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.

Page 152 of 217 · 20 per page

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’m standing on the far side of my familiar hedge, looking at this terra incognita that is the grand twentieth-century conjuration of our mythical English past. I walk out of the cover crop to where the thin, stony soil is exposed, so thick with chalk it’s like white paste; hair roots and flints, spotted with rain; tiny buttons of stone in impasto. The land falls away at my feet into a dry valley; a basin the size of a village, one beech copse hanging grey from its left-hand slope. It is a field of a million tiny tillers – little shoots of wheat. They give the chalky earth a furry tint, like algae on a cliff-face. Even in this dark, watery light, the valley shines palely. And I see what Mabel had seen. About a hundred yards in front of us, crouched in its form, is a big brown hare, black-tipped ears laid to its ginger back. But there’s more, much more here: down at the bottom of the valley, where the river would be were there water, is a herd of thirty fallow deer. They are the colour of moleskin on their backs, shading to pale grey underneath. They’re tight-clustered, quivering with indecision. They’re watching me. Thirty upraised heads. The herd is delicate and powerful, and it is waiting to see what I will do. I can’t resist the urge that takes hold of me then. I hold on to Mabel, who is watching them too, and like a woman possessed, walk towards them, with that strange disconnect between head and feet you feel when walking downhill. I’m technically trespassing, but I can’t help it. I want to interact with them in some way. I want to get closer. And as I do, the pressure of my impending arrival pushes single deer off to the right, and they walk, then canter, in a long line, along the bottom of the valley and up to the wood at the far edge of the field, a good half-mile away. They are bewitching. Mabel watches them. She is ignoring the hare. The deer in procession resemble charcoal cave paintings rendered manifest. Art’s magic working backwards. The chalk behind them, bone. And now the hare runs, too. The hare runs in the opposite direction to the deer. The animals run, and the landscape seems then to be parting in front of me. Deer one way, hare the other. And now they are quite gone: the hare to the field-margin at the top of the hill to my left, the deer into the wood at the top of the hill to my right. There is nothing before me now but wind and chalk and wheat.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It was eight thirty exactly. I was looking down at a little sprig of mahonia growing out of the turf, its oxblood leaves like buffed pigskin. I glanced up. And then I saw my goshawks. There they were. A pair, soaring above the canopy in the rapidly warming air. There was a flat, hot hand of sun on the back of my neck, but I smelt ice in my nose, seeing those goshawks soaring. I smelt ice and bracken stems and pine resin. Goshawk cocktail. They were on the soar. Goshawks in the air are a complicated grey colour. Not slate grey, nor pigeon grey. But a kind of raincloud grey, and despite their distance, I could see the big powder-puff of white undertail feathers, fanned out, with the thick, blunt tail behind it, and that superb bend and curve of the secondaries of a soaring goshawk that makes them utterly unlike sparrowhawks. And they were being mobbed by crows, and they just didn’t care, like, whatever. A crow barrelled down on the male and he sort of raised one wing to let the crow past. Crow was not stupid, and didn’t dip below the hawk for long. These goshawks weren’t fully displaying: there was none of the skydiving I’d read about in books. But they were loving the space between each other, and carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances. A couple of flaps, and the male, the tiercel, would be above the female, and then he’d drift north of her, and then slip down, fast, like a knife-cut, a smooth calligraphic scrawl underneath her, and she’d dip a wing, and then they’d soar up again. They were above a stand of pines, right there. And then they were gone. One minute my pair of goshawks was describing lines from physics textbooks in the sky, and then nothing at all. I don’t remember looking down, or away. Perhaps I blinked. Perhaps it was as simple as that. And in that tiny black gap which the brain disguises they’d dived into the wood.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Blood has already melted a thin line through the snow and the hawk’s feet and feathers are powdered with a crumbly paste of snow and blood that resembles decorative sugar. The hawk looks up and about at his surroundings. A back yard, garages, a low fence. A barbecue heaped deep with snow. An inflatable Santa riding an inflattable Harley Davidson. Icicles hanging from Christmas eaves. Somewhere I can hear a television, and beyond that someone is singing ‘Happy Birthday’. I have never seen anything so fiercely wild and so familiar. How can it be here? How can the wild be here in this back-lot in the middle of a town, in the midst of home and community? These are the things I had flown from. It was the wildest hunt I had ever seen. Sitting by the window staring out at the sliding river, I begin to wonder if home can be anywhere, just as the wild can be at its fiercest in a run of suburban back-lots, and a hawk might find a lookout perch on a children’s play-frame more useful than one on the remotest pine. Maine has given me a family for Christmas and shown me a hawk can be part of it too. It’s shown me that you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you. It’s our last morning. Erin, Mum and I are walking along Parsons Beach, bracing ourselves against the wind. It is a bitter, salt cold day; we tread on frozen sand. Strings of seaducks fly far offshore, ragged lines over soaked slate baize. The waters under them are full of lobsters; Maine is famous for them; signs for lobster rolls hang everywhere across town. Erin’s dad had been a lobsterman once, and I’d gone out fishing with them years ago. Which is to say, I sat on the deck of their boat and watched as they hauled traps, measured, sorted and banded lobsters, rebaited the traps and set them overboard. They worked for hours while I sat there, unable to help, unable to do anything except watch. They were delighted I’d come out with them, and it was a wonderful day, but I felt guilty all the same: I was an English tourist out of her depth. Walking on the beach I remembered that boat-trip and felt uncomfortable as hell. I’d spent months out with Mabel on the hill. I’d seen the harvest come in, tractors harrowing slopes, stockmen turning sheep out to winter in the fields. And I’d not spoken to anyone. No one at all. I thought of the summer tourists here standing in packs to photograph the lobster boats coming in, or angling their cameras to catch the twisted light and shade on stacks of lobster traps on Cape Porpoise quay. Was I like that?

