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 Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  Even though the tracker has become keenly attuned to the animal he is tracking, he must also remain aware of all other stimuli (information) in his environment, both internal and external. He may be being tracked or at least watched by other hungry or curious animals. His safety depends on remaining present by employing the felt sense. In this way his finely tuned senses can pick up the slightest sound or movement. Internally, he may be warned of danger by an intangible sense that something isn’t quite right. Smells are rich, colors bright and vibrant. Everything is bursting with life. In this state of awareness it is possible to find beauty in what otherwise might be perceived as mundan e- a twig, a caterpillar, a drop of dew on a leaf. While the tracker is attuned to this flow he feels a deep sense of well-being. He is ready to respond, alert yet relaxed. Optimally functioning “orienting responses” give the tracker confidence and a sense of security about his ability to successfully identify and meet any challenge he encounters. For wild animals, these instinctual responses mean surviva l- offering the capability for attunement and oneness with the environment that will keep them alive. For humans, far more is available through the utilization of these animal responses. They enhance our capacity for connection and enjoyment, bringing aliveness and vitality. When we are healthy and untraumatized, these instinctual responses add sensuality, variety, and a sense of wonder to our lives. The Orienting Response The hadosaur continued to eat, just a few feet from him. Grant looked at the two elongated airholes on top of the flat upper bill. Apparently, the dinosaur couldn’t smell Grant. And even though the left eye was looking right at him, for some reason the hadosaur didn’t react to him. He remembered how the tyrannosaur had failed to see him, the previous night. He decided on an experiment. He coughed. Instantly the hadosaur froze, the big head suddenly still, the jaws no longer chewing. Only the eye moved, looking for the source of the sound. Then after a moment, when there seemed to be no danger, the animal resumed chewing. — Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park Imagine you are strolling leisurely in an open meadow, and a shadow suddenly moves in the periphery of your vision. How do you respond? Instinctively, your previous motions stop. You may crouch slightly in a flexed posture, and your heart rate will change as your autonomic nervous system is activated. After this momentary “arrest” response, your eyes open wide. Without willing it, your head turns in the direction of the shadow in an attempt to locate and identify it. Sense your muscles. What are they doing?

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We must look at our community with compassion, estimate its strengths as well as its weaknesses, and assess its potential for change. Let us start with the family. It is true, as the old adage says, that charity begins at home. As the Confucians have taught us, the family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. Family life involves self-sacrifice, because daily we have to put ourselves to one side in order to accommodate the needs of other family members; nearly every day there is something to forgive. Instead of seeing this as an irritant, we should see these tensions as opportunities for growth and transformation. Ask yourself what you really feel about your family. What makes you proud and happy about them? Make a list of the ways in which your family nourishes you. Perhaps you could write a letter to them outlining your history as a family, and your hopes and fears for each person in it. Does your family have a black sheep, and how has this situation come about? Can it be rectified? How do you conduct arguments and disagreements? What are your particular strengths in family life? Is there anything more you could do? The Confucians believed in the importance of ritual in family life. In ancient China, each family member had to subordinate his or her needs to another: the older son to his parents, a wife to her husband, and a younger son to his older brother. The system was so designed that there was an interchange of reverence and everybody received a measure of respect. The older son, for example, would probably become a parent himself and be served by his son in the same manner as he was serving his own father. You might have both an older and a younger brother, so you were nourished by the rituals of consideration at the same time as you were bestowing them. The li required a son to submit absolutely to his father’s wishes, but the father was supposed to behave fairly, kindly, and courteously to his children. Family life was seen as similar to the carefully choreographed ritual ballets of ancient China, a series of interweaving and reciprocal dances in which each person had a partner and contributed to the beauty of the whole. The li gave all family members training in empathy: when his father died, for example, the eldest son would withdraw from the family home and fast, sharing his father’s growing weakness and suspension between life and death. None of this, of course, will do today.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Beliefs are important in grounding our frameworks of meaning – those complex webs of opinion that let us determine ‘how things are in the world’. I experienced this when I was drawn to Marxism as a teenager. Looking back on that distant and bygone cultural world of the 1960s, I can now see that I was tuning into the three elements of meaning – comprehension, purpose and mattering – proposed by George and Park, without consciously framing my response to Marxism with those specific terms. Marxism seemed to make sense of the complex and seemingly random flux of history; it gave me a sense of purpose as an agent of change who could end the oppression of the working classes, allowing me to feel I had significance in the grand scheme of history. I experienced both the ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning, taking pleasure in being able to make intellectual sense of the world, and experiencing a sense of peace or fulfilment resulting from this perception of meaning and personal mattering. How does this work in a religious context? How does the threefold account of meaning set out by George and Park work out in practice? Given the diversity of religious beliefs, I shall explore how a Christian might respond to this, and leave space for others to make their own connections. 1. Comprehension . We want to make sense of our world, grasping the oneness that lies behind the plurality of our experiences and weaves them into a coherent whole. Christianity has a deep belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things in God, who is seen as the focal point of its threads of meaning (a major theme in Dante’s Divine Comedy ). The letter to the Colossians, a New Testament writing thought to date from around 60 CE, speaks of all things ‘holding together’, having a fundamental coherence grounded in the Christian faith (Colossians 1.17). No matter how fragmented our world of experience may at times seem, there is a half-glimpsed bigger picture which holds things together. 