Disappointment

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.

Page 6 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The Role of the Church This vision of the church’s calling—to be the means through which Jesus continues to work and to teach, to establish his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven—is an ideal so high that it might seem not only unattainable, but hopelessly out of touch, triumphalistic, and self-congratulatory. One of today’s most-repeated clichés is that there are lots of people who find God believable, but the church unbearable, Jesus appealing, but the church appalling. We are never short of ecclesial follies and failings, as the sorrowing faithful and the salivating journalists know well. What does it mean to say that Jesus is king when the people who are supposed to be putting his kingship into practice are letting the side down so badly? There are three things to say here, and each of them matters quite a lot. To begin with, for every foolish or wicked Christian leader who ends up in court, in the newspapers, or both, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands who are doing a great job, often unnoticed except within their own communities. The effect of perspective (we only notice the things that get into the papers, but the papers only report the odd and the scandalous) means that almost all of what is done by the churches goes unreported, allowing sneering outsiders to assume that the church is collapsing into a little heap of squabbling factions. Mostly it isn’t. The newspaper perspective is like someone who only walks down a certain street on the one day a week when people put out their garbage for collection and who then reports that the street is always full of garbage. Christians ought not to collude with the sneerers. “Walk down the street some other time,” we ought to say. “Come and see us on a normal day.” Second, though, we must never forget that the way Jesus worked then and works now is through forgiveness and restoration. His spectacular conversation with Peter (John 21:15–19), who would certainly have had his name in the papers after his appalling behavior on the night Jesus was arrested, shows a depth of love and trust. The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’s kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task. The moment any Christian, particularly any Christian leader, forgets that—the moment any of us imagine that we are automatically special or above the dangers and temptations that afflict ordinary mortals—that is the moment when we are in gravest danger. Peter’s disastrous, humiliating crash came an hour or two after he had declared that he would follow Jesus to prison and even to death.

• From Another Country (1962)

