Awe
Awe is the body's response to scale it cannot match. The breath stops for a fraction of a second; the eye widens; the sense of self briefly thins so that something larger can occupy the same room. Vela reads awe through the writers and traditions that have refused to make it small — that have kept awe as the encounter with the genuinely outsized rather than as a synonym for liking something a lot.
Working definition · The widening that opens before something vast or beyond the usual scale—wonder mixed with humility.
4329 passages · 9 Vela essays · in 1 cluster
Vela’s read on this emotion
Awe is one of the emotions most actively diluted in contemporary usage. *Awesome* is now an adjective for a sandwich. The reading attends to a more specific register: awe as the response to scale — natural, mortal, divine, historical — that the self cannot domesticate.
The contemplative tradition is the deepest reservoir for awe. The Hebrew word *yir'ah* — translated variably as *fear*, *awe*, *reverence* — names the response to the divine that older translations have struggled to carry into English. The Book of Job, the Psalms of creation, the prophets at the moment of vocation each preserve awe as a primary religious experience. The Sufi tradition — Rumi, Hafiz, the Persian mystical poets — reads awe as the soul's recognition of the Beloved. The Buddhist contemplative literature names a parallel register inside silence rather than presence. Augustine of Hippo writes *trembling awe* — *amor et timor* — as the structure of devotion in the *Confessions*.
The modern reading runs through the writers who have refused to flatten the natural sublime. The Romantic tradition — Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, the Hudson River school painters, John Muir in the Sierra Nevada — treats awe before mountains, rivers, and storms as a serious cognitive event. The literature of exploration — Robert Kurson's *Rocket Men* on the Apollo 8 crew seeing Earth from the moon, the Antarctic memoirs, the deep-ocean accounts — preserves awe at the scale of what humans can encounter when they leave the human-scaled world. Joy Harjo's *Crazy Brave* reads awe inside the Indigenous spiritual register that the colonial inheritance has tried to refuse.
Awe is not the same as wonder, admiration, fear, or gratitude. Wonder is awe's curious cousin — interested rather than overcome. Admiration is steadied seeing; awe is the witness flooded. Fear shares awe's somatic shape — the breath catch, the still body — but the object is threatening rather than vast. Gratitude can shade into awe when the gift exceeds what can be acknowledged. The four are kin; the reading keeps them distinct because the writers who have been most honest about each have kept them separate.
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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.
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Around the middle of the second century BCE he proclaimed, according to Velleius Paterculus’s Compendium of Roman History, that “the Assyrians were the first of all races to hold world power, then the Medes, and after them the Persians, and then the Macedonians. Then…the world power passed to the Roman people” (1.6). The five great ages of the world are now five great empires, with Rome as their climax. The gods had “exalted this Matthew 6:10, KJV great empire of Rome to the highest point yet reached on earth,” so that it had become “the empire of the world” (2.131). Daniel was a Jewish realist for whom the wineglass of history was not so much half empty or half full as cracked, leaking badly, and in serious need of repair. Also around the mid-second century BCE , he agreed with Sura that four great imperial kingdoms had preceded their own time, but he proposed a very different fifth one as their climax. It was not the kingdom of Rome, but rather the kingdom of God. And it stood against all imperial kingdoms before, during, or after its advent. That is the message from a nighttime vision in the book of Daniel: “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people. It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever ” (2:44). In the biblical book of Daniel the four preceding empires are those of the Babylonians, Medes, Persians, and Macedonian Greeks. They are represented as beasts “up out of the sea,” feral thrusts from the chaos of the land-threatening ocean (7:3). The Babylonian Empire “was like a lion and had eagles’ wings” the Median Empire “looked like a bear” and the Persian Empire “appeared like a leopard” (7:4–6). No comparison with a known wild animal, however, is adequate to describe the fourth imperial kingdom, of the Macedonian Greeks. It is like nothing that came before it. Daniel can only call it dreadfully “different,” and he does so three times: [It was] terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that preceded it…. [It] was different from all the rest, exceedingly terrifying, with its teeth of iron and claws of bronze, and which devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped what was left with its feet…. [It was] different from all the other kingdoms; it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces. (7:7, 19, 23) This is the fourth-century BCE empire of Alexander the Great, whose infantry carried two-handed twenty-foot pikes. That length meant about five ranks of pike heads pushing their lethal tips past one another into the killing zone.
