The heart of fools

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth" (Ecclesiastes 7:4).

Mirth: "amusement, especially expressed in laughter."

Jesus' first miracle was making wine for a wedding to keep the party going, so we can eliminate, right off the bat, the possibility that God hates happiness. But the proverb above implies making amusement your main residence: It speaks of it being in a "house," not an overnight motel. There is visiting a carnival, and then there is living there. And we would have to have a tin ear not to understand from the proverb that the writer is not referring to "joy." The Word says that joy is to be a normal fruit of the Spirit, as much as love, peace, patience, and the others.

Fools are not necessarily bad people; they are just in for a rude awakening. They are people who look like your next door neighbor, or like the person in the mirror. Professor Bruce Waltke, who has devoted a chunk of his life to studying Proverbs, finds in that book three kinds of fools, and only the first kind is what you and I would recognize as evil. The others are merely clueless.

What's wrong with cluelessness? Well, nothing-for a while. It's like those people C.S. Lewis wrote about in the fictional town in The Great Divorce who live in houses that are imaginary. Imaginary is good enough if you don't mind getting rained on occasionally. But the problem, as the tour guide tells the visitor in whispers, is that "it will be dark presently."

Our televisions and portable electronics are flush with entertainments, while America burns. Things have only gotten worse since Alexandr Solzhenitsyn chided Harvard in 1978 for "… TV stupor and … intolerable music":

"But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, as fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is all the joy about?"

In the movie Gladiator, two senators sit together as Caesar rides into town amidst an adoring throng. Gracchus leans over to Falco: "Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and they'll still roar."

An interesting thought for our times.