2025-01-03 A Meditation on Secret Disciplines

“3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. 4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 5 And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. 6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” 7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 11 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. 12 Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. 14 Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. 15 See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; 16 that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. 17 For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.” (Heb 12:3-17 ESV)

Students of the Spirit, the Christian walk is opaque by and large, not clearly seen, full of adventurous principles not yet learned. That is, to submit, to resign, to ask and to pray, these things meet with Intervening affect, Intervening Notes taken, Intervening awareness, reminder, reward and redemption. We study the duality of sin and redemption. We study the prayed-through faux interventions as perhaps Messages most divine.

The Christian walk, as a bona fide principle of the Walk, invites most harried, greedy, presumptuous assumptions. It invites persecutions and misconceived notions. For, we have become a planet with peaceable levels of gravity, of personal quiescence and calm, repentance and introspection: aha, do see how I tend to fight against sins most real: “Why him? Why her?” See how also the spirit of enmity, of strife, hunger, evil, rides high and mighty on a single hearsay: they, the interlocutor, is also a spirit, also a prophet, also a Believer in strange visions coming from all quarters, which visions are to be acted on, taken as legally prophetic and community-owned. And we ourselves can lag in this.

To live in community, to battle in company, to fight in cohort, this is to refuse the obsessive fault-finding and mockery. To see that sometimes a spade is just a spade. To open up, again, with the therapeutic couch, not frightful that some deep mystery, without our awareness, is coming from our lips. For we are possessed of material knowledge, a level of contemplation top-to-bottom Secret: yet hidden in plain sight. We are not lying to say, “This is the sum of the game”; “This is the Gospel, after all, what I was saying all along! It really lives here!” Instead of indulging that inimical Fantasy that all comes down to bravado and false punch: where, they say, is the Command, the Boldness, the Bark, the Roar? And subtlety is lost. Irony is lost. Humor is lost.

To the most cleared and present Knowledge Base, then! And to the barracks most filled with those of a special breed of Living Faith Out in Practice. We observe Sabbath, and observe days laboring. We take note, as students of that Fact exemplified in a Christ or in your favorite Saint, of Prophecy most real. It comes from our conscientiousness, too. From our heart, as we scuffle along and pass by folks on the street. We are after all most Cognisant of who-all is listening in, a soul right in front of us yet inwardly compromised, enemy-occupied territory, an inclination to rebel, to resist, to suggest, to attack, to flee. And we long ago forgot those tropes. We are innocent as doves, having forgotten or gone too blase about the First Principles, the miasma of helter-skelter hither and thither furtive pursuit, of hiding out from Parent or Guardian, Teacher or Scoutmaster, because we were guilty, we were ashamed, and as that sin was redeemed, we lost sight of the footwork, the groundlevel work of basic Message most Divine. Teach! Exemplify! Let the enemy within do its number on you, but submit to spirit not to threat and muscle! Ignore the blasphemy, the “A.I.” put in motion and thereby absolving of the guilt of the motivator. If they dreamt up the scheme, then they are guilty! And we are too, reflective, reactive, sanguine, and Peaceful. To be in Frame most Sublime, tutored by the Spirit, and brought up in the faith. Unafraid, of the murder. Of the pride. Of the cabal. Of what we scarcely can imagine of what and who “they” are. Clue: it will be a lesson in life, of ontology, of what is “out there”.

We are of an excellence not seen, His excellence, His patristic and maternal determination to Save, to Invest in, to see it through to the End. He makes us jealous with His patient optimism and games, a joke, a playpen, a child’s mobile, which spells Power to the loving Utmost. To gladly go the route of Engagement and Together hashing it all out. The horizon of a decade, two decades, our contract before you see land again, because we have Mission before us. What are your spiritual Disciplines? Do you stay moored to that Scripture? Are you enlivened by faithful derivative works? And think just how you might prove your vision, your allegiance. With a song. With a story. With a fighting Cause. Because it is difficult to deny Goodness, and harder still to resist Evil. To tell a tale of Comprehensive analysis, of reflection, of submission most unacknowledged: we were so submitted, and are so submitted, as to make accidental mockery of the orders! Was it a temptation in the wilderness? To jump from the temple’s summit and ask angels to catch us? Was it a proud avoidance, to muddle around contrite in contrast to their willingness to march forward? Was it a hungering compromise, to accept sin in our midst? Have we, mesmerized by the “enemy”, forgotten our own Gospel way? That there is a bright tomorrow for all God’s creatures. That new parables complement old. That new techniques are answered in derivative works most sublime. That it is also part of our mindset, to “Reboot”, to “Repent”, to “Ask again”: have you heard of a certain wanderer from Nazareth, from Scripture, and of what He did for me?