Hope

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 The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is why I argued in Surprised by Hope that evangelism needs to be flanked with new-creation work in the realms of justice and beauty. If we are talking about the victory over evil and the launch of new creation, it won’t make much sense unless we are working for those very things in the lives of the poorest of the poor. If we are talking about Jesus winning the victory over the dark powers and thereby starting the long-awaited revolution, it will be much easier for people to believe it if we are working to show what we mean in art and music, in song and story. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “It is love that believes the resurrection,” and hearts can be wooed by glorious or poignant music, art, dance, or drama into believing for a moment that a different world might after all be possible, a world in which resurrection, forgiveness, healing, and hope abound. Gifts that stir the imagination can frequently unblock channels of understanding that had remained stubbornly clogged when addressed by reasoned words. And those who are working for justice and beauty, just like those who are working to bring a fresh new articulation of the good news so that people may believe, must themselves have the same things etched, perhaps nailed, into their own lives. It will be painful. That is part of the point, not that we seek the pain, but that we seek to follow Jesus. Holiness and mission are two sides of the same coin. Both involve bringing the reign of Jesus to bear in places where up to now the powers have had held sway. The powers will not give in without a fight. But, exactly as with Jesus himself and exactly as he told his first followers, the fight itself and the suffering it involves (of whatever sort) are not incidental. The insight at the heart of Jesus’s own vocation was that suffering would not simply be the dark tunnel through which Israel would pass to God’s future. It would somehow be the means by which that future would be achieved. Most Christians today do not see things like this. Once we realize that we are part of the revolutionary movement that began at the cross, it may become clear once again, as it was to the first generation of Jesus’s followers. Cruciform Mission

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  32 in 4:6–8.) The family in question, he makes clear in 4:17–22, is the family that shares with Abraham the true worship of God (i.e., “faith[fullness]”). Abraham, unlike those spoken of in 1:18–23, “grew strong in faith and gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God had the power to accomplish what he had promised” (4:20–21). The question Paul faces in 3:21–26 is then the double problem of human sin and idolatry, on the one hand, and the divine faithfulness, on the other . This central passage is flanked on either side by passages that speak of the divine faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham and his family as the means by which this human plight will be resolved. All this means a vital shift from the usual reading of Romans to a truly Pauline one. Paul is not saying, “God will justify sinners by faith so that they can go to heaven, and Abraham is an advance example of this.” He is saying, “God covenanted with Abraham to give him a worldwide family of forgiven sinners turned faithful worshippers, and the death of Jesus is the means by which this happens.” This joins up with the clear implication of 2:17–20: God called Israel to be the light of the world, the answer to the problem of human idolatry and sin. The usual reading of Romans 3:21–26 is therefore outflanked. It is a shallow reduction of what Paul is actually saying. Sin and God’s dealing with sin in the death of Jesus are undoubtedly central, but these are set within the larger questions of both idolatry (and therefore of true worship) and God’s commitment to rescue the world through Abraham’s family, Israel . Neither Romans 1:18–3:20 nor Romans 4 is simply concerned with “sin” and “justification,” as in the normal reading. They are indeed concerned with both, but they frame both within the question of cult and the question of covenant . If there are signs that Romans 3:21–26 is also about cult and covenant, we should assume that this is what Paul thinks he is talking about. We can come even closer. Romans 3:27–31, the bridge between our key passage and chapter 4, is all about the coming together of Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircumcised, on the basis of pistis , “faith”—which looks like an additional fulfillment of the hints Paul dropped in 2:25–29.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  “Behold your God!” Behold, the Lord God comes with might. (Isa 40:9-10) Note that the prophet may have been afraid to say such an absurd and subversive word, but he is not to fear; he is to make this exile-transforming announcement. The new reality is that the One who seemed to be dismissed as useless and impotent has claimed his throne. And he has done so right in exile; right under the nose of the Babylonians. The poet brings Israel to an enthronement festival, even as Jeremiah had brought Israel to a funeral. Whereas that scenario left Israel in consuming grief, Second Isaiah brought Israel to new buoyancy. Whereas Jeremiah tried to penetrate the numbness, Second Isaiah had to deal with despair. Both had to speak out of Moses’ liberating tradition against the royal mentality that would not let people grieve or hope. We should hold to the metaphor of enthronement and not leave it too soon or reduce it too concretely. The poet is not changing external politics but is reclaiming Israel’s imagination. He