Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Trash (1988)

  “Now, honey. That’s not like you. Remember, the Lord loves a charitable heart.” “I don’t care. The Lord didn’t intend me to get nauseous in the middle of Sunday services. That child is a shock to the digestion.” Driving from Greenville to Greer on Highway 85 past the Sears, Roebuck warehouse, the airbase, the rolling green-and-red mud hills—a trip we made almost every other day—my stepfather never failed to get us all to sing like some traveling gospel family. WHILE I WAS SLEEPING SOMEBODY TOUCHED ME, WHILE I WAS SLEEPING, OH! SOMEBODY TOUCHED ME . . . MUST’HA BEEN THE HAND OF THE LORD . . . Full-voice, all-out, late-evening gospel music filled the car and shocked the passing traffic. My stepfather never drove fast, and not a one of us could sing worth a damn. My sisters howled and screeched, my mama’s voice broke like she, too, dreamed of Teresa Brewer, and my stepfather made sounds that would have scared cows. None of them cared, and I tried not to let it bother me. I’d put my head out the window and howl for all I was worth. The wind filled my mouth and the roar obscured the fact that I sang as badly as any of them. Sometimes at the house I’d even go sing into the electric fan. It made my voice buzz and waver like a slide guitar, an effect I particularly liked, though Mama complained it gave her a headache and would give me an earache if I didn’t cut it out. I took the fan out on the back porch and sang to myself. Maybe I wouldn’t get to be the star on the stage, maybe I’d wind up singing background in a “family”—all of us dressed alike in electric blue fringed blouses with silver embroidery. All I needed was a chance to turn my soulful brown eyes on a tent full of believers, sing out the little break in my mournful voice. I knew I could make them love me. There was a secret to it, but I would find it out. If Shannon Pearl could do it to me, I would find a way to do it to the world. I had the idea that because she was so ugly on the outside, it was only reasonable that Shannon would turn out to be saintlike when you got to know her. That was the way it would have been in any storybook the local ladies’ society would have let me borrow. I thought of Little Women, The Bobbsey Twins, and all those novels about poor British families at Christmas. Tiny Tim, for Christ’s sake! Shannon, I was sure, would be like that. A patient and gentle soul had to be hidden behind those pale and sweaty features. She would be generous, insightful, understanding, and wise beyond her years. She would be the friend I had always needed.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Rather than face the dishonour which in spite of my innocence you threaten me with, I shall hurl myself into this well, and when they find me dead inside it, they will all think that it was you who threw me into it when you were drunk; and so either you will have to run away, lose everything you possess, and live in exile, or you will have your head chopped off for murdering your wife, which in effect is what you will have done.’ Having made up his stupid mind, Tofano was not affected in the slightest by these words, and so his wife said: ‘Now look here, I won’t let you torment me any longer: may God forgive you, I’ll leave my distaff here, and you can put it back where it belongs.’ The night was so dark that you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face, and having uttered these words, the woman groped her way towards the well, picked up an enormous stone that was lying beside it, and with a cry of ‘God forgive me!’ she dropped it into the depths. The stone struck the water with a tremendous thump, and when Tofano heard this he was firmly convinced that she had thrown herself in. So he seized the pail and its rope, rushed headlong from the house, and ran to the well to assist her. His wife was lying in wait near the front door, and as soon as she saw him running to the well, she stepped inside the house, bolted the door, and went to the window, where she stood and shouted: ‘You should water down your wine when you’re drinking it, and not in the middle of the night.’ When he heard her voice, Tofano saw that he had been outwitted and made his way back to the house. And on finding that he couldn’t open the door, he ordered her to let him in. Whereas previously she had addressed him in little more than a whisper, his wife now began to shout almost at the top of her voice, saying: ‘By the cross of God, you loathsome sot, you’re not going to come in here tonight. I will not tolerate this conduct of yours any longer. It’s time I showed people the sort of man you are and the hours you keep.’ Being very angry, Tofano too began to shout, pouring out a stream of abuse, so that the neighbours, men and women alike, hearing all this racket, got up out of bed and appeared at their windows, demanding to know what was going on.

