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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But now my father had died. Hold tight. I hadn’t ever imagined that making jesses could be a symbolic act. But as I sat there, cutting hide into long strips, soaking them in warm water, stretching them, greasing them with leather dressing, turning them this way and that in this strange room of broken objects, I knew they were more than just pieces of leather. These were the cords that would hold me to the hawk, just as they would hold the hawk to me. I picked up the craft knife and tapered the end of one jess to a point with a long, smooth cut. There. I was conjuring presences, doing this. Suddenly the hawk was very real. And so, in a burst of remembrance so fierce he could have been there in the room, was my father. Grey hair, glasses, blue cotton shirt, a tie slightly askew, a cup of coffee in one hand and a look of amusement on his face. He used to make me cross by calling falconry equipment by the wrong names. He’d call hoods hats. Creances, bits of string. He did it on purpose. I’d get cross and correct him, thinking he was teasing me. And now I saw that Dad had known exactly what these things were called, but in the world of the photojournalist, the more expert you were, the less likely you were to call anything by its proper name. For him, photographs were snaps. Cameras simply kit. It wasn’t ever teasing. He was paying me a compliment. Bloody fourteenth-century French vocabulary. Shit. Shit shit shit. It wasn’t his way at all. My throat hurt. My eyes hurt too, and my heart. I cut the end of the other jess. Shaking fingers. Then I placed the two jesses side by side on the glass tabletop. They matched. Tomorrow, I thought, I’m meeting a man I don’t know off the Belfast ferry and I’m going to hand him this envelope full of paper in exchange for a box containing a goshawk. It seemed the unlikeliest thing imaginable.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  This explains why Choctaws gathered up the bones of their loved ones and placed them in little houses in the community before burying them in a mass grave. The burial practice mirrored the sacred way to live. As in life, so in death: each person would continue to live in the afterlife in the same sacred way they lived on earth; they would continue to be part of the people, of the sacred nation; they would live in community with God in heaven just as we live with God here in this mortal reality. The key theological principle at work is continuity, an unbroken thread of life that passes through death binding the community together in a bond undiminished by time. Choctaws died as they lived: together. Because each Choctaw was one of the chosen people, because each Choctaw was equal in the eyes of God, because each Choctaw had a unique piece of the vision given to humanity by God, then each Choctaw was an intimate and integral part of the whole. Choctaws, like almost every other Native nation in North America maintained a cardinal spiritual understanding: life is not about the individual, life is about the community. Andrew Jackson and his cronies did not share this spiritual vision with their Native American brothers and sisters who were Christian. Jackson prided himself as a rugged individualist. He was esteemed by other macho patriots of his age who also believed they were rugged individualists. Together, they saw their acts of fraud and intimidation against other Christians as their God given right to take what they wanted. They had the power. They had a plan. They were determined to erase Native Americans from the United States and let God sort out the survivors. One of the most important distinctions between traditional Native American societies and European societies is this difference between individuality and individualism. Native Americans embrace individuality, but abhor individualism. In traditional Native communities people prized their own unique sense of who they were as individuals. In the vision quest, they often left on their quest with one name, but returned with another. Because of what they had seen or heard, they had been transformed. Therefore, to honor and celebrate this spiritual moment of transition, of growth and change, they would be given a new name by which the community recognized them. Echoes of this exist in European Christian tradition. When a person enters a religious order as a monk or nun he or she may have their name changed in order to signify this highlight of their spiritual evolution. What could be more individual then a personal name? And what could call more attention to a person than changing a name? Generations of European women with maiden names can attest to this kind of historic practice. Native Americans embraced their individuality in this and a variety of other ways.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Walking away from the ancient communal graves of generations of the People, desperately trying to bring some of them like the bones of Joseph on the journey ahead, having to inter elders and children alone, knowing they would never be found again, lost in a kind of limbo: the pain and suffering of the Choctaws and all of the Native peoples forced onto the Trail of Tears is worthy of a lament for all time. It is a lament shared by Jesus, the Choctaw Messiah. In his first vision quest, according to Matthew (4:1–11), Jesus was “led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.” Like the Choctaw people, he was going out into a wild place, a place unknown and potentially hostile. In keeping with the classic form of the vision quest, Jesus was entering a “lonely” place, a place set apart. He was being attended by an elder, the Spirit, who took him to a place to make his vision quest just as Few Tails had taken Black Elk. As the Native Messiah, Jesus was ready for this experience. He had prepared himself as custom had dictated. He had been cleansed, purified, by the waters of the Jordan River when his brother John baptized him. This fact alone has significance for Native people because, as we saw in the previous chapter, in the concept of family understood by many Native American nations John could be thought of as the brother of Jesus. To understand the first vision quest of Jesus, it is critical to understand the nature of family. Traditional Native American families are not “nuclear.” They are a matrix of relationships that encompass a wide spectrum of people. The children of siblings are not thought of as “nieces” or “nephews,” but a person’s own children.13 These children would refer to what European culture characterizes as “uncles” or “aunts” with terms like “daddy” and “mommy.” An “immediate” family, therefore, is made up of a number of people not included in European definitions. In an even broader sense, these family members are gathered into the person’s clan. The clan system is as central to Native culture as it is, for example, to Scottish culture. Clans are family. They establish kinship ties that are of paramount importance to traditional cultures. Among traditional Choctaws, for example, clans follow a matrilineal line. Many families are part of a specific clan and the people within the clan are understood to be so closely related that they cannot intermarry. Marriage can only take place outside the clan.14 As the Native Messiah, Jesus is a person with a deep sense of relatedness to a whole village of human beings who are direct members of his personal family. He carries a clan marker in his heart, an understanding of the intimate bond he shares with hundreds of other men, women, and children. He is their “brother,” blood bonded to them.

