WOMEN CHURCH WORLD

Readings by ROSA LUPOLI

Dialogue with the scornful Ecclesiastes

 Dialogare con lo sprezzante Qoelet  DCM-004
02 April 2022

Lidia Maggi, Una fragile bellezza.
La vita con gli occhi di Qoelet
[A Fragile Beauty. Life through the eyes of Ecclesiastes],
San Paolo 2017

I was struck by the title and by the fact that it is a woman who comments on such a difficult biblical book as Ecclesiastes. No matter how much you study, meditate on and reread it, we always wonder how it was included in the Holy Scriptures or the profound reason why it is found among the books of wisdom.

Lidia Maggi, a Baptist pastor, theologian and biblical scholar, managed, with rare wisdom, to get me into the spirit of this Jewish sage who looks at life with disenchantment but also, beyond appearances, with deep responsibility and great desire. The initial quotation upset me, who would ever think of dialoguing with the scornful Koheleth? Only a special woman like the poet Wisława Szymborska, who instead spoke of him at the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature on December 7, 1996, imagining that she was even taking his hand and suggesting some sapiential reflections with polite irony.