Dark Devotional: Obsessive Compulsive Ecclesiastes

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 6:42 am by Guest Contributor

Dark Devotional: Obsessive Compulsive Ecclesiastes 2016-07-29T06:42:20-05:00 Guest Contributor

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“Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great misfortune. For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun? All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation; even at night his mind is not at rest. This also is vanity.”

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.”

“Then he told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.”

(From Readings for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops)

As someone with obsessive compulsive disorder, I feel a particular kinship with the author of Ecclesiastes. Retrospective diagnosis is unwise, but there really is something in the book that captures the experience of OCD – not only the continuous scansion of reality for perceived problems and threats, but the impotence to do anything about those threats no matter how many times one tries arbitrarily, again and again and again – in the end it all comes up as vanity. It’s a little like being afflicted with what for some people is a choice, as we see so clearly in the paired gospel for the day.

In Christ’s parable, the rich man’s plans for the future are prideful, a confident anticipation of his own success that takes no account of God. Conversely, in the passage from Ecclesiastes, the futility of this or any other plan has become a complex, gnawing anxiety – death will come and we can’t determine the fate of our wealth, whether our goods, those we love, or our own memories. Indeed, there is much we can’t determine regarding these things even while alive.

To return to the experience of OCD, the experience of the Ecclesiast is much more similar to it than that of the rich man. Yet the common thread is that both figures consider themselves alone. The wealthy man in his pride considers only his own efforts, and trusts himself without consideration of God. Similarly, though the anxious Ecclesiast and the person with OCD may be more pitiable than culpable, he or she thinks of him or her self as not any less alone than the rich man – in this case, however, the loneliness and reliance on self amount to the curse of despair because they are accompanied by an awareness of the impotence and untrustworthiness of one’s own efforts.

I don’t really have answers for these things – my own life is an oscillation between the pride of the rich man and the anxiety of Ecclesiastes – but I can at least draw attention to what gives me hope amidst them, and this is the fact noted in the reading from Colossians, that my life is hidden with Christ in God. What this means is that what I am – my self – is neither the “can we fix it? Yes we can!” self of the Bob-the-Builder optimist, nor the eternally defeatist self of the Ecclesiastean pessimist. Rather, it’s something other, a mystery awaiting full revelation in the person of Christ. When Christ who is my life appears, I too will appear with him in glory.

This puts the lie to the dreams of the rich man, for the experience of Christ’s life is not a matter of building bigger barns and better dreams but in fact the converse – Christ’s life is not grain stored up, but bread dispersed, a daily manna broken and offered, that cannot be kept past the day it’s given – our daily bread.

Yet this isn’t a matter for despair. Christ gave all his wealth – even his very body – to the world such that he had no control over what was done to it; he even let us humans nail it to a cross. And yet he could do this because he could trust that, in spite of his own chosen inability to determine the outcome, his body was ultimately not in the hands of his captors and abusers, but in the hands of his Father – “you would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11, NRSVCE).

Knowing all this – that our life is hidden in this body of Christ that trusts ever in God rather than its own pride or doubt – doesn’t perhaps make it any easier practically to live amidst the vanity. But it does remind us that there is something other we can hope toward, an alternative to the frustrating greatness of our own pride or despair that ever and always tempts us to give up.

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