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 Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I love how the Gospels start, with John the Baptist eating bugs and baptizing people. The religious people started getting baptized because it had become popular, and John yells at them and calls them snakes. He says the water won’t do anything for them, it will only get their snakeskins wet. But if they meant it, if they had faith that Jesus was coming and was real, then Jesus would ignite the kingdom life within them. I love that because for so long religion was my false gospel. But there was no magic in it, no wonder, no awe, no kingdom life burning in my chest. And when I get tempted by that same stupid Christian religion, I go back to the beginning of the Gospels and am comforted that there is something more than the emptiness of ritual. God will ignite the kingdom life within me, the Bible says. That’s mysticism. It isn’t a formula that I am figuring out. It is something God does. One night I watched the sunset till the stars faded in and, while looking up, my mind, or my heart, I do not know which, realized how endless it all was. I laid myself down on some grass and reached my hand directly out toward where? I don’t know. There is no up and down. There has never been an up and down. Things like up and down were invented so as not to scare children, so as to reduce mystery to math. The truth is we do not know there is an end to material existence. It may go on forever, which is something the mind cannot understand. My friend Jason and I went on a trip to Joshua Tree and Death Valley, and he had a map folded across his lap nearly the entire trip. Even when I was driving, he had the map out, following along with his finger the trajectory of the car, noting how close we were to certain towns, certain lakes. Jason liked to know where we were on the map (and so did I, as a matter of fact). But I was afraid to tell Jason about the universe, how scientists haven’t found the edge of it, of how nobody knows exactly where we are on the map.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  We met in Commons—Penny, Nadine, Mitch, Iven, Tony, and I. Tony said I had an idea. They looked at me. I told them that Tony was lying and I didn’t have an idea at all. They looked at Tony. Tony gave me a dirty look and told me to tell them the idea. I told them I had a stupid idea that we couldn’t do without getting attacked. They leaned in. I told them that we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said “Confess your sins.” Penny put her hands over her mouth. Nadine smiled. Iven laughed. Mitch started drawing the designs for the booth on a napkin. Tony nodded his head. I wet my pants. “They may very well burn it down,” Nadine said. “I will build a trapdoor,” Mitch said with his finger in the air. “I like it, Don.” Iven patted me on the back. “I don’t want anything to do with it,” Penny said. “Neither do I,” I told her. “Okay, you guys.” Tony gathered everybody’s attention. “Here’s the catch.” He leaned in a little and collected his thoughts. “We are not actually going to accept confessions.” We all looked at him in confusion. He continued, “We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.” All of us sat there in silence because it was obvious that something beautiful and true had hit the table with a thud. We all thought it was a great idea, and we could see it in each other’s eyes. It would feel so good to apologize, to apologize for the Crusades, for Columbus and the genocide he committed in the Bahamas in the name of God, apologize for the missionaries who landed in Mexico and came up through the West slaughtering Indians in the name of Christ. I wanted so desperately to say that none of this was Jesus, and I wanted so desperately to apologize for the many ways I had misrepresented the Lord. I could feel that I had betrayed the Lord by judging, by not being willing to love the people He had loved and only giving lip service to issues of human rights.

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

  It follows, Came Mary Magdalen, and the other Mary, &c. Late runs woman for pardon, who had run early to sin; in paradise she had taken up unbelief, from the sepulchre she hastes to take up faith; she now hastens to snatch life from death, who had before snatched death from life. And it is not, They come, but came, (in the singular,) for in mystery and not by accident, the two came under one name. She came, but altered; a woman, changed in life, not in name; in virtue, not in sex. The women go before the Apostles, bearing to the Lord’s sepulchre a type of the Churches; the two Marys, to wit. For Mary is the name of Christ’s mother; and one name is twice repeated for two women, because herein is figured the Church coming out of the two nations, the Gentiles and the Jews, and being yet one. Mary came to the sepulchre, as to the womb of the resurrection, that Christ might be the second time born out of the sepulchre of faith, who after the flesh had been born of her womb; and that as a virgin had borne Him into this life present, so a sealed sepulchre might bring Him forth into life eternal. It is proof of Deity to have left a womb virgin after birth, and no less to have come forth in the body from a closed sepulchre. JEROME. And, behold, there was a great earthquake. Our Lord, Son at once of God and man, according to His twofold nature of Godhead and of flesh, gives a sign one while of His greatness, another while of His lowliness. Thus, though now it was man who was crucified, and man who was buried, yet the things that were done around shew the Son of God. HILARY. The earthquake is the might of the resurrection, when the sting of death being blunted, and its darkness illuminated, there is stirred up a quaking of the powers beneath, as the Lord of the heavenly powers rises again. CHRYSOSTOM. Or the earthquake was to rouse and waken the women, who had come to anoint the body; and as all these things were done in the night-time, it was probable that some of them had fallen asleep. BEDE. (ubi sup.) The earthquake at the Resurrection, as also at the Crucifixion, signifies that worldly hearts must be first moved to penitence by a health-giving fear through belief in His Passion and Resurrection.

