2024-11-05 A Meditation on Divine Focus

“16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (Acts 17:16-21 ESV)

Holding aloft the Ark of the Covenant, to our New Testament sensibilities, is to hold aloft the Triune Mystery called Gospel faith. It is a mystery that shall turn dead-ends into flourishing gardens. It is a mystery that shall not grow weary and, though the Son of Man may have nowhere to lay His head—we live into a zany Insistence on this Mystery such that none shall discourage nor distract. We are “there”, and once “there”, the very fabric of the universe is orchestrated into a sublime symphony.

For, the present distress, tomorrow’s War, is today’s beleaguered recollection: that prompt that says, “What was it I had to remember?”; “What endings had I need of mourning or—slash—repenting of, that Resurrection Life, the Son’s head lifted up and no longer sleepy, would flourish?”; “How soon came the Trials, as though my constitution personal was that easily deceived!”.

For indeed the Gospel is no elite academic long process of betterment, but rather, the tests they are a mainstream and a downmarket: our trials, they seem “obvious”, so much so we may think it is some kind of jest. But also our trials are personally tailored, and they begin not with the simpler lusts that can be repented of, but with the suggestion most criminal that we Forget the Good News. Indeed, we walk as though into a Tomorrow Haze, wherein by some Divine Mystery things like lust, or like concupiscence, or like haughty eyes, like depressed talents of the human’s frame, are suddenly no longer a stumbling block: nothing such as these, whether indulged or not, can take us away from the Love that is Christ Jesus.

And that is Final: duelling in our mind is we ourselves and they an enemy, who resents and denies to us that satiety called sin-free living. And we, we nearly agree with them via the power of their suggestion, until we realize a limelight must divine in which we are Already Saved, and therefore Free to Be. To Be who we are, and letting no indulgence compete for the soul’s deeper Affinity unto Christ Jesus. Who is our participating neighbor, our alter-ego, our dance partner, our coach, and our Righteousness.

Tomorrow… never mind tomorrow, how about Today? Already the seeds of confusion are spent and disbursed. Already the forgetfulness is labelled as any deed we do habitually, blindly forgetting the outward, surface meaning. How could—emphasis on “Could”—we have been so absent-minded? How could we have slandered our own Good Works with ill output? How could we have denied our Better Angels yet again, and given reason for self-loathing and undiagnosed or unhealed regret?

Today, if it takes a Divine Mission, then so let it be: let no unconverted tripe distract from an Urgent gospel imperative, to Accept Mercy as though on rocket fuel and in full accelerating mode. It is exciting thus to have no secrets. It is exciting thus to ponder the propellant called Laughter. It is a refusal for a divvied-up sense of Consciousness: some deeds being deliberate and Holy, while others are regretted and distracting, a separate line of living, a separate sense of Awareness, a separate sense of Can Do that is lost. We wake up as though lovingly held, and only in time, when the time is right, do we face what errors past we did make.