2024-02-25 A Meditation on Illusion and Reality

“15 Because I was sure of this, I wanted to come to you first, so that you might have a second experience of grace. 16 I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and to come back to you from Macedonia and have you send me on my way to Judea. 17 Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say “Yes, yes” and “No, no” at the same time? 18 As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been Yes and No. 19 For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes. 20 For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. 21 And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, 22 and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.” (2 Cor 1:15-22 ESV)

Assessment, review, revision: the cycle of personal decision-making has at times the encounter with immediate change. Such is the conversion story told abroad, the apostle Paul’s change of heart or our own more simple reassessments. Reassessments of all things held holy. Reassessments of strange ways we are bullheaded, the immediacy a startled or energized look heavenward. Immediate concessions in some dispute, not out of failure or weakness but because our gameplan, our scope, our possessions, take on a divine new angle. Suddenly the principle of the matter changes. Suddenly we are those immediately contrite, immediately brought to the altar, immediately grateful.

Grateful, indeed, for the ways grace has met us precisely when we were trying to coach ourselves to a certain Calm amidst hectic obligations and timelines that aren’t generous. We were terrified or anxiety-ridden. We were on the hamster wheel and yet some spark or window of Divinity beckoned us, beckoned us to remember and to dwell Peace and Calm; reminded us that these things too shall pass. So it is no rebellious decision but rather a heartening New Tack, New Angle, New Disposition, we have turned to, all sober thoughts of career and intentions more broadly, humbled and reminded: it is an urgent change that careens bravely into our waking life. It is a wild angle that approaches us in our depths of despair. It is a Change and a Call, a Cause and a Motive, divine, held high, boasted around and talked of.

So too the things too beautiful for words that the spirit embeds into our waking and sleeping hours, the Projects, the Shared Life Together, the harrowing hour long gone and a new wakeful Togetherness writ large. In the dream or in the waking time of thanksgiving. In the what-if’s and the strange alliances or hopeful familiarities of a New Crowd, a Familiar Crowd, a crowd likewise amped up, on fire for the Good News, dwelling we of all people near to Christ’s Cross, and thus doing in all manner of Joy and Peace in believing.

Grace may just be some hard-won pattern of life as it is in situ, as it is observed, as it is in practical field experience found. It may be anything to confronts or dispels the fears or the hard-pressed duties; as we cope now and today with the Call to be dutiful yet to dwell peace and bliss, above the fray. So the simultaneous Call somehow to confront what we cannot ease of our own volition, yet also to embrace the Call and the Obligation as healthsome and obtaining of Peaceful or Intentional disposition to be about the Master’s business. We fight, we find the New Normal. We try and do our best, while also granting to the weary soul that maybe ten minutes of break time is more important than the wild gambit and race to comprehend. Some things we resolve in a blissful absence, in a dream or a waking wonderfulness. A waking vision or new tack, some psychologist’s explanation perhaps of good dreams or healthsome self-image, these are things gifted to us by Grace and not by our own earnings or endeavoring. We are confident to look more deeply into a problem, into life’s Call to be about explaining and understanding what things at the same time we cannot ever explain away or cope with on our own, but rather do alight upon a simultaneity Divine.