Announcing an Upcoming Series
Jacob the Wayfarer
There’s no character in the Book of Genesis who fascinates me more than Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, and father of Joseph.
He, like so many of us, is a concidence of opposites1: a devious trickster and scoundrel on the one hand and a forthright truthteller and hero on the other. He’s absolutely trustworthy in some regards and utterly faithless in others, lovingly self-giving at times and cynically heartless at others, ravished on at least two occasions by a theophanous vision but more often coldly fixated on wealth and power. He schemes and cheats, regrets doing so, repents of his actions—and then falls into the same cycle again and again. Although his life trajectory suggests some moral growth, the two sides of Jacob remain in conflict until—literally—his dying day.
And yet there’s something about this picaresque man that gestures at the grandeur of being human without whitewashing the weaknesses and failings to which its prone.
Jacob, in other words, is a reflection of you and me. He’s an archetypal existential figure whose wayfaring shows us that our flaws need not be fatal and, in truth, may be part of the rubbled foundation of our virtues. He reminds us of the great truth that although very few of us are saints, even fewer of us are broken through and through. The deeper we plumb his story, surely one of the greatest psychological and spiritual dramas in literature, the more our own interiors are revealed.
So in the next few weeks, I plan to launch an eight-part series, “Jacob the Wayfarer,” in which I’ll wrestle (pun intended) with the startling complexity of this fascinating character. Like my “Presence of Grace” series in which I explore Catholic novels (by the way, the next installment, on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, should be out next week), individual chapters on Jacob will be interspersed between my non-serial essays.
This is how I envision the series:
(1) Isaac’s Trauma: The Dangling Knife
(2) Heel-Grabber: Inherited Fear
(3) Red, Red Stuff: The Color of Tragedy
(4) Waking Under the Ladder: First Theophany
(5) Jacob in Love: The Trickster Tricked
(6) The Wayfarer Returns: And Yet Doesn’t
(7) Wounded Manhood at the Jabbok: Second Theophany
(8) Crossed Hands: The Past is Never Past
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With apologies to Nicholas of Cusa.
looking forward to it