2023-05-31 A Meditation on Strength

“10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Co 12:10 ESV)

To have strength is to have a bit of a full gaze. The soldier with strength is capable of more direct uptake, because she or he is in touch with the breadth of the matter. He or she is in touch with the near pain and frustration, thereby also in touch with the strong response. She or he has faced winnowing spirits, depressive silence and loudly offensive pain. He or she is all-encompassing, all-embracing, precisely because life has taken on a three-dimensionality, a wide latitude, a hopeful calm and reasoned purpose, pugnacity, push.

Let it all output together in plain joy and purposeful habit of thought. We are habituated to know that brand of strength borne in the sad trenches and the sideshows of life. Indeed, those sideshows are the plain center of it all, at times, that is, until we find ourselves capable of being handler and agent of the sideshow suddenly made all-obsessive and front-and-center. That Event is in need of a healing touch. That unspoken query: can our religious service touch even said humility of spirit, said embarrassment, said regret, said broken relationship, said uncouth encounter with the odd and the banal? For the odd, the banal, the unkosher, is haunting to the church attendee. The tension in the air spells a service un-in-touch with catharsis; the joy in the air spells a wide space for shaking it all out, touching upon wild thoughts and the prison system of the mind; the mind wretchedly pent up, bound and tied, unto things only a head trip of preaching or silent reverie, uncovers: that God is for us; that He is Lord of the harvest; that He will enter in upon our secrets, rather, those things we long to divulge if only in a safe and forgiving space.

So we are stronger for the journey, because we have let loose with the Encounter, the Evidential experience, the Tangible facts of life, the Unpopular side show, the Favorless aspects of our wretched body and being.

The tension in the air may spell someone’s poor and difficult work on the part of getting up the church service; the joy in the air their respective success: it ought to be a service where speaking wild thoughts, as though in tongues, is mildly, in theory, allowed: shake it out, let the words flow, let the pent-up longings find their home, their safety net, their therapist’s couch. Let it all output together in plain joy and purposeful habit of thought. We are habituated to know that brand of strength borne in the sad trenches and the sideshows of life. Indeed, those sideshows are the plain center of it all, at times, that is, until we find ourselves capable of initiating, of entering in upon, of growing Stronger for the sake of that our proper get-up. So we are ready, standing at the ready, this day, and every day.