asserts a newness that is so old Israel had forgotten, but it is there in memory. Moses’ energizing Song of the Sea ended with enthronement: “The Lord will reign for ever and ever” (Exod 15:18). It is as though Second Isaiah means to bring Israel back to the doxology of Moses, but it is not only a memory recalled. It is a seizure of power in this moment that carries with it the delegitimizing of all other claimants and definers of reality. The other claimants to power and definers of reality are, in this act of language, like the ancient Egyptians, dead upon the seashore. This public act of poetic articulation reshapes Israel’s destiny. Exile with the crowned sovereign is very different from kingless exile because it means the grimness is resolvable. And what a god has now claimed his rule! He is as terrifyingly masculine as a warrior with sleeves rolled up for battle and as gently maternal as a carrier of a lamb. It is all there—for exiles. It includes the comfort of enormous power, with stress on fort (strengthen); it includes the comfort of nurture, with stress on com (along with). Israel is in a new situation where singing is possible again. Have you ever been in a situation where because of anger, depression, preoccupation, or exhaustion you could not sing? And then you could? Change resulted from being addressed, called by a name, cared for, recognized, and assured. The prophet makes it possible to sing and the empire knows that people who can boldly sing, have not accepted the royal definition of reality. If the lack of singing is an index of exile, then we are in it, for we are a people who scarcely can sing. The prophet makes the hopefulness of singing happen again. The second enthronement formula is even more familiar: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings . . .

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  increasingly difficult to bring off and without great social effect. A confrontational model assumes that the “prophetic voice” has enough clout, either social or moral, to gain a hearing. Currently, the old “prophetic stance” of such churches lacks much of that authority, so that the old confrontational approach is largely ineffectual posturing. Given that social reality, which I think cannot be doubted, I suspect that whatever is “prophetic” must be more cunning and more nuanced and perhaps more ironic. For that reason it is important to see that the prophetic texts that feature the great confrontations are not to be directly replicated and reenacted. Rather, they are to be seen as materials that might fund the would-be prophetic voice, to give wisdom and courage, but which then invite immense imagination to know how to move from such texts to actual circumstance. This move, required by contemporary context, is to take the prophetic texts as text and not as “personality,” the tendency of the older confrontational model. Thus my accent on imagination has turned out to be exactly correct, for what is now required is that a relatively powerless prophetic voice must find imaginative ways that are rooted in the text but that freely and daringly move from the text toward concrete circumstance. Seen in that contextual way, “prophetic imagination” requires more than the old liberal confrontation if the point is not posturing but effecting change in social perspective and social policy. II Since I have suggested something of an equation of “royal consciousness” and “false consciousness,” I should acknowledge one ongoing critique of my position by my friend J. J. M. Roberts and his students. The persistent judgment of that perspective is that I have been much too severe on the monarchy in the Old Testament and have treated the thematic of the royal too harshly and dismissively. Perhaps so. But I think it important to identify two grounds for the quite different nuance we each bring to the question. First, I have tried to do serious social criticism of the ideology that exists in the royal texts. That is, I have brought to the text my own hermeneutic of suspicion. I believe that is in

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The deciphering of this nonverbal realm is a foundation of the healing approach that I present in this book. To convey the nature and transmutation of trauma in the body, brain and psyche, I have also drawn upon selected findings in the neurosciences. It is my conviction that clinical, naturalistic animal studies and comparative brain research can together greatly contribute to the evolution of methodologies that help restore resilience and promote self-healing. Toward this end, I will explain how our nervous system has evolved a hierarchical structure, how these hierarchies interact, and how the more advanced systems shut down in the face of overwhelming threat, leaving brain, body and psyche to their more archaic functions. I hope to demonstrate how successful therapy restores these systems to their balanced operation. An unexpected side effect of this approach is what might be called “Awakening the Living, Knowing Body.” I will discuss how this awakening describes, in essence, what happens when animal instinct and reason are brought together, giving us the opportunity to become more whole human beings. I aim to speak to the therapists who seek a better understanding of the roots of trauma in brain and body—such as psychological, psychiatric, physical, occupational and “bodywork” therapists. I also hope to reach the many medical doctors who are confounded by patients presenting inexplicable and mutable symptoms, the nurses who have long worked on the frontlines caring for terrified, injured patients and the policy makers concerned with our nation’s problematic healthcare. Finally, I look for the larger