2023-07-26 A Meditation on Awareness

“8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. 9 Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them. 10 We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.” (Heb 13:8–10 ESV)

Any retelling lags if done without cruciform awareness. To recreate, to reimagine, all the actual facts of the matter, the crowd we in youth stood before, a crowd we might in hindsight refer to Proverbs, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse the kisses of an enemy”, only in actual fact the heckling and hurt was no gift but a necessary fact of life. Likewise the so-called sins of wanderlust, imagined not quite out of proportion but forgetting the backdrop: “We did/did not have that kind of relationship”. An accuser fantasizes widely and outside of any loving or right context, plain obtuse and obsessed-over deeds.

Be that as it may, the soldier’s peculiar mandate is to face the illogical, the unkempt, the facts not neatly packaged. It is to meld our being around that heckling crowd, we being socialized down to the present hour precisely because we therein learnt to speak out of necessity, and speak words of peace, of placating, of pleading, of “Hey, back off, man!” assertion.

Likewise, the hard labors of career and works befitting of the gifts we have been Created to hold. Again, it wasn’t all sin or all sainthood, but a fight and an effort to satisfy, to accomplish, to shape mind and knowledge to new and better prophecies made by our head.

Likewise, God redeems and gives each their own peculiar body-wide-shared backdrop of experience. Yet we hasten to diminish it. Rather, we hasten to downgrade the obsession. Do not obsess over how this one or that one was raised, by what loving motherly or fatherly figures. Rather, accept today the invite to be one body. With various people used for various deeds of love.

The thought-warrior therefore knows the plaintive prayer over and against an enemy who is uptight and frustrated, angry and accusatory. It is a sad day when suddenly it dawns upon us in prayer—a moment of fright, we hope only imagined—that not all the community will weather the coming storms the same way. Some will somehow either not make it outright, or will be lost to us, on their own path, a path we only pray is cruciform too. So we discover an affection even for the ostensible “other” in our community: we shall long to stay in loving harmony, even if that harmony is a discussion back and forth.

God gave His Son, to hang on His Cross, because nothing in life is without a strange dance with both sin and righteousness. Nothing is off-limits to God’s loving care. The Spirit redeems all thoughts and memories via a strange and wondrous—not boring and complacent—get-up. God actually works through the street dweller or person of ill repute. God actually works through the jousting men, jousting women, the crowds that finger-point and accuse, heckle, and make our life—as a verdict for all eternity, it seems—a life on the margins. Thank you, to them. It was never easy. Yet today, in light of the Gospel, we look back with warm thoughts, only not deluded thoughts as to the fact we haven’t had an easy run of it. It was never a cake-walk. It was always meager in fellowship and austere in labors. The labors were as unto a stark mountain climb. And in all this, a soldier’s joy, for he or she has in fact seen life for what it is, and can gladly accept this and more from the day and from the morrow’s Call and Invite. Invite, that is, unto eternity. Unto gratefulness for all the ways… it was innocence, not knowing planning… it was peace, not disputed street corners and hovels… it was plain invite to make more of the day than what a more wealthy or proud neighbor would allow themselves. All in. All good. All redemption. All resurrection.