2023-02-15 A Meditation on Personality

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! “May they be secure who love you! Peace be within your walls and security within your towers!” For my brothers and companions’ sake I will say, “Peace be within you!” For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.” (Ps 122:6–9 ESV)

Somewhere out there is a soul, possessed of feeling and encouraged just like any of us is encouraged. This soul we are told to pray for. There is some divine hope against hope that simply showing the other side of our warring selves, the peace side, the other cheek, the gentleness and appreciation, is the gesture that one day will call the sinner home. One day the soul out there will be converted. One day, Christianity will seem not so offensive any longer.

No longer weak, no longer stereotyped as an awful or wimpy or greedy concession to the powers that be, Christianity will appear regnant, reigning from on high, in the heights of the heart and mind and soul. This will be our faith, and our gift, and our prayer. Somewhere that soul this day falls upon talents and sixth senses as to how to wage both peace and a war, one therefore unfortunately against a way of life, against a freedom, against those strange ways we are made what we are made of. The images of the frontline soldier remind us each of us has that evolutionary special retreat, or rather special forward stance, whereby we say “No matter!” to the bombs and the bullets, but risk our lives because we have stared down death. So too we risk our prayer life by going near to what is unconverted, but we do so willingly. We risk our appearance of common sense and logic, to do something hazardous and heroic. It doesn’t get more plain than this: just as Christ went to His Cross in sincerity, we harbor no artifice nor designs in saying and fighting and boasting forth with the words that all is done in love.

So the soul out there, somewhere, a person behind a machine; for such a soul we do pray. Who pushes a little here, then ebbs a little there. Who observes hours and days and seasons, capable of driving us mad with imagined aggressions or befuddling quiet. Whom we can pray alongside with, as each has their soldiers and their captains of fifty (2 Ki 1:13), that bigger aggressions be let out via smaller battlefields: let us no longer think little of the man’s or woman’s fighting life on the line. Let us not think all is necessarily going to devolve into petty quarrels and tit-for-tat skirmishes. Let us see as though in a mirror the humanity, that we may fight with the other cheek turned (Mt 5:39). That we may be on the same page. That we may make the transition to cleaner ambitions and less perilous corporate addictions.

Therefore the willingness to serve, is no false hope that the Master of the house is stepping gingerly or unafraid to use us; think of the fog of war, the Christian’s inner war and external decisions made in a wartime mentality, and see that we are sanguine, consecrating our lives unto not logic and upward ascent but unto the fog and the madness; many die as though they didn’t need to die; others suffer waiting for a response from above.

All of us are celebrating, however, that we heard a tailored and personal Word in this generation on some level. That we came to know each other as Man, Woman, and brother, sister. That God met us as His own servant modeled to be love for our betterment. Aiming to educate, He wrote with broad strokes everything from the dove descending on Him in baptism to the Transfiguration alongside two of His men, to the curtain torn as He descended to Hell on the Cross, prior to Rising. So we are cognisant of a war unlike any other, with wild advances, with peacetime gestures that prophetically save those fifties and more, and with peacetime losses. For, we pray for another soul “out there”, in hope we all feel enough of the peril to draw near to the promised victory.