Anxiety

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  sole cure for which ailment—it strikes me—is whiskey toddies with lemon and honey. Purely medicinal, of course. Don’t you want a drink? I say to Warren as I itchily shift around in bed. I can’t concentrate on grading. Not really, he says. The literary magazine he’d cofounded before keeps him editing manuscripts even nights he’s home. My limbs ache like I’ve run ten miles, and I’m clammy. In the past, quitting drinking was a breeze. I’d done it a thousand times—binge as a reward, say, or down it all one weekend then swear off on Monday. I whine to him that sleep’ll elude me. He yawns, hefting his folder to the floor with a thunk, saying (as a joke), I wish I couldn’t sleep. I sullenly kick back the covers on my side of the bed, pissed at how he’ll twist off the light, and block out my insomniac pouting. Downstairs, I stand before the brass thermostat swathed in layers of sweatclothes and woolens, for this is how I bundle to sleep at the igloo temperature Warren insists on—again, expense being cited. I scrub my chafed red hands together like a fly then I twist the wheel right. Before it reaches eighty, I hear —from the bowels of the house—the furnace go whomp. I even rise early to dial it back low before Warren—soaked in sweat—comes down in the morning, wondering why the thermometer’s red line holds at eighty, as I look mystified. Since there’s no liquor in the house, I concoct for myself a backache, filching a few of the blue valiums Warren rarely takes for his—truly bad—back. They’re for sleep, I tell myself. (My creative skill reaches its zenith at prescription interpretation, i.e., the codeine cough syrup bottle seems to read: Take one or two swigs when you feel like it. I take three.) In February I decide I’m under too much stress to quit booze cold turkey. Full sobriety as a concept recedes with the holidays. I’ll cut down, I think. But all the control schemes that reined me in during past years are now unfathomably failing. Only drink beer. Only drink wine. Only drink weekends. Only drink after five. At home. With others. When I only drink with meals, I cobble together increasingly baroque dinners, always uncorking some medium-shitty vintage at about three in the afternoon while Dev plays on the kitchen floor. The occasional swig is culinary duty, right? Some nights I’m into my second bottle before Warren comes in with frost on his glasses and a book bag a mule should’ve toted. Maybe he doesn’t notice, since I’m a champion at holding my liquor. Nonetheless, by the end of March, I have to unbutton my waistbands. Only drinking socially leads to a flurry of long afternoon lunches we can’t afford with people I barely know, so—for thrift’s sake—I often just split a bottle of wine while my lunch partner eats. In academia, meticulously split checks are the norm.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In truth, I dread Warren coming home that night, how we skirt each other’s paths, how he still looks at me with suspicion after my short sobriety. I really mean it this time. I fear I’ve sculpted for Dev a childhood tortured and lonely as mine was. But to confess these realities to Lux would reveal too much of my chewing insides. Instead, I babble on about my long-held grudges against the god I don’t believe in, saying, What kind of god would permit the holocaust? To which Lux says, You’re not in the holocaust. In other words, what is the holocaust my business? When my own life is falling apart, he wants to know, why am I taking as evidence of my own prospects the worst carnage of history? The smoke coils around him as he says, Try getting on your effing knees tonight. Just find ten things you’re grateful for. Your effing knees! Dev hollers, kicking his feet to motorboat the raft around. That night after he’s tucked in, I do try to stretch out my standard two-sentence prayer habit a little longer by dredging up a list of stuff to be grateful for, though not on my knees—no way am I gonna grovel like a reptile. Sitting in a red leather chair, I notice the cherry furniture Warren’s parents gave us. I close my eyes a second, saying, Thanks for the furniture. And the rent. Thanks Warren hasn’t left me and taken our boy. The exercise seems so self-helpy and puerile, but a few more things come to mind inadvertently. Thanks Dev doesn’t have a fever. Mother’s sober. Lecia’s business is going great, and her new boyfriend’s a prince. Thanks for Joan the Bone and Lux. Also the infirmary this weekend… Enumerating these small things actually pierces me with a sliver of feeling fortunate. Then from that one moonlit meeting, the young doctor’s face rises up in me, and I think of what she’d said about asking for my dream, so I add, While we’re at it, I’d like some money. Not a handout. I’m willing to work for it. It takes me a full five minutes to shut up begging, and it sounds crazy to say it, but for the first time in about a week, I don’t want a drink at all. It’s an odd sensation, since the craving’s shadowed my every waking instant for the past few years. But I abruptly stop feeling my skin like a too-tight sausage casing. (This an unbeliever might call self-hypnosis; a believer might say it’s the presence of God. Let’s call it a draw and concede that the process of listing my good fortune stopped my scrambling fear, and in relinquishing that, some solid platform slid under me.)

