* The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. He was a tough f**ker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he is fierce and he has, of course, the Damascene experience. He goes off and lives as a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Love bears all things, love believes all things” – you hear it at a lot of weddings. How do you write these things when you are at your lowest ebb? ‘Cause I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t deepen myself. I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, “How does that happen? It is amazing.”
* I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, “Why did this happen to me?” But there’s honesty in that too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture, don’t you think David looks like Elvis?
[Rolling Stone] He’s a great beauty.
It is also annoying that he is the most famous Jew in the world and they gave him an uncircumcised . . . that’s just crazy. But, anyway, he is a very attractive character. Dances naked in front of the troops. His wife is pissed off with him for doing so. You sense you might like him, but he does some terrible things as he wanders through four phases – servant, poet, warrior, king. Terrible things. He is quite a modern figure in terms of his contradictions. . . . Is this boring?
But if you go back to his early days, David is anointed by Samuel, the prophet Samuel, and, above all, his older brothers, a sheepherder presumably smelling of sheep shite, he is told, “Yeah, you are going to be the king of Israel.” And everyone is laughing, like, “You got to be kidding – this kid?” But only a few years later, Saul, the king, is reported as having a demon and the only thing that will quiet the demon is music. . . . Makes sense to me. David can play the harp. As he is walking up to the palace, he must be thinking, “This is it! This is how it is going to happen.” Even better, when he meets the king and gets to be friends with the king’s son Jonathan. It’s like, “Whoa, this is definitely going to happen! The old prophet Samuel was right.” And then what happens? In a moment of demonic rage, Saul turns against him, tries to kill him with a spear, and he is, in fact, exiled. He is chased, and he hides out in a cave. And in the darkness of that cave, in the silence and the fear and probably the stink, he writes the first psalm.
And I wish that weren’t true. I wish I didn’t know enough about art to know that that is true. That sometimes you just have to be in that cave of despair. And if you’re still awake . . . there is this very funny bit that comes next. So David, our hero, is hiding out in the cave, and Saul’s army comes looking for him. Indeed, King Saul comes into the cave where David is hiding to . . . ah . . . use the facilities. I am not making this up – this is in the Holy Scriptures. David is sitting there, hiding. He could just kill the king, but he goes, “No, he is the anointed. I cannot touch him.” He just clips off a piece of Saul’s robe, and then Saul gets on his horse as they go off. They’re down in the valley, and then David comes out and he goes, “Your king-ness, your Saul-ness, I was that close.”
It is a beautiful story. I have thought about that all my life, because I knew that’s where the blues were born.
* I’ve learned to try and put time aside to meditate on the day ahead. I don’t want to get all religious on your ass, so do forgive me, but if you’re interested, this is today’s meditation. I will share this with you because it is beautiful and because it might make you smile. Here it comes. This is Psalm 18, and it is one of those psalms of David that has been translated into a modern idiom by this man called Eugene Peterson – great writer. It goes: “God made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before him. When I got my act together, he gave me a fresh start. Now, I’m alert to God’s ways. I don’t take God for granted. Every day I review the ways he works. I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I’m watching my step. God rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.” Isn’t that beautiful?
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