2024-10-20 A Meditation on Self Nurture

“14 As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. 2 One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. 3 Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. 4 Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand. 5 One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7 For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. 8 For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. 10 Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; 11 for it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” 12 So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.” (Rom 14:1-12 ESV)

Loving on ourselves, we go broad and deep in that puzzlement called Grace, rather, no puzzlement—for that would make it Law, would make it heavy, would make it reluctant—but rather literally “go for it”. Eat the sweet. Have the conversation. Blossom with indulgence of the angsty or withered flesh. And then that vortex surrounding Grace: literally also keep trim, keep the flesh subdued, live into that body image and that soul constrained or winsome or cautious or healthily hungry still. See us rejecting that suffocating Need to Assign and to Relegate and to Delineate and to Forbid. For either we are walking in Grace or in Law. And today: how today do we sing that hymn called, going for it. Breaking the admittedly pittance of a rule. Indulging the angst-ridden stomach of Man, of Woman. Rather, dive in and narrowly evade: I walk in tandem with my legalistic side. I wrestle with what-ifs as diametrically counterpoint to a Deep Spiritual blessing called Home. Called Found. Called Ain’t So Bad.

That is, spiritual warfare comes and goes, and we even are tempted to doubt our Father in Heaven at times. We are forgetful of what Rubrics and Testaments evoked Christian Belief not just in our meager and middling selves, but in a lord On High. Who became Flesh, for us to live alongside. In that winsome Adoption of Grace as opposed to Law. In that Faith writ out, that we invest in our children, as He has invested in His. And then the game: what vortex makes for some urge indulged, to shout out, to hate verbally or let loose, to Encounter a need to get it out of our system, and all this in the full Awareness it shall be A-Okay. See us fools for Christ. See us with the teaching of the sage, saying “That’s nice, dear”, to all manner of wild-eyed hair-raising conversation topics. See us therefore minister Grace from a slimmed-down (somehow? Magic?) figure and shadow. We trod the line. We made Religion out of the longing: for more Grace, for a zero-debt Fellowship, wherein we are all There and Accounted For.

That fellowship finds a higher laughter around our despicable deeds. It finds a message so urgent: that in the smaller things we most advance Gospel (Grace), precisely so that we can be under the masseuse of Grace in bigger things. Who gently eases our burden, our shoulders lifted and eased unto unburdening, the shouting match a strange distant memory, the cringing statements a strange Testament to confusion birthing adolescence birthing adulthood birthing Respectability and Honorarium unto our brethren and our sistren. Whom we love.

To have a heavenly Father is to have a strange Cause, a Casus Belli, an Evidentiary Encounter that remarks strongly and strangely for the mild lighting around a hunger simply adopted and trained and indulged a bit, but us so wealthy in the Spirit—by our testimony, by our confession—that we can live gorgeously trim and which healthy figure means something about our healthy Mind, or helps us keep our Mind trained up to be fasted and toeing the line. Indulging the appetites but doing so somehow with a second co-pilot who veers just clear of really too much. One not two bites of the sweet. One not three sips of the carbs. One not numerous focal points of each other: your blessing this fine morning being my reason for Believing: that the shouting matches are yesteryear and the day greets us with strange Ability to live fasted yet unhungry, mania around what we can do minus the caffeine, at least speaking for this peculiar fine morning. A blockade gives way to a plethora of ideas. A soul realizes that to let go of some obsessive focus group and planning and hopes and dreams, is perhaps the place where loss and suffering and absence does Autograph and Solidify our Christian Crusade. Does make us legitimate suffering servants, as far as holding onto nothing material nor evidentiary as the world calls evidence. Here, it begins. Here, each and every beautiful soul we’ve ever met, does minister to us: what if we met up again now? What would be the prognosis, would we have forgotten that we love each other? And in all this we ride a blissful wave of the poor-in-spirit who find Christian Grace in Christ and each other.

We punish and discipline our bodies because of a mass, pan, deep momentum, not simply arriving at the goal but swinging through the pitch. Swinging through the ball. We obsess literally around some sense of fastedness—perhaps literally fasting, perhaps abstaining from social events and their wandering sense of reverence, perhaps disciplining our body in other ways—because we there discover what Christ ministered out of, His own absolutely broken back having gone into the wilderness and only there to have found temptations increased not mitigated. We swing through the pitch. We bulk our muscles and trim our frames because of faith that God uses any and all Training in order to teach as in teaching by analogy. All people are equal before the Lord, equal in sin. None is more valuable or important to the community than another. None should just “go away” because they are self-centered and sinful: all of us emerge from that harrowing night of the soul Ready and Willing to adopt the message of Grace: which Grace simply refuses ever to amp up on the Law if it would be at the expense of the Gospel. In all things we adopt that Mystery, that Vortex, that makes discipline possible precisely in our Indulgent Hearts. Loving Hearts. Engaging Hearts.