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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  When the Buddha was twenty-nine years old, the gods decided that he had lived in this fool’s paradise long enough, so they sent four of their number past the guards into the grounds, disguised as a sick man, an old man, a corpse, and a monk. Utterly unprepared for these spectacles of suffering, the future Buddha was so shocked that he left home that very night determined to find a way to help himself and others to bear the sorrow of life with serenity, creativity, and kindness. This story is a mythos , devised to show Buddhists what they had to do to achieve their own enlightenment. We cannot even begin our quest until we allow the ubiquitous dukkha of life to invade our minds and hearts. That is why nearly all the religious traditions put suffering at the top of their agenda. We would rather push it away and pretend that the ubiquitous grief of the world has nothing to do with us, but if we do that we will remain confined in an inferior version of ourselves. The definitive icon of Western Christianity is the image of a crucified man in an extremity of agony. It is an emblem of the cruelty that human beings have inflicted on one another from time immemorial. But it is also a pain that redeems the world. The Western Christian doctrine of atonement—one not held by the Greek Orthodox—is sometimes difficult to understand: it is hard to imagine how a compassionate God would demand such suffering as the price of our salvation. But the French philosopher Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) suggested an alternative: when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow feeling—and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us. The ancient Greeks, founders of the Western rational tradition, had a uniquely tragic view of life. Each year on the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, the leading playwrights of Athens presented tragic trilogies in a drama competition, which every citizen was obliged to attend. The plays usually dramatized one of the old myths adapted to reflect the problems and situation of the city that year. This event was both a spiritual exercise and a civic meditation, which put suffering onstage and compelled the audience to empathize with men and women struggling with impossible decisions and facing up to the disastrous consequences of their actions.

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

  This was no random thought, but a purposeful reference to Ovid (predictably), and the poet’s treatment of the legend of Hermaphroditus, the beautiful son of the god Hermes and goddess Aphrodite, forced by the gods into bodily and spiritual androgyny with an amorous water-nymph. To another monk Peter (whose comb Baldric always carried as a keepsake), he cheerfully wrote: ‘If you can, keep your deeds above reproach, but if you cannot, at least keep your confidences to yourself.’ [44] Behind this literary efflorescence among clerical authors was a practical consideration: how to make emotional sense of the twelfth-century transformation in monastic formation. Rejecting the Carolingian Benedictine oblation of children, these were communities built up from adults who had made a free, informed choice to enter monastic life, and brought with them adult emotional and sexual experience. [45] They needed to explore how they might shape a new emotional life among other men for the rest of their lives. In literature that would mean moving on from the unequal-age, life-cycle model which was the accepted convention of ancient same-sex activity. Among the texts that they would draw on would be another biblical text about love between equals, even though the participants were male and female, the Song of Songs. From the glory-days of Cluny onwards, this book of the Bible was the most frequently read and written about of all biblical books in commentaries produced in male monasteries, while there are very few texts discussing it surviving from any medieval woman: it was a literary text in a man’s literary world. For a monk, the Song of Songs was a meditation on divine love, but its vocabulary remained that of undisguised and mostly fulfilled adult sexual desire. [46] The monastery was a safe space for even extravagant outpourings of same-sex expression, as long as one observed very careful delimits and a carapace of literary and biblical allusion. When those limits were understood, it could lead to remarkable emotional frankness – for instance in a series of treatises on friendship created in a major specimen of the new monasticism, the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire. The author was one of its monks and later celebrated Abbot, Aelred, prolific in writing on spirituality and how it should be practised. In writing these texts on friendship, he was directly and successfully challenging his Order’s original prohibition on particular personal friendships in a monastic community. Once more a celibate looked back to a pre-Christian Classical model, in this case Cicero’s text De Amicitia (‘On Friendship’), to illuminate urgent personal questions: how permeable was the boundary between friendship and love, the physical and the spiritual? [47] Aelred was not prepared to define that frontier when writing of his grief for a dead friend, and neither can we: ‘some may judge by my tears that my love was too carnal.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  How can Hume reach this conclusion? He has no knowledge of any other universe, so cannot make a comparative judgement. His belief that this world of suffering and pain is inadequate or substandard seems to rest on an intuition , a feeling that there must surely be a better universe than the one we know. It is important to pause here, and note how much influence emotions, feelings and intuitions have on human reasoning. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out, many of our supposedly ‘rational’ moral arguments reflect emotional stances; moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgement has been reached on other grounds. 