"...boldly to the throne of grace..." (The Lord's Prayer, Part IV)

"Abba, Father, all things are possible for Thee. Take away this cup from Me. Nevertheless, not what I will, but what Thou will." Mark 14:36

"GUIDELINES! Not rules!"

One final thought on this subject: what I said in the beginning still holds now. There is no single "right way" to pray, no formula or checklist to follow, and even the best guidelines are not actual rules. Prayer is a living thing, because it is happening between two living persons, and what happens between two living persons is a paradox. On the one hand, it ought not to change. If it is a truly loving relationship, strong and deep, then it ought to last, ought to remain steady and sure like a rock. On the other hand, nothing will remain forever if it's not made new again, so it should strengthen and deepen, like a tree whose branches grow higher up and roots grow deeper down and yet the whole thing remains solidly immobile.

"I don't get fishing metaphors."

Make no mistake: regardless of your strategy, talking to God will be hard and feel clunky and frustrating at times, like any good relationship. It will last, however, and it will grow as long as there is love, and never forget: there is always love between you and God, whether you "feel" it or not. Of course, He has proven it grandly in Christ (Rom. 5:8), but He also proves it in the specific details of our lives, even in prayer where He has given us His Spirit to intercede for us (Rom. 8:26-27), saying what we cannot, finding the words we cannot. It's like that strange device that Flint Lockwood had that finally allowed his dad to articulate what he really wanted to say to his son. That is the Spirit in all our prayers. That is the love of God in all our prayers: we cannot lose, and we do not fail, no matter what or how we "feel" about it. So we strive in hope and struggle with joy, knowing that our good and great "Abba" God hears us, even and especially when we feel like we have nothing to say.

Amen.

Jon Vowell (c) 2013

The Eucatastrophic God (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

"The wilderness and the solitary places shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing...." Is. 35:1-2

Our God is a loving God. He is love (I John 4:8), a fighting love; not shallow and inconsequential toleration, but a love that kills and is killed for the Beloved. A love that cannot be boxed in or limited, because it is the love of God, and God will not be boxed in or limited except by Himself in covenant (Heb. 6:13-14) and Incarnation (Phil. 2:5-8), in short, in love. It is the paradoxes of God's love that make Him frustrating to a pure rationalist. God is rational, in that all that He does is consistent with Himself; but He is also more than merely rational, and often His consistencies are hidden from our eyes. They are too big for us to see.

This is not simply a matter of accepting God's "bigness," but rather realizing (wondrously, gladly) that He is a "big" person, and as a person He is not reducible to some analytical system of propositions. Of course, such systems are useful as tools, especially certain systems of philosophy or theology. Nevertheless, we must remember (as often as we forget) that our faith, hope, and love is neither in nor directed towards systems that make sense. Rather, they are in and directed towards a Person who loves and thus is full of surprises, for love is full of surprises. To desire and demand (as we often do) an answer for everything, an answer that is neat and tidy and merely rational, is to love some system more than a person, to worship philosophy and theology rather than God.

Many of the hardest "problems" leveled against the Christian Faith could be handle much more magnificently if we would just remember this one fundamental Christian assertion: God is great (i.e., is bigger and thus more inscrutable and unfathomable than we can imagine), God is good (i.e., He loves, and thus is a person who loves, and thus is full of unguessable surprises of goodness and love). Just look at the mind-boggling character and quality of His grace (viz., in redemption). It is logical, in that it flows logically from who God is; and yet logic could never have discovered it on its own, for it is a product of divine revelation rather than logical deduction. It is a surprise that makes sense; glorious, wonderful sense.

Look at Isaiah. In chapter 34, God left utterly desolate the city that injured His beloved. Now, in chapter 35, a new chord is struck: "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them." The "them" in this verse (KJV) is referring back to the animals and wild beasts that have taken up residence in the desolate city and thus confirming its desolation (Is. 34:11-15). Why be glad at such a sad picture? Because it signaled the beginning of glory, the "glory" and "excellency" of the Lord (Is. 35:2b), full of happy turns and sudden surprises: the desert will blossom into a garden (vs. 1-2), weak hands and knees will be strengthened (vs. 3-4), and the blind will see and deaf hear and lame walk and dumb speak (vs. 5-6) as the wilderness and parched, thirsty grounds become filled with water and grass lands (vs. 6-7). At every point, God is turning the world upside-down, turning the vain, prideful beauties of the world into ash and the poor, desolate places of the world into things of beauty and paths of holiness (vs. 8-9).

