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 Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I woke the next day as I always did, with the image of my mother’s face fixed in my mind, only this time it didn’t recede. She looked at me through the car window, then the door opened and we tumbled into her. I buried my face in her neck and wept into her hair. “You’re here. You’re really here.” Gary climbed all over her. “Mama, Mama, Mama,” he called again and again. “Yes, yes, I’m really here. It’s okay. It’s okay now.” That morning in Baton Rouge Mama promised she would never leave again. By the time the revival ended, she had changed her mind. “It’s just for two or three months, kids. There’s no one to play for the revivals right now, and until we find someone, I have to do it.” She said it broke her heart to leave us, and I believe it did. She cried and cried as she climbed into the backseat of someone’s old black Chevy. My brother, a quiet, easygoing kid, fell apart as the car drove away. He climbed the chain-link fence and when someone pulled him down, he kicked and flailed and cut his legs on the pointed metal pieces at the top. Blood ran in small streams down his legs as he raced the length of the fence howling, “No,” his mouth stretched into a wide, red o, like the entrance to a fun house. My mom’s face, framed in the car’s rear window, wore a look of surprise. Her arm waved from side to side, good- bye, good-bye. I watched the car grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared into that thin space where heaven and earth meet. The End-Time 1966–2001 SUPPOSE YOU BREAK THIS WORLD TO BITS, ANOTHER MAY ARISE. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1843, the French writer Gérard de Nerval visited Cairo and noted ironically that French bourgeois values were being imposed on the Islamic city. Muhammad Ali’s new palaces were built like barracks and furnished with mahogany armchairs and oil portraits of the pasha’s sons in their new army uniforms. The exotic, oriental Cairo of Nerval’s imagination lies under dust and ashes; the modern spirit and its exigencies have triumphed over it like death. In ten years’ time, European streets will have cut the dusty and drab old town at right angles.… What glitters and expands is the quarter of the Franks, the town of the English, the Maltese and the Marseilles French. 51 The buildings of the new Cairo, built by Muhammad Ali and Ismail, represented an architecture of domination. This would become even more obvious during the British occupation, as the embassies, banks, villas, and monuments built in parts of Cairo expressed European investment in this Middle Eastern country, exhibiting a jumble of styles, periods, and functions that would have been deemed incoherent in Europe. For, as the British anthropologist Michael Gilsenan points out, Cairo “was not passing through the same stages of a unilinear sequence of development that Europe had already passed through on the way to capitalism.” It was not becoming an industrial center, not moving purposefully from tradition to modernity, or acquiring a new urban coherence: Rather, it was being made into a dependent local metropolis through which a society might be administered and dominated. The spatial forms grew out of a relationship based on force and a world economic order in which in this case Britain played the crucial role. 52 The whole experience of modernization was crucially different in the Middle East: it was not one of empowerment, autonomy, and innovation, as it had been in Europe, but a process of deprivation, dependence, and patchy, imperfect imitation . For the vast majority of the people, who were not involved in the process, it was also an experience of alienation. A “modern” city, such as Muhammad Ali’s Cairo, was built on entirely different principles from those that gave meaning to the indigenous towns of Egypt. As Gilsenan points out, tourists, colonialists, and travelers have often found Oriental cities confusing and even frightening: the unnamed and unnumbered streets and twisting passages seem to have no order or orientation; Westerners get lost and can make no sense of their surroundings. For most of the colonized peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, the new Westernized cities were equally incomprehensible, and bore no relation to their instinctive sense of what a city should be. They frequently felt lost in their own country. Many of these superimposed Westernized cities surrounded the “old town,” which, in comparison, looked dark, threatening, and outside the rationally ordered modern world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The shahs tried to counter these objections by appealing to the popular religion of the masses, especially by associating themselves with the mourning ceremonies for Husain. They had their own rawda-khans, who recited the epic accounts of the Kerbala tragedy every day; they built a royal stage in Tehran for the performance of the annual passion play (taziyeh) commemorating Husain’s death, which took place on five consecutive nights during the sacred month of Muharram in the great court of the royal palace. The battle between Husain and Yazid was enacted, the deaths of the Imam and his sons depicted, and, on the night of the fast-day of Ashura, the anniversary of the Kerbala disaster, there was a grand procession, in which effigies of the martyrs (complete with lifesize representations of their shrines and whole choirs of children) were carried through the streets, while the common people followed, beating their breasts. Throughout Muharram, all the mosques were festooned in black drapery, and in the public squares, booths were erected for the rawda-khans, who chanted the dirge mournfully and loudly. By this date, there were a number of celebrated rawda-khans in the country who competed with one another for preeminence.