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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then she turned; and soon I lost her to the crowd. I turned then, too, and headed back into the tent. I saw Zena first, making her way out into the sunshine, and then Ralph and Mrs Costello, walking very slowly side by side. I didn’t stop to speak to them; I only smiled, and stepped purposefully towards the row of chairs in which I had left Florence.But when I reached it, Florence was not there. And when I looked around, I could not see her anywhere.‘Annie,’ I called - for she and Miss Raymond had drifted over to join the group of toms beside the platform - ‘Annie, where’s Flo?’Annie gazed about the tent, then shrugged. ‘She was here a minute ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see her leave.’ There was only one exit from the tent; she must have passed me while I was gazing after Kitty, too preoccupied to notice her ...I felt my heart give a lurch: it seemed to me suddenly that if I didn’t find Florence at once, I would lose her for ever. I ran from the tent into the field, and gazed wildly about me. I recognised Mrs Macey in the crowd, and stepped up to her. Had she seen Florence? She had not. I saw Mrs Fryer again: had she seen Florence? She thought perhaps she had spotted her a moment before, heading off, with the little boy, towards Bethnal Green ...I didn’t stop to thank her, but hurried away - shouldering my way through the crush of people, stumbling and cursing and sweating with panic and haste. I passed the Shafts stall again - did not turn my head, this time, to see whether Diana was still at it, with her new boy - but only walked steadily onwards, searching for a glimpse of Florence’s jacket or glittering hair, or Cyril’s sash.At last I left the thickest crowd behind, and found myself in the western half of the park, near the boating-lake. Here, heedless of the speeches and the debates that were taking place within the tents and around the stalls, boys and girls sat in boats, or swam, shrieking and splashing and larking about. Here, too, there were a number of benches; and on one of them - I almost cried out to see it! - sat Florence, with Cyril a little way before her, dipping his hands and the frill of his skirt into the water of the lake. I stood for a moment to get my breath back, to pull off my hat and wipe at my damp brow and temples; then I walked slowly over.Cyril saw me first, and waved and shouted.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  The concept of purgatory arose from practices of prayer for the dead. In an influential passage Augustine prays that his readers will join him in praying for his dead mother—which means her soul must be neither in heaven nor hell, but a state in which it can be helped. Purgatory is a place of temporal punishment, in contrast to the eternal punishment in hell. It has the character of purgation or purification, cleansing the soul from sinful habits and desires to make it worthy of God. In the most important interpretations of purgatory, it is a good place, where souls embrace their painful purification to cleanse their souls. In the late Middle Ages, the doctrine of Purgatory invited abuses. Purgatory was painted as hellish, inhabited by devils as torturers. Fear of purgatory was used as a way of raising money by selling masses and “indulgences,” sort of like time off from purgatory. Abusing the doctrine of purgatory eventually triggered the Reformation. = Suggested Reading Augustine, Confessions, bk. 9 (concludes with Augustine asking his readers to pray for his mother’s soul). Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgatory, The Spiritual Dialogues. Dante, The Divine Comedy. Questions to Consider 1. How closely does the picture of the afterlife in this lecture resemble what you think of as the traditional view of life after death? 2. Is the concept of purgatory, as a place of purgation for imperfect souls advancing toward heaven, an attractive one to you? PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat Lecture 19: Luther and Protestant Theology Luther and Protestant Theology Lecture 19 [Martin Luther] doesn’t mean to begin a Reformation; at least, he doesn’t mean to cause a split in the church. He does mean to improve the church like any other good Christian, but he starts a new Christian movement that he hadn’t intended. he transition from medieval theology to Protestantism is marked most importantly by a single famous figure, Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther was a monk upholding the authority of the pope. He did not set out to create a split in the church. He criticized the sale of indulgences because they detracted from true inward penance of the heart. In 1517, he put his 95 Theses on a church door. These criticisms were meant as an invitation for disputation. Luther’s theology matured in the next several years, at the same time as his growing conflict with the pope. The most distinctive theme in Luther’s theology is the contrast between two forms of the word of God: Law and Gospel. The Law is God telling us what we are to do, whereas the Gospel is God telling us what Christ does for us. The Law of God comes in two forms or uses. The first use of the Law, called the “civil” use, is concerned with a outward deeds, prohibiting murder, portrait of Martin Luther, who theft, etc. criticized indulgence in his 95 Theses.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Her efforts now redoubled. Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing (“My stomach hurts”) or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense: “This is no picnic for me either, buster.” Then there were the periodic concerns with my safety, the voice of my grandmother ascendant. I remember coming home after dark one day to find a large search party of neighbors that had been assembled in our yard. My mother didn’t look happy, but she was so relieved to see me that it took her several minutes to notice a wet sock, brown with mud, wrapped around my forearm. “What’s that?” “What?” “That. Why do you have a sock wrapped around your arm?” “I cut myself.” “Let’s see.” “It’s not that bad.” “Barry. Let me see it.” I unwrapped the sock, exposing a long gash that ran from my wrist to my elbow. It had missed the vein by an inch, but ran deeper at the muscle, where pinkish flesh pulsed out from under the skin. Hoping to calm her down, I explained what had happened: A friend and I had hitchhiked out to his family’s farm, and it started to rain, and on the farm was a terrific place to mudslide, and there was this barbed wire that marked the farm’s boundaries, and…. “Lolo!” My mother laughs at this point when she tells this story, the laughter of a mother forgiving her child those sins that have passed. But her tone alters slightly as she remembers that Lolo suggested we wait until morning to get me stitched up, and that she had to browbeat our only neighbor with a car to drive us to the hospital. She remembers that most of the lights were out at the hospital when we arrived, with no receptionist in sight; she recalls the sound of her frantic footsteps echoing through the hallway until she finally found two young men in boxer shorts playing dominoes in a small room in the back. When she asked them where the doctors were, the men cheerfully replied “We are the doctors” and went on to finish their game before slipping on their trousers and giving me twenty stitches that would leave an ugly scar. And through it all was the pervading sense that her child’s life might slip away when she wasn’t looking, that everyone else around her would be too busy trying to survive to notice—that, when it counted, she would have plenty of sympathy but no one beside her who believed in fighting against a threatening fate.

