Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 3 · January 3
The House of Mourning
“It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.”
The complaint against this verse is that it sounds like a man who has stopped enjoying things. Better to go to a funeral than to a party, and the living will lay it to his heart. Put that on a fridge and the household will quietly conclude you have turned morbid.
Ecclesiastes has earned a careful reading here, because the same book commands the opposite in as many words: go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart. The Preacher is running no campaign against feasting. He had done feasting on a scale nobody reading this will match, houses and vineyards and pools and singers, and he wrote down what it came to.
What the funeral has is information. That is the end of all men, and the room knows it. Everybody standing there has just been told the one fact about themselves they spend most of an ordinary week not thinking about, and they have been told it by a body, which is why it lands. The party is doing its job. Its job is anaesthetic, and it works.
So the verse is practical advice about where to stand if you want to see straight. The living will lay it to his heart, and the laying to heart is the whole point. Somebody who has been in that room recently makes different decisions about their calendar, their money, and the person they have not spoken to since March. That knowledge is available at a graveside and almost nowhere else. What you learn there does not keep.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 3 is Full (John 15:11).