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  It’s natural and normal to feel stressed and worried about these kinds of things. Jesus understands this, or he wouldn’t have addressed the issue. But here’s the good news. When you’re stressed, worried, and anxious about all of life’s demands, God understands and offers you another way. God cares for you, loves you, takes pride in you, and looks after your needs. God wants you to be a part of a faith community that trusts and depends on God. How do we recover a life together that heals our own anxieties (reorienting our focus so that it’s on God)? How do we join with God as he forms a people who offer peace and rest to a worried world? We need trusting and dependent communities that embrace practices of prayer, hospitality, and peacemaking. The Waiter’s Union, in Brisbane, Australia, is an example of this kind of Christian community. It describes itself as “a network of residents in West End who are committed to developing a sense of community in the locality with our neighbors, including those who are marginalized, in the radical tradition of Jesus of Nazareth.” The community started with two or three households twenty years ago, and there have rarely been more than twenty households at any one time during the network’s journey. The Waiter’s Union cultivates intentional community wherein people can support each other through the stresses and demands of life, serve their neighborhoods, and experience peace. Monday mornings from 6.30 to 7.30am we meet for worship, reflection, and planning for the week. Throughout the week people meet in a range of groups to nurture their souls and sustain their faith and values. . . . Sunday night from 6.30 to 8.00pm we meet for public worship with local people in the basement of St Andrew’s Anglican Church. Every two weeks we have a community meal, to which everyone is invited. Every six weeks we have a small gathering for fellowship with people in the network and every six weeks we have a large gathering with people in their region who are not in their network but who need continuing support for their faith-based community work. Every six months we have a two-week live-in community orientation program that provides an intensive introduction or re-introduction to the spiritual disciplines that are the foundation for their faith-based community work. Every twelve months we have a camp, to give us the chance to get away and just relax together. This community life supports the Waiter’s Union’s mission and faith-based community work. The most intensive learning experience found within the network is in a household dedicated to formation. Between four and six people live in this house at any one time. . . . It serves as a resource for ongoing training in community development. In 2010, groups helping Waiters explore spirituality, philosophy, politics, lifestyle, and so on, include short-term study groups, a reading group, a documentary group, a men’s group, and various groups focused on social justice issues. . .

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  When people came to him, he kept sending them back from the wilderness, through the Jordan, which washed away their sins, and, purified and ready, into the Promised Land, there to await the imminent coming of the redeeming and avenging God. What he was forming, in other words, was a giant system of sanctified individuals, a huge web of apocalyptic expectations, a network of ticking time bombs all over the Jewish homeland. Its magnitude insured a lasting memory, but its diffusion made it both possible and necessary for Antipas to strike precisely at John himself and at John alone. John was the first of those many large-movement and peasant-based first-century apocalyptic prophets centered on wilderness and Jordan, Moses and Joshua, but he also went a way particularly his own. John Baptizes Jesus That Jesus was baptized by John is as historically certain as anything about either of them ever can be. The reason is that the theological apologetics exercised by Josephus in telling about John are nothing compared with those exercised by the gospels in telling about John and Jesus. The Christian tradition is clearly uneasy with the idea of John baptizing Jesus, because that seems to make John superior and Jesus sinful. Mark 1:9 tells about the baptism without any defensive commentary, but immediately overshadows it with the heavenly voice in 1:10–11. In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” That would seem quite adequately to exalt revelation over baptism and Jesus over John. But it is not enough for Luke 3:21, which, before telling about the divine voice, hurries past Jesus’ baptism to emphasize his prayer; or for Matthew 3:13–15, which has John protest to Jesus; or for the Gospel of the Nazoreans 2, a text found outside the New Testament. Here are those three increasingly defensive texts: (1) Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened [and so forth]. (2) Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. (3) Behold, the mother of the Lord and his brethren said to him: John the Baptist baptizes unto the remission of sins, let us go and be baptized by him. But he said to them: Wherein have I sinned that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless what I have said is ignorance [a sin of ignorance].

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  “It was expressed in the social pressure towards a common, unchanging pattern of social institutions and ideological contents within particular classes or village groups. The individuals who deviated from the commonly accepted pattern of behaviour obtaining within their respective classes or groups, met with such repressive measures as ridicule, reproach, moral censure, ostracism or even the application of official legal sanctions” (2.91). The Q Gospel might sometimes exaggerate that external opposition, but it did not need to invent it. Strong opposition from outsiders and to outsiders is very clear in the Common Sayings Tradition. It warns about strong external opposition, for example, in such sayings as Carrying One’s Cross and Blessed the Persecuted (Appendix lA: #24, #28). It also asserts a rather general opposition against the Pharisees in On Hindering Others (Appendix lA: #16). But I now ask a more precise question: Is there evidence in the Common Sayings Tradition itself that there was already internal dissent within the communities involved? Apart from extra-Christian resistance, was there intra-Christian resistance as well? I rephrase the question in the light of those sociological epigraphs: Is outside opposition emphasized to control internal opposition? What evidence is there, in other words, that those itinerants seen in