Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Wednesday after Epiphany
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Something more like dancing
No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his loveis brought to perfection in us.
“There are times when a good struggle comes as one of those strange comforts of the wilderness.” So says poet and artist Jan Richardson.
Really?
“Sometimes we need not to rest but to wrestle, to be stretched to our limits, to reach deep into the reserves we did not know we had.”
There are poetic ways to say this, and Jan’s poem below brings us to the brink along with Jacob as he wrestled the angel (or was it God?). Jacob’s mostly unrepentant life had until now left many dark shadows in his memory, often involving his twin brother Esau. Jacob could have been fighting for his spiritual life on this dark night in the desert. The next morning he would meet Esau and attempt a reconciliation. He was scared. He knew his resources were at an end.
And … the wrestling in the dirt all night is exactly what he needed.
This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us, that he has given us of his Spirit.
Here is Jan’s poem (one of many in her “retreat,” linked above.
Jacob’s Blessing
If this blessing were easy,
anyone could claim it.
As it is,
I am here to tell you
that it will take some work.
This is the blessing
that visits you
in the struggling,
in the wrestling,
in the striving.
This is the blessing
that comes
after you have left
everything behind,
after you have stepped out,
after you have crossed
into that realm
beyond every landmark
you have known.
This is the blessing
that takes all night
to find.
It’s not that this blessing
is so difficult,
as if it were not filled
with grace
or with the love
that lives
in every line.
It’s simply that
it requires you
to want it,
to ask for it,
to place yourself
in its path.
It demands that you
stand to meet it
when it arrives,
that you stretch yourself
in ways you didn’t know
you could move,
that you agree
to not give up.
So when this blessing comes,
borne in the hands
of the difficult angel
who has chosen you,
do not let go.
Give yourself
into its grip.
It will wound you,
but I tell you
there will come a day
when what felt to you
like limping
was something more
like dancing
as you moved into
the cadence
of your new
and blessed name. – Jan Richardson
Jan paints too. She remembered that Jacob was renamed Israel by his wrestling partner.
I began to find my imagination drawn not to the figures locked in their fierce struggle; what drew me instead was the ground. I imagined the tracks and traces left by their feet, the imprint of their bodies on the earth, the map made by their wrestling. I imagined those lines beginning to form the blessing that Jacob receives, twining into the letters of the new name he will bear with him, limping, when morning comes.
We grow old slowly, most of us, and we accept less wrestling than we actually need. I think it’s right to claim whatever territory we’ve been given and to stand up and ask God for more. Not material territory, mind you, we’re not playing RISK. And not the glistening superficiality of achievement. No, I mean the spiritual stuff, the home-bound wisdom that grapples with doubt. And where fear of the unknown wrestles me into the dust, not letting go, but offering me a new name just as the sun is rising.
 (1 John 4, Psalm 72, 1 Timothy 3, Mark 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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