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  When we are in awe of something, we become less self-centered, more others-centered, and more connected to others around us.11 We worship when we experience awe. And cynicism and worship cannot coexist. I think about how cynical I’d become, about how my arms-folded self just wasn’t going to choose to trust. I didn’t want someone coming for me—which is, of course, the problem. Cynicism is especially powerful as a tool in Satan’s hands because when you and I are struck by it, we don’t see our need to be helped. We think we’re just fine, thank you very much. The truth? We desperately need Jesus. Bruno Mars released a love song years ago that says, “I’d catch a grenade for ya…jump in front of a train for ya.”12 While it was a catchy tune, I don’t think Bruno would really do that for ya, you know? But guess who would? Guess who did? Jesus, Son of God. He faced the greatest sacrifice to bust through our cool “I don’t need anybody” attitude, our intellect and shame and doubt. He entered our reality and arrested us with the story we longed to be true. A few months ago, while I was speaking at an event, a bit of a crisis was unfolding back at home. My younger daughter, Caroline, had accidentally locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and couldn’t get out. Our house in Dallas is approximately a hundred years old, which means that the window frames have about eighteen coats of paint, the floors are not perfectly level, and the door handles are prone to just falling off. Which is what had happened on one side of the door for sweet Caroline, leaving her trapped in the bathroom. Zac was with me at the event, frantically responding to text messages, first from Caroline and then from our son Conner, who was living a few miles away at college but had providentially happened to stop by the house to pick up a few things. It would be two hours after the exchange that I’d learn all that had gone down, and I laughed until I cried.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I flinch if I hear a jay calling, or a crow’s rolling, angry alarum. Both of these things could mean either Warning, human! or Warning, goshawk! And that morning I was trying to find one by hiding the other . Those old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia had taken over , were doing their thing, making me feel uncomfortable in bright sunlight, uneasy on the wrong side of a ridge, somehow required to walk over the back of a bleached rise of grasses to get to something on the other side: which turned out to be a pond. Small birds rose up in clouds from the pond’s edge: chaffinches, bramblings, a flock of long-tailed tits that caught in willow branches like animated cotton buds. The pond was a bomb crater , one of a line dropped by a German bomber over Lakenheath in the war. It was a watery anomaly, a pond in dunes, surrounded by thick tussocks of sand sedge many, many miles from the sea. I shook my head. It was odd. But then, it’s very odd indeed here, and walking the forest you come across all sorts of things you don’t expect. Great tracts of reindeer moss, for example: tiny stars and florets and inklings of an ancient flora growing on exhausted land . Crisp underfoot in summer , the stuff is like a patch of the arctic fallen into the world in the wrong place. Everywhere, there are bony shoulders and blades of flint. On wet mornings you can pick up shards knocked from flint cores by Neolithic craftsmen, tiny flakes of stone glowing in thin coats of cold water . This region was the centre of the flint industry in Neolithic times . And later , it became famous for rabbits farmed for meat and felt. Giant, enclosed warrens hedged by thornbanks once ranged right across the sandy landscape, giving their names to places here – Wangford Warren, Lakenheath Warren – and eventually, the rabbits brought disaster . Their close grazing, in concert with that of sheep, reduced the short sward to a thin crust of roots over sand. Where the grazing was worst, sand blew into drifts and moved across the land. In 1688 strong south-westerly winds raised the broken ground to the sky. A vast yellow cloud obscured the sun. Tonnes of land shifted, moved, dropped. Brandon was encircled by sand; Santon Downham was engulfed, its river choked entirely. When the winds stopped, dunes stretched for miles between Brandon and Barton Mills. The area became famed for its atrociously bad travel: soft dunes, scorching in summer and infested with highwaymen at night. Our very own Arabia deserta . John Evelyn described them as the ‘ Travelling Sands’ that ‘so damag’d the country, rouling from place to place, like the Sands in the Deserts of Lybia, quite overwhelmed some gentlemen’s whole estates’. Here I was, standing in Evelyn’s Travelling Sands.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “It’s my home, I suppose. The people, the land …” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “It’s funny, you know. Once you’ve lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.” He put his glasses back on and shrugged. “Of course, I know that in the long run I need to be replaced. That’s part of my job—making myself unnecessary. The Malawian doctors I work with are excellent, really. Competent. Dedicated. If we could just build a training hospital, some decent facilities, we could triple their number in no time. And then …” “And then?” He turned toward the campfire, and I thought his voice began to waver. “Perhaps I can never call this place home,” he said. “Sins of the father, you know. I’ve learned to accept that.” He paused for a moment, then looked at me. “I do love this place, though,” he said before walking back to his tent. Dawn. To the east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then dissipate, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks at a common slant, seemingly black before the rising red sun, strange markings against an ancient sky. It was like that for the rest of the day, as if I were seeing as a child once again, the world a pop-up book, a fable, a painting by Rousseau. A pride of lions, yawning in the broken grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like cheap wigs, tick birds scavenging off their mudcrusted backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water’s surface. Elephants fanning their vegetable ears.