2025-01-26 A Meditation on Now

“8 Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! 9 For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. 10 We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. 11 To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, 12 and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; 13 when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.” (1 Cor 4:8-13 ESV)

Satisfaction, satiety now, already, not as a goal: the fright factor, the abuse, the impossible binds that endeavor to create nervous breakdown, muttering, frustration: all these receive their comeuppance and their expulsion via a “satiety now” creed. We already had the winning pluck in our spirit. We already had the wise counsel in our deeds. We already had the probing humility in our inquiries.

We inquired, and we were measured and aloof, impartial and even-handed. We could face both glamour, glory, and pride, as against degradation, lumps, and disdain. We were immune, that is, to the general course of things. We were quite Sophisticated as over and against a milieu, a populace, a general spirit of things, so much lower and basic. We learned however in all things to be Sharp and Full-Throttle: never concede, never compromise, never lose the edge.

Because our Creed is of a living and breathing crystalline and tendril-remade, envisioned, Savior. We no longer worry: am I in the groove, wise of counsel, and calculated of mission? Our mission is unto Today’s Sacramental theology around the wedding game or celebration, that cohabitation with the Divine is a prelude to proclaim, Christ is carrying a mighty procession, and we are no longer obsessed, worried-over, traumatized, by the rat race or game of Life: our marriage is unto Christ the bridegroom; our deeds they are Eternal and already Calculated as unto Victory, because we began with the goal and the utmost, our Utmost for His highest.

Brainstem, principled, to “Go with the flow” is set against a minefield of past experience and our Present-Day “Church Militant” (to use a Reformation term) that, weakened, copes with all temptations as spiritual refusal zones: we are not “Go with the flow” but “Thrive amidst the torment”. We go long, go for broke, go deep, receive the forward Pass, of a life belligerent and feisty because of horror zones, those easily repeated mistakes, those lusts and temptations that, brought to awareness, create abrupt Manly, Womanly, Character. The “yes” in all things, is a “yes” to breakage, sin broken against the breakwater of Jesus.