2025-02-20 A Meditation on Owning Our Religion

“13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor 13:1-13 ESV)

Mankind owns his and her spiritual estate. Mankind longs for miracles. Mankind longs for assurance. Mankind faces the harrowing dark night of the soul, because a germ of doubt has begun to fester: we are absent miracles, absent assurance, absent answer to our yearning. Mankind owns this spiritual estate because, though derived from On High, it is derived by the One who made us in His image. It is derived because we own up to the duty and the mechanics of Advancing Christian creed and doctrine. We advance crazed notions of miracles, of a strange blase-almost Fact of some not-merely-nominal percentage of souls which Shall Be Saved.

Yet call it Birthday only the reverse, the undoing, the sense of aging without Any answer from the promiser of miracles and of walk-on-water assurance. The sense of slim pickings because, after all, it was a rather audacious, if too haphazard, move to profess Christ and Him Crucified. Only, bear not up under any unneeded burdens, O Christian! See not already the enthusiasm returns when once we mention certain… things! Like the Cross! Like the Christ! Like the Father’s love for us!

If it was rather audacious, it is because well spoke the prophet that Conversion wouldn’t “stick”: that we’d go back to our old thought-patterns; that some societal or methodological or psychological Divide does exist, and we who stammer and speak haltingly in one domain, also are mellifluous amongst our “own kind”. Sometimes. Sometimes the joints are lubed and the words they flow.

That is, God’s way of providing, does not leave us merely answering after the fact with Credit Due His Name. It does not leave us merely scoping out a better life now that Spirit has entered the equation: for, that same Spirit, goes AWOL, goes blank, if we lean too much on “Prove it to me!” thinking. We return to our former lords and godparents and advisers. And by-the-by, in the process, we blank on that Faith Upheld, that importance of we owning it ourselves, not just asking God the Spirit to be blithe and inspirational to us in our lazier estate. We own the Faith. We own the Creed. We own it all and we fight for it all, because that prophet was right: trials, they shall come. Doubts, they shall diminish, they shall weary, they shall speak a cool air to us, one without the power to save. Yet how can it be, if God ain’t in the business of manifest miracles quite, how can it be that He shall so audaciously suddenly Save a Soul? Because He is after all in the business of miracles, it just requires us to believe: it ain’t a magic show. It ain’t a unknown phenomenon, or any such thing except insofar as it is centered in the Cross. Miracles are not exclusive to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: the devil can do miracles. But the message of Christ and Him Crucified: this cannot be forged. This starts us on the miraculous via the simple Fact of our own converted soul. And the signs, the wonders, these are par for the course: anyone in the faux business of creating man-made signs and wonders: I make no apology for pleasantly nodding but largely ignoring them! Says the Christian. Because temptations shall arise, a myriad host of angels shall accompany, the very numerology and accents of a sight on the road, on the ticker tape, shall claim a magician’s authority and truth claim. But we are no magicians, if we believe on Christ! We firmly reject, the claim that this food bounty or that answer to prayer, is in itself, in sum toto, the Gospel: rather, the Gospel is that Christ spoke the food into existence from His own stations of the Cross. Christ spoke the prayer answered, even as the nails were far and above more interesting or painful and distracting to His estate. His mental estate was Challenged from Above, because He had been claiming that any notion of God the Father was already present and Incarnate in Himself. So no way to rest and plead a higher power! If that power is supposedly already in Himself! But, in fact, He did find a Higher Power, in the Father with whom He communed daily. And we, too, walk a gentler walk because of our high desire for the Father to be heard, for His brand of miracles to be profligate, for His circumnavigating and smart Patent or Brand to be ascendant.