(Jacob is on his way back home to find his brother. Outwardly he has all the signs of success; he's actually quite a scoundrel, but in many ways his life has been charmed, and all he has done has worked out to his benefit. But inside he still carries the emptiness of broken relationship with his brother and the unresolved guilt of wounds he has caused along the way. He is afraid of what he has left behind, of what he carries inside his heart, and of what he must come home to.)
We have a Joel Osteen book in our house. It's the one called Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day.
My step-son encourages me to read it because he finds Osteen "so encouraging," and I can see how that can be. But, at least at this stage in my life, I just don't see good news in Osteen's version of the prosperity gospel of More, Higher, and an always Better, More Improved "Me."
Two other books that speak more deeply to me right now are Pema Chodron's The Wisdom of No Escape, and Elizabeth Lesser's Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow.
The first, which I stumbled across in a used book store, is a series of morning meditations offered by Pema Chodron, abbess of Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastery in Cape Breton, to retreatants over the course of a month-long retreat. The second, which I began reading three years ago while on medical leave to deal with a variety of disorders, is a collection of life-stories of people who have found new and more whole life by facing and embracing, rather than running from and "overcoming" whatever darkness they encountered or were carrying in their life.
Both of these books speak of going deeper, rather than higher; of looking inside with honesty and gentleness at who you are, rather than reaching out with aggression, self-determination, and "a plan" to make yourself who you want to be (or think you need to be); and finding the wholeness and goodness of your inner self (in all your light and darkness mixed together), rather than having to prove yourself by constantly improving what you have and seem to be in your own eyes or the eyes of the world.
I wonder if Jacob, in the part of the people-of-God story we are reading in worship this Sunday, is in the midst of a transition from running with Joel Osteen and the prosperity gospel, to sitting with Pema Chodron, Elizabeth Lesser and the wisdom of no escape.
And if what we see, read, hear, pray and sing to God around that story this Sunday, will somehow touch our own longings for a deeper way of facing our own inner contradictions, and of glimpsing gracious wholeness through and beyond the unresolved emptinesses of our lives.
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