Anger
Anger is the body mobilized against an obstruction — heat rising into the chest and jaw, the gaze narrowing, the hands wanting a target. It is not a failure of composure but a verdict already reached: something here is wrong, and the wrong has an address. Vela reads anger as a primary emotion with its own dignity, distinct from the cruelty it is so often mistaken for, and attends to how often it is the honest first response to harm.
Working definition · Mobilized objection—heat and pressure toward obstruction, harm, or unfairness.
8921 passages · in 1 cluster
Vela’s read on this emotion
Anger is one of the most moralized of the emotions Vela reads, and the moralizing usually runs in one direction — toward suppression. The reading runs against that reflex. Anger is information before it is a problem; it names the place where a boundary was crossed, and the writers worth following have refused to apologize for it.
The reading is densest where anger has had to be argued for as legitimate. The testimony of the AIDS years — the personal essays and oral histories that came out of ACT UP, the activist coalition that confronted the early epidemic — keeps rage as a load-bearing register, not a lapse. Audre Lorde wrote about the uses of anger as a precise instrument rather than a loss of control. The memoir of survived family harm holds anger that took years to permit itself — anger at a parent, at an institution, at the self for not being angrier sooner. The contemplative inheritance is not silent here either: the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms of imprecation keep an unembarrassed register of anger directed at injustice and even at God.
Anger is not the same as resentment, contempt, or cruelty. Resentment is anger banked and cooled — grievance kept in storage. Contempt has given up on the other and looks down; anger still believes the other can be reached. Cruelty wants harm for its own sake; anger wants the wrong addressed. The four are kin and the reading keeps them separate, because the writers most honest about each have kept them separate.
Study and magazine
Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
Read the guidePassages
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.
Page 58 of 447 · 20 per page
8921 tagged passages
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
Finally I got up courage to return to the cemetery in the late afternoon. The shack was a smoking scab at the graveyard’s edge. Distraught and angry townsmen clumped together, muttering about ‘the beast and his half-witted bastard,’ and their audacity to abduct the Duchessa herself. How fortunate, they declared, that she had escaped with her honor, yet was able to expose their atrocities to her husband who had arrived to save her, in time. No, she was upset, and the doctors said she must stay indoors several weeks; no one was to see her. “I left the town; shortly afterwards, the country. “As I drifted east, I pondered on all this. Soon I was in countries where life meant much less than in Europe. The particularities by which coming and killing could link up surpassed all I had heretofore experienced. But still I pondered Catherine’s actions. During those periods which all of us who live this particular life must endure, when I lose all taste for women, she exemplifies that fantasy the bourgeois misogynist has predicated to justify his own inadequacy. But at other times, when concourse with my own sex revolts me, I see her more generously, and I realize that the actions of all of us were webbed by circumstance, bound by whatever forces move a Duke and Duchess, a grave digger and his son, a wanderer in an alien land. “She was generous enough to let me escape an easy hanging. “I return little enough by letting her escape my censure. “Toward the end of two years’ wanderings I stayed a double month in India, most of it in the house of Geana Liana, a woman not twenty-one, but in whose palatial establishment, inherited from a doting ‘uncle,’ acts were committed hourly by Indians and Europeans alike, night and day, that would make the deeds of the grave diggers, were they lights in the sky, fade—to take an image from Sappho—as the moon blinds out the near stars. Those talents I had begun to develop with the Count were brought to fruition there: I ministered deeds, envisioned more arduous ones, participated in many; often I helped the participants recuperate. “Geana herself, as I drank Turkish coffee and ate candied fruit on the balcony and she painted at my portrait, asked, ‘Jon? What do you want to do?’ Eyes winged with kohl, she smiled behind her veil. ‘You are a doctor who cannot heal anyone. You say you have studied the ways of different cultures, yet you are amazed at everything you see. Do you paint?’ “ ‘I draw a little—’ I had actually had a job as a medical illustrator for one term. “ ‘Tomorrow I will loan you paints and brushes. And you will paint a mural on the wall of the West Chamber with the white jade columns.’ “I painted the wall.
