The Burning Desire of Saul: Part Three
Part Three: Tamarisk
Saul is looking for a witch. He is old now, not only in age, but in spirit. Madness wrought by isolation has weathered and wrinkled him. In the camp behind him his army gathers at Gilboa in response to the mounting Philistine forces set out to plague Israel once again.
Under the cover of moonlight he walks with two men along a rocky path towards a cave. And though he is accompanied by servants, he is alone in many ways.
First, there is the absence of David, the incumbent king of Israel. Years ago, jealousy like fire scorched Saul’s heart as he watched the young David achieve military success and win the admiration of the people. Saul was not able to tolerate this pain and carry the weight of friends, family, and advisors who misunderstood him from a young age. In fits of rage, he lashed out against David and sent him fleeing. Now David has run away to hide amongst Israel’s enemies, the Philistines, thinking it’s safer to be with them than expose himself to the risk of a mad king. It dawns on Saul that the mad king is not the seething face of a dreaded enemy. The mad king is him.
The second loneliness that Saul feels is that of God. His mentor, Samuel, had told him he was rejected by God for making immature mistakes in the midst of high pressure situations. Unfortunately for Saul, Samuel told him a warped version of reality. God had rejected Saul as a king, not as a person. But Saul can now no longer tell the difference.
Then there is the absence of his son, Jonathan. Saul had failed Jonathan in the wake of Samuel’s rejection of Saul as king. The pain of that rejection sent Saul on a downward spiral into erratic behavior spurred on by the unmet desire to be seen, soothed, and safe. Saul prohibited eating during battle. Jonathan never heard the decree and strengthened himself with fruit. Saul, losing the reigns of his psyche, threatened to kill his son, only to be stopped by the onlookers. After that episode Jonathan was the recipient of insults and sneers. It is no wonder he was prone to running off.
But this night, Saul feels an absence heavier than all of those.
Even in the dark, Saul’s face glows through layers of clothes intended to disguise him. He knows what’s coming - Israel has no chance against this Philistine army, especially if David is with them. The malignant panic gripping his mind makes him desperate to find a source of safety and hope. But the one person who can provide that hope is dead in the long ago past of a painful life. He intends to remedy that absence tonight.
This post marks the third and final reflection over the life of Saul and what he teaches us about desire and rejection. In keeping with parts one and two, we have one final insight to garner from Curt Thompson, MD, author of The Soul of Desire.
Thompson has taught us that human existence is bound up in desire, and that all desire ultimately points to our longing for God’s beauty. Every pleasure we experience is a participation in the dynamic movement of God’s love that reaches for us and that we offer back in return. This desire for God is the most fundamental desire. Related to this desire are three fundamental needs held by every person: to be seen deeply, to be soothed when we do not get what we desire, and to know that it is safe to desire anything at all. In the lack of those three things, our brains take charge - wether we are aware of it or not - and seek to to meet those essential needs by any means necessary. The brain’s hijacking of our behaviors through primal neural networks is what leads to atrophied desires that can create all kinds of painful situations in our lives.
Thompson’s last insight for us has to do with hope. All of us, at some point in our lives, will not acquire the beauty we long for. Consequently, our desires will atrophy and our behaviors will be directed at the wrong ends. This process will happen to every person. How, then, do we heal? How do we find the beauty we truly long for rather than the shallow imitations our misaligned desires seek to acquire? Healing comes for us, Thompson suggests, when we are able to imagine a life that is whole and beautiful. Whenever we are able to have an imaginative encounter with that which is not yet, we can find true hope.
Yet it is this point exactly with which we struggle. We all have certain neural pathways - paths and rivulets carved out in our brains that make following a certain course of events an automatic process. Those pathways are helpful for every day life, like when we’re hungry or thirsty and we pursue food and water. When we have misaligned desires, though, changing those pathways can be enormously difficult. Our desires point to that which is not good for us in the long run, warped by lust, power, or an insatiable need for comfort. Sadly, we get stuck in these harmful pathways due history and repetition’s influence on our actions.
Hope, therefore, requires we visualize a life outside the life we have. We must imagine a life in which our behaviors are no longer stuck but point towards life giving relationships with God, ourselves, and others. This task of visualizing something not yet real feels impossible.
Yet, it is ultimately not us who are capable of perceiving the future, but the Lord of all history who meets us in the mess of our lives. God is the giver of hope. God is the one who helps us imagine a different future.
Continuing our story in 1 Sam 28, Saul approaches the cave with the two men. He wanders inside to find a burning lamp that casts a dim, orange cloud against the darkness. A woman sits by the lamp. By her attire, it is clear that this is the medium he is looking for.
She is startled by the strangers - Saul had exiled all the mediums of the land, leaving her jobless. She anticipated no visitors for some time. These men are risking the punishment under the law to be here. They come in seeking help, using the less desirable term for her vocation, witch.
The disguised king approaches the woman. Eying him conspicuously, she inquires, “Who would you like me to bring up?”
