2023-09-22 A Meditation on Mind Body Dual
“9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Mt 5:9 ESV)
“13 You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first, 14 and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.” (Ga 4:13–14 ESV)
The vast realm of human experience teaches us of a new kind of submission: we are submitted to the emotions and situation and health of this mortal frame. When we are “shook” (afraid), we are taught simply to turn to prayer. Yet just as with a physical malady, prayer is a longshot, a moonshot, quaint even, or at least not truly expected to bear fruits.
So to the shook spirit or the calm spirit: the former becomes the latter via a deep set honesty about how we are feeling ‘bout things today. Upset stomach or sanguine health. We are deeper in prayer than we realize, obtaining the outcome of our faith, parables and insights, clever and mundane, realizations of a twilight hour to the faith walk, a dying day previewed by spiritual death knells. We die daily (1 Cor 15:31). We are unshook and unbothered, unafraid and untense, unanxious, because we have stolen from satan the right to walk unperturbed through valley and vale, through forest and stream, through city and countryside.
Yet the deeper sensations come. They seek to make of us bothered and unprayerful robots. They seek our panicky reaction or at least a withering testimony to the proud souls who through this, at least, seem a little more strong for the course. We are the sensitive types. We tune in and wretch out a patently involved and incorporated bread of life. Our bread is a food that at times we scarcely wish to stomach, sleepless or not hungry at the set times, trying to be ritual and rhythm yet succumbing to some mania or depression, and then the soldier in us fierce to emerge as spirit tried and victorious. The soldier in us turning over out of habit and practice, the sensation, the distracting or focused guiding light amidst the night shade, as all and everything we focus on. This is Grace: to know a selfhood grand and capacious, spacious and broad, free and entitled to peace and to joy. This is tomorrow’s hope today, that the nervous pacing or the wandering thoughts: these we do walk alongside, just in faith that the hour will lean into the hour that follows, and we shall emerge thoughtful, prayerful, in the faith, in Christ, peace and at the Ready.
We are Ready because we have reckoned with the war before the war. Our war is with simple human frailty, what Scripture calls “original sin”. So much a relic of our mental posture. So much a sign of our spiritual tightrope act: see just how far we are from shore and perch. See us walking, as it were, on water. See us healed and made over as zealots for some small seed called Belief, called Faith, called Sustenance and Bread.
See us as mild stormclouds lift and disperse, and we… we forgetful to return and give thanks: today, this morning, I knew not how I could go on… yet God spoke and God paced the walk and God determined the words… now I am stealth and staid and stoic. All of us, products of a life with many turns and twists, yet stealth to go subterranean in the heart, to latch on to deep rivets and fulcrums, to Believe against odds that the staid work shall bear fruit, the stoic heart shall uncover what’s “really going on”; we are fighting and are thereby mocked by Satan for our persistence and our diligence. And in such diligence, war dispels, it can almost seem, we then returning however to give thanks for the peace time of the mind and dual body, for the enemy’s hypnotized pacific calm. Not hypnotized, perhaps, rather subdued, mightily held in place by a loving Father’s discipline, who wishes for us to discover, uncover, reveal the enmity overturned, the sin redeemed, the cry heard and assuaged. Who lets us walk subterranean and stealth, that the readiness may be ours, who latch on in who knows what untold and hidden points of conversation and of debate.