2022-10-11 A Meditation on a Global Village

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers,” (Eph 4:11 ESV)

It is a brave new world we inhabit, the little gestures being mighty contribution to a globe gone mad, on the edge, warring here and uptight there, judging, careening off of its rails. We see the madness uncloseted from our fellow-travelers, one time, fellow travelers and peers, who we condescend to understand, have gone stir crazy. No militarized response can infiltrate the pores quite like the ministry of love and of devotion. We are devoted to learn from the great psychologist Jesus and the great missionary Christ, of an end to our own frustrated shunning of the decrepit peer; we are learning not that we are corrupt or too suggestible, but rather that the limits of our own judgment occur where Love is allowed to alleviate.

Love uninhibits. We are convinced in each of our hearts that, as we deal with a globalization the likes of which Jesus and His first apostles didn’t quite yet attain to, we are competing over peaceful overreach; we are all peaceful, yet fighting the turf warfares elsewhere and fighting the micro battles in our communities; no civil war in an era where there is globalized Interest and globalized economy. Those economies we chalk up as Quality, Alleviating, Helpful, Distributive and Enabling; yet also as Wicked, Utilitarian, Exploitative, and Enslaving. We pray out of simple Calling and admittedly only so much by way of education, that our neighbor and peer be our frontline in a world competing over who has the best PR, the best peacetime handshake and glad happy countenance. Yet it is true that war is already on our front steps.

Little gestures have a blueprint and a dynamic: it is the heart itself convicted that starts to look outward in a gaze without false premise. It is the heart itself convicted that begins to sympathize, not to patronize, but to sympathize, with where this our neighbor has her or his genesis, where they come from, what all is getting up in their thought processes, what splinter in the flesh, what mighty spiritual attack suffered, perhaps quite near to a spiritual boon. For we come to the table with all manner of headache and personal dynamic betwixt two people: “I need forgiveness”, met with “I forgive you”, but then all manner of doubt, “Am I in fact forgiven?”, and “Does she or he believe me when I say that I forgive?”. So it becomes a game of circling, prowling, around those splinters with nary a gospel effective except that Soup-to-nuts Gospel of a Man hung on a tree; in this we see myriad souls, their lives saved down the line, perhaps just because of something—not we the doer—something we witness, or ourselves do in fact do.

So the Christian is old hat when it comes to spiritual war, to war zones and headache, blase indifference, carelessness, plain selfishness, plain blinders while one’s career itself is veering in the direction of evil (“Who do you think you are, coming to church like this?”). Yet the old categories are changing, the good firm and corporation found amidst formerly patronized and talked-down careers; it is precisely those model UN’s, formerly the avant-garde of spiritual goodness, that now imbibe evil and overlook honest work and workmanship; all this they do in the name of being “Good Citizens”, “Conscientious”, “Hospitable”, and so on.