Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Oh... IT own you...” she sighed. And in a flash I realized that this girl was actually taking my cherry in a realm of sensuality I had never known before. I had no choice but to trust her and be grateful to her for taking the trouble. I also had no choice but to believe that this new domain was entirely real. All the intensity and passion of sexuality were present, all the excitement and tension of a fully mounted couple. All the pressure of body against body, the rhythmic strokes and lunges, the sense of looming fulfillment. There were only two differences: I was the one being mounted, and all of this passionate energy was being channeled directly into my face. And I suddenly became a bit concerned too, not totally sure of my feelings. No one had ever made love to me like this before. What she Ladies Go First 463 was doing was truly intense and totally personal, but also somehow distant, almost as if it were happening to another person... It was as though she were following an accepted routine with definite rules as she alternated strokes and lunges and teasing motions with her most precious parts. I found myself wondering if she might actually be counting her strokes according to some exotic and unknowable formula. Now and then she made gentle moaning and yelping sounds, as though she were marking the end of one phase and the beginning of another. During the time when I was able to discern her eyes clearly — during that time at least there was no way I could miss them — they seemed to be eating me alive. I could almost see them even during those longer periods when my vision was blurred or totally blocked by her motions. Her gaze so completely possessed me that I kept longing for her eyes to reappear and gaze down upon me again. Most of the time her inner lips were perfectly centered on my nose, perched on the sides of my nostrils, and yet I felt no real pain or shortness of breath, at least none that I was aware of. Both her scent and her taste were positively intoxicating, sweet and musky together, so powerful that I begam to wonder if she was somehow using it to hypnotize me. Sometimes she would transfer her orifice upwards on to the rest of my face, all the way from my chin to my forehead, totally covering my eyes. But for the most part she zeroed in on my nose, making smaller motions up and down, or from side to side. Or she would indulge in multiple mini-bounces, slightly painful though they caused no real harm.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [58] Some of the colourful transvestite ascetic stories may have contained a kernel of truth, but the majority are likely to be further examples of male storytellers ‘thinking with women’ to organize their own emotional worlds. It is telling that there are no complementary stories of male ascetics passing as women. We are back with that trope of early Christianity that, to achieve perfection, a woman must become male, albeit a virginal male. It is the only way of transcending that natural characteristic of women, their subjection to ungovernable passions. 11. The early thirteenth-century portal depicting the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins at Hovhannavank monastery (Aragatsotn province, Armenia) shows the Wise Virgins as monks with beards. Examples of this thought are frequent in contemporary Christian literary texts that are far more obviously based on reality than the transvestite legends. It could be regarded as one of the organizing principles in Gregory of Nyssa’s biography of Macrina, who practised her asceticism in a very different social setting from that of Mary of Egypt. Gregory begins his account of his sister with the observation that, ‘A woman is the start of the narrative, if indeed a woman, for I do not know if it is proper to name her who is above nature [out of the terms] of nature.’ [59] Genderless or male, certainly not female: this was the best way of expressing Macrina’s extraordinary closeness to heaven beyond normal feminine capacity. ‘According to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts,’ said the fifth-century Egyptian ‘Desert Mother’ Amma Sarah, a saying preserved when very few of her pronouncements attracted the attention of male scribes, and a fine definition of ‘gendering’. [60] Some of the iconography of the Church in Armenia goes further than most Christian art by expressing the idea in a sculptural motif. Jesus’s parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25.1–13) is pictured with the wise among the virgins lighting their lamps for the bridegroom, but not as the young women of the original story: they are monks with beards. [61] *

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Sasha says. “No, I want a plastic bag, and you can put it over my head and tie it around my neck.” “That’s the spirit,” Sasha says, and we open the door and head inside to face the mayhem. Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That’s a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I’m supposed to be doing here, or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on. Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better. Our head trainer is Dave, a wiry, energetic guy in his forties with a shaved head and a gray goatee. On the first day we all go around and introduce ourselves, and tell everyone about something that makes us special. Dave’s thing is that he plays in a heavy metal cover band on weekends. Dave is part teacher and part preacher. Every two weeks he gets a batch of new recruits, and he goes through the same spiel, showing the same slides, telling the same jokes. He’s good at it. He loves HubSpot, he tells us, unabashedly. He’s had lots of jobs, and this is by far the best place he’s ever worked. This company has changed his life. He hopes it will change ours as well. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Dave tells us. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives. We are changing people’s lives.” He tells a story about a guy named Brandon, a pool installer in Virginia. His business was struggling. He could barely get by. But then he started using HubSpot software, and his business took off. Soon, his company was installing pools all around the country. He was rich! Eventually he was doing so well that he hired someone else to run his pool company so that he could become a motivational speaker. He travels the world spreading the gospel of inbound marketing, transforming the lives of thousands of other people. “This guy has become a superstar,” Dave says. “He’s a rock star. And it all started with HubSpot. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s what you are part of.”

