2024-12-20 A Meditation on Psy-Ops

“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.” (1 Peter 1:3-12 ESV)

The psy-ops just by the very fact they are named, may come down to this: have you expectation around victory? Each of us can work up a fright around that Expectation: in the end it shall all fall to pieces; my comeuppance is nigh; it all went down in service to a kind of schadenfreude, and me… meekly, resignedly, accepting that this was the paycheck, the culmination, the together role-playing around just who stands tall and who is afflicted.

For, what gives, except that you Missed an opportunity? That your star for a brief moment in time was on a broadly known Horizon, in the limelight, the neighborhood all abuzz each on their own prerogative but also on Ours, and we… did we flourish or did we come up Beat?

It is a daring claim to say that, whether our forebearers themselves knew something of defeat or by contrast were Ably riding that wave called Blessedness, what we are is plain for all to see: the distantly Hopeful, the New generation, the Inspired and those taking Inspiration from a sought-out Winner somewhere “out there”: we continue to Seek, because we know victory is ours: we see our forebearers like glue holding fast to Something, but this in itself may or may not be Us: we are variant and offshoot; our Inspiration is due to that gifted bequest made in love by a parent or guardian of the Right to explore and divine and be Unique and Different from them.

The psy-ops then are to us a glad occasion to celebrate, the festivities in the air precisely because in an entire boatload of middling possibilities we Discovered casus belli, a fighting Cause, a reason for the Season, an inspiration to get us out of bed each morning.

This we needed, because, determined and precious, we Sought and tried to find Something that would weather the barracks and the trenches, as a Light on the horizon, our Cause, our shared deep psy-ops reassurance our cause is righteous and precious and Gold. Our gold is able to bring to mind, as we lay in injury or exasperating waiting, to bring to mind thoughts Assuring and Beauteous, that reassure and upbuild the soldier in us. That our cause was for real. That both victory and defeat lay within our grasp. No, it is no foregone conclusion, and as we awaken this morn somehow coached or Confident, we also remember nothing is set in stone: on some level—we search for it—we are Fighting indeed, and already, and with both a victor’s mindset, and a loser’s fright. It could go sour. Some battles—we aren’t fighting for the Crown until we recognize this—some battles we shall lose, and this only means we are doing well by way of going all-in. Find the war zone, and own it today. Find the reason to despair, and own it now. Find the Expectation of a winner’s mindset, and dress in it today, as our uniform, as our salute, as our Ability to venture where hardly a story can be told, hardly a logical explanation made, because it is our own possession and internal logic, that gave us the fighting Edge and the denouement playing out. We knew. We were composed and Ready. We entered into the malaise knowingly, because we had mastered the doubts and revealed the Cause.

If we were sad, it is only because we are living in full Light as to all that breaks the heart, the folks dying or compromised, inept because of manifold hindrances, hemmed up and out of commission, friends with whom we are denied a time of celebration together, absence of a proper day job, and all this in order that we might be those souls hardly justifiable in pleasant community, because we are Soldiers, because we have an insight unpopular and pugnacious. Our insight… that all are in some level of denial perhaps, that all are doing the coping walk, trying—for we allow this to our interlocutors—trying on their own brand of Fight.