Fear

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 The Argonauts (2015)

  In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more. One night during our courtship, I came home to find the stump with bolts lying across the welcome mat of my porch. You had left town, and I had been baffled by your departure. But when I ascended my front steps and saw the weapon, shadowy in the twilight, I knew you loved me. It was a talisman of protection—a means of keeping myself safe while you were gone, a tool to fight off the suitors (had there been any). I’ve kept it by my bedside ever since. Not because I think they’re coming for us per se. But because it makes the brutal tender, which I’ve since learned is one of your principal gifts. The year my father died, I read a story in school about a little boy who builds ships in the bottoms of bottles. This little boy lived by the maxim that if you could imagine the worst thing that could ever happen, you would never be surprised when it did. Not knowing that this maxim was the very definition of anxiety, as given by Freud (“‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one”), I set to work cultivating it. Already an avid “journaler,” I started penning narratives of horrible things in my school notebook. My first installment was a novella titled “Kidnapped” that featured the abduction and torture of my best friend, Jeanne, and me by a deranged husband-wife team. I was proud of my talismanic opus, even drew an ornate cover page for it. Now Jeanne and I would never be kidnapped and tortured without our having foreseen it! I thus felt confused and saddened when my mother took me out for lunch “to talk about it.” She told me she was disturbed by what I had written, and so was my sixth-grade teacher. In a flash it became clear that my story was not something to be proud of, as either literature or prophylactic.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  It’s hard to explain, but I have a lot of friends who are private investigators. One of them gave me the number of a local PI, a guy named Andy Lamprey, described on a “total security solutions provider” website as follows: “A detective for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 29 years, Lamprey investigated numerous crimes, including homicide, and was a senior supervisor to the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT). He is a court qualified expert in narcotics and vice enforcement and has performed several risk and vulnerability assessments, threat and management assessments and fraud investigations nationwide.” You never know—there may come a time when you, too, feel the need to call upon an Andy Lamprey. Lamprey eventually connects me with a guy named Malcolm, another ex-LAPD cop, who will sit, armed, in an unmarked car outside our house through the night, keeping watch over us, if we want. We want. Lamprey says he can negotiate us a reduced rate of $500 per night (LA has unbelievably high rates for “cover,” as I learn it’s called). I call my mother to ask for advice, and also to alert her to the wingnut on the loose, in case he drifts her way; she insists on putting a check in the mail to pay for a night or two of Malcolm. I feel grateful, but also guilty: it was I who had insisted on writing about Jane’s murder, and while I knew intellectually that I wasn’t responsible for this man’s actions any more than Jane was for her murder (as the caller had indicated), my less enlightened self felt sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance. I had summoned the horrible thing, and now here he was, attaché case in hand. It wasn’t long before my image of him merged with that of Jared Lee Loughner, the man who, exactly two weeks prior, had walked up to Representative Gabby Giffords in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, and shot her, along with eighteen others. A form letter from Giffords was found in Loughner’s home with the words “Die, Bitch” scrawled on it; Loughner was known for saying that women should not hold positions of power. It doesn’t matter to me if both of these men are mad. Their voices still have clarity.

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

  A record player had appeared in the community room of the scholasticate, and we were allowed to use it during the afternoon recreation hour. I discovered a new world. I remember walking into the room one day after doing the washing up and being almost shocked by the beauty of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Now, thanks to my simple little player, for which I paid the princely sum of twenty- five pounds, I could have this sublime treat anytime I wanted. Jane introduced me to the late quartets of Beethoven and I would play these almost nightly. This, I was aware, was probably the kind of experience I had sought in religion. While I listened, I felt my spirit knitting together. Things began to make sense. But one night, the world broke apart again. It was early evening and I was tired, having stayed up most of the previous night to write my essay. This weekly essay crisis, as we called it, was a feature of Oxford life. Throughout the college, lights burned all through the night as students scribbled earnestly, trying to get their piece finished in time. Since leaving the convent, I had fallen into this weekly ritual and in a perverse way quite enjoyed it. There was something rather magical about sitting alone in the lamplight, surrounded by darkness and absolute stillness. Occasionally there would be a gentle scratching on the door, and Rosemary or Charlotte, whose essay night coincided with my own, would peer cautiously round the door, and we would have a midnight coffee break before returning to our books. The next day I felt