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)

  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)

  Chris is unsure, not wanting to say that God was simply at work in the Roman Empire, yet pointing out that without Roman roads and magistrates Paul would not have been able to do half of what he did. God does seem to have provided, as it were, the infrastructure through the work of people totally outside Israel and the church, even if then the good news had to be taken by the apostles themselves. Davie is inclined to stress the “miraculous”—the sudden rush of wind at Pentecost, the dramatic divine “interventions.” Yet even here Luke’s story seems to be one not merely of something new, but of the deep-seated renewal of the old order, the old world. The disciples are rescued from further persecution by a leading, and still unbelieving, Jewish rabbi, Gamaliel. Paul is rescued from certain death by a Roman centurion. God seems to be at work not only through the church, but also in the world outside. How, once more, can we make sense of all of this? What is Jesus up to? All four, Chris and Davie especially, would do well to study Acts 17, where Luke gives a summary account of Paul’s speech to the philosophically minded high court in Athens. Paul’s speech is both a defense against serious charges (“proclaiming foreign divinities,” which is close to what got Socrates condemned) and an explanation of the Christian worldview in which the fresh news of Jesus’s resurrection and of God’s upcoming judgment of the world completes, and does not destroy, the ancient Jewish wisdom of the creator God, who has remained as close as breath to his creation and to human beings. Somehow, if we are to speak wisely of God as king and Jesus as Lord, we have to speak of something radically new and the refreshment of something radically ancient, something fundamental in the way the world is. And if we are not just to speak of it, but to be part of it—to be among the humans who are enlisted in God’s project—then we need to understand the framework within which it all makes sense. The Centrality of Worship All kingdom work is rooted in worship. Or, to put it the other way around, worshipping the God we see at work in Jesus is the most politically charged act we can ever perform. Christian worship declares that Jesus is Lord and that therefore, by strong implication, nobody else is.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jerusalem itself was going to be thrown down, stone by stone. The harsh wind of western empire would blast away the Temple itself, the central symbol of national identity and the building that made Jerusalem what it was, because Jerusalem and its leaders had not recognized the moment when God was visiting them, was coming back to them in person (Luke 20:44). The Wind of God Here, then, is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable, and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God. This is God’s moment, declares Jesus, and you were looking the other way. Your dreams of national liberation, leading you into head-on confrontation with Rome, were not God’s dreams. God called Israel, so that through Israel he might redeem the world; but Israel itself needs redeeming as well. Hence God comes to Israel riding on a donkey, in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming peaceful kingdom, announcing judgment on the system and the city that have turned their vocation in upon themselves and going off to take the weight of the world’s evil and hostility onto himself, so that by dying under them he might exhaust their power. All his public career Jesus had been embodying the rescuing, redeeming love of Israel’s God, and Israel’s own capital city and leaders couldn’t see it. The divine hurricane sweeps in from the ocean, and to accomplish its purpose it must meet, head-on, the cruel western wind of pagan empire and the high- octane high-pressure system of national aspiration. Jesus seizes the moment, the Passover moment, the Exodus moment, not least because these too speak of the sovereign freedom and presence of God as much over his rebellious and incomprehending people as over the tyranny of Egypt. And as we watch the events of Jesus’s final days unfold, we cannot simply look on and register them as an odd quirk of history. The claim being made in the stories of Jesus is that this was the perfect storm. This was where the hurricane of divine love met the cold might of empire and the overheated aspiration of Israel. Only when we reflect on that combination do we begin to understand the meaning of Jesus’s death. Only then might we begin to understand how it is that the true Son of God, the true High Priest, has indeed become king of the world.

