Wrestling at Peniel

Sunday night's audio post from the steps of Grace Cathedral is a pretty perfect example of why this kind of thing never has made it (and probably never will make it) in the "mainstream" media. It's boring!

Standing on the steps of the Cathedral with the cable cars passing below, churning along the tracks and clanging their musical bells was a magical moment and something that I felt the need to "share" on this page. But the magic of the moment was mostly in my head and not on my cell phone. Hell, you couldn't even hear the cable car sounds that were the primary reason for my choosing to put the call up there.

The thing is, it's not just a matter of sound quality. The strength of the moment came from the Old Testament reading in the church, the story of Jacob wrestling the angel and being given, as a result of his tenacity, a new name. Even as I write this now, the brilliance of the emotion and the strength of that feeling are waning, but I can pull them back if I sink down into those feelings. However, I don't really know how valuable that experience is for anyone outside the confines of my own head.

I once heard T-Bone Burnett disucss producing one of Roy Orbison's last albums. I think it was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He declared thta his goal in production was to make the music sound on the album (with all the new bells and whistles modern recording provided) the way he remembered old Roy Orbison recordings sounded in his head.
That always struck me as brilliantly inshightful.

Isn't that really what we all want to do? Isn't that what any art form (and I believe that on some level blogging is becoming an art form) is actually about? Every single one of us is, at some level, trying to communicate what is really there inside our heads! It really doesn't matter what "the facts" are, even when the facts really do matter (which I believe is less often than we generally want to pretend). What matters most is our individual perception of that outside reality. If we can find a way to communicate that to someone else, and if that someone else will pay attention and communicate back, that is the begining of relationship. If we just put it out there and can't find a way to communicate the underlying experience then it really is just "Sound and Fury signifying... Nothing."

Ultimately, we are all wrestling at Peniel, just like Jacob and the Angel. If we can grab on, take the ride and hold out until morning, maybe we'll learn our true names.