2022-11-19 A Meditation on Breadth of Experience

“When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” (Mt 10:19–20 ESV)

Can it take a moment or two? Are the gospel utensils something to be discovered and recovered in us each day? We bear these tools with a willingness, but also a wrestling, lived, and tangible experience; our experience is of life spelt large, of true holding patterns and true license to drive forward. True recovery and discovery of some plateau, once difficult to put words to, but today joy and peace in believing.

We marvel. We pinch ourselves. We for once are taken through such valleys where we doubt or wonder if we have anything to say. And then, like clockwork, comes an Absence that spirit fills with Substance; a Void that words race in to heal; a Cataclysm wherein peace and calm does prevail. So we hear the lost former self; we hear the average day’s caution in entering upon the question: have you anything to share? We take up the Cross and the Message not out of selfish pride, but because we can; because we have this bedrock in ourselves founded upon a Holy Need, and a Holy Recovery, and a Holy Presentation.

So alternating realities do spell for us a fight not to feel embarrassed for our testimony; not to feel sheepish about our claim; to do all things in good order and to pleading purpose: we plead for mercy, when we do enter in upon holy affairs. And we know that self-regulation that does go silent when the mind is a-jumble with mechanisms uninspired, the day’s concerns, what shall I eat, what wear, what make pleasant conversation about.

Instead, this day is one Passed Over. This day is one surrendered. This day is one joy and peace in that divine hour spent in communion; would that all hours of the day were like those first hours. And they are: we find redemptive and overflowing amounts of Joy just in prayer and in contemplation. We find peace in believing. We find healthsome Spirit ameliorating, mating, entering upon, being there for us. And this in the utmost poverty of anything worldly, money, passions of the flesh, thoughts shamelessly of revenge or self-aggrandizement. We long to be that soul weaned and held, near to a lowly posture, therein better appreciating our Lord’s Divine posture, that we do enter in upon and participate in.