Wrestling with God

In thanksgiving for the life, ministry, and friendship of the Rev. Peg Beissert (1914-2013), a widow who wrestled with “the powers that be” to bring justice to us all.

This past Sunday I spoke to MCC Winston-Salem about the lectionary readings for the day: the Genesis passage of Jacob wrestling with God and Jesus’ parable of the widow wrestling with the unjust judge, wrestling with “the powers that be.” I’ve decided to share a few of those thoughts with you…

As a young boy, I have a fond memory wrestling with my dad. It was a friendly competition. I felt his strength but it inflicted no pain, and we were usually smiling through the whole wrestling match. It seemed a part of my brother’s and my rite of passage into manhood, but it also brought us close to him, and the physical intimacy felt good.

Slightly older, I wrestled with my boyhood friend from church, again in a friendly way—my idea. But I had to move into another room quickly because I was aroused and didn’t want him to see. In high school, though I wanted to take a weightlifting class, I didn’t, because it required wrestling, and I was afraid my secret would come out in such close proximity to another teenage boy.

James B. Nelson is one of the pioneer writers in body theology, a theology that recognizes the body as a place where we may meet the holy, where we may encounter God. There are dozens and dozens of body theologians now, many of them women, from racial minorities, or LGBT. But Professor Nelson is a straight, white male.

Nelson writes that during one service of Holy Communion, he rose to go forward to receive the consecrated bread and wine and realized to his consternation that he was aroused. He uses this involuntary response to illustrate the continuity of body and spirit, sexuality and spirituality. After all, eros, what I have nicknamed “the urge to merge,” is the fuel that feeds both our sexual and spiritual encounters, both lovemaking and prayermaking—we want to be one with another, whether with a partner or with God. We want to hold on until they bless us.

In one of the workshops I led as part of an LGBTQ spirituality event during Winston-Salem’s Pride weekend, I told the story (which has appeared in several of my books) of a woman who once attended a “church and homosexuality” workshop I led years ago. She had no religious background, she explained, but in her lovemaking with her partner she had discovered a spiritual realm she had never before experienced. “Since spirituality has to do with God,” she said, “I came here to find out about God.”

Just as I feared wrestling with my boyhood friend and teenage gym mates for fear of getting aroused and my secret homosexuality known, many of us fear wrestling with God as well as “the powers that be” because of the passions it arouses in us and the intimacy involved. But God who wrestled mud into human flesh in our creation and wrestled into human flesh in Jesus the Word made flesh badly, passionately, wants to wrestle with us, much like my father did, not to hurt or intimidate or frighten us, but to provide a safe intimacy and rite of passage for our struggle into spiritual maturity, becoming compassionate as our God in heaven is compassionate.

In the children’s sermon I tried to convey that The Bible is full of stories of people who wrestled with God, that church is full of people who wrestle with one another to form spiritual community, and that prayer may serve as a kind of wrestling venue.

Instead of beginning “Let us pray…” perhaps we could say, in the famous words of one wrestling announcer, “Let’s get ready to rummm-bllllle…!”

Related posts:

Hang-Gliding and Mudwrestling: The Spiritual Life

How to Fight

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations by mail or credit card are its only means of support. Thank you!

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Hang-Gliding and Mudwrestling: The Spiritual Life

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blog site.

During my workshops I like to use two metaphors for different ways of thinking about spirituality: hang-gliding and mudwrestling.

Some think of spirituality as hang-gliding high above your troubles and the troubles of the world, giving you perspective, so that, like God in that popular song years ago, you can see everything “from a distance.” And there’s some truth to this; spirituality can give us perspective in which we see the larger picture, the grander scheme, the wonder of it all.

But spirituality, to me, is often the task of mudwrestling, in which we wrestle with the powers that be, whether within our own psyches, within families and faith communities, in the workplace or the public square. We also wrestle with suffering and failure and disappointments, with disabilities and limitations and challenges. Some few wrestle with success or wealth or attractiveness. And this shapes our souls for good or ill. But whether they warp or enlarge our souls is the choice of the conscious spiritual life.

For many of us, religions in which we were reared caused the very pain with which we struggled. A friend, brought up as a biblical literalist, felt compelled to burn all of his family Bibles to embrace a new way of understanding scripture.

Yet I believe it’s in the Bible that we find people and a God willing to wrestle with one another. The spirituality of the Bible is more mudwrestling than hang-gliding, from the depiction of a God who wrestles mud into human shapes in Jewish scriptures to the depiction of creation itself groaning in childbirth in Christian scriptures.

Most obvious is the myth about Jacob wrestling with God in the middle of the night. “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” Jacob tells God. Thus Jacob is renamed “Israel,” which means one who strives with God.

I thought of this story one Sunday morning when reading The New York Times Magazine, featuring stories of how “Health is All in Our Minds.” Daniel Smith wrote about his and his brother’s lifelong struggle with debilitating anxiety in an article entitled “The Maniac in Me.” He eventually concludes with Kierkegaard that his anxiety is his “best teacher”—but not of itself, rather because of his “lifelong effort to think clearly and act well in spite of it.” He writes:

My brother and I grew up in a Jewish but largely secular home. Each of us had a bar mitzvah, but we managed to emerge from childhood with little understanding of, and littler faith in, religious texts. [My brother] is convinced that our lack of religion has handicapped us psychologically. “It’s not really fair, when you think about it,” he told me…. “We’re surrounded by people who came into this world with these portable little bundles of certainty, these neat foundational texts. They don’t have to go rooting around for comforting words. What do we have? What did we get? Nothing. A handful of movies and a few of Dad’s jokes. We’re at sea. We’ve always been at sea.”

On reading this I immediately thought of all the great characters in Jewish scriptures these anxiety-ridden brothers could have identified with: the stammering Moses, the reluctant Jonah, Jeremiah with feelings of inadequacy, Isaiah of the “unclean lips,” but especially the struggling Jacob.

     

That’s what I saw in the Bible growing up—people like me, wrestling with God, wrestling with the powers that be for acceptance, respect, equality, justice, and compassion. My own struggle shaped the soul I am today, shaping a spirituality within me of acceptance, respect, equality, justice, and compassion. What I wanted I now am better able to give. And I daresay many of you will identify with that sentiment. That’s probably why you’re reading this.

+++

Tax-deductible donations to this ministry may be given online through the blog site or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Thank you for your support!