• From Trash (1988)

  The Boatwright children had bad dreams. After supper they were all required to wash again while their mama watched. “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” The children scrubbed and scrubbed, while Shirley rubbed her neck with one hand and her bulging belly with another. “I’d kill this thing, if I could,” she muttered. Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals. “You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes. “You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones. “You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.” She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin to me at all.” It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children. Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk. “Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.” “Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested.

• From Trash (1988)

  “The music hasn’t even started.” I drank again, concentrating on feeling angry rather than self-conscious or ashamed. The last of the audience was milling past us while a piano chord sounded from the front of the hall. A little group of men and women passed us, the women defiant in silky skirts and the men holding the women close to them. One of the women stared at Billy and giggled when Billy grinned at her. The man with her looked nervous and impatient, but the woman didn’t seem to want to head for her seat. Like a pigeon transfixed by a snake, she was pinned to the far wall by Billy’s green-eyed stare. I almost laughed out loud. “I don’t care who they sleep with,” I whispered to Cass, “I just wish they wouldn’t tell so many lies about it.” “Mean bitch,” Cass quipped, not meaning it at all. Roxanne looked over at me strangely, her face working as if she were making up her mind about something. She looked up at Billy, who was still watching the woman against the far wall. “Hell,” Roxanne said, “these days I can’t tell who’s lying and who is just passing time.” “Passing time,” I repeated. I ignored Cass’s offer of another drink. Instead I turned and put my arm around Roxanne’s shoulders, watching with her as the audience settled down and Cass and Billy whispered behind us. I watched the way the women moved, the muscles that stood out in their necks, the way their eyes went from dark to light in the changing light. My teeth clenched, but I just held on to Roxanne, and kept my hip pressed close to Cass’s long legs. Most mornings when I woke there in the early dawn, I would lie still and think about the stories Anna told me. She didn’t really talk much to the other women in the house, not even the ones who came to sit on her water bed and smoke her dope—none of them knew she was arrested ten years ago. “Hell, they’d put me on posters and platforms if they did.” She laughed softly at the stories they told her, telling about her childhood now and then, but mostly getting them to talk. When I joined them to sit on the floor and drink a beer, Anna started teasing me about whether I’ve been over playing pool. “Just to watch,” I told her, and we both laughed. “I hate that pool hall.” Mona was embroidering a red-and-gold labrys on the back of her jacket. She bit off red yarn and spit it into her palm. “All those drunken punks out on the sidewalk all the time, pushing those big motorbikes around, and the women in there hanging on them. Makes me sick.”

• From Trash (1988)

  Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people just as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read—sometimes most important what I should not try to write. I began in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser, aching to break the world open with what I had to say on the page. There were specific feelings I wanted the stories to create, realizations I wanted people to experience. Sometimes it was grief I wanted to provoke, sometimes anger, almost always a spur to action, to change. I wanted the world to be different in my lifetime, and I truly believed that stories were one way to help that happen. I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft. I wanted to be good and I wanted to be effective, and these are not always the same thing. Sometimes I was trying to write a poem, but the thing would not pare down enough to anything less than narrative. Sometimes I was so angry, I wrote to stop my own rage. Mostly I was angry, and drunk on words, the sound of words more than the way they looked on the page. It is quite literally the case that I wrote out loud, reading the stories out loud over and over until they were closer to what I wanted. “If I die tomorrow, I want to have gotten this down.” That is how many of these stories started. Once in a while, I had read someone else’s story and put it down in rage, beginning my own to refuse the one that had so confounded me. Going back into these stories, I remember those moments even when I no longer remember the actual stories I was refuting. Taylor Caldwell stories, I called them in an early journal—stories in which poor southern characters were framed as if they were brain-damaged, or morally insufficient, or just damn stupid.

• From Trash (1988)

