"...like a tree..." (Notes to a Vagabond Generation)

"Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly.... [rather] his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by a river.... The ungodly are not so but are like the chaff, which the wind drives away." Ps. 1:1-6

The bogeyman of my generation.

All the counsels of the ungodly wither. They are without substance, for the counsel of God alone is all-substance. This is another one of those radical, rebellious notions that offend the finer sensibilities of my vagabond generation. We prefer to "keep our options open," avoid ruts, and escape "comfort zones." We fear stagnation; we fear petrification. We fear consistency and coherence, and what is more stagnant and consistent than a tree? It spends its whole life in one spot, gripping tighter to its beloved safe zone. It will never know the freedom and personal growth of the uprooted life. Of course, an uprooted tree no longer grows at all, but that is hardly the point to us. Carpe diem is the point, and we shall seize it even with our dying breath.

"Viva la freedom!"

All our romanticized idealism over "freedom" or "liberation" or "openness" does not change the hard, common sense fact that an uprooted tree is still a dead tree. You can replant it with each uprooting, but the continual upheaval will be enough to kill it eventually. Trees are meant to stay put, to take root where they are. The stability of its location, the consistency of its nourishment, the coherence of the operation of its parts---all this "stagnation" is its strength, its very life. If that is stagnation, then perhaps we should all be a little more "stagnate."

"All the earth and sky are mine."

It is not stagnation, however, and that is the single greatest error made by my generation: we equate stability and consistency with stagnation and death rather than life and strength. God certainly sees it as life and strength. That is why He uses the image of a tree in this psalm, and it is a perfect image. A tree is a paradox. It never moves, and yet it's always moving. It remains where it is planted, yet it consistently grows further upwards and downwards, gripping the earth tighter and tighter with a myriad of brown fingers coiling from a great knotted fist, and stretching into the sky higher and higher with a multitude of branches unfolding like outstretched hands holding a rich supply of leaves and seeds and fruits and flowers. It grows simultaneously more entrenched and more outrageous, outrageous because it is entrenched.

Dante visits "the liberated."

That same tree-paradox is the life of those who build them- selves on the true, substantive counsel of God. The more they entrench themselves in the truth, the more substance they gain, and the more outrageous and lavish and wondrous their life grows. Our vagabond generation does not understand this. We prefer to hobo it from one patch of ground to the next (in order to superficially "experience its culture" or whatever), and in the end our rootlessness leaves us tossed about by every wave of doctrine or thought or fashion. Like chaff on the wind, we are unceasingly restless and aimless, never finding home.

And all the while, we who are rootless cast a pitying eye to those who have been planted in God's truth, assuming that their immobility will be their destruction; but that assumption will be our destruction, for immobility can be a proof of life just as much as of death. Proof that the tree has been planted by a river. Why should it move? Why would it move? "To whom shall we go?" said Peter to Jesus. "You have the words of life" (John 6:68). By His words we are fed, and by His words we sink deep into infinite earth and stretch high into infinite sky. Again, why would we move? We have found the source of life.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Boil to Rags, Part 8: Amen (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 shall not perish but have everlasting life." John 3:16

I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever, for He has given us All. He has given the greatest, the highest. He has given Himself. Life has given Himself for us, has given Life to those who seek and find Him. Now we who were restless have found rest. We who were bound have been set free. We who were dead now live. Our bones were once out of joint, but now they are knit together, and breath has filled our lungs. A living breath, full of passion and purpose, burning with the very heart of God. We only thought that we lived, but that was but death's dream kingdom. Now we dead live. We have been made new, raised to walk in newness of life. A life beyond life, new life, life more abundant and free. Life bound up in holy, intimate communion with the Godhead: hidden in Christ, filled with the Spirit, known by God. For herein is everlasting life, that we might know Him, the one true God, and Jesus Christ, He who was dead and is alive and lives forevermore.

