Eyelash to Eyelash With God

24 January 2026  2 Samuel 1:1-4, 11-12, 19, 23-27

Memorial of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

“Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (2 Samuel 1:26)

After Moses, David is the most celebrated leader in the Old Testament. Maybe not even after Moses. David is called the “man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). He is the idealized king, whose name is mentioned in the same sentence as the Messiah.

He was also an adulterer, who conspired in the death of one of his most loyal men, Uriah, to cover up his affair with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.

He was a flop as a father, too. When his oldest son, Amnon, raped his half-sister Tamar, David did nothing about it, which so alienated Absalom, another of David’s sons, that Absalom attempted a coup which very nearly succeeded.

The world is not what we think it is. It is full of “thin” places – people and experiences where we can come eyelash to eyelash with the living God. David is one of the Bible’s oddballs who understood that.

Joab had Absalom killed, and when David got the news he wept for Absalom, but he didn’t punish Joab. Deep down, in those places he didn’t mention at parties, David knew Absalom was a problem, and it was better for him that the boy was dead.

David wasn’t an especially loyal husband, father, or friend. So why is he the “man after God’s own heart”? Why is he the idealized king, mentioned in the same breath as the Messiah?

For all his many faults, David lived his life at the border of the material world. He seemed to understand, as we usually do not, that the world is not what we think it is. He recognized the “thin” places of the world, where the distance between us and the unseen world of ultimate purpose and meaning is the most narrow. He recognized it facing Goliath in the Valley of Elah, and so he chose five smooth stones from the brook. He recognized the significance of the number five, a number representing God’s grace and favor. The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus fed the five thousand with five barley loaves. David recognized his confrontation with the prophet Nathan as another “thin” place. He didn’t deny or try to justify his sin with Bathsheba, but repented at once. He recognized his friendship with Jonathan as another “thin” place, and so his grief at Jonathan’s death was pure and profound: “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). Anyplace near the ark of the covenant was another “thin” place, so when the ark was brought into Jerusalem, “David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). And of course there were all the Psalms he wrote. David recognized the power of music to move people in ways that reason simply can’t.

The world is not what we think it is. It is full of “thin” places – people and experiences where we can come eyelash to eyelash with the living God. David is one of the Bible’s oddballs who understood that. His own father thought he was odd – when Samuel wanted to meet the sons of Jesse to choose Israel’s king, Jesse sent David to watch the sheep – surely Samuel didn’t want to see a weirdo like his youngest boy. Fortunately Samuel was one of those oddballs, too (1 Samuel 16:6-13). As were Joseph and Mary, as were Peter and Paul. Nearly all of the Bible’s greatest figures were people who recognized the thin places when they saw them.

Most people think Christianity  is a set of rules that hold a community together, a program for self-help, or a strategy for achieving a political agenda. It can be all those things, but none of them are the objective of the life in God. That life is to touch the face of God, and when we do, we hear Jesus say, as He did to the good thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The face of God touches us when a thin host is placed in our hands, and we hear a soft voice say, “The body of Christ.” Everything He is, touching us. The real world is not what we think it is. We meet the really real world at the thin places.