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.

Suffering the Opposites

I’ve been writing about the story of Esau and Jacob, their traded inheritance, and the blessing obtained through fraud. It is a story about human nature, one I’ve thought about for the better part of this year as my husband and I found ourselves cheated and idea of the spirit of Esau came up during the course of our suffering.

This story about Jacob and Esau is, on the face of it, troubling. Those of us familiar with it have groused over the apparent unfairness of the Most High God, who, if Biblical authors are to be believed, chose Jacob as the promise-carrier from the womb and rejected Esau.

The story of Esau and Jacob is a story about what we long for when we don’t have it, and what we struggle to live up to when we do: Inheritance, blessing. It’s about what is of value in a person and what’s merely to be expected, predictable, prosaic. Those who mean to wrestle with God and prevail require the most rigorous training, the fruits of which do not come without great sacrifice. This is an ancient story that appeals to us even today.

higher nature, lower nature

Genesis tells us that Esau was a skillful hunter, but Jacob a “peaceful man, living in tents.” Though we’re not given much information about these brothers, what we are given says volumes. Everything about Esau portrays the earthy, instinctive nature of man, whereas Jacob’s energy is that of the spiritual man, able to till the ground and wait for its produce, pursuing a greater blessing than those gained in the immediacy of the moment. These two are much like Cain, the hunter, and Abel the tiller of soil. Vegetarians and other non-violent protesters against our lower natures may find ready support in the Bible (as they do in Buddhism), for hunters are not the ones most often rewarded in these ancient stories. Violence begets violence; those who live by the sword shall die by the sword: these are the principles we see in the thread running through these old tales.

Still, there’s a place and a time for violence, for hunting, for calling the hounds and pursuing prey. “To everything there is a time,” Ecclesiastes says, “and a season for every event under heaven.” If we fundamentalize and isolate the differences between Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, we are sure to provoke the same type of violence their differences provoked. We will have gun-toting Republicans from Arkansas on the one hand, and New York Times Review of Books-wielding Democrats on the other. We’ll be fooled into thinking this is about either-or, right-wrong, good-bad, and we won’t see that Esau and Jacob are twins inside a common womb, that our lower and higher natures tend to fight and separate from each other just as these brothers did. We will fail to recall that God became man in the flesh, experiencing every temptation, “yet without sin.” We’ll forget who we are, how whole we are in our cores, and we’ll choose one side over the other. That’s not what this is about.

learning through suffering

Among the major differences between Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel is the ability to delay gratification, to value the right things, to patiently endure. It is the ability to see something beyond what is immediately gratifying, the ability to do the right thing even if it hurts. To be sure, we don’t see this sort of virtue in Jacob early on. This is why, I think, Jacob had to leave his home and family and find a wife among his relatives far away, only to be cheated out of his true love and given the wrong wife. Jacob’s higher man wasn’t always a higher man in practice. Jacob needed training, and so Jacob was cheated more than once by his father-in-law, Laban, and had to work for almost two decades to redeem both wives and grandchildren and finally leave that foreign land and return home. By that time, Jacob had suffered enough to know fear. Jacob knew he had limits, then.

Even Christ learned obedience through the things he suffered. Buddha said, “Life is suffering.” We do not pass Go and collect our $200 until we have suffered. Jung suggested that neurotic suffering is a type of suffering designed to keep us from real suffering. Real suffering contains opposites. Real suffering is when I see I am cheater and cheated, hunter and farmer, civilized and Wild Thing, Democrat and Republican, conservative and liberal. I firmly believe that the more vociferous a person’s arguments against “the other side,” the more certain it is that he is unconscious to his own other-sideness. I have never met a conservative who was not liberal with himself, nor a liberal who was not conservative with his own stuff. We are such hypocrites.

we have seen the enemy, and he is us

But to see that we contain and even practice what we most abhor is to suffer. To see that we had a calling, but missed it and are living stupid lives, is suffering. To see that we have been the sort of people who had treasures and inheritances of profound value in our hands, but squandered them or traded them for a bowl of soup is suffering. Knowing that we are cheaters willing to break another person’s heart and leave them standing there helplessly is suffering. Knowing that we stand there helplessly is suffering.

Only when I am conscious to my own real suffering as well as the suffering I cause others am I ready to move on to the next step toward becoming a real person. In the aftermath of our victimhood, my husband and I suffered a lot, but some of our suffering wasn’t real. We flailed around in anger because we didn’t want to writhe in grief. We had already lost a child; we didn’t want to face up to losing what we lost when the deal we struck was broken, for the broken deal felt exactly like a death even though no death occurred. We didn’t want to be alive to that grief again, for that kind of grief is a black hole. You go in and you don’t know when or if you will come back out. Though it is as big as space, it can be carried around in a human body. It is an ineffable grief, and its ineffability indicates that it is, in part, unconscious. And becoming conscious to the unconscious parts was to suffer.

