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The Resurrection meant more to me after I had encountered death, the death of my grandmothers, the death of my father; and I saw the Incarnation in a new way after the birth of my children. And certainly the two years that I have spent working on Certain Women have influenced the way I see the story of King David. King David and his joie de vivre, his willingness to admit his sins and repent, and his many loves, is very alive in my heart.
The biblical narrator brings David into the story in two different ways: Saul, when he fell into his terrible fits of depression, was advised to have someone play the harp for him, and one of his servants said, “I have seen a son of Jesse…who knows how to play the harp,” and Saul had David sent for.
David came to Saul and entered his service. Saul liked him very much, and David became one of his armor-bearers….Whenever the spirit from God came upon Saul, David would take his harp and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.
An evil spirit from the Lord troubled Saul. The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Does the Lord indeed do such things? Or do we blame the Lord rather than ourselves? In Jesus’ time someone with Saul’s problem would have been considered to have an evil spirit, and I find this more believable than God sending the evil spirit within him. And it has always fascinated me that the evil spirits, the demons, recognized Jesus as the Messiah, even when the people around him did not. Would Saul today be considered a manic depressive? Whatever caused his problem, David was called in, and his harp music brought Saul back to quiet and reason.
David’s second entrance into the story is the famous scene of the giant Goliath being slain by young David with a slingshot and a pebble. It’s a wonderful scene, Goliath shouting his challenge, David replying, and his brothers furious with him because they think he’ll shame them by getting killed by the giant. David is outfitted with Saul’s enormous and cumbersome armor, which he very sensibly takes off. His slingshot has served him well against animals who have tried to kill his sheep, and serves him well against Goliath. As Saul watched David going out to meet the Philistine, he said to Abner, commander of the army, “Abner, whose son is that young man?…Find out whose son this young man is.”
So again, David is brought into the story. He and Saul’s son Jonathan become friends in that marvelous way among men in story—and occasionally in real life. Ironically, such friendships often come out of times of war, not the faceless war of today where bombs are dropped and missiles sent to people who are unseen and unnamed, but wars where the enemy had a face, and your comrade could save your life. My father made deep, lifelong friends in the First World War, that last war where there was any sense that the enemy had a face, was a human being, loved his family, and probably believed in his cause. Erich Maria Remarque’s book Three Comrades came out of that terrible war which, instead of shocking us out of war, started a century of war. I have a vague memory of a cartoon with two people looking at one of the early guns, and the caption was, “This is so ghastly we’ll never have another war.”
David and Jonathan fought side by side and, to begin with, their weapons were primitive, because when Samuel anointed David, the Jews were still in the Bronze Age; David ultimately took them into the Iron Age. The Philistines, the enemy, sharpened the swords and sickles for the Jews because they wanted them to be dependent, incapable of sharpening their own tools and unable to move into what, for the Jews, was the future.
Saul, who never made the move out of the Bronze Age, was quickly jealous of David, not so much because of his friendship with Jonathan as his popularity with the people. Saul, with good cause, was afraid for his throne, and afraid that Jonathan would not inherit it.
When the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, the women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with tambourines and lutes. As they danced they sang: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” Saul was very angry; this refrain galled him.
It is easy to see why Saul was displeased, was jealous, was fearful. The next night when David played for him, the evil spirit came again upon Saul, and he cast his javelin at David, but David ducked out of the way and avoided being killed, and continued to behave himself wisely in all his ways (1 Samuel 18:15, KJV). And Saul was afraid of David, because the LORD was with David but had left Saul.
Can we hold the image of God in our hearts when we are consumed, as Saul was, with jealousy?
Jonathan was not jealous. He knew that David would be king and that he would not, and he was not jealous. He loved David with all his heart, and there, perhaps, is the key. True friendship is of the heart, and we have almost lost that concept as we have become more and more genitally oriented.
The deep friendships in my life are, for me, what keep the stars in their courses. Not only did Luci and Marilyn come to be with me in the hospital, but as soon as I got back to Crosswicks, Pat flew up from Florida to be with me and nurse me. There were other wondrous offers of help from friends who were willing to set aside their own plans if they could be of use to me.
This is the kind of friendship I believe David and Jonathan had. Isn’t that enough? More than enough?
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The loss of our deep understanding of friendship is reflected in the rather frantic attempts to remove from our thinking the image of God as Father (usually an angry father). When God is called Mother, that is as sexist as Father. Because I had both a mother and a father I could respect, they were my image of mother and father, and this did not carry over to God. Indeed, I never thought of God as being either male or female. In the language of prayer I sometimes refer to my Maker as Abba/Amma (Amma being the intimate feminine for mother, mama, as Abba is father, daddy). Abba/Amma is much softer and far more personal than Father/Mother. But in my own mind there has never been an image of a God of either sex. For some reason I thought of this while I was in the hospital, where I was often wakeful for most of the night. And I wondered if I did not need a metaphor for God—not an image, not even an icon, but a metaphor.
