Awe

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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  Worse, Jesus himself has every right to feel frustrated. Many Christians, hearing of someone doing “historical research” on Jesus, begin to worry that what will emerge is a smaller, less significant Jesus than they had hoped to find. Plenty of books offer just that: a cut-down-to-size Jesus, Jesus as a great moral teacher or religious leader, a great man but nothing more. Christians now routinely recognize this reductionism and resist it. But I have increasingly come to believe that we should be worried for the quite opposite reason. Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide behind other questions (admittedly important ones) and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of Jesus’s central claim and achievement. It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself. You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate. It is time, I believe, to recognize not only who Jesus was in his own day, despite his contemporaries’ failure to recognize him, but also who he is, and will be, for our own. “He came to what was his own,” wrote one of his greatest early followers, “and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). That puzzle continues.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, but, as we have seen, his deeds and words indicated that he was going to upstage the Temple, to do something that would make it redundant and leave it to its fate. Prophet? Yes, indeed, he spoke and acted as a prophet, but, however cryptically, he described his cousin as “more than a prophet” and clearly believed that he was bringing something greater again. Prophets characteristically pointed away from themselves to God and what God was doing and would do, but Jesus, as we have seen, spoke about God in order to explain what he himself was doing and was about to do. It was as though he filled the existing categories, flexible as they were, so full that they all overflowed, and in that overflow he overwhelmed his followers, his hearers, the enthusiastic and the suspicious alike, and ultimately those who were attempting to put him on trial, both Jews and pagans. The story, as we have it in the different gospels, is punctuated with moments of clarity, moments that steer the narrative away from the banal attempt that readers have made from time to time to squash Jesus into this or that box. Instead, these moments open the story up to the possibility that maybe, after all, heaven and earth would come together, God’s time and human time would coincide, and the physical reality of this world might indeed become the bearer of the fresh reality of God’s new creation. There are certain moments in the life of Jesus and indeed certain geographical locations that were already heavy with symbolic meaning. Think of the great Jewish festivals, particularly Passover, or the great Jewish landmarks, particularly the river Jordan and Jerusalem itself. At these moments and in these places, repeated throughout our sources, we find three strands meeting up, not now like the elements of a perfect storm, but more like three great rivers that had been traveling in separate valleys and now come together, as though through an earthquake or a landslip, merging with a swirl and a rush, a gigantic and powerful confluence. The great river of messiahship, of Israel’s long and checkered history of monarchy, comes crashing together with the dark flow of the servant, and both together are swept up in the longer, darker, and still more powerful current of the belief that Israel’s God would return at last to his people. The best historical analysis we can offer of what we can only call Jesus’s “vocation” is that he believed, through his prayerful study of the scriptures and his reading of what he himself called the “signs of the times,” that the full force of this great combined river would accomplish the purposes for which Israel itself had been called in the first place; and that it would do so in him, in his willing obedience to this vast and terrifying purpose.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But I have become convinced, the more I have read and studied and prayed the story of Jesus, that all these constructions need to be put within a larger one again—the larger one that the gospels themselves are trying to insist on and that seems to me exactly in line with the aims and motivations of Jesus himself. Somehow, Jesus’s death was seen by Jesus himself, and then by those who told and ultimately wrote his story, as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven. It was the ultimate Exodus event through which the tyrant was defeated, God’s people were set free and given their fresh vocation, and God’s presence was established in their midst in a completely new way for which the Temple itself was just an advance pointer. That is why, in John’s gospel, the “glory of God”—with all the echoes of the anticipated return of YHWH to Zion—is revealed in and through Jesus, throughout his public career, in the “signs” he performed, but fully and finally as he is “lifted up” on the cross. How can this be? How can the horrible, ugly, and brutal execution of a young prophet be the means of establishing God’s kingdom? What does it mean to say, as we have done throughout this book, that the point of the story is that God is now in charge, if the means by which that is accomplished is the death of the one who had gone about making it happen? There is of course much more that could be said on this subject. But, trying to boil it down and keep it simple, I think we can and must say at least this. In Jesus’s own understanding of the battle he was fighting, Rome was not the real enemy. Rome provided the great gale, and the distorted ambitions of Israel the high-pressure system, but the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin. The terrible thing is that this charge is true. All humans have indeed worshipped what is not divine and so have failed to reflect God’s image into the world. They, and creation, are therefore subject to corruption and death. At this level the Accuser is absolutely right.