Built to Behold (Pornography and the Beatific Vision)

"Whatever you want me to be..."

"One thing have I desired of the Lord, [and] that I will seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and inquire in His temple." Ps. 27:4

We all know why pornography in any form is wrong. The arguments have been made again and again. It is the objectification of human beings that reduces and degrades an individual person's unique Image-bearing self down to a mere sexual object. It is also inherently selfish, a one-way street of desire, where everything is taken in by the voyeur but nothing given in return, and thus reduces and degrades the voyeur to a mere appetite, an animalistic maw, a black hole, an empty void and abyss. Pornography is the hell of the users and the used.

There is, however, another reason why it is wrong, evil, diabolic. There is a reason that strikes at the very essence of what pornography is and therefore its essential perversion. To put it another way, if evil is merely the corruption and perversion of some good, then pornography, being evil, is essential a perverted good, and it is the perversion of that good that reveals the true tragedy. And guess what? It isn't about sex. We assume this, and understandably so (for pornography speaks to sexual desire), but it is not the true core, the most basic good it corrupts and destroys. Peel back the sexual, and you find a more fundamental drive, one that speaks to a unique element of our humanness.

We are built to behold.

Eye to eye

When David says there is "one thing" that he desires above all else, we need to listen careful to his answer. What he desires is intense intimacy and comm- union with God (which is the true sense of the word "dwell" in Hebrew), and that intimacy comes in two forms. One is the pursuit of true knowledge ("to inquire in His temple"). The other is aesthetic appreciation: "behold" in Hebrew means to contemplate with pleasure. This is no small thing. It is similar to the experience one may get when considering a work of art (such as a painting or sculpture or building), but is also similar to the experience everyone has when they look at their beloved, especially eye to eye. Indeed, looking upon beautiful things does something to us that we can't quite understand. We feel drawn in and locked out, called forth and ignored, embraced and left behind. And all this merely in the act of seeing that is also somehow experiencing. To see is, in some way, to experience; and the more intense or profound the sight, then the more intense or profound the experience.

This was not lost on philosophy, and certainly not Christian philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both saw the contemplation of the "Good" as the highest end to human pleasure and happiness (though they disagreed on how to reach such contemplation), and later Christian thinkers like Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Aquinas would work off of them and conclude that since God is "the Good" and God is love, then the only way to truly contemplate Him was to love what we contemplated, to behold Him with pleasure. It is from this logic that Dante's Divine Comedy concludes with the Beatific Vision, the pure beholding of God that is also communion with God.

Dante approaches home

This Vision is no mere fancy of mystics. On the contrary, it is exactly what Christ prayed for in reference to all believers. During His prayer in John 17, Jesus refers to "the glory" that He enjoyed with God "before the world was" (vs. 5), and that that same glory would pass on through Him to all who believe in Him (vs. 20-23). What exactly is this "glory" that Christ shared with God before the world was made and that He now shares with all believers? The communal love found in the Trinity itself: "that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us.... And the glory which Thou gave Me I give to them, that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them and Thou in Me.... That the love with which Thou has loved Me may be in them, and I in them" (vs. 20-26).

In both the Old and New Testament, the "glory" of God is shorthand for his essential nature, who and what He really is at His core. What Christ revealed about God's "glory" was the mystery of communal love found in the Trinity, and it is that "glory" we are called to and swept up into so that we may behold: "Father, I will that they also, whom Thou has given Me, be with Me where I am, that they may behold my glory which Thou has given Me, for Thou loved Me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24). This is eternal life: to know God and Christ in a deep, intimate way (John 17:3), the intimacy of seeing that is also experiencing, for we were built to behold.

"We shall behold Him...."

It is that good that pornography fundamentally perverts. We are built to behold the Good, whether in its substance found in the triune love of the Godhead, or in its beautiful shadows found in sunsets, in paintings and sculptures, and (yes) in the naked, freely given body of the beloved to whom you also freely give yourself. Our eyes were made to see God, and thus experience God, now and forever, and this is what makes pornography so perverse and yet so powerful: it is tapping into our fundamental drive to behold the Good, to behold God, to have the door open and the clouds part and the gray rain curtain of this world rise up and away and reveal the home our hearts ache to have, our real home, our real Lover and Friend.

We are built to behold, and porn is the perversion of beholding.

