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 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.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This would, in other words, be the new Exodus. Work through the seven themes once more. The tyrant would be not the Jerusalem leaders (though they, in love with their own wealth and prestige, were in league with the dark powers), not even Rome (though Rome would nail him to the cross), but all the powers of the Accuser, up to and including death itself. The leader would be, of course, Jesus himself. 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.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. The result, in the great prophetic poem, is the new covenant (Isa. 54) and the new creation (Isa. 55). The book then moves into a new mode in the last eleven chapters (56–66), focused on the coming glory of Zion, though here again highlighting the work of a strange figure, part salvation bringer, part rescuer, part judge (61:1–7; 63:1–6). And now it becomes more and more explicit that the work of bringing salvation is YHWH’s own work. He watched and saw that there was nobody else to do it, so “his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him” (59:16). Israel’s God himself must do what needs to be done, as at the time of the Exodus: “It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them” (63:9). But this sense of a rescue job to do and only YHWH to perform it may undergird the “servant” poems in the central section of the book as well. One of the prophet’s regular ways of talking about “God in action” is to speak of “the arm of YHWH,” echoing other scriptural passages all the way back to the song of Moses and Miriam in Exodus 15 (Isa. 40:10; 48:14; 51:9; 52:10; 53:1; 59:16; 63:5; echoing Exod. 6:6; 15:16; Deut. 5:15 and frequently; Pss. 77:15; 89:10; 98:1). But at the start of the second section of the final servant poem, it appears that the servant is himself “the arm of YHWH,” albeit heavily disguised: Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of YHWH been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (53:1–2) The return of YHWH to Zion, on the one hand, and the suffering of the servant, on the other, turn out to be—almost unbelievably, as the prophet realizes —two ways of saying the same thing.

• 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)

  16 MAZAMACrater Lake used to be a mountain. Mount Mazama, it was called. It was not so unlike the chain of dormant volcanoes I’d be traversing on the PCT in Oregon—Mount McLoughlin, the Three Sisters peaks, Mount Washington, Three Fingered Jack, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Hood—except that it was bigger than them all, having reached an elevation that’s estimated at a little under 12,000 feet. Mount Mazama blew up about 7,700 years ago in a cataclysmic eruption that was forty-two times more voluminous than the eruption that decapitated Mount St. Helens in 1980. It was the largest explosive eruption in the Cascade Range going back a million years. In the wake of Mazama’s destruction, ash and pumice blanketed the landscape for 500,000 square miles—covering nearly all of Oregon and reaching as far as Alberta, Canada. The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky. When the battle was over, Llao was driven back into the underworld and Mount Mazama had become an empty bowl. A caldera, it’s called—a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed. Slowly, over hundreds of years, the caldera filled with water, collecting the Oregon rain and snowmelt, until it became the lake that it is now. Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world. I knew a little something about lakes, having come from Minnesota, but as I walked away from Ashland, I couldn’t quite imagine what I would see at Crater Lake. It would be like Lake Superior, I supposed, the lake near which my mother had died, going off blue forever into the horizon. My guidebook said only that my first view of it from the rim, which rose 900 feet above the lake’s surface, would be “one of disbelief.” I had a new guidebook now. A new bible. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington, though back at the co-op in Ashland, I’d ripped off the last 130 of the book’s pages because I didn’t need the Washington part. My first night out of Ashland, I paged through the book before falling asleep, reading bits here and there, the same as I had with the California guidebook in the desert on my first night on the PCT.

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

  Well . . . no. To my very great surprise, I was discovering that some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God. Many of them preferred to say that God was Nothing, because this was not the kind of reality that we normally encountered. It was even misleading to call God the Supreme Being, because that simply suggested a being like us, but bigger and better, with likes and dislikes similar to our own. For centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had devised audacious new theologies to bring this point home to the faithful. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, was crafted in part to show that you could not think about God as a simple personality. The reality that we call God is transcendent—that is, it goes beyond any human orthodoxy—and yet God is also the ground of all being and can be experienced almost as a presence in the depths of the psyche. All traditions went out of their way to emphasize that any idea we had of God bore no absolute relationship to the reality itself, which went beyond it. Our notion of a personal God is one symbolic way of speaking about the divine, but it cannot contain the far more elusive reality. Most would agree with the Greek Orthodox that any statement about God had to have two characteristics. It must be paradoxical, to remind us that God cannot be contained in a neat, coherent system of thought; and it must be apophatic, that is, it should lead us to a moment of silent awe or wonder, because when we are speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do.

