Soul Struggle

It is through struggle that the soul makes progress.

Abba Poemen said of Abba John the Dwarf that he has prayed God to take his passions away from him so that he might become free from care. He went and told an old man this: ‘I find myself in peace, without an enemy,’ he said. The old man said to him, ‘Go, beseech God to stir up struggle so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by struggle that the soul makes progress.’ So he besought God and when struggle came, he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, ‘Lord, give me strength of the fight.’

The Apophthegmata

Struggle, suffering, disordered desires are necessary means for our formation into faithful and formed Christians. We don’t acquiesce to the difficulty, resign from the trials, or blame God for the thorns. We trust God to be present with us, to give us strength, and to form us into mature followers whose dependence and hope is found in Jesus!¹

Back to the soul.

The Hebrew word for soul, nephesh has numerous interwoven meanings. For instance, nephesh can be translated as desire, thirst, throat, and more. So how is the soul connected to all these words?

At the core of who we are, we find our desires, our wants, our hunger and thirst. I've heard it said that our “wanters our broken.” Which is to say our desires are disordered. We try and satiate our hunger and thirst with things other than God.

We chug saltwater knowing it will only make us more thirsty.

The Story of Jesus and the women at the well comes to mind…
“Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’” John 4:14

That reads a bit different when you start thinking about the scripture that Jesus would have known, and what he would have understood about the soul from its pages.

The very core of our being IS our soul. This is where we find our thirst for the divine. This is very different than the “God-shaped hole” idea. The soul is who we are.

The human body is made up of 60% water. It’s kinda like that. Water is in our bones, brains, muscles, and skin, it’s everywhere! The soul is and saturates our whole being!

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7 KJV ²

It’s in our struggle, it’s in our hunger and thirst that we begin to understand our need for the one who gives us strength, who can quench our thirst and satisfy our desires.

We don’t necessarily pray for the struggle to cease, or our thirst to be quenched. We pray for Jesus to shape our souls in such a way that he alone is our satisfaction. We take this posture because we understand that “it is through the struggle that the soul makes progress.” Progress into Christlikeness and divine participation.

“Brothers and sisters, whenever you face various trials, consider it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance complete its work, so that you may be complete and whole, lacking in nothing.” James 1:2-4

There are struggles in my life that I do pray would cease. There are struggles my friends and family are experiencing, I pray that God would swiftly guide them through. Maybe the prayer for myself and others could be something like, “Swiftly guide us through this time of struggle, form in us a deeper reliance on you. So that in our next struggle, we may more deeply rely on you.”

1. I took the liberty of changing the word warfare to struggle in the quote and then used the word struggle throughout for the sake of these reflections.

2. See my last post, Meditations on the Soul for more on this verse.