Contentment

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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  Unlike Daniel, there is no steady sequence of oracles here to enable us to get a quick and clear sense of what the prophecy as a whole is about. Israel, clearly, is still in trouble, even though the geographical exile in Babylon is over. There are promises of a great future under the leadership of the Messiah, “my servant the Branch” (3:8), echoing Isaiah 4:2 and 11:1 and Jeremiah 23:5 and 33:15, as well as the servant theme of Isaiah 42. This royal “Branch” will, as we should have guessed by now, rebuild the Temple (Zech. 6:12–13). When that happens, the days of fasting for the various desolations of Israel will be turned into feastings (8:18–19), a theme echoed by Jesus in his refusal to fast on the normal occasions (Mark 2:18–20) . But it is in the second half of the book, chapters 9–14, that we find the material drawn on by Jesus as he himself went to meet the ultimate perfect storm. We have already seen the oracle about the king coming on a donkey (9:9–10). There follow promises of God’s coming in person to rescue his people (9:11–17). But then there are warnings: Israel’s shepherds have led the people astray, and God will act to punish them (10:3; 11:3–17). As in Ezekiel 34, we are to understand the “shepherds” to be the official leaders of the people, specifically the priests and the aristocracy. The picture then widens, and we glimpse the nations of the world coming to fight against the Jewish people, with God winning a victory over them (12:1–9). But this will also be a time of mourning, mourning in the royal house of David, mourning as for a firstborn child, though concluding with a promise of cleansing from sin (12:10–13:1). The prophets will then join the other leaders in being ashamed for the lies they have spoken (13:2–6). And, before God can purify and refine his true people, they must first be scattered as their shepherd goes to his death: “Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is my associate,” says YHWH of hosts. Strike the shepherd, that the sheep may be scattered; I will turn my hand against the little ones. (13:7) This strange picture then broadens once again. All the nations will come to fight against Jerusalem, but as the battle reaches its height “ YHWH my God will come, and all the holy ones with him” (14:5). This will be the great moment of renewal, when, as in Ezekiel, living waters will flow out from Jerusalem, this time not only down to the Dead Sea, but also westward to the Mediterranean (14:8). And then, the climax of it all: And YHWH will become king over all the earth; on that day YHWH will be one and his name one.

• From Bold Move

  To make this doable without adding to his stress, he would put an “out of office” alert on his email for that timeframe so he could curb his desire to check the phone. This is important, because you want to ensure that your workable goal does not add additional stress. For Stephanie, we struggled to identify workable steps that would Align with living an authentic life. Stephanie was stuck on how to come up with a specific action when it comes to a broad construct such as authenticity. So I asked her to try to define behaviorally for me what this looked like for her. She said she felt that if she were being authentic, she would not have to try to fit in in either the Chinese or American cultures that encircled her life. If she was just being authentic, she could show up and express her opinions as . . . herself. Not her Chinese self or American self. Just Stephanie. So I pressed further, and she felt that the way she dressed would be one way of manifesting this value. Specifically, she would only wear one piece of clothing (specific ) that she felt represented her cultural identity (aligned ) each day of the week (scheduled ), regardless of where she was going. Stephanie was able to get to a bold plan because she took the time to visualize what being authentic looked like for her. This is a trick I use a lot with people, and one you can use too. When you choose an action, ask yourself, Is it something I can vividly see in my mind’s eye? Both Ricardo and Stephanie were able to get to workable steps—though not without some challenges, which is to be expected. The point I want to stress is that even if you don’t succeed at first, keep trying. I know I usually have to go back to the drawing board more than once to make sure I’ve set clear enough steps for myself. But as an architect for a life that you actually want to live, you’ll have to get used to revising your blueprints from time to time. Reflection Creating a Bold Plan to Realize Your Bold Vision It’s your turn to transform your values into actions by creating workable steps. Use the following questions as a guide: Why: Is it aligned?What matters most to you in your bold vision? [Your Notes] Identify the value that matters most to you in your bold vision and design the plan based on this value.What: Is it specific?What action can you take to reach your bold vision? Include enough specificity that you can actually visualize it happening and know the exact moment when it’s been achieved. Action: [Your Notes]Action: [Your Notes]Action: [Your Notes]How: Is it doable?It’s time to create an action plan. What do you need to carry out each of these actions? Action:[Your Notes] Action:[Your Notes] Action:[Your Notes] When: Is it scheduled?Break out your calendar.

