Meanings of the Limp

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Four)

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Eugene Delacroix

They sit on the table in front of me, the messages. In letters or emails, waiting a reply.

Stories of sudden bereavements, catastrophic loss, depressions so stultifying suicide seems the only escape. Or it can be a slow kind of blankness that’s crept over them. One day they woke and they were just numb. We question whether we are really living ‘our best life’. I can’t answer that kind of hashtag, but these messages, at some point, I must. They are asking for a response in the face of the dark.

I know in the end I am going to say something incredibly simple: find something to serve. We all serve in one kind of temple or another, but whether it’s the right one, it’s these ordeals that can help us figure that out.

The letters bring me into contact with diminishment, with the proper bleak, with hard, complex thoughts. With great rushes of sorrow. I step up from the desk and look out at the hills. I will have to come at this in a roundabout way.

There is an old Sufi story that says we are blindfolded hawks. That we are in prison, and that God wishes us out into the wind and the sun, beholding everything. But many of us get awfully attached to our prison cell, and the regular meals.

I don’t want to be blindfolded, I don’t want beeswax in my ears, I don’t want to be seduced by stuff and lose contact with the real. I want to be awake. And that means I’m going to experience loss and limit. That means I’m going to write letters just like the ones that end up on my desk. It means sometimes I’m going to howl like a love-lorn dog. And I am going to need a teacher that can see.

Yeshua wakes up before his disciples and goes to the wild, lonely places to pray. He is not blindfolded, he has no beeswax in his ears, he is un-seduced. That makes him terrifying. That makes him true. Somehow when I read him I feel the freshness of the night hanging off his words. His communion with the Everything of the universe. He is not blind, not at all. He is the Hawk-that-Sees.

In Michael Martin’s book Sophia in Exile, he tells the story of Francis of Assisi petitioning for founding his order. When asked what his rule would be, Francis holds up the gospels. The cardinalate is shocked, wonders if Francis is thick in the head, such a thing ‘seemed a thing untried, and too hard for human strength’. Just too bloody difficult. Impractical at the very least. And, as Francis finds, once established, his own order does struggle terribly under the weight.

But not to try? I think of Rilke:

When we win it’s with small things,  
and the triumph itself makes us small.  
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.  
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestler of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews  
grew long like metal strings,  
he felt them under his fingers  
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel 
(who often simply declined the fight)  
went away proud and strengthened 
and great from that harsh hand,  
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.  
Winning does not tempt that man.  
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,  
by constantly greater beings.

Modernity often wants us to win with small things. Fixated with little victories that secretly demean us. Anything to stop us wrestling with the angel. Anything to stop us realising quite how sacred the right kind of defeat can be.

A Liturgy of the Wild would understand certain submissions as very holy events. As breakthroughs. We remember that the number one no from Yeshua is pride. In all the talk of lust and greed it’s easy to skip past pride. But go to any prison and ask why a scrap broke out - disrespect - over and over again it’s disrespect that sends people animal crazy. Your pride gets punctured. Violence comes with words or fists, but we quickly see how pride is a vital form of oxygen. We strut about, dizzy on ourselves. A Liturgy of the Wild would take the counter-cultural step of knowing we are made not by endless accomplishment but our pact with limit. With beautiful, religious defeat. The strange affirmation of submission.

Limit brings meaning,

Endless success, despair.

I think I always knew that true Christianity was going to involve addressing that, so I stayed away. Rather the Pagan chief than some cress-munching apologist. I could also see how rampant ego could attach itself to piety as much as swagger. How it could hide that way. Pride is an incredibly granular demon to engage with, mind-bogglingly subtle, and I doubt I will ever get past it. A considerable part of me doesn’t want to. It’s been very useful. At its best it can be an energy that can be ridden, a red horse, it can get stuff done. But let’s face it, we need a maintenance programme.