53 Hume himself argued that moral judgements, like aesthetic judgements, derive from sentiment rather than reason, so that we achieve moral knowledge by ‘immediate feeling’ rather than by a ‘chain of argument’. 54 Steven Wykstra points to the problem that emerges here: the way we feel about our world does not count as evidence . Most of us, he notes, have at some times in our lives felt instances of suffering in this world to be evidence against theism, according to which the universe is the creation of a wholly good Being who loves his creatures, and who lacks nothing in wisdom and power. If it has proven hard to turn this feeling into a good argument, it has, perhaps, proven just as hard to get rid of it. 55 Lewis – who initially studied and taught philosophy at Oxford – was aware of Hume’s argument. Yet he came to see this as a vulnerable line of reasoning, dependent on unacknowledged prior beliefs which could not be proved to be true, and might simply amount to matters of personal taste. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? 56 The force of the argument from the injustice of evil and suffering depends upon the strong conviction that ‘the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.’ Yet Lewis found he could not articulate a meaningful notion of ‘justice’ without grounding this transcendentally in something that lay beyond his own personal beliefs or those of the community to which he belonged. It was a classic example of the difficulties faced by thinkers of the Age of Reason – having to judge one belief in terms of another belief. In the end, Lewis set his atheism to one side, and reaffirmed faith in God. Thirty years later, however, Lewis found that the experience of the slow death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer in 1960 reopened the question of pain and suffering for him emotionally, not simply intellectually.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  6. Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess peace talks with the Byzantine emperor Justin I. It was as a part of those talks that Radegund secured a splinter from the relic that, legend has it, had been brought to Constantinople by Constantine’s mother, Helena. Radegund died on August 13, 587, surrounded by her mourning community of nuns. Large numbers of people, dignitaries and townsfolk, wanted to view the body—some sick and hoping for a miracle. Rather than violate their enclosure by taking her body outside the convent walls, the viewers positioned themselves atop the wall, and the saint’s body was carried beneath them for viewing. She was almost immediately acknowledged by local people and bishops as a saint. She is known for healings and for saving some supplicants from drowning. In later years, the chapel where she lay was dedicated to her, along with parish churches at many of the locations important in her life. Her feast day is August 13. She is the patron saint of Jesus College, Cambridge, near which there is also a pub bearing her name. Reading McNamara, Jo Ann. “Radegund, Queen of the Franks and Abbess of Poitiers (ca. 525–587).” Chap. 4 in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 46 7 Saint Making in the Middle Ages T his lecture explores how Christianity in Europe, specifically Catholicism, shifted in its understanding of sainthood from the time of Radegund in the 6th century to the time of Francis of Assisi in the 13th century. It also covers how the new way of recognizing Catholic saints produced stacks of invaluable documentation of holiness, religious beliefs, and even mundane details of everyday life for medieval people. 47

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Setting forth from Ratisbon in May, 1189, the German army had proceeded by way of Hungary to Constantinople. The Greek emperor, Isaac Angelus, far from regarding the Crusaders’ approach with favor, threw Barbarossa’s commissioners into prison and made a treaty with Saladin.411 He coolly addressed the western emperor as "the first prince of Germany." The opportunity was afforded Frederick of uniting the East and West once more under a single sceptre. Wallachians and Servians promised him their support if he would dethrone Isaac and take the crown. But though there was provocation enough, Frederick refused to turn aside from his purpose, the reconquest of Jerusalem,412 and in March, 1190, his troops were transferred across the Bosphorus. He took Iconium, and reached Cilicia. There his career was brought to a sudden termination on June 10 in the waters of the Kalycadnus river into which he had plunged to cool himself.413 His flesh was buried at Antioch, and his bones, intended for the crypts of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, were deposited in the church of St. Peter, Tyre. A lonely place, indeed, for the ashes of the mighty monarch, and far removed from those of his great predecessor, Charlemagne at Aachen! Scarcely ever has a life so eminent had such a tragic and deplored ending. In right imperial fashion, Frederick had sent messengers ahead, calling upon Saladin to abandon Jerusalem and deliver up the true cross. With a demoralized contingent, Frederick of Swabia reached the walls of Acre, where he soon after became a victim of the plague, October, 1190. Philip and Richard reached the Holy Land by the Mediterranean. They sailed for Sicily, 1190, Philip from Genoa, Richard from Marseilles. Richard found employment on the island in asserting the rights of his sister Joan, widow of William II. of Sicily, who had been robbed of her dower by William’s illegitimate son, Tancred. "Quicker than priest can chant matins did King Richard take Messina."414 In spite of armed disputes between Richard and Philip, the two kings came to an agreement to defend each other on the Crusades. Among the curious stipulations of this agreement was one that only knights and the clergy were to be allowed to play games for money, and the amount staked on any one day was not to exceed twenty shillings.

