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 First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  “Unveiled faces” is a mystical image—the veil has been removed. So also is “seeing the glory of the Lord,” the radiant luminosity of the Lord “as though reflected in a mirror” (see also 1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly”). The result is that we “are being transformed.” All of these passages—and more could be cited—indicate that Paul had mystical experiences of the risen Christ. He experienced the post-Easter Jesus as the light and glory of God, the one who enlightened and transformed him. Paul was not simply a mystic. More precisely, he was a Jewish Christ mystic. He was a Jewish Christ mystic because, as already mentioned, Paul was a Jew and in his own mind never ceased being one. He was a Jewish Christ mystic because the content of his mystical experiences was Jesus as risen Christ and Lord. Afterward, Paul’s identity became an identity “in Christ.” And as a Christ mystic, he saw his Judaism anew in the light of Jesus. We cannot claim this foundation as a consensus view. Scholars and theologians have often written about Paul without grounding his vocation and message as an apostle of Jesus in his mystical experience of the post-Easter Jesus. They have treated Paul’s letters as if they were primarily about a set of ideas that need to be systematized and explained. But our view is neither new nor idiosyncratic. A century ago, the German New Testament scholar Adolf Gustav Deissman wrote in his book Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History: “Whoever takes away the mystical element from Paul, the man of antiquity, sins against the Pauline word: ‘Quench not the Spirit’” (1 Thess. 5:19). Deissman also affirmed that Paul’s phrase “in Christ” (which occurs over a hundred times in the genuine letters) “is meant vividly and mystically, as is the corresponding ‘Christ in me.’”1 We explore these phrases in Chapters 5 and 7. In addition to seeing Paul’s mystical experience of the risen Christ as transforming him from a persecutor of Jesus’s followers to a proclaimer of Jesus, there is one more crucial transformation to underline. And that is that his experience of the risen Christ transformed his perception of the authorities, the powers, that had crucified Jesus. Paul’s experience of the risen Christ carried with it the conviction that God had raised Jesus, that God had vindicated Jesus, that Jesus is Lord. But if God has vindicated Jesus, then the powers who killed him—Roman imperial authority in collaboration with Jewish high-priestly authority—are wrong. This sets up the fundamental opposition in Paul’s theology. Who is Lord, Jesus or empire? In Paul, the mystical experience of Jesus Christ as Lord led to resistance to the imperial vision, and advocacy of a different vision of the way the world can be. CHAPTER TWO HOW TO READ A PAULINE LETTER

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles. In his own words, Paul testifies that he had an experience of divine revelation (“God was pleased to reveal his Son to me”) that transformed him and gave him his vocation. Two verses later, in 1:17, he connects this experience to Damascus. After referring to some subsequent events in his life, he says, “Afterwards, I returned to Damascus.” In other letters Paul also speaks of having experienced Jesus. He does so twice in 1 Corinthians. In 9:1, he says that he has “seen Jesus our Lord.” Nothing in Acts or his letters suggests that Paul had ever seen the pre-Easter Jesus. The passage must refer to seeing the post-Easter Jesus—the risen Jesus as Christ and Lord. Later in the same letter, he speaks of Jesus appearing to him. In 15:3–8, he names people to whom the risen Christ appeared and includes himself in the list: “He appeared also to me.” Paul has had firsthand experience of the risen Christ—and, interestingly, one that he says belongs in a list of resurrection experiences had by Peter and other Christian apostles. In 2 Corinthians (which may combine several letters), Paul says he “will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord.” Note the plural: we should not imagine that the Damascus experience was his only experience of the risen Christ. Then he speaks of “a person in Christ who…was caught up to the third heaven.” Though Paul uses third-person language here, he almost certainly refers to himself. “Such a person,” he continues, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (12:1–4). The passage speaks of entering another level of reality (“the third heaven,” “Paradise”), in an ecstatic state (“whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know”), where he heard “things that are not to be told.” We do not think that the last phrase means secret information that could in principle be disclosed. Rather, it is best understood as something beyond words—“things unutterable,” as an earlier translation put it. Again to use William James’s language, this is mystical experience as ineffable—as impossible to put into words, as beyond words. Another passage in the same letter uses the language of mysticism: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:18)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We could pile up plenty of other examples, each of which would increase the volume of the question: Why? Why does this death and the story in which we find it carry this power? It seems to go well beyond any one articulate explanation, and it certainly goes way beyond the boundaries of explicit Christian faith. I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on. Skeptics may well continue to see the execution of Jesus as just one among thousands of crucifixions carried out by the Romans in the Middle East. But for reasons that seem to go beyond mere cultural traditions, this