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.

Page 259 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  But the covenant of God and Israel, and most of the preaching of the prophets, concerned corporate entities. The blessings and curses of the covenant applied to the people as a whole, without exceptions for individual behavior. Jeremiah suggested that individuals could save their lives during the siege of Jerusalem by deserting to the Babylonians, but he did not suggest that the Babylonian soldiers would discriminate on the basis of virtue. The novelty of Ezekiel’s teaching was that it called for such discrimination, by God if not by the Babylonians. The lives of Noah, Daniel, and Job would be spared even if the rest of the world were destroyed. (There was in fact an ancient precedent for such exceptions in the case of Noah!) The prophet was still greatly concerned for the welfare of Israel as a whole, but he showed a new concern for individual justice in the eyes of God. To the modern reader raised in an individualistic culture, this teaching of Ezekiel seems clearly right. It would not have been so obvious to the ancients. According to Exod 20:5, YHWH is a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents even to the third and fourth generations. Moreover, it is an experiential fact that the behavior of parents has consequences for their children, as the sons and daughters of alcoholics can well attest. Moreover, such a simple correlation of virtue and reward, vice and punishment, lends itself to self-righteousness on the part of the successful and to unfair blame of the less fortunate. We have seen some evidence of that problem in Ezekiel’s assumption that the exiles in Babylon were superior to those who perished in the destruction of Jerusalem. In all, then, the philosophical and theological merit of Ezekiel’s doctrine of individual responsibility is suspect. But the teaching had unquestionable pastoral merit. The attitude reflected in the proverb, blaming misfortune on the sins of the fathers, did the exiles no good. It was better for all to take responsibility for their own fate and to use it as an incentive to live better and more righteously. It was with good reason, then, that Ezekiel insisted on this doctrine. He returns to it yet again in chapter 33, which repeats some material from chapter 18. The Final Blow The most moving incident in the book of Ezekiel is undoubtedly the passage that concludes the “book of judgment,” 24:15-27. The prophet is told that God will take away “the delight of his eyes,” but he must not mourn. That evening his wife died. It seems clear from the passage that he loved his wife and wanted to mourn but was prevented by what he perceived as a divine command. The death of his wife is treated as a sign of the destruction of Jerusalem, which he also loved deeply but could not mourn. The inability to mourn is viewed as a pathological condition in modern psychiatry.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  So when she was a child and her mother tried to take her own life with sleeping pills, he induced vomiting, called for an ambulance, and then brought Elena into the bedroom. Margaret O’Malley was soiled and unconscious. Shit and piss and bile puddled around her, in her linen, spattered on the rug. This is your mother. Go ahead. Look . It was the holidays that always brought her back to this past. She had left home with the mixed feelings anyone might have. By the early sixties, her mother often threatened to take her own life. Elena calmly woke Benjamin and, as the sun rose, she caught the first train to New Haven, to the airport there. The threats had always evaporated by the time she arrived. Her mother was asleep, or on her bed, placidly doing a crossword puzzle, drinking gin and smiling. They dried out Margaret and then released her to the world. Dried her out and released her again. It was like any annual occurrence, like a harvest or saint’s day. They dried her out, and all were hopeful for a couple of weeks, even her father would seem to be of good cheer, and then her mother would drink again—sometimes she would even toast returning to the house—and soon it was back to the weekly delivery of cases. Elena’s father paid for her detoxifications and for her wardrobe and the tabs at each and every liquor store and for the long-distance telephone calls, and he paid extra to have her bathed and cared for at home. All the bills were paid. Had it been just the three of them, there would have been cause enough to leave Weston, Mass. But she had a brother, too. A carbon copy of his father—as stable as some inflammable gas—full of impatience and hate. And he drank like his mother. He was the most difficult man Elena had ever met. He actually argued about the weather. His sense of rectitude was so finely tuned that he lay awake nights ordering and enumerating worldly infractions according to a code he could never observe himself. Billy O’Malley was ten years older than Elena and he had taken her education entirely into his own hands. He claimed even to have named her himself, according to rules of prosody. Two bacchic feet. Elena O’Malley. No middle name. She’d just get rid of it later. He’d named her for Bacchus. Her parents were mostly busy anyway. Instructing her in water safety, he had pushed her, as an infant, into the swimming pool. She sank. Instructing her in etiquette, he had removed her elbows from the supper table with the sharp side of a steak knife. She took a number of stitches. Instructing her in respect for her elders, he’d dangled her by the ankles from a third story window. Instructing her in the management of local mass transit, he’d abandoned her blindfolded in downtown Boston. Elena had been a good student.