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Pecc. mer. et remiss. c. xxxii) Many dying in the wilderness from the attack of the serpents, Moses, by commandment of the Lord, lifted up a brazen serpent: and those who looked upon it were immediately healed. The lifting up of the serpent is the death of Christ; the cause, by a certain mode of construction, being put for the effect. The serpent was the cause of death, inasmuch as he persuaded man into that sin, by which he merited death. Our Lord, however, did not transfer sin, i. e. the poison of the serpent, to his flesh, but death; in order that in the likeness of sinful flesh, there might be punishment without sin, by virtue of which sinful flesh might be delivered both from punishment and from sin. THEOPHYLACT. (in loc.) See then the aptness of the figure. The figure of the serpent has the appearance of the beast, but not its poison: in the same way Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh, being free from sin. By Christ’s being lifted up, understand His being suspended on high, by which suspension He sanctified the air, even as He had sanctified the earth by walking upon it. Herein too is typified the glory of Christ: for the height of the cross was made His glory: for in that He submitted to be judged, He judged the prince of this world; for Adam died justly, because he sinned; our Lord unjustly, because He did no sin. So He overcame him, who delivered Him over to death, and thus delivered Adam from death. And in this the devil found himself vanquished, that he could not upon the cross torment our Lord into hating His murderers: but only made Him love and pray for them the more. In this way the cross of Christ was made His lifting up, and glory. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxvii. 2) Wherefore He does not say, ‘The Son of man must be suspended, but lifted up, a more honourable term, but coming near the figure. He uses the figure to shew that the old dispensation is akin to the new, and to shew on His hearers’ account that He suffered voluntarily; and that His death issued in life. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xii. c. 11) As then formerly he who looked to the serpent that was lifted up, was healed of its poison, and saved from death; so now he who is conformed to the likeness of Christ’s death by faith and the grace of baptism, is delivered both from sin by justification, and from death by the resurrection: as He Himself saith; That whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. What need then is there that the child should be conformed by baptism to the death of Christ, if he be not altogether tainted by the poisonous bite of the serpent?

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

  I answer: as we said in Arts. 4 and 6, the things which belong to faith by reason of what they are in themselves are the things which we shall enjoy in eternal life, together with the means whereby we are brought to eternal life. Now we are told that we shall see two things, namely, the hidden Godhead, the vision of which is our blessedness, and the mystery of the humanity of Christ, through whom we have access into the glory of the sons of God, as it is said in Rom. 5:2. Hence it is said also in John 17:3: “ And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. ” The first distinction for faith, consequently, is between what pertains to the majesty of the Godhead and what pertains to the mystery of the manhood of Christ, which is called “ the mystery of godliness ” in I Tim. 3:16. Three things are proposed for our belief concerning the majesty of the Godhead: first, the Unity of the Godhead, to which the first article refers; second, the Trinity of the Persons, on which there are three articles corresponding to the three Persons; third, the works proper to the Godhead. The first of these works is the “ order ” of nature, concerning which the article on the creation is proposed to us. The second is the “ order ” of grace, concerning which all that relates to the salvation of man is proposed to us in one article. The third is the “ order ” of glory, concerning which there is another article on the resurrection of the body and on eternal life. There are thus seven articles pertaining to the Godhead. There are likewise seven articles concerning the humanity of Christ, of which the first refers to the incarnation, or the conception of Christ, the second to his virgin birth, the third to his passion, death, and burial, the fourth to his descent into hell, the fifth to his resurrection, the sixth to his ascension, and the seventh to his coming in judgment. There are thus fourteen articles in all. Some, however, distinguish twelve articles of faith, six pertaining to the Godhead, and six pertaining to the humanity. They combine the three articles on the three Persons into one, on the ground that our knowledge of the three Persons is the same. They divide the article on the work of glorification into two, which refer respectively to the resurrection of the body and to the glory of the soul. They similarly combine into one the articles on the conception and on the nativity. On the first point: by faith we hold many things concerning God which the philosophers have been unable to discover by natural reason, such as the providence and omnipotence of God, and that God alone is to be worshipped. These are all contained in the article on the unity of God.

