2024-07-07 A Meditation on Retrospectives

“8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Php 4:8-9 ESV)

To invite retrospectives falls under the category of daring faith to make the deal: we are shattered; we are formed around ill crutches and atheistic dreams; we think all this our duty to invite upon ourselves, though standing in comparison to more mellow vibes. Mesmerizing Duty calls us to be both Alert and Reassured. It calls us to be wise, and also to be satisfied: strange, the retrospectives of what a crutch or an object of obsession created, carved, hurt in us. We are products of mad breakages, of wondrous Replacements of that healthy-minded Dream a parent or we ourselves allotted as our share. They dreamt for us, but we pray never in denial of the Actual Fact of the matter: broken, hurt, ill-formed, obsessed or pained, we actually in fact serve in Risen status, blessed Goodness and going large on the imaginative walk on water.

Going Big then is a resolution to heed the reminders of a more compromised estate, and also to do so such that we reach End Estate, and Beginning Newness. We are frightened, fraught, couching our existence in impossible—or already lovingly met—fears and hangups. We want it all, in some dream world. We think we are fools, to let slip between our fingers those Races and Competitions others edge us out of. We are saddened as though addictions were still our fare. Remembering the reliance, the abrupt action-hit-remission-action-hit. And those are not of any substance in the traditional sense perhaps, but the ways we both mesmerize each other with plain Beauty, and we offend each other by our total depraved or compromised ways.

Therefore the vision is no longer to offend that Atheist’s complaint: that we are in cozy imaginary world. That we are too prayed up, worshipful unto forgetfulness, not understanding our own Lord or even our Creed. Yet the pugnacious chip on our shoulder is that we do indeed know our estate of mind. We do indeed draw out of its paradoxes or easy criticisms, a balder Betrothed Eagerness to stick up for the underdog claims, to stick up for the paradoxes, contradictions, questions. We even dole out to the right people, Chosen people, Inducted people, the job of going perhaps a bit farther in that prayer adventure or experience. For us. That they might reach the Truths of persecutions, yes, but of a soul yearning as well, yearning to Thrive in Christ’s Name, yearning to Resolve in Jesus’ plain-spoken sobriety, yearning to suffer the loss of all things even respectability, in the Good Plan of Holy Walk.

It is frightening to an enemy when no pride prevents bending over backwards to understand that alternate viewpoint of the “enemy”: some are too established or proud to walk down that road, and it plays out in a rather easy assessment of just who is a friend and who is not. But we do both, because we have seen our own decrepitude and seen how the critic complains about us; we take their words to heart; it is no easy thing to be both Alive and Introspective. But we are those crazy militants of the Word who shake it all out, and within the confines of moral propriety we nonetheless are half-crazed to see yes, futility, brokenness, pride, ego, addiction, strife, patterned ill behaviors; somehow our Focus is learnt and healthsome; we make no plans or legislate no rubrics, but are still habitually Good Folk, by some measure. And having seen those in our camp, we lose nothing to see them everywhere, and we all Servants of a Master who dared become like us and walk with us, to see just how and why we were on this or that ill bent, rather, newly reformed as a healthy-bent because it was loved.