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Wrestling With God

"Wrestling With God"

Genesis 32:22-31

Ancient words give us a haunting story. We have Jacob wrestling with God, in the dark of night. This is an intimate, passionate struggle - wrestling! - and Jacob is hanging on for dear life. Jacob knew: you can't see the face of God and live. So when dawn breaks, Jacob takes a huge risk, holding on, demanding a blessing. One preacher says: "Jacob got hold of someone who smells like heaven ... it was the most alive he'd ever been in his life ... he'd never seen anything like the shining in that face, and he could not bear to let it go." In that threshold place between darkness and dawn, Jacob does see God face to face. God gives Jacob a blessing, and a new name, for having the audacity to wrestle back. Jacob also gets whacked on the hip, and walks away injured, limping. I bet he spent the rest of his life searching for that shining face! Once we've tasted that sweetness, we're forever hungry.

Wrestling with God, it is a risky business. Jacob got injured, and blessed! Injury and blessing go hand in hand, when we dare to tangle with God. We can't have one without the other. Annie Dillard says, about God: "Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? ... We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews." I propose today that the metaphor of ‘wrestling with God' is very appropriate for our spiritual journey, where times of questioning and doubt go hand in hand with belief and joy. We know the presence and the absence of God. I believe the life of faith is punctuated by dark nights of ‘wrestling' - even for those we want to put on a pedestal, as if they are somehow different from us, people we call ‘saints.'

I keep reading about Mother Teresa lately, though she died 10 years ago. Time Magazine, at least 2 NY Times editorials. Surely, Mother Teresa is a saint, way up on a pedestal, safely distant from us. Her work, in the Calcutta slums, something we could never do; her tremendous faith, something, clearly, we don't have. Well, it seems Teresa has jumped down off her pedestal, shown herself to be fully human, and re-inserted herself in our spiritual path in a way we never imagined. A new book has just been published, private letters to her spiritual confidantes. Mother Teresa fell head over heels in love with God, dedicated her ministry to serving the poor, won the Nobel Peace Prize, this we knew ... but it turns out she did not live happily ever after, after all. She wrestled with God, in a profound spiritual darkness, for 50 years.

Like any love story, hers is complex and turbulent. There was a time when Christ himself spoke to her. In this time of ecstasy, she saw God face to face. "Come," Jesus said to Teresa, "Come, carry Me to the poor. Come be My light." Teresa says: "Jesus gave himself to me." But then, one day, he took himself away. Teresa felt Christ's love slipping away from her, leaving her longing, in the dark. She wrote: "In my soul, I just feel that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me - of God not being God." "I find no words to express the depths of the darkness." Outwardly, she kept smiling. But she spent the rest of her life trying to recapture that initial spiritual bliss, of falling in love. Over time, with help from her spiritual directors, she began to make meaning of her grief; she felt her suffering was like that of Jesus on the cross, and she offered it back to God; her gift, helping others. Over time, she did find a measure of peace, identifying with how Jesus felt abandoned on the cross, the way the poor are abandoned, every day. Teresa's mission became this: Her darkness would be, for others, light.

Reactions to these revelations about Teresa have varied. Some are dismayed at the ‘imperfection' of her ‘faith'. Others feel vindicated in their suspicion that she was, all along, faking it. Christopher Hitchens, author of the atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great, calls Mother Teresa a "fraud." I inhabit a different universe from Mr. Hitchens; he demonstrates an utter lack of comprehension about what faith is all about. I look at Mother Teresa's private struggle, which she did not want published, and think, "Of course!" I am surprised - at people's surprise! Do we think the spiritual path is a merry-go-round? I have found it to be much more like a rollercoaster, with soaring highs, and desperate plunges, and very little control over the pace or the ride! Flannery O'Connor said: "What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." I, personally, find my metaphor descriptive ... for a rollercoaster has its moments of sheer exhilaration; like Jacob, seeing God, the most alive we've ever been! And there are stomach-wrenching plunges ... I believe we can't have one without the other. Jacob's injury and his blessing ... we get both, when we tangle with God.

You may know I spent the last year working as a Chaplain with Hospice. People had odd reactions to my work with the dying. Sometimes people would say, in a syrupy voice, "Oh, you're so good to do this!" I would murmur something polite, but inside I knew I was NOT good! I knew how tempted I was to stop in at Starbucks or TJ Maxx, rather than driving to see yet another patient with end-stage-dementia or Alzheimer's. I knew it was like pulling my own teeth to make myself walk into yet another nursing home, with its unique fragrance, sights and sounds, its overwhelming need. I knew my intense frustration - not with death and dying, which can be intensely meaningful, but with the reality that many people I visited were beyond words, and their families were not there. How can a person of words make a connection? I was a fish out of water; my spirit couldn't breathe.

I knew I wasn't good at all. But I also knew there were occasional moments of absolute grace, not anything I did, but gifts from God. I often felt ineffective ... AND YET... when I expected it the least, I would be surprised by moments of stunning precision and clarity. I would suddenly feel that familiar power pouring through me as I prayed with a patient or family ... it was like a jolt of recognition of an old friend, feeling God's power and presence tingling through my body, passing through my fingertips. Inside, I would say: "Oh, THERE you are ... you ARE still there!" If I just kept moving, God would grant me sweet moments of grace, enough to keep me going.

Mother Teresa did have moments of grace, in those years of darkness. They were enough to keep her going. Behind her bright smile, underneath her simple sari, in her heart of hearts, Teresa felt, and these are her words, "such deep longing for God." Her longing itself is beautiful, to me. The Rev. Joseph Neuner, one of her confidantes, says: "her very craving for God was a sure sign of his hidden presence in her life." This seems paradoxical, but I love it. Can it be that our yearning for God is a way of God seeking us? Can our longing, itself, be the channel, the connection with God? Teresa's was a love affair with God intense and profound. But the rest of us, in our daily rollercoaster between doubt and faith ... don't we also KNOW that same longing for God? I think we do know that hunger. It's why we're here, crash helmets or not. We want to see God face to face, just like Jacob, taste heaven.

Does God plant a homing device in us, a longing that will not let us be until we find our home in God? Mystics of every age use the language of longing. Saint Augustine prayed: "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You." C.S. Lewis spoke of: "Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off." Mother Teresa was very human, very much like us. Perhaps her gift to us, now, is her passionate longing. Like her, maybe our ‘craving for God is a sure sign of God's presence in our lives.' Maybe our longing is God wrestling with us, trying to reach us, in the threshold places of our lives. Our longing is God with us; like Teresa, let us turn that longing into Light for others, share the brilliance we have glimpsed, the shining of God's face. Amen.