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

  I had made a niche for myself in the world, something that had once seemed to be beyond my powers. True, I still experienced occasional moments of terror when my brain cracked open and the world became suffused with dread, but in other ways I could feel that my mind really was coming back to life. There were times when I still encountered the familiar emptiness, but sometimes I could feel a text calling to me and I was able to reply. I noticed that this tended to happen when there was some pressure. If I had a lecture to prepare for the following day, for example, I found that the thoughts and arguments would come while I was actually writing the piece, which took on a new life. Sometimes I needed another critic to start me off, but then I discovered that I could continue by myself and that, almost without realizing it, I was supplementing his insights with some of my own. It was like learning to ride a bicycle. I remembered pedaling confidently, convinced that my father was still holding the bike steadily, and then finding that I was balancing perfectly by myself. Interestingly, this tended to happen when I was writing about authors with whom I had initially felt no particular empathy: with the poet Philip Larkin or with the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. I was especially moved by the novels of Iris Murdoch, who had once been the philosophy tutor at St. Anne’s. I noticed that her characters often had what seemed to be a religious experience while they stood in front of a picture or contemplated a powerful landscape. These passages were so characteristic and so vivid that I felt certain that Murdoch herself must have been transfigured in this way, though, as Jenifer Hart told me, she had no conventional religious beliefs. Certainly Murdoch did not interpret the ecstasy of her characters in a traditionally theistic way, and yet it was clear that these were numinous encounters. It seemed that Murdoch had developed a form of secular mysticism, so that natural objects, works of art, or the experience of falling in love revealed a transcendent dimension that seemed natural to human beings. These experiences were clearly a revelation, similar to what religious people described as God or the sacred. Something similar had happened to me when I had listened to Dame Helen Gardner reading Ash-Wednesday. If traditional religious disciplines had failed to enlighten me, perhaps I would find in literature what had eluded me in the convent chapel. And this raised all kinds of questions about the nature of religion. If an unbeliever could experience the same kind of ecstasy as a Christian mystic, it seemed that transcendence was just something that human beings experienced and that there was nothing supernatural about it.

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

  “We’re going to take a brief tour before we go to your hotel,” he announced. “It’s not too late,” he added, clearly for Danny’s benefit. “You can’t spend your first night in Jerusalem without seeing more than this shit!” He gestured out of the window. “I want to get your imagination working. Give you some ‘inspiration.’ ” He spoke the last word in ironical inverted commas, but I could tell that he was serious. It was a good idea, and I sat back and waited for the commentary, the patter of the guided tour. Nothing was forthcoming. We drove on in silence, broken only when Danny had a furious altercation with another driver at some traffic lights, leaning across me to yell at him out of the window, which he had yanked down to let in the cold city air. There was much clashing of brakes and shouting. Everybody in the adjacent car joined in, and Joel added his own clearly insulting contributions from the backseat. Finally the other car screeched off in high dudgeon. “Bastards!” muttered Joel contemptuously. “Wind up your window! It’s freezing in here!” He sniffed. “You know,” he said in a lighter tone, “I think it’s snowing. Karen,” he suddenly shouted expansively, “you’ve brought the snow with you from London!” I peered through my window. “It doesn’t look as if it’s snowing to me.” Joel guffawed—that is the only word for the sound he made. “It’s the holy snow of Jerusalem,” he snapped. “You don’t see, you just believe!” I laughed too, because it was funny, but my laughter was lost in Joel’s roars of mirth; I would learn that he was always convulsed by his own jokes. The atmosphere in the car lightened, and I could tell that—if only because I had occasioned a witty remark of his own—Joel felt more friendly toward me.

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

  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. The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. We have seen too much religious certainty recently. Maybe this is a time for honest, searching doubt, repentance, and a yearning for holiness in a world that has lost its bearings.

• 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)

