2025-01-24 A Meditation on Timeless Truths
“16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (Acts 17:16-21 ESV)
Attentive ears recall timeless truths. There is always a higher echelon, turtles all the way down: what just “feels right” is an inherited Continuity, a witnessed Legacy, an apropos Dynamo: we cross the circle, the diameter to the Just Plain Life. Life in community. Life behind a symphony. Life qualified both to the cynical, Machiavellian philosophy even, counterbalanced by Genuine Success, Peaceful Companionship, Together-Mind Affects.
Ears subdued, patient, awaiting that Emboldened take charge mindset: we take charge by way of Loving the recalcitrant, Loving the sheepish, Loving the cozy or ultra safeguarded, frightful, easily spooked, weaker brother or sister. It was never a game: it was communication channels compromised, misunderstood, over-interpreted, over-legate, taken too seriously each and every word most definitely was: casual joke or debate illustrated, these are lifelong prophecies in the ears of some: “I’ve just never heard anything like it!” It was a different stroke of humor.
And that is our attentive ears, our half-crazed schizoid immediate landing zone, safe harbor sought: we, after all, were not so strong as to maintain a several layers of interpretation, a several channels of narrative, a several patient Optimistic Trance.
In trance, we helter-skelter ran to the nearest, rather obnoxious to the initiated, haven. Please bear with us, O initiated ones! We were timeless in our obstinance, predictable in our fright factor, mundane in our life choices. “I just didn’t hear that I was beloved.” Thus they say, and thus we remain both Encouraged and Disciplined: this far I shall not go; I am speaking to the broader mindset; I pursue no one except those catechized, called into, inducted into the Cipher, into the Crew, into the Beloved! Let the rest… pray for them! Let the rest be Mature and Grown women and men!
Today if you hear His voice: peace, gladsome levity, higher Calling; counterpose with arrest, subdued and chained witness; we cover all levels inbetween, between the peace and the arrest, freedom fighters who use Christ as the model for all comers. You are indeed Christ, thus to strive for Appropriate Relevance, to make oneself servant-minded, reactive, responsive. To lay a sublime Ultimate Things legacy, bearing in one’s heart the duties of their father and their mother. Of their siblings divine, their burden, their responsibility. We each of us Serve, and in Service, recover the winning mindset: no, Machiavelli (thanks for the joke: “it is better to be feared than loved”); yes, comfort and Final Rites, rather, ongoing Peace, in our daily labors. We belong, at least somewhere we belong. And here we are on top of the planet Satisfied. We act in each other’s stead; we are offshoots and derivatives of the group’s Sublime.
Wondrous, we land in no pretense but rather Acceptance, to be accepted as the Beloved, to be Busy about the Master’s Business, to wake up with demons dispelled and clean slate most Divine: excited, but not onerous; rambunctious, but not heathen; elegant, but not precocious. A heavenly family, a community, a Divinity Shared, to be those contributors of personal star unto the group Deity in Heaven. Monotheistic, but not far from what is called Temple, and the various divinities of lesser echelon, now reassembled into the aura or comet’s tail of His Love for His children.