbles
I will die with you, happy, Lord!
This is a translation of “Tormenta”, Spanish word of storm, a tango, composed in 1939 that my father used to listen when I was a child. At this precise moment, my mind is full of melodies and memories of old songs my father used to listen to. As many of you know, I was born in Colombia, more exactly in the city of Santiago de Cali. In this city and other cities like Medellin, tango was a musical kind accepted and loved for older generations, like my father and my grandfather. I still remember evenings in my father workshop, a place full of marvelous things for me: tools, oils, solvents and appliances he used to fix; I remember the smell of those oils and solvents, the heat of the day and his radio tuned to a local radio station that always played tango and old music. I didn’t like it, it sounded very old fashioned and boring to me. Suddenly with the time and with the self-awareness that I am alive, I started to listen and understand the meaning of lyrics of songs like this one. If you could listen to it, you will hear a beautiful, classical and rich musical expression with bandoneon (concertina), piano and violins. (Here a link to the song in you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulW9uVTCmw )
The author of this old tango was Ernesto Santos Dicepolo, an Argentinian poet, artist, playwright and also an observer and critic of his time and generation. This song and many others of his songs are generally dealing with the meaning of life, the injustices of life with some glimpse of God and atheism together. All his music and poetry have a Nihilist philosophy influx, you can see, there is a criticism of social, politics, cultural issues, regarding to values, customs and dogmas.
We can see also this nihilistic philosophy in older philosophic books like Ecclesiastes. Since this book has a reflection of reason. I won’t go into details about the author or in what time it was written. Ecclesiastes name is an adaptation of the name Cohelet. The author presents himself as Cohelet, and also as an Israel’s king who as a scientist researched, observed and explore the life of the humans under the sun.
The words of Cohelet are filled with reflections about the meaning of life and the fate of all living things included humans.
In Ecclesiastes 3 as we have been seen during this season, Cohelet starts talking about time, more precisely about events that belongs to our daily life, as the writer call it, the experience under the sun. This time events are showed.in juxtaposition like, time to be born and time to die, time to weep and time to laugh and so on. Cohelet is an observer sometimes stoic, maybe with some touches of tragedy or absurd about the sense of life. Those events can also be seen as stages of life, not necessarily in that given order, but sometimes we can be in one or other stage. Life is full of contrast and many contradictions too. The question: what for the gain of the worker toils, if at the end the fate is death, the sheol, which is indeed a state of non-identity or memory about our self-conscious, is indeed a dishearten question. Still though, we have a burden that God has laid on us. That burden set our minds to think about the sense of life, its contradictions and pains, our understanding and comprehension of the universe and its infinite frontiers and also the tragedy of our fate. Then, like something that save all, Cohelet expresses that there is nothing better for humans to be happy and do good while we are alive, maybe sometimes this distract us from that burden laid on us.
Is not to get gains to then rest as in Jesus parable of the rich fool, but to enjoy what every day brings, that every man eat, drink and find satisfaction. Sounds simple, but what a difficult thing sometimes it is. And this is a gift of God, and of course it is, in that way we are like protected from this burden.
The universe is God’s creation with its beauty and temporal stamp. I do like the idea and expression of eternity and infinitude in this book. “I know that everything God does will endure forever, nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it”.
A relativistic or maybe quantum mechanics expression like this: “Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account”. No wonder why Ecclesiastes is one of my favourites books in the bible.
The God judgment is for the righteous and the wicked, since there is time for everything under the sun. Thus there is time for the wicked to do his wickedness and also for the goodness of the righteous. Then there is the tragedy, the fate of humans and animals and all being, death, Sheol. For both human and animal; for both wicked and righteous there is a common destination. Since this is a big tragedy from this Cosmo vision, the only redemption here, the only distraction here is for the man to enjoy his work, since this enjoyment would astray us of this terrific and pessimist view.
Going back to the song, we can see the same pessimistic fate. There are questions about the sense of the life, what is the reason to be a good person since it seems the bad has a better life and maybe, from the oppressed point of view, a better kind of life. A burden on the top of the one already laid on us. Of course this song was written in a historic moment with its particular meaning, but it asks the same question and have the same contradiction as in Cohelet, at the end what is the advantage of be good? This question is asked to God self in an act of disbelieving and in the middle of the profanation of the sacred.
