“3 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. 5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. 12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Col 3:1-17 ESV)

The “community” is global. The “community” pits very outfitted men and women against each other or, rather, straining—in a good sense—the limits of friendship, mutual respect, collegiality, business day attitude. The “community” will bear all the truths of Human-King Generally, including Original Sin, including temptation, including contretemps and madness spilt broadly.

But as to said “community”, the league of saints, the six degrees of separation now three, four, flatlined Comrades and camaraderie whose links and breakpoints deep, only need a few iterations before All Mankind is on the phone, is in the closed-door meeting, receiving the Intelligence Briefings, practicing that Art wherein Love, Spirit, Generosity, Self-Sacrifice, Cruciform Faith leads the day.

Do you even Believe in God, it is asked. Any loud-mouth can prattle off memorized litanies and prayers, but it is the curtailed, hemmed up, deeply Reflective, Meditative one who needs Christ, and needs Him now. Our dreams, they vary into the avant-garde and the prophetic but never minus Original Sin; likewise our waking hours, we Reflect, Meditate that we are caged in by Sin, hemmed up by Flagging Relevance, liminal goodness meets liminal error; impunity against Sin, what a Dream indeed, in order that we no longer self-hate, no longer criticize why and how: sometimes we just aren’t nearly saying the “right thing”, making the “right joke”, smiling gladly at the “friendly query”.

The community of Saints, the community of movers and shakers, the ways Dialog is strangely—this by heads having life experience divine—entrusted just to some members of this International Guild, called prophetic, called intelligence, called thuggish, called heavy, but therein—the unbearable lightness of Being (thank you, Milan Kundera)—more peaceful and sanguine than anything produced for the secular Big Screen or Cinema. More wrought over in deep prayer and calm Engagement, despite its artistic reenactment in a literalism most violent. We are violent towards sin, violent towards the Urgent Gameday Decisions made. We make Decisions by a combination of Instinct and Planning. Analysis, the analyst and the field officer alike, having arrived by Christ’s shortcut to the Fastedness, His immediate Reinstatement, His Immediate Forgiveness, such that a boatload of knowledge broadsides the officer and agent and soldier. We are knowledgeable because we Confessed, and our Confession was heard.

Not because of long fasts. Not with some pie-in-the-sky sense all will be good (or worse, that we are good people innately). But with the sinner’s macabre outlook on all lifeforms, starting with themselves. And while we sublimely almost fall into each other’s arms (“Be merciful to me!”) we also shake it off day’s end and Line Up again for Tomorrow’s slugfest. Because we float and gyrate, dance in Liminal Sky, in Liminal Shoreline and Coast, in Liminal park and field and forest and mountain.