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

  It was partly due to all those years in the classroom. Day after day, hour after hour, I had been compelled to talk to a captive and often reluctant audience of adolescent girls. To hold their attention and convey the ideas and information that they needed, I had learned to think on my feet and make my material lively and interesting. And as a result, what had once seemed an impossible feat had become second nature. Not only that, I realized: I had positively enjoyed talking, seemingly to myself, in that dark studio, cut off from the rest of the world by the blinding lights, but conveying my message all the same. I had thought that the school had arrested my progress. I had feared that I was slipping backward into old habits of timidity, but all the time I had been developing a new skill. And if I could do that, I might be capable of other things. Maybe my future was not as hopeless as I had feared. And so, a few weeks later, on the last day of term, I found that I was neither distressed nor frightened to be leaving the school, even though I had no definite plans and no prospect of another job. I had imagined that I would be distraught. But instead I felt a great calm and an occasional flicker of excitement. It was time to go, I acknowledged as I stood with the other members of staff at the back of the hall for the final assembly. I recalled my first morning at the school, when I had stood up in the gallery with the sixth form, looking down at the hundreds of girls in the hall below, and felt suffocated by the all-too-familiar rhythms of institutional life. Against the odds, I had gained something from these years, but now it was time to move on. I listened to the very generous words of the headmistress as she thanked me for my contribution to the school in her detached way, almost as though she were speaking of somebody else. It felt as if I had already gone. Later that morning I was able to joke in my farewell speech to the staff and admire my present: a set of elegant cocktail glasses with dark red stems. I smiled to myself. Not an obvious present for an ex-nun.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “I have seen this throughout my career, especially in the advances in streaming video. Big mainstream studios were always watching what us little adult companies were up to and a perfect example is shown in the adult world bringing video to the web before the rest,” she said. “In my business, keeping ahead of the game in technology just made sense so we could satisfy our surfers and customers with new and exciting media. We started off with photos and stories, but to give customers a true experience, the next natural step was to provide video content. Once video was commonplace, the demand was to meet enhanced and higher-quality video requests, and so on.” The demand for “more,” “better” and “new” never abated. As the push moved beyond video toward more interactive media, the technological demands made by Jameson’s fans began to feel more like personal demands. “Fans never had a forum with which to interact with me before the Internet,” she said. “And then, with my participation, they were able to email, chat, submit artwork and send mail directly to my computer in a way that was easier than ever before. They couldn’t get enough. The more I made myself available, the more they asked. I had to learn to draw the line in order to keep my personal boundaries intact.” In some ways, Jameson was becoming the highly commercialized version of Jennifer Ringley. As lucrative as it might have been, though, there was to be no JennaCam to replace the long since defunct JenniCam. “As I made myself more available on web chats, I had many member requests to install a 24/7 webcam into my bedroom,” Jameson said. “That’s an area where I had to draw the line.” With Thrixxx’s Virtually Jenna, Jameson commercialized another piece of Internet technology that had until that point been a deeply personal aspect of many people’s online experience: the avatar. I have described some of the ways people have developed intimate relationships with their own avatars and have built up infrastructures of sex, love and marriage with others through MUDS and modern virtual worlds. Jameson’s avatar, though, commodified this intimacy in the form of a pornographic fantasy world in which you could buy, interact with and control the online version of a real person. (Of course, “real” is a tricky concept in this case, as the “real” Jenna Jameson, as with any porn star, is also mostly fantasy.) Given the personal relationship so many people have with their online presence, and Jameson’s limits as to how much privacy she will give up, it seemed as though creating a virtual Jenna might be a bit too much for her. She said, though, that other projects have felt more intrusive.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 18MY FINGER-SNAPPING PHASE IS NOW OVER, MY FOLD-POWERS are currently gone. I assume I’ll get them back sooner or later, but I’m never sure. What happened, as far as I can piece it together, is that one night, when Joyce and I were having sex, I unknowingly transferred all my fermational proficiencies to her. I had jokingly trotted out the penis pump and the Goddess Athena vibrator with the clit-stimulating fork-flamed torch of wisdom and told her that I’d bought them with her in mind, before we’d started going out. “I’m not a big vibrator person,” Joyce warned. But she did pump enthusiastically away at my penis with the penis pump, sucking it up into the clear plastic vacuum chamber and watching its veins pop out. When my penis had had more than enough of that treatment, I pulled it out and substituted the Athena vibrator in its place. Joyce and I then pumped the vibrator with the penis pump for a while, sucking it in as far as it would go. And finally, after some cajoling, Joyce turned on the Athena vibrator and slipped it inside herself. The fork-flamed torch of wisdom took her polytheistic clit to new heights. But what we didn’t realize at the time was that the penis pump had somehow sucked all of my temporal powers out of me. Then, when the Athena vibrator went into the penis pump, the same powers were apparently transferred to it, and when the Athena vibrator muttered its way deep into Joyce, the powers entered her. As a result, the next time I snapped my fingers, nothing at all happened—or rather, everything kept on happening. But the next time Joyce clicked on the switch of her Athena vibrator, time dutifully halted for her. I find I don’t miss the Fold too terribly much at present. My self-discipline has improved. I’m still temping, but I’ve begun going over some of the notes for my master’s thesis. (It’s a history of Dover Books.) Joyce, meanwhile, is having a good time. She carries her vibrating Cleft-Goddess around with her in her purse and turns it on at will, as when she has an important deadline at MassBank that she can’t otherwise meet. She strips pedestrians and tells me about strange genitalia she has seen and known. She talks of taking a jaunt down to Washington and sucking the presidential dick. Sometimes she uses Fold tricks while we’re having sex: for instance, she will alternate her mouth and her vadge on my richard so fast that I feel as if I’m in both places at once—as if she’s twirling over me. We’ve mentioned marriage as a possibility. The other day I was in her apartment. I did some pushups on the floor. Then I sat on her bed. I called out, “Can I tell you about this great dream I once had about how you saved the two of us with your flying blue brassiere?”

