2023-09-27 A Meditation on Subdued

“10 Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. 11 For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 12 Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. 13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder” (2 Pe 1:10–13 ESV)

A certain peace, a certain residence in calm. Exemplar, yet innocently such, the soldier’s landscape is meek and subdued to a point, to some perspective it is simple enough. Yet in the subterranean, in the calmly submitted, lie Character and Wit, Comprehensive Stakes and Investments. The resource, the exemplar, the owner, all these together form a New Day on offer, a Lancing Forth on deck, a Mighty Emblem of the owned Name and the fought-for Nation.

This emblem is a history lesson, a recollection, a reliving of what things made the soul, the soldiering soul, the Christian soul, into a believer. Calmly disposed, all anxiety and worry subdued yet not denied: we had prayed it through, as though praying for a cancer or hemorrhage, as though some things must wait for a Next Day and Second Coming. Some things we seek to contain rather than to dominate. It is not as though we couldn’t lance the corpuscle or amputate the limb, but it is that we desire a humane tack and a resilient wholeness of body. We subdue. We pray through. We keep that dynamo in effect. We keep that tension, high and with alacrity, modeled. For the outset of war is always tense, high tension, suddenly we fall onto habit and former progress; suddenly you can cut the tension in the air with a knife; suddenly bared, fresh meat for the slaughter, fresh innocence for the day’s fare, all this is making martyrs of all diligence and innocent testimony.

The preacher is immediately subdued by a clever spirit of wickedness that wants always “tit-for-tat”. We find those “Christians” who keep a ledger, an accounting, and find unspoken but partisan-wise shared explanations; these behind-the-scenes explanations ruin any effort at peace-talk or conflict negotiation. Because of a story-line not shared publicly. Because of an “obvious” impediment to full communion. Because we have forgotten the simple goal of leading our day’s dalliance with something forgiving, some aspect shown mercy, some blessing, some Cross that gives smile to the face and leaping forth in the heart. And yet, too we are convicted, that these our brethren and sistren may have their own unknown crosses. They may be right to seek the discipline of others. They may be carrying their own faults to the Cross rather than finger-pointing; the silence may just be a product of so much a landscape of scheming and conniving and partisan efforts and mess. And war.