About this episode
Chad Prevost reflects on his reckless adolescence and the journey of self-discovery through personal stories and biblical allegory.
When I was seventeen, I drove my parents’ conversion van home from a party with a six-pack in my system and a freshly-dented bumper on a stranger’s parked car. The officer who arrived at our house decided not to charge me with driving under the influence. He told me to go inside and sleep it off. I have thought about that night for thirty-five years. This episode is an essay reading. The material is personal. Three stories from my reckless adolescence in Richmond, Virginia, told plainly. The drinking and driving. The LSD afternoon at a Goochland County rock quarry. The way my parents finally put me in rehab and the way I was outraged when they did. I survived my adolescence on a margin of unearned protection that I did not deserve, and the survival did not feel, then, like the gift it was. The essay turns to the strangest passage in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 32. Jacob wrestling the man who turns out to be God, holding on through the dislocated hip, refusing to let go without the blessing. The man gives Jacob a new name. Jacob leaves with a permanent limp. The limp is, in the strange grammar of the story, the proof that the blessing was real. The argument the essay makes is the…
People in this episode
Host: Chad Prevost
Topics covered
- personal stories
- adolescence
- self-discovery
- faith
- recklessness
Keywords
- adolescence
- drinking and driving
- rehab
- self-discovery
- Genesis 32
- Jacob
- wrestling
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Genesis 32
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