"Let my bones burn whenever they see
Another pretty face, or a fragile flower,
Or the cold mountains in the blaze of dawn.
Let the restless rattling rage, lest they rest without You.
"Let my bones burn as I fumble about
This sensuous curtain, bumbling about
Like a blind man in a fog, double blind,
Unable to even see shadows as they are.
"Let my bones burn until I tell
All that there is to tell in this tale that
I find half-told and unfinished, with an end
I shall never know, until I am known.
"Let my bones burn to a crisp
If I foolishly fall into fakes and forgeries
And dare say that this is Thou.
This is Thou; yet this is not Thou.
"Seeing many, may I see One.
Of a sea of faces, burn One into me.
Let it burn, lest I forget it; let it burn,
So I know that I am known.
Let it burn in my bones forever."
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
March 31, 2008
March 24, 2008
There and Back Again
When you stand on the frontier of yet another writing endeavor, you should pause to consider the past. Though you see nothing ahead of you, you can indeed see for miles when you look over your shoulder. Before you lies a wilderness of blank pages; behind you lies a wonderland of freshly written words and writings. At your feet lies paths untrodden; behind you lies the well-trodden paths across familiar lands. Before you lies discoveries unknown; behind you lies a wealth of treasures already dug up. Before you lies new lands and oceans to cross; behind you, with you, all around you, is the God that has led you thus far, and He will lead you further up and further in.
Never once think that you can ever plumb the full depths that is the well of God (Romans 11:33). You can never search across all His lands and find nothing new under the sun. Every new poem, story, journal, or post started, every new journey begun, stand as defiant testimonies before all the world that the God you serve and know has no end in sight, that He is indeed the perpetual mystery, the eternal adventure, the everlasting undiscovered country. As you step out once again, let Him keep your feet, and you will be swept off into Him.
Writer's Prayer
"Now I set my pen to write,
I pray the Lord, my light, my life:
Even if I die before I wake,
This journey shall have no end..."
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
Never once think that you can ever plumb the full depths that is the well of God (Romans 11:33). You can never search across all His lands and find nothing new under the sun. Every new poem, story, journal, or post started, every new journey begun, stand as defiant testimonies before all the world that the God you serve and know has no end in sight, that He is indeed the perpetual mystery, the eternal adventure, the everlasting undiscovered country. As you step out once again, let Him keep your feet, and you will be swept off into Him.
Writer's Prayer
"Now I set my pen to write,
I pray the Lord, my light, my life:
Even if I die before I wake,
This journey shall have no end..."
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
March 12, 2008
Some Questions (a slight doxology)
"Can it be that sweat drops of blood
Can pierce the armor of Sin and shame
Greater than swords of steel and iron?
"Can it be that the power of Sin,
Which stood like a rock undaunted,
Now withers before the meekness of Heaven?
"To fathom the strength that is the Cross,
Salvation won through suffering shame.
Can my mind come near to grasping the whole of it?"
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
Can pierce the armor of Sin and shame
Greater than swords of steel and iron?
"Can it be that the power of Sin,
Which stood like a rock undaunted,
Now withers before the meekness of Heaven?
"To fathom the strength that is the Cross,
Salvation won through suffering shame.
Can my mind come near to grasping the whole of it?"
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
March 7, 2008
Dreamer
"You and I were always meant to wake the dreamers from the dark." -Nichole Nordeman
"I can't sleep in the bed I've made.
I can't sleep because I'm wide awake
To the rubble of my failures.
They have choked up the source of grace.
"I am awake, but it feels like falling asleep.
I wander under the sky a sleeping ghost,
Sleeping in a sick land of slick coverings and cheats
That serve to silence my quiet desperations.
"I am a dreamer desecrated by I know not what.
I hover in a hazy maze of monotonous monstrosities,
Hiding hearts and hopes; concrete pillows for broken heads
And broken souls, which lie like shards of glass
Forgotten.
"I can't sleep in the bed I've made.
