“5 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 2 Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. 3 I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. 4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. 5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. 7 You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? 8 This persuasion is not from him who calls you. 9 A little leaven leavens the whole lump. 10 I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view, and the one who is troubling you will bear the penalty, whoever he is. 11 But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed. 12 I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves! 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. 14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.” (Ga 5:1–15 ESV)

Pokes and prods should not distress the Watchful Calm of the flight deck soldier. Original Sin has wrought a havoc-laden tear or course through Sanity and through Measured Reactivity: we try to go copacetic and Measured, but come day’s end we are a bundle of yearning, searching Educational Aspects, Flashpoints, Risk and Reward systems; we would like to be God, but settle for ten percent of His thought-out Analysis.

Five percent, and the cruel and strange fascinations with the downfall of Another, the weird and murderous Intrigue or stomach for Scandal… and to said Scandal, the wisdom route saying, whatever your participation in Scandal, flee! It is too dangerous, one can really get hurt poking around here. Because there are myriad Caution zones of, “Hey, you can really hurt yourself going down that route,” the Caution zone of Pride, lack of humility, and let’s face it, theology, clerical work Itself: big leagues. Little sanity or legal precedence insofar as immediately, “Well, would you like to think of your mother as anything less?” shot-from-the-hip Reactivity as to the question of the Virgin’s perpetual virginity, for example. We don’t Reason around some work places or thought zones; we immediately get irate and lash out and get Political.

So it is always a flirtation with the Presumptuous, clerical work. Too, there is so much room for Good Clerics, experienced in life, patient as judge, advocate and jury. Patient to do the mystical work of saying, “Hey, time was I really couldn’t forgive myself, then I decided…”. Decided to accept Christ’s mercy. Decided in glib fashion, nearly, rather not in smug fashion, to swallow a smile and go sharp-foreheaded into the melee: who is Better than these other clerics, perhaps, or in any case those who “get it” are unpresumptuous, amongst equals, to be Lauded and Given Thanks for. So pride is punctured through the gut, through the heart. But we adopt a Healthy self-assessment: keep on in the Fight, O Soldier, O Cleric! Your work is Important.

Pokes and prods, the air Ripe for a shootout, a Wild West duel, a chess game involving these screaming birds on the flight deck. Targeted Mind Game, Thought Zone, Personal Testimony, and a stronghold is urgently Bombed over and lanced through. We each of us either in the control room or boots on the ground, are a symbiotic Net and Cloud Reality, twenty-four-seven lines of communication open to earpieces and big screen Room. We are after their Hidden stuff as much as their—don’t let it ape or frustrate you—demonstrated Front. The Hidden Stuff of plain Class Warfare, or padding the bank accounts of One Set of people and not the Other Set of people. The Hidden Stuff of publicly lauding but privately mocking God, mocking the Son, the Father, the Spirit. The Hidden Stuff of feeding it all into a cryptic cipher or algorithm, with false weights, with false adoration for the macabre and the lives as quantified and monetized.

Armies and cohorts of Loving Souls do invest flowers into said screaming guns and birds, because to Love is to bomb over in another way, and we do not go depressive and say it is all the same thing, day’s end. Love is patient and kind, love bears no ill grudges. Love is a strategic Perch as to our own Walls remanded and torn down, the Walls of being aped, being prodded and poked until we react in undue Haste. Is it too much to say we Pity the enemy, just a bit? Yet never do we go false confidence route, never dismiss them as merely pitiable. They have aspects plainly Evil about them. It is One Deed we need see, to understand the entire Edifice is built on sandy ground.

Eyes on the Prize, war is in regards to the fact, all things will be bubbled to the surface and negotiated, when we “Win” a war, already we “Lost” so much treasure. We seek early Preparatory Deeds of Service to the encroaching Mindsets and Hateful Stripes. Many hear the Call already to go Full Throttle, lives on the line but no matter, go Full Throttle Certain and Composed and Sane and Measured, but fingers on the button, it Will Be Okay and Forgiven if we do err and push or err and not push. We must Engage the Spirit in full acceptance of His Plan not being undone by any Human Influence, but rather constantly Reinventing and Reshaping around a Life-Affirming but Educational and therefore Painful, no less, reality. We may lose half our “boots on the ground”; in the process we may lose plain pewsitters, patient Civilians; we may lose our Warroom sanities and personal Fittedness for War, jaded, permanently Shellshocked, too bitter never to have quite had the Positive Church experience to hearken back to whilst Designing Tomorrows flatlands, plains, hills, fjords and mountains: tomorrow’s Spirit and Church (Bride).

The ecstasy of surrender, is therefore already built in to our Victory Day. We are first to proclaim, all war is a Defeat, yet all war is potentially in Service to the Higher Up. To morals or plain Peace and Calm, liberal society and principled judiciaries, markets kept up with the times, and labor forces happy and market economy. The ecstasy of the Opponent Realizing how Giant and Tandem would be a Teaming Up, to do so after all in the Name of Christ, in the Name of “the Old Religion”, in the Name of Laboring in the pan-religious Vineyard. But we need Space, to live up and grow into the Men and Women as Called to Be. We offend some, perhaps, by not speaking Tough or Murderously, but in fact we are Quite Tough and just do things in a slightly more quiet or ungossipy Manner. More, the things they bandy about in complaint and blasphemy, are things we keep quiet about, secrets kept… and thus, the “Loser” sitting for a few years in the seat intended for the “Winners”: only, that we understand Winners and Losers in some non-gratuitous or personally-lauding, proud manner. To be a “Winner” is to experience Ecstasy as well, but the ecstasy of Lives of Friends and those served. Nothing self-congratulatory or indulgent, nothing capricious or precious, cute or oblong.