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Suppose this God did after all make the world. And suppose he were to claim, at long last, his sovereign rights over that world, not to destroy it (another philosophical mistake) or merely to “intervene” in it from time to time (a kind of soggy compromise position), but to fill it with his glory, to allow it to enter a new mode in which it would reflect his love, his generosity, his desire to make it over anew. Perhaps these stories are not, after all, the sort of bizarre things that people invent in retrospect to boost the image of the dead hero. Perhaps they are not even evidence of the kind of “interventionist,” miracle-working, “supernatural” divinity of some “conservative” speculation. Perhaps they are, instead, the sort of things that might just be characteristic of the new creation, of the fulfilled time, of what happens when heaven and earth come together. Perhaps, after all, the attempts to cut them down to size are themselves part of a different agenda-driven process of invention that yields a world where such things don’t happen because they shouldn’t, they couldn’t. Because if they did, it might mean that a living God really had established his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven and was intending to let this rule grow into a large shrub from a small seed, putting an end to the fantasy of human sovereignty, of being the master of one’s own fate and the captain of one’s own soul, of humans organizing the world as though they were responsible to nobody but themselves. Perhaps the real challenge of Jesus’s transformations within the material world is what they would imply both personally and politically. If they are about God becoming king on earth as in heaven, the chances are he’s not going to stop with storms on lakes. There will be bigger fish to catch. And to fry. At the heart of the story told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and suffused through the whole narrative of John—we have the most striking example of all : After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and James’s brother John, and led them off up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transformed in front of them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light. Then, astonishingly, Moses and Elijah appeared to them. They were talking with Jesus. Peter just had to say something. “Master,” he said to Jesus, “it’s wonderful for us to be here! If you want, I’ll make three shelters here—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!” While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them. Then there came a voice out of the cloud. “This is my dear son,” said the voice, “and I’m delighted with him.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I usually traveled down with Jenifer in the Morris Minor, with Nanny and Jacob squeezed together into the backseat. It was a long, difficult journey, and my task was to talk to Jenifer, who had to do all the driving, while Nanny tried to keep Jacob amused. As soon as we arrived, we had to rush through the house, removing all the signs of the occupancy of Jenifer’s sister, who had the house during the winter months. Her elegant ornaments were thrust disdainfully into a cupboard (“Can you imagine choosing this?” Jenifer would ask, brandishing a quite unexceptionable lamp shade. “Ludicrous!”) and were replaced by Jenifer’s more unconventional objects. There had almost been outright war between the sisters when Jenifer had defiantly painted the kitchen wall a brilliant orange, Mariella apparently preferring magnolia. Herbert generally followed us in comfort on the train, and by the time he had arrived, the house was ready for habitation. Staying at Lamledra had always been an education. It had given me, as it were, a crash course in the permissive society. Adam and Charlie often turned up, each with a large entourage of wives, girl-friends, and other members of their respective communes. I often wondered whether Adam was more successful at meditation than I had been, but never dared to ask. I always found Adam and Charlie somewhat daunting, even though they were always perfectly, if rather distantly, friendly, and I was quite intimidated by Adam’s wife, Mary, who treated me with the scorn she reserved for somebody who had clearly sold out to the system. I much enjoyed Herbert’s account of an afternoon he had spent at Throstle’s Hole, the house he had bought for Adam’s commune. To preserve the spirit of equality, Adam and Mary used her surname as well as his, and so were listed in the telephone directory as Hamilton Hart. On the afternoon in question, two members of the local Conservative Party who were out canvassing and, not unnaturally, thought that the Hamilton Harts of Throstle’s Hole would be a pretty safe bet, had visited them. Herbert gleefully described the horror of these stalwart Tories when they confronted the communal scene, with various stoned communards crashed out on the floor, another couple meditating in yogic positions, refusing to acknowledge their presence, while Mojo, Adam’s daughter, ran naked amidst the general squalor. For once, Jenifer’s favorite adjective, “ludicrous,” seemed entirely appropriate.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He describes what followed: Then Father Seraphim gripped me firmly by the shoulders and said: “My friend, both of us, at this moment, are in the Holy Spirit, you and I. Why won’t you look at me?” “I can’t look at you, Father, because the light flashing from your eyes and face is brighter than the sun and I’m dazzled!” “Don’t be afraid, friend of God, you yourself are shining just like I am; you too are now in the fullness of the grace of the Holy Spirit, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see me as you do.” Then I looked at the holy man and was panic-stricken. Picture, in the sun’s orb, in the most dazzling brightness of its noon-day shining, the face of a man who is talking to you. You see his lips moving, the expression in his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel his arms round your shoulders, and yet you see neither his arms, nor his body, nor his face, you lose all sense of yourself, you can see only the blinding light which spreads everywhere, lighting up the layer of snow covering the glade, and