This is an absolute turn around. This is redemption. This is resurrection. This is the awesome and inscrutable activity of a God who loves and thus is full of surprises, and there is no greater surprises than this: God has chosen the foolish things to confound the wise, and the weak things to confound the mighty. He has chosen base and despised things and things that are not to bring to naught things that are, for the foolishness of God is wiser than man, and the weakness of God is stronger than man, so that all flesh may glory in nothing but Him (I Cor. 1:25-29), the Great-Good God whose unpredictable grace cuts deeper than we know and does exceedingly, abundantly more than we can ever imagine. That is who we worship: not principles, not propositions, not deductions, but the personal-infinite God of love whose grace is greater than all our systems as well as our sin.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

God is not a Democrat (an observation by an orthodox rebel)

"Love is not an attribute of God, it is God; whatever God is, love is. If your concept of love does not agree with justice, judgment, purity, and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong. It is not love you conceive of in your mind, but some vague infinite foolishness, all tears and softness and of infinite weakness." -Oswald Chambers

"Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more.... Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire." -George MacDonald

Our society's long-standing shallow view of tolerance has produced a strong internal notion to accept ourselves and others "just the way we are". This is not necessarily a bad thing. Outer appearances should in no way be a litmus test for a person's dignity and value as a human being, and ofttimes what certain callous persons refer to as "flaws" in others are merely quirks that serve as facets to a person's unique and individual essence. Christian orthodoxy sets a standard for human worth that is simpler and yet higher than such paltry things as looks, education, status, class, race, gender, or even behavior. That standard is the imago dei, which we all meet simply by being born. It is God who determines are value, and no one else.

That being said, God's standard and our toleration are both double-edged swords. The latter is so, because it would have us believe that "who we are" (or who we make ourselves to be) is as good as it will get for us, and the idea that we should "love ourselves" means that we should just be satisfied with what we get. The former, however, knows no such satisfaction. Who we are is valuable, but who we are is not the end. We are what we are, but we are not what we ought. For there is another doctrine of Christian orthodoxy called the Fall, and if it says anything at all, it says that we are not who we ought to be. Herein lies the danger of our self-satisfaction: to be content with a categorically valuable and yet lesser state of being when there is a higher one available to us; and God is saying, "Friend, go up higher."

Judging people by our shallow personal standards is wrong, but not because people are ultimately "fine the way they are". Rather, it is wrong because (as stated before) we are not the judge of human value: God is. We "judge not" because we are not the judge; but (much to the chagrin of our postmodern society) there is a judge, and though He loves us for who we are (i.e., the imago dei) He also loves what we ought to be. There is an excellence of existence for which we were created for, an excellence that is nothing short of God Himself, for it is His glory that we have fallen short of (Rom. 3:23).

A democracy cannot stand excellence, and it is an unfortunate element of modern society (which worships at the altar of democracy) that we would rather view excellence with suspicion and tear it down to our level than aspire and try to ascend to its. We sense that there is something intrinsically undemocratic about glory, about perfection, about holiness; but unfortunately for us, God is not a democrat. He is a King and a Father, and He will see His children be like Him. Not for His sake, but for ours, so that we may finally know the infinite satisfaction in being what we ought, of being like Him by knowing Him fully and absolutely and intimately forever and ever. That is life more abundant, and it is available to everyone born in the imago dei. God's hand is stretched down towards us all. It is a human hand, riven and strong; and know this: it is only our self-centered, democratically fueled sentiments that claim no higher standard than their own private one, it is only our shallow toleration of our self, that will make us spit at the grace of God.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily on the Beatitudes, Part 1: The Call of Desperation (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"Blessed are the poor in spirit..., they that mourn..., [and] the meek...." Matthew 5:3-5

Divine blessing belongs to those who taste desperation. The proud and the confident can never stand on the rock of God. They will always trust their own two legs in sinking sands. The great insult that Christianity lays at the feet of fallen men is this demand for vulnerability and weakness before God. All self-assurance is to be lost and all confidence excluded. If there's one thing that so-called "self-sufficient" people cannot stand, it is this call to admit their desperation. Such an action is anathema to them; they would much rather feign strength than come under such terms.

Feigning strength is all that they can do, however. The call to desperation is not a command to change into something; rather, it is the charm to break the spell that has been cast over us. The truth is that all human strength is a lie: we are all sinners, cut off from the source of all strength, and thus are necessarily poor, miserable, and blind. Our pride and confidence are mere delusions; we are all of us helpless before the power and consequences of Sin, and to be faced with our helplessness is to wake up to reality. It is only when we wake up that we step onto the road that leads to the grace of God.

Epitaph: Jesus calls us back to reality so that we may partake of this truth: those who have nothing will gain everything.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2010