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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But at night, when the child lay lonely and wakeful, these acts that had proved a consolation in the morning, having sprung from a desperate kind of loyalty to Collins—these acts would seem trivial and silly and useless, since Collins could neither know of them nor see them, and the tears that had been held in check through the day would well under Stephen’s eyelids. Nor could she, in those lonely watches of the night-time, pluck up courage enough to reproach the Lord Jesus, who, she felt, could have helped her quite well had He chosen to accord her a housemaid’s knee. She would think: ‘He loves neither me nor Collins—He wants all the pain for Himself; He won’t share it!’ And then she would feel contrite: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Lord Jesus, ’cause I do know You love all miserable sinners!’ And the thought that perhaps she had been unjust to Jesus would reduce her to still further tears. Very dreadful indeed were those nights spent in weeping, spent in doubting the Lord and His servant Collins. The hours would drag by in intolerable blackness, that in passing seemed to envelop Stephen’s body, making her feel now hot and now cold. The grandfather clock on the stairs ticked so loudly that her head ached to hear its unnatural ticking—when it chimed, which it did at the hours and the half-hours, its voice seemed to shake the whole house with terror, until Stephen would creep down under the bed-clothes to hide from she knew not what. But presently, huddled beneath the blankets, the child would be soothed by a warm sense of safety, and her nerves would relax, while her body grew limp with the drowsy softness of bed. Then suddenly a big and most comforting yawn, and another, and another, until darkness and Collins and tall clocks that menaced, and Stephen herself, were all blended and merged into something quite friendly, a harmonious whole, neither fearful nor doubting—the blessèd illusion we call sleep. 2In the weeks that followed on Collins’ departure, Anna tried to be very gentle with her daughter, having the child more frequently with her, more diligently fondling Stephen. Mother and daughter would walk in the garden, or wander about together through the meadows, and Anna would remember the son of her dreams, who had played with her in those meadows. A great sadness would cloud her eyes for a moment, an infinite regret as she looked down at Stephen; and Stephen, quick to discern that sadness, would press Anna’s hand with small, anxious fingers; she would long to inquire what troubled her mother, but would be held speechless through shyness. The scents of the meadows would move those two strangely—the queer, pungent smell from the hearts of dog-daisies; the buttercup smell, faintly green like the grass; and then meadowsweet that grew close by the hedges. Sometimes Stephen must tug at her mother’s sleeve sharply—intolerable to bear that thick fragrance alone!

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The force of the argument from the injustice of evil and suffering depends upon the strong conviction that ‘the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.’ Yet Lewis found he could not articulate a meaningful notion of ‘justice’ without grounding this transcendentally in something that lay beyond his own personal beliefs or those of the community to which he belonged. It was a classic example of the difficulties faced by thinkers of the Age of Reason – having to judge one belief in terms of another belief. In the end, Lewis set his atheism to one side, and reaffirmed faith in God. Thirty years later, however, Lewis found that the experience of the slow death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer in 1960 reopened the question of pain and suffering for him emotionally, not simply intellectually. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed (1961), one of his rawest and most challenging books, as a way of recording and reflecting on his thoughts and experiences as he grieved. Suffering is portrayed as relentlessly opaque, resisting rational explanation. Where is God? … Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.57 Lewis’s journal for this difficult period records his thoughts, no matter how incoherent, as he explored every intellectual option open to him. Lewis was determined to confront and engage with each of them, experiencing the emotional distress and cognitive dissonance they each evoked. Maybe God was a tyrant. Maybe there wasn’t a God. So, was this the end of Lewis’s Christian faith? Was the suffering and death of his wife such a blatant contradiction of Lewis’s core beliefs that his only option was to abandon them? Was the cognitive dissonance unbearable for him? That is certainly the impression created by the movie Shadowlands (1993), which suggests that Lewis’s faith collapsed after Davidman’s illness and death, leading him into some undemanding form of Stoic humanism. Yet here, as so often, movies offer their own version of history. In reality Lewis’s faith recovered. A Grief Observed describes what Lewis regarded as a process of testing – not a testing of God, but a testing of Lewis. ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.’58 In a letter written a few weeks before his death, Lewis remarked that while A Grief Observed ‘ends with faith’, it nevertheless ‘raises all the blackest doubts en route’.59 It was, nevertheless, a reconstructed faith, more attentive to the raw emotions caused by suffering and doubt in the life of faith.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  familiar and long, from his skin and a small angry trail of blood follows after. I can barely move, the fading pleasure in my hips, turning bitter, the feeling of the blood within. I roll to the side and tumble the carcass off of me. Kuschelbaer . . .no. 1 bury my face in his cold belly and scream my agony into his skin. Oh God. You should have killed me instead. You should have killed me. If only you had killed me instead when you could have. ’m so alone. I feel so confused. I can’t think, everything is happening too fast. Who am I? Am I supposed to be the girl or the demon? I should be dancing somewhere, am I late? Why am I naked? Where is my baby? Will the Unicorn come and call my name? Why can’t I live on the moon? Come back to me. Why are there no tears? I want my tears. There should be tears for him. My ...my big snuggly bear, kuschelbaer, don’t leave me again. Oh no, oh no, oh no... dance with me. I want to kill something. Kill it slowly. I want to feel my teeth in