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

  Curiously, I found this liberating. After years of deference and formality, it was strangely peaceful to abandon these codes of politeness, at least for a while. I was quite content to sit in the car and gaze enthralled at the biblical scenery without having to think of stimulating topics of conversation. For the first two days of my stay, the weather was cold. It didn’t snow, after all, but there was a sharp wind and a sleety rain. But even though this didn’t fit my expectation of sun-baked deserts, the sense of walking in an already familiar landscape persisted. It was like stepping into a myth. Here were the places I had struggled to imagine during all those meditations: the Garden of Gethsemane, the Via Dolorosa, and Ein Karim, the home of John the Baptist. Jesus had probably walked up those steps leading to the temple mount. He had certainly walked right here beside the Sea of Galilee. This was the best sightseeing I had ever done in my life. I was not simply letting the sights and sounds of the Holy Land sweep past me in an impressive panorama, but was in search of Jesus and Paul, trying to fit my thoughts and ideas with the landscape and the convoluted history of its famous sites. In the process, these holy places entered my mind and heart in a way that they had never done when I had tried to re-create them in the “composition of place” during meditation. I could understand why so many people felt possessive about the Holy Land. I was beginning to feel that it was mine, too. And yet the land was also a challenge, because the reality was nothing like my pious imaginings, nor would either Paul or Jesus have recognized it. When I had made the Stations of the Cross in the convent, I had never in my wildest dreams thought that I would one day sit at the fourth station—where Jesus had met his mother on the road to Calvary—eating hummus and pita bread. But that is what we did one day when Joel stopped at an Arab restaurant on the Via Dolorosa. Ahmed, a Palestinian who was taking us to Bethlehem and the West Bank, joined us there. Later that day we sat on the roof of the Basilica of the Nativity, drinking Arabic coffee, which Ahmed had brought in a flask, and smoking cigarettes, looking down on Manger Square below. My religious order had been dedicated to the infancy and childhood of Jesus. Bethlehem had been a constant symbol of our spiritual quest: like the Magi, we were to follow the star that would lead us to the holy child and his mother. Each one of our convents was a Bethlehem. But here I was, laughing with Joel and Ahmed, neither of whom had any time for religion, and having an impromptu picnic on the site of Jesus’ birth.

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

  On the afternoon in question, two members of the local Conservative Party who were out canvassing and, not unnaturally, thought that the Hamilton Harts of Throstle’s Hole would be a pretty safe bet, had visited them. Herbert gleefully described the horror of these stalwart Tories when they confronted the communal scene, with various stoned communards crashed out on the floor, another couple meditating in yogic positions, refusing to acknowledge their presence, while Mojo, Adam’s daughter, ran naked amidst the general squalor. For once, Jenifer’s favorite adjective, “ludicrous,” seemed entirely appropriate. Whenever Adam or Charlie visited Lamledra, Jenifer would turn the servants’ wing over to them. “Just make up all the beds,” she told me the first time. “I have no idea who is sleeping with whom.” Not only did Charlie have a number of different partners, but Adam and Mary were often otherwise engaged. This was the sexual revolution with a vengeance, and I was amazed by Jenifer’s lack of concern. Alan Ryan, Joanna’s former husband, was also a regular visitor, with his girlfriend, Katie. In addition, Jenifer and Herbert would invite their own friends. So it was a rather strange house party on that Cornish cliff, with distinguished Oxford academics living cheek by jowl with hippies and other members of the alternative society. But everybody coexisted amicably. On one evening, Herbert and Isaiah Berlin gave a spirited reading of Max Beerbohm’s “ ‘Savonarola’ Brown” in the drawing room, and had us weeping with laughter. In the hall, next door, the air was thick with marijuana, while the communards sat dreamily listening to Charlie’s guitar. I drifted between these two worlds. I had no desire to be with my contemporaries in the hall, though they would politely invite me in for a joint from time to time. I also, just as politely, declined. I did not need to cultivate exotic states of consciousness; I was able to engineer quite enough bad trips of my own, and my experience of drugs in the Warneford had given me a lifelong aversion to this type of recreation. But neither was I at home with the Oxbridge celebrities, though they too were reasonably welcoming on the few occasions when I plucked up the courage to join them. In any case, nobody took much notice of me. I was just the skivvy and, when not on duty, could wander around the house, left peacefully to my own devices. This suited me very well.

