2024-06-11 A Meditation on Center of Being

“25 “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (Jn 14:25-27 ESV)

The moving target of “center of being”, of “personal agency”, of “decisive behaviors”; these things ebb and flow because what reckons factual and present in our lives is a sense of failed efforts and a sense of actual going along with things. We trust, and allow the spirit both to guide and to reassure when we seem off kilter, off track. And we have learned by much practical experience, that the Spirit is a trustworthy drill sergeant, and we His people do in that final issue begin to obtain an ability both to flourish, and to leave so much unattended too: if there were enough hours in the day, think of all we could take on responsibility for… and if each of us is dutiful and thus minded towards responsibility, it is anyone’s guess as to all the ways we could be doing better. “Look: you are indebted for this”; “See: you are accused of that”; “No fair: we all of us are putting in our dutiful labors, and you seem to be in some kind of third realm”.

That is, the Christian is mindful that life meets us when and how we just begin, have first inklings, of understanding. And it all went by in such a rush, right? It all was fun while it lasted, but see: we shall take up God’s Cross, saying that Yes all debts are ours now to attribute to proper ownership, His ownership, His demonstrated longings for more of this thing called Life, yet it being in His case cut quite short.

It all reckons in a daze, umpteen interactions sleep-deprived or manically at work; we look up to those who seem more “put together” than us, yet in fact we ourselves have a Good Shepherd who has affirmed us, not as self-enabling proud workers, but as those who “get it”, who are “loved”, who therefore respond in “surety”; getting things “right”. We have that motherly or fatherly assurance of some mild level where True Life occurs; and it is painfully real the duty unto this message at the expense of any message contrary to it; we wonder where is the call to labor, where the imposition of a duty or a family tradition; where the embarrassment at some things or the avoidance of others… all this meets a place of utter Patience, Jesus’ patience for us, and His proven third-realm operating, such that things come together in painfully-lived-into bouts of time, elongated and wide the timing and the sense finally glimpsed that Yes we are on mission, and Yes we are gladsome in our disposition, apologizing when we go astray, but no longer victim of that weird sense of having failed someone who cares for us, a feeling that for some is obtained during the “high” of an errant course decided upon, or for a long bout of absence, but most of all, for anything that can take us away from the Provision and the Cross’s Duty towards each and every Child of the Most High.