2024-12-11 A Meditation on Daring the Next Step

“9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 10 He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. 11 You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.” (2 Cor 1:9-11 ESV)

“35 The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus; 2 it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. 3 Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. 4 Say to those who have an anxious heart, “Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.” 5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; 6 then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; 7 the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down, the grass shall become reeds and rushes.” (Is 35:1-7 ESV)

The ultimate step, the next one, we learn by life experience, it is a Necessary step but a Reluctant step. There is no celebration as to engaging, identifying, an enemy “out there”. We scrape through it, through the step, hurt a bit, not logically showing pure prowess but showing some hurt and reluctance: no matter, we shall be the Bold and the Now to act and enact, to have tended to the inner soul already, and to have found this inner soul Prolific, Broad-minded, with Chutzpah and Game aplenty.

The gambit is that we didn’t want to, after all, to act here and now. We were fighting inner reluctance masked as outward weariness. We were decisive, however, to play the mentalist game, like those Pure Israelites who marched spookily around the city seven times, after which time its walls fell. We play the mentalist Game and learn to shoulder the burden, even when it isn’t rightly “ours” to shoulder: when it is a game leg in a peer or a restless night in a watching colleague. When it is a muck gotten up to by a comrade. When it is an Enemy, who didn’t play fair, ignored the rules of decency and good manners that we scoff at the absence of, broadly proud of our own Pedigree and Lineage. In that regard, at least, that poor we may be in some measures, but Rich in patient decency to one another.

Illogical decency. Qualifications that behoove some elder statesmen of the family to assert their preferences and taste, almost to the point of being ridiculed as fools. Fools for Christ. Fools for the absence of Ambition. Fools for not seeming properly to Fight the good Fight.

The soul, secretly furtive, hiding out with some few reluctances but much more their immediate dissolution when once they are brought to light. We are not the city walls that were spooked by the march. We are of stronger fortress walls than that. We cease to worry around the rambunctious and outward nature of our inner tended-to soul. Because it takes a gladsome tiding and city-street shout, to assert our Love for the brethren and the sistren. It takes a rambunctious tear that becomes Translated to a simpler, quieter Good Deed done to the poor. All of us are facing an idiosyncrasy and illogic, that life is far more mysterious and dog-eat-dog than we can quite realize or face up to. But face it we do, because we are tended-to, our souls innermost centers are Ministered to, so that we can turn outward the gladsome disposition, and be helpers to the Cause. Because our ability to be Helpmeet is our ability to cease to adjudicate and measure, to cease to climb and teeter at the undeserved loftiness, to begin to take it on Faith: these our parents and teachers, were good souls, souls who knew something or other about proper behavior and mission.

On mission, then, we take the compulsory but regrettable steps that make us wince, that would hurt us all the more were we not Coached and Graduated from a school of hard knocks. We are less frightful than some in our midst, and for all the motherly or fatherly ability to mope or complain, for the sake of so many who are weaker and less endowed than us, we put on a Game Face. We once upon a time knew we could mope ad nauseam, but Today Already we are the credentialed and authorized. We would gladly cry in mother’s arms, if such a Jesus came our way, but until our gifts of discernment thus do recognize, we shall Already and Immediately be exemplars and model citizens.

Because our modality is Courage. Our modality is nothing “complete” or “finished”, but the desire strangely to go the distance however Painful. However it winces up our inner honesty, likewise it sheens and promenades our outward Readiness. Plentifully Ready, not with all the answers, only that God is provider of Strength and Resolve, and it is found precisely when we cease to fuss around our own strength. Precisely then, we enter that Vision of the ancestor, of the parent, of the teacher, of the drill-sergeant, that In Faith some things are coming together of a Higher Mystery and ultimate Meaning.