What they do is “squeeze” eight chunks of stuff and eight sets of formulaic phrases into six days by having one set apiece on Days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, but two sets on Days 3 and 6, as you can easily see in the accompanying chart. Furthermore, the fourth and final chunk of creation in the “separating and preparing” half of creation (plants, trees) is “squeezed” in there, although it more properly belongs in the second “decorating and filling” half. All of that is important only to emphasize the self-conscious deliberation and magnificent art -ificiality that went into those balanced halves. Creation is, for the Priestly tradition, a beautifully balanced divine masterpiece. The First Creation Account Separating and Preparing Day 1 (1) Then God said, “Let [LIGHT ] be.” And there was [LIGHT ]. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (1:3–5) Day 2 (2) And God said, “Let [SKY ] be.” And it was so. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. (1:6–8) Day 3 (3) And God said, “Let [SEA , LAND ] be.” And it was so. And God saw that it was good. (4) Then God said, “Let [PLANTS , TREES ] be.” And it was so. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. (1:9–13) Decorating and Filling Day 4 (5) And God said, “Let [SUN , MOON ] be.” And it was so. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (1:14–19) Day 5 (6) And God said, “Let [BIRDS , FISHES ] be.” And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. (1:20–23) Day 6 (7) And God said, “Let [ANIMALS ] be.” And it was so. And God saw that it was good. (8) Then God said, “Let [HUMANS ] be.” And it was so. God saw everything…was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (1:24–31) In that structure, Days 1 and 4, Days 2 and 5, and Days 3 and 6 correspond to one another. But although Days 1, 2, 4, and 5 each have one chunk of creation and one set of formulaic expressions apiece, Days 3 and 6 have two chunks of creation and two sets of formulaic expressions apiece. It is that compression of eight chunks into six days that clarifies the authors’ intention and purpose. Put negatively, we humans are not the crown of creation. (We are the work of a late Friday afternoon. And maybe not even God’s best work is done on a late Friday afternoon.) Put positively, the crown of creation is the Sabbath day itself.
It begins with a visionary dream in the mind of God, a visionary dream that is with God and is God: In the beginning was the Word (ho logos ), and the Word (ho logos ) was with God, and the Word (ho logos ) was God. This one (houtos ) was in the beginning with God. (1:1–2) We translate the Greek ho logos as “the Word,” and that is both correct and vacuous. What does ho logos or “the Word” mean in the opening words of John’s magnificently poetic overture? It means that God did not come up with a bright new idea called Jesus around 4 BCE . The eternal and generative dream of God was for a world of justice and peace, for an earth unsullied by oppression and injustice, by violence, bloodshed, and war. That hope, vision, dream for the earth was always with God and was God. But, John claims, it became embodied, incarnated, revealed humanly in Jesus: “The Word (ho logos ) became flesh and lived among us” (1:14). John’s overture claims that Jesus of Nazareth is the visionary dream of God as embodied humanly in time, place, and sandals. Think of it this way. A mighty river pushes steadily against a logjam, but cannot break through except in trickles and rivulets. Then, one day, it breaks through fully and floods forward on its way. It broke through at a specific moment in time, but it was not created at that moment. It was always there, pressing, pressing, pressing. Furthermore, if you could control all the variables, you might be able to explain that moment of breakthrough. But it would be a serious mistake downriver to think that the river had just been invented. And that too is a challenge parable. MY THIRD POINT FOLLOWS directly from that initial probe. It asks whether John’s megaparable of Jesus is, despite what we saw in my first point above, not merely an attack parable against Judaism, but even more profoundly a challenge parable to the three synoptic gospels. This present point proposes that John’s gospel is a challenge to the life, death, resurrection, and “return” of Jesus as they are presented in the synoptic vision of the other gospels. The next steps of this point will compare those four elements of Jesus’s story as they appear in John with those as they appear especially in Mark, as Mark is the major source for Matthew and Luke. I begin with the life of Jesus. My focus here is how differently John interprets the miracles that fill so much of that life in the synoptic gospels. The healing miracles, for example, were cited by Luke to establish and vindicate Jesus’s very identity when questioned by the imprisoned Baptist: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them” (7:22).
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Both Roosevelts practiced in the family firm. Here’s Great-grandfather in the old touring car with McKinley right before he was shot. Warren gets quiet during the stories. He was bred in quiet and carries quiet in him but elegance also. Even picking burrs out of Tiger’s tail he can pull off with gravitas. But he can also drift far from me into himself. Sitting across from him, I can’t meet his eyes. Maybe he’s patiently irritated with how awed I am by the posh household he’s fleeing. Or maybe I’m breaking rules of comportment subtle enough to resemble the minuscule gaffes you get demerits for in precision diving contests. Warren’s grandfather—in riding gear circa 1930-something, holding a polo mallet—is Warren’s exact double. Here’s the cover of The New York Times that falsely reported his death after a fall. Mr. Whitbread stares into some decades’-old distance, saying, The old man was on a horse again the next morning. Infuriated my mother. People in New York were sending wreaths to the house, and he was galloping across a field. Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try—without letup—to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads’, preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. André triple-crème cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn. It’s taken me so much effort just to do as medium-shitty as I’ve heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of. I take another sip of port, which slides down as if greased. Warren seems thousands of miles away, and why has he kept all this from me? Here’s Mrs. Whitbread in her dress for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Some polo connection? They’ve stopped explaining why they were various places. Here’s Mr. Whitbread flanked by briefcase-carrying aides, striding confidently up the steps of the Supreme Court. Warren says, I remember sitting behind you, and you pulled out some notecards. You were there? Mr. Whitbread asks. Mrs. Whitbread looks exasperated. Of course, darling. I thought they should experience it. Warren goes on, And your client said, What are you doing? Mr. Whitbread tosses some nuts into his mouth, saying, I suppose I told him I was preparing my argument. And he said, Now? (Working for The Washington Post at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—later claimed Mr.