audience of voracious readers of a wide variety of subjects—ranging from adventure, anthropology, biology, Darwin, neuroscience, quantum physics, string theory, relativity and zoology to the “Science” section of the New York Times. Inspired by a childhood of reading Sherlock Holmes, I have attempted to engage the reader in the excitement of a lifelong journey of mystery and discovery. This voyage has carried me into a field that is at the core of what it means to be a human being, existing on an unpredictable and oftentimes violent planet. I have been privileged to study how people can rebound after extreme challenges and have borne witness to the resilience of the human spirit, to the lives of countless people who have returned to happiness and goodness, even after great devastation. I will be telling some of this story in a way that is personal. The writing of this book has presented me with a very exciting challenge. I offer an account of my own experience as a clinician, scientist and inner explorer.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  He tells of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus and of the very specific commission Jesus gave him: I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen and of the occasions I will appear to you in the future. I will rescue you from the people, and from the nations to whom I am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me. (Acts 26:16–18) Now at last the satan’s power has been broken, so that forgiveness of sins and membership in a new family is open to all! This fits exactly with what Paul says when he reminds the Thessalonians of the message he had proclaimed to them from the beginning. People all over Greece, he says, are telling how the Thessalonians turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who delivers us from the coming fury. (1 Thess. 1:9–10) This is the message we hear also in two of the best-known speeches of Paul in Acts, first to the puzzled crowds in Lystra, urging them to turn away from foolish idols to the living God (14:15–17) and then to the court of the Areopagus in Athens (17:22–31). In the latter Paul speaks of the one true creator God. The pagan world gave plenty of indications, including poems and the haunting inscription “To an unknown god,” that people were aware of this true God. But the truth was badly distorted by the normal temples and what went on inside them. The Creator, however, was now introducing a new dispensation. He had drawn a veil over the past and was commanding everyone, everywhere, to turn away from these follies, warning of a coming day of reckoning at which the man he had raised from the dead would be the judge of all. This message was, of course, foolishness to the Greeks. Paul says as much elsewhere (1 Cor. 1:23). But the message retained power: the power of forgiveness, of a new world, a new creation, a new start. A new God? New to them, perhaps, but in fact this was the God who had made the world and looked after it all along, but of whom most peoples had been ignorant. And though Paul does not mention the crucifixion of Jesus in the two speeches just outlined, when we study his mature reflection in the letters, we can see what is going on. As we saw earlier, his vision of the death of Jesus included the fact that all pagan divinities had been defeated.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  And what we now find in Romans 7:1–8:11 is just such a fuller narrative. This central passage, in fact, is one possible expansion of the official formula to which we have often alluded: “The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible” (1 Cor. 15:3). As we have seen, the phrase “in accordance with the Bible” has little to do with isolated proof-texts and everything to do with the meaning of the long, dark, puzzling narrative of Israel ending with the question mark at the end of the books of Malachi and Chronicles. “Exile” was still in operation. The first Christians saw the message and accomplishment of Jesus as the long-awaited arrival of God’s kingdom, the final dealing-with-sin that would undo the powers of darkness and break through to the “age to come.” The whole point, as in Galatians 3, was that Israel’s long and sad story was not just a rambling muddle, an accumulation of irrelevant but damaging mistakes of generations that had more or less lost the plot. Paul never saw Israel’s past history like that, though many readers of Paul have assumed that he did. Rather, like so many other Second Temple Jews, Paul saw Israel’s history standing under the rubric of Deuteronomy 26–32. The covenant always envisaged blessings and curses, and the curses, the result of disobedience, ended in exile. One of the regular words for that “exile” or “captivity” when Israel’s scriptures were translated into Greek was the word that Paul uses in his dramatic summary of Israel’s plight under the law in Romans 7:23: aichmalōtizonta , “taking captive.” Only after that would there come the great divine act of liberation and transformation through which the covenant would be renewed. Only then would the divine plan for the whole creation—the covenant plan through Israel for the world—be put into effect. Paul, as we see at many points, has wrestled long and hard with this story, and here we see what is arguably the most important result of that struggle. For most of Christian history it has been quietly assumed that the long, complex prophetic sequence envisaged in Deuteronomy—so well known to Jews of Jesus’s day, so little known to the followers of Jesus after the first few generations—was basically irrelevant to the Christian story. One could leap straight from Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7 into the gospels