I will be the first to admit I suffer from emotional constipation. Or perhaps it isn’t so much the constipation as the inability to digest life in such a way that produces emotional movements. As evidence of this, I spent two whole sentences using poop as a metaphor for emotions. Either way, I have some complications with my emotional tract.
Issues. I got issues. Which is a tacit way of saying I have problems with the idea of God’s love. Now, what I am about to describe will sound insane, perhaps slightly oedipal, but just hear me out. This is the beginning of the character arc of the post, if you needed the hint.
When I think of God’s love what comes to mind is a big breasted, matronly love that coddles even the dimmest of idiots. It’s a love without teeth. It is gooey. It is tame and domestic. God’s love is a giant breast. It is soft, comforting and I can suckle so long as I remain toothless. As you may imagine, this may interfere with worshipping God on Sunday mornings, singing the praises of a celestial boob in the sky. These thoughts are a hitch. I know this.
So how do I experience the love of God in truth, which seems like an emotional experience if there ever would be one. Sometimes women at church hold their bosom like a purring kitten is napping in their brassiere; every time it mews they raise a hand. Others have a satisfied, slightly pained expression of those receiving a shiatsu massage. I fully admit they are experiencing the love of God (who am I to say otherwise?), but this is where my brain draws the connection to the teat. As a result, and to deal with these assumptions I know are way, way off, I tend to be more analytical, cerebral and pensive. But I don’t want my children growing up with a pulsating brain for a father whose heart is floating in a jar of formaldehyde on the upper shelf.
So I took it to the source and asked God what experiencing his love was like. Turns out, it’s a bloody nose.
I did not have spontaneous epistaxis or anything, or have blood trickle from my nose like I just closed the gateway to the Upside Down. It’s an analogy. Settle down. What happened is the Lord brought to mind Jacob and his tussle with God on that lonesome plain east of Jabbok, with none to witnesses but a derelict moon draped in the star-eaten blanket of sky.
Here is the account.
The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh.
Genesis 32:22-32 (ESV)
Compared to his brother Esau, a roving and fierce huntsman, Jacob was a tent dweller, soft in the soles and thin legged. He was the darling of his mother, but the lesser of the two sons in his father’s sight. Up until this moment he was a grifter, ambitious, and quite successful at subterfuge. Over time, he amassed a vast fortune of wives, children, servants and livestock, all of which was predicated on a swindle of his older brother’s foolish abandonment of his blessing.
The narrative here is abrupt. Jacob is alone in an open plain which would presumably would make it difficult to sneak up on someone. Then, sudden-like, a man is present and begins assaulting Jacob for no apparent reason.
What must have he been thinking? Was he was being robbed? Was there the Promised Land Slayer on the loose, randomly killing sojourners up and down the Jordan? Did Jacob start the fight? There’s a million different ways God could have shown up that night, but the chosen form was as a man ready to tussle.
The fact that this fight lasted all night is somewhat unexpected. I presume God could have wrecked him easily, as evidenced by God using his finishing move on Jacob’s hip as dawn was breaking, and the fight being instantly over. But still, with leg akimbo, Jacob held onto the other Man’s gi and would not let him go until he was blessed by the Man.
Of course, this was the purpose. God did not wrestle with Jacob to take, but to give. He was given a new name and a blessing, one which involved no swindling this time or tricking it out of the hands of another man, but looking the Blesser in the face.
I think about relating to God while living life on planet Earth with a faith that just seemed to show up one day. Now I am stuck with a mind that can’t unsee Him, yet the heart of a wayward tomcat. Sometimes I swear in my prayers at Him in frustration, others I fall on my knees in because that is the most obvious response in the universe. Today, I can taste salvation on my tongue (tart on the sides, salty on the tip, but sweet), tomorrow I lament His forsaking of me. Here I receive sonship like a happy child; there, He bursts into the brothel where I volunteer my time and produces the receipt to prove I am His purchase, hauling me off over his shoulder. I am at once an eternal son and intractable asshole of the universe. Can this push, pull, embrace, slug, running, returning, agonal cry, joyful cry, pestering, rebuffing, breaking, healing, be described as anything but a life long, intimate wrestling between Father and son?
I am a bait ball of anger, rage, pain, fear, love, frustration, joy, failure and humanity. I have a Father who is physical with me, let me take it all out on him. He tuckers this little guy out, makes me think that I have him on his heels, then slips my hold and, in his fatherly love – that is, and always has been, ready to kill and ready to die – breaks my nose and lets me know it is Him that did it.
Having two sons myself, this story finds the fleshy underbelly of a heart with the carapace of a desert tortoise. My boys want to know they can contend with me. Through some cosmic mystery, they know they are most loved when they are most pinned, they are accepted when they are pushed against, they are most content when contended with. Wrestling is the intimate physicality of two living wills testing strength, and it is what they need. The love is in the grapple.
The intimacy and knowledge on display here is astounding. God knew what Jacob needed was a physical, fatherly skirmish. Jacob was a heel-grabber, winning by subterfuge. Now he must wrest from God’s hands what he always usurped. Then God busted his hip as a reminder of his covenant to always wrestle him and changed his name to make it all official – from Jacob to Israel, “wrestles with God”.
Jacob’s hip was loose in the socket and he walked with a slur in his step the rest of his days. The remembrance of this was captured for posterity in the quirky dietary law of avoiding the hip joints of animals. And so the stories I will tell my children recounting God’s love may mean I strip my sleeve and bear a scar as I whistle-laugh delightedly through a crooked nose.
If you have followed the character arc from the beginning, you may have noticed I have arrived at a different place then when I started. Perhaps you are a twisted deviant like myself and also had boob-related associations with the love of God. I still get that angry itch deep down sometimes when I think about God’s love and the giant flesh pillow parallel. Kind of makes me want to wrestle.
Thought Butter 