The book of Ecclesiastes is the most unvarnished, complex, poetic, honest, comforting, and terrifying book I’ve ever read. Most people won’t read it or can’t read it properly because they won’t let it strip away the layers of protection we build around ourselves to insulate ourselves from this kind of honest look at what the world and human life really are, in all their chaos and order and heroism and tragedy and harmony and dissonance.

The Teacher isn’t trying to write a dissertation. He’s using the power and poetry of words to explore his experience of life and just tell us honestly what he’s seen. And like the world itself, it’s messy and astounding and terrible and sweet and disastrous. He free associates from one bit of wisdom to another that balances of contradicts it, rises to glorious hopeful visions and shares his own despair and cynicism. It’s timeless, as utterly true today as it was the day it was written.

Even if you struggle to believe in God and the Bible, you can’t help but believe in Ecclesiastes. Commentators never seem able to just let this book be what it is, they want to use context to box it up and tame it, as if you could tame God and the world and make them fit in your neat little treatise. For the person who has found themselves in the wilderness of thought, this book meets you there.

I think this book and Song of Songs are perhaps the two greatest pieces of philosophical poetry ever conceived, and far from being out of place in the Old Testament form a unified core of wisdom and poetry that brings the humanity at the heart of the whole Hebrew Bible together. Man trying to understand himself, understand God, understand the world, trying to live with the realities of them all. And I think it actually helps to read both; I think they balance out one another in passion and reflection.

If you aren’t grateful and terrified and hopeful and full of despair when you reach the end of Ecclesiastes, you probably haven’t really given yourself to it. The fact that this book sits at the center of the Bible has always given me great hope. Because it states the terror and despair and confusion of the world better than I ever could, its power to speak truth is unparalleled, but it lives at the heart of the scriptures. It isn’t something outside, something that challenges of contradicts or is cast out. This is openly presented as pinnacle of wisdom that will heal the heart. It is the shadow whose confrontation will teach wisdom and bring peace.

If you can face Ecclesiastes, you can face the world, and you won’t be outside God’s wisdom, you will be in the heart of it. If you have time, I would love to see you examine Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. I think you would find them to be endless food for thought and wine for the heart’s comfort. The truths in them are not all kind and pleasant, but they heal the heart and fortify it. They are a garden of delights and the terror of a storm in the mountains.

The day comes for us all when the pitcher shatters at the well and the stone breaks at the milling, when the toil of life ends and we can no longer do that which it was our lot to do. These books never shy away from reminding us of that. But they also remind us to rest, and that to enjoy our days is gift from God.