The Chief End of Man (is not Man)

"In Thy presence is fullness of joy. At Thy right hand are pleasures forevermore." Ps. 16:11

"O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name forever.... O taste and see that the Lord is good." Ps. 34:3, 8

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A: Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

(Question 1, Westminster Shorter Catechism)

It ain't paint by numbers.

Nobody makes themselves, and nobody is meant for themselves. These are two truths that are continually forgotten.

Everybody believes that they must make themselves. We are all blank slates or empty vessels who must substance ourselves with identity and purpose, becoming "self-begot, self-raised" by the end of our lives. We see no essential quality or purpose for us, no created meaning or given identity. We do not see ourselves as becoming something specific (like a child growing into their clothes, or an acorn growing into an oak). Instead, we see ourselves as nothing until we make ourselves something, anything. All this and more are the assumptions of the average person, and it is a great lie. No one made themselves, and no one makes themselves, and any attempt to make ourselves will fall short of the glory we are called to.

Respect the 'stache.

People also assume that we are meant for ourselves. The Nietzschean dream has been watered-down, but it is still alive: our chief happiness is to be found in our own aggrandizement, realization, and fulfillment. We are self-centered beings to the core, even in our finer moments. Everything boils down to our own happiness, our own flourishing. All our deeds, good or bad or neutral, are built around and building towards our own fulfillment, towards the identity and meaning that we plan for ourselves. Even God Himself (if we believe in such a thing) becomes subordinate to our own ends: religion becomes a means of social grace and standing, and worship becomes a means of emotional satisfaction. How many churches are there whose congregants come together in the name of God to worship themselves?

We are not meant for ourselves. We are meant for God, to exalt Him and delight in Him. This is the identity in which we were created. This is the purpose for which God made us. We were made for God, and you ought to be instantly suspicious of any doctrines or philosophies or fashionable thoughts that make you the chief end. They are wide off the mark precisely because they are so close to it. To exalt and delight in God, to glorify and enjoy Him, is where we are fulfilled and where we flourish. He is the soil we were made to be planted in, and we will sprout in no other. This is another one of those balances that seems to prove the truth of the Christian Faith: our happiness and fulfillment are all part of the picture, but they are not the point. They are involved in the end, but they are not the end, not the "chief end". We were made for joy and pleasure, but joy and pleasure belong to God alone, for He is Good (Matt. 19:17) and His Goodness alone creates gladness (Ps. 4:6-7).

If you're happy and you know it...

This is why it is wrong not only to make our own happiness the chief end but also to banish happiness altogether as something immoral or irrelevant. God is wedded to our happiness. He is our happiness. That is the point. There is no happiness or fulfillment outside of God. To put it another way, we will never find happiness as long as we are obsessed with finding it. As soon as we fling that obsession overboard and make God our obsession, our center, our one and only love, we will find to our pleasant surprise that we are happy. Happy in Him. He who loses self-obsession will be fulfilled. He who loses his life will find it, but only if you lose it in God. All else is sinking sand. All else is nothing, for outside of God is nothingness, and everything that does not seek Him reeks of nothingness.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Foucault VS Lewis (a fragment of a discussion on meaning)

Foucault: It is all very well for you. Claiming the origin at the back of all discourse. What benefits you receive! What power! But I am full of doubts, and you are full of ignorance. Perhaps your Origin does exist, but it makes no difference whether He does or not. I don't think you've got the idea of the rind: the thick outer skin of derivatives and endless dispersions which we call (in each turn) "truth". Picture reality as an infinite globe with this very thick crust on the outside. Its thickness is a thickness of words. Words endlessly refracted and repulsed by each other, splintering forth into a thousand possibilities, potentialities infinite and vast! We are born under the surface. Under the text. Piling more and more over our heads. If your Origin exists, He's not in the globe. He's outside, like a moon

Lewis: Even if that were true, my friend, He did not stay there. He was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Foucault: So you say, and claim it to be the central happening of all that happens. But can you not see that it is merely another displacement? Another dispersion? The Origin cannot survive the derivatives, for they are parricidal to the core.

Lewis: Indeed they are, and were.

Foucault: I see what you're thinking, but it is all folly. There is no central happening of all happenings. There is no center, no tyrannical focal point for the discursive field, but millions and millions of discourses with their own centers, leading either nowhere or (what is better) to more and more "centers" for ever. I defy your God! I defy him with all the power of words and empty spaces and repetitions and dispersions and make Him bow down before bigness. How can you claim that there is a center for all the universe? You were born years ago and it is from old, and most of it is dead space were you cannot live or think or speak your private truth-to-power. Look at it all unblinkingly and you will see that there is no center. No Origin living or dead or resurrected. No plan or meaning or summation of the discursive play. As soon as you think you see one, it melts away into nothing, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea; or else it mutates into some other plan that you never dreamed of, and what was the center becomes the rim. Thus I doubt if any shape or plan or pattern was anything more than a trick of your own eyes, cheated with a hope informed by a panoptic force outside of and shaping your fragmented self. I ask you: to what is all this spiraling nothingness driving? What is the morning you speak of? What is this Incarnation of the Origin to be the beginning of?

Lewis: The beginning of the Great Dance, though we do not talk of it "beginning". It does not wait to be perfect until all is gathered into it. We do not speak of when it will "begin". It has begun from before always. There was no time when all things did not rejoice before His face as now. The dance that we dance is at the center, and for the dance all things were made.

