See to it . . .

What I am writing about, among other things, is grief. It’s about the grief of standing alone, of being left, of your gift not being good enough, of not being valued, of being an object or a means to an end to another person. All are experiences that may–and for many people, do–hearken back to an earlier time when the ones pushing us away were our parents, when the one who left was a mother or father, when the human mirrors surrounding our hatchling selves reflected mere shadows and sighs and pushed us into gray, marginal, provisional identities; yet we knew our wings shimmered with a billion, trillion lights.

Even when grief has no tincture of retrospective in it, it is still painful. There are no two ways around it: to love, to relate to others, to commit, to strike deals are all risky. We risk that every pint of blood we donated will be wasted and the patient will still die. The patient may well be me, if I give too much. Is this the risk I want to take, the risk of having my own brother cheat me out of our father’s blessing? Is this the risk I want to take, that I will have to leave my country, my parents, my own twin, all my friends and all that is familiar to me, only to travel to a foreign land and be cheated myself for the next decade or two? Really?

striving with god

These are the risks these brothers took. I doubt they were conscious when they made their choices. Still, one brother was the sort who valued what truly is of value, while the other remained a temporal, carnal man. These are the psychological facts of the story of Jacob and Esau. Esau wasn’t willing to struggle for anything that he couldn’t hunt down and kill by midday. One New Testament writer calls Esau a “wicked, godless man,” the Greek word for godless being profane: outside the temple. Our English word for “profane” comes from the Latin profanus, meaning “uninitiated,” but has the same root meanings as the Greek. One gets the idea of the unwashed, uninitiated one standing outside the cathedral. Inside, they are washing believers in the baptismal font.

Jacob was an initiated man who ultimately earned his name, Israel, meaning He has striven with God. Unlike Esau, Jacob was willing to struggle for years, to fight for his life, to wrestle with the Angel of God. Jacob had the moral character and the endurance to press forward to right goals. Esau lacked these and, though he ended up a wealthy man, he is not remembered well or fondly and left no lasting legacy.

While thinking about being cheated and how I thought and felt about it, and its aftermath, I rather synchronistically have been reading James Hollis’s book, On This Journey We Call Our Life:Living the Questions. In it, I ran across a passage about Jacob’s encounter with the angel:

Recall the Biblical struggle of Jacob with the Angel of Darkness (Gen. 32:26-32). Though his limb was wrenched from its socket, Jacob would not let go until the Angel blessed him. The Angel did so “because you have been strong against God,” by giving Jacob a new name: Israel.

So we are asked to confront our sufferings, to wrestle with them though that brings us even more pain, in order to know what they want of us. Just as we might interrogate a frightening figure in our dreams to learn why it has so come to us, so must we ask of our lives what task of growth is demanded. As Jung says, [. . .] we are asked a question by life, and our life is a question. What does it want of us? What is demanded that we may live more fully? (2003, Toronto: Inner City Books, pp. 122-123).

flight of icarus

The deal we struck with our partners was different from other deals we’ve struck because great gains and losses were possible and we were as conscious as could be about the decisions we made. We were like the guy who goes to Vegas and puts all he has on lucky number 13. The payout for a win would be unbelievable; the losses sobering and long-lived. What kinds of fools would risk this? This is a question with implications to which we were fully conscious. You might say that our decision to go ahead all those years ago was the single most conscious, alive, real, risky, and frightening decision we have ever made in our lives. I do not know many who would have done it. And so like Icarus we flew to the sun. With the same result.

Of course, I am smiling at us now.

I’m smiling because in the myth, Icarus plummeted into the sea, which is just exactly where we fell. We dove into our respective unconscious lives, revisited old wounds, asked others to examine us, re-chose our choosings, then finally looked at one another and said, “Well done.” I would not change what we did except to do it even better. I do not regret our choices, but I will always be sorry that our partners done us wrong and that they are the sorts of characters who list more to the Esau than the Jacob side.

Our partners listed to that side, as we thought they probably would, because they’re wounded souls. I can’t say that we didn’t see the possibility coming, though naturally we hoped it wouldn’t and offered enough insights and warnings that another path was certainly possible. Even so, it’s not realistic to imagine that anyone who has been cheated themselves will not grow up to be a cheater. One must often be an Esau before he can consider becoming a Jacob. My advice to others is to be leery of striking deals with people who have been cheated in profound ways, for they will need to revisit their pain by inflicting it on you. Maybe remorse will teach them humility and give them a sense of respect. Maybe one day they’ll choose a Jacob path.

Even Jacob had his problems, as we have seen–nothing that 14-20 years of servitude did not solve. Still, 20 or 40 years of servitude for Esau would not have been enough. This is it in a nutshell: Jacob finally responded to suffering by growing a character, and Esau never did.

“See to it,” the writer of Hebrews admonished, “that there be no profane, uninitiated person among you with a spirit like Esau’s, who can’t see the blessing, inheritance, and privilege given him, but who turns up his nose at it and trades it for something that will only temporarily satisfy your sensual need.” Instead, he’s saying, be like Jacob: A man with a vision.