O God, in our times of struggle and doubt help us to be persistent and not to let go until we receive your blessing. Amen.

Dear friends, a third person comes to my mind when I read the story of Jacob's struggle with the angel and the parable of the persistent widow (sometimes called, I think inaccurately, "the parable of the unjust judge"). It's a person who has been in the news just recently and many times in the recent past. A person like Jacob but also like the persistent widow. Can you imagine who that might be? Before I reveal her name, let's back step briefly into those two readings from Genesis and the Gospel of Luke.

Jacob's wrestling with the angel (indeed: wrestling with God, as the story makes explicitly clear at the end) is one of those biblical stories, which has captured the imagination of generations. The story has been told and re- told, embellished upon, written about, fictionalized, made into poems and dramas, painted, drawn and sculpted innumerable times over the ages. Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor and writer of elegant prose, calls this story "an enigmatic, mystical poem." The scene is fraught with mystery and suspense and resonates with archetypal, symbolic meaning.

Image this scene filmed by Alfred Hitchcock! That is how ancient tellers and hearers of this story would have understood it. Jacob, as you may recall, is a deceiver. He cheats his older brother out of his inheritance. He is also the deceived when he gets "tricked" into marrying Leah, the older sister of his beloved Rachel. Visualize this scene in Peniel a la Alfred Hitchcock: nighttime on an isolated, grassy river bank. A stranger appears and engages the sleepy and unsuspecting Jacob in a wrestling match, which continues into the night. Who will prevail? It's sweaty hand-to-hand combat between the two and seems to be a stalemate. As dawn approaches, the stranger (whom later tradition saw as an angel) wounds Jacob but he does not succumb. The stranger asks to be released but Jacob refuses until the stranger blesses him. The dawn breaks and Jacob receives the blessing of a new name as the first rays of the sun are reflected in the river. No longer "Jacob - the deceiver" he would now be Israel, "He who struggles with God and prevails."

What is this struggle, which a later age and different culture would refer to with the word, jihad? Who is this stranger? Why is Jacob denied the request for the stranger's name? What exactly is the blessing, Jacob demands to have? Why is he wounded? All these questions are evoked by this story which has fascinated and scared people for centuries. Fascination and fear - those are the two elements of the Holy, that wonderful mysterium fascinosum et tremendum as Rudolf Otto, the great scholar of the Holy, has called it.

As with any story which unfolds a density and multiplicity of levels of meaning, this story is one we can return to again and again because there is always some new meaning, some different aspect we hadn't noticed before. On one level the story is a collective about the people of Israel; on another level it's the story of the individual torn between faith and doubt, the individual wounded by the very thing which gives him blessing, an oxymoronic, counter-intuitive thought if ever there was one. And so this story challenges us as a community and as individuals to seek and find ourselves in it. Who among us has not struggled at some point in our lives? Who among us is not wounded in some way? Who among us has not been blessed, perhaps even found blessing in our very woundedness? Who among us has not had at some point in our lives a "dark night of the soul?" Who among us has not experienced that rare moment of seeing God "face to face," facie ad faciem? Perhaps we were not aware of it at the time and it's only in hindsight that we perceive what the experience in fact was.

Coupled with Jacob's wrestling with the angel or with God, we have Jesus' parable more aptly named "the parable of the persistent widow." This story has been problematic because of our tendency to see the parables as allegories, which they are not. Seeing it as an allegory makes God into an "unjust judge," which is at complete odds with our conviction that justice and mercy are writ large on the divine banner. Rather, the story is about the widow and her persistence in prayer. In a way this widow is Jacob redux. She struggles with this judge, she nags, cajoles, and complains. She makes herself a nuisance. She bothers and annoys. Relentless in her entreaties, she will not "let go" until she gets the blessing. Jesus praises her for her peskiness. Many a person in this widow's stead would have given up, thrown in the towel, as the saying goes. "Forget it; move on" is so often our motto. This widow is a person of faith who will not "forget it." Even though her case seems hopeless, she is unyielding - like Jacob - and her persistence pays off - as does Jacobs.

Dear friends, can we not see ourselves in her? Are we not challenged to see ourselves in her? We are all - collectively and individually - on that nuanced continuum of faith and doubt, hope and despair, belief and unbelief. We are all somewhere between those poles at either end of the spectrum. But so was the "third person" I mentioned at the beginning of my reflection today. Does anyone have a guess who she is? Time magazine recently featured Mother Teresa's "secret life" of doubt, despair and unbelief, Mother Teresa, sometimes refered to "the saint of the gutters" for her commitment to the poor and destitute. Her writings now revealed show her to be a person all too familiar with struggling with God, a person wounded and blessed, but also a person whose persistence kept her in some kind of balance on that continuum of faith and doubt. If we considered her to be a saint before these revelations of her own struggle, how much more now that the "dark side" of her struggles has been revealed? Dear friends, there's hope for you and me in our own doubts. Let us look to Jacob, to the persistent widow, to Mother Teresa and "not let go" until that blessing comes. Amen.