Boil to Rags, Part 2: The Great Dance (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

(See the first post in the series here.)

"For God so loved...." John 3:16

Herein is a great mystery and lovely beauty. The God that we serve and adore is neither mechanical nor inert. The core and source and glory of Reality is not a lonely dynamo whose silent energies are all centripetal and not centrifugal. The Empyrean Prime, who is beyond and yet sustains all appearances, is alive and He loves. All three of Him dances to His love, and all the elements and pieces of the universe dances to His love. All great galaxies and subatomic singularities and every mind and soul under the sun lives and moves and has their being in the ever-dynamic Being of Love Himself, His love for Himself and His love for all things made and begotten and proceeding from Himself.

There is no discontentment in His love, for it is a Dance and not a trade. Its transactions are giving, and it receives so that it may give, and give all the more. So the begotten is given and gives the proceeding, who gives and receives of the Father so that it may give further. So you see, there is no discontentment. No pride or bitter jealousy. No raging accusations or schemes of humiliation. Rather, all is a gift of Love. Love beating out and pouring forth from the very heart of existence like golden heat from an eternal furnace.

Yet there is also no contentment in this Love, never a moment where it utters, "Hold, it is enough." All of its endings are beginnings. All of its deaths are resurrections. All things are made new and newer still, further up and further in to newer and newer perfections, deeper still into the divine substance of the Perfect Himself. He is not satisfied with anything less than Himself, and He is not satisfied with giving anything less than Himself, so that He might receive nothing less than Himself. And it is we, we few, we happy few who are meant to be caught up in that holy reception, made one with the Divine Dance, finding our measure and place. Not lost in the impersonal ether, but found. Found by Love at last. Seeing Him face to face at last. Knowing Him as we are known. There is no fading here, no ceasing to be. You do not cease to be once you rest in the bosom of Being. There you Are. There you finally Become. In the center of His Love is the ending and beginning of our very existence.

Let the heathen rage. Let them weep and gnash their teeth with their gods of sex and money, of self and self alone, of noise and chaos, of static and silence. The Threefold Heart and Mind and Lord of all is calling. His voice is in the stars, on the winds, on the very lips of the morning: "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Boil to Rags, Part 1: Ultimate Reality (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

"Christianity, even watered down, is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags." -G.K. Chesterton

"For God...." John 3:16

Here is the grand assumption, the presupposition supreme. Here is the first cause and mystery, reality resplendent at the back of all appearances. A fountain of ever-flowing Fact and ever-vibrant Life, a Life strong and taut like a bow string set for firing shafts of splendor into the outer dark, or set for playing symphonic sights and sounds that break against all weeping and gnashing like infinite waves against a dead shore. Nothing is barren in that Almighty core, a holy seed ever-germinating newer life, newer still with every harvest. All things new with every reaping. There is no stopping this Life, this Three-Person Life. He is the only power remaining, the only that ever was. All others are derivative from Him and dependent on Him. All strength is weakness beside Him, all truth lies, all beauty corruption, all goodness filthy rags. He is the paragon par excellence, and without Him all is No-thing.

He speaks his Word against our lies, against our raging, simplistic notions, against our mania for fads and fashions and all things temporal and fading away. He is the rock smashing our feet of clay, the immovable mountain which no man can ascend. He breathes His Beauty across our ashes, stirring dead, dull things to life more abundant and free, inspiring despair to come out of its self-inflicted desolation, and bringing us to the threshold and consummation of all desire and pain. He is the fire that consumes our filthy rags into glory unimagined. He lives His Goodness amongst our diseases, our diseased minds and hearts. Our diseased souls that want no good and find no rest. We all are cripples before His ecstasy, and His dance sends we lame leaping. He is the unhidden origin of all our health and happiness and being. He is Being sui generis, and outside or beyond Him there is No-thing.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

The Myth of Postmodern Community (as argued by an orthodox rebel)

One sure thing you can say about postmodernism is that it loves "community". At least, it loves its idea of "community". Whether or not you've heard of "postmodernism," and whether or not you believe that the term has become irrelevant and outdated, if you've lived through the past thirty or so years of western history then you've been influenced by its ideas (whether or not you know it). You have been influenced by the notion(s) that there is no ultimate, overarching idea or "narrative" that explains everything away. You have been influenced by the notion(s) that since there is no overarching narrative that explains everything away, there is now only our individual narratives. And thus (the aged postmodernist sage says triumphantly) we are now free to share our individual "stories" (i.e., subjective experiences) in the great "dialogue" and/or "conversation" of humanity. Hence, postmodern "community".

