2024-09-10 A Meditation on Reoriented

“2 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” 7 So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.” (1 Pet 2:1-8 ESV)

Impulse reorientation means for crass outlets being quite nipped. The convert seems strained until it is seen that this new Spirit (the Holy Spirit) is guarding the lips just as much as the heart and the mind. The convert seems over-the-top careful, in tempting situations, because they have—even, it is said, after one intinction or experience—carved a route that then becomes “Familiar”. So the ghost stories of a murder at midnight… that being our innocence.

But no fear! Those whose sins precede them may on the flipside be more imbibers of that Wine and dabblers in that Bread, than the casual easy-going pewsitter. No mere taste, but the heavy “meat”—as it is called in the New Testament—of a careening “gestalt” turnt solvent and softened, mercifully treated and recognized as after all Humane.

But first to that storm-tossed sea and we… we needing the steady hand from Above, because no one of us is so sanctimonious that we would willingly surrender our pride and ego in the interest of a closer with Thee. Thus strange pokes in the ribs, laughing jibes, a realization: these are but the Lord’s Children ‘round here. These have not gone the distance I—and my cohort, my playmates, my bonded buddies—have gone. See for once when we acclimate and lose that nervous fright at the precipice of a sin accidentally subconsciously revealed, lose it and in its place Reality: these children… these saints… they mightily love the Evangelical (in the grand historical twentieth-century-plus sense) testimony.

Only this: it supercedes all other storylines, that a Man came to this colorful earth and died for us. It speaks of an immediate Cry called “soldier’s” unto we literally flipping up from the prayed over, passed over, unction-beholding, mercy, and becoming Like Him in and of our own volition, it being our own wish and living testament.

We as soldiers caretake the strange zoo and kaleidoscope of souls preening (some) parading (others) partaking (a precious few) of the Solemn Narrative, the Recollected Wounds, the Abrupt Interruption of sin and of those highways and byways where once blood coursed through unimpeded, both to good end and to a dying man’s savior-less evening-time or day’s end. We if drunk were leaning on the substance to excuse the gladsome high Expressions or Negotiations. We if unsober were leaning on the faux sacramental nature of our addiction to the end of nothing-to-lose… and to the end of what friends therein are made, this “crazy” soul blabbering and testifying to an affirming and life-giving curiosity around strange contradictory salutes unto good behaviors.

Only the fear, the tightened willpower, yet too the war waged when once those cornered and with backs against the wall, begin to use the other ninety percent of the brain; wake up; use their unique wounds without careless worry about pleasing that infant in row such-and-such. In some sense, all we ever suffered under, our forlorn wanderings of youth, our existential questions, our place on the social totem pole, all this we learn to accept back as still true post conversion. Only that now we have that newly made each day Salvation Story. We are now eager to be the frontlines, because it is a hard fact of life that Jesus Reigns on some “other” (spiritual) level. Jesus is Cruciform, denying and avoiding any spirituality that has no sense of the Cross built in (for many are the signs and wonders of that heavenly shooting match between God and the Devil; “spiritual” need not be strangely warming to the heart that is troubled and that finds itself submissive).