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

  And going up, they cast down the just man, saying to one another: "Let us stone James the Just." And they began to stone him, as he did not die immediately when cast down; but turning round, he knelt down, saying:, I entreat thee, O Lord God and Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Thus they were stoning him, when one of the priests of the sons of Rechab, a son of the Rechabites, spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet (Jer. 35:2), cried out, saying: "Cease, what are you doing? The Just is praying for you." And one of them, a fuller, beat out the brains of the Just with the club that he used to beat out clothes. Thus he suffered martyrdom, and they buried him on the spot where his tombstone is still remaining, by the temple. He became a faithful witness, both to the Jews and Greeks, that Jesus is the Christ. Immediately after this, Vespasian invaded and took Judaea.’ " "Such," adds Eusebius, "is the more ample testimony of Hegesippus, in which he fully coincides with Clement. So admirable a man indeed was James, and so celebrated among all for his justice, that even the wiser part of the Jews were of opinion that this was the cause of the immediate siege of Jerusalem, which happened to them for no other reason than the crime against him. Josephus also has not hesitated to superadd this testimony in his works: ’These things,’ says he, ’happened to the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was the brother of him that is called Christ and whom the Jews had slain, notwithstanding his preeminent justice.’ The same writer also relates his death, in the twentieth book of his Antiquities, in the following words,’ " etc. Then Eusebius gives the account of Josephus. § 28. Preparation for the Mission to the Gentiles. The planting of the church among the Gentiles is mainly the work of Paul; but Providence prepared the way for it by several steps, before this apostle entered upon his sublime mission. 1. By the conversion of those half-Gentiles and bitter enemies of the Jews, the Samaritans, under the preaching and baptism of Philip the evangelist, one of the seven deacons of Jerusalem, and under the confirming instruction of the apostles Peter and John. The gospel found ready entrance into Samaria, as had been prophetically hinted by the Lord in the conversation at Jacob’s well.338 But there we meet also the first heretical perversion of Christianity by Simon Magus, whose hypocrisy and attempt to degrade the gift of the Holy Spirit received from Peter a terrible rebuke. (Hence the term simony, for sordid traffic in church offices and dignities.) This encounter of the prince of the apostles with the arch-heretic was regarded in the ancient church, and fancifully represented, as typifying the relation of ecclesiastical orthodoxy to deceptive heresy.

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

  Yes, it’s tempting to find a home in our pain, to define ourselves by the awful experiences we’ve endured. But if I’m learning one thing from my family and friends, it’s that there is an altogether better way. My friend Tara stood up at church last night and spoke of the multiple racist statements people have made to her face throughout her life and of the outright physical attacks she’s suffered and of the pain she’s known year after year. Some of this inexcusable behavior occurred at a previous house of worship, which made Tara leery of reengaging in a local church. “But I decided to make a choice,” she said with bravery. “I am choosing to trust again.” She went on to tell the story of joining our church and launching a series of racial reconciliation conversations that are bringing together women of various ethnicities to discuss how we truly come together and do better. I look at Tara’s impact on our congregation, and I think, How could someone so wronged turn back to people who hurt her and say, “I want to build a bridge to get back to you. I want to try again”? Tara would answer my question with a single word: Jesus. The way of Jesus shifts everything. In Jesus, we can acknowledge our frustration, pain, and suffering without abdicating our peace and joy. In Jesus, we can change where we fight from without changing what we fight for. By the power of Jesus, we can demonstrate to ourselves and others that, regardless of how grim the situation seems, God is in the business of redeeming all things. Out of gratitude to Jesus, we can see God’s purposes in our pain. Tara understands that while the fight she’s in is real, she is assured certain victory in the end. And from that place of grateful confidence, she can reach out, she can trust, she can love. Seeking God’s Purpose Behind the Pain Again, we can acknowledge our suffering without abdicating our joy. We can fight for justice but from a place of peace. Because we don’t find our identity in a cause, we are secure in who we are in Jesus. And then there’s this: when we make the brave shift from victimhood to gratitude, we affirm our understanding that God remains committed to redeeming all things. Paul told the Philippians he was sure that everything that had happened to him had happened for a specific purpose.

