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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White had escaped the school by running to the woods, but he’d rented a cottage on the old road to its door. He’d gained freedom by changing his life, but he’d not escaped the concept of freedom that school had given him. At school you move up from year to year, gaining more power and privilege until finally you leave. It was this notion of freedom – as the natural end to an ordeal-filled education – that never left White, and it was working within him when he lengthened Gos’s leash with breakable twine. As a schoolboy he knew that the boys over whom he’d had authority would one day have authority themselves. As a schoolmaster, too. And a falconer. Deep down he knew he was always training his charges for a time when they would be free. 25 Magical places Ten days have passed. Last night the forecast was bad. A storm surge threatened to inundate East Anglia. All night I kept waking, listening to the rain, fearing for the caravans along the coast, their frail silver backs against the rain and rising seas. But the storm surge held back at the brink, and the morning dawned blue and shiny as a puddle. After lunch I take Mabel up to the hill. Fractious gusts of wind rattle the hedgerows, blowing voluminous shoals of leaves over us as we walk up the track. There’s sticky mud, and pheasant prints in it. Flocks of fieldfares chak chak and dodge in the hawthorns by the cow field, breaking low when we get too near, bouncing over the hedge and away in thrushy strobes of black and white. It’s nice to see them. Proper winter is here. And Mabel is fizzing with happiness, wagging her tail in barely suppressed excitement, tummy feathers fluffed over her grippy toes, eyes gleaming silver in the sun. If this hawk could speak, she’d be singing under her breath. Something has changed inside me. Today it’s hard to slip into the exquisite, wordless sharpness of being a hawk. Or rather, the hawk seems more human today. A rabbit lopes across the path twenty yards away and she chases it; swings up into a poplar, clutching onto a thin, near-vertical branch and leaning into the wind, narrow as a stoat. She looks about. Sees something. Goes to the next tree, looks down. Then flies back to the first one. I proffer my fist. She comes down immediately, and off we go again. Raah, she says. More.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It was from a man who said that he had for thirty years lectured on birds and watched them all his life. ‘How you can talk of love for a bird after subjecting our wonderful predatory birds to such torture is beyond a normal mind,’ the letter ran. ‘Is there not enough cruelty in the world without adding to it for one’s amusement or hobby?’ ‘This letter put me off food for three days,’ White later confessed, ‘though I answered it with several pages of affection, apology and explanation.’ He waited for a reply. When it came, White wrote, the letter-writer ‘used the word “normal” five times, concluding with the pronouncement that he did not wish to hear from me again. It seemed polite to leave it at that.’ I’ve moved back to the city, to a little rented house in a street near the river with a small sunny garden that ends in a tangle of briars. Cats stalk the pavement outside, there are pigeons all over the roof, and it’s good to be in a house that I can call my own for a while. Today I’m unpacking boxes and stacking books on shelves. Three boxes down, five to go. I open the next box. Inside, on top of the other books, is The Goshawk. Oh, I think, as I pick it up. It is strange to see it again, because I’ve not thought of White for a while. As I grew happier his presence receded, his world more and more distant from mine. I look at the scuffed spine, open it, and flip to the very end. I want to read the very last page, where White lists all the things Gos was: a Prussian officer, Attila, an Egyptian hieroglyph, a winged Assyrian bull, ‘one of the lunatic dukes or cardinals in the Elizabethan plays of Webster’. A litany of human things in stone and armour, in marks on pages and dints in sun-baked clay. I peer out of the dusty window at Mabel in the garden. She has bathed and preened and now she’s leaning backwards to the oil-gland above her tail, nibbling it gently, then pulling each tail feather through her beak to make it waterproof. I know she is content: the half-closed, happy eye, the rattling of her feathers: these are signs of raw good humour. I cannot know what she is thinking, but she is very alive. I think of White’s list of things and what a strange, sad ending it is. I swear to myself, standing there with the book open in my hand, that I will not ever reduce my hawk to a hieroglyph, an historical figure or a misremembered villain. Of course I won’t. I can’t.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I only nodded; and then I yawned. And seeing me, she yawned too. ‘Good-night, Miss Astley,’ she said from behind her hand. She did not look like the Green Street girl now. She looked only weary again, and plainer than ever. I waited a moment while she stepped upstairs - I heard her shuffling above me, and guessed of course that she must share her chamber with the baby - then I took up a lamp, and made my way out to the privy. The yard was very small, and overlooked on every side by walls and darkened windows; I lingered for a second on the chilly flags, gazing at the stars, sniffing at the unfamiliar, faintly riverish, faintly cabbagey, scents of East London. A rustling from the neighbouring yard disturbed me and I started, fearing rats. It was not rats, however, but rabbits: four of them, in a hutch, their eyes flashing like jewels in the light I turned on them. I slept in my petticoats, half-lying, half-sitting between the two armchairs, with the blankets wrapped around me and my dress laid flat upon them for extra warmth. It does not sound very comfortable; it was, in fact, extraordinarily cosy, and for all that I had so much to keep me ill and fretful, I found I could only yawn and smile to feel the cushions so soft beneath my back, and the dying fire warm beside me. I was woken, in the night, twice: the first time by the sound of shouting in the street, and the slam of doors and the rattle of the poker in the grate, in the house next door; and the second time by the crying