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the Yemeni city of Najrān (now in south-west Saudi Arabia), attracted by an existing Christian community, and the city became a major centre for Miaphysite Christianity. In 523 or 524 its population suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of their overlord, Yusuf as’ar Yath’ar of the Yemeni kingdom of Himyar; in the previous century, his family had converted to Judaism and his campaigns were expressions of his own militant zeal for recreating Israel in Arabia. King Kaleb of Ethiopia, already provoked by Yusuf’s killing of Ethiopian soldiers, forcefully intervened across the Red Sea after this outrage and defeated and killed Yusuf.34 With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure. After more than a thousand years of existence, it was never rebuilt until modern times. A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined to be a new prophet: Muhammad (see pp. 255–9). The memory of the end of the Marib dam, when Sheba’s gardens were replaced ‘with others that yielded bitter fruit’, was still traumatic enough to win a mention in Muhammad’s revelations in the Qur’an, where the disaster was described as a punishment from God for Sheba’s faithlessness.35 But before we meet the new prophet and the impact of his faith on the world, we must turn to the other dissidence against Chalcedon: the Church of the East, the Dyophysite heirs of Theodore of Mopsuestia. THE CHURCH OF THE EAST (451–622) At the time of the Council of Chalcedon, with Nestorius declared a non-person despite the council’s quiet acceptance of much of his theology, matters looked dire for defiant Dyophysites. They had no power base in the Byzantine Empire comparable to Miaphysite Alexandria, and even eastwards beyond the imperial frontier there was no secure refuge for them among Syrian Christians in the Sassanian Empire. The mid-fifth century saw renewed pogroms of Christians by the Zoroastrian authorities. In the worst sequence under Shah Yazdgerd II, what

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The ulema certainly experienced the dawn of modernity as destructive. They had been a power in the land when Muhammad Ali became governor. He wooed them, made them promises, and for three years there was a honeymoon period between the pasha and the clergy. In 1809, however, the ulema lost their traditional tax-exempt status, and Umar Makram urged them to oppose Muhammad Ali and force him to rescind the new taxes. But the ulema had rarely shown a united front, and the pasha was able to lure a significant number into his own camp. Makram was exiled and with him went the last opportunity for the ulema to oppose Muhammad Ali. His departure was also a defeat for the ulema as a class. As a Muslim, Muhammad Ali was careful to pay lip service to the religious scholars and the madrasahs, but he systematically marginalized them, and divested them of any shred of power. He deposed sheikhs who defied him and, as a result, Jabarti says, most ulema acquiesced in the new policies. He also starved them financially. By seizing the revenues of the religiously endowed properties (awqaf), he took away the ulema’s principal source of income. By 1815 a large number of the traditional Koran schools were in ruins. Sixty years later, the Islamic establishment was in desperate financial straits. There were no stipends for teachers, and mosques could no longer afford to support their prayer leaders, muezzins, Koran reciters, and caretakers. The great Mamluk buildings had deteriorated, and even the Azhar was in a wretched state.44 In the face of this onslaught, the ulema of Egypt became cowed and reactionary. Their traditional consultative role in the government was taken by the new foreign elite of administrators, most of whom had little respect for local tradition. The ulema were left behind in the march for progress, and the pasha left them alone with their books and manuscripts. Since opposition had become impossible, the ulema turned their backs on change, entrenching themselves in their scholarly traditions. This would continue to be the chief ulema stance in Egypt. They did not regard modernity as an intellectual challenge but experienced it instead as a series of odious and destructive regulations, as theft of their power and wealth, and as an agonizing loss of prestige and influence.45 When Muslims in Egypt came into contact with the new Western ideas, therefore, they would find no guidance from the clergy, and would look elsewhere for help. For centuries, there had been a partnership between the ulema and the ruling elite in Egypt. Muhammad Ali had severed that relationship and abruptly inaugurated a new secularism. It had no ideological backing but had been imposed as a political fait accompli. In the West, people had had time to adapt to the gradual separation of church and state, and had even created a spirituality of the mundane. For most Egyptians, however, secularization remained alien, foreign, and incomprehensible.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Spanish reconquista of the old Muslim territories of al-Andalus was a catastrophe for the Jews of Iberia. In the Islamic state, the three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had been able to live together in relative harmony for over six hundred years. The Jews in particular had enjoyed a cultural and spiritual renaissance in Spain, and they were not subject to the pogroms that were the lot of the Jewish people in the rest of Europe.4 But as the Christian armies gradually advanced through the peninsula, conquering more and more territory from Islam, they brought their anti-Semitism with them. In 1378 and 1391, Jewish communities in both Aragon and Castile were attacked by Christians, who dragged Jews to the baptismal fonts and forced them, on pain of death, to convert to Christianity. In Aragon, the preaching of the Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) regularly inspired anti-Semitic riots; Ferrer also organized public debates between rabbis and Christians that were designed to discredit Judaism. Some Jews tried to evade persecution by voluntarily converting to Christianity. They were officially known as conversos (“converts”), though the Christians called them Marranos (“pigs”), a term of abuse which some of the converts adopted as a badge of pride. The rabbis warned Jews against