hollow and depleted, but triumphant, and I used to revel in the post-tutorial euphoria: essay done, duly praised, and a lovely fresh assignment beckoning me invitingly into the next week. But on this particular occasion, my eyes prickled with fatigue. Suddenly I found myself invaded by the familiar stench, but this time it was different. My brain felt as though a cosmic potato masher was pounding it, reducing it to long worms of sensation like spaghetti, but spaghetti that was alive. I could hear a bell ringing mournfully in the distance and I was convinced that somebody was standing beside me. I could almost glimpse his face out of the corner of my eye. An aged, senile mask with empty eyes. Some part of me knew that there was nobody there, and that if I reached out to touch him my hand would encounter empty air. And yet I could not connect this knowledge with the specter because it had its own reality, its own absolutely commanding presence.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this, but many still choose to resist the conclusion—despite the increasing use in public life of the language of “force” (economic “forces,” political “forces,” peer “pressure,” and so on). In recent scholarship, Walter Wink in particular has offered a sharp and compelling analysis of “the powers” and the way they function in today’s world as much as in yesterday’s. The psychotherapist Scott Peck wrote a book, People of the Lie, about the small but significant number of his clients who had, it seemed, bought so deeply into unreality that they appeared to have been taken over by dark forces beyond themselves. The post-Enlightenment idea that such language reeks of medieval superstition is too simplistic by half. Granted the split-level world of Enlightenment thought, we should perhaps expect that we wouldn’t have very good language for talking about a reality that is neither divine nor reducible to terms of the ordinary material world. But this should not stop us trying to come to grips with the reality in question. Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of “good” and “bad” in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast “people like us” as basically good and “people like them” as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an “axis of evil” and then to go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and “the other lot” into demons; we “demonize” our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding having to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  As her time grew near, your brother took her in. His family situation was under strain, but at least she had a bed there, her own room. It was almost good enough. But really none of it was good enough, even though it was better than many get. When she began to lose consciousness, your brother had her moved to a local hospice; you flew there in the dead of night, desperate to get there in time, so that she wouldn’t die alone. Now I’m sick of these two clowns who aren’t in pain. I say I want to go to the hospital because that’s where they take the babies out. Jessica stalls; she knows it’s not time. I begin to get desperate. I want a change of scenery. I’m not sure I can do this. We’ve spent hours on the red couch with a heating pad, in the tub kneeling on towels, in the bed with me holding Harry’s or Jessica’s hand. I have to think of something that will convince them that it’s time to go to the hospital. “The baby feels low, and I’m having it at the hospital, and that’s where I want to be,” I growl. Finally they say OK. The car is where the pain turns into a luge. I can’t open my eyes. Have to go inside. Outside there is a lot of traffic; I squint and see Harry doing the best he can. Every bump and turn a nightmare. The pain cavern has a law, its law is black shudder. I begin to count, noticing each one takes about twenty seconds. I think, any kind of pain must be bearable for twenty seconds, for nineteen, for thirteen, for six. I stop making sounds. It is horrible. Hard time parking, no one around, even though every other time we’ve been to the labor wing there has been a bevy of attendants with wheelchairs. I am going to have to walk. I walk as slowly as a person could walk, doubled over down the hall. Jessica greets some people she knows. Everything around me is normal and inside I am in the pain cavern. We check into the labor wing. The nurse is nice. Freckled, heavy-set, Irish-seeming. She says five centimeters. People are happy, I am happy. Jessica tells me the hard part is over, she says getting to five centimeters is the hard part. I am nervous but relieved. Jessica asks for room number 7. The hospital is blessedly slow, quiet, empty. Room number 7 is lovely, dark. We can see Macy’s from the window. Whitney Houston has just been found dead in a hotel about ten blocks away, the Beverly Hilton. The nurses are talking about it in hushed tones as they come and go. Was it drugs, I manage to ask from the cavern. Probably, they say. In our labor room there is a bathtub, a scale, and a baby warmer. Maybe there will be a baby.