2023-09-05 A Meditation on the Free-For-All of Making Friends

In the free-for-all, in the gladhappy discovery, each of us has a moral compass that murmurs, plaintively reminding us of the future date called Salvation: the future date called Repentance; the future date called Healing. Yet that day, if we believe, is Today. No hindrances require time nor a “second coming” to be healed. That time is now; already we are working through the pain or failings or regrets. Already we embrace a creed almost a little personal, a little different from the free-for-all and gladhappy discovery of friends, allies, sympathetic minds, and colleagues. That is, to believe is to have a personal alone time of True Gospel heart and soul correction, upbuilding, stamp of approval.

So we worry not for that “Future need”: “One day, I’ll be at peace with who me and my life decisions and experiences has made me”. No! That day is any old time we have the courage to believe, and our lips are instructed by wise, New Testament, counsel, to make the theology vocal, to help our own disbelief with the statement of faith, to reassure all who come our way that this one is a child of the Most High. For it is Jesus who speaks through us. It is no occasion for boredom or “not more of all that religious rigamarole”, rather a dare and a trust fall. Each of us had something personal, of individuated recognisance, our pledge and duty to undertake, in healing self-surgery and mind for prayer.

The winsome spirits meet winsome spirits, today encouraged, today inspired, today allied. And that is a gladsome occasion, literally to have proof positive that, first, my yoke is easy and my burden light, but second, that it is no weakening spirit but rather an Ubermensch, an Overcoming, a potent creed, and each of us encounters it in peculiar ways, a little different from the sycophant or one cozy telling others how to live their lives. We discover it on the bus or in the schoolyard, in quiet reverie or near-death frightful experiences. We in tandem believe our outward Confession makes friends and allies, whilst our inward Blessing gives us a sheen and polish that others likewise “see”. It isn’t just about us. It is an irrigated, composted and nurturing soil, no longer slick or tainted by factual spiritual enmity (of which more in a moment), but Inherited, Imbued, Educated, Chosen—each of us literally chosen for higher purposes—and Invested Upon.

Then the enmity, which devil simply appeals to a doctrine called Strength, yet one that denies the servant leadership, the personal humility, the burdens shared, the so-called “weakening” claims about our actual estate. No, our actual estate is ruined and complicit in the soul’s apple-picking. The actual estate is better for that meager, sublime, personally-answerable, decision Today to become Christian, via Today becoming cleansed and healed and forgiven. So that we might better wear the mantle of our in-crowd, of whom we are proud and bold to be a member. With whom we are strong and responsible to a strange and laughable status quo, responsible to what was tolerated but is tolerated no more, the murder and strife, the tense attempts to celebrate a Servant Leader called Christ. No longer tense, no longer compromised, no longer flattered nor tempted, we today let all things answer to a Lord of the Harvest, a harvest that recognizes simple Grace arising wherever self-awareness, true self-awareness, is proclaimed.

That Grace is the opposition to all boasts and strong-man claims to be a sum of deeds. Those deeds only distract; the good man or woman intrinsically Does good deeds, so what is the fuss? The fuss is that the good man or woman also acknowledges that they are not “Good”. They rest in the work of Another. They serve Another. They believe the best of their peers and the worst of their own estate. They accept blessings of whose origins they cannot claim to be responsible for: God loved us; God made us; God utilized us.