The July sky was as yellow as sulphur. Heat was stifling, the Bundrens’ poor hillside farm baked brick-hard. A cyclone was coming, and Addie Bundren had lain near death for ten days in William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying.
Doctor Peabody climbed the high hill to visit Addie’s bedside. He heard the push and pull of a handsaw. Cash, Addie’s eldest son, was building his mother’s casket. Addie’s husband stood on the front porch in faded overalls, a dark serge patch cut from worn-out Sunday pants stitched in place over one knee. In the bedroom, daughter Dewey Dell fanned the dying Addie in the smothering yellow light.
Vardaman, Addie’s youngest son, was stricken with fear at the sight of the casket and at the relentless push and pull of Cash’s saw: “Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash?...Are you going to nail it shut?”
Seventy-years old and fat, Dr. Peabody was winded and disgruntled from the steep climb. The smell of death floated in the sulphurous air. Addie moved only her eyes, first to Dewey Dell, then to Dr. Peabody. Pitilessly, the doctor thought to himself that her death was not worthy of his time, her death no more than a tenant moving out of a tenement house. “That’s the trouble with this country….shaping and creating the life of a man in its implacable and brooding image,” he muttered to himself.
The Bundrens had promised Addie to bury her with relatives in Jefferson, some forty miles away. The remainder of As I Lay Dying dramatized the tragic yet humorous journey, while Addie’s unembalmed body jostled for nine days in the hand-made casket on a mule-drawn wagon toward the chosen burial site.
Doctor Peabody’s words that “the country” shapes a man’s life bears out in Faulkner’s novel. The Bundrens were poor and troubled, but also self-serving and quarrelsome. By the novel’s end, Peabody’s words make a broader sweep than the hard-up, fractious Bundrens. Though we have choices, we, too, are influenced by our “country” — our family, friends, community, and culture that try to bend and shape and create us.
It’s true, isn’t it? All these place pressure upon our lives. We know damaged and mangled families, broken relationships, and ruined values. Often those are our own families.
As I revisited Faulkner’s novel, I also revisited Ecclesiastes, a hard book for me. Solomon is bold and unrelenting. He looks me in the eye, speaks straight into my face. Solomon’s Ecclesiastes is like Versailles’ famous hall of 357 mirrors. It reveals, reflects, throws back who I am, what I am — and what I look like to the Lord and others.
Fact is, I can resemble the Bundrens: snippy, contemptuous, greedy, ignorant, cold-hearted, self-focused. Between Faulkner and Solomon, I felt tromped on and rolled over by mules pulling a steel-wheeled wagon with a jostling casket on top. Many of us know that pain.
Seven passages in Ecclesiastes struck my soul especially hard:
A handful of quietness is better than two handfuls of chasing the wind (4:6).
It is an unhappy business to never be satisfied (4:8).
A fool voices many words (5:3).
Don’t love money because money won’t
ever satisfy (5:10).
Never let my stuff own me (6:1-2).
Get discontented with discontentment and with an appetite that is never satisfied (6:7).
Don’t let my stuff and my culture suffocate my soul (6:12).
When I’m messed up like the Bundrens, or living “under the sun” and “chasing the wind,” as Solomon warns, what do I do? To borrow a secular term, I rightsize my life. I begin to live “under Heaven,” not “under the sun.” I turn from self-centeredness, indulgence, faithlessness, and greediness. I move toward God, sound reasoning, gratitude, and purity. I strive to love God, my neighbor, my fellow believers. I live as the Lord’s friend. I rightsize my life.
How do I do that? How do I rightsize my life? Repeatedly, Solomon offered guidance for how to realign our values and live a good and wise life “under Heaven” — that is, under the Lord’s superintendence. Uncluttered and purposeful. A life put to good and holy use.
First, don’t forget rightsizing is not the same as downsizing. Downsizing is often a one-time event — cutting back, making things smaller. Rightsizing is almost always an ongoing process. It means adjusting, realigning, decluttering, improving, making better use of. The best companies, businesses, and industries regularly rightsize. So should we, both physically and spiritually. Though Solomon never uses the word, Ecclesiastes teems with ways to rightsize life. I’ll mention five.
Evaluate. Are my attitudes, my lifestyle, my “stuff” hurting me? Solomon called these things evil (5:13). The Hebrew word hurt in verse 13 is rah (in English). Rah has ten or more shades of meaning for evil — not just bad morally and ethically, but the entire gamut of good and evil. Rah depicts evil as absolute trouble, vileness, and ruin. The fictional Bundrens are hurt by their lifestyle, their greed and competition, their bickering, and even by their meager “stuff.” Am I?
Admit. If there is hurt as Solomon depicts it, will I own up to it? Whatever his eyes desired, Solomon says, he pursued, until he admitted it was all vanity, an unhappy business. Is that me? Is my heart never satisfied (4:7-8)? Am I content to live with discontentment? Am I chasing the wind — going around and around to gain nothing but weariness and more dissatisfaction (1:6-8)? To Solomon, the wind was an insubstantial vapor, a wisp of fog — a nothing. It cannot be caught, harnessed, tamed, controlled, or held (2:11). What unhappy business, what wind am I chasing?
Decide. To rightsize my life according to Solomon, I must decide what to do. Someone recently warned that if I decided to go rock climbing (which I certainly will not), I should be careful what I grab on to. “Some rocks are unstable,” she said. Many of Ecclesiastes’ 222 verses suggest something like that. We often try to grasp the unstable, the insubstantial, the worthless. Such grasping is ultimately futile.
Do I want my life to be more than the stuff I cling to — houses, land, furniture, bank accounts, investments, retirement funds, “toys,” books, hobbies, electronics, or whatever? In the end, every one of these may prove unstable, even insubstantial in the deepest sense. Decide to keep “stuff” in its right place.
Implement. Work a plan to live life “under Heaven.” Commit to a holy and sacred simplicity. Declutter both physically and spiritually. In the early 1960s, my husband, Bill, visited a woman in a small New Hampshire town near our church. She led Bill along a narrow path through various rooms of her home, all stacked to the ceiling with stuff. “There are two pianos in here somewhere,” she whispered. She seemed guilt-ridden about the mess she was in, but unable to declutter either physically or spiritually.
A holy and sacred simplicity will declutter every day with the Lord and His Word, a fresh self-surrender — giving back to the Lord what we’ve grasped as our own. Let go physically and spiritually. Practice gratitude for our blessings large and small. Devote ourselves to a tranquil heart. Abandon “the pursuit of the next best thing,” as T. M. Moore says in his book, Ecclesiastes: Ancient Wisdom When All Else Fails.
Adjust. Many in business and industry rightsize regularly. So should I, for rightsizing is an ongoing process. It is a daily walk with and for the Lord, not a one-and-done event. So, I will revisit Ecclesiastes regularly. I will take a new look at Solomon’s old wisdom and the mystery and counsel of my Creator (11:5). He is the One who put eternity in my heart, who makes everything new, who recreates and rightsizes me in His image (3:11).
Lord, I want to rightsize my life. Declutter me. Remake me in Your image. Amen.
About the Writer: Brenda Evans lives and writes in Ashland, Kentucky. You may reach her at beejayevans@windstream.net.