And one came to me. In my responsiveness to God I am the infant in the womb, totally nourished, fed, warmed, completely cared for, but with no image of the Caregiver. That, for me, is a workable metaphor. And it does take it completely out of the realm of sex.
At the time that metaphor came to me I was almost as helpless as the baby in the womb, and that may have helped precipitate this understanding.
One sad result of the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that we have, as a result, depended too much on knowledge, and not enough on wisdom. We are, all of us, male and female, supposed to contain within ourselves the qualities of each. The people I know who use their intellect to the fullest, while never losing the intuitive and the imaginative, are indeed luminous.
It’s not easy. If we (as Sophia, wisdom) are willing to understand that fact and truth are not necessarily the same thing, we will be feared and criticized. But perhaps fact and truth are like male and female; we need both to make the image of God.
The battle of the sexes is not so much a battle between men and women as a battle within our own selves. Dare we use our intellects fully at the same time that we trust our intuitions?
It is all of the deepening truths that are beyond provable fact that help us to be human and, ultimately, mature and loving human beings, daring to open ourselves to the truth that will make us free.
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David was not afraid of the truth, and so his love of God was both spontaneous and joyous, or anguished and penitent. But God was very present in David’s life, as much after Samuel anointed him king as when he was a shepherd in the hills with his sheep.
Although David was still without his throne or cro
wn, telling no one (as far as we know) about his anointing, he grew nevertheless steadily more and more of a threat to Saul, and Jonathan stood by him, trying to make peace, helping David to flee when fleeing was the only alternative.
Saul, in his wiliness (since the flung javelin had not worked), said to David,
“Here is my older daughter Merab. I will give her to you in marriage; only serve me bravely and fight the battles of the LORD.” For Saul said to himself, “I will not raise a hand against him. Let the Philistines do that!”
But the Philistines did not kill David as Saul had hoped, and he gave his daughter, Merab, to another. Michal, Saul’s younger daughter, loved David, and when Saul heard this he was pleased, thinking that he would have another chance to get rid of David. David, very properly, told Saul that he was a poor man and could pay no bride price for Michal, but Saul asked for a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, again hoping to have David killed by enemy. But David brought Saul two hundred foreskins of the Philistines, so Saul had to give him his daughter, Michal.
It does not seem to have been a happy marriage. Michal was torn between her father and her husband, and in helping David to escape Saul’s wrath by lowering him out a window, she also lost him, at least temporarily, because David had to flee as far from Saul as possible. Jonathan was again a true friend to David, helping him in every way that he could. David gathered himself an army and brought his parents to Mizpeh, asking the king of Moab to care for them until David would learn what God will do for me.
In the scriptural story we see Saul disintegrate further into madness, self-pity, rage, even accusing Jonathan of conspiring against him. It is a sad story of the decay of a man who could have been great, but who was threatened by greatness.
David, unlike Saul, was not self-conscious about God’s call to him. He honored Saul as God’s anointed, but he also knew himself to be called, and he was willing to follow that call without pride. His pride showed itself in other ways, his adultery with Bathsheba, for instance, and his seeing to it that Uriah was killed. He was, too often, self-indulgent, but he did not turn away from paying the price. As Nik, the playwright, and I lived with the story of David, he became very dear to our hearts.
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STORY AS THE LORD’S PRAYER
When I say my prayers at the end of the day, I am coming to terms with the events of the day, with the story of my day. Part of the Offices of Evening Prayer and Compline is the Lord’s Prayer, and this prayer is in a way the story of our Maker. I say this prayer at least thrice each day and usually more often, and it is amazing how I discover something new in it every time.
Our Father. Yes, a lot of people have trouble with limiting God to Father, and so do I, but in the Lord’s Prayer it has never seemed to me to be a limitation. Jesus is talking about his Father, talking out of the particular time and space in which he was born.
The word God itself is an offense to many. The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber has something to say about the use of the word God, which has helped me through several periods of rational doubt, during which the word has been so smeared that it has seemed almost useless.
Martin Buber once visited a famous old philosopher. He had been offered the use of the philosopher’s study, but one morning when he got up early to correct the galley proofs of the preface to one of his books, his host was already in his study. Buber explained to him that he had the galleys in his hand, and the old man asked if he would read the preface to him. Buber did so, and when he had finished, the philosopher cried out with growing passion and grief, “How can you bring yourself to say ‘God’ time after time? How can you expect your readers will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and conceptualization. What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the Highest called ‘God’ it sometimes seems blasphemous.”