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  30 Lecture 5: Mark—Jesus the Suffering Son of God 39): The curtain in the Temple is torn in half. This was the curtain that stood before the sacred room called the Holy of Holies, a room in which God himself was thought to dwell, in which no one could enter except the high priest, once a year. This curtain that separated God from his people is ripped in half. For Mark, God is now available to his people directly, through the death of Jesus. Somebody ¿ nally recognizes who Jesus really is: the pagan centurion who, seeing Jesus die, proclaims, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” For Mark, Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah—not despite the fact that he suffered and died, but precisely because he suffered and died. Jesus’ identity is ¿ nally con¿ rmed at the end of the story. Three days later, Jesus’ women followers go to his tomb and ¿ nd it empty. He has been raised from the dead. In keeping with the theme that Jesus was completely misunderstood, we’re told that the women À ee the tomb and don’t tell anyone, because they were afraid. At this point, we should review the major points we have covered concerning Mark’s Gospel account. Mark’s Gospel was the ¿ rst to be written, by a Greek- speaking Christian who had inherited a number of traditions about Jesus. This author, though, did not simply repeat these traditions to provide us with historically accurate detail about what Jesus said and did. Mark’s account is much richer and contains more nuance than that. Mark molded his traditions to make his point that Jesus was an unexpected messiah, one whose suffering and death were neither accidental, nor incidental, to his messiah-ship. For Mark, Jesus suffered and died precisely because he was the messiah. Moreover, Mark wanted his readers to know that if they expected to follow Jesus, they too must take up their crosses and come after him. Ŷ The Gospel of Mark. Brown, Introduction to the New Testament, chap. 7. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 5. Essential Reading 31 Hooker, The Message of Mark. Kingsbury, The Christology of Mark’ s Gospel. 1. What do people today generally mean by the term messiah and how does this contrast with the meanings that were more common in ancient Judaism? 2. Why do you suppose Mark portrays the disciples of Jesus as so ignorant of who he really was? Supplemental Reading Questions to Consider

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  My very soul was taken: I had no need to read them twice: I’ve never seen them since: I shall not forget them so long as this machine lasts. They flooded my eyes with tears, my heart with passionate admiration. In this state the old gentlemen came back and found me, a cowboy to all appearance, lost, tear-drowned in Swinburne. “I think that’s my book”, he said calling me back to dull reality. “Surely”, I replied bowing; “but what magnificent poetry and I never heard of Swinburne before.” “This is his first book I believe”, said the old gentleman, “but I’m glad you like his verses.” “Like”, I cried, “who could help adoring them!” and I let myself go to recite the Proserpine: “From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever Gods may be That no life lives forever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.” “Why you’ve learned it by heart!”, cried the old man in wonder; “learned”, I repeated, “I know half the book by heart: if you had stayed away another half hour, I’d have known it all” and I went on reciting for the next ten minutes. “I never heard of such a thing in my life”, he cried: “fancy a cowboy who learns Swinburne by merely reading him. It’s astounding! Where are you going?” “To Lawrence,” I replied. “We’re almost there,” he added and then, “I wish you would let me give you the book. I can easily get another copy and I think it ought to be yours.” I thanked him with all my heart and in a few minutes more got down at Lawrence station then as now far outside the little town clasping my Swinburne in my hand. I record this story not to brag of my memory for all gifts are handicaps in life; but to show how kind Western Americans were to young folk and because the irresistible, unique appeal of Swinburne to youth has never been set forth before, so far as I know. In a comfortable room at the Eldridge House, in the chief street of Lawrence, I met my brother: Willie seemed woefully surprised by my appearance: “You’re as yellow as a guinea; but how you’ve grown”, he cried. “You may be tall yet but you look ill, very ill!” He was the picture of health and even better-looking than I had remembered him: a man of five feet ten or so with good figure and very handsome dark face: hair, small moustache and goatee beard jet black, straight thin nose and superb long hazel eyes with black lashes: he might have stood for the model of a Greek god were it not that his forehead was narrow and his eyes set close.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  And indeed, it looked as if he were right. In spite of all the firemen could do, the fire spread with incredible rapidity. In half an hour I saw they were not going to master it soon or easily and I rode back to get Reece, who had told me that he would have come with me the previous night if he had known where the fire was. When I got back to the hotel, Reece had gone out on his own and so had Dell and the Boss. I went back to the fire. It had caught on in the most extraordinary way. The wooden streets now were all blazing; the fire was swallowing block after block and the heat was so tremendous that the fire-engines could not get within two hundred yards of the blaze. The roar of the fire was unearthly. Another thing I noticed almost immediately: the heat was so terrific that the water decomposed into its elements and the oxygen gas in the water burned vehemently on its own account. The water, in fact, added