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

  But there was a third factor. Every time we visited the Western Wall, my eyes were drawn upward to the golden Islamic dome on the site formerly occupied by Herod’s temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans. The Dome of the Rock, I was told, was the first major building to be constructed in the Muslim world. Here was another faith that, in its earliest days, had been proud to declare to the world that it was firmly rooted in Judaism. Ahmed and his family took me up to the Dome one Saturday, and I stared at the rock from which the prophet Muhammad was said to have ascended to heaven. It was also the rock on which the prophet Abraham had offered his son to God, Ahmed explained. Again, I felt ashamed of my ignorance. I knew nothing—nothing at all— about any of these traditions. I had had no idea that Muslims venerated Abraham, but now Ahmed told me that the Koran revered all the great prophets of the past, even Jesus. And when we visited the Mosque of al-Aqsa at the southern end of Herod’s huge platform, I felt immediately at home. There were light, space, and silence. A bird flew in from outside: the mosque seemed to be inviting the world to enter, instead of shutting the profane world out. I watched Muslims sitting on the floor, studying the Koran— looking remarkably like the Jews studying Torah in the yeshiva as their lips mouthed the sacred language. This, I realized, was a form of communion. By repeating words that God had in some sense spoken to Muhammad, Muslims were taking the Word of God into their very being. By doing what God had somehow done, they were symbolically positioning themselves in the place where God was.

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

  There was the Tower of David, over there the modern basilica of Mount Zion, down below the Valley of Gehenna. This was a homecoming, after all. I had a strange sensation of being physically present in a place which had for so long been part of my inner landscape, a province of my own mind that now took on an objective life of its own. I could feel my personal geography shifting to take in this new reality, and yet also sensed that I had somehow caught up with myself and was about to discover something important. When we caught a glimpse of the golden Dome of the Rock, I involuntarily but audibly caught my breath, and as we veered away from the walls, I turned back to Joel to thank him. He was watching me and, almost in spite of himself, was smiling. The purpose of this first visit was to find a way of putting my inevitably abstract, theological, and historical ideas into a visual form suitable for television. The most important task right now was to find locations where I, as the presenter of the series, would film my “pieces to camera,” speaking directly to the audience. These had to be chosen with care. Each place had to have a clear relevance to the subject matter of the presentation delivered there, and our choice would affect the shape of our six hour-long films. Every morning Danny and Joel would collect me from the American Colony Hotel for a day’s tour in Jerusalem or the surrounding countryside, visiting places that Joel thought I should see; during the second week we spent a few days in Galilee, in the north of Israel, looking at the sites connected with Jesus’ ministry. Joel could not drive. He was a recovered alcoholic and had lost his license, but I would sit in the front of the car with Danny while Joel directed our tour from the backseat. There was no small talk, however. On the first morning, while we were driving out to the Mount of Olives, I had made another attempt at polite conversation, twittering in my English way to fill the awkward silence. After he had endured my pointless remarks—“How beautiful the light is! How long have you lived in Jerusalem, Joel? And where do you live, Danny?”—for about ten minutes, sighing heavily and answering in curt monosyllables, Joel’s patience finally came to an end. “Karen,” he growled, “if you have something to say, say it! If not, sheket!” The last word clearly meant “Shut up!” I looked back at Joel inquiringly, surprised to find that I did not feel at all offended. Joel grinned. “You are not in England now!”—a phrase that would often fall from his lips during the coming months. “There is no need to be a polite lady here in Israel. We are not formal people. There is no point to speak if there is nothing to say.”