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Hildebrand refused at first, because Bruno had not been canonically elected, but by the secular and royal power; but he was persuaded to follow him. Bruno reached Rome in the month of February, 1049, in the dress of a pilgrim, barefoot, weeping, regardless of the hymns of welcome. His election was unanimously confirmed by the Roman clergy and people, and he was solemnly consecrated Feb. 12, as Leo IX. He found the papal treasury empty, and his own means were soon exhausted. He chose Hildebrand as his subdeacon, financier, and confidential adviser, who hereafter was the soul of the papal reform, till he himself ascended the papal throne in 1073. We stand here at the close of the deepest degradation and on the threshold of the highest elevation of the papacy. The synod of Sutri and the reign of Leo IX. mark the beginning of a disciplinary reform. Simony or the sale and purchase of ecclesiastical dignities, and Nicolaitism or the carnal sins of the clergy, including marriage, concubinage and unnatural vices, were the crying evils of the church in the eyes of the most serious men, especially the disciples of Cluny and of St. Romuald. A reformation therefore from the hierarchical standpoint of the middle ages was essentially a suppression of these two abuses. And as the corruption had reached its climax in the papal chair, the reformation had to begin at the head before it could reach the members. It was the work chiefly of Hildebrand or Gregory VII., with whom the next period opens.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To the bitterness of grief there was added a very anxious concern for those who survived. Day and night my wife is constantly present to my thoughts, in need of advice, seeing that she is deprived of her husband.545 ... These events have produced in me so much sadness that it seems as if they would utterly upset the mind and depress the spirit. You cannot believe the grief which consumes me on account of the death of my dear friend Claude." Then he pays a touching tribute to Féray, who had lived in his house and stuck closer to him than a brother. But the most precious fruit of this sore affliction is his letter of comfort to the distressed father of Louis de Richebourg, which we shall quote in another connection.546 § 90. Calvin and Melanchthon. The correspondence between Calvin (14 letters) and Melanchthon (8 letters), and several letters of Calvin to Farel from Strassburg and Regensburg. Henry, Vol. I. chs. XII. and XVII,—Stähelin, I. 237–254.—Merle D’Aubigné, bk. XI. ch. XIX. (vol. VII. 18–22, in Cates’ translation). One of the important advantages which his sojourn at Strassburg brought to Calvin and to the evangelical Church was his friendship with Melanchthon. It has a typical significance for the relationship of the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions, and therefore deserves special consideration. They became first acquainted by correspondence through Bucer in October, 1538. Melanchthon brought Calvin at once into a friendly contact with Luther, who read with great pleasure Calvin’s answer to Sadolet (perhaps also his Institutes), and sent his salutations to him at Strassburg.547 Luther never saw Calvin, and probably knew little or nothing of the Reformation in Geneva. His own work was then nearly finished, and he was longing for rest. It is very fortunate, however, that while his mind was incurably poisoned against Zwingli and Zürich, he never came into hostile conflict with Calvin and Geneva, but sent him before his departure a fraternal greeting from a respectful distance. His conduct foreshadows the attitude of the Lutheran Church and theology towards Calvin, who had the highest regard for Luther, and enjoyed in turn the esteem of Lutheran divines in proportion as he was known. Melanchthon was twelve years older than Calvin, as Luther was thirteen years older than Melanchthon. Calvin, therefore, might have sustained to Melanchthon the relation of a pupil to a teacher. He sought his friendship, and he always treated him with reverential affection.548 In the dedication of his commentary on Daniel, he describes Melanchthon as "a man who, on account of his incomparable skill in the most excellent branches of knowledge, his piety, and other virtues, is worthy of the admiration of all ages." But while Melanchthon was under the overawing influence of the personality of Luther, the Reformer of Geneva was quite independent of Melanchthon, and so far could meet him on equal terms.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Catholics agreed to the evangelical view of justification by faith (without the Lutheran sola), and conceded the eucharistic cup to the laity, but the parties split on the doctrine of the power of the Church and the real presence. Calvin was especially consulted on the last point, and gave a decided judgment in Latin against transubstantiation, which he rejected as a scholastic fiction, and against the adoration of the wafer which he declared to be idolatrous.536 He was displeased with the submissiveness of Melanchthon and Bucer, although he did not doubt the sincerity of their motives. He loved truth and consistency more than peace and unity. "Philip," he wrote to Farel (May 12, 1541),537 "and Bucer have drawn up ambiguous and varnished formulas concerning transubstantiation, to try whether they could satisfy the opposite party by giving them nothing.538 I cannot agree to this device, although they have reasonable grounds for doing so; for they hope that in a short time they would begin to see more clearly if the matter of doctrine be left open; therefore they rather wish to skip over it, and do not dread that equivocation (flexiloquation) than which nothing can be more hurtful. I can assure you, however, that both are animated with the best intentions, and have no other object in view than to promote the kingdom of Christ; only in their method of proceeding they accommodate themselves too much to the times .... These things I deplore in private to yourself, my dear Farel; see, therefore, that they are not made public. One thing I am thankful for, that there is no one who is fighting now more earnestly against the wafer-god,539 as he calls it, than Brentz."540 All the negotiations failed at last by the combined opposition of the extreme men of both parties.541 The emperor closed the Diet on the 28th of July, and promised to use his influence with the pope to convene a General Council for the settlement