something and hear it cry and beg to God for its life. Jesus! Lying bastard Jesus! Blood. Over by the trees, further down the river, the whisper of blood is on the air. Under the smell is a bright feeling of pain. There is pain and there is blood and there is an emotion I can’t understand anymore. Walking through the high grass of the field between tree groves along the river bank. The bright moonlight on my skin. Without love or hope of love, I am exactly who I am meant to be. I am transforming. I am becoming glorious. The whore of Babylon riding the beast. When people see me they shall worship me. The grasshoppers jumping away from me as I pass. High above, crows are crying for me, poor black angels. The night air leading me. I am home again. Somewhere God is shaking His fist at me. Baaa baaa baaa. Weil ich Fesu Schaflein bin ... Freu’ich mich nur immerhin ... I am Jesus’s little lamb. Ich Fesu Schaflein bin. Baaa baaa baaa. Hop hop hop. I am Jesus’s little lamb chop. Baa baa baa. Chop chop chop. Blood scent coming from those trees beside the water. But there is this funny sound. I lower my head and listen carefully and there is a The Lady and the Unicorn 323 slap... slap... slap... not of skin on skin, but something else. And the sea smell of tears. Now I move like the hunter. I am the Angel that withers hope. Iam Death become woman. Cry you crows! Cry for little Nordchen. Here he is, here in the trees, I see him.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “T can’t leave you.” “T don’t want to be without you,” I said. “Then don’t be.” But five minutes later I asked what was going to happen and she said we were done and I nodded my head. Still we stayed in bed and I pressed my lips against hers, placed my hand on her ass, ran my palm over the contours of her backside to the top of her legs. I kissed her deeply and cried more. “Don’t cry,” she said. Pd cried in front of her so many times over five months. At first I had been embarrassed but then I realized she liked it so I cried freely. I was shocked by my own propensity for tears. I never knew I had so many of them and they were so close to the surface. I would cry when she was hitting me and she wouldn’t even stop. She would beat me the whole way through until the tears were gone and I relaxed again and I came back to her. She said she wanted to provide a space for that little boy inside of me. But now she didn’t want me to cry anymore and I tried to put the tears back into wherever they came from and I succeeded and then they came ” again and then they stopped. Still I knew I was making my own decision. There were things I could say to keep it going and I wasn’t saying them. I was once again jumping from a burning building, abandoning what seemed like an unsustainable situation, something I had been doing since I ran from Once More Beneath the Exit Sign 407 home when I was thirteen, moving out to the streets of Chicago. I never went back. I never did. ’ve been running away my entire life. I reached into that tub next to the bed and grabbed a condom from a paper bag. I fucked her hard and fast and in a way unlike I had ever fucked her before. She began to scream and then her own tears came, drenching her face until she resembled a mermaid. This was our due. We were breaking up and we were entitled to this sex and we were going to have it. I slammed into her with everything I had. It was like fucking in a storm. I gripped her legs, the flesh of her thighs. I sniffed at her neck. “C’mon,” I said, and she screamed and shook with orgasms. Then we rolled over and she was on top of me with her fingers in my hair and one hand on my throat. We were still _ fucking. She pinched my nipple hard, she reached down between my legs. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to come.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  As a child and a young adult, I had watched my mother grieve many deaths. I’d felt panicked when she cried, when she had “sad attacks.” But I got to see real human feeling in grown-ups, got to practice that kind of discomfort, got to see that we would survive. When my turn came to be a grown-up with feelings, I had not forgotten. I don’t think I ever fell apart in front of June, not apart-apart, but I was grouchy, weepy, tired. When I had the energy, we talked about it, and I tried to explain what she was seeing in me, to put words to my emotions and actions. I wanted to metabolize the grief for both of us, to offer her what she needed—no more and no less—to comprehend what she might feel. I hope she’d understand, as I was coming to understand it, that things might feel groundless, but she was safe. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The weekend of the Fourth of July we went on a camping trip to Lake Wenatchee—me, Ash, and June, with a couple of the Thursday-night dinner families. We didn’t have our own tent or sleeping bags, so we borrowed them, and when we arrived at the site, I saw that we were out of our league. The other families had fancy tents and cots, bins full of dedicated cooking equipment for camping, and comfortable, well-designed chairs that folded into stuff sacks. I knew they’d been camping multiple times a summer for years, but it didn’t help; they also had intact marriages, which was even worse. I woke up in the night, pinned between June and the nylon wall of the tent, and started to cry. I tried not to make any noise, but Ash reached over and touched my shoulder. You okay? they asked. I hate all of this, I squeaked. All their perfect lives. Shhhhhhhhhh, they whispered, rubbing my arm. We’ll get through this. We will. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I wrote this down in a notebook. Happiness : joy :: sadness : suffering. The difference is in intensity and duration. I went around and around: Could I have done this all, all these months, differently? But really, could I? The merry-go-round was more palatable than what I’d started to suspect: that I would suffer, and that I’d probably make other people suffer too, because I couldn’t avoid it. The best-case scenario, then, might be a safe place to do the suffering, and a witness to keep me company. But Jesus, who would agree to that? Who would possibly accompany me? Because if someone agrees to be my witness, then I will have to be theirs too.