  These words sounded, in his own ears, stiff and uncaring. But he had known Cass and Richard too long and been too young when he met them; he had never really thought of Cass and Richard as lovers. Sometimes, of course, he had watched Cass move, realizing that, small as she was, she was all woman and all there, had good legs and nice breasts and knew how to twist her small behind; and, sometimes, watching Richard’s great paw on her wrist, wondered how she bore his weight. But he had the tendency of all wildly disorganized people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own. And for the very first time he had the sense of Cass as a passionate woman who had merely been carrying on a legal love affair; who writhed as beautifully and shamelessly in Richard’s arms as the women Vivaldo had dreamed about for all these years. “I guess,” he added, “I must sound pretty dumb. Forgive me.” She smiled—smiled as though she had read his thoughts. “No, you don’t. Perhaps I also thought we had it made. But nobody ever has it made.” She lit another cigarette, straightening her shoulders, slowly circling, as she had for many weeks now, around some awful decision. “I keep telling myself it’s because of the way our lives have changed, now that Richard’s becoming so well known. But it isn’t that. It’s something that’s been there all along.” Now she was very grave and dry. She looked at Vivaldo through the smoke of her cigarette, narrowing her eyes. “You know, I used to look at you and all your horrible adventures and compare you to Richard and me and think how lucky we were. He was the first”—she faltered and looked down—“the very first man I ever had, and I was the first for him, too— really the first, the first girl, anyway, he ever loved .” And she looked down again, as though the burden of confession were too great. Yet they were united in the knowledge that what she had begun she must now finish. “And you think he doesn’t love you any more?” She did not answer. She covered her forehead with her ringed left hand and stared into the dish of salted peanuts as though the answer to all riddles were hidden there. The tiny arrows on her wrist watch said it was twenty-five minutes to seven. Ida would have left Ellis hours ago and would have visited her singing teacher. She would now be in the restaurant, her station set up, and her uniform on, preparing for the dinner rush. He could see her closed, haughty face as she approached a table, manipulating her pad and pencil as though it were a sword and shield. She would not have stayed long with Ellis—he was a busy man.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This vision of the church’s calling—to be the means through which Jesus continues to work and to teach, to establish his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven—is an ideal so high that it might seem not only unattainable, but hopelessly out of touch, triumphalistic, and self-congratulatory. One of today’s most-repeated clichés is that there are lots of people who find God believable, but the church unbearable, Jesus appealing, but the church appalling. We are never short of ecclesial follies and failings, as the sorrowing faithful and the salivating journalists know well. What does it mean to say that Jesus is king when the people who are supposed to be putting his kingship into practice are letting the side down so badly? There are three things to say here, and each of them matters quite a lot. To begin with, for every foolish or wicked Christian leader who ends up in court, in the newspapers, or both, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands who are doing a great job, often unnoticed except within their own communities. The effect of perspective (we only notice the things that get into the papers, but the papers only report the odd and the scandalous) means that almost all of what is done by the churches goes unreported, allowing sneering outsiders to assume that the church is collapsing into a little heap of squabbling factions. Mostly it isn’t. The newspaper perspective is like someone who only walks down a certain street on the one day a week when people put out their garbage for collection and who then reports that the street is always full of garbage. Christians ought not to collude with the sneerers. “Walk down the street some other time,” we ought to say. “Come and see us on a normal day.” Second, though, we must never forget that the way Jesus worked then and works now is through forgiveness and restoration. His spectacular conversation with Peter (John 21:15–19), who would certainly have had his name in the papers after his appalling behavior on the night Jesus was arrested, shows a depth of love and trust. The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’s kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task. The moment any Christian, particularly any Christian leader, forgets that—the moment any of us imagine that we are automatically special or above the dangers and temptations that afflict ordinary mortals—that is the moment when we are in gravest danger. Peter’s disastrous, humiliating crash came an hour or two after he had declared that he would follow Jesus to prison and even to death.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  As for Solomon’s human and social wisdom, it is but the eponymous wisdom of his creators, worldly not cosmic, thus anthroposophy not theosophy. The story told to prove this wisdom—”The Judgment of Solomon”—is but a fable convenue . In other sources it is attributed to David. And neither is Jewish wisdom originally. The literature of the Jains of India tells this same story of their Solomon. Proverbs 22:17-23:11 is a nearly verbatim translation of the Egyptian book, The Wisdom of Amenetnope , written about 1000 B.C. But no matter the source, this wisdom contains one gem “of purest ray serene”—”with all your getting, get understanding.” Understanding is of all human qualities the highest; without it man is but a blind “creature moving about in worlds not realized,” the Bible included. Such is he today. In other chapters we condemned his ways and systems, and we did so because we realized that they are but the result of his present lack of understanding. Therefore, like Solomon, we say to him: “With all your getting, get understanding.” Had our statesmen one iota of this, they would not have reestablished the state of Israel. Had our astronomers an iota of it they would not offer absurdities as creation theories. Solomon’s wisdom was not such that it saved him from downfall. He “fell” as did Adam, Noah and Samson, and for the same reason: the authors were secretly following the creative process. If it be otherwise, then the promise of God is not worth the paper it is written on. Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon were all promised a kingdom that would last forever, yet in spite of all these promises and forevers the “chosen” ended in captivity and final dispersion. In 70 A.D. and again in 135, Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jews forbidden to enter it. These promises are true only cosmologically, for this kingdom is the world, not Israel. No human kingdom lasts forever, but as far as we are concerned, the earth does. Mythology, all is mythology, saith the preacher (priest), and by it the Jews built for themselves a mythical kingdom. Aside from this, they never had one. Their political history began with the Maccabees, and their system was a commonwealth. One objective clue to the political antiquity of any race is its coins, and there are no Jewish coins prior to the Maccabean period, and even those they had are of Greek imprint. The first of these are of the year 138 B.C., the time of Simon the Maccabee. Another political and national clue is the calendar, and the Jews had none; they used the Babylonian. Their present calendar 5,700 plus has no basis in fact. It is based on the absurd date of creation 3760 B.C. This makes 1239 A.D. the 5000 year and the present 5730 plus, minus facts. The Maccabean period is Jewish history; the rest is mythology historized.

