#28 LEAH: MARY AS AN UGLY DUCKLING
“I like Leah, Gatekeeper. In The Red Tent she is described as tall, strong and with vibrant eyes of different colours, one blue, and one green. She is blessed with full high shapely breasts and muscular calves. What do you see when you look at her?”
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“In real life, as opposed to your romance, she is the exact opposite although I’ll grant you she is tall. Leah has a squarish face, small in shape with clear sallow skin, and a bad posture because she is slightly stooped; she’s near sighted and has a high domed forehead. Her teeth are crooked, the front upper incisors crossed, all the defects you would expect to see in an overcrowded mouth with a high palate; a plain woman, very plain and half blind with bad eyesight.
Leah had no illusions about herself because she’d been told since she was small she was the ugly one and she was neglected as a child. Leah was also not very strong. Her pretty sister tormented her and because Leah did not have the physical strength to be a shepherd and Laban had no sons until much later, Rachel had to be the shepherd, which was something she didn’t like.”
“What was Leah’s role in the family of Laban?”
“Cinderella! The drudge! She ran the household, cleaned, ground the grain. But she was the eldest, and therefore, according to custom, she must be married first. Laban had entered into a contract with Jacob only to hoodwink him. The marriage feast would run for a week like a Hindu wedding and on the first night Laban got Jacob very drunk. Then he sent Leah, not Rachel, to Jacob’s tent. Because Jacob, had sexual congress with Leah he either had to marry her or forfeit the dowry which he had worked so hard for seven hard years. So Jacob had to do another deal to marry Rachel by agreeing to work another seven years and therefore paying Rachel’s bride price, twice.
Jacob was so disgusted at Laban’s treachery that he did not treat Leah well. Leah was sweet natured, hard working and wanted desperately to please him. She named her first son Reuben, which means “Look! A son.” I have had a son … now … look at me. She hoped after his birth she would be treated better. Instead Jacob treated her carelessly: she would wash his feet and then feed him and he would push her away without any kind words. Jacob would say to her: ‘I don’t know why I am stuck with you – you’re so ugly.’
And Leah’s sons belittled her authority because they knew they could get away with disobeying her and they encouraged their half brothers to make fun of her as well. He was tricked into marrying her, an unforgivable treachery both to her and to him and he just wanted to get rid of her if he could.”
“But didn’t Jacob have to learn about trickery by being tricked?”
“Exactly and because he didn’t learn his lesson God was prompted to intervene.”
“Why did Mary have to incarnate as Leah?”
“She had to learn to be ugly and short-sighted after her beauty as Sarah and to help Jacob achieve his mission.”
“Did she ever have to reincarnate as a very ugly woman again?”
“Once that ugly was enough!”
“Did her looks improve as she matured?”
“Over the years her looks softened as her face grew fuller. Jacob did, somewhat remorsefully, grow to love her and the sons she gave him and his daughter, Dinah. If you follow what each name of their sons’ means in Hebrew, you can see the improvement in their relationship. From “hey, look, a son’ to ‘God answered my prayers’ to Zebulhum, ‘He makes me happy’. Jacob wasn’t a man who expressed his love very easily and Rachel was still the love of his life.
Eventually Jacob grew to appreciate Leah’s finer points; she was the uncomplaining model of the handmaiden with a heart of love. She taught Jacob about selfless love and she taught that also to her sons.”
“What characteristics of Mary did Leah bring in?”
“Patience, kindness, compassion, boundless love, incredible loyalty and Mary’s capacity to see it through to the death … perseverance. Leah demonstrated that you can be strong without being aggressive. And these were the finer points Jacob came to appreciate!”
“What was her life’s purpose?”
“It was to co-found a dynasty with Jacob and to tie all her qualities together. Leah’s was one of the most remarkable lives in the Bible; her life that had nothing going for it. Betrayed by her father, despised by her husband, hated by her sister, rejected by her children, no-one was ever on Leah’s side…nobody…ever!”
“Did she achieve what she set out to achieve?”
“She unswervingly displayed all her beautiful qualities!”
“What was her spiritual challenge?”
“For Leah, it was a hard life in which she was hurt very deeply, very often by her father, her sister, her husband, and eventually by her children. Leah’s spiritual challenge was coping with a poor self-image, as an unlovable human being, who did not have the authority the premium wife should have. In spite of a life full of put-downs, Leah was humble with a brightly burning faith in God and a loving wife to a neglectful and emotionally brutal husband.”
“What was her greatest achievement?”
“Leah’s triumph over all those circumstances makes her the mother of all those wives who suffer unfairness, neglect, and lack of appreciation and of love. She was a woman of great virtue for when it would have been very easy to lapse into resentment, very easy to seek out revenge, or very easy to mistreat other women’s children or other wives or handmaidens, instead of being a destructive force, she was a cohesive force. Above it all, unbelievably, she loved Jacob. Well you’ve met him, he was easy to love. And she improved the gene pool by giving a healthy intelligence to her offspring. Rachel, beautiful though she was, was not very bright. Mary has acknowledged this as one of her lives of spiritual triumph.”