Intermission

I’ve been very bad about updating lately due to the demands of everyday life, not the least of which is that I’ve started work for my certificate in Jungian studies and am writing a paper for the seminar that occurs this week. I find it impossible to do justice to the Jacob and Esau series while also writing for the seminar, so thought I’d have an intermission during which I post some of what I’ve been reading over the past month.

creating a life

I’ve been reading Creating a Life by Jungian analyst James Hollis and Jung’s Symbols of Transformation at the same time. Hollis is the head of the Jungian studies program I’ll undertake over the next two years. Creating a Life is the book a person should read after reading about (and hopefully undertaking) the developmental tasks of middle age (40+ years), for it points you in the right direction after the razed earth policy mid-life seems to demand.

I appreciate Hollis’s honesty about the work of a therapist, because it made me feel much better about having quit my work as one. He writes:

“Were therapists required by “truth in advertising” legislation to tell their reality, then virtually no one would ever enter therapy. The therapist would be obliged to say at least three things in return to the suffering supplicant:

First, you will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself. Decades from now you will be fighting on these familiar fronts, though the terrain may have shifted so much that you may have difficulty recognizing the same old, same old.

Second, you will be obliged to disassemble the many forces you have gathered to defend against your wound. At this late date it is your defenses, not your wound, that cause the problem and arrest your journey. But removing those defenses will oblige you to feel all the pain of that wound again.

And third, you will not be spared pain, vouchsafed wisdom or granted exemption from future suffering. In fact, genuine disclosure would require a therapist to reveal the shabby sham of managed care as a fraud, and make a much more modest claim for long-term depth therapy or analysis. “

Hollis concludes this topic by suggesting that depth therapy or analysis will not cure anyone, but will, at least, make life more interesting by helping one discover the “complex riddles wrapped within” and thus, hopefully, bring them and other inner contents into consciousness.

purgatorio

I found Creating a Life comforting, even though I know that bringing these contents into consciousness heralds an inevitable, purgatorial descent in mid-life that is shunned by most. Having surrendered most of the so-called convictions I acquired and lived by in my 20s and 30s, I experienced my 40s as a psychological postapocalyptic wasteland peopled by fellow pilgrims who were very, very few and quite far between. I thought I was alone in grieving the dearth of mentors in whom the Wise Old Man or Crone archetypes had been made manifest, but Hollis showed me that I don’t perceive or grieve the loss of mentors alone. He writes that we have very few initiated adults among us because most will not take the path of ego-annihilation demanded by the initiation process.

When Jesus said that none were worthy to follow Him unless they took up their cross first, He meant it. One can never be raised in the image of the God-man until he has first suffered and died, suspended between heaven and hell, eternity and this mortal world. Yet because of the pain of this suffering and in spite of our best intentions, we end up trudging along the paths our parents and grandparents trod before us. We don’t want to suffer; we will not die. We keep feeding the ego with its constant cries of “I want, I need,” catering to its demands and claims and its need for status and collective approval. We end up being older, more tired and fearful versions of our old selves. Our lights grow dim from flickering; we shrink back from the challenge before us and eventually shrivel into mere shadows of the selves we were meant to be.

As I have said while writing about Jacob and Esau and as we will see as I progress with the series, nobody–and I mean nobody–attains wholeness while forging through life on an ego-based, selfish path. This is why, as Stephen Covey says, we are called to imagining and implementing “win-win” solutions in every single conflict. Anything less does not demand the little deaths demanded by compromise. The fact that we are polarized as a nation along political, religious, cultural and socioeconomic lines illustrates just how unconscious we are to saving our own lives, how impossible the likelihood that we will yield and thus grow.

a bloody blundering

My 12-year-old daughter asked me the other day whether I’d choose to go back in time if I could, if I’d want a “do-over” for any part of my life. I imagined being 12 or 16 or 28 or 36 again, mulling over the mistakes and blunders I’ve made, the people I’ve hurt, the stupid decisions I’ve made. Did I want to go back and change something, anything? After awhile I told her that I wouldn’t want to go back under any circumstance, for in spite of these mistakes and regrets, the first half of my life was, as Hollis writes, “a great and inevitable mistake, a bloody blundering.” An inevitable mistake, a mistake that had to be made.

To be young is to be a fool living among fools, no matter how wise we imagine we are. The wisest old folks you know (if you can find any) will tell you they were fools when they were younger; the trick is to learn from having been one and to press on toward wisdom and clarity. This is how it is with me; I’m pressing on, creating a life for myself. As it says in Proverbs, “if you are wise, you are wise for yourself; if you are foolish, you alone will bear it.” Having carried the results of my own follies for all the years since I did them, I’m wiser for having carried them. I’m lingering in a place where I am happy and miserable, content and full of yearning, clear-eyed but stumbling blindly, sane in the craziest way possible, grateful to be where I am at this moment in time, this ripe moment, this beautiful, pregnant moment.