High and Low (Homily 53)

"For thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place with him who is of a humble and contrite spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. [...] But the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace...for the wicked." Is. 57:15-21

God is the High and Holy One: His very nature is "other than" ours. He is categorically distinct and separate, sui generis. He dwells in a high and holy place, i.e., a mountain, the traditional symbol for the dwelling of divinity (from Olympus to Zion). God is above; He reached to the tops of the clouds. God is great; His size is sublime, stretching beyond the limits of our comprehension. "Beyond" is the only word for Him, for He surpasses us in ways we have neither scale nor system to measure.

Yet who dwells with Him? Who also stands on His mountaintop? Who also abides in His holy hill? The humble, the contrite, the lowest of the low. Brought lower by their own abasement, yet brought higher by the surprising love of God, for His love too is beyond us, sublime and measureless and strong. This High and Holy Beyonder loves the broken (Ps. 51:17; Is. 66:2) and takes pity on we fragile children of dust (Ps. 103:13-14), raising us up to heavenly places in Christ (Eph. 2:4-7), setting our feet on the rock, the immovable mountain, that is our God (Ps. 18:31). This too is "beyond" us, exceedingly overflowing what the cup of our mind can hold.

Can you see why there is no peace for the wicked? No peace for those outside of God and His Christ? For what can be more opposite to a mountain than the sea? The one is high, glorious, unmovable, and stable; the other low, treacherous, mutable, and fluid. To the one, storms can only hang about it like a cape or a crown, only adding to its majesty. To the other, storms are their master. Impotent before them, they have no choice but to be whipped and whorled and blown about, unstable in all their ways, broiling and spewing and foaming all of their hidden substance to the surface, bringing to light their true character and quality. The sea has not the strength to be at peace, but the mountain has strength and that to spare. It is the inheritance of the saints of God: you who are established upon the mountain shall never be moved  (Ps. 15:1-5), for the mountain shall never be moved (Rev. 1:8). But for all those who stay outside, I can only give you this: you will lie down in the midst of the sea and have no peace while you drown.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Gospel to the Postmoderns (A Philosophy of Potatoes, Part V)

"I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create [national] calamity. I, the Lord, do all these things. Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. Let the earth open, and let it bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together. I, the Lord, have created it." Is. 45:6-8

There are always gaps in our lives: gaps of knowledge, of understanding, of ability, of identity and purpose. The truth of things always seems just beyond our reach, lost in a cloud of contradictory witnesses, all shouting their personal preferences in a private language of their own making. The white noise created by their effusions and emanations drowns out the clear cadences of reality, and we despair of ever getting to the truth of things, of ourselves. Our only hope (and what a paltry hope!) is to make our best guess, our best approximation to a target we cannot even see clearly. It is no surprise, then, that we all fall short.

It is no surprise to God either. It is the biggest joke of our contemporary, postmodern world that it thinks itself the new thing when it is really the old thing. The same old thing. The same old unbelief, now writ large. The same old failures: failure to see, to hear, to understand, to believe. All of our newest thoughts are merely a shiny new wrapper on the same old junk. We say that the authorial origin is displaced from us by our excess of discursive derivatives. God put it much simpler: we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We are separated from the Divine Origin of Being and Goodness by our primal deviation from His course. Consequently, we have all of us gone astray, even turning others to their own way, every man doing what is right in his own eyes because there is no king in the land. No authorial center to know and reference and be. We lost Him long ago. In our ignorance and arrogance we are lost, spiraling further down into the ever-widening yet ever-increasingly empty abyss of our lostness.

What can bridge this infinite gap? What can slice through all of the derivatives and find the Origin? What can retrace all the traces back to the Source? What can refill every absence with the presence of Meaning? What can reset all displacement and dispersion until the Whole is realized again? What can wash away our Sin? Nothing but the blood, the blood of God in Christ. Nothing but grace, the grace of God in Christ, for in Christ God became flesh and dwelt among us. The Origin became a derivative, the Source a trace, the Whole a discursive displacement, becoming one with the text, the conversation, the discursive field of play, the flesh and blood of men and the whoop and wharf of time. This was not an act of detached Reason, or cold Machine or mere Mind, nor another absurdism of fundamental Chaos. This was an act of grace, grace on the part of One greater than us, greater than all our noise, all our displacements, our mythologies and differances, greater than all our Sin.