Part VII were meeting with dissent from Christian householders? Internal Dissent in the Q Gospel Conflict with outsiders, as Lewis Coser has shown, actually serves a positive and constructive purpose as a means to define more clearly group boundaries, to enhance internal cohesion and to reinforce group identity…. Thus, while ostensibly directed at the “out-group,” these polemical and threatening materials function in fact to strengthen the identity of the “in-group” and to interpret for them the experience of persecution, rejection, and even the failure of their preaching of the kingdom. John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q , pp. 167–168 Kloppenborg describes the beatitudes that open Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Q Gospel 6:20b–23 as “‘anti-beatitudes’ [that] stand in contrast to the views of the conventional wisdom that those who dwell in affluence and safety are blessed.” They are a “programmatic statement” of “the ‘radical wisdom of the kingdom.’” But, he continues, “other examples of such radical wisdom are to be found in the immediate context: in 6:27–35, 36–38, 39–45” (1987a:188–189). That is not exactly accurate. This Q Gospel sermon breaks down into two rather clear halves. The first half in Q Gospel 6:23–35 is the manifesto of the kingdom’s radicality. Kloppenborg is perfectly correct on that point. And the tone there is almost rhapsodic or even ecstatic. But the second half, in Q Gospel 6:36–45, is ordinary, everyday, non-radical wisdom. And the tone there is critical and censorious. Here are the units involved in that second half: As Your Father Q 6:36 (Appendix 2B: #8) Judgment for Judgment Q 6:37a (Appendix 2B: #9) Measure for Measure Q 6:38bc (Appendix 2B: #10) The Blind Guide Q6:39 Gos. Thom. 34 (Appendix 1A: #13) Disciple and Servant Q 6:40 (Appendix 2B: #11) Speck and Log Q 6:41–42 Gos. Thom.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a public letter to his son. In it he writes, “Here is what I would like for you to know. In America, it is tradition to destroy the black body—it is heritage. ”1 He then asked readers of The Atlantic to share their stories of racial prejudice. Many stories of racism and its consequences poured in. These are personal stories of racism, and public accounts of the brokenness of humanity. We are living in a broken world. Western societies are struggling with the rise of racism, misogyny, nationalism, conflict, violence, and more. Many African Americans, Native Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, and other minoritized groups think that systems are unjust.2 Political, judicial, policing, and other systems seem stacked against them. Hundreds of thousands of people are displaced globally due to poverty, discrimination, climate change, or political and religious upheaval. They seek refuge, hope, freedom, and a new life. Many political and public figures are making the most of these turbulent times. They appeal to xenophobia, nationalism, and antagonisms. These messages have been magnetic in parts of North America, Europe, Australia, and other settings. The conditions seem ripe to support racism, misogyny, exclusion, injustice, conflict, and division. Nations and peoples that once enjoyed unrivaled global power and influence now feel like they are in decline, and they don’t know what to do about it. A large percentage of the population feels disenfranchised from political and other systems that seem to support wealthy individuals and institutions. These systems seem deaf to them. They feel anxious, worried about the future, angry, and disoriented. They see themselves getting poorer. They see their neighborhoods becoming racially and religiously diverse. So they are looking for others to blame. Muslims, “foreigners,” or undocumented immigrants are easy scapegoats. Societies that have been told how to speak about race, gender, and religion haven’t really changed. They’ve just pushed these feelings and animosities down deeper, resulting in collective anger, prejudice, and fear. Unfortunately, many Christian leaders and churches are going along with these currents. The church is no longer at the center of culture, power, economics, and politics, as it was in Christendom. Some Christian leaders are anxious about their waning influence. They worry about their loss of power and status. They’re easy to woo because they want their chance in the spotlight and their access to power and the powerful. Various tribal allegiances too often form Christian identity. Confident, charismatic, successful, misogynistic, nationalistic, Christendom-courting, loudmouthed demagogues have filled the vacuum. But here is the bright side! The church of Jesus Christ can speak life and hope into this situation. It can proclaim and embody the new creation in Christ, and show a different ethic and way of life in the world. God enables us, as God’s one, new, and transformed people, to recover our humanity and help change the world.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  John Meier concluded, concerning the historicity of that account that, “by itself, historical-critical research simply does not have the sources and tools available to reach a final decision on the historicity of the virginal conception as narrated by Matthew and Luke. One’s acceptance or rejection of the doctrine will be largely influenced by one’s own philosophical and theological presuppositions, as well as the weight one gives Church teaching. Once again, we are reminded of the built-in limitations of historical criticism. It is a useful tool, provided we do not expect too much of it” (1.222). I am more uneasy than I can say with that serene disjunction. To say that Jesus is divine or Son of God is theologically beyond historical proof or disproof. That seems to me absolutely correct. It is a matter of faith—that is, of the theologically based interpretation of history’s meaning. But to say that he had no earthly father and that Mary conceived him virginally is an historical statement open, in principle, to proof or disproof. Those are matters of fact and open to historical discussion. The conception of Jesus is told by the evangelist Luke writing in the 80s of the first century. It is a miracle of divine and human conjunction, a child conceived from a divine father and a human mother. It occurs without the participation of any human father. In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:26–35) That text makes claims that are historical, that are empirically verifiable, at least in part and in principle. It does not speak just of God but of a woman, Mary, who belongs to this earth and to its history. How does the historian respond? One reaction is to insist that any negation is just as theological as affirmation and that neither is historically acceptable.