Wrestling with the truth

Memory is not what we think it is… Certainly not what we remember it to be. We imagine our memory as something like a video camera running constantly in our heads, recording our experiences. When the film’s finished it is neatly filed away, and when we need to remember, it’s simply a case of finding the file and pressing ‘play.’ But it’s not like that.  1 our heads are not big enough to store all the videos and 2, we’re far too lazy. So, apart— possibly— from a few undeniable big facts, our memory is less like the storage on our smartphone and more like a scrapbook or a bits jar- a bus ticket here, a piece of ribbon there, a faded photograph under that. When we remember, we  don’t run the video: we pick up the ribbon, and construct the rest as seems most plausible. 

This is why memories of the past are almost always impossibly rosy: basically, we’re making it up. Unless you grew up in Leeds in the 1970s that is: you couldn’t make that up.  But the past, as we remember it is really a function of the present and not nearly as we like to remember. After all, the past was rubbish: that’s why we live in the present.

Anyhow, the constructive nature of our memory has its parallels with and indeed implications for the things we tell ourselves and others about ourselves. We build an idea of the sort of person we are based partly on the person we would like to be in the future (inside the body of this weak and feeble accountant is a lion tamer waiting to be released)  But the lion’s share of what we see when we hold up that mirror to ourselves is based on the person we have been in the past. For which we rely on memory… Aha.

Here’s an example, a phrase I’ve used any number of times:  ‘I’ve never hit anyone in my life’. It is true; I am not a violent man. And ‘I’ve never hit anyone in my life’ is true. If- but only if ‘anyone’ excludes siblings.

I have only one, elder, brother: the relative scarcity of that resource didn’t however prevent fraternal fighting: for most of our boyhoods this pretty much characterised our main mode of interaction. It wasn’t quite  Cain and Abel, but it was frequently not far from Tom and Jerry.

The pinnacle of almost a decade of brotherly belligerence was when I pushed him through a glass door- without opening it first. Somewhere in Leeds is probably still a suburban semi with 1970s glass in a 1940s frame. It doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm, unless some sort of post-traumatic stress is to blame for his choice of career in accountancy, in which case, world, I’m very, very sorry. I can’t claim to have won the fight: at the age of 13 my brother learned, Judo, which very quickly- and painfully, for me- put an end to fraternal fighting.

We were not unusually fractious children or dysfunctional siblings; our parents had no favourites and although it was the North of England,  as long as you liked dripping, there was enough food to go round: we were not fighting over limited resources. But fight we did. Almost everyone with more than one child— or indeed anyone with a sibling— will confirm the general pattern: put any two humans together, in whatever context, and if you give it enough time they will eventually fight. If you haven’t got time to wait and want to shorten the process, ask them how they voted in the Brexit referendum. This is what humans do. We love, yes. We create and cooperate too. But we also struggle, and we also fight. You might say, it’s in the DNA.

Our first reading today was from one of those parts of the Bible— and they seem to especially thickly populate the book of Genesis— where we are introduced to a twilight, disturbing and sometimes just plain weird world where the Sunday School account of God we are familiar and comfortable with meets a shadowy, older world of mythology.  In an archetypal tale, almost nightmare-like with its figure of the stranger who will not let us pass,  Jacob, on a dark night by a river, comes face to face with— and then proceeds to fight with— God.   

At the beginning of this story, it is made clear to us that Jacob does not know the identity of the stranger— introduced as ‘a man’— blocking his way. By the end of the tale however, as we can see by Jacob’s naming of the place of his struggle ‘Peniel’– the face of God– he is more than fully aware of the divine nature of his opponent. Now we might quite reasonably predict that if Jacob had known that his sparring partner was the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent creator God upon whom he relied for his very existence, he might have thought twice before trying to grapple him to the ground in a Full Nelson. His trousers might have been a lot damper too. But then again, it might just be the case that Jacob’s response would have been exactly the same even if the stranger had been wearing a fluorescent green name tag with ‘THE LORD’ written on it and a t-shirt bearing the motto ‘It’s God, Stupid’.

All through the Bible—  take as sample exhibits the tales of Adam and Eve,  the adventures of Jonah or many of the Psalms— we see example after example of the human impulse to fight turned into a desire to wrestle with God (and with Jonah especially, the tendency to sulk afterwards when, as is inevitable, we don’t win). Man and God, fight like cat and dog. This seems particularly prominent in response to the times when God, instead of being the unseen, unacknowledged and unappreciated provider of everything we delight in and rely on, suddenly impinges himself onto our consciousness and makes demands of us. Lest we think this something is peculiar to the Old Testament world,  we can look on to the experience of Jesus himself, the Son supremely obedient to the will of the Father, who nevertheless underwent the agonising struggle between human and divine wills  in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

Rather than being a terrible sign of our disobedience, or intrinsic rebelliousness, the pious pugilism of the religious impulse— the tendency not to sit down and meekly take what comes to us but to grapple with God— is something that is only to be expected. Ever since our remote ancestors first wriggled out of the grasp of God, took back control and found themselves dazed and unhappy on the wrong side of the gates of Paradise, the human condition has been to fight: against the natural world, against time, and against each other. Now, unless we are going to play the futile game of trying to lock God away in our box marked ‘religion’ it seems inevitable that struggle is going to characterise our relationship with our maker. If you accept the Christian notion of a  God who is so concerned with his personal relationship with us, so concerned with communicating on our level that he became one of us in the supreme mystery of the incarnation,  it only stands to reason that this God who comes to meet us in our everyday, human reality, will meet us in that characteristically human response of struggle.

From very early days, Christians have interpreted the story of Jacob wrestling with the man / angel / God as being in some way speaking about the practice of prayer, that prayer is, in a metaphorical yet very real sense ‘wrestling’ with God.  If we do accept that notion then we can reach a quite unexpected conclusion. We can conclude that one of the commonest mistakes we make when praying is that we tell God what we think he wants to hear –lots of pious stuff– rather than what is really on our hearts– anger, despondency, frustration, sadness etc. (it’s not just me). This may be for all the very best motives, but perhaps what God wants is for us, like Jacob, to roll up our sleeves, chalk our palms, get feisty, and let him have it. After all, when you’re dealing with a God who sees all and knows all, there’s no point pretending. No matter how painful or unpleasant the truth of our prayers, God’s response will always be the same: unconditional love.

Struggle with God is an inevitable part of the state of struggle which infuses all human experience of life.  It’s what we do. And for  a God who loves us so much that he met us as one of us in the incarnation, it’s what he expects. Moral of the story in 8 words: when you pray, tell it as it is.