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The herald might well be accompanied by a squad of soldiers, especially in potential trouble spots. Everybody knew then, as people who live under tyrannies today know equally well, that a change of ruler is a moment of vulnerability, a moment when a revolution could erupt. The reason Sepphoris had had to be rebuilt, perhaps with help from local carpenters such as Joseph and possibly even Jesus himself, was that it had been the center of a major anti-Roman revolt after the death of Herod the Great, and the Romans had smashed it to the ground. The proclamation of a new emperor, then, carried weight. It wasn’t a take-it-or-leave-it affair. It meant that Tiberius was now in charge—and that his local agents, with his backing, had to be obeyed. Or else. Celebration, Healing and Forgiveness So what about Jesus’s own kingdom announcement? His going around Galilee saying, like one of Caesar’s heralds, that God himself was now becoming king would be a poke in the eye for two people at least. In the north of the country, where Jesus was launching his campaign, there was Herod Antipas, one of the many sons of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas wasn’t particularly powerful, but, though the Romans hadn’t allowed him to keep his father’s title of “king of the Jews,” he was the nearest equivalent at the time. Indeed, it was he who had been rebuilding Sepphoris as his capital. In the south, there were the chief priests, with the (annually appointed) high priest at their head—a pseudo-aristocracy, kept in place, as was Herod Antipas himself, by Roman backing. The Romans liked to run their huge empire through local power brokers on whom they could rely to collect the taxes and keep the population under control. If either Herod or the high priest heard that someone was going around announcing that God was becoming king, they would smell trouble at once.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen between Richard and me.” She forced herself to look into his eyes, and she put her drink down on the night table. “But it isn’t you that’s come between Richard and me—you don’t have anything to do with that.” “I don’t now, you mean. Or I don’t yet.” He put his cigarette down in the ashtray on the mantelpiece behind him. “But I guess I know what you mean, in a way.” He still seemed very troubled and his trouble now propelled him toward her again, to the bed. He felt her trembling, but still he did not touch her, only stared at her with his troubled and searching eyes, and with his lips parted. “Dear Cass,” he said, and smiled, “I know we have now, but I don’t think we have much of a future.” She thought, Perhaps if we take now, we can have a future, too. It depends on what we mean by “future.” She felt his breath on her face and her neck, then he leaned closer, head down, and she felt his lips there. She raised her hands to stroke his head and his red hair. She felt his violence and his uncertainty, and this made him seem much younger than she. And this excited her in a way that she had never been excited before; she glimpsed, for the first time, the force that drove older women to younger men; and then she was frightened. She was frightened because she had never before found herself playing so anomalous a role and because nothing in her experience had ever suggested that her body could become a trap for boys, and the tomb of her self-esteem. She had embarked on a voyage which might end years from now in some horrible villa, near a blue sea, with some unspeaking, unspeakably phallic, Turk or Spaniard or Jew or Greek or Arabian. Yet, she did not want it to stop. She did not quite know what was happening now, or where it would lead, and she was afraid; but she did not want it to stop. She saw the smoke from Eric’s cigarette curling up from the mantelpiece—she hoped it was still in the ashtray; the play script was beneath her head, the symphony was approaching its end. She was aware, as though she stood over them both with a camera, of how sordid the scene must appear: a married woman, no longer young, already beginning to moan with lust, pinned down on this untidy and utterly transient bed by a stranger who did not love her and whom she could not love. Then she wondered about that: love; and wondered if anyone really knew anything about it. Eric put one hand on her breast, and it was a new touch, not Richard’s, no; but she knew that it was Eric’s; and was it love or not? and what did Eric feel? Sex, she thought, but that was not really the answer, or if it was, it was an answer which clarified nothing. For now, Eric leaned up from her with a sigh and walked back to his cigarette. He leaned there for a moment, watching her; and she understood that the weight between them, of things unspoken, made any act impossible. On what basis were they to act? for their blind seeking was not a foundation which could be expected to bear any weight.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  A violent image for a violent reality. I have in this book used the analogy of the perfect storm partly as a way of picking up Schweitzer’s point and developing it further. But even this, like all analogies, inevitably breaks down. What we might need, in addition, is to imagine some forces in different planes. In addition to the gale of Rome, the high-pressure system of Israel’s distorted ambitions, and the cyclone of the returning purposes of God, we perhaps need a downward vortex, a giant whirlpool, that threatens to suck down into the black depths all who sail too close to it. One might even tie the themes together and suggest that the gale and the pressure system are themselves driven by the same forces that are dragging down the dark waters: Rome and rebel Israel are the unwitting tools of the Satan, the Accuser, the great force of anti-creation. And one might suggest that Jesus, precisely because he believed that in his public career “the time was fulfilled,” believed too that all these powers of evil were gathering themselves for one last battle, one last attempt to thwart the good purposes of the creator God, to pull the cosmos and the human race down into the depths. The only way, he believed, by which this great anti-creation power could be stopped and defeated would be for him, Jesus, anointed with God’s Spirit to fight the real battle against the real enemy, to take the full power of evil and accusation upon himself, to let it do its worst to him, so that it would thereby be exhausted, its main force spent. He would be the David for this ultimate Goliath—though with the difference that, since violence and death were themselves the ultimate enemy, this David would win the battle by losing his life, with the four nails of crucifixion and the spear thrust in his side taking the place of the five stones David took for his sling. Jesus’s own mind, heart, and body would be the battlefield on which the final victory would be won, as they were also the Temple in which the powerful, loving presence of Israel’s returning God had made his home.