Already Answered
ALREADY ANSWERED — THE BLOG SERIES
The questions keeping you up at night were asked three thousand years ago. They were answered, too.
Short essays that take a question people are actually asking and follow it back to the Wisdom Book that already answered it. Subscribe to get each new post as it goes up.
A Time for Everything
A man at a red light was singing it with the windows down. He was quoting Ecclesiastes in traffic, and he had no idea.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 4
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
In May the Library of Congress added The Byrds' recording of "Turn! Turn! Turn!" to the National Recording Registry, which is the shelf this country keeps for recordings it does not intend to lose. The song went to number one in 1965. Almost every word of it is Scripture, and almost nobody noticed.
I was reminded of this at a red light a few weeks ago. The car beside me had its windows down and an oldies station on, and the man driving was singing every word of it, badly and with total commitment, the way people sing when they think the light is longer than it is. He was quoting the Book of Ecclesiastes in traffic.
This one has been on my list a long time. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose.
Pete Seeger wrote the song in 1959. He took it from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, the first eight verses, and he did not adapt them so much as copy them out. Here is how the chapter opens in the Catholic Bible: "There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens."
What follows is the part everyone can hum, the long list of paired seasons. Though the most famous line in it is not quite what a Catholic reads today. The King James has "a time to be born," which is easier to sing and is the version three generations of us are carrying around. The rendering I read is blunter about who is doing the work: "A time to give birth, and a time to die."
The poem is also darker than the melody lets on, and Seeger did not soften it. The chapter makes room for killing, for hating, for tearing down, for war. He left all of it in, which means the song that became a peace anthem carries every violent line the chapter has.
So the question is not what Seeger cut. He cut almost nothing.
The question is what he added. Two things. The title, which is his. And one line at the very end, after the last pair, war and peace. The song closes on a promise that it is not too late. Six words, and apart from the title, the only ones in the song that nobody in the Bible wrote.
Here is what the chapter says instead, three verses past where the song stops. "God has made everything appropriate to its time, but has put the timeless into their hearts so they cannot find out, from beginning to end, the work which God has done."
Read that twice. There is a right time for every one of those seasons, and you can feel that there is, and you will not be shown the schedule. The ache to see the whole shape of your life was put there on purpose. So was your inability to see it.
What Ecclesiastes says is harder than what Seeger added, and I have come to think it is more useful. A promise like his can turn out to be wrong. It gets said at hospital beds and over caskets and it is sometimes simply not true. Ecclesiastes offers no guarantee about your timing. What it claims is that there is timing at all, that the seasons are not random noise. And it explains the restlessness: you cannot stop wanting to see the pattern because something put the wanting there.
I spent years certain I had missed my window. I was past forty when I came back, and I had done the math on what was left. What I had not noticed is that the chapter is not a promise about whether you still have time. It is a description of how time works for everybody, including the people who never left.
So the song is right that there is a season for everything. It is only wrong, and gently, about whether you get to see where you are standing in it.
If somebody sings this one in your car, you will have something to tell them at the next light.
Already quoted. Already answered.
Ecclesiastes is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
The verses are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3:2, and 3:11).
Nothing New Under the Sun
A man in a tire-shop waiting room said it at the news and went back to his phone. He was quoting one of the oldest books in the Bible, and it was never a shrug.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 2
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
The waiting room at the tire place has a television bolted up in the corner, and nobody watches it on purpose. Thursday afternoon it was running the same story it had been running all week. A man in the chair across from me looked up at it for a second, said "Nothing new under the sun," to nobody in particular, and went back to his phone.
He was quoting the Bible. Not loosely, either. That sentence sits in there almost exactly as he said it, written by a man who was not making conversation. I did not think less of him for not knowing where it came from. I have said the same line in the same tone more times than I could count.
I keep a list. Phrases like that one, said by people who have no idea they are quoting anything, all of them out of the seven books in the middle of the Bible that this blog has been about from the beginning. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose. This is the second entry.
It comes from Ecclesiastes. The man who wrote it calls himself Qoheleth, which is less a name than a job description, something in the neighborhood of the Assembler or the Preacher. He is writing more than two thousand years ago, and he opens the book by taking inventory of everything a person can chase and reporting back that none of it holds. Then he says this: "What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!"
Read that last sentence again and notice how little has happened to it. Most of the phrases in this series came into English through the old translations and got worn smooth on the way, which is usually where the story is. This one is the exception. The King James has "there is no new thing under the sun," which is not how anybody says it now. The version we actually use is nearly word for word what a Catholic reads today. More than two thousand years of handling, and the sentence came through almost intact.
