“11 While he clung to Peter and John, all the people, utterly astounded, ran together to them in the portico called Solomon’s. 12 And when Peter saw it he addressed the people: “Men of Israel, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk? 13 The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. 14 But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, 15 and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. 16 And his name—by faith in his name—has made this man strong whom you see and know, and the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you all. 17 “And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. 18 But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. 19 Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, 20 that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, 21 whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. 22 Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. 23 And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ 24 And all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days. 25 You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ 26 God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.”” (Acts 3:11-26 ESV)

Crystal Vision, the soldier’s response to a body catholic and worshiping, their own gestalt and modicum of action, is curiously inimical, curiously Opposed, curiously one-in-a-million. No, the church does Not have things right, by and large, except for its strange insistence on Study (the Books of old and new scripture), its strange insistence on Authority (the Son, manifested through the Spirit), its strange insistence on Creed (from perhaps a better time in the church’s epochal history). Yes, if these things are incubated… the soldier’s quest nonetheless is Rambunctiously Inspired, dying as the clouds part to reveal Heavenly Light to the martyred.

Why, all things told, do we Adhere to the church’s rubrics? To their—to his or her Spiritual Guide—curiously infantile or youthful Ambitions and Flatteries: this one ordained, that one blessed in their ambition, another assured in their weakly-principled Voting by flattery and imitation, to please their professors and vestries. All this, and Today the soldier is Called to believe in a lark, to find hope in a strange stew, to elicit Purpose in a bad omen or two.

The soldier calls this Mission perhaps Gospel, as in that strange Overman, Ubermensch, of the End to all critiques and End to all horrified Reactionary “hits” on her or his Person. We are not ashamed to have “gone there”, if in thus dying to pride and dying to perfectionism, we lanced the elephant in the room or healed a few folks ‘round here, with the stuff of a youthful magazine or television show most secular but in the Healing Business.

The soldier also Believes in the doctrine of Repentance, would that that aspect of “Gospel” were enacted according to the heavenly Vision. According to the plainness of—at all the wrong times we are feeling penitent, and at all the right times we are nowhere to be found—a mea culpa, a request for a second chance, a Faith… that such self-immolation or self-humbling, will be the grander message than that message which screams “Pagan!”, “Criminal!”, “Corruption!”. There is always room for some headship literally to “Steal” the unction by a timely confession. Because it hearkens, perhaps because, to something Everyone is coping with, their own inchoate and disassembled Center of Being, burdened whilst ground over the grindstone here and the millstone there, by a Futility sweeping over the body catholic, that never will this church “See the light”.