  “I got mustard grass, you know, and yellow nettles. Grow ’em cause it makes people mad, ’cause an’t nobody can tell me anything. It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine.” They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved. “Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.” Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat. Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards. “You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!” Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone. “Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!” Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died. “You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.” Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.” “Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Luther represents here the ministerial office as the creature of the congregation; while at a later period, warned by democratic excesses, and the unfitness of most of the congregations of that age for a popular form of government, he laid greater stress upon the importance of the ministry as an institution of Christ. This idea of the general priesthood necessarily led to the emancipation of the laity from priestly control, and their participation in the affairs of the Church, although this has been but very imperfectly carried out in Protestant state churches. It destroyed the distinction between higher (clerical and monastic), and lower morality; it gave sanctity to the natural relations, duties, and virtues; it elevated the family as equal in dignity to virginity; it promoted general intelligence, and sharpened the sense of individual responsibility to the Church. But to the same source may be traced also the undue interference of kings, princes, and magistrates in ecclesiastical matters, and that degrading dependence of many Protestant establishments upon the secular power. Kingcraft and priestcraft are two opposite extremes, equally opposed to the spirit of Christianity. Luther, and especially Melanchthon, bitterly complained, in their later years, of the abuse of the episcopal power assumed by the magistrate, and the avarice of princes in the misappropriation of ecclesiastical property. The principle of the general priesthood of the laity found its political and civil counterpart in the American principle of the general kingship of men, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are born free and equal." 2. In the second part, Luther chastises the worldly pomp of the Pope and the cardinals, their insatiable greed, and exactions under false pretenses. 3. In the third part, he deals with practical suggestions. He urges sweeping reforms in twenty-seven articles, to be effected either by the civil magistrate, or by a general council of ministers and laymen. He recommends the abolition of the annates, of the worldly pomp and idolatrous homage paid to the Pope (as kissing his feet), and of his whole temporal power, so that he should be hereafter merely a spiritual ruler, with no power over the emperor except to anoint and crown him, as a bishop crowns a king, as Samuel crowned Saul and David. He strongly demands the abrogation of enforced clerical celibacy, which destroys instead of promoting chastity, and is the cause of untold misery. Clergymen should be allowed to marry, or not to marry, according to their gift and sense of duty. Masses for the dead should be abolished, since they have become a solemn mockery, and devices for getting money, thus exciting the anger of God. Processions, saints’ days, and most of the public festivals, except Sunday, should be abrogated, since holy days have become most unholy by drinking, gambling, and idling. Monasteries should be reduced in number, and converted into schools, with freedom to enter and to leave without binding vows.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And this is how he carries on, not just once a month, but a thousand times a day. What chance then do you think a woman, fickle by nature, can have against all the entreaties, the blandishments, the presents, and the thousand other expedients to which any intelligent lover will resort? Do you think she is going to resist him? Of course not, and you know it, no matter what you claim to the contrary. Why, you told us yourself that your wife is a woman, made of flesh and blood like the rest, in which case her desires are no different from any other woman’s, and her power to resist these natural cravings cannot be any greater. So that, however virtuous she may be, it’s quite possible that she acts like all the others. And whenever a thing is possible, one should not discount it prematurely or affirm its opposite, as you are doing.’ Bernabò’s reply was brief and to the point. ‘I am a merchant, not a philosopher,’ he said, ‘and I shall give you a merchant’s answer. I am well aware that the sort of thing you describe can happen in the case of foolish women who are without any sense of shame. But the more judicious ones are so eager to safeguard their honour that they become stronger than men, who are indifferent to such matters. And my wife is one of these.’ ‘If, of course,’ said Ambrogiuolo, ‘a horn, bearing witness to their doings, were to sprout from their heads whenever they were unfaithful, then I think that the number of unfaithful women would be small. Not only do they not grow any horns, however, but the judicious ones leave no visible trace of their activities. There can’t be any shame or loss of honour without clear evidence, and so if they can keep it a secret, either they get on with it or they desist because they are weak in the head. You can rest assured that the only chaste woman is either one who never received an improper proposal or one whose own proposals were always rejected. Even though I know that there are cogent and logical arguments to support this assertion, I would not be spelling it out with so much confidence were it not for the fact that I have often had occasion to prove it for myself with any number of women. And I will tell you this, that if I were anywhere near this ever-so-saintly lady of yours, I shouldn’t think it would take me long to lead her where I have led others in the past.’ ‘We could go on arguing like this indefinitely,’ said Bernabò, who was by this time thoroughly incensed. ‘You would say one thing, I would say another, and in the end we would get precisely nowhere.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  On hearing these words, the King immediately came to the conclusion that the Queen had been taken in by an outward resemblance to his own physique and manner. But he was a wise man, and since neither the Queen nor anybody else appeared to have noticed the deception, he had no hesitation in deciding to keep his own counsel. Many a stupid man would have reacted differently, and exclaimed: ‘It was not I. Who was the man who was here? What happened? Who was it who came?’ But this would only have led to complications, upsetting the lady when she was blameless and sowing the seeds of a desire, on her part, to repeat the experience. And besides, by holding his tongue his honour remained unimpaired, whereas if he were to talk he would make himself look ridiculous. And so, showing little sign of his turbulent inner feelings either in his speech or in his facial expression, the King answered her as follows: ‘Do you think, my dear, that I am incapable of returning to you a second time after being here once already?’ ‘Oh no, my lord,’ the lady replied. ‘But all the same, I beg you not to overdo it.’ ‘Your advice is sound, and I intend to follow it,’ said the King. ‘I shall go away again, and bother you no further tonight.’ And so, boiling with anger and indignation because of the trick that had clearly been played upon him, he put on his cloak again and departed, bent upon tracking the culprit quietly down, for the King supposed that he must be a member of the household, in which case, no matter who the fellow was, he would still be within the palace walls. Accordingly, having equipped himself with a small lantern shedding very little light, he made his way to a dormitory above the palace-stables containing a long row of beds, where nearly all of his servants slept. And since he calculated that the author of the deed to which the lady had referred would not yet have had time to recover a normal pulse and heartbeat after his exertions, the King began at one end of the dormitory and went silently along the row, placing his hand on each man’s chest in order to discover whether his heart was still pounding.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  mother reported the incident to him. He responded by demanding that her son be gone from the house by the time he got home from work the next afternoon. Boyd was immediately sent to me by bus. I wrote my mother a letter expressing outrage at my brother’s banishment. My stepfather was the one who should leave, I said, not the children. He was the problem, I wrote, venting, not our baby brother. What I didn’t know is that when my stepfather walked to the end of the driveway every day to get the mail, he opened everything and read it without my mother’s permission, even her private mail. When my mother called to tell me that he’d read the letter and that I was now banned from the house and that my name could no longer be spoken, I reminded her that opening someone else’s mail is a federal offense. Because of the banishment by my stepfather, I was dead to my mother’s home for many years. In the country there was a revolution going on. I’d seen it lift its head at Indian school as fresh art began coming through us. Indian country began riding the wave of a giant waking consciousness, inspired by the civil rights movement. We were waking up all over the country, at Alcatraz, in Pine Ridge, in Minneapolis, in Washington, D.C. As students active in the Kiva Club, the university’s Indian student organization, we were on fire with the possibility of peace and justice for our peoples. We stepped forth to take care of the spirit of our peoples, in the manner of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, whose organized front in the early 1800s fought to protect and renew tribal rights and traditions. Our generation was the seventh generation from the Tecumseh and Monahwee generation. Seven marks transformation and change, the shift from one kind of body to the next. Though black America inspired us, Indian peoples were different. Most of us did not want to become full-fledged Americans. We wished to maintain the integrity of our tribal cultures and assert our individual tribal nations. We aspired to be traditional-contemporary twentieth-century warriors, artists, and dreamers. There was also a revolution of female power emerging. It was subsumed for native women under our tribal struggle, though we certainly had struggles

