Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 98 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I went back upstairs, opened a bottle of beer, and sat on the edge of the bed. That’s when I recalled the weekend before when Milli had called me on the pay phone at work. Just at that moment when I realized the Marine was coming toward me, I forgot—it sounded like she was crying, I just didn’t remember, with all the excitement, to ask her later why she had called. Now Id give anything to know. The telephone rang. I ran to pick up the receiver. It was Edwin. Of course she knew. Darlene had been waiting downstairs with the car while Milli came upstairs to pack. Darlene wanted Ed to tell me how sorry she was and how much she loved me, too. “You OK?” Edwin asked me. “T don’t think so,” I told her. There was a long silence. “You were great together,” Ed said. “Yeah, we wete, weren’t we?” “She really loved you,” Ed reminded me. “Those lunches you packed for Milli in the brown paper bags with those little red hearts on them?” “How did you know that?” I asked. “Did the other girls tease her about it?” Stone Butch Blues 21 “Hell no,” Edwin said. “They were jealous. You made it hard on the rest of us butches. We all had to start packing ‘love lunches.’ Anyway, promise you won't tell Darlene this?” I promised. “Milli told Darlene that she thought she might have been loved once or twice in her life, but nobody had ever cared about her as good as you did.” I took a deep breath. “Did she say that a long time ago?” “Nah,” Ed said, catching my drift, “recently.” “Ed, I hurt.” “T know,” Ed said gently. “P’m sort of in the same boat. Things are kind of rough right now with me and Darlene.” “Why is it so hard?” I felt confused. “T don’t know,” Ed sighed. “I guess love’s never easy. But it’s different between a butch and a pro.” Ed sounded lost in her own thoughts. “It’s love with no illusions.” There was a long silence. We both took a deep breath. “My bike isn’t running.” “Go to work tonight,” Edwin advised. “Tl meet you there in the morning and we'll take a look at it.” “Ed,” I said, “I really fucked up this time.” 122 = Leslie Feinberg “Nah,” she reassured me, “you just got a little more growing up to do.” “T don’t know if I can do it,’ I told her. My friend laughed. “You got no choice.” ISTOPPED GOING TO THE bars for a few weeks. Td heard Milli left town, but I just didn’t feel like seeing anybody. I got two temp jobs in order to pay for some major repairs on my Norton and to keep me busy. My life felt so hollow after I lost Milli. During the day I packed cartons of milk at the dairy on Niagara Street.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  He falls back in the seat, lets his head roll to one side, and eases out a come-on grin. He starts to fumble the buckle over his Levi’s. “Come on, Trev. You’re blazed. Let’s not, okay?” “I used to hate it when you call me Trev.” He drops his hands, they lie in his lap like unearthed roots. “You think I’m fucked up?” “No,” I mumble, turning away. I press my forehead against the window, where my reflection hovers above the parking lot, the rain falling through it. “I think you’re just you.” I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner’s neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? “Hello,” he says, without turning his head. We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell each other goodbye or good night. “Hello, Trevor,” I say into the back of my wrist, keeping it in. The engine jolts, stutters up, behind me the woman coughs. I’m back inside the bus again, staring at the blue mesh seat in front of me. — I get off on Main St. and immediately head toward Trevor’s house. I move as if I’m late to myself, as if I’m catching up. But Trevor is no longer a destination. Realizing, too late, that it’s useless to show up unannounced at a dead boy’s house to be greeted only by his grief-fucked father, I keep walking. I reach the corner of Harris and Magnolia, where I turn, out of habit or possession, into the park, cross the three baseball fields, the earth rising up musty and fresh beneath my boots. Rain in my hair, down my face, shirt collar. I hurry toward the street on the other side of the park, follow it down to the cul-de-sac, where the house sits, so grey the rain almost claims it, rubbing its edges into weather.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I feel like if I didn’t want to do something that you suggested to do, I could tell you that now.” Without prompting, Miriam holds out her arms and hands again and sweeps them around in a horizontal semicircle. “Yes, these are my boundaries. I can set my limits—that feels good ... and I can tell you what I need.” We both smile. Miriam closes her eyes and sits quietly for several minutes. While it may seem simplistic, having the actual, kinesthetic, proprioceptive experience of being able to form and hold boundaries gives Miriam a significant physical experience that contradicts the pervasive sense of powerlessness that has driven her perception of the world. Rather than being folded defensively across her chest, her arms now lie resting on her legs—exemplifying a more open stance and a willingness to look inward. Miriam continues, “First I started to feel the shaking again ... It became more intense, but then it started to settle down on its own.” She is now beginning to self-regulate by moving through activation/deactivation cycles. “I felt some warmth starting in my belly and then spreading out in waves ... That felt really good ... I could even feel the warmth flowing into my hands and legs ... but then my gut started to knot up. I started feeling a little sick, nauseous and queasy. I realized that I was thinking about Evan, my first husband. Actually, I saw a picture of him walking toward me. He was killed a month after we were married ... I think that I never got over it ... I couldn’t believe it happened ... In a way I still don’t ... I dream about Evan a lot. It’s always the same dream. He comes to me; I’m despondent. I ask him why he left me. He doesn’t answer me, but turns his back and walks away. I wake up wanting to cry, my throat is all tight, but I don’t want Henry to know. I feel so terrible; like there’s something wrong with me ... I don’t want to cause him any pain.” “Miriam, I’m going to ask you to say something and notice what happens inside when you say the words. But remember these are my words. They might not mean anything to you. I’m only asking you to try them out and then just to notice how your body responds. Try not to think too much about it; just do it. Does that feel OK to you?