  That evening I stayed late for a rehearsal. My role was chiefly to administer moral support. I could not contribute directorially, because the plays were so cryptic that I couldn’t really understand them. But there was a nice sequence that I always enjoyed, in which Nicky, one of the most gifted of our students, performed a magical dance to the accompaniment of strange, haunting music. A curious feature of these somewhat arcane plays was a chorus of four women, who had to fold and unfold a large cloth, which they displayed to the audience. I hadn’t a clue what this signified, and never quite dared to reveal my ignorance to Richard, but I guessed that the women were the Irish equivalent of the Fates or something of that sort. That evening, the girls made us all laugh when we reached the end of the play, since when the cloth was unfolded for the last time, we saw that it was inscribed with the words “That’s All, Folks!” Richard was not amused—he took this venture very seriously—but I was still smiling to myself when I reached Baker Street station to begin the long journey home to Finchley. The rush hour was over, and the large, dank ticket office looked desolate and grim. A few commuters hurried past, the collars of their coats turned up against the cold. Outside it was raining and the drunks had taken up their usual places near the turnstiles. Everything seemed as usual. But just after I had gone through the ticket barrier, it hit me: the smell, the acrid taste, the flickering quality of the light, and the terror. But the experience was more intense this time. I was dimly aware of lurching around, trying to get away from something— but from what? I grasped the railing as my thought processes splintered and the fluorescent station lights began to flash violently with a ferocity that was almost blinding. And then there was a change. Suddenly—at last—all the conflicting pieces of the pattern seemed to fuse into a meaningful whole. I had entered a new dimension of pure joy, fulfillment, and peace: the world seemed transfigured, and its ultimate significance—so obvious and yet quite inexpressible—was revealed. This was God. But no sooner had I realized this than I began to fall down that familiar dark tunnel into oblivion. A couple of hours later, the attending doctor in the A and E department of the Middlesex Hospital told me that I had suffered an epileptic seizure, and arranged an appointment for me in the neurology department. I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list.

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

  Those contemplative moments occurred within the benign hubbub of the household. I walked into the kitchen one afternoon to find Herbert and two philosophers sitting solemnly in front of Mariella’s dishwasher, which one of them had tried to repair, contemplating it with the same kind of rapt attention as I had bestowed upon the moon the night before. “It has just completed its second cycle,” Herbert informed me with wonder in his voice. That was also the year when Charlie arrived one afternoon with a grand piano, which he had picked up cheap. The entire household had turned out to propel the piano up the steep winding path on a rolling sequence of broom handles, until we managed to manhandle it into the hall. For the rest of his visit, Charlie and Jenifer played pieces for two pianos together—he flamboyant on the grand, she lean, intense, and dry on the old upright—calling encouragement to each other above the Mozart and Beethoven. Exotic as my life with the Harts often was and different from anything I had ever known before, there was much that was reassuringly familiar. Jenifer’s frugality made her as stringent about economy as any of my former superiors. We were not allowed to vacuum the carpets or wash our sheets too frequently, lest we wear them out. She was adamantly opposed to the newly repaired dishwasher—“a ludicrous waste of water!”—and there were constant arguments about the electric fire in the drawing room, a miserable little contraption, which should probably have been banned for safety reasons rather than for the pathetic amount of power that it splutteringly consumed on its three ancient bars. “You had the fire on this morning, Herbert, just because it was a little chilly! There is absolutely no need for such waste! If you want a fire, there’s plenty of wood and—” “The same discussion”—Herbert had beamed around the table, quite unabashed—“is probably going on at this moment in boardinghouses in Worthing.”

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

  Insight does not always come to order, and there will certainly be no renaissance if you are merely trying to “get” something for yourself. As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself in the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond the self. Then, in February 1976, just over a year since the viva that, I thought, had wrecked my life, I received the greatest gift of all, though at first it seemed like another setback. It had been a perfectly ordinary day in college. Richard was producing some short plays by W. B. Yeats and I was his assistant, dogsbody, and stage manager. That evening I stayed late for a rehearsal. My role was chiefly to administer moral support. I could not contribute directorially, because the plays were so cryptic that I couldn’t really understand them. But there was a nice sequence that I always enjoyed, in which Nicky, one of the most gifted of our students, performed a magical dance to the accompaniment of strange, haunting music. A curious feature of these somewhat arcane plays was a chorus of four women, who had to fold and unfold a large cloth, which they displayed to the audience. I hadn’t a clue what this signified, and never quite dared to reveal my ignorance to Richard, but I guessed that the women were the Irish equivalent of the Fates or something of that sort. That evening, the girls made us all laugh when we reached the end of the play, since when the cloth was unfolded for the last time, we saw that it was inscribed with the words “That’s All, Folks!” Richard was not amused—he took this venture very seriously—but I was still smiling to myself when I reached Baker Street station to begin the long journey home to Finchley. The rush hour was over, and the large, dank ticket office looked desolate and grim. A few commuters hurried past, the collars of their coats turned up against the cold. Outside it was raining and the drunks had taken up their usual places near the turnstiles. Everything seemed as usual. But just after I had gone through the ticket barrier, it hit me: the smell, the acrid taste, the flickering quality of the light, and the terror. But the experience was more intense this time. I was dimly aware of lurching around, trying to get away from something— but from what? I grasped the railing as my thought processes splintered and the fluorescent station lights began to flash violently with a ferocity that was almost blinding.