2023-10-11 A Meditation on Cosmic Plateau

“13 Now when the south wind blew gently, supposing that they had obtained their purpose, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close to the shore. 14 But soon a tempestuous wind, called the northeaster, struck down from the land. 15 And when the ship was caught and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and were driven along. 16 Running under the lee of a small island called Cauda, we managed with difficulty to secure the ship’s boat. 17 After hoisting it up, they used supports to undergird the ship. Then, fearing that they would run aground on the Syrtis, they lowered the gear, and thus they were driven along. 18 Since we were violently storm-tossed, they began the next day to jettison the cargo. 19 And on the third day they threw the ship’s tackle overboard with their own hands. 20 When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned. 21 Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, “Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. 22 Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. 23 For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, 24 and he said, ‘Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.’ 25 So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. 26 But we must run aground on some island.”” (Ac 27:13–26 ESV)

Cosmic headwinds, time flux, blaring climate change heat of day. The “already” but “not yet” means that Tomorrow’s Promise is ours today; the encounter with the living Lord is met in encounter as we clobber the encounter together Today; all things good are found in the Now, not in the Morrow, but no time to fuss urgent teaming up and partnering unto some Horizon stage-managed for Today.

Yes, the man or woman’s face features storm wind and yet determination, as we for once label concrete deeds and action-responses as being “Grace” in this hour: the climes too dire to pontificate on theoreticals; the headwinds too disturbing to ease our safety harness; the cosmic flux so doubted and so invisible, yet our Purchase, our Inheritance, our Pouring Out of all we are unto this the altar of fellowship. “Grace” is something that could have gone either way. “Grace” is a hairbender of a turn, into what is scary and also desired, into bones and sinews injected, bolstered, internally synchronized, commensurate with the heightened Adulthood attained unto by the person as a whole. We grow, overnight and in the winnowing hour. We stand unjudged, today and in the tempting hour. We evict a serpent, the better to strive in unison with all that breaches in theory, that tumbles in concept, that is brinkmanship in fact. To walk a narrow path, cliff side beneath and to one side. To do so in fog and then in clarity of day, and see a frightful reality that prayer has hidden from us. For the flux is too mega. The winds are too culpable. The strain is too legit. We are tossed this way and that while ear to the ground, finger to the wind, discerning and celebrating Life upon Life, Grace, the sincere step forth that marries Horizon to Now.

We were wondering, as tossed in the throes of sleepiness and then the throes of wakefulness, if there is any occasion to put up a sign, a witness, a moral deed done by accident not by mandate. For to mandate “morality” is to fall into Law, a deadening backwater that has no power to save. Our “morality” is to love the sojourner, to be peace to the neighbor, to work urgently and with determination to accomplish simple things, things of lived experience perhaps, or of alert confidence that a beacon is being planted, a flag advanced, the storm-tossed delivered. Safely “moral” because of a style of life called by some immoral, we meet the would-be innocence with fighting spirit and determination: I shall not compromise; I shall not let corrupting talk spring forth; I shall know it is better to love than to be fickle and hate. Better to allow Jesus to be our license to stand tall and confident than to put our own guilt onto others. Better to say, “Not for our sake, O Lord, but for yours”. To each other. To the spirit of the air, the one now at work in the sons of disobedience. And rightly to assess that spirit that carries through the vale of doubt and of crutches, of things leaned upon, of our fleeting youth and the hour that spells decade upon decade, wherein Friendship has begun with an Enemy and Serpent in mutual sight, called War, and said Friendship shall carry on in all Peace.