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
The religion and theology that Jesus desires bring healing, life, freedom, and empowerment. Such faith and theology prioritizes the religious, theological, and spiritual expressions of those who are usually ignored and silenced. This is about giving away power and discovering the astonishing power within weakness. We must relinquish linguistic power. English is a global language, but its use isn’t always considered. Why do we have so many English-language theology and ministry texts translated into other languages instead of sponsoring books written in other languages? Scholars in Korea are expected to write an article in an English journal to gain “credibility” as a scholar in Korea. Why don’t we give power away by encouraging people to do theology in their own language, by supporting people to write in their own languages, and by sponsoring the publication and distribution of non-English-language books? We must relinquish gender-based power. Women experience discrimination and disadvantage on a daily basis. This is as true in the church as in other parts of society. It is time, especially for men, to give away their power so that women can flourish and experience life fully. Grace writes elsewhere, Clearly, as women accept their call into ministry, many are experiencing prejudice and sexism. The problem is even more shameful as it relates to women of color clergy. Women of color are usually the last hired and the first fired for paid church and denominational positions. Women of color also are faring poorly in gaining jobs in theological education. Even those institutions that supposedly comprise people who are theologically trained, continue to discriminate against women of color! Sunday morning is not only the most segregated day of the week, it is the day of week that women of color clergy are most discriminated against. What are we to do with this discrimination and prejudice that exist so prominently within the religious community? Are we to sit back, continue to throw our hands up in the air in exasperation, and give up hope for ourselves and for our daughters? Women clergy and those who support them are loudly saying “NO! This discrimination must end on our watch.”12 Embracing the Power of the Cross and the ResurrectionJesus calls us to relinquish our power. He invites us to embrace a different kind of power—one rooted in powerlessness, weakness, and foolishness. After washing the disciples’ feet Jesus asks them, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” (Jn 13:12 ). “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (Jn 13:14-15 ). This astonishing and countercultural power is the power of the cross and resurrection. We find this power in empathy, repentance, relinquishment, humility, integrity, justice, equality, diversity, reconciliation, and life together. In the summer of 2009 my (Grace’s) mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. The doctors gave her six months to live.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
In the shadow, his eyes returned to the leather band on the fleshy neck. “I called you at the jail. They told me you weren’t in. They suggested I try here at the Mirrors .” Bull turned his head slightly; the priest saw one of the brass studs flash on the collar. “Since it’s so near the church, I thought I’d come over.” “What is it, Father?” “Young Peggy-Ann . . . I have a study group for young women; for the ladies of this town interested in the spiritual problems of our age. And as they relate to other ages. So that they may find their proper and fitting place as women in this one. Now, the group is only two. But Peggy-Ann was late this evening. And I thought—” “What happened?” “She was molested! She was viciously molested, practically outside the church door!” Bull scraped at his crotch and shifted his weight. “Is she all right?” “Well, she’s . . . she was hysterical . . . no! No, of course she was not all right! The blood was running down her leg! She had huge bruises on her arms and breasts. She’d been cut and beaten besides. She was too terrified to defend herself. She can’t even walk. She’s too shocked, too hysterical to speak coherently. Catherine, the other woman in my group, is caring for her now at the church. Peggy-Ann had no family. They were killed in the fire on Colson Hill last Spring. You must excuse me, but I’m terribly upset by the whole business!” “Sure. I understand. Did she give you any idea who did it?” “But . . . but that’s why I’m upset! I saw who it was! I came out to look for her; and he was holding her in his arms!” “One of the fishermen? Them boys get some liquor in them and they just forget all manner of what’s decent—” “No. No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t anybody I’d ever seen from these parts. I’ve spent enough time at the docks so I know most of our boys by sight. No, it was probably a drifter. He didn’t have the look of one of our town’s boys. A skinny character, light hair.” “Do you think he’s liable to still be around? Did he see you?” “Yes.” “Then I bet he was scared off.” Bull shifted his weight. “You know, Father, probably the best thing you can do—” he worked his fist on the barrel “—is take as good care of the little girl as you can, and just forget—” “I don’t think you understand!”
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
“We abandoned him shortly; and the Duchessa was a sway of brown hair against Guido’s flexed thigh, pale fingers on dark wool. I watched the grave digger and my lady-live toil below and above my lady-dead. Finally Catherine stood to watch. Guido tried to push her back down, but she became amorous, kissing his arms and back: where her lips left, her tongue remained. Guido’s teeth tore the cold mouth. “ ‘Kiss me that way,’ Catherine whispered. ‘Me, me! Ah, now! What do you want of the corpse?’ She tried to slip between Guido and his gelid mistress. He shoved her. But she only tried harder. I could see, by his jerky movement, anger building, though he tried to contain himself. To appease him, I dropped on my knees to pleasure him as my habit was. But my lady-live seized him from my mouth. ‘In me . . . In me . . . !’ she pleaded. I was kneeling on her cloak. She wore beneath it the most translucent of shifts, which she had now bunched to her belly. She worried his brown shaft in her chestnut hair, tried to insert it in her wet slot. He twisted to the side long enough for her to gain half its length. Inflamed by part measure she thrust herself in his way in earnest. Guido held her face from his sight by the flat of his hand while he gnawed the breast beneath. ‘No! no . . . you must give your lips and teeth to—’ “I saw, past their legs, pietro move to the fireplace. For a moment the fire behind darkened him to a demon. He snatched the gleaming cleaver from the mantel, and hurled himself at the Duchessa and his father. He yanked Catherine’s hair back, brought the cleaver down— “I cried out and leaped to pull him off. He got a second blow. “All three were on the floor. “I pulled Pietro back by the shoulders. There was blood on Catherine’s forehead—but though her eyes were closed, she was breathing. I realized, even as Pietro struck a third time, then flung the weapon clattering to the wall, he’d hit with the flat of the blade! “ ‘Now, Papa! Now she’ll be still, like the other ones, like the beautiful other ones, Papa!’ “Guido had already gone down on her. Pietro gnawed her shoulder and pushed his fingers into her cunt. ‘Oh, you get your big dick in there, Papa! Fuck her, fuck her and then let me fuck her!’ Father and son, faces pressed together, bit her belly. When Guido rose, Pietro clawed into her like a nervous weasel. She bled. I rose to stop him, but Guido halted me.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
It’s like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is. Problem three: Our landlords, the Loud Family. This time, they’re after Dev’s blue blow-up wading pool. They left a message: If there’s a yellow circle in the lawn, our security deposit must cover the cost of sodding. Sod off, I said to the answering machine, shooting it the finger, both barrels, underhanded, like pistolas from a holster. Double-dog damn them. Mr. Loud plans to spend all spring and summer painting the house. All today he stood on a ladder scraping—meticulously by hand—lead paint. Meanwhile, his old-time transistor blares the so-called easy-listening channel—zippity doo-dah for nine hours—and he’s only cleared a four-foot square, and I have to tape shut Dev’s room so no lead gets in. Mr. Loud’s bringing a boom box tomorrow, and all his Peter, Paul & Mary tapes. Do I remember Puff the Magic Dragon , he wants to know. Do I? On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. Virtually every hour, Mr. Loud trudges loudly in to pee—age maybe seventy, one plaid thermos, yet the guy pees like Niagara Falls. By dusk, he’s washing his brushes in my sink, while in my mind, I’m notching an arrow in my bow and aiming it at his ass. Problem four—minor but ongoing: I’m just a smidge further in the bag tonight than I’d planned on, which keeps happening. The yard hasn’t started to spin like a roulette wheel yet. I’m upright, but even the slightest list can set it off. Posture’s what I need, balance, like walking with a book on my head, which I always sucked at. Unless I keep that bubble exactly in the middle, the whirlies will start. Tip my head even one inch to the left, the oak tree pitches right. Unless I focus extra-hard at something close, I’ll tumble off the face of the planet, trailing puke as I fly. What helps is staring at the index finger. Just foreground it and let the rest fuzz up. I sit upright against the kitchen door, staring at my own finger like it’s the Delphic oracle. And there I sit, poised as if on a flagpole, feeling with my free hand for my drink, when the wisp of an idea trails through my head. It doesn’t last, but it’s audible: you’re the bad mom in the afterschool special, the example other moms—little parentheses drawn down around their glossy mouths—go to the principal about. Oh, horseshit, I think. Mother fell down and pissed her pants, Daddy got in fistfights and drank himself to death. (Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) I turned out half okay; well, a quarter—at least a tenth okay.
