Nativity Catholic Church
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Lord, Keep Me Moist! Many of the drawings of biblical events found in my very first “Children’s Bible” are still quite vivid in my imagination. In fact, this particular text is still sold today, and every once in a while, I’ll wander through the children’s section of the bookstore and grab hold of a copy, just to reminisce. I don’t believe it’s changed one bit since the time I treasured it as a child. Perhaps my early fascination with the tale of Jacob’s struggle with the angel, as related in the Book of Genesis (32:23-33), owes itself to the dramatic rendering, found in that bible, of that divine-human encounter. I still see the figure of Jacob, biceps bulging, sandaled feet firmly planted in the desert sand, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the mysteriously heavenly emissary. Even though I was a child, I knew that angels worked for God, but somehow I imagined that Jacob should have prevailed in the tussle, after all, the angel’s wings seemed to be getting in the way of wrestling Jacob to the ground! Somehow, I thought angels to be sissies—what with their puffy feathers, flowing dresses and golden locks. Of course, as the story goes, Jacob was prevailing...until the angel took a cheap shot and struck Jacob in the hip joint! Now, I suppose, from my present vantage point in life, it’s not so much the biblical picture that keeps the story a fascination, but rather the reality of my own struggles with the divine. The wrestling match between Jacob and God (in the guise of a heavenly messenger) is incredibly human, incredibly believable, because the struggles go on in the mind, heart and soul of every “Jacob” who lays claim to a relationship with God. We all can identify our own Peniels (the name Jacob gave to the place of his wrestling match), our own places of divine-human wrestling, where we have encountered “the face of God,” and also, like Jacob, have “lived to tell about it,” perhaps not walking away from these encounters with a “new name,” as Jacob-Israel, did, but most likely with a new perspective or new way of acting. The struggle between Jacob and the man-turned-angel-turned-God is a classic rendition of an oft-repeated stage in the spiritual life. As we look back over our life stories, we can mark out many Peniels along the way, where we have witnessed the face of God—not only in pristine and glorious ways, but most certainly in ways that have wrenched, not our hip sockets, but rather our hearts, our minds. To draw intimate with God clearly means that we must wrestle with who God is, how we understand or do not understand God, how we will respond to the divine One who mixes it up with us in the stuff of our daily pilgrimage. It seems that a recurrent stage of our spiritual journey is the struggle between our attempts to shape God and God’s attempts to shape us. In a meditation written centuries ago by St. Irenaeus of Lyons, we find these challenging, yet moving words: "It is not you who shape God. It is God who shapes you. If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season. Offer him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the Artist has fashioned you. Let the clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers." The images of Irenaeus quickly bring to mind a favorite Scripture passage of so many Christians, the story of the prophet Jeremiah and the potter. In Jeremiah 18, “The Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah thus...rise up, be off to the potter’s house; there I will give you my message.” Jeremiah witnesses the potter working at the wheel, and ultimately comes to experience the revelation: “like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, house of Israel.” While in many ways, the image is comforting and reassuring, yet herein lies the struggle, the beginnings of the lifelong wrestling match we engage in with God. The potter is in control...the potter does all the shaping. But we want to be in control; we want to do our own fashioning and shaping. In fact, when we witness the work of the potter at the wheel, while technique is everything, we also come to see that the clay doesn’t always have the best of it! Witness a potter working, fashioning clay: the potter beats it, slaps it, roughs it up...the potter squeezes and pinches it...the potter mishandles and smashes it down, only to start up again. And then, of course, there’s the constant spinning, the dizzying whirling and twirling of the wheel, nearly pulling the clay apart, if not for the steady hands of the potter holding it together. No, the life of the “clay” is not easy, compared with that of the potter. Quite often, we are the ones who want to saddle up on the potter’s stool; we want to be the ones doing the smashing and squeezing, the stretching and slapping, the pinching and pushing. We want to be the ones shaping God rather than being shaped by God. But we are the clay...not the potter—– and so may our prayer, our desire echo that of St. Irenaeus: “Lord, keep us moist!”
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