Wrestling

Pope Francis is, here, seen not wrestling

Pope Clown has made another one of his interventions, in which he has invited the faithful to “wrestle” with God.

Mind: in a different context, this might have a sense of its own. If St Catherine of Siena had spoken of such “wrestling” (I don’t know whether she has), we would immediately understand the broader context of this, that is: a context of total submission to God’s will.

However, we live in the time of Francis, when the context is diametrically opposed to obedience to God, an opposition incessantly promoted by Francis himself. Therefore, it seems to me that the Evil Clown’s words have a subversive potential which, in another time, they would not have.

Your average, garden variety Catholic nowadays lives in a state of constant wrestling with God, in the sense that he either thinks that he is right and God is wrong or, hopefully in most cases, that somehow the Church was always wrong then and he and God are right now. All those people who add to “I am a Catholic” that fateful little word, “but”, are doing just that, all the time.

The idea of prayer is not wrestling, it is accepting. It is, when you ask, an asking that must come from a position of perfect obedience, or total acceptance of whatever humiliations, troubles, or pain the Lord has seen fit to let us have, for reasons which, whilst unknown to us now, are surely for our good.

Thy will be done. Full stop.

XXI Century “wrestling” (no doubt, the one Frankie has in mind) has nothing of it. It suggests, rather, the rebellion of the one who cannot accept what Christ says about his homosexual son, her divorced and remarried daughter, and their unbaptised nephews.

It’s the wrestling that opposes to God’s law my own law. It’s the wrestling that makes one decide that his lurv for the adulterous wife of another must be god-given, and therefore infallible and sacred. It is the belief that “muhh conscience” trumps what the Church says.

It is easy stuff. It makes one feel pleasantly rebellious, but righteous at the same time. It is quite after the spirit of the age.

My suggestion is: never wrestle with God.

You will lose every time, and will run a serious risk of ending up barbecued for eternity, together with countless other wrestlers.