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

  Yeshiva education was not a matter of acquiring information about Judaism; the process of study itself was just as important as the content, and was itself transforming: the heated arguments, the intensive interaction with a teacher, the question-and-answer methodology all propelled students into a heightened awareness of the divine presence. Indeed, studying English literature at university may have been a fruitful preparation, because increasingly I was coming to see that theology, like religion itself, was really an art form. In every tradition, I was discovering, people turned to art when they tried to express or evoke a religious experience: to painting, music, architecture, dance, or poetry. They rarely attempted to define their apprehension of the divine in logical discourse or in the scientific language of hard fact. Like all art, theology is an attempt to express the inexpressible. As T. S. Eliot said of poetry, it is a “raid on the inarticulate.” Until art was made accessible to the masses— in the printed book, the gramophone record, the compact disc, or the public museum—most people would have experienced the ecstasy of art only in a religious context. Like great art, the best theology tends to be universalistic. Ethnic, tribal, or ideological polemic is as out of place in theology as in Soviet Realist art. If you are bent on proving that your own tradition alone is correct, and pour scorn on all other points of view, you are interjecting self and egotism into your study, and the texts will remain closed. I found this idea beautifully expressed by the influential twelfth-century Muslim mystic and philosopher Ibn al-Arabi: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not confined to any one creed, for, he says, “Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah.” Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance. 4 This was becoming my own experience. I was writing about the three Abrahamic faiths, but could not see any one of them as superior to any of the others. Indeed, I was constantly struck by their profound similarity. I was equally delighted by the insights of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers: none of them had a monopoly of truth. Working in isolation from one another, and often in a state of deadly hostility, they had come up with remarkably similar conclusions. This unanimity seemed to suggest that they were onto something real about the human condition. At quite an early stage in my research, I was fortunate to come across a phrase that sprang out at me from a footnote in Marshall G. S.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. It forms part of a new set of signposts, Jesus-shaped signposts, indicating what is to come: a whole new creation, starting with Jesus himself as the seed that is sown in the earth and then rises to become the beginning of that new world. Something similar seems to have been going on, as we shall see later, in the upper room on the night when Jesus was betrayed. God’s space and ours, God’s time and ours, God’s matter and ours. These three dimensions of the story of Jesus demonstrate the complete inadequacy of three ways of looking at Jesus that, however popular they have been, must be set aside at this point before we can proceed with yet more dimensions of this most extraordinary of stories. A New Kind of Revolution First, it will not do to suppose that Jesus came to teach people “how to get to heaven.” That view has been immensely popular in Western Christianity for many generations, but it simply won’t do. The whole point of Jesus’s public career was not to tell people that God was in heaven and that, at death, they could leave “earth” behind and go to be with him there. It was to tell them that God was now taking charge, right here on “earth”; that they should pray for this to happen; that they should recognize, in his own work, the signs that it was happening indeed; and that when he completed his work, it would become reality.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It means, “God is in the place where he can call the shots, and you’d better watch out!” This is how, in the story of Jesus, the long narrative stretching back to his baptism (and, in Luke particularly, to his birth) comes to its climax. He was born to be king of the world, the king who would upstage Caesar himself; he was baptized as Israel’s Messiah, who in Psalm 2 would rule the nations; and now he is enthroned, installed officially as what he already was in theory. This, along with the resurrection, is part of what Jesus meant when he told his followers that the “son of man” would “come in his kingdom” and that they would see it (Matt. 16:28). This, indeed, is part of the point of Luke’s description about Jesus being “lifted up” and taken out of sight by a “cloud” (Acts 1:9), which brings us to the third point about ascension. If, as I have stressed, “heaven” and “earth” are not far apart, but are actually meeting and mingling in and through Jesus, why this vertical movement? Here we may want to remain open-minded as to how much Luke intends this description to be a literal account of a concrete reality and how much he is intending primarily to evoke that famous passage in Daniel 7:13 in which “one like a son of man” comes on the clouds of heaven to be presented before and enthroned beside one who is called “the Ancient One.” What I mean is this. Luke certainly intends us to be thinking of Daniel 7 in all its political significance. This is the moment at which Israel’s representative is installed as the true world ruler, with all the warring pagan nations made subject to him. How much Luke intends us also to be thinking of an actual physical event it is hard to say. There is no problem, as far as I can see, about it being a physical event; as some have suggested, an upward movement is perhaps the best way of indicating a departure from one sphere in order to arrive in another. But neither the ancient Jews nor the early Christians believed that “heaven” was a location within our present continuum of space and matter, a location situated at some distance from our world and to be reached by a primitive form of space travel. We are, after all, at this point at the edge of worldview, of language, of all human thought. We should not expect to be able to put a story like this into easy contemporary categories.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It takes one more wind to make the perfect storm. And, as in the original Massachusetts disaster, this one was of a different order altogether. To understand this great cyclone, this tropical hurricane, you have to understand, as I said before, something about the ancient Jewish vision of God. This always was the highly unpredictable element within the Jewish story itself. God remained free and sovereign. Again and again in the past, the way Israel had told its own story was different from the way God was planning things. The people, no doubt, hoped that the way they were telling their own story would fit in comfortably enough with the way God was seeing things, but again and again the prophets had to say that this was not so. Often God’s way of telling the story cut clean against the national narrative. And Jesus believed that this was happening again in his own time. God had promised to come back, to return to his people in power and glory, to establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven. The Jewish people always hoped that this would simply underwrite their national aspirations; he was, after all, their God. They wanted a divine hurricane simply to reinforce their already overheated high-pressure system. But the prophets, up to and including John the Baptist, had always warned that God’s coming in power and in person would be entirely on his own terms, with his own purpose—and that his own people would be as much under judgment as anyone, if their aspirations didn’t coincide with God’s. Jesus not only believed that this was another of those moments where the true, prophetic vision of the divine hurricane would clash with the current national mood. He believed, it seems—the stories he told at the time bear this out quite strikingly—that as he came to Jerusalem he was embodying, incarnating, the return of Israel’s God to his people in power and glory. But it was a different kind of power, a different kind of glory. This is another point that Jesus Christ Superstar got exactly right. Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, and Simon the Zealot urges him to mount a proper revolution. Jesus, he says, will then get the power and the glory forever. But then Jesus sings, hauntingly, the lines that make clear that there is a radical difference between the national aspiration, as voiced by the Zealots, and the divine purpose. Neither Simon nor the crowds nor the other disciples nor Jerusalem itself have any idea what power is. They don’t understand what glory is. They simply haven’t a clue. So he continues with the warning, which, in all our sources, he went on to enact in a dramatic symbol.