conversion, but at first the “New Christians,” as the conversos were called, became wealthy and successful. Some became high-ranking priests, others married into the best families, and many achieved spectacular success in commerce. This brought new problems, since the “Old Christians” resented the upward mobility of the new Jewish Christians. Between 1449 and 1474, there were frequent riots against the Marranos, who were killed, had their property destroyed, or were driven out of town.5 Ferdinand and Isabella were alarmed by this development. The conversion of the Jews was not drawing their united kingdom together but instead causing fresh divisions. The monarchs were also disturbed to hear reports that some of the “New Christians” had lapsed, returned to the old faith, and lived as secret Jews. They had, it was said, formed an underground movement to entice other conversos back into the Jewish fold. Inquisitors were instructed to hunt out these closet Jews, who, it was thought, could be recognized by such practices as refusing to eat pork or to work on Saturday. Suspects were tortured until they confessed to infidelity, and gave information about other secret “Judaizers.” As a result, some 13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during the first twelve years of its existence. But in fact many of those who were thus killed or imprisoned, or had their property confiscated, were loyal Catholics who had no Judaizing tendencies at all. The experience not unnaturally made many of the conversos bitter and skeptical of their new faith.6

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  modern martyrs for the faith in a manner more familiar in the early days of the Roman Empire, and the Oecumenical Patriarch secured their remains for his Great Church of Hagia Sophia. The Vilnius martyrs were not forgotten, and by the early fifteenth century they became a sign of the Christian unity of Constantinople and Muscovy. When in 1411 Emperor John VIII Palaeologos married a daughter of Vasilii II, Grand Prince of Muscovy, he sent Moscow a splendid specimen of the liturgical vestment known as a sakkos as a gift for Metropolitan Photios. It still exists, and it pointedly bears images of the Lithuanian martyrs alongside those of the Emperor and the Grand Prince.32 By that time, the design was a symbol of how the conflict between Muscovy and Lithuania had eventually been resolved. The course of the contest between Lithuania and Muscovy long swayed unpredictably. In 1352, with the outrage of the three martyrs still fresh in his mind, the Oecumenical Patriarch rejected Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania’s nominee for metropolitan, and instead he chose a Muscovite closely related to the princely house. Diplomatic pressure on the Byzantine emperor from Lithuania’s ally the Republic of Genoa (by now a major force sustaining Constantinople’s fragile prosperity) then secured Olgerd a consolation prize in the shape of a metropolitan bishopric specifically consecrated for Lithuania alone. This was a controversial move which did not endure, but within a few years the undoubted fact that the metropolitan based in Moscow never took any personal interest in the western territories of the former Rus’ led to Constantinople making a different appointment: a separate metropolitan for the region of Galicia, a former province of Kievan Rus’ which had been annexed by the kingdom of Poland in 1349. From 1375 to 1378 there were even two rival Metropolitan Bishops of Kiev, both appointed by the Oecumenical Patriarch, but at the solicitation of Muscovy and Lithuania respectively: a strange if temporary anticipation of the Great Schism of Popes which was about to erupt in the Latin Church of the West (see p. 560).33 The Orthodoxy of western Kievan Rus’ was steadily diverging in character from that of Muscovy and the east, to the extent that it should be given a distinctive name as the Ruthenian Church. The decisive factor in the contest came from the west. In his international diplomacy, the Grand Prince of Lithuania naturally had to consider Latin Christendom as well as the Orthodox world, far more than was necessary for the Grand Prince of Muscovy. Amid the steady expansion of Lithuanian frontiers, the Latin Christian Teutonic Knights were a continuing source of annoyance and harassment to the Lithuanians, continually crusading against the godless grand prince, and in the process helping themselves to a number of attractive territories and towns along the Baltic (see p. 387). By the second half of the fourteenth

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  The final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 had an ambiguous resonance in Moscow. To lose the holy places of Constantinople was a bitter blow, but the catastrophe did leave a useful vacuum in Orthodox leadership, for which the Muscovite leadership had been preparing over the previous century. Church and Court cooperated very closely in an increasingly autocratic system which presented the Grand Prince as the embodiment of God’s will for the people of Rus’. The Grand Prince was effective in disposing of competitors: in 1478 he annexed the city-state of Novgorod, which had the effect of eliminating the model of a merchant republic from Russian society. The Hanseatic League regarded this annexation as a watershed in its relations with the East: it permanently withdrew the credit facilities which it had long extended to Novgorod and Pskov, for it did not trust the arbitrary rulers of Muscovy to be reliable financial partners. In a land where resources were perpetually scarce and the urge of the monarch to expand his dominions and power was consistently strong, the grand princes sought to gain as much control as they could over exploitable assets of manpower and finance. The Church hierarchy aided them by preaching the holiness of obedience to the prince with a thoroughness and zest which had little precedent in Byzantium, let alone Western Latin Christendom; but bishops and abbots did not forget that the Church had its own view of its destiny and purpose. The tension between these two agendas had