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

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Let us examine then in the actions which Jesus did, how He teaches us to be instant in prayer to God, going apart by ourselves, and in secret, no one seeing us; putting aside also our worldly cares, that the mind may be raised up to the height of divine contemplation; and this we have marked in the fact, that Jesus went in to a mountain apart to pray. AMBROSE. Every where also He prays alone, for human wishes comprehend not the wisdom of God; and no one can be a partaker of the secrets of Christ. But not every one who prays ascends a mountain, he only who prays advancing from earthly things to higher, who is not anxious for the riches or honours of the world. All whose minds are raised above the world ascend the mountain. In the Gospel therefore you will find, that the disciples alone ascend the mountain with the Lord. But thou, O Christian, hast now the character given, the form prescribed which thou shouldest imitate; as it follows, And he continued all night in prayer to God. For what oughtest thou to do for thy salvation, when Christ continues all night in prayer for thee? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. ad Pop. Ant. 42. et in Act. c. 16. Ed. Lat.) Rise then thou also at night time. The soul is then purer, the very darkness and great silence are in themselves enough to lead us to sorrow for our sins. But if thou lookest upon the heaven itself studded with stars as with unnumbered eyes, if thou thinkest that they who wanton and do unjustly in day time are then nothing different from the dead, thou wilt loathe all human undertakings. All these things serve to raise the mind. Vain-glory then disquiets not, no tumult of passion has the mastery; fire does not so destroy the rust of iron as nightly prayer the blight of sin. He whom the heat of the sun has fevered by day is refreshed by the dew; nightly tears are better than any dew, and are proof against desire and fear. But if a man is not cherished by the dew we speak of, he withers in the day. Wherefore although thou prayest not much at night, pray once with watching, and it is enough; shew that the night belongs not only to the body, but to the soul.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was Billy Budd , an opera I recalled as a gauche, almost amateur affair, and I had not in the least expected to enjoy it; and yet, when Captain Vere’s monologue ended and the scene on board the Indomitable opened up, with the men holy-stoning the deck and singing their oppressed, surging chorus, I was covered in goose-flesh. When Billy, press-ganged from his old ship, sang his farewell to his former life and comrades—‘Farewell, old Rights o’ Man , farewell’—the tears streamed down my face. The young baritone, singing with the greatest beauty and freshness, brought an extraordinary quality of resisted pathos to Billy; in the stammering music his physiognomy, handsome and forthright and yet with a curious fleshy debility about the mouth, made me believe it as his own tragedy. None of this should have surprised me. I had not heard any music for a few days, and I was all charged up, glowing and gratified, so that my sense of everything was heightened. I felt every phrase of the music in a physical way, as if I had turned into a little orchestra myself. In the interval we had champagne, though James would only take a drop, saying it would give him a headache. He was prone to bad headaches, often of a nervous kind (for instance, when he had a clear weekend after being on call for two or three weeks he would spend it supine in a darkened room, a hand pressed to his brow). The heat and intensity of a theatre always brought on a bit of a head for him too. I think he concentrated exceptionally hard—at a concert he would either follow the score or his knuckles would be white with tension—whereas I, though I was gripped and appalled by the opera, blubbing again at the despair of the poor little Novice, his body and spirit broken by his flogging, had also had periods of several minutes’ duration when I had paid no attention at all, thinking about Phil, and sex, and what I was going to do later. My grandfather looked at me apprehensively. ‘Are you enjoying it, darling?’ he asked. ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘It’s a funny old production, but there’s something quite touching about that.’ ‘Mm—I agree. Quite unchanged since the very first performance, of course.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  They find a place to park downtown and walk through fat, wet flakes of snow into the grand foyer of the auditorium, and go stand in the box-office lines alongside hundreds of other wrestling people dressed in T-shirts bearing slogans such as PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY . Once handed their general-admission tickets, they quickly engage in a sort of semicivilized land rush, a full-on—but mostly polite—scramble inside the doors in order to secure their schools’ traditional group of seats in the Barn, their unofficially staked claims in Section 220, or Section 103, or Section 4, or wherever. Section 4, by the way: Horrible seats. A lousy view with a bad angle to the mats, stuck right at the northwest corner turn of the building. But that’s where the families and fans of Marion’s Linn-Mar High School have sat for years’ worth of State Tournaments, and the most recent group isn’t going to change now, not with Jay bearing down on history. Says one parent, very seriously, “That’s just tempting fate.” The lighting isn’t much at Veterans. The upper-level seats arc heavenward at an instant-nosebleed clip. The announcer generally comes through the loudspeakers sounding, to borrow a descrip tion from long ago, like geese farts on a muggy