Grief

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 Another Country (1962)

  “This just came,” she said. “I thought it might be important.” “Thank you,” he said. She, too, hoped that it might be the money he was waiting for, but she closed her door behind her. It was nearly suppertime and she was cooking; in fact, the entire street seemed to be cooking, and his legs threatened to give way beneath him. He did not look carefully at the outside of the envelope because his mind was entirely occupied by the recalcitrant check, and he was not expecting a check from America, which was where the letter came from; and he crumpled it up, unread, in his trench-coat pocket and crossed the courtyard and went upstairs to his room. There, he put the letter on the table, dried himself, and undressed and got under the covers. Then he lay the cigarettes out to dry, lit the driest one, and looked at the letter again. It seemed a very ordinary letter, until the paragraph beginning We were all very fond of him, and I know that you were, too—yes, it must have been Cass who wrote. Rufus was dead, and by his own hand. Rufus was dead. Boys like me? Yves had teased. How could he tell the boy who lay beside him now anything about Rufus? It had taken him a long while to realize that one of the reasons Yves had so stirred his heart, stirred it in a way he had almost forgotten it could be stirred, was because he reminded him, somehow, somewhere, of Rufus. And it had taken him almost until this very moment, on the eve of his departure, to begin to recognize that part of Rufus’ great power over him had to do with the past which Eric had buried in some deep, dark place; was connected with himself, in Alabama, when I wasn’t nothing but a child; with the cold white people and the warm, black people, warm at least for him, and as necessary as the sun which bathed the bodies of himself and his lover now. Lying in this garden now, so warm, covered, and apprehensive, he saw them on the angular, blazing streets of his childhood, and in the shuttered houses, and in the fields. They laughed differently from other people, so it had seemed to him, and moved with more beauty and violence, and they smelled like good things in the oven.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When I looked up Meaning a Life on Amazon, there was only one review. It was by a guy who gave the book a single star, complaining: “Purchased this book hoping to gain insight into the life of one of my favorite poets. Very little about George and a lot about Mary.” It’s her autobiography, you fucking moron, I thought, before realizing my trajectory had followed something of the same course. Before the birth of her daughter, Linda, it turns out Mary suffered several stillbirths—too many, apparently, for her to give a number—as well as the crib death of a six-week-old. About all this, Mary writes: Birth … I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it…. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me. Even now, writing of the experiences of age twenty-four to thirty, I wish to encompass my isolation and the wracking devastation of loss, the sense of being a nothing on the delivery table, knocked out by anesthetic, only to regain consciousness and be told once more, “The fetus is dead.” George and Mary are famous for living a life in conversation, in poetry. We talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring. But here, Mary is unsure that words are good enough. I never talked about it even to George. Her experience may be one of devastation, but she still worries that words might chip away at it (intolerable). Nonetheless, years later, as her husband begins to peel away from language, Mary tries to tell. In his epic treatise Bubbles, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts forth something he calls the “rule of a negative gynecology.” To truly understand the fetal and perinatal world, Sloterdijk writes, “one must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.” I applaud this involution, this “cave research,” this turn away from mastery and toward the immersive bubble of “blood, amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath.” I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write. Winnicott acknowledges that the demands of ordinary devotion can be frightening for some mothers, who worry that giving themselves over to it will “turn them into a vegetable.” Poet Alice Notley raises the stakes: “he is born and I am undone—feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.”