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

  In characteristic post-Revolutionary papal style, it resolved matters that had remained previously too difficult for consensus, chiefly the decision (which the Council of Trent had avoided) to spell out the Pope’s divine authority, as successor to Christ’s commission of sacred power to the Apostle Peter. This decree, Pastor Aeternus , affirmed that in carefully defined circumstances, the Pope could make pronouncements on doctrine that were infallible and could not be altered (the first being the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception). The vote on Pastor Aeternus , from which agonized doubters absented themselves rather than oppose the Holy Father, took place in a city on the brink of being seized by the Italian army; French troops sent by the Emperor Napoleon III to guard the Pope’s ancient possession of Rome from Italy had suddenly been withdrawn following the Emperor’s disastrously declared war on Prussia. [35] The aged Pope Pius was left governing the tiny enclave of the Vatican, a living symbol for the devout of the Church’s suffering at the hands of the Enlightenment and Revolution. His death eight years later carried equal symbolism, because he wished to be buried elsewhere in his former city. The burial was postponed for three years and was then distressingly disrupted by hostile rioters; anti-clerical liberals nearly threw the coffin in the Tiber. The public neuralgia continued within the nation at the heart of a now global Catholicism, while Catholics made their pilgrimage to Rome in huge numbers to show their reverent solidarity with Pius and his successors: ‘Peter in Chains’ within the Vatican walls (Plate 32). The sense of siege and confrontation persisted in official Roman Catholicism for another century. The structures of the Church were themselves a bulwark against outside interference: two celibate gender silos of priests and nuns together with the copulating lay family, whose husband and wife were encouraged to procreate as much as they could, and who were hectored from the pulpit or in the confessional if they did not. They were also increasingly the Church’s main source of finance through their giving, after so much wealth had disappeared over the previous century – not least from the loss of the Papal States, previously a direct source of revenue for the Vatican. The clergy were trained in institutions that increasingly recruited boys on the verge of puberty to ‘minor seminaries’, and then kept their education and general development in a wholly single-sex environment through the seminary until they were released into pastoral ministry in their twenties. It is surprising that any of them were capable of ministering effectively to the majority female congregations in front of them. [36] Amid the Church hierarchy’s increasing pastoral attention to their lay flocks who were their chief source of financial support, at the beginning of the twentieth century Pope Pius X introduced a liturgical change with a corollary that further affected – and indeed celebrated – the Catholic family.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Perhaps, in different circumstances, you too would be capable of evil actions. Retaliation is likely only to exacerbate the hatred and violence activated by the threat mechanism. On September 11, 2001, for example, there were demonstrations and expressions of sympathy for the United States in countries all over the world, including Palestine and Iran. If there had been a nonviolent and openhanded response to the attacks on the Twin Towers instead of a military offensive, might the outcome have been different? Remember Confucius’s words: if you seek to establish yourself, then seek to establish others. Humiliating the enemy can be dangerous. The harsh conditions inflicted on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War gave birth to the conditions that helped to bring Adolf Hitler to power. We need to find a way to ensure that all peoples enjoy the treatment that we wish for ourselves. There is much talk of the need for dialogue as a way of improving international relations. But will it be Socratic or an aggressive dialogue that seeks to humiliate, manipulate, or defeat? Are we prepared to “make place for the other,” or are we determined simply to impose our own will? An essential part of this dialogue must be the effort to listen. We have to make a more serious effort to hear one another’s narratives. All too often, when the enemy starts to tell his story, the other side interrupts, shouts him down, objects, and denounces it as false and inaccurate. But like any mythos, a story often reflects the inner meaning of an event rather than factual, historical accuracy. As any psychoanalyst knows, stories of pain, betrayal, and atrocity give expression to the emotional dimension of an episode, which is just as important to the speaker as what actually happened. We need to listen to the undercurrent of pain in our enemy’s story. And we should be aware as well that our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We have to try to look carefully and deeply into our own hearts and thus learn to see the sorrow of our enemy. The Greeks were a warlike people, but they understood this. The first of their great tragic dramas to survive was Aeschylus’s The Persians, which was presented on the festival of Dionysus in 472 BCE, just eight years after Athens had defeated the Persian army in the landmark battle of Salamis. But before the Athenian victory, the Persians had rampaged through Athens, pillaging, burning, and trashing the city and obliterating all the beautiful new temples on the Acropolis. Yet in his drama, Aeschylus asks the audience to weep for the Persians and asks them to see Salamis from the enemy’s point of view. Xerxes, the defeated Persian general, his mother, Atossa, and the ghost of the late Persian king Darius are all treated with sympathy and respect.