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 Wild (2012)

  Perhaps Clarke’s most important contribution to the trail was making the acquaintance of Warren Rogers, who was twenty-four when the two met in 1932. Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and in some cases construct what would become the PCT. Though initially reluctant, Rogers soon became passionate about the trail’s creation, and he spent the rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal, financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way. Rogers lived to see Congress designate the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, but he died in 1992, a year before the trail was finished. I’d read the section in my guidebook about the trail’s history the winter before, but it wasn’t until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they’d been imagining me. It didn’t matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

• 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 Wild (2012)

  As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the “green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain. California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT again. It was sunny and clear but the air was cool, and it grew progressively cooler with each day as I passed into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, where the trail stayed above 6,000 feet. The views opened up again as I walked along a ridgeline of volcanic rocks and boulders, glimpsing lakes occasionally below the trail and the land that spread beyond. In spite of the sun, it felt like an early October morning instead of a mid-August afternoon. I had to keep moving to stay warm. If I stopped for more than five minutes the sweat that drenched the back of my T-shirt turned icy cold. I’d seen no one since I left Ashland, but now I encountered a few day hikers and overnight backpackers who’d climbed up to the PCT on one of the many trails that intersected it, which led to peaks above or lakes below. Mostly I was alone, which wasn’t unusual, but the cold made the trail seem even more vacant, the wind clattering the branches of the persevering trees. It felt colder too, even colder than it had been up in the snow above Sierra City, though I saw only small patches of snow here and there. I realized it was because back then the mountains had been moving toward summer, and now, only six weeks later, they were already moving away from it, reaching toward autumn, in a direction that pushed me out.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  In 1978, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw were graduate students at the University of Essex in England when they created MUD1. “We always knew what we had,” said Bartle. “Roy was always a little embarrassed by all the fuss, but we knew we had something special.” (MUD stood for “multi-user dungeon.” Four years before the launch of MUD1, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had published a new paper-and-pencil role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons. MUD1 drew inspiration from that game, and the moniker reflects the early dominance of fantasy and science fiction scenarios.) Within the game, Richard and Roy were omnipotent and omniscient. They could create, destroy and control the fate of all those who entered the world. They could see who did and said what—nothing that happened in that world was beyond their influence. They were the gods of MUD1. There had been other text-based computer adventure games before MUD1. Titles like STARTREK (1971), Hunt the Wumpus (1972) and especially Colossal Cave Adventure (a 1977 text simulation that blended descriptions of an actual Kentucky cave system with elements of fantasy and magic) had already demonstrated just how much fun one person could have typing compass directions into a computer. The thing Richard Bartle knew he had was the capacity to allow many players to log on to the system remotely and concurrently. When Roy and Richard typed the words “RUN MUD” into the operating system shell of a mainframe computer on the Essex campus, they opened a virtual door through which many people could crowd at once. Because these events happened so recently, it is breathtaking to consider exactly how different the lie of the technological land was in 1978. Just four years before MUD1, aficionados first started uttering the word “Internet.” Also in 1974, the first WYSIWYG applications hinted at emancipation from the command-line interface, though this was still years away for the average computer user. When Bartle and I first connected via email, I made the mistake of bragging to him, “I am of the age where I remember thinking 2400 baud was pretty fast.” “Ha!” he wrote back. “We played MUD1 on 110 baud teletypes!” (Sending information at 110 baud, or bits per second, means it would take about four seconds to send this paragraph from one computer to another.) How did anyone ever endure the technology of that time? Computer-to-computer links that were so slow they were almost stationary; monochrome screens full of esoteric gobbledygook decipherable only by elite misfits; computer processors tens of thousands of times less powerful than today’s bottom-of-the-line models; counterintuitive interfaces; simple tasks that required whacked-out alphanumeric strings and arcane keystrokes. Plus lots and lots of incompatible and undependable technology. Connections were dropped, crashes were routine, recovery was slow, and even when everything worked smoothly, it was, technologically speaking, a monumental pain in the ass.