Monday Morning Meditation #39: Saul Fell on His Sword

Sorry about posting this a little later than usual for those of you on the East Coast of the USA and even father east. Normally, I post a little after midnight my time in California; however, yesterday was a very full day, and I needed some rest. So, I am posting this first thing Monday morning my time, which is well into the morning elsewhere. (There are some time disadvantages to living in California, but given all the other blessings, the timing issues that come up once in a while are not even an annoyance.)

Where I stopped reading this morning gave a new meaning for me to the expression "fall on one's sword." In I Chronicles 10, Saul's death is chronicled. (Sorry, could not prevent myself from latching onto that word choice.) When it is clear that he has lost not only his three sons in battle but also the battle itself, he kills himself, rather than being taken prisoner, by committing suicide. The means? He falls on his sword, running it through himself. The final two verses read:

"Saul died because he was unfaithful to the LORD; he did not keep the word of the LORD and even consulted a medium for guidance, and did not inquire of the LORD. So the LORD put him to death and turned the kingdom over to David son of Jesse."

Reading: I Chronicles 10: 13-14.

Meditation: The phrase about Saul dying because he did not turn to God but rather to a medium, among other other ways of departing from the Lord, reminded me that for some time I have thought about writing a post about my experiences with Tarot card reading during my many years as an atheist. Now I will write that post sooner rather than later since I cannot do much more than allude to a few associated things here in spite of the whole history rapid-fire unfolding in my memory as I meditate on these two verses.

Suffice it for me to say that I was a good Tarot card reader, as was my brother. What we predicted did happen. Every single thing, good or bad. We became pretty well known in our circles for this ability, and people we did not even know began to seek us out. Reports came that our readings even for those people turned out to be highly accurate. I used a commercial pack of cards, but my brother, Willie, preferred to draw his own. (I have about as much art talent as I have homemaking talent; quantifying either requires the use of negative numbers.)

Willie burned his cards when he came to faith many years before I did. I did not understand this at all and continued for many more years to provide readings for friends and even strangers. I never commercialized this "skill," i.e. never charged for it. I received my "reward" by a sense of satisfaction at seeing the predictions come true. After my conversion, I, being less dramatic than my brother, simply tossed the cards in the trash.

Why did I throw the cards away? Because I realized that I had been playing with something very sinister, even being manipulated by something sinister. A number of my New Age friends, who consider themselves spiritual and even in some cases faith-filled, see nothing wrong with Tarot cards and consider my "accurate" reading of them to be a talent and my repudiation of them to be too strict an interpretation of Scripture (somewhere -- and I will have to chase down the reference before I do a post on this topic -- the Bible, I believe in the NT, refers to Tarot cards as an evil). I cannot agree with my New Age friends for I have now seen Evil in other situations parading in traditional spiritual guises; those situations have only reinforced my sense that it was Satan, or some version of Evil, that was guiding the layout of the cards each time such that I was able to produce an accurate reading, i.e. a prediction that came true. What a great way to keep me from God -- providing me with the self-satisfaction that I had a bit of the greater universe under my control! (And that, along with other things and my own obliviousness to God, even though God had worked many miracles through me -- I called those Serendipity -- and had handed me a parachute every time I took a nose dive off a cliff -- I called that Luck, kept me from seeing God in my life for decades.)

That is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to private prayer, to thank God for never giving up on me and finally conking me on the head to get my attention, to praise Him for winning that battle between Good and Evil (the one that had my soul at stake), to repent not for my having turned to Evil for guidance in the past (for that I have already repented and been forgiven) but for those times that I simply forge ahead on my own and forget to "inquire of the Lord," and to ask God to keep conking me on the head when I forget the most important thing in this way. Now, as the sun is already beginning its ascent into full morning, I will spend as much time as I can in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.

I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:
Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.

For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.

Monday Morning Meditation #28: I Have Met My Enemy, and He Is My Friend

This week I finished I Samuel and read all of II Samuel. I have no idea why I just kept reading, with nothing touching me as a possible topic for meditation. Then, I realized that the two books taken together, with the stories of Saul chasing after David hither and yon, most usually for the purpose of trying to kill him, and David chasing hither and yon after women, with frequent time taken out for battle, provided a rich sujet for pondering.



Reading: I & II Samuel



Meditation: My first reaction after reading all the battles of Saul and all the battles of David, of the killing, of the deception was "what a bloody time that was" and "thank God I live in the 21st century. Then the image of all the wars going on today came to mind: the wars in which the US involved, the civil wars going on, and even the personal enmities that appear among supposed friends and in families. We are not far from David's time at all.



Then my mind wandered back to the Cold War. At that time, I was serving in the military, first as a soldier, then later, having received a direct commission, as an officer. The propaganda machine on both sides of the Atlantic churned out hatred day and night -- Americans of Russians and Russians of Americans. Hatred, fear, misunderstanding, cultural loathing, and all manner of ill along the very lines related in the books of Samuel. So how far have we truly come in the development of humanity?



Two incidents come to mind when I ask that question and when I think of war. One was a story from WWII in Belarus that was related to me by a decendent of the woman who experienced the incident. The other happened to me personally. I related both a while back on Mahlou Musings but will repeat them in full here although they are a bit long.