igniting the flakes that are falling on us both like white powder. “What do you feel?” asked Father Seraphim. “An amazing well-being!” I replied. . . . “I feel a great calm in my soul, a peace which no words can express. . . . A strange, unknown delight. . . . An amazing happiness. . . . I’m amazingly warm. . . . There’s no scent in all the world like this one!” “I know,” said Father Seraphim, smiling. “This is as it should be, for divine grace comes to live in our hearts, within us.” 8 One can, of course, doubt stories like this as well, but there are enough of them to suggest that we should rather keep an open mind. But if this suggests that we should be wary of dismissing them out of hand, it is also a reminder that the Transfiguration of Jesus is not, as it stands, a “proof” of his “divinity.” Moses and Elijah were “transfigured” too. So, in this nineteenth-century story, were the Russian mystic and his disciple. What the story of Jesus on the mountain demonstrates, for those with eyes to see or ears to hear, is that, just as Jesus seems to be the place where God’s world and ours meet, where God’s time and ours meet, so he is also the place where, so to speak, God’s matter—God’s new creation—intersects with ours. As with everything else in the gospel narrative, the moment is extraordinary, but soon over.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In this chapter, the prophet, who up to now has been able to interpret the dreams and visions of others, has a dream of his own. He sees a vision of four horrible monsters causing havoc on earth, climaxing in a terrible monster with a “little horn” that grows up in place of some of its original ones; and the horn speaks arrogantly against God and his people. But then the vision changes: As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. . . . The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. I watched then because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking. And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. . . . As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, And his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (7:9–11, 13–14) The interpretation of the vision is given in a short form (7:15–18) and a longer version (7:19–27): As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.” (7:15–18) Then I desired to know the truth concerning the fourth beast, which 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; and concerning the ten horns that were on its head, and concerning the other horn, which came up and to make room for which three of them fell out—the horn that had eyes and a mouth that spoke arrogantly, and that seemed greater than the others. As I looked, this horn made war with the holy ones and was prevailing over them, until the Ancient One came; then judgment was given for the holy ones of the Most High, and the time arrived when the holy ones gained possession of the kingdom. This is what he said: “As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Nor had anyone suggested that when the prophet spoke of “the arm of YHWH ” (53:1)— YHWH himself rolling up his sleeves, as it were, to come to the rescue—this personification might actually refer to the same person, to the wounded and bleeding servant. All this was, however, dramatically confirmed immediately after Peter’s confession, with the second echo of the baptismal voice. At the transfiguration, the voice is heard once more: “This is my son, my chosen one: listen to him” (Luke 9:35). As we saw, this is another explicit heaven-and-earth moment. Luke suggests that when Jesus was talking with Moses and Elijah, the subject of their conversation was “his departure, which he was going to fulfill in Jerusalem” (9:31; the word for “departure” is “exodus,” and Luke undoubtedly intended us to hear all the overtones that word would generate). This dovetails with Luke’s consistent emphasis on the divine plan that “must” be fulfilled, the plan that would send Jesus not to a throne, but to a cross—or, rather, as all four gospel writers insist, a cross that is to be seen as a throne. This, they all say, is how Jesus is enthroned as “King of the Jews.” Jesus’s vocation to be Israel’s Messiah and his vocation to suffer and die belong intimately together. What is more, they are together the means by which, he believed, Israel’s God would decisively launch his kingdom on earth as in heaven. The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be “orthodox” or “conservative” Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract “atonement” that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it. Many too have wanted a “divine” Jesus as a kind of “superman” figure, a heavenly hero come to rescue them, but not to act as Israel’s Messiah, establishing God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. Jesus’s shocking combination of scriptural models into a single vocation makes excellent historical sense; that is, it explains at a stroke why he did and said what he did and said. But, as we shall see, it remains as challenging in our world, and indeed in our churches, as it was in Jesus’s own day. The New Exodus It was this fresh vocation that demanded that Jesus should redraw the messianic themes of battle and Temple into a radical new configuration around himself. Following through this train of thought enables us both to root what he was doing back into the Exodus story, which he himself chose as the grid of interpretation for his death, and to begin to understand how it was that his forthcoming death would mean what he meant it to mean.