You would add words to words in lumpish aggregation, or discourses to discourses and dispersions to dispersions, but you shall never come near His greatness. Times without number He has circled the world while we were not alive, and those times were not desert. His own voice was in them, speaking His infinite Word, which dwells (all of Him dwells) within the word of the smallest discourse and is not cramped; the entire discursive field of play is inside the Word who is inside all words and it does not distend Him. They are also at the center. We are not the voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where we cannot come. Where there is, there is the Word of the Origin, speaking life into every hollow void, filling all ontos like blood fills a wound.

Each word is at the center, with all terms and categories. The discourses are at the center, with every dispersion they create. The field of play is at the center. The fragments of every soul are at the center. Where the Word of Origin is, there is the center. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole God, even in the smallness beyond thought. Each thing was made for Him and by Him and lives and moves and has its being in Him, and He is the center. You say there is no way out of the text? I say there is no way out of the center, save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere.

All this seems planless to your darkened mind, because there are more plans than you looked for. But in the plan of the Great Dance, plans and discourses and dispersions without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else is directed. All that is or was or is spoken or will be spoken is but a spark shed from the fire that is the endless utterances of the Word of the Origin, and no mouth can gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan. There seems no center because it is all center, and within that still point the field plays on.

-Jon Vowell, et. al. (c) 2013

The Purpose-Driven Light (The Gospel According to Isaiah, Part 4)

"Then said I, 'Here am I! Send me.'" Is. 6:8

It is not that we are just saved from damnation, though God knows that would be bounty enough. We have not simply been granted a free pass on Hell. What has also happened is a transformation: we have been made new, refashioned into a completely new creature. That is why salvation has sometimes been called "conversion". We often think of conversion as an intellectual realignment, but (if you remember your science books) it is actually more like a fundamental realignment. The very substance of our being has changed, and subsequently our desires and direction change. We have been set on a new path, given a new journey and new destination. I say "new" journey and destination, but it is really the old journey and destination: the journey of mankind walking with God deeper and deeper into God. Communion with God was our original purpose, a purpose lost and refound. It is only "new" to those of us who happen to be walking around at the moment.

The point cannot be stressed enough: in Christ we new life, not just a spot in heaven. That is the great truth of salvation: If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new. We are crucified with Christ, and yet we live; yet not us, but Christ who lives in us. And the life we now live in the body we live by faith in the Son of God. God has delivered us from the power of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son. Now we are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that we should show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness and into His marvelous light. In times past we were not a people, but we are now the people of God; and because He who called us is holy, so we ought to be holy in all manner of living. For He died for us all that we who live should not henceforth live unto ourselves but unto Him who died for us and rose again.

Now our life is hid with Christ in God, and we are the temple of the living God, as God has said, "I will dwell in them and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." Therefore we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, being not conformed to this world but being transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might have life and life more abundantly. And herein is eternal life: that we might know Him, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent (II Cor. 5:17; Gal. 2:20; Col. 1:13; I Pet. 1:15, 2:9-10; II Cor. 5:15; Col. 3:3; II Cor. 6:16; Rom. 12:1-2; Eph. 2:10; John 10:10, 17:3).

Christianity was never about fire escapes, and Jesus is so much more than a bus pass out of Hell. We have not just been called out of darkness, but also in to light. A living Light, full of purpose, and we are one with that purpose. We who are saved and being saved have a call, a commission, a meaning radically different from the ways of the world, for life ought not and cannot be the same once you are known of God.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

"When you pray...." Homily on the Lord's Prayer, Part 2: Our Purpose (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"...Thy Kingdom come...." Luke 11:2a

"His kingdom is forever." -Martin Luther

Prayer is not simply words to the ceiling or words with our self. It is (amongst other things) an acknowledgement of a reality that is greater than us, a reality that is personal, who has a name, and has a purpose to work out. That purpose is not merely one plan out of many, a single option put forth on a cosmic menu. It is the only option, the only reality, the only plan that is unfolding and will be accomplished, rolling along like a great wave that is yet far off but whose coming is whispered by the lesser waves that caress and batter the shoreline. You have but two choices in regard to what is destined to come: learn to ride it or be swept away by it. The Kingdom of God takes no prisoners, and it will have no rivals.

There are no stock characters in the Kingdom of God, no generic cut-outs or plain cookie-cutter Christians. Every one of its citizens (who dwell in the light of its already-but-not-yet status) has been uniquely equipped to be a specific member in the body of Christ, which is the living inauguration of the coming Kingdom. C.S. Lewis called the unfolding, overarching purpose and plan of God "the Great Dance," whereby every point in the pattern, no matter its size, has its place and serves its purpose. The purpose that it was meant to have. When we pray, we acknowledge that purpose. Our purpose. We acknowledge that their is more to our lives and circumstances then ourselves and others. There is a larger picture, a greater vision, a consuming fire that swallows up all of our paltry preferences and dull desires into its brilliance. It is the Kingdom of God, the ripples and reechoings of redemption coming from the very heart of the Trinity itself. When you pray, remember that you are not simply speaking; rather, you are testifying that you belong, viz., to God and to His purposes. You are not some small speck alone in a meaningless void. You belong to a King, and His Kingdom is your Kingdom, and it is coming.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011