1 Samuel 19 : 18-24 | Saul and the Prophets of Ramah

A few months ago I was in a class designed to train facilitators for group spiritual direction. Towards the end of the course, we were to team up and present a novel new model for group work, which we would all experience. One week late last spring two of my classmates decided that we would practice praying through icons. The had collected a large number of icons, some of them expensive and ornate, some of them ripped from magazine pages and decopoged onto stained blocks of wood. We were to circle the table holding the icons and select one that spoke to us. After we had selected our icons, we took them back with us to the circle where we normally met.

For a while we sat silently, gazing at our icon. For about twenty minutes we gazed, allowing time for our icons to speak to us, reveal themselves to us, and reveal ourselves to them. Eventually, we entered into prayer with our icon. Then one by one, we went around the circle, and shared our icon and our experience.

The icon I selected was an unusual one for iconographers. It depicts the scene where Jacob wrestles with the angel. If you will remember that story from Genesis, Jacob and the angel wrestle until morning, whereupon Jacob leaves with both a limp and a blessing. I chose that icon, I told my group, because it most accurately describes my relationship with God.

Our relationship, you see, has always been a contentious one. I have never been able to enter into the weepy, sentimental religion that embraces Jesus or God the Father or even the Holy Spirit whole-heartedly. They have always been dangerous, rather seedy characters in my book. I've never quite trusted them. And my spiritual life reflects this ambivalence. I am likewise dangerous, seedy and untrustworthy in my own way.

Yet, it is the beauty of this icon that it portrays a great truth about my relationship with God, that even though we are wrestling, even though our relationship is one of struggle, we are still engaged. We are still in communion. We are still in relationship. C.S. Lewis once said of his anthroposophist friend Owen Barfield, "Opposition breeds friendship." And that might be so, even with God. For even in the midst of this tooth and fang dance that we are doing, a grudging mutual respect has been established. You might even say, that in some twisted, masculine way, we are intimates.

Now, I say twisted, because that is how masculine affection has always struck me, even as I am a willing participant. My best friend, Lawson Barnes, whom some of you know, is an introverted sort. He's not a gushy, emotional person like myself, and we have over the years, agreed upon the terms of our affectionate exchanges, without actually coming out and talking about them, of course. The way it usually happens is I'll insult him, and he'll insult me. And if Kate is in the room, she will roll her eyes and mumble something about masculine intimacy. It's not real gooey stuff. Yet the message gets across.

This bizarre ritual is perhaps expressed best on the TV show the Simpsons, where two elementary school chums punch each other on the shoulder. Then they both rub their aching shoulders and smile. Affection given and received.

I believe this dance of opposition and intimacy is a deep one. Now I cannot speak for the experience of women, but for men, this dance is played out in many arenas of our lives. While psychologists say that the goal of the little girl is to bond with her mother, for the little boy the goal is to separate. And so the pattern is set for all of our relationships. We swing into an orbit of intimacy, and then we must swing back out to feel safe. Men are rather like comets, coming in close to the warmth of a star and then shooting far away, only to make another round later on.

This same dynamic is central to at least one major school of thought in transpersonal psychology. I am a great fan of transpersonal psychology, which differs from ordinary psychology in that it posits the unlikely yet compelling idea that we are not isolated egos walking around in the world, but instead are at some fundamental, even unconscious level, joined. While Freud might exemplify the former, more ordinary variety of psychology, Jung with his ideas of the collective unconscious, represents the latter.

Now there are almost as many models of transpersonal psychology as there are transpersonal psychologists, but there are two models which every student of this discipline must study: Wilbur and Washburn.

Ken Wilber is a student of world religions and a brilliant synthesizer. He has taken various models of psychological development and melded them into a single, coherent system picturing the progress of a persons psychological and spiritual life. This model is rather like a ladder, with each succeeding rung subsuming and transforming the rung that went before with increasingly all-encompassing awareness. It is rather like Jacob's ladder into heaven, a hierarchical model in which one ascends to higher and higher planes of integration and self-knowledge. This model is resonant with the mystical traditions of many of the great world religions, as well as the many initiatory mystery schools in the West, such as the Masons and the Rosecrucians. It is exemplary of the perennial philosophy described by Aldous Huxley.

Wilbur is indeed a brilliant theorist. But I've never felt comfortable with Wilbur. Instead, I have always preferred his rival Washburn, whose model is very different indeed. In Washburn's model, we are all born in full contact with the Godhead. When we come into this world we are aware but uncomprehending of the great swirl of activity outside of us. According to Washburn, we are equally aware and uncomprehending of the great swirl of activity within us. That activity is in fact, in Whitehead's vision, the primordial nature of God - the very mind of God; it is the collective unconscious as Jung would term it, or in Washburn's language, the Dynamic Ground of all Being.

Now this dynamic ground is hardly comprehensible to adults, let alone to children. Since this Dynamic Ground is the source of some of your most bizarre dreams and nightmares, I'm sure you know what I mean. In Washburn's theory, the infant's mind is bombarded by images, feelings, the great soup of potentiality from which all things spring. In order to make sense of him or herself as a separate being from the rest of creation, inside AND out, the infant must begin to create an ego, a protective wall in the mind to contain the dynamic ground and give the individual mind a little room to breathe and sort things out.