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
Show me a Christian who sits comfortably in segregated ecclesial life, in a homogeneity of Christian practice, and I will show you someone who is formed for worldly power, that is, someone whose work in the world, in whatever endeavor they have chosen, always bends toward maintaining the status quo of segregation, of white supremacy, of Western imperialism, of the propagation of violence, and of the destruction of the planet. Harsh words, yes, but true nonetheless, because there is no other option for Christians engaged in the practices of our faith. Either we are being formed toward worldly power or we are being formed toward our strength-in-weakness with God; either we are moving toward faithful practices that deform faith or faithful practices that actual form faith in God. It may seem strange to use the designation of “faithful” for deformed faith, but in truth there is an integrity to Christian practices even done under the conditions of colonial power, patriarchy, white supremacy, Western imperialism, and planetary destruction. Yet the integrity, consistency, and orthodoxy of Christian practices have never been enough to actually make them Christian. What makes them Christian is Jesus, following him into the lives of people different from us, drawing us through the Holy Spirit into that crowd of pleading people looking for help and release from the bondages of this world. Too many people today are abandoning the church and imagining other spiritual practices that can heal themselves and the world. There is something good to be said about learning from the traditions of spiritual life beyond Christianity. But the tragedy in the efforts of too many is that they have never understood the great riches and overwhelming joy of Christian practices that touch the heart of Jesus and join us through the Holy Spirit to the world. Too many people have never learned how the church is not a door to shut out the world but a door to enter more deeply into its beating heart. If through our practices we follow Jesus into the depths of the world, then we will learn that the healing we all seek for ourselves and our world is offered to us not in our own strength but in God’s power, if only we would seek it together. INTRODUCTIONNine Practices That Heal Our Broken HumanityO n July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died after a police officer put him in a chokehold for almost nineteen seconds while arresting him. Garner was a forty-three-year-old African American man. He was wrestled to the ground by four police officers on suspicion of selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. While one officer put his arm around Garner’s neck, three others pinned him to the ground. Garner repeated “I can’t breathe” eleven times while lying facedown on the pavement. He then lost consciousness, and the officers did not perform CPR at the scene. Garner died that day due to the brutality of his arrest.
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
Rather, we must pay attention to the ways social differences give shape to one another. We must demand that remedies to discrimination and oppression also attend to the way injustices compound when issues of race, class, and gender overlap. Religion as a social institution is not exempt from this. Religion often plays a role in maintaining hierarchies of power. Christianity specifically has been a key player in reproducing systems of oppression throughout history. It has done this through its support for the domination of women, imperialism, capitalism, slavery, and segregation. In recent years Christians have misused Scripture and theology to maintain social inequality. Most recently, many Christians have supported anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti–people of color, and anti-poor policies. Chung Hyun Kyung, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York, says that the Bible needs to come with a warning label. We all know that cigarettes come with a warning label stating that smoking can cause lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. Chung says that the Bible’s warning label should state that reading the Bible without guidance may lead to war, patriarchy, colonialism, slavery, classism, racism, and so on. We cannot address injustice without attending to race, sexual identity, social class, ability, gender identity, and age. We cannot develop racial/ethnic theologies that do not attend to gender and sexual identity. When we create a singular identity as normative, we marginalize the intersections of diverse people within a group, who experience oppressions in varying ways because of the intersections. Justice requires us to move toward dignity, hope, and freedom for all people inclusive of all their differences. Justice requires that we leave no one out. We must leave no one’s experience unconsidered in exploring and expanding our ideas of God, sin, redemption, and the church. We must leave no one’s oppression unchallenged and no system of oppression intact. In our present political climate we will only address injustice if we think and act in a way that addresses how race, class, gender, and ability relate to one another and intensify one another. As the church we must resist institutions and ideologies that perpetuate oppression. We must care for the “least of these.” In doing so we position the church not as a complicit institution but as a leader in a vision toward God’s kin-dom that welcomes, affirms, encourages, and supports all of God’s children in all their God-given complexity. In this way the church seeks to restore justice to all people of all ethnicities, classes, and genders. So often Christians are so concerned about personal piety that they forget that God cares about the social conditions that we find ourselves in. We see this throughout the Bible. God was concerned about the social condition of the Israelites who were slaves in Egypt, the poor who lived under the Roman Empire, and the lepers who were outcasts in society. God cares about the social condition that we are in, and thus so should the church.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
She stares at me with two different eyes—one blue, one green. The green one has a brown nick in it, like a fault in ice. I didn’t want to smack him, she tells me. It would’ve just been instinctual. Batching your pants is instinctual, Mother. We don’t batch our pants. We don’t beat babies. That’s what civilization is all about—reining in those pesky instincts. Dev’s never been slapped. She huffs, Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him. Rising up through me with primordial force is the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her till her head pops off like a broken Barbie. The urge shoots through me like a barreling train, and I feel every single car flicker by before I say anything else. Breath comes in my body and leaves it. I love you, Mother, I say with great measure, but if you lay one hand on him, I’ll kick you till you’re dead. Okay, she says, exhaling slow. Okay, that sounds fair. When I put Dev to bed that night, I ask him if Grandma scared him earlier. He gives me a puzzled look. Why would she scare him? About the cookie, I tell him. He tells me, You’d never allow that to happen. Which I repeat here as a boast, for that sentence might be the most gratifying endorsement I ever got. 23Lather, Rinse, RepeatFirst you wake in disbelief, then in sadness and grief and when you wake for the last time, the forest you’ve been looking for will turn out to be right in the middle of your chest. —Dean Young, “Side Effects” One evening after I’ve dropped off some final files to the big-deal telecom consultant I once worked for, I lounge with him and his wife on their patio under a sprawling oak. In the spirit of farewell to my goofy career as a telecom marketer in business, he takes down a double album cover and begins to roll a joint. We hardly do this—not since grad school—he says, but you deserve a send-off. Ten days without a drink at this point, I say no. His wife has a crystal wineglass in her hand and a winning grin. Sure you don’t want some? she says. The sculpted garden spreads around us, neat as a plate of sushi. She has on a gauzy black dress, and as she takes the joint and tokes it, she drapes her long legs over the garden chair, saying, This is very different from drinking, right? I mean…She trails off into an exhale.
