From a Description of the Novel: Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.

    Jacob was there because his luck had run out --- orphaned at 23 and penniless, he had no direction until he landed on this locomotive "ship of fools." It was the early part of the Great Depression, and everyone in this third-rate circus was lucky to have any job at all. Marlena, the beautiful star of the equestrian act, was there because she fell in love with the wrong man, named August, a handsome circus boss with a wide mean streak. And Rosie the elephant was there because she was the great gray hope, the new act that was going to be the salvation of the circus; the only problem was, Rosie didn't have an act --- in fact, she couldn't even follow instructions. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio, Jacob and Marlena and Rosie, was one of love and trust, and ultimately, it was their only hope for survival in a world built on flaws and wonders.

    The story is two stories; the ninety year old Jacob of today and the youthful Jacob he remembers. This excerpt is the world of Jacob of today, which of course contains the elements of human struggle of frustration and hope that were part of his yesterday, too. And today’s Jacob may face these again as the circus is in town, and its appearance begins to stir in him a history he had once lived.

    What is spiritual growth about? Is it finally conceding yourself to beliefs you don’t hold but that others say you should? Is it arranging your life so that you fulfill what society or various religions say is moral and good? Is it fulfilling your wants and needs and desires and understandings? Is it worshipping your own projections of authority, judgment, refuge, and security, worshipping a god of your own projections? Or, is it something entirely different? Maybe spiritual growth is about learning you are flawed and imperfect, inconsistent and ambiguous, but still searching to serve something larger than what you can fathom. Maybe spiritual growth has to be hard, must include pain and trial, longing and discontent, uncertainty and incomprehensibility, until at last you begin to change and grow in spiritual stature. Maybe spiritual growth involves discerning a purpose to your days and beginning to see your individual life as part of a life larger than the preferences, predilections, and prejudices of your ego alone. Maybe transformation can occur at any age!

    If you are not interested in theology or the prospect of God as something more than our individual ego-wants and needs projected large as flawless perfections, you may not find a deeper meaning to Sara Gruen’s book. The main character Jacob has a bawdy experience with a stripper, falls in love with a married women, wrestles with her vicious husband and plots to kill him, and when the husband is killed by the circus elephant Rosie, Jacob swoops in to rescue the elephant from being held accountable for the murder as elephants in Depression-era circuses often were. Elephants were executed for murder! He whisks off the widow to marry her and spends the rest of his life with her and the family they produce. Jacob is not a sympathetic hero like the underdog or the champion. No purity and perfection here. No delusion that death isn’t real because you can just be resurrected up out of the worms. Human pride, lust, greed, spitefulness, cunning, cruelty, malice, the sensual smell of animals and men, the secreted way human beings use one another for ego gratification, all of this is part of this novel. Like the world of the Old Testament, Water for Elephants is filled with flawed characters with warts and the circus is like a tribe of Israel. In fact in an interview author Sara Gruen admitted she liked literature that has “layers” and that the “backbone” of her book “parallels the biblical story of Jacob.” Of course, you can just read the novel as a story in the same way you can read your life as just a series of events and facts. Or, you can plunge into the layers.

    If you don’t know the story of the Biblical Jacob it will be difficult for you to enter into the deeper layers. One of the spiritual problems with our age is that we don’t know these stories and that sets up a challenge whose breadth we may not even comprehend. We don’t practice the art of using Biblical narrative to unlock the deeper regions of self and world. You can travel from cradle to grave thinking your life is yours alone and the facts of your life are all the meaning your life has. You can travel from cradle to grave thinking Bible stories are literalisms to be believed in as literally true or rejected literally as false. You can conceive of life as having primarily to do with truth and falsity. Or, you can practice living in the layers.

    Jacob comes to know intimately one woman and finds his lifelong love in another. Jacob gains a flock of this own animals, a family, and his life’s direction. Jacob goes on a journey which becomes a time of transformation whereby he comes to know who he is, discovering the meaning and direction of his life. This is Jacob of the Old Testament and Water for Elephants.