2. Purpose . A core theme in the outworking of Christianity is the idea of a ‘calling’. This articulates the principle that doing something purposefully for God or for Christ invests the action with a deeper value that transcends – without diminishing – its utilitarian functions and benefits. The poet George Herbert engages this theme in his poem ‘The Elixir’: A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine. 55 3.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The stars in the night sky are a long way from the surface of the earth, so even the nearest seem to move little, if at all. They appear to be fixed against the firmament from day to day and year to year, permitting us to think them into shapes and symbols. But astronomers know that every star is in motion, that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties. The constellations we see are temporary creations, our effort to draw order and meaning from a mostly unknowable universe, to tell ourselves stories, to guide our way home across oceans. Marriage is like that too: a method we’ve devised to protect against the disorder of the outside world, to make sense of the wonderful nonsense that is love. My husband and I would be two individuals who loved and supported and believed in each other, and in so doing, we’d choose to link arms for the long haul. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I don’t know if I believe in marriage, I confided to a friend, but I feel somehow that the things we could do together, and the people we could become, will be better than anything we could do on our own. I still believe in that. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We never lived together before we got engaged, not even in the same city, not even on the same coast. It wasn’t intentional; it was our chronology. We fell in love and proceeded accordingly. Being together in the literal sense was a foregone conclusion: we’d get there. Brandon happened to propose before we did, because he was excited, because we were in love. The timing was a surprise, but the fact of it wasn’t. Of course now I want to break into the scene, wringing my hands: But did you talk about kids? Did you talk about values? Did you talk about money? Did you sit across from each other and share your visions for life together? Did you make sure those visions aligned, wielding your scrutiny like a carpenter’s level? Do you know you could have done that? Do you think your story would be different? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon finished his master’s that spring and was accepted to a doctoral program at the University of Washington. In June, he landed in Seattle for good, and we began searching for a new apartment to rent, someplace that would belong to both of us, a place to start our life together.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As for myself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliotheque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. Without the slightest hesitation, and never making any corrections, he filled in one after another of his index cards in tiny copperplate handwriting, subsequently setting them out in front of him in meticulous order. Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliotheque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. Even before then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling, and clearing of throats, I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony, and that conundrum, said Austerlitz, was going round in my head again on a day which has lodged itself with particular tenacity in my memory, a day when I spent perhaps as much as an hour in the manuscripts and records department on the first floor, where I was temporarily working, looking out at the tall rows of windows on the opposite side of the building, which reflected the dark slates of the roof, at the narrow brick-red chimneys, the bright and icy blue sky, and the snow-white metal weathervane with the shape of a swallow cut out of it, soaring upwards and as blue as the azure of the sky itself. The reflections in the old glass panes were slightly irregular or undulating, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that

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

  In mid-fifteenth-century Italy, the sculptor Donatello famously chose the latter option. [89] And, of course, a family needs a home. It is a phenomenon of the late Middle Ages that the Holy House of Nazareth, scene of Jesus’s childhood with Mary and Joseph, decided miraculously to reproduce itself in locations more convenient to Catholic Europe than Galilee: in England at Walsingham and in Italy at Loreto. Walsingham’s story dates to the eleventh century – a rebuilding of the Holy House in Norfolk inspired by a dream or vision – but it is clear from an accumulation of royal visits there that the devotion is actually two centuries later in date, from much the same time that Francis of Assisi was inventing the Nativity Crib. Loreto is a more miraculous transaction involving angels: its story of angelic transportation from Galilee dates it to the 1290s. That suggests a relationship to the European humiliation of the loss of the last Crusader footholds in the Holy Land, but references to Loreto multiply in the fifteenth century, when both Holy Houses had their first major glory-days. [90] By the late Middle Ages, therefore, the Holy Family was in place, gathering together many strands of the Gregorian revolution to provide a more or less symmetrical model for lay sexual activity paired with clerical celibacy: a Catholic family for Western Christendom, though one where Jesus’s brothers and sisters seem discreetly to have absented themselves. Canon lawyers, having in the eleventh and twelfth centuries obstinately revived the assent theory of St Paul’s ‘marital debt’ in the face of unenthusiastic marriage-broking parents, helped the ideal relationship between husband and wife monopolize and legitimize all the strands of sexual love that had emerged alarmingly undisciplined into the consciousness of twelfth-century Europe. Marital sexual love, in contrast to all those untrammelled emotions, was not always sinful, though often previous writers during the Gregorian revolution had asserted that it was.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Moving OnIn this chapter, we have explored the idea of a ‘big picture’, a way of understanding this world and our place within it that is attentive to its particularities, while still attuned to the grander vision of reality that lies behind or beyond them. It creates specifically an imaginative space within which beliefs can be interconnected and enriched, enabling not simply an explanation of how our world works, but an interpretation of that world that enables its meaningful habitation. For Wittgenstein, authentic meaning and happiness arise when we think and live in accordance with something deeper and greater than ourselves – something to which we are accountable for our beliefs. ‘In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world.’48 Similar views can be instanced from Chinese or Japanese philosophies of life and spiritual traditions. Confucianism, for example, stresses the importance of enacting a way of life that is in harmony with the way of the world.49 To believe is not to be religious (though that is certainly one possible outcome); it is rather to have discerned ‘an unseen order