2022-11-29 A Meditation on Torment and Peace

“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Php 3:8 ESV)

Met somewhere on a once upon a time, the Spirit of Jesus is one we beseech to enter our lives in the faulty hour this day. In the time where we feel ourselves more enamored with accusations levied our way, more adjusted to frustrated mutterings and incomplete ciphers of what life is and should be for us.

Life should be like that spirit once upon a time; we do have a faulty track record both recent and removed by time; we know what it is to have passions of sin, that is, we decide this hour not to let any motoring along deprive us of the cogent and waking “presence”, the presence that makes rational, celibate, decisions, chaste decisions, reasoned thoughts. Indeed, all passion is moot in the light of that Love and that Freedom Experienced.

Anything announcing itself, intruding, swelling up in our conscience, is by a combination of effort and willingness, a combination with experience and practical knowledge, chased down. It comes to moot. It is not allowed to become “whom we are” in the Lord’s courts. And we stand at the ready, having such intrusions rare and few between, maybe, by this juncture, but thereby all the more pernicious. It heals to see them make themselves known, because in some variety of hiddenness, they are always there. Until the next life. And in some variety of openness, the Love works a higher medicine.

Likewise not our appetites generally, to squeeze in a bite or a drink; these things, suddenly marring the perfection of following hours of appetizing, that is, of eating, hold no sway over our deeper sense of absolution. We are Ready and Servant to the Lord.

Nor the self-hatred: “I’ve ruined everything. I always ruin everything.” “I promised my kids or a friend I’d spend the day with them, then I got high. I got drunk. Now I can’t go. I always ruin everything.” “See how I sat on something I should have shared. No matter what, I mess things up.” Is the jury out, we ask, as to our own salvation: heights attained to only being an occasion for deeper temptations and seeming failures in that crucial hour that matters?

At times it feels like our war isn’t with passive things: lust, addiction, laziness, all these are surrogates for war with plain Goodness, with Fellowship and Family Life Together; with the bond of friendship and the promise of forgiveness. God races to the matter: “these things are not in themselves sin, but are sin if they are hurting your circle, your fellowship, your peace.” So we long better to pray for one another. We put fellowship before verb and doctrine, before word and creedal endeavor.

Indeed, in self-sympathizing ways, we see sin largely a by-product of near experiences of a spiritual stripe. There is the near experience of making a proper confession, which then makes us target for attack from that spirit “out there” called Devil. There is the experience of sensing from someone or some church body, that we are not forgiven in their minds; this makes us lose hope, and it has the odd effect of encouraging sin.

There is this fulcrum, then, and the invention of new ways to sin, inventions of question marks: am I completely unfit to serve? Am I failed in the hour that counted? Yet in hindsight, we are all those holy qualities we strive for: if not perfect in deeds, then perfected in the repentance such deeds entail. If not perfect in habits, then perfected in the knowledge of the One True habitual Spirit that leads. If not perfect in celibacy, then perfect in the fruit of a God who gives fuzzy feelings of a spiritual variety, the room warmed, the sadness mourned, the joy celebrated, the good vibes Present, Cogent, Active, and Heartwarming.

Yes, by now we should have graduated, but have need for first principles (Heb 5:12); we long to banter around that fireside fellowship called pleasantry, called absolute absolution, freedom from any thoughts that torment and hound us into frightened corners. So our once upon a time friend, the Spirit of God, knows that the issue at stake is, are we one with the Most High? And in this oneness, is pleasantness of foray, of experience and service, our guilt exploited to the end of reminding us of mercy, our self-frustration used in the service of reminding us we are both more willing (starkly facing sin and throwing in the towel) to forget the love affair with ourselves and with this life, and therefore more capable of living existentially day by day here on earth; when humbled, we become Holy and patient.

We are oblong, no perfect remediated soul. We are mess and urgency. We urgently dwell near to an inner thought life turned outward by the calm hand and friend of Jesus. We see a self we wish we could just put away in a box, but out of our rebellious streak we better have that “Come to Jesus” moment, that waking fright that leads to Holy Thoughts.

We are more wholesome and healthy when we can dwell Forgiven, all things connecting together, the ennui and angst being a by-product of not having properly celebrated that penitence that got us here in the first place. So we have the warm hour and the sought-after peace. “This time I shall simply rest in the Lord’s care.”

Wake up, dear sinner, and know that He is with us in the dredges, in the boredom, in the zany impulses this way and that, in whatsoever sleepwalk seems to come over us, that takes us from perhaps false reassurance (“I am so holy…”) to renewed repentance (“Wow, I thought I had more noble thoughts. I thought I had better motives…”). He shows sinners whatever it takes to complete the cipher: God is for us; we are healed upon being humbled. Our humility is an attack from the Spirit and an intervention. It opens gates that we can speak into: “I trust all things into the care of my God and Father in Heaven.” “I never conceded for an instant to that accusatory spirit, that tries to take from me sanity, by pointing to the insanity of sin.”

Insane: to have intrusive thoughts precisely in those ways we had announced that we were clean. To have the very opposite of what salutary and coherent, righteous, morally fabric-like inner resolve. So our eyes wander (“I thought I hadn’t a serious problem with that; oh well, each day brings something new…”); our doubts sin against those who have built us up (“I can’t go on. So much for all the investment folks have made in me, in the love, in the trust…”); our fantasies and accusations against others (“That person hasn’t a good bone in them. It’s about time they got their comeuppance…”); our mechanical thought (“He’ll never trust me again, after what I did. Therefore, no sense in communicating my apologies, my efforts to make things right…”).