If I could, I'd give it away today, forever,
And seek the dream that is awakening.
To sleep; perchance, to wake, and live."
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
I can't sleep because I'm wide awake
To the rubble of my failures.
They have choked up the source of grace.
"I am awake, but it feels like falling asleep.
I wander under the sky a sleeping ghost,
Sleeping in a sick land of slick coverings and cheats
That serve to silence my quiet desperations.
"I am a dreamer desecrated by I know not what.
I hover in a hazy maze of monotonous monstrosities,
Hiding hearts and hopes; concrete pillows for broken heads
And broken souls, which lie like shards of glass
Forgotten.
"I can't sleep in the bed I've made.
If I could, I'd give it away today, forever,
And seek the dream that is awakening.
To sleep; perchance, to wake, and live."
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
March 6, 2008
Echoes of Heaven: Old Man of the Hills
Within the fog-cloaked hills of the Appalachians, just about ten miles north of Williamsburg, Kentucky, there walks a lone old man, thin and sturdy, like a withered tree. He walks a path worn and torn by many years of his endless, relentless trodding. In his right hand he holds a sapling; in his left hand he wields a shovel. His balding head is covered by a grey fedora, his back and shoulders by a thick, grey coat, and his hands and feet smell of earth. There is a wiry smile on his face, and a slow, comfortable stride to his step, the heels and soles of his feet caressing the ground with a familiarity that has been well earned. The farther up he went, the further the fog clothed him in an odd robe of splendor, single-colored, a fitting addition to the man as the man was to it. As he walked, it was as though he slowly and silently gave himself up to the fog, to the hills, to the earth, all the while holding a tree in one hand and wielding a shovel in the other. Unperceivable to the naked eye was that strange and holy fellowship between man and nature in which all the trees are his brothers and a walk through the hills is the communion of saints.
His walks into the hills are a might matter of legend to the people of
The children, however, had the most interesting stories. One boy said he buried treasure where he planted trees; he always talked about going up there and finding some of it. Another said that he buried the dead bodies of victims he had ceremoniously axed to death; he said he’d write a story about it some day. One little girl said that the man had lived forever and had planted the trees on all the hills, that he kept the hills alive. Whatever the story (or lack thereof), however, no one ever thought to simply ask the man what he was doing, or (even better) follow him up that hill, along that worn path, and see for themselves what things he hath done. That no one asks is sad; the stories are becoming fewer and fewer, the children more and more indifferent. The fog recedes higher into the hills these days; the old man must walk farther every year, but he is not weary. His stride is ever faithful, his face ever friendly, his grip ever firm as he holds a tree in one hand, and wields a shovel in the other.
March 5, 2008
The Second Fall (Or, Chesterton on the Fundamental Flaw in Modern Realism)
I know many good men and women who love Realist literature, and I can in no way blame them. To the Realist, what is real (whether it is good, bad, or ugly), is beautiful because it is true; there is no gloss or artificial layers to it. I understand the logic quite clearly, and agree with it whole-heartedly.
Still, I cannot bring myself to love the Realist tradition quite like I love the Fantasy tradition (note: I differentiate between tradition and genre). I often wondered why. There is a part of me (a spiteful, doubting, nagging part) that claims I am merely a child at heart and that I need to grow up and see the world as it really is. It says I need to put away childish things. However, there is another part of me (an enlarged, more wholesome part that is not really me) that still defiantly claims that my hesitation (and sometimes downright dislike) of Realist literature is not unfounded; on the contrary, its roots run right into the ancient core of another tradition I love, i.e., Christendom. The problem is, I could never quite articulate what it was that caused me to hesitate at the threshold of Realism; I never could say why I held it at a distance, admiring it for what it was but never embracing it as gospel. This inability to explain myself has left myself in a quandary more than once.