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love. 1 Zeus has taught human beings to think about their predicament: we cannot forget our pain; even in sleep, the memory of past sorrow drips ceaselessly into our hearts. Men and women may try to resist the law of suffering, but the gods have ordained that their reflective powers will set them on the path to wisdom, ripeness, and blessing. In Eumenides, the last play of the trilogy, Aeschylus shows us humanity’s passage from the brutal violence of a tribal, kin-based society, with its inexorable, self-destructive ethic of revenge, to life in a civilized city (polis), where crime is judged by the rational process of law. Still in flight from the Furies, Orestes arrives in Athens and flings himself at the feet of its patronal deity Athena. She convenes the city council to decide his fate by the due process of law. The Furies argue that Orestes must pay for his crime, but the jury is split and Athena has the casting vote. She acquits Orestes but placates the Furies by offering them a shrine in the city, decreeing that henceforth they will be known as the Eumenides, “the Compassionate Ones.” The polis can be seen as a symbol of the rational new brain that enables us to hold aloof from the instinctive drives of the old brain and take responsibility for them. In their long-term effects, the dark deeds of the past live on in the polis, so Athenians must acknowledge them and make a place for them in their minds and hearts; they can then transform these primitive passions into a force for compassion. 2 But when the old brain is co-opted by the new, the result can be disastrous. Reason was an ambiguous tool, because, as we have seen throughout history, it can be used to find a logically sound rationale for actions that violate our humanity. In his tragedy Medea, Euripides (c. 484–406 BCE) told the story of the eponymous woman from Colchis who married Jason, hero of the Argonauts, and helped him find the Golden Fleece. When Jason callously casts her off, in revenge Medea kills not only Jason and his new wife, but the children she and Jason conceived together. Very few animals would slaughter their young, yet Medea is driven to this act by her uniquely human reasoning powers.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In 430, at one of the darkest moments of the senseless and destructive Peloponnesian War, Sophocles (c. 496–405 BCE) presented his tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant to the people of Athens. When reason failed, it was still possible for human beings to learn from their pain. Renowned for his clear-sighted wisdom, Oedipus proved fatally, tragically ignorant. To his horror, he discovers that not only has he unwittingly slain his father, but also, unaware of her true identity, that he has married his mother. His tragedy, however, gives him an entirely new vulnerability and, consequently, an ability to enter into the suffering of others.6 His speech, hitherto reasoned and controlled, is now interspersed with wordless exclamations: “Ion … ion! Aiai … aiai!” When he meets his weeping daughters, he forgets his own distress in concern for their plight. The members of the chorus make their own journey to compassion. Initially appalled by Oedipus’s predicament, they cannot bear to look at him and shrink away in horror, but as they learn to appreciate the depth of his grief, this revulsion gives way to affection; they show the audience how to react to his tragedy as they reach out to Oedipus, calling him “dear one” and “darling.”7 In Oedipus at Colonus, which Sophocles presented at the end of his life, Oedipus, a man shunned for his unspeakable but unintentional crimes, becomes a source of blessing to the citizens of Athens when they have the compassion to take him in and give him asylum.8 Tragic drama reminds us of the role that art can play in expanding our sympathies. Plays, films, and novels all enable us to enter imaginatively into other lives and make an empathetic identification with people whose experiences are entirely different from our own. They can give us moments of compassionate ekstasis, and we should resolve, during this step, to allow art to unsettle us and make us question ingrained preconceptions. Films are especially emotive, because the big screen brings us even closer to the characters. We can find ourselves moved to tears, our mirror neurons firing as we witness the pain of characters in a movie, even though our rational minds tell us that their suffering is entirely fictional. When we have been affected in this way, we should not be too hasty to forget the experience as we leave the cinema or put the novel back on the shelf. We should let the pathos lodge permanently in our minds, in the same way as Athens made a home for both Oedipus and the Eumenides.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  No ancient writer has set before us so noble an example of a heartfelt, unselfish, and thoroughly human state of feeling, and none has described friendship with such entire truth in all its relations, and with such complete and profound knowledge of the human heart. This was a neat means of providing a descriptive framework for the intimate male friendships that characterized the nineteenth-century West, without descending to the ‘beastliness’ that was the constant lurking foe in the Victorian public school. [32] There was one real Victorian religious sub-culture within a sub-culture that burrowed further into the themes Rabbi Philippson was evading: a homosexual identity within a new creation of Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism. [33] Anglo-Catholicism as an alternative to the Evangelical emphasis on the Protestant and Reformation identity of the Church of England emerged in the 1830s among academics and students in Oxford University, hence it was frequently known as ‘the Oxford Movement’. Their promotion of a Catholic and sacramental view of Anglicanism in a series of ‘Tracts’ produced an alternative name: ‘Tractarianism’. The self-absorbed single-sex culture of university life in Oxford inevitably drew in leading personalities of homosexual orientation, notably the Vicar of the University Church, John Henry Newman. Newman was the most prominent among several Tractarians eventually to decide that the logic of their theological views pushed them to convert to Roman Catholicism. His stellar career thereafter as a spiritual and theological writer and eventually Cardinal of the Roman Church has led to much obfuscation on his obvious sexual inclinations, which, while almost certainly sublimated, led to his insistence on imitating various medieval same-sex couples in demanding burial in the grave of his most intimate friend and fellow convert, the priest Ambrose St John. Less conventional had been Newman’s grief-stricken insistence at St John’s death in 1875 on spending the night on the bed beside the corpse. [34] Newman and St John were by no means the last Anglo-Catholics to arrive in Rome with that sort of emotional baggage. The Oxford undergraduate Gerard Manley Hopkins was affected for life by one encounter over a few days with Digby Dolben, an Etonian Catholic convert and son of a Northamptonshire squire. Dolben drowned before traits possibly charming in a teenager could become irritating in adult years (though his homoerotic verse might have improved). Hopkins’s grief and loneliness add intensity to his quite extraordinary poetic output, sensuously exploring the glory of God’s

