The Wrestle and the Dance
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
-W.B. Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren”
“In what area of your life are you sensing a new beginning?” It was time for the final question my co-host Sarah and I have been asking each of our guests with the current podcast season we’re recording.
Our guest, Tiffany Yecke Brooks, recently released a goodness-packed book called To Rebehold the Stars, which offers refreshingly accessible practices to help those who have experienced faith deconstruction ways to rebuild a meaningful life of faith with God.
Her answer to our question resonated with me deeply. In her words, I received language for an invitation I’d been sensing, too, but didn’t know how to verbalize.
“I’m open to a new beginning in how I relate to God,” she said. “I want to be more open-handed, less needing to control my life. I have a friend who says it this way: Sometimes in our walk with God, everything is hard; everything feels like wrestling. But then there are other times when it’s a dance—you and God are dancing together, and it’s so fluid and natural that you no longer need to count the steps or keep time. What was hard is now simple, easy. So yeah,” she concluded, “I think I want more of that with God. The dancing.”
As she spoke, I leaned in—my heart beating faster—because I had written something similar in my journal only the day before:
“Help me to loosen my hold on the plans and attachments that entangle me, that keep me from running straight to you and receiving all that you have for me with open hands, heart, eyes. I surrender control back into your hands. Please let me know me when I’ve taken it back again, and help me live unburdened and open-handed.”
*
It is hard to loosen our grip, isn’t it? A desperation to maintain the illusion of control is, I believe, a natural response to the chaos and uncertainty of today’s world. Equally overwhelmed and grieved by macro realities like wars and rumors of war and micro realities such as, well microplastics, I submit that it has never been more difficult—or more necessary—to relinquish our cherished ideals of the way things ought to go in our lives and to surrender the crammed timelines we tend to construct for when such ‘oughts’ come to fruition.
Do you ever feel more attached to an outcome than to God?
It’s embarrassing to admit, but I do.
And yet, in wrestling with God for a self-prescribed blessing, paying rigorous attention to the steps I’ve assigned God and myself while keeping time for both of us, I wonder if I’ve been missing the dance.
If I am honest, my life often feels more like wrestling for the specific blessing I want rather than dancing with God. I complain when the music of God’s presence is too loud or too soft; then I step on God’s toes and blame God for it. But what if the real blessing is not in getting what I want, when I want it? Is there a better way?
As any introvert who has attended a wedding can tell you, the decision to enter the dance floor and join in the frenzy is akin to walking to the center of a crowded room, naked and under a spotlight. What is the right moment to join? What if they play a slow song next and I’m embarrassed to not have a partner? What if I look stupid? Our fearful questions keep us frozen. But that moment of letting go of crippling self-consciousness and surrendering to the joy of music? Pure, terrifying magic.
Just like the wedding dance floor dilemma, we wrestle with God over all that could go wrong with, well, everything. Our questions keep us glued to the spot we last knew safety. In seasons of wrestling with fear of the unknown, holding back on total surrender to God feels preferable, because we think it’s the only way to avoid missteps. Surrender is risk, pure and simple. Why exchange the blessed assurance of sameness for the cacophonous jungle of discomfort? And yet—the music persists, pursues us. So does the dancing we watch from the sidelines, often with wistful longing. It is ours to join the dance, or not. And surrender is the price of admission.
*
One of my favorite stories from the Bible is when Jacob wrestles with an angel all night for a blessing. Just before morning, Jacob tells the angel, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The angel’s response is odd; he asks Jacob, “What is your name?” Then, after Jacob sensibly replies, “Jacob,” the angel bestows a new name upon him—Israel, which means ‘he struggles with God.’
Then Jacob asks something even odder of the angel—something you’d think you’d get out of the way before wrestling with a stranger for hours: “Please tell me your name.” A question that is normally preliminary becomes the penultimate moment of this exchange. I think that’s the moment Jacob became a dancer—the moment his curiosity about the Divine triumphed over the blessing he desired. A limping dancer, but a dancer nonetheless.
The angel replied, “Why do you ask my name?”
And then the text says something that is easy to look past, but crucial:
Then he blessed him there.
Aside from the fact that the angel never gives Jacob an answer to his question, what astounds me about “then he blessed him there” is that the blessing comes after Jacob stops wrestling and instead expresses a desire to know the One with whom he wrestled.
Might the same be true of us?
What if the actual blessing is the moment of surrender—the brief, shining, eternal moment—when the fervent wrestle yields to a soaring waltz?
“What is your name?”
Are you listening? Someone wants to know.
I do not know what season of life you’re in now—whether life with God feels like more of a wrestle or if you are enjoying the sacred ease of the dance. Maybe you’ve forgotten your name, or maybe a new name is yours to receive.
Either way, the blessing is ours.
“What is your name?”
Wrestlers and dancers alike, may we be given the courage to ask the same in response, to surrender control to the One who is asking, to join the dance.