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

  It is no good trying to listen to a late Beethoven quartet or read a sonnet by Rilke at a party. You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth, or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness. I had found this to be true in my study of literature. As soon as I had stopped trying to use it to advance my career, it began to speak to me again. Now I was having exactly the same experience with theology. The religious traditions have all stressed the importance of silence. They have reminded the faithful that these truths are not capable of a simply rational interpretation. Sacred texts cannot be perused like a holy encyclopedia, for clear information about the divine. This is not the language of everyday speech or of logical, discursive prose. In some traditions, words are thought to contain the sacred in their very sound. When Hindus chant the syllable aum, its three distinct phases evoke the essence of the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, while the silence that follows when the reverberation of the chant has finally died away expresses the attainment of Brahman, the supreme but unspeakable reality. Other scriptures are chanted or sung in a liturgical setting that separates them from profane speech and endows them with the nonconceptual attributes of music. You have to listen to them with a quietly receptive heart, opening yourself to them either in ritual or through yogic disciplines designed to abolish secular modes of thought. That is why so many of the faiths have developed a form of the monastic life, which builds a disciplined silence into the working day. In the convent, I had spent most of my time in silence, but it had been too busy—noisy with tension and anxiety, anger and irritation. The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egotism that I was supposed to transcend.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  His plan was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king—yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him. (Eph. 1:10) This means that the second coming takes on all the dimensions present in Israel’s scriptures, the dimensions of the whole creation singing with delight when Israel’s God comes to “judge” the world (Pss. 96; 98). “Judgment” in this sense is like the “judgment” given when a poor widow finally has her case heard, the bullies who have been oppressing her are firmly rebuked, and she is vindicated. “Judgment” is what happens when someone who has been robbed of home and dignity and livelihood is upheld, with everything restored. “Judgment” is what happens when a forest that has been damaged through overzealous logging, on the one hand, and acid rain, on the other, is wisely replanted and the source of pollution identified and stopped. The world is out of joint, and God’s “judgment” will perform a great act of new creation through which it will be restored to the way God always intended it to be. To speak of the second coming is therefore to speak of God’s whole new world, the new world envisaged in Revelation 21–22 or Romans 8, and of Jesus at the middle of it, administering God’s just, wise, and healing rule. Jesus is the truly human being who will, in the end, take the properly human role (as in Genesis) of reflecting the creator’s image of wise and fruitful order into the whole creation. That is what his “coming” and his “judgment” will mean. God will do for the whole cosmos, in the end, what he did for Jesus at Easter; the risen Jesus, remember, is the prototype of the new creation. God will do this through Jesus himself; the ascended Jesus, remember, is the ruler within the new creation as it bursts in upon the old. And God will do it through the presence of the risen and ascended Jesus when he comes to heal, to save, and also to judge.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The sacrifice, likewise, would be Jesus himself; that, we must assume, is why he chose to make his decisive move at Passover-time, knowing that it would lead to the death of the firstborn, the beloved son, a hint he dropped in one of his last parables (Mark 12:6–8). The vocation would be the vocation he had marked out for Israel in the Sermon on the Mount: going the second mile, turning the other cheek, loving enemies, and praying for them even as they nailed him to the cross. The inheritance would not, now, be a restored holy land, but the whole world, the uttermost parts of the earth, which had been promised to the Messiah as his inheritance and then promised again to the servant as the realm to which he, through his suffering, would bring God’s justice. And the presence of Israel’s God would be the presence of Jesus himself, coming to Jerusalem as the embodiment of Israel’s returning God, the fulfillment of Isaiah 40 and 52. This, Jesus believed, is what it would look like when Israel’s God came back to Zion. It would not be the three men visiting Abraham, not the burning bush, not the pillar of cloud and fire, not Isaiah’s smoky, seraphim-surrounded vision, not Ezekiel’s whirling wheels, but a young man on a donkey, in tears, announcing God’s judgment on the city and Temple that stood on the cosmic fault lines, establishing his own still incomprehending followers as its surprising replacement, and then going off to take upon himself the full weight of evil, the concentrated calamity of the cosmos, so that its force would be annulled and the new world would be born. This way of looking at the climax of Jesus’s story is not, to be sure, the standard, traditional, “orthodox,” “conservative” reading, though it highlights from a new angle the “traditional” dogmas of “incarnation” and “atonement.” My contention is that it enables us to understand the original, historical reality for which those dogmas are later, often dehistoricized, abstract summaries.

