2024-04-04 A Meditation on Low-Key Hope

“41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” (Lk 19:41-42 ESV)

In strange manner the low-key or subdued soul is learnt to be anything but: alive, with alacrity, fussing always at a level appropriate to what’s at stake. The debates, some too evil even to condescend to. The reasoning, some too sordid even to take part in; all these things are about a hunger sometimes not seen: what drives one person to do the things they do; to go to the extremes; to risk all, reputation and status, for a brief moment of an illusion spelt out or—who are we to judge—a principle dedicated unto.

Life therefore topples upon life, in blur of color, in brushstroke of representation. All the little parables learnt at work, learnt at play, learnt by the life-giving refusal to let cynical or plain bondages of sin, be the only story. We have a story better held in faith than scientifically proven. We know of a Resurrection that opens a sensitive, under-appreciated, vulnerability writ into the stars, a life-giving strange way all of us are trusting children, spared some horrible sweeping judgment; cause at times for a loving paternal, maternal overview to bless the Lord who writ such life into the Spirit of the place. Who invested, and saw awkward gesticulations, avid leaps, smooth operations, all things strange and invented as man encounters man, as person encounters person, as life encounters life.

Therefore to be near to the burden is near to the flame is near to the dynamo, wherein we burst forth innovative and adherent to the wellness of all present; we are not cagey nor calculating but rather insanely giving and granting the benefit of any and all doubt. It is the flipside of the whine, the complaint, the frustrated spirit met with the onslaught perceived: frustration makes it all seem so predictable, so frustrating, so low-key maddening. And it is a convert’s story which makes the Christian church not quite a police academy but rather starkly radical about its lack of steel-met arrest: we dare to forgive. We dare to make much of what fields of experience stand to be mined. We know ourselves shown mercy, so we show it to others. At expense. At cost of the reputation of “sane”. At self-humbling manners. At that trust-fall maybe never occurring in the comforts of our homestead, but immediate and making up for lost time by some divine arithmetic.