A Reflection for VII Pentecost (Proper 12 A) All Saints’ Church,
Southern Shores, N.C. July 27, 2014
Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
We now come to the 3rd part of the Jacob journey in the lectionary, and here is what has happened so far. Jacob is a manipulator and has swindled his brother, Esau; pulled a fast one on Isaac, his father; and got his mother to help him in the whole fraudulent scheme. He is, as they say a piece of work, but so far he has gotten away with it all, one step ahead of the punishment he so richly deserves. He fled out of the family home and was on his way to hide out with his mother's brother, Laban, until Esau's anger cooled down. Laban owns a herd of sheep and goats and is always on the move to find pasture land, and so staying on the move seems like a good way for Jacob to hide. On his way to Laban's range of pasture, Jacob spends the night and has an encounter with God. He does not know who God is, and God has to introduce God’s self as the God of Jacob's father and grandfather. Jacob realizes that this encounter can have serious consequences on his usual style of manipulation, and he decides to move on, hoping that he will not have to run into this God too often. He sets up a marker to flag the site and he suggests that “If (notice the limiting word), if God stands by me and protects me on this journey that I’m beginning, keeps me in food and clothing, and brings me back in one piece to my father’s house, this God will be my God. This stone that I have set up as a memorial pillar will mark this as a place where God lives. And everything you give me, I’ll return a tenth to you.”
Since Jacob has nothing, that seems a safe promise to make,
for ten percent of nothing is nothing and – remember, Jacob is a manipulator -
I think he is hoping that this IOU for a ten percent tip or agent's fee will
keep the Big Guy happy and off his back. What does Jacob have to lose? Yet,
beneath this cynicism, a seed is planted about God in Jacob's soul. A seed
which will continue to gather lots of weeds like in the Matthew parable for
today, but in God’s mercy, the weeds remain until the time when God helps us to
remove them.
Jacob makes it to Laban's compound and meets one of Laban's
daughters and introduces himself as a long lost cousin. He stays there a couple
of months and finally Laban asks him how long he plans to stay. Now Laban is
also a manipulator, and he doesn't want to pay a wage to this free-loading
cousin, so he suggests that, if Jacob agrees to work for a certain number of
years, he can marry one of his daughters when that time is up. Laban thinks it
is a good solution because he won’t have to pay a dowry, like he had to pay to
marry off his sister Rebekah to Isaac. This way he gets free help for room and
board and marry off his daughter.
Plus he knows that Jacob has fallen “in love” with Rachel and he will be a
sucker for that deal. Rachel is the pretty one, but her older sister, Leah, has
got weak eyes. Many of the modern translators use phrases like “nice” or
“lovely” but the Hebrew is best translated as “weak”. With that handicap she
would be considered defective goods for a husband who is looking for a good
strong worker. This is a patriarchal society and men rule, and Jacob and Laban
speak to each other as manipulating men. In this story, what goes around comes
around as Jacob the liar, the manipulator, gets lied to and manipulated. Laban
gets Jacob drunk at the wedding banquet and packs him off to the bridal bed
with Leah. Whether Rachel is part of this deception, the narrator is silent,
but I would not be surprised, for later on in the Jacob saga, she gets pretty
tricky and manipulative.
However, something has happened to Jacob. When he had the
encounter with God, there was a part of his dormant soul that was awakened to
move to a full life, to live into the blessing and birthright of the person he
was created to be. To become a whole person means to be connected to the male
and female parts of oneself. Jacob is a man living in a patriarchal society and
he is adroit with the male side of his personality quite well; manipulators
know how to really read people. The Spiritual side of a person, the access to
the soul, is usually influenced by the opposite gender side and, for the man
Jacob, the other side would be what Jung called the “anima” which is the Latin
word for soul. In order to go deeper into his soul, he has to use his anima to
approach the God who he met on the road. The anima has been awakened by the
encounter with God, and it will take a lot of effort to do the soul work as he
becomes vulnerable to God.
Robert A. Johnson in his book We: Understanding the
Psychology of Romantic Love, speaks of the difficulty of living fully in a
patriarchal society;
The patriarchal mentality of our
society is inherently partial, dedicated to living the masculine side of human
nature at the expense of the feminine and at the expense of wholeness. Into
that tight insulated mind, almost nothing can enter. We are proof against the
unconscious, against feeling, against the feminine and against our own souls. The
one place where we are vulnerable, the one place where our souls can break
through our modern armor, is in our loves.
But Jacob is “in love”, and “in love” is not love; it is a
psychological malady tied to a spiritual aspiration. The quest for wholeness is
short-circuited when the anima is directed to another person and that person is
seen as the one who gives meaning to the person “in love”. Robert A. Johnson
quotes a Mexican love song: “Always you were the reason for my existence;/To
adore you for me was religion.” All of us know songs, poems, plays, movies,
lines which exclaim, “At last sweet mystery of life I've found you!” or “You
are my soul mate” and the like.
Love is knowing the full person and wanting what is best for
the other person; to be “in love” is to project one's own needs and desires
onto the other and fixate on those projections. To be “in love” lasts as long
as the projections keep coming, but begins to fall apart when we start noticing
that the other is not always the perfect one, and the God or Goddess begins to
look incredibly human. It is also a burden on the person who is the subject of the projections because
s/he can't live his/her own full life, expending so much energy living the
other person's life for them. It is
exhausting meeting every fantasy when who we really are is ignored.
When that unraveling of the illusion happens, the would-be
lover has two choices. (1) The lover shifts and finds another object on which
to place his or her illusion; always “in love”, but never finding the “right”
one, the Juliet worthy enough for this Romeo to suffer, die, and lose
themselves in the Juliet de jour's arms; never loving but always being “in
love” with being “in love”. This what Jacob does for the next several
chapters. He serially will go to bed
with both of his wives AND their maids, and I think he is “in love” every time. Then when he is disappointed in the level of
perfection in one, he moves on to another.
This is just a guess on my part, but that is the way I used to operate
as a serial “in lover”, projecting all my need to “find” myself in someone
else's eyes instead of doing the hard work of love myself. (2) The other option is to withdraw the
projections and approach the other with respect and awe. Love is only when two
people, working on becoming whole, as full individuals, enter into a
relationship. Love is not 1 plus 1 equals 1, nor 1 plus 1 equals two, but one
plus one equals three which is you, me, and the sacred space between us.
To be “in love” is not a bad thing, for it can open a path
to the deeper understanding that there is really this whole other reality deep
in our soul, to follow our anima into a relationship with the divine. Johnson
quotes de Rougemount, Love in the Western World: “Why is it we delight
most of all in some tale of impossible love? Because we long for the branding;
because we long to grow aware of what is on fire inside us”
To be “in love” is the beginning, and if we are lucky and
work hard at it, we can move to love. When we see our weakness in making God
and Goddesses out of fallible human beings, then we can ask for help from the
spirit of God to transform us into seekers of a deeper relationship with God.
As Paul says in today’s lesson from Romans: “The Spirit helps us in our
weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit
intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart,
knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the
saints according to the will of God.”
Paul can also be counted on to tell us what love really
looks like in the 13th Chapter of 1st Corinthians. It
does not look like the ego-driven projection of our wants and fantasies on to
another person but :
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
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