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  By 1940 the father was too weak to continue at his job. He moved back home, and over the next few months Mary watched as her beloved father grew weaker and thinner by the day, racked by excruciating pain in his joints, until he finally died on February 1, 1941, at the age of forty-five. It was months later that Mary learned that his illness was known as lupus erythematosus—a disease that makes the body create antibodies that attack and weaken its own healthy tissues. (Today it is known as systemic lupus erythematosus, and it is the most severe version of the disease.) In the aftermath of his death, Mary felt too stunned to speak to anyone about the loss, but she confided in a private notebook the effect his death had on her: “The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency, like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder.” She felt as if a part of her had died with her father, so enmeshed had they been in each other’s lives. But beyond the sudden and violent wound it inflicted on her, she was made to wonder about what it all meant in the larger cosmic scheme of things. Deeply devout in her Catholic faith, she imagined that everything occurred for a reason and was part of God’s mysterious plan. Something so significant as her father’s early death could not be meaningless. In the months to come, a change came over Mary. She became unusually serious and devoted to her schoolwork, something she had been rather indifferent to in the past. She began to write longer and more ambitious stories. She attended a local college for women and impressed her professors with her writing skill and the depth of her thinking. She had determined that her father had guessed correctly her destiny—to be a writer. Increasingly confident in her creative powers, she decided that her success depended on getting out of Georgia. Living with her mother in Milledgeville made her feel claustrophobic. She applied to the University of Iowa and was accepted with a full scholarship for the academic year beginning in 1945. Her mother begged her to reconsider, thinking her only child was too fragile to live on her own, but Mary had made up her mind. Enrolled in the famous Writers’ Workshop at the university, she decided to simplify her name to Flannery O’Connor, signaling her new identity. Working with fierce determination and discipline, Flannery began to attract attention for her short stories and the characters from the South she depicted and seemed to know so well, bringing out the dark and grotesque qualities just below the surface of southern gentility.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 4: Further, it is written (Rom. 8:28) that “to them that love God all things work together unto good,” even sins as a gloss declares [*Augustine, De Correp. et Grat.]. Therefore there is no need for them to grieve for sin after it has been forgiven. Objection 5: Further, contrition is a part of Penance, condivided with satisfaction. But there is no need for continual satisfaction. Therefore contrition for sin need not be continual. On the contrary, Augustine in De Poenitentia [*De vera et falsa Poenitentia, work of an unknown author] says that “when sorrow ceases, penance fails, and when penance fails, no pardon remains.” Therefore, since it behooves one not to lose the forgiveness which has been granted, it seems that one ought always to grieve for one’s sins. Further, it is written (Ecclus. 5:5): “Be not without fear about sin forgiven.” Therefore man should always grieve, that his sins may be forgiven him. I answer that, As stated above ([4829]Q[3], A[1]), there is a twofold sorrow in contrition: one is in the reason, and is detestation of the sin committed; the other is in the sensitive part, and results from the former: and as regards both, the time for contrition is the whole of the present state of life. For as long as one is a wayfarer, one detests the obstacles which retard or hinder one from reaching the end of the way. Wherefore, since past sin retards the course of our life towards God (because the time which was given to us for the course cannot be recovered), it follows that the state of contrition remains during the whole of this lifetime, as regards the detestation of sin. The same is to be said of the sensible sorrow, which is assumed by the will as a punishment: for since man, by sinning, deserved everlasting punishment, and sinned against the eternal God, the everlasting punishment being commuted into a temporal one, sorrow ought to remain during the whole of man’s eternity, i.e. during the whole of the state of this life. For this reason Hugh of St. Victor says [*Richard of St. Victor, De Pot. Lig. et Solv. 3,5,13] that “when God absolves a man from eternal guilt and punishment, He binds him with a chain of eternal detestation of sin.” Reply to Objection 1: Shame regards sin only as a disgraceful act; wherefore after sin has been taken away as to its guilt, there is no further motive for shame; but there does remain a motive of sorrow, which is for the guilt, not only as being something disgraceful, but also as having a hurt connected with it. Reply to Objection 2: Servile fear which charity casts out, is opposed to charity by reason of its servility, because it regards the punishment. But the sorrow of contrition results from charity, as stated above ([4830]Q[3], A[2]): wherefore the comparison fails.