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In 1989 she felt that the time had come and made her first visit to the country. One day, while she was watching two destitute little girls playing in the dirt of the street, one of them smiled at her and tried to hold her hand. Christina was immediately overcome with memories so painful that she tried to walk away; she wanted no more grief, no more involvement. Yet all the time she was saying to herself: “There’s no difference between an Irish gutter and a Vietnamese gutter. At the end of the day they are the same.” Suddenly past and present came together, and Christina realized that the Vietnamese girl was the child she had seen so long ago in her dream. Sobbing, she sank down in the dirt and pulled the children into her lap, promising to take care of them. This was a major turning point: “Here the pain, sorrow and anger of my childhood in Ireland would be resolved. I would work with the street children of Ho Chi Minh City. Here I would stay. Here I would find happiness.” 4 Christina became a crusader for the street children of Vietnam. She founded an orphanage with the help of wealthy businessmen, and later established the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation in London, which raised thousands of dollars. This enabled her to open the Children’s Medical and Social Centre in Ho Chi Minh City in 1991, just two years after her first visit to the country. There are now foundations in France, the United States, and Australia. When she began her work, friends told her that she was attempting the impossible. “You are only one person,” they insisted. But Christina never forgot that “when I was a child, I needed only one person to understand my suffering and pain.… One is very important.” 5 Her life has been a demonstration of this truth. Let us consider the moment of recognition. When Christina looked into the child’s face, she saw herself; she realized that there was no “us” and “them”; “at the end of the day they are the same.” From a purely rational perspective, this statement makes little sense. There must be a thousand differences between a Vietnamese and an Irish gutter; surely it would have made more sense for Christina to work for homeless children in Ireland; there was no real connection between herself and the Vietnamese girl. But during the previous steps, we have been developing a more empathetic outlook, based on imagination rather than logic. Our work has revealed that we are not alone in our suffering but that everybody is in pain.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Let them interpret them as they want; you, however, Lord, see them and consider them.’ [48] Aelred’s distinguished Cistercian contemporary, Bernard of Clairvaux, gave vent to agonies of deep loss like that of Aelred’s over the death of his fellow monk Gerard, the cellarer of Clairvaux Abbey, in a sermon preached to the brethren there in 1138 (inevitably on the Song of Songs). Bernard spoke of struggling with expressing such individual personal emotion and, having resolved that problem for himself and his audience, he was able to say of his bereavement from the pulpit: ‘All by myself I experience the sufferings that are shared equally by lovers when compelled to remain apart.’ [49] Various other all-male settings offered possibilities. A surviving witness is a small but significant number of memorializations of close same-sex relationships in tombs: images of two men sharing the monument. Academics are unsurprising among them: the remaining medieval college chapels of Oxford University have several examples. There is also the extraordinary survival in Istanbul of a tomb-slab for two fourteenth-century crusader knights, one of whom reputedly refused food and died a few days after the death of the other – the slab depicts a stylized kiss in heraldry marshalled as if for husband and wife. This is likely to be an example of ‘sworn brotherhood’: a formal agreement between two males for support in war or for power-sharing that escaped the punitive definitions of sodomy in the medieval West. [50] Sworn brotherhood pacts could be regarded as imagined, spiritual versions of biological relationships, in the manner of those who became godparents. * Aelred’s works, probably little circulated in his own time, have found a new resonance and popularity in the very different setting of modern Western culture, just as Abelard’s praise of physical sexual expression has done. Amid contemporary admiration of these voices from the past, one vital difference between then and now needs remembering: in the twelfth century this was a male literature for men. The background was the creation of those all-male institutions, universities, providing for men to do male things: study and create systematic theology against the background of Classical philosophy, or prepare for legal and medical studies. This shifted the academic and intellectual centre of Latin Christendom away from the Benedictine centres of scholarship that had included nunneries as well as monasteries, in a world where abbesses had often been as powerful as their male counterparts. There was a last twelfth-century flourishing of the old tradition in the person of the now famous aristocratic polymath Hildegard, Benedictine Abbess of Rupertsberg near Bingen on the Rhine. She was a mystic and visionary, but her literary creativity embraced cosmology, medicine and musical composition as well as theology. She was among the last generations of the tradition of Benedictine oblation, and a proof of what that lifelong monastic identity might produce.