a long future within Russian Orthodox Christianity. The growing power of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the immense reverence paid to Sergei in the pilgrimage cult which began very shortly after his death in 1392 were not unconnected with the close ties which Sergei had developed to the Grand Prince of Muscovy, ties which were later strategically magnified by his hagiographers. It was said that he had blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi when the Prince decided to attack his Tatar overlord; a victory in battle followed for Muscovy at Kulikovo in 1380. The reality of the blessing is dubious, and the victory was not such a turning point as it looked in subsequent Muscovite chronicles, but such doubts do not diminish the part that the narrative of the events played in constructing a new history for the Muscovite principality. During the fifteenth century, narratives of great saints of the Church lent their subjects’ authority to the growing concentration of power in the hands of the grand princes.41 Moscow’s subservience to the Tatars was quietly forgotten: gone were the prayers for a Tatar khan which Muscovite coins had once borne, and in a wholesale rewriting of history, Muscovy’s clerical chroniclers recast the Tatars as perpetual enemies of Muscovy. Two years after the annexation of Novgorod, Grand Prince Ivan III formally announced an end to the tribute which he and his predecessors had paid to the khans for two centuries. This was part of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The police did shoot and there were more martyrs. The confrontation was especially violent in Tabriz, where as many as one hundred mourners may have died, and six hundred people were arrested. Young men broke away from the procession to attack the cinemas, banks, and liquor stores (symbols of the Great Satan), but no people were assaulted. 66 Forty days later, on March 30, the mourners turned out onto the streets once again, this time to weep for the martyrs of Tabriz. On this occasion, about a hundred demonstrators were shot in Yazd, as they left the mosques. On May 8, there were new processions to honor the martyrs of Yazd. 67 The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people. This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.” 68 The word for martyr, shaheed , meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology. 69 In June and July, the shah made some concessions, promising free elections and the restoration of the multiparty system. During these months, the demonstrations were quieter. There seemed to be a lull, and the Western-educated secularists and intellectuals, who had hitherto taken no part in the mourning processions but had supported the demonstrators by making purely verbal protests against the regime, assumed that the battle had been won. But on August 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed four hundred people. This was immediately attributed to SAVAK, and ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, chanting “Death to the shah! Burn him!” 70 Iranian students organized big demonstrations against the regime in Washington, Los Angeles, and The Hague. The shah made more concessions: the Majlis debates became freer, orderly demonstrations were permitted, some of the casinos were closed, and the Islamic calendar was restored. 71 But it was too late. During the last week of Ramadan, when Muslims usually keep vigil in the mosques, there were demonstrations in fourteen Iranian cities, in which between fifty and one hundred people died.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By this date, there were a number of celebrated rawda-khans in the country who competed with one another for preeminence. These mourning rites became a major Iranian institution under the Qajars. Besides linking the monarchy with Husain and Kerbala, and thus helping to legitimate Qajar rule, they also served as a safety valve, giving the masses an outlet for their frustration and discontent. The people were not passive spectators; throughout the recitations and performances, they made their presence felt. As a French visitor noted, “the whole auditory responds to them with tears and deep sighs.” 58 Throughout the battle scenes, the spectators sobbed and wept, striking their breasts with tears streaming down their cheeks. While the actors expressed their horror and sorrow through the text, it was—and remains—the task of the audience to provide the explicit and violent expressions of grief, completing an essential part of the drama. They were at one and the same time symbolically on the plains of Kerbala and in their own world, weeping for their own tragedies and pain. To this day, the American scholar William Beeman explains, the audience are taught to weep for their sins and their own troubles, and to remind themselves of Husain’s even greater suffering. 59 They could thus identify with the Kerbala story, bringing it, by means of these dramatic rituals, into the present, and thus giving the historical tragedy the timeless quality of myth. The flagellants represented the people of Kufa who had abandoned Husain and, therefore, chastised themselves, but they also stood for all Muslims who failed to help the Imams create a just society. Shiis weep for Husain and give him a symbolic funeral, because he did not get one in real life and his ideals were never implemented. To this day, Iranians say that during Muharram, they also recall the sufferings of their friends and relatives. But these personal memories lead them to an emotional apprehension of the problem of evil: why do the good suffer and the wicked seem to prevail? As they moan, slap their foreheads, and weep uncontrollably, the participants arouse in themselves that yearning for justice which is at the heart of Shii piety. 