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

  Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you. The study of texts for A History of God had become very different from the research I had done during my years in television, when I had been reading and amassing information at breakneck speed to keep one step ahead of the production team. At that time, I had remained trapped on the cerebral level, as though I were reading a guidebook or an instruction manual. Instead of allowing these images and dogmas to percolate slowly, drop by drop, into the deeper, unconscious levels of my mind, I had grasped prematurely at what I thought they meant. I had also been engaged in a crusade during my time in television. I use that word deliberately because, however well intentioned, my work had had an aggressive edge. I had wanted to show that religion was indeed bonkers, partly in order to free myself once and for all from a system that had exerted such a baleful influence on my life. I had read in order to debunk. Egged on by colleagues and friends who found the very idea of faith risible, I had too often reached for the witty, deflationary phrase or the sparkling put-down while explicating a theological point. And instead of losing myself in my work, I had been engaged in what amounted to constant self-advertisement. Even in Muhammad, when I had deliberately inhibited this habit of superficial cleverness, I had been writing a polemic and had an agenda. True, it had been a benevolent polemic, one that tried to build up rather than demolish, but an argument had constantly been in progress in my head as I anticipated the hostile point of view that I wanted to counter. I had not let the ideas speak quietly for themselves or to come to me in their own good time. Now I found myself in a position where I had no agenda. There was no point in thinking up barbed remarks about a Jewish mystical idea or revealing the hopeless irrationality of a Greek Orthodox doctrine, because there was nobody to hear it. In the past, my literary agent and publishers had wanted me to be ceaselessly entertaining and topical in order to make the seriously uncool subject of religion accessible.

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

  Those contemplative moments occurred within the benign hubbub of the household. I walked into the kitchen one afternoon to find Herbert and two philosophers sitting solemnly in front of Mariella’s dishwasher, which one of them had tried to repair, contemplating it with the same kind of rapt attention as I had bestowed upon the moon the night before. “It has just completed its second cycle,” Herbert informed me with wonder in his voice. That was also the year when Charlie arrived one afternoon with a grand piano, which he had picked up cheap. The entire household had turned out to propel the piano up the steep winding path on a rolling sequence of broom handles, until we managed to manhandle it into the hall. For the rest of his visit, Charlie and Jenifer played pieces for two pianos together—he flamboyant on the grand, she lean, intense, and dry on the old upright—calling encouragement to each other above the Mozart and Beethoven. Exotic as my life with the Harts often was and different from anything I had ever known before, there was much that was reassuringly familiar. Jenifer’s frugality made her as stringent about economy as any of my former superiors. We were not allowed to vacuum the carpets or wash our sheets too frequently, lest we wear them out. She was adamantly opposed to the newly repaired dishwasher—“a ludicrous waste of water!”—and there were constant arguments about the electric fire in the drawing room, a miserable little contraption, which should probably have been banned for safety reasons rather than for the pathetic amount of power that it splutteringly consumed on its three ancient bars. “You had the fire on this morning, Herbert, just because it was a little chilly! There is absolutely no need for such waste! If you want a fire, there’s plenty of wood and—” “The same discussion”—Herbert had beamed around the table, quite unabashed—“is probably going on at this moment in boardinghouses in Worthing.”

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

  There is no point to speak if there is nothing to say.” Curiously, I found this liberating. After years of deference and formality, it was strangely peaceful to abandon these codes of politeness, at least for a while. I was quite content to sit in the car and gaze enthralled at the biblical scenery without having to think of stimulating topics of conversation. For the first two days of my stay, the weather was cold. It didn’t snow, after all, but there was a sharp wind and a sleety rain. But even though this didn’t fit my expectation of sun-baked deserts, the sense of walking in an already familiar landscape persisted. It was like stepping into a myth. Here were the places I had struggled to imagine during all those meditations: the Garden of Gethsemane, the Via Dolorosa, and Ein Karim, the home of John the Baptist. Jesus had probably walked up those steps leading to the temple mount. He had certainly walked right here beside the Sea of Galilee. This was the best sightseeing I had ever done in my life. I was not simply letting the sights and sounds of the Holy Land sweep past me in an impressive panorama, but was in search of Jesus and Paul, trying to fit my thoughts and ideas with the landscape and the convoluted history of its famous sites. In the process, these holy places entered my mind and heart in a way that they had never done when I had tried to re-create them in the “composition of place” during meditation. I could understand why so many people felt possessive about the Holy Land. I was beginning to feel that it was mine, too. And yet the land was also a challenge, because the reality was nothing like my pious imaginings, nor would either Paul or Jesus have recognized it. When I had made the Stations of the Cross in the convent, I had never in my wildest dreams thought that I would one day sit at the fourth station—where Jesus had met his mother on the road to Calvary—eating hummus and pita bread. But that is what we did one day when Joel stopped at an Arab restaurant on the Via Dolorosa. Ahmed, a Palestinian who was taking us to Bethlehem and the West Bank, joined us there. Later that day we sat on the roof of the Basilica of the Nativity, drinking Arabic coffee, which Ahmed had brought in a flask, and smoking cigarettes, looking down on Manger Square below. My religious order had been dedicated to the infancy and childhood of Jesus. Bethlehem had been a constant symbol of our spiritual quest: like the Magi, we were to follow the star that would lead us to the holy child and his mother. Each one of our convents was a Bethlehem.

