I’m Not Lost, I’m Looking for Bugs

The Edge of Meaning and the Freedom of Insignificance

This post is a sermon I preached at Jubilee Mennonite Church on 15 August 2024. Thanks to the people of JMC for letting me work out my faith (faith issues?) in their company.

Both the book of Ecclesiastes and this sermon are more about experience than theology (though the degree to which one’s experience shapes one’s theology would be interesting to explore) . My experiences, or those described in Ecclesiastes, and the questions they raise, may or may not be ones that you’ve had, and that’s ok. Everyone’s life is different, and we all connect with different parts of Scripture in different ways and at different points in our lives.

Bucket O’Bugs

I’ve been known to wander about, looking at flowers and insects and such. My kids call it ‘nerding’ – “Dad’s going nerding again!” One time I was exploring a wooded area around the local baseball field where some kids were playing and I overheard them wondering to each other what I was doing. I relayed this experience to my wife, who then got me this shirt to wear on such excursions – ‘I’m not lost, I’m looking for bugs.”

Years ago when I still got to work out of the office and do surveys for rare species, there were a couple of rare moth species that we were looking for. Many nocturnal moths are attracted to light, so the way we would survey for these moths is to set up a light trap.

A light trap is essentially a 5 gallon bucket with a light set up on top of it with a series of panels or baffles around the light. The moths fly at the light, hit the baffles and fall through a funnel into the bucket. We would set up the traps in the evening, then return the following morning to see what we caught. There was usually at least a handful of moths of a variety of species, maybe a couple dozen moths on a good night, and often a few mosquitoes and other small insects as well.

One evening we set up a trap just south of CFB Shilo near the junction of the Souris and Assiniboine Rivers. The next morning when we checked the trap, we found…bugs.

Thousands upon thousands of small flies called midges had filled the entire 5 gallon pail. In fact the pail was overflowing with midges, and they had started to pile up beside the bucket. Midges are about the size of big mosquitoes – imagine how many mosquitoes it would take to pack a pail that size! There were so many midges in the pail that the ones at the bottom were being crushed by the weight of all those above them.

It turns out we had just so happened to set up our trap on the same night that there was a mass emergence of midges from the rivers nearby. The immature stages live in water then, when they become adults, they leave the water. Likely hundreds of thousands if not millions of adult midges had ‘hatched’ from the water and risen into the air in massive swarms to breed and been attracted to our light trap.

Sometimes there’s so many midges in such mass emergence events that they show up on weather radar systems like a cloud. The male midges die shortly after mating and the females live just long enough after mating to lay their eggs. The adult stage of these midges is perhaps a couple days at most.

War

Years ago I read a history of war – not a particular war, but the phenomenon of war. I recall the author discussing how far back in human history there were wars and how we may have some archaeological evidence for wars many centuries ago, but often don’t know who exactly was involved or what they were fighting about.

I remember being struck by the thought that many thousands of people – people like me who had families and friends, dreams and desires, laughter and tears – these people fought over things that today we know nothing about, things they felt were worth killing and dying for, but that those things are lost to the mists of time and mean nothing to us today. We don’t know their names, we don’t know their stories, we don’t know what they fought about, we just know that they are forgotten, as unknown and meaningless to the world today as the thousands of midges that died that night years ago in their frenzied flight to the light of our bucket trap.

“Eventually everything disappears into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it makes no difference.”
~Kate Atkinson

To paraphrase the writer of Ecclesiastes: good or bad, rich or poor, wise or foolish – doesn’t matter – there is no remembrance of people of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. Everything I say, everything I do, everyone I love, the battles we wage, the wars we fight, the powers that be – all will be forgotten. And the world, the universe, will move on. The sun rises, the sun sets, the wind blows, the rivers flow. Nothing has changed and nothing will change.

“The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so -roughly 0.0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile.”
~Stephen Jay Gould

“What does our behavior matter, when [humans] will have disappeared from the earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, [human choices] look absurd – crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile.”
~Robert MacFarlane

The passage of time has a way of diluting meaning.

Ecclesiastes

The writer of Ecclesiastes sees that humans believe they matter, both as individuals and as a species, and according to his* Scriptures God seems to think humans matter, yet he saw that reality was shot through with situations that seem to suggest the exact opposite. He embarks on a search for significance, and Ecclesiastes is the record of his findings.