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

  Yet these prophets were also surely motivated by that all-too-human desire to see their enemies suffer as they had—an impulse that the Golden Rule had been designed to modify. They would not be the last to adapt the aggressive ideology of the ruling power to their own traditions and, in so doing, distort them. In this case Yahweh, originally the fierce opponent of the violence and cruelty of empire, had been transformed into an arch imperialist. Part Two KEEPING THE PEACE 5 Jesus: Not of This World? Jesus of Nazareth was born in the reign of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus (r. 30 BCE—14 CE), when all the world was at peace. 1 Under Roman rule, a large group of nations, some of them former imperial powers, were able for a significant period to coexist without fighting one another for resources and territory—a remarkable achievement. 2 Romans made the three claims that characterize any successful imperial ideology: they had been specially blessed by the gods; in their dualist vision, all other peoples were “barbarians” with whom it was impossible to deal on equal terms; and their mission was to bring the benefits of civilization and peace to the rest of the world. But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly. 3 Rome’s fully professional army became the most efficient killing machine the world had ever seen. 4 Any resistance at all justified wholesale massacre. When they took a city, said the Greek historian Polybius, their policy was “to kill everyone they met and spare no one”—not even the animals. 5 After the Roman conquest of Britain, the Scottish leader Calgacus reported that the island had become a wasteland: “The uttermost parts of Britain are laid bare; there are no other tribes to come; nothing but sea and cliffs and more deadly Romans ... To plunder, butcher and ravage—these things they falsely name empire.” 6 Polybius understood that the purpose of this savagery was “to strike terror” in the subject nations. 7 It usually worked, but it took the Romans nearly two hundred years to tame the Jews of Palestine, who had ousted an imperial power before and believed they could do it again. After Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian Empire in 333 BCE, Judea had been absorbed into the Ptolemid and Seleucid Empires of his “successors” (diadochoi). Most of these rulers did not interfere in the personal lives of their subjects. But in 175 BCE the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV attempted a drastic reform of the temple cult and banned Jewish dietary laws, circumcision, and Sabbath observance. The Hasmonean priestly family, led by Judas Maccabeus, had led a rebellion and managed not only to wrest Judea and Jerusalem from Seleucid control but even to establish a small empire by conquering Idumaea, Samaria, and Galilee.

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

  Theirs was not a centralized empire; the emirs who commanded the districts were virtually autonomous and worked closely with the ulema, who gave these disparate military regimes ideological unity. To raise educational standards, they created the first madrassas, and Nizam al-Mulk established these schools throughout the empire, giving the ulema a power base and drawing the scattered provinces together. Emirs came and went, but the Shariah courts became a stable authority in each region. Moreover, Sufi mystics and the more charismatic ulema traveled the length and breadth of the Seljuk Empire, giving ordinary Muslims a strong sense of belonging to an international community. By the end of the eleventh century, however, the Seljuk Empire had also started to decline. It had succumbed to the usual problem of a military oligarchy, since the emirs began to fight one another for territory. They were so intent on these internal feuds that they neglected the frontier and were incapable of stopping the influx of pastoralists from the steppes who had begun to bring their herds into the fertile settled lands now ruled by their own people. Large groups of Turkish herdsmen moved steadily westward, taking over the choicest pasturage and driving out the local population. Eventually they arrived at the Byzantine frontier in the Armenian highlands. In 1071 the Seljuk chieftain Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in Armenia, and as the Byzantines retreated, the nomadic Turks broke through the unguarded frontier and began to infiltrate Byzantine Anatolia. The beleaguered Byzantine emperor now appealed to the Christians of the West for help. 5 Jesus: Not of This World? J esus of Nazareth was born in the reign of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus (r. 30 BCE—14 CE), when all the world was at peace. 1 Under Roman rule, a large group of nations, some of them former imperial powers, were able for a significant period to coexist without fighting one another for resources and territory—a remarkable achievement. 2 Romans made the three claims that characterize any successful imperial ideology: they had been specially blessed by the gods; in their dualist vision, all other peoples were “ barbarians” with whom it was impossible to deal on equal terms; and their mission was to bring the benefits of civilization and peace to the rest of the world. But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly. 3 Rome’s fully professional army became the most efficient killing machine the world had ever seen. 4 Any resistance at all justified wholesale massacre. When they took a city, said the Greek historian Polybius, their policy was “to kill everyone they met and spare no one”—not even the animals.