From Come As You Are (2015)
But magnificent sex goes further and deeper. As Kleinplatz and Ménard put it, “Magnificent sex requires growing beyond the conventional scripts most people learn in their youth. Disappointing sex lives can change. The goal here is not merely to discard sex guilt, shame, and inhibition. Rather it is to jettison the entire aspirational package of paint-by-numbers sex.”25 People who have magnificent sex don’t just show up and put their bodies in the bed—e.g., good sex. They deliberately cultivate a context that’s “just safe enough” to dare the leaps of faith they take into the wild places in their souls. That’s magnificent sex. And out-of-the-blue desire has almost nothing to do with it. When people who have magnificent sex want sex, they don’t just want the sex we see performed in the mainstream media or porn. They want to know themselves and their partners more fully, and they want to be seen and known more fully, felt more deeply, held more closely. This is what I call “magnificent desire.” As Gottman and his colleagues found, couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term prioritize sex—but. It’s also normal for there to be times when sex drops off the list of priorities. When you have a new baby, when you’re caring for a dying parent, when you’re both overwhelmed with work, sometimes there truly isn’t time or energy to pause and turn toward each other with erotic intention. You can allow that to be true, knowing that it’s a phase of life you’ll pass through together, and you’ll find your way back to each other on the other side. And it’s worth considering what you will each find there, on the other side of your shared dry spell. Is it play or connection or exploration or peace? Or is it more like a chore or an obligation or drudgery? If you dread the idea of showing up and putting your body in the bed, lack of desire is not the problem. Lack of pleasure is the problem. To want sex may be to want the routine pleasures of the body and of play. Sometimes, though, it is to want something more. Precisely what that “more” is varies from person to person and changes across our life spans, but people who have magnificent sex describe sex that gives them far more than pleasure. It tunes them in to their partner at a deep, physiological level. It reveals their own desires to themselves, and it dares them to reveal those desires to a partner. It takes them deeper into their own personhood, even into their own divinity, and it takes them deeper into their partner’s internal world. Ask yourself: What kind of sex is worth wanting? And how far would you go to create that in your life?
From Martin Luther (2016)
During this year in Magdeburg, Luther was also taken with a local figure known as Prince Wilhelm of Anhalt, whose gaunt frame haunted the streets of the city. His family had been quite religious: both of his brothers became priests, and his one sister became a nun. But Wilhelm would outdo them all when he took orders as a Franciscan monk, formally dedicating himself to a life of poverty and renouncing all filial claims to his father’s principality. Like the founder of his order, he set his worldly title and riches aside to follow Christ in the humblest way imaginable, as a public beggar. Wilhelm’s severe presence on the streets of Magdeburg at that time must have been affecting. In the mendicant Franciscan fashion, he went about with a sack on his back. He was also known to be assiduous in performing tasks in the monastery. And his endless vigils and fasts—along with the self-flagellation au courant at that time—ultimately reduced him to a walking skeleton. He died in 1504, while only in his mid-forties. Luther later wrote, “With my own eyes I saw him carrying the sack like a donkey. He had so worn himself down by fasting and vigil that he looked like a death’s-head, mere bone and skin. No one could look upon him without feeling ashamed of his own life.”7 That Wilhelm had so utterly forsaken the trappings of this world, even those of a prince, could not have failed to captivate the sensitive young man, whose extraordinary introspection, as would be so powerfully evidenced in later years, would place a powerful check on the worldly ambitions his father had carefully planned for him.
The best way to understand that vision of “our daily bread” is to go back before the Abba Prayer or any of those meals with Jesus—during his life, before his death, or after his resurrection—to the far older story of the “bread from heaven,” in the desert during the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. It is daily bread as bread daily. You will recall, from Chapter 3, that the Priestly tradition moved from Sabbath creation through Sabbath day and Sabbath year to climax with Sabbath jubilee. That same tradition created a magnificent parable to sum it all up and located it during the Exodus from Egypt. It is a vision of the Sabbath day, but also of how God distributes food as manna/bread for all. It is also the best commentary on “our daily bread” in the Abba Prayer of Jesus as meaning enough bread for today, and tomorrow, and every day to come . The people complained of hunger in the desert, and “the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to rain bread from heaven for you’” (Exod. 16:4). The promise is that “you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God” (16:12). When the manna appeared, the people “said to one another, ‘What is it?’ [Hebrew man hu’, hence manna ]. For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat’” (16:15). The manna is quite simply God’s bread, but there are five very precise instructions for harvesting this miraculous food from heaven: The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” (16:4) “On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.”…On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food. (16:5, 22) “Gather as much of it as each of you needs, an omer [about a half gallon] to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents.” The Israelites did so, some gathering more, some less. But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed…. Morning by morning they gathered it, as much as each needed. (16:16–18, 21) “Let no one leave any of it over until morning.” But…some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul. (16:19–20) On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, and they found none. (16:27) Those parabolic emphases are quite clear.