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
It is our wont to read the prophetic texts, more than any other biblical texts, as contemporary to our own time, place, and circumstance. It is important to remember that these are ancient texts that cannot easily be read in contemporary ways. But such texts do indeed feed our imagination and sometimes embolden us in our own social circumstance. In the instances I have cited from these three “major Minors,” we may participate in a second wave of “prophetic imagination.” The first level of such imagination is that these poets imagined that their particular social contexts were answerable to the will of the covenantal God. This was itself a major act of imagination that violated the more pragmatic assumptions of the “money men” who dominated that urban culture. They imagined that the economy was answerable to God! Our appropriation of these texts for our own circumstance requires a second act of prophetic imagination whereby the imagination of these ancient texts speaks an important word in our midst. There is no doubt that our political economy is quite like that found by the prophets, only on a larger scale. On that larger scale, we can readily identify a political economy that exploits the economically vulnerable. This is accomplished legally through manipulation of tax and credit laws, deregulation of protective measures, maintenance of an unlivable minimum wage (not to mention wage theft), and the endless circles of advantage whereby the well-connected prosper at the expense of everyone else. Therefore, prophetic imagination requires an acute social analysis, and this exactly in a privileged, entitled community of the well-off that is so fully conformed to the tune of civil religion that it willfully lacks the categories for such social analysis. Now as then, prophetic imagination is to see that our present power arrangements and practices work against neighborly well-being. But prophetic imagination as exhibited by these three major Minors not only offers social analysis; it also has two other truths as well. One is to connect the outcomes of such predatory gain to the rule of YHWH. These prophets are not predictors. But they can anticipate that no good can finally come from such policies and practices. They are certain that a sorry end is in store for such a society that violates the will and purpose of God. Amos therefore can lament an end that is sure to come for such a societal arrangement: “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple shall become wailing in that day,” says the Lord GOD; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!” 8:2–3 Thus Hosea can imagine the rejection of Israel by God: Then the LORD said, “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God.” 1:8 Thus Micah can imagine such a systemic failure of the economy: On that day they shall take up a taunt song against you,
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
At this writing, she is the only character whose fate I do not know. Bull, Nazi, Nig, Kim, Sambo, Dove, Benny, Gunner, Kirsten, you nameless beast in the cellar, and you too, we must hunt her, for she is terribly powerful. Captain, it is your addition to our entourage that steels me to face her. You bring an implication of mythic chaos with which to tempt her. She must be destroyed. She has spied on the devil, and now employs what she has learned to indulge freedoms that absolutely threaten us. Her scarcity in this narrative is the first sign of her power. You have no doubt deduced the standing competition between us. I have presented only an encounter during which, I think you will agree, she lost and I was a generous winner. There are very few of those. That there is no example I personally can bear to present where victory went otherwise, even to service that vaunted symmetry which I hold inviable:— there is the major indicator of her strength: That, as an obsession, she can so mar my intended effect of grace, gusto, and compression, simply by not showing up! It is her aesthetic and ethical elusiveness that make her the subject of the hunt. She is no figurine gratuite marked up to pay for the resonances of this tale. Her import is all I have not told you, am unable to tell you. Blame on her the distortions you have already noted in what I have tried to display. If you have any outrage left for that, then perhaps you will feel a little of what I feel for her. Yes, my view is distorted, but do not think it is small, or without compassion. Were it, believe me, it would generate no such obsession. She has spied on the devil. But so have you. So have we all, and indulged the irony of recognition, which, on a greater scale, is her only crime. Oh, she enjoys the theatre (perhaps gluts herself upon it), museums, has an entire life of the mind I have only implied. She reads of the destruction of young women in novels such as these and takes pleasure in it. She finds it amusing when innocent young men are executed for the unspeakable. But I need not go into her facility in the management of property, politics, or the division of money. Many of us have lain with her, not all against our will as did the poor monster mad in the cellar; most of us, not surprisingly have fared better than he. Notice I have spared you the evocation of sympathy for him as spur to our revenge. But, Captain, if you are compassionate . . . Enough. I have evoked your mythic virility with which to challenge her. But I see our number has grown considerably, even while I maunder her. Then come.