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Angela stared at her, white and aghast: ‘You are mad,’ she said slowly, ‘you’re raving mad. Tell him what? Have I let you become my lover? You know that I’ve always been faithful to Ralph; you know perfectly well that there’s nothing to tell him beyond a few rather schoolgirlish kisses. Can I help it if you’re—what you obviously are? Oh, no, my dear, you’re not going to tell Ralph. You’re not going to let all hell loose around me just because you want to save your own pride by pretending to Ralph that you’ve been my lover. If you’re willing to give up your home I’m not willing to sacrifice mine, understand that, please. Ralph’s not much of a man but he’s better than nothing, and I’ve managed him so far without any trouble. The great thing with him is to blaze a false trail, that distracts his mind, it works like a charm. He’ll follow any trail that I want him to follow—you leave him to me, I know my own husband a darned sight better than you do, Stephen, and I won’t have you interfering in my home.’ She was terribly frightened, too frightened to choose her words, to consider their effect upon Stephen, to consider anyone but Angela Crossby who stood in such dire and imminent peril. So she said yet again, only now she spoke loudly: ‘I won’t have you interfering in my home!’ Then Stephen turned on her, white with passion: ‘You—you—’ she stuttered, ‘you’re unspeakably cruel. You know how you make me suffer and suffer because I love you the way I do; and because you like the way I love you, you drag the love out of me day after day—Can’t you understand that I love you so much that I’d give up Morton? Anything I’d give up—I’d give up the whole world. Angela, listen; I’d take care of you always. Angela, I’m rich—I’d take care of you always. Why won’t you trust me? Answer me—why? Don’t you think me fit to be trusted?’ She spoke wildly, scarcely knowing what she said; she only knew that she needed this woman with a need so intense, that worthy or unworthy, Angela was all that counted at that moment. And now she stood up, very tall, very strong, yet a little grotesque in her pitiful passion, so that looking at her Angela trembled—there was something rather terrible about her. All that was heavy in her face sprang into view, the strong line of the jaw, the square, massive brow, the eyebrows too thick and too wide for beauty; she was like some curious, primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition. ‘Angela, come very far away—anywhere, only come with me soon—to-morrow.’ Then Angela forced herself to think quickly, and she said just five words: ‘Could you marry me, Stephen?’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘God pity you!’ he suddenly blurted out. ‘Your triumph, if it comes, will come too late for Mary.’ She stared at him aghast: ‘How dare you!’ she stammered, ‘How dare you try to undermine my courage! You call yourself my friend and you say things like that . . .’ ‘It’s your courage that I appeal to,’ he answered. He began to speak very quietly again: ‘Stephen, if I stay I’m going to fight you. Do you understand? We’ll fight this thing out until one of us has to admit that he’s beaten. I’ll do all in my power to take Mary from you—all that’s honourable, that is—for I mean to play straight, because whatever you may think I’m your friend, only, you see—I love Mary Llewellyn.’ And now she struck back. She said rather slowly, watching his sensitive face as she did so: ‘You seem to have thought it all out very well, but then of course, our friendship has given you time . . .’ He flinched and she smiled, knowing how she could wound: ‘Perhaps,’ she went on, ‘you’ll tell me your plans. Supposing you win, do I give the wedding? Is Mary to marry you from my house, or would that be a grave social disadvantage? And supposing she should want to leave me quite soon for love of you—where would you take her, Martin? To your aunt’s for respectability’s sake?’ ‘Don’t, Stephen!’ ‘But why not? I’ve a right to know because, you see, I also love Mary, I also consider her reputation. Yes, I think on the whole we’ll discuss your plans.’ ‘She’d always be welcome at my aunt’s,’ he said firmly. ‘And you’ll take her there if she runs away to you? One never knows what may happen, does one? You say that she cares for you already . . .’ His eyes hardened: ‘If Mary will have me, Stephen, I shall take her first to my aunt’s house in Passy.’ ‘And then?’ she mocked. ‘I shall marry her from there.’ ‘And then?’ ‘I shall take her back to my home.’ ‘To Canada—I see—a safe distance of course.’ He held out his hand: ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t! It’s so horrible somehow—be merciful, Stephen.’ She laughed bitterly: ‘Why should I be merciful to you? Isn’t it enough that I accept your challenge, that I offer you the freedom of my house, that I don’t turn you out and forbid you to come here? Come by all means, whenever you like. You may even repeat our conversation to Mary; I shall not do so, but don’t let that stop you if you think you may possibly gain some advantage.’ He shook his head: ‘No, I shan’t repeat it.’ ‘Oh, well, that must be as you think best. I propose to behave as though nothing had happened—and now I must get along with my work.’ He hesitated: ‘Won’t you shake hands?’

