Aiming Upward, Missing the Point

Not a climb: Jacob's Ladder was a Gift

Aiming upward, missing the point

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A reflection on Jacob’s Ladder, Jordan Peterson, and the distortion of sacred stories into performances of pride—when grace becomes ambition.

For my teenage son's birthday, I bought tickets to see Jordan Peterson speak in Austin. I had long resonated with his work—not just as a dance between intellect and meaning, but as someone who was raised deeply entrenched in religion. My son inherited my love for Peterson but for a different reason. He was seeking guidance on how to become a good man. For me, the experience was reflective. For him, it was formative.

Later that year, Peterson added a new lecture to his tour. This time, in our own town of San Antonio. Though the tour shared the same theme, "We Who Wrestle with God," each lecture touched on different material and no two were the same.

When I bought the tickets to see him in Austin, the man I had been in a relationship with at that time mocked everything I found meaningful, including Peterson. When I didn't include him to attend the Austin lecture with me and my son, he was visibly hurt. But I had a clear reason: I told him I didn’t want him to defile what I held sacred. He wasn’t welcome. That’s when he started reading Peterson’s work and watching his lectures. After that, he began trying to engage me in conversations about it, perhaps to prove something or gain entry into my world. But I continually shut those conversations down, telling him it was not on the table for debate.

After we broke up, he bent over backwards to earn back my trust and prove himself a reformed man. He invited me to attend the San Antonio lecture with him. I said no. But I did tell him I’d be open to hearing about his experience afterward.

When I asked what he had learned, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “That the purpose of life is to climb the ladder toward God. To always aim upward.”

From the moment he said it, something felt wrong. I asked him to explain more, and, among other things, he talked about the story of Jacob's Ladder in the Bible. But the more he spoke, the more disoriented I became. The incongruence between his words and their meaning only deepened, especially the way he cried and held his hand to his heart while still speaking in a flat, monotone voice. His performance didn’t match the sacred weight of the ideas he was borrowing. All I knew was a growing sense of anger I couldn’t quite name.

I didn’t have the exact scripture at the ready, but I knew something was off. What he described didn’t feel sacred. It felt like pride disguised as progress. A book report delivered with conviction, but no real reckoning underneath. He spoke of aiming upward, but the energy wasn’t reverent—it was performative.

So I went back and found the story. Jacob was alone. Fleeing. Broken. Sleeping in the dirt with a stone for a pillow. And in that desolate place, he dreamt of a ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending. God stood above the ladder—not waiting for Jacob to climb, but declaring His promise in the midst of Jacob’s exile.

Jacob didn’t build the ladder. He didn’t climb it. He didn’t earn it. He received it.

And when he woke, he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.”

That moment—the one being held up as a self-improvement metaphor—was never about perfection or upward striving. It was about humility. Surrender. Revelation. It was about discovering that the divine had always been near, even when you feel most unworthy.

And then it hit me: what he had described wasn’t Jacob’s Ladder at all.

It wasn’t Bethel. It was the Tower of Babel.

I only knew that what he described didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel sacred. It felt like pride, not an awakening.

Now I see it clearly: Jacob’s Ladder was not about self-made ascent. It was about grace.

But instead of humility, I was shown a badge.

He wore his "becoming better" like a spiritual credential. As if this upward aim excused the damage done. As if promising not to be abusive someday should overwrite the fact that he still was. He didn’t offer an apology. He offered transformation as a transaction: "Forgive me now for who I will become later."

He didn’t want to be transformed. He wanted to be reset. Every failure became a line break. Every wound he inflicted was followed by a declaration: “I’m not that man anymore.” But he was.

He still was. And grace doesn’t erase who you are just because you say you’ve changed. Grace meets you where you are, but it does not lie for you.

He distorted Peterson’s message into something it was never meant to be—a performance of righteousness. A new ramiumptum. Like the Zoramites of the Book of Mormon, standing on high towers to praise themselves and thank God for making them better than others. That’s what it felt like: a pedestal of borrowed wisdom. A theater of self-improvement with no actual descent into humility.

What made it worse was that he had never even read the Bible. But because he heard one lecture, he declared himself an expert. He stood before me with full conviction that he was blessed by God--even as I stood there, feeling something close to evil.

That incongruence made me furious because something I held sacred had been defiled.  What he paraded as spiritual revelation was nothing more than spiritual cosplay.

I almost let myself shrink, thinking maybe I had missed something. That maybe I didn’t know enough. But the truth hadn’t left me. I had simply forgotten the scripture. I had been casting my pearls before swine. I had been watching a man pray from the ramiumptum.

When someone distorts or defiles that which is sacred to you, you have every right to feel righteous anger. You have every right to name the moment. This was just one scene in a million in which I watched my own identity and beliefs be turned inside out. What was most unbelievable wasn’t just the performance. It was that he believed it.

He believed his borrowed performance of repentance was enough. He believed his tears were proof. He believed he had climbed the ladder.

But I knew, in my bones, that he had built a tower.

And God was not in it.