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

Homily 29: How to Be (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them." John 13:17

Happiness is invariably linked to obedience. We must rescue this concept from the legalists and moralists of the world. They have made obedience an arbitrary rule-keeping, reducing it to an inevitable drudgery. If there is any happiness, it is artificial, and there is many a legalistic church full of fake, artificial happiness. Outwardly is all smiles and shouts, but inwardly is a cancerous ennui. Life with God becomes a chore to be done, happiness and joy be damned. This is the view that most people have of obedience, and we must rescue it from such a horrid corruption.

God is Creator: He made everything. More to the point, He is our Creator: He made us. This is much more than a matter of matter. If God has names for all of the stars (Ps. 147:4), which physically are just balls of burning gas, He certainly has names for all of us, a name which He shall reveal to us one day (Rev. 2:17). That is a point that we must not miss: our identity is bound up in God, an identity whose full disclosure will come to us when we see Him face to face (I John 3:2). At the very least, we can gather for now that we are a creature: not in a bestial sense, but in the sense of something that is made. We are from the hand of a Maker; that is (in part) who we are. That is where we belong. It is our "place," so to speak, and identity is about place, viz., the place where we "fit," like a puzzle piece, or a bone in its socket. The whole history of human Sin (even to this day) can be seen as humanity trying to find their place without God, which is a futile endeavor. If we want to know who we are, then we must go to the One who made us.

This sheds a new light on God's commands. He is not just giving us rules, the arbitrary assignments of a divine monarch. Rather, He is teaching us how to be. The commands of God are the precious communique from Creator to creature where the former tells the latter who they are, who they ought to be (for the very nature of the Fall is that we are not who we ought to be). This is why obedience is happiness: when we obey the Creator, we are being who we are, who we ought to be and were meant to be. We have found our place, our identity, our home. And there's no place like home.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011