The great tragedy, in this model, is that once the wall of the ego is in place, it stays in place and the person walks around for the next 60 years thinking that he or she is, in fact, an individual being, cut off at the most fundamental level from every other being, including God. The great spiritual and psychological task of every person, is to break a hole in the ego-wall, and to begin a relationship with the Dynamic Ground.

Now in academic terms, that all sounds very nice. But in actual terms, it's scary as hell. For someone in whom the ego wall is intact, strong and high, the idea of reconnecting with the Dynamic Ground is one of the most terrifying propositions one can make. For the Dynamic Ground, when it is perceived as "the other" is ALWAYS perceived negatively. The Dynamic Ground is the terrible mother, bent on consuming her young. The Dynamic Ground is the angry father, determined to obliterate his wayward children. The angry images of God in the Old Testament typify this dynamic. God is "other", far away, angry, dangerous and untrustworthy. Some folks will go to any lengths to keep that ego wall strong and in place.

Some, however, find that this is a very lonely way to live. For not only does this lifetime of ego-building and reinforcing separate us from those humans we wish to be intimate with, but it also separates us from the Dynamic Ground of all Being, which is a fundamental part of ourselves. To be cut off from a part of yourself is schizophrenic, and it leads to crazy behavior. And because this Dynamic Ground is simultaneously the deepest part of everyone else, we are further hindered from intimacy with others. And since the Dynamic Ground is also God, we are cut off from intimacy with our maker.

Breaking down that ego wall is one of the most terrifying prospects of the spiritual journey. People will do anything to avoid it. But usually, God takes the initiative, and very often some kind of crisis will precipitate its falling. In psychology this is called spiritual emergency, or more simply, spiritual emergence.
This process is ideally modeled for us in our reading today from Samuel. Here is Saul, who, through the process of his own ego-building and ego-maintenance, has cut himself off from the inner activity of God. It is not unusual that depression results from this, and this was certainly the case for Saul. David, for Saul, represents the him that he could have been. David is the unfallen Saul, the one in whom God finds favor, as God once found favor with Saul. Saul, of course, wants to kill David, he wants to wipe out not only the threat to his throne, but perhaps more poignantly, the threat to his ego.

This is a time of great crisis for Saul. It is also a time of great spiritual emergence. Saul sends soldiers to Ramah to kill David. But what happens to the soldiers? They are lit by the spirit, and they begin to prophesy. Now prophesy in the Old Testament does not mean foretelling the future, but saying truthfully what they see. This is indeed a dangerous thing for an emperor, especially if that emperor, figuratively speaking, is wearing no clothes.

That is Saul's position exactly, and when his second and third batch of soldiers do likewise, Saul is in the unenviable position of having to go himself. And what happens there? Somehow, the barrier which Saul had erected in his mind to keep God out came crashing down. The man's ego was obliterated and the Dynamic Ground rushed forth, and Saul began, perhaps for the first time in his career, speaking the truth.

This transformation is as scary for us as it was for Saul. But it is in some sense the same for all of us. The Hebrew word for the place they were in is "Ramah" which means to betray or to beguile. Did God trick Saul into coming to this place? In a sense, yes. Did God betray Saul's wishes that God remain contained and safe? I would say that God did. Did goodness result. Of course it did.

How is your relationship with the Dynamic Ground of all being? Is there a part of yourself which seems dangerous, unkempt, irrational, improper? Is there not raging at the very center of your being a whirlwind of creativity, a maelstrom of spirit, which you would do everything in your power to keep in check? I'm willing to wager that there is. What would happen if it leapt out? "Oh, it would be disastrous!" It most certainly would. "Oh, it would be shameful!" I'm sure that Saul, rolling around naked in the dust would agree with you. "Oh, my friends would never forgive me!" If they don't, my dear, they were never your friends to begin with. The breaking in of the Holy Spirit and the breaking out of the Dynamic Ground are two metaphorical images for the self-same event. Whether the Spirit attacks from above as in biblical mythology, or explodes from within as in the perennial philosophy, the result is the same. Danger, disaster, and gentle, holy transformation of the spirit. And thanks be to God for it.

I awoke this morning wrestling with the Dynamic Ground. I will lay me down to sleep in a painful headlock in that same struggle. I pray that some time before I lay me down for the last time, that my wrestling will turn to caressing. That my contentious relationship to God will become softer, more intimate, more loving. And yet, this fighting, is it not a sign of real intimacy, even if it is masculine intimacy? I punch God in the arm, and he punches me back. We both smile. And one day, perhaps we will be able to actually embrace. I'm not holding my breath, but I am also not running from the fight. Let us pray.

God of intimacy and danger,
In you we find all that we most desperately long for
And at the same time, most terribly fear.
Help us to welcome the spiritual emergencies which will
Result in our inner walls crumbling, our defenses against you softening,
Until we can embrace that still point in our souls where the storm most wildly rages,
Where the spirit whispers and screams
Where you meet us, and where we ultimately meet ourselves.
For you are the ground of our being, and however far we run
We cannot escape ourselves.
We ask this in the name of one who opened himself fully to your spirit,
And calls us to do likewise, even Jesus Christ. Amen.