What do we do with this? There is no simple answer. For those struggling to escape pornography's powerful grasp, the remedy will be complex, a multifaceted administration of grace through hard knocks and strong friends. However, let this truth also be a part of the remedy. Let it provide some clarity, some solid ground to stand on: it is the fair beauty of the Lord that you really seek to see, that you are meant to see, and it is that desire that pornography has sunk its tentacles into and corrupted towards lesser, perverted substitutes. But you are not a hopeless case, because you have this hope: you were not built for unreal images on a page or screen (or stage); you were built for God, to behold Him who no eye can yet bear, nor any mind yet conceive. Draw near to this God, to His beauty, and He will draw near to you (James 4:8), and you will find help in time of need.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2015

A Team Effort (thoughts on courage by an orthodox rebel)

Hey! Don't tell me what to do!

"Be strong and courageous. Be not afraid, neither be dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee wherever you go." Josh. 1:9

"Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might." Eph. 6:10

A common  modern maxim is that we ought to "believe" in ourselves. It is quite a controversial statement. It is simultaneously derided as a cliche outgrowth of pop-philosophy and/or pop-psychology, and yet it is touted everywhere by almost everyone, esp. in our arts and entertainment. It does have a certain silliness and attractiveness to it. Silly because it seems overly simplistic; attractive because it seems positive and ennobling. In fact, it is silly and attractive because there is something true and false about it.

"Happy thoughts...."

The truth it contains speaks to its more general subject, i.e., confidence. The thing is talking about confidence. (Confidence in what, we shall get to in a moment.) This is the part where it tries to hit the nail on the head. We need confidence. Our courage needs some kind of assurance, an affirmation that it can be and is being backed up by something. With such an assurance, we can indeed do great things: take greater risks, think greater thoughts, and do greater acts. Thus, in this general sense of confidence, the maxim can ring true and become attractive.

How 'bout not?

Where it is false, however, is in its specifics: what or whom should our confidence be placed in? Here its answer is obvious: our confidence must be placed in ourselves, in our own strengths and instincts and skills and qualities. In the end, we must be the assurance of our own courage, the backing of our own backs. We alone are to be the final guarantee against all that besets us. Now, there is something ennobling about being your own hero, but there is also something terrifying because the whole thing rises or falls with you. And there is also something anti-Christian about it, which I will now labor to explain.

Do not think that I am about to call anyone who "believes in" themselves a horrible person. Far from it. I have no idea how horrible (or wonderful) they are or will be. I only say that they, horrible or not, have been misguided by misinformation. They have been told that the buck stops with them; for the Christian, this is false. The buck can never stop with yourself. It ought not to. We are finite, limited, and fallen, and while those facts do not rob us of one ounce of value or dignity before God and man, it does mean that we are ultimately unreliable. At some point and in some way, we will fail both ourselves and others. We have neither the strength nor skill nor anything else by which we can adequately back ourselves. This is why the biblical view of courage was always directed at God: be courageous because He is with you; have confidence in His great strength.

This is not simply about power. God has all power, but that doesn't mean it will do us any good. What does do us good is two ideas in addition to His power: He is intimately with us, and He intimately loves us. If you belong to Christ then you belong to God (Col. 3:3), bound together in a mystic sweet communion by infinite love (John 14:20-21; 17:23, 26). It is on the basis of these three truths that we have confidence, not because of ourselves but because there is one who (1) is greater than us, (2) is with us, and (3) loves us.

The loneliest number.

This is a real difference between Christian thought and everyone else. Christianity is fundamentally communal, all the way up to the trinitarian God Himself. Everyone else (mainly in America) is fundamentally individualistic: the "buck" really does stop with us. And the difference between the communal and the individualistic is stark, especially when it comes to courage. For example, in The Matrix, all falls on Neo, the "One". The fight rests on his shoulders alone, on his strengths and choices. But in The Lord of the Rings, there is not the "One" but the "fellowship," which even when it frays, it's frayed into groups. The smallest was Frodo and Sam. The task of destroying the ring was appointed to Frodo, but he did not go alone, and as he would later say, "Frodo wouldn't have gotten far without Sam." Two famous movie franchises. Two completely different messages. (And two different success rates.)

"My dear, do as I do, not as I say."