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He does not have a single explicit word about the collection, but he has several crucial references that can apply only to it. Here are the major texts (but notice that Luke makes sense only if you know what is happening from Paul): Promise: Gal. 2:10 Collection: 1 Cor. 16:1–4; 2 Cor. 8–9 Acts 11:27–30 Delivery: Rom. 15:30–31 Acts 20:4 Disaster: Acts 21:17–26 The promise was made at the Jerusalem Council in Galatians 2:10. The collection was taken up in four Roman provinces: Galatia, Asia, Macedonia, and Achaia. Paul’s plans for the collection involved two steps. First, each community would collect what it could every Sunday. Second, two accredited representatives would eventually accompany Paul to Jerusalem with each province’s donation. Paul’s fears for the outcome of the collection’s delivery are poignantly clear as he writes to the Romans from Corinth in the winter of 55 to 56: I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints. (Romans 15:30–31) There is a double danger in Jerusalem. Non-Christian Jews could consider Paul a traitor who had defamed God’s Law by claiming that neither Jews nor pagans should observe it. Christian Jews could consider him at least a danger and possibly even a traitor as well. They could refuse to accept the collection as collusion with a position they did not accept. Luke, not Paul, tells us what happened: James and all the elders … said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews, and they are all zealous for the law. They have been told about you that you teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow. Join these men, go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the law.” (Acts 21:17b–24) Paul was told, I presume, that the collection would not be accepted unless he used some of it as James and the elders demanded. I am not sure how they formulated those conditions. According to the speech made by Luke, Paul would have been a hypocrite to have accepted the collection since he himself did not “observe and guard the law.” But, as Luke tells the story, Diaspora Jews attacked Paul in the Temple for having brought a pagan inside the forbidden area; he was arrested, and executed four years later in Rome.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Warren gets back in the car, handing me a small paper bag over his shoulder. I fish through it for the eyedrops. Mother has her Shalimar out and is studying the cap for where the nozzle is. I tell her, They’ll be unfailingly polite. They always are. She squirts behind her ear, and the scent of rose attar touches some reptilian area of my brain, where lies whatever faint recollection of beauty I have. Warren, she says, you know what they say a mother-in-law’s job is at a wedding? I don’t, he says, pushing his glasses up his nose. Just shut up and wear beige. He actually snorts at the prospect. Mother takes my hand in her scented one. My heart was thumping so bad in my chest. I was scared to take another valium in case there was a toast or something because I’d fall into my plate. I take no comfort in sharing anxiety with my once towering, powerful mother, for any ways we favor each other feel distinctly un-bridal. I show her my throat, adding, Make me smell like you. Then we draw up into the gilded light of the Ritz, and the doorman helps me out. We enter the paneled bar to find the Whitbreads plural—six siblings, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law—scattered among the low tables. Taken together, they’re the tallest people in the room, and possibly the best looking. My chic sister and her lawyer boyfriend have been chatting equably with them over drinks when we bluster in. There’s the hubbub of shaken hands, and I can see Mother’s turned out nice and smiling. The martini that lands before me gets tossed down. Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes. The next thing I know, Lecia’s grabbing my arm as we stride up the stairs to the table, saying, What is she on? Then we’re seated at enormous tables draped with enough linen to clothe a convent. Sometime after the first course, Warren turns to me, asking if we can speak privately in the foyer. I rise on numb legs. The pre-wedding joke Lecia kept nudging me with was this: Soon as the Whitbreads met Mother, the wedding would be off. From across the room, my sister’s eyes lock on mine, brows raised. I shrug at her, and her napkin seems to wipe off her own smile. Walking behind Warren, I’m approaching execution, till he stops and draws from his breast pocket a small blue velvet box. It holds a platinum ring with a sapphire the size of a chiclet flanked by diamonds of equal size, which—with all the drinks in me—makes me wobble. He slides it onto my shaking finger, saying, They’re family stones. Mother had it made. I joke I’ll need a bodyguard to wear it in public.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I try slicking it down with a few flecks of water. The hair spray in it enlivens it to jut out. Eventually, I latch myself into a stall, heart thumping, dizzy. It occurs to me I actually need to brace my hands on either side of the walls. My insides are ricocheting around when the old advice burbles up. Pray. Get on your knees and get still. So I kneel down, my bony knees in a puddle of Lord knows what. None of the promised quiet comes to me. Breathe, Joan tells me all the time. If you don’t believe in God, you know there’s scientific evidence about the psychological benefits of meditation, even among nonbelievers. Breathe deeply to calm yourself. Then count your breaths to ten, over and over. But when I start counting breaths—slow, deep inhalations—I almost hyperventilate. Correcting for it, I speed up my breathing till I’m panting like a pooch. After a lifetime of effortless breathing, I’ve forgotten how. For a few minutes, it feels like gasping underwater. I try to detach from the scattered thoughts that float up in me, and they start to drift away from the small damp spot I’m kneeling in. Silently, I say one of the few prayers I know, the serenity prayer—maybe my second or third truly desperate prayer. I clasp my hands together before my chest, and where my head has been jabbering, I find unusual space. Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please. Starting to get up, I kneel again. And keep me from feeling like such an asshole. Those of you who’ve never prayed before will cackle like crows and scoff at the change I claim has overtaken me. But the focus of my attention has been yanked from the pinballing in my head to south of my neck, where some solidity holds me together. I feel like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before. The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away. I walk back to the table with a pearl balanced in my middle. And Lord am I hungry.