Saul does not hesitate. “Bring up Samuel.”
With those three words, the woman recognizes him as Saul and recoils in fear. Saul soothes her terror and asks that she continue with her work. Moving with anxious precision before a king, the medium performs her ritual. Lo and behold, an old, luminescent Samuel ascends from the ground shrouded in a robe.
Saul falls to his face. This, he tells himself, is who he needs to soothe his desperation. This is who he needs to assure him that he is not a madman. This is who needs to tell him he deserves to pursue a life that he wants.
But Samuel was never a person who did those things for Saul. Tragically, Samuel was all Saul had. Saul’s neural pathways were so twisted towards life-taking behaviors due to his early hardship that he was stuck in the cycles of decision making that abetted to his descent into madness. Saul was so incapable of imagining a different future that he literally resurrected the past, even though the past is what scorched him.
The ghost Samuel looks down at the grown boy he called to be prince. “Why have you disturbed me?” he asks.
Saul’s reply is pained. “The Philistines are approaching. God does not answer me. What do I do?” It is the dangerous vulnerability of every person harmed by one supposed to protect them.
Samuel, true to his character, speaks rejection over Saul. “Why do you consult me now that God has departed you and you are his enemy?” He then goes on to tell him that tomorrow Israel will be defeated, and Saul and his sons will die. And then he disappears back into the earth.
Saul’s story is important. It teaches us that desire is fundamental to all human relationships, and yet we misuse it constantly. Sometimes our misuse is due to pain we’ve received. Other times it’s the result of a poor reaction to stress that we unconsciously trigger to soothe ourselves in lust, food, power, you name it. If we’re not careful, our lives can spiral into an endless repetition of broken habits that hold us back. Most importantly, our misuse of desire is passed on to our loved ones. The way we cope with pain and stress is usually handed down to our children. Our handling of destructive desire is too dynamic to be contained without intervention, as Saul shows us.
As we wrap up this series, I want to think about the impact this story could have on the church and our families, though for some reason it is not given proper attention in our storytelling.
I remember first studying 1 Samuel in college in an Old Testament class. When we arrived at this story, I was stunned by the lack of deeper reflection given to these characters in the scholarly literature. Every commentary I picked up was the same rant: Saul sinned, therefore he got what was coming to him. Even the most respected scholars were glossing over the tension in this story, perhaps out of fear that they couldn’t make sense of the ambiguity.
It was only when I found Robert Polzin’s Samuel and the Deuteronomist that I felt like a serious mind was wrestling with the ambiguity. Polzin was brave enough to admit the flaws of Samuel and the tragedy of Saul. This book sent me on a journey as I walked with the living impact of these characters.
I think the story bothered me so much because I saw in Samuel and Saul what was happening in churches right in front of my eyes. You see, I was a young pastor-student, excelling in my studies… yet unable to find a job. When I took serious ventures into local churches, I found a competitive job environment in which clergy struggled for the few jobs that paid well. For some tenured clergy, the difficulty they had lived through to get their prestigious positions was too much. When young clergy such as myself came along, older clergy seemingly felt the need to make new pastors struggle as much as they did.
Just after college, I was part of a mass exodus of clergy from my denomination. Leaders in my district feared new, “liberal” pastors who were knocking on the door. Many of us were told to leave for reasons that baffled us. Somehow, tenured clergy - who had been mistreated when they were young - now found themselves in a place of power. How easy it was for them to offer to young people what had been offered to them when they were young. Can you see why the story of Samuel and Saul is important? Can you see why I insist on wrestling with these characters? Every action is about desire and what we do with it.
What I saw in my college years was a living example of the misuse of desire and the rejection that comes as a result. In many church traditions, the shortage of jobs that pay a living wage creates an environment in which young people need to advance beyond all others in order to win coveted positions. This race for financial stability, therefore, coincides with the desire for platform. In a world where economic vitality comes for those who make it to the stage, the stage is your master. Therefore, you learn how to perform well in order to win the admiration of the crowds.
Disaster strikes when clergy who finally get their platform make mistakes. Nothing will incite the anger of a congregation or a church staff more than a young professional who does not meet their needs. Suddenly the golden child “just doesn’t get it” or “isn’t one of the truly called leaders.” Funny how all memories of our past mistakes vanish when there’s a young person making the same mistakes in front of us.
When young clergy make mistakes and face perceived rejection by other pastors and congregants, it can be devastating to their sense of call. Remember, a platform-based journey to ministry requires high achievement. When young clergy realize that they are no longer perceived as a high achiever, everything can crumble.
Okay, I’m riffing a bit on unfounded claims. Let me make this a little more real: the 2022 study The State of Pastors by the Barna group paints a bleak picture. Over 40% of pastors were identified as being at risk of burnout. Physical, spiritual, and mental wellbeing has plummeted, as has perceived support and respect from the community. Even with the decline, though, it is young clergy that feel the pain most acutely. 58% of clergy over 45 say they are “very satisfied” with their decision to be a pastor. For people under 45, it’s 37%.
