2024-08-01 A Meditation on Strange Sights

“10 Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. 11 There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven. 12 But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. 13 This will be your opportunity to bear witness. 14 Settle it therefore in your minds not to meditate beforehand how to answer, 15 for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict. 16 You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. 17 You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your lives.” (Lk 21:10-19 ESV)

Strange sights, recruited yet a bit in disbelief, the business around here is decidedly coherent and effective: we are soldiers with a Mandate, with a Top-to-Bottom buzz of life, with a plain knowledge of backs against backs, shared enemies and shared peaceful oases.

For the Gospel is actively recruiting, on the basis of something seen through a gifted third eye, a reclusive or behaviorally teeming and puzzle-like fitting in, a third eye seeing just Who and Why we believe, we serve, we reinvent certain duties and puzzles out of all of life, no self-recrimination but outward magnanimous to get down to a business ready for the harvest. Ready for the harvest, we who glide through life and who cope with our own disappointments—ministered to quite thoroughly, given time—and our own seeming final issue or estate or judgment, in light of the Other Half to whom we are and were always Sent.

The soldier is possessed of strange sights and a working Enterprise, a busy-beaver wild-eyed Cosmos and Economy, the entertainment here, the socializing there, the desk duty here, the Product of it all over there: servants, duty-bound Emissaries, soldiers sent forth, into across that Divide of our border and their border: to a fate uncertain, yet vouchsafed by Bold Belief. Belief that to Encounter the enterprise is to put behind us all rejection or ill-fitting cliques and social groups, and warm to a life lived in terms of hours to go rather than empty decades of depressive or concerned or hurried fears and evasions and hiding out. We have hours in which to Celebrate the Cause, to Discharge the Duty, to Be for all people Blessing and Concern. Concerned for the poor on the bus or the trolley, concerned for the youth trying to grow up both popular and works-oriented, hard at work, dutiful, facing the Malaise and the Ennui and other plain faultlines without clever names, of life, of chrism being needed, of a daring memory that calls so much Blessed even as it scurries and explores and worries and thinks on Present Aspects of life.

Present Aspects just as endowed and enabled to be for us Satiety and Boldness, Vulnerability and Focus, the soldier’s license to Labor and Serve and Fight and Bless, all this while with a grin on the face strapping into the bomber or the flight suit, to don the parachute and the armaments, of a Faith that is Spoken over all those sleepwalkers “Back home”, all those with no one to Pity them, with no one to show the collegiate “Good Side” of the personality, to reward and give some foretaste of the Enterprise, the Institution, the Academy, ours being one of hard knocks.

Teeming and Corporate in mentality, the work ultimately does get done, we observe. We laud, we serve, we honor, we pray over, we regale, we self-elate, we go for broke: to be that Corporate Citizen of some Army and Military Divine, dreaded by some but plain-spoken and dutifully-laboring away in the minds of others. We are Citizens of no small outfit, but of the Courts of the King, of the Hopes of the Ages, of the Peace Glimpsed in order that the war might be all the more tolerable, willingly serving and dying because of that Glimpse and that sense: to all shall their time one day come. To all, shall we hasten to make of Christ’s thirty-plus years a few more decades not spent in ennui or wandering, but Purposefully dying on that Cross: in time, in season, with full Love for the Brethren and Sistren.