THINKING ABOUT THESE LIVES
Each of the lives in this chapter contributed to the founding of the belief in one God and did so in remarkably different ways. At times of climate change, events that are normally rhythmical and renewing become catastrophic, as we in the twenty-first century know only too well. The deluge between 6,500 and 7,000BC, which inundated the rift valley of modern day Iraq and spread to surrounding countries, was a catastrophic event. It destroyed the old and allowed the new to slowly flourish in a fertile crescent.
Noah’s role was not to preserve the biodiversity of the planet or even of his region, but exactly the reverse, to save the best breeding stock of recently domesticated farm animals and to save the best strains of wheat and barley. Noah was also to preserve his own biological seed from his nine wives and his son’s nine wives ready to become the distant ancestors in Mesopotamia of Krishna and Arjuna, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Leah, and Benjamin and Joseph.
The Noah of the Biblical account is a moral figure; the Nuah of the Gatekeeper’s is far from it. He is without the unifying moral context of the Biblical text. The Gatekeeper’s account describes a purely physical universe and the moral universe, which he says was superimposed later, is absent. This will become a pattern in a number of his Biblical accounts.
In the Bible, Noah’s story progresses the story of a people’s relationship with God; in the Gatekeeper’s account he describes the origin of the momentous leap in the improvement of grain and animal husbandry through selective breeding which allowed the cultivation and storage of superior forms of grain, from which villages, towns and cities grew and civilisation emerged in Mesopotamia. Without Noah, the start of western civilisation would have been set back thousands of years because by reconfiguring his animals, plants and seeds he influenced a major transformation of society.
Abraham, five thousand years later was a wandering herdsman and Sarah’s role was to restart the unifying process. These were three sources of spiritual input in their lives; the first was the voice of God heard only by Abraham. The second was the mysterious Zarathustrian priest Melchizedek and the third was the relatively weak influence of the Egyptian culture and religion.
The spiritual message in Mary’s life as Sarah was ‘endurance’. She persevered with good grace for seventy-five years in an abusive, emotionally violent marriage living the injustices of being a married woman who twice was given away as a concubine yet she could still laugh and enjoy life. Paraphrasing CS Lewis; she learned to forgive the unforgivable because God has already forgiven the unforgivable.
In her next life as Leah, she was a woman who was hated, but loved anyway. She was rejected by her parents, her sister, by her husband and by her sons. Her status as the first wife was never accepted. She patiently asked God for Jacob to love her. Instead she was the one to be punished for her father’s treachery. Jacob, named the deceiver, in fact was deceived by others: by Laban into marrying Leah and by Rachel’s bewitching beauty and by his own blindness for not realising the true worth of Leah.
Leah’s descendants are the luminaries of the Bible: it is her son Judah after whom the Jews are called and from her son Levi all priests would come. From her son Levi, Moses and his brother Aaron descended as was King David, Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary’s uncle, John the Baptist, Peter, Joseph, Barnabas and Jeshua ben Joseph, the Christ.
And then there is Jacob! God’s choice of patriarchs is interesting. They are tough herdsmen, rugged individualists, sharp dealers and enterprising men who travel on foot thousands of miles throughout their lifetimes walking from Iraq to Egypt. Jacob’s role was to found a nation and he needed vision, leadership, self-confidence, unbelievable physical and emotional toughness. He was well endowed with all those qualities. What he lacked was faith in God while what he had in abundance was trickiness. Jacob himself, despite being tricked three times did not change his behaviour. In a long night of wrestling, he wrestled with God himself and God won and Jacob acquiesced, wounded and acknowledged the might of God and greeted his new name ‘Israel’ with humility, knowing that God had met him man to man as an equal and his trickiness, his double dealing, didn’t work but his wisdom and justice did.
St Germain as Jacob is the second example of a life fathering Lord Sananda who will eventually incarnate in the third example of St Germain as his father as the Son of God, Jesus.
Although we cannot access the difficult lives of Jacob before this significant incarnation we can observe the trials of Mary as she prepares for her most momentous life. As lives follow one another the progress seems not to be an even trajectory upward, it appears to be a slow movement through dramatic setbacks, pitfalls and tedious marking of time interrupted by the occasional life of unbelievable challenge. Jacob had divine revelations, a physical entanglement with a more nimble and muscular God and, permanently wounded, goes on to found a nation and begin the two hundred year bondage of his people in Egypt. His son, Joseph, an aspect of Lord Sananda, the governing energy of Israel, clearly had a purpose in assisting his chosen people to settle into slavery in Egypt. At this stage, his reasons are unclear.