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Around us, the entire car stops. People hold gestures midair. She starts to kick the back of my seat—hard and rhythmically, which I don’t respond to at first. If I were thinking like anything but an animal, I would’ve apologized to her by now. But I sit there fuming instead, telling myself stuff like, She’s just doing this because I’m a woman of a certain age. I’m determined not to respond to the kicks that keep coming, but eventually, she says with force, You better not get off in Albany, bitch, ’cause I’ll slap your face. With blood pounding in my temples and all the venom that a woman disappointed in love can bring to an instant, I press my face into the slot between the seat and the window and hiss, If you touch me, I’ll cut your fucking hand off. I don’t even know where this sentence comes from. Not to mention that—in terms of cutting off a hand—I lack even a pair of cuticle scissors. All human activity within sound of me ceases. The entire car is throbbing with hatred for us both. The girl withdraws like a slug doused with salt, and the train lurches west. About twenty minutes out of the station, while I sit infused with acid at the outburst, I try to write the girl a note, but I wind up crouching by her seat to apologize. She shrugs coolly. Once home, I call my sobriety coach, Patti, who says, What d’you expect, Mare? Run around without a meeting, and eventually, you’ll start acting like a drunk again. I wasn’t that bad back then. Silence from Patti, who knows better. Okay, sometimes I was. She suggests I doctor bathwater with lavender salts, set votive candles all over, kill the lights, then step into my own baptismal fount. Maybe there I can rethink events on the train. Follow that, she says, with a list of how your life has changed since you quit drinking. Lying back in the fragrant water, I let a washcloth obliterate my features, rewinding to the days and hours before I got on the train. It’s the old story. Underslept and underfed, I’d been running with my shoulder bag thumping against my butt, doing quarterback dodges and rolls on crowded holiday streets, while behind me, pedestrians dove for cover. I was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I’d loped. Take the subway, the sane voice had said. Take the subway, you can buy a sandwich. Then counterattack claimed I needed cardio for the blubber on my ass. A sandwich isn’t the solution. You need to refinance. You need five hundred dollars this week or Dev’s Christmas is Tiny Tim’s.
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
Ask them to help you think about race and gender issues, and to help you understand faith, justice, and reconciliation better. Just listen and learn. Your small group will never be the same again. Talk about your own prejudices. In your small group, talk honestly and openly about your prejudices, racism, sexism, and blind spots. Don’t be afraid to talk about this. It is very important to share and discuss these issues so that we can learn and grow. Pray together for the courage to change, and make commitments to do so. Advocate for those who’ve been silenced or denied agency. In your group, speak up for those who have been silenced in your culture or neighborhood. Talk with church, business, political, and other leaders. Write letters. Speak at events. Demand change. Become an ally for minorities and marginalized groups. Refuse to be silent. Join a Black Lives Matter march. Go to an Asian American, African American, Native American, or Latinx church. Demand that these people have a voice and the freedom to make free and valued decisions, actions, and choices. Posting on social media isn’t enough—use your privilege, time, money, and voice to demand that others are heard and are free to decide their own challenges and futures. Get involved. Your small group or church can’t do everything alone. You need to join other groups seeking to make a difference. Get involved with Black Lives Matter, Stand with Standing Rock, the American Association of University Women, the Disability Rights Network, the Association of Women’s Rights in Development, and so on. EightRECONCILE RELATIONSHIPSA few years ago I (Graham) had the chance to visit the Tent of Nations, which is in the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories. The Tent of Nations is a family farm owned by a Palestinian Christian family. Its mission is to build bridges between people, and between people and the land. We bring different cultures together to develop understanding and promote respect for each other and our shared environment. To realize this mission, we run educational projects at Daher’s Vineyard, our organic farm, located in the hills southwest of Bethlehem, Palestine. Our farm is a center where people from many different countries come together to learn, to share, and to build bridges of understanding and hope.1 Amal Nassar and her Palestinian Christian family preach nonviolence from their farm. They’ve been battling to hold on to their land while Israeli settlements encroach (they’ve owned this land in the West Bank for one hundred years). The BBC recently ran a fascinating piece on the Tent of Nations.2 The family is a living example of the idea of peaceful resistance. I was delighted to interview Nassar about the Tent of Nations and to record their story and vision.3 Sitting in one of the beautiful caves on their property, we talked about justice, peace, and reconciliation in Israel-Palestine. Covering the walls of the cave are paintings and words about peace and reconciliation (written in many languages).