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

  Dt 277+ 0 לת‎ Nu 13% + 7 t.;—great, 1. m magnitude and extent, e.g. sea Nu 34°, river Gn 15'8, wilderness Dt 1”, rain ד‎ K 18%, moun- tain Zc 4’, city Gnio”, house Je 52", altar Jos 22”, throne 2 Ch 9”, sea-monsters Gn 1”, fish Jon 2', eagle Ez 17%, terebinth 28 18%, sub- stance Gu 15", wealth Dn 11’, victory 1S 19°; 1819” ביר הַגָּרוּל‎ rd. 1739 ב'‎ ace. to G We Dr. 2. in number, e.g. nation Gn 12”, congregation Je 31% camp 1 )([ ד‎ 27%, army Ez 17", sacrifice 2K 10”, slaughter Dt 28° 18 4”. 3. in > intensity, fear Dt 4, weeping Is 38% power פח‎ Ex 32", joy Jon 4°, anger Dt 29”, indigna- tion Je 21% sin Gn 20°, iniquity Gn 4”, evil Gn 39°, trespass Ez 9’. 4. in sound, loud voice Gn 39", cry Ex 11°, shout Jos 6°. 5. in age, elder, eldest, son Gn 27', daughter Gn 29", brother Gn ro”, sister Ez % 6. in importance, a. things +953(7) TO) an im- portant thing or affair Ex 18” Dt 4” 1S 12" 2K 5% 8%; mn יום‎ Je 30’ Ho2? Jo2" 3¢ Zp 1" Mal 3”. b. of men, great,.distinguished, Moses Ex 11°, David 2 ₪ 5”, Job Jb 1°, Mordecai Est 0% kings Eco Je 27’; esp. of king of Assyr. pian ו המֶלְךּ‎ ere sao a ea SE Sarru rabbu, sarru dannu, e.g. 162 9% 1; הפּהן‎ הַגּרוּל‎ the h. p. Lv 21" + 20t.; bing (הָ)אִיש‎ 1S 257 Bog” 2 K 5}: npn} TWN 2 K 48; ora a great man 28 3° Mi 73; לא תַהְדּר פָנִי נָדוּל‎ thou shalt not honour (favour) the person of a great man (opp. 27) Ly 19” (H); (ה)גדולים;:‎ the great 28 P= 1Ch17° Nerr™ (vid. infr.) Pr18%25° Jes5° (2K 10" GL dyyxiorevovras, Klo ON) ; further לי‎ isa, 2 1 ָּל- :34 םס ד 6 (ְכּל-)גְדלִיו "סד‎ ְּדוּלִיה‎ Na3”. 0.107 God, himself 2 Ch 2* Ne 4° 8° y 86" 99? 135° 147° Is 12° Je 10°; הרול‎ OND) Dé ץ‎ ro!” Ne *ג‎ 9" y "דד‎ 95% Je 32% Dn o'; גדול מכל האלהים‎ Ex 18"; גדול ומהלל מאד‎ 1 Ch 16% W 48' '96* 145°; שי מלך גדול‎ 47° 95° Mali"; this works Dt 11° Ju 27 דד ץש‎ tglory ץש‎ 21° 138°, tname Jos 7° 1S 12” 1K 8% 2 ג()‎ 67 ¥ 76? 99% Je 10° 44% Ez 36% Mal ויד‎ mercy 1K 3° 2 Chi?’ ץ‎ 57" 86” 108°, goodness Ne 9”, compassion 15 7. in phrases ָּוּל+‎ DVT TY ct is yet high day (Fr. grand jour, Germ. hoch am Tage, the day is atits height) Gn 2070 +733 jOPD (or reverse) as well small as great Dt 1" 1 Ch 25° 26% 2Ch זר‎ m3 Ty) (לְמְתּטן‎ (or reverse) from small to great Gnig" 185° 307 2K 23? 25% 2Chri5® 34% Est 1° Je 6% 8" 31% 4218 44” Jon 3°. 8. cstr. DYDI3(7) ל‎ great of wings Ez17*", so of anger Pr 19" (Qr); usually 01 God, in power Na

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But for all his demonstrations of bravado and skill, Mr White, Mr Terence Hanbury White, known to all as Tim after the chemists’ chain Timothy Whites, was terribly afraid. He was twenty-nine years old, had been a schoolmaster at Stowe for five years and a writer for seven, but he had been afraid as long as he could remember. ‘Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt, and death, I have to attempt them,’ he’d explained in a book of sporting essays, England Have My Bones, published the previous year. He had to be brave. From the schoolroom he’d race at top speed to the aerodrome, his heart tight in his mouth, afraid of stalling, afraid of the instructor’s contempt, afraid of getting into a spin from which he’d never recover, of burying himself in a wreck of crumpled wings and struts and earth. He rode with the Grafton over the muddy fields of Buckinghamshire in perpetual terror that he would fail to be brave, fail to ride well, fail to pass himself off as a gentleman, would incur the wrath of the Master of Foxhounds. And back in India, right at the beginning, where he remembered lizards and fireworks and candlelit darknesses and grown-ups in evening dress, he remembered also the terror of beatings, and arguments, and his mother’s hatred of his father, and his father’s hatred of her, and his drinking, and the endless, awful, violent war between them in which he was the pawn. His mother lavished attention on her dogs and her husband had them shot. She lavished attention on the boy and the boy was convinced he’d be next. ‘I am told,’ he wrote, ‘that my father and mother were to be found wrestling with a pistol, one on either side of my cot, each claiming that he or she was going to shoot the other and himself or herself, but in any case beginning with me.’ And then: ‘It was not a safe kind of childhood.’ He brings the end of the fountain pen to his lips and considers what he has written. I pounce upon a bird with cruel talons and desperate beak. It may have been hurting me a little, but it would have hurt much more if I had let go. I held it tight and powerless to harm me, calling for somebody else to help by holding its feet. It was an English bird.