particular death still carries enormous evocative power. And just as in the Middle Ages many found that they could relate to that story by meditating on the “instruments of the Passion” (the scourge, the crown of thorns, the nails, and so forth), so today various human elements of the story—the cockcrow as Peter is denying that he knows Jesus, the kiss by which Judas betrays his master—have become proverbial. They seem to sum up the way in which we humans get things horribly wrong, but at the same time they do so within a larger and more powerful context of meaning. When we come to more explicitly Christian presentations, the same point emerges all the more powerfully, especially when we notice how the cross, even though it’s such a simple symbol, somehow resists being turned into a mere cliché. In Roland Joffé’s award-winning 1986 movie The Mission, the cross in various forms haunts the whole narrative. The story begins with the death of one of the early Jesuit missionaries to the remote South American tribe of the Guarani. The tribesmen tie him to a wooden cross and send him over the vast Iguazu Falls, providing the movie with its poster image. The story ends with the massacre of the unresisting leaders, carrying the symbols of the crucifixion in procession, as the Portuguese colonial forces, bent on enslaving the natives rather than evangelizing them, close in and open fire. The meaning of the cross—especially its stark opposition to the world’s ways of power—is allowed to hang like a great question mark over the entire narrative. More explicit again are the many ways in which the cross has been described in the classics of Christian literature. In John Bunyan’s famous Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the hero, Christian, is trudging along, weighed down with a huge burden. Eventually he comes to a place where, in Bunyan’s matchless description:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the languages of the day, “resurrection” didn’t mean “going to heaven”; it didn’t mean that Jesus, or perhaps his “soul,” had “survived” in some nonbodily sense. That was precisely what it did not mean. There were words to denote that kind of non-bodily postmortem survival. Many people in many cultures would have found it quite normal to envisage such a survival for someone recently dead. The word ‘resurrection’ was different. It meant a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead. Many first-century Jews believed in “the resurrection of the body” in this sense. But for them it was to be a great final event in which all God’s people would be raised from the dead in the end. It would be the launching point of God’s new world, his new creation, the “age to come.” It would happen to all God’s people in the end, not to one person, inconveniently and out of sequence (as it were) in the middle of history, with all the muddle and mess of the world still going on around it. As I and others have argued in detail elsewhere, the only way we can make sense of the first century is to say that Jesus’s first followers really did believe he had been bodily raised from the dead and that this meant that God’s “new age” had somehow begun. The only way we can make sense of that belief is to say that they were not deluded or deceived, but were telling the truth, even though it was a truth for which the world was unready: that Jesus really was fully and bodily alive again, indeed more fully and more bodily alive than before. He had gone through death and out the other side, and his body itself was the start of the new creation. This wasn’t a matter of “resuscitation,” but of a new, transformed kind of body. And—though this takes more explanation, to which I alluded in the previous chapter—this new body seemed to be equally at home in the two interlocking dimensions of created reality, what the Bible calls “heaven” and “earth,” that is, God’s space and our space. All of this and much more is given with the extraordinary and totally unexpected event of Jesus’s resurrection. And with the resurrection we find the beginnings of the interpretation of the crucifixion. The cross meant what it meant in the light of what happened next.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It had a political meaning: “We’re in charge here, and you and your nation count for nothing.” It therefore had a theological or religious meaning: the goddess Roma and Caesar, the son of a god, were superior to any and all local gods. As Jesus of Nazareth hung dying that Friday afternoon, all those meanings would have been deeply intuited and understood not only by the Roman soldiers, but by the weeping women at the foot of the cross and the disgraced disciples behind their locked doors. Unless we grasp and hang on to not only the physical horror of the cross, but also its multiple symbolic meanings in late antiquity, we will fail to understand why the early preaching of the cross was what it was. We will fail too to understand the questions the historian and theologian must ask: How and why did the cross so quickly acquire a radically different symbolic meaning? And what precisely did that revolutionary meaning say about God, the world, Israel, and the human race? All this means that when we are attempting to understand the crucifixion of Jesus, to think the early Christians’ thoughts after them, we are entering a dark and dangerous area. We should not expect to be able to “capture” this theme, to summarize it in an easy slogan. The early Christians’ shorthand summaries point beyond themselves into areas with which the thought of our own day, including contemporary Christian thought, is not nearly as familiar as it should be. Just as the resurrection of Jesus cannot be fitted into any other worldview, but must be either rejected altogether or allowed to reshape existing worldviews