Further Up, Further In (Homily 55)

What hath God wrought?

"I have trusted in Thy mercy. My heart shall rejoice in Thy salvation. I will sing unto the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me." Ps. 13:5-6

The foundations of the past are hope and strength for today; light and guidance come from what has already been established. "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (Ps. 119:105), a word written long before I was born and spoken long before the foundations of the earth were laid. In fact, the Christian life is all about foundations, about seeing them laid thick and solid. It is all about God setting precedent, of watching Him build His case in your life like a man builds a tower, or better yet, a cathedral. Watch each brick be laid and ornamentation carved, and slowly but surely the monstrous edifice takes shape before your eyes, and what was once an amorphous rubble becomes a sublime work of art.

"I support which candidate?"

It is all art with God. All beauty. All true beauty and beautiful truth. It is not about machinery or efficiency. God is not reducible to a system. We are not here to deduce and define some divine algebra. We are not here to "figure it out," not because there is nothing to figure out but because the figure is too great for us, a figure shaped in the Person of God. We do not comprehend Him; we stand in awe, in overwhelming humility and wonder. We stand still and know that He is God and that we will never reach the end of Him. We can never reduce Him to our myriad manias, to our legalistic claptrap or liberal corrosion, to our efforts to explain or obscure Him. Thank God that He is greater than all our rabid reductionism, or innate and insane desire to make everything smaller than us.

God has revealed Himself, not that we may "figure" Him "out," but that we may begin to know Him (John 17:3), not as a principle or some cosmic machinery, but as a person, as a friend would a friend or a lover a lover. To this end He is building His presence into your life, brick by brick, moment by moment, until He is the most real thing you know, the one true thing, the Fact above all other facts. The point of Christian living, of the life of faith, is to know that God is real: vividly, intimately, personally real. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something: an ideology, a gimmick, or another reductionism. They cannot give you God, the reality of God spreading over and through every inch of your life like waves to the sand of the shore.

Nope. Still haven't arrived.

Like a good marriage, God is known over time, not grasped in an instant. You must never fall into the snare that says, "I have arrived" when it comes to your relationship with God, that you have discovered all there is to know about Him and now the adventure is over. That can only lead to boredom and despair (and perhaps an abandoning of God for something more "exciting"). The truth is that we never arrive, even throughout eternity, not because there is nothing to arrive at, but because God is incomprehensible, beyond our full comprehension, which means it will take all eternity to know Him fully, and therein lies hope and peace and joy.

Further up. Further in.

Hope because even if we cannot see far ahead, we can see for miles behind us, and all of God's bountiful goodness and love trumps our doubts. Peace because all things are working together for our good (Rom. 8:28), working towards are knowing of God, until we finally see what life was meant for: all knowing, all intimacy, all a drawing further up and in to divine love. And joy because identity and purpose and meaning are found at last, not by an arbitrary fiat of our own but by the God who created us for Himself. So see your life for the divine art that it is. Look and see God building His presence into your days, becoming more and more real. See all that you've been through, even the hard and horrible (II Cor. 4:16-18), as the foundations of a yet greater structure, one that will stretch on into eternity, deeper and deeper into the heart of God.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Entropy (and the Silence of God)

"Be still, and know that I am God...." Ps. 46:10a

I often wish that I could feel all the strength of God's peace, to drown in the silence and stillness at the depths of His Being, to be pulled with cords of infinite desire into His simplicity. I think we all (in some way) wish for that because we are not that: we are not peaceful or silent or still or simple. We are "all wound up" tighter than a bow-string, continually tightening and fraying and tightening again in an endless cycle of mounting stress and frenetic exasperation.

Consequently, we crave peace, moments when the world would just shut up and shut off and leave us alone. Moments like lying in bed in the morning, feeling the coolness of the sheets, listening to the stillness of the house, and watching sunlight ripple across the curtains. Moments like hanging with your friends around a campfire as evening grows long and all conversation is exhausted and there's nothing to do but sit and stare into the slow-dying fire dancing gently in the pit. Moments like coming home from an excruciating day and finding no one home, so you collapse into the couch as you are, find just the right "spot," and drink in the silence and occasional easy noise of the wind in the trees and songbirds in the yard.

The legalistic part of our self would guilt us into calling such moments laziness, but there is another part of us that knows better. We know those moments are something good. We know (in some dim way) that we have not stumbled into a vice but upon the summation of all virtue. We have drunk of the stillness of God, and it tasted just like heaven.

The Hebrew word for "still" in Psalm 46 is unique: it means not only stillness but also to become still, to lose all energy and slacken all activity unto all comes to rest. The idea is that of entropy: the expulsion of all energy until all comes to a standstill. It is an apt image, for we cannot simply be still. We must become still.

"Jane! Stop this crazy thing!"

It is an effort, a struggle, a knock-down-drag-out fight to let go of every thing, every thought, and every person pulling at us, and God knows it. We are all tops spinning and being spun maddeningly around, spun again and again by circumstances. To stop suddenly would be too jarring; we must ease into it, into the stillness, the quiet, the collapse, releasing from ourselves the myriad of gnawing thoughts like steam from a valve. We must take the time to occasionally come to a halt, to be taken into the stillness, for it is there that we can know God. In the silence, He speaks and we can finally speak. There we can consider the real God and speak our real mind.