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

  It was a massive pile, with a servants’ wing and an amazing baronial-style hall, which had probably been spectacular when Lady Williams had first set up house, but now it had succumbed to Hartlike chaos. From the terrace there was a spectacular view of the Dodman Point and, beyond the red slash of the fuchsia bushes, the startling blue of the Atlantic. In the sloping paddock in front of the house, which curved steeply toward the small beach below, horses from the local riding school grazed peacefully, silhouetted nobly against the sea. I usually traveled down with Jenifer in the Morris Minor, with Nanny and Jacob squeezed together into the backseat. It was a long, difficult journey, and my task was to talk to Jenifer, who had to do all the driving, while Nanny tried to keep Jacob amused. As soon as we arrived, we had to rush through the house, removing all the signs of the occupancy of Jenifer’s sister, who had the house during the winter months. Her elegant ornaments were thrust disdainfully into a cupboard (“Can you imagine choosing this?” Jenifer would ask, brandishing a quite unexceptionable lamp shade. “Ludicrous!”) and were replaced by Jenifer’s more unconventional objects. There had almost been outright war between the sisters when Jenifer had defiantly painted the kitchen wall a brilliant orange, Mariella apparently preferring magnolia. Herbert generally followed us in comfort on the train, and by the time he had arrived, the house was ready for habitation. Staying at Lamledra had always been an education. It had given me, as it were, a crash course in the permissive society. Adam and Charlie often turned up, each with a large entourage of wives, girl-friends, and other members of their respective communes. I often wondered whether Adam was more successful at meditation than I had been, but never dared to ask. I always found Adam and Charlie somewhat daunting, even though they were always perfectly, if rather distantly, friendly, and I was quite intimidated by Adam’s wife, Mary, who treated me with the scorn she reserved for somebody who had clearly sold out to the system. I much enjoyed Herbert’s account of an afternoon he had spent at Throstle’s Hole, the house he had bought for Adam’s commune. To preserve the spirit of equality, Adam and Mary used her surname as well as his, and so were listed in the telephone directory as Hamilton Hart. On the afternoon in question, two members of the local Conservative Party who were out canvassing and, not unnaturally, thought that the Hamilton Harts of Throstle’s Hole would be a pretty safe bet, had visited them. Herbert gleefully described the horror of these stalwart Tories when they confronted the communal scene, with various stoned communards crashed out on the floor, another couple meditating in yogic positions, refusing to acknowledge their presence, while Mojo, Adam’s daughter, ran naked amidst the general squalor. For once, Jenifer’s favorite adjective, “ludicrous,” seemed entirely appropriate.

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

  For other people it may be a career in law or politics, a marriage, a love affair, or the raising of children. But that bliss provides us with a clue: if we follow it to the end, it will take us to the heart of life. My life has kept changing, but at the same time I have constantly found myself revolving round and round the same themes, the same issues, and even repeating the same mistakes. I tried to break away from the convent but I still live alone, spend my days in silence, and am almost wholly occupied in writing, thinking, and speaking about God and spirituality. I have come full circle. This reminds me of the staircase in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, which I picture as a narrow spiral staircase. I tried to get off it and join others on what seemed to me to be a broad, noble flight of steps, thronged with people. But I kept falling off, and when I went back to my own twisting stairwell I found a fulfillment that I had not expected. Now I have to mount my staircase alone. And as I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the light. 1 Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London, 1991), pp. 47–48. 2 Some of the characters in this memoir have their own names. Those who prefer anonymity have pseudonyms. 3 On the fifth of November, the British celebrate the foiling of an attempt by a group of Catholic gentry to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the early seventeenth century. They burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, the conspirator who placed the explosives, and stage small firework displays. 4 Quoted in R. A. Nicholson, ed., Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, 1922), p. 148. 5 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago and London, 1974), 1:379; my italics. 6 Sutta Nipata 118. 7 Chandogya Upanishad 6:13. Karen Armstrong THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs, including A History of God, The Battle for God, Through the Narrow Gate, Holy War, Islam, and Buddha. Her work has been translated into forty languages. She is also the author of three television documentaries and took part in Bill Moyers’s television series Genesis. Since September 11, 2001, she has been a frequent contributor to conferences, panels, newspapers, periodicals, and throughout the media on both sides of the Atlantic on the subject of Islam. She lives in London. ALSO BY KAREN ARMSTRONG Through the Narrow Gate Beginning the World The First Christian: St.