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

  i ומלט:‎ vb. slip away (not in Qal) (N H מִילוּט‎ rescue; & pon (rare) = BH; Ar. bis is have scanty hair ; 1v. cast the oc without hair ; [slip away, escape fr. hand is a\2]);— Niph. P73 ms. 0292 Ju 3% +46 t.; 3 fs. MOD ש‎ 1245 with } cons. mDED. Je 43” ie mpl. נמלטו‎ 294° + 8t. Pf.; Impf. phi Amog'+ 13t.; 9) Ju3°+7t.; 1% אמִלְטָה‎ Gn 10%; 3 mpl. sob Mal 3” + D2 it. ה‎ Imv. הלט‎ Gn fo a antes + הַמַלְטִי‎ Ze 2; Inf. abs. pbin 18 27} (but rd. ODEN OX G We DrLohr HPS: > Th Kit Bu ins. ON bef. (הפ'"‎ ; estr.zd.,Gn 19" Est 4°; Pt. pdr 1 K 19"%;—1. slip away S83 אִמַכְטָה‎ “AST ALIN ד‎ 5 207? Let me slip away to see my brethren; slip through, or past (into the house) 28 4°(cf. Dr HPS and Pi. 1, Hiph. 2 ; > Klo * 30ND), ,לאט /א‎ after G €habor), 2. escape, Ju - ברח || [+1:0) ללוש ,(נוּס ||) 19% ₪ ז‎ , vy" 22% ) || 3), 307 1K 18* 207 (|| ,(נוּס‎ 2 K 10% Ts 20° (i) S33, D3), 49 5 16 465 43%? ((|D2), Ez ד‎ 731538 Am 9' Jo 3° 20 2" Mal 3” 124° Pea Jbi! 16-17-19 6, 1D of place whence 1 $238 20 572 | 1. give birth to a male child Is 667 (|| ny ef מלך 6. “8 = whither 1822'27": עד‎ cm os Gn 19% (J), Ju 3%; ©. ace. 2K igi Is 37%, Est i c. מן‎ of 8 fr. whom Ee ¥? 6. ב0 2 27% 18 מִיד‎ 167 Je 324 34° 38°* Durem ‘19 Je 41; avn 1K Toei 0 עַלנָפָש‎ foo one’s life Gn 19", 3. pass. be delivered yp 22) Pr 117) 28% Jb 22% Dn 12! (later usage Pi. 5 nbn Ez 93°; ּמְלַט-‎ Ec 9%; sf מִלטְנוּ‎ 2S 19%; Impf. pop Am 2"+8 t., sf שי ימלטהי‎ 4x?) םר‎ nebo yr, 6 + א 1 מַלֶטִי‎ 19; +4t.Imv.; Inf. abs. nb Is 46 . 39°; ד מְמַלָטות.‎ 8 19%; pl. OSD 28 19% 1. lay (eggs; i.e. let them slip out; of arrow snake) Is 34%. 2. let escape: *מלמו עצמתיו‎ 2K 23" and so they let his bones (the prophet’ escape (from the burning). 3. deliver, abs Is 464; c.acc. Is 46? Je39*%" y 417 Jb 22% 2 Ec 889%; ¢. 1%) Jb 65; 3 281% עשחִיתוּתֶם‎ 107; elsewh. YD3 nbn deliver, save, life 1§ 19? 2 S198 1K 1” Je 48° 51° Ez 33° Am oil wv 89% 1164; נפש‎ om. Am 27 ץ‎ 337 Jb 20% — (This form not in Hex., Ju., Ch., Is.1) Hiph Pye) 2 ms, ד ד הֶמָלִיט‎ > 3) oe ו הִמְלִימָה‎

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

  What are we afraid might be found out? Here are a few things I’ve seen, both in my own life and in the lives of those I know and love: The fear of being put to work. Sitting alone with God has a way of bringing action items that we try so hard to avoid to the surface of our consciousness. Need to forgive someone who wronged you? Reach out to the person you hurt? Make good on a commitment you’ve been neglecting? Sitting in the quiet with God will remind you of these things and a thousand more. The fear of being asked to change. Worse still, what if solitude reveals not just a specific action you need to take but rather a broader issue you need to repent of? The nightly numbing habit. The increasing tendency to yell at your kids. The pull of Facebook when you’re being paid to work. If we don’t carve out time when the Holy Spirit can help us assess the quality of our lives, then we convince ourselves we won’t have to assess the quality of our lives. Easy, right? Yeah. Not the best approach.3 The fear that you’re all alone in the world. Clearly this one hits closest to home. Why did I refuse to practice solitude during that eighteen-month span? Because I was afraid that if I reached out to God, there would be nobody home to take my call. I hate that I didn’t close that distance sooner. Quiet time isn’t so quiet, is it? Our heads actually get noisier when the noise all around us falls away. Behind every one of these fears is a lie: I cannot face God as I am. All we can see at first is the mess. Here’s the truth: we are messed up, every one of us. Which is exactly why we need time with God alone, in the quiet, where we can hear His healing voice. We have a choice between chaos and quiet, between noise and solitude with God, between denial and healing. So why is it dangerous to keep believing this lie? Because humans never stay in neutral. We are either moving toward something or moving away from something. The antidote to running from ourselves is running to the only One who helps us get over ourselves. The lie is that we will be shamed.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  We worry that if we were to make a change and speak up for ourselves, the world would spin on its head. People would surely leave us. We would be all alone. Abandoned. What good is a doormat after all if there is no one to walk on it? I won’t lie to you. When you do start standing up for yourself, some of the people in your life are not going to like it. They’ve been used to a relationship where you have been all the things to them—taxi driver, therapist, chef (likely all for free). When you start demanding respect, saying no sometimes, or expecting something in return, some people are going to start leaving some pretty nasty Yelp reviews because you raised your menu price. And that’s okay. You will survive. When you set boundaries, you will see pretty quickly who loves you for who you are and who