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  This arc was nothing so simple as the trade route of an early empire in the traditional sense, commercial or territorial. Nor was it merely an expanding frontier line. It was not a line, an edge, comprehensible in Turnerian terms as such, but a ring of territories, of marchlands—territories linked to a single overall system designated “British.” But even broadened out to all of these magnitudes, one’s vision proved to be too restricted. It remained for J. G. A. Pocock, a New Zealander educated in England and long resident in the United States, to suggest that this entire interactive Atlantic culture system, this huge band of variant marchlands, was in itself only a segment of a global system that ultimately reached Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the Pacific world as well.6 The ramifications of such a view are extensive and important. Issues arising in various locations within the periphery which once seemed disparate and discrete can now be seen to have been closely related, and the relationships help explain the course of events. In this perspective, for example, it becomes apparent that official British policy, promulgated in London, restraining the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West in America was shaped in part by the fear of Scottish and absentee Irish landlords in high office in London that their lands would be depopulated by the extension of settlement in America and hence that the economic stability of their lives would be threatened as Americans migrated west into areas four thousand miles from Whitehall. One suddenly understands the reach and penetration of Dr. Johnson’s imagination when he observed, on his tour of the western Scottish islands in 1773, that the attraction of the American frontier to discontented Highlanders on the Scottish frontier was a threat to the survival of British culture. Highlanders relocated on the far western British periphery, he said, will simply be lost to the nation: “For a nation scattered in the boundless regions of America resembles rays diverging from a focus. All the rays remain but the heat is gone. Their power consisted in their concentration: when they are dispersed, they have no effect.”7 Was such a dispersal outward from the center to the margins, with its attendant loss of “concentration,” wise? Could it be stopped? Could British law be used to prevent the circulation of British people along the peripheries of British territory? What should be the proper relationships of the outer boundaries to each other and to the core? These problems, which take on meaning only insofar as one grasps not just the eighteenth-century American frontier but the British world system in its entirety, were being discussed actively at the highest level of the British government in November and December 1773, and were at the point of resolution in a controversial proposal that Parliament prohibit further British migration to America, when the conflict between Britain and the colonies put an end to the discussion.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  It is interesting, by the way, that we know that event to the day but we know the date of Jesus’ death only as sometime within a decade of years, from 26 to 36 C.E . In any case, Constantine, wanting a unified Christianity as the empire’s new religion, ordered the Christian bishops to meet, under imperial subsidy, in lakeside Nicea, southeast of Constantinople, and there erase any major theological disagreements between them. Even if one is not already somewhat disquieted at imperial convocation, presence, and participation, it is hard not to become very nervous in reading this description of the imperial banquet celebrating the Council of Nicea’s conclusion, from Eusebius’s Life of Constantine 3.15: Detachments of the bodyguard and troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of them the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the Imperial apartments, in which some were the Emperor’s companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ’s kingdom was thus shadowed forth, and a dream rather than reality. A Christian leader now writes a life not of Jesus but of Constantine. The meal and the Kingdom still come together, but now the participants are the male bishops alone, and they recline, with the emperor himself, to be served by others. Dream or reality? Dream or nightmare? It is, of course, an example of the dialectic just proposed between historical Jesus and confessional Christ, of peasant Jesus grasped now by imperial faith. Still, as one ponders that progress from open commensality with Jesus to episcopal banquet with Constantine, is it unfair to regret a progress that happened so fast and moved so swiftly, that was accepted so readily and criticized so lightly? Is it time now, or is it already too late, to conduct, religiously and theologically, ethically and morally, some basic cost accounting with Constantine? Searchable TermsNote: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader. 1 Corinthians, 122, 123, 125, 147, 184–85, 186–87, 188, 189 1 Timothy, 126 2 Corin thians, 189 Acts of the Apostles, 187–89, 196–97 Aeneid (Virgil), 3–4, 44 Agricola (Tacitus), 44 Alexander the Great, 145 Anthony, Mark, 2–3, 4 Antipas, 48, 145; compared with John, 53 Apocalypticism, 45–49, 55–56, 132, 155, 156, 158; and arrival of the Kingdom of God, 62–63; goals of, 46; Jesus and John the Baptist in, 51–54; types of, 45. See also Class system; Eschatology; Jesus; John the Baptist; Kingdom of God; Millennialism; Schweitzer, Albert; World-negation Apostles, 121–24, 187–88; women as, 195–96. See also Christian community, development of leadership in; Eleven, the; Paul; Twelve, the Apostleship of, 187–92 Apparition, 180–81, 186–87, 221; as conferral of authority, 192.