of the theological questions.542 Calvin had left Regensburg as soon as he found a chance, about the middle of June, much to the regret of Bucer and Melanchthon, who wished to retain him.543 His sojourn there was embittered by the ravages of the pestilence in Strassburg, which carried away his beloved deacon, Claude Féray (Feraeus), his friends Bedrotus and Capito, one of his boarders, Louis de Richebourg (Claude’s pupil), and the sons of Oecolampadius, Zwingli, and Hedio. He was thrown into a state of extreme anxiety and depression, which he revealed to Farel in a melancholy letter of March 29, 1541.544 "My dear friend Claude, whom I singularly esteemed," he writes, "has been carried off by the plague. Louis (de Richebourg) followed three days afterwards. My house was in a state of sad desolation. My brother (Antoine) had gone with Charles (de Richebourg) to a neighboring village; my wife had betaken herself to my brother’s; and the youngest of Claude’s scholars [probably Malherbe of Normandy] is lying sick in bed.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  You know, and see the Eiffel Tower too.” “Oh.” Claire looked annoyed, but also like she was trying to hide that she was pleased. “You didn’t need to come all this way.” “Claire, you have a kid now. Do you not get it? Wouldn’t you—if your daughter—” Fiona couldn’t bring herself to say the child’s name. It would be an invasion, a privilege she hadn’t been invited to enjoy. Claire said, “That’s different.” An accusation, maybe, but instead of taking the bait, Fiona said, “Your dad is fine.” “I know.” “How?” “I mean, we have Google here. You can see when he’s doing lectures. And your store seemed okay, so I figured you were fine.” Fiona wanted to ask if she understood that she had denied her parents the right, for the past three years, to know if she was alive or dead. She wanted, at least, to know why . But that was something to work out down the road. In this conversation, it would be a bomb. She said, “Karen has breast cancer. That’s why he’s not here. She’s starting radiation.” Claire looked only mildly concerned. “Is it bad?” “I mean, it’s cancer . But it sounds treatable.” “She’s gonna get way too into that pink ribbon stuff, isn’t she. She’s gonna go on all the marches and never shut up about it.” Years ago, Fiona might have admonished her—she’d always been careful to speak respectfully of Karen, maintain good relations—but she let herself laugh, and it felt wonderful. Fiona took an envelope from her purse and wrote Damian’s number on the back. “He’s going through a lot,” she said, “and if he could hear your voice I know it would help.” Claire accepted the envelope noncommittally, stuck it under the band of her apron. Fiona whispered. “Are you here legally?” “It’s complicated. I’m not about to get arrested or anything. I’ve overstayed. But I can get it sorted out.” “Why not just come home? To Chicago?” “Tell me you didn’t keep my bedroom preserved.” She hadn’t, thank God, or that would have stung. Claire’s bed was still there, and her dresser and her books, but right after she first took off for Colorado Fiona had moved the sewing table in there, and then things had spread. Fiona said, “I’ll be here another week or two. Do you remember Richard Campo?” It was a silly question. A photo that Richard had taken of baby Claire crying in Damian’s arms was one of his more canonical works. It still hung in MASS MoCa. Claire wrote her college essay about that picture. “He has an opening at the Pompidou on Monday. I’m staying with him.” She was tempted to imply that this was the main reason she’d come over, that Claire was secondary, but why? For pride? It had been her failing with Claire all along—pretending not to love her as much as she did. Trying to steel herself against a broken heart, the way she would with a boyfriend.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  In that charged encounter is a characteristic moment of tension for Christianity: how does one form of authority relate to another, and which is going to prevail? Perpetua was disobedient not just to her father but to the institutional Catholic Church which later enrolled her among its martyrs, because she was a Montanist. Some of the most remarkable passages in her account occur in her description of the second and third dreams or visions that she had in her prison cell. She saw her younger brother Dinocrates, who had died of cancer at the age of seven without being baptized as a Christian, in a dark place, very hot and thirsty, and just out of reach of a cooling pool of water. She prayed for him. In the third dream, she watched him drink from the pool, and ‘play joyfully as young children do’; the cancerous growth in his face melted away. Perpetua did not comment on this vision of release, but the likelihood is that she would not have needed to for the contemporary readership she envisaged. What she was saying was that, through prayer, she had been granted the power to release the dead from suffering because of her faith in the ‘New Prophecy’. Dinocrates needed no institutional Church or cleric to remedy his lack of sacramental grace. But perhaps the most agonizing moral choice of all for Perpetua was whether to be a martyr or a good mother. In choosing to affirm her faith and face imprisonment and death, she was forced to abandon her suckling baby. There followed a miserable alternation of separation and return of the child, in which in the end she was told in her prison cell that her baby no longer wanted her breasts. Seldom do we read a Christian text which so brutally exposes what a Christian commitment might mean: it returns us to the terrifying story of Genesis 22, when God commanded the Patriarch Abraham to make a human sacrifice of his own young son, Isaac, and only countermanded the order as the butcher’s knife was raised. In counterpoint to the Church’s pronounced drive towards conformity with society’s often perfectly reasonable expectations, which we have noted as such a characteristic feature of the later literature in the New Testament (see pp. 114–18), Christian obedience repeatedly plays a troubling wild card. It is the Apostle Peter’s impudent retort to the angry high priest of the Jerusalem Temple, recorded in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Not so long after Perpetua brutally confounded her father’s natural expectations and set herself up as the agent of God’s forgiveness, bishops including Peter’s self-styled successor in Rome would come to find themselves cast in the role of the high priest: furious at the disobedience of Christians to their own authority and in the end even condemning Christians to death, as once Peter had been by the Roman authorities. More often than such incidents of dramatic intensity as Perpetua’s sufferings,