day. The concession lines curl sideways in snakelike patterns to accommodate the extra floor-level bleachers that are jutting their way backward from the mats; the bathrooms show their age in leaks; and when you want to go over to the wall by the entry doors to have a look at the painstakingly hand-drawn brackets for each weight class that over the course of four days here will become the living history of the tournament, you find yourself pretty quickly stuck in the middle of a human traffic jam, too many folks packed into far too small a space. You can’t move left or right without needing to circumnavigate a fellow who, from appearances, might still be wrestling today if his high school eligibility hadn’t expired sometime last century. In short, it’s just about heaven. As Doug LeClere puts it, “Every time I step inside that building the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Look: It just happened. And all I did was talk about it.” And they will miss the Barn when they go. They will miss the history and the stories and the reserved “unreserved” seating and the mat access, fifty years’ worth of good stuff. What they gain in the move down the street to the shiny new place, the one under construction now and bearing the Wells Fargo bank logo on the outside, they will lose in institutional value and the dependable sameness of the years. The new place is to be thoroughly modern and much more stylish, substantially larger, eminently comfortable, full of bells and whistles and climate control. It ought to suck just about completely.

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

  HILARY. (de Trin. c. 16.) Or, His descending from heaven is the source of His origin as conceived by the Spirit: Mary gave not His body its origin, though the natural qualities of her sex contributed its birth and increase. That He is the Son of man is from the birth of the flesh which was conceived in the Virgin. That He is in heaven is from the power of His everlasting nature, which did not contract the power of the Word of God, which is infinite, within the sphere of a finite body. Our Lord remaining in the form of a servant, far from the whole circle, inner and outer, of heaven and the world, yet as Lord of heaven and the world, was not absent therefrom. So then He came down from heaven because He was the Son of man; and He was in heaven, because the Word, which was made flesh, had not ceased to be the Word. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xii. c. 8) But thou wonderest that He was at once here, and in heaven. Yet such power hath He given to His disciples. Hear Paul, Our conversation is in heaven. (Phil. 3:20) If the man Paul walked upon earth, and had his conversation in heaven; shall not the God of heaven and earth be able to be in heaven and earth? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom xxvii. 1) That too which seemeth very lofty is still unworthy of His vastness. For He is not in heaven only, but every where, and filleth all things. But for the present He accommodates Himself to the weakness of His hearer, that by degrees He may convert him. 3:14–1514. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: 15. That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxvii. 1) Having made mention of the gift of baptism, He proceeds to the. source of it, i. e. the cross: And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up. BEDE. He introduces the teacher of the Mosaic law, to the spiritual sense of that law; by a passage from the Old Testament history, which was intended to be a figure of His Passion, and of man’s salvation.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  And as it typically has done over the past few decades, the wrestling community looks to Dan Gable to defend it, a charge that not even Gable, the most famous and beloved wrestler in modern American history, can meet. Still, he tries, which has the deleterious effect of taking him ever farther away from the University of Iowa program that he essentially molded himself. His cherished Hawkeyes, under his handpicked successor, are hemorrhaging talent, losing Iowans to places those wrestlers never even contemplated while growing up. Gable can’t seem to do a thing about that, either. Nobody trains you for this kind of stuff on the mat. Listening to people talk about Gable and quote Gable and post his sayings on their walls and treat his words as scripture, one finds it amazing that he can walk into a room without instantly drawing the air out of it. In fact, here on a school night, the man can enter the City High gymnasium and not even be recognized—that, or they’re so used to seeing him around that he no longer is capable of making a dramatic entrance. Either way, he just sort of slips in one of the side doors around the time the varsity match is ready to begin, this slow-moving man on crutches, wearing a yellow, long-sleeved Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt, sweat pants, boot-slippers and a white-lined winter cap with earflaps that button up on two sides. He wears glasses, as he has worn for years. On the top of his head, the hair has been reduced to a fading wisp. He moves purposefully but carefully, so as not to aggravate a left hip that has recently undergone its second replacement surgery. The right hip is up next, and after that Gable is hoping nothing else falls off or withers away from a body that he for years employed as, essentially, the subject of an ongoing experiment with the outer limits of self-inflicted physical torment. He moves over to the first row of bleachers, well off the far side of the mat. He has a vantage point, but not at center. His youngest girl is a statistician for the wrestling team, and his wife is out of town, so Gable basically finds himself killing time, watching a little wrestling, unapproached, unbothered. Past him, students and varsity athletes scurry back and forth, oblivious to his presence. Gable seems smaller now than ever could have been possible, considering the height and the breadth of his achievements. It is incongruous, putting this physical being together with those grand things accomplished. But, of course, no one in sports is a giant forever. In work, Gable was always something larger than his actual size—and that may be the way to describe the best of wrestling, really. The best wrestler, once upon the mat, can become something bigger and more special than he is in any other walk of his life.