2024-06-29 A Meditation on Experience and Fellowship

“1 Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. 2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” 3 As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight. 4 The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply; their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names on my lips. 5 The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. 6 The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. 7 I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. 8 I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. 9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. 10 For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption. 11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” (Ps 16:1-11 ESV)

Experience inducts; lack of experience, or brands of fasting, of choosiness about purchases or avoiding the yuppy supermarket (so impossible in today’s cities), also inducts; the warrior has found pals around induction into basic Life Experience, which experience is hated or resented or let’s just say unfamiliar. Who can say what it means to emerge on the other side of a grueling trial? Who can say what calm descends when we’ve faced infidelities or plain presumption, thinking we own others or plain sins of friendship? Who can say what is the Prayer Warrior who acknowledges—in prayer, before the Holiest, in the presence of the Spirit—acquiesces to a simpler Posture: I… I am simply hoping in my meek little set of tools and insights, to mine something Wonderful. I have no resentment of someone else’s largesse. I have no resentment of the ones having an easier time of things. I simply Believe: me, first to the altar; them, first to the gifts of the altar.

And we pray lean on me, that is, let us lean Mightily on that Holiest, who harbors no ill-will towards us though we’ve made mockery of the Office at times. The Office of Belonging, of Suited Up, Vested, Inducted… patience or rather instinct causes us to seek a more humble Perch. Yet ours is the Day, and ours also the Night, to live and grow into robes of high disposition, of grandeur, of levels of expectations actually eventually, with Divine Patience, met.

Therefore we allow for Life to fall into allotments and spaces around our Familiar and our Unfamiliar, our Fast and our Exposure. A manse for each Encounter. The recent convert Aware: I am a bit broken, the standard divides offended against and broken, things… I need to be alert in prayer around ways I might need a bit more from the Holy Spirit than those brethren, sistren, who have the Book (Rom 11:24). Rather, it takes time: time to Appreciate what the standard expectations and scoffing disdain (to speak of sin, present everywhere) meets us for reasons nearly principled or political: it is easy to boast or mock others when our glide, our barriers breached for Good Purpose, give us knowledge and experience that helps us glide through trying scenarios. We have the “all the way” mentality of knowing things about the opposite gender, or our objects of amor, not because of any sinful deed done in the flesh, but because that deed wasn’t rearing its ugly possibility head and denouncing, refusing to allow the Friendship.

Both are true: we know what it is to have our Estate only found in that long night wandering the city streets with the fellows. With the gals, too, our peculiar soldiering fellowship. And in all this the Faith is that plain Instinct, cultivated in those ways we Differ, those shops we might laugh at a bit rather than allowing Capitalism’s wares to inform us blindly. Some have more insight, we call them Prophets. Some are Preserved, because they never went down that route, or rather, they have a loving Teacher or Parent who made them content in and within their own natural courses, their meek toolkit, their simple Observational routine with Life and its Bouquet.