of the baby, in Florence’s room. This sound, in the darkness, made me shiver, for it recalled to me all the awful nights that I had spent at Mrs Best’s, in that grey chamber overlooking Smithfield Market. It did not, however, last for very long. I heard Florence rise and step across the floor, and then return - with Cyril, I supposed - to bed. And after that he didn’t stir again, and neither did I. When I woke next morning it was at the slam of the back door: this was Ralph, I guessed, leaving for work, for the clock showed ten to seven. There was movement overhead soon after that, as Florence rose and dressed, and much activity in the street outside - amazingly close, it all sounded to me, who was used to slumbering undisturbed by early risers in Diana’s quiet villa. I lay quite still, the contentment of the night all seeping from me. I didn’t want to rise and face the day, to pull my pinching boots back on, bid Florence good-bye, and be a friendless girl again. The parlour had grown very cold overnight, and my little makeshift bed seemed the only warm place in it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  A frowning contraction of the crines around her beak and an almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes meant something like happy; a particular, fugitive expression on her face, oddly distant and reserved, meant sleepy. To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next. This is the sixth sense of the practised animal trainer. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It’s part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear, and then in the birds she watched, took flight. It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away. Three tentative raps on the front door. ‘Hang on,’ I call. A small voice inside me, resentful and savage, hisses, Go away. It is Christina with two takeaway coffees and the Sunday papers. ‘So,’ she says, settling herself in a chair by the fireplace. ‘How’s it going? Is the hawk OK?’ I nod. I raise my eyebrows. I am vaguely aware this isn’t enough to make a conversation. ‘Mmm,’ I say. The voice is not entirely mine. She hugs her knees and looks at me curiously. I must try harder, I think. So I talk about the hawk for a while, and then I can’t speak any more. I stare at my paper cup. I’m pleased to see her. She shouldn’t be here. This coffee is good. We should be alone. These resentful thoughts surprise me. Manning the hawk is all about showing it new things. Christina is a new thing. ‘I’m going to try something,’ I tell her. ‘Ignore the hawk. Just keep reading the papers.’ I fetch a fresh piece of beef from the kitchen, sit with the hawk on the sofa, reach up and remove her hood. There’s a moment of fast-beating incomprehension and the air in the room turns to ice. Tight-feathered, in savage irresolution, eyes like porcelain saucers, the hawk stares. My heart sinks. She is going to bate. But the moment stretches, and she does not. After a deal of cautious observation she decides that a human turning newspaper pages is something entirely fascinating. An hour later all is calm and companionable.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For the first time in months my life had a purpose. I was waiting for the moment from which all else follows: the hawk lowering her head and beginning to feed. That was all I wanted. That was all there was. Waiting. Watching. Sitting with the hawk felt as if I were holding my breath for hours with no effort. No rise, no fall, just my heart beating and I could feel it, in my fingertips, that little clipping throb of blood that – because it was the only thing I could sense moving – didn’t feel part of myself at all. As if it was another person’s heart, or something else living inside me. Something with a flat, reptilian head, two heavy, down-dropped wings. Shadowed, thrush-streaked sides. There was a greenish cast to the light in the room, dark and cool and faintly submarine. Outside life went on, hot and distant. Shadows passed behind the curtains that were shoppers and students and bicycles and dogs. Vague, person-shaped shades making sounds like tin-can telephones, burred and incomprehensible. The slap, slap of walking feet. The hissing buzz of another bicycle. Long minutes passed. A piece of down dislodged from the hawk’s covert-feathers drifted slowly to the carpet at my feet. A tiny star , barely any quill to it, just a muss of soft white plumes. I looked at it for a long time. I’d not looked at an object like this, with such searching attention with my mind elsewhere, since that reindeer moss, on the day the phone call came. White-knuckle jobs , Dad used to call them: it was Fleet Street slang for the dangerous assignments. Leaning out of a helicopter with a camera in one hand and the other gripping the door-frame because the safety harness had snapped. Or looking through a fish-eye lens from the top of Salisbury Cathedral, standing on a frail iron rung hammered into stone four hundred feet in the sky. ‘White-knuckle jobs? I get through them by looking through the camera,’ he said. ‘I bring it up like this’ – and he mimed holding it to his eye. ‘Look through the viewfinder. Stops you being involved. Stops you being scared.’ You no longer possess a body to fall or fail: all that exists is a square of finely ground glass and the world seen through it, and a whole mass of technical decisions in your head about exposure and depth of field and getting the shot you hope for. Sitting there with the hawk in that darkened room I felt safer than I’d done for months. Partly because I had a purpose. But also because I’d closed the door on the world outside.