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

  One of the areas tackled by the council fathers was the religious life, which urgently needed reform. Many of the orders had got stuck in a traditional rut. Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in tune with the times. But this proved to be a monumentally complex task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level, and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing, yet nothing of equal value had emerged to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in Saint Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples that only a few find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that—I realized sadly—was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that caliber. I suspect that many of those who left during the seventies had also faced up to this hard truth.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.” He fell away from her, and, as though in a dream, she saw his great body stagger to the sofa; and he fell beside the sofa, on his knees, weeping. She listened, listened to hear a sound from the children, and looked toward the door, where they would be standing if they were up; but they were not there, there was no sound. She looked at Richard, and covered her face for a moment. She could not bear the sound of his weeping, or the sight of those breaking shoulders. Her face felt twice its size; when she took her hands away, they were covered with blood. She rose, and staggered into the bathroom. She ran the water, the bleeding slowly began to stop. Then she sat down on the bathroom floor. Her mind swung madly back and forth, like the needle of some broken instrument. She wondered if her face would be swollen in the morning, and how she would explain this to Paul and Michael. She thought of Ida and Vivaldo and Ellis, and wondered what Vivaldo would do when he discovered the truth; and felt very sorry for him, sad enough for her tears to begin again, dripping down on her clenched hands. She thought of Eric, and wondered if she had also betrayed him by telling Richard the truth. And what would she say to Eric now, or he to her? She did not want, ever, to leave the white, lighted haven of the bathroom. The center of her mind was filled with the sight and sound of Richard’s anguish. She wondered if there was any hope for them, if there was anything left between them which they could use. This last question made her rise at last, her dry belly still contracting, and take off her bloody dress. She wanted to burn it, but she put it in the dirty-clothes hamper. She walked into the kitchen and put coffee on the stove. Then she walked back into the bathroom, put on a bathrobe, and took the cigarettes out of her handbag. She lit a cigarette and sat down at the kitchen table. It was three o’clock in the morning. She sat and waited for Richard to rise and come to her. Book Three: TOWARD BETHLEHEMHow with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? —SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet LXV

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When I looked up Meaning a Life on Amazon, there was only one review. It was by a guy who gave the book a single star, complaining: “Purchased this book hoping to gain insight into the life of one of my favorite poets. Very little about George and a lot about Mary.” It’s her autobiography, you fucking moron, I thought, before realizing my trajectory had followed something of the same course. Before the birth of her daughter, Linda, it turns out Mary suffered several stillbirths—too many, apparently, for her to give a number—as well as the crib death of a six-week-old. About all this, Mary writes: Birth … I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it…. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me. Even now, writing of the experiences of age twenty-four to thirty, I wish to encompass my isolation and the wracking devastation of loss, the sense of being a nothing on the delivery table, knocked out by anesthetic, only to regain consciousness and be told once more, “The fetus is dead.” George and Mary are famous for living a life in conversation, in poetry. We talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring. But here, Mary is unsure that words are good enough. I never talked about it even to George. Her experience may be one of devastation, but she still worries that words might chip away at it (intolerable). Nonetheless, years later, as her husband begins to peel away from language, Mary tries to tell. In his epic treatise Bubbles, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts forth something he calls the “rule of a negative gynecology.” To truly understand the fetal and perinatal world, Sloterdijk writes, “one must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.” I applaud this involution, this “cave research,” this turn away from mastery and toward the immersive bubble of “blood, amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath.” I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write. Winnicott acknowledges that the demands of ordinary devotion can be frightening for some mothers, who worry that giving themselves over to it will “turn them into a vegetable.” Poet Alice Notley raises the stakes: “he is born and I am undone—feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  She moved one hand over her brow, uselessly pushing up her hair. “I didn’t have to tell him; he didn’t really know, he didn’t suspect you at all, of course; he thought it was Vivaldo. I told him because I thought he had a right to know, that if we were going to—continue—together, we could begin again on a new basis, with everything clear between us. But I was wrong. Some things cannot be clear.” The boy and girl were coming to their side of the room. Cass and Eric crossed over, to stand beneath the red painting. “Or perhaps some things are clear, only one won’t face those things. I don’t know.... Anyway—I didn’t think he’d threaten me, I didn’t think he’d try to frighten me. If he were leaving me, if he were being unfaithful to me—unfaithful, what a word!