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Even after all of that, however, the community is not secure against the radicalism of itinerant prophets, whom it is quite willing to accept and revere but also wishes to contain and control. Those preceding passages gave the Didache ’s community control over prophetic actions. The spiritual power and authority of itinerant prophets were not negated; prophets were accepted and respected still, but they were also contained and controlled. They would not be allowed to wreck the community and then move on to repeat the damage elsewhere. But what if itinerant prophets insisted that it was the Lord Jesus who demanded this or that action? Think, for a moment, about the insistence on “Jesus said” in both the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas . For whom was that significant? If followers of Jesus said that to strangers, the listeners would simply ask, “Who is Jesus?” or “Why should we care what he said?” But said to those already Christian, the phrase would have a profoundly challenging effect. Those who had said , “Lord, Lord,” responding in faith, would be disturbed if told that they had disobeyed that same Lord by what they did . How, in other words, could the Didache community contain and control the most radical sayings attributed to Jesus by his itinerant followers? That is the next chapter. CHAPTER 21INTERPRETING THE COMMANDSIn the Synoptics we are told the rules given to the first Christian missionaries. The Didache gives the rules for dealing with these people. Gerd Theissen, Social Reality and the Early Christians , p. 41 (from essay originally published in 1973) There are three linked questions that arise as we consider the Didache as part of a larger body of early Christian writings. First, what, in general, is the relationship of the Didache to the three synoptic gospels? Is it dependent on them or independent of them? Second, what, in particular, is the relationship of Didache 1:3b–2:1, sometimes termed the text’s “evangelical section,” to Matthew, Luke, the Q Gospel , and any earlier source of those documents? Third, how does the Didache connect with that other earliest tradition in Paul’s letters? Of those three problems, the first two are addressed in this chapter, and the final one will reappear later in Chapter 23. The Independence of the Didache There is only one instance in which sayings quoted in the Didache are certainly drawn from written gospels: Didache 1:3–5. This passage is a compilation of sayings from the Sermon on the Mount, but with distinct features of harmonization of the texts of Matthew and Luke. It is an interpolation that must have been made after the middle of the 2nd century and cannot, therefore, be used as evidence for the original compiler’s familiarity with written gospels. Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels , p. 17 The Didache shows no evidence of knowing either the Pauline or the Johannine tradition. But does it know the synoptic tradition?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  First, it is difficult to reconcile Paul’s list of people to whom Jesus appeared after the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) with those of the evangelists as they conclude their gospels. Second, it is difficult to reconcile those gospel accounts among themselves with regard to time, place, and content. Third, it is quite likely that none of those gospel accounts is describing visions at all. What happened to Paul was certainly a vision, but those gospel accounts are more about establishing an authority than about receiving an apparition. Finally, the gospel accounts indicate very serious theological disagreements between each other on the necessity or validity of such visions. In an earlier preparation for his own resurrection visions, Luke 16:31 gave this solemn warning: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” Those problems are all important ones and I do not disregard them, but they are not the major one that haunts this book. If we were to say that visions and apparitions, divine conceptions and bodily resurrections do not ordinarily happen, then we could conclude that the gospels record typical human delusions about things that never happen or that they record unique divine accounts of events that happened only once. But my problem going into this book is that such arguments are certainly invalid for the early first century and probably invalid for the late twentieth century. Visions of risen corpses or apparitions of resurrected bodies are not uniquely special. The question, then, is what is special about any given one? What is the content of your vision, the challenge of your apparition? Dualism and Inconsistency There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus…. In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Paul, Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 12:13 Some Christians (whether Jewish or Gentile) could declare that there is no Greek or Jew, no male or female. No rabbinic Jew could do so, because people are bodies, not spirits, and precisely bodies are marked as male or female, and also marked, through bodily practices and techniques such as circumcision and food taboos, as Jew or Greek as well. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel , p. 10 I begin this book, then, with a problem or, if you prefer, a presupposition. It is not a religious or a theological presupposition but an anthropological and an historical one. It is not enough to say that the vision of a dead man birthed Christianity, because that, at least in the first century and probably in every century since, is not special enough of itself to explain anything.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Right before Easter, as our church gears up to baptize and confirm newcomers, I’m still—metaphorically speaking—staring down from the airplane door, wondering whether my parachute will open if I step out. At one point Toby asks me, Why haven’t you taken communion at any of the churches you’ve visited when you travel? Those priests don’t know if you’re Catholic or not. The idea shocks me, and I say so. Why not? He has a mischievous grin on his face. That would defile the Sacrament, insult the belief of all those people in church who’re committed to the faith. So, he says, that is sacred to you? It was, is. In the end, no white light shines out from the wounds of Christ to bathe me in His glory. Faith is a choice like any other. If you’re picking a career or a husband—or deciding whether to have a baby—there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is—at the final hour— horse dookey. You can only try it out. Not choosing baptism would make me feel half-assed somehow, like a dilettante—scared to commit to praising a force I do feel is divine—a reluctance grown from pride or because the mysteries are too unfathomable. In the back of a dark church on Holy Saturday, I sit between Dev and Toby. In the pews, everybody holds an unlit candle, and the priest comes in with the altar’s mega-candle. Stopping at the back row, he touches its taper to the charred filament on either side of the aisle. The flame’s passed one to another until we’re all holding fire in our hands. Not long after, Walt calls after a longish silence. He’d been nursing Shirley through her long battle with cancer. And other than seeing them at their son’s wedding, I’d been in scant touch till her death. On the phone, I tell him how—in conference with an obstreperous student—I was about to snap at the kid when it dawned on me that he was Huck Finn. See, I say on the phone, how I’m still channeling you? How is finding Huck Finn in your office channeling me? Don’t you remember telling me that unless you knew what was in my head, you couldn’t get Ernst Cassirer in there? Knowing the kid was Huck Finn let him be who he was with me. I remember reading Cassirer with you. And that little rat you took care of after she’d had her babies? There were so many of them, he says. I tell him how my students keep shape-shifting into characters from novels. A shy, disheveled farm kid was the young stable boy Wart about to pull a sword from a stone and become a king. A flushed sorority girl who hung a ball gown in a dry cleaner’s bag from my doorjamb while she spoke transformed into flushed young Kitty hoping to dance the mazurka in Anna Karenina.