Wrestling With God

Author Nikos Kazantzakis in Report to Greco wrote that when he was young, his mother was very religious and went to mass every day. His father was anti-religious and bitter toward religion, so Nikos was torn. When he was nineteen years old, he decided to spend the summer at a monastery on one of the mountains in Greece. At this monastery there was a famous old monk known as Father Makarios.

One day Nikos asked, “Father Makarios, do you still wrestle with the devil?” Father Makarios said, “No. I used to wrestle with the devil all the time. But now I have grown old and tired, and the devil has grown old and tired with me. So I leave him alone and he leaves me alone.”

Nikos asked, “Then life is easy now?” Father Makarios responded: “Oh, no. Life is much harder now. For now I wrestle with God.” Nikos exclaimed, “You wrestle with God and hope to win?” “No,” said Father Makarios, “I wrestle with God and hope to lose.”

These two images – wrestling with the devil and wrestling with God – represent or symbolize two different aspects of the spiritual struggle and journey, and perhaps two different stages in the evolution of human consciousness.

When we wrestle with the devil as in Jesus’ trial in the wilderness we are dealing with egoic desires, ambition, and greed. But when we wrestle with God, we are facing the great questions of life and confronting our ignorance in our understanding of the Great Mystery. Unfortunately, many Christians never get to the second stage of the spiritual journey. They either become trapped in egoic pursuits or they become settled in their conditioned beliefs and never seek truth on their own apart from what they were programmed to believe.

The second stage of the journey is often avoided, because it poses the greatest risks and threats to our sense of security and confidence, exposing that what we trusted were nothing more than fake props posing as pillars of faith. It’s best to go through this struggle now, in this life, rather than the next whatever that may involve. Spiritual transformation leads through it, not around it, and there is no avoiding it.