2023-10-17 A Meditation on Emergent
“15 We do not boast beyond limit in the labors of others. But our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may be greatly enlarged, 16 so that we may preach the gospel in lands beyond you, without boasting of work already done in another’s area of influence.” (2 Co 10:15–16 ESV)
Where there was nothing, life begins to take shape. The quizzes, the tests of emotional intelligence, these are draining perhaps but from them we emerge stronger and fit for whatsoever is thrown our way. For, life has sprung forth eternal. Resilient life. A peace and certainty greater than the persons involved.
Therefore saved for another day. Therefore cause and confidence to fight. Therefore today’s soldier fears not to have all things winnowed away, to be shell-shocked, to commit untold crimes against one’s own prognosis and career. We are frightened, not by someone else’s sins, but by what is in our own hearts. All monasticism and vows aside. All proofs of our goodness put out with the rubbish of self-righteousness.
Regarding that life; what is in our own hearts regarding that blossoming persistent ability both to laugh and to bless, to receive and to give. For our deeds catch us in need of personal oversight. Our inability to break out of a rut, our seeming slavery to a predetermined denouement: see us walk the line. Yet to soldier onwards is to roll with the punches and to be that grander poise, to be Guide unto those who have sought an innocent answer. To fight is to be unashamed of what emotional luggage or weariness for once captivated us. We were captivated, but emerged the stronger. We were tested, but learned to bless others rather than finger-point. We were in the midst of genuine war, the actual article, and that took on its own personal form, even as at a distance our women, our men, were in their own parallel battle joined.
Grace is not lugubrious. Grace is not caught unawares of what temptations whisper in man’s, woman’s ear. Never reducing another healthsome soul, body and person to any bundle of desires, we soldier on because, well, we have a duty to answer love with love, trust with trust, outlay with outlay. Untold strength is called for. Patient discernment, mutual investigation of the matter, is apropos. Obvious pitfalls are cause not just to put aside the warmer course, but to re-engage with said course on a flipside called Chaste. Chaste of man’s hubris, of man’s plain half-and-half: half good stuff, half a rebellious fool not worthy of any friendship.
We are possessed of genuine Encounter of some hasty at times, but sincere form. In this hour a bundle of energy meets another bundle, and races to the conclusion in record-setting form. Which conclusion is that Man, Woman, or each to their own, does tend to warm the temperature and indulge some New brand of life emergent; something greater than any person, yet frightful and cause for new monastic vows, for principled avoidance, for the perennial question mark: is this a trustworthy and reliable tack to go on? We are those defeated by our own possibilities, guilt-ridden by our own jealous friends resident in our minds. We are most to be pitied, without hope in the world upon truly seeing sin for what it is.
To be Grace is to understand the insanity of man’s and woman’s motives: we repeat or falter in the same old ways, expecting a different outcome. That is the definition of insanity. Yet the Christian soldier has her or his own hope, perhaps one shot Experience, and lives and dies, fights and prognosticates, over this. This sense once felt (and only once, perhaps) of a blanket sphere of acceptance beyond mere lifestyle choices, but going deep: acceptance of us as those no longer proper Jews because of our sins, and cooled, worried perhaps, frightened at what a moment of honesty reveals, about the state and possibilities of the person. Of ourselves. What we can and cannot promise, needing as we do to dispense with simple explanations and dive in, try our hand at things we perhaps should have been wiser than to indulge in.
We are servants to the theology which says, there is no hope apart from hope in Another, in that Person who sustains with a gesture, Jesus. We honor Him, and find ourselves remade newfound as Christians and men, women, of the Book. In this we can begin to lay out a strategy, where we are full-throttled operating on all cylinders, to cherish that One Experience. Of Grace. Of Christianity. Of a truth not obvious but recognized and felt somewhere in the soul, of a New Way here before us. And it becomes permanent, received always in every moment.