My father used to tell me, this song was prohibited in places where the Catholic Church was allied with
tyrannies and powers and did see in these lyrics a threat against their hegemony.
On the parable of the rich fool Jesus tell to the crowd that life doesn’t consist on the abundance of possessions. In this same parable there are words from Cohelet refection: eat, drink and be merry. The same words Cohelet used to express our redemption to the awaiting fate and life burden, but in this case, there is not the same logic about a simple life, there is something more. The rich man wanted to eat, to drink and to be happy but on the bases of his richness and gains. Then night comes and he dies. There is the same fate for the poor and for the rich, for the one that is worry about futile things collecting them and the one that is rich toward God. What is then the difference? A big one, the rich fool is double fooled and this is because he is focused on something that will assure him to reach the stage of enjoy the life and get distracted or preserved for the destination, but during his preparation he never gets the chance to taste it, just dies and that’s it.
The first time I heard Anabaptist theology in Colombia I was amazed. I have been a Christian since I was 15 years old but never found something that filled me at all, there was always something missed but I wasn’t able to understand or to tell it. Since the beginning of my Christianity I used to destroy from time to time all my faith bases and used to go to crisis of existence. I used to cry and asked several times to my mother why she gave birth to me. Not because I was rejected or something like that, but because form a short age I discovered that burden inside of me. I was so scared about this and used to question the God of my faith at that time why that?, why you make the things in this way? I used to be a sad teenager, many times very transcendental but with big desires to be happy in the deepest way. I never was induced to believe in any God, religion or political idea at home. My father always told me to find my way on those venues. So I decided to be a non-Catholic Christian since everybody around me, especially from my mother’s family side were or are catholic. What a big problem for my grandfather a Christian catholic from my mother side, but an encouragement from my father that used to be an atheist. Time kept going with stages in my life. There were times to believe and times to disbelieve; times to weep and times to laugh. One day I started to get interested in issues like the violence in my country and other social issues and how the perpetrators of this violence were in impunity while the weak and poor were oppressed and never listened. I used to ask God why? Why this things happens, what is my responsibility in this? Never found an answer. One day, when I was a university student, I heard a Mennonite pastor talking in a biblical study group in Bogota and I was amazed by his words. He was talking about the kingdom of heaven and the proposal of Jesus in his gospel. Not only a spiritual proposal but one near to my humanity and burden, even an economical proposal with justice I never saw before. Then from that day on I decided to be a Mennonite. My father always used to challenge my faith by asking me questions that generally I wasn’t able to respond. One of his favourites ones was “salvation from what?”. People in South America, especially Christian’s evangelicals go door to door with the intention to evangelize those in the houses and they always use this term, “salvation”, but more in a spiritual way. Then I started reading Anabaptist theology and I was able to tell my father, salvation from oppression, injustice, impunity and distribution of the gains. He agreed I remember that. He is gone now but I do remember this very well.
I can say there is salvation in Cohelet and this salvation comes by having merry in our life, that everybody drinks and eats. But if I see under the sun, like Cohelet did, that’s not the case. There are some full riches that want everything for them; creating imbalances under the sun, taking away of others those gifts of God. Then the burden gets harder since there is nothing for the enjoyment, there is nothing to eat or drink and even worse the fate is more near and clear every day. If you see the conflicts around the world, the violence in Colombia for example, and trace back the roots of this you will see reasons and most of the time because there is accumulation of goods in a few people without thinking in the cost to get them. Life for them is just getting more and more, and then they not only want to rest and drink, and eat and have merry based on their gains. They want more and more. What a contradiction under the sun, what injustice, what fool are those but what difficult to dimension it for them. To accomplish with their goals, they adjust the law in the way they want, to get what they want, even intimidating the real owners of places to displace them and take ownership of their lands an sale them to foreign corporations that at the end are feed with the desire and hunger of their shareholders. Are there consequences for this? Many consequences: hunger, thirstiness, sadness and dead.
Around the world politicians don’t fallow political ideas anymore, they just follow economical ideas. In the middle of all of this, there is the vast majority of the planet population; victims of economical experiments. Not to going further or pessimistic, the banks, those entities that are protected more for the government than any other citizen.
But if we hear and understand the words of Cohelet and also what Jesus wanted to teach to the crowd, there is still salvation. Life is still beautiful and enjoyable despite of this panorama. Eternity is still a mystery under the sun. Just enjoy our labor and be in peace one to each other.