    In the Old Testament Jacob’s story culminates at the river Jabbock the night before his reckoning when, it is said, that he wrestled with the angel. If you live in literalisms this is either literally true or false, but if you dive into the layers it is something more. Jacob had come to see all the pain and misery he had caused to himself and others because he was self-serving. He was ego-centric. He was thoughtful, but it only served the cunning way he deceived others for his own gain. He was loving, but could love another as that other person served his wants and needs, like a child’s love for his mother who does everything for him. He could care for others including his own family, but only as that care somehow benefited him. At the river he was about to confront his brother whom he had swindled with thoughtful cunning, had loved as it benefited himself, and had cared for only for his own gain. At the river Jabbok he came to see all this, the shadow side of himself. He wrestled with that and learned these characteristics would not go away because they were what constituted him. They were the person he was created as. But in realizing this he could be transformed and grow in spiritual stature through his intent and his consent. He would use these characteristics of himself not to serve his own wants and needs, but as the means to aim himself towards serving something larger than his own ego. The name Jacob means figuratively, “he deceives.” Jacob confronts his shadow side and is transformed, gets a new name at Jabbok, a new identity after wrestling with the angel by the river and no longer living in the deception of ego-centricity..

    You can live in the layers at any age, or literalisms all your life long. You can be transformed out of self-centeredness at any time in your life, or read your life only as a series of events and facts. You can live in the layers and be transformed, and this can happen as many times as there are days to your life.

    Ever since Freud we cannot look at religion and the spiritual dimensions of narrative the same again. We project onto the cosmos issues of authority and judgment really having to do with our fathers, and claim we either know God’s characteristics, which are strikingly like our father’s, or don’t believe in God, which again is a God we’ve rejected but who bears a striking resemblance to our father. We say we are religious or irreligious and really are serving our own ego and its projections and neuroses. We project onto the world issues of security and refuge really having to do with our mothers, and then can’t figure out why we are insecure, lack confidence, anxiously wrestle with self-doubt, and find the world unwilling to meet our every need, asking, “Why me?” when we suffer. Well, why not me? We say we are religious or irreligious and really are driven by our ego wants and need fulfillments. Narrative can be used spiritually to separate out what are our projections, from what the deeper layers of self and existence are. We can see how we deceive ourselves in our ego-centricity.

    In Water for Elephants Jacob is an old man looking back over his life. In a “Joseph-and-his-amazing-technicolor-dreamcoat” society like ours formed around youthful pursuits, this old man is suffering neglect and a loss of self. In his dream-like remembering he escapes to his youth in the circus where he worked as an animal veterinarian. To old Jacob’s generation “running off to join the circus” was a means or expression for escape or adventure. Jacob is taking an inventory of his life like his counterpart at the river Jabbok, and his remembering of his spiritual transformation during his youthful circus days becomes itself an opportunity for another, and maybe final, spiritual transformation.

    Spiritual transformations are brought about when our egocentricity is changed through suffering. Jacob remembers how he joined the circus because he has suffered the loss of his parents when he was in his 20’s. He was unprepared for this loss in part because he had yet to differentiate himself from his father or his mother. He suffered as though he was the victim of some capricious judgment of a random God, a god whose characteristics were like an earthly father. He chafed at how life had not given him the security and certainty he wanted and needed and deserved, characteristics of an earthly mother! He did not know his own motives, and at first looked to the women of the circus for security and refuge as it they were his mother. He looked to the judgments of the almighty circus boss Al as if he were his father.

    But his ego-centricity - the way a human being experiences his life as simply the projections of his own desire to escape suffering, his own neuroses about his parents abandoning him - all of this begins to change when out of his own suffering Jacob begins to care for others. Spiritual transformations are brought about when our egocentricity is changed “through suffering, through the recognition of a power greater than our own will at work in our lives …” (The Man Who Wrestled with God, John Sanford, p 21) He takes care of the animals as if they are his family, nursing them to health, caressing them when they are frightened and alarmed, feeding them when they are hungry. He even is forced to mercifully end the life of one horse to save it from horrible suffering. Jacob rescues one old man from a certain and gruesome death, and secretes him away in his room to keep him safe from harm and to bring him care and compassion him. He risks compassion despite social prohibitions. The power of human affection brings Jacob out of his ego-centeredness and into a covenantal relationship of responsibility and obligation with other human beings, other sentient creatures, and what one theologian called, our Covenant with Being. He is still the flawed character he was before. But he has grown in spiritual stature to use his flaws to ennoble life and carry it forward towards Love and Justice. He begins to live for a power greater than his own will, larger than his own neuroses, his own shadows, even greater than his own sense of justice and affection limited as human conceptions of these are.

