2022-11-23 A Meditation on Varieties of Experience
“Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” (1 Ti 6:12 ESV)
Life comes in many tones, and it is easy to think rationally: that adulthood, maturity, is a matter somehow of being a one-man-show, embedded amongst dragons, hated, blighted, given hardship, yet soldiering forward with an uncanny poise. For we are poised by faith in our Lord, to beat down the chattering spirits, to overcome the collegiate backstabbing, to sigh a bit and say, I’ve had my good seasons, that I might know the goodness of the Lord, and now I resign to an upward slog in life. I find some kind of verite in the paradoxical nature, the ironic self-sabotage of enemies, the plain jesting nature of a devil to my lifework.
These things need not be so! Indeed, Christian religion teaches that the demand life makes is no tolerable, necessary evil. Life demands our all. Life doesn’t find us “halfway there”, but rather finds us totally overcome, and in the Name of Jesus, totally victorious. No time to save that pleasant flipside for a rainy day: we invite it in this day. This day, we are recollecting an impossible bind, out of which, patently “sane” amidst “insanity”, we walked in to the recruitment station. To a rich person, this is insanity, for who thus gives over their life to the common cause? Who cuts ties with so much potential in life? Who thinks to win with company and fight what could not be won with cogent, plain, reason and dialog? For it is insane binds that cause us, if not to scream “Uncle!”, to register away in our brain a glimpse of elysian fields, of something More, of a dying man’s visions of the hereafter, only we are not dead but in possession of this life, this persecuted and embattled life.
Thus, the bind: insane conclusions therein, from the forgetful vantage point of a reasoned and peace hour. What was it like, thus to be tormented? What was the water-boarding and drip-drip-drip of the torture master, like, after all? How did life play games with us, letting out a little slack when we showed any fight, but then rapacious to reclaim the tug-of-war when we once let down our guard.
“I thought we had a gentlemanly agreement: I showed some fight, now, I show laissez-faire, trusting you learned a bit of a lesson, or came to some brand of agreement!” Not so! We are transformed, transfigured, renewed, and Resurrected as beings cogent of the ways of evil, stern and solemn to the truth behind any gladhappy or winsome soul that does come our way: we see the bind in their lives, and the fact that seasons both good and bad do come to all, but this is a mystery; all need Total Redemption, not a grumpily tolerated poison pill or blighted perch in life.
We hedge our bets, we negotiate with the devil, we are too bubbly-brained and overwhelmed by the Call to face a real kind of enemy, and in this “sane” transfiguration of what was “insane”, to head down to that recruitment office. With spellbound, astonishing, vision. With rescued hope. With some inkling of fight and of life still left in us. We today will use the fellowship, the weapons of our warfare, the honest appraisal of a life gone mad, to wage the good warfare.
Today, we will clamor after a Total Victory, so that we can get down to that head-down daily peacetime labor, each man with his or her field, with their spouse and kids, with their civic engagement around the public square. In that sense, we measure out hardship which is no hardship but rather the delight of work. But we do not for a moment allow basic truths to be compromised, reasonably allowed to malign us, be cause for trading waking visions of a better life, for something we’d be embarrassed honestly to explain to a gathering. We are not ashamed of the letters on our heart, that call us to varsity Employ, because we have seen the Lord, we have seen the passion, we have seen the diadem and priestly role of living near to said Experience, today overcomers, tomorrow victorious; indeed, our victory is with us This Day.