• From Wild (2012)

  After she got sick, I folded my life down. I told Paul not to count on me. I would have to come and go according to my mother’s needs. I wanted to quit school, but my mother ordered me not to, begging me, no matter what happened, to get my degree. She herself took what she called a break. She only needed to complete a couple more classes to graduate, and she would, she told me. She would get her BA if it killed her, she said, and we laughed and then looked at each other darkly. She’d do the work from her bed. She’d tell me what to type and I’d type it. She would be strong enough to start in on those last two classes soon, she absolutely knew. I stayed in school, though I convinced my professors to allow me to be in class only two days each week. As soon as those two days were over, I raced home to be with my mother. Unlike Leif and Karen, who could hardly bear to be in our mother’s presence once she got sick, I couldn’t bear to be away from her. Plus, I was needed. Eddie was with her when he could be, but he had to work. Someone had to pay the bills. I cooked food that my mother tried to eat, but rarely could she eat. She’d think she was hungry and then she’d sit like a prisoner staring down at the food on her plate. “It looks good,” she’d say. “I think I’ll be able to eat it later.” I scrubbed the floors. I took everything from the cupboards and put new paper down. My mother slept and moaned and counted and swallowed her pills. On good days she sat in a chair and talked to me.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  But this had been something else. Those little buzzers had worked some kind of electronic Robin Williams magic. I didn’t just understand the weight of my abuse logically. I felt it, like a blade through flesh, like a bone popping out of place. I felt it like a lover saying it’s not going to work: sharp, immediate, and terrifying. I actually felt, with searing clarity, the horror of what happened to me—maybe for the first time ever. I felt how tremendously sad it was that I was forced to make my parents feel loved at such a young age. I felt how courageous I must have been to endure that torture, day after day for so many years, by the people I trusted most in this world. I felt a sense of love and adoration for my childhood self that I’d never been able to summon before. There is a difference between knowing and understanding. I had known that this wasn’t my fault. EMDR unlocked the gate to the next realm, toward understanding. The difference is one between rote memorization and true learning. Between hypothesis and belief. Between prayer and faith. It seems obvious now—how can there be love without faith? — I learned two critical things that day. First: Just because the wound doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it’s healed. If it looks good and it feels good, it should be all good, right? But over the years I’d smoothed perfect white layers of spackle over gaping structural holes. And the second thing I learned was: My parents didn’t love me. It’s not as if I hadn’t suspected this. There was that whole child abandonment thing, after all. But in my head, there were reasons and excuses for this. And now, for the first time, I saw the truth—the real reason they could not love me, had never loved me. I believe that they hated themselves too much to love me; their sadness made them too selfish to see me at all. The reason I hadn’t been loved had nothing at all to do with me or my behavior. It had everything to do with them. I tried this new idea on for size. “My parents didn’t love me,” I muttered to myself, quietly, then louder: “My parents didn’t love me.” It’s a tragic sentence. It should feel like a shot to the gut. But instead, it had both resonance and stillness. It happened. It’s true. And it’s okay. There are people who love me. I will be cared for. And I have my capable self. Everything is going to be fine. Holy cow. This shit is for real. I arrived at my front door having barely registered how I got home. On repeat: My parents didn’t love me, and it’s okay. Maybe I’m cured, I think. Maybe it truly is this simple.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Paul’s voice in When Breath Becomes Air is strong and distinctive, but also somewhat solitary. Parallel to this story are the love and warmth and spaciousness and radical permission that surrounded him. We all inhabit different selves in space and time. Here he is as a doctor, as a patient, and within a doctor-patient relationship. He wrote with a clear voice, the voice of someone with limited time, a ceaseless striver, though there were other selves as well. Not fully captured in these pages are Paul’s sense of humor—he was wickedly funny—or his sweetness and tenderness, the value he placed on relationships with friends and family. But this is the book he wrote; this was his voice during this time; this was his message during this time; this was what he wrote when he needed to write it. Indeed, the version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version with whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year, the Paul who wrote this book—frail but never weak. Paul was proud of this book, which was a culmination of his love for literature—he once said that he found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death. When Paul emailed his best friend in May 2013 to inform him that he had terminal cancer, he wrote, “The good news is I’ve already outlived two Brontës, Keats, and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.” His journey thereafter was one of transformation—from one passionate vocation to another, from husband to father, and finally, of course, from life to death, the ultimate transformation that awaits us all. I am proud to have been his partner throughout, including while he wrote this book, an act that allowed him to live with hope, with that delicate alchemy of agency and opportunity that he writes about so eloquently, until the very end. —