and proceed as though all was well. But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel’s Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Clearly money is a major factor, and the nations that for centuries have profited from their “enlightened” cultural, technological, and economic status must look at themselves in the mirror and ask the kinds of questions that white South Africans had to face in the 1980s. Clearly too the way in which the Enlightenment had defined “religion” so as to separate it from the rest of real life has turned out to be an apparent luxury whose price is only now being revealed. The principalities and powers have been quite happy to have that discreet veil cast over their steady advance, and it is time for them to be unmasked. The victory of the cross needs to be announced over that usurped power, so that the millions whose lives have been squashed out of shape can once again have hope—real hope, not simply the “hope” of arriving in an increasingly unwelcoming northern Europe. How to make that victory known is all the more difficult in view of the fact that so many churches have colluded with the privatization and spiritualization of “salvation” on the model I outlined earlier. But the attempt must be made—not simply to return to the seventeenth-century optimism, which as we saw could easily lead to some form of triumphalism, but to hold together the whole truth of the gospel, the forgiveness of sins through which the dark power is broken, and to find every way possible, through symbol and action as well as through words and reason, by which it may be announced and applied. The task may seem impossible, but that’s what they said about the resurrection. If money is one obvious problem, another is sex. We are all now aware of the way in which vulnerable people have been and are being sexually exploited on a grand scale. What was until recently behind a screen has increasingly come to light. We wring our hands and wonder what we can do, as our children and grandchildren are exposed to graphic pornography, tricked into “sexting,” and encouraged to regard as “normal” various practices that most of my generation had never even heard of. But the problem, I believe, goes farther back and has come to light in my country at least through the high-profile revelations of sexual malpractice on the part of well-known public figures. They were able to get away with it in the 1960s and 1970s, it seems, because the climate of the times was all in favor of “liberation” and all against any form of “repression.” It was fashionable, and still often is, to sneer at marriage, virginity, abstinence, and self-control. Any who wanted to argue for, let alone practice, the sexual ethic that until recently had been assumed by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike were laughed out of court, mocked for being “repressed” or “killjoys,” and invited to “become more grown up” and to “live in the modern world.” The fruits of this are all around.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  determinedly dismissed such claims and relied instead on a tepid god who functioned simply as patron of the regime. Such prophetic insistence asserts that YHWH has a specific will and purpose (known in the Torah) that lies outside the totalism of the day and that will not be mocked or countermanded by the practice of that totalism. When social or cultic practices violate or contradict that purpose, God works judgment, so say the prophets, through various agents and mediations—sometimes “natural” crises, sometimes through other nations. That divine purpose does, of course, concern socioeconomic justice for the vulnerable (widows, orphans, immigrants), but it also sometimes concerns the disciplines of holiness that fail to match the singularity of God’s people to the singularity of God (see Lev 19:2; Ezek 22:26). When the “prophetic” among us concerns social justice without the claim of divine agency, it is possible, as with many religious progressives, to contain social justice within the purview of the totalism—that is, without elemental transformation. It is the recurring claim of Israel’s prophets, however, that the claim will not and is not contained within the totalism of any regime, not even that of the holy city of Jerusalem. Such prophetic insistence affirms the freedom of God to act outside of, beyond, and in contradiction to the totalism. It can, for that reason, anticipate the divine work of newness that is voiced as divine promise. Thus, the prophets can confidently assert, “The days are surely coming,” or “in that day.” The anticipated day of God’s newness is an authentic newness. It is not derived from or extrapolated from present life circumstance. Thus in both acts of prophetic judgment and prophetic promise , the prophets speak a world of divine resolve that owes nothing to the present totalism. The totalism does not believe it can or will be terminated; it does not, moreover, believe any new alternative is possible. It is the character of God, known here in poetic articulation as sovereign who will not be mocked by the pretensions of the totalism and as promise-keeper who will not be contained in or foiled by the dead-ends of the totalism that is the subject of the prophets. The reason prophetic utterance evokes the lethal hostility of the totalism, I judge, is not simply because of an advocacy for social justice, though the

