2024-01-24 A Meditation on Accelerant

“12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15 As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” 16 For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? 17 And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? 18 And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? 19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” (Heb 3:12-19 ESV)

Gifts come our way of plain fun in the gathering, the electricity in the air, no longer forlorn about any edifice or wall to climb “out there”. For again, we are all on, amped and ready, because some dastardly lethargy, malaise, sloth was excavated: our radar, our attentive ears, judged that indeed after all there is substantial difference to be made. The soldier is in some sacramental or theological relationship with their Calling. The soldier is recipient of some Gift, if is found that great drill sergeant Christ, in the air, received, affected by, sins undone.

What is our sin, after all, if not blockage of the finer tendrils, finer points of the human brain—yes—but more than brain, the soul. What is our project today but to refuse the ennui or the sadder assessments, the mechanisms that test us, that put some measure of comprehension to paper, some measure of moral duty, some measure of duty by way of aging parents or appreciative siblings. To assess a need for direction, to see all as a fulcrum between two poles, amped and forgiven, or ponderous and derelict.

We are no longer derelict. We are today infused or rather exhumed from the grave. We have died, and our life is hid with Christ. We have Received, the Calling and the war to the observant, the one possessed of a higher Edge or Meaning, a gravity and a lethargy no longer tolerable. For we do not seek out war, it finds us precisely as we begin to grow into that Vision: each man a field and an ox, a plow and a spouse, together to work the fields, together to rear the children. Only then, gifted and blessed, war knocks at the door: be attentive and circumspect around your principles and your possessions; be instead of miserly or covetous be joyous. Yes, the fact of war defeats us on all levels, except that we are no longer slaves to sin and defeat, but are Victorious Today in that logical pair of alternatives, that fulcrum, that this-or-that no longer measured by family wealth or resume-building, but a fight against the dastardly accusation, an accusation originating in our own doubting souls, but one repeated by any enemy who thinks he or she can unseat us.

The fulcrum is the ability to be peace and copacetic in exactly the bind or the war or the impasse where we perk up, wake alert, have a moment of clarity or a waking vision, a dream troubling us in the night-season, or a friend’s warm greeting. The fulcrum is our very talent gifted us, in the Divinity’s hope that we shall do more than bury or deny it. The fulcrum is where we have long since bid rest and vacation adieu, and learn to live, eat, sleep and drink, fight and labor Alert: life has done horrid things to people we very well know, and then so has it done to we ourselves. And to see all that in the lineage of personal accountability, passed down, ancestral sins and newly-minted ones. Would that we would accept the doctrine of Sin for no reason other than its staying power, is revelatory power, its parable of hard work being a fruit of rather than a reason for forgiveness. Thus, the protestant ethic. The catholic respectability. The sense of duty and more than duty, of provision in a Body at large. So it is no day for mourning all the books we shall never read nor the projects of our generation long ago left behind, but to accept Peace In Situ, trench reality marrying us to that finer side of the fulcrum, joy and peace in believing, joy and peace in staring down the impossible people we live with or the secretly friendly people we together escape with from the top-down impersonal expectations.

We are unapologetic for our friends. We are in no wise making a belligerent tack, but rather out of the Promise and Gift of friendship we immediately are called to the mat, taken down a notch, hated for our fellowship and our joy. All Man, Woman, needs in life is some repose and hearth, yet the efforts to couple up or form triad or such, are regulated and denied and coveted and hoarded. So we bide our time in a more accelerated, accelerant situation, in which all drop their pet concerns and wide-eyed face the War: and in this situation, this accelerant situation, there is no time to hate on the friendly types or the makeshift bliss and solemn yet joyful hours spent side-by-side.