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 81 1. This contrasts with the disappearance of Virgil at the end of Purgatorio. 2. The “commission” of Virgil in Inferno 2 is recalled, thus reminding us of the beginning of the poem. B. Dante says a moving prayer of thanksgiving to Beatrice. III. In Canto 32, Bernard of Clairvaux shows Dante the structure of the mystical rose. A. The rose contains all kinds of elaborate symmetries. 1. Male and female are juxtaposed. 2. Old and New Testament are juxtaposed. 3. Young and old are juxtaposed. 4. Circular and linear arrangements are combined. B. These symmetries are the source of the symmetry of the universe itself. IV. The final canto begins with Bernard’s hymn to the Virgin. A. Marian piety is a big part of Cistercian devotion to this day. B. This hymn is characterized by the language of paradox. 1. The Virgin is the daughter of her son. 2. She is the most humble and exalted of creatures. 3. At this point in the journey, the language of paradox is the only one that makes sense. C. These central mysteries are what Dante “sees” at the end of the canto. D. In its emphasis on mediation and grace, and in its poetic power, this prayerful poem or poetic prayer can be seen as summing up the entire Commedia, reminding the reader of the beginning of the poem with Mary’s intercession on behalf of the pilgrim. E. Bernard begs the Virgin to intercede so that Dante may see God face to face. V. Dante is aware of the inadequacy of memory and of language at this point. A. The experience that he is trying to describe is above language. B. The experience is also such that all he has left is inadequate memory.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 59 F. Dante is able to learn from them as he learns from the souls in the two previous canticles, though what he learns here are positive examples of conduct. G. This canticle is highly spiritual, but it does not abandon the earlier political and artistic agenda of the poem. Instead, heaven elevates and ennobles these concerns. II. Canto 1: 1–3, is both a thematic recapitulation of the whole Commedia and an important clue to the nature of the Paradiso. A. These lines say that traces of God can be found throughout creation. B. These traces are especially evident in paradise. C. Therefore, Dante’s journey through paradise consists of his learning to see and follow the traces that lead him to God. 1. Dante warns us that his memory of these things may be limited. 2. His constant theme of the ineffability of heaven—the sheer impossibility of adequately representing it in speechrelates to this. D. These traces include the structure of the universe, the souls he encounters there, and the various theological, philosophical, and political discourses that are presented there. E. The good reader of the poem is expected to follow the pilgrim on this journey. F. The language itself changes on the journey. The discourse in hell is coarser. The Paradiso introduces many new words that Dante invents: His experience presses the limits of language. III. The first three spheres of Dante’s paradise, the moon, Mercury, and Venus, contain souls who were defective in the virtues represented by those spheres: faith, hope, and charity (or love). A. Dante the poet wishes to show that perfection on earth is by no means necessary for salvation. B. He also uses these early encounters to return to a discussion of the nature of the will and freedom, extending the discourse of Purgatorio on these subjects. IV. In Canto 3, the pilgrim meets Piccarda Donati.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  T h i s h y m n i s c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y t h e l a n g u a g e o f p a r a d o x . 1. T h e V i r g i n i s t h e d a u g h t e r o f h e r s o n . 2. S h e i s t h e m o s t h u m b l e a n d e x a l t e d o f c r e a t u r e s . 3. At this point in the journey, the language of paradox is the only one that makes sense. C. T h e s e c e n t r a l m y s t e r i e s a r e w h a t D a n t e “ s e e s ” a t t h e e n d o f t h e canto. D. I n i t s e m p h a s i s o n m e d i a t i o n a n d g r a c e , a n d i n i t s p o e t i c p o w e r , this prayerful poem or poetic prayer can be seen as summing up the entire Commedia, reminding the reader of the beginning of the poem with Mary’s intercession on behalf of the pilgrim. E. Bernard begs the Virgin to intercede so that Dante may see God face to face. V. D a n t e i s a w a r e o f t h e i n a d e q u a c y o f m e m o r y a n d o f l a n g u a g e a t t h i s point. A. T h e e x p e r i e n c e t h a t h e i s t r y i n g t o d e s c r i b e i s a b o v e l a n g u a g e . B. T h e e x p e r i e n c e i s a l s o s u c h t h a t a l l h e h a s l e f t i s i n a d e q u a t e memory.

