As a quick glance at my profile at different times in my life would show, I don’t like excercise, but I (sometimes) do it. As a lover of meat, I don’t like the vegan fast of Lent, but it is good for me so I do it. Work is a joy, generally, but every profession contains the job part of work where one suffers like Job with the parts of the job that are tedious.
No complaints, just longing for the coming of the year of Jubilee. When Christ returns, we lay down the tedium and start the joyful work of feasting, creating, seeing Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. It is the true ending of all slaving. Each human will find the perfect niche in the created order that will make us as happy as we can be. If bliss makes a man uncomfortable, he can say “no” and choose to be a dullard, but it is a hell of a choice.
The promise of our baptism is that we can renounce Satan and his work, the tedium of evil, the endless never sated desires, and find rest, meaningful work, without a form to fill out for all eternity.
If you are part of the Western church, then you have been celebrating Easter for a week now, but for those of us in the East, the Son is risen! Call it Second Easter, though my kids used to call it real Pascha after the Easter warmup left the candy cheaper for them. Toward the end of the Saturday services at Saint Paul our pastor (the inimitable Father Richard) says: “Now that our Lenten exercises are done . . .”
If one of my children is there, he or she will look for me and grin. They know I am imagining walking the treadmill at LA Fitness and having Christ return and say: “Your exercise is done! Enter into the joy of a new body!” Sometimes I think of working on an accreditation folder and having the Rabbi come and say: “You can stop now. Real learning can begin without any need for all of that.”
Slander said that newly freed people after the Civil War believed that they would not have to work. “The bottom rail would be on the top. . .” Government or someone would provide the good things of the land to them without endless toil. If anybody had made that mistake, it would have been excusable, since the “master” had been trying to live as if he was in heaven on the enslaved man’s back. Enslaving people was an attempt to bring the glories of Paradise, the rest from endless toil, to the world, but did so by using people to replace the power of God. The slaver indulged in rest, his own worldly paradise, by making a little hell for others.
Yet the year of Jubilee is coming! We will be freed from senseless toil. This Lenten land exercises our souls and makes us fit for the only aristocracy that is, that is real: where everyone is an aristocrat, excellent people in pursuit of excellence forever.
Thanks be to God!
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