of some kind’ or grasped an intuited scheme of things, that enables us to understand our world and live a meaningful life. The case for faith or belief in sustaining meaningful human existence does not need to be made on religious grounds, nor is religion the sole example – or even the best example – of a way of thinking that requires faith. Yet since many consider that religion is the most obvious instance of something that is characterised by beliefs, we will explore the question of specifically religious belief in the next chapter, before moving on to consider how we might assess the reliability of our beliefs. Chapter 3The Case of Religious BeliefIt is fatally easy to believe that something that has been named is something that is understood. Everyone thinks they know what ‘religion’ is. Perhaps this is why it remains such a viable category in public discourse and everyday life. But cultural familiarity is not the same as intellectual stability. We are all familiar with the term ‘love’, but people profess and embody this notion in vastly different ways from one culture to another, across age groups and even within the same home. What is Religion?Religion, we are often told, is a universal human phenomenon. This may be true, but the popular conceptualisation of ‘religion’ is decidedly western, shaped by the social and intellectual history of modern western Europe and North America. Allegedly ‘global’ definitions of religion are generally based on the views of present-day WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) populations, overlooking the views of as much as eighty-eight per cent of humanity today, and reflecting a disturbing disregard for how the concept was understood in the past.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  To counter the arrogant self-sufficiency of jahiliyyah, Muhammad asked his followers to make an existential “surrender” (islam) of their entire being to Allah, the Compassionate (al-Rahman) and Merciful (al-Rahim), who had given “signs” (ayat) of his benevolence to human beings in all the wonders of the created world.80 A muslim was a man or woman who had made this surrender of ego. One of the first things Muhammad asked his converts to do was to prostrate themselves in prayer several times a day; it was difficult for Arabs imbued with the haughty jahili spirit to grovel on the ground like a slave, but the posture of their bodies was designed to teach them at a level deeper than the rational that the “surrender” of islam entailed daily transcendence of the preening, prancing ego. Muslims were also required to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor; this zakat (“purification”) would purge their hearts of residual selfishness. At first the religion preached by Muhammad was called tazakkah, an obscure word related to zakat, which means “refinement, generosity, chivalry.” Muslims were to cloak themselves in the virtues of compassion, using their intelligence to contemplate God’s “signs” in nature in order to cultivate a similarly caring and responsible spirit that would make them want to give graciously to all God’s creatures. Because of Allah’s bountiful kindness, there was order and fertility where there could have been chaos and sterility. If they followed this example, they would find that instead of being trapped in the selfish barbarism of jahiliyyah, they would acquire spiritual refinement. Islam is not a pacifist religion; Muhammad had to fight a war of self-defense against the Qurayshi establishment of Mecca, who had vowed to exterminate the Muslim community. Aggression and the preemptive strike were strictly forbidden. Sometimes fighting was necessary to preserve such humane values as religious freedom.81 But it was always better to forgive and to sit down quietly and reason with your enemy, provided that this dialogue was conducted “in the most kindly manner.”82 Tragically, Muhammad found that war had its own deadly dynamic; in the desperate struggle, atrocities were committed by both sides. So as soon as the tide turned in his favor, Muhammad adopted a nonviolent policy, riding unarmed with a thousand unarmed Muslims into enemy territory. There, having narrowly escaped being massacred by the Meccan cavalry, he negotiated a treaty with the Quraysh, accepting terms that seemed to his outraged followers to throw away all the advantages they had gained. Yet that evening, the Qur’an declared that this apparent defeat was a “manifest victory.” While the Quraysh had behaved according to the violent jahili spirit, harboring “stubborn disdain in their hearts,” God had sent down the “gift of inner peace” upon the Muslims, so that they had been able to respond to this assault with calm serenity.83 The treaty that had seemed so unpromising led to a final peace: two years later, in 630, the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to the Muslims.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘ ’Old on!’ bellowed Williams, ‘What the ’ell be you doin’? Quick, shorten ’is bridle, yer not in a circus!’ And then seeing Stephen: ‘Beg pardon, Miss Stephen, but it be a fair crime not to lead that horse close, and ’im all corned up until ’e’s fair dancin’!’ They stood watching Raftery skip through the gates, then old Williams said softly: ‘ ’E do be a wonder—more nor fifty odd years ’ave I worked in the stables, and never no beast ’ave I loved like Raftery. But ’e’s no common horse, ’e be some sort of Christian, and a better one too than a good few I knows on—’ And Stephen answered: ‘Perhaps he’s a poet like his namesake; I think if he could write he’d write verses. They say all the Irish are poets at heart, so perhaps they pass on the gift to their horses.’ Then the two of them smiled, each a little embarrassed, but their eyes held great friendship the one for the other, a friendship of years now cemented by Raftery whom they loved—and small wonder, for assuredly never did more gallant or courteous horse step out of stable. ‘Oh, well,’ sighed Williams, ‘I be gettin’ that old—and Raftery, ’e do be comin’ eleven, but ’e don’t feel it yet in ’is limbs the way I does—me rheumatics ’as troubled me awful this winter.’ She stayed on a little while, comforting Williams, then made her way back to the house, very slowly. ‘Poor Williams,’ she thought, ‘he is getting old, but thank the Lord nothing’s the matter with Raftery.’ The house lay full in a great slant of sunshine; it looked as though it was sunning its shoulders. Glancing up, she came eye to eye with the house, and she fancied that Morton was thinking about her, for its windows seemed to be beckoning, inviting: ‘Come home, come home, come inside quickly, Stephen!’ And as though they had spoken, she answered: ‘I’m coming,’ and she quickened her lagging steps to a run, in response to this most compassionate kindness. Yes, she actually ran through the heavy white doorway under the semi-circular fanlight, and on up the staircase that led from the hall in which hung the funny old portraits of Gordons—men long dead and gone but still wonderfully living, since their thoughts had fashioned the comeliness of Morton; since their loves had made children from father to son—from father to son until the advent of Stephen. 2That evening she went to her father’s study, and when he looked up she thought she was expected. She said: ‘I want to talk to you, Father.’ And he answered: ‘I know—sit close to me, Stephen.’