It was Oswald Chambers who said that the ones who affected us the most in life are not those who told us something new, but those who gave utterance to that which has been "dumbly struggling" in you for utterance. Well, Chesterton has given me utterance. From his book Heretics, in the chapter titled "On the Negative Spirit," I give my reason for why I, as a Christian writer, cannot fully embrace modern Realism (I emphasize the main point):
"Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which has often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in what Stevenson called...the 'lost fight of virtue.' A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of the law; its only certainty is ill. It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to...
"[It] is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century...The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candor of the moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names...But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good. The thing which it resented, and, as I think, rightly resented, in [modern realism], is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes almost blind with doubt.
"If we compare, let us say, the morality of The Divine Comedy with the morality of Ibsen's Ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the Inferno of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments--Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one--Hell...
"All I venture to point out, with an increased firmness, is that this omission [of an enduring and positive ideal], good or bad, does leave us face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no definite images of good. To us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which we cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us."
The problem with the modern mind (and a character in Pan's Labyrinth demonstrates this well) is that it thinks fantasy is merely "childish" or "blind" or "immature" because it only sees the good and ignores evil. That is an utter lie. If there is no evil in a story, no antagonist or antagonism beset against the hero(es), then there is no story. To borrow words from Dr. W, modern Realism has a whole lot of tension, but no resolution other than the realization that all is not well. Christians firmly hold that, in the real world, evil is a fact, and the good guys do not always win. However, Christians also hold that, in the real world, the Good does win in the end. In the realist fantasy (like the LOTR), it is indeed a long, dark road to get there, but we will get there.
Further comments about Christianity's stance on good and evil in regards to reality can be found in this other blog entry of mine.
Still, I cannot bring myself to love the Realist tradition quite like I love the Fantasy tradition (note: I differentiate between tradition and genre). I often wondered why. There is a part of me (a spiteful, doubting, nagging part) that claims I am merely a child at heart and that I need to grow up and see the world as it really is. It says I need to put away childish things. However, there is another part of me (an enlarged, more wholesome part that is not really me) that still defiantly claims that my hesitation (and sometimes downright dislike) of Realist literature is not unfounded; on the contrary, its roots run right into the ancient core of another tradition I love, i.e., Christendom. The problem is, I could never quite articulate what it was that caused me to hesitate at the threshold of Realism; I never could say why I held it at a distance, admiring it for what it was but never embracing it as gospel. This inability to explain myself has left myself in a quandary more than once.
It was Oswald Chambers who said that the ones who affected us the most in life are not those who told us something new, but those who gave utterance to that which has been "dumbly struggling" in you for utterance. Well, Chesterton has given me utterance. From his book Heretics, in the chapter titled "On the Negative Spirit," I give my reason for why I, as a Christian writer, cannot fully embrace modern Realism (I emphasize the main point):
"Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which has often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in what Stevenson called...the 'lost fight of virtue.' A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of the law; its only certainty is ill. It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to...
"[It] is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century...The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candor of the moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names...But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good. The thing which it resented, and, as I think, rightly resented, in [modern realism], is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes almost blind with doubt.
"If we compare, let us say, the morality of The Divine Comedy with the morality of Ibsen's Ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the Inferno of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments--Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one--Hell...
"All I venture to point out, with an increased firmness, is that this omission [of an enduring and positive ideal], good or bad, does leave us face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no definite images of good. To us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which we cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us."
The problem with the modern mind (and a character in Pan's Labyrinth demonstrates this well) is that it thinks fantasy is merely "childish" or "blind" or "immature" because it only sees the good and ignores evil. That is an utter lie. If there is no evil in a story, no antagonist or antagonism beset against the hero(es), then there is no story. To borrow words from Dr. W, modern Realism has a whole lot of tension, but no resolution other than the realization that all is not well. Christians firmly hold that, in the real world, evil is a fact, and the good guys do not always win. However, Christians also hold that, in the real world, the Good does win in the end. In the realist fantasy (like the LOTR), it is indeed a long, dark road to get there, but we will get there.
Further comments about Christianity's stance on good and evil in regards to reality can be found in this other blog entry of mine.
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