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
In chapter 56 there is a contest over who is eligible for membership in the community. Isaiah 56:7 affirms that foreigners who do not have clear Jewish pedigree and eunuchs are seen to have no barrier to inclusion. Thus the text urges inclusiveness and flies in the face of the restrictions of Ezra, who wanted to limit membership in restored Israel to those of “holy seed”—of proper genealogy (Ezra 9:3). This text likely offers a vision that was taken up in the early church with the much-contested inclusion of Gentiles. Is Not This the Fast I Choose . . . ? (58:6) In chapter 58 there is a dispute concerning proper worship. In the familiar part of that text, it is stated that the proper fast, the most intense of religious disciplines, is to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see the naked, to cover them, and not hide yourself from your own kin. 58:7 In this interpretation, worship is transposed into neighborly engagement. We usually do not notice that in verses 1–4 there is a critique of worship that is a satisfying of religious desire but that is compartmentalized; such worship may go along with “oppression of your workers.” Such worship is cut off from the neighborly life of the community. Taken as a whole, this poem offers a sharp contrast between self-indulgent worship and an alternative that has love of neighbor in purview. The Spirit of the Lord Is upon Me. . . . (61:1) In the familiar text of chapter 61, the one who speaks is again given a vocation by the spirit of the Lord to act in transformative ways in society. Reference to “the year of the LORD’s favor” leads to the likelihood that what is intended here is nothing less than an observance of the year of Jubilee (see Lev. 25), a ritual enactment of neighborliness whereby neighborliness prevails over sharp economic practice. This sustained focus on justice is expressed through inclusiveness (chap. 56), neighborly worship (chap. 58), and economic transformation (chap. 61). In sum, the poetry offers a vision of a new Jerusalem (65:17–25). This is no longer the old Jerusalem of the eighth century that failed the test of justice and righteousness. This is no longer the Jerusalem that was grieved by Babylonian dislocation. Rather this is buoyant poetry that offers the imagination and perspective of a new Jerusalem that is intended by God, one that is permeated with neighborly governance and economic solidarity, supported by the attentiveness of God’s own self. This poetry anticipates a new urban economy for Jerusalem in which there is no infant mortality (v. 20), no foreclosures on homes (vv. 21–22), and no children at risk (v. 23), but full protection in an infrastructure of caring justice. CONCLUSION
It is, in fact, a reactive inversion of the pattern of exploitation common to the peasantry as such : The radical vision to which I refer is strikingly uniform despite the enormous variations in peasant cultures and the different great traditions of which they partake….At the risk of over generalizing, it is possible to describe some common features of this reflexive symbolism. It nearly always implies a society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions of rank and status (save those between believers and non-believers) will exist. Where religious institutions are experienced as justifying inequities, the abolition of rank and status may well include the elimination of religious hierarchy in favor of communities of equal believers. Property is typically, though not always, to be held in common and shared. All unjust claims to taxes, rents, and tribute are to be nullified. The envisioned utopia may also include a self-yielding and abundant nature as well as a radically transformed human nature in which greed, envy, and hatred will disappear. While the earthly utopia is thus an anticipation of the future, it often harks back to a mythic Eden from which mankind has fallen away.* That is the ancient peasant dream of radical egalitarianism. It does not deny the other dream, that of brutal revenge, but neither does that latter negate the former’s eternal thirst for reciprocity, equality, and justice. One instance from the first century shows both those dreams coming together in the last days of the doomed Temple during the First Roman-Jewish War. As Vespasian’s forces moved steadily southward and tightened the noose around Jerusalem in the fall of 67 and winter of 68 C.E ., groups of peasant rebels under bandit leaders were forced repeatedly into the capital for refuge. They became known, collectively or in coalition, as the Zealots, and one of their first actions was to install a new High Priest. According to ancient tradition, the High Priest was chosen from the family of Zadok, as had been true since at least the time of Solomon. But when, in the second century B.C.E ., the Jewish dynasty of the Hasmoneans wrested control of their country from the Syrians, they had simply appointed themselves High Priests. And thereafter, from Herod the Great to the outbreak of the revolt against Rome, the High Priests were selected from four families, likewise not of legitimate Zadokite origins. What the Zealots did was return to the legitimate high-priestly line, but within it they elected by lot rather than by choice. Josephus, telling the story in Wars 4.147–207, as an aristocratic priest is almost inarticulate with anger at what he considers an impious mockery. Here is the key section, in 155–156: They accordingly summoned one of the high-priestly clans, called Eniachin, and cast lots for a high priest.
The more profound issues are where , in each religion, we have a God of violence or a God of nonviolence and how that God and/or that God’s people respond to the initial presence of imperial violence (whether by miracle, by martyrdom, or by revolt). Let me illustrate my point with four Jewish documents written against imperial domination, religious persecution, and the Temple’s desecration across two hundred years of steadfast resistance in the Jewish homeland. I have chosen these texts somewhat at random. They start, in 1 and 2 Maccabees , with resistance to Syrian imperialism under Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the middle 160s B.C.E. and end, in 3 and 4 Maccabees , with resistance to Roman imperialism under Gaius Caligula in the early 40s C.E. The first example is 1 Maccabees , written at the end of the second century or start of the first century B.C.E. Here the response to imperial violence is local violence—military revolt in the form of guerrilla warfare and pitched battle. The situation is Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ attempt to unify the Jewish homeland into his Greco-Syrian empire, the collaboration of some Jewish aristocrats with his design, and the revolt of the Hasmonean family, nicknamed the Maccabees, against their plans. 1 Maccabees records the successes of three Maccabean generations from 167 to 134 B.C.E. and does not mention God at all. If divine help is presumed, it is left totally implicit. The revolt was militarily most successful and established a Jewish dynasty in the Jewish homeland for a hundred years—that is, until the relentless eastward expansion of Rome was ready for the next stage in 63 B.C.E. A second example is 2 Maccabees , abbreviating a larger work from the first half of the second century B.C.E. The response depicted here combines all three possible solutions to imperial oppression: divine miracle , courageous martyrdom , and military revolt . The historical situation is the same as above, but it is recorded only from 167 to 161 B.C.E. First, miracle . In 2 Maccabees 3 , one Heliodorus, acting on behalf of the Syrian monarch, attempts to rob the Temple treasury in Jerusalem. He is flogged to the ground by angelic intervention, and only the prayers of the high priest “grant life to one who was lying quite at his last breath.” Next, martyrdom . In 2 Maccabees 6–7, an old man and a mother with seven sons refuse to equate Zeus with Yahweh and suffer martyrdom rather than submit to breaking traditional Jewish food laws. Finally, revolt . In 2 Maccabees 8–15, God is implored “to hearken to the blood that cries out to him” and then, but only then, do martyred deaths guarantee Maccabean victories. All three paradigmatic responses are present in 2 Maccabees , but there is also a certain necessary sequence: from miracle through martyrdom to revolt. A third example is 3 Maccabees , written possibly in the 40s C.E. after Caligula’s threat to Egyptian Judaism had been ended by his assassination.