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  We have to work with human nature as it actually is, and confront the fact that ‘tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition and that no group – not even one’s own – is immune’. 10 Evolutionary pressures have ‘sculpted human minds to be tribal’, leading to the potential for social antagonism and violence. The New Atheism suggested that religion is the cause of toxic social division; a more reliable view is that our instinct for tribalism often seizes on religion for its own ends. Like just about everything that human beings turn their hands to, this enterprise of believing can go wrong. As we have seen, beliefs can lead to discrimination, violence and prejudice. This, however, points to the need to be critical and reflective about those beliefs, and how they are enacted and embodied. We can’t change who we are – but we can try to live ethically and peacefully. Paradoxically, it is the belief that we should live in these ways that allows us to subdue and redirect our more fundamental human instincts – a point emphasised by Thomas H. Huxley in his famous 1893 lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’. For Huxley, ethical values – which human beings create – can help suppress our more fundamental primitive tendency towards violence, rooted in a distant past. The solution to toxic beliefs is not a crude abolition of the category of ‘believing’, but the search for better forms of believing that foster good lives, individually and communally. Much research has been carried out on the way in which belief systems are correlated with flourishing and resilience, at both the individual and communal level. This research often focuses on how beliefs help individuals cope with ageing, trauma and uncertainty; in recent times, its scope has been expanded to include indigenous communities, exploring how their beliefs and practices enable them to survive, particularly in the face of colonialism and the erosion of their traditional cultures. 11 A recurrent theme to emerge from this research is that existentially disengaged beliefs do not seem to encourage human flourishing or create resilience. We care about beliefs that make a difference to us. I was fascinated by the 2006 debate which led to Pluto being reclassified as a ‘dwarf planet’ by the International Astronomical Union. But did it impact on me in any meaningful way? No. It was interesting in a detached sort of way. I also believe that the atomic weight of the chemical element chlorine is 35.453 – not because I’ve checked this out myself, having outsourced this matter to the scientific community at large. But if it turned out it was 35.467, I would shrug my shoulders. It would be interesting, but not personally relevant to me, even though it might be important to theoretical chemistry. Yet other beliefs make a profound difference to how we understand ourselves, and feel about our lives. Human flourishing seems to rest on three broad pillars: truth, purpose and meaning.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  As The World's information channel informed us that winds were now approaching gale force and seas rising to eighteen feet, the captain's voice suddenly issued from hidden speakers over my bed (more shades of The Prisoner), assuring passengers in a casual, conversational tone that conditions would "probably" not get too much worse and chiding those among us who had apparently been complaining that the seas had been too calm and unexciting. This is another difference between you and me and the very rich: The very rich, among them most residents of The World, for instance, have previously owned yachts. They know what it feels like to have your stomach rise up into your rib cage every few seconds while the floor heaves and pitches around you. And they seem to like it. I have to admit, the ship managed the seas beautifully. Even when swells reached the occasional twenty-seven feet, my sleep was undisturbed by groaning or creaking, the shriek of protesting beams or stressed rivets. The hull, as if surrounded by shock absorbers, handled every crashing wave with a solid, well- muffled authority. Nothing in the apartment moved or dropped save an occasional book flopping onto its side. Pots and pans stayed on the stove, lamps stayed on tables, doors remained shut, cabinets closed. As the ship rose and fell, the most violent movements were inside my stomach as I was squashed and lifted (rather gently I confess) above and into my firm and expensive bedding. I don't know that I would ever buy a residence on The World, regardless of what lottery I might someday win, or that I would ever book lengthy passage in her rental suites or studios. Most of her residents own two or three homes, which suggests a net worth unattainable in my lifetime and the lifetimes of all my friends put together. As delightful as it sounds to drop by one's floating home- away-from-home in say, Sydney, sail for Ho Chi Minh City, disembark for a few weeks, then rejoin her at some other port of call by plane—or private jet, as some surely do—I am not, I think, a seafaring man. I wish The World well, and all the intrepid souls who sail within her. They know better than I the ways of the deep blue sea—and how cruel a mistress she can be. They are used to solitude and are, I think, surprisingly self-sufficient for a demographic no doubt used to much pampering.

