2024-07-02 A Meditation on Conviction

“28 But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ 31 For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”” (Lk 23:28-31 ESV)

Measures adopted in peaceful times become die-hard convictions in the absence of peace. The notion of “Call”, Christian or religious Call, undergoes a comedy of extremes: for some, any talk of pastoral work is a heresy, is presumption, is vain ambition. Then, and mostly because we believe in adaptation rather than in a simple “No”, we see the extreme from the other end: how eager we are, how duty-remiss, how forgetful we are, that Christian vocation is easy to brush aside.

And to the camaraderie: that one with a Vocation also makes everyone around them feel a sense of vocation and meaning. Likewise those not so adaptable, who have presenting sins (I can think of no other reason not to serve), these seem to remind us all is vain striving, that we ourselves too had better otherwise find ways to entertain ourselves, find other careers, find less lofty thought.

I am here today to announce that we adapt rather than exclude. No one is harmed with a little thought in the direction of things Dutiful and Servant-Minded as opposed to the trappings of capitalist or other society. Those things, the best of them is what we may most shirk from, those things Reward in an afterwards-sense, in the hereafter and what’s-to-come.

So to the measures we adopt, and to that hazardous life lived near to danger yet Precise and Punctilious to be obsessive a bit around our Cause. Our behavior Edgy and Honorific of the Most High. Our thoughts revolving around Man’s absolute new innocence of wrongdoing, in light of Christ sacrificing Himself for all those decisions we can now announce were made with no concept of the punishment, no concept of the heightened alerts raised, no concept of the warmongering, of a slight, of a joust, of a first blow struck. Somehow we both knew, and were carried along by a forgetfulness in that hour where it actually mattered. We can brush aside, we blush apologetic words: no, you are not in fault any longer; we do not know our own deeds. And that goes for good deeds as well as ill.

So the moral Cause we take as the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, aware of so many who may have a longer record of service and, but, then is our concern: all well and good, provided there is no impossible futility or sense we ourselves need to go first a little farther. No sense we ourselves are still the odd one out. No sense… because that is precisely the gospel, that yesterday’s sins are today’s Boasts of Greatness, His Greatness, our awareness that all our deeds have the innocence now of those of a novice, whom we blush to critique, whom we demure to fault, whom we bless to welcome.