around itself, so the cross itself demands the rethinking of categories. We cannot capture it; to be Christian means, among other things, that it has captured us. If we make it our own too easily, fitting it into the theories and preachers’ illustrations that explain it all neatly, we will have shrunk it, reduced it to a size that we can manage and perhaps manipulate. The aim of the present book is to do the opposite: to point to new visions more robustly biblical and more deeply revolutionary of what the cross meant to the first Christians and even to Jesus himself. Within the world of Greece and Rome there is a remarkable feature that some have seen as helping to explain how the cross of Jesus so quickly acquired its specific meaning, that Jesus died “for us,” “for our sins,” and so on. The idea of someone dying for someone else, so familiar from Christian statements of the gospel, is far more clearly visible in ancient pagan literature than in ancient Jewish literature. (It is, in fact, hardly there at all in ancient Israel, though the exceptions are important too, as we shall see.) No fewer than six of Euripides’s plays have this as a major theme.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  17–19), and then with the Temple in Jerusalem itself (21:28–29; 24:6; 25:8). And the new life of this new community was itself anchored in worship, declaring “the powerful things God has done” (2:11), establishing a new pattern of life centered upon “the teaching of the apostles and the common life,” “the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42), a life that, to begin with at least, tried to hold together the ancient Temple and the ordinary domestic sphere: Day by day they were all together attending the Temple. They broke bread in their various houses, and ate their food with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and standing in favor with all the people. (2:46–47) Many of the subsequent scenes in Acts focus upon the new life of worship and the ways in which, through this new pattern of life, the apostles found themselves standing, priestlike, at the uncomfortable intersection of heaven and earth, drawing both together in scripture-based worship and intercession and indeed in danger and martyrdom. Scenes like Acts 4:24–31 make the point well enough. Another graphic example is provided by Stephen’s witnessing of Jesus’s standing at the right hand of God and then joining with Jesus’s own intercession by praying for his murderers (7:56–60). These are essentially priestly scenes. Acts tells the story of the early church as the story of the powerful personal Presence and the reconstituted worship of Israel’s God, the world’s creator. Second, then, there is the hope for the worldwide rule of this God. Out of worship and prayer there grows witness; and the “witness” is not simply about people saying, “I’ve had this experience; perhaps you might like it too,” but about people announcing that a new state of affairs has come into being. This too begins from the day of Pentecost, as we have seen, when the disciples announced to the startled crowds that the ancient prophecies had been fulfilled, that “forgiveness of sins” had happened as an event in real space and time, and that the whole world was now called to order in the name of its creator and restorer. To announce Jesus as Israel’s Messiah is to say that this is now happening and “forgiveness of sins” is the key to it all. This witness continues through the many different scenes of gospel announcement: Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, Peter to Cornelius in Acts 10, and so on. It reaches a first decisive climax in chapter 12, when Herod Agrippa I begins a serious attack on the church but is forestalled, first by Peter’s angelic release from prison and then by his own sudden death. Luke’s comment makes the position clear: Herod died, “but God’s word grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:24). Here is the vital note of kingdom: the kingdoms of the world turn out to be, in ultimate terms, powerless against the kingdom of God.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is the primary problem of Romans 1. It is the problem to which Paul refers in the second half of 3:23. And it is the problem that is then addressed directly in 3:24–26, where Jesus himself is put forward by the creator God as the place and the means of the fresh meeting between the true God and his human creatures. That is why, when describing Abraham’s faith, Paul indicates that the patriarch reversed the idolatry: “He grew strong in faith and gave glory to God” (4:20). And that is why, immediately after the end of the whole argument, Paul sums up to the point he has reached in the cultic language of 5:1–2, where those who are justified have “access” to the divine grace and celebrate the “hope of the glory of God.” The first thing that is missing from the usual line of thought, then, is any attempt to show how Paul deals not just with “sin” itself, but with the idolatry that lies behind it and the ensuing loss of “glory.” The second thing missing from the usual account is any attempt to show how 3:21–26 fits with the line of thought Paul introduced in 2:17–24. (Here I develop further the point I mentioned briefly a moment ago.) This passage too has been squashed out of shape, in this case by readers assuming that Paul is here simply talking about “the Jew” as a special case within the “works contract.” In this “usual” reading, Paul is merely rubbing in the point that all humans are sinful. Jews may think they are morally superior to Gentiles, but in fact they are not. It is of course true that in 3:19–20 Paul does indeed conclude that nobody, whether Jew or Gentile, can be “in the right before God.” The Torah itself makes this clear. Paul then hammers the same point home again in 3:23: “All sinned, and fell short of God’s glory.” But this overall argument (that all human beings are sinful, and that Jews are no exception) cannot be allowed to nullify the specific and different point that 2:17–3:9 is actually making. This too is vital if we are to understand the inner dynamic of 3:21–26.