Loving your enemies and turning the other cheek are not military tactics. So how, then, can Jesus be called the Davidic messiah for those first Messianic or Christian Jews? Could it be that Jesus himself—and thence his first companions and later followers—had a different vision of eschaton, apocalypse, and messiah? Did their understanding differ from that more popular vision of the new David as warrior liberator? And, if so, how are we to understand that distinctive vision in the Abba Prayer’s “Your kingdom come”? How, for example, did their imagination fill out the details of that messianic, apocalyptic, and eschatological kingdom of God from Daniel 7? This is not, by the way, a question about how Christianity separated itself from Judaism. It is a question about how one distinctive Jewish option and group—that of messianic or Christian Judaism—distinguished itself from other Jewish options and groups in the Jewish homeland in that fateful first century CE. My proposal is that Jesus had an interpretation of God’s Great Cleanup of the World that differed radically from the more general expectation among his own people. You could call his alternative vision a tradition swerve, a paradigm shift, a model change, or even a disruptive innovation. My own preference is to describe the challenge of his kingdom movement—and thence of the “kingdom coming” in his prayer—as a paradigm-shift within contemporary Judaism. The term paradigm shift was originally used over forty years ago to explain the transition from an established scientific viewpoint to a radically new one—for example, from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. A standard paradigm, ordinary model, or traditional interpretation continues undisturbed for such a long time that we think of it as reality itself. Problems, anomalies, and things that do not fit tend to get swept under the rug of normalcy, until the mound gets so big that people start stumbling over it. But the set paradigm or normative model holds fast until a new vision emerges that explains not only all that the older one did, but also those other discrepancies that the old model could not. The term paradigm shift is actually useful not just for scientific revolutions, but for many other tradition swerves in human experience—in art and literature, in music and drama, in politics and religion. And, indeed, the first century CE had paradigm shifts in several other crucial areas. By the start of that century Rome was successfully shifting its political paradigm from a republic led by two aristocrats to an empire led by one autocrat. By its end Judaism was successfully shifting its religious paradigm from Temple sacrifices led by priests to Torah study led by sages. In the middle of that century, in between those two momentous model changes in Roman imperialism and Jewish traditionalism, that of Jesus may have seemed at first but a minor Galilean eccentricity. But, eventually, it too would be as world-changing as they were.
But now it is not just a question of slaves becoming free by the action of God, but of slaves becoming heirs of God. Is that just a moment of rhapsodic vision that would have to be drastically toned down if and when Paul thought it over? I do not think so, because he says it all again and even more fully in his later letter to the Romans: When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…. The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (8:15–17, 26–27) All the same language appears here once again: the Spirit of God prays in us and for us; the cry of that Spirit in us is “Abba, Father!” and the result is that we are not just freed slaves of God or even beloved children of God, but “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” Paul’s claim is clear, and it is, as I said, quite stunning. We cannot pray the Abba Prayer to God the Father by ourselves or from ourselves. We can only pray it by, with, and through the Holy Spirit. Better: only the Holy Spirit can pray it in us, for us, and through us. Better still: it is a collaborative prayer between—in this order—God’s divine Spirit and our human spirit. We translate that combination of divinity and humanity—as above—with God’s “Spirit bearing witness with our spirit” (8:15). But Paul held the two in a much tighter combination with a single Greek word. He wrote of “with-witnessing” (summarturei ) to emphasize the extraordinarily profound collaboration between divine Spirit and human spirit in the Abba Prayer of Jesus. One final and all-important question. What does it mean for Christians to become “an heir, through God” (Gal. 4:7) or “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17)? We have already seen one aspect of it. God liberates us from injustice and, as heirs, we inherit that same obligation for others. There is, however, another aspect as well, and this goes back to Genesis, the first book of the Bible. You can see that second aspect if you glance back at the two parts from Romans 8 (vv. 15–17, 26–27) that I cited together above. There is a section of text left out in between—and notice that it is between—those two assertions about the Spirit of God praying within Christians.
Creation is not the work of six days, as is often mistakenly said—and whether it is said literally or metaphorically, historically or parabolically, it is still mistaken. Creation is the work of seven days, and, as its climax, the Sabbath day is built into the very fabric of our world, the very creation of our earth. That is why, as we see below, the Sabbath(s) will be so important for understanding the holiness of God and what it means to make and keep holy the name of that God. Finally, one last point before continuing the Leviticus 19 lead that sent us to Genesis 1. In that ecstatic vision of the dawn of creation there is no bloodshed—not between animals, not between animals and humans, and not between humans: God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. (1:29–30) We may smile at that dream of lions on lettuce, tigers on tofu, and panthers on pesto. But, rather than mocking carnivores as would-be herbivores, what about humans not killing one another? Animals have instinct, and we have conscience. We left Eden in Genesis 2–3 having eaten of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ” (2:17), that is, with only conscience as our guide. Our first act out of Eden was fratricidal murder and escalating violence in Genesis 4 (more on that in Chapter 8). Be that as it may, what does God’s Sabbath—in Leviticus 19 or Genesis 1—have to do with God as the Holy One of justice and righteous ness? It is time to follow the trail from Sabbath day through Sabbath year to Sabbath jubilee. And always remember that, from Genesis 1 onward, that Sabbath regulates the weekly structure of our temporal world. What, then, is the purpose of God’s Sabbath? Sabbath Day. The Jewish Sabbath on Saturday simply developed, we might think, into the Christian Sabbath on Sunday. It was only, we might think, a change of day. Sunday is a day of rest, so that Christians may attend church. It is rest from work for worship. But the original Sabbath was rest from work as worship. Here are three examples from the Torah—still, by the way, in our Christian Old Testament—that bespeak a very different religious sensibility, a very different meaning for the Sabbath day: Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work.