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Lewis wrote A Grief Observed (1961), one of his rawest and most challenging books, as a way of recording and reflecting on his thoughts and experiences as he grieved. Suffering is portrayed as relentlessly opaque, resisting rational explanation. Where is God? … Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. 57 Lewis’s journal for this difficult period records his thoughts, no matter how incoherent, as he explored every intellectual option open to him. Lewis was determined to confront and engage with each of them, experiencing the emotional distress and cognitive dissonance they each evoked. Maybe God was a tyrant. Maybe there wasn’t a God. So, was this the end of Lewis’s Christian faith? Was the suffering and death of his wife such a blatant contradiction of Lewis’s core beliefs that his only option was to abandon them? Was the cognitive dissonance unbearable for him? That is certainly the impression created by the movie Shadowlands (1993), which suggests that Lewis’s faith collapsed after Davidman’s illness and death, leading him into some undemanding form of Stoic humanism. Yet here, as so often, movies offer their own version of history. In reality Lewis’s faith recovered. A Grief Observed describes what Lewis regarded as a process of testing – not a testing of God , but a testing of Lewis . ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.’ 58 In a letter written a few weeks before his death, Lewis remarked that while A Grief Observed ‘ends with faith’, it nevertheless ‘raises all the blackest doubts en route ’. 59 It was, nevertheless, a reconstructed faith, more attentive to the raw emotions caused by suffering and doubt in the life of faith. In the end, Lewis held his faith together, not so much by a rational argument or logical analysis, but rather through a controlling image that captured his imagination, and gave him imaginative space to hold multiple themes together – namely, the image of the crucified Christ. 60 Lewis here draws on a longstanding Christian devotional practice which generally takes the form of affective contemplation of the sufferings of Christ, generally mediated through reflections on the passion narratives and images of the crucified Christ. 61 Such a devotional reflection on the suffering and death of Christ engages the emotions and imagination, allowing the believer to step into the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and experience the sense of awe, bewilderment and distress that this so clearly evoked on those who saw it happen – and then correlate this with their own situation. As Lewis found, the intellectual issues may not be resolved; yet they are no longer seen as posing an existential threat to faith.

• From Trash (1988)

  Randall went by and said there’d be a baby, a hatched egg to throw out with the rags, but there wasn’t. I watched to see and there wasn’t; nothing but the blood, thinning out desperately while the house slowed down and grew quiet, hours of cries growing soft and low, moaning under the smoke. My Aunt Raylene came out on the porch and almost fell on me, not seeing me, not seeing anything at all. She beat on the post until there were knuckle-sized dents in the peeling paint, beat on that post like it could feel, cursing it and herself and every child in the yard, singing up and down, “Goddamn, goddamn that girl . . . no sense . . . goddamn!” I’ve these pictures my mama gave me—stained sepia prints of bare dirt yards, plank porches, and step after step of children—cousins, uncles, aunts; mysteries. The mystery is how many no one remembers. I show them to Jesse, not saying who they are, and when she laughs at the broken teeth, torn overalls, the dirt, I set my teeth at what I do not want to remember and cannot forget. We were so many we were without number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted? My maternal great-grandmother had eleven daughters, seven sons; my grandmother, six sons, five daughters. Each one made at least six. Some made nine. Six times six, eleven times nine. They went on like multiplication tables. They died and were not missed. I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them. I am the point of a pyramid, sliding back under the weight of the ones who came after, and it does not matter that I am the lesbian, the one who will not have children. I tell the stories and it comes out funny. I drink bourbon and make myself drawl, tell all those old funny stories. Someone always seems to ask me, which one was that? I show the pictures and she says, “Wasn’t she the one in the story about the bridge?” I put the pictures away, drink more, and someone always finds them, then says, “Goddamn! How many of you were there, anyway?” I don’t answer. Jesse used to say, “You’ve got such a fascination with violence. You’ve got so many terrible stories.” She said it with her smooth mouth, that chin that nobody ever slapped, and I love that chin, but when Jesse said that, my hands shook and I wanted nothing so much as to tell her terrible stories.