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I tossed the peach pit, I saw that I was surrounded by hundreds of azaleas in a dozen shades of pink and pale orange, a few of their petals blowing off in the breeze. They seemed to be a gift to me, like the peach, and Kyle singing “Red River Valley.” As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn’t offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular—the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail. Before I stood to put Monster on, I heard footsteps and turned. There was a deer walking toward me on the trail, seemingly unaware of my presence. I made a small sound, so as not to startle her, but instead of bolting away she only stopped and looked at me, sniffing in my direction before slowly continuing toward me. With each step, she paused to assess whether she should continue forward, and each time she did, coming closer and closer until she was only ten feet away. Her face was calm and curious, her nose extending as far as it dared in my direction. I sat still, watching her, not feeling even a little bit afraid, as I’d been weeks before when the fox had stood to study me in the snow. “It’s okay,” I whispered to the deer, not knowing what I was going to say until I said it: “You’re safe in this world.” When I spoke, it was as if a spell had been broken. The deer lost all interest in me, though she still didn’t run. She only lifted her head and stepped away, picking through the azaleas with her delicate hooves, nibbling on plants as she went. I hiked alone the next few days, up and down and up again, over Etna Summit and into the Marble Mountains on the long hot slog to Seiad Valley, past lakes where I was compelled by mosquitoes to slather myself in DEET for the first time on my trip and into the paths of day hikers who gave me reports about the wildfires that were raging to the west, though still not encroaching on the PCT.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Here too we discover that this was not a new thing, a sudden idea imported at the last minute. It is implicit in that heavenly voice at the baptism. It is there in the Sermon on the Mount. It is there, in particular, as Jesus speaks about the hen sheltering the chicks under her wings; his intention was to see the danger coming and to take its full force on to himself (Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34). It is there again when he speaks of the “cup” he himself had to drink; the allusions there are all to the “cup of God’s wrath,” working through the destructive violence of the Roman Empire against what seemed to it to be rebel subjects and a rebel king (Matt. 20:22; 26:39). And it is there when, on his last bitter journey, he warns the weeping bystanders that what Rome is doing to a green tree it will do, far more, to a dry one. He is the green tree, not ready for the fire; the next generation of Jerusalemites will be the dry sticks, rebels who will court the great disaster until it comes upon them. All the gospel writers draw this theme out, and it is perhaps Luke in particular who highlights it. Jesus is innocent, but he is dying the death of the guilty. He has not been advocating violent rebellion against Rome, but he is suffering the fate that Rome regularly inflicts on violent rebels. Jesus, having warned his people of what was to come, has gone to take it upon himself. His predictions of the destruction of the Temple and the city are matched, stride for stride, by his own vocation. That is part of the mystery of his crucifixion: “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquity.” He cannot establish the new creation without allowing the poison in the old to have its full effect. He cannot launch God’s kingdom of justice, truth, and peace unless injustice, lies, and violence do their worst and, like a hurricane, blow themselves out, exhausting their force on this one spot. He cannot begin the work of healing the world unless he provides the antidote to the infection that would otherwise destroy the project from within. This is the point at which we see how the early work of Jesus’s public career, the healing, the celebrations, the forgiveness, the changed hearts, all look forward to this moment. This is what it looks like when Israel’s God becomes king. This is what it looks like when Jesus is enthroned as king of the Jews. Those two statements sit side by side. But to get the full story you have to creep around beside them, in awe, and look through the first at the second, then move to the other side, in gratitude, and see the first through the lens of the second. The Crucifixion How did Jesus prepare his followers for this gigantic, previously unimagined vision?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is where the glory of God is revealed, so that all flesh may see it together. Once you allow the Passover meal to speak in the way it should, these are the themes to which you will be led. And it is John who draws out, in particular, the way in which all the lines converge into the perfect storm. Earlier in the gospel it has become clear, as it does in all the accounts, that the real and self-appointed leaders of the Jewish people are set on a course that is radically different from Jesus’s. The Pharisees are looking for an intensification of law keeping in the hope that this will speed up the coming restoration of Israel. The chief priests are anxious to keep their own shaky power intact and are prepared to do whatever it takes to prevent the Romans from coming and destroying the city (11:48). That, indeed, is what leads them to the conclusion, which John ironically endorses, that one man had better die for the nation (11:50–53). The high-pressure system of Jewish hopes is at its greatest, but it is not moving in the direction that Jesus knows he has to go. Meanwhile, however, the great gale of Roman imperial power is gathering its full force; a crisis in the Middle East is the last thing Rome wants, and it will take all the steps it needs to crush anything that looks like a rebel movement. And then the cyclone: Jesus arrives in Jerusalem as the one through whose work God’s glory has been and is being revealed. Many readers have managed to ignore this theme in the Fourth Gospel and have simply read John as a “spiritual” or (in that sense) “theological” tract, encouraging them into a personal spirituality and the hope of an otherworldly salvation. But John is quite clear. When the power of Rome and the betrayal of Israel’s leaders meets the love of God, the great whirlpool that results will bring about God’s kingly victory, the victory of the kingdom of God over the kingdoms of the world. Watch how John builds the sequence up. Some foreigners come to see Jesus during the preparations for the Passover festival, and at the heart of Jesus’s answer to them is the remarkable promise: “Now comes the judgment of this world! Now this world’s ruler is going to be thrown out!