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

  When I was working in television, the phone rang constantly. I had to go to endless meetings to discuss shooting schedules and talk for hours at a time with colleagues about the concept. But now, researching A History of God, I found that the telephone rarely rang, and I would sometimes go for two or three days at a time without speaking to anybody. I was alone with my books. I would get up each morning, eat breakfast, and drink a cup of coffee while I walked around my long, narrow garden, examining the plants or my elderly apple trees, and then go up to my study. The street outside my window was deserted; the clock on my desk ticked steadily, hypnotically, and nothing came between the words on the page and me. At first this silence had seemed a deprivation, a symbol of an unwanted isolation. I had resented the solitude of my life and fought it. But gradually the enveloping quiet became a positive element, almost a presence, which settled comfortably and caressingly around me like a soft shawl. It seemed to hum, gently but melodiously, and to orchestrate the ideas that I was contending with, until they started to sing too, to vibrate and reveal an unexpected resonance. After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which, of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and walk around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no longer expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity. I was no longer just grabbing concepts and facts from my books, using them as fodder for the next interview, but learning to listen to the deeper meaning that lay quietly and ineffably beyond them. Silence itself had become my teacher. This, of course, is how we should approach religious discourse. Theology is—or should be—a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music.

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

  I spent a lot of time on the terrace that Easter, not reading much but gazing out to sea. At night there was sometimes the extraordinary spectacle of the full moon casting a path of shining light on the ocean all the way to the horizon. Those contemplative moments occurred within the benign hubbub of the household. I walked into the kitchen one afternoon to find Herbert and two philosophers sitting solemnly in front of Mariella’s dishwasher, which one of them had tried to repair, contemplating it with the same kind of rapt attention as I had bestowed upon the moon the night before. “It has just completed its second cycle,” Herbert informed me with wonder in his voice. That was also the year when Charlie arrived one afternoon with a grand piano, which he had picked up cheap. The entire household had turned out to propel the piano up the steep winding path on a rolling sequence of broom handles, until we managed to manhandle it into the hall. For the rest of his visit, Charlie and Jenifer played pieces for two pianos together—he flamboyant on the grand, she lean, intense, and dry on the old upright—calling encouragement to each other above the Mozart and Beethoven. Exotic as my life with the Harts often was and different from anything I had ever known before, there was much that was reassuringly familiar. Jenifer’s frugality made her as stringent about economy as any of my former superiors. We were not allowed to vacuum the carpets or wash our sheets too frequently, lest we wear them out. She was adamantly opposed to the newly repaired dishwasher—“a ludicrous waste of water!”—and there were constant arguments about the electric fire in the drawing room, a miserable little contraption, which should probably have been banned for safety reasons rather than for the pathetic amount of power that it splutteringly consumed on its three ancient bars. “You had the fire on this morning, Herbert, just because it was a little chilly! There is absolutely no need for such waste! If you want a fire, there’s plenty of wood and—” “The same discussion”—Herbert had beamed around the table, quite unabashed—“is probably going on at this moment in boardinghouses in Worthing.” And so, in a way, I felt quite at home. Asceticism was certainly central to the whole Lamledra experience. Every morning after breakfast, the guests were frog-marched by Jenifer with spades and matchets to do battle with the ubiquitous nettles and thistles in the grounds.

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

  My new confidence showed in the fact that I was not particularly worried about the future. In the summer of 1973 I would come to the end of my government grant, but I had a new supervisor now, my thesis was going well, and we thought that it would be finished and ready for submission in about a year. This in itself was quite an achievement. Some people took at least seven years over their thesis, while others found it psychologically impossible to bring it to a conclusion. There was no point in even looking for a job without a doctorate, but thanks to my parsimonious regime, I had a considerable amount of money saved, and living rent-free at the Harts’, I could easily support myself during the intervening year. It was probably because I had relaxed in this way that, in the Hilary term of 1973, I felt the first flicker of true recovery. I had gone to hear Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English Literature, lecture on T. S. Eliot. She was known in the faculty as “the Dame.” It suited her grand manner and her way of waving students into an auditorium as if she were welcoming them to a garden party. That day she was lecturing on the sequence of poems which Eliot had called Ash-Wednesday. The first of these, she explained, was Eliot’s version of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” I became immediately alert, because it was from this poem that I had taken my mantra, with its serene determination to let go of the past and cultivate new strength and joy. As I listened to the Dame reciting Eliot’s lines, I felt for the first time in years profoundly and spontaneously moved by the poetry. I no longer had to wait for her to interpret it, and my appreciation was no longer wholly cerebral. It was an essentially emotional, intuitive response that somehow involved my entire personality, reaching something deeply embedded within. I had thought I had lost this capacity forever, but now here it was again. There was a complete and satisfying fit between my inner and outer worlds. The poem, with its quiet, haunting accuracy, perfectly expressed my own state, and endorsed it, showing that I had not weakly abdicated from the struggle for life and health, but had somehow stumbled upon a truth about the human condition and the way men and women work.