From Martin Luther (2016)
Later that day, from Friedberg, just north of Frankfurt, Luther wrote a long letter to the emperor. It is a humble and respectful letter, but in it Luther asserted this new and earth-shattering idea that he had recovered from the Gospels, that neither pope nor emperor possesses any authority unless it is given to him from God. It is an echo of what Jesus said to Pilate, when Pilate asked, “Don’t you know that I have the power to crucify you?” and Jesus replied, “You have no authority over me, except that which has been given you from above.”11 Luther had rediscovered the lever that can move the world, and the leveler that puts all on equal footing before God. It was that which made us all free, our equality as subjects of the King of Kings. While at Friedberg, on the next day, April 29, Luther told Caspar Sturm, the imperial herald, that he, Luther, was now safe and he therefore relieved Sturm of his duties, dismissing him. In fact, Luther wrote a statement to this effect, because this was not a simple affair, and with that statement he included a letter that the herald was to deliver to Spalatin. In the letter to Spalatin, he passed along his greetings to Pappenheim, the imperial marshal. Also—and of course this was most important of all—he enclosed the long letter to the emperor. Whether Luther and company had craftily planned all of this in advance, we don’t know, but what we do know is that the principal reason Luther now dismissed Sturm was what was about to take place. KidnappedWe presume that Luther spent the night of the twenty-eighth in Friedberg and that Sturm was dismissed on the twenty-ninth. That day Luther proceeded with his remaining company to Grünberg, where he spent the night, and then traveled forty miles to Hersfeld. In Hersfeld, Luther was honored with a tremendous welcome by the city council and the abbot of the Hersfeld monastery. He described it in a letter to Spalatin: You would hardly believe in what friendly fashion the abbot of Hersfeld received us! He sent the chancellor and treasurer a good mile out to meet us; then he himself together with many riders met us at his castle and accompanied us into town. The city council welcomed us inside the gate. The abbot fed us sumptuously in his monastery and made his private chamber available for my use. [The next morning] they compelled me to preach. In vain I pled that the monastery might lose its royal privileges if the emperor’s officials should interpret my sermon as a breach of the safe conduct, since they had forbidden me to preach while on my way. But I said that I had not consented for the word of God to be bound; and that is true.12
And, as heirs, we assume the powers and responsibilities of householding our world so that all alike have enough. Paul was speaking to Christian Jews, and it was quite appropriate to call them “heirs of God” for the care of creation. But is this prayer for Christianity only, or does it speak to all humanity? I suggest that it is a single powerful beat from the heart of biblical tradition and that it is addressed to all the world. I read it, therefore, against this context from Genesis 1:26–28: “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them…. “Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” That mandate of responsibility is repeated twice to frame and interpret what it means for humans to be made in God’s image. Humans (“male and female”) are created to run God’s world. We are, as human beings, co-responsible with the Householder for the household of the world. Christians are “heirs of God” from Paul, but all humans are “images of God” from Genesis. I turn next to the rhapsody on that magnificent human destiny in Psalm 8 and, as you read, notice its rampant poetic parallelism: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. (8:3–8) Once again, our human glory is to be “a little lower than God” and thereby responsible for all God’s creatures of land, sky, and sea. Paul interprets the Lord’s Prayer to mean that Christians are “heirs of God” with responsibility for the “groaning” of creation. My proposal is that the Abba Prayer involves that and much more. It recalls the challenge of Genesis 1:26–28 and Psalm 8, which calls all human beings to that responsibility. The opening and closing verses of Psalm 8 are verbatim the same: “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (8:1, 9). So, finally, how does what we have learned so far on “Our Father in heaven” prepare for and flow into a discussion of “hallowed be your name”?