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

  That’s hardly a normal decision for a teenage girl. Until we get to the root of that—find out what had gone so wrong in your life that you decided to leave the world— and, ” he added pointedly, “to leave your family” —he paused significantly—“we cannot really get to the root of your problem.” And so it began. I embarked on years of psychiatric sessions during which we raked over the memories of my unexceptional childhood. No doubt this conformed to the orthodoxy of the day, and in many cases I am sure that this is an effective way to treat the problems of adult life. But in my case, it simply did not work. The anxiety attacks, the terror, and the occasional loss of consciousness continued, and each hallucinatory episode pushed me further away from the rest of the world, making it even more impossible for me to get onto that merry-go-round. When I wrote Beginning the World, I used the conversations with Dr. Piet as a narrative device to explain what I thought was happening to me psychologically. But the truth is that I remember very little about them. I desperately wanted the treatment to work and cooperated as fully as I could, but Freud, I believe, once said that if you are suffering from toothache, you cannot engage in any productive analysis. You cannot even fall in love. Against the background of these strange periodic attacks, which Dr. Piet dismissed as mere symptoms of a deeper malaise, these psychiatric sessions felt as though we were conducting an esoteric discussion of medieval history while the house was on fire. I wish that Dr. Piet had allowed me to discuss my experiences in the convent. If I could have talked to him about the novitiate, the loneliness, the strain of the last few years of religious life, or my ambivalent feelings about it all, then maybe I could have begun to process the experience. But Dr. Piet usually deflected any such discussion. He saw it as a distraction, a smoke screen that enabled me to hide from my real problems. “You see, in the convent, you were safe,” he would tell me earnestly. “You were not challenged in any way. It was a secure, quiet existence—far from the madding crowd, if you like. You didn’t have to face up to emotional or sexual issues. You were in abeyance. You had, as it were, crawled back to the womb.” I would listen, bemused by this fantasy. For Dr. Piet, the religious life was like the secret gardens or lost domains of literature. He saw serene processions of beautiful nuns gliding down sunlit cloisters, and imagined the convent as an enclave of sisterly peace and concord.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  As for their opposition to war, it is the most hopeful sign in this century. Only when young men the world over refuse to die because old men can’t think, will there be peace. 1 Abram Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews , second edition, p. 88. 15Ezekiel’s VisionS uppose someone told you something that seemed of great spiritual significance, and, on inquiry, asserted that he had gained this knowledge in a vision. No doubt you would consider him a spiritual man and an instrument of divine revelation. Then suppose you learned later that this man did not have a vision at all, and that what he had told you was common knowledge among the wise. You might still rate the knowledge high, but your estimate of the man would fall pretty low; indeed if you were like most people, you would set him down as an old fraud. Well, such is Ezekiel, and such is his pretended vision, but let the old fraud expose himself. The italics are ours. 1. Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God . 4. And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. 5. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man , 10. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man , and the face of a lion , on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle . 15. Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. 16. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel . 18. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. 19. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. 20. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels (Chap. 1).

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

  “And anyway, we’re not asking you to leave us immediately,” the head continued in bracing tones. I looked up, hopeful of a stay of execution. “Of course not, my dear, what do you take us for? At the very least, we’re obliged to give you a term’s notice, and the school year finishes in just a few days’ time.” She gave a silvery laugh. “You surely don’t imagine that we’d throw you out just like that, do you? No, listen, this is the plan I’ve worked out with the governors. Next year you will work part-time only, but on a full-time salary. You will earn exactly the same amount as you are earning now. Miss Cockburn will take over as head of department, and we’ll get somebody else in too. You can have a year with very light duties and take the time to recover your health and look around you for something fresh. Now, how does that sound?” It was a humane, even a generous settlement. I gave a watery smile to acknowledge this, but I was convinced that the words the head had spoken at the beginning of the interview were closer to the truth than this false cheer. This was indeed the “end of the road” for me. I would never get another teaching job. My dismissal on grounds of ill health would always stand in the way of employment. And what else—realistically—could I hope to do? “In any case, Miss Armstrong,” the head said in a more steely tone that startled me out of my reverie, “I don’t think that money can be much of a problem for you. You must have made a lot of money from your book.” Ah, the book. I had wondered when we would get to that.

