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In Order to Wrestle You Must Embrace

If you’ve ever watched a wrestling match, you’ve seen that the very nature of the sport is grappling. The competitors hod, twist, pin, and muscle each other around until one of them gives. They are forced to embrace each other in order to wrestle.

– Anonymous, Embracing Obscurity, p. 86.

I had a long post on this quote planned, but I can’t quite wrap my head around all of the implications at this point. Hence what follows is a hodgepodge of semi-related thoughts.

As I read this passage, I initially thought of C.S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism and Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. They both stressed the need to get out of the way and let a book have its way with you. Lewis called this ‘receiving’ a narrative. Embrace the narrative before you begin to judge it. If you cannot sympathize with a story in some way you do not truly understand it. G.K. Chesterton put it this way:

When the Professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all (The Everlasting Man, p. 101).

I also thought of Jacob’s wrestling match with the Angel of the Lord in Genesis 32. Jacob was in some ways forced into this match to be sure. But as he embraced the struggle, he had to make a commitment to hang on. It was through that commitment that the event became a wrestling match rather that a mere beat-down. One must commit before the true wrestling begins.

This line of thinking picks up on clear lines of thought as old as Augustine and Anselm:

As the right order requires us to believe the deep things of Christian faith before we undertake to discuss them by reason (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo).

Another line of thought related to this quote is covenantal: commitment comes before intimacy.

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