Heaven (and the Fulness of God)

"...with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light." Ps. 36:9

Parallel (in contrast)

Hebrew poetry follows the logic of parallelism: the first part of a poetic line is mirrored in the second part, either in contrast or by compliment. The parallelism found here is complimentary, implying that "life" and "light" are in some way synonymous, which is not an unheard of biblical image. Jesus was said to be the "life" that was "the light of men" (John 1:4), and He Himself said that any who followed Him would have "the light of life" (John 8:12). This imagery even has its biblical contrasts, such as when the "Shepherd Psalm" talks of "the shadow of death" (Ps. 23:4). None of this is new symbolism: light and dark have long been associated with good and evil and all their corollaries, and this image is consistent in the Bible as well.

What is interesting here is the odd repetition in the second part of the verse: "in Your light we see light." It smacks of tautology, but I believe it can't be anything so banal. Psalm 36 is broken into three movements: the first describes the wicked as those "with no fear of God" before their eyes (vs. 1-4), the second describes God and why it is foolish to not fear Him (vs. 5-9), and the third describes the separate fates of the righteous and the wicked, of those who fear God and those who don't (vs. 10-12). The odd repetition comes at the end of the second movement; it is the climax of the psalmist's thoughts on God, the purest expression of why we should "fear" Him. As such, I like to think it is more than a mere redundancy.

More than just this.

The Hebrew word used here both times for "light" is "owr," which means more than just illumination (like lighting a match). It means illumination in every sense of the word: glory, splendor, the dawn, happiness (i.e., someone's face "lights up"), enlightenment, and of course, life (the "spark" or "flame" within). It is an all-encompassing light, a Light of lights, one that includes all lights and yet is reducible to none. Now, there is still a repetition, but it is not "light" and "light" but rather "all-light" and "all-light". In short, the psalmist is saying, "In Your All-Light we see all light," or "In Your full Goodness, we see all that is good," or "In Your full Glory, we see all that is glorious," etc.

It is similar to Psalm 16:11 where it says, "In Your presence is fullness of joy." The Hebrew word for "fullness" is "soba," which means to be filled to satisfaction. "Fullness" of joy is a summation and fulfillment of joy, a culmination of all that is joyous. Likewise, just as God is "fullness of joy," He is also "fullness" of light. He is all things joyous, all good and glad moments and objects and concepts, in a single source; and He is all things luminous, all glorious and vivid and illuminated things, in a single source. He is the All-Light and the All-Joy: in His Light we see all other lights, and in His Joy we find all other joys.

Home at last.

This is why Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and why Anselm said that the "most supreme" Being had to encompass all that was good while being reducible to none of it, and why Aquinas posited God as the proper desire and home of the soul, drawing it to Himself like gravity draws a stone to the earth. In the Christian mind (as in the mind of our Hebrew ancestors), there is only one place of complete satisfaction, only one place of rest and peace at last and forever, and it is not in money, sex, power, success, prosperity, self-actualization, self-discovery, activism, capitalism, socialism, progressivism, conservatism, or the thousand other flawed institutions and endeavors of fallen humanity. Rather, it is in God alone, for He alone is the All-Joy, the All-Light, the All-Good, the source and fullness of all things joyous and splendorous and wonderful.

In this life, we are blessed enough to catch just shadows and echos of His greater life, both in the way that all facets of existence declare His glory (Ps. 19:1-4) and all visible things reveal His invisible attributes (Rom. 1:19-20). The numinous moments allotted to us now contain enough beauty to weaken us like a wound, if we're paying attention. How much more then shall the effect be when faith turns to sight and all shadows turn to all-light and all echos swell into one mighty voice as singular and as multifaceted as a symphony? How much sweeter will life itself be when we find its fountain in God and taste and see its fullness in Him? I know no other definition of Heaven than that.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2014

A Continuing Defense of Glory (from another Original Orthodox Rebel)

Continuing the premise laid down in this post, here is an excerpt from "Hymn 1" of St. Symeon's Hymns of Divine Eros. It not only speaks of the reception into glory awaiting the faithful, but also the rejection by glory that awaits the unbelieving.