What is wrong with those comments, apart from a somewhat grating condescension, is that they are irrelevant to the situation. All involved may have been “likable” as individuals or groups, but that does not explain the systemic problem that made some of them hate or kill the others. Now read the following judgments: On Herod the Great, King of the Jews: “Herod was, on balance, a good king….Herod was a good king, on balance” (1993:19, 21). On Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea: “Antipas was a good tetrarch….Antipas was on the whole a good ruler” (1993:21, 93). On Caiaphas, high priest of Jerusalem’s Temple: “Joseph Caiaphas was a success….Caiaphas was pretty decent” (1993:27, 265). The point, once again, is not whether those judgments are valid or invalid. The point is that systems are reduced to personalities and structures are equated with individuals. Pilate may have been a saint, but God could still stand against him, for some Jews, as the embodiment of systemic Roman injustice. Second, the roots of that problem go deep into Sanders’s misunderstanding of religion in general and Judaism in particular. It is that same misunderstanding that allowed him, in the preceding case of the tax collectors and sinners, to argue that Jesus faithfully observed God’ Law on issues of the sabbath, food, and purity but negated it on acceptance of flagrant evildoers without demanding repentance, restitution, or conversion. Here are the two key statements. In a chapter on “The Common People,” he says that “detailed investigation of economic conditions lies beyond the scope of this book” (1992:120); and in a chapter titled “Tithes and Taxes,” he says that “the general assessment of economic conditions lies outside the range of this book” (1992:159). My point is not that Sanders is complete on religious thought and practice but inadequate on economic affairs. And neither do I expect him to be an ancient economic historian. But how, within Jewish tradition, can you separate religion from politics, ethics from economics, commercialization from conscience? How, for example, could you discuss the Holiness Code’s repossession of property, even as theoretical ideal or utopian dream, without raising economic questions? There is nothing as un-Jewish as a separation of land from covenant, economics from religion, and ritual from justice. In conclusion, Jesus’ kingdom movement was not, on the one hand, about practicing asceticism. That is a luxury for those who have food and shelter, marriage and children to abandon. Nor, on the other hand, was it about gathering general outcasts, marginalized morally by sin, physically by impurity, or socially by occupation. The kingdom movement was precisely focused on the destitute and the dispossessed—that is, on those groups who proliferate in any peasant society under rural commercialization. That was, in this case, Lower Galilee under Antipas’s urbanization of Sepphoris and Tiberias in the first twenty years of that first common-era century.
If Burton Mack or others argue that either Cynicism or Jesus is secular rather than eschatological, the best response is to argue that they are quite wrong—but without negating either the Cynic philosophy or the Jesus tradition in the process. Finally, there is that last statement setting political eschatology against social concern. Those terms are equivalent, in my understanding, for the historical Jesus and for the Jewish God whose kingdom he proclaimed. Social justice as divine mandate necessarily involves political, social, and economic eschatology. (And to my ear, by the way, “social concern” is a rather feeble way of expressing divine justice for earth.) It is almost as if, in the light of those three concerns in general and Burton Mack in particular, Koester is seeking to distance himself not only from Mack but from his own earlier analysis of the tradition of Jesus’ sayings (and even from that very tradition itself). That is, of course, fiercely ironic, since nobody has done more to establish that tradition than Koester himself. It is now much too late to dismiss or even denigrate it. What is needed, however, is to give both those traditions equal consideration, not to exalt one over the other, not to set one against the other, and not to separate one from the other more than we should. In any case, I now leave that aside to focus on Koester’s more positive analysis of that second tradition. He builds a powerful picture of earliest Christianity as a deliberate counterempire to Roman imperialism. “There are two things that Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth have in common. Both were murdered, and both received divine worship after their death. There is another interesting parallel. Neither Augustus nor Virgil wrote a life of Caesar, nor did Paul write a life of Jesus” (1994b:535). That is not, of course, just a series of accidental coincidences. Both sides are claiming the arrival of the eschatological or golden age. That fundamental parallelism is, therefore, a profound antagonism: two eschatological programs clashing with one another. Christianity knew that from the beginning and clearly. Rome knew it from the beginning but unclearly. Koester develops that basic antagonistic parallelism over four inaugural aspects: ritual, myth, story, and community. In the Roman case, cultic ritual began in 42 B.C.E. when the assassinated Julius was dedared divine and Octavius, his adopted son, became “divi films,” son of a god. In 27 B.C.E. Octavius was declared “Augustus,” not quite divine but close enough for now. In 14 C.E. , within a month of his death, Augustus was declared “divus” in his own right, son of a god and a god as well. A mythological hymn was mentioned by Koester above. Augustus had it: in 17 B.C.E. , as I mentioned, Horace’s “Carmen Seculare” acclaimed Augustus as descended, across more than a thousand years, from the Trojan Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite or Venus.
