2024-07-30 A Meditation on Creaturely Wanderings

“19 Have you been thinking all along that we have been defending ourselves to you? It is in the sight of God that we have been speaking in Christ, and all for your upbuilding, beloved. 20 For I fear that perhaps when I come I may find you not as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish—that perhaps there may be quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder. 21 I fear that when I come again my God may humble me before you, and I may have to mourn over many of those who sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, sexual immorality, and sensuality that they have practiced.” (2 Cor 12:19-21 ESV)

Creatures relegated to hungering and thirsting, to gnawing at the bone or yawningly sleeping off a meal, we are also Creatures who hunger and thirst for Spirit. We are willing, though our peer be hopelessly hand-to-mouth, hopelessly faux-comforted in life, on an untenable—if we’re honest—perch, or to some folks raising the question: is any of it deserved?

Therefore the theologian of the Cross—to use a term of Gerharde Forde—takes no personal ownership for the fawning glowing orb of Sanctification: we are Sanctified as it were, by coincidence, not by deservedness, not by obedience, not by observance, but as a Final Result of a Death and a Dying, the End of our self-mastered ownership and the beginning of “getting used to” beloved status.

Then to the trauma ward and to the refusal—so licensed, so true-to-history—to make ourselves vulnerable, to stand down the armaments, to be that one kid-like soul who does dare believe, good works are seen by a Benevolent Father, and are Rewarded. Yet so many fail the admissions test: they dare not thus Believe, they Doubt such a woman’s or man’s existence, they deny the Eye in the Sky who Knows. For, all of us are hand-to-mouth, all of us are gorging at times and gloomily fasting at other frustrated times, all of us need some of that Theology of the Cross: saying, as it does, that Man is worry-less and hopeful, enchanted and Dutiful, because of a Strange Outlay that pushed none of the right buttons, but that brought Healing.

The outlay of the Soldier. The outlay of the going-for-broke “I’m gonna bless this person” so undeserved. The outlay of the secret silent Dying on the invisible sidelines though Today front and center: that people not only Died as our Savior Died, but intended no Guilt nor Observance, Obligation nor Debt, to we the Recipients. Strange that we walk as in those museums of a horrific late state of events, on the bones and skulls and ruined social structures—nay, ruined neotenous life itself. Somehow playing Catch-Up we are surprised that Logic cannot explain how this emptied family or that terminated ancestral line, is indeed facing a Resurrection most Benign, most Audacious, most Courageous. In us. In the murmurings of the Saints. In the brushing-up-against highways and byways of life: no, it was not Deserved, this Man’s Cross; but if only we are to “Get used to it”, it spells a distancing of the orb from our own person’s and onto that Person of Another, of Jesus.