The World & I: Why did you pick Jacob as your subject rather than, say, Abraham or Isaac?
Frederick Buechner: Ever since I read Graham Green's The power and the Glory, that marvelous novel about the whiskey priest, I've been interested in the notion of a saint as a human being who's just as much clay-footed and full of shadows as the rest of us, but who is used nonetheless by God for His own purposes, in His own way. That started me writing about such people my self, and I wrote a series of novels about a man named Leo Bebb, who was (a) a kind of religious crook and (b) a saint in that sense, sort of a bearer of grace. And that led from him into Godric, another, in this case, historical, English saint who was a pirate and a lecher and a scoundrel in some ways, but also a saint. And another one, Brendan. And suddenly, I thought, "My God, there's Jacob. Absolutely made to order--a man who was all that he was, a rascal, a character of his father, a character of his brother and, at the same time, was the father of the twelve tribes and the bearer of the promise." So Jacob was a natural next step for me. Here was another wonderful saint. Feet of clay but full of the grace of God, a lifegiver.
W&I: What does Jacob's story as you have written it have to do with us today as we seek God?
Buechner: I think that the relevance of this Jacob story for all of us in our search for God, maybe, first of all, is that God is at least as enthusiastically, if not more so searching for us. That seems to be what is happening again and again in the Jacob narratives. You'd think that God would simply wash his hands of Jacob, but there He is appearing to him in a beautiful dream, or speaking words of comfort and hope to him in the night.
And the second thing is one must never give up hope because nothing that we do seems to put us beyond the reach of God's mercy. Jacob is one of the lam, taking off one jump a head of the sheriff having cheated his brother and knowing that his brother is about to come after him with an ax--full of guilt and shame, with good reason to feel both. It's at that point that god gives him that wonderful dream, with the ladder stretching to heaven, at the top of which God Himself stands, and says, "I'm going to make you the father of a great nation." So I would say two things: God searches for us, and nothing we do puts us beyond the reach of God's mercy.
I think I found that in my own life--I don't make any conscious connection, but a
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