I think there is something absolutely true about the Christian notion of communal courage. This came home to me in a very frustrating way. I had just watched The Cat Returns, which is an adorably wonderful film with the most disappointingly idiotic moral ever. "Idiotic" because it was not what the film was about. In the final scene, the Cat Baron has just rescued a girl named Haru from the Cat Kingdom. Along the way, Haru had found her confidence and bravery. The Baron's final words to her, spoken with the intonations of Toucan Sam, were, "Remember: follow your heart!" And then the whole thing was spoiled. "Follow your heart" is the same as "believe in yourself," and the film was about neither of those things. Haru did indeed find her courage and confidence, but it was because of the Baron, not herself. The Baron believed in her, fought for her, cared for her, and on the basis of his courage and confidence for and in her, she found her own. That was the real message of the film, the message of communal courage: you cannot be brave alone. It is (so to speak) a team effort.

"Here I've found my bravery."

When Moses died and Joshua was made the leader of Israel, God tells him not to be afraid because He is with him: "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee" (Josh. 1:5). In a strange, non-analogous way it reminds me of the end of Braveheart where Robert the Bruce looks at his fellow Scots and says, "You have bled with Wallace. Now bleed with me." The idea is the same even if the exact image is not: we cannot have confidence alone. We cannot have courage in the void. There must be another with us, one who is somehow greater than us, who is closer than a brother, and who loves us with passion and faithfulness. We act on communal courage all the time, in our imperfect way. How many "stupid things" were you willing to do because your friends were with you? How many terrifying things have you done because a loved one had your back? And how much greater will the risk and danger be, how much sweeter and grander the adventure, when God is the Beloved in whom we believe?

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Into Thy Calm (a fragmentary liturgy)

 
[folio begins]

...seek the Lord while He may be found.

Call upon Him while He is near.

Let the wicked forsake his ways,

And the unrighteous man his thoughts.

Let him return to the Lord, that He may have compassion on him,

And to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.

For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways,

And My thoughts than your thoughts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

And do not return there but water the earth

Making it bring forth and sprout,

Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

So shall My word be that goes out from My mouth:

It shall not return to me empty-handed,

But it shall accomplish that which I purpose

And shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

For you shall go out in joy

And be lead forth in peace.

The mountains and the hills before you

Shall break forth into singing,

And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands...

[folio breaks off]

 

[manuscript begins]

...so if I had one chance to tell you something, then I would tell you that it is all true. Everything. Everything that God has purposed. It is all true, all real, all happening and going to happen. Even the wildest, craziest promise is going to happen. You will go through the dark night and walk into the sun of a far, green country. You will walk into it with joy, led forth with peace, and all the mountains and hills and trees will break forth into singing, and everything sad will be made untrue, and everything wicked will be unmade, and we shall all be remade and are being remade in every moment and every inch of our lives. You who are the children of God: right where you are, wherever you are sitting are standing, you are caught up into the whirlwind of God's will, a wind blowing in one unstoppable direction, towards an end that will be the beginning of all your deepest desires and the resurrection of all good things in a splendor so thick and sweet that your soul will drown in light inaccessible, joy indescribable, and peace passing beyond the smallness of your thoughts and dreams and...

[manuscript breaks off]

[manuscript begins]

...by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole solid figure of these enamored and inter-inanimated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure was the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly---as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw---even this, at the zenith of complexity, complexity itself was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awakening from trance and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation, he looked about him...

[manuscript breaks off]

Selah. Amen. Again...

-Jon Vowell, et. al. (c) 2013

Homily Magnus: A Wild and Wonderful Romp (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"If any man loves God, he is known by Him." I Cor. 8:3

"Enlightenment" (aside from being a particular historical movement) is considered by almost all cultures to be the ultimate goal of humanity. It is an arrival at truth, the truth, the truth that unlocks all the mysteries of existence. In non-Christian circles, this is a kind of salvation: once enlightened, one finds peace with themselves and the world. This enlightening can come in many forms, but the two most common are also the most non-Christian.

One is a purely secular method. The scientific advancement of our understanding (and even our senses) can lead us to grasp the fundamental forces that unite the universe. The other (found in the Platonism of the west and the religions of the east) is a spiritual/intellectual ascension whereby the mind grasps the transcendent truth in its purest form, an ascension acquired by dialectic or meditation. In either case, the end result is a state of serenity: the mind has grasped ultimate truth, the solution to all problems, and we need fight and fret no more.