—I don’t think I’d try to hold him that way. I don’t think I’d try to punish him. After all—he doesn’t belong to me, nobody belongs to anybody.” They began walking again, down a long corridor, toward the ladies. “He said these terrible things to me, he said that he would sue me for divorce and take Paul and Michael away from me. And I listened to him, it didn’t seem real. I didn’t see how he could say those things, if he’d ever loved me. And I watched him. I could see that he was just saying these things to hurt me, to hurt me because he’d been hurt—like a child. And I saw that I’d loved him like that, like a child, and now the bill for all that dreaming had come in. How can one have dreamed so long? And I thought it was real. Now I don’t know what’s real. And I felt betrayed, I felt that I’d betrayed myself, and you, and everything—of value, everything, anyway, that one aspires to become, one doesn’t want to be simply another grey, shapeless monster.” They passed the cheerful ladies and Cass looked at them with wonder and with hatred. “Oh, God. It’s a miserable world.” He said nothing, for he did not know what to say, and they continued their frightening promenade through the icy and angular jungle. The colors on the walls blared at them—like frozen music; he had the feeling that these rooms would never cease folding in on each other, that this labyrinth was eternal. And a sorrow entered him for Cass stronger than any love he had ever felt for her. She stood as erect as a soldier, moving straight ahead, and no bigger, as they said in the South, than a minute. He wished that he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  however on the last night, i put a pillow under her knees, and i told her i was going to take a walk. that i would smell honeysuckle and see fireflies, wet my shoes in midnight dew. i told her that i was going to do those things because i was going to stay on earth in this form. “but your work here is done mama.” i told her that she had set us all up very well with her love and her lessons. i told her she had inspired me to become an artist. i told her that i loved her so much, that we all knew that she loved us too, that she was surrounded in love, surrounded in light. and i walked. after my walk, among other things, i told her i was going to go to sleep, and she should too. i said it firmly. i told her to not be afraid, to relax, that it was ok if she had to go. i told her i knew she was tired and that all accounts of heaven (from those who have so briefly visited) are that it is pure bliss. i told her not to be afraid. i thanked her. i said, “thank you mom.” i leaked tears but tried to hide them from her now. i turned on the bathroom light and closed the door so a long foot thick rectangle of yellow reached her from feet to head. i touched her feet over the blanket, then her thighs, her torso and bare chest below her throat, her shoulders her face and ears. i kissed her all over her beautiful bald head and i said, “goodnight mama. you go to sleep.” and then i laid down in my little chair bed there put my jacket over my upper body and silently cried myself to sleep. the sound of her breathing, deep and gulping and certain. It’s very dark now. Harry and Jessica have fallen asleep. I am alone with the baby. I try to commit to the idea of letting him out. I still can’t imagine it. But the pain keeps going deeper. At the bottom, which one can’t quite know is the bottom, one reckons. I’ve heard a lot of women describe this reckoning (it might also be called nine centimeters), at which one starts bargaining hard, as if striking a deal to save your conjoined lives. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this, baby, but word is that you’ve got to come out, and that I’ve got to let you, and we’ve got to do this together, and we’ve got to do it now. They tell me the baby is facing a weird way, I have to lie on my left side, with my leg elevated. I don’t want to. They tell me twenty minutes this way. I see a collection of hands holding my leg. It hurts. After twenty minutes, he has turned.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Then he jumped down, just as the train began to pick up speed. He ran along the platform a little longer, then stopped, his hands in his pockets, staring, and with the wind raising his hair. Eric watched him, waving. The platform narrowed, sloped, ended, the train swerved, and Yves vanished from his sight. It did not seem possible and he stared stupidly at the flying poles and wires, at the sign saying PARIS–ST. LAZARE, at the blank, back walls of buildings. Then tears rolled down his face. He lit a cigarette and stood in the vestibule, while the hideous outskirts of Paris rolled by. Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all. New York seemed very strange indeed. It might, almost, for strange barbarity of manner and custom, for the sense of danger and horror barely sleeping beneath the rough, gregarious surface, have been some impenetrably exotic city of the East. So superbly was it in the present that it seemed to have nothing to do with the passage of time: time might have dismissed it as thoroughly as it had dismissed Carthage and Pompeii. It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never—it was the general complaint—left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness. This fight, carried on in so many different ways, created the strange climate of the city. The girls along Fifth Avenue wore their bright clothes like semaphores, trying helplessly to bring to the male attention the news of their mysterious trouble. The men could not read this message. They strode purposefully along, wearing little anonymous hats, or bareheaded, with youthfully parted hair, or crew cuts, accoutered with attaché cases, rushing, on the evidence, to the smoking cars of trains. In this haven, they opened up their newspapers and caught up on the day’s bad news. Or they were to be found, as five o’clock fell, in discreetly dim, anonymously appointed bars, uneasy, in brittle, uneasy, female company, pouring down joyless martinis.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  My deep and wild friend Keegan had called me one afternoon and, in the midst of this hurt, gave me some sister-girl-witchy wisdom: “Go put on a long and flowy skirt with no underwear, and go find somewhere in nature to sit your coochie on the earth. Let the earth hold the ache for you. Just cry and let it all out.” I had stopped mid-sob at the suggestion. The advice was unexpected and profound as an actual act, something I could do with myself and not just a thought to obsess over. And later that day, I swung my skirt off my ass in a swirl and lowered my pum pum onto the sweet, green grass in the park by my house. I felt soothed and understood by the depth and weight of the earth, that nobody’s words or my mental pondering could provide my heart. I was going through a heartache existing on the energetic and physical level, and getting to feel the breeze on my pussy reminded me of a part of me that was essential and limitless. I really did feel a relief and release as I melted into all the layers of earth beneath me. This experience taught me to ask nature to hold and ground me in my immensity, and I have brought that to my work as an organizing artist. Because it is so intense being a human, descended from legacies of trauma and triumph and all kinds of things that we carry within us as Black folks (and all folks), invisible yet influential on a soul level. So much of our healing will include sweetening on, rubbing on, and laying open in the expanses of nature and letting it wrap our bodies in remembering and pampering. The ancestors in our bodies, known and unknown, need these rituals of healing and softness, as do we. In the wilderness of ancient, marrow-deep trauma, I’m figuring it out. And despite any of the delusions of oppression, I’m allowed to luxuriate, for me and all of those in my blood. I have learned to rely on nature, desire and creative inspiration to be a compass and a place of solace for my heart in the persistent struggle for justice and transformation that I’m committed to. In this lifetime, I was born a warrior, healer, and sweetener, and nature was my first mentor on how to be erotic, wild, free, generative, intelligent, rhythmic, sexual, sensual, and shameless. When I create and work in the community, in the presence and meditation of nature’s wildness, it becomes a practice of sweetness I offer myself within the beautiful struggle.

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

  But this proved to be a monumentally complex task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level, and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing, yet nothing of equal value had emerged to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in Saint Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus tells his disciples that only a few find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that—I realized sadly—was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that caliber. I suspect that many of those who left during the seventies had also faced up to this hard truth. So I arrived at my convent at a difficult juncture, and would be one of the last people to be trained according to the old system. The reforms set in motion by the Vatican Council came just too late for me. And I experienced the traditional regime at its worst. A young nun in those days had to undergo a long period of intensive training. In my order, we spent the first nine months as postulants, wearing a sober black dress with a little white veil and practicing selected portions of the rule. The postulantship was a period of probation, designed to test our resolve, and about half of us dropped out. I must emphasize that there was never any pressure to stay.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took a step towards them, and ran my hand along the line of sleeves. I would never take them up again ...The thought was too much; I couldn’t leave them. There were a couple of old sailors’ bags nearby - giant great things that we had used once or twice to rehearse with, in the afternoons, when the Britannia stage was quiet and clear. They were filled with rags: very quickly I took one of them and loosened the cord at its neck, and pulled all its stuffing out upon the floor until it was quite empty. Then I stepped to the rail, and began to tear my costumes from it - not all of them, but the ones I could not bear to part with, the blue serge suit, the Oxford bags, the scarlet guardsman’s uniform - and stuffed them into the bag. I took shoes, too, and shirts, and neck-ties - even a couple of hats. I didn’t stop to think about it, only worked, sweating, until the bag was full and almost as tall as myself. It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satisfying to have a real burden upon my shoulders - a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart.Thus laden, I made my way through the corridors of the Britannia. I passed no one; I looked for no one. Only when I reached the stage door did I see a face that I was rather glad to see: Billy-Boy sat in the doorman’s office, quite alone, with a cigarette between his fingers. He looked up when I approached, and gazed in wonder at my bag, my swollen eyes, my mottled cheeks.