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  valley, where Elias was to take evening prayers that same day. The ruins were still smoldering when we reached the center of the town, and people were standing about in the road in small groups, some with their hands still raised to their mouths in horror. The fire engine had driven straight across a round flower bed, and there on the grass, dressed in their Sunday best, lay the bodies of those who, as I hardly needed Elias to tell me, had sinned against the Lord’s commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. In this way a kind of Old Testament mythology of retribution gradually built up inside my head, and I always saw its supreme expression in the submersion of the village of Llanwddyn beneath the waters of the Vyrnwy reservoir. As far as I can remember it was on the way back from one of his journeys to preach away from home, at either Abertridwr or Pont Llogel, that Elias stopped the pony-trap on the banks of this lake and walked out with me to the middle of the dam, where he told me about his family home lying down there at a depth of about a hundred feet under the dark water, and not just his own family home but at least forty other houses and farms, together with the church of St. John of Jerusalem, three chapels, and three pubs, all of them drowned when the dam was finished in the autumn of 1888. In the years before its submersion, so Elias had told him, said Austerlitz, Llanwddyn had been particularly famous for its games of football on the village green when the full moon shone in summer, often lasting all night and played by over ten dozen youths and men of almost every age, some of them from neighboring villages. The story of the football games of Llanwddyn occupied my imagination for a long time, said Austerlitz, first and foremost, I am sure, because Elias never told me anything else about his own life either before or afterwards. At this one moment on the Vyrnwy dam when, intentionally or unintentionally, he allowed me a glimpse into his clerical heart, I felt for him so much that he, the righteous man, seemed to me like the only survivor of the deluge which had destroyed Llanwddyn, while I imagined all the others—his parents, his brothers and sisters, his relations, their neighbors, all the other villagers—still down in the depths, sitting in their houses and walking along the road, but unable to speak and with their eyes opened far too wide. This notion of mine about the subaquatic existence of the people of Llanwddyn also had something to do with the album which Elias first showed me on our return home that evening, containing several photographs of his now sunk beneath the water.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The ancient Greeks, founders of the Western rational tradition, had a uniquely tragic view of life. Each year on the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, the leading playwrights of Athens presented tragic trilogies in a drama competition, which every citizen was obliged to attend. The plays usually dramatized one of the old myths adapted to reflect the problems and situation of the city that year. This event was both a spiritual exercise and a civic meditation, which put suffering onstage and compelled the audience to empathize with men and women struggling with impossible decisions and facing up to the disastrous consequences of their actions. The Greeks came to the plays in order to weep together, convinced that the sharing of grief strengthened the bond of citizenship and reminded each member of the audience that he was not alone in his personal sorrow. In his trilogy Oresteia, Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) showed that suffering was not only built into human experience but indispensable to the quest for wisdom. The three tragedies depict a seemingly unstoppable cycle of revenge killing. In the first play, Clytemnestra murders her husband, King Agamemnon, to avenge the death of their daughter; then the saga continues with the story of their son, Orestes, who slays his mother to avenge his father; the trilogy concludes with Orestes’ headlong flight from the Erinyes (also known as the Furies), the terrifying gods of the underworld who would hound a transgressor like a pack of wild dogs until he atoned for his sin with a horrible death. Suffering was a law of life, the chorus reminds the audience, but it was also the path to wisdom: Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well. From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love.1 Zeus has taught human beings to think about their predicament: we cannot forget our pain; even in sleep, the memory of past sorrow drips ceaselessly into our hearts. Men and women may try to resist the law of suffering, but the gods have ordained that their reflective powers will set them on the path to wisdom, ripeness, and blessing.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Three weeks into our separation, I woke up with a patch of itchy welts on my torso, the size and hue of pencil erasers. Hives. By night the spray of pink dots had joined together, the way droplets of rain make a puddle: my entire chest was covered, and my groin, my arms, the backs of my hands. Hives streaked down my legs and marched across my scalp. When June tried to climb onto my lap, I yelped. My skin pulsed and crawled, like it wanted to get away from me. Are you allowed to grieve if you’ve caused the death? Is that something that can happen? I had ended my marriage, but I had also ended a life that I had, at one time, loved. What exactly was this grief? The loss of him, of us? I wanted it to be, but I wasn’t sure. We’d started to lose each other long before. I’d missed him for years. This lament was not that. June’s parents aren’t together anymore: the phrase came out of me as though someone else were speaking it, as though I were eavesdropping at the playground. I ended a life that had been not only mine, but ours. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon gave me some dirt: an acquaintance had recently left his wife of two decades for another woman. We knew little of this couple and nothing of their marriage, but this feels great: the distraction of someone else’s drama. I pore over the acquaintance’s photos online, images and emoji-filled captions from a trip with his girlfriend. I know I am this husband, but I feel for his wife. I think of the public radio host—a woman in her fifties, an interviewer of philosophers and poets—the one whose show I’d listened to for a long time before I learned she was divorced. When I found out, I was disenchanted. How can she lead conversations about the meaning of human life when she doesn’t even have her shit together? She can’t even stay married! As though the ability to stay in a marriage were irrefutable evidence of character, the kind of trait you might boast in a job interview. As though staying married weren’t just as often motivated by fear, financial insecurity, religious codes, inertia. The ability to leave a marriage that no longer works: What kind of character is this evidence of?