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

  Within a few weeks, I had managed to impose a shape on my day. I had a gas ring in my room, but was allowed to use the Harts’ kitchen whenever I wished. Not that I ever attempted any elaborate cooking: it was simply a question of scrambling eggs and heating cans of soup. But even if I had been more ambitious, it would not have mattered. There was never any hint that I was in the way or interrupting family life. There was no family life, as such. This was a household of separate individuals, who shared a house cooperatively. Nanny was not the starchy Gorgon I had feared, but a sweet-faced, aging woman who battled bravely with the mounting chaos of the house. She and Jacob usually ate breakfast together, while Herbert, Jenifer, and I queued up politely for cooker or kettle, preparing our own meals. During the day, Herbert and Jenifer lunched and often dined in their respective colleges. If she was at home, Jenifer’s suppers were as perfunctory as my own, whereas Herbert enjoyed preparing experimental little messes for himself. The day would begin with a great deal of coming and going. Herbert would plunge back and forth in his dressing gown between the kitchen and his study/bedroom with mugs of coffee, which he tended to park and forget. Nanny would retrieve some of them later in the day. Jenifer would sit in the dining room, looking gaunt and weary in a brown camel-hair dressing gown that had seen better days, black National Health spectacles on her nose, studying the newspapers. Jacob chattered ceaselessly, snatching pages from his mother and reading out phrases at the top of his voice, which sounded surreal when isolated in this way. “ ‘Crisis Looms’!” he would announce portentously. “Mummy—‘The— Trend—Persists’! Persists! Karen—‘Ministers Gather! At nine o’clock.’ Nine o’clock sharp,” he would add thoughtfully. “If they don’t arrive sharply, there’ll be trouble. They might arrive bluntly. Mummy, what will happen if they don’t arrive sharply?” “Oh, I expect they will.” “But if they don’t? If they don’t?” he persisted. “Will the prime minister be very angry? Will he say, ‘You’re bad, bad ministers’? ‘Recession Imminent’! Mummy, what is recession?” Jenifer and I would look at each other helplessly. Jacob would not be fobbed off with anything less than an adequate answer, unless another phrase caught his fancy. “ ‘Moon rises’!” he would shout invariably, as soon as I arrived downstairs to make my breakfast. “Karen—‘Moon rises! Twelve forty-five a.m.’!” “What is he talking about?” I had asked Nanny on my first morning. “It’s in the paper. The time the moon rises each day. It’s the first thing he looks for every morning.” Nanny smiled into the sauce-pan of porridge. “It’s one of his little games. You’ll soon get used to us, Karen.”

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

  “What is the sermon like?” Herbert asked. “There are some intelligent men there, I believe.” “Don’t talk about these boring things, Karen!” Jacob yelled, bringing his fork splat down on his plate and causing a brief volcanic eruption of gravy and cabbage. “Ssh . . . It’s interesting what Karen is saying, Jacob,” Jenifer protested, wiping gravy from her cheek. “It is interesting, up to a point,” Herbert conceded. “Remarkable that reasonably educated people can go on believing in the virgin birth or the Trinity. Might as well believe in the Olympian pantheon. I mean, why Jehovah rather than Apollo? Frankly, I think Apollo might be the more appealing option.” I could see his point. Jehovah had done little enough for me. Perhaps I should give Apollo a try. “Catholicism doesn’t seem to have made you very happy,” Jenifer remarked, echoing my own thoughts and ducking as Jacob hurled a potato across the room. It spattered steamily on the large mirror, and there were exclamations of protest. “Jacob, eat up now!” “How could the Catholic Church possibly make anybody happy?” Herbert grinned at me. He enjoyed baiting me about the notorious abuses of history. “Centuries of oppression and fear. The Inquisition, the sale of indulgences . . .” “The immorality of the popes,” I threw in. “Book burning. Pogroms.” “Jesuits and equivocation!” “This conversation has been going on for too long! Talk about something else,” Jacob demanded at the top of his voice. “We don’t want to hear about churches and popes and all that stuff!” “All right.” Jenifer turned to him. “You start a conversation.” “Let’s talk about Bonfire Night.”3 Jacob relaxed now that the conversation was within his range. The fifth of November was one of the landmarks of Jacob’s year. He started looking forward to it months in advance. At first he had been terrified by the noise of the fireworks and the lurid effigies of Guy Fawkes, but Nanny and his parents had managed to coax him out of his fears by making a little festival of it. “Daddy, tell about how it will get dark and you will light the bonfire.” “And the flames will start to crackle in the twigs,” Herbert obliged. “Snap, crackle, and pop!” “And you will be so excited, Jacob,” Jenifer put in, “when the fireworks start.” “Whoosh! But Karen, you may be a little bit frightened. Just at first. But I’ll say to you, ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be scared of.’ ” “Thank you, Jacob.” “Daddy! Who was Guy Fawkes?” “He was a Catholic!” Herbert shouted in glee, pushing his chair back from the table, while the meal ended in laughter. I followed the nurse down the corridor, inhaling that inimitable hospital smell, catching glimpses of other people’s dramas. Blue bedspreads, a trolley, a wheelchair. “Straight down to the end,” the nurse told me cheerily, “and your friend is in the small ward on your left.”