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I stood watching the water for some time, I’m not sure how long, until I was startled by a distant noise that made its way over the sound of the water. It was an unmusical clanging that it took me a moment to recognize as a bell, a large bell as if from a tower, though I didn’t know of any such towers in Mladost, which was built by the Communists and so built free of churches; even now the only places of worship are little clapboard affairs, American missionaries in rented halls. I didn’t know of anything in Mladost that could make this sound, grand and unlovely, a single bell, ringing twice in quick succession with each pull of the rope (I imagined), so that its lopsided toll rolled out over the water and the trees. I walked toward it, and soon I could feel the ground getting smoother, becoming a path that led upward, until finally the uneven stones became brick. It was a lovely path, immaculate as few things are here, and on the right there was a low stone wall that as the path mounted joined with another wall, plaster and brilliantly white. It was a compound of some sort, tucked here behind the blokove , something large and old, I thought, though it was perfectly maintained; the bricks in the path were old, as were the trees that overhung them. I followed the sound, the bell ringing quite close now from the other side of the wall, as the path widened until it was large enough for a car, and I realized it must extend all the way up to the road. There was a gate in the wall, two large wooden wings interrupting the stone. It was closed, but in each of these doors there was an opening in the shape of a cross, and as the ringing of the bell stopped, I peered through at the grounds within, a series of small buildings and paths through green spaces. It was a community, not a church but a monastery, which predated the district and must have been built when the neighborhood was nothing but countryside, when Sofia must have seemed at once accessible and comfortably far away. I had heard a summons for prayer, then, though I saw no movement within. There are monasteries all over the country, in most of which a single monk keeps watch, or two, they’re dying out here like everywhere else; but there was still someone ringing a summons for prayer, even if no one was around to answer it.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  There was a sketch of what the cathedral would look like on one of the boards, along with its name, SVETI PURVOMUCHENIK STEFAN , Saint Stefan the First Martyr, I thought, puzzling out the roots for first and pain, the suffix that makes a word signify a person. Printed in a larger font than the saint’s name was the project’s corporate sponsor, one of the country’s biggest banks. The site was surrounded by a fence draped with green mesh, which was torn away in places. No one was building anything now, and it didn’t look like anyone had been working there for a long time. The pillar was the only section they had really begun, though maybe they had laid foundations for the rest, I couldn’t tell because of the snow. There was also an arch, I could see now; it peeled off from the side of the pillar, and next to it were a few steps leading up to a small platform. It was going to be the entrance, then, and the pillar must have been intended for the bell tower, though they hadn’t gotten very far; there were thin metal rods extending naked a few feet beyond the concrete, an aspiration, so far as I could tell, entirely abandoned. I made my way across the road, two lanes on one side of the concrete median and two on the other, the ice more perilous than the traffic. The fence wasn’t really meant to keep anyone out, or not anymore; the metal posts were planted in concrete blocks one could move easily enough, as someone had already done where the segment of chain link was unsecured, creating a passageway I slipped through. The arch was graceful, despite the cheap material it was made of, and the whole site was like a ruin, or a ruin in reverse, caught rising rather than falling. The ground was strewn with beer bottles, cheap plastic jugs sticking up through the snow; there was no telling how long they had been there. I climbed the few stairs to the platform, which was sheltered from the snow by the arch, and here there was more refuse, a profusion of cigarette butts and plastic bags and, here and there, the discarded wrapper of a condom, the top strip torn and bent, opened hurriedly, I imagined, gripped by fingers or teeth.