60 The dirges and passion plays remind them each year of the persistent evil in the world and reaffirm their belief in the final triumph of goodness. This popular faith was clearly very different from the legalistic, rationalistic Shiism of the mujtahids . It also had an obvious revolutionary potential. It could—and would—be easily used to point to evils in society and to a perceived likeness between the current ruler and Yazid. During the Qajar period, as under the Safavids, however, this rebellious motif was restrained and the emphasis was still on the suffering of Husain, which was seen as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the people.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  These mourning rites became a major Iranian institution under the Qajars. Besides linking the monarchy with Husain and Kerbala, and thus helping to legitimate Qajar rule, they also served as a safety valve, giving the masses an outlet for their frustration and discontent. The people were not passive spectators; throughout the recitations and performances, they made their presence felt. As a French visitor noted, “the whole auditory responds to them with tears and deep sighs.”58 Throughout the battle scenes, the spectators sobbed and wept, striking their breasts with tears streaming down their cheeks. While the actors expressed their horror and sorrow through the text, it was—and remains—the task of the audience to provide the explicit and violent expressions of grief, completing an essential part of the drama. They were at one and the same time symbolically on the plains of Kerbala and in their own world, weeping for their own tragedies and pain. To this day, the American scholar William Beeman explains, the audience are taught to weep for their sins and their own troubles, and to remind themselves of Husain’s even greater suffering.59 They could thus identify with the Kerbala story, bringing it, by means of these dramatic rituals, into the present, and thus giving the historical tragedy the timeless quality of myth. The flagellants represented the people of Kufa who had abandoned Husain and, therefore, chastised themselves, but they also stood for all Muslims who failed to help the Imams create a just society. Shiis weep for Husain and give him a symbolic funeral, because he did not get one in real life and his ideals were never implemented. To this day, Iranians say that during Muharram, they also recall the sufferings of their friends and relatives. But these personal memories lead them to an emotional apprehension of the problem of evil: why do the good suffer and the wicked seem to prevail? As they moan, slap their foreheads, and weep uncontrollably, the participants arouse in themselves that yearning for justice which is at the heart of Shii piety.60 The dirges and passion plays remind them each year of the persistent evil in the world and reaffirm their belief in the final triumph of goodness. This popular faith was clearly very different from the legalistic, rationalistic Shiism of the mujtahids. It also had an obvious revolutionary potential. It could—and would—be easily used to point to evils in society and to a perceived likeness between the current ruler and Yazid. During the Qajar period, as under the Safavids, however, this rebellious motif was restrained and the emphasis was still on the suffering of Husain, which was seen as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the people. During the nineteenth century, it was not through the taziyeh that the people rebelled; instead, many expressed their discontent in two popular messianic movements.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  145 their carnal love has caused. Guinevere becomes a nun and Lancelot, a monk, fasting and serving God until Lancelot learns that Guinevere has died. Lancelot can no longer eat or drink, and he wastes away and dies. He is buried by knights who fought beside him. This story of love, the search for the Holy Grail, becomes a story of redemption. Sinners, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, bring destruction to those they love. But God can take away their sin so that they die in peace. Morte d’Arthur is a great love story and a great religious story. The book speaks to the values of the Middle Ages—an era remote from us in both time and spirituality. ■ Malory, Morte d’Arthur. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages. Matthews, King Arthur, Dark Age Warrior, Mythic King. Weston, From Ritual to Romance. 1. In the Morte d’Arthur is love portrayed as a positive or negative force? Is the difference that of pure, divine love or carnal love? How would you distinguish the two? 2. Do you regard love as one of the strongest forces motivating humans? Can you think of other instances, besides Marc Antony and the Duke of Windsor of public men or women who have thrown away everything for love? Does this have any relevance in your life? Essential Reading Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  And in that moment, as in the first night when I held her, I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths. “Goodbye, Eudora.” When I arrived back in Cuernavaca just before the rains—tired, dirty, and exhilarated—I headed for Frieda’s house and my clean clothes. She and Tammy had just come in from the farm in Tepotzlán. “How’s Eudora?” I asked Frieda, as Tammy fetched us cool drinks from the kitchen. “She’s left town, moved up to the District, finally. I hear she’s reporting for a new daily up there.” Gone. “Where’s she living?” I asked dully. “Nobody has her address,” Frieda said, quickly. “I understand there was one hell of a brawl up at the compound between her and La Señora. But evidently they must have gotten their business settled, because Eudora left soon afterwards. It all happened right after you left.” Frieda sipped her fresca slowly. Glancing at me, she took some change from her pocket and sent Tammy to the market for bread. I carefully kept what I hoped was an impassive expression on my face as I toyed with my fruit drink, screaming inside. But Frieda put her drink down, leaned forward, and patted me on the arm reassuringly. “Now don’t worry about her,” she said kindly. “That was the best thing in the world Eudora could have done for herself, getting out of this fishbowl. If I wasn’t afraid of losing Tammy to her father in the states, I think I’d leave tomorrow.” She settled back in her chair, and fixed me with her level, open gaze. “Anyway, you’re going back home next week, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I said, knowing what she was saying and that she was quite right. “But I hope to come back some day.” I thought of the ruins at Chichen-Itzá, of the Olmec heads in Tabasco, and Eudora’s excited running commentaries. “I’m sure you will, then,” Frieda said, encouragingly. I returned to New York on the night of July 4th. The humid heat was oppressive after the dry hot climate of Mexico. As I got out of the taxi on Seventh Street, the sound of firecrackers was everywhere. They sounded thinner and higher than the fireworks in Mexico. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 23 I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  reversal until his death in 1658, but after two years of increasing disorder, maypoles, Christmas and King Charles II were all summoned back from exile.80 The Church of England which Charles restored, episcopal and ceremonial, complete with expensively refurbished cathedrals, had gained new martyrs for its cause, for the first time since the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. Newly aggressive against Puritanism after their sufferings, the clergy who dominated it were much more obviously out of step with the continent-wide Reformed ethos than they had been before the war, and the Church Settlement of 1662, with a revamped version of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, excluded many Protestants who before the civil wars would have found a home within the national Church; now they were labelled Dissenters, whether they liked it or not. So, in the twenty-year civil wars of the Atlantic Isles, a new identity was born for the Churches of England and Ireland, which was occasionally at the time called Anglican, a term which came to be much more widely used in the nineteenth century. Alongside Anglicanism was a strong and irrepressible Protestant Dissent.81 Anglicanism is a religious outlook which has kept its distance from the rest of the Reformation, but also from Rome, and is prepared to live with the ambiguous consequences. It took time for this conscious middle ground to develop; those in charge in the Church to begin with after 1660 tended to remember their sufferings and emphasize what made their new Church exclusive in its identity. Those who regretted that outlook, while also deploring the extremes of ‘Puritanism’ which were its mirror-opposite, were soon abusively known as ‘Latitudinarians’; and their hour had not come.82 Between Anglicanism and Dissent, in concert with the allied but contrasting story of Scottish Protestantism, anglophone Protestantism gained a religious profile which has reproduced its peculiarity across the world, as we will discover in tracing the fortunes of British imperial adventures in Chapters 19 and 20. In tracing the fortunes of Protestantism, we have been neglecting half a Reformation: that which remained loyal to Rome. There is still much argument about what to call this other movement: ‘Counter-Reformation’ has long been popular, but narrowly ties it to a reaction to the Protestant Reformation, particularly that within the Holy Roman Empire, about which the expression (in German, Gegenreformation) was first used. One distinguished modern scholar of the subject has suggested a broader usage, ‘Early Modern Catholicism’, but that seems too wide and shapeless.83 Probably the best formulation, which suggests the internal dynamism of what happened, is ‘Catholic Reformation’. That is a reminder that if Luther was the heir of the reformist neuroses of 1500, so were popes, and that it was also popes who oversaw an expansion of Western Christianity over two centuries from 1500 which took it to every continent of the

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  41 to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. But according to the last lines of Mark’s gospel, the women are so afraid that they tell no one. o This ending must have seemed abrupt to the other gospel writers. In Matthew and Luke, the women go to the tomb, learn that Jesus was raised, and tell the disciples.  In all three of these gospels, Mary is one of the women who goes to the tomb, but in the Gospel of John, she goes by herself (John 20). When she discovers the tomb is empty, she runs and tells Simon Peter and another disciple. As Mary stands outside the tomb, Jesus appears to her and asks why she is weeping. At fi rst, she doesn’t recognize him, but when she does, she addresses him as Rabboni, “teacher.” Jesus instructs her to tell the disciples that he has been raised, which she does.  Was it Mary Magdalene who discovered that the tomb was empty, and was it she who fi rst proclaimed that Jesus was raised from the dead? If that’s the case and if Christianity is the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead, one could argue that Mary Magdalene was the one who started Christianity. That would make her incredibly important to Christianity, but it would not mean that she was Jesus’s closest disciple during his lifetime; there’s a signi fi cant difference between the two propositions. o In one case—possibly the historical scenario—Mary is the one who begins the proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection. In the other case, she’s one who accompanies Jesus during his entire ministry and is his closest disciple, but we have no evidence for this. o Jesus’s male disciples are quite prominent in his public ministry. All the gospels and Paul tell us that Jesus called the 12 disciples. The gospels fi rmly attest that Jesus proclaimed his 12 disciples would sit on 12 thrones in the future kingdom of God, ruling the 12 tribes of Israel. The rulers of the future kingdom would be men, not women, not Mary Magdalene.