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I whispered Edwin’s name out loud as teats ran down my cheeks. Theresa wheeled around and threw her arms around me. She knew. She understood. She held me while I choked on my tears. I sniffled and looked at my boots. She watched my face. There were tears in her eyes, too. She touched the stubble on my cheek with her fingertips. I couldn’t read her thoughts; I never could. It was time to leave. “You working?” I asked her. “Some,” she said. She touched my cheek again and turned to go. “Theresa,” I called her name. She looked at me. “Does she sit between the rows in your garden?” Theresa shook her head. “No, Jess. You’re the only one.” I picked up the big blue bear and extended it to her. She smiled sadly and shook her head again. Then the door shut and she was gone. Stone Butch Blues 193 I walked a couple of blocks to the supermarket and stood outside the automatic doors. After a while this little kid came by, holding onto his mother’s hand. He stared at the bear as he approached and then turned to watch it as he walked by. His mother sort of dragged him along before she turned to see what he was looking at. “Is it OK?” I asked her, nodding toward the bear. She looked surprised, but she nodded. I handed the bear to the boy. “Take good care of her, promise?” He nodded. His arms could hardly get around the stuffed animal. His mother nudged his shoulder. “Say thank you to the nice man.” 194 Leslie Feinberg THE SUN WAS JUST PEEKING over the horizon. My breath froze on my beard. I wearily boarded the temp labor bus. “Hey, Jesse,” Ben sat down next to me and reached out his huge, calloused hand, as he did every morning. He could have crushed my hand in his, but it was in his firm handshake that I always rediscovered his gentleness. I looked at this great bear of a man and smiled, genuinely glad to see him. The bitter cold didn’t seem to affect him. I remembered why when he pulled a silver hip flask from his coat pocket. He offered it to me first. I took a long swig and coughed as I handed it back to him. “Wild Turkey,” he smiled. “T like a little nip in the morning to get me going.” Actually, Ben liked little nips throughout the day to keep him going. We were parked next to a coffee shop. From where I sat I could see through the restaurant window. Annie, the waitress who had my complete attention, was pouring coffee and joking with the men at the counter. A powerful longing pulled on me, almost drawing tears. “How'd you like a piece of her?” a guy in the seat in front of us asked his friend. Ben watched me cringe. “Hey, shut up,” Ben told him.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Edna sniffled and nodded. “I’m in deep freeze, Jess. And somehow I have to save myself. You can’t do it for me. And I don’t know how. I’m so scared.” 238 = Leslie Feinberg I reached for her out of instinct. She held me at an arm’s length with a light touch. Tears filled my eyes, but I reined myself in, knowing I had many nights ahead of me to grieve. “Why?” I asked her. “I just don’t understand why you can’t try.” She bit her lower lip. “I am trying, Jess. I have tried. I just don’t know what’s happening, I’m just as lonely as you are. I need so much. That’s what scares me, that and how much you need me.” “Oh, Edna. Isn’t there something I can do to keep you from leaving me? Isn’t there anything I can do to change your mind?” Edna shook her head. Tears streamed down her face. “Oh, Jess. I love you so much. Please believe mer” I was relieved when she came into my arms to cry, until I realized she was letting me hold her for the last time. A wave of panic almost drowned me. I could feel in my gut what my life was like before Edna came back into it. “Edna,” I whispered. She covered my lips with her fingertips. “I can’t,” she said. Edna held my face in both her hands and looked into my eyes. “What will you do, Jess? Oh god, I wish I was strong enough to save us both.” I looked away from her. “Dll be fine,’ I heard myself say. We both laughed out loud. “That was a very butch thing to say, wasn’t it?” I admitted. “Oh, very,” Edna laughed. We slipped back over the boundary of our laughter to our tears. I wondered if she would have left me if there had been more inside of me to love, or if I just could have needed less. Edna kissed me on the mouth. If I had moved toward her she would have pulled away. And so I held very still and her kiss lingered a moment longer. She stood up. “I’m so sorry, Jess.” If pleading would have kept her in my life I would have dropped to my knees, but I knew she wouldn’t stay. “Can I drive you home?” I asked, hoping for time to try to change her mind. She shook her head. I stood up and let my lips memorize her forehead, her cheeks, her chin. I loved the way age had softened her face. “Can't I see you sometime? Talk to your” She put her hand on my chest. “Maybe at some point. Not now.” Her lips were close to mine. I kissed her hesitantly. She didn’t draw away from me. For a moment I felt her need, then she pulled back. I watched Edna walk away from me. Stone Butch Blues

