king david by moretto
King David of the Old Testament has been in my mind quite a lot recently. He's a puzzlement and an excellent example of balance. I think of him as the Genghis Khan of the Middle East in his time. Genocide was what his army did. They represented the new cosmology, Aries the ram, on a mission to exterminate the previous belief system, Baal, Taurus the bull. God told him to kill em all. Don't even leave a dog standing. Their parties after a battle of up close and personal killing with knives, hatchets and spears amounted to Dionysian excesses to make the Romans look like beginners. I've thought that to be sent back in time to one of those parties as I am now, a squeamish American, it would be like jumping into a mosh pit at a punk concert, one that smells so bad it makes me want to puke. Old King David had a liking for a good party. These were people who let blood when they fought. Swords slashing arteries open, people on the ground bleeding out, screaming in agony, piss, shit, no time for the living to concern themselves with anything but slinging swords and dodging other swords. Their battles were blood baths, killing by blood-letting. Later, at the party with the babes and the booze, smelling of blood and sweat, charged with an extended adrenaline rush, the original Israelis, they commit every "ungodly" act there is, dancing and drinking, belly dancers on the tables.
king david
This is David the shepherd boy, slayer of Goliath with a rock, teenage lover of King Saul's boy, prince Jonathan, unto scandal, fearless warrior, desert warlord, sweeping genocide over the land they came to take over. USA cleared the North American continent by way of genocide, inspired by King David's genocide. Kill em all. Sermons at the forts in Indian Country used King David's genocidal wars to inspire the boys to go out there and kill every last one of them redskin heathens. It don't make no difference, they aint got no souls, they don't know Jesus Christ as their personal savior. They're already damned to hell, let's advance them to their fiery destiny and get them out of our way. Genghis Khan blazed a trail from Mongolia across the -Stans, then only one country, Kazakhstan, by now divided up into all the different -Stans, and up into the Ukraine. A beautiful film, ANDREI RUBLEV, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, a four hour b&w story of a monk, an icon painter, who witnessed a Tartar (Mongol) take-over of a walled city in the Ukraine where they killed everybody. A hard film to watch. No guns or explosions. More up close and personal slashing swords and blood flying. Though it was four hours, it seemed like no more than two, and it was not an action movie. The scene of the Mongol raid was no more than a minute or two. It was the Mongols, but it was the sort of thing King David and the Israeli Rams did to the same degree.
king david
From my way of seeing as a lover of God, somebody who looks to "do right" in the light of God, or higher self, what-have-you, genocidal warlord does not qualify as somebody God could have much affection for. It makes no more sense to me to say King David was loved by and watched over by God personally, than to say the same of Genghis Khan. Of course, it can be said of everyone, but it is made a point of with David. If it can be said of David, it can be said of Khan, and it can be said of the USA. God must think genocide is wonderful entertainment. Does it mean the genocides going on in North Africa in our time, committed by warlords in Nissan pickups, are God's favorite warriors working for the glory of God? Paul of the New Testament was a Jewish executioner who killed early Christians, a Jew Nazi. Questioning such as this does not make me think less of God, but helps adjust the perspective I see God through. I've been of the belief from Sunday school onward that God prefers meek school nerds who carry their bible on top of their books to show everybody they are Christians, the bible a reference to back up the witness winning souls to the Lord. Throughout my adult life I thought God preferred sweet to sour. Now I'm thinking he likes both. It's leading me to believe that God gets a kick out of the entire human experience, all the way from sitting cross-legged in an abandoned Hindu temple for thirty years to chopping heads off left and right, raping virgin harem girls, pleasing God any way the cards fall.