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

  As soon as it was published, I realized that Beginning the World had been a mistake and that I would probably have to rewrite it one day. It was not a truthful account. This was not because the events I recounted did not happen, but because the book did not tell the whole story. The publishers were concerned that I should not come across as an intellectual. So I had to leave out any kind of learned reflection. There could be no talk of books or poems, for example, and certainly no theological discussion about the nature of God or the purpose of prayer. I should stick to external events to make the story dramatic and accessible. I was also told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible, and as I was still very unsure of myself as a writer, and assumed that my publishers knew what they were doing, I went along with this. But most important, I wanted this cheery self-portrait to be true. It was, therefore, an exercise in wish fulfillment, and predictably, the result was quite awful. Today I can hardly bear to look at Beginning the World, which has a hearty, boisterous, and relentlessly extrovert tone. It is like reading my life story as told by Ruby Wax. The reality was very different. During those years, I did in fact live a great deal inside my head, and approached the world largely through the medium of books and ideas. To an extent, I still do. And I was not a lively, positive girl. Much of the time, I was withdrawn, bitter, weary, frightened, and ill. And while I was writing Beginning the World, I was particularly scared—with good reason, because yet again, my latest career had collapsed and the future looked most uncertain. The book was badly conceived, and could be nothing but a distortion of an important and ultimately valuable period of my life. And so I have decided to try again. We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter. Reviewing my own story has made me marvel at the way it all turned out. I am now glad that after all I did not simply “begin the world.” Something more interesting happened instead—at least, I think so. T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of six poems that traces the process of spiritual recovery, has been central to my journey. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent.

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

  “What do you want to do next week?” I had asked at the end of the hour. They gazed at me blankly. “Dunno,” one of the boys eventually volunteered. “You must have some idea,” I had said, a little testily. Silence. “What about Keats?” “Oh no,” the girl groaned. “Oh no—anything but Keats.” “What have you got against Keats?” I demanded. What could anyone have against Keats? Didn’t they admire those extraordinary odes, the sonnets—the letters, for heaven’s sake? The students continued to look at me expectantly, and for a wild moment I longed for one of them to get up and yell that he absolutely hated Keats, that he thought Keats was insufferably indulgent, pretentious, and overrated. I would have welcomed any sign of involvement or commitment. “Do you really not like Keats?” I asked again, hoping to coax them into a reaction. They shrugged and smiled sweetly. There was no hostility; they were perfectly . . . pleasant. I gave up. “Well, what about John Clare?” “Okay,” the girl replied equably, “I’ll do Clare.” I had given them a reading list and an essay title, which they had written down diligently, and we had parted cordially. But now, as I hurtled northward on the rattling train, I wondered what on earth was the point. Of course, not all the students were so passive. Only last week I had had a splendid session with two highly intelligent girls. But what had those three students actually learned this afternoon, and what would they learn about Clare? Certainly they would acquire a little information about him, but was their course teaching them to think? Was it enhancing their lives? Would the world be a better place because they had shared Clare’s insights? Or were they simply passing the time pleasantly? I shook myself irritably out of this reverie. I was glad to have this job. I couldn’t expect the moon. And yet I had thought, at some absurd level of my being, that if only I could get an academic post, everything would fall neatly into place. I had believed that I would find a new vocation.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  A few days later, he tracked her down on social media and asked her out. She hedged, not sure that she was interested, but not convinced she wasn’t. “Well, we can just hang out,” she finally said. They planned to go bowling, but all the lanes were full, so they bought ice cream at a local market—Anwen insisted on paying for hers, to show that it wasn’t a real date—and sat outside, talking. Both remembered enjoying the conversation, chatting and laughing for several hours. Another time, they went for a walk together. Sameer dropped Anwen back at her dorm, hugged her goodbye, then leaned in for a kiss—nothing too heavy, but enough for Anwen, who had only ever kissed one other guy, to realize the chemistry wasn’t there. Sameer continued to text, showed up at a couple of partner dance events, insisted on bringing Anwen soup when she was sick. She responded coolly. Eventually, she stopped texting back, and, figuring she wasn’t interested, he let it go. That spring, they both went Greek. Anwen hadn’t been interested in sororities, but all her friends were rushing, so she did, too. Sameer, who’d been a fan of the National Lampoon Van Wilder movies in high school, was eager to pledge. “I thought college was a place to, yeah, learn a lot, but also to party hard,” he said. All fall, he’d walked past the fraternity he hoped to join, seen the girls heading inside in their skimpy outfits, heard the music blasting. “It seemed like the coolest thing ever,” he said. What clinched it, though, was a conversation he had with a senior brother about their service work, the chance to give back to the community. That appealed to Sameer, who missed the volunteering he’d done with his dad. “Later, I found out that was very much a sham,” he said. “Mostly, frat life was about binge-drinking and hooking up.” Like a lot of guys I met, Sameer was quick to tell me that his fraternity was “not the worst,” not the “bro-iest” or the “frattiest,” that other houses had the overt reputation for assault. “But then,” he added, “that’s kind of like saying we were the least deadly of all the sharks, isn’t it? Like, ‘Yeah, we only kill one person a week!’ But you’re still killing people. So what the fuck?” Anwen knew Sameer would attend the big party welcoming Greek recruits. She even joked to her friends as they were getting ready not to let her go home with him. The two quickly bumped into each other heading opposite directions on a staircase, just after Anwen had dumped her jacket in a brother’s room that was being used as a coat closet. “Hey,” she said. “I just want to apologize for completely stopping texting you.” “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I understand. You’re not looking for a relationship.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Without another word, his father plopped onto the couch and turned on an episode of Bob’s Burgers. When it was over, he went upstairs to bed. End of discussion. “I feel he sort of failed me,” Mason said. “I kind of wish . . . Even after I fired back at him, there was still an opportunity for him to have that conversation with me. Maybe if he had said, ‘This will skew the way you view women. It’s not real. And it’s not going to help you get a girl; it’s only going to keep you from interacting with girls in a healthy manner,’ that might have made a difference for me. But my parents were too fearful to actually deal with any of it.” By his sophomore year of high school, Mason was spending about an hour a day immersed in porn. He watched in his bedroom. He watched in the den. He watched in the bathroom stalls at school. He watched at parties. It was, he said, as integral to his life as brushing his teeth, eating, drinking, sleeping. “You can spend so much time in this porn fantasy world that you don’t even look up and live your real life,” he said. Once, he popped in his earbuds and scrolled through his downloads in the back of the family car after a dentist appointment (no drilling jokes, please), as his brother and mom chatted in the front seat. “That’s how normalized it became,” he said. “If it was going to be thirty minutes in the car, I might as well watch porn.” Although at this point Mason had never kissed a girl or even held hands, he said that he half expected that at any moment a “hot woman” would appear out of nowhere and demand to have sex with him. “That was my whole perception of how it was supposed to go,” he said. “In porn, women are portrayed as these sexually driven animals. It’s all they want; it’s all they care about. It warped my perception for so long.” He didn’t realize how much, though, until, at age sixteen, while surfing a Russian social network that allowed him to circumvent his parents’ safety filters, he watched a video of a woman defecating into a hotdog bun. She poured condiments on the result and handed it to a second woman, who ate it. I asked Mason if he found that arousing. “It was, kind of,” he admitted. “Outside of that specific context, I would find this obviously disgusting act to be repulsive. I do find it repulsive. But it was being portrayed as extremely sexual. That’s what porn does. Just media in general. Sexualizes anything. Sexualizes people eating poop. And it boggles my mind how easy it was to be drawn in by it all.”

