Benedict XVI explains the meaning of Jacob's struggle with the unknown. "''Our whole life is like this long night of struggle and prayer, to be consumed with the desire and search for God’s blessing." And at the end of the spiritual battle there is the request for a new name, that means conversion and forgiveness.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - The life of the believer is like the biblical episode of Jacob's struggle with God at the ford of Jabbok. This is how Benedict XVI presented the meaning of the passage from Genesis chosen for the general audience today. ''Our whole life is like this long night of struggle and prayer, to be consumed with the desire and search for God’s blessing that can not be torn or won by counting on our own strength, but must be received from him with humility, as a free gift that allows us, finally, to recognize the face of the Lord.''

"God is not man’s adversary or enemy”, rather man " wins the moment he surrenders to God's merciful love," said Benedict XVI in his catechesis held today in St. Peter's Square in front of about fifteen thousand pilgrims, among them some wounded U.S. troops.

The passage chosen by Pope Benedict is not easy to interpret, ''and the explanations that biblical exegesis can give about this passage are many'' but ''when these elements are taken on by the sacred authors and incorporated into the biblical account, they change their meaning and the text opens up to wider dimensions'.'

Benedict XVI explained that ''the story of the battle at Jabbok offers itself to believer as a paradigmatic text in which the people of Israel speak of their origins, and outline the features of a particular relationship between God and man.'' Accordingly, "the spiritual tradition of the Church saw in this story a symbol of prayer as a battle of faith and victory of perseverance.''

The biblical text "speaks of the long night of searching for God, the struggle to learn his name and see his face, it is the night of prayer that with tenacity and perseverance asks for God's blessing and a new name, a new result of conversion and forgiveness. " For this reason, Benedict XVI added, the struggle of Jacob becomes a point of reference for understanding the relationship with God that finds its highest expression in prayer. Prayer requires trust, closeness, an almost symbolic struggle, not with an adversarial God, but with a Lord who is full of blessing and who always remains mysterious, always seems unattainable. " The Pope concluded: "And if the object of desire is the relationship with God, His blessing and His love, then the fight can only culminate in the gift of oneself to God, recognizing our own weakness, which we defeat at the very moment we surrender ourselves to God's merciful love''.

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