“The kindly eyes flamed,” Buber said. “The voice itself flamed. Then we sat silent for a while facing each other. The room lay in the flowing brightness of early morning. It seemed to me as though a power from the light entered into me. What I answered, I cannot today reproduce, but only indicate. Yes, I said, it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burdens of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of men with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger marks and their blood. But where might I find a word [other than God] to describe the Highest?…If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the innermost chamber of the philosophers, I could only thereby capture an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of men have honored and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly they draw caricatures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name.’ But when all the madness and delusion fall to the dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness, is it not the real God they implore?…Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason is not the word ‘God’ the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all times? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which are so readily referred to ‘God’ for authorization. But we may not give it up….We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and make it whole; but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”
“O God,” an eighty-plus aunt of mine kept saying as I helped her get ready to take a taxi to the hospital—the last journey she would ever take. “Oh, God help me, God help me,” she said over and over again.
God is the strange and desecrated name I have been taught to call my Creator. Some of my friends spell it G-d, knowing that we cannot know the true name. But the cry, O God, comes instinctively to my heart when I am frightened or unhappy. I have no illusion that it is the true name, that name of names too terrible and mighty to be uttered by mortal tongue. The word Jehovah is nothing but a made-up word, put together from some Hebrew consonants, and in some translations of Scripture the word Lord replaces Jehovah or Jaweh. I have prayed, “O God!” for lo, these many years. And it is enough. Perhaps one of the joys of heaven will be to hear the real name of our Maker.
So, just as Buber felt he could not give up God, I feel that I cannot give up Father, especially at the beginning of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. Our Father. The word Father, as the word God, transcends all that we have done to it, just as with our rigidities we have almost demolished beyond recognition the words Christian and religion.
Our Father which art in heaven. And where is heaven? It too is a word which has been abused. The good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. But who are the good and who are the bad? Only God knows that, and when we try to make such judgments we invariably blunder. It is God who is in heaven, who, perhaps, is heaven. Surely it is not a place that is either up or down. Heaven is wherever and whenever God is present; when he is present within us, then heaven is within us. If we do not begin to live in heaven now we will not be able to recognize it later—in fact, we may confuse it with hell. But trying to define heaven is like trying to define God. It is, I believe, that place where our souls continue to be taught to grow in love and wisdom, and how that teaching is to be done I do not know. Where is Hugh, now? Where is Tallis? God will not forget them; el holds them in the palm of the protecting hand.
Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. How do
we hallow a name that we do not rightly know? We can start by having a sense of reverence and awe whenever we speak to or refer to God, Abba/Amma, Maker, Creator. When Luci was with me in the hospital she commented ruefully about the language of the workmen outside my window. They were certainly using the Lord’s name in vain, but it was not a deliberate vanity. “It’s just their paucity of vocabulary,” I said. Such casual, careless language is not good, but it is far less evil than deliberate cursing, consigning someone to hell, rather than leaving that judgment to God.
Too often we try to hallow our own names, falling into the easy trap of hubris. We need to honor our names, but only God’s is to be hallowed. Our human names are tied to our families. They are given us, and honored at our baptisms. We need to respect them, and we need to be careful what we do in our own names.
When I write, when I speak, my beginning prayer is always that of the psalmist: that I may be got out of the way and not hinder God; only then, when my own willfulness and pride are vanquished, can God use me as co-creator.
Many years ago, when Jim Morton came to be dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, he asked Tallis and me to give the Wednesday Evening Lenten Meditations. I was challenged and awed, and I asked Tallis, “What shall I be thinking about? What are we going to talk about during Lent?” He looked at me impatiently. “Go away. Don’t bother me. You’re better when you don’t think.” And that was all I could get out of him, though I kept begging him to tell me what I should be thinking about.
Ash Wednesday came; he still had told me nothing. We went to St. Saviour’s Chapel, behind the high altar, for Communion. Then we had soup and bread, and then Tallis and I sat down, side by side, with everybody else facing us, and I still had no idea what was going to happen. Finally he pulled a small black book of deep Russian meditations from his pocket, each a couple of minutes long. He read the first one. Then he said serenely, “Now Madeleine will give you a parenesis of this.” A parenesis: an example drawn from nature. I didn’t have time to get in my own way. I didn’t have time to think. I simply responded to the Russian meditations, one after another, for the next hour.
The Rock That Is Higher Page 12