Struggle

*STRUGGLE - see CROSS, PAIN, SUFFER, CROSS, WAY, TRANSCEND, PURGATORY

It is not that the struggle ever goes away but that we have transcended it so that it no longer affects us as it once did. In this second stage, courage, virtue, and nobility predominate and we face our experiences with a happiness that is not undone by anything we encounter. As this happiness works its way through us and this stage matures, it merges into infinity, which is also love. (Stillness, p242)

The greatest human struggle of all: attempting to raise ourselves from our animal instincts to become "in God's image." (Dr. Laura, PS, 6/97)

I know you are tired of the struggle. Yet I tell you this: When you follow Me, the struggle disappears. (Conversations, p115)

Israel which can be translated "One who struggles with God" or even "God fighter" from when Jacob wrestled with a mysterious stranger and discovered that he had in reality been struggling with God. Scripture is a tool that allows us to apprehend a dimension that transcends, that goes beyond knowledge to an experience, whose text points beyond itself to a reality which cannot adeguately be expressed in words and concepts. Reading scripture demands the same kind of meditative and intuitive attention that we give to a poem; that we often have to wrestle with the text, only to learn that we are denied the certainity of a final revelation. Scripture enables us to know at some profound level that life has an external dimension and the biblical authors force us to make an imaginative effort - that it is a hard struggle to discern a sacred reality in the flawed and tragic conditions in which we live. Like Jacob, we will have to wrestle in the dark, denied the consolations of final certitude and experiencing at best only transient, elusive blessing and we may find that we have been wounded in the course of our struugle. (Beginning, p3-6)

As so often in myth and legend, the hero can achieve enlightenment only by taking an arduous (exhausting) path through the shadow of death. Joseph experienced real desolation; faith does not insulate us from the terrors of the human condition. Judah had begun the painful journey from selfishness and ignorance to self-knowledge and learned that it is impossible to save what we love by holding on to it. (Beginning, p103,105)