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Commodian was probably a clergyman in North Africa.1567 He was converted from heathenism by the study of the Scriptures, especially of the Old Testament.1568 He wrote about the middle of the third century two works in the style of vulgar African latinity, in uncouth versification and barbarian hexameter, without regard to quantity and hiatus. They are poetically and theologically worthless, but not unimportant for the history of practical Christianity, and reveal under a rude dress with many superstitious notions, an humble and fervent Christian heart. Commodian was a Patripassian in christology and a Chiliast in eschatology. Hence he is assigned by Pope Gelasius to the apocryphal writers. His vulgar African latinity is a landmark in the history of the Latin language and poetry in the transition to the Romance literature of the middle ages. The first poem is entitled "Instructions for the Christian Life," written about A.D. 240 or earlier.1569 It is intended to convert heathens and Jews, and gives also exhortations to catechumens, believers, and penitents. The poem has over twelve hundred verses and is divided into eighty strophes, each of which is an acrostic, the initial letters of the lines composing the title or subject of the section. The first 45 strophes are apologetic, and aimed at the heathen, the remaining 35 are parenetic and addressed to Christians. The first part exhorts unbelievers to repent in view of the impending end of the world, and gives prominence to chiliastic ideas about Antichrist, the return of the Twelve Tribes, the first resurrection, the millennium, and the last judgment. The second part exhorts catechumens and various classes of Christians. The last acrostic which again reminds the reader of the end of the world, is entitled "Nomen Gazaei,"1570 and, if read backwards, gives the name of the author: Commodianus mendicus Christi.1571 2. The second work which was only brought to light in 1852, is an "Apologetic Poem against Jews and Gentiles," and was written about 249. It exhorts them (like the first part of the "Instructions" to repent without delay in view of the approaching end of the world. It is likewise written in uncouth hexameters and discusses in 47 sections the doctrine of God, of man, and of the Redeemer (vers. 89–275); the meaning of the names of Son and Father in the economy of salvation (276–573); the obstacles to the progress of Christianity(574–611); it warns Jews and Gentiles to forsake their religion (612–783), and gives a description of the last things (784–1053).

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was the Thames, I knew, which widened at its estuary to form the kind, clear, oyster-bearing sea I had grown up on. It gave me an odd little thrill, as I stood gazing at the pleasure-boats beneath Lambeth Bridge, to know that I had journeyed against the current - had made the trip from palpitating metropolis to mild, uncomplicated Whitstable in reverse. When I saw barges bringing fish from Kent I only smiled - it never made me homesick. And when the barge-men turned, to make the journey back along the river, I did not envy them at all. And while we strolled and gazed and grew ever more sisterly and content, the year drew to a close; we continued to labour over the act, and Kitty herself became something of a success. Now, every contract that Walter found her was longer and more generous than the last; soon she was over-booked, and turning offers down. Now she had admirers - gentlemen, who sent her flowers and dinner invitations (which - to my secret relief - she only laughed over and put aside); boys, who asked for her picture; girls, who gathered at the stage door to tell her how handsome she was - girls I hardly knew whether to pity, patronise or fear, so closely did they resemble me, so easily might they have had my role, I theirs. And yet, with all this, she did not become what she longed to be, what Walter had promised her she would be: a star. The halls she worked remained the suburban ones, and the better class of East End ones (and once or twice the not-so-nice ones - Foresters, and the Sebright, where the crowd threw boots and trotter-bones at the acts they didn’t like). Her name never rose much or grew larger on the music-hall notices; her songs were never hummed or whistled about the streets. The problem, Walter said, lay not with Kitty herself but with the nature of her act. She had too many rivals; male impersonation - once as specialised as plate-spinning - had suddenly, inexplicably, become a cruelly overworked routine. ‘Why does every young lady who wants to do her bit of business on the stage these days want to do it in trousers?’ he asked us, exasperated, when yet another male impersonator made her debut on the London circuit. ‘Why does every perfectly respectable comedienne and serio suddenly want to change her act - to pull a pair of bell-bottoms on, and dance the hornpipe?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  All eyes had been upon us as we made our entrance; all eyes were on us still, as we headed for the exit. I heard Miss Bruce return to her seat, and someone call, ‘Quite right, Vanessa!’ But another lady held my gaze as I passed her, and winked; and from a table near the door a woman rose to say to Diana that she hoped that Miss King’s trousers had not been too desperately singed... The trousers were rather spoiled; back at Felicity Place, Diana had me walk and bend before Maria and Evelyn and Dickie, in order to decide it. She said she would order me another pair, just the same. ‘What a find, Diana!’ said Maria, as Evelyn patted the cloth. She said it as she might say it about a statue or a clock that Diana had picked up for a song in some grim market. She didn’t care whether I overheard or not. Why should it matter that I did? She meant it, she meant it! There was admiration in her eyes. And being admired, by tasteful ladies - well, I knew it wasn’t being loved. But it was something. And I was good at it. Who would ever have thought I should be so good at it! ‘Take off your shirt, Nancy,’ said Diana then, ‘and let the ladies see your linen.’ I did so, and Maria cried again, ‘What a find!’ Chapter 3 I wish, for sensation’s sake, I could say that my parents heard one word of Kitty’s proposal and forbade me, absolutely, to refer to it again; that when I pressed the matter, they cursed and shouted; that my mother wept, my father struck me; that I was obliged, in the end, to climb from a window at dawn, with my clothes in a rag at the end of a stick, and a streaming face, and a note pinned to my pillow saying Do not try to follow me ... But if I said these things, I would be lying. My parents were reasonable, not passionate, people. They loved me, and they feared for me; the idea of allowing their youngest daughter to travel in the care of an actress and a music-hall manager to the grimmest, wickedest city in England was, they knew, a mad one, that no sane parent should entertain for longer than a second. But because they loved me so, they could not bear to have me grieve.