Non-Christian enlightenment, even if it is "spiritual," is still primarily intellectual: passions and desires must be purged so that the mind can dwell in a calm objectivity and thus grasp the truth. But Christianity makes one very important difference. Desire is not purged from the soul, but instead purged of its deficiencies. Our desires are not evil distractions but crooked affections, affections that must be set straight. Your desires must not be abandoned but perfected. Your "loves" must be put in order, for love is the key to Christian enlightenment.

It is true that there is an intellectual ascent towards God. After all, one must know Him as a true fact as well as understand the facts about Himself that He has revealed to us. Simply put, you cannot even begin to know Him unless you (1) know that He exists and (2) know, in part, who and what He is. That is not heavy philosophy but common sense. If you want to know anything (from parking meters to persons), then they must be both real and knowable. It is an existential "no duh".

But there is something else that is common sense, at least to the Christian: mere facts are not good enough. There is one step more that must be taken, a step that Bonaventure called "synderesis," which is a fancy Greek word meaning that you desire what you know. The object of enlightenment must not only be understood factually but also loved intimately, loved because of what you know about it. In other words, if the facts of a thing do not lead you to love that thing, then you do not really understand it at all. Hence comes the chasmic Christian distinction: true enlightenment only comes through love, viz., love of the highest truth.

This can all sound a bit ivory-towerish, but it's not. We know it is not; we know it is a practical truth of everyday life. The facts just aren't good enough to know something. It is not good enough to only know facts about your spouse (or significant other): their favorite color or music, the food they hate the most. These can create a helpful understanding of them, but it cannot stop there. If it does, then you will never truly know them until those facts move you in love for them. Then true knowledge begins.

I took piano lessons when I was younger. Took them for over ten years. I went to lessons weekly and had multiple recitals. I was (if I do say so myself) very good. I learned all the facts quite well: chord progression, reading sheet music, understanding all the different symbols, etc. I could play any piece put before me, and to this day I can enjoy music as good as any professional. But as soon as other things got in my way (college, work, writing and drawing), I dropped it almost too easily. Why? Because I only knew the facts about it. I didn't love it. I had no passion for it at all.

Of course, the reason I took piano lessons at all was because of my mother, and the reason she had me take them was because she loved the piano. She certainly knew all the facts: she was a college-trained church pianist. But she had something more, something I didn't have, and that was love for the thing itself. I knew this whenever I watched her play. There was a magic in her fingers that I just did not possess. Listening to me was like listening to a machine. Listening to her was like listening to a love affair. Naturally, of course, for the facts aren't good enough, and a thing is never really known until it is loved. As C.S. Lewis put it, "He who loves, sees."

This practical truth is the very heartbeat of Christianity. Our "enlightenment" is to know God, but that knowledge is not in facts alone but in launching from those facts into love. This is the constant theme of the Christian tradition, from Irenaeus to Maximus and Symeon. It is the point of Aquinas' Summa and Dante's Commedia. And (most importantly) it is the truth of the Bible: the highest goal is to love God (Matt. 22:37-38), which means to know God and His Christ in a manner intimate and total (John 17:3; Phil. 3:8-11) and reciprocal (I Cor. 3:23, 8:3, 13:12; Gal. 4:8-9). It is not a truth that we love but rather a Person who is true, and that is the distinction that makes all the difference, marking an insurmountable watershed between Christian enlightenment and the "enlightenment" of others, for ours is truly an ascent while theirs is more of a descent.

Enlightenment is not to fall deeper and deeper into an isolated intellectualism, one whose "peace" is only the silence of its own loneliness. On the contrary, that is the very essence of Hell. I answer that true enlightenment is to go higher and higher into an Other who is love: to know Him is to know love (I John 4:7-8) and to be love (I John 3:2). It is a joyous, rather than abstract, occasion. Our enlightenment, our salvation, of which we are presently part of, is not a study but a marriage, a wild and wonderful romp deeper into desire, for desire is the final door.

If you would know God, then love God. Love what you know about Him. If you know nothing, then go and learn something, anything that captures your mind, and then let it capture your heart, and then let that knowledge and love grow, taking you further up and further in to the God who made you to know and be known, to love and be loved. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Unnecessary Divorces (an orthodox rebel responds to Frank Schaeffer)

I've mentioned before how there is a great swath of young Christians who feel the need to rebel against the perceived dead formalism of past generations and subsequently create a more vibrate, living Christian Faith. As I've listened to the "conversation" of these well-intended souls, I stumbled across this article by Frank Schaeffer (the son of Christian luminary Francis Schaeffer). I suggest you read it carefully, because he says some interesting things.