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  looking out too, and sometimes cleared their throats slightly. When they had gone again, it was as quiet as before except for the shallow breathing I could hear behind me, and an eternity seemed to pass between each breath. On Christmas Day, making a great effort, Gwendolyn sat up in bed once more. Elias had brought her a cup of sweet tea, but she only moistened her lips with it. Then she said, so quietly that you could hardly hear her: What was it that so darkened our world? And Elias replied: I don’t know, dear, I don’t know. Gwendolyn lingered until the New Year. On Epiphany Day, however, she reached the final stage. The cold had grown stronger than ever outside, and it had become more and more silent. The whole country, so I heard later, came to a standstill that winter. Even Lake Bala, which I had thought as big as the ocean when I arrived in Wales, was covered by a thick sheet of ice. I thought of the roach and eels in its depths, and the birds which the visitors had told me were falling from the branches of the trees, frozen stiff. It was never really light in these days, and when at last, very far away, the sun shone faintly in the misty blue sky, the dying woman opened her eyes wide and would not move her glance from the weak light filtering through the windowpanes. Only when darkness fell did she lower her lids, and not long after that a gurgling sound began to emerge from her throat with every breath she took. I sat beside her all night, together with the minister. At dawn the stertorous breathing stopped. Gwendolyn’s body arched slightly and then sank back again. It was a kind of tensing movement; I had felt it once before, when I picked up an injured rabbit from the headland of a field, and its heart stopped in my hand for fear. But directly after she had arched herself in death Gwendolyn’s body seemed to shrink a little, reminding me of what Evan had told me. I saw her eyes sink back in their sockets, and her thin lips, now stretched tautly back, half-bared her crooked bottom teeth, while outside, for the first time in many days, the rose-colored light of dawn touched the rooftops of Bala. I don’t remember exactly how the rest of that day passed after she died, said Austerlitz. I think I was so exhausted that I lay down and slept very deeply for a very long time. When I got up again, Gwendolyn was already in her coffin, which stood on the four mahogany chairs in the front room. She was wearing her wedding dress, kept all these years in a trunk upstairs, and a pair of white gloves with a great many little mother-of-pearl buttons which I had never seen before. The sight of them brought tears into my eyes, the first tears I had ever shed in the manse. Elias was sitting beside the coffin keeping watch over the dead woman, while on his own out in the empty barn, which creaked with the frost, the young assistant minister who had ridden over from Corwen on a pony was rehearsing the sermon he would preach on the day of the funeral. Elias never recovered from his wife’s death. Grief is not the right word for the condition into which he

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Verneuil—whom I had met in Paris, and of whom I shall have more to say— when we stood in the nave of the wonderful church of Salle in Norfolk, which towers in isolation above the wide fields, and I could not bring out the words I should have spoken then. White mist had risen from the meadows outside, and we watched in silence as it crept slowly into the church porch, a rippling vapor rolling forward at ground level and gradually spreading over the entire stone floor, becoming denser and denser and rising visibly higher, until we ourselves emerged from it only above the waist and it seemed about to stifle us. Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light, and which seemed to go on and on for ever. In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time. Perhaps that is why, in the gloomy light of the waiting room, I also saw two middle-aged people dressed in the style of the thirties, a woman in a light gabardine coat with a hat at an angle on her head, and a thin man beside her wearing a dark suit and a dog collar. And I not only saw the minister and his wife, said Austerlitz, I also saw the boy they had come to meet. He was sitting by himself on a bench over to one side. His legs, in white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the small rucksack he was holding on his lap I don’t think I would have known him, said Austerlitz. As it was, I recognized him by that rucksack of his, and for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago. As so often, said Austerlitz, I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something quite different, something inexpressible because we have no words for it, just as I had no words all those years ago when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand. All I do know is that when I saw the boy sitting on the bench I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death. I can only guess what reasons may have induced the minister Elias and his wan wife to take me to live with them in the summer of 1939, said Austerlitz. Childless as they were,

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The great rabbi Akiva, executed by the Romans in 135 CE, taught that the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was the greatest principle of the Torah.49 Only his pupil Ben Azzai disagreed, preferring the simple biblical statement “This is the roll of the descendents of Adam” because it emphasized the unity of the human race.50 In order to reveal the presence of compassion at the core of all the legislation and narratives of the Torah, the rabbis would sometimes twist the original sense and even change the words of scripture. They were not interested in merely elucidating the original intention of the biblical author. Midrash (“exegesis”) was an essentially inventive discipline, deriving from the verb darash, “to search,” “to investigate,” or “to go in pursuit of” something that was not immediately self-evident. A rabbi would be expected to find fresh meaning in scripture, which, as the word of God, was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Another famous story shows that from the very beginning, the rabbis realized that compassion was the key to religion now that the temple had been destroyed. It happened that R. Johanan ben Zakkai went out from Jerusalem and R. Joshua followed him and saw the burnt ruins of the Temple and he said: “Woe is it that the place, where the sins of Israel find atonement, is laid waste.” Then said R. Johanan, “Grieve not, we have an atonement equal to the Temple, the doing of loving deeds [gemilut hasadim], as it is said, ‘I desire love [hesed] and not sacrifice.’ ”51 Practically expressed compassion was now a priestly act that would atone for sins more effectively than the temple sacrifices. It is a good example of the new midrash. Rabbi Johanan is quoting the prophet Hosea, who would probably have been surprised by his interpretation.52 In its original context, hesed had meant not “love” but “loyalty”; for Hosea, God had not been speaking of the loving deeds that Jews would perform for one another but of the cultic fealty that Israelites owed to him.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The problem is that philosophical theories that aim to make sense of suffering are often presented in immensely dull and technical ways, that treat suffering as a rational problem demanding an intellectual solution, often involving arcane definitions and distinctions that baffle their readers, leaving them drowning in a glutinous alphabet soup. The success of The Shack made it clear that what people were looking for was a meaningful and accessible engagement with the problem of suffering which they did not find in self-help manuals, traditional spiritual comfort food, and least of all in an abstract rational analysis based on generic notions of divinity which failed to engage the emotional aspects of suffering and pain. This is a real problem. The American philosopher of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff found himself unable to read academic works on theodicy following the death of his son in a climbing accident in 1983. They just didn’t connect with his situation. ‘I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. I have read the theodicies produced to justify the ways of God to man. I find them unconvincing. To the most agonised question I have ever asked I do not know the answer.’ 50 When it enters our lives, we are overwhelmed by the immensity of the question of suffering. As Johann Baptist Metz remarks, this is ‘a question that can neither be answered nor forgotten, a question for which we, from our side, have no answer; it is the question of “too much.”’ 51 Wolterstorff is one of many Christian writers to explore the question of whether the painful presence of suffering in the world negates Christian belief. C. S. Lewis, now a canonical Christian writer, found the devastation of World War One so troubling that he doubled down on his teenage atheism. Shortly after the end of the war, Lewis published a collection of poems entitled Spirits in Bondage in March 1919 under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. 52 Lewis’s ‘Ode for New Year’s Day’, written when under fire from German artillery near the French town of Arras in January 1918, protests against a silent uncaring heaven, a disinterested spectator of the carnage of the war. The existence of evil and suffering in the world was a moral outrage that would lead any intelligent person to reject belief in God. This is an influential argument, and many have experienced its force. David Hume, for example, argued that the world we know and experience is so clearly inadequate that it could only have been made by an ‘infant deity’, or some elderly deity in his dotage, who urgently needed to be retired from duty. Yet there is a problem with this argument.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Suffering: C. S. Lewis and the Reconstruction of BeliefOne of the surprise bestsellers of 2007 was William Paul Young’s The Shack, a twenty-first century re-imagining of the book of Job published by Windblown Media, a Californian company that nobody had ever heard of.48 The book sold twenty million copies. As if that wasn’t enough, ten years later the novel was made into a Hollywood blockbuster that grossed over $96 million globally. Some critics of the movie complained about its ‘pontificating’49 which they felt blunted the imaginative power and dramatic force of the novel. Yet the remarkable popular success of both book and movie made it clear that many today remain intensely engaged with the issue of suffering, yet are dissatisfied with the abstract and inaccessible philosophical rationalisations which are routinely presented as solutions to these enigmas. The problem is that philosophical theories that aim to make sense of suffering are often presented in immensely dull and technical ways, that treat suffering as a rational problem demanding an intellectual solution, often involving arcane definitions and distinctions that baffle their readers, leaving them drowning in a glutinous alphabet soup. The success of The Shack made it clear that what people were looking for was a meaningful and accessible engagement with the problem of suffering which they did not find in self-help manuals, traditional spiritual comfort food, and least of all in an abstract rational analysis based on generic notions of divinity which failed to engage the emotional aspects of suffering and pain. This is a real problem. The American philosopher of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff found himself unable to read academic works on theodicy following the death of his son in a climbing accident in 1983. They just didn’t connect with his situation. ‘I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. I have read the theodicies produced to justify the ways of God to man. I find them unconvincing. To the most agonised question I have ever asked I do not know the answer.’50 When it enters our lives, we are overwhelmed by the immensity of the question of suffering. As Johann Baptist Metz remarks, this is ‘a question that can neither be answered nor forgotten, a question for which we, from our side, have no answer; it is the question of “too much.”’51 Wolterstorff is one of many Christian writers to explore the question of whether the painful presence of suffering in the world negates Christian belief. C. S. Lewis, now a canonical Christian writer, found the devastation of World War One so troubling that he doubled down on his teenage atheism.