Wrestling with God: Finding Hope and Meaning in Our Daily Struggles to Be Human

by Ronald Rolheiser

In our intent, we’re sincere, but no ideology carries the wisdom, balance, and challenge found in the great religious traditions, in the scriptures, in Jesus, and in what is best in our churches.

I already felt then, just as I feel now, that both human life and the human heart have a depth that’s always partially beyond our grasp.

The scriptures are filled with stories of persons finding God and helping bring about God’s kingdom, even as their own lives are often fraught with mess, confusion, frustration, betrayal, infidelity, and sin. There are no simple human beings immune to the spiritual, psychological, sexual, and relational complexities that beset us all.

An awareness and an acceptance of the pathological complexity of our own lives can be the place where we finally find the threads of empathy and forgiveness: Life is difficult for everybody. Everyone is hurting. We don’t need to blame anyone. We are all beset with the same issues. Understanding and accepting that truth can help us to forgive each other—and then forgive ourselves.

In essence, the soul is two things: it’s the fire inside us giving us life and energy, and it’s the glue that holds us together.

We can lose our souls either by not having enough fire or by not having enough glue.

God is fire, infinite fire, an energy that is relentlessly seeking to embrace and infuse all of creation. And that fire is inside us, creating in us a feeling of godliness, an intuition that we too have divine energies, and a pressure to be singularly special and to achieve some form of greatness.

The task in life, the poet Robert Lax suggests, is not so much finding a path in the woods as of finding a rhythm to walk in.

We are infinite souls inside finite lives and that alone should be enough to explain our incessant and insatiable aching, but there is something else: our souls enter the world bearing the brand of eternity and this gives all of our aching a particularized coloring.

Classical theology and philosophy name four transcendental qualities that are somehow true of everything that exists: oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty. Everything that exists somehow bears these four qualities; however, these qualities are perfect only inside God. God alone is perfect oneness, perfect truth, perfect goodness, and perfect beauty. Lonergan asserts that God brands these four qualities, in their perfection, into the core of the human soul.

In this life, we don’t learn truth, we recognize it; we don’t learn love, we recognize it; and we don’t learn what is good, we recognize it. We recognize these qualities because we already possess them in the core of our souls.

Some mystics taught that the human soul comes from God and that the last thing God does before putting a soul into a body is to kiss the soul. The soul then goes through life always dimly remembering that kiss, a kiss of perfect love, and the soul measures all of life’s loves and kisses against that primordial perfect kiss.

We bear the dark memory, as Henri Nouwen says, of once having been caressed by hands far gentler than we ever meet in this life.

In our search for life, meaning, happiness, and God, we should not forget that our spirit is open to life only through our senses, and our senses provide depth and meaning only because they are animated by spirit.

Our senses make these real, even as our spirit gives them meaning.

For everyone who is emotionally healthy and honest, there will be a lifelong tension between the seductive attractions of this world and the lure of God.

This world is its own mystery and has its own meaning, a God-given one. It’s not simply a stage upon which we, as humans, play out our individual dramas of salvation and then close the curtain. It’s a place for all of us—humans, animals, insects, plants, water, rocks, and soil—to enjoy a home together.

The world is meant to take our breath away, even as we genuflect to the author of that breath.

This begs the obvious questions: How can the sexuality of young people be emotionally and morally contained during all those years? Where does that leave them in the struggle to remain faithful to the commandments?

First, they should more realistically acknowledge the brute power of sexuality in our lives and integrate sexual complexity more honestly into spirituality. Second, the churches should be far more empathic and pastorally sensitive to the issues that beset people because of their sexuality.

all of us, no matter what age or state in life, must at some point mourn what’s incomplete and not consummated in our lives.

Of course, that’s impossible, only God can do that. Our yearnings and our needs are infinite because we are Grand Canyons without a bottom.

Claiming your solitude and experiencing friendship and other forms of intimacy are not substitutes for sex but one of its rich modalities.

To name something correctly is to partly free ourselves of its dominance.

Renowned spiritual writer Richard Rohr is fond of saying, “Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly.”

But we must trust that God understands our humanity: God doesn’t demand that we give him our conscious attention all of the time.

And God even accepts our resistance to him and our need to assert, with pride, our own independence.

Togetherness, ease with each other, comfort, and the sense of being at home are what we give each other then.

God’s power still takes that same modality. Babies don’t intimidate, even as they inspire holy fear.

Virtually every theophany in the scriptures (an instance where God appears) begins with the words: “Do not be afraid!” What frightens us does not come from God.

He had discerned that God is not so much a law to be obeyed as a gracious presence under which we are asked to creatively live.

The God whom Jesus both incarnates and reveals is a God who is forever open to repentance, forever open to contrition, and forever waiting for our return from our prodigal wanderings.

The “unbridgeable gap” here refers, among other things, to a gap that remains forever unbridged here in this world between the rich and the poor.

But injustice is also the result of social, economic, and political policies that, whatever their other merits, help produce the conditions that spawn poverty, inequality, racism, privilege, and the lack of conscientious concern for the air we breathe.

We need to give to the poor not because they need it, though they do, but because we need to do that in order to be healthy.

Too much excess, it is believed, leaves a person unhealthy.

And we need to see our giving not so much as charity but as obligation, as justice, as something we owe.

In Jewish spirituality, blessing is always intended to flow through the person receiving it so as to enrich others.

Nobody will get to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

In Matthew’s Gospel, mature discipleship doesn’t depend upon our believing that we have it right, it depends only upon our doing it right.

If Jesus is to be believed, we will be judged religiously more by how we treat refugees than by whether or not we are going to church.

Our lens must always be moral rather than political, though obviously both wealth and poverty have huge political implications.

In essence, how we know as human beings, and how we know God, is deeply paradoxical; that is, the more deeply we know anything, the more that person or object begins to become less conceptually clear.

Faith, by definition, implies a paradoxical darkness: the closer we get to God in this life, the more God seems to disappear, because overpowering light can seem like darkness.

It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and that God loves us unconditionally.

This purifies our experience of God because only when all of our own lights are off can we grasp divine light in its purity.

In that darkness, when we have nothing left, when we feel there is no God, God can begin to flow into us in a pure way.

Dark nights of the soul are needed to wash us clean because only then can the angel come to help us.

The first thing that Christianity defines dogmatically about God is that God is ineffable—that is, that it is impossible to conceptualize God and that all of our language about God is more inaccurate than accurate.

God is still real, still there, but our finite imaginations are coming up empty trying to picture infinite reality, tantamount to what happens when we try to imagine the highest number to which it is possible to count.