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  was one of his foundation principles, since Jesus’s posthumous Apostle and interpreter Paul of Tarsus (see pp. 97–102) went out of his way to contradict the unconditional ‘commandment from the Lord’ on this matter, and one of the Gospel writers similarly nervously modified the ‘no divorce’ command to allow for the circumstance of adultery.42 CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION Certainly Jesus cared profoundly about the Temple in Jerusalem. His intense feelings about it made him predict its destruction, and apparently his own ability to rebuild it in three days. He provoked a disturbance in it, protesting at what he saw as its misuse for commerce and profit, and it was the goal of his last fatal public appearances. Then he was arrested in Jerusalem, put on trial and executed along with two common criminals on a hill outside the city, by the ghastly Roman custom of crucifixion. It is a sequence of events – the ‘Passion’, so called from the Latin verb to suffer, patior – which forms the dramatic culmination of the Gospels’ account of his public ministry. There is indeed more high drama in the Passion than in the accounts of Jesus’s subsequent resurrection and renewed appearances to his disciples. At the beginning of that story of humiliation, torture and death, on the night that he was betrayed to Temple and Roman authorities, is the account of his ‘last supper’ with the Twelve. On that occasion, not merely the Synoptic Gospels but also Paul of Tarsus, in a reminiscence of the actual earthly life of Jesus very rare in Paul’s writings, record that he took bread and wine, broke the bread, gave thanks and gave them to his disciples. It was a meal taken amid the Jewish festival of the Passover, the joyful season when the Jews remembered their liberation from Egypt (see pp. 51–2). Indeed, perhaps the group was celebrating the Passover meal itself. The death of Jesus became inextricably linked in the minds first of the witnesses, then of the later Church, with the lamb killed for a blood-soaked sacrifice in the Passover ceremonies. Jesus spoke of the bread of the supper as his body and the wine as his blood. A rich mixture of thought associations with death, sacrifice and thanksgiving for deliverance from disaster has flowed from that evening meal, into the supper drama which Christians have made the centre of their worship and have called the Eucharist. That is still the everyday Greek word for ‘thanks’. There is endless and probably irresolvable debate about how this ritual meal might have related to pre-Christian Jewish worship customs and ritual thanksgivings. What is clear is that there was nothing quite like it in previous tradition. From the earliest time of its institution, it involved a recital of

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But two years later, when the emperor Valens died and Gratian revoked the sentences of banishment, Gregory recovered his bishopric. Now other trials came upon him. His brothers and sisters died in rapid succession. He delivered a eulogy upon Basil, whom he greatly venerated, and he described the life and death of his beautiful and noble sister Macrina, who, after the death of her betrothed, that she might remain true to him, chose single life, and afterwards retired with her mother into seclusion, and exerted great influence over her brothers. Into her mouth he put his theological instructions on the soul, death, resurrection, and final restoration.1959 She died in the arms of Gregory, with this prayer: "Thou, O God, hast taken from me the fear of death. Thou hast granted me, that the end of this life should be the beginning of true life. Thou givest our bodies in their time to the sleep of death, and awakest them again from sleep with the last trumpet .... Thou hast delivered us from the curse and from sin by Thyself becoming both for us; Thou hast bruised the head of the serpent, hast broken open the gates of hell, hast overcome him who had the power of death, and hast opened to us the way to, resurrection. For the ruin of the enemy and the security of our life, Thou hast put upon those who feared Thee a sign, the sign of Thy holy cross, O eternal God, to whom I am betrothed from the womb, whom my soul has loved with all its might, to whom I have dedicated, from my youth up till now, my flesh and my soul. Oh! send to me an angel of light, to lead me to the place of refreshment, where is the water of peace, in the bosom of the holy fathers. Thou who hast broken the flaming sword, and bringest back to Paradise the man who is crucified with Thee and flees to Thy mercy. Remember me also in Thy kingdom!... Forgive me what in word, deed, or thought, I have done amiss! Blameless and without spot may my soul be received into Thy hands, as a burnt-offering before Thee!"1960 Gregory attended the ecumenical council of Constantinople, and undoubtedly, since he was one of the most eminent theologians of the time, exerted a powerful influence there, and according to a later, but erroneous, tradition, he composed the additions to the Nicene Creed which were there sanctioned.1961 The council intrusted to him, as "one of the pillars of catholic orthodoxy," a tour of visitation to Arabia and Jerusalem, where disturbances had broken out which threatened a schism. He found Palestine in a sad condition, and therefore dissuaded a Cappadocian abbot, who asked his advice about a pilgrimage of his monks to Jerusalem. "Change of place," says he, "brings us no nearer God, but where thou art, God can come to thee, if only the inn of thy soul is ready ....

