Disclaimer:  I don’t actually think God is a surfer dude sea turtle.  But I do think He loves the ride, the highs and lows, with me.  Ok, I’ll let you read on now so you can see if you agree.

“Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel”

Ephesians 6:19

I have a reminder set on my phone for Mondays when I normally write my blog post: “fearlessly make known the mystery.”  Today’s post … I’m having a hard time even putting it into words.  It talks about, discusses that mystery.  But it’s a mystery so how can I really find human words to even come close to describing it?

As Fr. Richard Rohr writes, “I’m deliberately using the word mystery to point to depth, an open future, immense freedom, a kind of beauty and truth that can’t be fully spoken or defined. … Mystery is not something you can’t know.  Mystery is endless knowability.”1

And that’s what I’m writing about – a part of that endless knowability.  I realized last summer that I had been praying for someone for almost three years even though at the start I didn’t know that person very well and so was praying without really understanding why or for what I was praying.  I think God was telling me what to pray for, though, because the things I asked for were a part of what He was already going to do:  “Pay attention to this, Carrie.”

Also during those three years, I had some serious wrestling matches with God.  Years wrestling angrily with God.  Wrestling after all implies a battle between two people – two wills – and only one person can win.  But while I was wrestling with Him about what He was doing in my life, I was apparently trusting Him enough to pray that He work in someone else’s life.

Then last year that friend shared a poem called “The Man Watching” that talks about storms and wrestling. And praying and wrestling started to seem not like separate actions but both part of the mystery. Here are a few lines:

What we choose to fight is so tiny!  
What fights with us is so great.  
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,  
we would become strong too
~Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Man Watching"

I read that poem, sat with it as I absorbed it rolling over me, and then wrote,

I feel like I wrestle with God a lot – and I get very resentful because I feel like I lose…a lot.  I’m wrestling more than others (I think whether true or not) and their lives go back to normal while I get hit with even more storms.  Been wondering if storms have to end to get from chaos to calm transformation.  Am I doing something wrong if I’m not getting out of the storms?  But life doesn’t go back to normal after a storm because it seems like that’s the point – to be changed…in the wrestling.  I can’t figure out if I’m feisty enough, stubborn enough, or just plain stupid enough to keep wrestling, to assent to that change.  But instead of wrestling seeming punitive/corrective action, now I’m envisioning God yelling, “RIGHTEOUS!” like the surfer dude sea turtle in Finding Nemo.

I watched that clip from the movie again before writing this (it’s below in case you haven’t seen it for a while or ever).  As I watched it, I so related to the fish, Marlin.  I’m just holding on for dear life while God is having the time of His life!

My friend responded,

As I understand it, the Hebrews saw faith and scripture as something to wrestle with.  Wrestling is the nature of engagement with the divine.

As only God can do, I had just read about that in The Quest by Beth Moore (a small Bible study I had been working on for two years!).  “’Jews…are traditionally taught to question in order to learn more deeply… For [Christians] who are comfortable with the idea of surrender, God-wrestling is not an easy concept.’ …but surrender does not preclude questions.”

The most famous God-wrestler is Jacob from the Old Testament, who wrestled all night with a stranger. In a sermon by Frederick Buechner, as the sun starts to rise, “[the stranger] merely touches the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and in a moment Jacob is lying there crippled and helpless. The sense we have, which Jacob must have had, that the whole battle was from the beginning fated to end this way, that the stranger had simply held back until now, letting Jacob exert all his strength and almost win so that when he was defeated, he would know that he was truly defeated…  God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another we all of us fight – God, the beloved enemy.”2

Maybe I’m looking at the wrestling incorrectly.

Maybe God’s having the time of His life wrestling with me because He sees victory even if it feels like defeat to me. 

I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:

Whoever was beaten by this Angel 
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand
~Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Man Watching"

So, here’s how I currently am thinking about the mystery of wrestling with God.  Obviously I’m not physically wrestling with someone or even something.  And obviously I will never win this wrestling match with God.  But I’m learning the point of wrestling with God isn’t to win.  It’s to engage.

And I find myself back to trying to describe the mysteries of praying and wrestling, two activities seemingly at odds with each other based on how we define them – one good, one bad, one done in trust, one done in anger – yet which I was doing simultaneously.  I have come to the conclusion that prayer and wrestling are just human words for what we can’t understand – soul intimacy with God.  For simply paying attention to Him. “Pay attention to this, Carrie.” Prayer and wrestling are the same.

Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.  ~Rumi

The “knowledge of mysteries”…that my soul soars with the certainty of but my mind just can’t find the words to organize into something my human brain can comprehend. Maybe “RIGHTEOUS!” actually is the perfect word to describe that mystery.

1 Mystery is Endless Knowability Fr. Richard Rohr. https://cac.org/mystery-endless-knowability-2016-08-23/

2 The Magnificent Defeat. Frederick Buechner. https://day1.org/articles/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003adf/the_magnificent_defeat