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

  The sacramentum of marriage had gained extra theological freight among some Western writers from the ninth century in the course of their determined assault on aristocratic ‘resource polygyny’ and on customary law allowing for a marriage to be dissolved. [53] Now the Gregorian revolution embraced marriage within a theological framework of seven sacraments, expanding the scriptural duo of Baptism and Eucharist. Peculiarities remained in this nuptial sacrament. Alone among the sacraments, it was now not available to priests, only laypeople. Moreover, a priest did not perform it: unlike the other six sacraments, it was a work performed by two laypeople – the couple – whose vows the priest merely witnessed and then blessed. The efforts of some theologians to alter that balance towards clerical authority were not successful: there was probably an awareness among clergy that the move would be unpopular. Many laity approaching marriage, particularly women, might relish the thought that their own consent was the crucial element in what they were doing. [54] A sacrament being an outward and visible sign of an inward or spiritual reality, this new reality encouraged a formal ecclesiastical ritual in church for all, for the first time in the Western Church. Western clergy had previously only been involved in negotiating or presiding over royal or noble marriages, but from the eleventh century a long campaign sought to make this requirement universal. [55] This was a marked shift even from the new devotional activism of the Carolingian Church. Carolingian monarchs or high nobility might have considered a church ceremony as bonus legitimation for dynastic turning points, but it had still been optional. In an analogous liturgical situation, the Emperor Charlemagne did not consider giving an active role to the senior clergy present in his chapel in Aachen when he granted his imperial title to his son Louis in 813; the younger man simply took his crown from the altar while everyone present looked on as witnesses. [56] An institution of marriage carefully constructed on the basis of family negotiations had not felt itself needing much confirmation in Christian liturgy. As late as the end of the eleventh century, the German romantic poem Ruodlieb included a prolonged description of decorously cheerful wedding ceremonial in a knightly family. It was still entirely domestic and did not involve a priest at all – all the more remarkable since the poet-author was a monk of the stately Benedictine house of Tegernsee in Bavaria. [57] A significant liturgical symbol of the anomaly in the marriage sacrament now constructed by liturgists was that at first it remained slightly distanced from the interior of the church building. The most prominent liturgical pattern-book in medieval England was the ‘Use’ of Sarum, designed to specify the elaborate round of services in a brand-new cathedral, under construction from 1220 on a virgin site at Salisbury ( Sarum ). Its wedding rite placed the bulk of the ceremony ‘ ante ostium ecclesiae ’, in front of the entrance to the church.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  But what is the status of this line of reasoning? Let’s be quite clear: this does not, and was not intended to, constitute a rational proof for God’s existence. Perhaps C. S. Lewis’s idea of a ‘supposal’ might be helpful here – a provisional assumption, proposed as a possible explanation of puzzling observations or experiences, which requires testing. Suppose there is a God, such as that which Christianity proposes. Does not this fit in well with our experience of reality? And is not this resonance indicative of the truth of the supposal? The approach is clearly not compelling; it is rather suggestive , hinting that the best way of testing a worldview might not be to assess its individual components, but to step inside the larger vision of reality that it enfolds, and test its quality and depth. One of the most important functions of a worldview is to inform and give stability to notions of meaning and purpose. In the next section, we shall consider how beliefs undergird these two important themes, which are of considerable importance to personal and social existence. Meaning: On Finding Significance and Purpose While some philosophers, such as Susan Wolf, appreciate the importance of the question of meaning, the most significant engagement in recent years with the pervasive human desire to find ‘meaning in life’ has come from psychology, which has sought to establish both what people understand by ‘meaning’ and the difference that this makes to their lives. The psychologists Login George and Crystal Park concluded that whether life is perceived as ‘meaningful’ or not is shaped by ‘the extent to which one’s life is experienced as making sense, as being directed and motivated by valued goals, and as mattering in the world.’ 51 Detailed surveys persistently indicate that human beings consider it to be important to have a perception of coherence in life allowing us to make sense of the world and our own personal existence; a sense of purpose , in which we discern core aims and aspirations for life; and a conviction of significance , in which our lives matter and are seen to have value. 52 A helpful distinction can be drawn between ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning. The former is about making sense of one’s experiences of life, while the latter concerns the feelings of satisfaction, fulfilment and happiness that result from our belief that we are living and acting meaningfully. 53 Is this human longing for meaning in life a ‘want’ or a ‘need’? 54 Is meaning something that some feel they would like, an optional extra that might add something to their existence? Or is it deeply rooted in our fundamental humanity, without which we cannot flourish – especially in the light of the ‘existential nihilism of the scientific worldview’? While this debate continues, an excellent case can be made that this is something integral and essential to human actualisation.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  him under the chin, they never touched the ground again. As night fell they would rise two or three miles in the air and glide there, banking now to one side, now to the other, and moving their outspread wings only occasionally, until they came back down to us at break of day.