Category Archives: Love
In Vino Veritas
Take the largest part of that truth first. God makes wine. For all its difficulties, there is no way around the doctrine of creation. But notice the tense: He makes; not made. He did not create once upon a time, only to find himself saddled now with the unavoidable and embarrassing result of that first rash decision. That is only to welsh on the idea of an unnecessary world, to make creation a self-perpetuating pool game which is contingent only at the start–which needs only the first push on the cue ball to keep it going forever. It will not do: The world is more unnecessary than that. It is unnecessary now; it cries in this moment for a cause to hold it in being.
Do you see what that means? In a general way, we concede that God made the world out of joy: He didn’t need it; He just thought it was a good thing. But if you confine His activity in creation to the beginning only, you lose most of the joy in the subsequent shuffle of history. Sure, it was good back then, you say, but since then, we’ve been eating leftovers. How much better a world it becomes when you see Him creating at all times and at every time; when you see that the preserving of the old in being is just as much creation as the bringing of the new out of nothing. Each thing, at every moment, becomes the delight of His hand, the apple of His eye. The bloom of yeast lies upon the grape skins year after year because He likes it; C6H12O6 = 2C2H5OH + 2CO2 is a dependable process because, every September, He says, That was nice; do it again.
Let us pause and drink to that.
To a radically, perpetually unnecessary world; to the restoration of astonishment to the heart and mystery to the mind; to wine, because it is a gift we never expected; to mushroom and artichoke, for they are incredible legacies; to improbable acids and high alcohols, since we would hardly have thought of them ourselves; and to all being, because it is superfluous: to the hairs on Harry’s ear, and the seven hundred and sixty-eighth cell from the upper attachment of the right gluteus maximus in the last girl on the chorus line. Prosit, Dear Hearts. Cheers, Men and Brethren. We are free: nothing is needful, everything is for joy. Let the bookkeepers struggle with their balance sheets; it is the tippler who sees the untapped Hand. God is eccentric; He has loves, not reasons. Salute!
The secular is not the sacred. Creation exists in its own right, is no parable, no front, no Punch and Judy show in which God plays all the parts, but a vast and raucous meeting where each thing acts out its nature, shouts I am I, as if no other thing had being. The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms; wine is order to wine: Things are precious before they are contributory. It is false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good, but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own goodness; He has no use for it; only delight.
Just think what that means. We were not made in God’s image for nothing. The child’s preference for sweets over spinach, mankind’s universal love of the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does–for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, and mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them tov. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God’s design, our lawful love.
Another toast then.
To Da Vinci’s notebooks; to Einstein’s preoccupations; to Mozart and to Bach, and to the child who hears a canon for the first time in ‘Frere Jacques‘; to the singularities of chalk and cheese and to the delectability of all things, visible and invisible; l’chaim because it is good; to health, for no reason but itself; to men because they are men, to women without explanation, and to the good company of every secular thing in saecula saeculorum. Toast them with their own watchword: Here’s how!
Worry as Love Language
The feet-on-the-stove stance of this book is a deliberate attempt to cure myself, and anyone else who will listen, of the nasty habit of worrying the world to pieces like a terrier with a rag.
Contemplation will be the only defense against drowning in our own spare time. Even now, the doctrine of justification by work is difficult to defend. Jobs are shorter and more boring than they used to be. It’s hard to believe that five hours a day of button-pushing and paper shuffling are the heart and soul of human existence. Heaven help us, then, in the bright new day of the guaranteed income and the twenty-hour week. The grim old religion of salvation by rushing will go bankrupt altogether, and we shall go straight out of our minds–unless we learn to sit still. . . . The habit of contemplation, therefore–the ability to sit down in front of something and care enough to let it speak for itself–cannot be acquired soon enough. Accordingly, I invite you, too, to put your feet up on the stove. If some true believer in the gospel of haste comes along and asks us why we are wasting time, we shall tell him we are busy getting the seats of our pants properly shined up for the millenium.
Recent revelations have felt so good. So healing. So happy and whole.
And then Satan sneaks back behind my ear and says, “It can’t last. You’ll be miserable again soon. Misery is where you humans belong.”
Satan or John Piper. Little jerks. It’s easy to think worry is love or dedication or commitment. More love bombs.
That’s wrong. That’s what Capon is saying. God calls us to a Party. To joy. Joy is what lasts. Yes, our world is broken and miserable and sick. But the glimpses of joy and bliss are glimpses at what is permanent. That lingers. That’s the Kingdom.
A friend just passed along this Tim Keller quotation that sums it all up:
The story of Jesus standing before the tomb of Lazarus is an endless source of insight for me. As he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus was not smiling. He was angry. He was weeping. Why? Because death is a bad thing! Jesus wasn’t thinking, ‘They think that this is a tragedy, but no harm done! I’m about to raise him from the dead. This looks like a bad thing, but it’s not. It’s really a good thing! It’s a way for me to show my glory. It’s really exciting! I can’t wait!’ He wasn’t thinking that. Jesus was weeping at the tomb, because the bad thing he’s about to work for good is bad. The story of Lazarus does not give you a saccharine view of suffering, saying bad things are really blessings in disguise or that every cloud has a silver lining. The Bible never says anything like that! God will give bad things good effects in your life, but they’re still bad. Jesus Christ’s anger at the tomb of Lazarus proves that he hates death. He also hates loneliness, alienation, pain, and suffering. Jesus hates it all so much that he was willing to come into this world and experience it all himself, so that eventually he could destroy it without destroying us.
There’s no saccharine view in the Christian faith. The promise is not that if you love God, good things will happen in your life. The promise is not that if you love God, the bad things really aren’t bad; they’re really good things. The promise is that God will take the bad things, and he’ll work them for good in the totality.