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Both kids looked at each other and shook their heads. “Up in the sky, where the wind blows,” I told them. “I'd be safe in the sky, where no one would look for me. But P’m still around. Pll still be watching overt you.” Scotty wiped the tears from his eyes with his mittens. “When I’m the wind I could be in the sky with you.” I nodded and pulled him closer. Tears dripped down Kim’s chin, but her face appeared calm. “Can you come back and visit us?” I thought before I answered. “You'll see me again, but not for a while. Not till it’s safe for me to come back.” I pointed to the golden eagles nearby. “You know, there’s not many eagles left. The food they eat got all poisoned with chemicals, and sometimes people shot at them. You know what the eagles did?” They both shook their heads. “They flew high up into the mountains, way up above the clouds and they’re going to stay up there and fly around in the wind until it’s safe to come visit.” Kim knelt on the bench and put her gloves on my checks. They were cold and wet with snow. “Please take me with you,” she whispered. My eyes burned with tears. “I have to hide alone, Kim. And your mommy loves you a lot. She needs you, too. Grow up the best way you can, Kim. Ill come back to you, I promise.” The snow was falling so heavily that it nearly covered us on the bench. I got up and brushed us off. I kissed Scotty’s cold nose before I retied his scarf across his face. I waited on one knee for Kim to come to me. She fell into my arms so hard we both almost tumbled over. As we approached the eagles, Kim ran ahead. She stopped and watched them. “Are they happy in Stone Butch Blues 181 there?” she asked me. I shook my head. “They’d be happier up there.” I looked at the sky. Snowflakes fell on my eyelashes and cheeks. “Can we make snow angels now?” Scotty demanded. I nodded. Scotty and Kim flopped backward in the snow and thrashed their arms and legs. “Look at me, look at me,” they each shouted. I made a snowball and rolled it until it was as big as a boulder. “What are you making?” Kim asked. They both came close. “T’m making a snowwoman,” I told her. Kim made a face. “It’s not a snowwoman, it’s a snowman,” she sulked. “How do you know?” I asked her. “You haven’t seen her yet.” Scotty started rolling a tiny lump of snow. “Can I help make her?” he asked. I nodded and started a good-sized snowball for him. Kim stamped her foot. “There’s no such thing as

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Ruth sighed. “It was a patchwork quilt.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. I felt my color rise. “It’s nice to remember where you come from. But now I’m ready to go home,” she said. Ruth squeezed my hand. “C’mon, Jess. Let’s go home.” 322 = Leslie Feinberg THE MOMENT I CLIMBED THE subway stairs at Christopher Street I heard an amplified voice say the words lesbian and gay. When I emerged to street level, I found myself in the midst of a crowd of hundreds of people listening to speakers at a rally. I'd seen gay demonstrations in the streets before. I had always paused to watch from across the street, proud this young movement was not beaten back into the closets. But I always walked away feeling outside of that movement and alone. This time one voice stopped me in my tracks. It was a young man who took the mike and in a strong voice, trembling with emotion, described being restrained and forced to watch his lover being beaten to death with baseball bats by a gang, “I watched him die there on the sidewalk,” he cried, “and I couldn’t save him. We have to do something. This can’t keep going on.” He handed the microphone to a woman whose hair was wrapped in bright African fabric. She urged others to come up and speak. A young woman from the crowd climbed up on the stage. “There were these guys in my neighborhood in Queens.” Her voice could hardly be heard, even with the microphone. “They used to yell things at me and my lover. One night, I heard them behind me. I was alone. They pulled me into the parking lot behind the hardware store and raped me. I couldn’t stop them.” Tears streamed down my face. The man next to me put his hand on my shoulder. His eyes were filled with tears, too. “T never told my lover what happened,” she whispered into the microphone. “T felt like we’d have both been raped if I told her.” As she climbed down from the stage I thought: This is what courage is. It’s not just living through the nightmare, it’s doing something with it afterward. It’s being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It’s trying to organize to change things. And suddenly I felt so sick to death of my own silence that I needed to speak too. It wasn’t that there was something in particular I was burning to say. I didn’t even know what it would be. I just needed to open my throat for once and hear my own voice. And I was afraid if I let this moment pass, I might never be brave enough to try again. I moved closer to the stage, nearer to finding my voice. The woman who was chairing looked at me. “Did you want to speake” I nodded, dizzy with anxiety. “C’mon up, brother,” she urged me.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  46. And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre. 47. And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he was laid. GLOSS. (non occ.) After the passion and death of Christ, the Evangelist relates His burial, saying, And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathæa. BEDE. (ubi sup.) What is called parasceue in Greek, is in Latin præparatio; by which name those Jews, who lived amongst Greeks, used to call the sixth day of the week, because on that day they used to prepare what was necessary for the rest of the sabbath day. Because then man was made on the sixth day, but on the seventh the Creator rested from all His work, fitly was our Saviour crucified on the sixth day, and thus fulfilled the mystery of man’s restoration. But on the sabbath, resting in the tomb, He was waiting for the event of the resurrection, which was to come on the eighth day. So we must also in this age of time be crucified to the world; but in the seventh day, that is, when a man has