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And in thinking about these founder figures, I believe we must finally conclude that each brought a message of radical hope. To seventh-century Arabia, Muhammad brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment and everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddha held out hope that suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that the last shall be first, that even the tax collectors and lepers—the outcasts—had cause for hope. And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause for hope?” — Back at Room 43, the Colonel was smoking in the room. Even though I still had one evening left of washing dishes in the cafeteria to work off my smoking conviction, we didn’t much fear the Eagle. We had fifteen days left, and if we got caught, we’d just have to start senior year with some work hours. “So how will we ever get out of this labyrinth, Colonel?” I asked. “If only I knew,” he said. “That’s probably not gonna get you an A.” “Also it doesn’t do much to put my soul to rest.” “Or hers,” I said. “Right. I’d forgotten about her.” He shook his head. “That keeps happening.” “Well, you have to write something,” I argued. “After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out—but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.” one hundred thirty-six days after TWO WEEKS LATER, I still hadn’t finished my final for the Old Man, and the semester was just twenty-four hours from ending. I was walking home from my final test, a difficult but ultimately (I hoped) successful battle with precalculus that would win me the B-minus I so richly desired. It was genuinely hot out again, warm like she was. And I felt okay. Tomorrow, my parents would come and load up my stuff, and we’d watch graduation and then go back to Florida. The Colonel was going home to his mother to spend the summer watching the soybeans grow, but I could call him long-distance, so we’d be in touch plenty. Takumi was going to Japan for the summer, and Lara was again to be driven home via green limo. I was just thinking that it was all right not to know quite where Alaska was and quite where she was going that night, when I opened the door to my room and noticed a folded slip of paper on the linoleum floor. It was a single piece of lime green stationery. At the top, it read in calligraphy: From the Desk of...Takumi Hikohito Pudge/Colonel: I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  74 Lecture 11: Was Jesus Raised from the Dead?  People frequently have visions of loved ones after their deaths. These visions occur more often when people feel deep agony over a person’s death, personal guilt, or anger. Often, these visions are taken to be veridical by the person experiencing them. o There are innumerable documented instances of people speaking to and touching dead loved ones in their visions, but normally, those who experience visions do not think that their loved ones have been physically raised from the dead. o The early followers of Jesus, however, did not share our common view of the afterlife, in which a person dies and goes to heaven. Jesus’s early followers were apocalypticists who believed that at the end of the age, all dead people would be physically raised. o When these people had visions of Jesus, possibly induced from agony over his death, guilt, or anger, they naturally believed that he had been physically raised from the dead. And this led to two immediate conclusions: First, God had raised Jesus and made him his son, and second, the resurrection had started. Those who had experienced visions concluded that because Jesus had been raised, the general resurrection of all people was soon to come. For this reason, these followers of Jesus concluded that they were living in the last days. o The early followers were wrong, of course; time has continued to march on. But the belief in Jesus’s resurrection has marched on, as well, and became the basis of the Christian faith held by some 1 billion people in the world today. The fi rst followers of Jesus came to believe in it because they had visions of Jesus after his death. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Christ. Suggested Reading 75 1. Do you think historians can marshal historical proof for a miracle, such as the resurrection of Jesus? 2. What do you see as the historical plausibility of both the existence of an empty tomb of Jesus and the claim that his followers had visions of him after his death? Questions to Consider

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  World. It says a good deal about the legacy of Wilhelm von Humboldt (see pp. 830–31) that German professors could take themselves that seriously.4 Some Anglican bishops could be heard making equally remarkable statements. The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, in one sermon in Advent 1915 called on the British Army ‘to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old’. At least Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister, did not share the Kaiser’s enthusiasm for bellicose sentiments from scholars and clerics, and styled Winnington-Ingram with elegant distaste ‘an intensely silly bishop’. But the killing on all sides was as thorough as the Bishop of London had prescribed.5 The four years of slaughter revealed where the power lay between nationalism and religion. When Pope Benedict XV used his studied neutrality to seek a negotiated peace in 1917, both sides ignored him, despite his outstanding record as a diplomat.6 Just as symbolic were the desperate demands by the increasingly beleaguered German government to churches to sacrifice treasured items for the war effort. German parishioners watched in misery as their bells were carried away after being rung for the last time – the very bells which had rung out so cheerfully for the outbreak of war.7 Then in 1917 came the first fall of a Christian empire, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church which had so long styled itself the Third Rome. Tsar Nicholas II was amiable, pious and well intentioned, but dull-wittedly autocratic – James Joyce neatly described Nicholas even before his downfall as having ‘the face of a besotted Christ’.8 The Tsar made the mistake of appointing himself as commander-in-chief in a war which he increasingly mismanaged, thus associating the Romanov dynasty intimately with the catastrophe into which Russia descended. At the centre of the empire, the Tsarina Alexandra was prominent in home