With God as Guide
As a Christmas present to myself, I went ahead and bought the new Jordan Peterson book “We Who Wrestle with God.” I have especially enjoyed his series on Exodus where he and a panel of other academics and scholars unpack Mose’s escape from tyranny, only to find themselves in the desert. As I reflected on my own life, I saw clearer much of the symbolism in recent years. We left the Seattle area to a place that God would show us, and I could tell you with 100% certainty that I would have never picked this land. We don’t exactly get to choose, and I find this to be a better option when I have been prone to make the worst decisions for myself in the moment. I’d rather someone make a choice for me who knows me, just as often I receive far better presents than I’d gift to myself, (besides this book of course). If I didn’t choose it, then I’m far more confident that something good awaits. I do not have to toss and turn wondering if I had led my family to the wrong destination, not when the choice has been decided by outside forces in a miraculous move across country completely paid for with 100 miracles circling the story much like a Biblical excerpt. All I know is that I escaped the tyranny- whether self inflicted, (most of it of course was) or via exterior happenstance, (and there was that too). Up until recently, I thought for certain that we had entered the theoretical Promised Land, but in my anxiousness to then take it over, I had forgotten the dreaded story of the desert. Compared to the tyranny, the desert is wonderful, but it has come with its own frustrations. Mostly, the desert is not meant to be taken over. It’s an in between, and if you try and take it over, it becomes evident that nothing can be or should be built there.
“It is apprehension of the reality and inevitability of that desert state- that intermediary grief, hopelessness, and confusion- that makes us approach enlightenment or its messengers with trepidation, resistance, or outright hostility. Would the surgery necessary to remove all that is not properly aligned or meet within us not risk killing the patient- or, at least, leave him or her begging for death? We so often reject penitence, even when accused, with reason, by those who love us, (and who we know love us). We reject the necessity of transformation, sticking blindly and stubbornly to our guns. We remain slaves to our own narrow, self-serving whims because we refuse to acknowledge even a hint of our own self-produced inadequacy. Who among us could therefore survive the kind of winnowing that would allow only what was best within us to stand? Thus, we avoid the healing death of the fire that is simultaneously God and the redeeming Word. As the Gospel of Thomas has it, “Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the (Father’s) kingdom…
… Had we made the proper sacrifices, would the dread spirit of the punishing God have passed over us? These are in truth open questions. What answers emerge from the biblical corpus, piecemeal, step-by-step? It is all on you- with God as Guide. That is an unbearable burden, although a noble burden; certainly a challenge; possibly the ultimate challenge; possibly the secret to life and the return to Paradise itself.”
It is all on you- with God as Guide. This led me out of the tyranny of my own mind and place. It was the awful truth that stung me deeply to my core. It is not on God, as so many surrounding me were prone to say. It is not everyone else’s fault, as so many others in culture were shouting on the streets. I alone have a cross to bear, and when no one else could be blamed or no prayers hoisted into Heaven be answered, I looked within myself. What could I do? Though we live in a world of chaos with trillions of moving parts, what could I do to take hold of my cross without being utterly destroyed by it? I could change the way I viewed life. I could pivot every time something was out of my control. I could do everything in my power to make the few choices that only I could make, and somehow, that led me out of the tyranny and into the desert. It was a crippling process but when the figurative army was behind me and the giant body of water before me- the sea parted and I led my family through. It was all on me, no one else sharing my responsibilities, with God as guide.
When you escape the tyranny, the desert can look like a promise. Eventually though, the spoils of Egypt dry out and the attempt to conquer the land that was merely a path forward becomes a child’s fantasy. There’s a process to everything. We escaped the tyranny, but it takes time for the tyranny to escape us. With a new place, a quiet place, there’s nowhere to run. Like being on a long airplane ride in modern times, perhaps we eventually run out of episodes to watch or things to distract us and all we can do is look out the window and face our own thoughts. Like a passenger on an airplane, we are the least in control. This is not to say that when we embrace our cross, it is not “light” as it is written. It is light. We do not have to fly the plane or choose the destination. What we do have to do is be willing to get on the flight and that is the burden we bear because it comes with the consequences of acknowledging that we do not have as much control as we think we do. All we have to do is be willing to be transformed, and as the beautiful writing of Peterson illustrates, it is much harder and rarer than many could imagine.
It is all on you- with God as guide.