Probably no subject holds greater fascination for human beings than that of relationship, with its very special culmination in sexual communion. Books, technical manuals, psychological treatises, counsel, therapy groups, infinitely variegated patterns of discussion and experimentation, flood the field with information but do nothing to alleviate the sense of desperation, mass confusion and failure. For the evident fact is that with all the controversy this field stimulates, human beings simply do not know how to relate to one another.
Musing on this, I was encouraged to ask myself what I could offer to an already raging inferno of thought and feeling that would be constructive and not merely add fuel to the fire. The following, peculiar as it may seem to those who are hypnotized by the sense of needing to know more and more about sexual expression, is nevertheless the essence of a basis for a controlled, creative experience in this most delicate of all areas of human function, usually approached with unconditional abandon.
In this “free-spirited” age of investigation and experimentation there remains, apparently, very little sense of inhibition with respect to sexualfunction. And yet I, not being one to put down my forebears as ignorant savages before the modern miracle of me, cannot but ask myself why such restraint as the race has known in this field, a restraint exercised diligently by many peoples in times past, came to be. Why the urgent sense of caution here engendered in the human heart?
Man, in his search for pleasure, has taken sexual expression into the marketplace and has created a culture geared entirely, in one way or another, to the ultimate gratification of this urge. But as the patterns of behavior become looser and looser, the central beauty and significance of sexual function become more and more obscure. It is interesting to note that, historically, any period of sexual license has always gone hand in hand with a period of cultural breakdown and decay. Like “love and marriage,” sexual license and disintegration go together “like a horse and carriage,” the cart generally being placed before the horse. Here is a simple but profound truth that mankind has repeatedly discovered and subsequently managed to forget, the pursuit of personal pleasure taking precedence in personal consciousness over all other considerations.
Perhaps our forebears were not entirely ignorant, a fact which we with our contemporary psychological slickness have tended to miss. I wonder if we could learn something from them, exercising the rather rare quality of humility. My thoughts concerning this crucial relationship suggested to me a story which is part of our cultural heritage, but which has tended to become buried beneath our own more recent literatures. Nerve and sinew, bone and blood of the best of our writings, the Bible, though often maligned in these times, remains undoubtedly the wisest of all our books. Within its covers are many stories portraying something of the innermost qualities of human being. Among these is the story of the Hebrew king, David. This narrative, perhaps more than any other in the Bible, portrays the panoramic pattern of unfolding living relationships with their variegated potentialities.
Beginning with his youthful membership in a family displaying the usual sibling rivalries, under the loving eyes of his father, Jesse, the sequence of stories goes on to portray David’s love for the Prophet of the Lord, Samuel, his brotherly love for King Saul’s son, Jonathan, his effort to encompass the enmity of Saul, his prowess as an exiled leader of the house of Judah, his initial failure with his wife Bathsheba but their subsequent creative union resulting in the birth of Solomon, his relationship to his sons and daughters and the building of the powerfully integratedkingdom of Israel. The whole cycle of stories forms a colorful tapestry of relationship with many tones and textures, woven from the life of a man devoted to the service of the One God. Poet, warrior, man of affairs, husband, father and “a man after God’s own heart,” David has found his way into the legends of the world and into the very heartbeat of the race. Yet there is a significance here which has scarcely been appreciated.
What is the clue to understanding this intensely devoted expression of love and relationship, the result of which was the shaping of a powerfully integrated kingdom and a culture free under his reign from the human stigma of decay? Sometimes, it is true, he was in error and the kingdom with him suffered for it, but never was he fundamentally in contempt of a principle of relationship which took its highest expression in Him in his worship of the One he called the Living God.
There is a vital point in this which we must approach with a delicacy of interest capable of kindling in the tangled emotional realm a sense of the real significance of a single vital relationship—a relationship which transcends, integrates and gives sustaining meaning to all others. Because our experience in this regard has been slight, its significance, at first, may elude us.
Undoubtedly, by contemporary standards, the most peculiar of all the relationship patterns which David revealed in his living was that which he demonstrated dramatically, time after time, toward the one he called the LORD’s Anointed. Here is a relationship the significance of which, despite our modern efforts at sophistication and exalted psychological knowledge, has eluded the awareness of most. It is an essential relationship, and from it unfolds the whole fabric of other relationship in what- ever sense and at whatever level of intensity. Yet after some three thousand years its character has emerged but little in human consciousness, because of deep-rooted resistance in human nature and discomfort with respect to it.
The particular story is, moreover, presented in such terms that the absoluteness of the relationship is unquestionable. You may remember the account of the growing insanity of King Saul, with his paranoid patterns of behavior toward David, alternating between a passionate hate and a passionate love for him and resulting finally in David’s expulsion from Israel and his pursuit by Saul’s hosts throughout the wilderness. I do not know if, with our “every man for himself” attitudes, we can appreciate the significance of the gesture David made with respect to theinsane Saul; for these days our respect for high patterns of leadership seldom looks beyond the man to the significance of the position. Have we sunk so low in the secular mire that any who choose to rise out of it must be accused of some brand of elitism and immediately stoned or, by one means or another, eliminated?
I am not here condoning insanity, but this is not the point. There is both an ancient truth of human being and an absolute psychological reality in the requirement of perfect and absolute orientation toward a single center, a single spiritual source—toward what the Hebrew people, in their understanding of the principle, called the Office of the LORD’s Anointed. In a secular frame of mind, I doubt we would appreciate the implications; but, finding within our hearts the stirrings of the spirit of love, we may sense the absolute need for orientation toward a single living presence within our experience, toward something which gives pattern and focus to ail our expression, toward something which encompasses wholly.