Now, I am glad that Mr. Schaeffer feels the loss of connection between modern Christianity and its ancient Faith and practice. I too think that a return to the liturgy, and the fundamental communion that it brings, would do a great amount of good in every Christian circle. It is a great shame that most modern, American Christians have been severed from their past, which (as I've demonstrated elsewhere) is full of a much wisdom and beauty.

However, just like every other so-called "progressive" Christian, Mr. Schaeffer can't seem to shake off one misguided mantra: solid theological content is ultimately irrelevant (because it is divisive); what really matters is just the ceremony itself and a sense of "[m]ystery and open-mindedness when it comes to theological content: uncertainty is good" (emphasis mine). The substance is unimportant. What is important is the show: grasp the rites and rituals with an iron grasp, but let things like doctrine and truth be fluid and in flux. This is the same old foolish idea that monkey-wrenches the whole operation.

As I've said before, I'm all for a return to humility in our doctrine. We need to recognize that God is so much bigger than our systems that we make for Him. It is a dangerous mistake to put God in a box, but it is an equally dangerous mistake to think that He has no sharp, distinct lines at all, lines that He Himself laid down for us, revealed to us in Scripture. True, He does not reveal all (for there are not enough books in the world to capture it all), but He has revealed some, and that some is fixed and immoveable. It cannot be erased without disastrous consequence.

Think about it: what is the liturgy without doctrine? What is all our Christian ceremony without those nasty creeds codified from the Scriptures (that nasty closed canon)? What does the Eucharist even mean without the hard doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, without the fixed, substantive idea that Christ was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," etc.? What does worship mean without the hard doctrines of God's Holiness and Incomprehensible nature, without the idea of "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth"? What does community and communion mean without the hard doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, without the idea that we "believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints," etc.?

I will tell you what they all mean: nothing. They mean absolutely nothing anymore, because they have no substance. The beliefs, the hard, doctrinal truths that we believe, are the substance. Lose them, and the whole thing evaporates, leaving behind the husk of dead formalism, the very thing that many in Mr. Schaeffer's camp are trying to escape. What they need to realize is that there is nothing without belief in solid, revealed truth, the truth of God's word, simultaneously simplified and expounded in creeds and dogmas and doctrines. There is no liturgy or community or worship or even Christianity itself without the certainty that certain things are true.

I will never understand the unnecessary divorces that we commit in the name of Christ. The old fundamentalists and evangelicals divorced Truth and Life, fell on the side of Truth, and received an impotent religiosity. But "progressive" Christians (from emergents to anarchists) are no better, for they too have divorced Truth from Life, but instead fell on the side of Life, and what have they gotten for it? An anti-formalism and fundamental skepticism that can find no place to rest, no identity to call its own, and not even the Faith they love so dearly can survive the corrosive chaos. The saddest thing about modern, American Christianity is how from generation to generation we always take a part of the picture rather than the whole, and the result is always worse than where we began.

Here is one true dogma, and I state it defiantly in the face of all modern Christian simplifiers, from radical fundys to radical pomos: it is not Truth or Life but rather Truth and Life: Certainty and Beauty, Light and Love, infinite solid ground beneath our feet and an infinite sky over our heads. They hold each other in a fierce and fiery paradox, and by their presence the whole edifice of the Christian Faith rises and rest stable and secure. But lose either of those elements, and you don't have Christianity anymore. In fact, you have nothing at all.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

A Part of the Play (musings on sweet desire by an orthodox rebel)

"Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desire of your heart.... [He] opens [His] hand, and satisfies the desire of every living thing.... He fulfills the desire of those who fear Him." Ps. 37:4; 145:16, 19

I saw a beautiful sunset last week at Shelby Farms. The sun set behind some trees on the other side of a lake. The sky became prismatic, split perfectly into the shades of the spectrum. The trees were jet black in return, and the smooth surface of the lake doppelgangered the whole image. As I stood there trying to take it all in, I attempted to assess the feelings moving inside of me. For some reason, I felt it was not good enough to simply stand and watch. I felt the need to do something, anything. Write a song or poem, do a dance or clap my hands, shout to the sky or even go for a swim. Dive right into that glassy, cold water, swim across it and then right up the trees and into the colors of the sky. Whatever it was I felt like doing, one thing was certain: being a spectator just wasn't satisfactory.