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

  All the traditions insist that the sacred is not merely something “out there” but is also immanent in our world. Again, I had not taken my texts sufficiently seriously. I had often quoted the famous story from the Upanishads in which the sage Uddalaka makes his son Svetaketu aware of the omnipresence of the divine by telling him to dissolve a lump of salt in a beaker of water. In the morning, the lump has disappeared, but though the salt is now invisible, it pervades the entire beaker and can be tasted in every sip. “My dear child,” Uddalaka concludes, “it is true that you cannot see Brahman here, but it is equally true that it is here. This first essence—the whole universe has as its Self. That is the Real. That is the Self. That you are, Svetaketu.” 7 Our task is to learn to see that sacred dimension in everything around us—including our fellow men and women. That, I think, is the meaning of the story of the apparition of Jesus on the road to Emmaus. The two disciples are depressed; Jesus has just died a terrible and disgraceful death, and this has dashed all their hopes. A stranger joins them on the road and engages them in conversation. He discusses the scriptures with them, showing that the Messiah had to suffer before his glorification. That evening the three dine together, and the stranger breaks bread. In that instant they recognize that he is Jesus, but just as they realize this he disappears, like Dionysus. The story recalls the oft-repeated rabbinical teaching about the divine becoming present whenever two or three people study Torah together. Even though the disciples were not aware of it, the presence was with them while they were reviewing the scriptures together on the road. Henceforth, we will catch only a fleeting glimpse of it—in the study of sacred writings, in other human beings, in liturgy, and in communion with the stranger. But these moments remind us that our fellow men and women are themselves sacred; there is something about them that is worthy of absolute reverence, is in the last resort mysterious, and will always elude us. Perhaps in our broken world, we can only envisage an absent God. Since September 11, I have found myself drawn to the powerful mythology of the Jewish Kabbalah, which imagines God as originally a sacred emptiness; sees creation as a massive error, the world shattered and dense with evil; and offers no easy solution. Everything is a bewildering puzzle. One kabbalistic text tells us that when the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, the Holy King departed from the earth and no longer dwelt in our midst. Maybe God vanished also—like Dionysus—after the destruction of the World Trade Center, an atrocity that was committed in God’s name.

