Photo: canva.com
In an interview with John Dear on the NCR (National Catholic Reporter) website I found this quote from Cornel West. “To live is to wrestle with despair yet never allow despair to have the last word." This quote resonated with me as earlier that day at our Community Eucharist we reflected on the story in the book of Genesis where Jacob wrestled with God and, though he came away limping, he received the blessing he desperately craved.
Our encounters with God sometimes take the form of wrestling with our conscience or struggling with the temptations that confront us. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for 40 days before he began his public ministry. He emerged from this experience with the blessing of knowing more clearly what God wanted him to do.
As Jacob’s encounter left him with a limp, so too does our wrestling with life leave its mark on us. Our experiences and the passing of time can sometimes be visible on our faces. Some in our world seek desperately to erase these marks, trading a form of beauty created by life for one that is artificial.
More often, the scars left by our struggles are not visible. As the slogan for Anzac Day some years back put it, “not all wounds bleed". A growing number of people in our world have mental health issues. Levels of stress are also rising, fed by economic uncertainty and rising costs, political instability, rising concerns about the health of our planet and growing conflicts in many parts of the world, to name a few of the major factors. The effects are generally hidden until they become too much and something cracks.
For the last 2½ years, I have been wrestling with the impact of long COVID on my life. Long COVID takes many forms, but one of the common symptoms is fatigue, something not immediately visible to others.
A colleague, who had a stroke recently, passed on to me a fact sheet about the impact of fatigue on stroke victims. It affects not only the physical side of life where energy is depleted rapidly, but also builds slowly, and impacts one psychologically so that motivation, the ability to get up and go, is greatly diminished. It also has a mental impact in that it becomes harder to stay focused and concentrate on activities like reading.
This fact sheet came as a form of blessing in that it helped me to make sense of what I had been experiencing. As I wrestle with the impact of long COVID, I hope the blessing that I take with me is that of being more sensitive not only to the visible struggles that people have but also those that are hidden. I hope I can relate to them with an understanding and kindness born from my own struggles. We wrestle with many things, including despair, but blessing is the last word.
Fr Pat O’Shea lives and works in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban eBulletin