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  (c) The sacrifice of the mass: that is, the offering to God of the very body and blood of Christ by the hands of the priest when he pronounces the words of institution; in other words, an actual repetition of the atoning sacrifice of the cross, only in an unbloody manner. This institution is the very heart of Roman-Catholic (and Greek-Catholic) worship. Luther attacks it as the third bondage, and the most impious of all. He feels the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of a task which involves an entire revolution of public worship. "At this day," he says, "there is no belief in the Church more generally received, or more firmly held, than that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice. This abuse has brought in an infinite flood of other abuses, until faith in the sacrament has been utterly lost, and they have made this divine sacrament a mere subject of traffic, huckstering, and money-getting contracts; and the entire maintenance of priests and monks depends upon these things." He goes back to the simplicity of the primitive institution of the Lord’s Supper, which is a thankful commemoration of the atoning death of Christ, with a blessing attached to it, namely, the forgiveness of sins, to be appropriated by faith. The substance of this sacrament is promise and faith. It is a gift of God to man, not a gift of man to God. It is, like baptism, to be received, and not to be given. The Romanists have changed it into a good work of man and an opus operatum, by which they imagine to please God; and have surrounded it with so many prayers, signs, vestments, gestures, and ceremonies, that the original meaning is obscured. "They make God no longer the bestower of good gifts on us, but the receiver of ours. Alas for such impiety!" He proves from the ancient Church that the offering of the eucharist, as the name indicates, was originally a thank-offering of the gifts of the communicants for the benefit of the poor. The true sacrifice which we are to offer to God is our thanks, our possessions, and our whole person. He also objects to the use of the Latin language in the mass, and demands the vernacular.