The experience reminded me of every time I go to see a play. I love plays, partially because of my education and partially because I've acted in them before. So I try to go see them whenever I can. However, I also hate plays because they make me sad in the end. Comedy or tragedy, I invariably discover that being a member of the audience is dissatisfying. I want to be in the play, to take up a role like one takes up a mantle, and be a part of that stage and in the midst of that story. Something bigger than me is happening before my eyes, something too glorious and important to just sit and watch. I want to become a part of what I see, to perform with the performance, to be one with the play. That is how I felt watching the sunset.

Some might say (not unfairly) that my analogy breaks down. I had said that one of the reasons I love plays and want to be in one is because I've been in them before. It is a desire for return, but how exactly can I "return" to the sunset? Have I ever before been one with that kaleidoscope ceiling of the soon sleeping sky? It sounds impossible, of course. However, if I feel bound to remain consistent with my analogy (and I do), then I would have to say that I have indeed been one with the sunset at some point in time. We all have. That is what Eden means. It is not just some tale about naked people in a jungle. It is about original humanity living an existence that we have long forgotten, and yet not completely forgotten. It has been imprinted onto our very souls, for our souls were made to walk with God.

At the origin of all things, we walked with God and all that He is. We were not spectators then: we were part of the play. How horrible is the separation Sin has wrought upon us! We have deliberately flung ourselves away from the central light of the stage to the outer dark of the audience. Worse still, we cannot even see the play anymore, for a veil is erected between us and it. Between us and Him. For now, we can only sense hints and riddles, seeing patchworks of shadows and colors, and even the small joys of spectating (which do exist) are reduced to aching guesswork. So now we sit in the dark, with our guesses, and our painful longings to return somewhere that we can't remember anymore. Of course, in Christ the veil is torn in two, but we too easily lose the wonder of it. We forget that Christ did not tear down the veil between us and moralisms or good behavior; rather, He tore down the veil between us and God, us and the Play, us and the Beauty at the back of all things.

Take your wildest dream or imagination, the one that haunts and hurts your whether waking or sleeping. I tell you that it is all true. One day, it will all be true. One day, faith shall be sight. We will return to the stage, we will cross through the woods, we will dive into the ocean, we will swim across the waters and through the trees and into the sky and then past the sky and stars and spheres to where we will come face-to-face with the King in His beauty and bright array. All the hints and hurts of glory on this world are but the screen upon which Reality is only a blur. That sensuous curtain is not a cheat, but a promise, a promise of greater things yet to be seen, yet to be done. One day it will roll away like a scroll being rolled together, and we will see and be like and be one with the One whose colors are the colors of the dawn. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

The Lonely Maker (some Advent poetry by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

Now that Thanksgiving has passed, the Christmas season can officially begin. (That's right: I'm a purist. Don't hate.) In light of this and in honor of the season, I'll be sprinkling my blog with an occasional "Advent post," starting with this excerpt from George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul.

I do remember how one time I thought,

"God must be lonely--oh, so lonely lone!

I will be very good to him--ah, nought

Can reach the heart of his great loneliness!

My whole heart I will bring him, with a moan

That I may not come nearer; I will lie prone

Before the awful loveliness of loneliness' excess."

A God must have a God for company.

And lo, thou hast the Son-God to thy friend.

Thou honor'st his obedience, he thy law.

Into thy secret life-will he doth see;

Thou fold'st him round in live love perfectly--

One two, without beginning, without end;

In love, life, strength, and truth, perfect without flaw.

Thou hast not made, or taught me, Lord, to care

For times and seasons--but this one glad day

Is the blue sapphire clasping all the lights

That flash in the girdle of the year so fair--

When thou wast born a man, because alway

Thou wast and art a man, through all the flights

Of thought, and time, and thousandfold creation's play.

We all are lonely, Maker--each a soul

Shut in by itself, a sundered atom of thee.

No two yet loved themselves into a whole;

Even when we weep together we are two.

Of two to make one, which yet two shall be,

Is thy creation's problem, deep, and true,

To which thou only hold'st the happy, hurting clue.

No less than thou, O Father, do we need

A God to friend each lonely one of us.

As touch not in the sack two grains of seed,

Touch no two hearts in great worlds populous.

Outside the making God we cannot meet.

Him he has made our brother; homeward, thus,

To find our kin we first must turn our wandering feet.

