Wrestling for Blessing

Blessed be God who animates our lives and encounters and challenges us in the night and blesses us by the dawn. AMEN

I used Rilke’s famous lines last week to guide us to living into the questions, blessedly assured that the answers would reveal themselves...at least the holy ones would. Sometimes living the questions is a struggle.

Today as we meditate on the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, a messenger of God, through the night refusing to let go until the blessing received at dawn, another passage from Rilke’s Book of Hours might help as well. 

It starts with a dream

Add faith, and it becomes a belief.

Add action, and it becomes a part of life.

Add perseverance, and it becomes a goal in sight.

Add patience and time, and it ends with a dream come true.

In deep nights I dig for you like treasure. 

For all I have seen 

that clutters the surface of my world 

is poor and paltry substitute 

for the beauty of you 

that has not happened yet.... 

My hands are bloody from digging. 

I lift them, hold them open in the wind, 

so they can branch like a tree. 

Reaching, these hands would pull you out of the sky 

as if you had shattered there, 

dashed yourself to pieces in some wild impatience. 

What is this I feel falling now, 

falling on this parched earth, 

softly, 

like a spring rain? 

These words speak of struggle, the process of faith, dreams, nighttime, shattering and gentleness. These words speak to me of desire, for God, clutter of mind which impedes, injury and sorrow in pursuit, and redemption and release, like gentle cleansing rain.

Who among us has not struggled with our faith? Sought a hidden God? Descended to the depths of a grief so dark as to shroud holy grieving peace and mercy? 

Who among us has not had that feeling of despair and yet found or felt some light some uplifting which revealed a new aspect or perspective of life or identity, of who we are?

This is what Jacob experienced. In a dark night on a lengthy journey he encountered an angel and after endurance unimagineable only let go upon receiving a blessing...at dawn. Injured with a limp to remind him of his engagement with the divine, he received something else to carry...he was named, he assumed his identity no longer the heel grabber but Israel, the chosen one. He represents all of us in our identification with God.

St John of the Cross calls that state the Dark Night of the Soul. Many assume that is a diagnosis of clinical depression. Many hear that label and don’t want to go there, feel they have been there, or simply want to avoid the “struggle” to figure it out. 

But in fact as Gerald May points out in his book of that title, The Dark Night of the Soul was not intended to be a “bad” thing, as though such a naming was even helpful, as it was a description of a nothingness, an emptiness which when embraced would reveal hopefulness not helplessness. In the now familiar words of John Lewis, it was a place of good, not bad, trouble. Redemptive trouble.

Please don’t hear what I say as a diminishment of reality of clinical depression rather as a slightly different spiritual state. 

Since Covid and especially since the insurgency of emotion surrounding Black Lives Matter, systemic injustice, and an accompanying sense of helplessness, not hopelessness, I have felt submerged in a dark night myself and, like other times  of discernment in my life, I have identified mightily with the notion of wrestling, struggling with an angel, something holy and divine.  I have not felt stressed, I have not felt anxious, ....I have felt contemplative and committed while struggling with an angel not yet known. I am consoled by the fact that I have been there before, though not as deeply. I am consoled that this location is mutual as I am accompanied by the Living Christ. I am consoled by the wonder and possibility of it all and how I might emerge. I am excited and trusting that I will emerge changed, limping, with scars, and more deeply in love with God. I am tenacious in hope that the blessing will come at dawn. I am blessedly reassured that in God’s time I and we will emerge having been named with a greater realization of who and whose we are. 

CSLewis endured such a period only to be surprised by Joy. Known as the one who wrote the masterpiece Mere Christianity among other classics, few remember that he was once an atheist. In his struggle with faith he wrote the following: “ You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. ...I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayer: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” 

May we all give in to blessing at dawn.

Our words of institution to become what we receive come to me this morning in a new light. The Story of Jacob is our story. The cycle of wrestling, endurance, hope and blessing is the cycle of our life in God, with God, as we are broken, limp and religamented that our religion might be authentic and congruent with our identities. 

So may you recognize hope the next time you are visited by an angel in a dark and difficult time. 

In your wrestling with angels my you behold who you truly are. May God bless you and keep you. May you become what you receive, a blessing carrier, a wrestler for justice and freedom, a beloved community limping yet whole.