From Come As You Are (2015)
Olivia told me: “One of the rules we set was I had to ask for permission before I had an orgasm. And he did not always say yes when I asked. Um, we’ll be doing that again.” “What was good about it?” I asked. Olivia’s expression turned serious, but with a glow. She said, “It was like… when we let ourselves synchronize and both of us were climbing toward orgasm at the same, deliberate pace, we, like… it was like I could feel his pleasure in my body. I could even feel my own pleasure inside his body. Does that sound insane?” “Not even a little bit,” I said. Creating a great sex-positive context for the lower-desire partner resulted in a context that was mind-blowingly, almost painfully erotic for the higher-desire partner. This chapter is about why and how that works. Imagine a world where everyone has desert plants in their gardens—aloe plants and dragon trees and fiddlenecks and yuccas—and everyone knows how to tend them: lots of sun, very little water. And imagine that you happen to have a tomato plant in your garden. Everybody “knows,” in this desert world, that plants need very little water, so you water your tomato plant sparingly… and it slowly dies. You wonder, “Maybe I’m watering it too often? Maybe there’s not enough sun?” And you continue to water and watch, and you wonder, “Why is it dying? I’m doing what I’m supposed to do!” A tiny shift in knowledge—the bare fact that tomato plants are better adapted to a subtropical climate than to a desert, so they thrive on more water—can change how you tend your garden… which can bring your tomato plant back to life. Now, if someone comes along and offers this fact, there will be those who say, “Plants don’t need lots of water, that’s part of what it means to be a healthy plant!” Others will say, “Tomato plants are crazy—broken!—to need all that water!” Some will search for a remedy for the tomato plant, to make it more like an aloe. And there will be tomato gardeners who simply can’t let go of the idea that they’re supposed to be able to produce abundant fruit on almost no water at all, and they will do anything to have a tomato plant that thrives in the desert. But you try it. You give your tomato plant more water. And you go from “Why is it dying?” to “Wow!” as you’re rewarded with abundant fruit and lush, fragrant greens. All because of a tiny shift in knowledge. This chapter is about one such tiny shift in knowledge, which can move your relationship with your sexual wellbeing from “Why is it dying?” to “Wow!”
If we could assess all the variables of time and place, we could possibly explain why it happened at that time and in that way; but barring that, the exact reason for time and place may elude us. “As in heaven” reminds us that God’s will for creation was always there and ever the same, but that a window of opportunity opened in the first century CE and “as in heaven” became “so on earth.” That is what John says most accurately and poetically at the start of his gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God…. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. (1:1–2,11–16) The Word (Logos in Greek) is the eternal vision and creative dream of God for the world. It is the “will” of God for justice and righteousness, which “became flesh” in Jesus of Nazareth. We are now ready to begin the transition from the former to the latter half of the Abba Prayer, from “heaven” to “earth,” and so from Chapters 3–5 into Chapters 6–8 of this book. And, at this point, one possible confusion must be mentioned. Are we perhaps not supposed to think about earth in the present, but about heaven in the future? Possible—and often actual—confusion comes especially from Matthew’s language. Although Matthew speaks five times of the “kingdom of God,” he speaks thirty-one times about the “kingdom of heaven.” Does that latter phrase push God’s kingdom into future time in heaven above? Not at all, because Matthew means exactly the same reality by both expressions. Just compare these two verses: Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven . Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God .” (19:23–24) Matthew respectfully avoids the name of God by using, as it were, the dwelling for the dweller, just as, mutatis mutandis, we do by announcing, “The White House says…,” when we mean “The President says…” For Matthew, “kingdom of heaven” means exactly the same as “kingdom of God.” God’s kingdom is not about future heaven, but present earth. That is quite clear from the “on earth” in the Lord’s Prayer. It is, indeed, even clearer in the original Greek, “as in heaven so in earth,” than in our English translation, “on earth as in heaven.” The Greek emphasizes that heaven is where the eternal model exists for our earth, not where the future destiny of our earth awaits. When “heaven” comes down to “earth,” how is our world transformed?
A first theme begins by translating the patriarchal name “father” as the more appropriate term “householder.” It accordingly understands God the Father as God the Householder of the World. And as the human householder makes sure that all in the household have enough, so also does the divine Householder. That is the awesome simplicity behind the Bible’s acclamation of God as a God of “justice and righteousness.” It is only just and right that all who dwell together—in household or Household—have enough. A second theme is that, at the dawn of creation in Genesis 1:26–27, the divine Householder created human beings as “images” of that divine character. We are to collaborate with God as appointed stewards of a world that we must maintain in justice and equality. “It is required of stewards,” as Paul says, “that they be found trustworthy” (1 Cor. 4:2). A third theme is that, for Christians, Jesus is the “Son” of the “Father,” who is the divine Householder of the World. “Son” is another patriarchal term, but also a very specific one in a world of male primogeniture, where the firstborn son—or the only son—is the sole heir of the household. Jesus is the Heir of God, the divine Householder of the World. A fourth element is that Christians are called to collaborate with Christ as Heir of God. That comes from the collaborative nature of the kingdom of God as eschaton, that is, from our necessary participation in the Great Divine Cleanup of the World. We cry out “Abba! Father!” to quote Paul once more, in ecstatic awareness that we are “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:15, 17). A fifth and final theme is how all of that comes together in the Abba Prayer of Jesus. It is both a revolutionary manifesto and a hymn of hope not just for Christianity, but for all the world. Better, it is addressed from Christianity to all the world. Better still, it is from the heart of Judaism through the mouth of Christianity to the conscience of the earth. In that Abba Prayer the hallowing of God’s name means the coming of God’s kingdom so that God’s eternal will is accomplished “as in heaven so also on earth .” Think again of a two-sided coin: one side of the coin proclaims the divine name, divine kingdom, and divine will; the other side announces enough human food for today, no human debt for tomorrow, and the absence of human violence always. Think now, have you ever seen a one-sided coin? EPILOGUE The Strangest BookTwo questions—or maybe even objections—have probably occurred to you as you read through this book, this biblical meditation on the Abba Prayer of Jesus. They focus on the claim that God as the divine Householder of the world house is a God of nonviolent justice. The first question or objection concerns nonviolence and the second concerns justice . And those two terms stand or fall together.