—Austerlitz had been so deeply immersed in his Welsh tale, and I in listening to him, that we did not notice how late it had grown. The last rounds had long since been poured, the last guests were gone except for the two of us. The barman had collected the glasses and ashtrays, wiped the tables with a cloth, and was now waiting to lock up after us with his hand on the light switch by the door. The way in which he wished us Good night, gentlemen, with his eyes clouded by weariness and his head tilted slightly to one side, struck me as an extraordinary mark of distinction, almost like an absolution or a blessing. And Pereira, the business manager of the Great Eastern, was equally civil and courteous when we entered the hotel foyer directly afterwards. He seemed positively expectant as he stood behind the reception desk in his starched white shirt and gray cloth waistcoat, with his hair immaculately parted, one of those rare and often rather mysterious people, as I thought on seeing him, who are infallibly to be found at their posts, and whom one cannot imagine ever feeling any need to go to bed. After I had made an appointment to meet Austerlitz the next day Pereira, having inquired after my wishes, led me upstairs to the first floor and showed me into a room containing a great deal of wine-red velvet, brocade, and dark mahogany furniture, where I sat until almost three in the morning at a secretaire faintly illuminated by the street lighting—the cast-iron radiator clicked quietly, and only occasionally did a black cab drive past outside in Liverpool Street—writing down, in the form of notes and disconnected sentences, as much as possible of what Austerlitz had told me that evening. Next morning I woke late, and after breakfast I sat for some time reading the newspapers, where I found not only the usual home and international news, but also the story of an ordinary man who was overcome by such deep grief after the death of his wife, for whom he had cared devotedly during her long and severe illness, that he decided to end his own life by means of a guillotine which he had built himself in the square concrete area containing the basement steps at the back of his house in Halifax. As a craftsman, and having taken careful stock of other possible methods, he thought the guillotine the most reliable way of carrying out his plan, and sure enough, as the short report said, he had finally been found lying with his head cut off by such an instrument of decapitation. It was of uncommonly sturdy construction, with every tiny detail neatly finished, and a slanting blade which, as the reporter remarked, two strong men could scarcely have lifted. The pincers with which he had cut through the wire operating it were still in his rigid hand. Austerlitz had come to fetch me

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I handled the gentle, slow-motion cantering of my kitchen floor well, I thought, for a landlubber, and when the time came, the steaks joined the potatoes in the reassuringly named Competence B-300 oven until medium rare. Soon, Nancy and I, in fluffy white ResidenSea bathrobes, were sitting at our dining room table, a towering floral arrangement dead-center, eating perfectly respectable Black Angus steaks and crispy-skinned potatoes, accompanied by an astonishingly affordable bottle of Brouilly. Emboldened by this early success, I rose early the next morning and confidently made omelettes aux fines herbes, chopping the fresh herb and parsley with the delightfully sharp knives provided. I'd seen a pretty impressive selection of stinky French cheeses at Fredy's and had over-optimistically ordered an Epoisse and an Alsatian Muenster. But when I went to fold a slice of the Muenster into my omelette, it became clear that this particular cheese had seen better days. My omelette tasted like a dead man's feet, with a dreadful ammonia aftertaste, and ended up in the food disposal (which worked like a charm). Nancy, however, was very pleased with her cheese-free omelette, happily poring over the day's Times. Later, in that happy, hazy, lazy, semisunstroked state that comes with too much time spent drinking banana daiquiris (made with real bananas) poolside, I was in no shape to cook much for lunch. I padded down to Fredy's for a fresh baguette and some cold cuts. Though dress during the day was casual (there is a dress code after six), passing a few silver-haired gentlemen in crisp khakis, handmade bespoke linen shirts, and thin timepieces, I felt like Gilligan, crashing a party for the Howells. Back in my apartment, I made sandwiches, soppressata and jambon blanc for me and sliced steak (leftover from the previous night) for Nancy. Suffering from an inferiority complex while shopping in my jeans and T- shirt, I'd overcompensated by buying a bottle of Roederer Cristal to wash the sandwiches down. I may not have been rich, but I was, after all, living as if I were—if only for a few days. Feeling on top of the world as only the drunk can feel, a here-today-gone-tomorrow-what-the-hell kinda rich, I finished my sandwich and the champagne and staggered through my living area, past the couches and armchairs and cocktail table, out onto my veranda and flopped into my Jacuzzi. The perfect end, I thought, to a perfect meal. Before dinner, Nancy and I watched a video from the ship's extensive library on our big-screen TV, the wretched, incomprehensibly awful Arabesque—the only positive effect of the film being that after eighty minutes with Sophia Loren, I was in the mood for Italian.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Schutz and eventually the repugnant Hitchcock were favored with regular tables of their choosing. Hitchcock was additionally favored with the offering of a free renovation of his kitchens in Bucks County, South Hampton, and Manhattan (supposedly from Rob but actually from a Schutz-controlled contractor). The restaurant was saved. The Puebla Posse soon ran the kitchen—even hiring additional friends and family members from their hometown of Atlixco. Though Rob continued to retain the title of chef, Manuel was given the day-to-day responsibility of running the kitchen and the title of chef de cuisine and a sizable raise to go with it. Needless to say, everyone got a generous Christmas bonus. No one got kicked out of their apartment. Credit card payments were made. Thousands of miles away, new satellite dishes appeared on rooftops in tiny Mexican towns. Best of all, Rob continued to cook now and again. On slow Sunday or Monday nights, his black Town Car would pull up outside and he'd walk briskly through the dining room as voices hushed and people pointed out that "the chef is here." He no longer ventured into the dining room. He never schmoozed. With his future secure, he gave up his dreams of television. Though he worked relatively little at Saint Germain—or anywhere else for that matter—content to golf and read and dream much of the time, to settle things with old wives and current girlfriends, he did drop by now and again. He'd put on a snap-front dishwasher shirt, some faded checks, his old clogs, and an apron. He'd tell Segundo, or whoever was working saute that night, to knock off early and he'd cook. He'd cook every order off his station, and off others besides. He'd stay till the very end, until the last order was gone. Then he'd dutifully clean and wipe down his station like he'd done when he'd been young and coming up. Afterward, he'd sit at the bar with his crew, who were now allowed to drink at Saint Germain, and they'd review the evening and tell stories and bust each other's balls. They'd tell stories, like the night of the Christmas Miracle, when the restaurant was saved. When they'd stayed, the whole crew, to drink the remainders of all those magnificent wines left over from their new benefactor's table and to congratulate themselves on their good fortune. A few days or weeks later, he'd return. And do it again. He'd cook. He'd cook like an angel. COMMENTARY SYSTEM D I wrote this piece shortly after Kitchen Confidential came out and was clearly feeling nostalgic for my kitchen and my cooks.