For the average postmodernist (again, whether they call themselves that or not), all outer forces or influences are a threat to the individual self. Governments, institutions, traditions, cultures, customs, families, and even other people are all conspiring against you to try and "write" you, i.e., conscribe you into some predetermined role or identity made up out of their own nefarious (or simply different) intentions and agendas. We have all (says the aged postmodern sage) been victims of this conscription in the past (esp. minorities and women), and it is our joy and glory to break off these meta-narrative chains and dance in the limitless sunshine of our subjectivity.

The problem is this: dancing is something that you do with others. Yet "subjectivity" is a necessarily particular and individual thing, belonging solely to an individual subject. Now, dancing is surely a communal thing (at least when your dancing with someone rather than at them), but how is subjectivity communal? How can something so fundamentally individual be a basis for communion with someone else? The truth is that it can't. It's like having a "dance" where everyone danced with their own style, to their own music, at their own speed. The result would be a hilarious and pathetic mess.

Our aged postmodern sage (bellowing deeply from his decaying lectern) tells us that we must cast off all of the oppressive narratives of every outer stimuli and assert our own self, our own identity. Then he tell us the reason why: all that those oppressive narratives did was to teach us to hate others (because they were "different," "foreign," etc.) and ourselves (because you aren't keeping "the rules," "the norms," etc.). Once we finally cast off those oppressors, we can finally come together out of love and mutual respect and understanding. In short, we can finally have real community.

The postmodern sage can say that if he wants but it does not change the fact that you cannot build community around self-assertion. Community is about being a part of something bigger than yourself, based around a common, unifying factor. Self-assertion, however, cannot be that factor. It has only the power to fragment, not unify, because it is all about the self, not the group. The all-powerful "I", not the tertiary "we". It is the unconquerable will that has the courage to never yield to any outside force, and it is the center of the postmodern universe.

You see, postmodernism is fundamentally a hyper-individualistic, self-centered philosophy: it asserts the self against all comers. The "I" must necessarily be all-powerful for the individual subject because the "we" is necessarily a threat to the subject. Remember: every narrative that is not your narrative is out to conscribe you into itself, to define you, to demarcate you, to load you with the heavy burden of its set identity for you. That means that everyone who is not you is necessarily a threat to you. What community is there is such a worldview as that? There is no community. No real one anyway. Every assembly of postmodern types (both secular and religious) is not a community. Rather, it is a gathering of unconsciously narcissistic people using others as an audience to their own self-aggrandizement. It may have something like "dialogue" and "conversation," but it does not have community. All that it has is merely us talking about ourselves for the sake of ourselves, and that is not community. That is the lonely "I" gnashing its teeth in the dark. Perhaps postmodernism did in fact free us from hateful, scheming oppressors; but in doing so it has left us in the void, with only the echo of our own voice to comfort us.

Community, real community, requires humility. The humility to see all "others" (including governments, institutions, traditions, cultures, customs, families, and other people) as not a threat to the self. The humility to not live and die on the hill of self-assertion,  self-creation, self-aggrandizement, self-discovery, self-knowledge, self-love, self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and self-satisfaction. The humility to die to self and live for others. It is true that we must use our heads when surveying those others; after all, not all dance partners are equal (and only One is perfect). Yet we must live and breath in the truth that there is no love or satisfaction or knowledge or identity without others. That is why postmodern "community" is a pipe-dream. Their hyper-individualism, treating all others as a threat to the self, creates only a lonely isolationism that becomes the greatest oppressor of all.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

Cultural Apologetics 101 (as demonstrated by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' Hill and said, "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: 'To the Unknown God'. Whom therefore ye worship in ignorance, Him I declare unto you.

"God, who made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Neither is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all life and breath and all things. And He hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being, as also certain of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.'

"For inasmuch, then, that we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and of man's devising. The times of this ignorance God overlooked, but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained. Of this He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead."

