Man of Sorrows

"Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all." Ps. 34:19

"I'm having my best life now."

Our God is a man of sorrows. He has been acquainted with grief and affliction (Is. 53:3-4), and He has promised the same to those who follow Him (Matt. 10:16-25; John 15:18-20). I find an odd comfort in this. Our God has made a plan for pain. He does not ignore it or downplay it or frown upon those who experience it. He experienced it, deliberately (Phil. 2:8; Heb. 12:2-3), and has sanctified it into an avenue of glory (II Cor. 4:16-18). This does not suddenly candy-coat it. This does not mean that all who suffer should "buck up" and smile more. Pain is still pain. Affliction is still affliction, and suffering is still suffering. It all still hurts and wears you out. The difference is that it isn't meaningless anymore; nothing is meaningless anymore. All has been infused with purpose, and thus infused with hope: not just that you'll get through it all but also that it is all leading somewhere good (Rom. 8:18, 28-30).

"Just BeliEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEve!"

This is what makes "prosperity" teachings or any other syrupy Christianity so laughable and damnable. Laughable because they so blatantly contradict common sense about the fundamental tragedy in existence, and damnable because they attempt to undo the deeper comedy that God has done. He gave pain a purpose, but they would undo that purpose in our minds, returning suffering to a sign of disfavor and failure. They have displaced hope with despair, for who can truly say they are living their best life now? Who can truly say they have claimed all that they've named? Who can say that their afflictions have all ended because they had just enough faith (as if faith were a cure for suffering rather than the strength and succor to endure it)?

The world does not need another rabid optimism to spread childish lies; rather, it needs something stronger, something more robust, something adult. It needs something that can face all the rugged realities of life without flinching or excusing or dismissing. In short, it needs a God who is acquainted with grief to take pity on our frail frames (Ps. 103:13-14) and provide a purpose for pain.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

On Strength (Homily Magnus)

"Be thou exalted, Lord, in Thine own strength. So we will sing and praise Thy power." Ps. 21:13

The babe with the power!

The modern western world is obsessed with power. From our most intellectual blather to our most common jargon, we've got power on the brains. In literary circles, we're concerned with characters having "agency," the ability to make their own choices and choose their own destiny. In the world of pop psychology, we endlessly seek "empower- ment," an affirmation and enabling of our own self and desires. Popular culture regularly feeds into our need for self-actualization, and in the revolving-door insane asylum of social and political activism, power is the key agenda: who has it, how they're abusing it, and how we can acquire more for ourselves and others.

"Come at me, bro."

It feels cheap and easy to lay this particular mania at the feet of Nietzsche, but I cannot help it. He is too obvious a target, as he would prefer. No doubt he had his inspirations, and he has definitely inspired others who carried his ideas further and further, but if you observe all the assumptions of our postmodern society and reduce them back to their source, you get Nietzsche. He was the voice crying in the wilderness, the first step in a new direction. It is he who successfully reduced all of life to power, to dominance and submission, to masters and slaves, to supermen and sheep. It is he who declared (ironically) that all language is the myriad masks of power, and it is his postmodern disciples of the mid to late 20th century that stretched his ideas all the way into popular consciousness. Now there is no truth; there is only power, and all claims on truth are merely disguised plays at power. There is nothing left for us but the destruction of all the "truths" and then the mad scramble for power that pours out of them like candy from a sad, shattered pinata.

There can be only one.

It is no wonder that Nietzsche (and everyone poisoned by his epistemological children) hated Christianity. It is a great rebuke to his worldview of power, for not only will the meek inherit the earth, but also all-power already belongs to One. Forever and endlessly belongs to One. God has all the power, for He is all the power. He infinitely is it and has it and gives it to all without once diminishing His surplus. Before Him, the mad scramble for power and the mad cycle of dominance and submission end. There is only one Power, and it is God. Likewise, there is only one dominance, and that is His. And there is only one submission, and that is ours. The superman already exists, has always existed. He is God incomprehensible, the Father Almighty.

All of Him, all at once.

Yet it is not mere power that makes God incomprehensible, but rather all of His divine attributes at once. He brings all of Himself to bear on every action that He takes, and included in Himself is not only infinite power but also infinite love and justice and grace and wisdom and goodness. Perhaps the greatest rebuke to the Nietzschean ethic is God's irreducibility: His incomprehensible nature is not a complexion of parts but rather a single, harmonious whole with every attribute working in perfect interwoven tandem and solidarity. Thus, His all-power can only come prepackaged with His all-love and all-wisdom and all-goodness and everything else that He infinitely is.

Think of it this way. We know what it means to leave a part of ourselves behind when we make a decision. We leave a part of ourselves "at the door," so to speak. There are times when we make a solely emotional decision (with our children or loved ones), where we leave logic and reason and other factors behind. On the other hand, we can with effort make solely logical decisions, blocking out emotional elements and trying to make a cold, rational choice. In either case, something is left out. This is not necessarily the best or worst way to make decisions, but it is a way we are familiar with, because it is true to who we are: we are not like God. We are not a harmonious whole of attributes; He is. He never leaves any of Himself "at the door." He brings all that He is into every action He makes, for He cannot be reduced to any one part of Himself. That is what is meant by His "irreducibility."

Portrait of the superman.