The words survived. The meaning did not.
We use it to close a subject. Somebody describes a scandal or a trend or an argument, and "nothing new under the sun" is the polite way of saying you have heard enough. It is a shrug with a pedigree. It means: this is not interesting, and I am not going to be surprised by it.
Qoheleth was not doing that. He was not bored. Two sentences later, in the same breath, he says what he actually meant: "There is no remembrance of past generations; nor will future generations be remembered by those who come after them."
That is the rest of it. He is not complaining that the world has run out of material. He is saying that everyone who came before has already been forgotten, and that the people coming after will forget you too. The sun keeps rising on the same story because there is nobody left who remembers the last time it happened. Now go back and read "nothing is new under the sun" with that attached to it. It is not weariness. It is a man looking straight at how short a life is and how fast the record of it closes.
He does not leave us there, and this is the part of Ecclesiastes that surprises people who only know its reputation for gloom. Having established that you will be forgotten, he does not tell you to build a monument. He does not tell you to make your mark, or to go find something that finally is new. He tells you to go have lunch.
"Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works."
That is his answer to the fear of being erased, and it is not a consolation prize handed over at the end. It is the argument. If what you were counting on was being remembered, that was never going to hold your weight. What is left is the day you are actually standing in, the bread you are actually eating, and the God who, he says, favors the work of your hands right now. Ecclesiastes spends twelve chapters clearing away everything that cannot carry a life, and when he is finished the ordinary day is the thing still standing.
Psychologists came at half of this the long way around. In 1971 Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described what they called the hedonic treadmill: people adjust to their circumstances, good ones and bad ones, and settle back toward a baseline, so the new thing stops feeling new and the chase starts over. Later researchers have argued the picture is more complicated than that, that baselines do move and not everyone returns to the same place, and I would not want to oversell a fifty-year-old idea. But the direction is the one Qoheleth was pointing. Novelty is a poor place to build. What the research does not supply, because that is not its job, is what to do instead. He had that part.
I had my own version of that shrug. Not in a waiting room, and not about the news, but the same reflex, and years of it. I never stopped believing. I stopped being curious, which is a quieter way to leave. Whatever they were going to say on Sunday, I was fairly sure I had heard it. Nothing new under the sun, in exactly that tone, aimed at seven books I had never actually read. I was past forty when I finally opened them and found out how much I had been certain of without ever checking.
So that is the second entry. A sentence people use to end conversations, written by a man who was not ending one. He meant it as the hardest thing he knew about being a person, and then he answered it with bread and wine and the afternoon in front of him, which is a stranger and a better answer than the shrug has any idea it is carrying.
You will probably still say it. I still do. You will just be saying more than you meant to.
If you know someone who says this one, and most of us know several, you could send it over without comment. The rest of the passage does the work.
Already quoted. Already answered.
Ecclesiastes is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
Qoheleth's words are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Ecclesiastes 1:9, 1:11, and 9:7).
I’m Not Sure I Want to Come Back
What all seven Wisdom Books say to the one who is almost ready
Last Christmas Eve, Michael drove to the parish he grew up in and parked where he could see the doors. He kept the engine running. He watched people file in out of the cold, families mostly, coats over good clothes, and when the bells rang for the entrance hymn he put the car in reverse and drove home. He has done some version of this more than once.
He left years ago, the quiet way, over nothing he could name. Lately something in him has turned back toward that building, the way a compass needle swings, and it will not stop pointing. He is closer than he has been in years, and he is not sure he wants to come back. Both are true at once, and it is more common than anyone on either side of the door lets on.
You have met four people in this series. Dan, who stopped believing and finally got honest about it. Ellen, who went to the same parish for almost two years and was never once known. Paul, who kept the rules until he noticed nobody had handed him the reasons. Carol, who prayed into four years of silence. Different wounds, one direction. If you recognized yourself in any of them, some part of you is sitting where Michael sits, engine running, watching the doors.
What holds a person in that parking lot? The people inside usually guess wrong. Three fears, as near as I can tell.
The first is that walking back in means admitting you were wrong to leave. Not to God, exactly. To everyone. To the self that defended the leaving at dinner tables for years. Coming back turns the past into a verdict on your own judgment, and who wants that?
The second is being seen. The usher who remembers you. The question, however kindly meant, of where you have been. Ellen ached to be known and never was; Michael dreads being known, at least at the door. The ache and the dread are cousins.
The third sits underneath, and nobody says it out loud. That you will finally go, and it will feel like nothing. The hymn will be a hymn. The homily will be a homily. You will stand and kneel and walk out unchanged, having spent the last hope you were saving. As long as Michael stays in the car, the possibility stays alive. Walking in risks the one thing that leaving never touched.
