1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
So God sees not as mortals do, but instead into the heart. Because of this sight, David will make the next best king, says God, and God has Samuel anoint David. He becomes "Messiah," which just means 'the anointed one.'--which is at best a tenuous kind of political existence, given that Saul is not only still alive and kicking (and clinically depressed and homicidal) but also holds still holds the throne. I think there's supposed to be a little Christian metaphor in there somewhere. Jesus becomes the Messiah and departs into heaven but will return to displace the king of this world and become its rightful king--just like David eventually flees to work outside Israel with the Philistines, but one day will return to his rightful throne, the one to which he's been anointed.
But I'm more interested in this seeing business which God seems to be better at. I feel like the typical reading of this passage runs something like this: we all only see the skin of people, whether they're pretty or not, and therefore we are materialists, falling short of God's calling to us. We should, instead, learn to look into the heart of people and see who they truly are. I think this is wrong.
We are not materialists, not as Americans in the West. We just ain't. Materialism comes in many forms, all with their nuances, like: a. materialism means that only the the 'stuff' of a thing matters, never any external form; b. materialism means that only the tangible realm exits; or c. only the tangible realm is knowable. But we're not materialists--those folks are thoughtful, devoted, and perhaps mistaken, but that ain't us. If we were materialists, we would all recycle. If we were materialists, we would fix our cars rather than buy new ones. If we were materialists in the West, we would actually CARE for all this material we throw away.
No, we're not materialists--we're shallow. We don't even care to answer the question of whether only the material world exists. We're just too lazy and shallow to bother with that, and so we sorta roughly accept that maybe what we can see is what we got. We have plastic surgery not because we believe our material bodies are all that matter, but because we are fearful that our society won't like the way our body looks. We want to maximize (or minimize, depending on the body part and our cultural background) various body parts simply so that life is more of what we desire--we are too shallow to ask if we are, in fact, desiring the wrong thing.
So, if this Old Testament lesson indicts us, it is not because we are too materialistic. It is because we are too shallow to take even materialism seriously. Thus, if God sees not like we do, that means that God sees depth.
If God sees the heart, this does not mean that God sees our absolute reality at our center--I'm not even sure that that kind of 'essentialist' (meaning all things have an essential essence) is Hebrew, much less Christian. Although I do stand in the minority view there. But the Hebrew word for 'heart' there means more like the place from where intentions arise, or the place where decision are made, or the place where dedication is played out. It is a decision organ, not an essential quality about us.
So when God looks, God sees not like we do with our lazy, shallow gaze that considers only what we want from what we see. God sees our innermost thoughts, the possibilities of who we might become. Or perhaps even better: God sees not only our immediate desires, but the greatest desires from which our immediate ones spring. And God is not afraid to judge those desires--this one will make a good king, this one won't.
What we lack is depth. We'll use any excuse to run from it. Investigating our own hearts and desires is too much work, or its too intellectual, or its too earthy and practical, we say. Or: God only wants obedience, not understanding; or, it was good enough for my forebears, it's good enough for me. We have reasons within reasons for refusing to go deeply into anything, much less ourselves or our neighbor or God, all of which would change us and lead us to the other two.
What I hear in this lesson is not only that God disdains our shallow vision, but I hear even more an indictment of our shallow age, an age that has provided us with so much fodder to feed our fleeing from depth. It is no accident so few can sit in silence for longer than ten, or even five, minutes without pain. It is no accident that many sleep with the television on, having watched it at every free moment. It is no accident that we no longer feel comfortable with terms like liberal and conservative--even our old political markers have been sucked dry of the intricacies of their stances, of the thoughtfulness of their histories.
I can't help but remember Alasdair Macintyre, who famously at the end of his book After Virtue claims that we are entering a new Dark Ages where, hopefully, a new kind of monastery will arise to preserve the arts, treasures, and depths of our kind. He claims that we need a new, doubtless very different, St. Benedict. Some folks think he's talking about universities, others about churches, but I increasingly think there is truth in his somewhat apocalyptic prophecy. Without communities of depth, how will we ever learn to see beyond the surface, to learn something about how God sees? And this is not a fatalistic question--many of us have known communities of depth, seen what they can preserve and grow.
And so, I come to the question most in my thoughts these days: how do we foster Deep Places?