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But they also believed that Jesus had thereby fulfilled the dreams of those who wanted God, and God alone, to be king. Jesus, they believed, had lived and worked within the same overall story as other would-be kings of the time. But he had transformed the story around himself. In Jesus, they believed, God himself had indeed become king. Jesus had come to take charge, and he was now on the throne of the whole world. The dream of a coming king—of God himself as the coming king, ruling the world in justice and peace—had come true at last. Once we get inside the world of Jesus’s day and begin to understand what he might have meant by the word “God,” we begin to understand too the breathtaking claim that Jesus was, himself, now in charge. He was the one who had “an everlasting dominion” (Dan. 7:14), a kingship that would never be destroyed. This claim can never be, in our sense or indeed in the ancient sense, merely “religious.” It involves everything, from power and politics to culture and family. It catches up the “religious” meanings, including personal spirituality and transformation, and the philosophical ones, including ethics and worldview. But it places them all within a larger vision that can be stated quite simply: God is now in charge, and he is in charge in and through Jesus. That is the vision that explains what Jesus did and said, what happened to Jesus, and what his followers subsequently did and said. And what happened to them too. But here is the puzzle—the ultimate puzzle of Jesus. This puzzle boils down to two questions. First, why would anyone say this of Jesus, who had not done the things people expected a victorious king to do? Why, indeed, did Jesus end up being crucified with the words “King of the Jews” above his head? And why would anyone, three minutes, three days, or three hundred years after that moment, ever dream of taking it seriously? Second, what on earth might it mean today to speak of Jesus being “king” or being “in charge,” in view of the fact that so many things in the world give no hint of such a thing? Those are the questions that will now occupy us in the rest of this book. In Part Two, we shall look at Jesus’s public career, watching him stake the claim that God’s kingdom was being launched then and there and hearing him explain it to his puzzled hearers. We shall then see where it led him and learn how he understood his own forthcoming death as the means by which, in a strange and dark mystery, God’s kingdom would be established forever. That will open a new way for us to consider, in Part Three, what it might mean in today’s and tomorrow’s world to speak of Jesus as being truly in charge—and, equally important, not just to speak of it, but to help make it happen.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  At these moments and in these places, repeated throughout our sources, we find three strands meeting up, not now like the elements of a perfect storm, but more like three great rivers that had been traveling in separate valleys and now come together, as though through an earthquake or a landslip, merging with a swirl and a rush, a gigantic and powerful confluence. The great river of messiahship, of Israel’s long and checkered history of monarchy, comes crashing together with the dark flow of the servant, and both together are swept up in the longer, darker, and still more powerful current of the belief that Israel’s God would return at last to his people. The best historical analysis we can offer of what we can only call Jesus’s “vocation” is that he believed, through his prayerful study of the scriptures and his reading of what he himself called the “signs of the times,” that the full force of this great combined river would accomplish the purposes for which Israel itself had been called in the first place; and that it would do so in him, in his willing obedience to this vast and terrifying purpose. Israel’s God had promised to return and establish his kingdom. He would do this in and as the Messiah, the servant. In and as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus must have known that to believe something like this about oneself, about one’s own vocation, was to court the charge of madness or of blasphemy. These charges were duly made against him—by, among others, members of his own family. It is highly unlikely that the early church made such things up. Jesus really did speak and act as though he believed he was called to bring these three great rivers of historic purpose into one. It must have been clear from early on that they would carry him over a final great waterfall into an abyss never previously imagined. Every other way of bringing God’s kingdom had been tried and failed. This one was where the scriptures seemed to point and where his own prayerful awareness of vocation was pointing with them. He went ahead. The Baptism