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

  This, of course, is how we should approach religious discourse. Theology is—or should be—a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music. It is no good trying to listen to a late Beethoven quartet or read a sonnet by Rilke at a party. You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth, or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness. I had found this to be true in my study of literature. As soon as I had stopped trying to use it to advance my career, it began to speak to me again. Now I was having exactly the same experience with theology. The religious traditions have all stressed the importance of silence. They have reminded the faithful that these truths are not capable of a simply rational interpretation. Sacred texts cannot be perused like a holy encyclopedia, for clear information about the divine. This is not the language of everyday speech or of logical, discursive prose. In some traditions, words are thought to contain the sacred in their very sound. When Hindus chant the syllable aum, its three distinct phases evoke the essence of the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, while the silence that follows when the reverberation of the chant has finally died away expresses the attainment of Brahman, the supreme but unspeakable reality. Other scriptures are chanted or sung in a liturgical setting that separates them from profane speech and endows them with the nonconceptual attributes of music. You have to listen to them with a quietly receptive heart, opening yourself to them either in ritual or through yogic disciplines designed to abolish secular modes of thought. That is why so many of the faiths have developed a form of the monastic life, which builds a disciplined silence into the working day.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  HONOR AUTHENTICITY LOVE TRUST Values at Work Values out of context are only words with little meaning. To see how they work as inspiration and direction in expansion practice, let’s revisit Maria, Eric, and Samantha. Maria wanted to move beyond her hypochondriasis and she was willing to feel more anxiety in the short run by dropping some of her safety strategies of checking and seeking reassurance. She’d identified a more expansive mind-set to cultivate, one that allowed for uncertainty about her physical sensations. It was a good, sound plan. Tired of hugging the shore, Maria was ready to push off for uncharted waters. But what about when the water got rough? What were the values that would inspire Maria and help her stay on course? When I asked Maria what values were more important to her than feeling safe and certain, she was surprised at how hard it was to identify them. But when I showed her the values chart she had no trouble naming them. Fun, Flexibility, Adventure, Resilience, Presence I suggested Maria enter them in her smartphone, so when she felt lost and needed to get her bearings, they would serve to remind her of what inspired her practice. And that’s exactly what they did. Eric’s expansion practice was to restrict the time he allowed himself to making decisions, and to accept invitations to social events. Both intentions threatened his monkey mind-set—that if he made mistakes he’d be judged and rejected by others. I asked Eric why he was willing to do this. What was more important to him than safety? Here are the values that he came up with: Self-Acceptance, Commitment, Authenticity, Growth, Resilience, Courage Eric kept a list of these values on the back of his business card in his wallet where they’d always be in reach. And over the course of his practice he reached for them often. The only value Samantha had been honoring was safety for her son. While it sounded noble, Samantha knew it wasn’t leading her in the direction she wanted—usually just to her phone or her checkbook. When she looked over the Values List she was able to find some worthy replacements. And for clarity’s sake, she refined them a bit. Health (my own), Trust (in my son), and Responsibility (to myself) To remind herself of her values, she changed the home screen on her phone from a photo of her son to a photo of herself. When she was tempted to dial him to check up on him, she was reminded to whom her real responsibility was. She planned to change the photo back someday but only after she had her values straight. Is your I must be certain, I cannot make mistakes, I am responsible for everybody mind-set leading you away from your values? What is the toll this is taking in your life? What are the values you want to be directed by?

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

  This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly colored William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the Oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantel-piece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to bare essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. All were a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people, and to material objects if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow. Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life. My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social, and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the fifties, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties, and girls were clad in demure twin sets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanor of these young people was even more startling. They had long, flowing hair instead of the tidy, repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged, and often eccentric—flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely Eastern robes.