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

  Just live simply as a secular and give up these inappropriate spiritual ambitions. You’re in the world now. Make friends with it. One day at a time. But soon even that would become impossible. 6. The Usual Reign A few weeks later, however, in September 1976, I started my new job, and did not feel so sanguine. The school looked like a Victorian jam factory; it was a clumsy building in red brick with large, ungainly windows. Over the years, a haphazard series of new wings had been added, so that the whole pile sprawled awkwardly over a huge area of the leafy, prosperous suburb of Dulwich in Southeast London. As I went through the front door, I did not feel that I had started an exciting new phase of my life, but as though I were beginning a prison sentence. I knew that I was lucky to get this job. This was one of the best private girls’ schools in London. It was academic, and still taught Latin and Greek as well as the sciences to a high level. I had been appointed an assistant mistress (I was amused by the archaic ambiguity of my title), but the following year I would become the new head of English and run my own department. At my interview, Pearl, who was currently in charge of English studies, told me that she hoped to retire soon and that I would be nicely placed to take over. “I’m beginning to find it all rather a grind,” she told me in her rather arch drawl. “I’ve been doing this job for over twenty years, you see.” “Twenty years!” I was aghast; I had been wondering how I was going to endure the next twenty minutes . “Well, you’ve got to spend twenty years somewhere ” was her unruffled reply. True. But not here, I pleaded with the absent, nonexistent God during school prayers on that first morning. Because of my experience in higher education, I had been made a sixth-form tutor, so I was standing with my new charges in the gallery, looking down on the serried ranks of girls in the hall below, all clad in an unbecoming navy uniform. The headmistress walked onto the stage. “Lift up your hearts!” she murmured in a listless, lifeless tone, and I felt my own heart plummet to my boots. I just did not want to be there. Yet there really seemed no alternative. I had come a long way in the seven years since I had left the religious life, and in recent months I knew that I had made great strides. I no longer feared for my sanity; I had a new circle of friends; I was having fun.

