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When We Are Left Alone

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
August 23, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Genesis 32:22-31
Romans 7:14-25

“Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”

“The life of the personality being horizontal, craving community [and] that of the soul, vertical, needing solitude, we mingle and retreat,” writes essayist Barbara Hurd, “seek company and refuge. We are the tide, the continuous going out and coming in that is the rhythm of our lives.”

On the other side of the Jabbok in the middle of the night, with the tide of his life going out, Jacob was not left alone by chance. Anxious about the impending showdown with his brother Esau—the twin whose birthright and blessing he had stolen long ago by trickery and deceit--Jacob sent his two wives, his two maids, his eleven children and all that he had across the river in order to be left alone. “Something prompts him to separate himself from kin and substance,” says Professor of Social Thought Leon Kass, “and face his ordeal alone.”

We all know the impulse if not the act. “Leave me alone” we have said to family and friends who are only too eager to give us advice or goad us into action when we need singly to think through the thicket that our human condition has become. “Leave me alone” we shout when we are shamed by our behavior and cannot yet face the wrong we have done or the right we have left undone. “Leave me alone” we whisper beneath our breath when the world is too much with us, its unrelenting noise, its breakneck pace, its unbearable pain.

Though if we allow this text to interpret our lives, what may instead strike us is the contrary fact of our aversion to being left alone. Silence and solitude are seldom our choice and today have become even less of an option. “No one can calculate the engulfing volume…which pounds individual…emotions [and] memory, from the coming of the mass media in the romantic age to the dam-burst of the Internet and the planetary Web,” writes critic George Steiner. “The pseudo-technical term ‘hits’ is revealing. The impact on the antennae of awareness is incessant, the noise focused on consciousness inescapable….The strobe lights of immediacy…blind the recesses of vision inside us….In the pornography of noise, calm privacies have become a privilege of the fortunate or the condemned.”

You can chalk this up to cultural conditioning and be done with the matter. Or you can confess that the prospect of being left alone to contend with our frailty, our failings, our fears, our sin and our sadness is reason enough to opt for the strobe lights of immediacy, the pornography of noise.

Our own theological tradition has often been employed to justify lives lived horizontally and in no need of solitude. The Reformers closed the cloisters and critiqued the contemplative life, believing the vocation of the Christian was to be found in the cacophony of the social order as together we asked, “What is God doing in the world to make and keep human life human?” [Paul Lehmann] Not silent contemplation but service has marked Presbyterian discipleship. For decades I have counseled those seeking an experience of God to volunteer at the soup kitchen or sleep with the homeless or tutor a child in the city. God is less to be found in the solitude of a prayer closet, I have said, and more likely awaiting you in the fray where human lives are at stake. I still believe this with all my head and heart.

But I am beginning to believe there is another fray, a wrestling worth our lives that awaits us as we allow ourselves to be left alone. I imagine not the solitude of the contemplative so much as the great effort involved in listening for a word we cannot tell ourselves. “Pressed to the ground of being,” writes Steiner again, “the inner ear of the thinker or poet or master of metaphor seems to apprehend the charged silence….There is a sense in which all extreme concentration could be seen as related to the theological. It seeks out the as yet unknown, it presses on the bounds of the empirically evident. The inner voices heard by the poet, the tensions of unresolved relation edging towards consciousness in the composer and mathematician, come out of that loaded silence towards which the mind and spirit bend their attentiveness.” “Ought we to think of respecting a tranquil habit of inward life” asked Coleridge, “…in and by which our Peace with God, and the lively Working of his Grace on our Spirit are perceived by us.”

Instead we remain on the run from the consequences of lives lived without a habit of inwardness. I am preaching, more than you know, to myself! Dwelling in “the stridency of everyday and everynight which…make such listening more precarious,” we continue on our way as thankless recipients of our Father’s blind faith and misplaced blessing. No doubt like Jacob we will grow weary with ourselves and our ill-gotten gain in a foreign land, will turn toward home and tremble before our inevitable deaths, will journey restless and long to be given a future we do not deserve by the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God who has spoken a disembodied promise to do us good, the God who may turn out to be the God of Jacob too. I think this is the restlessness Augustine identified in those who have yet to reside in God.

