2024-03-19 A Meditation on Movements of the Soul

“3 “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. “ ‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. 4 Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. 5 The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. 6 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’” (Rev 3:3-6 ESV)

Part of the Christian’s parcel deal are advancements holy in their scope, to meet the Conscientious prayer-warrior or Lenten duty-bound soul precisely in their sense of regret, their sense of so much having been undone that could have been silently accepted and gratefully allowed us as things Owned, Deserved by Christ’s imputed sense of deservedness, and Embodied in our lives. We are deserved because He found us worthy of Love. We are well in body and soul because He cared for the soul met with the body, wide horizons met with eventual weariness, the parcel deal being a major upgrade found and mastered, major transitions, shifts of power and of concern in our lives, astonishing forward movement, and a soldiering cry that thanks-be-to-God many daily wars are well beyond won. Many things are already in the bank. Many things are equipping us for a future war we scarcely have enough innate respect for, being how easily we diminish and laugh away any claim that we belong on such a high and lofty stage.

For, we are His people for His future advancement of society and of love writ out and of community. We have in the bank such progress as none can shake a stick at. We also in times of benevolence of accomplishment, begin to own up to the reverse pattern, the times wasted or tossed in the waste bucket of injury to each other, of personal panicky hurt let out towards others, of strange ways we suddenly resolve to live out our meager and brief days only in mind of one thing: to fix what we broke. To make good on apologies and make right the failure to Love. To do it all in the light of one who Loved on Us. To see His urgent decision-making in times of panic or times of strange crazy mind-boggling scenes requiring strange crazy mind-boggling decisions. We must decide even when all avenues mock us and coax us to compromise; One such Decision is all it takes to launch us into the legacy and make of us Effective personages. We have stood up to evil, rampant laxity and panic-stricken lashing out. And today’s victories are ours to Own: we Own the goodness washing over each and every one of us. We own the temptations as no longer but dry kindling to burn in the penitential bonfire. We own that strange way that all of us live on a precipice of entirely daily new ways an evil spirit tempts, and entirely daily new ways we slide on that scale of innate virtue, habit, and unto Decisive conscious and deliberate Decision-Making. Some things we realize to be deeply embedded in our souls, the ways we are peace and copacetic in all communal settings. The way we tame our appeal for closure or completeness when such completeness would be illness or would be a blinded bad decision.