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Here you knew yourself to be not just at a show but in a theatre: you caught the shape of the stage and the sweep of the seats; and you marvelled to see your neighbours’ faces, and to know your own to be like theirs - all queerly lit by the glow of the footlights, and damp at the lip, and with a grin upon it, like that of a demon at some hellish revue.It was certainly as hot as hell in the Canterbury Palace on Gully Sutherland’s opening night - so hot that, when Alice and I leaned over the gallery rail to gaze at the audience below, we were met by a blast of tobacco- and sweat-scented air, that made us reel and cough. The theatre, as Tony’s uncle had calculated, was almost full; yet it was strangely hushed. People spoke in murmurs, or not at all. When one looked from the gallery to the circle and the stalls, one saw only the flap of hats and programmes. The flapping didn’t stop when the orchestra struck up its few bars of overture and the house lights dimmed; but it slowed a little, and people sat up rather straighter in their seats. The hush of fatigue became a silence of expectation.The Palace was an old-fashioned music hall and, like many such places in the 1880s, still employed a chairman. This, of course, was Tricky himself: he sat at a table between the stalls and the orchestra and introduced the acts, and called for order if the crowd became too rowdy, and led us in toasts to the Queen. He had a top-hat and a gavel - I have never seen a chairman without a gavel - and a mug of porter. On his table stood a candle: this was kept lit for as long as there were artistes upon the stage, but it was extinguished for the interval, and at the show’s close.Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to. On the night of Sutherland’s first performance he welcomed us to his show and promised us an evening’s entertainment we would never forget. Had we lungs? he asked. We must be prepared to use them! Had we feet, and hands? We must make ready to stamp, and clap! Had we sides? They would be split! Tears? We would shed buckets of them! Eyes?‘Stretch’ em, now, in wonder! Orchestra, please.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Over time they encouraged me to continue following the twin paths of my life as a Christian and as a follower of Native Tradition. I did not fully understand where this balancing act between different cultures would ultimately take me, but at least I knew that abandoning one for the other would be a mistake. As difficult as it might be, I would try to hold them in tension, working with both to find my way to … what: Resolution? Reconciliation? Synthesis? I was not sure, but I was willing to do what the vision told me and remain patient. I was awed enough by what I had experienced to be shocked into a level of belief that let me move forward with my life. In the years to come, I found walking this bicultural road to be very difficult. I came to appreciate how being patient was not simply a matter of sitting in God’s waiting room, but a serious test of faith. Many times I was tempted to let go of my Christian faith to simplify my life as a Native American. At times this dual path caused me to be in a spiritual limbo. I used to say that I was too white for Indians and too Indian for whites. I felt like I did not fit. I lived in the tension between cultures, trying to remain faithful to both Native tradition and Christian teachings. Consequently, my vision was an ongoing mystery. It did not give me instant gratification, but only helped me to see through a glass but darkly. I believe this was an important part of my vision because so often in contemporary American culture we want immediate answers to our questions. The crow did not give me a resolution to my conflict, but only a test of faith. My transformation, therefore, was a process, not a solution. I continued for the rest of my seminary education trying to balance my Christian life with my Native history. It was a difficult exercise in ambiguity, but looking back I recognize that true understanding develops over time, in the gray areas of our lives, not always in the flash of a single insight. My vision of the crow helped me on my path to leading a spiritual life. It helped to heal me of a deep split that was beginning to tear my mind and heart apart. It showed me that what my own Native ancestors, Choctaw Christians who walked the Trail of Tears, believed was not wrong. It also showed me that there was something else out there waiting for me, something I had to persevere in pursuing, a single path that would one day make sense of my life in ways I could not completely imagine as a young man. What about you? What did one of your earliest visions look like? When did it come to you? How did it appear? Where were you? What were you doing?