fuel to the flames. As soon as I made sure of this, I saw that the town was doomed and walked my pony back a block or two to avoid flying sparks. This must have been about three or four o’clock in the morning. I had gone back about three blocks when I came across a man talking to a group of men at the corner of a street. He was the one man of insight and sense I met that night. He seemed to me a typical, down-east Yankee: he certainly talked like one. The gist of his speech was as follows: “I want you men to come with me right now to the Mayor and tell him to give orders to blow up at least two blocks deep all along this side of the town; then, if we drench the houses on the other side, the flames will be stopped: there’s no other way.” “That’s sense”, I cried, “that’s what ought to be done at once. There’s no other way of salvation; for the heat is disintegrating the water and the oxygen in the water is blazing fiercely, adding fuel to the flames.” “Gee! that’s what I have been preaching for the last hour”, he cried. A little later fifty or sixty citizens went to the Mayor, but he protested that he had no power to blow up houses and evidently, too, shirked the responsibility. He decided, however, to call in some of the councilmen and see what could be done. Meanwhile I went off and wandered towards the Randolph Street bridge and there saw a scene that appalled me. Some men had caught a thief, they said, plundering one of the houses and they proceeded to string the poor wretch up to a lamp-post.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  12 Lecture 2: The Greco-Roman Context For many people today, God is far beyond humans in every way; most ancient people did not conceive of the divine realm as completely separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. There was a hierarchy among the gods themselves, a kind of divine pyramid, with the most powerful god at the top, the state gods below him, various local gods below them, family gods still further down, and so on. The more powerful gods were also more remote. Near the bottom of this divine pyramid were beings who were much more powerful than us, but much less powerful than the full gods. These were people that we might call divine men—humans who were born to the union of a god and a mortalwho were either more powerful than the rest of us, like Hercules, or more awe-inspiring, like the Emperor Augustus, or more wise, like the Greek philosopher Plato. There were stories, in fact, of divine men who were miraculously born, who could perform such divine miracles as healing the sick and raising the dead, who delivered divine teachings to their followers, and who at the end of their lives ascended to heaven to live among the gods forever (e.g., Apollonius of Tyana). This may sound familiar, because there are stories in the New Testament of Jesus doing all these things. For us today, these stories are completely unique, unlike anything else in our experience. For people in the Greco-Roman world, though, these stories would have made perfect sense. The existence of such divine men was widely recognized throughout their context. Ŷ Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 2. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians. Shelton, As the Romans Did: A Source Book in Roman Social History. Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire. Essential Reading Supplemental Reading 13 1. Explain why “context” is so important for meaning. Think of some examples from your own experience in which a misunderstanding occurred because somebody took a word or action out of context. 2. Summarize the most important ways that religion in the Greco-Roman world was so different from what most people today think of as ‘religion.’ How can “common sense” in one context seem to be “non- sense” in another? Questions to Consider

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other world. I never had anything approaching it before sale when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I seemed to love myself for a minute and then found myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this window I looked out upon a marvelous reach of landscape entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb stretches of light and color and cleanness. I know that for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began to come to, so to speak,—sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I forgot a faint sense of C.... [the town in which the writer was] [131] , away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking 'Why, I used to live in C....; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C.... did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of determining where I was very funny. But the whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven minutes or ten minutes." The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend: "I was reading a newspaper, and the indication of the approaching delirium was an inability to keep my mind fixed on the narrative. Directly I lay down upon a sofa there appeared before my eyes several rows of human hands, which oscillated for a moment, revolved and then changed to spoons. The same motions were repeated, the objects changing to wheels, tin soldiers, lamp-posts, brooms, and countless other absurdities. This stage lasted about ten minutes, and during that time it is safe to say that I saw at least a thousand different objects. These whirling images did not appear like the realities of life, but had the character of the secondary images seen in the eye after looking at some brightly-illuminated object. A mere suggestion from the person who was with me in the room was sufficient to call up an image of the thing suggested, while without suggestion there appeared all the common objects of life and many unreal monstrosities, which it is absolutely impossible to describe, and which seemed to be creations of the brain. "The character of the symptoms changed rapidly.