Enclave: Sanity Asylum

When the world is insane, you build a safe place to remain sane.
For all the world it looks like a cult in a compound. Yet, when the world is crazy, it’s opinion cannot be taken seriously. Threats, yes, we worry a bit about them. But mere thoughts are the thinkers’ problem. When “outside” means abnormal norms, it’s time to consider how you can escape, even if only for brief moments to remind you what sanity is. It will depend on your own character and context, but to the extent possible for you, creating a sanity enclave is worth consideration.
If you are coming late to this discussion, or if this post is your first introduction to my weird rantings here on this blog, you’ll be forgiven for not coming back. If something in this appeals to you, scan through some of the previous posts to gain a better grasp of my madness. The title of the blog reflects my desire and efforts to think through the requirements of God’s Laws. Having come to the place where I am comfortable with what I have gained so far in this endeavor, and would be willing to accept that final fate of mankind whenever it comes, what’s left for me is to continue poking at what brought me here, in a public facing dialog with myself and anyone else who bothers to comment. Maybe I can do someone else some good.
In my own little world here, I strive to embrace and observe what I have come to understand about God’s Laws. A critical element in this is refusing any notions of pushing it upon anyone who isn’t under my just authority. My children are grown, and there will be no more of them, so they’ll have to decide if, and to what degree, I am still the elder who guides them. Most of my other kin are both unaware and uninterested in what I think for the most part. I bear them no ill will for this; everyone has to choose. What’s left is the vague future possibility someone will be moved to take my rantings seriously and agree to form a covenant bond. Right now I don’t have any significant number of folks in my geographical proximity interested in what I’m doing. My wife is on board, and a few others to varying degrees, but the whole thing is too tenuous to do much with it. We talk and agree and pray together, but as a group, we don’t feel called to build a tighter community just now.
Yet, in that we few together hold a similar outlook based on God’s Laws, we have a shared community of faith and action. The world around is not yet such a great threat as to make this unworkable. That will surely change, but until it does, we have only some idea how we might adjust, in terms of goals and outcomes.
If all the world was more compliant with God’s Laws, we’d never give it much thought. No human planning we could imagine would work to change things very much, so the burden is upon whatever limited response lies in our hands to press our own lives into the mold, as it were. Yes, it will always bring conflict, and in each case we have to decide whether the conflict is justified or not. Sometimes the conflict is the mission, is the message, but we try to avoid conflict which serves no such purpose. At some point you end up creating a pretty firm separation from the rest of the world, at whatever cost. That’s because if it kills us, or does something short of that, such is the price for breaking with this fallen world. The line was drawn in Eternity before this particular patch of human history came along.
In my own mind, contrary to many of my youthful dreams and plans, I am forced for the sake of my own sanity to recognize God has called me as elder. In this context, it means I’m to prepare myself to provide fatherly administrative and organizational guidance for so many of those as are interested in getting involved in my vision of sanity. The details of what that means aren’t important in this discussion, but I do possess one of the primary qualifications: I know beyond all doubt I’d rather not tell other people what to do. If you hung out with me, you’d sense that very quickly. I’m willing to organize things only to the degree necessary to provide maximum freedom of individual choice and still preserve whatever it is makes life worth living.
It’s necessary to include in that some recognition of the vast range of human desire and intention in asserting their own claim on life. If you can’t live with others, you will live in conflict, and not very long, at that. We are social creatures.
Concrete plans would be almost meaningless. The whole point here the idea itself: When any number of people can come together in one location, with sufficient agreement to work alongside each other and build a community, it has to be done right. Doing it right means having some grasp of what God’s Laws mean, and what they seek to declare about human nature, and what remedy they offer to compensate for how badly broken we all are. Right now, this implies a trend to enclaving. There are a thousand ways this will create trouble with those who can’t agree to come inside, and who are hostile to almost every element of the community, down to the very epistemological questions of what constitutes reality itself. But it’s that epistemology which is the primary issue of separation in this case. When you embrace the epistemology God revealed, an awful lot of other stuff is eliminated before you start. One thing eliminated is the feasibility of concrete recommendations from where I sit behind this keyboard.
If you buy much of what I suggest here on this blog, you will soon find yourself needing an enclave, even if it’s just yourself versus the rest of your world. There has to be someplace where God’s justice rules as much as it is going to on this earth, or you will lose your way, your very sense of self.