(1) Belarus. During WWII, advancing German troops would burn down entire Belarusan communities. To escape detection, the citizens of the towns would flee to the surrounding swamps as the Germans approached. In one small village, a mother of many grabbed her children and fled, only to discover to her horror upon reaching the wooded swamp that she had inadvertently left her infant in his crib. She wanted to go back after him, but it was too late. The Germans were already at the edge of town, and the townspeople made the mother stay in the swamp for fear of her giving away their position to the German enemy. The mother wept for her lost infant for three days. When the Germans vacated, the townspeople returned to their razed town, hoping to rebuild it. The mother walked along with them, in the blackest of grief. As the townspeople reached the outskirts, they saw one house still standing, the house that contained the crib of the infant who had been left behind. The mother, hardly breathing as a result of overlapping waves of fear and hope that crushed the breath from her, rushed into the house. There in his crib was her infant, well fed and happy. A bottle was beside the baby, and next to the crib on a rocking chair, which had obviously been used to feed and comfort the infant, was a German soldier’s warm winter shawl. To the shawl was pinned a note: “To the mother of this beautiful child.”



(2) Mahlou. In a most fascinating way, I once came face to face with the so-called enemy. That meeting remains one of my favorite memories. It occurred in a restaurant in Minsk in 1993. I was helping Academicians from the Belarus Academy of Sciences bring knowledge of individual differences in approaches to learning to the new textbooks being prepared in the Belarus language for K-12 students in a variety of subjects following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the nationalization of curricula. The Humanities University gave us a place to work, and the president and vice-president took me and several other guests to dinner soon after my arrival. I sat catty-corner from Anatoly, the vice-president. For some reason, Anatoly and I began comparing our biographies and were stunned to learn that during the Cold War, I was an officer in the US Army and he an officer in the Red Army; we had both had the same specialty and held the same rank. For a brief moment, we stared at each other, then Tolya (after such a discovery, it was only natural that I would begin to use the nickname for Anatoly) exclaimed, “You were my enemy!”



“And you were mine,” I responded.



We marveled about this discovery until long after dinner had ended. How could it be that two people who seemed to understand each other s poluslova (from half a word), as the Russians say, had been directly targeted against each other in an earlier time? Both veterans of the Cold War, we found we had even more in common than our scholarship. Thereafter, every day Tolya would bring me candies or cookies for our break, and we would sit and marvel again at how strangely fate had wrapped our lives together — and that we had found it out. We shared no military secrets; there were really none of any value by then, anyway. What we shared was a new understanding of the word, enemy.



When it came time for me to leave, the Belarusans, as is typical of their culture, threw a parting party for me. Tolya kept jumping up with a toast and running over to hug or kiss me. This is not exceptionally unusual behavior except that Tolya was known to be an extreme introvert and rarely took part in toasting.



"What did you do to Tolya?" one faculty member asked me.



"I did nothing," I replied. "He took an enemy to dinner."



With the recent cooling off of relations between the USA and Belarus, Tolya has become locked away from me for now, perhaps even forever. Who knows when winds of politics will shift again? But now I know what lies behind the old Iron Curtain that is being drawn again between me and a land and people I came to know affectionately a decade ago. And for one bright and shining moment, I stood side by side in friendship with my enemy.



And that is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to prayer to repent for those times that I have thought of others, any others, as enemies, to thank God for giving me the unusual opportunity to meet my enemy in flesh and blood and find him to be a friend, and to give praise for the way in which He teaches His children. After that, I will spend time in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.



I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:



Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.



For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.

Monday Morning Meditation #25: Not As Man Sees

This week I read past the rejection of the Israelites of God as their king and their demand for a human king and past the story of King Saul and his periodic turning away from God and God's forgiveness again and again. All of this sounds like a modern-day story, and I suppose I could have reflected on any of it. However, I did not feel God leading me in that direction. Rather, my mind came to rest on the story of the annointing of David as successor to Saul. Samuel, in trying to discern which of the seven sons of Jesse the Bethlehemite presented to him would be king was led to think that the eldest, comeliest, tallest, and strongest was the most suited. "But the LORD said unto Samuel: 'Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have rejected him; for it is not as man seeth: for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.'" It was ultimately the less physically endowed, harp-playing David who was chosen.

Reading: I Samuel 16:7

Meditation: I wonder how many better decisions we might make and better conclusions we might reach if we were to see as God sees, not as man sees. How many times have we judged a book by its cover, to use a modern expression? One of the most well known instances of this of recent days would be Susan Boyle's appearance in front of the Britain Has Talent judges. One could see their mirth at the thought that such a frumpy woman could sing. They even toyed with her. And then she opened her mouth!

A student of mine a number of years ago did a graduate thesis on presidential elections in the United States. Quite surprisingly (perhaps surprising only to me because I am so very short), the tallest candidate nearly always was elected president. (Hm, our presidents are getting taller and taller -- and, given this criterion, Hilary Clinton never had a chance.)

When we judge people from the outside, we make the mistake that God prevented Samuel from making. And because we do not see as God sees, there is likely much evil passing as good among us for evil can dress itself in the garbs of good very easily, slipping into our lives, living with us, and being widely accepted simply because it looks like good.

We may never be able to see as God sees, only as He helps us to see when the need arises. Nonetheless, we can come a little closer if we look at the heart, as God instructed Samuel, and not at the body, and especially if we put aside our preconceived ideas of beauty, good, and worthiness and listen to what God tells us about each of these and about the people, things, and ideas in our lives. No, we cannot see as God sees; we will always see more or less as man sees, but we can keep in mind that our eyesight is not 20/20 spiritually and allow God to lead us when our vision is especially clouded.

And that is far as I can go with you on this Monday morning. I must retire to prayer to repent for those times that I have tried to see with my own eyes, to thank God for pointing out what I should really be seeing, and to give praise for His incredible patience in being willing to teach me over and over again how to see. After that, I will spend time in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.

I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:

Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.

For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.