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “I have a date,” she said, reaching for the next book to sign. “After that,” he said, and I liked his self-confidence, though he wasn’t her type, being chubby, dark, and dressed in a suit from the Salvation Army. She wanted the shy blond, of course, way younger than her, who wanted to be a poet too. He was the one who came home with us. I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive; it smelled of wood and green tea. A handful of stars appeared in the sky, but in L.A. none of the constellations were the right ones, so I connected them up in new arrangements: the Spider, the Wave, the Guitar. When he left, I came out into the big room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. “Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.” The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after. I gazed at the white oleanders she had arranged on the coffee table that morning, three clusters of blossoms representing heaven, man, and earth, and thought about the music of her lovers’ voices in the dark, their soft laughter, the smell of the incense. I touched the flowers. Heaven. Man. I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind. ALL THAT SUMMER , I went with her to the magazine. She never thought far enough ahead to put me in a Y program, and I never mentioned the possibility of summer school. I enjoyed school itself, but it was torture for me to try to fit in as a girl among other girls. Girls my own age were a different species entirely, their concerns as foreign as the Dogons of Mali. Seventh grade had been particularly painful, and I waited for the moment I could be with my mother again. The art room of Cinema Scene, with its ink pens and a carousel of colored pencils, table-sized paper, overlays and benday dots, border tape, and discarded headlines and photographs that I could wax and collage, was my paradise. I liked the way the adults talked around me; they forgot I was there and said the most amazing things. Today, the writers and the art director, Marlene, gossiped about the affair between the publisher and the editor of the magazine. “A bizarre bit of Santa Ana madness,” my mother commented from the pasteup table. “That beaky anorexic and the toupeed Chihuahua.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 10: Further, it is written (Ps. 33:2): “I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall always be in my mouth.” But the solemn festivals were instituted for the praise of God. Therefore it was not fitting that certain days should be fixed for keeping solemn festivals; so that it seems that there was no suitable cause for the ceremonies relating to holy things. On the contrary, The Apostle says (Heb. 8:4) that those who “offer gifts according to the law . . . serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things. As it was answered to Moses, when he was to finish the tabernacle: See, says He, that thou make all things according to the pattern which was shown thee on the mount.” But that is most reasonable, which presents a likeness to heavenly things. Therefore the ceremonies relating to holy things had a reasonable cause. I answer that, The chief purpose of the whole external worship is that man may give worship to God. Now man’s tendency is to reverence less those things which are common, and indistinct from other things; whereas he admires and reveres those things which are distinct from others in some point of excellence. Hence too it is customary among men for kings and princes, who ought to be reverenced by their subjects, to be clothed in more precious garments, and to possess vaster and more beautiful abodes. And for this reason it behooved special times, a special abode, special vessels, and special ministers to be appointed for the divine worship, so that thereby the soul of man might be brought to greater reverence for God. In like manner the state of the Old Law, as observed above [2116](A[2]; Q[100] , A[12]; Q[101], A[2]), was instituted that it might foreshadow the mystery of Christ. Now that which foreshadows something should be determinate, so that it may present some likeness thereto. Consequently, certain special points had to be observed in matters pertaining to the worship of God. Reply to Objection 1: The divine worship regards two things: namely, God Who is worshipped; and men, who worship Him. Accordingly God, Who is worshipped, is confined to no bodily place: wherefore there was no need, on His part, for a tabernacle or temple to be set up. But men, who worship Him, are corporeal beings: and for their sake there was need for a special tabernacle or temple to be set up for the worship of God, for two reasons. First, that through coming together with the thought that the place was set aside for the worship of God, they might approach thither with greater reverence. Secondly, that certain things relating to the excellence of Christ’s Divine or human nature might be signified by the arrangement of various details in such temple or tabernacle.