2023-04-13 A Meditation on About the Day’s Business

“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” (1 Pe 4:12 ESV)

Hardly has the day begun and binds impossible and florid try to disengage us. Disengage us from the continuing effort to be people of faith. Disengage us from the continuing effort to use patient time of prayer and thought to be of service to others. Disengage us from the continuing effort to accept as Real and Evocative His call on our lives, on the communities we grow in, on the pastoral reckoning, us translated by His sacrifice, us healed by His nonobligatory death, us touched, passions tamed, passion for life lauded high above all else. We are to go kind on ourselves, resting and being thereby emblematic of the full-fledged Humanity that God created us for.

We are to go gentler on an exchange whereby we are measured and assessed and made nothing more than tool of the trade, nothing more than utilitarian uses of our life force, which is what this world does. We are to greet the morning in this spell, this trance, this motoring along: we motor along in a light contributed to us out of the magnanimity of a Lover of souls. We motor along as Company Women and Men, certain that no power nor principality can alienate us from the good promises of our Scripture.

Our gospel is offensive to some, but for us it is the power of God to save all those who believe. Therefore we laud and honor the Author of the trance, of the life, of the myriad holy rationales, of things arrived at and that puzzle us for their beauty and giftedness. We are gifted Effective things. We are called to a Tangible kind of spell, of spiritual growth spurt, of togetherness with the fellow-laborers, who carry each others’ crosses, who are there and endeavoring, sin and flagrant error aside, to eek out a useful, duty-driven life.

This day we celebrate, because dour countenances and despair threaten to be a counter-attack. They threaten to assert a stasis and nothing more, here and no farther shall you go. Here, in this stasis, you shall mope and despair and struggle to ascertain a duty-driven lifestyle. Here, in this stasis, you shall not frighten the devil any longer. Here, you shall be socially “appropriate”, communally “non-disruptive”, inherited taste “inoffensive”. We have a taste for Gospel, we search it out, like the woman searching for a lost coin in Scripture (Lk 15:9). We abide close by that eternal flame of Courage and of Impact, made by our Lord those thousands of years ago. We believe many have gone similar routes, but the novelty of the first who truly died well, speaks to us His friends this morning.

Therefore the Gospel is implicated in teaching an almost accidental morality, and a code. No matter. For, the Gospel would seem too easy, too forgiving, too bland, were it not that this is God’s design for us. It is pan-, as in universally applicable, to be a now respectable social force, to form a backdrop of improvement of morals and of meaning notwithstanding the emphasis on Grace. We suddenly hold high in mind anything pleasing to the Father. We even, in inspired community, become respectable, but not onerously, rather, in high fashion and impetus, momentum and busy-ness.

Indeed, strange is the mindtrip we go on, no former notions of it all being boring: it is not boring, it is our mental whirlwind, wondrous, tailor-made for where we dwell and in mind of keeping us utterly fascinated, and about the day’s business, no regrets. About the call not to hide out in easy locales, hidden from our peers, but to wear our heart on our sleeve and know simple degrees separate us from friends near and far. Simple changes in latitude and longitude. Simple call to the effective work.