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  I turned around. “No, I didn’t!” She nodded. “They found him in a lobby behind the stairs in a building on Forty-eighth—frozen to death. They think he had a heart attack or something. Oh, that boy was just the sweetest! I used to let him stay with me all the time. On my couch. He was always so nice.” Now she leaned over and put her hand on my wrist. “I have never known anyone who could get into sex more than he could. I mean, that boy loved to come!” “Yes, I know.” “I mean—” a bit loaded, she was just on the other side of discretion—“I have a few little kinks, myself, and he was always the world’s most obliging lay. You see, I like to get fucked in unusual places. Once, when he came by looking for a place to stay, I threw him into the shower, dried him off, stuck him in an old suit jacket of mine from the last time I had a straight job—it just about fit him—and took him to the Rainbow Room. You ever been to the Rainbow Room, honey?” “On the top of Rockefeller Center? Yes . . .” “And I made him fuck me in the stall in the ladies’ room.” She sat back now. “And that boy was not quiet when he came. Another time—” she turned and pointed toward the door—“right across the street there in Beefsteak Charlie’s. You ever been in there? They got the back room, which is three steps down from the front, and off around the side. They close that at nine-thirty, before they kick everybody out at ten. Well, honey, we went right in there—and he did me out on one of the tables. I mean, half the waiters was in there, eggin’ us on. I don’t know what the manager thought—if he knew. And don’t tell me about the Staten Island Ferry at midnight—” She shook her head. “That boy was so talented. I don’t think he’d had his twenty-ninth birthday yet.” She shook her head once more. “Frozen to death in a hallway—with a heart attack. I think the drugs must have weakened his system.”

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  “You have to leave this. You don’t deserve to be treated like this. You have to leave.” “I can’t leave. They need me. I have to protect them.” “No, you don’t.” Joey hugs baby me extra tight. “You don’t have to fix anything to deserve love. I love you for who you are. You can fuck up. You can do whatever you want and you’ll still deserve love.” Baby me struggles, tries to fight her way out of his grip, bites his arm hard enough to draw blood. Finally, Joey holds her at arm’s length, looks her in the eye, and says, “THEY DON’T LOVE YOU.” He points at my parents. “They don’t love you like you deserve to be loved. They are buried in their own misery and hurt to the point where they just cannot give you the kind of love that you need.” Buzzers off. Tears still flow freely down my cheeks. I sum up what has happened. “Does baby Stephanie want to leave yet?” Eleanor asks. “No.” “Can you send in anyone else to help?” “I don’t know.” “What about adult Stephanie? She might recognize you.” Joey disappears. I step forward and I kneel down next to her. “Listen,” I say. “I understand why you want to stay. It’s because you don’t know any kind of love outside of this. But I promise there’s different kinds of love out there, and you will meet other people who will give you what they can’t.” Baby Stephanie looks at me hatefully and says, “But all those people left you.” It’s like she’s slapped me. And then I’m angry. Tough-love time. I point to my parents. “But they both leave,” I say. She seems shocked. Somehow, she hadn’t known. “It’s true,” I yell, and now I’m loud. “They both abandon you in a few years. All the hard work that you put in to save them, all the mediation, the effort, none of it pays off. They don’t appreciate it at all. They never thank you.” I see her harden. I know she believes me. It’s time to get her out. Buzzers off. Eleanor pulls me out again. I tell her what happened. She says, “But what if she can’t go? Can you give her the tools that she needs to stay?” Buzzers on. I want her to leave so bad. My real body is crying out of fear for her. I think of all the rational tips and tricks I could provide her with, things that could defuse conflict situations, but she’s already doing them.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Leo spent his remaining days in grief over his defeat. He died at Rome, April 19, 1054, in his fifty-third year, after commending his soul to God in a German prayer of humble resignation, and was buried near the tomb of Gregory I. As he had begun the reformation of the Church, and miracles were reported, he was enrolled in the Calendar of Saints. Desiderius, afterwards Victor III., wrote, "All ecclesiastical interests were reformed by Leo and in him a new light arose in the world." § 6. Victor II. and Stephen IX. (X.). 1055–1058. Hildebrand was absent in France when Leo died, and hurried to Rome. He could find no worthy successor in Italy, and was unwilling to assume the burden of the papacy himself. He cast his eye upon Gebhard, bishop of Eichstädt, the ablest, richest, and most influential prelate of Germany, who was warmly devoted to the emperor. He proceeded at the head of a deputation, appointed by the clergy and people, to the German court, and begged the emperor to raise Gebhard to the papal chair. After long delay, Gebhard was elected at a council in Regensburg, March, 1055, and consecrated in St. Peter’s at Rome, April 13, as Victor II. He continued the synodical war against simony, but died as early as July 28, 1057, at Arezzo, of a fever. He was the last of the German popes. The cardinal-abbot of Monte Cassino was elected and consecrated as Stephen IX. (X.), Aug. 3, 1057, by the clergy and people of Rome, without their consulting the German court; but he died in the following year, March 29, 1058. In the meantime a great change had taken place in Germany. Henry III. died in the prime of manhood, Oct. 5, 1056, and left a widow as regent and a son of six years, the ill-fated Henry IV. The long minority reign afforded a favorable opportunity for the reform party to make the papacy independent of the imperial power, which Henry III. had wisely exerted for the benefit of the Church, yet at the expense of her freedom. The Roman nobility, under the lead of the counts of Tusculum, took advantage of Hildebrand’s absence in Germany to reassert its former control of the papacy by electing Benedict X. (1058–1060). But this was a brief intermezzo. On his return, Hildebrand, with the help of Duke Godfrey, expelled the usurping pope, and secured, with the consent of the empress, the election of Gerhard, bishop of Florence, a strong reformer, of ample learning and irreproachable character, who assumed the name of Nicolas II. at his consecration, Jan. 25, 1059. Benedict was deposed, submitted, and obtained absolution. He was assigned a lodging in the church of St. Agnes, where he lived for about twenty years. § 7. Nicolas II. and the Cardinals. 