Wrestling with the Angel

“Isn’t it the greatest possible disaster, when you are wrestling with God, not to be beaten?”
(Simone Weil)

In the mysterious Biblical story, Jacob is alone one night during a journey, when ‘a man’ appears and wrestles with him until dawn. When Jacob refuses to let him go, the stranger dislocates Jacob’s hip, but also gives him a blessing and a new name; ‘Israel’, which means ‘struggles with God’ (Genesis 32:22-32).

This story is an image of the struggle with God that is central to the Quaker way, although it is often absent from modern descriptions of Quaker experience. Early Quakers recorded that their initial encounter with the Inward Guide was often conflictual - the Light revealed aspects of themselves that they would rather not see, and urged them in directions they would rather avoid. As the leadings of the Inward Guide were resisted, the struggle would intensify, sometimes leading to severe physical illness or emotional crisis. Perhaps this kind of experience is so often glossed over today because modern Friends are understandably suspicious of anything that suggests coercion or threat in religion. The Biblical stories that portray God as threatening and punishing are usually rejected as outdated and unhelpful. But there is nevertheless an important reality of ‘struggling with God’ that takes place in our own experience, for many of us who have encountered the reality of the Inward Guide, but who have resisted what it has tried to show us and how it has tried to lead us.

This resistance can take many forms. We usually want to defend a favourable view of ourselves, and to ignore any inklings of our self-interested motives, resentments or narcissism. We are often reluctant to embrace nudges of the Spirit that suggest we might be led to disturb our habitual comforts in some way, by reaching out to unfamiliar people, or making some change in our daily life that involves risk or inconvenience. This kind of spiritual sluggishness or inertia is common to almost all of us, and perhaps acts as a necessary ballast to avoid being swept away by temporary enthusiasms. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to stay stuck in the defensive posture that insists on digging in, refusing to hear what the Spirit has to say to us, or to follow where it leads. All too often, the result is a life that goes nowhere, that continually circles around its collection of small concerns, and never breaks out of the track of narrow, habitual self-interest. It is perfectly possible to pass a whole lifetime in this way, in which the call of the Inward Guide is smothered so insistently that life withers away, and one becomes haunted by vague regrets and anxieties, crowded around by the insistent threat of meaninglessness.

For some of us, the rejection of the Light is more deliberate. The dark impulses of addiction and compulsion, even when we recognise them and know them to be destructive, can draw us towards choices that are deliberately damaging - self harming through over-eating, alcohol, drugs or dangerous behaviour. The deliberate impulse to self-destruction will be familiar to everyone who has struggled with addiction or despair. It is the urge to escape the agonising tensions, regrets, humiliations of life, by extinguishing feeling and responsibility. We can choose to fight against the Light, tearing at ourselves and wounding those around us in our furious rejection of inward life.

The experiences of early Quakers, like the story of Jacob, suggest that the struggle with God does not have to end like this. For some of us, the greatest blessing we ever receive might be a painful dislocation, when our life is interrupted by a suffering, failure or humiliation that knocks us out of our habitual self-justification and distractions. We might find that none of our goals are any longer worthwhile, that our cherished opinions or attitudes were meaningless posturing, and that we no longer know what to do or who to be. We have been brought to the point of surrender to the inward springs of life that were struggling to be born within us. Now we can receive a new name, a new identity and purpose for our life, because we have ‘struggled with God’ and thankfully, blessedly, we have been defeated.

How have you 'struggled with God'? and have you received a gift or blessing?