Bring the whole series into that parking lot. Job, where we started, doubted at full volume, and when God finally spoke, he rebuked the polite defenders and vindicated the doubter. Unsure is how Job arrived, and God did not send him away. Sirach, the old father from Ellen’s post, called one friend who truly knows you a treasure beyond price. But no one is known without being seen. Being seen is what the treasure costs. Proverbs, the book behind Paul’s rules, spends nine chapters persuading before those rules even begin. It never expected you to move without a reason. And the Psalms, which sat with Carol in the dark, keep a prayer for the person who feels nothing, and call even that a prayer.
Three voices you have not met speak straight to Michael. Ecclesiastes is the honest one: a man who tried everything, felt the hollowness under all of it, and still comes down on the side of the ordinary day, the meal, the work, the person beside you. If Michael walks in and feels nothing, Ecclesiastes felt it first and stayed. The Song of Songs may be the closest: love arrives at the door in the night, the one inside hesitates too long, and the poem aches with the near miss and a search that will not quit. And the Wisdom of Solomon makes the quietest promise of all: the seeking runs both directions. While you sit deciding whether to look for wisdom, she is already on the road looking for you.
Seven books, and not one of them makes certainty the condition for coming back. I looked; it is not there. What is there, page after page, is motion that begins before anyone is ready: a doubter arguing his way toward God, a prayer with nothing left in it, a hand reaching for a door it almost did not open.
I opened this series with numbers, and they read differently from the parking lot. For every 100 people who walk into the Catholic Church, 840 walk out, and former Catholics are roughly one in eight Americans; both figures come from Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study. In the first post they were statistics. Read them from the driver’s seat instead. One in eight means the parking lot is one of the most crowded places in American religion. And not one of the 100 who walk in was required to be sure before crossing.
The 840 are almost never told this. The Church has more than room for its returners. It has a need only they can fill. A convert brings wonder, and the Church runs on it. A returner brings what no convert can: the memory of what leaving cost, and walking proof that the door opens from the outside. Every Michael who walks back in makes the next Michael’s walk shorter.
This series began in the back of my parish church, at the Easter Vigil, watching eight people become Catholic. I keep thinking about five of them. A young man in his twenties who grew up with no religion at all. A woman in her early forties who had never set foot in a church until two years ago. A man in his forties who had been raised Mormon. A young woman preparing for marriage, whose fiancé was already Catholic. An older woman raised Methodist, who had spent her whole life looking for something she could not name, and had finally found it.
Here is what I did not say then. Every one of those five was arriving for the first time. Nobody throws a Vigil for the returner. No candles, no name read out, no applause. You come back on an ordinary Sunday, and the only person who knows what it cost to walk through that door is you. The Methodist woman spent a lifetime looking for something she could not name. Michael already knows its name. He knows the candle smell and the creak of the kneelers and the exact weight of the door. That is what makes it harder. It is also what makes it shorter.
One last piece of honesty. I cannot claim Michael’s parking lot; my road back did not go through a door at all. It went through a page. I never stopped believing. I just stopped going, Christmas and Easter for years while I still called myself Catholic, and I was past forty before anything changed. What changed was seven books in the middle of the Bible that nobody had ever handed me. Somewhere in the slow reading of them, whether I wanted to go back stopped being a question. I go to Mass almost every day now, and I still cannot account for that.
I wrote a book about those seven books. It is called The Original Search Engine. If anything in these posts resonated, the book goes deeper than a blog post can. If nothing did, I am glad you read this far, and I mean that.
Michael is still in the parking lot. I will not end this series by walking him through the door; that is not mine to write, and you would smell the tidiness from a mile away. Maybe next Christmas Eve. Maybe never. Here is what will be true whenever he turns the engine off. The people inside are not sure either. Some of the psalms sung from that lectern were written by people who were not sure. The front door has never been open wider; I meant that as arithmetic in the first post. I mean it now for the man in the car. And the door will be open.
Already answered. Three thousand years ago.
The question is whether you are ready to walk through it.
One more word, in two directions. If these posts kept arriving because someone kept sending them, that person was never trying to fix you, only to say, as gently as they could, that the door is open and you are wanted on the other side. And if you did the sending, you have done the only part that was yours. The walking was never yours to carry. You can set it down.
This is the last post in the series. The seven books are where they have always been, in the middle of a Bible you probably already own, and the book I wrote about them will be there whenever you want to go further. Thank you for reading this far with me.
All seven Wisdom Books are explored across 40 chapters in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
Michael is a figure, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.