On Goodness (Homily 58)

"...men of the world who have their portion in this life, and whose belly You fill with Your hidden treasure. They are full of children and leave their substance to them. As for me, I will behold Your face in righteousness. I will be satisfied, when I awake, with Your likeness." Ps. 17:14-15

Scandalous!

Every good thing come from God (James 1:17), and He gives good things even to those who do not love Him (Matt. 5:44-45). He gives them passions to pursue and talents to realize those passions. He gives them minds to think and reason to arrive (in part) at the truth. He gives them hearts to love and the ability to find love, to see and appreciate beauty and desire its presence, to long for and attempt to deliver goodness to others. He gives them strength to accomplish things as well as various comforts to succor their weaknesses. He gives rain for their harvests and opportunities for their enterprises. He delivers their enemies into their hands and delivers them from their enemies. He gives them peaceful sleep and happy days, and all this without asking. It is and has been scandalous how good God is to those who do not love Him (Job 21:7-13; Ps. 73:2-5; Jer. 12:1-2). But there is one good thing He does not give them, for they do not, will not ask for it: Himself.

"I am restless for You."

God gives all good things because He is all good things. They find their source and being in Him and are meant to draw us to Him (Rom. 2:4) like rivers flowing to the ocean. The goodness of God belongs to all (Acts 14:17), but God Himself belongs only to His people, His children, His beloved and bride, to those who are satisfied with Him alone. One can never be satisfied with the goodness of God alone. You will always want more, reducing God to a blessing machine for your own avarice. But to have God Himself, to seek God and be found by God, is to find the Good behind the goodness and the goodness thrown in. Then His goodness is no longer a blessing but a bonus, for God is the blessing, the satisfaction of our souls (Ps. 42:1-2) when we taste and see that He is good (Ps. 34:8). Amen.

-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

In Defense of Glory (with an excerpt from an Original Orthodox Rebel)

Not too many posts ago, I published an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' essay "The Weight of Glory". One of the things I like about Lewis is the perfect way that he puts things. His wording not only sounds nice but also makes his ideas make sense. Another thing I like about him I discovered recently: he's not original, at least not entirely. Much of his thinking was just a rewording (or "redelivering") of what Christians have believed and taught as orthodox for centuries. As proof, I present this excerpt from St. Augustine's Confessions (viz., XIII.10). This small section is a good representation of one of the key elements on Augustinian thought, i.e., that we can never rest until we rest in God. Such thinking sounds suspiciously like Lewis; or perhaps I should say, Lewis sounds suspiciously like Augustine. You be the judge.

Why is it said of him [i.e., the Holy Spirit] alone that he is "your gift"? [Because] in that gift we find our stability, there we enjoy you yourself. Our stabilization is our peace. So love tumbles us toward it, your Spirit's favoring will drawing our lowliness up from the portals of death. In that favoring will is our peace.

A physical object tends by its weight to find its natural level. It does not tend, necessarily, downward but toward whatever its natural level is. Fire tends up as a stone tends down. Their weight keeps them in motion until they find their own level. Oil poured under water comes to the surface. Water poured out over oil sinks below it. Their weight keeps them in motion until they find their level. Out of their proper place, they are unstable. In their proper place, they are stabilized. The weight moving me is love. By your gift we are kindled and borne upward, we are set afire and we go, we "ascends the heart's ascents" and "sing the climbing song." It is your fire, your fire for good, that burns in us as we go up toward "our peace, which is Jerusalem," since "I take joy from those who told me, We are going to the Lord's house." There your favor will give us our proper place and we shall wish for nothing but "to stay there eternally."

 

Rich (a song of sweet desire by Current Orthodox Rebels)

Why is this band awesome? Because this song is literally the musical version of Lewis' essay "The Weight of Glory" (an excerpt of which can be found here).

Part of Our Inconsolable Secret (thoughts by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

I like to break up the monotony every once in a while, especially when I'm doing one of my infamous "series". So here, for your reading pleasure, is an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' essay "The Weight of Glory" (from the book by the same name). I do this merely to tease you, as you should go buy the book immediately if you are one of those shame-faced few who have yet to purchase it.

If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise [of heaven]. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connection is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted.

When I attempted, a few minutes ago [earlier in the essay], to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as "the journey homeward to habitual self." You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: "Nobody marks us."

A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being "noticed" by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (I Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, "I never knew you. Depart from me."

In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside---repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

 

The Secret Signature of the Soul (as explained by an Original Orthodox Rebel)

The following is an excerpt from pp. 149-152 of C.S. Lewis' book The Problem of Pain:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then [you] turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw--but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported.

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are [always] curiously ignorant of: something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the swell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling...of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died just as they caught your ear.

But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives [or husbands] or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife [or husband] or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

This signature of each soul may be a product of [our] heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. [...] Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key; and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you--you, the individual reader.... Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. [...] God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

Desire vs. Differance: A Debate Bewteen Lewis and Derrida (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

Satisfaction is fleeting. No matter how hard or how long we search hither and thither across this good earth, amassing knowledge upon knowledge and experience after experience, we never seem to "find" whatever it is that we are "looking" for. We've been often fooled. Many times we think that we have found the thing that has been driving us forward, calling us out through the various wasted realms of this world, from decadence to deprivation; but each time we reach what we think is finally the thing, the drive and the call remains. Thus, we are perpetually restless, fluttering our wings from one nest to the next.