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama pissed and shat and birthed at the same time, baby snakes streaming out of her. The river hooded over her head and she opened her mouth underwater, exhaling snakes. They poured out from her mouth and anus and vagina by the dozens, writhing away from the radius of her belly. It was a new breed no one had seen before, rain-red. When the rain ended, the river returned to its socket, the shape of a spine misaligned. The mud returned to its color, but the snakes inside remained red. They browsed the water for meat. The army* discarded its prisoners here, holing the boys’ wrists to thread a wire through. When the first boy was shot, the rest fell in with him. The army saved bullets this way. Polishing their names on its tongue, the river strung through their skulls and necklaced them. Snakes erased the boys’ bodies, entering through eye sockets to eat the rubymeat of their brains. At night, the river cleaved from its bed and heaved itself onto land, roaming as a snake. The red rain receded to a rumor, but some said the day the river was impregnated with snakes, there was a woman seen on the banks. Some said this woman had no spine, snakes for arms, teeth for eyes, adding details until she was nothing they could name. One night when she was almost nineteen and married to Agong, her second soldierfuck, Ama went down to the banks in the dark to see if it was true, if her snakes were women at night, if the river walked itself. Ama waded in and the river didn’t budge, thick as jelly. Ama waited for the snakes to circle her ankles, the snakes she’d birthed on her own. The moon pimpled the skin of the river. She walked back to the bank and sat in the mud, wondering where the snakes had gone, if they still loved her, if they still missed the color inside her. She closed her eyes and lay on her back, imagining all her ribs were the rungs of a raft. How bright a boat she would be. When she opened her eyes, three moons in the sky. One was whole and the others were halves. She sat up and saw a snake hanging on to her calf by its fangs. Ama wrenched it off. Before she could lie back down, the water tore in two. A body nosed onto the banks, gutting the mud. It was a woman with scales the color of blood, wearing her skin inside-out. She tucked her arms and legs into her body before oaring them out, shoving away the mud with each winging. Ama undressed and curled beside the riverwoman in the mud, soaking in the palm-sweat of night. She lowered her head to the riverwoman’s skin, tilting her tongue into the belly button, lapping out its sour lake of sweat.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  That’s why it strikes me as funny because on the surface all I saw was a crow sitting on a rooftop with me. But when that simple encounter is placed into the context of a vision quest, into the intentional intersection between the sacred and the finite, it begins to look, and sound, and feel much different. There is no rational explanation. My vision of the crow is as beyond logic as Black Elk’s sky full of dancing ponies. I cannot prove the truth of what I say any more than he could, any more than any Christian mystic or Native American medicine man. I can only tell my story and, by so doing, invite my listeners to step over into an alternate reality, a place of mystery that the human quest for divine understanding must always inhabit. As the crow and I remained fixed in one another’s gaze, and as the stillness around us blocked out any extraneous sound, I heard a holy voice. It was holy to me because it was exactly where I was: both within and without at the same time. It was a voice that I could hear in my mind, but that I did not generate. It was not me speaking. In the same way, I believe it was not the crow speaking, even though it was coming from the crow. I used to laugh when I would recount this part of my vision to seminary students in my classes on Native American theology. I would tell them, “No, the crow’s beak did not move as she spoke to me, but yes, she was speaking to me.” The crow was the bearer of a message, the channel through which the voice flowed, the focal point for the sacred and the mundane to connect. Visions are messages. They are messages transmitted through the medium of our senses. We see things, hear things, even feel or smell things that we accept as real. But these images and sensations are not bound by our senses. They exist just beyond our grasp. We do not generate or control them. We cannot fix them into a particular time or space. Instead, we occupy a spiritual proximity to the source of our vision, a tangent point between the infinite and the finite. We never completely know how things happen or for how long they happen. We only know that they did happen and that they have left us with some meaning we need to understand. In my case, my senses told me that a strange black bird and I were in the presence of a mystical voice, a word that was being spoken to us, through us, around us, and beyond us. It was as if my prayers to the six directions, my gyroscope of spiritual balance, had momentarily been sent spinning. When the sacred finally did arrive to answer my quest, it knocked all of my sense of control out of equilibrium.