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. Christ, when He had foretold all that should come upon Jerusalem, went forth out of the temple, He, who while He was in it, had upheld the temple that it should not fall. And so each man, being the temple of God by reason of the Spirit of God dwelling in him, is himself the cause of his being deserted, that Christ should depart from him. It is worthy of note how they shew Him the buildings of the temple, as though He had never seen them. We reply, that when Christ had foretold the destruction that should come upon the temple, His disciples were amazed at the thought that so magnificent buildings should be utterly ruined, and therefore they shew them to Him to move Him to pity, that He would not do what He had threatened. And because the constitution of human nature is wonderful, being made the temple of God, the disciples and the rest of the saints confessing the wonderful working of God in respect of the forming of men, intercede before the face of Christ, that He would not forsake the human race for their sins. RABANUS. The historical sense is clear, that in the forty-second year after the Lord’s passion, the city and temple were overthrown under the Roman Emperors Vespasian and Titus. REMIGIUS. So it was ordained of God, that as soon as the light of grace was revealed, the temple with its ceremonies should be taken out of the way, lest any weakling in the faith, beholding all the things instituted of the Lord and hallowed by the Prophets yet abiding, might be gradually drawn away from the purity of the faith to a carnal Judaism. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. Ixxv.) How means He this, that one stone shall not be left upon another? Either as conveying the notion of its utter overthrow; or with respect to the place in which it stood, for its parts were broken up to its very foundations. But I would add, that, after the fate it underwent, the most captious might be satisfied that its very fragments have perished. JEROME. Figuratively; When the Lord departed from the temple, all the buildings of the Law and the structure of the Commandments were so overthrown, that none of them could be fulfilled by the Jews, but, the Head being taken away, all the parts were at war among themselves. ORIGEN. Every man also, who, by taking into him the word of God, is become a temple, if after sinning he yet retains in part the traces of faith and religion, his temple is in part destroyed, and in part standing. But he who after sin has no regard for himself is gradually alienated, until he has altogether forsaken the living God, and so one stone is not left upon another of God’s commandments, which he has not thrown down.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  To these questions the New Testament writers offer an answer that is so explosive, so unexpected, so revolutionary, that it has remained entirely off the radar for most modern readers, including modern Christian readers. To take the most obvious example, the Gospel of John says: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14). The word for “lived” here is eskēnosen, “tabernacled,” “pitched his tent.” John is saying that in Jesus the new tabernacle, the new Temple, has been built, and the divine Glory has returned at last. The “Word” who was and is God has become flesh. The vehicle of this glory is the “father’s only son”: picking up 2 Samuel 7 and the related psalms, the evangelist is declaring that the ancient promises and the long-awaited hopes have been fulfilled in this Messiah, this Jesus, this Davidic son of God. Through this Jesus we glimpse that the very phrase “son of God,” like the tabernacle itself, was a building designed for God himself to dwell in. Readers are invited to see the creative Word through whom all things were made coming as a human being and, as Isaiah had promised, unveiling the divine Glory before all the nations. Once we understand the image-bearing purpose of human beings, this is perhaps not so hard to imagine as some have supposed. As John’s gospel progresses, we come to realize that the moment when that Glory is fully unveiled is the moment when Jesus is crucified. This is part of John’s dramatic and revolutionary theology of the cross. We should note what all this means. Modern Christians need to be reminded regularly that Jews in this period did not perceive themselves to be living within a story of an angry moralistic God who threatened people that he would send them to hell if they displeased him. Nor were they hoping that, if somehow they could make things all right, they would go to a place called “heaven” and be with God forever. Some ancient pagans thought like that; most ancient Jews did not.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  You may begin to discover how differently your whole body acts and reacts, for example, while walking, talking, driving, working on the computer and standing in line at the grocery store. There is no winning or losing, success or failure, with these brief daytime trips into the body consciousness. The only objective is to continue the journey, exploring a little further each time with a sense of wonder. Try to keep yourself in the frame of mind that it is you that is living the experiences no matter how it feels. Try to accept blockages and resistances as part of the experience without holding on, censoring, forcing or pushing them away. With each and every experience, preface your observation with the words, “Now I am aware of …” or “Now I am experiencing …” This may seem silly and repetitious, but it is useful in establishing an attitude of exploration and self-acceptance. There is no need for struggle or change. Observation of what you are sensing is the ticket. Exercise 2: Differentiating Sensations, Images and Thoughts Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down, but not on a surface that is too soft or where your head is too elevated if you decide to recline. First attend to what you see, hear and smell in the external environment. Use the words, “Now I am aware of this or that …” Then softly invite your focus inward to the surface and interiors of your experiencing. Note any images (pictures), muscular tensions, visceral sensations or emotional feelings. Allow yourself to become aware