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was more ghastly than the image of the jeering hall; more ghastly than the prospect of being laughed and hissed off a thousand, thousand stages... So when Kitty stood in the wing of the theatre that night, waiting for the chairman’s cry, I stood beside her, sweating beneath a layer of grease-paint, biting my lips so hard I thought they would bleed. My heart had beat fast for Kitty before, in apprehension and passion; but it had never thudded as it thudded now - I thought it would burst right out of my breast, I thought I should be killed with fright. When Walter came to whisper to us, and to fill our pockets with coins, I could not answer him. There was a juggling turn upon the stage. I heard the creaking of the boards as the man ran to catch his batons, the clap-gasp-clap-gasp- cheer of the audience as he finished his set; and then came the clack of a gavel, and the juggler ran by us, clutching his gear. Kitty said once, very low, ‘I love you!’ - and I felt myself half-pulled, half-thrust beneath the rising curtain, and knew that I must somehow saunter and sing.At first, so blinded was I by the lights, I couldn’t see the crowd at all; I could only hear it, rustling and murmuring - loud, and close, it seemed, on every side. When at last I stepped for a second out of the glare of lime, and saw all the faces that were turned my way, I almost faltered and lost my place - and would have done, I think, had not Kitty at that moment pressed my arm and murmured, ‘We have them! Listen!’ under cover of the orchestra. I did listen then - and realised that, unbelievably, she was right: there were claps, and friendly shouts; there was a rising hum of expectant pleasure as we worked towards our chorus; there was, finally, a bubbling cascade of cheers and laughter from gallery to pit.The sound affected me like nothing I had ever known before. At once, I remembered the foolish dance that I had failed, all day, to learn, and left off leaning on my stick to join Kitty in her stroll before the footlights. I understood, too, what Walter had wanted of us in the wing: as the new song drew to a close I advanced with Kitty to the front of the stage, drew out the coins that he had tipped into my pocket - they were only chocolate sovereigns, of course, but covered in foil to make them glitter - and cast them into the laughing crowd.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  This scene doesn’t forecast damage or violation per se, but most such literary scenes (the non-French ones?) do. Think of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, whose primal scene of violation I must have read a hundred times over as a young girl. Here is eight-year-old Maya, our narrator, reporting on the actions of her uncle: “Mr. Freeman pulled me to him, and put his hand between my legs…. He threw back the blankets and his ‘thing’ stood up like a brown ear of corn. He took my hand and said, ‘Feel it.’ It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest.” This is but the opening salvo of the recurring sexual abuse of Maya at the hands of Mr. Freeman. To be honest, however, I didn’t remember that the abuse continued until I researched it just now. As a child I stuttered out on just this one scene, so startled was I by the penis-corn. If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be. In high school, a wise teacher assigned the short story “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. The story blew through my penis-corn-addled mind and swept it clean. In just a few short pages, Munro lays it all out: how the force of one’s adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. Munro makes “Wild Swans” more tolerable and interesting by having its protagonist get jerked off by a male stranger on a train (a traveling priest, of course) without her consent or protest, but also without her being forced to do anything to his body. In lieu of genital description, Munro gives us landscape: the view outside as the train hurtles forth, which the girl beholds as she comes.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  “Your moment has come,” he said to the chief priests, the officers of the Temple police, and the elders who had come out to arrest him. “Your moment has come at last, and so has the power of darkness!” (Luke 22:53). The darkness, it seems, had to be allowed to do its worst in order to be defeated. And the dark powers that put Jesus on the cross continued to the last with their mocking questions: “Save yourself, if you’re God’s son! Come down from the cross!” (Matt. 27:40), echoing the same voice in the desert, “If you really are God’s son, tell these stones to become bread!” (Matt. 4:3). Somehow it appears that Jesus’s battle with the satan, which was the battle for God’s kingdom to be established on earth as in heaven, reached its climax in his death. This is a strange, dark, and powerful theme to which we shall return. For the moment the point is clear: Jesus is indeed fighting what he takes to be the battle against the real enemies of the people of God, but it is not the battle his followers or the wider group of onlookers was expecting him to fight. Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel’s king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God’s sovereign and saving rule, through his own suffering and death. Cleansing the Temple The same is true when we consider the other great “royal” aspiration: to cleanse or rebuild the Temple. We regularly refer to the striking action Jesus performed in the Temple as his “cleansing of the Temple.” We don’t, perhaps, always realize that any such action was staking an implicitly royal claim: it was kings, real or aspiring, who had authority over the Temple. It was Israel’s kings or would-be kings who planned it (David), built it (Solomon), cleansed it (Hezekiah, Josiah, Judah the Hammer), rebuilt it (Zerubbabel, Herod the Great), and hoped to defend it (Simon bar-Giora) or to rebuild it once more (Simon the Star). In each case, of course, building the Temple was associated with the larger story of victory over enemies, liberation for the people, and so on. It was the Exodus narrative, in other words, the Passover narrative, all over again; and we shouldn’t forget that a key element in the Passover narrative was always the presence of Israel’s God himself with his people, in the pillar of cloud and fire and then, apparently more permanently, in the tabernacle. Passover implies Presence. Jesus, as we have seen, chose the Passover season as the moment to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, deliberately awakening in the onlookers’ minds the powerful prophecy of Zechariah 9:9–11: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you;

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We know that this book was a favorite of many Jews in the time of Jesus. There is every sign that, as with Isaiah, it was a book Jesus himself drew on heavily for his understanding of what God was up to and what his own role might be within that drama. Jesus was not the only person in the period who made Daniel 7 thematic in his vocation. A hundred years after his day, the great Rabbi Akiba hailed bar-Kosiba, Simon Son-of-the-Star, as Messiah. Akiba is reputed to have explained his view with reference to the famous passage in Daniel 7. This chapter is very important, and we must look at it in a little more detail. In this chapter, the prophet, who up to now has been able to interpret the dreams and visions of others, has a dream of his own. He sees a vision of four horrible monsters causing havoc on earth, climaxing in a terrible monster with a “little horn” that grows up in place of some of its original ones; and the horn speaks arrogantly against God and his people. But then the vision changes: As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. . . . The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. I watched then because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking. And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. . . . As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him . To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, And his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (7:9–11, 13–14) The interpretation of the vision is given in a short form (7:15–18) and a longer version (7:19–27): As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Long before that point, two more elements had entered the story of Israel and continued thereafter to dominate the horizon. When I lived in Jerusalem for three months in 1989, I frequently walked through the ultra-Orthodox Jewish quarter, Mea Shearim. Among the fascinating and evocative sights and sounds of that community I observed many posters. Some of them were warning visitors to dress modestly: no bare flesh here, please! But many of them were harping on a darker, more powerful double theme. Many of the families in Mea Shearim had escaped from Eastern Europe around the time of the Holocaust. The horror of that period had shaped their imagination. It was because of what Hitler did that one must now observe the ancestral law. It was because of what Hitler did that God would now do a new thing. And it was because of what Hitler did that this Jewish community was praying and waiting and longing for—the Messiah. “Hitler and the Messiah!” “Hitler and the Messiah!” The great wicked ruler and the coming great deliverer! That was the message I saw then. And that, with the first name changed to suit different circumstances (Caesar? Herod?), is the message you would have heard in Jesus’s day. These two themes—the great evil empire and the coming royal deliverer—look back partly to the Exodus itself, when Moses delivered Israel from Pharaoh’s Egypt. But they increased in power with the long story of Israel’s monarchy and the spectacular national disasters that had befallen the people during that period. These themes are, if you like, the particular dust storms that the great high-pressure system of Israel’s history picked up along the way, gathering momentum with every passing decade. Memories of King David and his famous victories over the surrounding pagan nations were kept alive, as prophets promised a coming day when a king from David’s family would bring justice, peace, and prosperity to the whole world. (Had the Roman poet Virgil been reading Isaiah 11? Probably not, but the coincidence of themes is striking.) Memories of King Solomon building the Temple in Jerusalem were kept alive by those who defended, cleansed, restored, or beautified the Temple, a process that was still going on in Jesus’s day under the patronage of the Herod family. The coming king would defeat the wicked, oppressive nations and would build, or rebuild, God’s Temple! Hitler and the Messiah! Down with the one! Bring on the other!

