2023-07-28 A Meditation on Grace in the Slog

“For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.” (1 Co 2:10–13 ESV)

Communication. The intent is there. Passing obtuse reaches, finding a dialog picked up just where left off. On some level, what the preacher and the Christian calls “Grace” is as much in the naivete, the innocence, the mellifluous words as it is in any baggage we carry around with us. We are Grace when we sing and chat, revealing who and what we are on a plane playing field, a standard dialog, a revealed champion outlay and input. Grace is the license to trust, to free-fall into waiting arms, to engage and inform. Grace is a remarkable lightheartedness, a lightness of being, the Invite to work one or two things over on the matter. So our Project. Our Conversation. Our Sing-song Punctiliousness. All this is somehow engaged with interlocutor minus the lugubrious, minus the heavy-handed, minus the Pilgrim’s hefty sack of burden.

In hushed whisper, in somehow something turned inward-outward, in discovering who and why and all things in a melodious and calm outlay. We are Grace when we have made the firm stand over and against obnoxious creaturely set-in-ways lust or blockage, regret or pain, when we are unmonitored or untapped, when an All-seeing Eye only hopes to reveal the baser errors, and to applaud and firm up the lighter purposes. So we enter and dialog and encounter. We find it healing to know that, hey, this is a free exchange, a communal Encounter and Bodes Well for body and mind and soul. Clipped, not heading the route of regret or heavyset error, but Encounter and Mind, Body and Revealed simplicity of dance. Of lines of text that surmount the lust for images. Of a tamer brand of what in prior times was our daily grind, our daily “Oops” and “Not this again”. Our daily list of empty-headed unmade promises and error-prone caprice or hunger. Our false habits and ticks.

There is something healing when all is licensed yet not all is indulged. There is something freeing when we can say “This much and no more” to the chance impulse and Encounter, the ones we regret or that lead to terror-stricken self-realizations, a mountain of mistaken yet indulged pastimes. Then, the New Creation, the Being melodious and sing-song of being attributed Well and Healthsome. When for a moment we regretted the lust, we were for some brief span of time joyous and proper in our mortal frame, eternal and loving, caring and dialoguing, with artificial interlocutors as much as with things no computer can recreate, our friends and daily piecemeal work, at the grocery, at the subway, at the cafe and barroom, in our homes and on our routines and routes to work and play. For who comprehends the habits of our mind? Who knows the willingness immediately to cast upwards and cast on God? Who knows the standard portal of all-encompassing Peace, Engagement, Willing Labor? Is the experiment boding well, or infested with an ace leader’s detritus, we the unwitting recipients of no grace but temptations and regrettable deeds? For Nirvana and Heaven do dwell with us on earth, if only we would feel out the Jesus in our technological midst, the peace project, the logic and login, the bedrock where no policing nor paranoia dwells, but healthsome first principles for all comers, such principles as we Embrace, Surround, Call-to-account, Dwell In, and Reside Copacetically Within. Each entitled to their Calling, labor and enjoyment.