Let Me Go, for the Day Is Breaking
Rev. Lilli Nye October 23, 2005

Maybe some of you have heard of the Sun Magazine. Each month in essays, stories, interviews, photography, and poetry, ordinary and extraordinary people struggle to understand their lives, and Life, baring themselves and the process of living with great honesty and intimacy.

One of my favorite monthly features in the Sun is a section called “Readers Write.” Each month, the magazine presents a strange little theme as a stimulus for its readers to produce their own pieces. Readers submit small jewels of writing cut from their lives—reflections, odd little stories, beautiful and sad memories, launched from a single word or simple phrase provided by the magazine. For example:

June 2002: The Phone Call January 2003: Scars May 2004: Second Chances March 2005: Grace

The “Readers Write” theme for the September 2003 was “Blessings in Disguise,” and although I have tossed out or passed on many of my old issues of the Sun, I tore out these particular pages and saved them in a box, coming across them recently when we moved.

The section contains 20 entries, many only a few paragraphs, describing stories of tragedy transformed into strength, of shame becoming a doorway to honesty, of vulnerability leading to unexpected friendship or delight. Writing of blessings in disguise is…

• Roger, whose rage at everything eventually landed him in prison, where he has transformed his life, now reading four books a week and writing poetry that he has been able to get published.

• There’s Cindy, reflecting on life with her 12-year old son, Alex, who has Down syndrome, and how his boundless, unprejudiced affection for everyone and his habit of running up to total strangers and greeting them with an exuberant hug is a most wonderful, heart-stretching nuisance.

• There’s Tina, who finds the courage to leave her husband after years of verbal abuse when he finally punches her across the face. She reflects that if it had not come to that horrible, violent turning point, she would have stayed with him forever, her life bleeding invisibly away.

• There’s the man who sinks into a deep depression after his wife leaves him, until he comes to accept his homosexuality, falls in love with another man, and realized how absolutely right his wife had been to end their relationship.

• There’s Janice, who has lived with inoperable cancer for two years—that’s two years longer than anyone imagined she could live—and who lives every day with a gratitude and happiness she never knew as a healthy person.

Every single entry tells the story of a quiet epiphany, some kind of subtle, deep awakening or blessed transformation, brought about by a circumstance that at first seemed wholly undesirable.

Like Jacob, accosted without warning or reason in the night by a divine antagonist, each of these individuals had been accosted by a trial that no one would wish on anyone: getting hit by a delivery truck…having a stroke at age 30… …getting fired…being sexually assaulted…nursing one’s beloved spouse through illness and death….

The stories are amazing yet ordinary. They simply describe the things we go through and which transform us as human beings, life being what it is on this bitter and beautiful earth.

In a book called Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, author Joan Chittister uses the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel as her the central metaphor. In the story she sees a particular series of struggles. She explores how, when one perseveres through any of these struggles, when one keeps wrestling and presses through to the other side, those struggles turn out to be initiations, yielding new blessings, new gifts. They are doorways into a transformed self.

She writes that, “There is no one who does not have to choose, sometime, someway, between [just] giving up and growing stronger. And yet if we give up in the midst of struggle, we never find out what that struggle would have given us in the end. If we decide to endure it to the end, we come out of it changed by the doing of it. It is a risk of mammoth proportions. We dare the development of the self.”

• There is always the struggle of unwelcome change, and the gift of conversion as we learn to embrace and integrate that change;

• There is the struggle of isolation, when we feel cut off from others and helpless, and its potential gift of independence, as we gradually take responsibility for ourselves, and our own happiness, at the deepest level;

• There is the struggle of darkness and uncertainty, and its gift of learning to walk forward in faith;

• There is the struggle of fear, and the gift of courage that comes when we turn and confront something that really scares us;

• There is the struggle of powerlessness, when we cannot control things, and must finally surrender, finally let go;

• There is the struggle of vulnerability, and the gift it gives of accepting our limitations and learning to receive from others;

• There is the struggle of exhaustion, and the gift of discovering one’s capacity for endurance;

• There is the struggle of scarring, and the gift of wisdom and compassion. Real struggle marks us for life. It imprints us with the record of damage. Jacob will always limp from his violent encounter with the angel. But the record of suffering that we carry can also sensitize us to the suffering of others. What we have endured carves out a place of deeper feeling in us. We now see that another person carries scars not unlike our own, and we understand, we connect, we are moved reach out.

Each of these struggles requires change, and each change is contains a loss and is like a small death.

The core question becomes how to go about each of these dyings without giving in to the death of the soul. That question holds the crux of a spirituality of struggle. That question points to the difference between a purposeless depression and the anxiety, the struggle, of spiritual growth.

Hector Aristizábal is a native of Colombia and survived years of imprisonment and torture by the Colombian military for his subversive activities—that is, for being a peace and justice activist. Now living in the U.S., he is still an activist and a therapist, working with torture survivors, gang members, prisoners, AIDS patients, and low-income immigrant families.

On the one hand it is absurd and a little outrageous for me, a person so unscarred by comparison, to stand here and use the words of someone who has been tortured to make a point. I do so with the utmost humility.

But when we can hear the healing wisdom of one who has endured and survived the worst imaginable suffering, it offers a kind of ultimate context in which to understand all the other struggles, great and small, that we must survive. If someone can come through that, and still be whole, then I can come through my experience and still be whole.

I came across an interview with Aristizábal in another issue of the Sun. He is known for quoting the African saying, “The blessing is next to the wound,” a saying that mirrors, remarkably, the essential message of the Jacob story. When asked how there can possibly be any blessing found in the wounds of torture he answers:

“That is up to each person. Each of us who survives must create meaning from the experience: Why did this happen to me? Why did I survive when other people didn’t? We seek meaning by creating narratives about our lives. The dominant narrative for torture is about victims. But I don’t believe in victimhood. People have tried to place me in the category of victim, and I won’t allow it. Those of us who have been tortured need to see it simply as one more event in our lives, not the defining characteristic of who we are. And any time you go through a difficult ordeal, it can awaken inner resources. … Each person can learn the lesson his or her spirit needs to learn. This is very hard to do…”

Later, he says, “Sometimes, in the ordeal, we find the seeds of our identity.”

The key moment in the biblical story of Jacob is the moment when the angel gives him a new name. In the Hebrew culture of the time, one’s name is an expression of one’s very nature and one’s destiny. To receive a new name reflects a conversion of being, an initiation into a new state, a new identity. It indicates that the prior self has passed away. One has been fundamentally changed.

Although wounded, Jacob becomes Israel, “the one who struggles with God and prevails.” This is the moment of blessing he seeks.

There comes a point, if one doesn’t give up, but keeps wrestling, keeps striving through the night, there comes a point when light begins to appear on the horizon. The demon-angel that we have been wrestling and by which we have been so wounded finally yields up its blessing to us. And we realize that we can begin to let go of that struggle now. Perhaps it means letting go of who we were, or thought we were, or who we thought someone else was, or what we thought was real. In letting go, an entirely new set of possibilities opens to us.

There is a beloved passage from the poet Rilke:

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed... But, please, consider whether these…sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? …Were it possible for us to see further than our own knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with [even] greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity…a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

Each of us will struggle with various demon-angels in our lives, or maybe with the same one repeatedly or for years. But I pray that in time that wrestling yields to each of us its blessing, and that the spiritual foe with which we wrestle can at last say, “You have struggled with me long and hard and have prevailed. Let me go now, for the day is breaking.”