2024-10-24 A Meditation on Third Eye

“14 As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. 2 One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. 3 Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. 4 Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand. 5 One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. 8 For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. 10 Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; 11 for it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” 12 So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.” (Rom 14:1-12 ESV)

The ghosted semblance of Man, we do not have the luxury of plain living, that is, of simply being one of the crowd. We are one of a kind, because to convert, to have a prodigal’s moment of return, we speak now out of a strange Juxtaposition, Dichotomy, a wild Coherence. We cohere because we man up to the hour, we begin a veritable War with many voices asking only that we recall our “sickness” and speak of that, whilst we plead only to imagine if only all and sundry were to come together over coffee or a soda they would realize we are simpatico, cut from similar cloth, exactly opposite, in some cases, to the prejudices and violent judgments the rumors of which precede us.

No matter, only that we endeavor to Point to a higher authority, in the vein of a battalion real but mostly of we as sheep not as hawks or leaders, and as sheep we need a higher Authority to spell the induction, the assertion, the vote of confidence, the Pauline Request to honor such as these. Such as we ourselves, not insofar we are bumbling and needy human souls, but insofar as the Light of Christ has alighted on us and for an instant we have a Word called Love, called Favor, called Conducive, called Contemporaneous. Yet any softness in our gait is taken as a weakness or as a given; we are not honored for those ways others run amok over us. Yet this too leads to pride, so again we bless those who do draw near and we learn from those who do their deeds of discipleship in our presence and even towards our body. Their discipleship: is it different from ours? Is theirs one of good works, strange and wonderful good works? Loving the awkward and outsider, peace to the enemy, self-discipline most earnest? While ours can seem more like a chip on the shoulder, a complaint or petition unto the Leaders and the Educators in our midst? All this is fine and well: we form a Body not because of how clever our assessments are, but because the lame get along with the crazed, who get along with the unbeautiful who get along with the awkward.

Still: God has placed heroic souls in place no longer because they are less sinful, but precisely in spite of their myriad sins, sins that others latch onto and fuss over. So we left behind good works, but now return once again to the good work of Suffering. We return once again to the good work of Fighting. We are fighting and we are suffering as mega-men and mega-women in the company of Sheep. Each of us is this mega-plus size because we have heard the Gospel and have dared for once to speak up. As though into a hornet’s nest. As though even one smart word is enough to get us railed against and strung up, pinned to the wall, beaten senseless.

The Word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword (Heb 4:12). Our ghosted semblance of Man, of Woman, means in some arenas we are bent out of luck. We, in some arenas, have no bold stand nor right to exist. We must be modest in what arenas we claim as our own. Because, not forgetting our ghosted semblance, we are a Different Cut of Man by now, and to make decisions is to struggle with very plausible dualities, both sides seeming calm and reasoned. For, our endeavor and angularity these days is around something that gets us excited: the Word of our Lord. In this Word we could write and talk all through the day, each prayer being a springboard for the next.

God has dealt to us that spell called Holy, which spell does rework the Man, the Woman, around a semblance most desiccated and dried out as our former selves. And today, to have eaten the manna and the bread as provided, to have drinken the seltzer and the wine as provided, is to Resurrect in some Impossible Way, so we are still masters of our former domains, but are so with a tenuous-at-times hold: it is a ghostly transference and togetherness held up. We are New Creations, and must soldier Forward rather than being the clever soul who sits around know-it-all and having all the sly answers. We must soldier Forward rather saddened that the passing fruits of this life are set against a background of loss and War, of futility, of error and simple unthought-out deeds that ruin much. So we pray, because our War is in the Name of God, the Name of the Lord, whose yes’s and no’s are in either case somehow Gospel, so deep is the assurance of a positive, loving, relationship. That is, all things are Yes in Christ Jesus, because what we fear: our past mistakes, our what-ifs most hellish and self-critical, our bad deeds uncorrected; these things become the quilt and diorama of Christ the sin-suffering Servant. These things spell a third Heaven, a reality elusive to the doubtful but Front and Center to the Called Servant, the Warrior of, the Soldier towards, Man’s legacy as Saint and Beloved.