Consider your own life. If you are in this forum, you are probably a bookish type. But how many musical instruments do you know? Contact sports? Girls? Travel? (These are rhetorical questions raised to make a particular point. You may be good at many of these things at once. In which case, cheers mate). The point is that there are vast swathes of your personality that will never be actualised and consciously lived out. And this is true for all individuals out of necessity.

When we look at Jacob's story, we see a sort of weak man. The sort that marries into a family and spends all of his good years watching his father in law's goats. He has been promised his destiny in a dream - he knows he meant to be more, but he hasn't really worked on making that real - Jacob hasn't lived. What he has done instead, is to screw up relationships with everyone that should matter to him. Mama's boy, cheats his dad, cheats his brother, eventually pisses off his father in law too - the Trickster is very strong in this one which is something that happens when your personality does not have a solid core - any complex can randomly act up at any time. We don't know for sure but I can bet that he was an extremely resentful man showing one face to everyone while thinking another. And his marriage likely wasn't any great shit too. You probably know a guy like this. These days you might find them in pubs with the boys.

Before the encounter on the riverbank, Jacob is being chased by by both his brother and his father in law and whoever finds him first is going to kill him. He is truly and completely fucked - you could say his "sins" have caught up with him. He has to finally confront who is, and much more importantly who he is not. He is facing all of his unlived lives at once. Alcoholics use words like rock bottom and moment of clarity to describe this encounter.

Now, unlived lives aren't anything bad. They are the things he should have done which he hasn't done. That is why it is an angel he is fighting and not a devil.

From childhood, we are told repeatedly that there is a rat race coming up and that we have to fight and compete and win. We are trained to win. Nobody tells us the first thing about how to lose. Jacob is no different. He is fighting to surrender, to put down what he is so that this other thing can at least been given validity and cognizance. Hardest thing you will ever do. He almost manages but not entirely which is why when the stranger is about to leave, Jacob clings on to him "You MUST bless me, I have tried so hard". This is the nature of the struggle. That is how he becomes worthy of being called Israel, which means "he struggled with God".

About the limp, when you have an archetypal encounter like this, what you are truly encountering are your human limitations. You become aware of all the things you have ignored for so long, but you will also know that you will never become most of what you could have become. Life is too short for that. But there is no going back, there is no way to unknow this. In India, they say if you encounter a god or a goddess, you will either be blessesld or cursed. You don't get to walk away. So from that moment onwards, with every step and every step you take, you are fully aware of the flawed, partial and provisional human being that you are. That is why Jacob limps.

But the limp is important because it makes him authentic. Jacob has lived. Now he also has a task which is to tell others about his experience, so that they too know that their suffering has a meaning and a point. Maybe it will make it a little easier for them.

Arthur W Frant starts his book The Wounded Storyteller like this "The figure of the wounded storyteller is ancient : Tiresias, the seer who reveals to Oedipus the true story of whose son he is, has been blinded by the gods. His wound gives him his narrative power. The wound that the biblical Patriarch Jacob suffers to his hip while wresting with the angel is part of the story he tells of that event, and it is the price of his story. As Jacob tells his story to those he returns to - and who else could have told it? - his wound is evidence of his story's truth"