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  No ancient writer has set before us so noble an example of a heartfelt, unselfish, and thoroughly human state of feeling, and none has described friendship with such entire truth in all its relations, and with such complete and profound knowledge of the human heart. This was a neat means of providing a descriptive framework for the intimate male friendships that characterized the nineteenth-century West, without descending to the ‘beastliness’ that was the constant lurking foe in the Victorian public school. [32] There was one real Victorian religious sub-culture within a sub-culture that burrowed further into the themes Rabbi Philippson was evading: a homosexual identity within a new creation of Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism. [33] Anglo-Catholicism as an alternative to the Evangelical emphasis on the Protestant and Reformation identity of the Church of England emerged in the 1830s among academics and students in Oxford University, hence it was frequently known as ‘the Oxford Movement’. Their promotion of a Catholic and sacramental view of Anglicanism in a series of ‘Tracts’ produced an alternative name: ‘Tractarianism’. The self-absorbed single-sex culture of university life in Oxford inevitably drew in leading personalities of homosexual orientation, notably the Vicar of the University Church, John Henry Newman. Newman was the most prominent among several Tractarians eventually to decide that the logic of their theological views pushed them to convert to Roman Catholicism. His stellar career thereafter as a spiritual and theological writer and eventually Cardinal of the Roman Church has led to much obfuscation on his obvious sexual inclinations, which, while almost certainly sublimated, led to his insistence on imitating various medieval same-sex couples in demanding burial in the grave of his most intimate friend and fellow convert, the priest Ambrose St John. Less conventional had been Newman’s grief-stricken insistence at St John’s death in 1875 on spending the night on the bed beside the corpse. [34] Newman and St John were by no means the last Anglo-Catholics to arrive in Rome with that sort of emotional baggage. The Oxford undergraduate Gerard Manley Hopkins was affected for life by one encounter over a few days with Digby Dolben, an Etonian Catholic convert and son of a Northamptonshire squire. Dolben drowned before traits possibly charming in a teenager could become irritating in adult years (though his homoerotic verse might have improved). Hopkins’s grief and loneliness add intensity to his quite extraordinary poetic output, sensuously exploring the glory of God’s

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The Evangelical Revival and Great Awakening brought another form of potential liberation: for women. They allowed women new opportunities of self- expression and achievement, as so often when new religious movements grow and improvise, but – equally characteristically – as new institutions settled down into masculine patterns those opportunities were curtailed. The Moravian ‘Sifting Time’ was an unsurprising example. Count von Zinzendorf had travelled down some surprisingly radical theological pathways: he rejected the Virgin Birth or any notion of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, and emphasized the role of the Holy Spirit as Mother, picking up a Christian theme last prominent in third- or fourth-century Syria. He parted company with Reformation Protestantism and Augustine of Hippo sufficiently to reject the idea of original sin, including Eve’s part in the Fall, which led him to allow women into the Moravian presbyterate. Much of this went missing when the Church was remodelled after the Sifting Time, the chief casualty predictably being female ordination. [44] The Methodist movement shows the same general profile from opportunity to exclusion. John Wesley’s own personal relationships with women were tumultuous, starting with the fiasco of his venture as a Church of England chaplain to the new British colony of Georgia in 1737, sent home in disgrace after he had irresponsibly mixed pastoral care with female emotional entanglements. In 1748 his brother Charles (fearing further scandal over a social mismatch) sabotaged John’s plans to marry Grace Murray, a Methodist society housekeeper and John’s companion on a preaching tour in Ireland. John’s impulsive rebound-marriage to a well-off widow, Mary Vazeille, proved a bad mistake, and ended in separation. [45] He channelled later passions into several apparently chaste intense friendships with female followers; the positive aspect of his preoccupations was that he listened to women and sympathized with their wish for active roles in Methodist mission more than most of his male contemporaries. The house journal Wesley founded for the Connexion in 1778, the Arminian Magazine (later Methodist Magazine ), gave almost equal space to biographical or autobiographical writings from women as from men, and in 1782, with remarkable risk-taking, it published a quarter-century-old correspondence about one of the relationships that had caused Wesley’s wife particular grief, Wesley defiantly commenting on the importance of the letters’ spiritual content. [46] Wesley’s capricious editorial control in the Magazine is symptomatic. Early Methodism was indeed ‘a movement of women, who formed a clear majority of society members almost everywhere Methodism took root’, but it remained publicly run by men. [47] Wesley’s emotional impulses held the key to the exceptions. He was not generally in favour of women becoming preachers but encouraged Methodist women to lead small bible-study and devotional groups (‘classes’) and spread the gospel in informal ways. Mrs Sarah Crosby, one of the younger female recipients of his passions (and, like him, separated from her spouse), regularly exchanged letters with him and won his cautious approval for a public preaching ministry, against his original High Church instincts. It likewise began against her inclinations.