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Their sense of origins goes back to a layered theology of the successive creation and destruction of life on Earth, a kind of religious echo of the paleontological record of mass extinctions and rebirths. For the Hopi, we are living in the Fourth World. Each of the earlier worlds was created by the thought of God, a distinction Hopi would make from Christians and Jews who describe genesis as an act of the Word. Hopi theology takes the act of creation back one more step into the mind of God, asserting that even before the Word there must be the Thought. Like Hinduism, Hopi tradition places the locus of existence in the mind of the Creator and from that source emerges a vast and intricate succession of evolutions, pantheons, and relationships. The natural world and its human inhabitants are understood to have existed in different epochs, each rising and falling through time, until the current incarnation of life was reached. As this Fourth World began, human beings came out from the womb of the Earth, emerging into the daylight, being nurtured by supernatural benefactors: the spirits and the natural allies of both the plant and animal realm. Once human beings were born into the world in this way, coming out like infants into reality, they began their epic migrations. Like ancient Israel, they began a search for their promised land, guided by God and enduring many tests along the way, but always journeying to the place where they would establish their sacred home. After their long residence in the cliff dwellings, the Hopi resumed their search until they found the mesa tops of what is now northeastern Arizona. Here they established four original communities, among them the oldest continuously occupied place in North America, Oraibi, the village of the Third Mesa. From these high vantage points, the Hopi lived in peace, farming the land below generation after generation, practicing their ancient traditions in the underground kivas that are as characteristic of their faith as cathedrals are to Christianity. Many years ago, when I was making my vision quest on the rooftop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was asked to record a series of morning devotions for a local television station. This was in the day of the “sunrise sermon” on TV, a five-minute opening devotion that started the broadcast day at 5:00 am. I remember thinking that I might be the only person to ever see what I created, but I made a week’s worth of five-minute spots, each one talking about Native American religion. To be honest, I have forgotten all of the spots I made except for one. I still remember the spot I recorded talking about Hopi tradition. I explained that kivas were Hopi ceremonial sites, circular underground chambers accessed from an enclosed roof by a single ladder. I said that they were metaphors for the womb of the Earth from which humanity had emerged at the time of the Fourth World.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Fragments relating to the Council of Nicaea. The Syriac text from am ancient MS. by H. Cowper, Lond. 1857. LITERATURE. Of the historians cited at § 119 must be here especially mentioned Tillemont (R.C.), Walch, Schröckh, Gibbon, Hefele (i. pp. 249–426), A. de Broglie (vol. ii. ch. iv. pp. 3–70), and Stanley. Besides them, Ittig: Historia concilii Nicaeni, Lips. 1712. Is. Boyle: A historical View of the Council of Nice, with a translation of Documents, New York, 1856 (in Crusé’s ed. of Euseb.’s Church History). Comp. also § 65 and 66 above, where this in connection with the other ecumenical councils has already been spoken of. Nicaea, the very name of which speaks victory, was the second city of Bithynia, only twenty English miles from the imperial residence of Nicomedia, and easily accessible by sea and land from all parts of the empire. It is now a miserable Turkish village, Is-nik,1316 where nothing but a rude picture in the solitary church of St. Mary remains to the memory of the event which has given the place a name in the history of the world. Hither, in the year 325, the twentieth of his reign (therefore the festive vicennalia), the emperor summoned the bishops of the empire by a letter of invitation, putting at their service the public conveyances, and liberally defraying from the public treasury the expenses of their residence in Nicaea and of their return. Each bishop was to bring with him two presbyters and three servants.1317 They travelled partly in the public post carriages, partly on horses, mules, or asses, partly on foot. Many came to bring their private disputes before the emperor, who caused all their papers, without reading them, to be burned, and exhorted the parties to reconciliation and harmony. The whole number of bishops assembled was at most three hundred and eighteen;1318 that is, about one sixth of all the bishops of the empire, who are estimated as at least eighteen hundred (one thousand for the Greek provinces, eight hundred for the Latin), and only half as many as were at the council of Chalcedon. Including the presbyters and deacons and other attendants the number may, have amounted to between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Most of the Eastern provinces were strongly represented; the Latin church, on the contrary, had only seven delegates: from Spain Hosius of Cordova, from France Nicasius of Dijon, from North Africa Caecilian of Carthage, from Pannonia Domnus of Strido, from Italy Eustorgius of Milan and Marcus of Calabria, from Rome the two presbyters Victor or Vitus and Vincentius as delegates of the aged pope Sylvester I. A Persian bishop John, also, and a Gothic bishop, Theophilus, the forerunner and teacher of the Gothic Bible translator Ulfilas, were present. The formal sessions began, after preliminary disputations between Catholics, Arians, and philosophers, probably about Pentecost, or at farthest after the

