Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (8). Just Enjoy Life, Part Three.

Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 4:6; 5:12; 5:18-20; 6: 1-9; 9:7-10; 10:19.

Just enjoy life—This was one of the important conclusions of Ecclesiastes. Consider two of the passages above. One says, “Go eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do.” This has a second layer of meaning: If you know that you are doing evil, you cannot really enjoy your bread and your wine. “Keep your garments white and oil on your face…” Today we would say, keep body and clothes clean, so that you can feel good about yourself, in confident happiness. “Food is for laughter, and wine gladdens life; and money answers everything.”

But Solomon does not say just to enjoy empty pleasures. The Biblical Solomon is said to have had a thousand sexual partners, but he was miserable. The writer of Ecclesiastes, pretending to be Solomon, says that true sexual enjoyment is, “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love.”

But the kind of pleasure that is most fulfilling is the satisfaction of good work. Among the passages noted above: “Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will never let him sleep.” Note that a craftsman can sleep, contented with his good work; but a slave cannot feel satisfaction. “Behold, what I have seen to be good is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all your work at which you spend the few days of your life under the sun. Your gift is to enjoy what you have been given, little or much. If you are happy, you won’t have time to sit around and think about the days of your life.” You won’t be singing, as Roy Clark did in the 1960s, “Yesterday when I was young, the taste of life was sweet, like rain upon my tongue…”

According to Solomon, it is a great tragedy when you cannot enjoy whatever good you may have. “There is a great evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavily upon men: God may give a man everything that one could desire, and yet does not give him the power to enjoy it. He could have a hundred children, and live to a ripe old age, but if he cannot enjoy them, a stillborn fetus is better off than he is, for the fetus comes from nothingness and goes into nothingness, and has never known anything; at least the dead fetus can rest. It is better to enjoy what you can see than to always be yearning for what you cannot have.”

Once again, we encounter Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, Luck the Empress of the World. Enjoy your work and your pleasure right now, don’t wait until it is too late. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might—for there is no work, no thought, no knowledge, no wisdom in Death to which you are going.”