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I flop on the bed and click the TV on to channel-surf when I notice that, just under the screen, sits a minibar. I can picture the frosty air it holds, its tidy array of bottles. Eyeing it like I would a crocodile sloe-eyed on the bank, I back out of the room and take the elevator downstairs again. The desk clerk says housekeeping can take it out eventually, but they’re overloaded. So I sit in the lobby, hands twisting in my lap, until it’s time for the drinks I can’t have. 29Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead)YOU ARE HERE. —A mall directory I don’t enter the Morgan Library for the second reception thinking, Wow, I’ve arrived, my life will change now. I edge in sweating like a sow, shaking like a dope fiend, and heavy with dread. I feel the paste pearls around my neck and the cardboard soles of my cheap shoes. The party spreads out inside a book-lined cathedral—forty-foot ceilings lined with volumes. Glass cases around its perimeter glint in the low light. One holds a Bible printed by Gutenberg, another a Shakespeare folio, another etchings by poet William Blake. Standing there, I study a knot of people at the room’s center with no idea how to elbow my way in. Then with some jostling, the crowd parts, and there stands Toby Wolff, looking immensely hearty dead center of that vaulted room. He wears a blue blazer and has a beer in his hand. Hardly anybody reads memoirs much, but I check them out by the armload, including that year Toby’s This Boy’s Life, his own hair-raising account of battles with a bullying redneck stepfather. The fact that Toby’s origins are almost as scabby and unfortunate as my own partly make him approachable. Plus he taught me in grad school before he was a big deal. I’d even written him for advice on how to rework the discombobulated novel I’d cobbled together into nonfiction. (The concocted protagonist had served as a correction to the real me—beautiful and noble; she’d volunteered at the local nursing home and did differential calculus in sixth grade.) The letter Toby sent back got taped over my desk. It said: Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth. For the unbeliever I am, Toby’s wave in my direction is incalculable shithouse luck. (I’d later call it grace.) He gives me an avuncular hug and claps my padded shoulder. He’s mustachioed and fit, with a military bearing earned in Vietnam. Good for us, huh, Mare? I’m trying not to drink, I tell him, a confession he barely registers.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The problem just mentioned in the epigraph links all the way back to earlier parts of this book. By the end of Part II, you knew that I had very little confidence in peasant memory or oral transmission as it is usually invoked to explain the early decades of the Jesus tradition. If there were only oral memory at work, then the historical Jesus would probably be lost to us forever. By the end of Part III, you knew that I considered certain early sources, such as the gospels of Q, Thomas , and Mark, to be independent of one another. But even if those sources had pointed back before themselves to orality rather than textuality, or at least to some delicate interface between orality and textuality, such oral memory had already been rendered questionable in Part II. This epigraph from Barry Henaut seems, therefore, an epitaph for historical Jesus research. It is taken, in fact, from a concluding chapter entitled “Oral Tradition: The Irrecoverable Barrier to Jesus,” which upgrades to imperative Rudolf Bultmann’s proposal to place “the name ‘Jesus’ always in quotation marks and let it stand as an abbreviation for the historical phenomenon with which we are concerned” (295, 305). I consider, as mentioned earlier, that suggestions to put the name of Jesus in quotation marks or to surround Jesus with a cloud of unknowing are attempts to protect him, alone in all the world, from publicly argued evidence and historically conditioned reconstruction. Historical Jesus agnosticism is simply epistemological uniqueness, the negative historical side of a positive theological issue. Why is Jesus more unknowable or less reconstructable than any other ancient person about whom data has survived? Leaving that aside, however, I agree absolutely that the invocation of an oral tradition about Jesus that is fortunately beyond disproof but unfortunately beyond proof is not a very good strategy of reconstruction. But notice those two phrases that I italicized in the epigraph: “spoken word” and “oral sayings.” It is this emphasis on words and sayings that I want to discuss here. I ask whether remembering his sayings or imitating his life is the primary mode of continuity from the historical Jesus to those who walked around with him and remained around after him. The Didache , as we have just seen, did not even cite his sayings as his . But it used as a criterion of authenticity the ways (tropoi ) rather than the words (logoi ) of the Lord. Continuity was in mimetics rather than in mnemonics, in imitating life rather than in remembering words. Let me take a concrete example. I think it is as likely as anything historical ever is that Jesus said, “Blessed are the destitute.” But even if that were a direct quotation, its meaning could have changed as the saying was cited and transmitted. It could, for example, have moved from ethical into ascetical or apocalyptic eschatology.