loves you for what you do for them. People will either honor the respect you’re requesting or they will shame you for it. This gives you invaluable data, my friend. Many of us are afraid of getting data that we don’t want. We’ll keep ourselves in a place of purgatory for months or years because we’re afraid of people showing us their true colors. Boundaries can show how the people who seemed to love you may have only loved how you made them feel. Don’t be afraid of finding out that truth. You don’t need to keep swimming in shark-infested waters. If you’re feeling scared to swim into unknown territory—the kind where you actually push back against the sharks in your life—you’re not alone. Jordan was petrified of setting limits with others. He was afraid he would get fired if he didn’t work every weekend. He thought no one would want to date him if he wasn’t always willing to drive an hour in LA traffic every week. But when I asked him if the way he was living his life was working for him, he replied tersely, “No.” When I asked him whether he was willing to see what would happen when he did what he wanted, rather than what everyone else wanted, he cautiously said, “I guess I could try it.” We came up with a list for Jordan to practice. He communicated more clearly with his colleagues about his availability, rather than placing himself constantly on call. He told his dating partners that he couldn’t drive out sometimes, but he was happy to have them visit him. While he was nervous about how these experiments would turn out, he quickly saw results. He learned who respected his time at work and they built stronger relationships. For the ones who didn’t value his time, he eventually found new cases with partners who honored his schedule. Soon enough, Jordan had free weekends to enjoy as he pleased.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  So we could say on the spectrum of pleasure, yes, I like to get touched, I like to get fucked, but also, what about for my community, for my people? What is pleasurable in finding a place of grace and well-being and transcending oppression? If we’re not imagining where we’re going, then it will constantly just be pushing back outside from inside of cages, as opposed to imagining what’s happening outside of cages. So I feel incredibly indebted to this essay in particular … wow, there are just so many good quotes. One in particular, “Giving into the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford. And the unintentional are those that do not wish to guide their own destinies.”36 And I wrote, as my live, ripe, twenty-one-year-old self, “Our lives have mapped our destinies for generations.” You know, I was writing a conversation with Audre Lorde. I was like, “Here, Audre. This is what I think about what you just said.” But how do we map our destiny and desire? By understanding where we’ve come from and where we want our generations to go? [Writing] our destinies and desires, that has been my life since the early nineties. I believed, I’m going to live like a writer. I’m going to be a writer. I desire to be, and I am a writer. I desired to say to my family, “I’m going be a writer,” even when, in the early nineties, many of us still didn’t choose that as a job. My whole life was filled with desire and destiny. I grew up around jazz musicians, and my mom raised me around theater and the folk festival scene. I also had queer family—three generations of Black queer family. So I was very used to a gender spectrum, a cultural reality that was very performative and queer, that was very full of life and desire. I was not devoid of that as a child. And yet, as a survivor and a bystander of family violence, desire was hard to trust. When I was young, before he was in recovery from violence, my father was—this term is limited—a batterer and caused great harm; my mom was a survivor, and I was a survivor/bystander. So all of my erotic self was wrapped in “how do I associate with pleasure and desire without fear, without losing control, without being harmed?” I really had to walk out of a space that allowed for me to unravel and unpack those things as separate so I could define my sexuality and my erotic self in relationship to something that did not have to be violent, to understand that the desire to be loved and to love your family wasn’t always mired with violent pasts but could begin again with new, healing destinies.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women. When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial. And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse. In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity—the abuse of feeling.