Conflicts Without, Fears Within: A Spirituality of Struggle

Week of May 5, 2003

Exactly twenty-five years ago the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck published a book called The Road Less Traveled (1978) which stood on the NY Times bestseller list for an astonishing ten years. The book has sold more than seven million copies and been translated into at least 23 languages. In his book Peck penned one of the most famous opening sentences ever when he wrote, “Life is difficult.” Those three words actually formed the entire first paragraph. Rather than moan and complain, he advised, we need to accept this reality. Personal growth, Peck went on to write, is most often a complex, arduous and lifelong task.

One reason Peck’s book was and is so wildly successful is because that opening sentence runs counter to our accepted cultural wisdom, and is maybe even counter-intuitive. Ours is a culture of entitlement, not struggle. We celebrate wealth, prowess, power, strength, bravado, and confidence. We abhor weakness, failure, and struggle. Joan Chittister is on to something when she observes how in our American culture “pain is unacceptable, headaches are some kind of affront to human development, strain is a problem to be solved, stress is intolerable.” The myths of Superman and Wonderwoman are alive and well, she suggests, and woe to the person who experiences feelings of vulnerability, discouragement, fear or depression.¹ Painful experiences like these, according to the cultural myth, are to be disdained as unfortunate tragedies rather than, in Peck’s view, to be seen as fertile opportunities for personal growth towards health, wisdom and wholeness.

Perhaps we might expect such a message from our culture, but in my experience we also hear a similar message in our Christian churches. When I listen carefully week after week in church, I keep hearing about “three points that will radically change your life.” I learn that by doing a simple task for the church I can have an “incredible” impact on someone. But week in and week out my life feels far more ordinary, mundane and banal. I hope and pray I am changing, but I am a long way from anything that is phenomenal or extraordinary, terrific or tremendous, incredible or unbelievable.

Brennan Manning captures this naive idealism that even Christians perpetuate:

Hyperbole, bloated rhetoric, and grandiose testimonies create the impression that once Jesus is acknowledged as Lord, the Christian life becomes a picnic on a green lawn---marriage blossoms into connubial bliss, physical health flourishes, acne disappears, and sinking careers suddenly soar. The victorious life is proclaimed to mean that everybody is a winner. An attractive twenty-year-old accepts Jesus and becomes Miss America, a floundering lawyer conquers alcoholism and whips F. Lee Bailey in court, a tenth-round draft choice for the Green Bay Packers goes to the Pro Bowl. Miracles occur, conversions abound, church attendance skyrockets, ruptured relationships get healed, shy people become gregarious, and the Atlanta Braves win the World Series. Idyllic descriptions of victory in Jesus are more often colored by cultural and personal expectations than by Christ and the ragamuffin gospel.²

In the end, of course, this type of rhetoric is a recipe for failure and disappointment because we know that this is not how life is truly lived. Life is far more nuanced, textured, complicated, and, we should be careful to affirm, beautiful and rich.

In contrast to these notions of gain without pain, Chittister prescribes what she calls a “spirituality of struggle” which takes as its starting point the narrative of Jacob’s struggle with the angelic visitor (Genesis 32:22-32). Jacob, you will remember, had swindled his brother Esau of his birthright, then deceived his own aged and blind father in order to steal the family blessing. He fled in fear. One night he was all alone on the River Jabbok when a terrible and unknown stranger wrestled with him. The struggle was a veritable death grip, and it lasted all night. Somehow, the text says, it was a struggle with God himself. Jacob asked to know the name of this strange visitor, but he received no answer. What he got was a crippling touch to his hip that caused him to limp for the rest of his life. But he begged for God’s blessing, and this man Jacob, having cheated his brother and betrayed his father, got just that. At dawn God blessed him at the River Jabbok, but it was a blessing forged in a terrible struggle. This blessing came as a gift to Jacob, not because he prevailed in the struggle, or certainly not because of his goodness. In his treatment of this same passage Frederick Buechner refers to this as “the magnificent defeat,” that is, “the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”³

What Chittister calls a “spirituality of struggle” acknowledges that our lives can be very fragile and unpredictable. I am reminded of Paul who described feeling “harassed at every turn---conflicts on the outside, fears within” (2 Corinthians 7:5, NIV). In the Jacob narrative she finds eight elements of struggle. But this is by no means masochism. It is not a stoicism that keeps a stiff upper lip through pain. Struggle is not merely a negation and loss of all we hope and dream. Rather, within these struggles, Chittister identifies eight corresponding gifts that God uses to enrich and deepen our lives out of His “endless abundance.”

The Struggle		The Gift
change		conversion
isolation		independence
darkness		faith
fear		courage
powerlessness		surrender
vulnerability		limitations
exhaustion		endurance
scarring		transformation

Somehow Jacob struggled through the night with a terrible and unknown stranger. He did not give up, he was not defeated. In the end God blessed him. “Jacob does what all of us must do,” writes Chittister, “if, in the end, we,too, are to become true. He confronts in himself the things that are wounding him, admits his limitations, accepts his situation, rejoins the world, and moves on.”⁴ This is not an easy path, nor is it one our culture would prescribe, but it can be a very good one. It sounds like Paul who wrote that “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10, NIV).

¹ Joan Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 68, 88.
² Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 1990, 2000), p. 175.
³ Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (San Francisco: Harper, 1966), pp. 10-18.
⁴ Chittister, p. 87. Chittister devotes one short chapter to each of the sixteen struggles and gifts.