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It crushed him; but it did indeed start to move in the opposite direction. A violent image for a violent reality. I have in this book used the analogy of the perfect storm partly as a way of picking up Schweitzer’s point and developing it further. But even this, like all analogies, inevitably breaks down. What we might need, in addition, is to imagine some forces in different planes. In addition to the gale of Rome, the high-pressure system of Israel’s distorted ambitions, and the cyclone of the returning purposes of God, we perhaps need a downward vortex, a giant whirlpool, that threatens to suck down into the black depths all who sail too close to it. One might even tie the themes together and suggest that the gale and the pressure system are themselves driven by the same forces that are dragging down the dark waters: Rome and rebel Israel are the unwitting tools of the Satan, the Accuser, the great force of anti-creation . And one might suggest that Jesus, precisely because he believed that in his public career “the time was fulfilled,” believed too that all these powers of evil were gathering themselves for one last battle, one last attempt to thwart the good purposes of the creator God, to pull the cosmos and the human race down into the depths. The only way, he believed, by which this great anti-creation power could be stopped and defeated would be for him, Jesus, anointed with God’s Spirit to fight the real battle against the real enemy, to take the full power of evil and accusation upon himself, to let it do its worst to him, so that it would thereby be exhausted, its main force spent. He would be the David for this ultimate Goliath—though with the difference that, since violence and death were themselves the ultimate enemy, this David would win the battle by losing his life, with the four nails of crucifixion and the spear thrust in his side taking the place of the five stones David took for his sling. Jesus’s own mind, heart, and body would be the battlefield on which the final victory would be won, as they were also the Temple in which the powerful, loving presence of Israel’s returning God had made his home. The key to it all, as the earliest Christian writers saw clearly, is the belief that, as Israel’s Messiah, Jesus did indeed represent his people. The life of the nation is bound up in the king. As, once more, with David fighting Goliath, the one stands in for the many, so that his victory becomes theirs. The representative is thus the only fitting substitute (despite generations of theologians playing those two categories off against one another). And the point, then, is that Israel is the representative of the world; God called Abraham’s family in the first place to be the people through whom the whole world would be blessed, would finally be released from the ancient curse.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This was where God’s glory, his tabernacling presence, his Shekinah, had come to rest. That’s what the Bible had said, and some fortunate, though frightened, individuals had glimpsed it and lived to tell the tale. But God lived, by definition, in heaven. Nobody, however, supposed that God lived most of the time in heaven, a long way away, and then, as though for an occasional holiday or royal visitation, went to live in the Temple in Jerusalem instead. Somehow, in a way most modern people find extraordinary to the point of being almost unbelievable, the Temple was not only the center of the world. It was the place where heaven and earth met. This isn’t, then, just a way of saying, “Well, the Jews were very attached to their land and their capital city.” It was the vital expression of a worldview in which “heaven” and “earth” are not far apart, as most people today assume, but actually overlap and interlock. And Jesus, as we have already seen, had been going about saying that this God, Israel’s God, was right now becoming king, was taking charge, was establishing his long-awaited saving and healing rule on earth as in heaven. Heaven and earth were being joined up—but no longer in the Temple in Jerusalem. The joining place was visible where the healings were taking place, where the party was going on (remember the angels celebrating in heaven and people joining in on earth?), where forgiveness was happening. In other words, the joining place, the overlapping circle, was taking place where Jesus was and in what he was doing. Jesus was, as it were, a walking Temple. A living, breathing place-where-Israel’s-God-was-living. As many people will see at once, this is the very heart of what later theologians would call the doctrine of the incarnation. But it looks quite different from how many people imagine that doctrine to work. Judaism already had a massive “incarnational” symbol, the Temple. Jesus was behaving as if he were the Temple, in person. He was talking about Israel’s God taking charge. And he was doing things that put that God-in-chargeness into practice. It all starts to make sense. In particular, it answers the old criticism that “Jesus talked about God, but the church talked about Jesus”—as though Jesus would have been shocked to have his pure, God-centered message corrupted in that way. This sneer fails to take account of the fact that, yes, Jesus talked about God, but he talked about God precisely in order to explain the things that he himself was doing. So we shouldn’t be surprised at Jesus’s action in the Temple.