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The jazz broke up and fell silent, as if someone had hit it with a fist. ‘What, what, what, what?!!’ ‘Berlioz!!!’ And they began jumping up, exclaiming . . . Yes, a wave of grief billowed up at the terrible news about Mikhail Alexandrovich. Someone fussed about, crying that it was necessary at once, straight away, without leaving the spot, to compose some collective telegram and send it off immediately. But what telegram, may we ask, and where? And why send it? And where, indeed? And what possible need for any telegram does someone have whose flattened pate is now clutched in the dissector’s rubber hands, whose neck the professor is now piercing with curved needles? He’s dead, and has no need of any telegrams. It’s all over, let’s not burden the telegraph wires any more. Yes, he’s dead, dead . . . But, we, we’re alive! Yes, a wave of grief billowed up, held out for a while, but then began to subside, and somebody went back to his table and—sneakily at first, then openly—drank a little vodka and ate a bite. And, really, can one let chicken cutlets de volaille perish? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By going hungry? But, after all, we’re alive! Naturally, the grand piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, several journalists left for their offices to write obituaries. It became known that Zheldybin had come from the morgue. He had installed himself in the deceased’s office upstairs, and the rumour spread at once that it was he who would replace Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned from the restaurant all twelve members of the board, and at the urgently convened meeting in Berlioz’s office they started a discussion of the pressing questions of decorating the hall with columns at Griboedov’s, of transporting the body from the morgue to that hall, of opening it to the public, and all else connected with the sad event. And the restaurant began to live its usual nocturnal life and would have gone on living it until closing time, that is, until four o’clock in the morning, had it not been for an occurrence which was completely out of the ordinary and which struck the restaurant’s clientele much more than the news of Berlioz’s death. The first to take alarm were the coachmen 5 waiting at the gates of the Griboedov house. One of them, rising on his box, was heard to cry out: ‘Hoo-ee! Just look at that!’ After which, from God knows where, a little light flashed by the cast-iron fence and began to approach the veranda. Those sitting at the tables began to get up and peer at it, and saw that along with the little light a white ghost was marching towards the restaurant. When it came right up to the trellis, everybody sat as if frozen at their tables, chunks of sterlet on their forks, eyes popping.

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

  This forced self-subordination of Francis offers one of the most touching spectacles of mediaeval biography. Francis had withheld himself from papal privileges. He had favored freedom of movement. The skilled hand of Ugolino substituted strict monastic obedience. Organization was to take the place of spontaneous devotion. Ugolino was, no doubt, Francis’ real as well as professed friend. He laid the foundation of the cathedral in Assisi to his honor, and canonized him two years after his death. But Francis’ spirit he did not appreciate. Francis was henceforth helpless to carry out his original ideas,808 and yet, without making any outward sign of insubordination, he held tenaciously to them to the end. These ideas are reaffirmed in Francis’ famous will. This document is one of the most affecting pieces in Christian literature. Here Francis calls himself "little brother," frater parvulus. All he had to leave the brothers was his benediction, the memory of the early days of the brotherhood, and counsels to abide by the first Rule. This Rule he had received from no human teacher. The Almighty God himself had revealed it unto him, that he ought to live according to the mode of the Holy Gospel. He reminded them how the first members loved to live in poor and abandoned churches. He bade them not accept churches or houses, except as it might be in accordance with the rule of holy poverty they had professed. He forbade their receiving bulls from the papal court, even for their personal protection. At the same time, he pledged his obedience to the minister-general and expressed his purpose to go nowhere and do nothing against his will "for he is my lord." Through the whole of the document there runs a chord of anguish.809 Francis’ heart was broken. Never strong, his last years were full of infirmities. Change of locality brought only temporary relief. The remedial measures of the physician, such as the age knew, were employed. An iron, heated to white heat, was applied to Francis’ forehead. Francis shrank at first, but submitted to the treatment, saying, "Brother Fire, you are beautiful above all creatures, be favorable to me in this hour." He jocosely called his body, Brother Ass.810 The devotion of the people went beyond all bounds. They fought for fragments of his clothing, hairs from his head, and even the parings of his nails.