‘Lord, Nan,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Whatever is up with you? Are you sick?’I shook my head. ‘Give me your fag, Bill, will you?’ He did so, and I pulled on it and coughed. He watched me warily.‘You don’t look right, at all,’ he said. ‘Where’s Kitty?’I drew on the fag again, and handed it back to him.‘Gone,’ I said. Then I pulled at the door and stepped into the street beyond. I heard Billy-Boy’s voice, lifted in anxiety and alarm, but the closing door shut off his words. I raised my bag a little higher on my shoulder, and began to walk. I took one turning, and then another. I passed a squalid tenement, entered a busy street, and joined a throng of pedestrians. London absorbed me; and for a little while I ceased, entirely, to think.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Rufus wanted to say, Don’t let me stop you, man , but he said nothing. He felt black, filthy, foolish. He wished he were miles away, or dead. He kept thinking of Leona; it came in waves, like the pain of a toothache or a festering wound. Cass left her seat and came over and sat beside him. She stared at him and he was frightened by the sympathy on her face. He wondered why she should look like that, what her memories or experience could be. She could only look at him this way because she knew things he had never imagined a girl like Cass could know. “How is Leona?” she asked. “Where is she now?” and did not take her eyes from his face. He did not want to answer. He did not want to talk about Leona—and yet there was nothing else that he could possibly talk about. For a moment he almost hated Cass; and then he said: “She’s in a home—down South somewhere. They come and took her out of Bellevue. I don’t even know where she is.” She said nothing. She offered him a cigarette, lit it, and lit one for herself. “I saw her brother once. I had to see him, I made him see me. He spit in my face, he said he would have killed me had we been down home.” He wiped his face now with the handkerchief Vivaldo had lent him. “But I felt like I was already dead. They wouldn’t let me see her. I wasn’t a relative, I didn’t have no right to see her.” There was silence. He remembered the walls of the hospital: white; and the uniforms and the faces of the doctors and nurses, white on white. And the face of Leona’s brother, white, with the blood beneath it rushing thickly, bitterly, to the skin’s surface, summoned by his mortal enemy. Had they been down home, his blood and the blood of his enemy would have rushed out to mingle together over the uncaring earth, under the uncaring sky. “At least,” Cass said, finally, “you didn’t have any children. Thank God for that.” “She did,” he said, “down South. They took the kid away from her.” He added, “That’s why she come North.” And he thought of the night they had met. “She was a nice girl,” Cass said. “I liked her.” He said nothing. He heard Vivaldo say, “—but I never know what to do when I’m not working.” “You know what to do, all right. You just don’t have anybody to do it with.” He listened to their laughter, which seemed to shake him as though it were a drill. “Just the same,” said Richard, in a preoccupied tone, “nobody can work all the time.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is the one the Bible was talking about when it says, ‘See, I’m sending my messenger ahead of you And he will clear your path before you.’ “I’m telling you the truth: John the Baptist is the greatest mother’s son there ever was. But even the least significant person in heaven’s kingdom is greater than he is. From the time of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has been forcing its way in—and the men of force are trying to grab it! All the prophets and the law, you see, made their prophecies up to the time of John. In fact, if you’ll believe it, he is Elijah, the one who was to come. If you’ve got ears, then listen! “What picture shall I give you for this generation?” asked Jesus. “It’s like a bunch of children sitting in the town square, and singing songs to each other. This is how it goes: ‘You didn’t dance when we played the flute; You didn’t cry when we sang the dirge!’ “What do I mean? When John appeared, he didn’t have any normal food or drink—and people said ‘What’s gotten into him, then? Some demon?’ Then along comes the son of man, eating and drinking normally, and people say, ‘Ooh, look at him—guzzling and boozing, hanging around with tax-collectors and other riffraff.’ But, you know, wisdom is as wisdom does—and wisdom will be vindicated!” (Matt. 11:2–19) It must have broken Jesus’s heart to have to send the message back, but send it back he did. Yes, he said, the work he was doing really was the breaking in of God’s kingdom. But no, sadly, it wasn’t working out the way they would have liked. And when, days or weeks later, they brought him news that Antipas had had John beheaded on the whim of his alluring stepdaughter, I suspect that Jesus’s sorrowful reaction (Matt. 14:13) was as much about this irony—the fact that he hadn’t been able to do anything to rescue John—as about his natural sorrow at his cousin’s death, or his natural recognition that he himself might well be the next in line for the same treatment. Here again the shadow of the cross looms over the story of the kingdom. So what was Jesus doing? What sense did it make then, and what sense might it make now, to see him as in some way inaugurating “heaven’s rule,” or “God’s kingdom”? Why didn’t it mean setting John free from prison? How might what he was doing and saying be seen, by any stretch of the imagination, as putting into practice a program that said, “This is what it looks like when God’s in charge”? That’s the question that must have been on many minds and hearts in revolution-hungry Galilee. Here was someone talking about God becoming king; well, they’d had a few of those before, so what was new?