It’s a very, very sad reflex that asserts itself every where I look.
Reading between the lines of the Law Covenants, we learn that God places a heavy emphasis on social stability. It seems the summum bonum of Jesus’ second commandment — Love your neighbor as yourself. Not stasis by any means, but within the flux of worldly sorrows, the whole of our earthly duty, aside from acts of worship, is to go long on people and short our investment in material goods. People are the single most important investment we can make on this earth. That’s a critical part of how we glorify the Father.
Satan cannot create anything, but can only pervert what God has done. The pinnacle of everything wrong in human history so far is the Western cultural middle class. If there is anything that hinders our efforts to cast lose from this world and serve God in truth and spirit, it is the social orthodoxy of materialism that comes from the rise of the middle class in Europe after the Middle Ages. They have dumbed down “prosperity” to mean mere material wealth.
A part of that awful perversion of materialism is the damned assertion that homogeneity is godly. We all snicker at the typification of suburban sameness, but the instinct for conformity is distinctly the domain of the cultural middle class. Example: “One doesn’t wear white shoes after Labor Day” — with prissy snobbish snickering in the background. You get the picture. These are the people who do their best to destroy Christian faith by perverting the meaning of the term. These are the people who created the culture where everyone stands around staring at their cellphone, ignoring each other and all the genteel arts of civility. These are the people who throw you in jail for daring to be the least bit non-conformist.
Think about the virtual staff here at Kiln of the Soul online parish. Yours truly didn’t choose Sister Wildcucumber as an associate. God chose her; I simply was blessed with recognizing her calling and talent. It’s not the same as mine. When God speaks to me, I don’t hear what she hears every time God speaks to her. There is no conformity or orthodoxy, just a functional overlap and commonality of purpose. She writes what she has experienced in serving God, and it must of necessity come out different than when I write about my experience in some ways. The details are not the point, but the tendency to hear from God.
The whole standard of communion between us is not full agreement on the details. The standard is what we can tolerate together from each other. I can work with her and we can amplify each the other’s labors. God blesses the synergy because it’s His energy. He confirms this for each of us. She could have easily said “no” when I invited her to join the staff. Others will eventually come later and each will have the same option. And it wouldn’t be wrong for someone to ask me. I can’t decide for others, only for me. It is my duty to God to remain sensitive and recognize His hand at work. Not in the concrete results, but in the move of the Spirit of God to give strength and clarity to the moral vision, to harmonize with His character in this world.
We aren’t investing in some organization with numbers, real estate and a big budget. Those things don’t exist here, and cannot. We are investing in souls who all share one common trait, almost impossible to describe. We all see with eyes of faith beyond the inherent deceptiveness of our mere human senses. We perceive the world through our hearts, not trusting our senses and our reason. We don’t measure as man measures because that’s too small and narrow. We measure with the depth of divine moral discernment.
The standard of communion is the room God has built into each soul.