• From Educated (2018)

  she said, in her small voice, “I’m not a midwife, just an assistant.” The woman returned several times, perching on our sofa again and again, describing the uncomplicated births of her other children. Whenever Dad saw the woman’s car from the junkyard, he’d often come into the house, quietly, through the back door, on the pretense of getting water; then he’d stand in the kitchen taking slow, silent sips, his ear bent toward the living room. Each time the woman left Dad could hardly contain his excitement, so that finally, succumbing to either the woman’s desperation or to Dad’s elation, or to both, Mother gave way. The birth went smoothly. Then the woman had a friend who was also pregnant, and Mother delivered her baby as well. Then that woman had a friend. Mother took on an assistant. Before long she was delivering so many babies that Audrey and I spent our days driving around the valley with her, watching her conduct prenatal exams and prescribe herbs. She became our teacher in a way that, because we rarely held school at home, she’d never been before. She explained every remedy and palliative. If So- and-so’s blood pressure was high, she should be given hawthorn to stabilize the collagen and dilate the coronary blood vessels. If Mrs. Someone-or-other was having premature contractions, she needed a bath in ginger to increase the supply of oxygen to the uterus. Midwifing changed my mother. She was a grown woman with seven children, but this was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge. Sometimes, in the days after a birth, I detected in her something of Judy’s heavy presence, in a forceful turn of her head, or the imperious arch of an eyebrow. She stopped wearing makeup, then she stopped apologizing for not wearing it. Mother charged about five hundred dollars for a delivery, and this was another way midwifing changed her: suddenly she had money. Dad didn’t believe that women should work, but I suppose he thought it was all right for Mother to be paid for midwifing, because it undermined the Government. Also, we needed the money. Dad worked harder than any man I knew, but scrapping and building barns and hay sheds didn’t bring in much, and it helped that Mother could buy groceries with the envelopes of small bills she kept in her purse. Sometimes, if we’d spent the whole day flying about the valley, delivering herbs and doing prenatal exams, Mother would use that money to take me and Audrey out to eat.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She narrows her eyes with pleasure, bristles around the nose, and her feathers soften into loose falls of ochre and cream. ‘Has she done that before?’ asks Christina. ‘No,’ I say. ‘This is the first time.’ Laughter from the television audience as an SS officer dressed as a woman hoves into view and the hawk finishes eating, lifts herself into a vast, frothy mop of feathers, holds them there for an instant and shakes them all back into place. A rouse. It is a sign of contentment. She has not roused before. Now my hawk is tame enough to sit bareheaded. From her perch by the window she watches the curtains move over a carpet furred with dust. She won’t yet be picked up without a bate. But I’m working on that. From the sofa I flick a thumbnail-sized scrap of steak towards her. It falls with a sticky thwick on the vinyl cloth beneath her perch. She looks down at it. Frowns. Turns her head to one side to inspect it more carefully. Then hops down with a scratch of talons and a rattle of feathers, picks the meat delicately from the floor and swallows it. Gone. For a while she stands there, as if trying to remember something she has forgotten, then bounces back onto the perch with brio, all shaggy trousers and waggy tail. I wait a while, then send another scrap of flesh her way. Thwick . Hop . Swallow . Hop . I lower myself to the floor and sit there for a while. Shuffling slowly sideways on my rump, I watch the hawk out of the corner of my eye. She tenses. I stop. She untenses. I move. She tenses. I stop again. I inch across the carpet until I reach that hair-fine juncture where any movement nearer will make her bate from the perch. Breathing as carefully as if I were about to take an extravagantly long rifle-shot, I slowly – so slowly – extend my garnished fist towards her . I can almost taste the hawk’s indecision; the air is thick with it. But – joy! – she is looking at the food in front of her . She leans forward as if to pick it from the glove, but then something inside her snaps. With an awful clang of the metal ring of the perch against its steel base, she bates away from me. Damn . I take her up onto the glove for a few mouthfuls of food. When she is settled back on her perch, we play the game again. Flick . Hop . Flick . She’s solved the puzzle of where the food is coming from and some part of her is reconsidering my place in her world. She watches me intently as I inch towards her and again extend the garnished glove.