Chapter 2:3 “I wanted to see what was worthwhile for humans to do during the few days of their lives.”

Chapter 3:18-20 “God tests people so that they may see that they are like animals. Humanity’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; people have no advantage over animals. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”

This was the central problem for the writer of Ecclesiastes, yet no matter what he tries to figure this out, he comes up empty, and concludes that at the end of the day, humans are just another creature.

To the writer of Ecclesiastes, life seems to be nothing but a sand castle on the beach, and the tide always comes in. So what’s the point? Imagine this guy giving the commencement address at a graduation: “Congratulations, you’ve reached a useless and arbitrary milestone, go out and do stuff, or not, it really doesn’t matter.”

Ecclesiastes and the Church

Has anyone ever heard a sermon based on Ecclesiastes? I don’t think I have. Maybe sometimes the ‘a time for everything’ passage shows up.

Why is this book so rarely referenced in the church? It’s not one of those short, easily forgotten books like Jude, or a minor prophet comfortably tucked away at the end of the Old Testament where it’s easy to ignore.

Is it because Ecclesiastes is a bit of a downer – everything’s meaningless! Perhaps – it’s not exactly the recipe for a good time, but then again neither are crucifixion and eternal damnation and you’ve likely heard sermons on those things.

I wonder if at least part of the reason we find Ecclesiastes uncomfortable is because it drives a truck through our easy, comfortable answers. The author has no patience for dancing around questions, for ignoring the elephant in the room – tidy Sunday school answers won’t cut it for him. While some may try to ignore the question, or distract themselves with activity and accumulation, he has enough strength or desperation to look at human existence and its thin veneer of meaning and, like the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s famous story, yell out ‘The emperor has no clothes!’

Why?

You know when a child starts endlessly asking ‘Why?’

“Why is that car blue?”
“I guess because someone painted it blue.”
“Why?”
“They must have liked that color.”
“Why?”
And on it goes until eventually the adult throws up their hands and says “I don’t know why!”

I wonder if the author kept asking himself ‘What’s the point? Why am I doing this?’ And he would come up with an answer, but then, like the child, he kept asking ‘Why?’ And eventually he came to a place where there was no answer. Everything was just chasing after the wind.

Continually asking myself ‘Why?’ is how I ended up at the cliff.

I don’t recall exactly how it came about, but I have a distinct memory of thinking about some of these things and coming to a place where everything being meaningless became a very real possibility to me. I had heard of this philosophical position known as nihilism, but what was previously just an interesting philosophical idea in the abstract suddenly hit me in the core – all of this, everything I do, everything we do, could really be meaningless. It felt like I had stumbled through a tangle of life’s big questions only to suddenly arrive at the edge of a cliff looking out over the vast void of complete and utter nothingness. It took my breath away.

This was an uncomfortable place for me. Consciously or not, I had always assumed or believed that life had some sort of ultimate meaning, that I had a purpose, even if my understanding of that purpose was nebulous or poorly defined. I had always assumed there was a meaning to be found.

So now seriously considering that life might be meaningless was startling and unnerving. I wanted to look away, to walk away from this metaphorical cliff, to pretend it wasn’t there and go on with life as before, but I knew enough about myself to know that that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t go back, at least not without an honest reckoning of what lay before me. I also couldn’t bring myself to leap over the edge, to take the final step into the chasm, and embrace the belief that life, the universe, and everything was completely devoid of meaning.

So I sat down there, at the edge of meaning. I credit this decision to sit to wisdom, though not my own. I recall my mother once telling me to not make big decisions if I wasn’t able to think clearly, if my judgement was clouded. Sitting, ceasing movement and searching, gave me the time I needed to process the various thoughts and feelings I was experiencing at this important juncture in my journey. My next step would have to be carefully considered.

What Time Is It?**

The book of Ecclesiastes was not formative to my Christian faith. In my experience with church, Ecclesiastes has usually been treated as a curiosity, a novelty to peek at. Sitting at cliff’s edge, I wasn’t sure the Bible could offer me much – it just seemed to raise more questions than it answered, and it typically made the very types of assumptions or gave the easy answers I was trying to look beyond.

