“17 But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, 18 because we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, again and again—but Satan hindered us. 19 For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? 20 For you are our glory and joy. 3 Therefore when we could bear it no longer, we were willing to be left behind at Athens alone, 2 and we sent Timothy, our brother and God’s coworker in the gospel of Christ, to establish and exhort you in your faith, 3 that no one be moved by these afflictions. For you yourselves know that we are destined for this. 4 For when we were with you, we kept telling you beforehand that we were to suffer affliction, just as it has come to pass, and just as you know. 5 For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to learn about your faith, for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you and our labor would be in vain. Timothy’s Encouraging Report 6 But now that Timothy has come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of your faith and love and reported that you always remember us kindly and long to see us, as we long to see you— 7 for this reason, brothers, in all our distress and affliction we have been comforted about you through your faith. 8 For now we live, if you are standing fast in the Lord. 9 For what thanksgiving can we return to God for you, for all the joy that we feel for your sake before our God, 10 as we pray most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith? 11 Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you, 12 and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, 13 so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess 2:17-3:13 ESV)

The usual rigamarole of lives of faith, we do well to step back and also to re-integrate ourselves into the truth claims posited. Because it is a stark Cry of Aptitude, Aggression, Antagonism and War with so much that passes for “normalcy” or our “former selves”. Strangely stark and oddly integrated, the rigamarole and creed professed, this meets the reality of various sacramental exchanges somehow being, the latter being, more germane, more effective and aptitudinal than simply “Man alone and contemplative in a starkly empty room”.

The sacramental nature of a Last Supper, where it is pleaded and prayed through, that each of us would somehow accept Forgiveness for things jostled and infectious to our inner being, unhealed, unable to be surfaced and ameliorated. We maybe sense this as the communicant Priest says our name and greets us with gladsome Invite to the table of the Lord, or perhaps our sacrament is in the trenches, where again it is no planned or mental trick of endurance, rather a Sacrament of “here I am again…”, the times and places being paramount, even as our Lord chooses both the odd Hour and the random Place to coexist and dwell together with us His people.

We do well, therefore, to greet as a stark counterpoint, the posture of Faith, as voiced in a Creed but as Recollected in an Urgent Hour, something sacramental and Imbued, Taken In, a posture from which we Speak and Act. That moment Recollected, it is impetus and movement unto the infinite. It is dallying in direct antithesis to the “evil memories” (what writer James Joyce patronizingly named “sin” to his atheistic stance); we have evil memories that jostle as well, and declare War rightly on the mesmer and the waking dream in which salvation is ours but only just. Only just, are we saved. Only by wings and a prayer, are we meandering, coping, making it through the wilderness and dream-tropes recollected in waking moments: this thing, that suddenly is front-and-center and Familiar… yet it was limited to the sleeping Dream until now, and now I see it awake as a manifest Trope of my life of perambulation and contemplation. God is in every waking hour and every sleeping hour, to nurture and to Imbue with a Divine Meaning all our dream-tropes and waking-tropes. His plethora of Evolutionary Progress of Ideas is stronger and more Inspired, un-human, unworldly, than we imagine.

This is our War, to visit again our Faith Claims as though adopting them for the first time, natively, naturally, realistically, because it was an Odd Day that saw them taken for granted, or assumed, or seen as a given. We step back and re-embrace the Faith Walk, the Journey miasmic and perpetual. We find our fighting stride, our cadence of repugnance towards Sin, our patient Acceptance: more is sinful than we imagine, and more urgently are we met on our journey by the Chief Priest and Fellow-Traveler Christ. No worries any longer, that He is a distant “One Day” encounter: we encounter Here and Now, by that loving Brother and Sister who meets us instead of with glib Creed, with Sacrament, with a Supper Together, a meaningful fact of Character not being broken: he or she who stays in character… it prevents the failed message of not taking things seriously. We stay in character around what is Holy, because it would be a shame to pontificate or to this-or-that think around a Creed: our creed is lived into as a no-joking Entreaty and Reminder.