What gain have the workers from their toil?

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Mennonite Heritage Museum
“What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil (Ecclesiastes 3: 9-13).”

Ecclesiastes’ author (the preacher? philosopher? son of David? all three?) expends a lot of ink in the early chapters to make the point that work as hard as we might, death can make of it all a big disappointment. I’m reminded of the abandoned, collapsing fences and barns we see beside the roads and highways of Saskatchewan; people once toiled to build what were proudly erect edifices that are now nothing but nuisances to be left to decay or be ripped up and discarded. The philosopher characterizes all this labour as vanity, as a chasing of the wind.

This week we buried a friend who “took pleasure in all his toil.” Jim was the kind of guy who could build model airplanes using mainly found materials, find a way to attach a camera and take aerial photos of the community . . . long before drones. He could build a metal lathe, meticulously machining all the gears and chisels and slides and wheels to precise tolerances. He could fix virtually anything, could build a house including all the plumbing and wiring.

As museum curator, I’ve set myself the task of memorializing some of the inventive achievements of Jim’s life, a life which the preacher might have characterized as vanity if he had been there to witness his spent body being lowered into the cold ground. I doubt that Jim ever read and pondered Ecclesiastes at any depth; Jim was dyslexic, had a hard time wrestling meaning from the written word. But understanding the mechanical, including the mathematical calculations and calibrations necessary to do the mechanical or the electrical, these things he aced and from this “toil,” took a goodly measure of happiness.

Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” It’s an Ecclesiastes-like comment, and probably valid. But neither Thoreau nor the preacher end with “that’s just the way it is.” Thoreau found happiness in simplicity and a bonding with the natural world; the preacher who wrote Ecclesiastes found his contentment in the inevitable goodness of God. Neither conceded that quiet desperation and vanity are the governing principles of a short life lived. “. . . it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil,” says the preacher.

To toil at work that provides satisfaction is never vanity, even if in the end that toil goes unrecognized, its “product” abused or unappreciated. It’s a gift that blesses its recipient’s short life. To determine to change the world is one thing, but to denigrate the gift that gives pleasure may be just plain stupid. Isaiah 22:13: “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.” It’s not license for self-indulgence, more a cry for balance, more of an antidote to the dieting maxim, “If it tastes good, spit it out!”

All who are obliged for survival to do mundane, mind-numbing work should probably take a page from Jim’s manual: take up art, grow a garden, build a model train landscape, felt an owl, buy a horse and learn to ride, swim the English channel, refinish a very old table, cook and bake food that schmecks. Then enjoy what you’ve accomplished.

Or build a metal lathe from found material. Goodbye, Jim . . . and thanks.




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