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

  But all was not lost, because the practice of compassion, the Buddha had taught, could also effect ceto-vimutti, the “release of the mind” from the toils of self-seeking that is synonymous in the Buddhist scriptures with the supreme enlightenment of Nirvana. In monotheistic terms, this compassion could bring us directly into the presence of God. It was a startling moment of clarity for me. Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision. As a very early Buddhist poem puts it: “May our loving thoughts fill the whole world; above, below, across—without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world, unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity.” 6 We are liberated from personal likes and dislikes that limit our vision, and are able to go beyond ourselves. This insight was not confined to Buddhism, however. The late Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that when we put ourselves at the opposite pole of ego, we are in the place where God is. The Golden Rule requires that every time we are tempted to say or do something unpleasant about a rival, an annoying colleague, or a country with which we are at war, we should ask ourselves how we should like this said of or done to ourselves, and refrain. In that moment we would transcend the frightened egotism that often needs to wound or destroy others in order to shore up the sense of ourselves. If we lived in such a way on a daily, hourly basis, we would not only have no time to worry overmuch about whether there was a personal God “out there”; we would achieve constant ecstasy, because we would be ceaselessly going beyond ourselves, our selfishness and greed. If our political leaders took the Golden Rule seriously into account, the world would be a safer place. I have noticed, however, that compassion is not always a popular virtue. In my lectures I have sometimes seen members of the audience glaring at me mutinously: where is the fun of religion, if you can’t disapprove of other people! There are some people, I suspect, who would be outraged if, when they finally arrived in heaven, they found everybody else there as well. Heaven would not be heaven unless you could peer over the celestial parapets and watch the unfortunates roasting below. But I have myself found that compassion is a habit of mind that is transforming. The science of compassion which guides my studies has changed the way I experience the world.

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

  But my new agents and publishers seemed content to let me to be an egghead, and nobody wanted to talk about God at a London dinner party. I could immerse myself in the silence, allow it to open up wide spaces in my head, and listen to the undercurrent of these new ideas. This, I am now convinced, is the only way to study religion. I think that I was lucky not to have studied theology or comparative religion at university, where I would have had to write clever papers and sit examinations, get high marks, and aim for a good degree. The rhythm of study would have been wrong—at least for me. In theology, I am entirely self-taught, and if this makes me an amateur, that need not necessarily be all bad. After all, an amateur is, literally, “one who loves,” and I was, day by solitary day, hour by silent hour, falling in love with my subject. I discovered that I could scarcely wait to get to my desk each morning, open my books, and pick up my pen. I anticipated this moment as eagerly as a tryst with a lover. I would lie in bed at night waiting for sleep, delightedly reviewing what I had learned that day. Occasionally, while sitting at my desk or poring over a dusty tome in the British Library, I would experience miniseconds of transcendence, awe, and wonder that gave me some sense of what had been going on in the mind of the theologian or mystic I was studying. At such a time I would feel stirred deeply within, and taken beyond myself, in much the same way as I was in a concert hall or a theater. I was finding in study the ecstasy that I had hoped to find in those long hours of prayer as a young nun. When I shared this with my students at the Leo Baeck College, Rabbi Lionel Blue, my boss in the comparative religion department, told me with amusement that this was very Jewish. It was what Jews experienced when they studied Torah or Talmud. I also learned that Saint Benedict had instructed his monks to spend part of the day in lectio divina (divine study), during which they would experience moments of oratio, or prayer. I was, moreover, discovering that many of the great theologians and mystics whose work I was studying would have found the idea of a purely academic degree in theology rather odd. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, you could not be a theologian unless you were also a contemplative and participated daily in the liturgy. In Islam, after the formative career of the eleventh-century theologian al-Ghazzali, philosophy and theology became inseparable from spirituality. In Judaism, the study of Torah and Talmud had never been as goal directed as some modern scholarship.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were scared out of their wits. Jesus came up and touched them. “Get up,” he said, “and don’t be afraid.” When they raised their eyes, they saw nobody except Jesus, all by himself. (Matt. 17:1–8) Suppose that, after all, the ancient Jewish story of a God making the world, calling a people, meeting with them on a mountain—suppose this story were true. And suppose this God had a purpose for his world and his people that had now reached the moment of fulfillment. Suppose, moreover, that this purpose had taken human form and that the person concerned was going about doing the things that spoke of God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, of God’s space and human space coming together at last, of God’s time and human time meeting and merging for a short, intense period, and of God’s new creation and the present creation somehow knocking unexpected sparks off one another. The earth shall be filled, said the prophet, with the knowledge of the glory of YHWH as the waters cover the sea. It is within some such set of suppositions that we might make sense of the strangest moment of all, at the heart of the narrative, when the glory of God comes down not to the Temple in Jerusalem, not to the top of Mount Sinai, but onto and into Jesus himself, shining in splendor, talking with Moses and Elijah, drawing the Law and the Prophets together into the time of fulfillment. The transfiguration, as we call it, is the central moment. This is when what happens to space in the Temple and to time on the sabbath happens, within the life of Jesus, to the material world itself or rather, more specifically, to Jesus’s physical body itself. So what does this story mean? What, if anything, does it “prove”? Consider another transfiguration story, from a different time and place. Nicholas Motovilov (1809–32) visited Seraphim of Sarov (1754–1833), a well-known saintly hermit, and asked him how one could know that the Spirit of God was really present. It was a cloudy day, and they were sitting on tree stumps in the woods.