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

  “Ah, it was nothing. You see I’m still here. Alive and breathing!” And again he laughed and shook his head, as if the car worked independently of him, as if our safe arrival would be yet one more example of God’s ample blessings. The restaurant was Mexican, beside a marina, and we chose a table with a view out over the water. I ordered a beer, Roy a margarita, and for a while we made small talk about my work and his accounting job at a large mortgage finance company. He ate with gusto, drank a second margarita; he laughed and joked about his adventures in America. But as the meal wore on, the effort he was making began to show. Eventually, I came around to asking him why his wife hadn’t joined us. His smile evaporated. “Ah, I think we’re getting divorced,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “She says she’s tired of me staying out late. She says I drink too much. She says I’m becoming just like the Old Man.” “What do you think?” “What do I think?” He lowered his head, then looked at me somberly, the flame of the tea candles dancing like tiny bonfires across the lenses of his glasses. “The truth is,” he said, leaning his weight forward, “I don’t think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.” For the next hour, he recounted all the hard times that Auma had spoken of—of being yanked away from his mother and everything familiar; the Old Man’s sudden descent into poverty; the arguments and breakdown and eventual flight. He told me about his life after leaving our father’s house; how, bouncing from relative to relative, he had gained admission to the University of Nairobi, then secured a job with a local accounting firm after graduation; how he had taught himself the discipline of work, always arriving at his job early and completing his tasks no matter how late he was out the night before. Listening to him, I felt the same admiration that I’d felt when listening to Auma talk about her life, the resilience they had both displayed, the same stubborn strength that had lifted them out of bad circumstances. Except in Auma I had also sensed a willingness to put the past behind her, a capacity to somehow forgive, if not necessarily forget. Roy’s memories of the Old Man seemed more immediate, more taunting; for him the past remained an open sore.

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

  And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won. The day before Thanksgiving, Harold Washington died. It occurred without warning. Only a few months earlier, Harold had won reelection, handily beating Vrdolyak and Byrne, breaking the deadlock that had prevailed in the city for the previous four years. He had run a cautious campaign this time out, professionally managed, without any of the fervor of 1983; a campaign of consolidation, of balanced budgets and public works. He reached out to some of the old-time Machine politicians, the Irish and the Poles, ready to make peace. The business community sent him their checks, resigned to his presence. So secure was his power that rumblings of discontent had finally surfaced within his own base, among black nationalists upset with his willingness to cut whites and Hispanics into the action, among activists disappointed with his failure to tackle poverty head-on, and among people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise. Harold didn’t pay such critics much attention. He saw no reason to take any big risks, no reason to hurry. He said he’d be mayor for the next twenty years. And then death: sudden, simple, final, almost ridiculous in its ordinariness, the heart of an overweight man giving way. It rained that weekend, cold and steady. In the neighborhood, the streets were silent. Indoors and outside, people cried. The black radio stations replayed Harold’s speeches, hour after hour, trying to summon the dead. At City Hall, the lines wound around several blocks as mourners visited the body, lying in state. Everywhere black people appeared dazed, stricken, uncertain of direction, frightened of the future. By the time of the funeral, Washington loyalists had worked through the initial shock. They began to meet, regroup, trying to decide on a strategy for maintaining control, trying to select Harold’s rightful heir. But it was too late for that. There was no political organization in place, no clearly defined principles to follow. The entire of black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun. Now that he was gone, no one could agree on what that presence had meant.

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

  n.[m. | wailing, lamentation, mourn:‏ נְהִיז ing song “5 abs. Am 5°+5t.; “721 Je 9%-‏ judgment 111 28 ace, cogn.; Ji‏ 8'י' wailing, at‏ NWI, 4°23, || 12), v7 )6. ad., || AY‏ על".0) ?9 (||*P2, DIA) ; mowrnin‏ 3 (קול 1‘( v3‏ YT Am 5% of 7-5 mourners, 8‏ נ' in mourning song; cf. 76 (9, where tau‏ q-v. (C‏ לפ Ez 2” (|| 3x,‏ הַי also‏ ,)72%||( Berthol).‏ .61 , נהי Co rd.‏ n.f. id. (si vera 1.);—only‏ נְהיהז ayy m3 na , where, however, Thes al. der.‏ p. 228asupr.); but prob‏ .זי (Niph.,‏ היה fr.‏ rupt, del. 69 Sta74W 8° 12" We Now as di‏ m.[m.] si vera 1., wailing (AV‏ ]2[ 1 Ex 27®‏ וְנְשָאוּ ;—ADP DP poe‏ )22"=( v. MV; so Wer who, h‏ ,בּנִיהָם 6 © improb.;‏ ever, del. as gloss, ef, Buhl Berthol. \‏ .6 (נָ)הִי =) n.[m.] si vera 1., wailing‏ דקר 1 where probably read 12 Ol Co, ¢‏ , יָהִי "2 Ez‏ .(קינים והגה ||( Berthol‏ T [213] vb. Pi. lead, guide to a w ing-place or station, and cause to rest th bring to a station or place of rest; guide ; refresh (cf. Ar. 5 watering- 1 station, stage of 5 road ; > also As. נהלל plain all the passages from this As. ndlu ; against him Vv. Pri LOPh 58 Che Acad., April 12, 1884 DHM ZF 1-876 סע ,21.1886 גכ א‎ at prop. by RDWilson?*”- Rey.(N.¥.), April, 1885 (careful art.), of. Che? 2 crit. wy :-—Pi. Pf. 2 ms. ְהַלְתָ‎ Ex ז‎ 5% station), and cause to rest there, subj. "8 shepherd, Is 49"° (“by loc. ; עַל".6) שץצ, (נהג||‎ loc.; |), Is go" )|| א קַבִּץ, רעה‎ | 2. lead or bring to a station, a goal,” subj. Ex 15" (song; no obj. expressed, “by 106.; || (נחה‎ ; human subj. 2 Ch 28” and they conducted all the feeble of them by means of (2) asses (|| 829). 3. Lead, guide: fig., md pel PS Is 5178 there 78 no one to be a guide for her, i.e. for Jerus., drunk with cup of »’s fury (|| 722 PM); י'‎ subj. y 314 lead me )| הְתִנְחְנִי‎ 4. give rest to (?) IBN 2Ch32” and he gave them rest on every hand, cf. ₪0 B (=/DD eta) ונח‎ 1 Ch22*+, prob. so read here, v. Be DHM Ot). 5. refresh with food, ’3") בל‎ Gn 47" (J). Hithp. Jmpf. prob. journey by stations, stages, only rs. 120INS Gn 33% (J), L will pro- ceed, journey on, by stages (i.e. deliberately, with family and cattle). bon v. 1. .נלל‎ tI. נַהַלל‎ n.m. pasture, or perh. (EncBi™) watering-place (see V), only pl. נהללים‎ re.