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and to him who has no might he increases strength. (Isa 40:28-29) And then the promise to all of us exiles: Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Isa 40:30-31) The poet contrasts us in our waiting and in our going ahead. For those who take initiative into their own hands, either in the atheism of pride or in the atheism of despair, the words are weary, faint, and exhausted. The inverse comes with waiting: renewed strength, mounting up, running, and walking. But that is in waiting. [11] It is in receiving and not grasping, in inheriting and not possessing, in praising and not seizing. It is in knowing that initiative has passed from our hands and we are safer for it. Obviously this becomes more than a critique of Babylon. It is also a critique of every effort to reorganize on our own, and it is a warning about settling in any exile as home. The newness from God is the only serious source of energy. And that energy for which people yearn is precisely what the royal consciousness—either of Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar—cannot give. The prophet must not underestimate his or her urgent calling, for the community of faith has no other source of newness. I am aware that this runs dangerously close to passivity, as trust often does, and that it stands at the brink of cheap grace, as grace must always do. But that risk must be run because exiles must always learn that our hope is never generated among us but always given to us. And whenever it is given we are amazed. Jeremiah and Second Isaiah together, poets of pathos and amazement, speak in laments and doxologies. They cannot be torn from each other. Reading Jeremiah alone leaves faith in death where God finally will not stay. And reading Second Isaiah alone leads us to imagine that we may receive comfort without tears and tearing. Clearly, only those who anguish will sing new songs. Without anguish the new song is likely to be strident and just more royal fakery. 1 . Thomas M. Raitt, A Theology of Exile: Judgment/Deliverance in Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). ↵ 2 . John Bright, Jeremiah , AB 21 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965). For different perspectives, see Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile/Homecoming (Grand Rapids:

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  A few years ago I discovered Keeping Together in Time,[4] written by the great historian William H. McNeill near the end of his career. This short book examines the historical role of dance and military drill in creating what McNeill calls “muscular bonding” and sheds a new light on the importance of theater, communal dance, and movement. It also solved a long-standing puzzle in my own mind. Having been raised in the Netherlands, I had always wondered how a group of simple Dutch peasants and fishermen had won their liberation from the mighty Spanish empire. The Eighty Years’ War, which lasted from the late sixteenth to the midseventeenth century, began as a series of guerrilla actions, and it seemed destined to remain that way, since the ill-disciplined, ill-paid soldiers regularly fled under volleys of musket fire. This changed when Prince Maurice of Orange became the leader of the Dutch rebels. Still in his early twenties, he had recently completed his schooling in Latin, which enabled him to read 1,500-year-old Roman manuals on military tactics. He learned that the Roman general Lycurgus had introduced marching in step to the Roman legions and that the historian Plutarch had attributed their invincibility to this practice: “It was at once a magnificent and terrible sight, to see them march on to the tune of their flutes, without any disorder in their ranks, any discomposure in their minds or change in their countenances, calmly and cheerfully moving with music to the deadly fight.”[5] Prince Maurice instituted close-order drill, accompanied by drums, flutes, and trumpets, in his ragtag army. This collective ritual not only provided his men with a sense of purpose and solidarity, but also made it possible for them to execute complicated maneuvers. Close-order drill subsequently spread across Europe, and to this day the major services of the U.S. military spend liberally on their marching bands, even though fifes and drums no longer accompany troops into battle. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who was born in the tiny Baltic country of Estonia, told me the remarkable story of Estonia’s “Singing Revolution.” In June 1987, on one of those endless sub-Arctic summer evenings, more than ten thousand concertgoers at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds linked hands and began to sing patriotic songs that had been forbidden during half a century of Soviet occupation. These songfests and protests continued, and on September 11, 1988, three hundred thousand people, about a quarter of the population of Estonia, gathered to sing and make a public demand for independence. By August 1991 the Congress of Estonia had proclaimed the restoration of the Estonian state, and when Soviet tanks attempted to intervene, people acted as human shields to protect Tallinn’s radio and TV stations. As a columnist noted in the New York Times: “Imagine the scene in Casablanca in which the French patrons sing ‘La Marseillaise’ in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of the Singing Revolution.”[6]

