Wrestling or Dancing? The Movement of Faith

A love to see courage in action, folk trying new things that they once thought was beyond them. Helen Redhead is currently training to compete in her first power lifting competition. She told me she would be in the gym with her training partner who is competing in the men’s section. They were not only training, but wearing the outfits that the competition requires. I was told when I saw them not to make fun. Which I didn’t do of course. I did tell Helen later that they looked like a wrestling tag team. In many ways they are, as they are working together towards a goal and I know they have both wrestled and struggled with many obstacles in their lives. It is wonderful to see them working toward their goals.

Like a lot of youngsters, I loved wrestling as a child. My style was the 1970’s “Big Daddy” era. I remember being blown away when I found out a mate’s mum was dating an old retired wrestler Jim Breaks (Cry Baby Breaks as he was known). I remember the excitement of going to see it live at Cleckheaton town hall and the disappointment of “Big Daddy” not being there, or any of the other stars. The kids that followed my generation got more into the American Razzamataz WWF and WWE. They loved it just the same and no doubt every generation has re-enacted “King of the ring” or some version of it with their mates. When I was a teenager I use to to play the gruesome giant verses He-Man and She-Ra with my older sisters younger children. This basically involved them beating me up for half an hour. Whenever we meet at family gathering they always remind of how much fun they had when I baby sat.

Now of course this kind of wrestling is just staged nonsense, it is entertainment. That said there are so many metaphors for life found within it. The one that I’ve been thinking of is the scoring system, “either a knock out or two falls and or submissions.” It speaks powerfully to me about the nature of human life. How so often we wrestle with things, with ourselves with one another, with life, sometimes we fall, sometimes we even submit but rarely do we finally surrender and accept anything. I know how much I struggle with things at time. I am not alone, this is the nature of human life. In life to finally come to a place of acceptance with anything, can take some time, even if it is just ourselves. We wrestle with so many things in life. As John Dear wrote in “Living Peace”

“This process of making peace within ourselves can be one of the most difficult challenges we face. Each one of us wrestles with our own demons. The daily challenge is to befriend those demons, embrace our true selves, make friends with ourselves, disarm our hearts, and accept in peace who we are. The deeper we go into our true identities, the more we will realize that each one of us is a unique yet beloved child of the God of peace. In that truth, we find the strength to live in peace.”

Sometimes this can take a long, perhaps a life time to truly accept ourselves and one another. Pretty much everyone is struggling to come to terms with something all the time. It seems that once acceptance comes in one area, some new struggle comes to the surface. I have learnt that there is nothing that brings us closer together as humans than to bear witness one another’s struggles. There is real love in this; this is the love of human struggle; a love that unites every single one of us in our common humanity.

Now some people tell me that the struggle is a lack of faith. I do not agree at all. In many ways the struggle is the most faithful thing we ever do.

M. Scott Peck famously wrote as an introduction to his seminal work “The Road Less Travelled” that “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

In some ways living faithfully, spiritually alive, is the most difficult thing we do of all. It is not easy; it is a struggle. Searching for truth is difficult, understanding what we are here to do is difficult, beginning something new is terrifying and letting go of something old even more so. The answers only really come in the struggle as we fight, and wrestle until we finally surrender and often it just comes, from nowhere, as if it were some kind of miracle. We struggle, we wrestle, we fight on, this to me is living faithfully alive. It is the most faithful thing we do. This is such a part of being human, it always has been, and I suspect it always will be.

Whenever I think of such struggles with ourselves, with one another, with life, with God I think of Jacob and his struggles in Genesis ch 32. There it is right there in the first book of the Bible, this human struggle. People are the same as the have always been. There is nothing new under the sun.

In the passage Jacob is depicted wrestling with a mysterious man, who it turns out is probably God, although is not clear. Some say it is an angel and others a reflection of himself. As he wrestles with this being, he is grievously hurt, but he fights on. As the night ends and dawn breaks the being tries to leave but Jacob holds on and demands it blesses him as the price for ending the struggle. The being relents and blesses Jacob by giving him a new name “Israel” meaning “one who struggles with God” or as I once heard a friend say “one with whom God struggles.”

Don’t we all wrestle and struggle with ourselves, with others, with life, with God, or perhaps its others, life and God who struggles with us? So many times I have struggled to just experience what was on offer to me for fear of trying something new. I am not alone, I know.

What about you? Maybe, maybe not? You decide…

I know there is nothing more beautiful or connecting than to see us wrestling with something and to finally after so much struggle come to that place of acceptance, when we stop wrestling and struggling with life begin to dance through it all.

The dance is the hope that is born from the seeming despair that begins when we stop wrestling, when we allow ourselves to be blessed, the blessing is the hope born again in that despair. As Joan Chittister wrote in “Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope”

"But if struggle is the process of evolution from spiritual emptiness to spiritual wisdom, hope is the process as well. Hope, the response of the spiritual person to struggle, takes us from the risk of inner stagnation, of emotional despair, to a total transformation of life. Every stage of the process of struggle is a call to move from spiritual torpor to spiritual vitality. It is an invitation to live at an antipodal depth of soul, a higher level of meaning than the ordinary, the commonplace generally inspires. The spirituality of struggle gives birth to the spirituality of hope…The spiritual task of life is to feed the hope that comes out of despair. Hope is not something to be found outside of us. It lies in the spiritual life we cultivate within. The whole purpose of wrestling with God is to be transformed into the self we were meant to become, to step out of the confines of our false securities and allow our creating God to go on creating. In us."

Hope is born when the wrestle and the struggle becomes a dance, when we find ourselves back in the rhythm of life, in the dance, when we find ourselves expressing who we are in life, not ashamed or frightened to be who we are. We can dance alone and or dance with others, joining the cosmic dance of life. I was thinking of those wrestling tag teams, how they soon become dance partners, it probably isn’t that different to “Strictly Come Dancing”, or other forms of human expression. This is the dance of life that involves body, mind, and soul; the dance of life involves our whole being.

We can so often feel like we are wrestling alone, like Jacob in Genesis, but we are not. For our wrestling and or dancing takes place in the vast web of life. We are not solitary separate beings, but part of the greater web of life. We are not alone, we are part of the greater unfolding of life.

Life is forever changing. We are all of us struggling, wrestling with something, even if it is just ourselves. I think the mistake is to see this as some kind of battle and one we must do alone. We do not. Perhaps if we saw this instead as some part of the dance of life, we may not feel such resistance to it, or fear of it. Perhaps by joining together as part of the dance of life we would see the love in this dance. It is perhaps the one thing that unites us all.

The wrestle, the dance is true faith, true faith in action. Actually, it maybe the most faithful thing we ever do, for in so doing we play our part in creating the universal web of life, we play our part fully in the universal process and in so doing encourage others to come and join in the dance too.

So will you come and dance with me…Let it be a dance we do, may I have this dance with you, through the good times and the bad times too, let it be a dance…

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