• From Educated (2018)

  taking the same ungainly side steps Dr. Kerry had, tipping and swaying in the wind; everyone else was holding tightly to the stone parapet, knees bent, backs arched, as if unsure whether to walk or crawl. I raised my hand and gripped the wall. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. “It’s not a criticism.” He paused, as if unsure he should say more. “Everyone has undergone a change,” he said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.” A gust of wind swept over the parapet and Dr. Kerry teetered, clutching the wall. I stepped up onto the ridge so he could flatten himself against the buttress. He stared at me, waiting for an explanation. “I’ve roofed my share of hay sheds,” I said finally. “So your legs are stronger? Is that why you can stand in this wind?” I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your mind.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. — I WANTED THE MIND of a scholar, but saw in myself the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane. The first week passed in a blur of lectures. In the second week, every student was assigned a supervisor to guide their research. My supervisor, I learned, was the eminent Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a former vice- master of a Cambridge college, who was much celebrated for his writings on the Holocaust.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  We have been made stewards of the work God has given us. As stewards, He is our loving Master whom we trust and honor. And we work for His glory, not anyone else’s.7 Intuitively we understand this to be true. I mean, admit it: it may feel satisfying to binge on chips and salsa while scrolling social-media feeds for an hour or two (or three?), but at some point don’t you become as antsy and itchy as I do? Doesn’t your soul start screaming for something more? You know what our souls are saying to us? They’re saying, This just isn’t cutting it for me! Of course it’s not cutting it for you, because as long as you focus on you, it will never be enough. The fact is, our brains are hardwired to thrive when we are serving others. Though subconsciously we seek to be served and have our needs met, research has proven that our brains actually do much better when we’re on the giving end rather than receiving end. Serving others reduces activity in the stress- and threat-related parts of our brains.8 People who live with purpose sleep better and live longer.9 Serving others lights up a region that is part of the brain’s reward system,10 which helps us recognize and pursue things that bring us pleasure like a good meal, an encouraging interaction with a friend, or a hug from a trusted family member. You and I were custom designed to play a role in God’s eternal story and to experience deep purpose, not to while away our time with snacks and flicks. We want more than that, and there’s a reason we do. God made us to crave so much more. Surrender and Obey It’s hard to read through the Bible without clearly seeing what God expects from those who say they love Him, from those who tell Him, “I want Your will for my life.” Do you want to know God’s will for your life? I’ll give it to you in three words: Surrender. And obey. That’s it! So many books have been written on finding God’s will, yet—boom —here it is in plain sight: “He said to them all: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.’ ”11 [image file=Image00051.jpg] In our small-minded human-nature economy, we think that freedom means going our own way. In fact, freedom is found in laying our lives down in the service of God, the One who made us, who knows us, and who has welcomed us into fellowship with Him. It is in this state of full surrender that the longing to obey rises up in us. Think of it: Obedience to God without full surrender is an exercise in robotically following the rules. Surrendering to God without obedience is the equivalent of faith with zero works.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  3. "Let all men in their respective stations, whether of poverty, of competence, or of splendor, live in the remembrance of this truth, that God confers his blessings on them for the support of life, not of luxury; and let them consider this as the law of Christian liberty, that they learn the lesson which Paul had learned, when he said: ’I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am intrusted, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need’ (Phil. 4:11, 12)." The Doctrine of Election. (Book 3, ch. 21, § 1.) 1. "Nothing else [than election by free grace] will be sufficient to produce in us suitable humility, or to impress us with a due sense of our great obligations to God. Nor is there any other basis for solid confidence, even according to the authority of Christ, who, to deliver us from all fear and render us invincible amidst so many dangers, snares, and deadly conflicts, promises to preserve in safety all whom the Father has committed to his care .... The discussion of predestination, a subject of itself rather intricate, is made very perplexed and therefore dangerous by human curiosity, which no barriers can restrain from wandering into forbidden labyrinths, and soaring beyond its sphere, as if determined to leave none of the divine secrets unscrutinized or unexplored .... The secrets of God’s will which he determined to reveal to us, he discovers in his Word; and these are all that he foresaw would concern us, or conduce to our advantage .... 2." Let us bear in mind, that to desire any other knowledge of predestination than what is unfolded in the Word of God, indicates as great folly, as a wish to walk through impassable roads, or to see in the dark. Nor let us be ashamed to be ignorant of some things relative to a subject in which there is a kind of learned ignorance (aliqua docta ignorantia) ....