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

  Second, Muslims were commanded to give alms (zakat: “purification”) to the poorer and more vulnerable citizens of Mecca. It seems that initially Muhammad called his religion not Islam but tazakkah, an obscure word, related to zakat, which is probably best translated as “refinement.” Muslims had to cultivate within themselves a caring, generous spirit that made them want to give graciously to all, just as God himself did. By concrete acts of compassion, performed so regularly that they became engrained, Muslims would find that both they and their society would be transformed. As long as people are motivated solely by self-interest, they remain at a bestial level. But when they learn to live from the heart, becoming sensitive to the needs of others, the spiritual human being is born. Instead of the chaos, violence, and grasping barbarism of the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, there would be spiritual and humane refinement. Repeated actions would lead to the cultivation of a new awareness. The point is that this was not a belief system, but a process. The religious life designed by Muhammad made people act in ways that were supposed to change them forever. Without fully understanding what I was doing, I too had started to behave in a different way. Muhammad had been intended in part as a gift to the Muslim community, but I was astonished by the generosity of their response when the book was published in the autumn of 1991. None of the pessimistic predictions came to pass, and Muslims in Britain and in the United States (where the book appeared the following year) took it to their hearts. But on the international stage, relations with the Muslim world were rapidly deteriorating. Two short weeks after I had delivered the manuscript to the publishers, the United States–led coalition began the air offensive Desert Storm against Iraq. There were rigged elections in Algeria, when, with the tacit approval of the West, the secularist National Liberation Front suppressed FIS, the Islamic party which was set to win in the polls. The result was a hideous civil war. And at about the same time, fighting broke out in Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats. Once again we would see concentration camps in Europe, but this time the victims were Muslims. We seemed to be heading into a period of great darkness. In the ensuing years, as violence and religious extremism escalated in one region after another, especially in the Middle East, I found myself preoccupied by the problems of the Muslim world and its relationship with the West. No longer did news stories seem remote events that might as well be happening on another planet. The dread that had impelled me to write Muhammad would not go away. I wrote more books—about Islam, Jerusalem, and fundamentalism— because I felt instinctively that we were embarked on a dangerous course, that Muslims and Westerners were increasingly unable to understand each other and were all hurtling toward some nameless horror.

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

  After one of these evenings, Ahmed and three of his mates were driving me back to the hotel. The car radio was blaring out some tinny Arabic music, and two of the men on the backseat were drinking bottled beer. Suddenly the music stopped, there was an announcement, and the atmosphere in the car became very still. “It’s the Koran,” Ahmed told me tersely, but with eager anticipation, as though he were expecting a great treat. I was surprised. I knew that Ahmed was not a practicing Muslim; in fact, he seemed to dislike religion. Had I been driving in London with beer-drinking secularists and found that we were about to be treated to a reading from the Bible on the radio, somebody would have lunged immediately for the off button. But it was very different here. I listened to the chanted recitation as it filled the car. Periodically one of the men would make an involuntary exclamation of delight, and soon, feeling sorry for me, they tried to include me in the experience, by translating the text into English, the words tumbling over one another as they tried to express its complexity. “This is so beautiful!” Ahmed kept saying in obvious excitement. “I wish you could hear this!” He would then attempt another version of the words but broke off in frustration. “It is that, but more than that. Too much to tell you!” I was not merely impressed, but astonished. Somehow this scripture could still move these tough fifty-year-old men almost to tears, even though they never went near a mosque and saw religion as the bane of the Middle East. It was another impression to file away to think about later, when I had time.