From Martin Luther (2016)
At this early point, Luther was what is called a supplicant. Before he could become an actual novice monk, there was a significant waiting period that included extensive confession. But after some time, this first trial period ended, and the great day came. Luther was again brought into the chapter room, this time with all of the monks of the order present to witness the great moment. The twenty-two-year-old before them now did what they had once done, some recently and others many decades before. Luther on this day officially left the world outside the monastery behind him irrevocably and forever and became a novice monk, just as he had vowed that July afternoon on the blasted heath in Stotternheim. During this ceremony, Luther as the supplicant abased himself before the prior and before the altar, prostrating himself upon the tile floor, which remains there to this day. Only a few feet away from the young Luther lay the bones of Andreas Zacharias, the most renowned of the monastery’s monks, whose remains had the principal place of honor in the monastery. A hundred years earlier, at the Council of Constance, it was Zacharias who had most vigorously attacked the theology of the Bohemian Jan Hus, who was soon thereafter burned at the stake for heresy, most say as a direct result of Zacharias’s zealous efforts. Hus’s principal concerns were with the institution of the papacy, for Hus said Christians were to follow not any man but Christ himself. He also said that the Eucharist should be proffered as bread and wine both, just as Jesus did in the Gospels, and also because proffering both bread and wine only to priests created a false distinction between priests and laypeople. Hus was strongly against this division between laity and clergy, which he held simply could not be found in the New Testament. Luther would in time follow in the footsteps of this famous martyr, advocating for almost precisely the same things that Hus did, so his prostration for holy orders only a few feet away from the hallowed bones of the man who had kindled the fire to burn Hus was a strange beginning to his life as a monk. The prior Diedenhofen asked the supplicant Luther whether he was indeed willing to take on the difficult demands of the life of a monk, and outlined something of the great privations and trials that lay ahead. Luther heard these things and solemnly assented. And lest Luther believe he had now achieved his salvation by entering the monastery, Diedenhofen would have gravely intoned, “Not he that hath begun, but he that endureth to the end shall be saved.”2 In other words, the twenty-two-year-old had only now just arrived at the base of the great seven storey mountain that must “now be climbed.”*
But magnificent as all that is, Moses is not satisfied, and this most fateful interaction takes place: Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, ’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM .” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you .’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors…has sent me to you. ’” (3:13–15a) As you study that interchange, focus on those three terminal phases “has sent me to you” (italicized for emphasis). You realize that two divine names are held together in tensive interplay. In the center is the name “I am who I am ,” and it is framed by the twice repeated other name, “the Lord God of your ancestors.” Who is sending Moses and by which name? The primary and fundamental name of God is a verbal paradox just as the burned-but-not-burned bush is a visual one. God’s reply to Moses’s question is, in effect: “My name is the unnameable one.” But that is a contradiction in terms. It both gives and does not give a name—it is a bush that both burns and does not burn—at the same time. In other words, it is a warning to Moses and us that we cannot ever fully, adequately, or completely name the Holy One. God is fundamentally unnamable. And yet we must always try—the unnameable name must be named, the unburnable bush must be burned, the sacred ground must be walked on—but unsandaled. That is why, despite that warning, God actually gives Moses a nameable name. That secondary or operational name of God is the God of past, present, and future, the God of tradition and deliverance, indeed, of tradition as deliverance and deliverance as tradition. God is the one who saves God’s people from the bondage, misery, and suffering imposed on them by “taskmasters.” There must always be, however, a tension between the primary name—the Unnameable One—and all other names given to God, even that of Deliverer and Savior of God’s people. Even that of Father or Householder. On the one hand, we cannot ever name the Holy and think we have it done. On the other, we cannot ever not name the Holy and think we have it made. That mysterious paradox of God’s primary name both produces and subverts, both demands and mutates all of God’s other names. How we think a deliverer should deliver and a savior save may not be exactly how God delivers and God saves. And that is why we, like Moses, must keep standing on holy ground and must also keep removing our sandals. Not one act or the other, but both together.