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  At first the Greeks had resented the Phoenicians, whose culture was far more sophisticated than their own. But by the ninth century, they had begun to work creatively together. The Phoenicians established a base in Cyprus, and Phoenician craftsmen came to work in Athens, Rhodes, and Crete. Phoenician colonists began to open up the western Mediterranean, and in 814 they established Carthage on the north African coast. They showed the Greeks the mercantile potential of the sea, and the Greeks began to make new foreign contacts in Syria. In the late ninth century, Phoenicians, Cypriots, and Greeks founded the commercial center of Al-Mina at the mouth of the river Orontes, which traded slaves and silver in return for iron, metalwork, ivories, and fabric. 4 Greece was coming back to life, but the people remained in a spiritual limbo. A few elements of the old Minoan and Mycenaean cults remained: there was, for example, a sacred olive tree on the Acropolis. 5 But the thirteenth-century crisis had shattered the old faith. The Greeks had watched their world collapse, and the trauma had changed them. The Minoan frescoes had been confident and luminous; the men, women, and animals depicted had been expectant and hopeful. There were apparitions of goddesses in flowery meadows, dancing, and joy. But by the ninth century, Greek religion was pessimistic and uncanny, its gods dangerous, cruel, and arbitrary. 6 In time, the Greeks would achieve a civilization of dazzling brilliance, but they never lost their sense of tragedy, and this would be one of their most important religious contributions to the Axial Age. Their rituals and myths would always hint at the unspeakable and the forbidden, at horrible events happening offstage, just out of sight, and usually at night. They experienced the sacred in catastrophe, when life was turned inexplicably upside down, in the breaking of taboos, and when the boundaries that kept society and individuals sane were suddenly torn asunder. We can see this dark vision in the terrifying story of the birth of the Greek gods. In the Greek world, there was no benevolent creator god and no divine order at the beginning of time but only relentless hatred and conflict. At first, it was said, there had been two primal powers: Chaos and Gaia (Earth). They were too hostile to procreate, so they generated their offspring independently. Gaia produced Uranus (Heaven), the Sky God, and then gave birth to the seas, rivers, hills, and mountains of our world. Then Gaia and Uranus lay together, and Gaia gave birth to six sons and six daughters. These were the Titans, the first race of gods. But Uranus hated his children, and forced all twelve of them back into Gaia’s womb the minute they were born.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  At Olympia, athletes were not simply competing for personal fame, but were making a symbolic rite of passage from death to life. 63 At the western end of the stadium was the tomb of Pelops, a dark pit leading down to the depths of the earth. It faced the altar of Zeus in the east, a huge pile of earth and ash, the residue of innumerable sacrificial pyres. The god and the hero were like night and day, death and life. On the night before the race, the athletes sacrificed a ram in the precinct of Pelops, pouring its blood into the chthonian depths. On the next morning, they sprinted from Pelops’s tomb to the summit of the Zeus altar, into the rising sun, running away from death and bloody sacrifice toward the purifying fire. Like Pelops, the Olympian champion would eventually die, but his victory in the agon gave the victor a glory ( kleos ) that lived on in the memories of future generations. The cult of the hero was a unique feature of Greek religion. 64 The mortal hero was the chthonian counterpart of the immortal gods. By the end of the eighth century, the grave of an outstanding warrior would occupy a place of honor in most of the poleis. A constant reminder of the superior race of mortals who had lived in the heroic age, the hero was revered as a demigod. Now that he was dead, he lived a shadowy life in the depths of the earth, but his spirit was still an active presence in the community; the qualities that had made him so exceptional lived on. But his death had filled the hero with rage, and an unpredictable, disturbing aura emanated from his grave, which people passed in reverent silence. Unlike the gods, who lived on the heights of Mount Olympus, the mortal hero was close at hand. The rites at his tomb were designed to appease his anger and enlist his help. Worshipers visited his shrine without garlands, unkempt, with hair unbound, yet each polis was proud of its hero, who symbolized its special qualities. His grave was often placed next to the temple of the patronal deity, as its dark, chthonian complement. In Delphi, a sanctuary founded in the mid-eighth century, the joyous cult of Apollo, god of music and poetry, was offset by the tragic memory of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, one of the warriors who had entered Troy in the wooden horse. After the war it was said that Pyrrhus had visited Delphi to claim redress from Apollo, whom he blamed for the death of his father, but he was hacked to pieces beside the sacred hearth by temple servants, who were quarreling over some sacrificial meat. 65 He was buried under the temple threshold.

