2024-04-16 A Meditation on Breaking Free

“3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.” (Rom 12:3-8 ESV)

All souls bear in their frame the marks of compromise, and all souls this day break free, because our Role is mandate and principle, it is chiefly post-goodbye, the sadder days with mother or father give way to a sanctum emerged from, to a speech not halting nor self-critical, but effluent and bold: we are now Living, in the light of the Call, in the light of the Mandate, in principle and dive made, into the waters as stirred up, into the Morrow as existential invite, no more to be burdened or falsely pent up, in holding patterns, in diachronistic pause.

To speak is to worry less and accomplish more. It is to bite the bullet and to marvel: see what goods are ours, when past the day of pleasing all comers. We please because we are broken free, a father’s or mother’s pride in situ, in our own realm, post-partum, post-birth. It no longer behooves us to panic nor to fix everything; we fix instead ourselves, and do so with words at times offensive. Our words are our unique portrayal of spiritual mystery, the lucid or elusive spirit of companionship vis-a-vis the fraternal and the chaste, the dive into the depths of Spiritual Expose, Spiritual wantonness, that is, a Spirit effluent and effective.

The spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. We are called in total to break free, to be aware of the situations unholy or impossible: we are not the silver bullet for quite all problems, at least not yet. We are therefore turning away from the mensch, the entrenched, the cagey and greedy, to fields ripe for the harvest, we printing money, to use an analogy: our sanctum succeeded in asking, do you need yet just one more token of my love for you? Our sanctum practically broke our hearts with its sensitivity and affection; but, no more. We are broken free and welcome this day the facts of the matter, of a social Need, a communal Entreaty, a colloquial Request, be our salvation. Be the hands and feet of Christ. Know too, that the busyness of a middle class subway stop or Grand Central Station, is an invite to find a solemn or holy hovel or sanctum anew, an idyll brand new and for us. We can mint money there. We will have said Goodbye on some level, but by way of Invite to a new level. A new level with no time to delay: get thee to work. Get thee to following Christ who worked in furtive environs and did not travel about in a bullet-proof car. He leaned on the community. He tapped the common resources. He spoke sincere peace to the gathered folks. He was a product of their prayers.

The war, then, is front and center, savant visions meet the entrepreneurial practical laborer, who gets things done. The practical laborer who whips up into fever frenzy the buzz and the nomenclatures, each with their Name in Christ Jesus after His anointing touch. Each has their simple career planned, to ape the frights and ghost stories of the cynic or the one inimical to the faith; to ask us patiently to discern, why is this one lauded for their meek and quiet demeanor? Why pensive? Why is the reward not to the mover and the shaker, but to the solemn? All of us therefore benefit from the leader’s insistence that Peace shall Reign, yet too from the skin-of-our-teeth Fact: life demands a reboot, a risky prophetic call, a hated leadership, a joust anew.

We have our health therefore checked: are you free of any and all guilt? Are you free of any and all obligation? Is your duty unto Christ and to His Church? Let us momentarily keep silence for those fathers and mothers who have gone before us. And let us break free as entrepreneurs and as basic laborers in the vineyard. Let us put past us all ghost stories and frights, learning to bless and learning to maintain focus on those key points and takeaways, whilst like a mouse in a maze we are rewarded with pleasant words and punished with ill words, trained but not forgetting: sanity is ours, plain speech is ours, key takeaways are ours. We turn the fright into a blessing; see the genuine and sincere affection of God’s people. See the trust-no-one mindset give way to “well, with the exception of insert-name-here”. With several exceptions. With a healthy appreciation of that encouragement to unmoor and sail abroad. To accept the dovish invite: son, go far; dream big; worry not for me.

Radically different, we have become the very things our forefathers leaned away from. We have aped with sensual—in the spiritual, mellifluously sense—words of meditation, perhaps. Or with pragmatic attainments labeled “ambitious” (since when is ambition, in itself, a sin?). Yet to be a chip off the old block, to be still child of the Cause, is our prayer: no more let sin whisper ghost stories in your ear, but be a clean and goal-oriented family, be awake to the fields ripe for the harvest; replace irony with sincere post and posture, replace lust with sincere affection, replace self-humiliating or self-critical jest with Confidence in our own flesh and blood, in each other, in strange goodness that well outpaces nefarious sins.