2023-08-01 A Meditation on License to Dream
“6 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” (1 Co 2:6–10 ESV)
Castles in the sky, the license to dream, one of the deepest enablers is that God’s Spirit is thorough. It is a Spirit that spells remedy. It invites us, not to “normalize” or “soften” our thoughts, but rather to know a phenomenon strange and uncouth, embarrassing at times, not fitting in at other times. It is to know a warrior-level of obtuse sins and doubts, depressions and quirks, foibles and second guessing. We second guess the Call unto healing Today, instead supposing it to be a team effort, us and the Most High: wrongly we guess that we do some of the work, God does a little (by the way).
It is warrior-level of strange, all is shame and disgrace and embarrassment on some level, and this is not something to wish away, not something to address some few words to by way of remedy. No, His Spirit is thorough, thorough with depression, thorough with doubts, thorough with all that questions why we should go on.
Yet calmer climes, victorious gardens, from these it is easy to look back and prescribe, prescribe a little Love from Above, prescribe a soup-to-nuts theological framework. But… rather than patronize our weaker, embattled self with “of course” remedies, instead we simply talk through the habits of thought and mind that rightly recognize dire straits. Dire circumstance. Dire weird and strange intrusions into our thoughts. For the muttered curse of self-broken hatred is just as much a topic He wants to heal as is any lust or fantasy. We put aside the notion of personal time, as contrasted with God-time: instead, we rest in a forward embrace urgent and persistent, unapologetic for using the Full Gospel. God with us in the Valley of Shadow and Death. God with us, in only we would see ourselves on a precipice, close to self-immolation or ruin of what loving gestures have begun to ferment and take root.
No matter: we dastardly ruined so much of that investment. No matter, we start from scratch, having known a barebones, white-eyed, hair-raising duel underway. We were ruinous to ourselves whilst affectionately known for the selfless love shown towards some other kind souls. Or, we were beginning to doubt whether we were, after all, “mostly good”, “kind-hearted”, “of good stock”. For this is a divine encounter between Law and Gospel: are we still buoyed up by assurances of the native, of the nature sort, of the “good works” and “good attributes”? Are we buoyed up by the thoughts of us being “mostly good”? Or can we white-eyed, hair-raised, invite a Gospel such as we would never willingly invent, and let this be our day’s fare?
Therefore, we are calmed and weaned, quieted for the sake of God’s “good stuff” becoming our own. After the wrestling match, we anoint ourselves in His labors and grab hold of a Gospel that insists we are indeed broken too much, but also that we have One who saw us decrepit and chose to love us. In this doctrine, this theological framework, this simple composure, we can rest and bear witness silently or aloud. So, bring on the strange, the warrior’s or extreme athlete’s level of oddball recalcitrance, hiding, escapism, making the self scarce. Know He prescribes an urgent remedy, not a little bit of contribution, but an urgent remedy. Embrace this, and laugh at one’s own frustrated muttered curses and query: “How can I go on?” This is but to assure us that our heroes and we ourselves are modeled after the God who suffered, not after the omnipotent figure of might-makes-right.
So we take upon ourselves the self as found, not as idealized but as found: broken, hemmed up, soldiering through so much that cannot be announced easily in polite conversation. Yet even that conversation tempts us to deny our Lord, when sadly what comes out of our mouth is sacramentally capable of healing: to testify, and thereby to have ministered anointing to oneself. It tempts us to deny, because we aim for a “bigger reason” than just this or that neighbor who showed up. Yet in that neighbor Jesus saw a disciple to Call, and in us too He saw a heart that would and could testify to great things.