(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)
Action
If the rich and powerful are aliens to the common folks, we who are spiritual are even more alien to all of them together.
Nothing I’ve written precludes taking a job with an activist organization, political party, government agency or even wearing a military uniform. The primary difference between you and your coworkers will be the significance you place on your job. Even if they are cynical and utterly mercenary, as a great many will turn out to be in some degree and on some level, you will likely be the only one with a full commitment outside this world entirely. To the degree there may be others like you, encounters will be rare, if recognized at all.
No adventure will be too risky. The only question is what’s appropriate for your mission, what fits in your narrative. Privation is little more than an annoyance, seldom worthy of comment. You’ll have some measure of immunity against attacks through the three basic human appetites, if only because you know what to expect. Instead, you’ll focus more energy on realistic and morally just mitigation. You’ll stop wishing for what you cannot have and seek joy and contentment in what is available.
Your commitment to moral purity will make you easily one of the most conscientious workers. You won’t have to fight for any secret agendas of your own, because yours are invested in Heaven. By the same token, you won’t have trouble honestly objecting to things you simply cannot do. You won’t have much trouble paying the price for your objections. You’ll remain serene in the face of all sorts of passionate claims on your loyalty, because your cynicism expects it, but your hopes and dreams will be far, far away from theirs. You’ll be out of reach of their compelling narratives. They will probably never understand you, though you will surely understand them well enough.
You won’t panic when things don’t go as planned. Your narrative is written from an entirely different angle. No human perfidy will surprise you; no depravity will shake your confidence in the mission that calls you. No grand evil scheme of oppression is unexpected. When one authority or another, including the government under which you live, threatens some new terror and oppression, your only question is where in this will you find the glory of God. That is, you’ll pray to know how can you exploit things to maintain your mission and message that this life isn’t worth much. “Okay, Lord; now what?”
Take this far enough and nothing in your personal life will shake you from your mission. It affects your choices in whom you bond with, and how you bond. Your cynicism won’t be one of doubting their sincerity, but a realistic expectation of what they can deliver. If you can learn that cynicism about yourself, you are less surprised when those closest to you fail in their promises. It’s not that you won’t love fully and open yourself in the vulnerability that love demands, but you’ll still have a reserve somewhere that functions when love has been stabbed through the heart. Your trust mechanism will be inoculated against a fatal response. If you follow Christ, no human can sit on His throne in your soul.
Your panic mode will wither. That autonomic fight-or-flight will find poor linkage to your behavior, nothing to sustain it very long.
The biggest question for us is not what can we know, what’s real or what’s truth versus falsehood in terms of intellectual content. The facts are fungible for us, but truth and falsehood are a matter of moral commitment.
Of all the words important to us, the word “faith” has been more thoroughly hijacked than most. In biblical terms, faith is the faculty for seeing our world in terms of divine moral implications. It’s our capacity to perceive and obey the Spirit of God. Our biggest single weakness is the crippling of that faculty through confusion with any other source of input. A strong sentimental attachment can easily drown out the voice of God’s Spirit. So can a strong rational frame of reference, a lifetime of education, and any number of other influences from mere human sources can be used to subvert the power of genuine faith. None of those things are inherently evil, yet all of them can cripple genuine faith when we somehow elevate them to the place of faith, or attempt to make faith dependent on them, or even consistent with them.
Commitment to Christ does not necessarily equate with commitment to your church, your marriage, your children or your career. If He is not Lord over them, then He is not Lord. If you make no room for following Him out of those things, never mind whether such is likely, you aren’t following Him. Something else is your god. If you could completely conquer all humanity, discover all the mechanisms to the physical universe, opening the doors to colonization and conquest of distant galaxies, it would mean nothing if the collected bits and pieces of your humanity have not been humbly laid at the foot of the Cross. God still plans to completely replace the universe we know, so it’s not worth any concern. The only battle of significance is in your own soul.
Having won that battle, you cannot possibly win it for others. When you nail your own human self to the Cross, it’s all you can do to keep it there. The self does not die easily and keeps trying to come off that Cross. All the decisions made by all other humans, as far as you are concerned, rest fully in the hands of God. Nothing you do here can alter a thing outside your own soul. The most important concerns in your life are now rooted in Heaven. In this world we are left with only symbols and parables to talk about the Spirit Realm because nothing there can be delineated with mere words, nor understood with any native human faculty.
If you can see it, touch it or give it a name, if in any way it is rooted in our realm of existence here below, it does not warrant your expectations, hopes and dreams.
