One of the great tragedies in all literature is the biblical story of Saul. Saul makes Hamlet look like a Disney character. Hamlet, at least, had good reasons for the disaster that befell him. Saul, given the gifts with which he started, should have fared better, much better.
His story begins with the announcement that in all of Israel none measured up to him in height, strength, goodness, or acclaim. A natural leader, a prince among his peers, his extraordinary character was recognized and proclaimed by the people. The beginning of his story is the stuff of fairy tales. And so, it goes on, for a while.
But, at a point, things begin to sour. That point was the arrival on the scene of David — a younger, more handsome, more gifted, and more acclaimed man. Jealousy sets in and envy slowly turns Saul’s soul to poison. Looking at David, he sees only a popularity that eclipses his own, not another man’s goodness, nor indeed how that goodness can be a gift to the people. He grows bitter, petty, cold, tries to kill David, and eventually dies by his own hand, an angry man who has fallen far from the goodness of his youth.
What happened here? How does someone who has so much goodness, talent, power, and blessing, grow into an angry, petty man who kills himself out of disappointment? How does this happen?
The late Margaret Laurence, in a brilliant, dark novel, “The Stone Angel” (University of Chicago Press, $17), gives us an interesting description of exactly how this can happen. Her main character, Hagar Shipley, parallels somewhat the biblical Saul.
Hagar’s story begins like his: She is young, good, and full of potential. What’s to become of such a beautiful, bright, talented, young woman? Sadly, not much at all. She drifts into everything: adulthood, an unhappy marriage, and into a deep unrecognized disappointment that eventually leaves her slovenly, frigid, bitter, and without energy or ambition.
What’s as remarkable as it is sad, is that she doesn’t recognize any of this as happening to her. In her mind, she remains always the young, good, gracious, popular, attractive young girl she was in high school. She doesn’t notice how small her world has become, how few friends are around, how little she admires anything or anyone, or even how physically unkempt she has let herself become.
Her awakening is sudden and cruel. One winter day, shabbily dressed in an old parka, she rings the doorbell of a house to which she is delivering eggs. A young child answers the door, sees Hagar, and Hagar overhears the child tell her mother: “That horrible, old egg-woman is at the door!” The penny drops.
Stunned, she leaves the house and finds her way to a public bathroom where she puts on all the lights and studies her face in a mirror. What looks back is a face she doesn’t recognize, someone pathetically at odds with whom she imagines herself to be. She sees in fact the horrible, old egg-woman that the child saw at the door rather than the young, gracious, attractive, bighearted woman she still imagines herself to be. How can this happen? she asks herself. How can we, imperceptible to ourselves, grow into someone we don’t even recognize?
To a greater or lesser degree, this happens to us all. It’s not easy to age, to absorb the death of much of what we dreamed for ourselves, and to watch the young take over and receive the popularity and acclaim that once were ours. Like Saul, we can easily fill with a jealousy and an anger to which we are blind and, like Hagar, do not notice inside ourselves. Others, of course, do notice.
But, for most of us, as this is happening, we remain still good and generous people, except that we are more caustic, cynical, and judgmental than we once were. We remain good people, but whine too much, feel too sorry for ourselves, and curse more than bless those who have replaced us in youth, popularity, and status.
Hence, one of the preeminent human and spiritual tasks in the second half of life is precisely to recognize this jealousy, this ugliness inside ourselves, and to come back again to the love and freshness of our youth, to revirginize, to come to a second naivete, and to begin again to give others, especially the young, the gaze of admiration.
At the beginning of the Book of Revelations, the author, speaking in God’s voice, has this advice for us, at least for those of us who are beyond the bloom of youth: “I’ve seen how hard you work. I recognize your generosity and all the good work you do. But I have this against you — you have less love in you now than when you were young! Go back and look from where you have fallen!”
We might want to hear those words from Scripture before we overhear them from some young girl telling her mother that a bitter, ugly, old person is at the door.
