2024-09-17 A Meditation on Two Sides

“11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” (Isaiah 53:11 ESV)

Espionage at the highest levels, the skin in the game is polarized in secret ways, the two sides to choose from, the instinctive “This is benign”, “This is copacetic”, “This is our nation”. Do we dare make our distinctives around a Faith Experience, cruciform playing-out, faith that around such corner as we cannot see, around it is a Gifted Resurrection? To teach any and all comers that our best secret ingredient is one we wear on our sleeve, our lapel, our flag, our “Here I stand”.

Espionage meaning that a leap-frog situation arises, mentalism triumphing over pragmatism: we dare go a few future wars further, while not losing sight of locking down the homefront, the basics, the tough talk and flesh in the game. All of us intelligent around something purposeful that trumps cold calculation. Something faith-based. Something borne in our personal experience. The spycraft happens naturally, on the streetcorner debate or the wall of postings: have you worked yourself up to a tizzy around a Principle? Have you worked yourself up around an Experience? All of us ripe fields for the harvest, a death to self such that floral beauty grows out of the deadened corpse. Second life forges a way ahead around the body not yet past expiration date, good until the last drop.

The spycraft then is our warning around those chuckling themselves in a mesmerized attack: we ourselves can relate: we don’t Like the testimony of the one further along the scale of penitence; we can’t stand that their elation is couched without any pain or cynicism; we dislike the exuberance that seems over-the-top. Chill, man, is a saying with two sides to it: meet us in the experience of group peace, or stop coaching us to your Enlightened Level. Fast and furious the clan of sympathetic group-minded souls is. We recall in our little safe perches a childhood seen on the subway or in the community, of souls leaning on each other and committed in almost panicky were it not loving correction and style and wishful thinking: would only the lass smile at me. Would only the fellows hear me drop a rhyme or prophecy over a societal dismay.

So we are called upon not to willingly play that game called “Spy for me”. That game called, innocently peer into how so-and-so is doing things. That game called, “it’s all for the fun, we’re friends after all”. Besties? Conjoined twins? Hardly, perhaps, because the best spycraft is indeed around notions unspoken, the hope that This One is to be the One. That it is people we invest in and people, all lives mattering, to whom we with gladsome hearts do extend the right hand of fellowship.

The Cross is a Lived Experience, to use the parlance of what new term is found for imaginative mental illness. We are on a sheer cliff face and in an avalanche; life is not something meted out in potable quantities; we are oblong and strangely made, weird in our decisive salute of that Cross. We are coping; we are acknowledging unfixed brokenness in our history; we are acknowledging childlike sins and total need for a fresh start; we are the ones to be pitied, not those who hear us, but we ourselves: these souls needed Christianity; others were okay with societal game and common religion, but these souls needed Christ and His Religion. These souls were at the launchpad, and some strange confession of sin elevated each of us to that level called Espionage Worthy, others being the sin and we being the flesh-in-the-game straight-talking mesmerizing if you like, players. It is all meaningful and a side to take in a dispute even not yet mentionable in words. Choose this day… and be prepared to make a difference in any position you occupy, even at the highest levels of Care for one another and of Leadership and of Responsibility.