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Think back to those messianic themes. Jesus would indeed fight the battle, but it would be against the forces of evil, corruption, and death itself. And, like the Maccabean martyrs, who went to their deaths confident that God would raise them from the dead to new bodily life, Jesus came to believe that the only way one could defeat death itself, and thereby launch the new creation for which Israel and the world had longed, was to take on death itself, like David taking on Goliath in mortal combat, trusting that Israel’s God, the creator of life itself, would enable victory to be won. And, since death was seen in the scriptures as the ultimate result of human rebellion against God and the failure to obey him, if death were to be defeated, then idolatry, rebellion, disobedience, and sin would be defeated along with it. Death, like a great ugly giant, would do its worst, and pour out its full weight upon him. And the creator God would overcome it, showing it up as a defeated enemy. In human terms, as we have already seen, this was the craziest vocation one could imagine. The disciples knew that, and Jesus must have known it too. Nothing could have brought him to conceive of his vocation in these terms except his unshakeable faith in Israel’s God as the creator and his deep awareness of Israel’s scriptures as marking out the course he had to tread. Jesus really does seem to have believed not only that this was indeed the way to fight the battle, but that this was also the way to rebuild, to reconstitute, the Temple. This was the way in which Israel’s God would come back to his people as the rescuer, the deliverer, overthrowing the powers of the world, overcoming the folly and frailty of Israel itself. This was how, when the perfect storm had done its worst, Israel’s God would establish a new community, a people in whom the promises would be fulfilled, in whom the living God would come to dwell as in the Temple, revealing his glory to the world.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  (Mark 3:11–12) Experts . . . were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul!” Jesus . . . spoke to them. “How can the Accuser cast out the Accuser? If a kingdom splits into two factions, it can’t last. . . . But remember: no one can get into a strong man’s house and steal his property unless first they tie up the strong man; then they can plunder his house.” (Mark 3:22–27) They were suddenly confronted by a man with an unclean spirit. . . . Jesus was saying to him, “Unclean spirit, come out of him!” “What’s your name?” Jesus asked him. “Legion,” he replied. “That’s my name—there are lots of us!” . . . The unclean spirits came out and went into the [herd of] pigs. The herd rushed down the steep slope into the sea—about two thousand of them!—and were drowned. (Mark 5:1–20) “I saw the satan fall like lightning from heaven.” (Luke 10:18) “And isn’t it right that this daughter of Abraham, tied up by the satan for these eighteen years, should be untied from her chains on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16) “The satan demanded to have you [Peter]. He wanted to shake you into bits like wheat.” (Luke 22:31) The devil had already put the idea of betraying him into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. . . . After the bread, the satan entered into him. (John 13:2, 27) Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme, but we can’t expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it at all; that’s one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from “traditionalists,” insisting on seeing everything in terms of “supernatural” issues, hardly helps either. As C. S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to the reality. I’m with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsessions, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do. You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this, but many still choose to resist the conclusion— despite the increasing use in public life of the language of “force” (economic “forces,” political “forces,” peer “pressure,” and so on).

• From Wild (2012)

  “I changed my mind,” I said. “You tried to trick us.” “No, I didn’t. I just changed my—” “You changed your clothes too,” he said suggestively, and his words expanded in my gut like a spray of gunshot. My entire body flushed with the knowledge that when I’d taken off my clothes, he’d been nearby, watching me. “I like your pants,” he said with a little smirk. He took off his backpack and set it down. “Or leggings, if that’s what they’re called.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said numbly, though I could hardly hear my own words for what felt like a great clanging in my head, which was the realization that my whole hike on the PCT could come to this. That no matter how tough or strong or brave I’d been, how comfortable I’d come to be with being alone, I’d also been lucky, and that if my luck ran out now, it would be as if nothing before it had ever existed, that this one evening would annihilate all those brave days. “I’m talking about liking your pants,” the man said with a touch of irritation. “They look good on you. They show off your hips and legs.” “Please don’t say that,” I said as unfalteringly as I could. “What? I’m complimenting you! Can’t a guy give a girl a compliment anymore? You should be flattered.” “Thank you,” I said in an attempt to pacify him, hating myself for it. My mind went to the Three Young Bucks, who perhaps weren’t even back on the trail yet. It went to the world’s loudest whistle that no one but the red-haired man would hear. It went to the Swiss army knife too far away in the upper-left-side pocket of my pack. It went to the not-yet-boiling water in the handleless pot on my little stove. And then it landed on the arrows that rose from the top of the sandy-haired man’s pack. I could feel the invisible line between those arrows and me like a hot thread. If he tried to do anything to me, I’d get to one of those arrows and stab him in the throat. “I think you’d better get going,” I said evenly. “It’ll be getting dark soon.” I crossed my arms hard against my chest, acutely aware of the fact that I wasn’t wearing a bra. “It’s a free country,” he said. “I’ll go when I’m ready. I got a right, you know.” He picked up his Pepsi can and gently swirled around the water inside.