• From Wild (2012)

  Water fell from the sky and dripped from the branches, streaming down the gully of the trail. I walked beneath the enormous trees, the forest canopy high above me, the bushes and low-growing plants that edged the trail soaking me as I brushed past. Wet and miserable as it was, the forest was magical—Gothic in its green grandiosity, both luminous and dark, so lavish in its fecundity that it looked surreal, as if I were walking through a fairy tale rather than the actual world. It rained and rained and rained off and on through that day and all through the next. It was still raining in the early evening, when I reached the shores of the 240-acre Olallie Lake. I walked past the closed ranger station feeling a deep sense of relief, clomping over the mud and wet grass through a small cluster of picnic tables to the little collection of dark wooden buildings that constituted the Olallie Lake Resort. Until I’d hiked through Oregon, I’d had a profoundly different idea of what the word resort might suggest. No one was in sight. The ten primitive cabins scattered near the lake’s shore all looked empty, and the tiny store amid the cabins was closed for the night. It began to rain again as I stood under a lodgepole pine near the store. I pulled the hood of my raincoat up over my head and looked at the lake. The grand peak of Mount Jefferson supposedly loomed to the south and the squat rise of Olallie Butte sat to the north, but I couldn’t see either of them, obscured as they were by the growing dark and the fog. Without the mountain views, the pines and wide lake reminded me of the northwoods of Minnesota. The air felt like Minnesota too. It was a week past Labor Day; autumn hadn’t arrived yet, but it was close. Everything felt abandoned and forlorn. I dug inside my raincoat, pulled out the pages of my guidebook, and read about a place to camp nearby—a site beyond the ranger station that overlooked Head Lake, Olallie’s much smaller neighbor. I made camp there and cooked my dinner in the rain, then crawled into my tent and lay in my damp sleeping bag, dressed in my damp clothes. The batteries of my headlamp had gone dead, so I couldn’t read. Instead, I lay listening to the spatter of raindrops against the taut nylon a few feet from my head.

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

  Further, I had to make a daily, hourly effort to enter into the ghastly conditions of seventh-century Arabia, and that meant that I had to leave my twentieth-century assumptions and predilections behind. I had to penetrate another culture and develop a wholly different way of looking at the world. It required a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation, and one that suited me far better than the Ignatian method that I had followed in the convent to so little effect. It now strikes me that while I was writing Muhammad, I was learning the disciplines of ecstasy. By this, of course, I do not mean that I fell into a trance, saw visions, or heard voices. Had I done so, I would never have got the book finished in time. The Greek ekstasis, it will be recalled, simply means “standing outside.” And “transcendence” means “climbing above or beyond.” This does not necessarily imply an exotic state of consciousness. For years I had longed to get to God, ascend to a higher plane of being, but I had never considered at sufficient length what it was that you had to climb from. All the traditions tell us, one way or another, that we have to leave behind our inbuilt selfishness, with its greedy fears and cravings. We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao. What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind. There may even be a biological reason for this. The need to protect ourselves and survive has been so strongly implanted in us by millennia of evolution that, if we deliberately flout this instinct, we enter another state of consciousness. This is a purely personal speculation of my own. But the history of religion shows that when people develop the kind of lifestyle that restrains greed and selfishness, they experience a transcendence that has been interpreted in different ways. It has sometimes been regarded as a supernatural reality, sometimes as a personality, sometimes as wholly impersonal, and sometimes a dimension that is entirely natural to humanity, but however we see it, this ecstasy had been a fact of human life.