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In their brief window of opportunity, western Europeans set up a Latin Kingdom in a Jerusalem devastated by Crusader massacres in 1099; the invaders targeted its Muslim, Jewish and even Eastern Christian inhabitants with a ferocity that Christian commentators did not deny. Yet the reality was that Crusaders had hit unawares on a moment of peculiar weakness and disarray in Islamic states, which was not repeated, and none of western Europe’s herculean efforts over the next centuries equalled that first fluke. [10] The Latin territorial presence in the eastern Mediterranean was only finally snuffed out by the Ottoman Turks who took the island of Crete from the Republic of Venice in 1669, but by then the Latin hold on the Holy Land itself had long been extinguished – in Jerusalem, since 1244. The saga of the Crusades had many consequences, but one of the most lasting was newly to associate Western Christianity with a masculine gender stereotype that it has still not entirely rejected: the holy warrior. We have already encountered military saints in the early Church – Sergius and Bacchus, Martin, George – but, whatever their popularity had been in the past among soldiers, their stories were constructed on the assumption that they gained their sanctity by renouncing earthly warfare. Right into the eleventh century, waging war still triggered heavy penances for those involved: that had been one major consideration when Europe’s monarchs and lords founded monasteries and nunneries, in order to construct a reservoir of grateful religious ready to take on the burden of penance vicariously in their prayers. Now the very act of being a soldier and killing Christ’s enemies could earn holiness. At the time, this was a specifically Western development: a Greek traveller who made it all the way to Compostela in the early twelfth century was apparently taken aback to hear St James admiringly called ‘a knight of Christ’. [11] Not just saints, but God himself: it is an equal surprise to enter the crypt of Auxerre Cathedral in Burgundy, where the vault is dominated by a fresco of Christ himself at the end of time, riding a white horse in knightly fashion and leading a warrior-band of mounted angels (see Plate 6). The motif is rare in the New Testament, but here it directly illustrates a scene from that exceptional text, the Book of Revelation (19.11–16). [12] The thought had an immediate resonance for the cleric commissioning the fresco: almost certainly Humbaud, Bishop of Auxerre, protégé of Pope Urban II and himself an active promoter of the First Crusade. Humbaud actually died on his return journey from a Jerusalem pilgrimage in 1115. [13] In the background was a new rhetoric of classifying Christian society three ways: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured (oratores, bellatores, laboratores was a common summary of these categories).

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “He’s not a dog,” Aunt Zippy said. “He’s a cat, Morris, my long time companion. He will never harm you.” She led us down a long hallway, lined with photos of her with many different women. There was a picture of Aunt Zippy seated with Greta Garbo on a park bench. Another picture showed Aunt Zippy drinking cocktails with Mae West at a long bar and another showed her sitting in a rowboat with Eleanor Roosevelt on a calm lake. There was also a photo of Aunt Zippy shaking hands with Golda Meir. We entered a light airy room with a high ceiling. Curtains of crystal beads hung in front of the high windows, sending shining reflections of sparkling light on the white walls. A modern white sofa stood in the center of the room, flanked by matching armchairs. The only testament to Aunt Zippy’s profession was a gleaming skull on top of the pine coffee table in front of the sofa. The contemporary decor surprised me. “Just because I’m a witch,” Aunt Zippy said, “is no reason for me to succumb to conventional thinking about my vocation. I’ve already lived a hundred and ten years. Maybe I’ll live a hundred more. Why should I spend my time in some dismal dump filled with bats? Like they say, it isn’t over until the fat lady sings.” My mother giggled. “Right,” she said, smiling. Aunt Zippy snapped her fingers and three glasses filled with ruby liquid materialized on the coffee table. She picked up one of the glasses and handed it to me. “Enjoy this wine,” she said, “A glass of wine a day will keep the worry wrinkles away. Your mother and I will be back shortly.” My mother nodded at me encouragingly as she and Aunt Zippy each picked up a glass. They vanished through a door decorated with black roses that had appeared in a corner of the room. Morris didn’t follow them. He spread out under the coffee table and regarded me lugubriously. I had never tasted wine before. I took a sniff. It smelled like raspberries and Vicks Cough Syrup. When I tasted it I found it had a much stronger zing. I closed my eyes and listened to Morris purr softly somewhere below me. He seemed to be humming the first few bars of “Earth Angel”, my favorite song. Morty Rothman and I danced to it when we met at the party celebrating my friend Cora Sue’s sixteenth birthday. That was the first time I felt a boy’s bone grow hard and press against me through my clothes. He nuzzled my neck and stuck his tongue in my ear, another first. It was warm and wet and I liked it. The Witch of Jerome Avenue 393