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  there a hierarchy among the fallen angels? have demons a foreknowledge of contingent events?1561 Descending to man, Bonaventura discusses whether sexual intercourse took place before the fall, whether the multiplication of men and women was intended to be equal, which of the two sinned the more grievously, the man or the woman. Bonaventura differs from Thomas in giving proof that the world is not eternal. The mark of a foot, which represents created matter, is not of the same duration as the foot itself, for the mark was made at some time by the foot. And, following Plato as against Aristotle, he declared that matter not only in its present form but also in its essence is not eternal. The world is not thinkable without man, for it has all the marks of a habitation fitted up for a human being. Christ would not have become incarnate without sin. In the doctrine of the immaculate conception, Bonaventura agreed with Thomas in denying to Mary freedom from original sin and disagreed with his fellow Franciscan, Duns Scotus, whose teaching has become dogma in the Roman Catholic communion. It is as a mystic and as the author of the life of St. Francis, rather than as a dogmatician that Bonaventura has a characteristic place among the Schoolmen.1562 He evidently drew from the mystics of St. Victor, used their terminology1563 and did not advance beyond them. His mysticism has its finest statement in his Journey of the Mind to God.1564 Upon this pilgrimage of the soul to the highest divine mysteries, no one can enter without grace from above. Nor can the journey be continued without earnest prayer, pure meditation, and a holy life. Devout prayer is the mother and beginning of the upward movement towards God. Contemplation leads us first outside ourselves to behold the works of God in the visible world. It then brings us back to consider God’s image in ourselves arid at last we rise above ourselves to behold the divine being as He is in Himself.1565 Each of these activities is twofold, so that there are six steps in the progress of the soul. In the final step, the soul contemplates the Trinity and God’s absolute goodness. Beyond these six steps is the state of rapture, the ecstatic vision, as the Sabbath day of rest followed the six days of labor. The doorway to this mystical life is Christ. The experience, which the soul shall have hereafter, is an ocean of beatific ecstasy. No one can know it but the one who receives it; he only receive it who desires it; be only desire it who is inflamed by the baptizing fire of the Holy Spirit. It is a grace not a doctrine, a desire not a concept, a habit of prayer not a studious task, a bride not a teacher.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  And, of course, by now you know how my mother was born*20: Our grandfather ate the crab, steamed with green onions and glittered in oil, and spat a pink mouthful across the table. That wet fist of meat began to mewl and writhe, as if something was tented inside, beating a way out. A fetus: fully formed and orange as the crab’s shell. The crab was no god or ghost or demon. It was his daughter, born from a half-cooked man and a pirate, with a name no one could pronounce. The child spoke it herself, a sound halfway between swallow and song. Be careful what you ejaculate into the sea. A crab could crawl onto your ship and grow your child inside it.*21 My grandfather, having successfully sired children with his wife and a pirate, retired back to his fishing boat. My grandmother didn’t mind having one less person to feed, so he spent the rest of his life scouring the sea, holding the fishing pole between his knees as he doodled maps with both his hands. They were nonsensical maps, maps that were all ocean or all land, that had rivers ending in volcanoes or mountains that punctured the sky and let out all its color. They were maps with no directions, no orientation, no decipherable key. Sometimes the maps were just arterial collections of lines, rivers balled up like thread, roads without beginning or end. They were maps to get lost with, and when passing boats advised him to turn back, head toward safer waters—when dockhands tried to sell him real maps with real trade routes and real countries—he refused. He was trying to be lost, and he was professionally good at it. As long as he was lost, my grandfather believed that Ah Zheng would have to find him, recapture him from home, place him in the bondage of belonging again with someone. I choose to believe that Ah Zheng found my grandfather again, delirious with thirst and far from any coast; I still dream about it; I still see him in a fishing boat, small as a hat; then he’s suddenly overshadowed by a frigate; Ah Zheng on the deck, waving his shirt like a flag, bare-skinned and salt-striped; the logo of Ah Zheng’s new pirate fleet painted in his own blood; a scab-colored crab with a hundred legs; a hundred-legged crab with wings; Ah Zheng scolding Old Guang for leaving their daughter on land, letting her be corrupted by land-hemmed people; but at least there is time enough for a million more children, a million-gendered child; between them, there is an entire century to father; an entire sea to sire.*22

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The “test” implied in this vision is not only about the Messiah’s right relationship with God (and, therefore, humanity’s relationship to God), but also on the other end of the alignment, about the relationship to Mother Earth. Any human ego is capable of imagining “the sky is the limit.” We can be tempted to imagine that everything out there is up for grabs. We can become covetous, greedy, desiring to possess whatever we see. Sitting on a small patch of real estate, we may begin to think that there should be more. In fact, that we deserve more. The open sky, the endless expanse of creation, becomes not an object of wonder, but an object of plunder. One of the most bizarre things about European colonizers from the Native American perspective was their insane idea that they could “own the earth.” Traditional Native American societies do not have a concept of land ownership. The land is granted by God to the People in sacred trust as part of the Native