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I would be anemic and listless by the end, but I wouldn’t care, because I would know that at that second my own perky little cells were being crushed into alternative world orders of protoplasm by exotic megagravities in expensive vacuums in every high-powered NIH-funded research program in the area, and that trickster knowledge would power me upward into raptures of self-knowledge and self-abandonment. But I didn’t actually do it, because I would then have had to clean all the bloody test tubes after their runs were completed, since I wouldn’t want to leave something as unsettling as provenanceless yellow plasma around for researchers to discover. Fear is my least favorite emotion; I want to be responsible for creating as little of it as possible. I did look at a fair number of ultracentrifuges, however, and what I noticed was that the big floor-model machines, the ones built in Palo Alto by Beckman Instruments, bore a surprisingly strong resemblance to clothes-washers. They were a little wider, and they were blue (which should be a standard color for washing machines but perplexingly is not), and a close look at the control panel revealed, in addition to familiar words like SPEED, TIME , and TEMP , the less laundry-relevant terms VACUUM and ROTOR —but they still had an oval opening in the top that you closed after loading with a simple latch, and their direct-drive motor (I learned this from flipping through a textbook in one of the lab’s libraries) operated on exactly the same induction principal as a Maytag’s. The huge difference between these two consumer durables (and I think one of the best things about centrifuge as a noun is the ghost of the word huge it safely contains) was that the Beckman machine could turn a rotor, fitted with eight or even twelve little cuvettes containing some biohazard or other, at sixty thousand r.p.m. In other words, it could dependably spin, without flying apart, or overheating, or making disturbing noises (I noticed that it was quieter than a washing machine), at a rate of over one thousand revolutions per second . I lifted one of the rotors from a shelf in one of the labs. It was not a light object. It was milled out of some kind of compressed titanium alloy and it was finished in an elegant anodized black. It looked like a forty-five-dollar dark-chocolate birthday cake, with holes for, say, eight unusually thick candles—but it weighed about as much as a bowling ball, or a human head. I’m seldom as impressed as I should be when I hear that a weightless entity like an electrical impulse can dash around in its silicon irrigation ditches a thousand times a second, or even a million times a second, because electricity is ungraspable; opposable thumbs are of no use in its presence.

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

  We continued our journey through the busy streets and then, suddenly, turned a corner. There, floodlit but somehow timeless, were the extraordinary walls of the Old City, built, as I knew from my preliminary reading, by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century. We began to drive slowly around the circumference of the walled city, each turning revealing a new vista. There was the Tower of David, over there the modern basilica of Mount Zion, down below the Valley of Gehenna. This was a homecoming, after all. I had a strange sensation of being physically present in a place which had for so long been part of my inner landscape, a province of my own mind that now took on an objective life of its own. I could feel my personal geography shifting to take in this new reality, and yet also sensed that I had somehow caught up with myself and was about to discover something important. When we caught a glimpse of the golden Dome of the Rock, I involuntarily but audibly caught my breath, and as we veered away from the walls, I turned back to Joel to thank him. He was watching me and, almost in spite of himself, was smiling. The purpose of this first visit was to find a way of putting my inevitably abstract, theological, and historical ideas into a visual form suitable for television. The most important task right now was to find locations where I, as the presenter of the series, would film my “pieces to camera,” speaking directly to the audience. These had to be chosen with care. Each place had to have a clear relevance to the subject matter of the presentation delivered there, and our choice would affect the shape of our six hour-long films. Every morning Danny and Joel would collect me from the American Colony Hotel for a day’s tour in Jerusalem or the surrounding countryside, visiting places that Joel thought I should see; during the second week we spent a few days in Galilee, in the north of Israel, looking at the sites connected with Jesus’ ministry. Joel could not drive. He was a recovered alcoholic and had lost his license, but I would sit in the front of the car with Danny while Joel directed our tour from the backseat. There was no small talk, however. On the first morning, while we were driving out to the Mount of Olives, I had made another attempt at polite conversation, twittering in my English way to fill the awkward silence. After he had endured my pointless remarks—“How beautiful the light is! How long have you lived in Jerusalem, Joel? And where do you live, Danny?”—for about ten minutes, sighing heavily and answering in curt monosyllables, Joel’s patience finally came to an end.

