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.

The Blessing

In the morning when you rise
I bless the sun, I bless the skies
I bless your lips, I bless your eyes
My blessing goes with you

In the nighttime when you sleep
Oh I bless you while a watch I keep
As you lie in slumber deep
My blessing goes with you

This is my prayer for you
There for you, ever true
Each, every day for you
In everything you do

And when you come to me
And hold me close to you
I bless you
And you bless me, too

When your weary heart is tired
If the world would leave you uninspired
When nothing more of love’s desired
My blessing goes with you

When the storms of life are strong
When you’re wounded, when you don’t belong
When you no longer hear my song
My blessing goes with you

This is my prayer for you
There for you, ever true
Each, every day for you
In everything you do

And when you come to me
And hold me close to you
I bless you
And you bless me, too

I bless you
And you bless me, too

What We Know

When we listen to this beautiful song and read the lyrics, we know what a blessing is. Knowing what a blessing is can make tears well up, unbidden; we exclaim about how beautiful the singer’s voice is, how magical this song she sings, but as beautiful as the singer’s voice, what gives this song its timelessness is what we know about blessings. We know about them because being blessed by someone who has the love and power to bless us is an archetypal event–something that is common to all people in all ages. Whether it conjures up images of priests and censers, or the trembling hand of a grandmother, laid on her new great-grandchild’s head, or that of a tribal elder passing his hands over the youth and blowing smoke all around the young man’s head, we know what a blessing is.

Many of us have received blessings from our parents or grandparents, and many of us have not. Many of us spent our childhoods and young adulthoods waiting for that blessing, and it never came. Some of us have sat at the bedside of a dying parent and received nothing, no gracious word, no hopeful epithet to suit us. Some of us were blessed and given charges by the people we loved most, and went out into life under this banner. Whatever our individual experiences with blessings, we know what they are.

The word “blessing” comes from the Proto-Indo-European word bhel, from which blood, boulder, phallus, and blind derive. A blessing has life in it, like the blood. Also like blood, it carries a unique code–like DNA–specific to the one being blessed. A blessing has the mass, weight, and substance of a boulder; people who have been rightly blessed carry the weight of that blessing with them their entire lives and have something of substance to pass on to others. Like a phallus, a blessing is generative and powerfully procreative. It has the masculine strength of the warrior with his spear, and like the warrior, a blessing is protective as well as defensive. Its phallic energy causes many scenes of blessing to be symbolically rendered through male figures, even though every person, male or female, carries this energy. Finally, a blessing comes from a place as dark as blindness, for it arises from the unconscious, from what we know without knowing how we know it. A blessing is prophetic, having deep spiritual and mystical origins arising from some ancient tap root with fructifying power.

A blessing is an invoking of God’s favor, an expression of approval and good wishes, and an act of praise verbalized over another human being. We do not write our own blessings; we wait sometimes our entire lives to be blessed by someone else. And because we externalize the need to be blessed and are always looking for the priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, or fairy godmother who will lay hands on us and bless us, we forget that, deep down inside, our own priest, elder, patriarch, wizard, and fairy godmother has a ready blessing.

नमस्ते

Of all the traditions among other cultures that I wish we would adopt in the Western world, my favorite is the practice of bowing to another person in greeting. I love the Hindu and Buddhist greeting, namaste, for it means “the divinity within me honors the divinity within you.” I can think of few other ways in which a greeting can invoke more powerful blessing than this one. So, today, namaste. The divinity within me honors the divinity within you. I invite you to bow to yourself, and to meditate today on the blessings that have been spoken over you and to you, and the ones you wish had been but never were. I invite you to meditate until images of your own blessing come up inside your soul, and then become logos. I invite you to breathe those words over yourself, speak them to yourself, and bow to yourself. Then, take a bit of that blessing, and bow to a person you love, and bless him or her.