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

  “And anyway, we’re not asking you to leave us immediately,” the head continued in bracing tones. I looked up, hopeful of a stay of execution. “Of course not, my dear, what do you take us for? At the very least, we’re obliged to give you a term’s notice, and the school year finishes in just a few days’ time.” She gave a silvery laugh. “You surely don’t imagine that we’d throw you out just like that, do you? No, listen, this is the plan I’ve worked out with the governors. Next year you will work part-time only, but on a full-time salary. You will earn exactly the same amount as you are earning now. Miss Cockburn will take over as head of department, and we’ll get somebody else in too. You can have a year with very light duties and take the time to recover your health and look around you for something fresh. Now, how does that sound?” It was a humane, even a generous settlement. I gave a watery smile to acknowledge this, but I was convinced that the words the head had spoken at the beginning of the interview were closer to the truth than this false cheer. This was indeed the “end of the road” for me. I would never get another teaching job. My dismissal on grounds of ill health would always stand in the way of employment. And what else—realistically—could I hope to do? “In any case, Miss Armstrong,” the head said in a more steely tone that startled me out of my reverie, “I don’t think that money can be much of a problem for you. You must have made a lot of money from your book.” Ah, the book. I had wondered when we would get to that.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  What had happened was this. Antipas was married to a foreign princess, but then fell in love with his own niece, Herodias, who was at the time married to Antipas’s half brother Philip. (Anyone who wants to understand the Herodian family tree should be prepared to take a long weekend, a very large sheet of paper, and an ice pack.) The foreign princess was sent back home, and Antipas and Herodias became husband and wife. John the Baptist publicly denounced this arrangement. I don’t think he was simply concerned with Antipas’s immoral behavior, though that was flagrant enough. I think the point was, more tellingly, that anyone who behaved in that way could not possibly, not ever, not in a million years, be regarded as the true “king of the Jews.” John was expecting a true “king of the Jews”; Antipas had just demonstrated his utter unsuitability for the position. John pointed this out. Not surprisingly, then, John ended up in one of Antipas’s dungeons. But John believed that Jesus, his cousin, was the coming king! He was the one through whose work God would at last become king—would at last break the power of tyrants and set his people free! If that was going to happen, surely John himself was a case in point? After all, John’s own public career had reached its climax in launching Jesus on his mission, in setting him up as the man for God’s moment! So why wasn’t Jesus doing something about John’s plight? Meanwhile, John, who was in prison, heard about these messianic goings-on. He sent word through his followers. “Are you the one who is coming?” he asked. “Or should we be looking for someone else?” “Go and tell John,” replied Jesus, “what you’ve seen and heard. Blind people are seeing! Lame people are walking! People with virulent skin diseases are being cleansed! Deaf people can hear again! The dead are being raised to life! And—the poor are hearing the good news! And God bless you if you’re not upset by what I’m doing.” As the messengers were going away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John. “What were you expecting to see,” he asked, “when you went out into the desert? A reed wobbling in the wind? No? Well, then, what were you expecting to see? Someone dressed in silks and satins? If you want to see people like that you’d have to go to somebody’s royal palace. All right, so what were you expecting to see? A prophet? Ah, now we’re getting there: yes indeed, and much more than a prophet!

