Wrestling in the Dark

Part 4: Bargaining and Anger in deconstruction

This is part of a series where I examine spiritual deconstruction through the lens of grief. I’ll link the other installments here as they are released:

Intro | Shock & Denial | Pain & Guilt | Bargaining & Anger | Depression & Testing | Acceptance

“One, two, three, two, slip. Atta girl, faster: One, two, three, two, slip, two, double-jab, nope…again, let’s go. One, two, three, two, slip, inside…”

The boxing gym is almost empty. My shoes squeak shrilly over 2Pac as I move around the ring. It smells like rubber mats and rain-wet shoes and Lysol. The dark clouds outside make it look like it’s much later in the day than it is. A hurricane is on its way.

It weighs the air. It silences the screaming cicadas and katydids. It’s the reason my phone keeps lighting up in my gym bag with radar screenshots and updated landfall ETAs from concerned contacts. Hurricanes making it through the heart of Georgia, all the way up to my home in the foothills of Appalachia, used to be rare.

I’m facing my coach, trying to keep my back foot planted and my guard hand up by my face while correctly hitting his mitted hands. In between attempts, I swipe at my face with my bulbous gloves like a chubby-fisted toddler, battling my hair just as hard as I’m battling him. It breaks from my ponytail in long strands that whip at my eyes, stick in the corners of my mouth, and strangle my sweaty neck.

“You good?” Coach asks me. I guess it’s obvious that I’m distracted.

“Yeah, yeah, let’s go again.”

“How ‘bout you hop on the bag for a while,” he redirects, and I comply. I count jabs in my head as I wallop a huge tear-drop-shaped punching bag filled with water hanging by a chain from the ceiling. Still, my hair bugs the shit out of me.

For a long time, I viewed the anger that bubbled up in my deconstruction process the same way as my wild hair: as a distraction, an annoyance, something I would swipe at only for it to come back again and again and again. But my very brief time in the boxing ring has taught me that perennial hurdles, even those I perceive to be “just” little distractions, deserve my attention.

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Anger is a prominent station along the trail of deconstruction, but the station that often precedes it is Bargaining. At the Bargaining station, we might find ourselves thinking:

• If I can just pray harder…

• If I can just serve more…

• If I can just study longer…

• If I can just believe better…

…maybe then everything will feel solid again.

I remember, while in the depths of my own Bargaining stint, hearing a prominent female leader in the evangelical conference space talk about her struggle with doubt. Initially, her words resonated with me. She spoke about a fathomless despair that haunted her at night, that whispered nihilistic doom into her ears, that posited arguments like, “If you can’t trust the Bible about 7-Day Creationism, then how can you trust anything else it says?”

At the end of her talk, she laughed. She laughed. Wasn’t it so obvious, she asked us, that “the Enemy” was attacking her? And then she moved on like it was one big joke, and I had missed the punchline.

My spirit ran down the spiral staircase between my brain and my heart and furiously inventoried anything and everything it might bargain away in exchange for just a sliver of whatever allowed that woman to laugh in the face of such dread. But, of course, there was nothing. Nothing I could trade, sell, or give would stop my deconstruction. It was coming, sure and strong as a hurricane.

In the face of this powerlessness (preceded by shock, pain, guilt, and denial), is it any wonder that I became deeply, deeply angry?

Anger is an emotion many of us, especially as women, aren’t well equipped to handle. I write about this in my memoir, which is set to be released next spring. We swipe it away, sweep it under the rug, push it down deep to fester like an unpopped blister. This was how I responded to my own anger for a long time. It was always ineffective, and I was always surprised and confused by that.

I was afraid of my anger. I was ashamed that it burned so hot, and I was frightened of the damage it might do. What I didn’t realize was that that same bright anger can do more than destroy. It can also illuminate.

A healthy, adaptive use of anger during deconstruction can reveal where boundaries have been crossed and values undermined. It reveals hypocrisy. It drags abuse out of the shadows. It helps us figure out what we want and what we need.