Every heresy and error of man can be traced to a reduction of God (or the ultimate "thing"). Every crazed philosopher or good natured guru has made the same mistake, though they make it in a myriad of ways. Reduce all to peace, and you create a rabid pacifism that would allow horrific injustices to occur just to keep its hands clean. Reduce all to power, and you unleash a world of merciless narcissism, cruelty, and brutality. God is a slap in the face to all our nonsense, the spitting in the eye of our reductionistic insanities. He will not be reduced to our minimalist understanding. He will not be confined by our finite categories. He will be Himself and nothing less. His peace will not rest until it has broken every peace-breaker, and His power wrought its most awesome work in a poor carpenter from Nazareth who would not revile when He was reviled, and whose humiliating submission to death crushed the power of death forever, for the weakness of God is still stronger than the strength of supermen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

On Gentleness (Homily 59)

We're all labeled.

"...Thy gentleness has made me great." Ps. 18:35b

To speak of God's gentleness is to speak of His understanding. He knows us. He knows how small and frail we are, how limited and imperfect in our knowledge and abilities. He knows our propensity to fear, and He knows our frustrated desire to be better than what we are. We cannot fool Him. Our weakness is like an open book before Him, like an open wound, and He sees us for the bumbling fools that we are, sees our strutting and posturing for the facades that they are. He sees. He knows. He understands, and on the basis of that understanding He pities us. Not as our betters "pity" us, with a smirk hiding a sneer, but as a father would his children (Ps. 103:13-14): with a smile, and a loving, helping, outstretched hand.

God handles with care.

It is the gentleness of God that makes us great. It is by His mercies that we are not consumed. Where is boasting? It is removed. Where is pride? It has been swallowed up in love. What can we say to these things, for who is a god like this? Many gods have understood who we are and what we're made of, but they have not responded with gentleness, nor with pity, save the "pity" of the smirk-painted sneer. Our God never smirks or sneers. He forgives. He heals. He upholds by His right hand. He reaches out to lift up, to redeem our souls out of hell, to show us the paths of life (Ps. 16:10-11). We have deserved none of this, earned none of this. How could we? We are weak and frail, but God responds to our weakness with gentleness, breathing boundless grace and mercy through our lifelessness like a soft breeze sends dead leaves dancing across the ground. And because we are always weak, God is always gracious. Therefore, we only have grounds for joy, for we are caught up in a whirl of gentleness, of God's gentleness making us greater than we ever were before. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

"...they are weak, but He is strong...." (Homily 54)

You just gotta beliEEEEEve!

"Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name.... Out of the mouths of babies and infants you have ordained strength.... What is man that You are mindful of him? [...] You have crowned him with glory and honor, [and] have made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands.... How excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" Ps. 8:1-9

"God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things to confound the mighty, and the base and despised things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no flesh should glory in His presence." I Cor. 1:27-29

We want to be strong. We want to be better than others, or at least better than ourselves. We want our projects to succeed and our plans to bear fruit. We want our dreams to be realized, and we hope we have the skill and wit and tenacity to see them through. We want to be noticed and appreciated, to be seen as worthy and valuable, to be know as someone who brings something to the table. We hope that we have the charm and looks and abilities necessary to grab and hold someone's, anyone's attention. We want to know that we can do it. We want to know that we are loved and have secured that love.

"Hello! I am your problems."

We fear weakness. We fear failure. We fear being worthless and of no consequence, but that is often how we feel. Projects and plans and dreams stall or stall-out, becoming insurmount- able, seeming so very, very big and we so very, very small. We are ignored and unnoticed and undervalued. We feel everyone's eyes piercing past us, or worse: piercing into us and seeing all the mess, the flaws, the inconsistencies and hypocrisies. The failures and inabilities. The terrible burden of our innate weakness. We can feel unmade and exposed before others, and we will avoid any place or any person we feel we cannot fool. We will not risk the exposure. We will not risk having to confront ourselves, our small, weak selves.

God confronts us. He knows us. He knows our weakness. He knows that we are dust and fading vapor (Ps. 103:13-16). He knows how the weight of even our fleeting existence can become crushing. He knows our frustrations. He knows our fears. The fear of failure. The fear of weakness. The fear of making mistakes and not being who you were meant to be, not fulfilling all you were made to do, always feeling out of joint like a bone out of socket. He knows all about it, and He has only compassion and pity and sympathy for you. This Great Strength has nothing but merciful, loving kindness to we who are the great weak. He has kindness and purpose, for this Great Strength uses the weak for His great purposes. He calls and justifies and glorifies the doubting and the frail and the fearful and the downright unimpressive (Rom. 8:28-30) while all who are supremely confident in their own impressiveness are left outside (Luke 18:9-14), for this Great Strength summons the sick and not the healthy (Mark 2:16-17) and exalts the weak while crushing the proud through the weak (James 4:6; I Cor. 1:27-29).

The Word became weakness.

We who are weak and fearful and frustrated and self-de- feated and weary, come and find rest (Matt. 11:28-30). We have a great and mighty advocate, for we have a God who has been touched by our infirmities (Heb. 4:14-16). God became a man; not just a man, but a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Is. 53:2-4). He felt with His real skin and real soul the agonies of fear and rejection and betrayal and the seeming failure of all His efforts. We have a God who was afraid (Matt. 26:38-39), whose stress created sweat as thick as blood drops (Luke 22:44). We have a God who failed, whose messianic ministry lost all of its followers through offense (John 6:60-61, 66) or fear (Mark 14:50) and ended in ignominy and death. And yet, and yet, it was through those fears and failures and agonies that God triumphed. He triumphed through weakness, not in spite of it. The weakness of God, the strength made perfect in weakness, is still stronger than all the might of darkness and evil and human skill and ability. He has sanctified weakness and made it holy, made it into a means of triumph (II Cor. 12:9-10), made it His favorite tool and weapon and made weak people His favorite heroes, all so we may know that there is no God like this. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013