Boil to Rags, Part 2: The Great Dance (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

(See the first post in the series here.)

"For God so loved...." John 3:16

Herein is a great mystery and lovely beauty. The God that we serve and adore is neither mechanical nor inert. The core and source and glory of Reality is not a lonely dynamo whose silent energies are all centripetal and not centrifugal. The Empyrean Prime, who is beyond and yet sustains all appearances, is alive and He loves. All three of Him dances to His love, and all the elements and pieces of the universe dances to His love. All great galaxies and subatomic singularities and every mind and soul under the sun lives and moves and has their being in the ever-dynamic Being of Love Himself, His love for Himself and His love for all things made and begotten and proceeding from Himself.

There is no discontentment in His love, for it is a Dance and not a trade. Its transactions are giving, and it receives so that it may give, and give all the more. So the begotten is given and gives the proceeding, who gives and receives of the Father so that it may give further. So you see, there is no discontentment. No pride or bitter jealousy. No raging accusations or schemes of humiliation. Rather, all is a gift of Love. Love beating out and pouring forth from the very heart of existence like golden heat from an eternal furnace.

Yet there is also no contentment in this Love, never a moment where it utters, "Hold, it is enough." All of its endings are beginnings. All of its deaths are resurrections. All things are made new and newer still, further up and further in to newer and newer perfections, deeper still into the divine substance of the Perfect Himself. He is not satisfied with anything less than Himself, and He is not satisfied with giving anything less than Himself, so that He might receive nothing less than Himself. And it is we, we few, we happy few who are meant to be caught up in that holy reception, made one with the Divine Dance, finding our measure and place. Not lost in the impersonal ether, but found. Found by Love at last. Seeing Him face to face at last. Knowing Him as we are known. There is no fading here, no ceasing to be. You do not cease to be once you rest in the bosom of Being. There you Are. There you finally Become. In the center of His Love is the ending and beginning of our very existence.

Let the heathen rage. Let them weep and gnash their teeth with their gods of sex and money, of self and self alone, of noise and chaos, of static and silence. The Threefold Heart and Mind and Lord of all is calling. His voice is in the stars, on the winds, on the very lips of the morning: "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away."

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Homily 37: Love and Holiness (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"And may the Lord make you to increase and abound in love...to the end that He may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness...." I Thess. 3 (vs. 12-13)

There is a sacred bond and intimate connection that love has with holiness, with the otherness of God, for love is not a human invention. It does not even do it justice to call it a discovery. It is more like a revolution. Love falls upon humanity like a clap of thunder or erupts from amidst it with volcanic violence. In blatant opposition to the dark instincts of survival and domination that to this day drive the bestial side of mankind, there comes a voice and notion piercing through, wholly alien and yet wholly welcome, a passion that in its finest and truest manifestations places the self on the lowest rung and places another on the highest in an act that seems nigh to worship. Indeed, it inspires worship, whether in ceremony or in song; for mankind's instinct to survive has always been natural, but love has always been divine.

God is love, not in an accidental sense of His actions but in an essential sense of His existence. Love is His very being, which is to say that it is His holiness, the very quality of His otherness that makes Him separate and unique and above us. For us, love is lovely but seemingly foreign to our natures, a transplanted essence from other realms; but God knows no such division in Himself. His persons dance so fully in love's purest reality and expression that we cannot help but call them one, for they are one. Love pulls together perfectly (Col. 3:14), binding all together in a harmonious whole by its continuous deference to another, to the beloved. Its deference is its unity: therein is the paradox and the beauty. Sin is separation (Matt. 7:23, 25:41) and isolation of the self (Is. 14:13-14): therein lies the terror and the reason for why holiness can never know sin, for sin cannot abide its communion. To be freed from sin, to be holy, is to be one with Love: not our love, our vapid, shallow, half-halting indifference masquerading as tolerance; but love fierce and faithful and everlasting. The love of God and the God who is love. Amen.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

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