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Herod’s career, which began brilliantly, gradually went into decline. Our sources tell a sad but typical tale of a man who, having gained absolute power, used it increasingly not to make life better for his subjects, but to make life safer for himself. He killed several members of his own family, including his beloved Mariamne, on suspicion of plotting against him. On his own deathbed, guessing that nobody would mourn his passing, he gave orders for leading citizens to be killed at the same time, to guarantee weeping and wailing at his funeral. Fortunately, the order was not carried out. Herod the Great is important for our story not just because he provides a backdrop to the life of Jesus, but because he shows, admittedly in an almost caricatured fashion, what it might have meant for someone at the time to be “king of the Jews.” It meant victory; it meant Temple; it meant establishing the Jewish people in peace and prosperity. Herod tried to set his sails by the great high-pressure system of ancient Jewish narrative, while cleverly trimming them so as to avoid the impact of the gale blowing increasingly from Rome. However much his aspirations had shrunk, by the time of his death, to a thin, shrivelled little parody of his original hopes, we can still see in Herod a glimpse of the story that might make sense of it all, the story that stretched back to the ancient scriptures and on into a future that, to the eye of faith and hope, might yet produce the true king who would succeed where others had failed. Simon Bar-Giora The other failed king was Simon bar-Giora. He appeared at yet another time of social and political chaos, near the start of the great revolt against Roman rule that lasted from AD 66 to 70 and that ended with total catastrophe and the Temple’s destruction. There were plenty of other would-be leaders, prophets, and so on at the time, some emerging from families long associated with anti-Roman activity. But it was Simon who was ruling Jerusalem as the Romans closed in . Simon gained popular support, and then actual power, by announcing freedom for slaves. That was always a good move, not only in itself, but because the ancient memory of being set free from slavery in Egypt has always been central to Jewish self-understanding. Faced with other warlords and troublemakers, many of the leading men in Jerusalem were happy to give Simon power and to line up behind him.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He seems then to have applied the passage about the shepherds both to his own critique of Israel’s leadership and, more strikingly still, to his own forthcoming fate. For our purposes, the main thing to notice here is that Zechariah, like Isaiah and Daniel, envisages the same three lines all converging: the wicked pagan nations who fight against God and his people; the failed Jewish leadership; and God himself coming to do what nobody else can do. These are the three elements that, as seen by Jesus himself, constituted the perfect storm into which he rode, sorrowful but determined, for that final Passover in Jerusalem. I said there were three main scriptural passages that seem to have contributed to Jesus’s sense of vocation as he undertook this final journey. I mentioned then, and now recall, a fourth element we should factor in as well: the Psalms. We should assume that Jesus knew the Psalms as well as anyone and that they formed his natural prayer book and, as such, played a major role in shaping his worldview. And it is in the Psalms that we find, once more, the major themes of YHWH becoming king, installing his Messiah—his “son”!—in Jerusalem, and bidding the surrounding nations pay him homage (e.g., Pss. 2; 72). But it is in the Psalms too that we find, even in a psalm that speaks so powerfully of God’s kingdom coming, the sense of utter desolation, of being abandoned by God to horrible and shameful suffering and death (Ps. 22). These themes come together in many different ways in these ancient poems, and we are on utterly safe ground in assuming that Jesus not only knew them and reflected on them, but made them the very stuff of his vocation. He found himself in them and determined to act accordingly. All of this means that we can at last approach the central questions of who, what, and why. Who did Jesus think he was, what was he intending to do, and why? What did he think it would all accomplish? What did he think it would all mean? L Chapter 13 Why Did the Messiah Have to Die? AYER UPON LAYER it comes, dense and rich within the texts, echo upon echo, allusion and resonance tumbling over one another, so that for those with ears to hear it becomes unmissable, a crescendo of questions to which in the end there can be only one answer. Why are you speaking like this? Are you the one who is to come? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What sign can you show us? Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners? Where did this man get all this wisdom? How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Who are you? Why do you not follow the traditions? Do the authorities think he’s the Messiah?