1059–1061.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To return to John XXII., he became a prominent figure in the controversy within the Franciscan order over the tenure of property, a controversy which had been going on from the earliest period between the two parties, the Spirituals, or Observants, and the Conventuals. The last testament of St. Francis, pleading for the practice of absolute poverty, and suppressed in Bonaventura’s Life of the saint, 1263, was not fully recognized in the bull of Nicolas III., 1279, which granted the Franciscans the right to use property as tenants, while forbidding them to hold it in fee simple. With this decision the strict party, the Spirituals, were not satisfied, and the struggle went on. Coelestine V. attempted to bring peace by merging the Spiritual wing with the order of Hermits he had founded, but the measure was without success. Under Boniface VIII. matters went hard with the Spirituals. This pope deposed the general, Raymond Gaufredi, putting in his place John of Murro, who belonged to the laxer wing. Peter John Olivi (d. 1298), whose writings were widely circulated, had declared himself in favor of Nicolas’ bull, with the interpretation that the use of property and goods was to be the "use of necessity,"—usus pauper,—as opposed to the more liberal use advocated by the Conventuals and called usus moderatus. Olivi’s personal fortunes were typical of the fortunes of the Spiritual branch. After his death, the attack made against his memory was, if possible, more determined, and culminated in the charges preferred at Vienne. Murro adopted violent measures, burning Olivi’s writings, and casting his sympathizers into prison. Other prominent Spirituals fled. Angelo Clareno found refuge for a time in Greece, returning to Rome, 1305, under the protection of the Colonna. The case was formally taken up by Clement V., who called a commission to Avignon to devise measures to heal the division, and gave the Spirituals temporary relief from persecution. The proceedings were protracted till the meeting of the council in Vienne, when the Conventuals brought up the case in the form of an arraignment of Olivi, who had come to be regarded almost as a saint. Among the charges were that he pronounced the usus pauper to be of the essence of the Minorite rule, that Christ was still living at the time the lance was thrust into his side, and that the rational soul has not the form of a body. Olivi’s memory was defended by Ubertino da Casale, and the council passed no sentence upon his person.

• From Wild (2012)

  I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I’d been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking. PART ONE THE TEN THOUSAND THINGSThe breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra 1 THE TEN THOUSAND THINGSMy solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother’s grave one last time. There was the driving across the country from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon, and, a few days later, catching a flight to Los Angeles and a ride to the town of Mojave and another ride to the place where the PCT crossed a highway. At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it. And then there was the real live truly doing it. The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself. And finally, once I’d actually gone and done it, walked all those miles for all those days, there was the realization that what I’d thought was the beginning had not really been the beginning at all. That in truth my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail hadn’t begun when I made the snap decision to do it. It had begun before I even imagined it, precisely four years, seven months, and three days before, when I’d stood in a little room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and learned that my mother was going to die.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Not long after that, my grandmother Chloe discovered a lump on her breast. Let’s keep an eye on that, the doctor said. Could just be stress. It wasn’t. By the next year, the cancer had spread to Chloe’s organs. When she grew too weak to care for Johnny, Chloe realized she couldn’t delay the inevitable any longer. Reluctantly, she agreed with her husband that it would be best for everyone to send their young son someplace else to live. Johnny had just turned six. My mother had graduated from college and moved home. She was teaching kindergarten for children with special needs and offered to stay home and care for her little brother instead, but her parents said no. You need your own life, her mother insisted. The Gutenkunsts certainly had the means to pay for Johnny’s care. My grandfather’s business was going gangbusters, especially now that the war was over. They chose to send Johnny to St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, an institution for children and adults with disabilities run by Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi in Jefferson, Wisconsin, sixty miles from the Gutenkunst home. Heartbroken, Chloe consoled herself with the notion that she was not shipping off her precious little boy to some broken-down human warehouse on the outskirts of town. The tidy campus, with its Georgian Revival buildings made of Cream City brick, featured a chapel, theater, swimming pool, grand piano, and even a small golf course. The school, begun in 1904 as St. Coletta’s Institute for Backward Youth, was in its heyday when Johnny arrived in 1949, hailed as the nation’s premier institution for people with disabilities. It was home to 500 residents from all over the country who were cared for by a staff that included 103 nuns. Later that year, Rosemary Kennedy, sister of the future president, came to live there after a lobotomy left her without the ability to talk intelligibly or care for herself. St. Coletta’s proved to be a perfect hideaway for her, tucked in between the cornfields, far from the glare of the national media. The children attended school and church, while the older residents tended the plants in the greenhouse, put on plays, picnics, and pageants, and helped care for the horses, cows, chickens, and pigs that lived in nearby barns. Johnny lost his first tooth there. Such a cheerful child, the nuns said. But was he really? It was easier to believe that, my mother knew. If the family pretended like he was happy here, then surely he must be. Johnny loves singing and dancing, the nuns said. But Johnny barely spoke a word. They found it especially endearing how he cheered enthusiastically at every football and basketball game, regardless of which team had scored. Families coming to visit the campus said they found comfort in the familiar words from St.