• From Trash (1988)

  “I got mustard grass, you know, and yellow nettles. Grow ’em cause it makes people mad, ’cause an’t nobody can tell me anything. It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine.” They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved. “Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.” Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat. Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards. “You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!” Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone. “Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!” Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died. “You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.” Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.” “Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.”

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  drugging him so he would sleep with them, to read to my mother from the Bible. “These stories can’t be in the Bible!” she’d exclaim. And then I would point to the pages. I often read to my mother. Once I read the opening to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to her. I thought she’d recognize her family’s story, as she had grown up poor during the time of the Dust Bowl. She did. For several weeks she read the novel between jobs and while cooking for us. One night, a month or so after my mother had started reading, she marched into my bedroom while I was getting ready for bed. She was furious with Steinbeck and me. Why had I given her a story to read that left the family broken down in the middle of the road? How could a writer abandon the characters and the story at a place of ruin? Unlike the reality we appeared to be living, she wanted her stories to have good endings. I loved the erotic poetry of the Song of Solomon from the Bible. These were in essence love songs for a beloved. The beloved was also God. I turned to these songs in the Bible to escape the pedantic sermons of the preacher. I preferred to consider God as a beloved rather than as a wrathful white man who was ready to destroy anyone who had an imagination. One Sunday morning a well-meaning member of the congregation brought a trio of young Mexican-American sisters to church. They sat together in the front row, next to their sponsor. I was immediately uneasy. I knew how difficult it had been for me being Indian in church, and they were darker Indian-looking girls. I had a bad feeling. In the middle of the sermon the preacher breached protocol and called them out directly from the pulpit for whispering. It was all right to save dark-skinned souls at a distance, from Korea or Africa, but he made it clear that he did not want these people in his church. The pastor continued to have difficulty concentrating on his sermon. I watched as his face turned red from anger, and when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he demanded that the girls leave. I watched with the rest of the congregation as the girls walked out of the church. I wanted to leave with them. I didn’t have the courage to stand up with them and walk out. I never returned after that Sunday. From then on I suffered Sundays in a nervous silence in the house with my stepfather.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This new song, or second war-trumpet, was the book on the, "Babylonian Captivity of the Church," published in the beginning of October, 1520.248 He calls it a "prelude," as if the real battle were yet to come. He intended it for scholars and the clergy, and therefore wrote in Latin. It is a polemical, theological work of far-reaching consequences, cutting one of the roots of Romanism, and looking towards a new type of Christian life and worship. He attacks the sacramental system of the Roman Church, by which she accompanies and controls the life of the Christian from the cradle to the grave, and brings every important act and event under the power of the priest. This system he represents as a captivity, and Rome as the modern Babylon. Yet he was very far from undervaluing the importance and benefit of the sacrament; and as far as the doctrine of baptism and the eucharist is concerned, he agreed better with the Catholic than with the Zwinglian view. Luther begins by thanking his Romish opponents for promoting his theological education. "Two years ago," he says, "I wrote about indulgences when I was still involved in superstitious respect for the tyranny of Rome; but now I have learned, by the kind aid of Prierias and the friars, that indulgences are nothing but wicked devices of the flatterers of Rome. Afterwards Eck and Emser instructed me concerning the primacy of the Pope. While I denied the divine right, I still admitted the human right; but after reading the super-subtle subtilties of those coxcombs in defense of their idol, I became convinced that the papacy is the kingdom of Babylon and the power of Nimrod the mighty hunter. Now a learned professor of Leipzig writes against me on the sacrament in both kinds, and is about to do still greater wonders.249 He says that it was neither commanded nor decreed, whether by Christ or the apostles, that both kinds should be administered to the laity." 1. Luther first discusses the sacrament of the Holy Communion, and opposes three errors as a threefold bondage; namely, the withdrawal of the cup from the laity, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the sacrifice of the mass.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  brought down upon him the charge of ditheism. His disciplinary principles are rigoristic and ascetic. In this respect also he is akin to Tertullian, though he places the Montanists, like the Quartodecimanians, but with only a brief notice, among the heretics. His style is vigorous, but careless and turgid. Caspari calls Hippolytus "the Roman Origen." This is true as regards learning and independence, but Origen had more genius and moderation. The principal work of Hippolytus is the Philosophumena or Refutation of all Heresies. It is, next to the treatise of Irenaeus, the most instructive and important polemical production of the ante-Nicene church, and sheds much new light, not only upon the ancient heresies, and the development of the church doctrine, but also upon the history of philosophy and the condition of the Roman church in the beginning of the third century. It furthermore affords valuable testimony to the genuineness of the Gospel of John, both from the mouth of the author himself, and through his quotations from the much earlier Gnostic Basilides, who was a later contemporary of John (about A.D. 125). The composition falls some years after the death of Callistus, between the years 223 and 235. The first of the ten books gives an outline of the heathen philosophies which he regards as the sources of all heresies; hence the title Philosophumena which answers the first four books, but not the last six. It is not in the Athos-MS., but was formerly known and incorporated in the works of Origen. The second and third