Exactly what this phenomenon (if it even is a "phenomenon") is has preoccupied the minds of many. Two in particular have addressed it: one perhaps indirectly, while the other definitely directly. The former was French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and the latter was British scholar C.S. Lewis. Both seemed to notice the same phenomenon (in slightly different forms), and both theorized about what it could possibly mean. Exactly what their conclusions were have shaped the minds of many (whether they knew it or not) that have come after them.

The smoke-and-mirrors of words.

Derrida is famous (or infamous) for being the primary architect of the critical theory of "deconstruction," which famously asserts, "There is nothing outside the text." In the world of language, Derrida noticed that the meaning of words seems to be continually postponed: words are simply described by more words, which in turn are described by more words, which in turn are described by more words, etc. There seems no way to escape the webbing of language and get at any sort of stable, abstract meaning (i.e., an absolute reference of value) for language. Every time that we try to move past words towards their meaning, we stumble into more words. Every dictionary is filled with words describing words, while any true connection between a word and its meaning/value is not present.

This endless postponement of meaning/value in language is what Derrida called "differance" (a play on the fact that the French language uses the same word for "to defer" and "to differ"). Every word is different from its meaning/value, and thus its meaning/value is deferred; but the meaning/value seems to always be deferred. Thus, it is never reached. This raises the question of whether it is even reachable (or even exists) in the first place. Is there any way outside of "text"? Differance thinks not.

Though Derrida's point was (arguably) purely textual in nature, those that he influenced took his ideas out of the realm of language and into the realm of actual existence. All things are "text" because all things are described/defined/shaped by language. You are a person because we have a word called "person"; there is a God because we have a word called "God". Any attempt to further define either of those words will lead us, not to real personhood or the real God, but more words. In this sense, all is text; and if all is text, then there is nothing outside of that text, viz., there is no (or no knowable) stable meaning/value to existence. Any meaning/value we create is just that: a creation of our own that is simply and endlessly deferred to something else. We do not have beauty; all we have is the word "beauty" and whatever other words we use to define it. We do not have love; all we have is the word and words for "love". There is no God; there is only the word(s) "God". If things such as beauty, love, and God actually exist, they exist forever beyond us, because we cannot rise above the netting of language and reach them. We are trapped in a never-ending hall of mirrors and smoke, ever fooled and ever restless for what can never be attained, if it even exists at all.

The sting of sweet desire.

Lewis is famous (or infamous) for several different apologetic arguments across his career, such as "The Argument from Reason" and "The Trilemma". There is one, however, that often slips through the cracks, even though it was fundamental to his own conversion: "The Argument from Desire". The argument can be found in Mere Christianity, but its most fully expanded version can be found in the "Afterword" to the third edition of The Pilgrim's Regress.

Lewis noted that every human being has desires. Many are relatively simple, such as hunger or thirst or sexual drive. Other, however, or more complex (or "Romantic," to use Lewis' term), such as desires for beauty or love or God. For each desire, however (no matter how simple or complex), there is an object that satisfies it. We hunger, so there is food. We thirst, so there is drink. We have sexual urges, so there is sex. The object of satisfaction does exist. It is simply a matter of finding it.

It seems, however, that only the "simple" desires have immediate objects of satisfaction. What, then, of the more "Romantic" ones? These we seem to search and search for but never actually find. We seem to catch a glimpse here or there, but never the real thing. The object(s) of our more "Romantic" desires are always fleeting and fading away, only to be picked up again at some other point by some other object. Yet though the object seems to continually change (from this man or woman to that painting to that moment in time to that piece of music, etc.), the desire itself never leaves. It is always there to sting us awake and leave us restless and running.

Lewis believed that all human desires have an object that satisfies them. He also believed that "Romantic" desires seem to transcend our immediate context: nothing on earth seems to satisfy them. What does this mean? For Lewis, the answer was simple (yet profound): if we have a desire that this world cannot satisfy, then obviously we are meant for another world. When a creature is where it belongs, they do not feel these "Romantic" desires. As Lewis himself put it: "A man feels wet when he falls into water because man is not a water animal. A fish would not feel wet." Therefore, if we are feeling the sting of "Sweet Desire" (another one of Lewis' terms), then we are obviously not where we belong. We do not belong in the tangle of the text. We belong outside, where sweet desire is at last satisfied.

Both of these positions ("Differance" and "The Argument from Desire") have their different strengths and weaknesses (from a purely philosophical point of view), and they have their various proponents and detractors. For my own part, I'll only say this: Looking at the two positions (two of many, I'm sure), which one truly satisfies you; not in heart only, but in mind as well. Which one seems to answer more (though perhaps not all) of the questions of your reason and experience? I think the answer to that will be very telling indeed, not only about yourself but also about the arguments themselves.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011