goodness gracious
Mortality Stew

Linda Hoffman Kimball
Volume 23, No. 4

"Enjoy your A's while you get them because once you're grown up, nobody puts a gold sticker on your forehead and nobody gives you A's and nobody gives you steady, encouraging feedback." I announced this little bon mot to my teenaged sons as we drove home from registering them for school. 

"I've never heard you sound so bitter," Peter responded, flabbergasted. Then, rephrasing my lament with a flourish, he said, "So Life chews you up, spits you out, and then stomps on what it just spit out?" 

He created a graphic image – but did he capture my mood? Am I bitter? Has my own craving for positive feedback made me see Life as some scary street tough? 

Or was my phrase – not his – just an accurate assessment of how life really is? I don't think I laced my remark with edgy whining. (Well, okay. So maybe some edgy whining.) Mostly I meant it as a statement of fact like many others I might make: "Parenthood is no picnic"; "Don't expect your mission to be 'the best two years of your life'"; "Marriage is a lot of hard work." 

I know too many people who have been walloped by the great drifting chunks in what I have come to call "mortality stew." Part of signing on to human existence means agreeing to swim around in this pot of joys and troubles and do the best we can to learn and love. In the pot are inescapable clots. Some are annoying little bits of spice – like always choosing the longest checkout line, or dealing with insurance claims, or even the lack of feedback in adulthood. 

However, floating in the pot are also gnarly lumps of gristle and bone. These are the big ones: death, disease, failed relationships, accidents, war, loneliness. They don’t call it the lone and dreary world for nothing. 

In the Salt Lake Temple's world room, I happened to be sitting once right next to the wall with a vivid mural. It showed an animal with open jaws hovering over a dead deer. Yep, I thought. That's life, all right. 

Life's hardships can't be wished away. I won't slap happy little sub-titles on them. Even though I am an ardent believer in the Oprah Winfrey "turn your wounds into wisdom" philosophy, I won't pretend that the wound wasn't real in the first place. Oddly, these trials are both simultaneously legitimately trials and legitimately wells of wisdom. I'm reminded of the bumper sticker: "Oh no! Not another learning experience!" 

Last year teaching seminary, I discovered Ecclesiastes. All I knew about it before last year was the catchy tune about "a time for every season under Heaven" and the "all is vanity" lament, which shows up about sixty times in the short book. Vanity, rather than meaning something haughty and having to do with how one's make-up looks, literally means "breath" or 'breeze." Everything, then, is vanity – that is, fleeting and transitory. 

What does the Preacher in Ecclesiastes prescribe for this dilemma? He writes: "So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 8:15) That doesn't sound bitter. That sounds realistic and actually pretty cheery. Life is hard, but celebrate the good stuff. Life has disappointments, but find joy, too. 

And the Preacher's summation? For all the vanity, for all the mixed bag that life brings he says this: "Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone." One scholar sees the author of Ecclesiastes as "an utter realist; yet he will not let go of God." 

Besides, the good news – literally, the Good News – is that this life is not all there is anyway. If the lone and dreary world were all there were, Life would feel pretty tragic. It would be that street tough I dread. William Dean Howells was referring to literature and drama when he wrote, "What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." That is exactly what happens – applied beyond the narrow range of literary arts – when lives get connected to Jesus. 

Yes, yes, I know. First I sound like the gloomy pessimist inspiring images of Life spitting us out and grinding us down. Then, despite refusals to slap happy labels on life's difficulties, I insist on tying things up with that pretty Christian bow of redemption, hope, and peace. 

But that, I believe, is where the heart of the Christ's message takes me. Past a soft, pale Jesus. Past limp rhetoric and pat answers and "pretty bows." It takes me to the powerful God who heals and lifts me beyond mortality stew while I am still in the thick of it. I believe this. I'm working this daily into my bones. It will eventually be the last hurrah. It is the current Hallelujah.

return to table of contents