A manifestation of healthy anger that I still experience occurs when I hear certain people quote scripture. Initially, the sensations in my mind and body feel like anger. But if I dig into them, they are actually a bizarre combination of aversion and protectiveness.

How can I be averse to scripture while also feeling protective of it?

The only way I can square it is this: my aversion is to the manipulative, ill-informed use of words that I do, in fact, find sacred, even if my relationship with them is complicated and evolving.

I have had to learn, though, that anger is a hungry flame. Instead of simply revealing hypocrisy, it might try to consume the two-faced person behind it. Instead of illuminating a boundary to be maintained, it might demand retribution for past incursions. And if I savor too much the burning, my eyes will go blind, and my lungs will fill with smoke. My own anger can suffocate me.

It is double-edged. It can help me or harm me, and it can help others or harm them. It all depends on how I use it.

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I remember when I first hurled my anger directly at God.

For so long, I’d kept it caged. But finally, in the dark bowels of a random night, the inferno became too much to hold in. So I set it free.

This is why I have a special affinity for Jacob of the Old Testament.

Jacob was a man descended from a lineage of faithful patriarchs. His grandfather, Abraham, had left his homeland without a destination at God’s command, had not hesitated when God told him to kill his only son, Isaac (Jacob’s father). Some rabbinic teachings say that Isaac had been thirty-seven when Abraham nearly made him a sacrificial offering at the behest of God. From this, we can assume that Isaac fully understood what was happening and was willing to die simply because God had commanded it.

A tremendous (albeit imperfect) legacy of unfathomable faith. These are the men who preceded Jacob. When Jacob has his own encounter with God, he doesn’t obey unquestioningly like his grandfather; he doesn’t lie down on the sacrificial stone like his father. He starts swinging his fists.

And what does God do? God doesn’t compare Jacob to the men who came before him, doesn’t shame him for responding differently than his predecessors. God meets Jacob where he is — in his anger, in his fear, in his literal violence.

I struggle to think of anything more compelling than this. God digging divine hands into the dirt with and for us. It happens only a few times in scripture:

Once, to create humanity.

Once, to bury Moses in an unknown grave.

Once, to open blind eyes long thought to be a punishment.

Once, to defend an allegedly adulterous woman from being stoned to death.

And once, to wrestle with Jacob.

God gets dirty in the height of creative frenzy, in the depths of grief, to free a man trapped not by his unseeing eyes but by his community’s arrogant presuppositions, and to defend a woman whose death by mob violence would’ve been legal but still unjust. And to find Jacob.

In ‘Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible,’

Liz Charlotte Grant

says, “The image of God and humanity dropping to the ground to resolve our differences is romantic, surrealist, mythic.”

And they wrestle all night. When I started boxing, I could last about twelve minutes in the ring. After fifteen weeks of regular practice, I could last about forty minutes. Jacob fought God all night. The spine-deep emotion and resolve required to fuel that kind of extended stamina is mind-blowing.

Even when God commands Jacob to “let go,” he does not, and this might be the secret to Jacob’s stamina. Maybe it was a relief for this man of the wilderness to finally feel himself so squarely and indisputably in the hands of God, even with the violence and the anger and choking dust. And he would stay in God’s grip as long as he could.

In the end, God renames Jacob to Israel “because you have struggled with God…” (Gen. 32:28). Jacob’s hip, which God dislocated in the fight, never quite heals. He walks away from the encounter with a limp that he’ll keep for the rest of his life. But he also walks away with a new name, a new blessing, a new clarity.

This is the path of the deconstructionist. We are the ones who wrestle with God. We might gain a limp from the effort, but we also might gain a new name, a new blessing, a new anger-fueled clarity waiting for us on the other side.

So hold on through the night. Wrestle for as long as it takes. In the words of French philosopher Simone Weil, “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth…If one turns aside from [Christ] to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into His arms.”