2024-03-12 A Meditation on Sophisticated Faith

“I will visit you after passing through Macedonia, for I intend to pass through Macedonia, 6 and perhaps I will stay with you or even spend the winter, so that you may help me on my journey, wherever I go. 7 For I do not want to see you now just in passing. I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. 8 But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, 9 for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries.
10 When Timothy comes, see that you put him at ease among you, for he is doing the work of the Lord, as I am. 11 So let no one despise him. Help him on his way in peace, that he may return to me, for I am expecting him with the brothers.” (1 Corinthians 16:5–11 ESV)

Very sophisticated theories abound as to the Christian’s perhaps perennial frustration or vision: practical deeds, simple third-eye observations, social commentary, churchmanship, simply getting things done around here. In the moment it all seems wondrously open-ended: we envision; we go strongly into the night; we adjudicate and dream; we have a few words to share with these our beloved comrades in the faith.

The sophistication, therefore, is as to some efficacy, some pragmatic outlay, that accompanies any honest self-appraisal: any honest realization at the simple rewards and avoidances. The sophistication is that our comfort zone is no more likely, no more susceptible, to Grace than is that of the much less accomplished, the sinner, the fleeting presence in our faith communities: all of us are equally under the hated sin legacy going back to Adam and Eve; all of us can obsess and do window-treatment, surface embellishment, dressings and stop-gap measures, to “address” manifest sins, to have a bit of a fast or a come-to-Jesus poverty of spirit. Yet too we are called to go that way boldly, certain that in very sophisticated terms of the psychologist or the sociologist or political theorist, it is all a game of getting over ourselves, all a game of fruit spilling over out of the soul once honest with itself. And that is Faith: that letting go of the reins is laying hold of a Spiritual Awakening productive and True. It is to lay hold of a fashion suited to us individually, with inexplicable time and attention to the details, getting each soul embraced and held, by a Spiritual Presence. By a Care for the soul hiding out in the cracks and crevices of the overall society.

Therefore to laugh at ourselves is to embrace the Call unto accepting persecutions but also a certainty we hold fast to: that our understanding, our insight, our vision, is spilling over with ideas for our community or for our workplace projects or for our vacuums where leadership, simple leadership, is required. And this is no group-think, no foolish dismissal of the Individual, and of her or his Plans, but it honors the Christ in each of us, and it honors the Role writ large, to Matter, to Brush Up against one another, to gaze with curiosity in our eyes into the room and environs more broadly; into the gaze of another, into the curiosity for something if we’re honest more than any pedantic explanation of sin, but into curiosity for what together we might celebrate, joyously embracing virtually and in the mentality shared.