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

  Churches were in the position of the Church of the East under Sasanian or Muslim rule more than a millennium before; all they could do was to police their own communities as best they could and assert monogamy as an ideal for Christian identity, against considerable alternative social pressures. Such was the case in imperial and early Republican China, where, just as in early medieval Europe, Christian Churches faced a legally established social institution of concubinage, only abolished by the Republic in 1929. Some missionaries took a lenient view: in the 1920s, Bishop Frederick Graves of Shanghai emphasized that he was not going to insist on a man ending his relationship with a woman who under Chinese law was a concubine, but ‘innocent of wrongdoing’; all three parties in the relationship would suffer. It was enough that the Church should postpone the man’s baptism till either the wife or the concubine died. In a masterly piece of analogous pragmatism, his contemporaries as Anglican bishops in China generally allowed baptism to the women involved, since the Lambeth Conference of worldwide Anglicanism in its pronouncements on polygamy had said nothing specific prohibiting the baptism of family members of polygynous men. [52] In Ethiopia, Africa retained one ancient indigenous Christian culture, whose Christian monarchy rode out Western colonialism throughout the nineteenth century, crushing an invading Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Over the centuries the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had come to an uneasy understanding with polygamy. This marital custom was general in African cultures to the south but, more importantly, it reflected the peculiarly strong identification of Ethiopian Christianity with Judaism that steadily grew between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Ethiopian Christians reached back to the Hebrew Bible and adopted Jewish customs that the rest of Christianity had dispensed with, including circumcision and abstention from pork: likewise, polygyny. King Solomon was a role model for Christian kings of Ethiopia (from the thirteenth century the dynasty claimed Solomonic lineage), and that included his impressive array of wives. The habitual royal enthusiasm for multiple marriage was one of several long-term bones of contention between Ethiopian monarchy and clergy. The foundational compilation of local Christian literature, the medieval Kebra Nagast (‘Book of the Glory of Kings’, actually regarded as part of the canon of Scripture in Ethiopia), proclaims Ethiopian royal descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, while tartly pointing out that ‘after Christ, it was given to live with one woman under the law of marriage’. Monarchs ignored this pronouncement, as did very many of their subjects. Ethiopia’s compromise remains that lay polygynists reverently refrain from becoming communicants, and instead centre their devotion on a rigorous programme of fasting. [53] In Africa beyond the Sahara, marriage was a universal institution, but also very remote from the nuclear family systems of nineteenth-century Europe.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I will cook what is here. It recognizes the incomparable joys of eating wild strawberries or white asparagus in France, fresh baby eels in Portugal, tomatoes in Italy. The Bloods, in my experience, rooted as they are to place and time, are more likely than not to cook with real, heartfelt soulfulness and integrity, seeking to nurture, sooth, comfort, and evoke, rather than dazzle. I always liked to think of myself as a Blood. Having recently traveled the world, often to very poor countries where being a Crip is not an option, I was enchanted again and again by cooks making fresh, vibrant, hearty, and soulful meals, often with very little in the way of resources. Like with the early culinary pioneers of France and Italy, the engine driving great cooking in Vietnam and Mexico, for instance, seems to be the grim necessity of dealing with what's available when it's available—and making the most of it. I've yammered endlessly, tiresomely, on the desirability of food coming from somewhere, that the sort of regional, seasonal fare that so many French and Italians grew up with is what is missing from much of American and British culinary culture. But now I don't know. There is more than a whiff of dogma in the Blood argument. The French "Group of Eight" chefs who decried the introduction of "foreign" spices and ingredients into haute cuisine strike me as the same crowd who want every movie to be a bloated, government-funded costume drama starring the inevitable Gerard Depardieu. I once heard a Parisian chef, while watching a comrade from Alsace make choucroute garnis, comment, "Thees is not French." An element of jingoism hangs in the air when some chefs decry "outside" and "foreign" influences on cooking—a scary overlap between those decrying foreign- influenced food and those decrying foreigners. And the organics mob, so fervent in their recitations of the dangers of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation, often sound as if their agendas are driven by concerns far from taste or pleasure. The "slow food" lobby, arguing for sustainable sources of food, organic and free-range products, cruelty-free meat, and a return to a photogenic but never-to-be-realized agrarian wonderland, seem to overlook the fact that the stuff is expensive, and that much of the world goes to bed hungry at night—that most of us can't hop in the SUV with Sting and drive down to the organic greenmarket to pay twice the going rate. Don't get me wrong. I like free-range; it's almost always better tasting. Wild salmon is better than farmed salmon, and yes, the farmed stuff is a threat to overall quality. Free-range chickens taste better, and are less likely to contain E. coli bacteria. Free-range is no doubt nicer as well; whenever possible we should, by all means, let Bambi run free (before slitting his throat and yanking out his entrails). Since I serve mostly neurotic rich people in my restaurant, I can often afford to buy free-range and organic.