Meet The Wrestlers

I am sure you have read it several times, same as I did (last time, actually, yesterday). Someone is “battling” against a certain truth of the faith, or “wrestling” with another.

It is so XXI Century, isn’t it? The writer gets to feel a courageous, critical thinker, raising his towering intellect against the hard, cold wall of the faith, but without putting himself in enmity with it, which he knows is a no-no in the circles he is addressing. This is, normally, made from a position of assumed goodness (which, in fact, makes the writer look, and feel, even better). The critical thinker, who is intellectually developed and extremely compassionate at the same time, wrestles with the fact that he feels, and think of himself, as better than Jesus.

You see, Mr Wrestler does not really like the idea of anybody going to hell; he just cannot stomach the idea of Rajesh, his oh so good Backgammon pal, going to hell after he dies; he never knew of a suicide whose act he did not justify with some form of “depression”; he always thought that every lurv comes from God, which is why he has been wrestling with the Church position on sodomy. The list is extremely long.

In all this, Mr Wrestler (and his lawfully wedded wife, Mrs Wrestler; albeit their daughter lives in sin with Dahlia, they/them, a non-binary student now getting her PhD in gender studies) feels that delightful titillation of challenge, the same one he had when he, during his hippie phase, loved to defy conventions by smoking marijuana and occasionally “experimenting” together with his future wife, who also always found girls sexually attractive. Both remember that time fondly, you see, because “it made them what they are now”: two wonderfully inclusive middle aged people who smile to everyone with the same, guru-like, childish smile as they preach tolerance and love for all, whilst they cancel from their Facebook every Trump supporter.

They feel good with themselves, the Wrestlers. They feels so good, in fact, that this exclusionary, heteronormative, more than vaguely homophobic, very Capitalistic, and pretty judgmental Jesus makes them feel so delightfully uncomfortable, so fascinatingly rebellious, even as they still claim to include Jesus in their very inclusive (racist excepted, which is everybody they disagree with) Weltanschauung.

There must be a way, surely, to make Jesus as good as they are?

The Wrestlers will, very likely, keep wrestling to their last day. They will positively boast of it. They will make sure that everybody knows. They will keep smiling at you like an apprentice New Age guru. They will, secretly, wish they could be him (which would not work, because their social circle is full of Christian wrestlers like them).

We leave them on their own, as they sanctimoniously smile at us with their hands joined in a vague, but very inclusive-looking, “namaste” sign.

We wish them all the best, too.

But we know that we, for ourselves, will not want to die carrying any of that wrestling with us.