https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8dhgqSj11AM
Rilke has a wonderful poem where he talks about Jacob wrestling with the angel and he says this, chew on this. Most of our successes make us small. Most of our successes make us small. What we desire is to be defeated decisively by constantly greater beings. To be defeated decisively by constantly greater beings. And the business of storytelling is to carry something that feels heavier than you can handle. I’ll finish with this. I didn’t think I’d tell you this, but I’ve just returned from a remote Irish island, a place called Innis Shire, where I’ve been living in the remains of an old abandoned monastic cell, no roof, middle of January. It took three days to get there. And I was on this little plane and in the end they said, the boats, you’ll die on the boat. We’re going to have to fly you into the storm. And it was me and a guy called Michal, this little Irish guy with his dog. And Michal said to me, he said, you have a little depression in you. Just, I mean, there’s some sorrow moving through you. That’s how he would say it. Not in me, but moving through. And he said, this is what you have to do. When you get to the island, find a heavy rock, pick the rock up, carry it for as long as you can, and then put it somewhere higher than where you picked it up. And you will feel different. That was the genius of Michal. And then he was gone into the mist and I never saw him again. But I am now a confirmed rock carrier. But the important thing is don’t take it back to where you found it and put it on a slightly higher place than when you found it. So that’s what happens to Abraham in the Abrahamic stories, right? Because with each adventure he undertakes. He’s called upon to make a slightly more significant sacrifice, right? And that leads to a horizon of greater opportunity, which is capped by a slightly greater sacrifice. And so he moves, he moves up the ladder of sacrifice. And that’s a useful thing to know in your life, too, because what it means is that you will be called upon to sacrifice for the next adventure. And then the horizon of opportunity that that adventure will open up will require a larger sacrifice. And that never ends. I mean, it culminates, of course, with Abraham. It culminates in God’s demand that he sacrifice his son, which is obviously part of the story that human beings, that people still wrestle with terribly, that the atheist community points to constantly as indication of the pathological nature of of Yawa without understanding, for example, they don’t understand that you have to sacrifice everything to God. Right. And you say, well, you’re not your children. It’s like, well, not only do you have to sacrifice your children to God, but if you’re a good parent, that’s what you do. Right. And if you do it right, then you get them back. Yeah. Right. Which is a very good deal. But that doesn’t mean that the sacrifice isn’t real, because if you’re a good parent, you you don’t hold on to your child. You encourage your child to disappear. My daughter, when she was three, she came to me with the following dream. This is so cool. It was so remarkable. And I caught it. I wrote it down because she told it to me while I was writing. She came in. She said, Dad, I had a dream about Julian. Julian was like 18 months at the time. He was right on the transition from being a baby. Maybe he was 15 months to being a toddler. And she called him baby all the time. And we said, Michaela, he’s not a baby anymore. This bothered her because she liked the baby. And she had spent a lot of time taking care of that baby. And she was part of her was wondering, well, I like that baby. He’s gone. Like, now what? Now what’s there? And so she had this wild dream. She dreamt that a tree from the forest next to us came into the backyard and it burned to the ground and left a pit full of water. And the baby crawled into the pit full of water and dissolved into a skeleton. And a little bug went in and pulled him out. And then he was reborn on the outside of the water. And I thought, you know, don’t be thinking children don’t know anything. Like they they have ancient imaginations, right? Ancient imaginations and her imaginary representation was so it was so stellar that that that this tree would come and disappear. That was Julian, you know, going through this transformation into what he was going to become next. It was a loss. It was a baptism. It was a dissolution. And that something would guide him through that. And that was the bug. It’s like Jiminy Cricket. You know, it’s the it’s it’s I’m dead serious about that. It’s the thing that remains constant within you across transformations. Right. And and it pulled him out and he was reconstituted on the other side. She had to learn to let the baby go to sacrifice the baby so that she could establish a relationship with what was to come next. And there was some real grief in her about that. And it’s the grief that every parent has, especially mothers on recognition that the proper way forward is to sacrifice their children continually. Right. And and to what? Well, to the to be broken by the world. Right. Just like Mary with with the body of Christ. It’s exact. It’s this exactly the same thing. It’s never ending progression of increasing sacrifice, sacrifice of increasing intensity. Right. And so. That’s the pathway forward to to this, to the to the heavenly banquet.