Though I cannot support all my musings with statistics, my gut feeling is that the same cycle of desire and rejection that played out between Samuel and Saul continues to play out in our churches today. Our churches are becoming places in which pastoral vocation and the desire for public platform are increasingly intertwined. Environments like that are bound to produce cycles of bad leadership.
At the risk of ad nauseam repetition:
A person is rejected.
That person feels as though they are not seen, soothed, and safe.
That person develops strategies to meet the need to be seen, soothed and safe, often developing unhealthy coping behaviors as a result.
Those unhealthy behaviors get passed on to the next generation.
However, an equally important insight that the Samuel/Saul story gives us is that large-scale failures of desire and rejection start in the smaller arena of the family. When a family member chooses to act towards a loved one in ways that make that person feel as though they are not seen, soothed, and safe, it has a ripple effect across the whole family system.
Leaders and organizations offer rejection to one another endlessly. Perhaps, though, all of that hurt could be remedied in the family system of the leader or corporate body. If families can offer their members a safe arena to desire, things might change. In order for that change to happen within families, though, it requires imagination.
The prophets of the Old Testament teach us what it means to imagine. The recently-deceased Walter Brueggemann describes in his book “Testimony to Otherwise” that the role of the prophet is to give the church a vision that things could could be different than they are. The prophets do not predict the future; they tell us God can do a new thing to a world that feels stuck. Our choice of trusting in that possibility is the essence of faith.
Isaiah 43:19 says, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” This God is carving a path where there is no path and bringing water to where there is no water. This God gave the gift of imagination to the prophets - imagination with the power to rewire brains that are stuck.
Imagination like this, though, can only come from God. It is not our imagination or musings. Such human imagination will only lead to madness. Instead it is the imagination of a beautiful God who wishes beauty for us in all of our longings.
How do we practice imagination of this kind? Thompson in his book suggests art can play a powerful role in our healing-through-imagination. I, however, want to suggest the practice of reading Scripture. When you wish to visualize a life of beauty intended for you by God, you do not need to look far to see a different reality. Look to Scripture. Read over and over again the accounts of God’s wishes for you and creation. You can read Ezekiel 37, the story of dry bones coming to life. You can read the Psalms and their raw emotion turned into hope by God. Or, you could even turn to Revelation 21 and encounter a vision of a renewed earth. Scripture testifies to us that God can meet us in our feelings of rejected desires and give us the imagination for a new future which God is fully capable of bringing into fruition.
What these specific stories of Samuel and Saul teach us is how we apply our imagination. In these narratives, I suggest to you that meditating on Scripture and leveraging our imagination should point us first to renewed visions of our families, and then our churches or workplaces.
Why start with the family? Mirroring the intimacy of God’s creation of our every bone, the dance of desire is sculpted - and also healed - within the family. Samuel and Saul’s relationship forces us to examine how we treat our parents, children, siblings, and relatives chosen or biological. Furthermore, the generational dynamics, not just of the Samuel/Saul stories, but of the whole Old Testament, are crystal clear: when parents do not see, hear, and know their children, their children perpetuate cycles of misaligned desire, first in the family, then in public life. It happens with Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, Solomon’s children… all of the major characters.
When we allow God to give us renewed imagination for our families, we can offer a fuller version of ourselves to the corporate bodies to which we belong. We can grapple with our tendencies to mishandle our desire before we show up to lead in the public setting, protecting our coworkers, congregants, and fellow citizens.
It is up to us to each and every one of us to lean into the imagination God gives us to see a better future, especially in our family systems. When our families become healthier due to the grace of God that makes transformative imagination a reality, our churches, workplaces, and cities heal.
We end with a group of people who had imagination.
The words of Samuel did come true. Saul and his sons were killed in battle the next day. At Gilboa, the Philistines desecrated the bodies of Saul and his sons, pinning their remains to a wall.
Word spread all the way to a small village called Jabesh-Gilead. If you remember, these were the people Saul rescued from a mad king in an act of teenage valor after his coronation (1 Sam 11). These people remembered Saul and what he had done for them.
This small village mustered a fighting force. They risked their lives and marched to Gilboah. Under the cover of night, they retrieved the bodies of Saul and his sons and took the remains back to the village and prepared them for a proper Hebrew burial to give honor to the fallen.
But then they did something remarkable: they buried Saul’s remains not just anywhere, but under a tamarisk tree. 1 Samuel 22 mentions that Saul often met with advisors under a tamarisk tree, perhaps to marvel in the tree’s beauty during administrative discourse. This choice for burial on the part of the people of Jabesh-Gilead indicates that they knew Saul. As a young boy when he rescued them, they could see him. They knew what soothed him. And he was safe in their presence. Now, he would be eternally safe in their presence.
These villagers could imagine a young boy who was not thrust into a kingship he didn’t want. They could see him living a life; they could see him being brave. The only way for them to imagine such a story that could have been was the gifting of a God who wants beauty for us all - even mad kings.