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

  "Quo vulneratus insuper "Where deep for us the spear was dyed, Mucrone diro lanceae, Life’s torrent rushing from His side: Ut nos lavaret crimine To wash us in the precious flood, Manavit unda et sanguine. Where mingled water flowed, and blood. "Impleta sunt quae concinit "Fulfilled is all that David told David fideli carmine In true prophetic song of old: Dicens: in nationibus Amidst the nations, God, saith he, Regnavit a ligno Deus. Hath reigned and triumphed from the Tree. "Arbor decora et fulgida "O Tree of Beauty! Tree of Light! Ornata regis purpura, O Tree with royal purple dight! Electa digno stipite Elect upon whose faithful breast Tam sancta membra tangere. Those holy limbs should find their rest! "Beata cuius brachiis "On whose dear arms, so widely flung, Pretium pependit saeculi, The weight of this world’s ransom hung Statera facta saeculi The price of human kind to pay, Praedamque tulit tartaris."1276 And spoil the spoiler of his prey!" Pange, Lingua, Gloriosi Proelium Certaminis.1277 "Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle,1278 with completed victory rife, And above the Cross’s trophy, tell the triumph of the strife; How the world’s Redeemer conquer’d, by surrendering of His life. "God, his Maker, sorely grieving that the first-born Adam fell, When he ate the noxious apple, whose reward was death and hell, Noted then this wood, the ruin of the ancient wood to quell. "For the work of our Salvation needs would have his order so, And the multiform deceiver’s art by art would overthrow; And from thence would bring the medicine whence the venom of the foe. "Wherefore, when the sacred fulness of the appointed time was come, This world’s Maker left His Father, left His bright and heavenly home, And proceeded, God Incarnate, of the Virgin’s holy womb. "Weeps the Infant in the manger that in Bethlehem’s stable stands; And His limbs the Virgin Mother doth compose in swaddling bands, Meetly thus in linen folding of her God the feet and hands. "Thirty years among us dwelling, His appointed time fulfilled, Born for this, He meets His Passion, for that this He freely willed: On the Cross the Lamb is lifted, where His life-blood shall be spilled. "He endured the shame and spitting, vinegar, and nails, and reed; As His blessed side is opened, water thence and blood proceed: Earth, and sky, and stars, and ocean, by that flood are cleansed indeed. "Faithful Cross! above all other, one and only noble Tree! None in foliage, none in blossom, none in fruit thy peers may be; Sweetest wood and sweetest iron, sweetest weight is hung on thee!1279 "Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory! thy relaxing sinews bend; For awhile the ancient rigor, that thy birth bestowed, suspend; And the King of heavenly beauty on thy bosom gently tend. "Thou alone wast counted worthy this world’s ransom to uphold; For a shipwreck’d race preparing harbor, like the Ark of old: With the sacred blood anointed from the wounded Lamb that roll’d.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For him, photographs were snaps. Cameras simply kit. It wasn’t ever teasing. He was paying me a compliment. Bloody fourteenth-century French vocabulary. Shit. Shit shit shit. It wasn’t his way at all. My throat hurt. My eyes hurt too, and my heart. I cut the end of the other jess. Shaking fingers. Then I placed the two jesses side by side on the glass tabletop. They matched. Tomorrow, I thought, I’m meeting a man I don’t know off the Belfast ferry and I’m going to hand him this envelope full of paper in exchange for a box containing a goshawk. It seemed the unlikeliest thing imaginable. The goshawk I was about to collect had been bred in an aviary near Belfast. Breeding goshawks isn’t for the faint-hearted. I’ve had friends who’ve tried it and shaken their heads after only one season, scratching their newly greyed hair in a sort of post-traumatic stupor. ‘Never again’, they say. ‘Ever. Most stressful thing I’ve ever done.’ Try it, and you discover there’s a very fine line between goshawk sexual excitement and terrible, mortal violence. You have to watch your hawks constantly, monitor their behaviour, ready yourself for intervention. It’s no good just putting a couple of goshawks in an aviary and leaving them to it. More often than not the female will kill her mate. So instead you house them in separate but adjoining solid-walled aviaries, with a barred hatch between the two through which the pair can see each other. As winter turns to spring they conduct their courtship, like Pyramus and Thisbe, through the gap in the wall, calling, displaying, dropping their powder-blue wings and fluffing their white undertail coverts that look for all the world like a pair of capacious marabou bloomers, and only when the female seems ready – a piece of fine judgement that does not admit error – do you let the male into the breeding chamber. If all goes well, they mate, lay eggs, and a new generation of home-bred goshawks, downy white chicks with bleary eyes and tiny talons, enters the world. I’d never met the breeder of my new hawk, but I knew already he was a man of steel nerves and superhuman patience. White’s hawk was taken from the wild. No one bred goshawks in captivity in the 1930s: there was no need to try. There were a hundred thousand wild gosses out there in European forests, and no import restrictions to speak of. Like nearly all falconers’ goshawks back then, White’s had come from a nest in Germany. ‘A bundle of precipitous sticks and some white droppings’ was how he imagined his hawk’s birthplace: he’d never seen a goshawk nest.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I have a suspicion that all those hours making jesses and leashes weren’t just preparation games. In a scrapbook of my childhood drawings is a small pencil sketch of a kestrel sitting on a glove. The glove’s just an outline, and not a good one – I was six when I drew it. The hawk has a dark eye, a long tail, and a tiny fluffy spray of feathers under its hooked beak. It is a happy kestrel, though a ghostly one; like the glove, it is strangely transparent. But one part of it has been carefully worked: its legs and taloned toes, which are larger than they ought to be, float above the glove because I had no idea how to draw toes that gripped. All the scales and talons on all the toes are delineated with enormous care, and so are the jesses around the falcon’s legs. A wide black line that is the leash extends from them to a big black dot on the glove, a dot I’ve gone over again and again with the pencil until the paper is shined and depressed. It is an anchor point. Here, says the picture, is a kestrel on my hand. It is not going away. It cannot leave. It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behaviour as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother, who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight. Perhaps those jesses might have been unspoken attempts to hold on to something that had already flown away. I spent the first few weeks of my life in an incubator, full of tubes, under electric light, skin patched and raw, eyes clenched shut. I was the lucky one. I was tiny, but survived. I had a twin brother. He didn’t. He died soon after he was born. I know almost nothing about what happened, only this: it was a tragedy that wasn’t ever to be spoken of. It was a time when that’s what hospitals told grieving parents to do. Move on. Forget about it. Look, you have a child! Get on with your lives. When I found out about my twin many years later, the news was surprising. But not so surprising. I’d always felt a part of me was missing; an old, simple absence. Could my obsession with birds, with falconry in particular, have been born of that first loss? Was that ghostly kestrel a grasped-at apprehension of my twin, its carefully drawn jesses a way of holding tight to something I didn’t know I’d lost, but knew had gone? I suppose it is possible.