From Come As You Are (2015)
[image "An anatomical illustration of the external and internal structures of the clitoris and surrounding vulvar anatomy, including the corpus cavernosum, crus clitoris, bulb of vestibule, labia minora, urethral opening, and vaginal opening." file=image_rsrc64E.jpg] The anatomy of the clitoris. The cultural meaning of “clitoris” is often limited to the external part, the glans. The biological meaning includes a vast range of internal erectile tissue that extends all the way to the vaginal opening. [image "An anatomical illustration of the male reproductive system." file=image_rsrc64F.jpg] The anatomy of the penis. As with the clitoris, the cultural meaning of “penis” is limited to the external part—the glans and shaft. And, like the clitoris, the penis has internal erectile tissue. All the same parts, organized in different ways. Description 2 The clitoral hood covers the head of the clitoris, as its homologue, the foreskin, covers the head of the penis. And the male frenulum—the “Y-spot” near the glans, where the foreskin attaches to the shaft—is the homologue of the female fourchette (the French word for “fork”), the curve of tissue on the lower edge of the vagina. This is a highly sensitive and undervalued piece of real estate on all bodies. meet your clitorisIf you’ve never met your clitoris “face-to-face,” now is the time. (Even if you’ve had some good chats with your clitoris in the past, feel free to take this opportunity to get reacquainted.) You can find it visually or manually. After you’ve read the next two paragraphs, put down the book and try either method. To find it visually, get a mirror, spread your labia (the soft, hairy outer lips of your vulva), and actually look at it. You’ll see a nub at the top of your vulva. Or you can find it with your fingers. Start with the tip of your middle finger at the cleft where your labia divide. Press down gently, wiggle your finger back and forth, and scoot your fingertip slowly down between your labia until you feel a rubbery little cord under the skin. It might help to pull your skin taut by tugging upward on your mons with your other hand. It might also help to lubricate your finger with spit, commercial lube, some allergen-free hand cream, or even a little coconut oil. I have a specific reason for asking you to actually look at your clitoris: A student came up to me after class one night and told me that she had been Skyping with her mom, talking about her classes that semester, including my class, “Women’s Sexuality.” The student mentioned to her mom that my lecture slides included actual photos of vulvas, along with diagrams and illustrations. And her mom told her the most astonishing thing. She said, “I don’t know where the clitoris is.” The mom was fifty-four. So my student emailed her mom my lecture slides.
From Martin Luther (2016)
And there, at the focal point of the grandiloquence sat the fabled young emperor himself, duly elevated upon a dais. What did the elegant grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain make of this crude, impertinent monk? Portraits of Charles from this time give the unmistakable impression of a perfect twit, a cruel victim of spoiling and aristocratic inbreeding. But Charles V was very far from that. What must it have felt like for Luther to come into the presence of such worldly power? That he smiled seems evidence of equanimity born of his deep faith. When he came to the designated spot in the room where he was to stand, he beheld a table piled high with his own books, some forty in all. They were the Basel editions of his works, especially bound for the occasion. The man now charged with being Luther’s interlocutor—as the emperor’s spokesman—was Johannes von der Ecken, who is not to be confused with Luther’s Leipzig opponent, Johannes Eck. This Johannes von der Ecken was the secretary to the archbishop of Trier, who was one of the seven electors, and von der Ecken had himself been the one to oversee the burning of Luther’s books in that city. Because some in the room understood Latin, while others understood German, everything must be spoken in both languages. Most to the point, Emperor Charles himself spoke German rather poorly, so it might have been mostly for his benefit that everything was also spoken in Latin. So von der Ecken now addressed Luther—first in Latin and then in German—saying that the emperor had summoned him here to answer but two questions. The first was whether all of these books, bearing his name, had indeed been written by him. The second was whether he wished to recant anything from them. That was all and that would be all. Luther’s appointed legal counsel at Worms was Hieronymus Schurff, a professor of law from Wittenberg who had already been at Worms since February, at the behest of Frederick. But Schurff now leaped up and demanded that the books’ titles be read aloud. Thus von der Ecken now read from the long list to the assembly. The sheer number of books and the titles themselves must have rung through the chamber and the minds of all who listened. They went on and on. These were the writings that had caused this revolution, that had been printed and that had been disseminated throughout most of the known world and translated into many languages—and that had been read and discussed and read and discussed. One by one, the names of these works were announced. The long list of volumes itself spoke volumes. How the world had already changed as a result of them.
From Martin Luther (2016)
The book is a masterpiece of the bookmaker’s art, in large part because of Luther’s extensive clarifying commentary and margin notes. It can hardly be seen by us as it was first seen, because thanks to Luther so many are today familiar with the Bible and what is in it. But if we imagine a population that had never seen the Bible in a language they could read and had no idea of what was in the book, we may understand it as a revelation to almost all who first saw it, as not less than historic and indeed as revolutionary. Luther’s commentary prefaces in front of each book were for many Germans the very first explanations they had of what was in this book that had been for centuries hidden from them. There are innumerable examples of simple clarifying explanations that would have forever changed how people viewed things. In the beginning of the New Testament, for example, Luther explains the meaning of the word “gospel” as “good news,” and he explains that although the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are all the stories of Jesus’s life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, nonetheless the actual and true Gospel is to be found all through the New Testament. The whole of the story is the Gospel. Luther’s view of this was so central to his reading of the New Testament that he gave that precedence over all else, meaning that whereas he considered the Word of God sacred, he nonetheless felt comfortable ranking things in accordance with how closely they hewed to this central message of the Gospel. So Luther did not consider all of the books of the Bible equal, as one might expect. In fact, he even had his doubts whether the books of James and Revelation ought to be considered canonical and apostolic. At the end of the New Testament, he wrote, John’s Gospel and St. Paul’s epistles, especially that to the Romans, and St. Peter’s first epistle are the true kernel and marrow of all the books. They ought properly to be the foremost books, and it would be advisable for every Christian to read them first and most, and by daily reading to make them as much his own as his daily bread. For in them you do not find many works and miracles of Christ described, but you do find depicted in masterly fashion how faith in Christ overcomes sin, death, and hell, and gives life, righteousness, and salvation.21