2024-11-12 A Meditation on Experience Good and Bad
“1 I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and have not let my foes rejoice over me. 2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. 3 O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol; you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit. 4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. 5 For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Ps 30:1-5 ESV)
To try and safeguard or bank a quality experience, this is really antithetical to what Jesus did, what He calls us to do: our minds, they can reason out of anything, however, those times we are bare and exposed to the world, we can literally have reverse experiences. We can undo things that are so delicately and lovingly ascertained. Likewise, it is an easier climate we instead lean on: recall, O Christian, that it is He who works in to will and to His good pleasure. Recall, O Christian, your free association carries no risk of an embarrassing reveal. All things are His, and the sacrament of Presence, of Communion with each other, in these things we remain optimistic and utterly risk-taking, so as the more risk-immune to become.
The prayer gathering. The social “date”. The public statement. We are no longer headstrong via our Remove, but headstrong via our Engaged Mentality. We simply have no time for more regrets to accumulate; we simply have no time to curl up and die; we simply have no time to deny that—”This one, he (or she) isn’t in fact a ‘Christian’”—doubts pointed our way come with a “Sheesh” and a dismissal on the part of the one who doubts, are doubts germinating in someone else’s soul not ours.
What is this to say? The climate is set, the patterns untiringly repeat, and we, we are stellar in some cocoon in which Christ knows the actual us, and loves the matter of fact us, and unceasingly upbuilds the sin-weakened us. The sin that weakens, the ties that bind, the caged mentality, God gets almost angry with us for not having more calm faith, for pleading when it is only a small nothing favor being asked, for frustrating the community by being patently bound and tied down.
Rise, O Christian! Oh, but there lies an invisible Enemy who only hates this one, doesn’t share the hate evenhandedly, who is at times an enemy within. So we, too, we plead, but without quite a beggar’s glee in our empty handedness, rather with a stoic Faith in what lies Above.
That is, turning on a dime, those reversed Encounters are in the end a figment of our imagination. They were real, until we allotted to Christ the pain and that empty-handed approach. We Testify and—if the measure of a man, of a woman, is whether they are “found in Christ”, are in fact all things told “Christian”—we take comfort in knowing, as they persecuted Him, so too we shall be shouted down and escorted from the fellowship.
On some level, we all already are, insofar as we cut corners in the testimony insofar as it is a repeated thing: the first testimony, yes, it was real; but then we cut corners, perhaps, forgetting the sense of utter failure that greeted, formed our greeting with, Jesus; forgetting the calm self-contained Composure that excited us to Know that God… if nothing else, then here there is God and His love for us.
What this comes down to is the holiness of Encounter, and the sacrament celebrated in its name. We get accustomed to No Mistakes, then mess up; we get accustomed to headstrong, self-contained all-sufficiency, and then blabber inchoate and incongruous streams of thought to a friend. See, O Man, O Woman, you are under the most severe negative expectations! Others are—let them no longer—prescribing or insinuating confusion in your direction!