As long as the cares of this world have a hold of us, they will choke out the knowledge of God, and that is the tragedy of it all. In stillness we meet His Stillness. In quiet we meet His Quiet. In silence we meet His Silence. Not the silence of death or indifference but of ease, like the "silence" of the woods when there is no predator or trouble, and all is going as it should: creeks bubbling, birds singing, winds whispering, leaves rustling. So too is the "silence" of God: it is a peace coming from all things going well, a peace that passes all understanding, for from our view nothing is going well. But we must learn to lose our view in God's view, which is not found in "seeing the big picture" but in becoming still, in releasing our weariness and heavy burdens and falling into the Rest of God, wherein we find the rest of God as well.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

"It is not the one thing...." (The Perilous Balance)

Christianity is not love. It is not peace, nor justice, nor joy, nor goodness, nor beauty, nor moderation, nor wisdom. It is not about compassion to the oppressed or violence to the oppressor, neither the defense of the weak nor the defiance of the strong. It is not about truth. It is not about experience. It is not any one of these things. Rather, it is every one of these things all working in tandem to create a whole that is not reducible to its parts. To reduce it is to lose it; it is a perilous balance.

Orthodoxy is not any one thing. It is all ideals and virtues and good things working together in a tight, unbreakable, irreducible oneness, for it is the very truth of God, who is the summation of all ideals and virtues and good things in a tight, unbreakable, irreducible oneness. As our God is all good things working together in one person, and as the fruits of His Spirit are all good things working in our person, and as the Body of His Christ are many members with many gifts spread out across nations, tribes, and tongues all working together whether they realize it or not, so too Orthodoxy is an ingenious collaboration of all truth working together into a singular creed.

In our Father's house are many rooms, rooms for many and all shades of His glory, all facets of His beauty. The pacifists are there as well as the militant, the Franciscans as well as the Dominicans. The apologist and the artist and the social worker are there. The high church and the low are there, the traditional and the contemporary. All good things, all things true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and commendable and excellent and praiseworthy, all these things are ours for the taking, the thinking, the doing. All are acceptable to God. Let no mouth open to gainsay any of them. Let no brother gainsay his sister, and let no sister gainsay her brother. Let no pacifist gainsay the militant, and let no militant gainsay the pacifist. All belong in the balance; the absurdity called pacifism will balance the insanity called militancy.

Let all things be done in the image of our God, who is peaceful and wrathful, true and beautiful, compassionate and holy, human and divine. Let no heresy rise to reduce Him; let no ignorance rise to diminish Him. Not because He can be reduced or diminished, but because the reduction and the diminishment does damage to the heretic and ignorant (those terrible simplifiers), causing them to lose the whole that is God, for God is a whole. A single, simple whole who is irreducible and indiminishable. He is an infinitely faceted jewel, a stained-glass window whose design and beauty knows no end or paraphrasing, and is large enough to hold all good and true and beautiful things in His hands.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

"...and all the day long." (In His Hands, Part II)

"[God] caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them. He cleaved the rock, and the waters gushed out." Isaiah 48:21

We all assume that God is arbitrary, that He is shooting from the hip and working off the cuff. It is natural for us to think so, for we are arbitrary, and we make God in our own image. Like pagans of old, we presuppose that the world and the universe are both fundamentally chaotic, and why wouldn't we? It is larger than us, and its laws (if it has any) are hidden from us. Men are mad with their violence and corruptions, and the earth is mad with its disasters and calamities. And there we stand, small and infinitesimal before it all, overwhelmed by constant floods of mixed messages, random actions, and indifferent nature.

Standing where we are, it is easy to shrink all souls to our own size, to think that if we're overwhelmed then everyone's overwhelmed, including God. He tries His best, of course, and His all-power and all-wisdom come in handy for cleaning up messes (when He gets around to them). But from our point of view, we cannot help but think that He to gets frustrated and can only make decisions on the fly. Perhaps we're being reverent when we think this, trying to "excuse" God; but we still think He's a bit out of His league.

The key, however, is "from our point of view". It is one of the greatest faults of humanity that we always reduce everything down to our size, to our position and place. It is understandable. We want sympathy with others; it helps us feel like we're not alone in our situation. But here's the thing: God already sees from our point of view, both as God (Ps. 103:13-14) and Man (Heb. 4:14-15). Thus, He is not in need of seeing from our position. On the contrary, we need to learn to see from His. If we do, then we will learn this startling, offensive truth: there is no arbitration in God; it is all plan.

Look at Israel. God knew beforehand that they would sin (Is. 48:3-8) and had already planned the purging, perfecting punishment (vs. 9-11). But he had also preplanned Cyrus to be their salvation from that punishment (Is. 45:1-7; 48:12-16), a salvation coming in spite of all their sins (Is. 48:17-21). He had already planned out the whole thing. The exile was not an accident, and Cyrus was not "Plan B". It was all "Plan A". God knows there is a snake in the garden, and He already has a Seed fit to crush its head. He is never surprised.

We are frequently surprised, however, because we only see from our finite position. One of the marks of growing in holiness and sanctification and spiritual maturity is being torn from your agoraphobic bubble and led into the big country of our big God. True, there are many layers to our bubbles, but if you belong to God He will pop every one of them to finally let in some air and light, clean like an ocean breeze and clear like the noonday sky. Even then we will have only just begun to comprehend the height and depth and length and breadth of the love of God, which covers all angles as well as a multitude of sins.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

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