2022-09-18 A Meditation on Analogy

“This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”” (Mt 13:35 ESV)

There is mathematical delight in finding new perspectives, new orientations, new parables and metaphors, new explanatory devices. Yet, these also require a boldness, to launch forth with some daring and sense of them being requisite. The new mentality causes us to pin our hopes on this metaphor and not that one, to find a liberated and open, expansive, place to dwell spiritually-speaking, to be ready there on the day we are dying, but more than that, to be peace and joy in believing any day. So earthly fathers and mothers may fail us, but we have a Divine Father above; we are sons, we are daughters. We know this our Heavenly Father to harbor no ill will towards us, but rather to delight, and to mourn should evil befall us. We hope in a clear-eyed and expansive dwelling place, free to love and be loved, free to be solo and free to hearken to the words preached to us once upon a time: this God loves you; this God is only interested in being there for you; this God cares.

Against this is all manner of earthly machinations and efficiencies, people using people, no safe harbor for our soul, homeless and wretched ponderings, absence of that vote of confidence that does cause us to reflect, to see some kind of ground gained, to resolve this day all neatly and all of a sudden, to be better people, better sons and daughters, to fix up our act, to rise as He Rose, to laugh at shame past and to hand over embarrassing and painful memories as being examples of the sinful doubts He came to heal us of.

Therefore too, with children in our midst, we give them task and sense of belonging. We adore them. We treat them as capable and humble. They, in turn, suddenly desire to aspire after higher responsibility; it is a strange and wonderful place where each of us, regardless of the preacher’s own intentions, hearken to the Word as spoken and as received, to find that this day it proposes a new mathematically-efficient composition, a composure unto full-bloodedness, an answering of unspoken questions, a wholeness too healing and too full-on to doubt. We are healed. We are provided for, in spiritual matters. We hear the joke or the ribaldry as somehow reassuring. Love is no longer a term bandied about, but a sure and sincere explanation of just what is mechanizing and what is the operative principle. Before even love, we have space and trust, a belonging with a Father Above each of us has, who cares for us and does so in a way saying no dice to any and all efforts to appropriate and to reduce and to compromise our citadel called Home.