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  How does the gospel story in Matthew read when seen through the eyes of those Christians who are the survivors of this horrendous chapter in American history? The graveyard is a good place to begin looking for answers because how people treat the dead has a lot to tell us about how they treat the living. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, my ancestors had a very ritualized practice of preparing the dead for transition into the afterlife. In fact, one of the aspects of Christianity that was easy for Choctaws to adapt was the concept of everlasting life because the afterlife was conceived as being an extension of the everyday world we already know. Like the people of ancient Egypt, Native Americans traditionally thought there could be no more wonderful world than the one they had been gifted with by the Creator. Consequently, “heaven” was visualized as being very similar to Earth. It was a land of plenty, a place where people would continue doing what they ordinarily did in traditional Native religion: worship God in everything they did on a daily basis. This theology of the afterlife underscores one of the hallmarks of Native America’s original covenant. In traditional Native life, religion was a daily experience. Native people woke in prayer, went through their daily routine in a sacred manner, and ended the day in prayer. Life was religion. There were special ceremonies, of course, and unique moments like birth and death, but these were all woven into the fabric of an everyday spiritual life. There was no special day set aside to do “church.” All days were equally precious, equally holy. This everyday sense of the sacred, which is what Native people believe will continue after death, means that the holy is accessible to everyone, everywhere, at every time. In traditional Native societies people could seek God in their own quest. They could interpret the meaning they believed God had for them. Their occupations as human beings were sanctified, whether they were hunters or homemakers, because the pattern of everyday life is exactly what God had designed for them from the very beginning. So there was not a great sense of hierarchy in most of the traditional Native American nations before 1492. This is not to say that there were not Native nations with a sense of religious hierarchy. There were some, such as the one that developed into a great city state known as Cahokia.12 But in general, the religious worldview that had evolved throughout North America was far more egalitarian, far more focused on a rhythm of everyday piety and special communal ceremonies. There might be spiritual specialists, the medicine people, who would either be consulted or who would preside over special events, but their role did not set them apart from the community at large. The whole of the nation was one great spiritual family and every member of that family had a direct channel to God through prayer and vision quest.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  ELI. ערב]‎ | vb. be sweet, pleasing (NH id. (rare); Hiph. Impf. יעריבו‎ Ecclus 407; & עָריב‎ adj. pleasant, sweet) ; s—Qal Pf. 3 fs. NTW Je 31% my sleep was sweet to me (°5), hw וע‎ 601860. Pr 35; of offering nb לא ע'‎ Mal ו‎ עָרְבְתּ‎ Ez 16" 6. על‎ pers., to whom thow wast pleasing ; 3 pl. 5 ay לא‎ Je 6% (of sacrif.); Impf. 3 ms. שיחי‎ yy ny vy 104° let my medi- tation be pleasing unto him! 3 fs. 2 FYA Pr 13" (of realized wish); 3 mpl. לאי יערבו לו‎ Ho g* (of sacrifice; but Kue Che We GASm Now read Dy"). \ Tany adj. sweet, pleasant ; ;—vayd ’y שר‎ pnd Pr 20"; קילף ע'‎ Ct 2". IV. DW (Vof foll.; poss. be arid; Thes ep. Eth. 0N2: be arid, sterile, so Baentsch” VW“ 0.37 but dub.; Syr. |5is = BH; Ar. גג‎ n.pr. of depression ₪. of Dead Sea). n.[m.] desert-plateau, steppe (cf.‏ ערבז (si vera 1.) Is 21%‏ בערב בּערב- -- )1 "™ Che‏ in the steppe (of what we know as N. Arabia);‏ Vrss Lo Che Gu®™ al. 22Y2 in the‏ "ל but in‏ evening.‏ Paw n. gent. of foregoing, dweller ;—Is 13”; Tawa ‘IWS Je 3”. n.pr. gent. coll. steppe-dwellers‏ ערב? of N. Arabia | 5 extended‏ cf.‏ ו later (so Herod '"17 etc.) to whole‏ Ar. Reyes] the Arabs, Bediwy the people, Doughty‏ 5" 18) אערב ,ערב ,ערבן ee; Sab.‏ As. Aribu, Arubu, Arabi, people in N. Arabia,‏ COT**; also Urbs D1 ?*™* of‏ יו מַלְבִי ע' הַַבְנִים בּמַדְבָר. -; nomad ‘ Arab’ tribes);‏ Ch 9 + || 1K 10" (v. id.);‏ 2 , (ְעָרֶב .ד Je 25" (v.‏ also Ez 27% + 30° (v. ?0.(; v. esp. N64" in‏ ע' steppe- > Ency. Bib. adj. gent. Arabian (in strictly‏ ערביז ethnographic sense, Né* 5( ;- הָע'-‎ as subst. Ne 2" Geshem the Arabian, so 6'; pl. הָערְבִים‎ Ne / 2Ch 21* 22'; also (written as NH) הערביים‎ 26’ (Qr ,(ְהָעְרְבִים‎ and even הָעַרְבִיאִים‎ 17". I. עַרְבָה‎ | n.f. desert-plain, steppe ;—abs. ע'‎ 28 + , sf. ANDY Is 51°; pl. עבות‎ Je 5° vy 68% estr. ערבוּת‎ 2K 25°+, ערבת‎ Je52°;—1. earliest use: a. arid steppe W. of Dead Sea (in 8. Judah) ד‎ ₪ 23%, also Ez 47° Is 515, whence 787 ערב name הָע'‎ DY Jos 3° (JE || הפלח‎ DY), also 2K ז‎ Dt 4%, and (|lid.) 3% Jos 12*(D); DY חל‎ Am 6" must be E. of Dead Sea, si vera 10 but rd. prob. DYIYD נ'‎ +. bm). |. Jordan- 6% W. of river + ו‎ plain; near ford (opp. Jericho) 2 8 2% , 61. Jos 8% (JE); also Dt 11” 2 K 25*= Je 397 = 52’;—28 15” 17% v. May. 0. Jordan-valley E. of river 284’. 2.inD:

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My mistress had said she wouldn’t care to have me leave the house, unchaperoned - indeed, she had Mrs Hooper lock the great front door: I heard her turn the key each time she stepped to close it. I did not much mind my lack of liberty; as I have said, the warmth, the luxury, the kissing and the sleep made me grow stupid, and lazier than ever. I might drift from room to room, soundless and thoughtless, pausing perhaps to gaze at the paintings on the walls; or at the quiet streets and gardens of St John’s Wood; or at myself, in Diana’s various looking-glasses. I was like a spectre - the ghost, I sometimes imagined, of a handsome youth, who had died in that house and still walked its corridors and chambers, searching, searching, for reminders of the life that he had lost there. ‘What a scare you gave me, miss!’ the maid might say, hand at her heart, after she had come upon me, lingering at a bend in the stair or in the shadows of some curtain or alcove; but when I smiled and asked what work had she to do there? or, did she know if the day were a fine or a dull one? she would only blush and look frightened: ‘I’m sure, miss, I couldn’t say.’ The climax of my day, the event to which my thoughts naturally tended, and which gave direction and meaning to the hours before it, was Diana’s return. There was drama to be had in the choosing of the chamber, and the pose, in which I would arrange myself for her. She might find me smoking in the library, or dozing, with unfastened buttons, in her parlour; I would feign surprise at her entry, or let her rouse me if I pretended sleep. My pleasure at her appearance, however, was real enough. I at once lost that sense of ghostliness, that feeling of waiting in the wing, and grew warm and substantial again before the blaze of her attention. I would light her a cigarette, pour her a drink. If she was weary I would lead her to a chair and stroke her temples; if she was footsore - she wore high black boots, very tightly laced - I would bare her legs and rub the blood back into her toes. If she was amorous - as she frequently was - I would kiss her. She might have me caress her in the library or drawing-room, heedless of the servants who passed beyond the closed door, or who knocked and, at our breathy answering silence, retired unbidden. Or she might send orders that she was not to be disturbed, and lead me to her parlour, to the secret drawer that held the key that unlocked the rosewood trunk. The opening of this still enthralled and excited me, though I had soon grown used to handling its contents. They were, perhaps, mild enough.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Kitty did so. With no more glances at me she threw the contents of her shell into her mouth, chewed them hard and fast, and swallowed them. Then she wiped her lips with her napkin, and smiled at Father. ‘Now,’ he said, confidentially, ‘tell the truth: have you ever tasted an oyster such as that, before, or have you not?’ Kitty said that she had not, and Davy gave a cheer; and for a while there was no sound at all but the delicate, diminutive sounds of good oyster-supper: the creak of hinges, the slap of discarded beards, the trickle of liquor and butter and beer. I opened no more shells for Kitty, for she managed them herself. ‘Look at this one!’ she said, when she had handled half-a-dozen or so. ‘What a brute he is!’ Then she looked more closely at it. ‘Is it a he? I suppose they all must be, since they all have beards?’ Father shook his head, chewing. ‘Not at all, Miss Butler, not at all. Don’t let the beards mislead you. For the oyster, you see, is what you might call a real queer fish - now a he, now a she, as quite takes its fancy. A regular morphodite, in fact!’ ‘Is that so?’ Tony tapped his plate. ‘You’re a bit of an oyster, then, yourself, Kitty,’ he said with a smirk. She looked for a moment rather uncertain, but then she smiled. ‘Why, I suppose I am,’ she said. ‘Just fancy! I’ve never been likened to a fish before.’ ‘Well, don’t take it the wrong way, Miss Butler,’ said Mother, ‘for spoken in this house, it is something of a compliment.’ Tony laughed, and Father said, ‘Oh, it was, it was!’ Kitty still smiled. Then she half-rose to reach a pepper castor; and when she sat again she drew her feet beneath her chair, and I felt my thigh grow cool. When the oyster-barrel was quite empty, and the lemonade and the Bass had all been drunk, and Kitty declared that she had never had a finer supper in all her life, we moved our chairs away from the table, and the men lit cigarettes, and Alice and Rhoda set out cups, for tea. There was more talk, and more questions for Kitty to answer. Had she ever met Nelly Power? Did she know Bessie Bellwood, or Jenny Hill, or Jolly John Nash? Then, on another tack: was it true that she had no young chap? She said she had no time for it. And had she family, in Kent, and when did she see them?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The fire flamed, then grew hot and ashy, and at half-past ten or so Ralph yawned, and slapped his chair and rose from it and wished us both good-night. It was all just as it had been on my first evening there - except that he had a kiss for me, too, these days, as well as for Florence; and there was my little truckle-bed, propped in the corner, and my shoes beside the fire, and my coat upon the hook behind the door. I gazed at all this in a complacent sort of way, then yawned, and rose to fetch the kettle. ‘Stop all that now,’ I said to Florence, nodding at her books. ‘Come and sit with me and talk.’ It was not a strange request - we had got rather into the habit of sitting up when Ralph had gone to bed, chatting over the day’s events - and now she looked at me and smiled, and set down her pen. I swung the kettle over the fire, and Florence rose and stretched - then cocked her head. ‘Cyril,’ she said. I listened too, and after a second caught his thin, irregular cry. She moved to the stairs. ‘I’ll shush him, before he wakes Ralph.’ She was gone for a full five minutes or so, and when she returned it was with Cyril himself, his lashes gleaming in the lamplight and his hair damp and darkened with the sweat of fretful slumber. ‘He won’t settle,’ she said. ‘I’ll let him stay with us a while.’ She sat back in the armchair by the fire and the child lay heavily against her. I passed her her tea, and she took a sideways sip at it, and yawned. Then she gazed at me, and rubbed her eyes. ‘What a help you’ve been to me, Nance, these past few months!’ she said. ‘I only help,’ I answered truthfully, ‘to stop you wearing yourself out. You do too much.’ ‘There’s so much to do!’ ‘I can’t believe that all of it should fall to you, though. Do you never weary of it?’ ‘I get tired,’ she said, yawning again, ‘as you can see! But never of it.’ ‘But Flo, if it’s such an endless task, why labour at all?’ ‘Why, because I must! Because how could I rest, when the world is so cruel and hard, and yet might be so sweet... The kind of work I do is its own kind of fulfilment, whether it’s successful or not.’ She drank her tea. ‘It’s like love.’ Love! I sniffed. ‘You think love is its own reward, then?’ ‘Don’t you?’ I gazed into my cup. ‘I did once, I think,’ I said. ‘But...’

