Lord of the Feast

Overview

There’s a great song I’ve known for many, many years. It goes:

The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
To see what he could see.
And all that he could see,
And all that he could see was
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain
Was all that he could see.

That summarizes a lot of the Bible. Essentially, that’s what the Bible says is the characteristic of life without God. You see, we spend the early part of our life preparing for the great climb. You can think of life as a great climb. We’re told if we can get to the peak, life will have meaning. We all have different peaks, you might say, but with great energy and with a tremendous amount of anticipation, we prepare ourselves for the top, and most of us don’t get there.

Along the way, we find ourselves, not only tiring out, but in many cases, we’ve slipped. We’ve fallen. We’re lying down with broken bones, cracked and bleeding, and we’re angry. We’re saying, “I thought at this time of my life I’d be a lot closer to where I was trying to go in terms of career, in terms of love, and in terms of relationship status. I thought for sure I’d be further along than I am now, and look at where I am. I’m nowhere, it seems.”

You begin to say, “Why has life been so unfair? Why has God been so unfair to me? Why has he kept me down?” Well, you see, there are these people at the top. Sometimes, as we’re sitting there, lying bleeding on the pathway, we see a few people who have made the top of the peak, and we say, “Boy, that must be it. That must be the great scene.” What do you see when you get to the top? A great new land or just the same old grind on the other side of it?

You know, when Eugene O’Neill, who got to the top of his particular mountain, the theater … When he got up there, what did he see? He said, “I’m fed to the teeth with the damned theater … The game isn’t worth the candle. If I got any real spiritual satisfaction out of success in the theater it might compensate. But I don’t. Success is as flat, spiritually speaking, as failure. After the unprecedented critical acclaim to Mourning Becomes Electra I was in bed nearly a week, overcome by the profoundest gloom and nervous exhaustion.”

What did he see up there? You get to the top of the mountain; success doesn’t deliver. The party runs out.