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

  Later we sat with a Bedouin family who lived in the ruins of the deserted Palestinian refugee camp outside Jericho. Abu Musa gave Miriam and me a breakfast of pita bread and sour melted butter, while Ahmed rode the horse that the Bedouins looked after for him into the mountains. Then we had to drive home quickly, snaking swiftly up that mythical road, so that I would be ready to start work with Joel at nine o’clock. We reentered Jerusalem, turned a corner, and there on our right was the Dome of the Rock, blazing in the sunlight. Not only was it perfectly at one with the hills and stones, it seemed to bring all the elements of the environment together, completing them and giving them fresh significance. “Strong!” Ahmed said briefly, and we all nodded. That was exactly the right word. It was not simply my personal circumstances that had changed, but my religious landscape was also being transformed. In my convent meditations, Jews had scarcely figured in the scenes that I had tried so hard to conjure up. They were marginal figures, lurking in the wings in a rather sinister way. At best, they were simply foils to Jesus’ superior insight: they asked Jesus trick questions but failed to catch him out; they made obtuse and heartless remarks, which showed how impervious they were to true spiritual values. But now that I was thinking about these scenes in modern Israel, Judaism had moved from the periphery to the foreground, and made sense of the lives and careers of both Jesus and Paul. When we visited the Western Wall, the last relic of the temple planned by King Herod, which was nearing completion in Jesus’ lifetime, I stared fascinated at the crowds who were pressing forward to kiss the sacred stones. There were black-caftaned Orthodox, with their earlocks and huge fur hats, as well as men and women dressed in ordinary casual clothes. I watched a young Israeli soldier bind his tefillin to his arms with a thick strap as he bowed and prayed before the wall. Judaism was not the superseded faith of my blinkered meditations. It had a life and dynamism of its own, and was as multifarious as Christianity. It had continued to grow and develop, in ways that I had never considered, since Jesus had died in this city, some two thousand years ago.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  As with the resurrection itself, which forms the climax to this whole sequence, it is no use trying to rationalize these events. Disbelieve them if you will; retain the Epicurean detachment, the belief that if there is a God he (or she, or it) is a long way away and doesn’t get involved with this world. But at least see what is being claimed. These “miracles” make little or no sense within the present world of creation, where matter is finite, humans do not walk on water, and storms do what storms will do, no matter who, Canute-like, tries to tell them not to. But suppose, just suppose, that the ancient prophetic dream had glimpsed a deeper truth. Suppose there were a god like Israel’s God. Suppose this God did after all make the world. And suppose he were to claim, at long last, his sovereign rights over that world, not to destroy it (another philosophical mistake) or merely to “intervene” in it from time to time (a kind of soggy compromise position), but to fill it with his glory, to allow it to enter a new mode in which it would reflect his love, his generosity, his desire to make it over anew. Perhaps these stories are not, after all, the sort of bizarre things that people invent in retrospect to boost the image of the dead hero. Perhaps they are not even evidence of the kind of “interventionist,” miracle-working, “supernatural” divinity of some “conservative” speculation. Perhaps they are, instead, the sort of things that might just be characteristic of the new creation, of the fulfilled time, of what happens when heaven and earth come together. Perhaps, after all, the attempts to cut them down to size are themselves part of a different agenda-driven process of invention that yields a world where such things don’t happen because they shouldn’t, they couldn’t. Because if they did, it might mean that a living God really had established his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven and was intending to let this rule grow into a large shrub from a small seed, putting an end to the fantasy of human sovereignty, of being the master of one’s own fate and the captain of one’s own soul, of humans organizing the world as though they were responsible to nobody but themselves. Perhaps the real challenge of Jesus’s transformations within the material world is what they would imply both personally and politically. If they are about God becoming king on earth as in heaven, the chances are he’s not going to stop with storms on lakes. There will be bigger fish to catch. And to fry. At the heart of the story told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and suffused through the whole narrative of John—we have the most striking example of all:

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Outline I. T h e d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e c i r c l e o f t h e s u n b e g i n s i n C a n t o 1 0 w i t h a n elaborate hymn of praise to the created universe. A. T h e u n i v e r s e , p r e s e n t e d a s t h e w o r k o f t h e T r i n i t y , i s s e e n a s t h e work of a great artist who loves his art. 1. W e a r e a s k e d t o c o n t e m p l a t e t h i s w o r k a n d r e j o i c e i n i t . 2. C o n t e m p l a t i n g t h e u n i v e r s e w i l l m ake us more like its creator. B. T h e u n i v e r s e i s d e s c r i b e d i n t erms of the intricate relationship between parts and the whole. C. T h e u n i v e r s e i s a l s o s e e n i n t e r m s o f a s e r i e s o f w h e e l s , t h a t o f t h e equator and that of the ecliptic (the wheel describing the movement through the signs of the zodiac). 1. T h e s e t w o w h e e l s e x i s t a t t h e c o r r e c t a n g l e t o e a c h o t h e r . 2. I f t h e a n g l e w e r e e i t h e r g r e a t e r o r l e s s , t h e r e s u l t w o u l d b e chaos in the universe. II. T h e s o u l s i n t h e c i r c l e o f t h e s u n a r e a l s o p r e s e n t e d i n t e r m s o f wheeling circles.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Scope: This 24-lecture course is intended to help you analyze and appreciate the long poem by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) known as the Divine Comedy. One of the most profound and satisfying poems ever written, the Divine Comedy (or simply the Commedia, to use Dante’s own title) is well worth our continuing study. In its unified narrative structure, Dante incorporates aspects of the biblical and classical traditions, weaving these together in a brilliant synthesis that has helped form the basis for Western writers ever since. Or, as James Joyce once put it, “Dante is my spiritual food!” The full achievement of the Commedia, however, goes far beyond anything merely structural or “literary” in a technical sense. Dante is a geographer of the cosmos, and of the individual human soul. He dramatizes and asks us to reflect on fundamental questions—questions about our political institutions and problems, the nature of our moral actions, the possibilities for spiritual transformation, and the reasons for reading and writing; questions whose poignancy the lapse of seven centuries has blunted not at all. Dante does all this, moreover, in a demanding Italian verse form called terza rima and uses a complex arrangement of materials that makes the Commedia one of the great virtuoso pieces of world literature and most impressive artworks ever created in any medium. The Commedia is a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven (in Italian, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso). Set at Eastertide in the year 1300, the poem begins with Dante lost midlife in a dark wood (selva oscura) of error. Unable to recover his true path or extricate himself from danger, he is rescued by the great Roman poet Virgil. Virgil conducts Dante first on a descent through the nine circles of hell, continues with the climbing of the seven terraces of the mount of purgatory, then directs (but does not accompany) Dante on a journey toward a personal encounter with God at the very summit of paradise. Along the way, Dante changes guides. Virgil gives way to Beatrice, a young woman about whom Dante wrote in his early love poetry and who becomes his guide through most of the spheres of paradise. Beatrice in turn

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 82 1. D a n t e c o m p a r e s h i m s e l f t o s o m e o n e w a k i n g u p a f t e r a g o o d dream. 2. I n t h e Commedia’s last reference to classical literature, Dante compares himself to Neptune underwater when he saw the keel of Jason’s ship, the Argo, passing overhead on its quest. 3. N e p t u n e r e m e m b e r s m o r e a f t e r t w e n t y - f i v e c e n t u r i e s t h a n h e does after an instant. C. T h e p i l g r i m h a s , t h e r e f o r e , s u r p a s s e d t h e p o e t . VI. T o w a r d t h e e n d o f t h e c a n t o , D a n t e “ s e e s ” h o w t h e u n i v e r s e i s b o u n d together. A. H e s e e s a l l c r e a t i o n a s t h e “ s c a t t e r e d l e a v e s ” o f a s i n g l e b o o k . B. T h e l e a v e s o f t h e b o o k a r e b o u n d t o g e t h e r b y l o v e . C. T h e m i g h t y Commedia itself is compared to mere baby talk. VII. D a n t e ’ s c a p a c i t y t o e x p e r i e n c e t h e v i s i o n o f G o d e x p a n d s a t t h e e n d . A. T h u s , t h e v i s i o n h e s e e s i s n o t s t a t i c . B.