-The Apostle Paul (Acts 17:22-31)

Why Religion Matters to Everyone; Or, The Universal Foundations and Consequences of Belief (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

The follow is a "response paper" I wrote while in grad school. It was during a rhetoric class that dealt with the reliability of texts (specifically rhetorical texts). Aside from a corrosive premise that all things deemed "rhetorical" were inherently propagandic and thus inherently unreliable, one thing that irked me about the class was the assumption that the reliability of religious texts was a issue only to the religious, and that the concerns of religion were of no consequence to the secular. In order to politely disillusion the class and its professor, I wrote the following paper. I present it here with a few, non-fundamental alterations.

If we are to be true critical thinkers, it is necessary to view no text as "off limits" in regard to discussion and critique. In the true spirit of Plato's "double open-endedness," no conclusion or assumption is immune from scrutiny. Everyone's assertions, if they are robust assertions, are up for grabs; this is a fact that we must not forget if we are to be honest and clear in our engagement with the world. That being said, I feel that this view of critical thinking must be bolstered with a necessary caution.

We must not kid ourselves: it is erroneous to assume that the reliability of religious texts is a "landmine" issue solely for the religious, and that somehow the non-religious stand in impunity on the sidelines. This is a false premise; it assumes what it seeks to prove, i.e., that religious texts are unreliable. The fact is that the non-religious (and even the anti-religious) have just as much at stake in the reliability of religious texts as the religious. This is because religious texts in general (and the biblical texts specifically) do not claim to be about religion or religious things. Rather, they claim to be about truth, reality, life and death, right and wrong, i.e., the way things really are and really ought to be. This means that their verification or falsification has consequences for all of us, because we all have some kind of foundational assumptions about what is and ought to be.

Most of the non and anti-religious, however, when considering this issue, do not understand this. Their default position runs something like this: The sincere yet wrong-headed religionist, upon discovering the falsification of their holy writ (upon which their entire worldview was grounded and found sustenance), is indeed in a world of trouble, perhaps more than nonchalant speculation has realized. To have your philosophical underpinnings completely undermined, to have your foundational assumptions on metaphysics, epistemology, and morality completely shattered into a million irreparable fragments and lost to the wind, is a position beyond all nightmares. It is true that some manage to survive such an ordeal and move on to some other philosophy, but history gives us other common responses to such a traumatic event: varying degrees of madness possibly accompanied by suicide. Beliefs are not so easily cast aside.

Beliefs, however, are not just a "religious" thing; they are a human thing. We all believe in something (even if it is in "nothing," like nihilists), and those beliefs/biases/assumptions shape our view of the world and how we should function in it. Moreover, because belief is an inherent human quality, the reversal of the non/anti-religious default position on the reliability of religious texts is an equally viable consideration (though it is oddly less considered).

Let us suppose, then, such a reversal. Let us imagine, instead of a sincere yet wrong-headed religionist, a born and bred, thoroughly modern secularist who has been long schooled in the tradition of his elders, viz., that the Dark Ages began at the birth of Christ and continued to the Enlightenment where mankind was set free from superstition and declared (in the words of Lucretius) that "religion...is trampled underfoot, / and by [this] victory we reach the stars." He has long been taught that religion was nothing more than a concoction of the weak-minded who happened to be in power, and that their chief points of serious doctrine were the flatness of the earth, the smallness of the universe, the number of angels on a pinhead, and other ludicrous assertions. As such, he sincerely believed in the death of God, the unquestionable reliability of empiricism, the infallibility of scientific inquiry, and the closed system of cause and effect that is Nature, whose highest (and only) elements are matter and energy. To him or her, religion has proved itself impotent and has long lost its voice in any and all matters other than those discussed in churches or seminaries, those last remaining cloisters of narrow-mindedness. Let this be our first supposition.

Now, let us additionally suppose that within the lifetime of this sincere secularist, there arises a rather rebellious traditional religionist with a strong head on his shoulders and a penchant for irony. This religionist (with tact and force) rises up and dares to proclaim that any and every religious text is open to rhetorical (and even scientific) scrutiny. Let us also suppose that this rebellious religionist (through long, arduous study and research) releases a seminal work to much controversy because it substantially demonstrates (on the word of "most scholars") the absolute reliability of religious texts. Let this be our second supposition.