Covenant. It is, and remains, the creation of God. Human beings are the stewards of the land, caretakers only and not owners. They are responsible for maintaining it, sharing it, and enjoying it. Therefore, looking out to the world, they see a garden of blessing. European colonists saw profit. They saw an endless resource that could be conquered, claimed, owned, used. The spiritual vision of the invaders was both incredibly narrow (every little piece of property had to belong to them) and incredibly broad (they never stopped wanting more). The vision of the sky illustrates this fundamental temptation for the Native Messiah. Is the right relationship to all that there is a question of stewardship or of ownership? Which will it be? The profession of faith by the Native Messiah sends a resounding answer in affirmation of the Native Covenant. The Earth is a living being. She is personified in female imagery to underscore her role as the source of life. Earth, therefore, is Mother because the vast network of life, the systems of life, of which human beings are only a small part, is sacred. God designs them for a divine purpose. They maintain the universal balance of relationships ordained by God from the beginning of creation. For human beings to break that chain of kinship (for us to throw ourselves down to test it) would be a spiritual disaster. We are not to insult God by claiming that we can use the creation for our own purposes, much less for profit. We are not the masters of all we see. We cannot swallow the universe into the stomach of our own greed. We do not need more. The ethic implicit in a culture that understands family as a vast matrix of kinship is an ethic of sharing. The sky vision shows Jesus the fundamental value of Native life: it is to be lived in a spirit of stewardship. Human beings are entrusted with everything they see.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I believe it was because, at some point in their ancient migration, they saw something transcendent like Peter, James, and John saw. As the Hisatsinom, the Hopi ancestors walked on their long migration into the Fourth World. They emerged from darkness into light. They saw the spiritual power we describe as transfiguration. This vision was a cultural revelation, an insight, into the very nature of God. The moment was radiant. In their religious consciousness, the Hopi discerned the scientific, evolutionary nature of life. It was no longer just rocks and trees, birds and animals, people and spirits, but a vast interwoven network of relationships from the most minute to the most massive. For the Hopi, it was as if they could see into the mind of God. They could see how creation works. The Hopi had an epiphany that would not come again until Western scientific theory began to peel back the layers of interrelatedness in the natural world. Europeans did it over centuries of study, using technology, but the Hopi did it with spiritual intuition over centuries of religious inquiry. In their migration they had watched the cycles of the seasons, the movement of the stars, the patterns of plant life, and the habits of the animals. With a gift for religious rationalism, they connected the dots. They began to construct the big picture of God’s creation: a harmonious and finely balanced symphony of life forms, all interacting, all interdependent. In this revelation, the universe opened up to them. They saw how thought alone could be the origin for creation. They envisioned the Earth as a sphere and in their symbolism placed two twin brothers at the “top” and “bottom,” mythic figures who helped to hold the planet in equilibrium. They went on to identify many of the major players in the process of existence, both animate and inanimate: the katsinas who were as much a part of the shared reality as human beings. And finally, they placed themselves, the Peaceful Ones, into this vision of wholeness and cooperation. They made themselves agents of evolution, stewards of environmental balance. It was a vision light years beyond what the Spanish friars could have comprehended. In Spain the church was actively persecuting scientists for making discoveries the Hopi had achieved generations before. The church was trying to stifle this kind of scientific vision. The kiva was embracing it. What Peter, James, and John saw was a vision of Jesus transfigured, altered from an ordinary person into a being of celestial light. They glimpsed the raw power of the divine plan made present in human time and space. It was as if they were observing atomic fission up close. The Hopi vision was just as powerful; they realized what they were dealing with in their cosmic revelation was nothing more nor less than the power of life and death. Transfiguration can create, but it can also destroy.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I was no longer standing on a roof. I was no longer standing beneath a sky. I was not in any place other than a sacred space, a holy ground, and the voice of something far greater than my reality was sending me a message: Do not be afraid. There are two paths to follow, but one path to find. Be patient. This was the message the crow brought to me. In that timeless instant of contact with its spirit, these were the words I heard. I might say more accurately, these were the words that wrapped themselves around me. I stood in the midst of them. I was surrounded by them, upheld by them, enveloped by them. And then the vision ended. Just like that. In an instant it was over. Sound returned: traffic in the distance, a siren, a horn honking. The wind resumed its cold movement over the roof. The gray sky spread out over me like a blanket and the crow suddenly spread its wings and launched itself into a wide arc over my rooftop and out into the world. As for me, I stood motionless for a time, a little bewildered. I was not really sure what to think or what to do. I had to just be still and take it all in. What had just happened? Was it real? It took me a while to re-enter my reality. The gyroscope had suddenly stopped spinning, but I needed a