2024-02-17 A Meditation on Obstacles

“22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.” (Gal 5:22-26 ESV)

All life a quiet endeavor to address some hindrance or onus too large quite to grasp, bleary-eyed and yet also electricity in the air, we brush up against Finality while also brushing up against Possibility. Final, is strange mass hindering, strange mass “out there” and for real, while we reflect on impossible scenarios, relationships soured by the oppression of time, no time to pow-wow and agree on a back-to-back outward convivial, dual face unto the world. No time to save those we would save, no time to make better climes and scenarios come to pass.

We long for, we naturally, fruitlessly, submit to so much Reminder that your kind just don’t belong ‘round here; the command that we not get comfy, not Live Into or get up here; all these things bear a ghostly presence in our lives, the rule that you don’t forget and the rule that you will be reminded occasionally, as all life demands the blight not be undone. And the fears do unfurl in the passage of time, yet the life we live cannot be caged nor torn from our grasp: we are in possession of an equanimity and Calm that, if it is offensive to some, is offensive because it is God-sent and Gifted by Christ, who told of persecutions that would come. So it is without apology that the Christian takes on a fighting posture and a beleaguered post.

It is without apology that the Christian points heavenward and says to Him be the glory, and to me be the penitence. We repent yet we also do not dally around such holy notions; the response of a warmed-up crowd being that forgiveness is ours to own, yet that same crowd was the one days later shouting “Crucify!”. We rise up and we progress, because it is no loserdom nor banal existence but rather a bountiful dynamic that calls for Courage and calls for Fighting Spirit, and calls for us not to be people-pleasers even if we would so love just to submit and get it over with.

We try to submit but are mocked. We are trying to understand if it may be that our burden is greater than that of those around us, yet we do not get proud or self-righteous; any burden shared by one is a burden on the Body, who thinks all in it for themselves, each to their own post, yet that is wearied by the idiocy and blight of a peer. Who tries to deny their own salvation history, their own Cross, their own coping with the blight and with the dastardly, hated, penury.

All the Body suffers when one suffers. All the Body is called to a life ecstatic and together. All the Body is reminded of Christ and of His sufferings, so that the dastardly poverty so hated and avoided in a peer, now becomes our Cause and our Focus. We focus and we see the automatic response, to a mass and a hindrance widespread, daring us, threatening us against any successful thought, hoping we will just curl up and die. It is an obstacle no longer to fear, only with wisdom not to startle too much perhaps, yet with hope to know God has made avenues broad and amenable for us to walk in, where the enemy has not yet caught up; where the enemy has not the life experience nor wisdom to covet or to hate or to destroy. Where the enemy sees us curmudgeonly and hated, but no worry, for our day’s labor is getting done and our Calling is working itself out in fear and trembling.

Therefore peace, with that simple call to address the childhood sins. With that simple Call to be about the Master’s business of sobering up the listeners, if there be any listeners; the simple Call to find our path in these parts, and to live into something that can be explained and conversed around, our Calling, our Duty, and our Motivation.