2024-12-15 A Meditation on Outer Limits

“12 For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.” (Rom 2:12-16 ESV)

The outer limits of our self-image merge with Experience and Familiarity of a broader baptism. We are baptized into some existential give-and-take, wherein we in fact merge with the spheres of others, of our forgotten state of concern, of our issues, of all those things that are beyond our realm of power.

We see things that are utterly unfair. We see things that differentiate us from our peers. We wonder if it is true that our own conscience will be the final arbiter, as it accuses us or excuses us, or if this is somehow Unfair. See how some glide along, their prowess due to an early experience that we know only by hearsay or our own very temporary lodgings for a night. We are different from some such as these. We are couched in some Existential scenario a bit more welcome than what we intuit to be that of our peer. Hard to say, when things like poverty and compromises would suggest we learn more self-hate and remodeling spirit and eagerness for Any type of scraps from the master’s table.

But our Master lives on High. It is a miserable day for some, to learn that their sense of Accomplishment or Authority in life is somehow a bit compromised or leaky or weaker than that of an entirely other “set”. Yet how could this not be the case? You want to declare martial law and war around some dreamt-up confrontation, not going full sensory on just how reclusive and secretive and conniving are ninety percent of what we encounter spiritually speaking. There is not just one fiat civil strife and war, but myriad ones.

And then there is our deep refusal even to entertain those blasted spirits that have made a compromise with the devil. We are top-to-bottom curiosities to some, having a place in a give-and-take latitude of differing social scenes: from the daily bumping shoulders with roommates (are we liked? Are we contributing?) to the careful spiritual assessments of a church (is our modesty known to all?), to any number of career postures (where, after all, is the proof?).

Where we may have lost ground, we also have gained ground. Therefore our merciful ignorance (Catholics teach that innocence is a holy virtue, if I’m not mistaken) is an ignorance in service to a purposeful and pugnacious boast, in God, in Christ, in understanding no man nor woman can marshal the entire gambit of thought as though superior to it all: we rely on our sphere, on those inner conscientiousness things that will be our judge, we see it as of course completely unfair that some are hot and bothered by things that others dreamily or blissfully, mercifully, overlook. The poor person on the street corner who, having known wealth, is not punishing their own system of pride and regret with losses, of financial nature, of social nature, of any number of ways we get down on ourselves.