A Night on the Jabbok
[Inspired by Genesis 32:22-32, the blogger experienced this post as seemingly writing itself during a week-long hospitalization following a cardiac episode at the end of August.]
O Mysterious One,
I am Jacob, and this night I find myself on the north bank of the Jabbok. I am alone now insofar as everyone else, together with all that I possess, has already been sent ahead across the river. As at Bethel, I am engulfed in darkness and isolation, to say nothing of anxiety as to what lies ahead. I have reached the end of my stratagems and machinations, and am in straits.
Suddenly I am ambushed at the ford by a baffling stranger who then forcefully engages me. There by the stream, darkness pressing in within and without, the two of us have it out. The denouement of this match waxes and wanes. As we wrestle in the dark night neither of us gives quarter to the other, neither will back off. Persistence is offset by doggedness. As dawn is approaching I summon the courage to lock onto my opponent and demand a blessing. I am strangely countered by being given a puzzling new identity-shifting name meaning one who strives with the divine and prevails. I reciprocate by requesting my antagonist’s name, but again am evasively checked by the query “why?” It is then that I am finally blessed by my co-combatant albeit not before being wounded in the fray.
It is only after my ambusher at last disengages and leaves me that I realize that my perceived nemesis has been You, O Lover, Your moves and counter moves my myopic perceptions of Your Presence. Yes, it is You with whom I have wrestled. It is You to whom I delivered my best shots and lived to write this post-prayer. I had neither recognized Your Presence nor anticipated Your tactics. None less than You had stealthily stalked me, and I had survived to tell the story.
Now, having returned home, I again resort to the interrogative, my tool of choice. Are not such Jabbok moments, perceived as matches, especially translucent to Your Presence, to Your “splendor in the grass,” in the phrasing of Wordsworth? “Is [not] my gloom, after all, / Shade of [Your] hand, outstretched / caressingly?” in the words of Francis Thompson’s Hound? Do I not employ the image of “ambush” for You precisely because You always surprise, always cut across the grain of my expectations? Is this not so even when You menacingly present Yourself as Wrestler? Tethered by the finitude which has my longing far-exceeding what I experience, am I able, at least for now, to embrace any kind of engagement with You as . . . enough?
Yes, engagements with You of whatever sort, even those resulting in a limp: I’ll take them anytime.