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

  The shipwreck of the little Crusaders was commemorated by Gregory IX., in the chapel of the New Innocents, ecclesia novorum innocentium, which he built on San Pietro. Innocent III. in summoning Europe to a new crusade included in his appeal the spectacle of their sacrifice. "They put us to shame. While they rush to the recovery of the Holy Land, we sleep."431 Impossible as such a movement might seem in our calculating age, it is attested by too many good witnesses to permit its being relegated to the realm of legend,432 and the trials and death of the children of the thirteenth century will continue to be associated with the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem at the hand of Herod. § 55. The Fourth Crusade and the Capture of Constantinople. 1200–1204. Literature.—Nicetas Acominatus, Byzantine patrician and grand logothete. During the Crusaders’ investment of Constantinople his palace was burnt, and with his wife and daughter he fled to Nicaea: Byzantina Historia, 1118–1206, in Recueil des historiens des Croisades, histor. Grecs, vol. I., and in Migne, Patr. Gr., vols. 139, 140.—Geoffroi de Villehardouin, a prominent participant in the Crusade, d. 1213?: Hist. de la Conquête de Constantinople avec la continuation de Henri de Valenciennes, earliest ed., Paris, 1585, ed. by Du Cange, Paris, 1857, and N. de Wailly, Paris, 1871, 3d ed. 1882, and E. Bouchet, with new trans., Paris, 1891. For other editions, See Potthast, II. 1094. Engl. trans. by T. Smith, London, 1829.—Robert de Clary, d. after 1216, a participant in the Crusade: La Prise de Constant., 1st ed. by P. Riant, Paris, 1868.—Guntherus Alemannus, a Cistercian, d. 1220?: Historia Constantinopolitana, in Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. 212, 221–265, and ed. by Riant, Geneva, 1875, and repeated in his Exuviae Sacrae, a valuable description, based upon the relation of his abbot, Martin, a participant in the Crusade.—Innocent III. Letters, in Migne, vols. 214–217.—Charles Hopf: Chroniques Graeco-Romanes inédites ou peu connues, Berlin, 1873. Contains De Clary, the Devastatio Constantinopolitana, etc.—C. Klimke: D. Quellen zur Gesch. des 4ten Kreuzzuges, Breslau, 1875.—Short extracts from Villehardouin and De Clary are given in Trans. and Reprints, published by University of Pennsylvania, vol. III., Philadelphia, 1896. Paul De Riant: Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae, Geneva, 1877–1878, 2 vols.—Tessier: Quatrième Croisade, la diversion sur Zara et Constantinople, Paris, 1884.—E. Pears: The Fall of Constantinople, being the Story of the Fourth Crusade, N. Y., 1886.—W. Nordau: Der vierte Kreuzzug, 1898.—A. Charasson: Un curé plébéien au XIIe Siècle, Foulques, Prédicateur de la IVe Croisade, Paris, 1905.—Gibbon, LX., LXI.—Hurter: Life of Innocent III., vol. I.—Ranke: Weltgesch., VIII. 280–298.—C. W. C. Oman: The Byzantine Empire, 1895, pp. 274–306.—F. C. Hodgson: The Early History of Venice, from the Foundation to the Conquest of Constantinople, 1204, 1901. An appendix contains an excursus on the historical sources of the Fourth Crusade.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Enrique snatched her by her red hair and pulled her to her feet. “Show me some fuckin’ respect when I talkin’ to you. I show you some just by lettin’ you live.” He spat in her face and mushed her back down onto the chair. Flame balled up and cried like a baby, hoping Enrique would ease up off of her. Grabbing her temples, she screamed. She was doing the best she could to pay back Power’s debt, selling her ass and soul, and hadn’t a thing to show for it. But tomorrow that would all change. “Mira, that way.” Enrique pointed toward the bedroom door, and Flame dropped her stare at the floor. “Don’t act like you don’t know what the fuck I saying. All morenos know ‘mira’ means ‘look.’ Take ya ass in the back ’til I finish here. Comprende?” Fuckin’ Power. The room was hot and stuffy, with barred and boarded-up windows. Flame sat on the edge of the bed, tears streaking her pressed powder, and wondered what her sister, Mercedes, was doing to survive without her. Flame had been the one to feed, clothe, and make sure Mercedes had had a proper education ever since their momma decided to trade them in for a heroin kick almost seven years ago. She’d given up her dreams of going to college, learning a trade, having a workingman who pulled a 9-to-5, to make sure her sister didn’t have to live the life that she did. No one deserved the shit she was putting herself through for Power. She exhaled and sighed, wiped the tears from her face and assured herself I ain’t doin’ nothin’ for Power that he wouldn’t do for me. He’s gonna come through. Got to. Enrique stood in the doorway eating out of a bowl. “You hungry, mami,” he asked as if he hadn’t just spit on Flame. “There’s arroz con pollo and sweet plantanos in the kitchen.” Flame just shook her head. Her stomach was growling, but she didn’t feel hungry. Stress had fucked up her blood sugar levels. “No thanks,” she answered, remembering Enrique’s talk on respect. Enrique dragged his slippered feet into the room and sat next to her on the bed. Softly, he touched her shoulder, and she flinched and trembled. Setting the bowl down on the white sheets, he rubbed her face with the back of his hand. Instantly, her tears came to life again, running down her face like she wished she could haul ass up out of there.