“13 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. Fulfilling the Law Through Love 8 Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. 11 Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. 12 The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” (Romans 13:1-13 ESV)

The years that the swarming locusts ate and the stark refusal nonetheless to worship a foreign deity; yet amidst all things the Christian’s existential take is that we are of good cheer and gladsome, notwithstanding the crimped—as it would seem—years. Notwithstanding that it would be blasphemy to kneel before a foreign altar, still all life is seen through one perspective or another: gladsome tidings are extended, we reach out and congratulate, the Alternative Makeshift Personality. We are not beneath Congratulating, Demuring, Wondering and Wondrously saluting… he or she who in stellar fashion is—not preening, not of morbid curiosity or childish petulance—running the show, or so it would seem. Not a foreigner to the Crown, not an enemy to the cause, except insofar as each of us has within us both the seed of Good and the seed of Evil.

That is to say, today let us Marvel and Coarsely Applaud, the one who themselves has locusts swarming and experience of Aging Existentially, having been “Touched” in the sense not of emotionally recharged, but of being hurt or crimped. Let us realize that together each of us is existential and Coping, where have the years gone? Each of us can scarcely face that negated way of looking at things, even as Today we are of good cheer and substantially Hopeful notwithstanding the hate, the dastardly self-ruin, or friendly fire, or things too awful to look patiently upon. It is a paradox, isn’t it, that we are of merry heart this hour though the swarming locusts, to a prophet or a soothsayer, may have—again, by some accounts—have had their way with our younger years.

Lethal to the combined Experiences of ill-begotten gain, of evil-tainted outlay, of intruded-upon honest labor, sincerity ruined, diligence mocked, any notion of a fair exchange laughed upon: we never Deserved goodness, because truth-be-told it’s counterpart, the garden’s Apple, began within ourselves. Deceived by a serpent, no man but a slithering ground-dwelling thing. And therefore… all the more Informed Today, while it is still day, of the stages of contrition, of where our counterpart might Be, in the grand scheme of life. Rebellious, filled with hate? Or of a greater Patience than we ourselves, patience around waiting for someone to surrender, of waiting and fasting—so much so that the blood sugar levels anonymously prevent so much good labor or thought—simply praying and celebrating Communion together each week. This is our rocket ship to the stars, some might say: a city in a ship, time slowed down or sped up, weird and interstellar Dragons occupying the magnetic spaces in gargantuan scale.

Yet here we Humans are preserved in our little peaceful corner of the world, not tested beyond our ken, but Encouraged to learn, first the fruits or serpents of Physics, after the fruits or serpents in an earlier generation, of Religion, of Culture, of Democracy, of Technology—to go a step into Tomorrow. Therefore we mourn with those who mourn but is it okay… would it be alright, just today, if we didn’t hearken to that prophets denunciation of all past decades being consumed by locusts, and instead were of good cheer this Day, while it is still Day, that we are really blessed with our day job and restful nights, compared to the general stock of mankind, trapped in prisons or sweltering heat, hungry or laboring as children under a gun.

To be Ready is therefore to call it no crime to be Existential and Today regarding it all with Peace and Goodness. We need all the unction we can get. We need the soldier in us to be raring to go, boisterous and Healed, because the pinch of Evil is too much for words. It is balderdash and horrifying to the saner, mechanistically-thinking, peoples amongst us, who think after a day’s honest labor earning a day’s honest wages. “Just tell them to get a job” is met with, “this hour, perhaps it is only they amongst us all who actually are getting anything real done in fact”. The ones working, are working on a post-war society, in hopes that we take the pill with the blessing, the medicine with the apple sauce, of a Tomorrow War that is but a blip in the records of life in this corner of the universe. But a meaningful blip, lives—if we recall how much we honor the life and sacrificial death of that One, of Christ—each mystically Meaning so much, of infinite Worth and under-appreciated Contribution. Because our spirits—this is Junior Religion—live on in our comrades in arms. Our spirits speak a better word at times by patiently bleary-eyed facing the swarming locusts, as a testament to our Hunger for Life. Give us more bread, we scream, not less; give us more strife, not less, because it is all Out There to discover and to fight through. If once we alert our ears to what plaintive souls are saying about this Hour: that it is rife with opportunity to bite the bullet and fight on behalf of those who cannot fight.