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Next time I'm asked the question, I'll be ready with a very respectable answer. From Tian Tian, I wandered down to stall number five, an establishment called, appropriately enough, simply "Oyster Cake." The woman proprietor proudly told me she's been serving the same dish, and only that dish, for forty- five years. I figured, correctly, that after all that time she had to be pretty good at it. A throng of local customers, lining up for the deep-fried, Foochow-style beignet of oysters, minced pork, prawns, and batter, seemed to support this conclusion. I sat down at a center table (all the businesses share and jointly maintain the bare, bolted-down center tables), poked a squeeze bottle of spicy pepper sauce into the center of my cake, and gave it a good squirt. Pure goodness, washed down with a tall cup of sugarcane juice from an adjoining stall. Once I got started, it was hard to stop. At a business advertising "Pig Organ Soup," a brightly colored sign offered the appetizing-looking Malay specialty, ba ku the. I sat down once again and was presented with a brightly colored bowl of tender boiled pork ribs in a bowl lined with greens and clear, piping-hot broth. I ordered a freshly made mango juice and happily gnawed bones and slurped broth until full. It was tough to leave. Left untried were dozens of specialties, including an entire halal section set apart from the other stands; fried mee suah, sporting a tempting-sounding combination of mussels, pig's stomach, prawns, chicken gizzards, liver, and squid; and laksa, a spicy broth of seafood, noodles, and coconut milk. There was an enormous line of people waiting for a congee-style porridge—as in Taiwan and Thailand—and everywhere I looked, there seemed to be good, fresh, brightly colored stuff, brimming from crowded stalls with proud-looking proprietors. The place was clean, organized, friendly, and informal. Each business prominently displayed its grade from the health department. At the end of the day, in keeping with Singapore's stringent food- handling requirements, all leftovers would be disposed of—every business starting the next day from scratch with all new ingredients. This is what a food court should be, I thought, as I waddled toward the door. Imagine if there were a food court near you, at the mall, for instance, where instead of the soul-destroying mediocrity and sameness of American fast food, a wide spectrum of ethnically diverse lone proprietors—all of whom had been perfecting their craft for decades—offered up their very best. Imagine independently owned and operated businesses next door to each other, each serving one specialty as far from and different from the adjacent offering as each individual culture.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Detailed surveys persistently indicate that human beings consider it to be important to have a perception of coherence in life allowing us to make sense of the world and our own personal existence; a sense of purpose, in which we discern core aims and aspirations for life; and a conviction of significance, in which our lives matter and are seen to have value.52 A helpful distinction can be drawn between ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning. The former is about making sense of one’s experiences of life, while the latter concerns the feelings of satisfaction, fulfilment and happiness that result from our belief that we are living and acting meaningfully.53 Is this human longing for meaning in life a ‘want’ or a ‘need’?54 Is meaning something that some feel they would like, an optional extra that might add something to their existence? Or is it deeply rooted in our fundamental humanity, without which we cannot flourish – especially in the light of the ‘existential nihilism of the scientific worldview’? While this debate continues, an excellent case can be made that this is something integral and essential to human actualisation. Beliefs are important in grounding our frameworks of meaning – those complex webs of opinion that let us determine ‘how things are in the world’. I experienced this when I was drawn to Marxism as a teenager. Looking back on that distant and bygone cultural world of the 1960s, I can now see that I was tuning into the three elements of meaning – comprehension, purpose and mattering – proposed by George and Park, without consciously framing my response to Marxism with those specific terms. Marxism seemed to make sense of the complex and seemingly random flux of history; it gave me a sense of purpose as an agent of change who could end the oppression of the working classes, allowing me to feel I had significance in the grand scheme of history. I experienced both the ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning, taking pleasure in being able to make intellectual sense of the world, and experiencing a sense of peace or fulfilment resulting from this perception of meaning and personal mattering. How does this work in a religious context? How does the threefold account of meaning set out by George and Park work out in practice? Given the diversity of religious beliefs, I shall explore how a Christian might respond to this, and leave space for others to make their own connections.