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

  Changing our minds is possible. When you recognize the lie resting heavily on your shoulders, you can take off that suffocating coat and set it aside. What fear-filled thought is Satan using to suffocate your faith? Name it. Say its name. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to withstand whatever the future might hold. I choose to believe God will not allow me to be tempted beyond what I can endure and will always give me the strength to overcome temptation.11 I’m afraid that everyone will abandon me. I choose to believe God has promised not to leave me, and He always keeps His promises.12 I’m afraid of losing everything and everyone I love. I choose to believe God will sustain me in my brightest moments of victory and my darkest moments of suffering.13 I’m afraid of being found out. I choose to believe God knows every thought before I think it and loves me.14 I’m afraid that I’m really not capable of doing this job. I choose to believe God has given me everything I need to live a godly life.15 I’m afraid of being rejected. I choose to believe God has accepted me as His child and will never leave me.16 I’m afraid of not living up to their expectations. I choose to believe God wants me to seek His approval only and release the pressure to please people.17 I’m afraid of failing miserably for everyone to see. I choose to believe God specializes in taking weakness and using it for His glory.18 This is how we fight the spiral. We pull the thoughts out of our heads, and we steal all their power and then replace them with what is true! Anxious for Nothing My friend Jackie has tried to get pregnant for five years. The ache in her soul has been nearly unbearable. I was with her not long ago, and her despair had grown so intense that she was losing all hope in life, in God, in His “good and perfect gift[s].”19 She looked at me as if to say, “What if He passes over me? What if my dreams don’t come true?” As we talked, with a whole herd of people she loved surrounding her, woman after woman loaned Jackie her faith. They weren’t believing God on Jackie’s behalf for a child to show up in her womb; they were believing God on Jackie’s behalf, regardless of what may come. She left our time together glowing and hopeful, eyes set on trying some new challenges and embracing a world that may not contain a child in her womb. Because God is good and perfect, even when life is not—and she is choosing to believe He is in control. There are no promises that our worst fears won’t come true.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  IF SO, LIST AND EXPLAIN. BASED ON THE TOP TWENTY WORDS YOU CHOSE, RANK YOUR TOP TEN VALUES, ALONG WITH WHY EACH VALUE MATTERS TO YOU. Now here’s the thing: I see so many situations where people have let their anxiety win and their values lose. Where they have said to themselves that it’s just not worth it to go on a blind date, to confront a racist family member, or to go out to a great new restaurant by themselves because they don’t want to be uncomfortable. These examples widely vary but there’s a common theme. Those are days when team anxiety takes a W and our values take an L. I’m not here for it. When I think of this in the context of becoming a parent myself, I think about how anxiety could easily win this battle in my life. The fear of my child throwing up in my hair while I’m driving or the idea that I’ll take up permanent residence at château porcelain for nine—but really ten—months could easily be enough for me to walk away. But I’ll be damned if my anxiety makes that decision for me. I may not become a mother because I decide that I want to dedicate more time to my career, or that I want to travel more, or that I just plain don’t want to—but I will not let my anxiety make that choice for me. Letting my fear, especially my irrational fear with my phobia, determine the outcome of something as monumental as having children in my life is just not something I’m willing to agree to. To me, a brave life that is aligned with my values is the one I want to always choose instead of the life that is indebted to an avoidance of anxiety. Powerful things happened for Jacob when he reassessed his true values. Simply put: I started to see Jacob become fully alive. More than anything, I saw his eyes brighten for the first time. That glazed look that he had in the beginning had transformed into an animated face that was seeing the world clearly for the first time in a long while. Jacob was starting to see in color. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU JUMP IN . . . OR DON’T Think of all the times you have been brave enough to dive in. I guarantee, every time you’ve made a choice in your life out of courage, rather than fear, something transformative has happened. An incredible person may have come into your life. You may have created something magnificent for others to enjoy. You may have learned something invaluable that no one can ever take away.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I stood one day at a coffee-stall in the mouth of an alley off Berwick Street, and watched the entrance to one of these houses. There was, I saw, a constant flow of men and women over its threshold, and no one paid the slightest heed to any of them save the leering old woman who sat in a chair at the door, taking their coins - and her alertness lasted only until she had palmed her pennies and handed her customers their key. I believe a pantomime horse could have sashayed over that step with a harlot’s hand upon its bridle and - so long as the horse had its coin at the ready - no one would have stopped their business to turn and look ... A few days later, therefore, I put my costume in a bag, presented myself at the house, and asked for a room. The old woman looked me over and grinned, quite mirthlessly; then, when I gave her my shilling, she thrust a key at me, and nodded me into the darkened passageway behind her. The key was sticky; the handle of my chamber was sticky; indeed, the house was entirely horrible - damp and stinking, and with walls as thin as paper, so that, unpacking my bag and straightening my costume, I heard all the business from the rooms above, below, and on either side of it - all the grunts and slaps and giggles, and pounding mattresses. I changed very quickly, growing all the time, with every grunt and titter, less certain and less brave. But when I gazed at myself - there was a looking-glass, with a crack across it, and blood in the crack - when I gazed at myself at last, I smiled, and knew my plan was a good one. I had borrowed a flat-iron from my landlady’s kitchen, and pressed the suit free of all its creases; I had given my hair a trim with a pair of sewing-shears - now I smoothed it flat with spittle. I left my dress and purse upon a chair, went out upon the landing, and locked the door behind me - my new dark heart, all the time, beating fast as a clock. As I had expected, the old bawd on the step barely raised her eyes as I went past her; and so, a little hesitantly, I began the walk down Berwick Street. With every glance that came my way, I flinched; at any moment I expected the cry to be let up: ‘A girl! There is a girl, here, in boy’s clothing!’ But the glances did not settle on me: they only slithered past me, to the girls behind. There was no cry; and I began to walk a little straighter. At St Luke’s Church, on the corner, a man brushed by me with a barrow, calling, ‘All right, squire!’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He’s a person, I realise. A real person, skinny and bearded and wearing a blue T-shirt and with a water bottle in his hand and he is friendly and wary and a little in awe of the hawk. I think he might be a nice man. ‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ I begin apologetically. He grins and shakes his head. ‘I was surprised! It’s not something you see every day!’ I turn briefly to the hawk as she bends down to pull at the rabbit leg again. I open my mouth to speak. But when I look up he has gone. It is bright, after heavy rain, and the crowds of closing time have gone. On this second expedition from the house Mabel grips the glove more tightly than ever. She is tense. She looks smaller and feels heavier in this mood, as if fear had a weight to it, as if pewter had been poured into her long and airy bones. The raindrop marks on her tight-feathered front run together into long lines like those around a downturned mouth. She picks fitfully at her food, but mostly she stares, taut with reserve, about her. She follows bicycles with her eyes. She hunches ready to spring when people come too close. Children alarm her. She is unsure about dogs. Big dogs, that is. Small dogs fascinate her for other reasons. After ten minutes of haunted apprehension, the goshawk decides that she’s not going to be eaten, or beaten to death, by any of these things. She rouses and begins to eat. Cars and buses rattle fumily past, and when the food is gone she stands staring at the strange world around her. So do I. I’ve been with the hawk so long, just her and me, that I’m seeing my city through her eyes. She watches a woman throwing a ball to her dog on the grass, and I watch too, as baffled by what she’s doing as the hawk is. I stare at traffic lights before I remember what they are. Bicycles are spinning mysteries of glittering metal. The buses going past are walls with wheels. What’s salient to the hawk in the city is not what is salient to man. The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there’s a clatter of wings. We both look up. There’s a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It’s as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing , she thinks. This is fascinating .