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  And I did think of something, as a matter of fact. I got a fresh spool of thread from the sewing basket. I opened the packet of needles, which had a convenient front flap like a book of matches. The needles were arranged by size and resembled the pipes in a pipe organ; they were pinned with exactitude through two folds of blue foiled paper—a hand-held cathedral. I chose a medium needle, threaded it, and spent most of the afternoon sewing my rope-climbing calluses together in various ways. When the needle was partway through a callus I tapped its tip to feel the tension within the thickened skin; the sensation was usually painless. I waggled my fingers with two needles poked into them in the mirror, pretending I was being tortured. When I had pushed a needle all the way through, the thread that followed was almost ticklish; my nerves were being stimulated in a way that left them uncertain about what was inside and what was outside. It was as if I could hear the thread tugging through the holes in my skin rather than feel it. I sewed all eight fingertips in series and walked around the house moaning and looking for an audience; then I played something very simple by Bach on the piano—the additional presence of the thread in the moment of contact with each piano key, and the restricted range my fingers had, made the music seem unusually pointed and intelligent and pure. I played better, more high-steppingly, more like Glenn Gould, with sewn hands (though with many more wrong notes)—just as show horses were (I had read somewhere) made by unethical trainers to strut prize-winningly with mustard and chains in their fetlocks. I was my own marionette. I stopped the Bach in the middle and closed the piano lid. And as I closed the lid I knew what I was meant to do.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  When YHWH visits Abraham, Abraham sees three men and entertains them at a meal. When YHWH meets Moses, what Moses sees is a burning bush. When, later, YHWH guides Moses and the Israelites through the desert, what they see is a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When YHWH reveals his glory to the prophet Isaiah, all Isaiah tells us (in his terror) is that YHWH was high and lifted up, surrounded by angels, with the hem of his robe filling the Temple. Was that, we wonder, what was meant when, in the same book, we are told that the sentinels would shout for joy as in plain sight they saw YHWH returning to Zion? Was that what was meant when it said, “The glory of YHWH will be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isa. 40:5)? When Ezekiel saw the glory of YHWH, all he offered by way of a description was a strange account of YHWH’s chariot-throne, with its whirling wheels darting this way and that. Which of these models, if any, ought one to expect? Or would it be something different? The notion of YHWH himself as Israel’s true king thus became closely bound up with the idea of his powerful return. At the time of the exile, it was widely believed that Israel’s God had abandoned the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, leaving them to their fate. (How else, people reasoned, could they have fallen?) Ezekiel saw the glory depart because of the people’s wickedness (chaps. 10–11). But then, toward the end of his majestic book, he was given another vision of YHWH’s glory returning to the newly rebuilt Temple (43:1–5). For Isaiah and Ezekiel, then, not only would Israel return to its land, but YHWH would return to the Temple. That is at the heart of the vision of King YHWH in Isaiah 52. And that, we may suppose, is what devout Jews hoped and prayed for as they sang all those psalms about YHWH becoming king, taking charge at last, rescuing his people, and bringing justice to the world. But it hadn’t happened yet—or not as far as the prophets after the exile were concerned. Yes, they had returned from Babylon to Judaea. Yes, they had rebuilt the Temple. But YHWH had not returned to fill the house once more with his glory. The last two prophets in the canon both promise that he will indeed come, but this makes it all the clearer that he has not yet done so: Thus says YHWH: I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of YHWH of hosts shall be called the holy mountain. . . . Thus says YHWH of hosts: I will save my people from the east country and from the west country; and I will bring them to live in Jerusalem.