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We turn from Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. Or rather, Simon Son-of-the-Star. The year is AD 132, almost exactly a hundred years after the public career of Jesus of Nazareth and hence almost exactly three hundred years after Judah the Hammer. CHRONOLOGY OF SIMON SON-OF-THE-STAR AD 115–17 Unsuccessful Jewish revolts against Rome in Egypt, Cyrene, Cyprus 117 Hadrian becomes emperor 132 Hadrian institutes anti-Jewish legislation, builds temple of Jupiter in Jerusalem 133 Start of bar-Kochba rebellion; Rabbi Akiba hails bar-Kochba as the Messiah 133 Coins with “year 1” 134 Coins with “year 2” 135 Coins with “year 3” 135 Rome crushes rebellion; bar-Kochba and Akiba killed The story starts off the same. Another wicked king; another time of intense suffering; and another new hero emerges, winning (it seems) some initial victories. Another three-year campaign. The aim was the same: defeat the pagan enemy, reestablish the Temple, liberate the Judaeans, and establish a new king as master in his own realm, and perhaps more widely . The wicked king this time was the Roman emperor Hadrian. People in my country still know his name, because he built a wall across the north of England, more than two thousand miles from Jerusalem, to keep his empire safe from the wild tribes of Scotland. Like many other successful emperors, Hadrian was brilliant and ruthless. Two of his predecessors, Vespasian and Titus, had defeated the Jewish rebels in a famous and bitter war, culminating in the burning of the Temple in AD 70. Now Hadrian, perhaps spurred on by the possibility of further Jewish uprisings, decided on drastic measures. Like Antiochus Epiphanes, he transformed Jerusalem into a pagan city, giving it a new name, Aelia Capitolina. Antiochus, we recall, had attacked the major symbols of Jewish life and tradition, not least the food laws (by trying to force people to eat pork). Hadrian likewise attacked the Jewish symbols, with a particular focus being his ban on the practice of circumcision. Other factors too led to revolt. Rome had hinted at one point that the Judaeans might be allowed to rebuild the Temple, so when, instead, the city was turned into a pagan center, there would have been be a toxic mixture of disappointment and righteous indignation. Heavy taxation may have added fuel to the fire. There may also have been a perceived timetable. Jerusalem had been destroyed in AD 70; Jeremiah had spoken of seventy years of desolation, followed by restoration; perhaps after all God was intending to liberate his people in or around AD 140.