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

  While writing Muhammad, I had to make a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another. This was a kind of ecstasy. For six months I was intent all and every day on trying to understand a man’s search for sanctification. Even though I was not a believer, I had to think myself into a religious frame of reference, and enter the mind of a man who believed that he was touched directly by God. Unless I could make that leap of sympathy, I would miss the essence of Muhammad. Writing his life was in its own way an act of islām —a “surrender” of my secular, skeptical self, which brought me, if only at second hand and at one remove, into the ambit of what we call the divine. During these months, I often recalled my conversation with Hyam. I noticed that the Koran spends very little time imposing an official doctrine; it propagates no creed, and is rather dismissive of theological speculation. Like Judaism, Islam is not especially bothered about belief: the word kafir, often translated “unbeliever,” really means one who is ungrateful to God. Instead of accepting a complex creed, Muslims are required to perform certain ritual actions, such as the hajj pilgrimage and the fast of Ramadan, which are designed to change them. One of the first things the Prophet asked his converts to do when he began to preach in Mecca was to prostrate themselves in prayer several times a day, facing the direction of Jerusalem. Arabs did not approve of kingship, and it was hard for them to grovel on the ground like slaves, but the posture of their bodies in the characteristic prostrations of Muslim prayer taught them, at a level deeper than the rational, what was required in the act of islām, the existential surrender of one’s entire being to God. For a set time each day, they had to lay aside that egotistic instinct to prance, strut, preen, and draw attention to themselves. The physical discipline was meant to affect their inner posture.

• From Wild (2012)

  I walked east along a lush green corridor, the roadbed of the long-abandoned Columbia River Highway, which had been made into a trail. I could see patches of concrete in places, but the road had mostly been reclaimed by the moss that grew along the rocks at the road’s edge, the trees that hung heavy and low over it, the spiders who’d spun webs that crossed its expanse. I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face, pulling them out of my hair. I could hear but not see the rush of automobiles on the interstate to my left, which ran between the river and me, the ordinary sound of them, a great whooshing whine and hum. When I emerged from the forest, I was in Cascade Locks, which unlike so many towns on the trail was an actual town, with a population of a little more than a thousand. It was Friday morning and I could feel the Friday morningness emanating from the houses I passed. I walked beneath the freeway and wended my way along the streets with my ski pole clicking against the pavement, my heart racing when the bridge came into view. It’s an elegant steel truss cantilever, named for a natural bridge that was formed by a major landslide approximately three hundred years ago that had temporarily dammed the Columbia River. The local Native Americans had called it the Bridge of the Gods. The human-made structure that took its name spans the Columbia for a little more than a third of a mile, connecting Oregon to Washington, the towns of Cascade Locks and Stevenson on either side. There’s a tollbooth on the Oregon side and when I reached it the woman who worked inside told me I could cross the bridge, no charge. “I’m not crossing,” I said. “I only want to touch it.” I walked along the shoulder of the road until I reached the concrete stanchion of the bridge, put my hand on it, and looked down at the Columbia River flowing beneath me. It’s the largest river in the Pacific Northwest and the fourth largest in the nation. Native Americans have lived on the river for thousands of years, sustained by its once-bountiful salmon for most of them. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had paddled down the Columbia in dugout canoes on their famous expedition in 1805. One hundred and ninety years later, two days before my twenty-seventh birthday, here I was. I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself, though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet. I stood there for several minutes, cars and trucks going past me, feeling like I’d cry, though I didn’t.