Hear the Word speak into our present day delusion and crisis: grace alone is the bridge that spans the gulf of our mighty separation, the sword that slices through the jungle of our seemingly endless texts and myths and positions and postures and preferences and opinions and interpretations, cutting right through all of our jargon and gibberish, navigating the vacuity of our hyperspaces, deconstructing all of our simulations and simulacra, powering through every wall and obstacle that we have erected, crashing through with infinite, furious love and passion and purpose. His head is bleeding. His hands and feet and side are bleeding. His body has been demarcated by those in power. He was wounded for our dispersions, and by His stripes we are healed. By His resurrection, He defeated death and displacement and truth-to-power, so that at His name every knee shall bow and every discourse confess in one voice that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God most gracious. See what His grace has done. What only His grace could have done. It has brought us back to God. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Homily 47: For the Love of God (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"I have formed this people for Myself; they shall show forth my praise." Is. 43:21

The universe dances for the love of God, and by the love of God, for by the love of God were all things created, flying forth from the bounteous, rapturous joy of His Being like light from the sun, like sparks from the furnace, like foam from the sea. We were built from love and for love: from the love of God most glorious so that we may love God most glorious and all His glorious creatures. This is the true way of worship: not in words or song or dance but love, love that is not less than and yet is greater than all expression. True, our halting metaphors are ever-inadequate to pronounce our great purpose, yet we cannot help ourselves. We must sing, we must say, we must do, for the aching desire will not leave us be. Our bones burn until we prophesy the love of God to us, to all, to every one and thing.

Herein is love: not that we created ourselves, but that God created us, and recreated us. He is in the old things and the new things, and newer and newer things still, renewed in deeper and starker shades of glory and grace. There is no bottom to Him, and yet there is no bottom without Him. The dark is endless, the void deep where His love is not, where all things are not. Outside of His love is No-thing, and those who turn to its noths will feel the burn of endless exile, rejection by and of the summit of all light and desire. Who are we to neglect so great a salvation?  If we would be perfect as God is perfect, holy as He is holy, then we should abide by the summation of his commandments and law: love God, and necessarily love others (Matt. 22:37-40; Gal. 5:14).

But we are evil creatures indeed, for no one seeks after holiness, after righteousness, after God. No one seeks the way of worship, no not one. We have all of us turned astray, to our own way. Falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of our own isolation, our terrible loneliness, hard-won by our own spite and hell-born ignorance. God above, most brilliant and profoundest Being of the Deep Light, cleave our minds with Your truth, our selves with Your Selves. Strike us with Your love, your wild and reckless love; like a flash and crash of lightning against a dead tree, make your mark against our bark and spark the fire that burns towards Heaven once again. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Decayed (The Six Shades of Sin, Part VI)

"Woe unto them...who justify the wicked for a reward and take away the righteousness of the innocent!" Is. 5:22-23

Justice is a popular virtue these days, and injustice is an equally popular bogeyman. Properly understood, justice is based on balance: rendering unto everyone what is rightfully due to them. It is an error, however, to then simply equate injustice with imbalance. There is more to it than that, for imbalance is merely the effect of a more fundamental cause: corruption. That is the meaning of Isaiah reiterating immoderation at this point: "Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink..." (vs. 22). Injustice is a product of a prior corruption, the final effects of far deeper decay, and the sequence of this decay has already been made clear by the five previous "woes" in this passage.

From the endless void of greed spawns the reckless imbalance(!) of immoderation, which in turn leads to the greatest of all immoderation: the hubris of impiety. Once we consider ourselves to be equal to or greater than God and His law, the crooked unreality of immorality is a necessary consequent, and consequent to that is the paranoid stronghold of pride, for what else is that fear but a failure to see clearly? Finally, from there injustice blooms, the rear-guard of all moral decay, the crown jewel of that deadly diadem. The rot began long ago, and the decay is inevitable (and in worse cases, final). If woe is upon those caught in the net of sin, then greater woe is upon those who underestimate the insidiousness of Sin itself. This is the great strength of Christian ethical thought: Sin is not doing bad yet pleasurable things. "Bad things" are merely a superficiality, like the skin to a skull. The harder substance is beneath the surface. Sin is not bad doing but bad being. It is an inherent corruption and rottenness, a cancerous and infectious malady of the soul.

Both pagan philosophers and church fathers spoke of an "ascent" of loves, i.e., progressing upwards from the love of lesser things to the love of higher things until you reach the highest of all: God. But there is a descent to match the ascent, a downward spiral to match the upward flight. The true terror of this is that while in the ascent every step upward makes it harder and harder to take a step back, so every step downward makes it harder to step back up again. Glory is alluring; so is evil. "Sin is behoovely," said Lady Julian. It has its siren songs and seductive wares, and every step into its domain is another step deeper into the mire. At some point, there is no return. The descent into Hell is a consummation as irrevocable as the ascent to God. That is the horror and great darkness of Sin.

Sin is that dark, however, so that Grace may be all the brighter. The room is made pitch black so that the light may be like lightning. Herein lies another great strength of Christian thought: we are all of us born the sons and daughters of Hell. We need not concern ourselves with a descent into the mire; we have descended. We need not worry about dying that death; in Adam, we have all already died (I Cor. 15:22). We need not obsess with how to rise or fall; we have already fallen, and we are beyond the aid of men, but not beyond all aid. There is another who descended into Hell, one who was like us and yet not like us. Jesus came, born like a man and died like a man, plunging head-first into death, the dread offspring of Sin. But when He made that plunge, it was like a spark falling into an oil pit. The dungeon could not help but flame with light.