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She is unsure about dogs. Big dogs, that is. Small dogs fascinate her for other reasons. After ten minutes of haunted apprehension, the goshawk decides that she’s not going to be eaten, or beaten to death, by any of these things. She rouses and begins to eat. Cars and buses rattle fumily past, and when the food is gone she stands staring at the strange world around her. So do I. I’ve been with the hawk so long, just her and me, that I’m seeing my city through her eyes. She watches a woman throwing a ball to her dog on the grass, and I watch too, as baffled by what she’s doing as the hawk is. I stare at traffic lights before I remember what they are. Bicycles are spinning mysteries of glittering metal. The buses going past are walls with wheels. What’s salient to the hawk in the city is not what is salient to man. The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there’s a clatter of wings. We both look up. There’s a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It’s as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing, she thinks. This is fascinating. Some part of the hawk’s young brain has just worked something out, and it has everything to do with death. ‘For the goshawk,’ wrote White, ‘the necessity was a long walk on the fist; as it always was.’ But he walked as if the walking itself were the secret, not his attention to the feelings of his hawk. Even in the aftermath of my father’s death my tattered heart knew that the secret to taming hawks was to take things slowly. To move from darkness to light, from enclosed rooms into the open air, to stand at a distance, first, and then grow closer, over many days, to this alien world of raucous voices and swinging arms, of bright plastic buggies and roaring mopeds. Day by day, foot by foot, mouthful by mouthful, my hawk would come to see that these things were not a threat, and would look upon them with equanimity. But it was continuous murder for Gos. White walked because that was what the books said he should do, and so that was what he did, taking Gos outside even on the day he arrived. Forty-eight hours later he was walked to the Wheelers’ farmhouse to meet ‘all the family, barking dogs and all’, and the next day they were out on the road meeting cars and cyclists. ‘He bates repeatedly on these trips,’ White noted in his day-book. On it went.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  Luther’s concept of Gospel is based on Catholic sacramental theology. His early theological writing was focused on the effort to merit a state of grace by penitential works. He had been taught that a kind of preliminary “merit of congruity” is required before grace. This merit is acquired by penitential works: confession, contrition, and satisfaction. For Luther, the merit of our good works is always undermined by the fact that we do them not out of pure love for God but out of the selfish desire to be saved, for the motive of our heart is always “curved in on itself’ (incurvatus in se). The deep problem was uncertainty about whether or not good works were useless. A truly sincere contrition, therefore, requires self-hatred and the desire to be damned. He called this justification by faith alone, because it meant attaining righteousness by believing God’s accusation. The first time Luther identifies a gracious word of God to cling to—what he later calls “Gospel’—is in the word of absolution in the sacrament of Penance. The word of absolution is to be believed as Christ’s own word. More than a year after posting the 95 Theses, Luther finds a word of Christ’s grace—the Gospel—in Baptism and the Eucharist as well as the sacrament of Penance. He would say that the Gospel itself is a kind of sacrament, because its words and stories bring about what they signify. Justification by faith alone extends a version of medieval Catholic pastoral care to the whole of life. Many people found it terrifying to die when they did not know if they were in a state of grace or deserved damnation. A good priest would often hold up a crucifix before the face of the dying and urge them to trust in Christ rather than worry about their inadequate moral life. Luther called this kind of terror Anfechtung, German for “assault,” because it was a temptation of the devil which he frequently experienced himself. m 66 Calvin and Reformed Theology Lecture 20 Lecture 20: Calvin and Reformed Theology Reformed and Reformation don’t mean the same thing ... . The Reformed are one part of the Reformation, not the whole Reformation. They tend to be a little further way from Catholicism than Lutheranism is. There’s a kind of spectrum here; Lutheranism is closer to Catholicism largely because Lutheranism has a more Catholic notion of the sacraments. he Reformed tradition constitutes just one branch of the Reformation, which is different from the Lutheran Reformation. The Reformed were more thorough in breaking with Catholic piety and sacramental practices than the Lutherans. The designation “Reformed” comes from the phrase, “the church reformed according to the word of God.” The Reformed wing of the Reformation originated in Switzerland, beginning with Zwingli in Zurich, and continuing with its most important figure, John Calvin, in Geneva. The Reformed tradition in England includes Puritans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.