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Following the advice of my father, who was more aware of such necessities, my mother began inspecting my wardrobe. “You know,” he explained to her, “only rich men’s sons attend high school, and our boy must be decently dressed, too.” In their eyes, as in my own, my entering high school acquired the importance of an introduction into society, which it actually turned out to be, even more than I had guessed. Our alley and the Alliance School belonged to one society, but the European sections of town and the high school to another. Above all, I was now setting forth on the adventure that leads to knowledge. I sometimes think back now, with horror, on the darkness in which I might have been forced to live, and I then consider the many aspects of the universe that I might never have come to know. I would not even have dreamed of their existence, like some deep-sea fish that remain ignorant of the very existence of light. Knowledge was the very origin, perhaps, of all the rifts and frustrations that have become apparent in my life. I might have been happier as a Jew of the ghetto, still believing confidently in his God and the Sacred Books, devoting his Sabbaths to the fun of pilpul distinctions of Talmudic right and wrong, flouting tiny details of the sacred edifice of the Law but never going beyond the approved limits of the game. But I could only see, in those days, the element of new adventure, and I approached it violently and full of confidence, sure that I had everything to gain. All my family difficulties, from now on, took on the appearance of unworthy worries. I had the whole world to conquer. A month later, I successfully passed the scholarship examinations that relieved me of almost all the school fees, much to Monsieur Bismuth’s satisfaction. The city high school isn’t free, which of course reduces one’s chances of being admitted to it. I was less brilliant in the exams for the school certificate than had been expected: I was too confident and, carried away by the impetus of my enthusiasm, had already embarked, in my mind at least, on my high school career. ~ 8. THE DRUGGIST ~ It was only after the summer holidays that Monsieur Bismuth was at last free to see me. I had to wait a long while in the crowd of his customers. The drugstore was luxurious, its windows framed in chromium-plated nickel, the walls painted a light color, the chairs upholstered in leather. On the walls the many framed sheepskins testified to the eminent merits of the owner of the store and to his successes in several pharmaceutical contests. I felt sincerely happy on Monsieur Bismuth’s behalf, and somewhat proud too, as if I shared his glory. Wasn’t my future henceforth bound, in a way, with that of Monsieur Bismuth and of his achievements?

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the first of these passages Paul explores the inner dynamic of suffering. This is how it works, so to speak, inside the person concerned: We also celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope. Hope, in its turn, does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us. (5:3–5) But then, in the other passage, he explains that sharing the Messiah’s sufferings is the means by which, already in the present and then ultimately in the future, those who belong to him will share his rule in the new creation: If we’re children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. This is how I work it out. The sufferings we go through in the present time are not worth putting in the scale alongside the glory that is going to be unveiled for us. Yes: creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed. Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. Let me explain. We know that the entire creation is groaning together, and going through labor pains together, up until the present time. Not only so: we too, we who have the first fruits of the spirit’s life within us, are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body. We were saved, you see, in hope. But hope isn’t hope if you can see it! Who hopes for what they can see? But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it eagerly—but also patiently. (8:17–25) This rich, vivid portrayal of the present time—with creation groaning in expectation like a pregnant woman about to give birth, and with the Messiah’s people groaning within themselves as they long for their new resurrection bodies—is perhaps the finest description in the New Testament not only of what it means to share the Messiah’s sufferings, but also of why that is necessary.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This would be the ultimate freedom moment. “Let me tell you,” he said to his friends as they shared the cup at the meal, “from now on I won’t drink from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Luke 22:18; Matt. 26:29 has a slightly longer version of the same saying). The evangelists, writing much later, clearly believed that this prediction had come true. The victory had been won. Something was about to happen through which, as was fitting for an ultimate Passover, God would overthrow all the powers of the world and liberate his people from them once and for all. I therefore regard it as a fixed point in understanding Jesus’s death that Jesus himself understood what was about to happen to him in connection with Israel’s ancient Passover tradition and that this was linked directly to his beliefs about the launch of God’s kingdom. The royal power of God had already been displayed, close up and dramatically, in his public career. But Jesus believed that through his death this royal power would win the decisive victory through which not just Israel but also the whole world would be liberated: ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven. The Passover and Exodus themes cluster together in an almost bewildering and overdetermined fashion: the fulfillment of ancient promises, the liberation from slavery, the crossing of the Red Sea, the coming of God himself in the pillar of cloud and fire, the promise of inheritance. All these, in parables, healings, promises, and warnings, formed part of Jesus’s public proclamation and private teaching. Now they gathered to a greatness. Up to this point, it might appear that the theological significance with which Jesus was investing his