    Spiritual transformations are brought about when our egocentricity is changed “by coming to care for someone other than ourself.” (The Man Who Wrestled with God, John Sanford, p 21) Jacob falls in love. In the flawed world of human existence and affection it is not a perfect love. Marlena is married. At first Jacob treats the object of his love as if she were his long lost mother, placing her upon a pedestal which we often do to parents when we lose them, and men often do with their mothers and when they mistake infatuation for Love. At first he engages Marlena as a projection of his own needs for security and refuge. But, gradually he grows in self-understanding, that to have a relationship with another is have a relationship with a stranger, with an “other” who separate from our projections of our needs and neuroses, who is an autonomous self, an “other.” He comes to encounter and concern himself not with his own beliefs but with the “otherness” inherent in real relatedness.

    Marlena is married to a physically and emotionally abusive man who is a father figure to her, trapped in her own ego-centeredness as she is. When she decides to leave him she chooses the health of her unfolding self over the authority we project onto fathers to make all our judgments for us, to know “what is right for us.” It is, ironically, part ego-centeredness that engineers the pathological drive to declare it is God’s will that a woman stay in a physically abusive marriage. Marlena grows beyond her ego-centricity in her decision to leave her abusive husband, as Jacob grows in his love for a woman who is different from his mother and can make her own decisions. As individuals their various “selves” begin to unfold and real relatedness in their lives becomes possible.

    Spiritual transformations are brought about when we are liberated from our egocentricity “through suffering, through the recognition of a power greater than our own will at work in our lives, and by coming to care for someone other than ourself.” (The Man Who Wrestled with God, John Sanford, p 21) But, the setting for these transformations can be a circus train in the Depression, a nursing home, or wherever you find yourself today and every other moment of the coming week. The Jacob of today is an old man trapped in a deteriorated body, in a nursing home where he has no more autonomy of self than an infant whose needs are never considered, but supplied by parents in the ways that parents want to supply them. He’s not allowed to think for himself let alone take care of anything of himself by himself. He is not even allowed to shower or go to the bathroom himself. Although he is physically capable of these, it is against the rules of the nursing home. He suffers, wonders why this is happening to him, and needs be wrestled out of his own immediate wants and needs. He is ripe for a spiritual transformation!

    In other words, the spiritual life begins in the recognition that your life is not yours. If you see it as completely yours you are only looking through the lens of your own projections, your own neuroses, and your own fallible and necessarily narrow view of things. You can live this way. You can live as if your life is yours completely and yours alone, in the same way that you can read a novel like Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and think that all it is about is the story of a ninety year-old man remembering back to his younger days as a veterinarian in a second rate circus where he finds his life’s true love. You can think fact and event is all there is to existence, like the plot is all there is about a good novel. You can think the series of facts that make up your life are all your life means and is about. But by being here, I think you suspect something more than just facts and plot are at stake in our living. You suspect and hope there is something more.

    And it is this suspicion that is hope disguised, and which is buried deep within human being as the image of God in which we have been created. The spiritual life is about diving deeper and risking going into the layers of meaning to human existence to discover the way your life is not yours. We are flawed and imperfect. All who have walked this earth were and are. We can remained centered in our flaws and imperfections by projecting them out onto the world and expect it to have a perfection that meets all our needs and wants and desires. “God judges those who believe falsely” becomes indistinguishable from “It is God’s will that she should die so young and inexplicably.” We can serve a purpose no larger than our own neuroses writ large. Many do and call it religion. But make no mistake about it. It is pathology, a morbid spiritual disease. Or, we can see today that the sufferings we and humanity endures, the longing for meaning that lingers in us and all humanity, and the need for love of an “other,” are all callings to us to be liberated out of the exclusive worship of personal ego and into practicing a spiritually transformed kind of living. Here, that call of liberation is made every week for you to practice for an hour of self-examination inside of an intentional spiritual community, which itself is part of a long tradition of faith, so that your life every other hour can be lived out of that practice. Think on these things and examine how it is in your life that you serve ego and self. And consent to be liberated into another way, where the characteristics that make you who you are, can serve something larger than self, and reveal a truth consecrated through the ages through the service and sacrifice of individuals and communities: There abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

AMEN.

Be not afraid. And seeing there is naught to fear, and bearing witness to what can never die, go forth into the world in peace.

Be of good courage.

Search all things

And hold fast to that which is good.

Render unto no one evil for evil.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Help the afflicted.

Love all men, love all women, love all children,

Love all souls.

Serving the Most High.

And rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

AMEN.