Windows – Michal
"Now Saul's daughter Michal was in love with David..."
1 Samuel 18:20
"... David said, "Give me my wife Michal. She was promised to me. I killed 100 Philistines to get her."Then Ishbosheth told the men to go and take Michal from a man named Paltiel son of Laish. Michal's husband, Paltiel, followed them, crying all the way to Bahurim. Finally, Abner said to him, "Go back home." So Paltiel went back home."
2 Samuel 3:14-16
"As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart... When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him... And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death."
2 Samuel 6:16, 20-23
Maacah told me today I made a better door than a window. As usual, she was wrong. I have become a window. My old person of being a woman -a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter- has been locked closed by one man. That door can never be used again, and so what's left sits in a narrow screened window ledge and watches other unlocked lives.
He was my life once.
I always fought with my father, defending the mother I felt never had a voice. When he came it was another cause of battle, multiple battles, always made up after a few days with tears and penitence and raw throbbing souls, but the cause never ceased.
He was good, great; energetic where my father was fearful, courageous where my father was slow. Zeal and passion, hope and purpose. I thought he could give it to me instead of an empty existence of waiting. I let myself fall harder than I had any right to let a man drop me, every part of my life thrown away for inclusion in his.
When he left it was to a heroic sense at first, waiting for his return as his saviour and so at last, I hoped, equal. Gossip filtered through spies and servants of sons born to him and an awful realisation took root in my pushed aside insecurities and cast aside identity.
Paltiel was my decision. He wasn't great but he was good, and I didn't want great any more. I filled myself with small pieces of life and let myself carry small joys. When he held me in his arms I rested, quieted.
Now the scanty wind carries past me the dust of the life down there. A child shrieks in the stillness of the afternoon heat and I splay my hands on my infinitely flat belly and let the tears slide from closed eyes.
When I open them again it is to a heavy donkey cart thudding down the street. Tear marks spot the dark cloth at my breast. As I raise my eyes, across the street I glimpse a shape in the dim gap of the window, just below my eye level. It is a smiling face that leans closer towards me, waving, before I can look away quickly enough.
A door slams somewhere across the street, perhaps behind my neighbour's wall, and it is like something in my spirit stops straining against the too-tight chain and glides closed at last. Letting my hands dig into the grit of the sandstone on each side, I dart my eyes over again. She is still there, and this time I stand. I smooth a hand up to my chest and, quivering, turn it to the side.
The tiny motion is like opening hope again, cracking open a window in a stuffy room when the door is sealed.
I wave again.
NOTES:
I grew up shunning Michal as the mocker of the "king after God's own heart", but I'm not sure if I was the only Christian to secretly harbour sympathy at the remarkably emotive verses of her loving him, then being torn from Paltiel, who wept, of remaining barren. But since David was such a man of God, surely he must be in the right in this argument, especially with that speech about humility and uninhibited worship.
I then wondered, what if the small, moving pieces of her story we are given were there beyond a foil to the mighty David? What if she was included in the Bible not as 'right' or 'wrong' but as a broken, complex human with a different opinion to the man David?
It has been said that the Old Testament of the Bible reads more like an X-rated action/history movie rather than the neat theological essays we appreciate in the last half of the New Testament. We can perhaps feel more comfortable with the frankly disturbing when mentally edited between right and wrong, but I feel Michal is one such casualty of this human editing and our leaps to label.