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  It is a theme that runs through many of her novels. She often describes a character shocked into a perception of the “mystery” of another object or person, which is unexpectedly revealed as marvelously separate from himself or herself. Here a self-absorbed, somewhat superficial girl, a former art student, visits the National Gallery in London during a personal crisis and discovers that she is moved by the pictures in a new way: Here was something that her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless. Even [her estranged husband], she thought, only existed now as someone she dreamt about; or else as a vague external menace never really encountered and understood. But the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary, trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something in it after all. 2 4 Such an experience is an ekstasis that releases us from the prison of selfhood. The aim of this step is threefold: (1) to recognize and appreciate the unknown and unknowable, (2) to become sensitive to overconfident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people, and (3) to make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human being we encounter during the day. First, think about those experiences that touch you deeply and lift you momentarily beyond yourself so that you seem to inhabit your humanity more fully than usual. It may be listening to a particular piece of music, reading certain poems, looking at a beautiful view, or sitting quietly with someone you love. Spend a little time each day enjoying this ekstasis and notice how difficult it is to speak of your experience or to say exactly what it is that moves you. Try to explain to somebody precisely how it has this effect on you, what it is telling you, and listen to the inadequacy of your words. Investigate the theme of unknowing in human experience. If you are scientifically inclined, you can explore the indeterminate universe of quantum mechanics, the neurological complexity of the mind, or depth psychology. Second, stand back and listen to the aggressive certainty that characterizes so much of our discourse these days.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  4 Jesus the Christ The energies released by the relatively short earthly life and execution of Jesus still fuel a world faith, currently engaging the loyalties of around a third of its inhabitants. A little over three decades in an identifiable period of history have resonated beyond historic time, transforming all around them. Yet the young man at the centre of it startles by having such an ordinary name. His parents, like many at the time, called him Jeshua, in memory of the liberator who led the Hebrews into the Promised Land after the death of Moses. [1] Christians do their best to disguise this relationship between the two Jeshuas, by differentiating their names, so the name of the original liberating hero is rendered for instance into English as Joshua. The later liberating Saviour is called Jesus, a Greek variant (Jesous) on the original Hebrew. [2] Christians have added a second descriptor for him which is a title, and which should not be mistaken for a surname like ‘MacCulloch’. ‘Christ’ is another Greek word, translating the Hebrew word ‘Messiah’, or ‘Anointed One’, the future hope of Israel; it takes the ordinariness of the first name Jeshua and catapults it into the cosmos. The Saviour of the world has taken flesh (carnis in Latin), in what Western Christians call the ‘Incarnation’. This is the story set forth in four different accounts of the earthly life and resurrection of Jesus Christ, written for different communities now difficult to identify somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. They form a literary genre with little Classical precedent, focusing on a level of ordinary society that biography normally ignored: the interactions of Jesus with ordinary people, often on the margins of their society. One modern scholar has described them as ‘down-market’ versions of biography. [3] It is therefore appropriate that they (and some later imitations of them) share a distinctive description, which is, in English, ‘Gospel’. This is an Old English word meaning ‘good news’; many languages have kept the same idea in forms of the preceding Latin word, deriving in turn from Greek: Evangelium. Three of the Gospels, written by ‘Evangelists’ identified as Mark, Matthew and Luke, are together known as the ‘Synoptic’ Gospels, to distinguish them from the Gospel of John, which was probably written a decade or two later than they were. The Synoptics present the basic story of Jesus in a similar way, quite differently from John’s narrative: they even disagree with John on the length of Jesus’s public ministry, John’s account suggesting around three years, the others something over one. On this and other issues, the Synoptics ‘see together’, the root meaning of the Greek synopsis. [4] INFANCY AND FAMILY In the fourth century CE, the Mediterranean Christian Church created two summary statements of belief, now known as the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Yahweh appeared to [Abraham] at the Oak of Mamre while he was sitting by the entrance to his tent during the hottest part of the day. He looked up, and there he saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them he ran from the entrance of the tent to meet them, and bowed to the ground. “My lord,” he said, “I beg you, if I find favour with you, kindly do not pass your servant by. A little water shall be brought; you shall wash your feet and lie down under the tree. Let me fetch a little bread and you shall refresh yourselves before going any further. That is why you have come in your servant’s direction.” They replied, “Do as you say.” Abraham hastened to the tent to find Sarah. “Hurry,” he said, “knead three bushels of flour and make loaves.” Then running to the cattle Abraham took a fine and tender calf and gave it to the servant, who hurried to prepare it. Then taking cream, milk and the calf he had prepared, he laid it all before them, and they ate while he remained standing near them under the tree.7 In the ancient world, foreigners were dangerous; because they were not bound by the local vendetta, they could kill and plunder with impunity. Even