of when you switch from feeling or sensing to thinking, and then gently draw yourself back to inner sensing. You might say to yourself something like, “And when I have the thought that … what I notice in my body is …” At first you may find it difficult to differentiate between sensations, emotions and thoughts. Give yourself time as you accept the perplexity of this challenge. With practice you will become much more clear and adept at untangling the various aspects of body/mind. Trust that over time your steadfastness will bring with it, potentially, rich opportunities for extending your experiential edge . Exercise 3: Focusing on One Element of Experience This time as you explore your experience, notice and label your sensations, images and thoughts as they come into your awareness. When you peek inside, notice which of these three elements appears to be most salient. Then, one by one, shift your attention by focusing exclusively on images, then on physical sensations, next on feelings, and finally on thoughts. It is possible that certain experiences will just pop up into awareness from seemingly out of nowhere. This may surprise or even startle you and cause your “thinking mind” to jump in and try to understand what is going on. Resist this habit. It will take you away from the developing focal experience.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  TOWARDS SELF-RESTRAINT I have described in the last chapter how Kasturbai’s illness was instrumental in bringing about some changes in my diet. At a later stage more changes were introduced for the sake of supporting brahmacharya. The first of these was the giving up of milk. It was from Raychandbhai that I first learnt that milk stimulated animal passion. Books on vegetarianism strengthened the idea, but so long as I had not taken the brahmacharya vow I could not make up my mind to forego milk. I had long realized that milk was not necessary for supporting the body, but it was not easy to give it up. While the necessity for avoiding milk in the interests of self- restraint was growing upon me, I happened to come across some literature from Calcutta, describing the tortures to which cows and buffaloes were subjected by their keepers. This had a wonderful effect on me. I discussed it with Mr. Kallenbach. Though I have introduced Mr. Kallenbach to the readers of the history of Satyagraha in South Africa, and referred to him in a previous chapter, I think it necessary to say something more about him here. We met quite by accident. He was a friend of Mr. Khan’s, and as the latter had discovered deep down in him a vein of other-worldliness he introduced him to me. When I came to know him I was startled at his love of luxury and extravagance. But at our very first meeting, he asked searching questions concerning matters of religion. We incidentally talked of Gautam Buddha’s renunciation. Our acquaintance soon ripened into very close friendship, so much so that we thought alike, and he was convinced that he must carry out in his life the changes I was making in mine.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption. — The first time I remember being drawn to study medicine was at a summer camp when I was about fourteen years old. My cousin Michael kept me up all night explaining the intricacies of how kidneys work, how they secrete the body’s waste materials and then reabsorb the chemicals that keep the system in balance. I was riveted by his account of the miraculous way the body functions. Later, during every stage of my medical training, whether I was studying surgery, cardiology, or pediatrics, it was obvious to me that the key to healing was understanding how the human organism works. When I began my psychiatry rotation, however, I was struck by the contrast between the incredible complexity of the mind and the ways that we human beings are connected and attached to one another, and how little psychiatrists knew about the origins of the problems they were treating. Would it be possible one day to know as much about brains, minds, and love as we do about the other systems that make up our organism? We are obviously still years from attaining that sort of detailed understanding, but the birth of three new branches of science has led to an explosion of knowledge about the effects of psychological trauma, abuse, and neglect. Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us. Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  It was at about this time that I met Antonio Damasio at a small think tank that Dan Schacter, the chair of the psychology department at Harvard, had organized. In a series of brilliant scientific articles and books Damasio clarified the relationship among body states, emotions, and survival. A neurologist who has treated hundreds of people with various forms of brain damage, he became fascinated with consciousness and with identifying the areas of the brain necessary for knowing what you feel. He has devoted his career to mapping out what is responsible for our experience of “self.” The Feeling of What Happens is, for me, his most important book, and reading it was a revelation.[5] Damasio starts by pointing out the deep divide between our sense of self and the sensory life of our bodies. As he poetically explains, “Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.…One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.”[6] He goes on to describe how this “screen” can work in our favor by enabling us to attend to pressing problems in the outside world. Yet it has a cost: “It tends to prevent us from sensing the possible origin and nature of what we call self.”[7] Building on the century-old work of William James, Damasio argues that the core of our self-awareness rests on the physical sensations that convey the inner states of the body: [P]rimordial feelings provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence. These primordial feelings reflect the current state of the body along varied dimensions,…along the scale that ranges from pleasure to pain, and they originate at the level of the brain stem rather than the cerebral cortex. All feelings of emotion are complex musical variations on primordial feelings.[8]

