(next in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, August 21, 2005
Readings: Genesis 32: 3-30; Philippians 2: 5-11
“I want you to write down your three earliest memories,” the psychologist said. My seminary training was almost over and the Presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry had asked that I, like every candidate, undergo two days of personal and career evaluation. But now–my earliest memories? I was perplexed.
“What if I’ve forgotten what really happened–important things?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “The past is gone. What’s important now is what you think you remember. Obviously, the vast majority of experiences vanish from mind. But a few things stick there because they contain clues, as if in a code, about the great struggles and yearnings of early life. Those early challenges usually follow us our whole life long.”
So I thought and sifted and organized wisps of childhood memory until I had three that seemed earlier than any others. And with that, and in the subsequent analysis offered to me, I caught also an insight into the stories of the Bible–of Abraham and Sarah, Rebekah and Isaac, and Jacob and Rachel and Leah, how they came to be. No one can know what happened so long ago, how memories have been beaten and kneaded and rolled into bowls like a sourdough and made to rise again and again. After a long, long time, though, a few stories took a firm shape. Why? Because they contain clues, as if in a code, about the great struggles and yearnings of our early life in God. These stories encode the challenges that follow us our whole life long. They are lessons in the beginning. To read them literally would end the lesson.
With the story of Leah and Rachel, the saga of threat to the existence of the tribe came to a halt in abundance: eleven sons and a daughter slipped into life and thrived. We saw, however, that this extraordinary growth–for which our small, threatened tribe at Central can feel a pang of desire, even an envy–had at its center the strange, painful mystery of Jacob’s hatred for Leah and his love for Rachel, of Leah’s fear of Rachel, and Rachel’s envy of Leah. That fertile generation, that nation, the story says, arose through emotions of hate and need and fear and desire. They did not pretend, they did not repress, ignore, or deny. To become great, they passed through the hot sliding mire of the ego’s strife against its adversaries. This was a beginning lesson in growth.
Now we pass on, but the central question is only pressed deeper, for Israel’s attention was riveted by the possibility of transforming selfish hatred, fear, inequality, and separation into divine future. They told these stories not because they happened, as we have often said, but because they are happening.
Wealthy and well more than forty, Jacob had become rich not in children only but in chattel too. It was time to leave that strange land and return home. This is the great pattern for unfolding consciousness. The outward arc of the young adulthood is spent exploring and exploiting the powers of one’s personality, creatively working one’s will on the world in private and public loves, in sex and work, in family and community. At a certain time, however, comes the call to begin the arc of return, to progress in a wholly new way by crossing over the river and taking the path of spiritual growth home. In the great epics of western civilization, the hero never heads home young, but in the strength of middle age.
Jacob was terrified to go home to meet his brother’s anger–twenty years terrified! But the call to the inward arc is relentless. He must grow now, and he cannot grow–his nation cannot grow–unless he goes within to meet himself, his demon, his enemy. He prays a simple prayer–his first word to his God in twenty years, so far as the story knows. (Doesn’t that sound like a forty-something male?) He says: “Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother for I am afraid of him.” In other words: Take this cup from me; my will, not thine. Keep me as I am. This is a child’s prayer, a simple belief that God stands above, a tall parent watching out for me, the beloved child. But it is time for Jacob to grow, to begin the journey of the inward arc. For one ready to grow, there is no voice from heaven to meet the childish plea. Jacob receives no reply.
The way is arduous. Most people simply refuse the spiritual journey. They sense how hard will be the revealing of their new being from under their accustomed masks, so they stay out there, aging and hardening in the land of acquisition and shopping, the land of envy and misery, the land of oppression and violence and conformity. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” said Thoreau in the 1830’s. A century and a half have only made those masses more. But some, in whom God strikes open a hollow for suffering and compassion, head home.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la diritta via era smarrita.
So opens the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. “In the middle of the road of our life, I found myself in a dark wood from which the straight way was lost.” This is how the arc of return begins. In the night Jacob got up and took all his family and crossed the ford of the Jabbok, along with everything he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the rising of the dawn. This is how the arc of return begins. God responds not as the childish prayer asks, not from above, but in person–in your own person, and in a great struggle in a night of confusion–blindness– uncertainty.
Perhaps you know nothing of such a struggle. It is a mystery. You cannot seek it out and force God to the fight. There is strange grace in being given such a night and such a fight and such sight as comes with the rising of the dawn. Still, I think this grace is given far more often than it is received. It can come through the veil of any failure–at work, in health, in jail, when a throttling addiction crashes the daily routine, or in an unwanted death. For a subtle soul whose life is just not led into temptation, the grace of this struggle to the death for the old self can come at the beckoning of some stranger whose sorrows have never touched your awareness till now, when a sense for the union of your own gross satisfied self with something great beyond itself grows sharp, and the struggle is on.