paid the debt to death, our bodies indeed must rest in the grave, but our souls after good works in hidden peace with God; till in the eighth period, even our bodies themselves, glorified in the resurrection, receive incorruption together with our souls. But the man who buried the body of the Lord must needs by his righteous merits have been worthy, and by the nobility of worldly power able to perform this service. Therefore it is said, An honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God. He is called in Latin, decurio, because he is of the order of the curia, and served the office of a provincial magistracy; this officer was also called curialis, from his care of civic duties. Arimathæa is the same as Ramathain, the city of Elkanah and Samuel. PSEUDO-JEROME. It is interpreted, taking down, of which was Joseph, who came to take down the body of Christ from the cross. There follows: Came and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Learn to deflect envy by drawing attention away from yourself. Develop your sense of self-worth from internal standards and not incessant comparisons. Fatal Friends In late 1820, Mary Shelley (1797–1851), author of the novel Frankenstein , and her twenty-eight-year-old husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, moved to Pisa, Italy, after having spent several years traveling through the country. Mary had had a rough time of it lately. Her two young children had both died from fevers while in Italy. Mary had been particularly close to her son William, and his death had pushed her into a profound depression. She had recently given birth to another child, a boy named Percy, but she felt continually anxious about his health. The guilt and gloom she felt surrounding the death of her children had finally caused some friction between her and her husband. They had been so close, had experienced so much together, that they could almost read each other’s thoughts and moods. Now her husband was drifting away, interested in other women. She was hoping that in Pisa they could finally settle down, reconnect, and do some serious writing. In early 1821, a young English couple named Jane and Edward Williams arrived in Pisa, and their first stop in town was to visit the Shelleys. They were close friends with one of Percy Shelley’s cousins. They were thinking of living in Pisa, and they were clearly starstruck at meeting the famous couple. Mary was used to these kinds of visitors; she and her husband were so notorious that curious bohemians from all over Europe would come to gawk at them and try to make their acquaintance. Certainly the Williamses, like all the other visitors, would have known about the Shelleys’ past. They would have known that Mary had two of the most illustrious intellectual parents in all of England. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was perhaps the first great feminist writer in history, renowned for her books and scandalous love affairs. She had died giving birth to Mary. Mary’s father was William Godwin (1756–1836), a celebrated writer and philosopher who advocated many radical ideas, including the end of private property. Famous writers would come to see the child Mary, for she was an object of fascination, with striking red hair like her mother, the most intense eyes, and an intelligence and imagination far beyond her years. The Williamses would have almost certainly known about her meeting the poet Percy Shelley when she was sixteen and their infamous love affair. Shelley, of aristocratic origins and due to inherit a fortune from his wealthy father, had married a young beauty named Harriet, but he left her for Mary, and along with Mary’s stepsister Claire, they traveled through Europe, living together and creating a scandal everywhere they went. Shelley was an ardent believer in free love and an avowed atheist.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ By the end of her church trial, Hutchinson had very few friends left, but one person stood up with her and walked by her side out of that church: Mary Dyer. People gossiped that her stillbirth represented God’s punishment for her “monstrous” religious ideas. õ Hutchinson and most of her family died just a few years later in New York during a brutal Indian massacre. Mary Dyer went on to become a Quaker, and she kept coming back to Boston, determined to preach her message, until the Puritans arrested her and ordered her hanged in 1660. PARADOXES õ Christian theology is based on a set of paradoxes: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but still one being; God is all-knowing and all- powerful, yet somehow isn’t to blame for sin or all the bad things in the world; Christ is both human and divine at the same time; people are saved through faith, but they also have to live the right way, too. Over the centuries theologians have worked very hard to keep these opposing ideas in balance and not let orthodoxy teeter too far in one direction or the other. õ Across the expanse of Christian history, almost all the people who have been labeled heretics let this delicate equilibrium slide too far in one direction or another. For example, early heretics argued that the members of the Trinity were actually separate, that God the Father was superior to the Son and Holy Spirit. õ Williams and Hutchinson disrupted the balance between grace and works. In Christianity, it seems people can’t really follow logic too far to its ultimate conclusion. People have to live with paradox and mystery, especially if they want to use this theology to govern a working Christian community. Lecture 8—Puritans, Kings, and Theology in Practice 77 õ The Puritans had to make their terrifying vision of a wrathful, arbitrary God workable. In practice, they rationalized God. They made God just and logical with their ideas of the covenant. The heretics who outraged them most, who brought out the Puritans’ most savage inhumanity, were those who violated this delicate set of compromises. SUGGESTED READING Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire. Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England. Frasier, Cromwell. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä Could King Charles I have avoided launching a civil war and losing his head? ä How did the radical dissenters’ religious ideas shape their politics? ä Which of these movements were “winners” and which were “losers”? By what measure? 78 The History of Christianity II

