2022-10-08 A Meditation on the Straight and Narrow

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Ga 5:1 ESV)

Freedom is ours in Christ, staying on the straight and narrow, when no longer shattered by the scoffing enemy. No longer are we fooled into lending credence to precious statements. The contemporary is now us, not a cute outlay from one who has not our own soul’s best interests in mind. Such precious allure is in fact worthless and has no right in a position of trust.

The power internal to a woman or man, however, to be a minister, to mourn properly the sins of fallen Man, to identify what bad example or inwardly obsessed sin is present and send it out from our midst, is a step towards the full-on capacity the soldier has to heal. The soldier is able to heal, strangely (for they fight, and that with metal toolkit) because the soldier is honest about life’s exchange: the dynamic whereby we can now Rise up and take things seriously, as the soldier who goes before us has done. The soldier has legitimized a scary, yes, but plausible narrative. Suddenly our own imaginations have perspective and image bearer in the war servant called soldier.

To see something played out and named, heals and gestures us ourselves to join a good cause. Newsreels prompt us to Rise up, understanding that the spiritual maiming and bludgeoning is in fact contemporary and real in this hour. This may just be a gesture of healing.

To heal is simply to have our inner monologue given rest. It is an “Oh, yeah” moment: I have found love; I have known respite; I have warmed to the hearth around which we, as sisters and brothers, have gathered. It is a daring pose, a courageous gesture, a bold attitude, the one that seeks out no more scapegoat in light of that sin-bearer who did bear all our sin already, in His manhood and personhood, in His willingness to be at losing end of our minds’ momentary lapses and desires to accuse.

His was a grace that went all the way down. If we think of the opportunities we ourselves have to be supplicant and servant to each other, we get some taste of His Cross; and we, too, can be fully guarded and servant through and through, when we’ve learned to take that walk on water and trust that our loss will spell a future redeemed, Resurrected, New. So we are oblate for one another. We are no sugary speakers, but know a bedrock of supplication and availability, the simple quietude or patient words that invite the interlocutor, the saved soul, to speak openly without hindrance and from their heart. Such is a religious experience, beyond the brave portrayals of war or the fact of being heroic, for our heroism is a secret language, one that we have honed with peers and sister and brother, to be a common attitude, a mystery into which souls are inducted, a fraternity or sorority of no religious grandstanding and forced prayers, but of simple generosity and Christ-like composure.

Christ was laden with miracles, yet His disciples though thereby energized, were ultimately healed by a non-magical, non-mystical, non-supernatural experience: His Cross. That His heart resumed beating after a few hours, is as supernatural as it comes; however, it is a humane brand of the supernatural, not some pie in the sky or flight heavenward. It is our own invitation to cherish that precious but not precocious blood and life given, meager heartbeat acclimating to strong heartbeat, and that simple staccato of life a cause to astonishment, to embrace, ourselves to be healed. This is a straight and narrow that is vibrant and found in the hovels and neglected corners of our world; the curious and honest are the most healed and artful, because they had a Presenting Problem, perhaps. They knew the hatred of a racist or homophobic world. They also knew such enmity was aimed their way because of a “dastardly” conversion experience.