king david
Then there is the other hand. Didn't Jesus say something about don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Kinda sounds like playing a banjo. On the other hand, King David composed some extraordinarily beautiful Psalms, hymns, every one of them the equal of Amazing Grace in it's spiritual beauty. They dwarf Shakespeare's sonnets. King David, the bad mutha, could believably have had a tattoo on the back of his neck, MONSTER, spelled in Hebrew, as a title. Amazing Grace was written by a slave trader. God even likes the experience of a slave. The bible is loaded with slaves in both testaments. Slavery is an African institution, not an American institution. Slavery is happening all over Africa today, yesterday and all the way back. King David's people came out of Africa. They were Africans who migrated to the Mesopotamian (Iraq) and Persian (Iran) world the other side of Suez. Evidently they originally came to Egypt from south of Egypt, Nubia, and below that, Ethiopia. Ethiopia continues to have a community of Jews down through time, perhaps descendants of the ones left behind when the others were rounded up to go north to Egypt for massive labor projects. Something like the Cherokees remaining in western NC after the Trail of Tears to relocation in Oklahoma. The Hebrew wars cut a swath through the Arab world by way of genocide and took the land as their own. They conquered it. Brings to mind the Emperor of Qin (Chin) uniting the six warring provinces that made up China by conquering them one at a time.
king david
I used to be taught God wanted us to be good, sweet examples of looking our best as Madison Avenue advertising men for Jesus. And I was taught he wanted us to behave certain ways that are "good" and avoid behavior called "bad." Then you get to looking and it aint such a well defined line between good and bad. What can be terrible in one context can be the best there ever was in another context. I kind of took it for granted that God wanted us to be good. Maybe half a year ago a friend who is 30 asked me in conversation, What does God want us to do? I have puzzled over that one in the past and pretty much came to I don't know. I didn't want to give an off-hand answer, a fill in the blank answer. I wanted to go with it 100% because I knew he meant his question, and evidently suspected I could answer it. I went inside for a moment, closed eyes, looking inward at the dark, looking for what God wants us to do. In my mind I saw several billion people, all of them with different activities, different purposes, different motivations, all of them valid in God's eye. Death is the same as taking a nap in God's eye. God forgives everything. God loves us unconditionally. We don't even have to deserve it. Why not God love a warlord the same as a nun working as a nurse? They're both part of the tapestry of humanity, "made in God's image."
king david
I wanted to say something straight, something he could think about that maybe could inspire his own thinking. I said, "God wants us to live our lives." That seems to me to tell it. Whatever place we have in the world is our part of the whole. I'm not so sure good and bad apply. Balance, I think, is what we're after. Balance includes both sides of the coin. I feel like King David had the wild man covered, and the spirit man covered just as well. He must have been a well-rounded man, a man with understanding. Who can say anything about anybody? Genghis Khan, when he became the Great Khan, was an inspired leader and a man of profound understanding. As I look at my own lifetime, it has not been so dramatic and extreme. I find the fist half of my life was lived in darkness with some light shining through, and the second half in light with a little darkness peeping through. I don't think I'm afraid of the dark side any more, anyway not like I used to be.
king david
I'm thinking the story of King David is telling me to look at the whole, not just the half of it we call the good. Neither one side nor the other is the coin. The coin consists of both sides. Rotating light and dark on earth make life possible. It's only for other people we expect ourselves to be sweet and pretty all the time. Some people very advanced spiritually are ill natured and hateful to be around. I like to have a balance in the people I know, some who come under the heading, good, and some who come under bad. I like both and never attempt to turn bad to good. Because I really don't believe what we call bad is necessarily bad and what we call good is good either. They are totally subjective assessments, different from individual to individual, circumstance to circumstance. I saw the film of King David, I think with Richard Gere. It was about the next thing to nothing. I'd hoped to find some insight into David, but don't recall getting anything but disappointment. USA, a so-called Christian nation has something like 30,000 deaths a year by gun and the biggest prison population on earth. I can't help but see this is what has come to us for slaughtering our way across the continent. At the same time, God seems to have an affection for USA, despite all. We have a screwed up government, but the American people are an awfully interesting bunch of people. We are the people of the world.
king david
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