Faced with the growing insanity of Saul, David nevertheless would not violate this principle of absolute centering in the LORD’s Anointed. He knew the necessity of it so deeply, as a part of his attitude and orientation of heart, that to deny it would have been to deny life itself. Though persecuted by Saul, he could never on any account forget that Saul represented that office to which he was initially ordained. Under the most trying of all circumstances, leaving, consequently, no excuse for any other, David’s attitude—even given the opportunity to slay the insane king and seemingly end the tribulation—was, simply:
The LORD forbid that I should do this thing unto my master, the LORD’s anointed, to stretch forth mine hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the LORD.
[1 Samuel 24:6]
Here is a remarkable attitude which contains the essence of all fulfilment in expression of creative relationship, including, perhaps surprisingly, the basis for true sexual expression. We live in an age which does not honor such ancient ways of absolute devotion to the LORD’s Anointed. It is a slick and clever age which postulates its own right to do what is right in its own eyes—and this,fundamentally, without regard to the laws of life? “Indeed!” we expostulate. “there are no absolutes but those we invent and we are existentially alone to do what seems best to us.” Just such attitudes, however, have, engendered the chaotic, disintegrative state of contemporary society. For the truth is that not only are there specific and absolute laws governing relationship and sexual communion but also the outpouring of what is experienced in this delicate field becomes the ultimate shaper of what will be revealed in the “greater” culture of human civilization. They have always been linked, relationship, culture, and sexual expression, and always will be, whether or not we enjoy this particular law of life.
Within the human makeup are manifold potentialities for creative relationship of yet untold beauty. But, like the tightly budded blossom waiting to unfold petal upon flowering petal, a single requirement must be fulfilled. Without the lovely outpouring of sunlight the blossom perishes inwardly, rotting at the heart, never flowering. There is a union between sun and flower. Something similar is true of the complex organism we call man.
The human heart is a delicate affair which has at its quick, an absolute and single requirement to which everything else is relative. Simply, it is the law of life that the heart be firmly and unwaveringly oriented toward a single point of life expression greater than itself, if it is to flower in the sunlight of love, For some inexplicable reason human beings have disputed this law from time immemorial. Nevertheless, the disputation has not prevented man from persistently suffering failure in the very realm which contains the greatest potential for fulfilment and blessing? It may be said, categorically, that only those who have discovered and fulfilled this law in their living have ever experienced true fulfilment in any relationship, or have ever discovered the mysterious beauty and significance of this most sacred of all relationships, fired in the worship of Life.
The world, it is true, has seen its insanities and will probably see more. It is not without reason that the human heart is timid and hides its face furtively from the glance of the Beloved. How many, even of those who love one another, truly know one another? Strangers in a strange land. Yet if we accept the excuse of the insane stupidity of human beings and cower in darkness, never facing the single requirement of love for the LORD’s Anointed, how shall we ever do anything but rot in the bud? To avoid hurt, human beings have tried to take the ways of life into theirown hands and have, in consequence, invented “marketplace sex.” It has never been satisfactory, for bartering and trading in a marketplace of the heart does not encourage conditions wherein the sensitive blossoms of love can emerge in sunlit splendor. Fundamental principles are never violated with impunity. The heart was not created to be a marketplace but, rather, to be the holiest of all holy places.
Nevertheless, despite human manipulation of life’s gifts, life has never left man without a means of orientation toward its laws. Even David, pursued by the insanity of Saul, had known Samuel, the Prophet of God, and knew what it meant to turn to the true evidence of one anointed of Life. It would seem that with every generation there is a sufficient representation of true expression, at least one who emerges as a blessing of life to the world, one capable of bringing the sparks and embers of our scattered spirits to a point of burning intensity? The world has seen its prophets, its saints and its holy men. They have always stressed this fundamental law of devotion to the evidences of the highest expression of life, for without exception they, too, have learned the necessity of bringing their experience to a point of integrated intensity, fixed upon a single point of spiritual union within the flame of Life.
As we explore the story of David we find it leaves us no excuses. In the single instance wherein David violated the integrity of this fundamental relationship, through responsiveness to his apparent emotional need, the effects were immediately evident. His love for Bathsheba was put before his love for the Honor of God as it had begun to emerge in his own makeup. The child of Bathsheba perished in consequence. Restoring once again the integrity of his union with the Living God, the child Solomon, named the Peace of the LORD, was born and flourished.
Worship is not a popular condition of consciousness in a secular civilization given to its own pleasures, and yet the quality of worship suggests precisely what is necessary if we are to live wholly. The world is replete with concepts of God, but what of the knowledge of the Living God? What do we know of Life? What do we know of an orientation in passion to the living quick of our Being, such that everything we do is transmuted in the radiance of this spirited intensity of worship? The highest we know in another whose passion it is simply to serve the divine essences of life as they emerge in experience, may turn us encouragingly toward a single unifying source of beauty in our own experience. Such who exemplify this in their living may not be kings and priests, ministers, sages or what have you in the traditional patterns of culture, but they may always be known by their eternally unquenchable passion to serve that which is higher, fuller, than anything they have yet known and to portray the humility, the supreme quality of humility, toward the miracle of Being, never to stop short but always to continue to flower in the sunlight of the spirit.
The world needs such leaders, for they bring to point of burning in a clear coherent flame the yet unfocused elements of our natures, giving us, each one, the essential clue to Being—Being which brings forth the radiant flower of true relationship in full and self-responsible loveliness. You can always tell them. The anointing Oil of Love glistens with haunting beauty upon a clear, unclouded countenance.