If these two suppositions be the case (we are speaking hypothetically, of course), what is our conclusion? What has become of our secularist? He has suffered the same fate as the religionist, because the same cause has befallen him, and thus the same effect is produced: the very foundations of their beliefs (the death of God, etc.) have been shaken to the ground, and they too are left in the same nightmarish position. Though I could (and would) argue that moving from a vacuously atheistic, materialist position to a substantial robust, theistic position would ultimately result in sanity and joy rather than madness and sorrow, let it be enough for now to say that in the initial stages of the annihilation of first principles, the secular and the religious are in the same boat.

The point that we should gather is this: we take the issue of the reliability of religious texts far too lightly and flippantly if we assume some sort of immunity from the consequences of the verification or falsification of religious texts (or arguably any text whatsoever). We all have a stake in the claims of religion, and I would postulate that this is a fact that even the secular realize. It is perhaps true that the religious avidly fear analysis because that analysis may falsify their beliefs, but it is perhaps equally true that the secular fear such an analysis because it may very well verify the beliefs of the religious (and subsequently falsify their own). In other words, the avoidance of analysis (when there is any) is most likely not the result of stubborn ignorance or denial on the part of any party. The avoidance seems far more ecumenical, stemming from a very human, almost religious-like dread of the consequences. It may very well be that, on the one side, the religious quake, "What if I'm proven wrong?" While on the other side (and somehow able to be ignored), the secular fearfully whisper amongst themselves, "What if they're proven right?"

In either case, if we are to be critical thinkers who approach all texts and all views (with their assumptions and conclusions) honestly and openly, we would be wise to remember to tread deliberately yet softly, for the "religion" we trample on could be our own in the end.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

The Apologetics of Philippians 4:8 (as explained by a Current Orthodox Rebel)

The following is an excerpt (pp. 14-15) from Joseph Pearce's book  Literary Giants, Literary Catholics. Here Mr. Pearce explains the different kinds of Christian apologetics. Specifically, he focuses on the evangelizing power of Beauty.

Truth is trinitarian. It consist of the interconnected and mystically unified power of Reason, Love, and Beauty. As with the Trinity itself, the three, though truly distinct, are one. Reason, properly understood, is Beauty; Beauty, properly apprehended, is Reason; both are transcended by, and are expressions of, Love. And, of course, Reason, Love and Beauty are enshrined in, and are encapsulated by, the Godhead. Indeed, they have their raison d'etre [i.e., reason for being] and their consummation in the Godhead. Remove Love and Reason from the sphere of aesthetics and you remove Beauty also. You get ugliness instead. Even a cursory glance at most modern "art" will illustrate the negation of Beauty in most of today's "culture".

Once the theological understanding of the trinitarian nature of Truth is perceived, it follows that the whole science of apologetics can be seen in this light. Most mainstream apologetics can be seen as the apologetics of Reason: the defense of the Faith and the winning of converts through the means of a dialogue with the "rational" and its sundry manifestations. On the other hand, the lives of saints, such as the witness of Mother Teresa [or any missionary for that matter], can be seen as the apologetics of Love: the defense of the Faith and the winning of converts through the living example of a life lived in Love. Finally, the defense of the Faith and the winning of converts through the power of the beautiful can be called cultural apologetics or the apologetics of Beauty.

Throughout history, the Faith has been sustained by, and has built upon, each of these pillars. Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas and other giants of the Church have laid the philosophical and theological foundations upon which Christendom has towered above superstition and heresy, creating an edifice of Reason in a world of error. Numerous other saints have lived lives of heroic virtue and self-sacrificial love, showing that there is a living, loving alternative to all the vice and hatred with which humanity has inflicted itself. Similarly, numerous writers, artists, architects and composers have created works of beauty as a reflection of their love for God--and, through the gift they have been given, God's love for them.

Mr. Pearce's final thought sums up my desire as well:

It is in the last of these three spheres of apologetics, the apologetics of Beauty, that I have found my own vocation, and it has become my aim, indeed my passion, to evangelize the culture through the power [i.e., elements and artifacts] of culture itself.