moment to clear my head. I looked around me. Same old roof. Same old trees. Same old circle of cornmeal. Same old me. But somehow, everything had changed. And nothing would be “same old” again. Spiritual vision brings us to a place of decision: do we believe what we have seen or not? Do we acknowledge that we have had a vision, or keep it to ourselves? Do we try to understand how our reality has shifted, or do we doubt that any change has occurred at all? I believe these are questions a great many who are reading these words have already faced. I believe there are more out there who have had spiritual visions than who have not. Some may have decided not to talk about them; some have chosen to talk to only a few close friends or family; some have turned their visions into paintings or poetry; some have been trying to understand the full meaning of vision for their whole lives and, by doing so, have become deeply spiritual persons who have made a great difference in the world. I did not completely understand what the crow meant by the words she brought to me. At the time, I could only begin to interpret them. At first the holy words of my vision only brought me a deep feeling of peace. They reassured me that I was not alone in my struggle.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Then each would lie down beneath the tree as though he were dead, and the holy men would cut a place in his back or chest, so that a strip of rawhide, fastened to the top of the tree, could be pushed through the flesh and tied. Then the men would get up and dance to the drum, leaning on the rawhide strip as long as he could stand the pain or until the flesh tore loose. 1 The tree Black Elk refers to is a small tree that was secured in the center of the dance ground circle, one that had been ceremonially chosen with great care and reverence. As in many other world religions, this symbol of the tree represented the axis mundi, the tree of life that is the link between earth and heaven. Of course, the aspect of the Sun Dance that caused Europeans such concern was not the tree, but the blood and pain endured by the dancers. This is the part of the dance that is at the heart of the controversy. What were these men who allowed themselves to be pierced and tied to a tree doing? What was their motivation and what was the meaning behind the dance? The answer from the Native Covenant can be given in a single word: sacrifice. Men who participate in the Sun Dance do so because they have received a vision. They believe they have been given an opportunity to make a sacrifice of their own bodies, accepting the pain of piercing and torn flesh, in order to offer a blessing to their people. Their motivation is, therefore, a selfless act. They volunteer to dance out of an abiding love for their community. In the theology of the Sun Dance this noble gesture of love releases the power of healing into the whole nation. It allows the people to live and to prosper. It is an extreme form of the Good Medicine that sustains the traditional Native community. The Europeans who banned the Sun Dance did not grasp the subtleties of this theology. They saw only the blood and the suffering of the dancers. They assumed it was a style of human sacrifice just short of ritual murder, but still a maiming of the body. Their anxious imaginations equated the Sun Dance with a ceremony of blood lust, something that would whip the hostiles into a frenzy, so they forbade it to be performed. From their viewpoint they had suppressed a primitive ritual designed to incite Native Americans to seek more blood. From the Native American viewpoint they had denied the whole nation the healing offered by a handful of faithful men who were responding to a call from God. The suppression of the Sun Dance is important for us to consider because it so graphically illustrates the power of sacrifice in human society.2 Sacrifice can be a fearful thing or a noble thing, depending on the spiritual vantage point of the culture observing it.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Art has always, and in all civilized nations, stood in intimate connection with worship. Among the heathen it ministered to idolatry. Hence the aversion or suspicion of the early Christians towards it. But the same is true of the philosophy of the Greeks, and the law of the Romans; yet philosophy and law are not in themselves objectionable. All depends on the spirit which animates these gifts, and the purpose which they are made to serve. The great revolution in the outward condition of the church under Constantine dissipated the prejudices against art and the hindrances to its employment in the service of the church. There now arose a Christian art which has beautified and enriched the worship of God, and created immortal monuments of architecture, painting, poetry, and melody, for the edification of all ages; although, as the cultus of the early church in general perpetuated many elements of Judaism and heathenism, so the history of Christian art exhibits many impurities and superstitions which provoke and justify protest. Artists have corrupted art, as theologians theology, and priests the church. But the remedy for these imperfections is not the abolition of art and the banishment of it from the church, but the renovation and ever purer shaping of it by the spirit and in the service of Christianity, which is the religion of truth, of beauty, and of holiness. From this time, therefore, church history also must bring the various arts, in their relation to Christian worship, into the field of its review. Henceforth there is a history of Christian architecture, sculpture, painting, and above all of Christian poetry and music. § 103. Church Architecture. On the history of Architecture in general, comp. the works of Kugler, Kinkel, Schnaase, and others, on the plastic arts; also Kreuser: Der christliche Kirchenbau, seine Geschichte, Symbolik u. Bildnerei, Bonn, 1851. 