2023-04-25 A Meditation on Personal Call

“But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.” (1 Co 15:35–41 ESV)

All are at times feted, blessed, middle of the road, one of the pack; and all have their personal Call. To stand up and dare. To be that needed hero to society, to a society not yet mature as to what it needs, a society lost in pursuits that lull in sleepy fashion, a society hardly aware that the game is there to be won, that productive labors always bring offense, always invite persecutions, always grate against the fixed, established, inconsequential motoring along.

Each of us has our Call and each of us is therefore perched on a precipice: will we trust the Holy Spirit as we walk the tight line, or will we err on either the side of retrenched caution or braggadocio and irreverence? Reverence for God’s game is called for. Rules and dangers. Impossibilities and miraculous attending. Food out of nowhere. Encouragement out of lost upon lost hours. Reverence for a race no laughing matter, no curl-up-and-die consolation, no “all is floating gently along in a sea of grace” ill theology. No: the edge is real, and the call all the more so, each day to ask for mercy.

An electrified wavelength, the soldier’s walk. His or her sojourn in the brave day. Her or his fleeting lightspeed beginning of a divestment in comet’s tail of all former regrets and sins. This day we are post-death. This day we are post-regret. This day we cannot be hated upon any longer by the ill spirit. This day we tap, and enter upon, strange conjoined deeds, better for the companionship, and startling in what loopholes and failures are discovered in society at large.

So we delight to be God’s Child, each of us with all our neuroses, our feelings that everyone is mad at us or our insensitivity to a near peer’s special needs, needs for affection, for absolution (that is, one person greeting another as a complete and beloved Child of God), for correction: God is no monster, despite experiences of hard-pressed and abusive parents past, or relationships ill and past, or current absolute binds that deprive of a gentle place and a special realm for healing and growth.