What have we done to merit such favor? What gifts or strengths did we bring to catch the eye of the Almighty King? None. No righteousness. No goods. No power or might. All our righteousness is filthy rags before Him. All our goods are as good as evil. All of our strength is mere weakness. Before the I AM we are No-thing. Yet He has come for us, not because of us but because of Him. Because He is righteous. Because He is good. Because He is mighty. He is Love unstoppable, Life unkillable, and Light unquenchable. His goodness is in giving, a giving of Himself and nothing less. Not on our account, but on His. He loves to love, and He has sought us as His Beloved, not because we are lovely, but because He is God.

What is left for us to say but, "Amen."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily Magnus: On Death and Life (as proclaimed by an orthodox rebel)

"...for why will you die...?" Eze. 33:11b

Our world is made of antitrust. Over one-hundred years of unchecked, rampant skepticism has corroded away the image of trust. Suspicion is our new religion, forged on the altar of self-deification. All other things, whether they be friends or family or strangers or institutions or traditions or customs, are a threat to our own self-actualization. We must hold all others, however dear or precious, at arms length, taking with a grain of salt everything that they say or give. They must not be allowed to shape or dominate us. They must never own or conscribe any part of us. So we retract into ourselves in recesses beyond thought, in dark lairs of corners of our minds, and in those dungeons deep we forge in secret our master self, pouring into it our will with which we thwart all others. Our selves are always sword and shield, never true open arms and welcoming embrace. Something will always be held back, something no one is worthy of in our eyes, i.e., our real self, made only by the hand of God and the Fall. Such is the lonely, oh so lonely narcissism of our fragmented world.

God has a word for such self-centered isolationism. He has a strong, simple term for our sad division: Sin. It is from Sin that we cut ourselves off from all things. It is Sin that lifts high the banner of self as the flag of the world. It is the sin-sick soul who sings, "I am a god. I sit in the seat of God in the midst of the seas" (Eze. 28:2b), "My river is my own, and I have made it for myself" (Eze. 29:3b), and "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will be like the Most High" (Is. 14:13, 14). Our narcissistic fragmentation is not a result of postmodern liberation and deconstruction, nor of heroic and idealized self-assertion, but rather the monstrous pride that sets the self at the center of all things. Our exaltation of self, having degraded and degenerated into a horrid and absolute skepticism, eventually collapsed from a hyper-individualism where we are the only star in our lonely little universe. There are no gods or kings or even man; there is only me. No man is an island, but every man dreams of a private island, and no island is more private than the island of self-love.

We all have been drawn away by our own lusts for our will and way and self above and against all others, even God Himself; and when that lusts conceives, it brings forth sin, and when sin is finished it brings forth death (James 1:15 KJV). The soul that sins shall die (Eze. 18:4b). There is no other alternative. It is a law of existence just as much as gravity is a law of nature. It is the only reason and explanation for this living death that we are in: our noise and insanity, our fashions and futility, our callousness and frigidity, our decadence and apathy, our lusts and lunacy, our ugliness and horrible, horrible depravity. We are the hub of a lone wheel, trapped in the mud, spinning endlessly in an infinite rut, digging our own graves as we whirl in maddening stillness.

Hear now the word of the Lord who made the heavens and the earth and your self: "Why will you die?" Life is never found in the self; rather, it is found when the self is finally forgotten, given away, killed outright for the sake of another; and God is the ultimate Other: "He who loses His life for my sake shall find it" (Matt. 10:39). Herein is life, not the uncompromising worship of our self, but the unconditional surrender of the self into the love of God. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His only Son to save us from the dark tyranny of Sin that makes the self a god, so that we might know the only true God, know in the most intimate and sacred of ways. As Father and child. Friend and friend. Lover and lover. It is only when we take that first step, that first step of trust in the God who made us and loves us, that first step off of our lonely precipice to fall headlong into the infinite ocean and drown therein, only then will our sad division cease.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

"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."