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
The silencers variously intend to maintain the status quo. In the ancient text the paradigmatic silencer is above all Pharaoh, a metaphor for all silencers, a company that comes to include, in the biblical tradition, kings, priests, scribes, and “the crowd” that was uncritically allied with such powers. We know very well in our time, moreover, that many voices are required for the maintenance of a democracy, and so the silencers resort to voter repression and gerrymandering, strategies for silencing those who would disrupt present power arrangements. Thus, the ongoing historical process can be seen as an unequal contest between the silencers and those who would break the silence in the interest of new historical possibility. The contest is unequal because the silencers have better means of communication and control, not least management and ownership of most of the public media. In the world of the ancient text, “public media” meant especially the stylized practices of monarchy and temple. “Breaking the silence” is always counter-discourse that tends to arise from the margins of society, a counter to present power arrangements and to dominant modes of social imagination. To be sure, the breaking of silence is not always positive and constructive, as some silence breakers may also yield destructive voices; we should not romanticize. A case in point of such negative silence breaking is that of the far-right political leader in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who lost an election for prime minister in March, 2017. At the instant of his electoral defeat, he declared, “Regardless of the verdict, no one will be able to silence me.”1 Another example is flag burning in the United States. It is such unwelcome speech, but it is protected by the Constitution. Nevertheless, President Trump wants to silence such activists by jail or revocation of citizenship. That, of course, is the risk of allowing for silence breaking, but it is a risk that is indispensable for any human society that is not to drift further toward fascism and the domination of a single voice. The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political. The church at its most faithful is allied with artistic expression from the margin that voices alternatives to dominant imagination. Prayer—beyond conventional polite prayer—is an act of breaking the silence. Thus, in the parable of Luke 18:1–8 Jesus tells the disciples to pray like the widow in the narrative: that is, “to pray always and not to lose heart” (v. 1). Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church’s action in prayer. Gerald Sheppard has, moreover, proposed that the lament and protest prayers of the book of Psalms that critique and assault enemies are designed for being “overheard” by those enemies, who are thereby called to account.
By chance the lot fell to one who proved a signal illustration of their depravity; he was an individual named Phanni, son of Samuel, of the village of Aphthia, a man who not only was not descended from high priests, but was such a clown that he scarcely knew what the high priesthood meant. At any rate they dragged their reluctant victim out of the country and, dressing him up for his assumed part, as on the stage, put the sacred vestments upon him and instructed him how to act in keeping with the occasion. Lottery is what egalitarianism looks like in practice. If all members of some group are eligible for office, then the only fair human way to decide is by lot, leaving the choice up to God. That was how Saul, the first Jewish king, was elected from “all the tribes of Israel,” according to 1 Samuel 10:21. And that was how the early Christians chose a replacement for the traitor apostle Judas from among “the men who have accompanied us” since the beginning, according to Acts of the Apostles 1:21–26. Obviously, of course, as in the implicit and presumed male exclusivity of the former case and the explicit and very deliberate male exclusivity of the latter one, discriminations can be present even in a lottery. They are there, too, in electing a High Priest only from a certain family. But granting that, a lottery attempts to deal equally among all candidates accepted as appropriate within a given context. Despite all of Josephus’s tendentious rhetoric, what the Zealots did is quite clear and consistent. They restored the ancient Zadokite line according to selection by lot, and one presumes, of course, that such was to be the future mode of selection as well. Furthermore, this was probably more than just a new or legitimate High Priest. It was also, at least as far as the Zealots were concerned, a new and legitimate government of the city and the country. For those peasants, then, the idea of egalitarianism, even if not in its most radical form, was quite understandable and practicable. Radical egalitarianism is not contemporary democracy. In the United States, for example, every appropriate person has a vote in electing the president, but although every appropriate person has also a legitimate right to be president, we are not yet ready for a national lottery instead of a presidential campaign. The open commensality and radical egalitarianism of Jesus’ Kingdom of God are more terrifying than anything we have ever imagined, and even if we can never accept it, we should not explain it away as something else. I conclude, then, by putting Jesus’ vision and program back into the matrix from which it sprang, the ancient and universal peasant dream of a just and equal world.
While that term “middle classes” may be inaccurate for first-century realities, the distinction between “declined” or “born” into poverty is crucial for understanding Jesus and his first companions. I accept, therefore, Theissen’s proposal and Stegemann’s emphasis that the kingdom-of-God movement began by making “an ethical virtue out of social necessity”—that is, by refusing to accept the injustice they were experiencing as normal and acceptable to God. Those first itinerants were, like Jesus himself, primarily dispossessed peasant freeholders, tenants, or sharecroppers. They were not invited to give up everything but to accept their loss of everything as judging not them but the system that had done it to them. It was ethical to accept the abandonment of such a system and no longer to participate in its exploitative normalcy. This understanding will be clarified in studying individual units from the Common Sayings Tradition in the next chapter. Before we turn to that, though, I want to look in conclusion at apocalypticism, asceticism, and ethicism as modes of eschatology separate from one another but capable of diverse combinations with one another. Apocalypticism, Asceticism, Ethicism The conflict over, and eventual triumph of, asceticism should not be cast in terms of a debate on the holy, or of a reaction against rationalism and a rise in superstition and credulity, but in terms of the nature of power in society. On the one side is structure, institution, authority, and accepted norms, on the other is inspiration, individualism, charismatic leadership, and alternative values. So long as the latter nexus was perceived as antithetical to and destructive of the former, the radical ascetic, who was the locus of these phenomena, would remain suspect and an enemy to the prevailing social order. James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue , p. 185 Eschatology is divine radicality. It is a fundamental negation of the present world’s normalcy based on some transcendental mandate. In the tradition with which we are involved, that transcendental mandate was the will or law of the covenantal God of Judaism. That God, as we saw in Chapter 12, was a God of justice and righteousness for all the earth, a God who stood on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor, a God who opposed systemic evil not because it was systemic but because it was evil. In that tradition the kingdom of God was always an eschatological challenge. It stood against the kingdom of injustice and undermined, in vision and program, its seeming inevitability. The primary indication that the Common Sayings Tradition was eschatological is that it, like the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas after it, speaks repeatedly of the kingdom of God. This is the evidence in summary statistics (with the details given in Appendix 6): Gospel of Thomas 17 instances in 132 sayings 13% Q Gospel 10 instances in 101 sayings 10% Common Sayings Tradition 4 instances in 37 sayings 11% That is a relatively constant percentage across those three sources.