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and YHWH has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before it shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away, Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgressions of my people . They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of YHWH to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of YHWH shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. The result, in the great prophetic poem, is the new covenant (Isa. 54) and the new creation (Isa. 55). The book then moves into a new mode in the last eleven chapters (56–66), focused on the coming glory of Zion, though here again highlighting the work of a strange figure, part salvation bringer, part rescuer, part judge (61:1–7; 63:1–6). And now it becomes more and more explicit that the work of bringing salvation is YHWH ’s own work. He watched and saw that there was nobody else to do it, so “his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him” (59:16). Israel’s God himself must do what needs to be done, as at the time of the Exodus: “It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them” (63:9). But this sense of a rescue job to do and only YHWH to perform it may undergird the “servant” poems in the central section of the book as well.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  For “Hitler,” then, also read “Babylon.” Other disasters had come crashing down on the Israelites. But easily the worst was when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC, decimated the royal family, smashed the Temple to bits, and carried away its treasures, dragging off most of the population into an exile from which few would ever return. It was like Egypt all over again: enslavement in a foreign land. “By the rivers of Babylon,” wrote one of their poets, “there we sat down and there we wept” (Ps. 137:1). And it was memories of Jerusalem, of “Zion,” that made the tears bitter. They had lived at the fault line in world history and geography, and the earthquake had swallowed them up alive. And now here comes the extraordinary bit, the part of the story many miss out, the twist in the tale responsible for the fact that, by the time the high-pressure system of Jewish history reached the first century, it was already dangerously close to storm force. Though many Jews had, remarkably enough, been brought back from Babylon and by the end of the sixth century had even rebuilt the Temple, there remained a strong sense that this was not yet the real “new Exodus” for which they longed. Babylon itself had fallen, overthrown by a rival empire (Persia); but the phenomenon of which Egypt a thousand years before had been one classic example, and Babylon the most recent, was continuing. New wicked empires had arisen, and Israel was still enslaved to them. And there grew up a sense that a new Exodus, a real “return from exile,” was still to be awaited, had not yet happened. It would come when the last great world empire had done its worst. Indeed, it would result in the overthrow of that dark power. This is the long story, the great narrative of hope, the prospective eschatology, within which many Jews of Jesus’s day were living, had been living for a long time, and would continue to live. In Jesus’s day it was obvious which world power had taken on the role of Egypt and Babylon. This is where our high-pressure system meets our gale. The long story of Israel must finally confront the long story of Rome. This is no time to be out on the sea in an open boat. Or riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The clash of these two stories produced several movements within a couple of hundred years on either side of the time of Jesus. We shall look at these in a later chapter. For the moment we move on to the third element in the perfect storm of the first century. 4 Eclogues 4.Chapter 5 The Hurricane THE GALE OF ROME and the high-pressure system of Jewish hopes. It takes one more wind to make the perfect storm. And, as in the original Massachusetts disaster, this one was of a different order altogether.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It gets worse again. The Temple had come to symbolize the nationalist movement that had led many Jews to revolt against pagan oppression in the past and would lead them to do so once more. As we see graphically throughout the history of Israel, and not least in the first century, the Temple was the sign that Israel’s God, the world’s creator, was with his people and would defend them against all comers. Battle and Temple had gone together for a thousand years, from David himself through to Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. And Jesus had come as the Prince of Peace. “If only you’d known,” he sobbed out through his tears, “on this day—even you!—what peace meant. But now it’s hidden, and you can’t see it.” Enemies will come, he said. “They won’t leave one single stone on another, because you didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you” (Luke 19:42–44). Israel’s God was coming back at last, and they couldn’t see it. Why not? Because they were looking in entirely the wrong direction. The Temple, and the city of which the Temple was the focal point, had come to symbolize violent national revolution. Instead of being the light of the world, the city on the hill that should let its light shine out to the nations, it was determined to keep the light for itself. The Temple was not just redundant; not just a place of economic oppression. It had become a symbol of Israel’s violent ambition, a sign that Israel’s ancient vocation had been turned inside out. In Luke’s gospel, the scene of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem balances the scene near the start in which Jesus goes to Nazareth and risks his neck by declaring God’s blessing on the pagan nations. Then it was the synagogue; now it’s the Temple. It also balances the scene even earlier, when the twelve-year-old Jesus stays back in Jerusalem, to his parents’ alarm, at the end of a Passover celebration—and is finally discovered sitting in the Temple with the teachers, listening to them, quizzing them in turn, and explaining that he had to be getting involved with his father’s work (2:49). Now here he is, back again, involved up to the neck in his father’s work, astonishing the Jerusalem authorities for a different reason. This is the climax of his father’s work, and that work is now focused on Jesus himself, not the Temple. If Jesus is acting out a vision—astonishing, risky, and one might say crazy—in which he is behaving as if he is the Temple, redefining sacred space around himself, something equally strange and risky is taking place in the realm of time. Time Fulfilled

