2024-08-24 A Meditation on Spirit
“2 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” 7 So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Pet 2:1-10 ESV)
Like spirit unto spirit the mechanisms of life are somehow tandem or in symphony with each other’s spirit and personhood. We learn to recognize in brief encounter, the perhaps similarities to known entities but also—this for those who feel less experienced in life—we Adopt and Inbibe each other vis-a-vis mentalism and spirituality. We become pundits of each other. Also, we discern faulty variants of ourselves: these we repent of, or see shown in broad daylight for what they are. The guzzler or incontinent. The brash or compromised. The ones in stark Contrast to something that by way of this distinction we come to embrace.
That is, the distinction sharpens the Soldier to a camaraderie of fundamentally cleansed or contrite or Resurrected souls, one to another, cohort to each other, yet all this not by Man’s yearning or self-chosen route of discovery, but in a calmer, more tired, conclusive Event. We are surprised that all our efforts at self-improvement also are found near to our end-of-day weary sober assessment, the assessment of Divine Input, Insight, Information, Intrigue. We are intrigued to Discover and Discern that spirit unto spirit is event and horizon and “What’s going on…”.
Therefore the confession elides the circumspect and coherent Self. We are confessed unto a Joy wherein to see something, to see our own spirit as flawed, is no indictment but rather a new leaf turned, it is a distinction invited and now made, the distinction of a ghost we’ve eluded, a demon we’ve shed, a foreign uniform we’ve unshod. What is our Victory but this? That rampant Good Things are done in the names of Confident Fellowship, of brazen outward Gestures Benign, Beloved, Beauteous, the cohort, the foot-soldier’s level of Camaraderie and Juice. Juice to live into and upon our Teaching of Him, who lived and died a soldier’s patient, teaching, understanding and sympathizing, mode, mentality, spirituality, spiritualism. All this so that we could Embrace what no top-down authority can instill, Him for us and we… we ecstatic unto nearly the embarrassment of Joy, the repute and coherence of Confident Happiness, contentment divine, ending the faultlines and error-prone efforts to be anything or to be all things or to be more than what we ourselves consist in.