[T]hus are those who have stood by God Who glorified them:

they persevere, astounded by the excess of glory

and by the endless addition of divinity's splendor.

For the end will be eternal progress,

the condition of additional, endless fulfillment,

and shall make an attainment of the Unattainable, and God,

of Whom no one can get enough, shall become the source of satisfaction for all.

But the full measure of Him and the glory of His light

will be an abyss of progress and an endless beginning;

and just as those who have Christ transformed within them

stand by Him Who shines unapproachably,

so also the end in them becomes a beginning of glory.

And---in order to make the idea more clear to you---

in the end they shall have a beginning and in the beginning an end.

Understand me: one who is overflowing needs no addition,

and runners do not overtake the end of the infinite.

For if this sky that we see passes away,

as well as the earth and all things in the earth, then seek what I say:

it will be the attainment of the place where you find fulfillment.

[...]

This All is filled with the divine divinity

And so those who have a share in Him, those who dwell in Him,

how may they embrace all of Him, and so be satisfied?

How, tell me, would they grasp the end of the endless?

It is impossible and by all means impracticable.

For thus neither for the saints still in the body,

nor for those departed to God

can such a thought at all penetrate them.

For they also are covered by the light of divine glory;

they are enlightened, and they shine,

and they revel in all these things.

And they truly know as though by every certainty

that their perfection shall be endless,

and the progress of their glory shall be everlasting.

I wonder where those who fall away from God stand,

those who stand afar off from Him Who is everywhere?

[...]

These also shall certainly be within the All,

but they shall be outside the divine light

and certainly outside of God;

for just like those who do not see when the sun shines,

even if they are illuminated all around,

they finish their lives outside the light.

They are separated from the sun
by perception and contemplation.

So also is the light of the Triune Divivity in the All,

and in the middle of the light the sinners are enclosed in darkness,

not seeing, not having any divine perception at all,

but burning in their conscience,

and being condemned, they shall have unspeakable calamity,

and an unutterable suffering unto eternity.

 

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.

 

Further Up / Further In (a song by Current Orthodox Rebels)

Think of this as Homily 40 in song form:

Homily 40: On Job and Suffering (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees Thee." Job 42:5

The book of Job is an enigma for many, but its main mystery does not lie in the question, "Why do the righteous suffer?" For many, the real mystery is found in why God chose to answer with an apparent non-answer. Job asks for the reason behind his suffering. Fair enough, we say. Then God shows up and never addresses Job's suffering at all. Instead, He uses a series of questions in order to make a statement about Himself: His power, His majesty, and His glory (and subsequently Job's lack of those things). The whole exchange reeks of non sequitur, and yet Job finds satisfaction. Suddenly it is not a matter of bullying on God's part (a case easier to make if the book had ended at 40:5). God does not want Job to shut up, to "place [his] hand over [his] mouth"; He wants him to see something, i.e., Himself. Job does see, and this gives him peace. He asked for an explanation, but what he got was a revelation, and it was enough. Perhaps that is the actual mystery: neither Job's suffering nor God's apparent non-answer, but rather Job's satisfaction. In that mystery, however, there lies a profound significance that we must not miss.

We are all shallow creatures indeed, thinking that some formulaic explanation will bring ultimate satisfaction to our souls. Believer and non-believer alike often think that if God would simply state His case (with flowcharts and footnotes), then we would be content. But we would not be content, for it is not God's case that we need but God Himself. In the book of Revelation, the glory of Heaven is not that we will receive some syllogistic answer for our troubles but that God is there (Rev. 21:1-4, 22-27; 22:1-5), and (as Job seems to suggest) God will be the answer. That is the mystery and the beauty. The gray rain curtain of this world will one day fade away, and as we see the sight all souls long to see, as we catch the beatific vision of the Empyrean Prime in His Beauty, as we come face to face with our Maker and Lover and Friend, there will be no more questions, no more doubts, and no more tears. God's mere presence, His mere Self, will be the answer to all the riddles. Words fail at this point. They always fail the truth at some point, but all shall be well. Like Job, we too shall one day move beyond mere words, beyond mere hearing and into the glory of sight. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

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

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.