books, which are wanting, treated probably of the heathen mysteries, and mathematical and astrological theories. The fourth is occupied likewise with the heathen astrology and magic, which must have exercised great influence, particularly in Rome. In the fifth book the author comes to his proper theme, the refutation of all the heresies from the times of the apostles to his own. He takes up thirty-two in all, most of which, however, are merely different branches of Gnosticism and Ebionism. He simply states the heretical opinions from lost writings, without introducing his own reflection, and refers them to the Greek philosophy, mysticism, and magic, thinking them sufficiently refuted by being traced to those heathen sources. The ninth book, in refuting the doctrine of the Noëtians and Callistians, makes remarkable disclosures of events in the Roman church. He represents Pope Zephyrinus as a weak and ignorant man who gave aid and comfort to the Patripassian heresy, and his successor Callistus, as a shrewd and cunning manager who was once a slave, then a dishonest banker, and became a bankrupt and convict, but worked himself into the good graces of Zephyrinus and after his death obtained the object of his ambition, the papal chair, taught heresy and ruined the discipline by extreme leniency to offenders. Here the author shows himself a violent partizan, and must be used with caution.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The council consisted of seventeen cardinals, a hundred and twenty-four bishops, four hundred and fourteen abbots; the pope presided in person; Becket sat at his right, Roger of York at his left. Arnolf of Lisieux in Normandy preached the opening sermon on the unity and freedom of the Church, which were the burning questions of the day. The council unanimously acknowledged the claims of Alexander, asserted the rights and privileges of the clergy, and severely condemned all encroachments on the property of the Church. This was the point which kindled the controversy between the sceptre and the crozier in England. The dignity of the crown was the sole aim of the king; the dignity of the Church was the sole aim of the archbishop. The first rupture occurred over the question of secular taxation. Henry determined to transfer the customary payment of two shillings on every hide of land to his own exchequer. Becket opposed the enrolment of the decree on the ground that the tax was voluntary, not of right. Henry protested, in a fit of passion, "By the eyes of God, it shall be enrolled!" Becket replied, "By the eyes of God, by which you swear, it shall never be levied on my lands while I live!" Another cause of dispute was the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The king demanded that all clerics accused of gross misdemeanors be tried by the civil court. A certain clerk, Philip of Broi, had been acquitted of murder in the bishop’s court. The king was indignant, but Philip refused to plead in the civil court. The matter was taken up by the archbishop, but a light sentence imposed. The king summoned a Parliament at Westminster, and demanded in the name of equal justice, and in accordance with "ancient customs" (of the Norman kings), that all clerks accused of heinous crimes should be immediately degraded, and be dealt with according to law, instead of being shielded by their office. This was contrary to the right of the priest to be tried only in the court of his bishop, where flagellation, imprisonment, and degradation might be awarded, but not capital punishment. Becket and the bishops agreed that the king’s demand was an infringement of the canon law and argued the case from Scripture. Joab, and Abiathar the priest, were guilty of putting Adonijah to death. Joab was punished, but the priest suffered no other punishment than deposition from office. Nahum 1:9 was quoted as against a double tribunal for clerks. According to the Septuagint version, this passage declares that God does not give two judgments in the same case.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This experience was diametrically opposed to a system of relief by means of payments in money. It was an irrepressible conflict of principle. He could not be silent when that barter was carried to the very threshold of his sphere of labor. As a preacher, a pastor, and a professor, he felt it to be his duty to protest against such measures: to be silent was to betray his theology and his conscience. The jealousy between the Augustinian order to which he belonged, and the Dominican order to which Tetzel belonged, may have exerted some influence, but it was certainly very subordinate. A laboring mountain may produce a ridiculous mouse, but no mouse can give birth to a mountain. The controversy with Tetzel (who is not even mentioned in Luther’s Theses) was merely the occasion, but not the cause, of the Reformation: it was the spark which exploded the mine. The Reformation would have come to pass sooner or later, if no Tetzel had ever lived; and it actually did break out in different countries without any connection with the trade in indulgences, except in German Switzerland, where Bernhardin Samson acted the part of Tetzel, but after Zwingli had already begun his reforms. § 32. The Ninety-five Theses. Oct. 31, 1517. Lit. in § 31. After serious deliberation, without consulting any of his colleagues or friends, but following an irresistible impulse, Luther resolved upon a public act of unforeseen consequences. It may be compared to the stroke of the axe with which St. Boniface, seven hundred years before, had cut down the sacred oak, and decided the downfall of German heathenism. He wished to elicit the truth about the burning question of indulgences, which he himself professed not fully to understand at the time, and which yet was closely connected with the peace of conscience and eternal salvation. He chose the orderly and usual way of a learned academic disputation. Accordingly, on the memorable thirty-first day of October, 1517, which has ever since been celebrated in Protestant Germany as the birthday of the Reformation, at twelve o’clock he affixed (either himself or through another) to the doors of the castle-church at Wittenberg, ninety-five Latin Theses on the subject of indulgences, and invited a public discussion. At the same time he sent notice of the fact to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, and to Bishop Hieronymus Scultetus, to whose diocese Wittenberg belonged. He chose the eve of All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), because this was one of the most frequented feasts, and attracted professors, students, and people from all directions to the church, which was filled with precious relics.186 No one accepted the challenge, and no discussion took place. The professors and students of Wittenberg were of one mind on the subject. But history itself undertook the disputation and defence. The Theses were copied, translated, printed, and spread as on angels’ wings throughout Germany and Europe in a few weeks.187