• From Wild (2012)

  The Sierra Nevada is a single uptilted block of the earth’s crust. Its western slope comprises 90 percent of the range, the peaks gradually descending to the fertile valleys that eventually give way to the California coast—which parallels the PCT roughly two hundred miles to the west for most of the way. The eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada is entirely different: a sharp escarpment that drops abruptly down to a great flat plain of desert that runs all the way to the Great Basin in Nevada. I’d seen the Sierra Nevada only once before, when I’d come west with Paul a few months after we left New York. We’d camped in Death Valley and the next day drove for hours across a landscape so desolate it seemed not of this earth. By midday the Sierra Nevada appeared on the western horizon, a great white impenetrable wall rising from the land. It was nearly impossible for me to conjure that image now as I sat on the high mountain saddle. I wasn’t standing back from that wall anymore. I was on its spine. I stared out over the land in a demolished rapture, too tired to even rise and walk to my tent, watching the sky darken. Above me, the moon rose bright, and below me, far in the distance, the lights in the towns of Inyokern and Ridgecrest twinkled on. The silence was tremendous. The absence felt like a weight. This is what I came for, I thought. This is what I got. When at last I stood and readied my camp for bed, I realized that for the first time on the trail, I hadn’t put on my fleece anorak as the sun went down. I hadn’t even put on a long-sleeved shirt. There wasn’t the slightest chill in the air, even 7,000 feet up. That night I was grateful for the soft warm air on my bare arms, but by ten the next morning my gratitude was gone. It was seared off of me by the relentless, magnificent heat. By noon the heat was so merciless and the trail so exposed to the sun I wondered honestly if I would survive. It was so hot the only way I could keep going was by stopping every ten minutes to rest for five, when I would chug water from my bottle that was hot as tea. As I hiked, I moaned again and again, as if that would provide some cooling relief, but nothing changed. The sun still stared ruthlessly down on me, not caring one iota whether I lived or died. The parched scrub and scraggly trees still stood indifferently resolute, as they always had and always would. I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Suppose, in other words, that the ancient Israelite scriptures were right, and that heaven and earth were after all the twin halves of God’s created reality, designed eventually to come together. Suppose that what has kept them apart all this time is that the human creatures who were put in charge of the “earthly” part of this creation had rebelled, and that their rebellion had generated a sufficient head of steam for “earth” to declare, as it were, independence, the desire to rule itself. And suppose that this self-rule had become extremely powerful, keeping the two spheres separate and effectively tyrannizing “earth” with the regular weapon of the tyrant, that is, death itself. Suppose, then, that the creator God had finally come in person to break the tyrant’s weapon and inaugurate the new world in which the original purpose of creation would be fulfilled after all. That, it seems, is what the early Christians believed was going on when they met Jesus, very much alive again and appearing to be equally at home in “heaven,” where they couldn’t see him, and on “earth,” where they could. Think back to what we said earlier about space, time, and matter. What we are witnessing in the resurrection stories—which, obviously, are quite unlike any other stories before or since and therefore invite the skepticism they have received as much in the ancient as in the modern world—is the birth of new creation. The power that has tyrannized the old creation has been broken, defeated, overthrown. God’s kingdom is now launched, and launched in power and glory, on earth as in heaven. This is what Jesus said would happen within the lifetime of his hearers. A new power is let loose in the world, the power to remake what was broken, to heal what was diseased, to restore what was lost. The kingdom that Jesus had inaugurated strangely, mysteriously, and partially during his public career through his healings, feastings, and teachings was now unveiled in a totally new dimension. If we think of Jesus during his lifetime in the way we have throughout this book and then ask about the meaning of Easter, the answer is obvious. This is the real beginning of the kingdom. Jesus’s risen person—body, mind, heart, and soul—is the prototype of the new creation. We have already seen him as the Temple in person, as the jubilee in person. Now we see him as the new creation in person.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And so, in a way, I felt quite at home. Asceticism was certainly central to the whole Lamledra experience. Every morning after breakfast, the guests were frog-marched by Jenifer with spades and matchets to do battle with the ubiquitous nettles and thistles in the grounds. Nobody was excused from this forced labor, unless they had a physical disability or an article to write. “There goes the chain gang!” Herbert would murmur gleefully as he left the breakfast table for his room, resolutely refusing to take part. I too was exempt from the corvée, since I had housework to do. This included helping Nanny to cook lunch for the conscripts, who returned home hot, scratched, stung, and dirty—with no hope, of course, of a hot bath, since that too was regarded as a ludicrous extravagance. In the afternoon, everybody was expected to bathe from the beach at the foot of the cliff, but nobody was permitted to utter the word “cold” in case we put Jacob off. Tight lipped, with muscles clenched, we strode into the icy water, calling strangled cries of encouragement to Jacob, who showed good sense in his reluctance to join us. Sometimes he would agree to sit on an inflatable raft, which Herbert dutifully towed up and down, wading at thigh level through the freezing blue sea, his hair blowing patriarchally in the breeze. “How are you getting on?” I asked once as I swam briskly past. “I am unaware that I have legs,” he replied calmly, adjusting his spectacles. After we had dressed, each of us was required to fill one of the backpacks that we had brought down from the house with pebbles from the beach (few of us were ecologically minded in the early seventies) in order to replenish the gravel on the terrace, which was constantly being blown away by the high winds. We used to struggle up the cliffs bowed under the weight of our burdens, looking for all the world like the vainglorious who, to expiate their sin of pride, had to toil around Dante’s Mount Purgatory bent double under massive stones.