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When we read Isaiah 40–55 as a whole, we find that the motif of redemptive suffering in chapter 53 is new. Up to this point in the poem there is the promise of redemption from suffering, on the one hand, and the strange vocation of suffering for the “servant,” on the other. But only in the final poem (52:13–53:12) are the two brought together. When this happens, as in many great poems and indeed other art forms, we realize that the new thing has grown organically out of the varied elements of the poem as a whole, so that its meaning is not isolated, a strange new idea sitting by itself, but rather is held in place by the major themes of the surrounding chapters. This observation will be all the more important when we consider the striking ways in which Isaiah 53, above all other passages, is used in the New Testament as the scriptural clue to the meaning of Jesus’s death. It is not a proof-text taken out of the context of either Isaiah 40–55 as a whole (or 40–66 as a whole) or the entire larger narrative of Israel we have been considering. It is simultaneously a quintessential summing up of the plight of Israel and the promise of deliverance, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a unique new statement of the hope that this plight and this promise would somehow dovetail together. The “servant” represents Israel’s plight (“You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified”; Isa. 49:3); but then the “servant” becomes not simply a personification of the people as a whole, but a different figure, one who would stand over against the rest of the people, even over against any righteous remnant (since in 50:10 those who “fear YHWH” are those who “obey the voice of his servant”). Like many puzzling poems, this one keeps many of its secrets hidden, teasing subsequent generations to ferret them out. And that, of course, is what many early Christians thought they could do with this passage in relation to Jesus. The problem comes, I think, when the central thrust of Isaiah 53—that this suffering was the means, not merely the occasion, of the forgiveness of sins and all that went with it—is taken out of the context, both literary and historical, in which it is found and made to serve a different narrative.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  He was launching a revolution. What he did in Jerusalem brings all this into sharp focus. By itself, his dramatic action in the Temple might have various interpretations, as it has had in much subsequent discussion. Where people have tried to turn Jesus’s one-off kingdom movement into a “religion,” it has been seen as an attempt to clean up the “religious” establishment, to oppose commercialism, and so forth. This is all very worthy and no doubt necessary from time to time; but it has almost nothing to do with a one-off new Passover, a unique Exodus moment. When we put Jesus’s Temple action (Mark 11:12–18) into a Passover context, however, it suddenly carries the memory of Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh. This echo is heightened when we add in material (Mark 13:1–31 and elsewhere) in which language about the imminent fall of the Temple awakens biblical echoes of the fall of Babylon. More particularly, what Jesus did in the Temple, interpreted (as seems most likely) as a Jeremiah-like symbolic prediction of its forthcoming destruction, must have had to do in some way with his aim of declaring that Israel’s God, returning to his people at last, had found the Temple sadly wanting and was establishing something different instead. This in turn points back once more to the Exodus. Moses had told Pharaoh all along that the point of the Israelites leaving Egypt was ultimately in order to worship their God (Exod. 3:12, 18; 4:23; 5:1–3; 7:16; 8:1, 20;9:1, 13; 10:3, 24–26). The climax of the book of Exodus is not the giving of the law in chapter 20, but the construction of the tabernacle, the “microcosm” or “little world” that symbolized the new creation, the place where heaven and earth would come together as always intended. If Jesus did and said things that pointed to a “new Exodus,” many in his day would have understood this to mean some kind of renewal or even replacement of the present Temple. Those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, believed that the present Temple hierarchy was irredeemably corrupt and that they themselves constituted the true Temple, the place where Israel’s God was now at home and was to be worshipped and served. Such things were indeed thinkable at the time, even if it was extremely dangerous to attempt to put them into practice. Did Jesus believe something like that?