-George MacDonald (from Diary of an Old Soul)

The Dance and Death (an Advent devotional by an orthodox rebel)

There is stillness in God, but not as we understand stillness. In God is the highest life and energy. In Him and from Him is all movement, as Dante would describe it. In Him is the Great Dance, as Lewis would say. With God there is no ceasing of activity, but rather the perfecting of activity, because the activity is no longer wild and aimless and weary from wandering. It has found its object, its mark, its "resting" place. It has come home, and that is the stillness of God: the inward peace in finally becoming one with God's life and energy, of becoming one with the Godhead's triune dance. The peace of God, the stillness of God, is in the soul coming home at last, where God turns our mourning into dancing (Ps. 30:11).

There is stillness in Sin, and it is exactly as we understand stillness. Decay. Corruption. Moth and rust destroying. The sinful soul is the derelict soul. The soul that sins shall die (Eze. 18:4), and death is the final stillness, the final ceasing of all energies. Whenever a soul sins, it has turned itself away from God, away from the movement to the frigid static, away from the dance into the outer dark. For Sin is the calcification of the self onto anything that is not God. All other things of creation (even if they are good and noble) are dumb, lifeless idols whenever they try to take God's place, and their worshipers become just as dumb and lifeless. In the holiness that is the worship of God, in that grand dance and symphony, is life everlasting; but in the sin that is the worship of the self, or any other created thing, is the petrification of the soul unto death.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

Homily 32: Solitary Confinement (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! [...] Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore, she has become a wanderer." Lam. 1:1a, 8a

There is something isolating and destabilizing about sin. At bottom, it is attempted independence from God, attempting to set up your own will as central and dominate. Such an action has only one result: not independence from God (for every breath you take belies your dependence), but rather independence from all else. To be the god of your own universe is to be alone. When all else and everyone else live to serve your ends and means, they all become dust in your mouth and shadows to your eyes. The Fall infected us with a perpetual madness that tells us that rebellion against God brings freedom. It does not. It only brings a cage whose iron bars cut us off from the land of the living. The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), for sin steals all life, leaving you alone in the deathly void. Furthermore, the more you rebel, the more you actually begin to enjoy the cold silence of your self-erected dungeon, and soon its doors will be locked from the inside rather than the out.

God is the only God, and Jesus is the only Lord. That is not an arbitrary truth or assignment; it is the very way that the universe is made (Ps. 24:1-2; Col. 1:15-17). To submit to that great order is not weakness or impotence. It is the only way to find your strength, your song, your place in the Dance; for all that truly lives dances to the love song of God's will, by which the stars sing and worlds whirl. Those who refuse to partake in the triumph song of Life fancy themselves strong, but they are weak and dying. They are poor, miserable, and blind. They have not the strength of God's joy nor the power of His life, and all that they can do is sit in the dark by themselves and sneer.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

Homily 1: On Life and Light (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light." Ps. 36:9

Herein we find the source of all good things, the fountainhead of true life and living. What do those who are dead know of living? They know nothing but the grave, and even we who have been made alive have only shadows and half-whispers, making our hearts ache for the substance and symphony (if we are still awake and hungry). Many in the Church have been lulled to sleep by the constant drone of the world and modern religious life, falling face down in their own private mud, having lost the sound of the sea in their ears. Meanwhile, the dead march on into their ditches, believing that they have found the whole when all they have is stained and strained particulars. It is by grace alone that the sound and presence of real life haunts them again, the grace of God that sends again the echoes of His goodness and beauty. We know nothing of real life until we are one with He who is alive, and how will they know about He who is alive unless someone tells them about Him?

Our mind's eye cannot yet comprehend the reality of His beauty; He has scattered it abroad like flaming pearls across the dark pit. Those who are blind cannot see them unless He sends them light. People talk of real things: real love, real joy, real peace, real beauty. What do they know of such things apart from God? We who are His see only dimly (I Cor. 13:12); those on the outside see only darkness, a darkness that serves only as a mirror for their own emptiness. Such a horrible state should shake our souls with compassion. There is a whole world of people out there missing true life, who cannot see and be a part of what they were meant to see and be a part of. Let us, therefore, lead them to the place of light and life (John 1:4).

-Jon Vowell (c) 2010