To all who reach out to Him, He laid hold of us and we of Him. And by that mystic, sweet communion, out of the pit we rise, not by might nor by power but by the love of Him who loved us (Rom. 5:6-8; Col. 1:12-14; I John 4:9-10). Sin is behoovely, but all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, for grace is greater than all our sin and is able to save to the uttermost of its decay (Heb. 7:18-25). If the woes of Sin are great, it is so the blessings of Christ may be greater, for darkness can do nothing against the light but magnify its brilliance.

-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

Homily 36: The Other Coming (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"...[we] wait for His Son from Heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, who delivered us from the wrath to come." I Thess. 1:10

The Coming Christ

Christ will come again, and this is no mere delusion or escapism. Beyond the folds of time and the edges of creation, there is a glory prepared and preparing for us, a glory that will outstrip all of our imaginations and shatter all of our vanities.

We each are splintered shards of color, looking and longing for the prism from which we have been refracted and to which we can find the wholeness of light. It is light that is coming, light inaccessible made manifest in the man called called Christ that He might finish what He started millennia ago: to destroy the works of the devil, the outer darkness and its gnashing teeth, banished to the fringes beyond thought by the onset of living light, which it still cannot overcome or comprehend. In this hope, we find patience and endurance everlasting (vs. 3).

The Coming Wrath

There is, however, another coming than that of glory. Beyond the light glorious, there is the fire dreadful. Out past the limits of space and time burns the furnace of the white hot fury of God's wrath. Wrath against darkness. Wrath against sin. Wrath against death. Wrath against all that is fallen, whether worlds or stars or souls. It is no sudden or random wrath; it is deep-seated and long-brewing, for the earth is old with sin and death, and its stench is that of an open sore soured with much filth. There is a holy cauterization looming in the distance, gathering force and speed, until that day when the skies will crack with anger and burn as with the fires of dawn but now with a fire everspreading and unquenchable, whose satisfaction is not met until it receives the furthest farthing.

 

You who long for the glory of living light: do you give no thought to the wrath of ravenous light? A light that hates? Hates because it loves? Hates all dark because it loves all that is light? We who rejoice at the distant music of the spheres: do we not also hear the distant thunder of the hammers of God, forging the sword of His mouth, whereby the Maker will unmake all things? Do we not hear, and do we dare not have pity on those still undelivered, still lost in and doomed to die with the hated dark?

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Legalists and Shades of Grey: Why everyone is wrong (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

The following is a comment I dropped over at another blog. My comment was in relation to a discussion about legalists and literature, viz., how they usually approach all literature from a very narrow point-of-view that prevents the literature from having any positive growth and/or change in their life. I agreed with most of what was said, up until a certain paragraph. That was where the fun began.

"For every [legalist], plot can be boiled down to these elements: Someone is right. Someone is wrong. And Someone is bound to be damned if they keep it up. That's all that matters. Insight into things like life, love, pain, greed, sacrifice, hate, bravery, desire, and the common human condition are just so much window dressing [to them]." (by "Darrell," the site director for the blog)

I take issue with this statement, Darrell, though not for the reasons that you may think.

I am an English major (having just received my Masters last year) and an aspiring author (I'm working through my first novel even as we speak), and I completely agree with your main premise: [Legalists] do not get out of books what they're supposed to get out of books (viz., an enlightenment and enlargement of the mind and soul) because they come to every book with a narrowly constructed box that they try to jam everything into kicking and screaming. The world is larger than they suppose, and God larger still. This, we agree on.

However, I disagree that that box is simply "someone's right and someone's wrong and the latter will be damned if they don't turn around." Rather, I think the box is more "someone's right in my specific way and someone's wrong in my specific way and the later will be damned if they don't turn around in my specific way." [Legalists] have their man-made preconceived notions about what is "holy" and what is "damnable," and that is their error: their moral compass has been tinkered with by human hands, and only an act of God can blast the thing apart and rebuild it correctly. In short, their moral compass is skewed and cramped; that is their flaw. I know that you (and everyone here [on your blog]) would soundly agree with that.

Your actual statement, however, seems to imply that the [legalist's] flaw is not that their moral compass is skewed, but rather that they have a moral compass at all. Though I am sure that that was not your overt meaning, I still feel the need to caution against such implications.

Shades of grey do serve a dramatic purpose (both in novels and real life), but our world is not simply shades of grey anymore that it is simply black and white. In fact, if there were no "black and white," then the very concept of "shades of grey" would lose all meaning.

Simply put, "Someone is right [and] Someone is wrong [a]nd Someone is bound to be damned if they keep it up" may be simplistic, but it is still true, at least in this regard: "Except you repent, you will all perish" (Luke 13:3). The truth is that there is someone who is "right" and someone who is "wrong": God is right, and we are wrong; and unless we repent, we will perish. It is either-or. There is no middle ground.

I write this knowing full well that ninety-nine percent of everyone here will agree in some degree with what I am saying, but I still see this as a necessary caution. In correctly pointing out the suffocating claustrophobia that passes for [legalist] moralism, we must not turn and commit the opposite yet equal error of jettisoning black and white morality in its entirety. Shades of grey do exist, and thus we must approach others with compassion and understanding; but black and white exist too, and thus our compassion must include Jesus' warning: without repentance towards God, there is only damnation.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011