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I woke early the next morning. There was an eerie quality to the light seeping in around the drapes, and when I pulled them aside I saw that the air was full of snow, though the flakes were fine and not yet sticking to the ground. In the bathroom I studied my face, tilting it back and forth in the light, relieved that I could hardly see a bruise. I stepped out of my room, giving a wave to the watchman, who must have been coming to the end of his shift, and turned toward the Sea Garden, wanting to see the water again. The park wasn’t deserted this time, despite the hour and the snow; as I walked I passed old couples strolling briskly, men with their dogs, even cyclists, all out for a morning’s exercise beside the sea. Just past the entrance on the left there was a huge casino complex, from the depths of which I could hear the driving beat of dance music; there must have been a disco there, where even in the off-season the morning had yet to come. I wanted to see the water, but not just to see it; I wanted to be close to it, to imagine if not to feel the unearthly cold of it. And so I walked more purposefully through the garden, bypassing, as best I could, its more winding paths, and when I reached again the line of hotels and bars and, beyond them, the road, I didn’t retreat, I crossed the road and held my face to the wind, though it was biting and filled now with snow. Three long walkways extended from the beach into the sea, branching out at their ends into three separate promenades, like the arms, it seemed to me, of a snowflake as drawn by a child. I walked to one of these piers, which unlike the park was deserted, as was the sea, except for the gulls and, far out in the water, two huge tankers that sat unmoving at the horizon. At the near end of the pier there was a large stone sculpture, two stylized figures in robes, who might as easily have been monks as sailors and who seemed to be embracing although they were looking away from each other, one toward the sea and one toward the shore, an image of irreconcilable desires. The stone was pocked and scarred, already dissolving in the abrasive air.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Once more, you can only understand the ascension if you push out of your mind the idea of “heaven” you began with and try to imagine a more biblical picture instead. For most people today, as we’ve said already, “heaven” is a location of a completely different sort from the world in which we live. It is timeless, nonphysical, immaterial. (People sometimes say “spiritual” at this point, but that’s a misleading description of the way the early Christians thought and spoke. For them, “spiritual” had to do with the work of God’s Spirit; and God’s Spirit was at work most definitely within, not apart from, the world of space, time, and matter.) So when Luke tells the story of Jesus going up to heaven in a cloud, forty days after his resurrection, and when Paul writes of Jesus being “exalted” to heaven (e.g., Phil. 2:9–11), the one thing we should not think of is that, after his death, Jesus is now “going to heaven” in the normal modern sense of that phrase. There are four things to remember about the ascension. Each of them contributes to its meaning within the story we have been telling. First, to repeat, heaven and earth are not a long way apart. They are meant to overlap and interlock and finally to be joined fully and forever. And the whole point of Jesus’s identity, all along, is that he has been a one-man walking Temple; he has been, already, the place where heaven and earth have met, where people on earth have come into contact with the life and power of heaven. So for Jesus “going to heaven” isn’t a matter of disappearing into the far distance. Jesus is like somebody who has two homes. The homes are right next door to each other, and there is a connecting door. One day the partition wall will be knocked down and there will be one, glorious, heaven-and-earth mixture. What that illustration doesn’t quite catch is that heaven and earth are not the same kind of space. They are not merely contiguous, like two next-door houses. Heaven permeates earth. If Jesus is now in “heaven,” he is present to every place on earth. Had he remained on earth, he wouldn’t have been present anywhere except the one place where he was. The ascension enables him to be present everywhere.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I cd see too that he felt anxious about Tim, from the way he pretended to pay no attention to him & then I wd catch him looking at him through his eyebrows—full of humiliated fondness. The Castle was a funny old place, smaller than I’d expected & completely irregular. There was a hall in the middle, with a dark panelled room off it at the back. On either side half-collapsed walls made off into the wood, & were cunningly topped with small trees to look like authentic medieval ruins. Some of the windows were pointed, some round, some square, & through the ivy you cd see that the walls were patterned with huge pieces of vermiculated stone—not, I think, the usual builders’ material, which is drilled artificially, but the real thing, brought from some volcanic site. The whole surface of the little Castle was freakish & grotesque, with the hairy fingers of long-dead creepers, the dull gloss of the ivy, the arrow-slits, & the rough, labyrinthine lava. S. & I slid our fingers into the inviting little passages, & lots of woodlice & things came scampering out. At the back we went through an arch into a little dank yard, with ferns lolling from the walls, a heap of old beer-bottles in one corner, & the ash & half-burnt logs of a fire that had been lit there long ago. It was strange that whoever had camped there had not gone inside—we had found it unlocked, & there was a huge blackened chimney-breast in the hall. When S. & I went in the others were already flinging the picnic around as if it were a hare & they were dogs. There were some long trestle-tables, with benches, & at either end colossal Arthurian chairs made out of whole trees. The entire thing was like some mad college hall, except with pigeons flopping around, & more bird-droppings than usual on the tables. There were other bits of furniture too, hideous Victorian things too big to destroy, like a carved cupboard with a ruched scarlet curtain (all torn & stained) & an old S-shaped loving-chair, where 2 people cd sit acceptably side-by-side with a balustrade in between. ‘This is a queer old dive,’ said Chancey to me, in a confidential sort of way. ‘Do you think so?’ I said. ‘I was just thinking how like home it was.’ I cd see he didn’t know quite whether to believe me. It was a lesson in manners at lunch.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I looked at him humorously. ‘Go into what?’ He was unlocking a door under the shadow of the cantilevered stairs and groping for the light switch. ‘Come down here. Whoopsy! That’s it.’ In front of us a narrow staircase ran steeply down between unplastered rubble walls. It was a squeeze for us side by side, and I tended to be half a step behind, as he, one hand on the rope banister, committed himself with a heavy, lurching tread to each new stair. ‘This is the most remarkable thing,’ he said in a tone of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, he’ll like this, won’t he. There’s no other house in the world that has anything like this. Come along in, come along in.’ He took on for a moment the air of a horror-film villain, muttering gleeful asides while leading his victim into the trap. The stairs turned a corner, and we went down two or three more steps and under a rough wooden lintel into a cool, mildewy darkness. Various fleeting ideas, tinged with alarm, went through my mind as I stood and brushed at my upper arm where it had rubbed against the chalky staircase wall. Then Charles found the second light switch and the darkness fled, revealing a squarish quite lofty cellar room. Though it contained nothing at all there were two remarkable things about it. The walls, which were plastered and painted cream, had a continuous frieze running round, which, being above head height, looked tastefully classical at a glance but, like the library over-door, were homosexual parodies when inspected close to. And the floor, uneven, pitted in places, was a mosaic. We made our way along the walls on old drugget, through which the roughness of the floor obtruded, so that I was afraid of Charles stubbing his toe or even twisting his ankle. On the further side of the room he stopped. ‘You see it best from here,’ he explained. The colours were very subdued, the white almost a light brown, the reds rusty like dried blood. ‘Now, what do you make out?’ I thought about it; it was evidently a Roman pavement—a relic of some riverside palace or temple? I knew nothing about Roman London, had forgotten all but a handful of images from some illustrated lectures that Gavin had given several years before. In the top quarter was a large bearded face, with open mouth and the vestiges of neck and shoulders above a broad rent in the fabric where the tesserae merged into the restorer’s grey cement. To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Stockholm was beautiful, despite the constant snow and frigid temperatures. I gave some speeches and attended a few dinners. It was a short, cold trip, but the people were lovely and unusually kind to me. I was surprised at how gratifying I found their enthusiasm for our work. Most everyone I met offered support and encouragement. A couple of years earlier, I had been invited to Brazil to talk about punishment and the unjust treatment of disfavored people. I had spent a lot of time in local communities, mostly in the favelas outside São Paulo, where I met hundreds of desperately poor people who were intensely interested in talking. I spent hours in conversation with all sorts of people, from struggling mothers to impoverished children who sniffed glue to help them cope with hunger and police brutality. The cross-cultural conversations with those people, who had shared a lot of the same history and struggle as my clients in America, had a huge impact on me. In Sweden, the people I met were equally interested and responsive, even though they hadn’t experienced profound need or shared struggle with an abusive justice system. People all over the country seemed motivated to connect from a common place of tremendous compassion. The organizers asked me to speak at a high school on the outskirts of Stockholm. Kungsholmens Gymnasium is in an extraordinarily beautiful section of Stockholm, an island surrounded by seventeenth-century architecture. As an American with limited experience outside the United States, I was dazzled by the age of the buildings and marveled at their ornate architecture. The school itself was nearly a hundred years old. I was escorted through the school to a narrow, winding staircase with handcrafted railings that led up to a cavernous auditorium. Several hundred high school students packed the room, waiting for my presentation. The domed ceiling of the enormous hall was covered with delicate hand paintings and Latin phrases written in decorative script. Floating angels and trumpet-wielding infants danced all over the walls and ceiling. A large balcony packed with more students seemed to ascend elegantly into the drawings.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: The fear of God is compared to a man’s whole life that is ruled by God’s wisdom, as the root to the tree: hence it is written (Ecclus. 1:25): “The root of wisdom is to fear the Lord, for [Vulg.: ‘and’] the branches thereof are longlived.” Consequently, as the root is said to be virtually the tree, so the fear of God is said to be wisdom. Reply to Objection 3: As stated above, faith is the beginning of wisdom in one way, and fear, in another. Hence it is written (Ecclus. 25:16): “The fear of God is the beginning of love: and the beginning of faith is to be fast joined to it.” Whether initial fear differs substantially from filial fear?Objection 1: It would seem that initial fear differs substantially from filial fear. For filial fear is caused by love. Now initial fear is the beginning of love, according to Ecclus. 