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But the emperor, through his representative, Theodore Calliopa, the exarch of Ravenna, deposed the pope as a rebel and heretic, and removed him from Rome (June, 653). He imprisoned him with common criminals in Constantinople, exposed him to cold, hunger, and all sorts of injuries, and at last sent him by ship to a cavern in Cherson on the Black Sea (March, 655). Martin bore this cruel treatment with dignity, and died Sept. 16, 655, in exile, a martyr to his faith in the doctrine of two wills. Maximus was likewise transported to Constantinople (653), and treated with even greater cruelty. He was (with two of his disciples) confined in prison for several years, scourged, deprived of his tongue and right hand, and thus mutilated sent, in his old age, to Lazica in Colchis on the Pontus Euxinus, where he died of these injuries, Aug. 13, 662. His two companions likewise died in exile. The persecution of these martyrs prepared the way for the triumph of their doctrine. In the meantime province after province was conquered by the Saracens. § 112. The Sixth Oecumenical Council. A.D. 680. Constans II. was murdered in a bath at Syracuse (668). His son, Constantine IV. Pogonatus (Barbatus, 668–685), changed the policy of his father, and wished to restore harmony between the East and the West. He stood on good or neutral terms with Pope Vitalian (6 57–672), who maintained a prudent silence on the disputed question, and with his successors, Adeodatus (672–676), Donus or Domnus (676–678), and Agatho (678–681). After sufficient preparations, he called, in concert with Agatho, a General Council. It convened in the imperial palace at Constantinople, and held eighteen sessions from Nov. 7, 680, to Sept. 16, 681. it is called the Sixth Oecumenical, and also the First Trullan Synod, from the name of the hall or chapel in the palace.618 The highest number of members in attendance was one hundred and seventy-four, including three papal legates (two priests and one deacon). The emperor presided in person, surrounded by civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries. The acts are preserved in the Greek original and in two old Latin versions.619 After a full discussion of the subject on both sides, the council, in the eighteenth and last session, defined and sanctioned the two-will doctrine, almost in the very language of the letter of Pope Agatho to the emperor.620 Macarius, the patriarch of Alexandria, who adhered to Monotheletism, was deposed. The epistle of Agatho is a worthy sequel of Leo’s Epistle to the Chalcedonian Council, and equally clear and precise in stating the orthodox view. It is also remarkable for the confidence with which it claims infallibility for the Roman church, in spite of the monotheletic heresy of Pope Honorius (who is prudently ignored). Agatho quotes the words of Christ to Peter, Luke 22:31, 32, in favor of papal infallibility, anticipating, as it were, the Vatican decision of 1870.621

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  regrouped in the town of Pella in the upper Jordan valley and maintained contact with other like-minded Jewish Christian communities in the Middle East. Their refusal to become associated with the second great Jewish revolt of 132–5 cost them dear in terms of violence from their fellow Jews, who regarded them as traitors, but even when the crushing of the rebellion brought them relief, their future was one of gradual decline. No longer did they have the prestige of a centre in the sacred city of Jerusalem. The fourth-century Roman scholar Jerome came across surviving Jewish-Christian communities when he moved to live in the East, and he translated their ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ into Latin, but after that they faded from history. The Church of Paul, which had originally seemed the daughter of the Jerusalem Church, rejected the lineal heirs of the Jerusalem Church as imperfect Christians. Soon it regarded their ancient self- deprecating name of Ebionites (‘the poor’ in Hebrew: an echo of Jesus’s blessing on the poor in the Sermon on the Mount) as the description of a heretical sect. Interestingly, the later Christian historian Eusebius claims that the Ebionites rejected the idea of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. That may well have been because, unlike Greek-speaking Christians, they knew that the notion was based on a Greek misreading of Isaiah’s Hebrew prophecy (see p. 81).81 The catastrophe for Jerusalem had another important effect: it left the Jewish intelligentsia determined to make their peace with the Roman authorities, to preserve their religion and to give it a more coherent identity. Like the Jewish Christ-followers, the surviving leaders of mainstream Judaism were forced to regroup away from the former capital and the Romans concentrated them on a former estate of the Herodian royal family at the town of Jamnia (Yavneh), near the coast.82 Here tradition says that this gathering was very influential in giving Judaism a unity of religious belief which it had not previously possessed; it hardly matters whether or not the story was really that simple, because the end result was indeed a much more clearly circumscribed identity for Judaism. The Sadducee leadership was dead or discredited, and so it was the Pharisee group which shaped the future of this ancient monotheistic faith, producing an ever- expanding volume of commentary on the Tanakh and a body of regulations to give a sense of precise boundaries to Jews in their everyday life. That was compensation for the tragedy that they could no longer look to the Temple to provide identity and purpose. Temple sacrifice ended for ever; what was left was the first religious tradition which could have taken the phrase which later became so important to Muslims and called itself the People of the Book. Instead of the Temple, the synagogues were now destined to carry the whole life and devotional activity of the Jewish people. It is interesting to see this development reflected in the Gospels. If any section