Whoever has begun to come home this way knows also that this fight with God isn’t just once, and then, salvation! No, its “onceness,” as in the story of Jacob, appears so to the memory because the first time was like crossing a river. Then God came down out of the childish imagination and the nights and the fights thereafter were many and the sights new, and more are coming. God touches the hollow of your compassion every time, stretching and deepening you. To the ignorant observing world, it looks as if such a one limps down life’s road, yet from within you know that what looks like a limp to their hard eye is the power in you with every step on the journey of return to pause and to see anew.
But all this growth, all this grace, starts only if you pass over the river and are left alone. This is the one action that depends on your will alone–to let yourself be left alone, in spite of the demands of everything you have. This is how we grow. Rainer Maria Rilke set it in a poem called “The Man Watching.” It ends this way.
How small it is, what we fight!
What fights with us: how great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
As things do by an immense storm,
We would become strong and not need names.What we conquer is small stuff,
And the triumph itself makes us small.
What is eternal and extraordinary
Does not want to be bent by us.
It is the Angel, who appeared
To the wrestlers of the Old Testament
When the wrestler’s sinews
Grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
Like chords of deep music.Whoever this Angel has beaten
(Who often simply declined the fight)
Went away proud and strengthened
And great from that harsh hand
That kneaded him as if to change his shape
Winning does not tempt that man
This is how he grows: By being defeated, decisively,
By constantly greater beings.
We might almost end there, but Jacob’s story bids us see the extraordinary drama of our own spiritual development supra-personally also, through the lens of history and of spiritual evolution itself. Jacob’s particular struggle–his demon–was captured by his name, Jacob/Sneak-From-Behind. His whole nature and all the success it had brought had been planted in the soil of his reliance on his separate, individual self. Like so many, he was invested in what is now called “zero sum” calculation, the belief that my loss will be your gain, or my gain your loss. So he cheated and lied and bobbed and weaved. What finally cast him into the grace of a fight with God for his true self was awareness that he was about to meet his enemy Esau straight on, no sneaking from behind. One way or another, his old self was done for. “Israel” emerged from that confrontation, and Jacob died.
We still can take this lesson. That is “we” as a whole, the people of God, the Body of Christ, the communities of Spirit. We have dwindled– Protestant and Catholic, all across the Western world. The traditional and conservatively religious claim to know the reason for this. They think in terms of separation, for like Jacob, they are fixated on zero-sum fantasies. They believe the loss of members from a church like Central can or should become their gain, because they imagine they are right about God and we are wrong. But today’s lesson in beginning a community–a people of God– suggests that the reason the churches have withered over these decades is that they continued praying to a child’s God, looking up to the heavens, when in fact the time had come for them to begin to make the inward journey and to accept much more real, consequential spiritual struggles. The churches were begging to keep their shallow idea of God above, with its small imagination of human possibility and its feeble, irresponsible notion of being saved from sin so that we might be excused to continue next week in the evils we had done last week and life long. In the churches, there has been no doctrine for, and no commitment to, a precise struggle with God leading to the death of one’s old self and union and communion with enemies. Lacking this upward guiding spiritual movement, and needing real spiritual food, people fled from the pablum offered in churches. They did not necessarily find good food off in pathless woods, though many have. But if there was to be no spiritual growth at all, better to stand outside the church than in; better to abandon pretense than to go through ritual motions. This is why the churches have dwindled–because in huge numbers people knew intuitively that they had to move on to make the arc of return.
The church had become a tool of society’s competing desire for the status quo, for the same old wars and the same little fights and the same small spiritual contests. “How small it is, what we fight!” This is why the American churches move so swiftly behind the flag, to make war on a tin-pot dictator, and call it religion. This is why fierce fights about human sexuality obsess the churches–in order to keep the conversation about Christ small and limit the movement of his limbs on earth. The ego’s great triumph, to use religion to keep everything wrapped and tied, and forestall transformation of oneself in relationship to one’s fears and one’s enemies. So decade upon decade, the church would not put on the mind of Christ, would not meet the man at the river, and the mind of Christ moved on without the churches. That is what happened when we ignored the lesson in the beginning of our growth in God, the lesson at the Jabbok. This is how we grow: By being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, August 2005
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