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

  Sandra Wilson writes, “Hurt people hurt people.” 52 (Not that this is an excuse or that being hurt automatically means you will hurt others as a precursor.) Sadly, when this pain is unresolved, we can get hurt the most by the people we expect to love us the most. Colleen’s aunt pushed her own pain onto her niece, from woman to girl, day after day. And just as bad: our countries, in all their brokenness, can hurt people and families beyond measure for centuries. Even as policies on paper can change, those emotional and physical scars are inherited well beyond the bodies that originally received them. In the United States, when we look at our history and acknowledge the lasting impacts of slavery, stealing lands from Indigenous tribes, and placing Japanese Americans in internment camps, among so many other horrific examples, there is no way that we can deny the intergenerational trauma that has been passed down—and how it still is impacting those living today. It’s no wonder that the descendants of the people who survived these atrocities live in daily fear and are distrustful of law enforcement, our economic structure, and the government at large, not to mention that they are actively enduring their own present injustices. They have not been protected and in fact, they have intentionally been maligned. We cannot deny this reality and it’s up to each of us to be a part of changing this. These crimes can have extensive effects. Even though we may not have directly lived through the atrocities of our country’s history, our bodies may say otherwise. We can be impacted on a biological, microscopic level. These inquiries into the effects of intergenerational trauma began when researchers started studying Holocaust survivors and noticed that, in some cases, the children of concentration camp survivors seemed to be more traumatized than the survivors themselves. 53 Since the 1990s, these studies have gone even further, examining the impact of generational trauma on gene expression, a field of study known as epigenetics. One significant study found that children may be affected by exposure to parental trauma not only before they were born, but before they were even conceived. 54 All this to say, our DNA can literally be modified because of the pain that our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and generations prior endured. We’re more than our cells, though. These narratives of trauma are embedded just as deeply. Rightly so, many of us have learned from our families that the world is unsafe and that people cannot be trusted. As people have witnessed one horrific act of injustice after another, we would be foolish not to.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The whole long history of their struggle, survival, and spirituality was in my mind and heart. My lament was more than a question about my own doubts; it was a question about the integrity of my culture. Memories of racism, genocide, exploitation, and humiliation stood with me in that circle of cornmeal. Issues of the identity of God, the truth of the Bible, the authenticity of tribal traditions were all there as well. In myself, I may have been no one special, but like every human being I embodied the sum of my life story. I carried the cultural baggage of my birth. As a Choctaw, I carried the Trail of Tears with me. Knowing whether or not Jesus made that walk with my ancestors was of enormous consequence. The epiphany of the crow came into the heart of this torn spiritual reality and began the process of healing it. Not instantly. Not easily. But with authority. With power. When we assert the validity of our visions, as humble as they may be, we acknowledge the power of God to change reality. We acknowledge transformation. We acknowledge that there is no history, whether personal or corporate, no matter how painful or distorted, that cannot be redeemed by God’s intervention. In an age such as the one in which we live where both individuals and cultures are so isolated, there are few messages of hope more important than the one we can announce by speaking of our visions. There is a poignant comment that Black Elk makes when he is explaining to John Neihardt why he is willing to have his vision recorded: I am going to tell you the story of my life; and if it was only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make so much of his winters, even when they bend him like the snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, to be grass upon the hills This then is not the tale of a great hunter or a great warrior, or of a great traveler So also have many others done, and better than I. But now that I can see it all from a lonely hilltop, I know that it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in a bloody snow. 24 Like Black Elk, you and I are ordinary people with no special claim to God’s grace or insight. And like him, we have also been given the opportunity to make our lament, to go crying for the vision that will shape our lives, and perhaps help to shape the lives of many others.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And it happened every time. So I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to eight-year-old me that Gos snapped his leash and was lost in the wind and rain. I greeted it with sad resignation. But it was dreadful all the same. But I hadn’t trained a hawk then, and I had no understanding of loss. I did not know how White felt. Now I did. I sat on my bed and it pressed on my chest like a weight the size of a hill. I felt it. For the first time I understood that vast blankness that shuttered his heart in horror. ‘I cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.’ His heart is torn in half. The pigeon in his hand is rigid with terror; it has turned from a bird to a thing of iron and feathers. Its red eye is blank, its little beak panting. He steels himself and throws it high in the air towards the hawk in the tree. The pigeon he’d bought to trap the hawks in the wood – such irony – rises up, trailing the creance behind it. Gos stoops upon it like a vast predatory butterfly, but then pulls away and swings into the next tree. White pulls the pigeon to earth, picks it up, follows, and throws it out again. He fishes for Gos with the pigeon as a fisherman casts lures for a pike. He has been doing this for a while now, and each time the hawk’s stoop brings it closer to the pigeon and White’s waiting hands. He bends to pick the pigeon from the ground, exhausted, wings spread, its flight feathers so wet they look like fraying pencils. He knows this terrified bird can barely fly. He knows that the next time he throws it into the air the hawk will catch it. Just one more time. But he cannot do it. He knows this pigeon. He had tamed it. It had sat companionably on his finger. It was his friend. His world is broken; he is breaking his Word. It is brute cruelty. He cannot do this any more. He remembers a passage in Blaine’s book on capturing hawks while they sleep, hugs the soaking pigeon to his breast and leaves Gos to nightfall. He returns with a ladder, a rope, a torch and the salmon rod he’d used once before to hook Gos down from a tree. He stands under the tree, trembling with hope of success, when Graham Wheeler, the farmer’s lad who had come to help, runs up. Gos takes fright and slips from the tree into darkness.

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

  I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him—and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son. I turned on the light and dug out his old letters. I remembered his only visit—the basketball he had given me and how he had taught me to dance. And I realized, perhaps for the first time, how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint. I stepped to the window and looked outside, listening to the first sounds of morning—the growl of the garbage trucks, footsteps in the apartment next door. I needed to search for him, I thought to myself, and talk with him again. [image file=image_rsrc2W4.jpg] CHAPTER SEVEN [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] IN 1983, I DECIDED to become a community organizer There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change. And my friends, black and white, would heartily commend me for my ideals before heading toward the post office to mail in their graduate school applications. I couldn’t really blame them for being skeptical. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can construct a certain logic to my decision, show how becoming an organizer was a part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers and the loss of Lolo to power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father’s death. I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone—and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom. But such recognition came only later. At the time, about to graduate from college, I was operating mainly on impulse, like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception. In classes and seminars, I would dress up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I’d discovered in books, thinking—falsely—that the slogans meant something, that they somehow made what I felt more amenable to proof. But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.