25:16, “The fear of God is the beginning of love.” Therefore initial fear is distinct from filial fear. Objection 2: Further, initial fear dreads punishment, which is the object of servile fear, so that initial and servile fear would seem to be the same. But servile fear is distinct from filial fear. Therefore initial fear also is substantially distinct from initial fear. Objection 3: Further, a mean differs in the same ratio from both the extremes. Now initial fear is the mean between servile and filial fear. Therefore it differs from both filial and servile fear. On the contrary, Perfect and imperfect do not diversify the substance of a thing. Now initial and filial fear differ in respect of perfection and imperfection of charity, as Augustine states (In prim. canon. Joan. Tract. ix). Therefore initial fear does not differ substantially from filial fear. I answer that, Initial fear is so called because it is a beginning [initium]. Since, however, both servile and filial fear are, in some way, the beginning of wisdom, each may be called in some way, initial. It is not in this sense, however, that we are to understand initial fear in so far as it is distinct from servile and filial fear, but in the sense according to which it belongs to the state of beginners, in whom there is a beginning of filial fear resulting from a beginning of charity, although they do not possess the perfection of filial fear, because they have not yet attained to the perfection of charity. Consequently initial fear stands in the same relation to filial fear as imperfect to perfect charity. Now perfect and imperfect charity differ, not as to essence but as to state. Therefore we must conclude that initial fear, as we understand it here, does not differ essentially from filial fear.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  While the room was very old, the acoustics were perfect, and there was a balance and precision to the space that seemed almost magical. I studied the hundreds of Scandinavian teenagers seated in the hall while I was being introduced. I was impressed by how eager they appeared. I spoke for forty-five minutes to the strangely silent and attentive group of teens. I knew English wasn’t their first language and had real doubts about how much they were even following what I said, but when I finished, they erupted into vigorous applause. Their response actually startled me. They were so young but so interested in the plight of my condemned clients thousands of miles away. The headmaster joined me onstage to thank me and suggested to the students that they offer their own thanks with a song. The school had an internationally famous music program and student choir. The headmaster asked the choir students to stand wherever they were in the auditorium and briefly sing something. About fifty giggling kids stood up and looked around at each other. After a minute of uncertainty, a seventeen-year-old boy with strawberry blond hair stood on his chair and said something to his choirmates in Swedish. The students laughed, but they became more sober. As they became still and perfectly quiet, the boy hummed a note in a beautiful tenor voice. His pitch was perfect. Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line. Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork. My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed.

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

  51. In view of everything (26). Here he draws from the foregoing arguments his intended conclusion, saying that it is clear from everything that has been said that the name wisdom which we are investigating belongs to the same science which considers or speculates about first principles and causes. This is evident from the six primary conditions which clearly pertain to the science that considers universal causes. But because the sixth condition touched on the consideration of the end, which was not clearly held to be a cause among the ancient philosophers, as will be said below (1177), he therefore shows in a special way that this condition belongs to the same science, namely, the one which considers first causes. For the end, which is a good and that for the sake of which other things are done, is one of the many causes. Hence the science which considers first and universal causes must also be the one which considers the universal end of all things, which is the greatest good in the whole of nature. LESSON 3 The Nature and Goal of Metaphysics ARISTOTLE ’ S TEXT Chapter 2: 982b 11-983a 2327. That this is not a practical science is evident from those who first philosophized. For it is because of wonder that men both now and formerly began to philosophize, about less important matters, and then progressing little by little, they raised questions about more important ones, such as the phases of the moon and the courses of the sun and the stars and the generation of the universe. But one who raises questions and wonders seems to be ignorant. Hence the philosopher is also to some extent a lover of myth, for myths are composed of wonders. If they philosophized, then, in order to escape from ignorance, they evidently pursued their studies for the sake of knowledge and not for any utility. 28. And what has happened bears witness to this; for when nearly all the things necessary for life, leisure and learning were acquired, this kind of prudence began to be sought. It is evident, then, that we do not seek this knowledge for the sake of any other necessity. 29. But just as we say that a man is free who exists for himself and not for another, in a similar fashion this is the only free, science, because it alone exists for itself. 30. For this reason, too, it might rightly be thought that this science is not a human possession, since in many respects human nature is servile.