2 vols., and the English works of Knight, Brown, Close, J. Ferguson (A Hist. of Architecture, Lond. 1865, 3 vols.), etc. Architecture is required to provide the suitable outward theatre for the public worship of God, to build houses of God among men, where he may hold fellowship with his people, and bless them with heavenly gifts. This is the highest office and glory of the art of building. Architecture is a handmaid of devotion. A beautiful church is a sermon in stone, and its spire a finger pointing to heaven. Under the old covenant there was no more important or splendid building than the temple at Jerusalem, which was erected by divine command and after the pattern of the tabernacle of the wilderness. And yet this was only a significant emblem and shadow of what was to come.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "7. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of his own will, whereby he extendeth or withholdeth mercy as he pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice. "8. The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care, that men attending the will of God revealed in his Word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may, from the certainty of their effectual vocation, be assured of their eternal election. So shall this doctrine afford matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God; and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the gospel." IV. Methodism And Calvinism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Servetus, with the Bible as his guide, aimed at a more radical revolution than the Reformers. He started with a new doctrine of God and of Christ, and undermined the very foundations of the Catholic creed. The three most prominent negative features of his system are three denials: the denial of the orthodox dogma of the Trinity, as, set forth in the Nicene Creed; the denial of the orthodox Christology, as determined by the Oecumenical Council of Chalcedon; and the denial of infant baptism, as practised everywhere except by the Anabaptists. From these three sources he derived all the evils and corruptions of the Church. The first two denials were the basis of the theoretical revolution, the third was the basis of the practical revolution which he felt himself providentially called to effect by his anonymous book. Those three negations in connection with what appeared to be shocking blasphemy, though not intended as such, made him an object of horror to all orthodox Christians of his age, Protestants as well as Roman Catholic, and led to his double condemnation, first at Vienne, and then at Geneva. So far he was perfectly understood by his contemporaries, especially by Calvin and Melanchthon. But the positive features, which he substituted for the Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, were not appreciated in their originality, and seemed to be simply a repetition of old and long-condemned heresies. There were Antitrinitarians before Servetus, not only in the ante-Nicene age, but also in the sixteenth century, especially among the Anabaptists—such as Hetzer, Denck, Campanus, Melchior Hoffmann, Reed, Martini, David Joris.1092 But he gathered their sporadic ideas into a coherent original system, and gave them a speculative foundation.1093 1. Christology.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The entire silence of the apostles and the primitive church teachers respecting the departure of Mary stirred idle curiosity to all sorts of inventions, until a translation like Enoch’s and Elijah’s was attributed to her. In the time of Origen some were inferring from Luke ii. 35, that she had suffered martyrdom. Epiphanius will not decide whether she died and was buried, or not. Two apocryphal Greek writings de transitu Mariae, of the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, and afterward pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Tours († 595), for the first time contain the legend that the soul of the mother of God was transported to the heavenly paradise by Christ and His angels in presence of all the apostles, and on the following morning807 her body also was translated thither on a cloud and there united with the soul. Subsequently the legend was still further embellished, and, besides the apostles, the angels and patriarchs also, even Adam and Eve, were made witnesses of the wonderful spectacle. Still the resurrection and ascension of Mary are in the Roman church only a matter of "devout and probable opinion," not an article of faith;808 and a distinction is made between the ascensio of Christ (by virtue of His divine nature) and the assumptio of Mary (by the power of grace and merit). But since Mary, according to the most recent Roman dogma, was free even from original sin, and since death is a consequence of sin, it should strictly follow that she did not die at all, and rise again, but, like Enoch and Elijah, was carried alive to heaven. In the Middle Age—to anticipate briefly—yet other festivals of Mary arose: the Nativity of Mary,809 after A.D. 650; the Presentation of Mary,810 after the ninth century, founded on the apocryphal tradition of the eleven years’ ascetic discipline of Mary in the temple at Jerusalem; the Visitation of Mary811 in memory of her visit to Elizabeth; a festival first mentioned in France in 1247, and limited to the western church; and the festival of the Immaculate Conception,812 which arose with the doctrine of the sinless conception of Mary, and is interwoven with the history of that dogma down to its official and final promulgation by Pope Pius IX. in 1854. § 84. The Worship of Martyrs and Saints. I. Sources: The Memorial Discourses of Basil the Great on the martyr Mamas (a shepherd in Cappadocia, † about 276), and on the forty martyrs (soldiers, who are said to have suffered in Armenia under Licinius in 320); of Gregory Naz. on Cyprian († 248), on Athanasius († 372), and on Basil († 379); of Gregory Of Nyssa on Ephraim Syrus († 378), and on the megalomartyr Theodorus; of Chrysostom on Bernice and Prosdoce, on the Holy Martyrs, on the Egyptian Martyrs, on Meletius of Antioch; several homilies of Ambrose, Augustine, Leo the Great, Peter Chrysologus Caesarius, &c.; Jerome against Vigilantius.