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  By the time I got to the last tape my eyes were swollen from crying and my throat raw from screaming. During the very last scene, Keita was kneeling in front of the camera, waiting for God knew who. A tall cat with piss-yellow skin came into frame, totally naked. Keita proceeded to lick up and down the shaft of his dick, while running her nails across his ass cheeks. His back arched in ecstasy as she sucked him like a peppermint stick. Dude grabbed her by the wig she was wearing and began fucking her mouth like a jackhammer. She began jerking his dick while she licked under his balls and made her way around to his ass. I wanted to throw up again, but I didn’t have anything left in my stomach! As if the knife hadn’t been driven in deep enough, the dude’s face came into frame and what little bit of breath I had left in my body escaped me. It was my man Reggie. So, Keita was the freak-ass stripper that he had been spending so much of his time and money with. I sat there and watched helplessly as my man fucked my girl in every single hole. When he was done, he came all over her face and proceeded to wipe what was left onto her waiting lips. I was a man defeated. For all the running around on Keita I did, it never occurred to me that she might be doing the same. Not my love-goddess. Never in a million years. I thought I knew all the tricks, but apparently she knew one that I didn’t. Keita had put one over on the infamous Chocolate. Seeing my woman fucking all those guys on tape took something out of me. The fire that had only hours prior burned within me was gone. I no longer had the strength or desire to live. I crawled—yes, crawled—to where my gym bag lay and retrieved my gun. The iron felt cool yet comforting in my hands. I placed the barrel in my mouth and prepared to leave this cruel world behind, until I heard the sound of the front door opening. “Baby, are you here?” she called up. “Dante, why are all the lights off? Are you being nasty?” Hearing her voice enraged me. Here I was about to check out over a no-good, low-life bitch. The more she talked, the madder I got. At one point I felt like I had completely taken leave of my senses, and for the kind of shit I was thinking about, I guess I had. Suddenly, a plan began to form in my mind.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  She promptly sent the maid to fetch a length of silk cloth which was kept in one of her strongboxes, and when she returned with it they spread it on the ground and placed Gabriotto’s body upon it. Then, weeping continuously, she rested his head on a cushion, closed his lips and his eyelids, made him a wreath out of roses, and filled all the space around him with the other roses they had gathered. And turning to her maidservant, she said: ‘It is not far from here to his house, and so you and I are going to carry him to his front-door and leave him there, just as we have arranged him. Soon it will be day, and they will take him indoors. It won’t be any consolation to his family, but for me at least, in whose arms he has died, it will bring some small pleasure.’ And so saying, she threw herself upon him once again, her tears streaming freely down her cheeks. She lay there sobbing for a long while until eventually, heeding her maidservant’s repeated and anxious reminders that the dawn was approaching, she dragged herself to her feet. Then, removing from her finger the ring with which Gabriotto had married her, she threaded it on to his, saying through her tears: ‘Dear husband, if your spirit is witness to my tears, and if there is any consciousness or feeling left in the human body after its soul has departed, receive fondly this final gift from the woman you loved so greatly when you were living on earth.’ No sooner had she said this, than she swooned and fell yet again upon his body. After a while she came to her senses and stood up, and then she and the maidservant took up the piece of cloth upon which his body was lying, went form from the garden, and proceeded in the direction of his house. But as they were making their way along the street with his dead body, they had the misfortune to be discovered and stopped by the officers of the watch, who happened at that precise moment to be passing through the district on their way to investigate some other mishap. After what had happened, Andreuola was more eager to die than to go on living, and, on recognizing the officers of the watch, she addressed them frankly and said: ‘I know who you are, and realize that it would be futile for me to try and escape. I am quite prepared to come with you and explain all this before the magistrates. But if any of you should venture to lay a finger on me, or to remove anything from this man’s body, you may rest assured that I shall denounce you.’ And so no hand was laid upon her, and she was led away with Gabriotto’s body to the palace of the podestà.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  21. Padre Pio: The Science of Miracles In 1960, the Vatican was sent a series of tapes purporting to hold private conversations from the friar’s chambers and confessional. Pope John XXIII wrote privately that he had been told the tapes contained disturbing revelations about improper relationships with women. Yet another apostolic visitor was dispatched to investigate the convent. Extended interviews between the visitor and Padre Pio revealed how the friar had come to mistrust the Vatican. He particularly suspected they wanted to take control of the cash flow coming to the convent from his followers. And he resisted any efforts to turn away journalists or to impose order on the lay Franciscan women who jealously guarded access to him. The visitor made several recommendations to address the issues, and for several years, Padre Pio lived under the new strictures. The Vatican’s efforts to bring Padre Pio’s organization in line ended, however, with the election of Paul VI in 1963, who granted him “full liberty” in his ministry. Pio ended his years among the company of his trusted friends, living simply as he preferred and enjoying the good that his hospital was doing in the community. In the summer During World of 1968, observers noticed the War II, rumors spread stigmata on his hands appeared to have healed. A few months later, on that Padre Pio had September 23, he died quietly in powers of levitation the night. and even flight, that Padre Pio’s feast day is September he’d miraculously 23. He is the patron saint of civil intercepted bombs, and defense volunteers, teenagers, stress that he’d even appeared relief, and the town of Pietrelcina. to Allied fighters in Some would say he is an unofficial patron saint of Italy as well, so flight and turned them widespread is his veneration there. away from civilian areas. Reading Luzzatto, Sergio. Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age. Translated by Frederika Randall. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. 164 22 Josephine Bakhita: Freed from Slavery T he name her parents called her is lost to today’s scholars and even to herself. But the saint known as Josephine Bakhita is recognized around the world as a symbol of freedom from slavery and of welcome for refugees. Bakhita is the name given her by her kidnappers, who seized her from her village in Darfur and sold her into slavery in faraway cities. For years, she suffered horrific cruelty at the hands of those who enslaved her before she could finally choose her own path. 165

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  20. Josephine Butler: Victorian Feminist to arrest prostitutes, and the legislation also spawned grassroots “social purity” groups and “vigilance committees” across Britain. They sought to shut down music halls and theaters as well as brothels, lumping them all together as “dens of vice”—and in the process mounted campaigns against all extramarital sexual activities. Meanwhile, Josephine embarked on a flurry of letter writing, aiming to expand resistance to the CDA to British colonies. She could not go herself, as George had become sick. He died in 1890. Josephine never fully recovered from his loss, but she continued to work for the suppression of prostitution regulation abroad and wrote frequently as an advocate of international causes. Butler left behind a voluminous correspondence, assorted biographical sketches of other campaigners for women’s causes, and six books. One book was a biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, who she refigured as a feminist prophet, a model for Butler’s own work. Butler felt a keen closeness with the saints, particularly female mystics such as Catherine and Teresa of Ávila. Their emphasis on personal communication with the The Ladies’ National divine mirrored Butler’s devotion to Association she prayer, though she struggled with it led against the at times. CDA is now known Butler died on December 30, 1906. She is remembered in the Anglican as the Josephine Church on May 30, and a college Butler Society residence hall and a women’s college and still works on of higher learning in England bear her name, along with several behalf of abused memorials. and underage sex workers. Reading Boyd, Nancy. Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003. 157 21 Padre Pio: The Science of Miracles P erhaps no saint better represents the tension between the modern need for evidence and irrefutable proof and the unknowable miraculous workings of the charismatic saint than Padre Pio. In his long career as a Capuchin monk, he was revered as a mystic and ascetic, a recipient of miraculous stigmata. He was a founder and a healer who used his popularity to help the poor through modern science and medicine. He was also repeatedly investigated, censured, separated from his followers, and demonized as a fraud and heretic by the Vatican and his own order. His associates included fascists, Nazi sympathizers, and war profiteers. This lecture covers the life of this controversial figure. 158