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

  "The son whom the Lord had lent you for a season, He has taken away. There is no ground, therefore, for those silly and wicked complaints of foolish men: O blind death! O hard fate! O implacable daughters of Destiny! O cruel fortune! The Lord who had lodged him here for a season, at this stage of his career has called him away. What the Lord has done, we must, at the same time, consider has not been done rashly, nor by chance, neither from having been impelled from without, but by that determinate counsel, whereby He not only foresees, decrees, and executes nothing but what is just and upright in itself, but also nothing but what is good and wholesome for us. Where justice and good judgment reign paramount, there it is impious to remonstrate. When, however, our advantage is bound up with that goodness, how great would be the degree of ingratitude not to acquiesce, with a calm and well-ordered temper of mind, in whatever is the wish of our Father .... "It is God who has sought back from you your son, whom He had committed to you to be educated, on the condition that he might always be His own. And, therefore, He took him away, because it was both of advantage to him to leave this world, and by this bereavement to humble you, or to make trial of your patience. If you do not understand the advantage of this, without delay, first of all, setting aside every other object of consideration, ask of God that He may show you. Should it be His will to exercise you still farther, by concealing it from you, submit to that will, that you may become wiser than the weakness of thine own understanding can ever attain to.

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

  +5)N interj. (onomatop.; cf. o6/, 43) woe! an impassioned expression of grief and de- spair: usually with dative °: אוי‎ Is 6° woe to me! for I am undone, so 24% Je 10 15"; אוי לָנּ‎ woe to us! 18 47* Je 45 6; 5 NIT Je 43458; 35 NIN La 5". With the 2nd or 3rd ps. often implying a denunciation; 4278 anid Nu 21” (=Je 48") Je 137 Ez 16% re- peated qb SN אזי‎ ; Ts 39 pvipad אוי‎ vy! Ho 78 9° (|| pnp .(שד‎ With a voe. (or implicit accus.) Ez 24% הַדָּמִים‎ WY MN; absol. Nu 24%. Used as a subst. Pr 23% “8 "9 (|| אבוי‎ "2). TANS = אזי‎ y 20%) mix. IIT. TM (to cry ix, howl cf. Ar. 31, tocry $1 +tobeassumed prob.as source of two foll. words). +11. [אי]‎ n.m. jackal (howler, for אָו'*‎ v. Ba*®*®, ef. Ar. Sl 2 \, whence wv)” Ki5)—pl. DMs, Is 13° 34% Je 50° (inhabitant of desert, ruin). pte איה‎ n.f. hawk, falcon, kite (perh. fr. ery; cf. Ar. 3352) a kind of hawk) Ly 11¥ Dt 14* generic, cf. ְמִינָה‎ & Di; Jb 287 (keen-sighted). tir. (T° n.pr.m. ( falcon) 1. a Horite Gn 36%1Chi®. 2. father of Rizpah 25 apr. (Bab. Avél (Amél)‏ אדיל מרדך1 Maruduk, man of Merodach) son & successor‏ Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, B.c. 562-‏ 01 K 25” (vy. COT)=Je 52".‏ 2 ,60 I. DN (be foolish, cf. ,יאל‎ 6 Ay. זנ‎ grow thick (of fluids)). SUN | adj. foolish—'x Jb 5°+; pl. DON yp 107" +, ete.;—foolish, Pr 29° א')‎ &*) Ho 97 (pred. of prophet); 61. 18 35°, elsewhere n.m. fool (always morally bad), who despises wisdom & discipline Pr 17 15°; mocks at guilt 14°; is quarrelsome 20%; licentious 7*; it is folly & useless to instruct him 16% 27% (1g t. Pr); ef. also Je 4” Jb 57° 15197 ץ‎ 107". 17 איל adj. id. Zc 11.‏ אוְלִיז n.f. folly.—abs. Pr 12%: estr.‏ 2 אוּלֶת y 38°, etc.;—folly, special pro-‏ אוּלְתִי sf.‏ 2 +14 (vy. 23) Prr2™+ (r2t.); c.ONNB‏ כַּסִילִים duct of‏ only 16% 27 for alliteration.‏ אָולִיים .€ Pera‏ It is bound up in mind of boy, to be removed‏ personif.‏ א" ;22° only by rod of discipline Pr‏ Pr 14};‏ הכמת נָשִים tears down house built by‏ it is contrasted with 1333 Pr 14” 157).‏ II. ,אול‎ IN (be in front of, precede, lead ; v.Thes NG™4 1. 74; SBA 182,175, who comp. Ar. js for aa Targ. אוולא‎ ; cf. Sab. אול‎ DHM Epler. Denkm. 5.5. yon the other hand 1,800 5-5: +9 ₪ sub 1. אלה‎ infr.) +1 [אוּל]‎ n.[m.] body, belly; sf. אוּלֶם‎ (in contempt) 17 3° (lit. their front, prominent part). +11. [bass] n.[m. | leading man, noble; pl. estr, PINT אוּלי‎ 2 K 24% Kt (Qr 8 +. a. ([איל]‎