today, very few of us would willingly bring three total strangers off the street into our own homes. But Abraham shows no such reluctance. On the contrary, he rushes out to greet the travelers, prostrates himself before them as if they were gods or kings, brings them into his encampment, and gives them the best of what he has. This practical act of compassion leads to a divine encounter. There is no crude moment of revelation; Yahweh does not suddenly unmask himself. It simply emerges in the narrative, without any fanfare, that God is somehow present in this meeting and mysteriously takes part in the ensuing conversation. He seems to speak through the three strangers. They ask Abraham where his wife Sarah is, and one of them promises: “I shall visit you again next year without fail and your wife will then have a son.” Sarah, who is eavesdropping, laughs at the absurdity of this prediction, because she is a very old woman. Suddenly it transpires, though, that the stranger is Yahweh: But Yahweh asked Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Am I really going to have a child now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for Yahweh: At the same time next year, I shall visit you again, and Sarah will have a son.”8

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  LEGACY Introducing a stimulating recent book that also covers more than three thousand years, the historian Roderick Beaton defines Greeks simply as ‘speakers of the Greek language’. [1] That is what makes Greece so fundamental to Christianity, since its New Testament was composed in a colloquial form of Greek. The linguistic choice was the dynamic legacy of a people originally scattered through an intricate complex of valleys, coastal areas and islands, now mostly represented by the modern Republic of Greece. They spoke many dialects across that patchwork of lands, but all were forms of Greek; by the time of Jesus and those who interpreted his life, Greeks had spread their speech and their outlook on life astonishingly widely across three continents. Traces of Greek language retrieved by archaeology witness the first distinctively Greek society around 1500 BCE , which, through three centuries, built cities, palaces and monumental tombs across what is now southern Greece and south-west Turkey. These people appear never to have formed a single political unit, though the city of Mycenae and its rulers in central Greece wielded wide authority. After a general political and societal collapse occurred around 1200 BCE (for reasons still not clear), no single power ever again commanded the entire Greek-speaking world, not even the military phenomenon that was Alexander the Great nine centuries later. Instead of empire, the Greeks experienced an ever-widening sense of unity through what they said and wrote, providing the identity of Hellas (‘Greekdom’). Chief among their literature were two epics which were not sacred books like the Hebrew Bible or New Testament but performed the same unifying task: the Iliad and Odyssey . The first tells of a single military campaign, probably reflecting some real war of centuries before, in which Greeks besieged and destroyed the (non-Greek) city of Troy in north-west Anatolia (Asia Minor, today Turkey). The Odyssey chronicles journeys home to Ithaka from the siege by one Greek hero, Odysseus, over ten years. The two epics took shape orally in recitation sometime in the eighth or seventh century BCE , attributed to a poet named Homer, of whom we know nothing for certain. They were written down in a form of script that the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians, another coastal Mediterranean people, and refined for their own purposes: the alphabet, ancestor of our own alphabet via its later adaptation by the Romans. The Israelites, neighbours (and frequently fractious neighbours) of the Phoenicians, took the technology of the alphabet in a different direction to record their own Hebrew language and write down their own sacred literature. In both cases, literature reinforced or created self-identification. For the Greeks identity was based on their shared knowledge of Homer’s epics, together with certain religious sites, temples and ceremonies which they saw as common property in Hellas – especially the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi and a shrine and associated pan-Hellenic games held at Olympia in the Peloponnese.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Every new experience must be disposed of under some old head. The great point is to find the head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two played for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling it a 'ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes' having been accustomed to see his 'eggs' broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate our established habits of 'apperception' are simply not taken account of at all; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by which to measure them. [122] The Fuegians, in Darwin's voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a 'matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a pen-drawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at the skill.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  123 The Book of Revelation Lecture 23 The Book of Revelation was not written to describe our own future, it wasn’t written in the context of 21st century America, but in the context of 1st century Rome. I n the last lecture, we saw that a good deal of the early Christian literature was produced in the context of persecution and suffering. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ¿ nal book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of John. This is a fascinating visionary account of the end of the world, an account that has provided grist for the mills of doomsday prophets ever since, for whom it is by far the most favored book of the New Testament. It is probably also the book that is, and always has been, the most misunderstood. The basic story line of the book is reasonably clear. After some introductory matters, the book describes a series of disturbing visions given to a prophet named John. After an opening vision of the risen Christ, John is instructed to write letters to each of the seven churches of Asia Minor, detailing their successes and failures and urging them to remain committed to Christ. He is then miraculously transported to heaven, where he is shown the future course of the earth’s catastrophic history. He sees God on his thrown and a lamb that has been slain next to it (representing Christ). The lamb is handed a scroll that is sealed with seven seals. As he breaks the seals, one by one, disasters strike the earth: war, famine, plague, suffering, and death. The breaking of the seventh seal leads to another sequence of disasters, as seven angels appear blowing seven trumpets, each blast bringing yet more disasters. The seventh trumpet leads to another sequence of disasters, as seven angels appear with seven huge bowls ¿ lled with God’s wrath, which are poured one by one upon the earth. Meanwhile, on earth, the great enemy of God has arisen, the satanically inspired anti-Christ, who is responsible for destroying the people of God and leading multitudes away from him. At the end, when God’s wrath is used up, there is a ¿ nal battle. Christ confronts and overthrows the anti-Christ, destroys all his enemies, subjects them to eternal punishment in a lake of ¿ re, and creates a new heaven and a new earth, a

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  His art of forgetting is close to the “science of compassion” I described earlier, with its discipline of emptying the mind of culturally conditioned preconceptions in order to “make place for the other.” If our view of others is perpetually clouded by our own prejudices, opinions, needs, and desires, we will neither understand nor truly respect them. Today unknowing no longer seems obscurantist. As we have seen, so many of the things we once took for granted have proved unreliable that we may have to “forget” old ways of thought in order to meet the current challenges. At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicists believed that there were only a few unresolved problems in the Newtonian system before our knowledge of the universe would be complete. But a mere twenty years later, quantum mechanics exploded old certainties and unveiled a universe that was indeterminate and unknowable. As the American physicist Percy Bridgman (1882–1961) explained: The structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all.… The world fades out and eludes us.… We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible to our minds. 14 Yet physicists have not felt frustrated by contemplating the unknowable. The cosmologist Paul Davies has described the joy he experiences when delving into unanswerable questions. “Why did we come to exist 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang? Why are the laws of electromagnetism or gravitation as they are? Why these laws? What are we doing here? … It’s truly astonishing.” 15 The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked “We don’t know anything” and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth. 16 But far from being depressed by his lack of knowledge, he actually reveled in it: “One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and of our incredible role in it.” 17 Albert Einstein (1879–1955) experienced mystical wonder when he contemplated the universe : To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men. 18 He was convinced that “he to whom this emotion is a stranger … is as good as dead.” 19 Albert Schweitzer might have agreed. When he looked back on his life, he saw that one of its guiding perceptions had been the “realization that the world is inexplicably mysterious.”

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  126 Lecture 23: The Book of Revelation Zebedee, Jesus’ disciple, because at one point, he has a vision of the apostles and doesn’t seem to see himself. Apocalyptic writings contain bizarre symbolic visions. The future is described not in straightforward and prosaic terms but in mystical and metaphorical ones. Often, though, the symbols are transparent when read in light of the book’s historical context. Take, for example, the “great whore of Babylon” whom the prophet sees in Revelation 17. This is a prostitute who has committed fornication with the kings of the earth; who is seated on a scarlet beast, bedecked in ¿ ne clothes and jewelry; who is drunk with the blood of the martyrs; and who has written on her head, “Babylon, the mother of whores.” A strange sight indeed. But this image is not so hard to interpret: The beast is said to have seven heads, which the author explains refers to seven hills on which the woman is seated (v. 8). At the end, we’re told that she is the “great city that rules over the kings of the earth” (v. 18). Who then is the great whore of the earth? Which city ruled the world at the end of the 1 st century, a city that had persecuted the Christians, a city in fact that was known throughout antiquity as the city built on seven hills? Any ancient reader would have recognized the city of Rome readily. Consider the most famous puzzle of Revelation: the great enemy of God, the anti-Christ (Chapter 13), who is given the number of the beast, 666. Who is it? The answer is not so surprising when the text is put in a 1 st-century context. By indicating the beast’s “number,” the author is referring to the common practice from antiquity of calculating the number of a word or name based on the numerical value assigned to each of its letters. Who was the ¿ rst emperor of Rome to persecute Christians? Nero. Spell Caesar Nero’s name in Hebrew letters and add them up. They total 666. Interestingly, a recent book that discusses a newly discovered Greek manuscript has the number as 616, which is the numerical value of an alternate spelling of Nero’s name. This may not be as exciting as thinking that the anti-Christ is someone living in our own day or is soon to come. We have had devoted Christian authors over the past 50 years arguing that 666 must refer to Hitler, Mussolini, the Pope, Henry Kissinger, Saddam Hussein, or Ronald Wilson Reagan (6-6-6). But if we’re interested in knowing what the author himself meant, it helps to think about his world.