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But this provides a clue to how Paul at least sees the logic of the cross underneath the surface of the poem. The Messiah was lord of all, yet became a slave. He was all-powerful, but became weak. He was equal with the Father, yet refused to take advantage of this status. Add to this the echoes throughout this passage from Isaiah 40–55, particularly the “servant” poems, and we can go one step farther: he was innocent, yet he died the death of the guilty. This is how the cross establishes God’s kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death. The kingdom of God is established by destroying the power of idolatry, and idols get their power because humans, in sinning, give it to them. Deal with sin, and the idols are reduced to a tawdry heap of rubble. Deal with sin, and the world will glorify God. There are many remarkable things about this poem, but we should note one in particular. Paul wrote this letter in the mid-50s of the first century, that is, less than thirty years after Jesus’s execution. Either he wrote this poem for use in this letter, which is quite possible, or he was quoting a poem that either he or somebody else had already written. The poem is a masterpiece of compressed biblical theology. One can only stand in awe at the combination of insight and expression that could encapsulate so much in a mere seventy-six Greek words. What this tells me is that already in the very early church it was common coin, first, that Jesus’s death established God’s kingdom; second, that this came about because of his servant-shaped identification with sinful humanity, sharing their death and so bearing their sin; and third, that this action was not something Jesus did despite the fact that he was “in God’s form” and “equal with God,” but rather something that he did because he was those things. In whatever way the New Testament tells the story of the cross, it is always the story of self-giving divine love.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The first day of school came too soon for my fears. Thanks to remnants from my uncle the tailor, my mother was able to outfit me with a pair of brown pants and an overall apron of black poplin, a material the mere smell of which can still remind me of elementary school. My father had been able to get from Bodineau, his supplier, a fine calfskin school satchel. This was my only scholar’s luxury. I was allowed to wear my Saturday jockey cap, which added considerably to my awe and to the solemnity of the occasion. Still, nothing much happened. There was too much confusion, during those first few days of the school year, to allow much attention to be lavished on us, so that I had time to become accustomed to my new surroundings. Without any serious shocks, my sense of alienation was overcome by my curiosity. The school was situated in some old stables of the Bey’s palace which had been purchased advantageously by the Alliance Israélite and subjected to minimal alterations; to me, it all seemed most beautiful. Except on a few Saturday walks, I had never had a chance to see any trees or greenery, and our schoolyard had two tall rows of eucalyptus trees that seemed huge to me and elicited my constant admiration. All the classrooms were small, with narrow windows that were closed with dirty gratings; I soon found them warmly intimate. My schoolmates impressed me less favorably, all of them being too noisy and brutal for my liking. Every morning, before leaving home with my fine satchel slung from my shoulder and my cap pushed down over my eyebrows, I marked time, on our doorstep, with my shoes. I insisted that my mother say, before I leave: “Peace be with you!” Only then did I set forth confidently. But sometimes my mother was still angry from some outburst and would utter a curse: “Go away! May death carry you off!” Then I would immediately feel a shudder go right through me, and all day I would fear some dreadful event. Never have I been able to rid myself of this magic spell of language. Whenever a colleague curses me, “May you perish,” I feel cold at the back of my neck and foresee the horrors of death. Whenever anyone says “Drop dead!” I can already feel myself begin to fail. It is as if language, far from being a transparent tool, really shares some of the nature of the things it designates as well as some of their weight.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  dominating figure of Moses who provides our primary understandings. That is to say, the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else. That urging is fundamental for this discussion, for I am urging in parallel fashion that if the church is to be faithful it must be formed and ordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources external to its own life. [4] The ministry of Moses, as George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald have most recently urged, represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharaoh’s Egypt. [5] The newness and radical innovations of Moses and Israel in this period can hardly be overstated. Most of us are probably so used to these narratives that we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses. It is clear that the emergence of Israel by the hand of Moses cannot be extrapolated from any earlier reality. Obviously nothing like the Kenite hypothesis (that Moses learned his monotheism from his father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite) or the monotheism of the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt (instituted by Pharaoh Akhenaton) will help us at all. While there are some hints that the God of Israel is known to be the God of the fathers (see. Exod 15:2), that evidence is at best obscure. In any case, the overriding experience of Exodus is decisive and not some memory now only hinted at in the tradition. However those antecedents are finally understood, the appearance of a new social reality is unprecedented. Israel in the thirteenth century is indeed ex nihilo. And that new social reality drives us to the category of revelation. [6] Israel can only be understood in terms of the new call of God and his assertion of an alternative social reality. Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause. Theological cause without social political reality is only of interest to a professional religionist, and social political reality without theological cause need not concern us here. But it is being driven by the one to the other that requires us to speak of and wonder about the call to the prophetic. [7]