Another book I’ve been reading is Ron Hutton’s Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe. Whilst he efficiently shakes many of our most cherished folkloric beliefs he breezily states on Christianity: ‘all that its founder had prescribed was a code of ethics, a direction to hold a commemorative meal in his honour and (apparently) a cult of his own figure as a saviour and redeemer, set within the ritual and theological structure of the Judaism of his time.’

All? Hardly worth bothering with then. It’s a way-of-being, a fundamental consciousness so mind-bogglingly challenging that St Francis’s cardinalate told him he was mad to even try. ‘A code of ethics’ doesn’t do justice to what Yeshua embodied or the shockwaves we find ourselves deep in two thousand years later.

Tell that to the slaves and the women and the sick and the desperate who heard his message in the early centuries. Tell that to those under the cosh of late-period Roman Empire excess and cruelty. What they heard was liberation. What Yeshua’s ‘code of ethics’ can do, is, as Rilke suggests, change our shape. And it changes our shape by facing something that is monumentally bigger than us. We get chewed, masticated, but slowly, incrementally slowly I admit, something starts to happen.

Every night I lie in the dark and know exactly how far I am from Wild Mountain, from Grail consciousness, from Yeshua’s example, but I am glad-as-glad-can-be to be on the journey. It’s not just a ‘code of ethics’, it’s a sinking into the mind of Christ. And I will be falling, falling, falling for the rest of my life. There is no bottom to the mind of Christ.

Recently I spoke to a spiritual teacher. I told them just how far I was from Yehsua’s directives. It seemed impossible. Like a message from Pluto or something. I’d received the echo location but simply couldn’t excavate the sufficient discipline. The teacher smiled and said that sensation was in all of us. They said that until the wisdom grew from the inside not the outside it would feel like an imposition not an invitation. But it is an invitation. More life!

And in the meantime, they said, practice. Fall down, stand up. Get clean. Don’t linger on the missteps. Signing off with these lines from the book of Samuel, they quietly reminded me just how lucky I was to be lifted from a derelict to a quester:

He raises the needy from the dust; from the ash heap lifts up the poor,

To seat them with nobles and make a glorious throne their heritage.

I consider the letters on the table, or on the laptop, or the absolutely haunted look in a friend’s eye when next we meet. They may say to me, “I’m already wrestling with circumstance, and with betrayal, and with sickness, with the world, and now you want me to wrestle with God? Try to be serious!”

I understand, I absolutely understand.

But God’s in all those other wrestles. And those struggles will break us without catching the sacredness of the unravelling. It can turn in a second, once you glimpse it. The move from the liminoid to the liminal. We all know about the liminal these days – very popular word – the liminoid less so. Liminoid is when you get the traumatic event but not the insight. There’s no meaning, nothing to be worked with. That’s a layer of hell, right there.

It’s not enough to say we are just meaning-making creatures. Like it’s a kind of neurosis in the face of pain. I think there’s a ground of meaning so profound we can barely face it. That there’s actually more meaning than we can stand.

In this talk of limit, of what marks and lames us, I don’t mean go looking for scars, I don’t mean fetishising disaster, I don’t mean becoming addicted to disorder. But I do mean listening, putting your great and ancient ear to the dark soil of circumstance and listening. Surround yourself in the Grail of Yeshua’s care when you do so, reach out for his fur in the darkness. You may spit and hiss at me for saying it, but I have to say it. I would be withholding gold.

And in the limits and toughness and wild care of such instruction may we find liberation.

*

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

*

In his early days, Jacob was something of a hustler, a cheat, and always looking for a blessing. He gets one from his dad, but only when he fools him. He receives gain by deceit. We remember him by his sick father’s bedside, in the half light, under a goat skin. Pretending to be his wild brother Esau. That dishonesty must have stuck with him somewhere. The crookedness of it. He may have got affirmations here and there, but his real, unadorned blessing is when he is defeated by the Angel. That initiatory limp gave him something all the gold in the world couldn’t supply.

The world affirms with little victories, the divine blesses by defeating the smallness in us. Opens us to the vast.

I sit back down at my table and I start to write.

Sophia in Exile, Michael Martin

Queens of the Wild, Ronald Hutton