Jacob knew such restlessness. At the beginning of the 32nd of Genesis, he turns toward home still trusting in the deception and trickery that had gotten him a birthright, a blessing, two wives and great wealth. With fear he turns as well to face the brother he has wronged. Jacob sends word to Esau of his return and asks if he might find favor in his sight. Word comes back to Jacob that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred men by his side. Jacob presumes the worst. In what might be called the pornography of noise (or at least one last stab at double-dealing), Jacob sends Esau two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty milch camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. Moreover Jacob has the audacity to remind God of God’s promise to do him good and asks for deliverance from the hand of his brother for the sake of the future of God’s people. In a word and against the consequences of his sin, Jacob is peddling as fast as he knows how to peddle. God is silent. Darkness descends. His kin and substance depart.

Jacob is left alone. But in the same sentence that tells of his solitude, we are also told that Jacob is not alone. He is accosted by a stranger who initiates the contest that both marks Jacob and remakes him. Though their wrestling lasts for the night, we are told nothing about the ordeal. If we were to imagine the substance of Jacob’s verbal contest with the stranger, we could come no closer than to repeat the words of the apostle Paul: I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do….Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Likely there are those here who have known such a night: known the darkness that cannot be dispelled and the need to be delivered; known the interminable silence and the valley of the shadow. Some toss and turn and rise exhausted to face an unforgiving and unforgiven self yet another day. But if by some unexpected grace the mind and spirit should bend their attentiveness toward the charged silence, a wholly other encounter commences. We sense with fear and awe that we are not alone…that a stranger has come to us unasked, has taken hold of us and is at enmity with us. Here, says Karl Barth, “is where a [mortal] stands wholly and utterly against God, and in this resistance against God…is marked by God…weakened by God.” Pressing the bounds of empirical evidence, we see no one; we have been given no name; we have only the witness of our wounds to show for our wrestling.

I think of Reynolds Price’s encounter with a “reliable presence” in the midst of unbearable pain. “I never asked myself who it was, from a gallery of possible hearers….It—he, she or whatever—never spoke a sound but only heard me out as I worked at discovering my minimal needs and feasible hopes….Its reliable presence seemed only to say that I had somehow to build my life on radical uncertainty, knowing only that I was heard by something more than the loyal but powerless humans near me.” Or I think of Ann Lamott who was raised to believe in books and music and nature by her “fifties Cheever [family] with their cocktails and affairs” but who writes “I bowed my head in bed and prayed because I believed--not in Jesus—but in someone listening, someone who heard.” I think of Paul Tillich’s scant affirmation spoken to many of us lost in the rigors of reason: “Do not ask the name now. The name will be given later. Do not do anything now. There will be much to do later. Do not expect anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”

Like Jacob, we wrestle and hold on in the dark as though our life were at stake in this contest to believe. “Let me go for the day is breaking,” the stranger says to us most nights. For some lame reason, we do not. “A believer” says Robert Jenson, “is one who has heard something…destiny-clueing [in this stranger] and cannot any longer get away from what he has heard.” At the least, we have heard word of a human being, a man in these latter days who died and descended into hell and was raised real enough to wound us and gracious enough to bless us. In other words, we have wrestled with someone who is “neither a ghost nor a godlet,” says Jenson, but who is rather alive.

“The surprise of his aliveness,” Jenson goes on to say, “will be how he will include all our follies and triumphs, each singular variety of publicanism and phariseeism, and the individual plot and style of every human life in the mutual fulfillment wrought by his hope and acceptance.” “Please tell me your name,” we say to the stranger as the sun rises. “Who do you say that I am?” comes the rabbinical response a millennium, then two and now three later.

“The darkness has faded just enough,” to paraphrase another preacher, “so that for the first time [we] can dimly see [our] opponent’s face. And what [we] sees is something more terrible than the face of death—[we see] the face of love. It is vast and strong, half ruined with suffering and fierce with joy, the face a [person] flees down all the darkness of [the] days…at last…[crying] out, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me!’ [This is] [n]ot a blessing…[to be had] now by the strength of…cunning or the force of…will, but a blessing that…can [be had] only as a gift.” I think it is a gift given those who are left alone to strive with God and who are destined to bear "in the body the insignia of the defeat that is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.” “’Tis Love, ’tis Love!” wrote Charles Wesley. “Thou diedst for me”:

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