Wrestling with God During Lent

In his books, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality and Prayer: Our Deepest Longing, Ronald Rolheiser uses the same story to help us see that wrestling with God is part of our journey. The story goes something like this:

Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of Zorba the Greek was a deeply religious man. He was an artist, a seeker and ferociously independent. He was often referred to as mystical. Kazantzakis had deep interior struggles in his relationship with God. At times, he found himself obedient and other times he found himself resistant.

In his memoir, Report to Greco, Kazantzakis reveals a personal story about a summer spent in a monastery as a young man.  During this time, he had a series of conversations with an old monk. In one of these conversations, he asked the monk if he still wrestled with the devil. The monk told him that he no longer struggled with the devil – he had grown old and the devil had grown old – and the devil no longer had any strength. The monk revealed that he now struggled with God. Kazantzakis responded by saying: You struggle with God and hope to win? The monk said no: I struggle with God and hope to lose.

Wrestling with God can move us into a deeper and more profound kind of prayer. In the end, our real struggle is with God. In the book of Genesis, we see that Jacob wrestles for an entire night with a Spirit. In the morning, we see that the Spirit turns out to be God. Rolhesier tells us: “What a perfect icon for prayer? A human being and God, wrestling in the dust of this earth.”

As we journey through Lent, there will be many different struggles; some of these struggles may even be with God.