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was excited to be back on the trail, 450 PCT miles north of where I’d been. The snowy peaks and high granite cliffs of the High Sierra were no longer in view, but the trail felt the same to me. In many ways, it looked the same too. For all the endless mountain and desert panoramas I’d seen, it was the sight of the two-foot-wide swath of the trail that was the most familiar, the thing upon which my eyes were almost always trained, looking for roots and branches, snakes and stones. Sometimes the trail was sandy, other times rocky or muddy or pebbly or cushioned with layers upon layers of pine needles. It could be black or brown or gray or blond as butterscotch, but it was always the PCT. Home base. I walked beneath a forest of pine, oak, and incense cedar, then passed through a stand of Douglas firs as the trail switchbacked up and up, seeing no one all that sunny morning as I ascended, though I could feel Greg’s invisible presence. With each mile that feeling waned, as I imagined him getting farther and farther ahead of me, hiking at his customary blazing pace. The trail passed from the shady forest to an exposed ridge, where I could see the canyon below me for miles, the rocky buttes overhead. By midday I was up above seven thousand feet and the trail grew muddy, though it hadn’t rained in days, and finally, when I rounded a bend, I came upon a field of snow. Or rather, what I took to be a field, which implied there was an end to it. I stood at its edge and searched for Greg’s footprints, but saw none. The snow wasn’t on a slope, just a flat among a sparse forest, which was a good thing, since I didn’t have my ice ax any longer. I’d left it that morning in the PCT hiker free box at the Sierra City post office as Greg and I strolled out of town. I didn’t have the money to mail it back to Lisa’s, much to my regret, given its expense, but I wasn’t willing to carry it either, believing I’d have no use for it from here on out. I jabbed my ski pole into the snow, skidded onto its icy surface, and began to walk, a feat I achieved only intermittently. In some places I skittered over the top of it; in others, my feet crashed through, sometimes forming potholes halfway up to my knees. Before long, the snow was packed into the ankles of my boots, my lower legs so snowburned it felt as if the flesh had been scraped away with a dull knife.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The Acts of the Apostles is the New Testament book that is most obviously about what happens when the Spirit comes. It should be equally obvious that the Spirit enables Jesus’s followers to do and say things that the authorities, both Jewish and pagan, see as dangerous nonsense—just as they did with Jesus himself. When many people today think of the Holy Spirit, they think simply of personal spiritual experience (perhaps including “charismatic” gifts such as “speaking in tongues”) or powerfully effective spiritual gifts such as healing. These are there in Acts, to be sure. But the story line is not about the church discovering these gifts and simply enjoying them for their own sake. It is about the church living as a new community, giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord rather than to the kings and chief priests who rule the Jewish world or the emperor or magistrates who rule the non-Jewish world. “We must obey God,” declares Peter, “not human beings!” (Acts 5:29). We shouldn’t be surprised, then, at how it works out. Since the whole story of Jesus’s ascension and the Spirit’s arrival in Acts 1–2 is basically about Jesus as the new Temple (joining heaven and earth together) and the Spirit enabling the church itself to be an outpost of that new Temple (humans, creatures of earth, being indwelt by the very breath of heaven), the conflict focuses on temples: first, the Temple in Jerusalem (chap. 7), and later the temples in Athens (chap. 17) and Corinth (chap. 19), before coming back to the one in Jerusalem (chaps. 22–26). The underlying issues in Acts—provoked by the Spirit—are about the things that come together in the Temple, namely, God and power. Who is the true God? Where is he now living? And, above all, who is now in charge? For the early Christians, the answer was, “Jesus.” “They’re saying,” said their accusers in Thessalonica, “that there is another king, Jesus!” (17:7). Well, precisely. That’s what the whole story has been about. But, again, it’s a different kind of kingship. That too is what the whole story has been about. The story of “how Jesus became king” in Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and across the world (the program announced in Acts 1:8) is anything but the smooth, triumphant procession of a conquering worldly monarch, obliterating the opposition by the normal military methods. The methods of kingdom work are in accordance with the message of Jesus as king; that is, they involve suffering, misunderstanding, violence, execution, and, in the final spectacular scene (before Paul gets to Rome with the message of this new world emperor), shipwreck. Luke tells the story of how Jesus becomes king in Acts in a way that matches exactly the message of how Jesus became king in his own public career.