• From Trash (1988)

  “Tribadism,” I’d named it, trying to position myself so that I could enjoy it as much as she did. I really wanted to taste her, to put my tongue between her thighs, into her armpits, under her chin and behind her ears. Her hipbone hurt me and she kept lifting her torso so that I couldn’t even feel the lush heat of her full breasts. I wrestled for a while, licking her salty neck, wanting to bite her and imagining that she was enjoying my tongue. “Christ! You’re making me sticky,” Judy complained. She never stopping talking even while she was grinding her labia into my hipbone. “. . . I’m going to Gainesville on Wednesday. . . . Oh! Want to talk to Jackie about going with me . . . oh . . . you too maybe . . . oh . . . oh . . . horses . . . want to go riding . . . want to go riding with me . . . I love to ride . . . Oh!” It made me crazy, as if sex were a set of calisthenics one did to trigger sleep. When she came, she went rigid and silent, her body rising up and off of me stiffly, her eyes unfocused. I wondered what she thought then, but didn’t ask. When she came back to herself, she rolled over as if it were now my turn to climb on top and do the same. I pretended to fall asleep instead just to get her to be quiet, to lie still beside me while I rested my hands on the soft swell of her hips and watched the streetlight flicker as the wind blew the leaves around on the trees outside. She was a lawyer’s daughter from Miami and not a bad person. Not a bad person at all, I told myself, just different from me, very different from me.