2023-09-28 A Meditation on Fellowship

“Teach and urge these things. 3 If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, 4 he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, 5 and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain. 6 But godliness with contentment is great gain, 7 for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. 8 But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. 9 But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” (1 Ti 6:2–9 ESV)

Is it time and education that makes for us to run from spiritual brokenness? Is it some experience that hates the “new normal” of angst and lobbing barbs at each other from a distance? For we wonder and ask of ourselves, why are we composed and self-contained, why principled and patient, why harried but calm? Is it our upbringing? Is it that refusal to let the sun go down on our anger? Is it the weariness, the sleepy overwhelming nerves and demands of such “Law”? The “Law” that hates rather than blesses? The “Law” that accuses rather than absolves? The “Law” that is unaware of its own addictive and mad power to obsess and make the “new normal”?

Yet the soldier is no victim of intense spiritual war, though effort is made to leave her or him unkempt, disheveled, a wild mess. To push the gauntlet a bit too far. To get accused, when making normal and cautious inquiries, of wild inappropriateness. So today we are those humbled by our own capacity, yet shaking it off and hopeful in our own Belongingness. We Belong. We Fellowship. We match with parent or kin, with friend or neighbor, with the few inspired ones Christ has given to us: this story is no longer about those who mock and doubt (the New Testament blood and kinfolk of the disciple) but about the few brave and proud who “get it”, who form the team against which any hurt of one member is a hurt of all members. Who “get” each other, as comrades and fellow-travelers. For we have our type of wealth, of spiritual and brave variety: we are wealthy for our pluck and socialization, to brush alongside these our friends old and new, to take as a blessed given the bravery and the sacrifice, the fitting forward position, the lack of any complaint or need, squarely facing the guns and the hail of fire.

To have learned a personal edict, a quiet time understood in principle, if not always in fact and in deed. To vibe off of not our own self-sufficient quest but a submission to a group, needful of what beauty may arise conjointly. Yet also protected in the sphere of the individual, a bullet point, a line item, a distinct node of a wide web: these things bless and upbuild the would-be patron of the Faith, the would-be soldier of the Cross, the would-be Calm and Composed Sage voice (for such callings come dime a dozen to the warrior of the spiritual wilderness). The sage is called, and the therapist is blessed, the pastor is involved, the seamstress of religion does knit.