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Instead of ending in a tribal reunion, the journey finishes in faraway Jerusalem, the holy city of Jews and Christians. Instead of glorifying hatred and war, it is a story of harmony and transcendence of the tribal group. One night, so the story goes, when Muhammad was sleeping beside the Kabah, he was awakened by Gabriel, the spirit of revelation, and miraculously conveyed to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There he was greeted by all the great prophets of the past, who invited him to preach to them before he began his ascent, like a Jewish mystic, through the seven heavens to the throne of God. The story falls reverently silent when Muhammad enters the divine presence, but it is clear that it was based on the surrender ( islam ) of the ego: “In awe, he lost his speech and lost himself—Muhammad did not know Muhammad here, saw not himself.” 11 The mythos is an expression of the Prophet’s yearning to bring the Arabs, who had long felt that they were off the map of the divine plan, into the heart of the monotheistic family. Instead of shunning the newcomer as a pretender, the other prophets welcome him as a brother. At each stage of his journey through the seven heavens, Muhammad meets and talks with Adam, Jesus, John the Baptist, Joseph, Enoch, Moses, Aaron, and Abraham. In one version of the story, Moses gives him advice about the number of times that Muslims should pray each day. It is a story of pluralism: the prophets pray together, embrace one another, and share their insights. It has become a paradigm of authentic Muslim spirituality, representing the perfect “surrender” of both the personal and the tribal ego. The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who have a particular devotion to this story, developed an outstanding appreciation of other faiths. It is quite common for a Sufi poet to cry in ecstasy that he is no longer a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim and is equally at home in a synagogue, mosque, temple, or church, because once you have glimpsed the divine, you have left these man-made distinctions behind. As we leave this step, we should meditate on the words of the influential Sufi philosopher Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240). His warning against religious exclusivity can also be applied to any “tribal” chauvinism. Do not attach yourself to any particular creed so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Sarah, who is eavesdropping, laughs at the absurdity of this prediction, because she is a very old woman. Suddenly it transpires, though, that the stranger is Yahweh: But Yahweh asked Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Am I really going to have a child now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for Yahweh: At the same time next year, I shall visit you again, and Sarah will have a son.” 8 Yet when the strangers leave, “Abraham remained standing before Yahweh.” 9 Instead of thinking that the plight of these passing travelers has nothing to do with him, Abraham has “made place for the other” in his life. He has thrown down the precautionary barriers we erect to protect ourselves from harm and entered a sacred dimension of experience. In Hebrew, the world for “holiness” is qaddosh, which literally means “separate, other.” This myth suggests that if instead of excluding the stranger we welcome him, overcoming our inertia, reluctance, fear, or initial repugnance, we will have intimations of the transcendent Otherness that some call “God.” There is a similar moment in the New Testament in Saint Luke’s gospel. It is three days after Jesus’s crucifixion, and two of his disciples are walking together from Jerusalem to nearby Emmaus. 10 They are naturally in great distress. On the road, they fall in with another traveler, who asks them why they are so troubled. Instead of telling him to mind his own business, they share with him the terrible story of Jesus’s execution, explaining that they had believed he was the Messiah. The disciples are taking a risk, because the stranger could easily have ridiculed them. But they have the courage to open their hearts to him, expose their raw vulnerability, and confide their most intimate hopes to somebody they have never met before. Their trust is rewarded. Instead of jeering at them, the stranger is able to comfort them. Starting with Moses, he begins to expound the “full message of the prophets,” arguing that the Messiah was destined to suffer before entering his glory. In fact, there is nothing in either the Torah or the prophetic writings to suggest any such thing. The stranger has embarked on some highly inventive rabbinic midrash, and the disciples could have rebuked him for taking too many liberties with the original texts and dismissed his exegesis as nonsense. But again, they are ready to listen to his insights; they allow him to change their minds about their own faith, which is enhanced by this input. Later they would remember how their hearts “burned within them” when the stranger expounded the scriptures. It is another story of hospitality: the disciples have allowed a stranger to enter their minds and have let his ideas find a home there. When they arrive at their destination, the disciples beg their new friend to stay the night with them.