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The rain falls on the glades, avenues, and all the temples and obelisks of Stowe, and Gos sits there, imperious, indecisive, and horribly soaked, for White’s constant stroking had taken the waterproofing oil from his feathers. The gale buffets his perch. It is not comfortable here. It is not comfortable at all. He opens his wings, intending to fly down to the man with the food in his hand. He leaves the tree, turns in mid-air , starts to descend. White’s heart, beating. The hawk approaching. Then the wind fills his wings and pushes, and the hawk, who has no skill and does not know how to fly in a gale like this, is sucked away downwind and is gone. There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are. I was a lucky child. Until I saw that pheasant die in a winter hedge, all I knew of death came from books – and one kind in particular . I was looking at a whole shelf of them now. That morning I’d filled the car with boxes, put Mabel on her passenger-seat perch and driven back to my parents’ house for the weekend. My parents’ house . I supposed it was my mother’s house now. I had come back because I was preparing to move. A dear friend had offered me his house while he and his family went to China for a few months, and I was impossibly grateful to them, but the prospect of losing my beautiful college house was hateful. I stacked the boxes in the garage then sat with my mother in the kitchen while Mabel loafed and bathed and preened on the sunny lawn. We drank tea, reminisced, talked about Dad and times gone by . There was a lot of laughter . It was good to see her . But it was not easy to be there. We sat in chairs that Dad should be sitting in, drank from cups he had drunk from, and when I saw his careful handwriting on a note pinned by the back door it got too much. Much too much. I ran into my old room, sat on the little bed and hugged my knees, pain worming around inside my chest like a thing with a million tiny teeth and claws.

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

  It was and always will be inexcusable. And though not an unavoidable causation, in her case, that trauma likely contributed to the development of her BPD symptoms. While not a requirement by any means (many folks with BPD have not experienced trauma), it’s not uncommon that people with BPD have in fact experienced trauma in their lifetimes. In fact, estimates from a range of studies show that 30 to 80 percent of folks with BPD have endured trauma at some point in their lives. 45 Trauma can come in many different forms. The DSM-5 defines a traumatic event as “exposure to threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence”; it can be directly experienced or indirectly experienced by witnessing others, learning of something that happened to a loved one, or repeatedly facing aversive events (as in the case of emergency responders). 46 And even though about 70 percent of folks experience this definition of trauma at some point in their lives (with over 30 percent endorsing at least four or more traumatic events), it’s not a given that a person will go on to develop BPD, PTSD, or another mental health condition for that matter. 47 There are so many factors at play, including our genes, our environment, and our lived experiences, that can impact whether or not we experience symptoms. Trauma shows up differently depending on the circumstances. There’s been a designation of “large-T” traumas and “small-T” traumas or “micro- traumas.” 48,49 Large-T traumas can include singular events such as natural disasters, mass shootings, or car accidents that can impact communities, families, and individuals. Micro-traumas are the daily cuts that build up over time, including bullying and micro-aggressions, and lead to a lifetime of collective traumatic experiences. Furthermore, some of us experience complex trauma, where we’re enduring frequent, large-T traumas, such as ongoing physical and sexual abuse, living in poverty, intimate partner violence, or being a victim of war or discrimination, among other examples. 50,51 In Colleen’s case, it was all too much, as she was experiencing complex trauma for years throughout her childhood. Enduring regular though unpredictable physical abuse, parents who left her, and unstable friendships was more than enough to contribute to her symptom-atology. Time and time again, Colleen came to expect that others would be cruel to her, that the world was unsafe, and that she didn’t belong. WHY WE REALLY ARE GENERATION ANXIETY The story of Colleen’s trauma really didn’t start with her, though. Inter- generational trauma is all too real, and we’ve got to talk more about it. Though I never met Colleen’s aunt, I’d venture a strong guess that she has her own tales of trauma, as she had to leave her country in Taiwan and start over in the United States. As Dr.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For years I’d explained that I’d rather eat hawk-caught food than things that have had a blind and crowded life in a barn or battery cage. One minute the rabbit is there, twitching its nose in a field that smells of nettles and grassy roots, then it is running, and then it is caught, and then it is dead. I’d told people that there are no injuries in hawking: either things are caught or they escape, and I’d told them, too, that nothing is wasted: everything the hawk catches is eaten by the hawk or me. If you choose to eat meat, I’d said, this is the best way I know to get it. But these arguments seemed petty now, and pointless. They had nothing to do with what it was like. To be there, with a hawk and a caught rabbit that twitched and kicked and died. And the world biting into me. The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away. ‘But how could you?’ people asked. Someone said it was a way of destroying the world a piece at a time after my father’s death. ‘Were the rabbits you?’ another asked. No. ‘Were you killing yourself?’ No. ‘Were you sorry?’ Yes. But the regret wasn’t that I had killed an animal. It was regret for the animal. I felt sorry for it. Not because I felt I was better than the animal. It wasn’t a patronising sorrow. It was the sorrow of all deaths. I was happy for Mabel’s success and I mourned the individual rabbit. Kneeling by its corpse I’d feel a sharp awareness of my edges. The rain prickling on my collar. A pain in one knee. The scratches on my legs and arms from pushing myself through a hedge that had not hurt until now. And a sharp, wordless comprehension of my own mortality. Yes, I will die. I learned that momentary shouldering of responsibility that allowed me to reach down and administer the coup de grâce to a rabbit held tight in Mabel’s feet. A part of me had to click into place and there was another part of me I had to put far away. There’s no better phrase than the old one to describe it: You have to harden your heart. I learned that hardening the heart was not the same as not caring. The rabbit was always important. Its life was never taken lightly. I was accountable for these deaths. For the first time in my life I wasn’t a watcher any more. I was being accountable to myself, to the world and all the things in it. But only when I killed. The days were very dark.