It must be possible that the soul made

Should absolutely meet the soul that makes;

Then, in that bearing soul, meet every other

There also born, each sister and each brother.

Lord, till I meet thee thus, life is delayed;

I am not I until that morning breaks,

Not I until my consciousness eternal wakes.

[...]

Go, my beloved children, live your life.

Wounded, faint, bleeding, never yield the strife.

Stunned, fallen-awake, arise, and fight again.

Before you victory stands with shining train

Of hopes not credible until they are.

Beyond morass and mountain swells the star

Of perfect love--the home of longing heart and brain.

 

 

Boil to Rags, Part 6: Free Indeed (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

(See the first post in the series here.)

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him...." John 3:16

Faith is the very heartbeat of existence. The world may doubt faith, but it can never live without faith, for faith is trust in action, a very common and yet a very magnificent occurrence. It touches everything, from the flowers that trust the sky for rain to the child who trusts their parents without fear or question to the very heart of the Godhead Three: their perfect communion breeding perfect knowledge, and perfect knowledge leaping out in perfect trust. He trusts in His will, and into His hands He commits His spirit. So you see, from the highest to the lowest, faith is trust; furthermore, it is trust in another, for where there is no other, then there is no faith. Faith in Self is not faith at all but the very essence of Sin, and what is of Sin is not of faith. Likewise, faith in faith is not faith but foolishness, for faith is an action and not a being, and an action turned back in on itself is aimless and therefore lost. Thus, it is not good that faith should be alone.

Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Without trust, we dishonor Him, claiming Him to be unworthy of our lives and our love. Yet we abandon ourselves to everything else: to pleasure and power, to dominance and doubt, to money and markets, to self and satisfaction, to work and causes and fads and all the unstable chaff of this world. We abandon ourselves anew every day to a myriad of vaporous lovers, but we will neither submit nor surrender to Love Himself. Oh, we will disguise our fear and arrogance by calling it false names like rationalism or "healthy" skepticism or "humble" agnosticism, but we are all liars and self-deceived. Our skepticism is always selective, and we will always trust in our doubts as long as they will keep us both safe from the living God and free for our own will.

Yet the doubting soul is never free, for freedom belongs to faith alone. Doubt pulls one into the self: our lusts and desires and will to dominate our own life. It is a vacuous narcissism that pulls all inward, making a cage out of its own desire. But faith knows no cages, for it is an ever-expanding thrust outward, breaking barriers and walls and bars, discovering newer and newer undiscovered countries and canvases of souls. Never stopping until it touches and is caught up in that Soul whose very essence is faith, an endless giving and receiving, trusting and loving. For in God alone our faith find a resting place where its movements never cease, and thus it is ever-satisfied.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily 37: Love and Holiness (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"And may the Lord make you to increase and abound in love...to the end that He may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness...." I Thess. 3 (vs. 12-13)

There is a sacred bond and intimate connection that love has with holiness, with the otherness of God, for love is not a human invention. It does not even do it justice to call it a discovery. It is more like a revolution. Love falls upon humanity like a clap of thunder or erupts from amidst it with volcanic violence. In blatant opposition to the dark instincts of survival and domination that to this day drive the bestial side of mankind, there comes a voice and notion piercing through, wholly alien and yet wholly welcome, a passion that in its finest and truest manifestations places the self on the lowest rung and places another on the highest in an act that seems nigh to worship. Indeed, it inspires worship, whether in ceremony or in song; for mankind's instinct to survive has always been natural, but love has always been divine.

God is love, not in an accidental sense of His actions but in an essential sense of His existence. Love is His very being, which is to say that it is His holiness, the very quality of His otherness that makes Him separate and unique and above us. For us, love is lovely but seemingly foreign to our natures, a transplanted essence from other realms; but God knows no such division in Himself. His persons dance so fully in love's purest reality and expression that we cannot help but call them one, for they are one. Love pulls together perfectly (Col. 3:14), binding all together in a harmonious whole by its continuous deference to another, to the beloved. Its deference is its unity: therein is the paradox and the beauty. Sin is separation (Matt. 7:23, 25:41) and isolation of the self (Is. 14:13-14): therein lies the terror and the reason for why holiness can never know sin, for sin cannot abide its communion. To be freed from sin, to be holy, is to be one with Love: not our love, our vapid, shallow, half-halting indifference masquerading as tolerance; but love fierce and faithful and everlasting. The love of God and the God who is love. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012