2023-05-23 A Meditation on Dominant Spirit

“In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5:16 ESV)

Each flag-bearer, making last hurtles unto the goal, calm and space is spelt, directed towards our way, by the unidentified, unfussed-over realm of Grace. Experience, as we listen. As we imitate. As we learn, coping mechanisms giving birth unto Dominant Mechanisms, dominant Spirit, winsome courage, hope-filled restoration, theft away from all that the devil has stolen and couched in ennui or in depressive spirits. All that, we reclaim. All that, in listening, imitative spirits, we allow to Flourish and to Rise, to reckon this day with that outlay of Grace, which outlay does afford us our Peace and Sanctuary. Our peace-time, and safe-space. Our license yes to belong, to grow, to thrive, and to dream Large whilst fighting near, front, and center.

Each one a bearer of Glad Tidings, cheering each other up with their humor and sense of forgiveness: we forgive, rather, we say “No matter!”, rather, we say “Come up here!” (Rev 11:12). The parents’ who strangely do not mention our shame or our Difficult Arena, realizing with us in lockstep spirit that their love transcends, dominates, writes large, the shared faith: God is a God of reformed lives. God is a God of hopeful investment. God is a God of created in self-same image. God is our God: together, unwittingly today built up via that Grace, too much goodness properly to account for, to count up, to recognize, or cynically to distance ourselves from in cold measures.

Instead, in warmth of hearth and home, we imitate and listen, to the elder statesman, yet to our inner voice that decries Peace and Salutary Climes. Quietude, that we may the better tether or let tether out, of that spirit of boldness within, we in utter submission to God’s plan for Inspired love, lancing forth against entrenched sin. Blase sin, patent ineptitude, for life’s successes are not simply to moralize and lecture each other in making better decisions, rather, with hands-off restraint we still do teach of need of Divine Intervention. God, and God alone, can make the Change Agent. God, and God alone, can safeguard the converted soul through a valley of jackals, snares, and sycophants. God, and God alone, gives some notion of future vision even as though through an impossibility. God serves the great good by illustrating, with this one or with that Saint, a lark, a treasure buried in broad field, a shoulder burdened yet joyfully so with so much hardship and responsibility, responsive to the needs of community and kin, light-dwelling, light-walking, light-contemplating.

That spirit is in each of us, who imitate yet also reinvent and create for new posterity’s sake, the dynamic and the hope: the next generation better than this one, we happily (though still original sinners) gifting unthanked-for deeds of service unto that future beyond our own life’s reach.

Is it sensitive? Is it talked of in hushed tones? What is the right forum for describing, for beginning to delineate, how a mad rush of spirits does give rise to one fore-runner, one lead-agent, that agent called Grace? That we scarcely can account for what in most inner sanctuary, is building us up and inviting Growth, inviting Flourishing, inviting intrepid self-renewal: the self Created and creating, burgeoning with growth, inspired by Spirit, beloved by Father, walked along-side with by Son, personhood. So to quantify Grace is to assess and view rightly that we cling to guilt, to accusation, to pretended caution, as though our interlocutors were on the verge of terrible things “as usual”, when instead it lies in our own domain to Bless and to Prepare and to Send Forth renewed, created, flourishing.

So we are not guilty when our faith is in a persecuted corner. We are not guilty when our faith is accompanied by endless waiting and unforeseen, unprecedented sense of personal failings. We are not guilty when our dominant spirit is unthanked-for, is taken as a given; today we describe and ascertain a modicum of gratitude to the Heavenly Father for good progress, for good posture, for good stance as unto an at-times invisible host of good and of ill. We have reached the Promised Land. We have reached the Kingdom Now. We have reached our Spirit’s salutary home.