• From Another Country (1962)

  Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.” He looked down, then over to the front row. “You got to remember,” he said, gently, “he was trying. Ain’t many trying and all that tries must suffer. Be proud of him. You got a right to be proud. And that’s all he ever wanted in this world.” Except for someone—a man—weeping in the front row, there was silence all over the chapel. Cass thought that the man must be Rufus’ father and she wondered if he believed what the preacher said. What had Rufus been to him?—a troublesome son, a stranger while living and now a stranger forever in death. And now nothing else would ever be known. Whatever else had been, or might have been, locked in Rufus’ heart or in the heart of his father, had gone into oblivion with Rufus. It would never be expressed now. It was over. “There’re some friends of Rufus’s here,” said Reverend Foster, “and they going to play something for us and then we going to go.” Two young men walked up the aisle, one carrying a guitar, one carrying a bass fiddle. The thin dark girl followed them. The black- robed boy at the piano flexed his fingers. The two boys stood directly in front of the covered corpse, the girl stood a little away from them, near the piano. They began playing something Cass did not recognize, something very slow, and more like the blues than a hymn. Then it began to be more tense and more bitter and more swift. The people in the chapel hummed low in their throats and tapped their feet. Then the girl stepped forward. She threw back her head and closed her eyes and that voice rang out again: Oh, that great getting-up morning, Fare thee well, fare thee well! Reverend Foster, standing on a height behind her, raised both hands and mingled his voice with hers: We’ll be coming from every nation, Fare thee well, fare thee well! The chapel joined them, but the girl ended the song alone: Oh, on that great getting-up morning, Fare thee well, fare thee well! Then Reverend Foster prayed a brief prayer for the safe journey of the soul that had left them and the safe journey, throughout their lives and after death, of all the souls under the sound of his voice. It was over. The pallbearers, two of the men in the front row, and the two musicians, lifted the mother-of-pearl casket to their shoulders and started down the aisle. The mourners followed. Cass was standing near the door. The four still faces passed her with their burden and did not look at her. Directly behind them came Ida and her mother. Ida paused for a moment and looked at her—looked directly, unreadably at her from beneath her heavy veil. Then she seemed to smile.

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

  But that didn’t seem right either. I didn’t want to make those years a dark secret. After all, I hadn’t robbed a bank or been in prison. But neither did I want to get unduly heavy and ruin the party. Despite all my negative feelings about religion, I still felt protective about the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal. I still mourned the girl I had been, with her sense of high adventure, the hope and the crazy optimism that had led me into the religious life. None of this was suitable conversational fodder for a dinner party. So it was really easier to fob my guests off with a couple of funny stories and leave it at that. I realized that I scarcely knew anybody who was religious these days. There were one or two churchgoers at college, but they were not soul mates and I didn’t see much of them. It was odd to think how completely my life had changed. Just five years earlier I had been enveloped in a monastic atmosphere, and now I had swung a full 180 degrees and was living in a wholly secular environment. Some people in my life were still involved in religion. Jacob continued to attend Mass, because a member of the Blackfriars congregation had volunteered to take him. And then there was my sister, Lindsey. She had not stayed long in Canada. The man she had pursued had been a disappointment, and she hated the long winters. So she had married an Englishman whom she had met in Winnipeg and had driven all the way to California with him and their two Siamese cats. She had also become a Buddhist of the Nichiren school. I had no idea what that involved, but apparently it did not require her to wear a yellow robe or become a vegetarian. She chanted a mantra for about an hour each day, my mother told me. I found it hard to imagine this. Lindsey and I seemed to have changed places. “I don’t know what it is with this family and religion,” my long-suffering mother said in mock bewilderment. “Where did I go wrong?” Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about my religious obsessions anymore. My involvement with God was well and truly over. Pleased with myself, and with a mounting sense of excitement, I patted the bulky parcel containing three copies of my thesis, duly typed and bound in important-looking black covers with gilt lettering. It was a very satisfying sight. It had not been easy, but I had managed to complete this task.