2024-08-15 A Meditation on Revelry

“2 Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple. 3 For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place, and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. 4 And the mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. 5 All this is for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem? 6 Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards, and I will pour down her stones into the valley and uncover her foundations. 7 All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces, all her wages shall be burned with fire, and all her idols I will lay waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them, and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return. 8 For this I will lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make lamentation like the jackals, and mourning like the ostriches. 9 For her wound is incurable, and it has come to Judah; it has reached to the gate of my people, to Jerusalem.” (Micah 1:2-9 ESV)

To dwell in the possibilities of the mind, is to comprehend how radical our Salvation Story is: a story without any time nor space to boast in good deeds, but rather to see how: the Spirit speaks to us, books could not contain the words that would be written (Jn 21:25), revelry is the flipside of a sleepless morn, and the loss of all things, the failures, the unforgiven—to ourselves—sins: these are meaningless and find no purchase amongst the early morning greeting of that Heavenly City and its potential.

Then as well the Spirit hunkers down, we ourselves buzzing in grand mind of the coming Judgment: will War be a heavenly brand of judgment, or will it be dastardly and propose a false front, a wrong-headed ascertainment—in this life—of who is saved and how. We require the fact of a Heaven beyond this realm, to accommodate so many souls whose beauteous daydream and logistics-thinking, is finally met with an onslaught of penury and pain, hardship and disdain, too great for even the best poetic minds to atone for. People have unfair things happen to them. People live under hard spells of an enemy or inimical, thoughtless, A.I. spirit.

Immoral yet teachable, education seeks to give a toolkit to people of every station in life to make substantive decisions with great moral quality, whether for good or for ill. Yet also we see education at the foot of the great big television screen; we see education on the tough streets or rural cavalries assembled. We see so much, and in this hour denied to the sleepy-headed soul their sleep, is a waking Vision called Sacrifice, the bus ride through fog-heavy ancient villages with even more sleepy or subdued spirits on their way to the working-class day job. We awake, because we are in Training. Training Day upon us, we are attentive yet not forbidden to accept what War does come, what All-In mentality does begin to germinate; we are all-in and strapped-in to the spaceship for Tomorrow’s War; we are not making of it some event horizon, rather we are accepting that this outcome and state of Affairs is hardly the “worst thing possible”; no, that would be war without common Cause; war without Plain-Spoken delineations of Evil and Fair Play, Evil and Good, Evil and Innocent. Together, we are hoping it shall be a war that knows no simplistic borders, but that declares a common cause against greed and utilitarian ambition, denudeings, plunderings, exploitations. Yet too we speak of a flag aloft, saluting this one, that does indeed represent the Missionary Expansion of the West, the Celtic Evangelization to some, of the world.