government, to equally disastrous effect. Public outrage at the sense of drift focused on the faith-healing holy man Grigorii Rasputin, who had gained a hold over the Tsar and Tsarina because of his apparent ability to control the haemophilia of the heir to the imperial throne. Rasputin has been an object of much sensationalist fascination, not least because of the Grand Guignol ghastliness of his assassination by furious aristocrats in 1916, but it is as well to appreciate his ambiguity: pilgrim on foot from Siberia to Mount Athos, contemptuous of social hierarchy, treated with sympathy and respect by some senior churchmen (others loathed him). Even in his drunkenness and promiscuity, Rasputin looks remarkably like the Holy Fools whom we have met repeatedly in their long journey from the eastern Mediterranean – and so his many admirers saw him. Russian folk religion was returning to take its revenge on the autocracy which had shackled its Church in Peter the Great’s Holy Synod.9

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  even possess a working seminary for the training of his clergy. This near-death of Orthodox Christianity in the Second Rome is a direct result of the First World War, just as was the martyrdom of the Third Rome.20 The only substantial Christian refuge to be created in the 1923 peace settlements at Lausanne owed its existence to the Third French Republic, which might seem a paradox until one remembers the Republicans’ instrumental attitude to the Church in French colonies as an agent of French cultural hegemony.21 France was anxious to maintain its traditional strong influence in the Middle East, which dated back to the seventeenth century, when the French Crown arrogated to itself the role of protector of Levantine Christians. Accordingly it secured the creation of a French mandate over a coastal and mountainous region described as the Lebanon, whose boundaries closely followed the strength of the population of Maronite Christians – an indigenous Church of the area, originally Monothelete in its views on the nature of Christ (see pp. 441–2), but in union with Roman Catholicism since the twelfth century. When the Lebanon later gained its independence in 1943, seizing on a moment of French disarray in the Second World War, the new republic formulated a constitution carefully designed to balance the interests of Christians against other confessional groups. It succeeded for some three decades, before unravelling in civil war; the consequences of that breakdown are still unfolding.22 25. The Middle East and Turkey after 1923 On the eastern frontier of the new Turkish Republic, the shattered remnants of Christianity were also wretchedly caught up in international politics. Virtually all remaining Armenians fled, leaving eloquent ruins of Christian churches behind them, and the Dyophysites of the Church of the East were soon mostly in Iraq. In 1924 the Miaphysite or Syriac Orthodox people of Urfa (Edessa) faced the consequences of a successful Turkish counter-attack against French invading armies. Some stayed within the new Turkish Republic, around the holy mountains of Tūr ‘Abdīn, where their monasteries still do their best to guard the life of prayer dating back more than fifteen centuries. Urfa itself, cradle of Christianity’s alliance with monarchy, now has virtually no Christians left. Most Urfalese Syriac Orthodox fled over the new border into what was now the French mandated territory of Syria, and there in the city of Aleppo they painfully constructed a new life and preserved as much as they could from the past, including their ancient and unique musical tradition, probably the oldest in the Christian world.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I might be like, “So I was driving down the street and then BOOM a deer jumps out of the woods and almost hits my car, and I almost peed my pants.” That’s a grammatically disastrous sentence, but the reason I switch tenses there is because when describing the moment of crisis—the deer jumping out into the street—I feel as if it is still happening, and I want to express to you that it was so intense that on some level the experience is not over. We like to be very rigid in the way we imagine tense—some things are happening, other things have happened, etc. But one of the reasons we’ve created SO MANY tenses in English is that the way we actually experience time is quite complicated. When Pudge is talking about Alaska’s death, he is telling you a story that for him is still happening, a story that he hasn’t processed and put behind him. For me at least, that’s how trauma works. As Faulkner famously put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Do you know what Alaska’s last words were? No, I don’t know her last words. From the moment I began to think about the story, I knew I’d never be inside the car with her that night, and that my readers wouldn’t be, either. I wanted Pudge to believe in the value of dying declarations as a way of closing the book on a human life, but then to be denied that closure when it comes to the death of someone he loves. He has to live with not knowing—not knowing her last words, and more importantly not knowing whether she committed suicide. I wanted the story to explore whether it is possible to live a hopeful life when you so often do not get answers to questions that deserve answers. Why did you decide to use the word ‘disintegrating’ to describe the school after the Eagle told everyone of Alaska’s death? Julie and I actually talked a fair bit about that word choice before arriving at disintegrating, so I’m happy to be asked the question! What I like about disintegration in that moment is that it implies there had been up until then an integration. Pudge had assimilated into the culture of Culver Creek, and although certainly not all the students like each other, there is a feeling of balance and unity and integration with the Culver Creek bubble: Almost everything that has occurred so far in the story has been either about people living on that campus or visiting it. There are no outside events at Culver Creek. You only see Jake when he visits.