WRESTLING
WITH GOD
by Richard E. Valinsky, Ph.D.
The spiritual journey is a journey inward to the deepest most hidden
part of us. When Christ said, “Have you not been told you are
gods” he was directing
people to acknowledge this deepest part of themselves which is none
other than God. God is omnipresent and therefore within
everyone. Each individual is a manifestation of God, a particular
unfolding of God’s infinite potential. Each individual is unique.
There has never been, nor is there now, nor will there ever be another
individual who has your exact combination of experiences and
genes. Therefore the spiritual teachings that we receive from
scriptures and teachers, in order to remain alive in us, must never be
approached in a rigid, literal fashion. They must be bent, but
not broken, to be alive for us, to have the transforming power to
bring us to God. But in this process we must also bend ourselves
to become one with the teachings. We must be open to being changed, and
changed in radical ways which are unimaginable to us in earlier stages
of spiritual development. It is not entirely accurate to think
that we just passively receive spiritual understanding and wisdom. We cannot just rely on what religious tradition and clergy hand to us. Rather, like
Jacob we must wrestle with God, with the teachings of God in the scriptures. In this process, just as Jacob was,
we will be permanently altered. On this journey we travel
from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to
Light, from mortality to Immortality, from the many to the One.