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It was, in particular, the place where God himself had promised to come and live. This was where God’s glory, his tabernacling presence, his Shekinah, had come to rest. That’s what the Bible had said, and some fortunate, though frightened, individuals had glimpsed it and lived to tell the tale. But God lived, by definition, in heaven. Nobody, however, supposed that God lived most of the time in heaven, a long way away, and then, as though for an occasional holiday or royal visitation, went to live in the Temple in Jerusalem instead. Somehow, in a way most modern people find extraordinary to the point of being almost unbelievable, the Temple was not only the center of the world. It was the place where heaven and earth met. This isn’t, then, just a way of saying, “Well, the Jews were very attached to their land and their capital city.” It was the vital expression of a worldview in which “heaven” and “earth” are not far apart, as most people today assume, but actually overlap and interlock. [image file=image_rsrc27Z.jpg] And Jesus, as we have already seen, had been going about saying that this God, Israel’s God, was right now becoming king, was taking charge, was establishing his long-awaited saving and healing rule on earth as in heaven. Heaven and earth were being joined up—but no longer in the Temple in Jerusalem. The joining place was visible where the healings were taking place, where the party was going on (remember the angels celebrating in heaven and people joining in on earth?), where forgiveness was happening. In other words, the joining place, the overlapping circle, was taking place where Jesus was and in what he was doing. Jesus was, as it were, a walking Temple. A living, breathing place-where-Israel’s-God-was-living. As many people will see at once, this is the very heart of what later theologians would call the doctrine of the incarnation. But it looks quite different from how many people imagine that doctrine to work. Judaism already had a massive “incarnational” symbol, the Temple. Jesus was behaving as if he were the Temple, in person. He was talking about Israel’s God taking charge. And he was doing things that put that God-in-chargeness into practice. It all starts to make sense. In particular, it answers the old criticism that “Jesus talked about God, but the church talked about Jesus”—as though Jesus would have been shocked to have his pure, God-centered message corrupted in that way. This sneer fails to take account of the fact that, yes, Jesus talked about God, but he talked about God precisely in order to explain the things that he himself was doing.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We will find it difficult even to understand what it was about . If we do try to believe it, we will be forced to treat it simply as fantasy, a pretty idea rather than rock-bottom reality. That is the curse of the false either/or that has been wished on scholarship these many years: either robust skepticism or grit-your-teeth conservatism. Back to our first perfect storm. It’s time for both of those false reactions to be confronted by first-century reality. Space, time, and now matter. In this last respect too the prophetic visions of the ancient scriptures suddenly acquire new dimensions. Jesus’s announcement that God is now in charge, that God is becoming king on earth as in heaven, means that we can glimpse, fitfully and in flashes, something of what this prophetic vision might mean—in where Jesus is and what he is doing. We can see the material world itself being transformed by the presence and power of Israel’s God, the creator. We see it already, to be sure, in the healing stories. In them the physical matter of someone’s body is being transformed by a strange power, which, in one telling scene, Jesus feels going out of him (Mark 5:30). But then, to the astonishment of the first onlookers and the scornful skepticism of Epicureans ancient or modern, we see creation, as it were, under new management. The professional fishermen who caught nothing during the night are overwhelmed with the catch they get when Jesus tells them where to cast the net. Jesus not only heals the sick; he raises the dead. He feeds a hungry crowd with a few loaves and a couple of fish. Something new is happening, and it’s happening to the material world itself. He commands the raging storm to be quiet, and it obeys. Then, worse still, he walks on the lake and invites Peter to do it too. As with the resurrection itself, which forms the climax to this whole sequence, it is no use trying to rationalize these events. Disbelieve them if you will; retain the Epicurean detachment, the belief that if there is a God he (or she, or it) is a long way away and doesn’t get involved with this world. But at least see what is being claimed. These “miracles” make little or no sense within the present world of creation, where matter is finite, humans do not walk on water, and storms do what storms will do, no matter who, Canute-like, tries to tell them not to. But suppose, just suppose, that the ancient prophetic dream had glimpsed a deeper truth. Suppose there were a god like Israel’s God.