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, Augustine says in his book on Penance [*De vera et falsa Poenitentia, the authorship of which is unknown]: “In doing penance grief should be continual.” I answer that, One is said to repent in two ways, actually and habitually. It is impossible for a man continually to repent actually. for the acts, whether internal or external, of a penitent must needs be interrupted by sleep and other things which the body needs. Secondly, a man is said to repent habitually. and thus he should repent continually, both by never doing anything contrary to penance, so as to destroy the habitual disposition of the penitent, and by being resolved that his past sins should always be displeasing to him. Reply to Objection 1: Weeping and tears belong to the act of external penance, and this act needs neither to be continuous, nor to last until the end of life, as stated above [4728](A[8]): wherefore it is significantly added: “For there is a reward for thy work.” Now the reward of the penitent’s work is the full remission of sin both as to guilt and as to punishment; and after receiving this reward there is no need for man to proceed to acts of external penance. This, however, does not prevent penance being continual, as explained above.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The room is silent as a photograph. Lan is stretched out on the floor on a mattress. Her daughters—you and Mai—and I are by her side. Wrapped around her head and neck is a sweat-soaked towel, making a hood that frames her skeletal face. Her skin had stopped trying, the eyes fallen into her skull, as if peering from inside the brain itself. She resembles a wood carving, shriveled and striated with deep lines. The only indication that she’s alive is her favorite yellow blanket, now grey, rising and falling on her chest. You say her name for the fourth time and her eyes open, searching each of our faces. On the nearby table, a pot of tea we forget to drink. And it was that floral, sweet jasmine scent that makes me aware, by contrast, of the caustic, acrid odor undercutting the air. Lan has been lying in the same spot for two weeks. With the slightest movement shooting pain through her thin frame, she developed bedsores under her thighs and back that got infected. She has lost control over her bowels and the bedpan beneath her is perpetually half-full, her insides literally letting go of themselves. My stomach grabs as I sit, fanning her, her remaining strands of hair fluttering at her temples. She peers at each of us, again and again, as if waiting for us to change. “I’m burning,” she says, when she finally speaks. “I’m burning like a hut inside.” Your voice, in reply, is the softest I’ve ever heard it. “We’ll put water on it, Ma, okay? We’re gonna put out the fire.” — The day Lan was diagnosed, I stood in the doctor’s nothing-white office as he spoke, his voice sounding underwater, pointing to various sections of my grandmother, her skeleton pinned against the backlit screen. But what I saw was emptiness. On the X-ray, I stared at the space between her leg and hip where the cancer had eaten a third of her upper femur and part of the socket, the ball completely gone, the right hip porous and mottled. It reminded me of a sheet of metal, rusted and corroded thin in a junkyard. There was no evidence as to where that part of her disappeared to. I looked closer. Where was the translucent cartilage, the marrow, the minerals, the salt and sinew, the calcium that once formed her bones? I felt then, as the nurses droned on around me, a new and singular anger. My jaw and fists tensed. I wanted to know who did this. I needed this act to have an author, a consciousness held in a defined and culpable space. For once, I wanted, needed, an enemy.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  You sit beside your mother, your hands, finally empty, lie in your lap. Mai points to Lan’s toes. “They’re turning purple,” she says with eerie calm. “The feet, they go first—and they’re purple. Only a half hour now, at most.” I watch Lan’s life begin to recede from itself. Purple, Mai had said, but Lan’s feet don’t look purple to me. They’re black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an opaque yellowish tint—like bone itself. But it’s the word purple, and with it that lush deep hue, that floods me. That’s what I see as I watch the blood pull out of Lan’s black feet, the green surrounded by clusters of violet in my mind, and realize the word is dragging me into a memory. Years ago, when I was six or seven, while walking with Lan along a dirt path that hugged the highway off Church St., she abruptly stopped and shouted. I couldn’t hear her over the traffic. She pointed out the chain-link fence that divided the interstate from the sidewalk, eyes pupil-wide. “Look, Little Dog!” I stooped down, examined the fence. “I don’t get it, Grandma. What’s wrong?” “No,” she said, annoyed, “get up. Look past the fence—there—those purple flowers.” Just beyond the fence, on the highway side, lay a spill of violet wildflowers, each blossom no larger than a thumbnail with a tiny yellow-white center. Lan crouched, held my shoulders, leveling her eyes with mine, serious. “Will you climb it, Little Dog?” Her gaze narrowed in mock skepticism, waiting. Of course, I nodded eagerly. And she knew that I would. “I’ll boost you up and you just grab them quick, alright?” I latched on to the fence as she lifted my hips. After wavering a bit, I made it to the top, straddled it. I looked down and immediately felt sick, the flowers somehow tiny, faint brushstrokes on a whir of green. The wind from the cars blasted my hair. “I don’t know if I can!” I shouted, near tears. Lan grabbed my calf. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said over the traffic. “If you fall, I cut open the fence with my teeth and save you.” I believed her and jumped, landed in a roll, got up, and brushed myself off. “Get them by the roots with both hands.” She grimaced as she clung to the fence. “You have to be quick or we’ll get in trouble.” I pulled one bush up after the other, the roots bursting from the dirt in ashy clouds. I tossed them over the fence, each passing car made a gust so strong I almost fell over. I pulled and pulled and Lan stuffed them all in a plastic 7-Eleven bag.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  It’s through the drag performers’ explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard. — I remember the table. How flames started to lick at its edges. I remember my first Thanksgiving. I was at Junior’s house. Lan had made me a plate of fried eggrolls to bring over. I remember a house filled with over twenty people. People who slapped the table when they laughed. I remember food being piled on my plate: mashed potatoes, turkey, cornbread, chitlins, greens, sweet potato pie, and—eggrolls. Everyone praising Lan’s eggrolls as they dipped them in gravy. How I, too, dipped them in gravy. I remember Junior’s mother putting a black plastic circle on a wooden machine. How the circle spun and spun until music happened. How music was the sound of a woman wailing. How everyone closed their eyes and tilted their heads as if listening to a secret message. I remember thinking I’d heard this before, from my mother and grandmother. Yes. I heard this even inside the womb. It was the Vietnamese lullaby. How every lullaby began with wailing, as if pain could not exit the body any other way. I remember swaying while listening to my grandmother’s voice crooning through the machine. How Junior’s father slapped me on the shoulder. “What you know about Etta James?” I remember happiness. I remember my first year in an American school, the trip to the farm, how afterward, Mr. Zappadia gave each student a ditto of a black-and-white cow. “Color in what you saw today,” he said. I remember seeing how sad the cows were at the farm, their large heads lulled behind electric fences. And because I was six, I remember believing color was a kind of happiness—so I took the brightest shades in the crayon box and filled my sad cow with purple, orange, red, auburn, magenta, pewter, fuchsia, glittered grey, lime green. I remember Mr. Zappadia shouting, his beard trembling above me as a hairy hand grabbed my rainbow cow and crushed it in its fingers. “I said color in what you saw.” I remember doing it over. I remember leaving my cow blank and staring out the window. How the sky was blue and merciless. How I sat there, among my peers—unreal.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  How else to repay the boy who gave me my first pizza bagel but to become his shadow? The problem was that my English, at the time, was still nonexistent. I couldn’t speak to him. And even if I could what could I say? Where was I following him? To what end? Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation. To stay close to Gramoz was to remain within the circumference of his one act of kindness, was to go back in time, to the lunch hour, that pizza heavy in my palm. One day, on the slide, Gramoz turned around, his cheeks puffed red, and shouted, “Stop following me, you freak! What the heck is wrong with you?” It was not the words but his eyes, squinted as if taking aim, that made me understand. A shadow cut from its source, I stopped at the top of the slide, and watched his shiny comb-over grow smaller and smaller down the tunnel, before vanishing, without a trace, into the sound of laughing children. — When I thought it was over, that I’d done my unloading, you said, pushing your coffee aside, “Now I have something to tell you.” My jaw clenched. This was not supposed to be an equal exchange, not a trade. I nodded as you spoke, feigning willingness. “You have an older brother.” You swept your hair out of your eyes, unblinking. “But he’s dead.” The children were still there but I no longer heard their small, perishable voices. We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another. “Look at me. You have to know this.” You wore a face. Your lips a violet line. You went on. You once had a son growing inside you, a son you had named, a name you won’t repeat. The son inside you started to move, his limbs running the circumference of your belly. And you sang and spoke to him, like you did to me, told him secrets not even your husband knew. You were seventeen and back in Vietnam, the same age I was sitting across from you. Your hands cupped now like binoculars, as if the past was something that needed to be hunted down. The table wet beneath you. You wiped it with a napkin, then kept going, telling of 1986, the year my brother, your son, appeared. How, four months into your pregnancy, when a child’s face becomes a face, your husband, my father, pressured by his family, forced you to abort him. “There was nothing to eat,” you went on, your chin still cupped over the table. A man on his way to the restroom asked to get by. Without looking up, you scooted over. “People were putting sawdust in the rice to stretch it. You were lucky if you had rats to eat.”