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Even the story of Jesus’s resurrection and his going into “heaven” are only the beginning of something new, something that will be completed one day, but that none of the early Christians supposed had been fully accomplished yet. The early Christians were, after all, a small minority, staking their daring and apparently crazy claim about Jesus from a position of great weakness and vulnerability. They were perceived, with some justification, as a threat to the established order, and so they attracted criticism, threats, punishment, and even death. But their threat to the present world was not of the usual kind. They were not ordinary revolutionaries, ready to take up arms to overthrow an existing regime and establish their own instead. Celebrating Jesus as the world’s rightful king—as we see them doing in our earliest documents, the letters of Paul—was indeed a way of posing a challenge to Caesar and all other earthly “lords.” But it was a different sort of challenge. It was not only the announcement of Jesus as the true king, albeit still the king-in-waiting, but the announcement of him as the true sort of king. Addressing the ambitious pair James and John, he put it like this: “Pagan rulers . . . lord it over their subjects. . . . But that’s not how it’s to be with you” (Matt. 20:25–26). And, as he said to Pilate, the kingdoms that are characteristic of “this world” make their way by violence, but his sort of kingdom doesn’t do that (John 18:36). We all know the irony of empires that offer people peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice—and kill tens of thousands of people to make the point. Jesus’s kingdom isn’t like that. With him, the irony works the other way around. Jesus’s death and his followers’ suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven. Jesus’s kingdom must come, then, by the means that correspond to the message. It’s no good announcing love and peace if you make angry, violent war to achieve it! That, as we shall see, is the watchword for the “today” bit of the story of Jesus. But what about the “tomorrow” or “forever” bit? What is the ultimate future? Jesus’s first followers were unequivocal: Jesus will return. He will come again. He will reappear in power and glory, triumphing over all the forces of death, decay, and destruction, including the structures that have used those horrible forces to enslave and devastate human lives. The present mode of the story is not the end. Pundits debate the origin of the phrase, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” (the best guess is that it’s a metaphor from opera, though it is applied to sport and even to church services). But in the Christian story it ain’t over till the Master returns. As with the ascension, there are several things we need to say right away about this extraordinary claim.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The terrifying warnings are sustained through the great discourse we know as Mark 13, Matthew 24, or Luke 21, using end-of-the-world language to demonstrate that with the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple a world is indeed coming to an end, because a new world is being born. Jesus had come to his own, and his own had not received him; he had come to the place where God had promised to put his name, and the place had rejected him. He therefore invoked the language of the book of Daniel—against the very city and Temple for which Daniel had been so concerned. The “abomination that desolates” would stand in the Temple (Dan. 9:27; Matt. 24:15) not as a prelude to the Temple being rescued, but rather as a prelude to the tumultuous event that would be like the fall of Babylon itself, an event for which the only appropriate language would be the darkening of sun and moon and the falling of the stars (Matt. 24:29; Isa. 13:10). And in that terrible event, Jesus wanted his followers to see the sign of his own vindication. No longer would the Temple in Jerusalem be the place where heaven and earth met. From now on, heaven and earth would meet in the person and through the achievement of the “one like a son of man,” who after his suffering would be vindicated, who would be “coming on the clouds of heaven” to be seated beside “the Ancient One” (Matt. 24:30, quoting Dan. 7:13). The greatest empires of the world would do their worst, and Israel’s representative would be enthroned as their Lord, establishing a kingdom that could never be shaken. To say that this was not what anyone else in Israel at the time had imagined, let alone dreamed of or prayed for, was putting it mildly. The disciples themselves must have been shocked and dismayed. But this vision of judgment is not an extra bit of teaching tacked onto the end of a public career that was in all other respects about something else. The note of warning had been there throughout, from the Sermon on the Mount (think of the foolish man building his house on the sand!), to the Nazareth Manifesto (think of God’s blessing bypassing God’s people and going out to the foreigners!), to the solemn warnings in Luke 13, following reports of Jews being killed by Roman soldiers and by a falling tower in the southeast corner of Jerusalem, to repent or to perish in the same way. No wonder people thought Jesus was like Jeremiah, always warning that the enemy would come and destroy, and that when that happened it would be God’s own wrath rather than simply a ghastly accident.