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  First there was In Search of Excellence, Mary Karr brings us In Search of Incompetence. He was rich enough to be jovial about this, but I knew if I screwed up the presentation and lost this client’s fat retainer, I’d be dead, for without this expert’s benevolent referrals, I had zero credential. Can you help me with my notes? I said. But through the phone’s overseas hiss, I heard another phone start ringing, and he said, Maybe this other flight came through— Then the dial tone went retreating across the Asian oceans, and I resisted the impulse to pound the phone receiver on the first solid surface. Toward dawn in the hotel room, I pick up the legal pad and try to envision my solo presentation. Standing at the grease board, I’ll draw a horizontal line—an X axis—saying, This line represents your spending. It goes from spending zero on the left to shelling out shitloads of money on the right. My vertical Y axis measures returns on that money—from getting back zero at the bottom to making zillions at the top. I’m gonna tell the president of Company X and his minions that they need to spend as little as possible while making shitloads in return. The question is, how to stretch this expensive advice into a nine-hour meeting? I never have to find out. The next morning Mr. Consultant skids into the boardroom sideways from a flight I never knew he got on. He takes the laser pointer from my hand, and I sit sweatily at the conference table. Other than taking notes, I’m free of the babble floating over us. Free, that’s how being a poet looks to me, like freedom from the grind among pencil-necked office guys in clip-on ties. Sitting there, I fantasize about the birthday dinner my grad school guru planned in San Francisco before I catch the red-eye back. He’ll talk about translating the great Polish Nobel dude and about the ballads of Wordsworth and about his own drunk mother whose loony-bin demise he managed to live through. He knows the botanical names of plants and how to do carpentry work. In my mind, I picture his curious, becalmed expression the way certain saffron-robed acolytes do Buddha. His very stare will rebaptize me a writer, despite my business suit.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  40 Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory For over two years, Mother hounds me to let her read pages I’m scribbling about the worst patch of our family history, but I’m still x-ing out, deleting, starting over. She swears public opinion frets her not one whit. In fact, she and Lecia both signed off on a summary of the story before I set out. If I gave a big rat’s ass what anybody thought about me, Mother says, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA. Which I didn’t do. But I know reading it could hurt them, since writing it often wrings me out like a string mop. Some afternoons after I close my notebook—I’m working longhand—I just conk out on the floor of my study like a cross-country trucker. I see a shrink who says the naps don’t mean I’m repressing stuff. Don’t you know, he says, feeling all that stuff again is exhausting? So the prospect of dragging Mother and Lecia through it too feels like abuse. Mother’s sole focus is money. Whatever wounds I parade through the marketplace, she’s mostly just skippy I have a car, however far it is from paid off. In fact, she’s sure I’ve misunderstood the contract somehow. That’s your money though? That’s right, Mother. My money. What if they don’t like the book? Oh well. What if it doesn’t sell? What poet would plan for anything different? The next call she approaches head-on: There’s no way you’ll have to give the money back? No ma’am. No way, no how. Right. But do they know you’ve spent it already? Once she tries to finagle a peek at the book by threatening to die: saying, What if my heart fails before you finish it? I’ll just have to regret it the rest of my life. I remind her that as a portrait painter, she never turned the canvas around for view till it was dried, never signed it till she knew what she was endorsing. The summer it’s done, I fly her up to Syracuse. Right off, she drops her purse in the hall and falls on the manuscript like a harpie. No, she doesn’t want to come to the park with Dev and me. She waves us on. I’m not going anywhere, she says. She takes up a lounge chair in the backyard with pages in her lap while I obsessively assemble cold soups and dips and marinades for the grill nearby, trying not to vulch over her. What am I waiting for? Given that she takes in books the way a junkie shoots dope, I want it to mesmerize her, which—since she’s its subject—is pretty much a slam dunk. I’m also hoping she’ll confirm in detail what she’s agreed in broad stroke is true.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Even after I rent out my attic to a grad student—a motorcycle-driving lesbyterian who sets my Republican neighbors’ tongues wagging—I can’t make ends meet. At first Warren and I plan to sell the house to give back Mr. Whitbread’s small down payment, till Warren figures out my engagement ring could buy the whole place outright, so I fork that over instead. That’s the kind of stuff we bicker about. Maybe he feels, as I do, that he’s given too much up—in furniture and car (on my part), house (on his part), or time with our son (on both parts). But when two different lawyers urge us separately to chase payouts we both know don’t exist, we fire them. With a mediator, we hammer out a deal neither of us can imagine surviving on, then we sign it. The Whitbread family tree sports nary a divorce, and it shames Warren to break the news. Once he does, the channels between the family and me snap so totally shut, I don’t hear the fallout. While my clan views the split as a done deal, Mother can’t feature me without Warren’s solidity. The boat I row (financially speaking) is fully loaded and taking water, but so’s Warren’s. Warren loans me our sole vehicle pretty much on demand, but it galls me to ask him. Facing walls of ice at my drive’s end, I try to tell myself that not having a car to shovel out is a bonus, but climbing over slippery, filthy edifices to reach a bus stop, Dev’s mittened hand in mine, I curse the oyster-gray sky and the fat flakes that Dev never tires of catching on his tongue. The bus to Dev’s after-school takes a full hour each way, and pulling him in a red wagon to and from the grocery store leaves me feeling stranded as a polar explorer. (People who’ve never seen a credit-union employee roll her eyes when you request a two-thousand-dollar car note will say, Just borrow.) In Syracuse, I find another circle of identical shit-brown chairs occupied by sober strangers, and I call Joan the Bone to complain about the mildewy carpet and the chilblains I get wearing wet boots in the unheated room. She says, Uh-huh. Are they sober? While Joan’s never more than a phone call away, she can’t be my polestar at such a remove. Before I moved, we’d agreed I’d have to find a local contender. You’re irreplaceable, I tell her on the phone. I am, aren’t I? she says, nudging me by phone to court Patti—a former English teacher who helps run an outpatient rehab—a petite woman with a