First, God tells him to leave the land of his family to set out for a land he does not know. Abram, now Abraham, does as God tells him. Then, in an even more dramatic show of faith, he accepts God’s instruction on circumcision as a sign of the covenant. But the situation I am thinking of is God’s instruction that he sacrifice his son Isaac to show God the depth of his faith. For me, this story can shed some light on what God expects of us as parents. Let me explain.
As animals, we are biologically predisposed to procreate, to “be fruitful and multiply.” As mammals, we are also programmed to nurture our young, so that they can learn to love, move on, procreate, and thereby continue the species. As far as we know, unlike our mammalian counterparts, however, human beings are gifted (or is it cursed?) with an ego, a self-centeredness that also needs to be fed and nurtured. For the most blessed among us, that ego is sustained by faith and trust in the Divine and by a sense of our uniqueness in the eyes of God.
For most of us, though, the ego within needs to be fed from the outside—through our intellect, our achievements, our possessions, our reputations. And what could be more personal an achievement, more important a “possession” than our own flesh and blood? Even if we are not biological parents, the emotional and psychological bonds with our children create a connection that rivals genetics. It is no wonder that so many of us, used to having everything our way, with our fragile egos so closely bound to things of this world, are so wrapped up in our children and their lives, and often find it hard to let them go.
In the tradition of Jungian archetypes, we look to the story of Abraham and Isaac as a depiction of what God intends for us in our role as parents. At first, God speaks loud and clear to Abraham’s human need for ego gratification and his desire for immortality when he says, “I will make of you a great nation” (Gen 12:2, NAB) and “Look up at the sky and count the stars…just so shall your descendants be” (Gen 15:5). He gives him a son to carry on his lineage and care for him in his ever-advancing years.
Then, just when the boy Isaac is coming of age, God speaks again to Abraham, instructing him to now sacrifice this most treasured gift, his link to immortality. Of course, we know the story has a happy ending in that Isaac does not meet his.
While God has not, to my knowledge, asked any other human being to offer his or her offspring as holocaust, God does expect us to sacrifice the ego gratification we derive from our children for our children, to let them go off on their own path, to make their own lives, separate and distinct from ours. It takes a strong sense of self, which, in my view, needs to be based on an even stronger faith to do this effectively, without wounding ourselves or our children in the process.
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