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Stage four bone cancer was the official diagnosis. While you waited in the hall with Lan in the wheelchair, the doctor handed me the manila envelope with the X-rays inside, and simply said, avoiding my gaze, to take your grandma home and give her whatever she wanted to eat. She had two weeks, maybe three. We brought her home, laid her back on a mat on the tile floor where it was cool, placed pillows along her length to keep her legs in place. What made it worse, you remember, was that Lan had never once believed, even to the end, that she had a terminal illness. We explained her diagnosis to her, about the tumors, the cells, metastasis, nouns so abstract that we might as well have been describing witchcraft. We told her that she was dying, that it would be two weeks, then one week, any day now. “Be ready. Be ready. What do you want? What do you need? What would you like to say?” we urged. But she wouldn’t have it. She said we were just children, that we didn’t know everything yet, and that when we grow up, we’d know how the world really works. And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong? Pain, however, is no story in itself. And these last few days, while you were out making funeral arrangements, picking out the coffin, Lan would howl and cry out in long, piercing bursts. “What have I done?” she’d say, looking at the ceiling. “God, what have I done to have you step on me like this?” We would give her the synthetic Vicodin and OxyContin prescribed by the doctor, then the morphine, then more morphine. I fanned her with a paper plate as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Mai, who had driven all night from Florida, shuffled through the rooms, cooking food and making tea in a zombie-like daze. Because Lan was too weak to chew, Mai would spoon oatmeal into her barely opened mouth. I kept fanning as Mai fed her, the two women, mother’s and daughter’s black hair fluttering in unison, their foreheads almost touching. A few hours later, you and Mai rolled Lan on her side and, with a rubber-gloved hand, removed the feces from your mother’s body—too wasted to expel its own waste. I kept fanning her face, jeweled with sweat, her eyes shut as you worked. When it was over, she just lay there blinking. I asked her what she was thinking. As if waking from a sleepless dream, she answered in a gutted monotone. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?” “Okay, Grandma, I know—” But she wasn’t listening.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  8 Ibid., 124. 9 Ibid., 127. 10 S. G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians, 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 175. 151 Parting of the Ways 151 Wilson, like most Johannine scholars, treats John 16:2–4 as a reference to a historical trauma of expulsion, in accordance with the influential work of J. L. Martyn.11 But, as Martin de Boer has noted, few have noticed that Martyn himself understood John 16 as a reference to a second trauma: the murder, and martyrdom, of Johannine believers at the hands of Jewish authorities. For Martyn, the gospel’s high Christology was not the cause of expulsion but the effect of that expulsion, and the catalyst for this second, life-threatening trauma. 12 The criterion of plausibility is central to de Boer’s defense of Martyn’s hypothesis. De Boer argues that “the claim that both expulsion and execution were fabrications of the Johannine community is unlikely given the specificity of the charges (which, if false, could easily have been disconfirmed by the first readers of the Gospel) … It is unlikely that such predictions would have been preserved or attributed to Jesus if they had not been fulfilled in the experience of the Johannine community.” He further adds that “the external evidence, such as it is, supports this reading. ”13 Like Bockmuehl, de Boer supports the claim of plausibility by appealing to a number of extracanonical sources: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, selected rabbinic, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature. Also relevant are the reported martyrdoms of Stephen (Acts 7:58–60), James the son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2–3), and James the brother of the Lord (Josephus, A.J. 20.200), as well as the persecution of Paul (234–45). De Boer concludes that while these texts cannot all be taken at face value, “the number and diversity of sources and witnesses … cumulatively give a considerable degree of plausibility to the historicity of the second trauma mentioned in John 16:2b,” that is, the Jewish persecution and murder of Johannine Christ-confessors. 14

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I sit there as you and Mai, without hesitation, move about, your arms hovering over your mother’s stiff frame. I do the only thing I know. My knees to my chest, I start to count her purple toes. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5. I rock to the numbers as your hands float over the body, methodic as nurses doing rounds. Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead. After Lan is cleaned and changed, after the sheets removed, the bodily fluids scrubbed from the floor and the corpse—because that’s what language dictates now: corpse instead of her—we gather again around Lan. With all your fingers, you pry open her stuck jaw, while on the other side, Mai slips Lan’s dentures inside. But because rigor mortis has already set in, the jaws clamp down before the set of incisors can be secured and the dentures pop out, fall onto the floor with a hard clack. You let out a scream, which you quickly silence with a hand over your mouth. “Fuck,” you say in rare English, “fuck fuck fuck.” With the second attempt, the teeth click into place, and you fall back against the wall beside your gone mother. Outside, a dump truck clanks and beeps its way down the block. A few pigeons gargle among the scattered trees. At the bottom of it all, you sit, Mai’s head rested on your shoulders, your mother’s body cooling a few feet away. Then, your chin turning into a peach pit, you lower your face into your hands. — Lan has been dead five months now, and for five months has sat in an urn on your bedside table. But today we’re in Vietnam. Tien Giang Province, home of Go Cong District. It is summer. The rice paddies sweep out around us, endless and green as the sea itself. After the funeral, after the monks in saffron robes chant and sing around her polished granite gravestone, the neighbors from the village with trays of food lifted over their heads, the ones with white hair who recall Lan’s life here nearly thirty years ago, offer their anecdotes and condolences. After the sun dips under the rice fields and all that’s left is the grave site, its dirt still fresh and damp at its edges, strewn with white chrysanthemums, I call Paul in Virginia. He makes a request I don’t expect, and asks to see her. I take my laptop and carry it the few yards toward the graves, close enough to the house to obtain three bars of Wi-Fi.