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

  I could not deny it. Gone were the days when I had partied in North London after a school day. Now I would crawl home on Friday evening and fall into bed, exhausted by the demands of the week. The head let the point sink in and continued: “This is no good for you. You’re still a young woman. You are—how old are you?—thirty-six? That’s nothing at all, believe me. You shouldn’t be struggling like this, with no life at all outside school. You know that this isn’t right.” “But what am I going to do?” My voice had thickened with tears, which I firmly tamped down. I wasn’t going to beg. And my financial prospects were no concern of the headmistress, who now dismissed any thought of perpetual penury with an airy laugh. “Oh, any number of things! You have remarkable talents, Miss Armstrong. You’re wasted here, my dear. A lot of people could teach English literature to the level required here, but you have an exceptional mind and you’re not using it to anything like its full capacity. There is nothing here to stretch or challenge you intellectually. You know that. You must be bored stiff a great deal of the time.” Again, I had nothing to say. She was quite right, of course. When I went into a classroom preparing to teach a class of fourteen-year-olds how to use the semicolon, I sometimes wondered how I could face the next forty minutes. But at least it was a job. This talk about my intellectual superiority was all very fine, but it had no market value outside the classroom that I could see. Feeling the familiar sensation of utter defeat, I looked down at my lap, unable for a moment to speak. “And anyway, we’re not asking you to leave us immediately,” the head continued in bracing tones. I looked up, hopeful of a stay of execution. “Of course not, my dear, what do you take us for? At the very least, we’re obliged to give you a term’s notice, and the school year finishes in just a few days’ time.” She gave a silvery laugh. “You surely don’t imagine that we’d throw you out just like that, do you? No, listen, this is the plan I’ve worked out with the governors. Next year you will work part-time only, but on a full-time salary. You will earn exactly the same amount as you are earning now. Miss Cockburn will take over as head of department, and we’ll get somebody else in too. You can have a year with very light duties and take the time to recover your health and look around you for something fresh.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate. It is time, I believe, to recognize not only who Jesus was in his own day, despite his contemporaries’ failure to recognize him, but also who he is, and will be, for our own. “He came to what was his own,” wrote one of his greatest early followers, “and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). That puzzle continues. Perhaps, indeed, it has been the same in our own day. Perhaps even “his own people”—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus’s contemporaries did. But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him? This book is written in the belief that the question of Jesus—who he really was, what he really did, what it means, and why it matters—remains hugely important in every area, not only in personal life, but also in political life, not only in “religion” or “spirituality,” but also in such spheres of human endeavor as worldview, culture, justice, beauty, ecology, friendship, scholarship, and sex. You may be relieved, or perhaps disappointed, to know that we won’t have space to address all of these. What we will try to do is to look, simply and clearly, at Jesus himself, in the hope that a fresh glimpse of him will enable us to gain a new perspective on everything else as well. There will be time enough to explore other things in other places. Getting Inside the Gospels Jesus of Nazareth was a figure of history. That’s where we have to start.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  When we find out that they are only human after all, we turn on them, blaming them for the intractable problems that they, like their predecessors, haven’t been able to solve. So why did people think that Jesus might be any different? It wasn’t as though they hadn’t had disappointments before. The long story of Israel had had its high points, but if you add up everything that had happened over the previous thousand years, the sequence of disappointments is so long, so repetitive, and so dispiriting that you might forgive them for giving up hope altogether. Some did. Most didn’t. And the reasons why they didn’t give up hope tell us a great deal about what they thought would happen if and when their God finally took charge. At this point we must take off the spectacles through which we normally see the world, not least the modern Western world, and put on a different set. If we are to understand Jesus, we have to learn to see the world as his contemporaries saw it. We have already begun to do this in the opening chapters. Now, tricky though this is for a historian (because our sources are thin and patchy), we must take this process a step farther. What Went Wrong? To put it very simply, the Jews of Jesus’s day believed that their God had made the world and that he had remained in charge of it. They didn’t understand, any more than we do, why a world made by a good God would somehow go wrong, but clearly that had happened. The signs were all there: broken bodies, broken lives, broken systems, broken countries. The whole thing needed fixing, needed mending, needed to be put right.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself. You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate. It is time, I believe, to recognize not only who Jesus was in his own day, despite his contemporaries’ failure to recognize him, but also who he is, and will be, for our own. “He came to what was his own,” wrote one of his greatest early followers, “and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). That puzzle continues. Perhaps, indeed, it has been the same in our own day. Perhaps even “his own people”—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus’s contemporaries did. But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him? This book is written in the belief that the question of Jesus—who he really was, what he really did, what it means, and why it matters— remains hugely important in every area, not only in personal life, but also in political life, not only in “religion” or “spirituality,” but also in such spheres of human endeavor as worldview, culture, justice, beauty, ecology, friendship, scholarship, and sex. You may be relieved, or perhaps disappointed, to know that we won’t have space to address all of these. What we will try to do is to look, simply and clearly, at Jesus himself, in the hope that a fresh glimpse of him will enable us to gain a new perspective on everything else as well.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So did the chief priests and the Pharisees, who rightly saw that the story had been told against them. “Don’t Miss It” Jesus’s stories build to a crescendo, keeping pace with the wider narrative of his brief public career. The kingdom is coming, on earth as in heaven; but the people of the kingdom, “the children of the kingdom,” are missing out on it! Everything is coming right at last—and everything is going wrong at the same time. There is a dark twist in the way God’s plans are working out, in the way that Israel’s destiny is being fulfilled. All suggestions that Jesus was simply a “great religious teacher” telling his contemporaries about a new pattern of spirituality or even a new scheme of salvation must be set aside (unless, of course, we are to rewrite the gospels wholesale, which is what many have done in their efforts to domesticate Jesus and his message). Jesus’s parables, never mind for the moment anything else about him, tell us in their form alone, but also in their repeated and increasingly direct content, that the purposes of heaven are indeed coming true on earth, but that the people who in theory have been longing for that to happen are turning their backs on it now that it is actually knocking on their door: Jesus spoke to them once again in parables. “The kingdom of heaven,” he said, “is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son. He sent his slaves to call the invited guests to the wedding, and they didn’t want to come. “Again he sent other slaves, with these instructions: ‘Say to the guests, Look! I’ve got my dinner ready; my bulls and fatted calves have been killed; everything is prepared. Come to the wedding!’ “But they didn’t take any notice. They went off, one to his own farm, another to see to his business. The others laid hands on his slaves, abused them, and killed them. (The king was angry, and sent his soldiers to destroy those murderers and burn down their city.) Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but the guests didn’t deserve it. So go to the roads leading out of town, and invite everyone you find to the wedding.’ The slaves went off into the streets and rounded up everyone they found, bad and good alike. And the wedding was filled with partygoers. “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who wasn’t wearing a wedding suit. “‘My friend,’ he said to him, ‘how did you get in here without a wedding suit?’ And he was speechless.