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In Khosrow’s Persia there was zero tolerance for rebellion but no religious discrimination: on the eve of a revolt, the king warned that he would “kill every man who persists in insubordination against me—be he a good Zoroastrian, a Jew, or a Christian.”107 Like most traditional agrarian rulers, the Persian kings had no interest in imposing their faith on their subjects; even Darius’s imperial version of Zoroastrianism had been strictly confined to the aristocracy. Their subjects worshipped as they chose, living in communities of Christians, Jews, and pagans, governed by their own laws and customs, and ruled by religious officials who were agents of the state—an arrangement that determined the social organization of Middle Eastern society for over a millennium. After Khosrow’s death, there was a civil war in Persia, and the Byzantine emperor Maurice intervened to put the young Khosrow II (r. 591–628) on the throne. Alienated from the Persian nobility, Khosrow II surrounded himself with Christians, but the splendors of his court set the tone for Middle Eastern monarchy for centuries to come. He continued his father’s reforms, making Mesopotamia a vibrant, rich, and creative region. The Jewish community at Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad) became the intellectual and spiritual capital of world Jewry, and Nisibis, dedicated to the study of Christian scripture, another great intellectual center.108 While Byzantine horizons were shrinking, Persians were broadening their outlook. When his ally Maurice was assassinated in a coup in 610, Khosrow seized the opportunity to conduct massive raids for slaves and booty in Byzantium. And when Heraclius, governor of Roman North Africa, gained the imperial throne in another coup, Khosrow embarked on a huge offensive, conquering Antioch (613), large areas of Syria and Palestine (614), and Egypt (619); in 626 the Persian army even besieged Constantinople. But in an extraordinary riposte, Heraclius and his small disciplined army defeated the Persian forces in Asia Minor and invaded the Iranian Plateau, attacking the unprotected estates of the Zoroastrian nobility and destroying their shrines before he was forced to withdraw. Utterly discredited, Khosrow was assassinated by his ministers in 628. Heraclius’s campaign had been more overtly religious than any previous war of Christian Rome. Indeed, so intertwined were church and empire by now that Christianity itself had seemed under attack during the siege of Constantinople. When the city was saved, the victory was attributed to Mary, mother of God, whose icon had been paraded to deter the enemy from the city walls.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  By the lion who brushes out his paw-prints with his tail so that the hunter is thrown off the track. So we should with penance erase the marks of our sins that the devil may not find us out. 2. The serpent which closes both ears to the seducer, one ear with his tail and the other by holding it to the ground. Against the devil we should shut our ears by the two thoughts of death and eternity. 3. The ant from which we learn industry in making provision for the future. 4. A certain kind of fish which sucks itself fast to the rock in times of storm. So we should adhere closely to the rock, Christ Jesus, by thoughts of his passion and thus save ourselves from the surging of the waves of the world. Such materials show that the homiletic instinct was alert and the preachers anxious to catch the attention of the people and impart biblical truth. The sermons of the German preachers of the 15th century were written now in Latin, now in German. The more famous of the Latin sermonizers were Gabriel Biel, preacher in Mainz and then professor in Tübingen, d. 1495, and Jacob Jüterbock, 1883–1465, Carthusian prior in Erfurt and professor in the university in that city.1154 Among the notable preachers who preached in German were John Herolt of Basel, already mentioned; the Franciscan John Gritsch whose sermons reached 26 editions before 1500; the Franciscan, John Meder of Basel whose Lenten discourses on the Prodigal Son of the year 1494 reached 36 editions and Ulrich Krafft, pastor in Ulm, 1500 to 1516, and author of the two volumes, The Spiritual Battle and Noah’s Ark. More famous than all others was Geiler of Strassburg, usually called from his father’s birthplace, Geiler of Kaisersberg, born in Schaffhausen, 1445, died in Strassburg, 1510. He and his predecessor, Bertholdt of Regensburg, have the reputation of being the most powerful preachers of mediaeval Germany. For more than a quarter of a century he stood in the cathedral pulpit of Strassburg, the monarch of preachers in the North. After pursuing his university studies in Freiburg and Basel, Geiler was made professor at Freiburg, 1476. His pulpit efforts soon made him a marked man. In accepting the call as preacher in the cathedral at Strassburg, he entered into a contract to preach every Sunday and on all festival and fast days. He continued to fill the pulpit till within two months of his death and lies interred in the cathedral where he preached.1155 "The Trumpet of Strassburg," as Geiler was called, gained his fame as a preacher of moral and social reforms. He advocated no doctrinal changes. Called upon, 1500, to explain his public declaration that the city councillors were "all of the devil," he issued 21 articles demanding that games of chance be prohibited, drinking halls closed, the Sabbath and festival days observed, the hospitals properly cared for and monkish mendicancy regulated.