The Bible has all kinds of books – books of theology, books of history, books of poetry. Ecclesiastes is a book of experience, a memoir, a travelogue through the heart’s deepest questions. And I wonder if this is exactly what drew me to it. I yearned to sit and chat with someone who also knew of this cliff, whose struggle to make sense of everything was deep and personal. And here was the no-holds-barred account of the author’s own experience.

Wine aficionados collect bottles of wine – wine from different places, different times, made from different grape varieties. But they don’t typically drink them as soon as they get them. Instead they store them in a cellar, waiting for the right time, the right occasion, the right company for each specific bottle.

I sometimes think of the Bible like a cellar. All the books are there, ready to be opened and read when the time is right. Like special bottles of wine, there may not be many occasions that call for Ecclesiastes, but it most definitely does have a time and a place that can’t be filled by any other book. Ecclesiastes was the right book at the right time for me. Regardless of where my journey of faith leads, Ecclesiastes has left a mark on me.

I wonder what the debates around the table were like when they were discussing which books to include in the Bible and Ecclesiastes came up. What arguments were made for and against including it? Whatever the case, I am grateful to those who successfully lobbied to include Ecclesiastes, who kept it in the cellar, ready for an occasion just such as this.

What now?

While I still sometimes find myself sitting at cliff’s edge these days, more often than not I find myself wandering. And even when that wandering takes me far from the cliff, the experience of its existence stays with me so that even the familiar now looks different. Grappling deeply with the question of meaning and purpose has changed me, even if the answer(s) remain elusive.

One of things I’m experiencing is release from the burden of accomplishment. I am dust and to dust I shall return. I’m finding that this can dramatically shift my perspectives on work, on utility and productivity, and what I spend my time and energy doing and fretting over.

“I am not saying, of course, that nothing matters; but if the thought keeps crossing your mind that you will be dead soon, it is hard to work up any passion for such questions as: What are the implications of transformational grammar for the teaching of writing? Reflections on one’s mortality curiously make one come alive to the incredible amounts of inanity and fanaticism that surround us, much of which is inflicted on us by ourselves.”
~Neil Postman

“There was a deep stupidity in ambition, a blindness in it, that it was so serious, so unplayful. It failed to value the moment, and so failed to recognize happiness, even though that was the most important consideration of all.”
~Kim Stanley Robinson

Once the hubris of human ambition and accomplishment is stripped away, once the absurdity of the human experience is accepted, then the door opens to delight.

2:24-25 – A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God…

3:12-13 – I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil – this is the gift of God.

3:22 – So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot.

5:18-20 – Then I realized that it is good and proper for a person to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them – for this is their lot.

8:15 – So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their work all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.

9:7 – Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do.

Six times in this short book, the author encourages the reader to enjoy food, drink, and labor. Essentially, find joy in the doing of things that you must do, that all creatures must do. Don’t pin your hopes and happiness on results. Learn to enjoy the doing. It is not the what that has meaning, it is the how. For me the question is becoming less about ‘What should I do?”, but rather ‘How should I be?’

If the past can’t be changed, and the future is truly out of my hands, then the moment becomes the site of meaning. The situation or person right in front of me – that’s what matters; if I am to mean something, it can only be in the immediate – because what happens after that is anyone’s guess.

So I’m learning to let go of the future. The freedom of insignificance allows me to focus on living, to experience, to explore with a boldness not possible before. While not always comfortable or easy, I’m exploring the paradox of being meaningless yet living meaningfully. To find joy in being no less and no more than a creature in Creation.

“A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.”
~Arthur C. Clarke

“With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip.”
~Lyanda Lynn Haupt

“I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m here and I’m listening; and there is still joy in this world.”
~Robin McKinley

Purpose and meaning may still be elusive, I may not know exactly where I am or what I’m doing, I may find myself wandering and wondering a lot, and while there are times where I find this very unsettling, more and more I’m able to say I’m not lost – I’m looking for bugs.

“The night freed us from our obsession with reason. It told us that we were a bundle of electric wires plugged into everything that came along. It was enough to be alive and around. The same was true of everything else.”
~Etel Adnan

~

*Given my understanding of the culture of the day, I assume the author/editor of Ecclesiastes was male.

**Many thanks to Ken Warkentin for posing this question in relation to reading and using Scripture. I return to it regularly and it was the inspiration for this section of the sermon.