death was simply about a great, freedom-bringing victory. That, indeed, is the overarching significance of the evidence, all the way from his initial kingdom announcement after his baptism through to his dark words about the imminent kingdom at the final meal. But how would this victory be won? What had to happen for the dark powers to be defeated? Here we come a step closer to the heart not only of Jesus’s own vocational vision, but of the whole New Testament picture of what actually happened, theologically speaking, on the first Good Friday. I have stressed that Jesus chose Passover as the moment for his final dramatic symbolic actions—including the death he believed he would suffer. He did not choose one of the other festivals. In particular, he did not choose the great and somber Day of Atonement. However, as we saw in Part Two, by the time of Jesus the long story of Israel had reached a point where two things ran together, at least potentially.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This, Paul declares, has happened through the death of Jesus, and it has happened because the death of Jesus was “for our sins.” Balancing this, at the end of the letter we have another statement that, like the opening one, joins together the deeply personal meaning and the worldwide meaning (which some have called “cosmic”) of the cross. The whole letter has held these together, and now Paul sums them both up: As for me, God forbid that I should boast—except in the cross of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, through whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. Circumcision, you see, is nothing; neither is uncircumcision! What matters is new creation. Peace and mercy on everyone who lines up by that standard—yes, on God’s Israel. (6:14–16) All this only makes sense, of course, if in the resurrection the new age has clearly come to birth. Jesus’s crucifixion by itself could never have carried meanings like this, as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15:17: unless the Messiah has been raised, “you are still in your sins,” not just because “you personally” might not have experienced forgiveness, but because the world as a whole had not turned its long-awaited corner. This is the point underlying these opening and closing statements: that the new world has come to birth; that the death of Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, was the means of abolishing the power of the old world; and that those who belong to Jesus are now part of the “new creation,” “God’s Israel.” (That latter phrase is controversial, since many readers have resisted the implication that Paul would use the word “Israel” to refer to the whole people of Israel’s Messiah, whether they were Jewish or non-Jewish. But the interpretation I have given seems clearly in line with the thought of the letter as a whole.) The whole argument of the letter—that Gentile Jesus believers are full members already in the single family promised to Abraham and that therefore they should in no circumstances think of getting circumcised—is held together within these bookends. Paul clearly has in mind a temporal scheme in which the Mosaic law was designed to serve its God-given purpose for a deliberately limited time, a kind of long bracket between the original promise to Abraham and the fulfillment of that promise in the messianic creation of the single family.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Take that away, and the slide back toward some kind of pagan formulation has begun. * * * There are many other things one might say about the death of Jesus in the letters of Paul. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that the little Letter to Philemon, though it does not mention the death of Jesus specifically, exemplifies its meaning, which for Paul focused on the “ministry of reconciliation.” Paul extends one arm to Philemon and the other to Onesimus and brings them together within his own love for them both, insisting to Philemon that if Onesimus has wronged him in any way he, Paul, will make it good. That looks to me like a practical application of the cross. Philemon functions as a small signpost to Paul’s largest and most important letter, one that has always featured prominently in any discussion of the meaning of Jesus’s death: the Letter to the Romans. This demands a deep breath and a fresh start. 15 The Powers and the Power of Love W HEN THE RISEN Jesus met the frightened disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem, he commissioned them for a worldwide mission. In John’s gospel this comes out with lapidary simplicity: “As the Father has sent me, so I’m sending you” (20:21). This will mean, he says, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven,” and “If you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained” (20:23). For this awesome task they are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the next chapter, as this commission is focused for a moment on Peter’s rehabilitation, it comes with an explicit warning: this will mean suffering. “When you are old, you’ll stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you up and take you where you don’t want to go” (21:18)—a reference, it seems, to Peter’s own forthcoming crucifixion. Then Jesus says familiar words, but they are now full of new meaning: “Follow me!” In Luke’s gospel things are put slightly differently, but with the same overall effect: “This is what is written,” he said. “The Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and in his name repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, must be announced to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are the witnesses for all this. Now look: I’m sending upon you what my father has promised. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I hadn’t had any since we left Amsterdam, where we lived when I was seven; the smell of it used to permeate our neighborhood there. My mother always said we’d go to Bali. I imagined us in a house with an extravagantly peaked roof, overlooking green rice terraces and miraculously clear seas, where we’d wake to chimes and the baaing of goats. After a while I made myself a cheese and sweet pickle sandwich and went next door to Michael’s. He was halfway through a bottle of red wine from Trader Joe’s—“poverty chic” he called it, because it had a cork—and he was crying, watching a Lana Turner movie. I didn’t like Lana Turner and I couldn’t stand looking at the dying tomatoes, so I read Chekhov until Michael passed out, then went downstairs and swam in the pool warm as tears. I floated on my back and looked up at the stars, the Goat, the Swan, and hoped my mother was falling in love. All that weekend, she didn’t say a thing about her date with Barry, but she wrote poems and crumpled them up, threw them at the wastebasket. IN THE ART ROOM , Kit proofread over my mother’s shoulder, while I sat at my table in the corner, making a collage about Chekhov, the lady with the little dog, cutting out figures from discarded photographs. Marlene answered the phone, covered the receiver with her hand. “It’s Barry Kolker.” Kit’s head jerked up at the sound of the name, a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer. “I’ll take it in my office.” “It’s for Ingrid,” Marlene said. My mother didn’t look up from her layout sheet. “Tell him I don’t work here anymore.” Marlene told him, lying like oil. “How do you know Barry Kolker?” the editor asked, her black eyes big as olives. “Just someone I met,” my mother said. That evening, in the long summer twilight, people came out of their apartments, walked their dogs, drank blender drinks down by the pool, their feet in the water. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue. My mother knelt at her table, writing, and a slight breeze brushed the wind chimes we’d hung in the old eucalyptus, while I lay on her bed. I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty. There was a knock on the door, wrecking the peace. Nobody ever came to our door. My mother put down her pen and grabbed the folding knife she kept in the jar with the pencils, its dark carbon blade sharp enough to shave a cat.

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

  Whether eternal happiness is the proper object of hope?Objection 1: It would seem that eternal happiness is not the proper object of hope. For a man does not hope for that which surpasses every movement of the soul, since hope itself is a movement of the soul. Now eternal happiness surpasses every movement of the human soul, for the Apostle says (1 Cor. 2:9) that it hath not “entered into the heart of man.” Therefore happiness is not the proper object of hope. Objection 2: Further, prayer is an expression of hope, for it is written (Ps. 36:5): “Commit thy way to the Lord, and trust in Him, and He will do it.” Now it is lawful for man to pray God not only for eternal happiness, but also for the goods, both temporal and spiritual, of the present life, and, as evidenced by the Lord’s Prayer, to be delivered from evils which will no longer be in eternal happiness. Therefore eternal happiness is not the proper object of hope. Objection 3: Further, the object of hope is something difficult. Now many things besides eternal happiness are difficult to man. Therefore eternal happiness is not the proper object of hope. On the contrary, The Apostle says (Heb. 6:19) that we have hope “which entereth in,” i.e. maketh us to enter . . .” within the veil,” i.e. into the happiness of heaven, according to the interpretation of a gloss on these words. Therefore the object of hope is eternal happiness. I answer that, As stated above [2431](A[1]), the hope of which we speak now, attains God by leaning on His help in order to obtain the hoped for good. Now an effect must be proportionate to its cause. Wherefore the good which we ought to hope for from God properly and chiefly is the infinite good, which is proportionate to the power of our divine helper, since it belongs to an infinite power to lead anyone to an infinite good. Such a good is eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of God Himself. For we should hope from Him for nothing less than Himself, since His goodness, whereby He imparts good things to His creature, is no less than His Essence. Therefore the proper and principal object of hope is eternal happiness. Reply to Objection 1: Eternal happiness does not enter into the heart of man perfectly, i.e. so that it be possible for a wayfarer to know its nature and quality; yet, under the general notion of the perfect good, it is possible for it to be apprehended by a man, and it is in this way that the movement of hope towards it arises. Hence the Apostle says pointedly (Heb. 6:19) that hope “enters in, even within the veil,” because that which we hope for is as yet veiled, so to speak.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: We ought not to pray God for any other goods, except in reference to eternal happiness. Hence hope regards eternal happiness chiefly, and other things, for which we pray God, it regards secondarily and as referred to eternal happiness: just as faith regards God principally, and, secondarily, those things which are referred to God, as stated above ([2432]Q[1], A[1]). Reply to Objection 3: To him that longs for something great, all lesser things seem small; wherefore to him that hopes for eternal happiness, nothing else appears arduous, as compared with that hope; although, as compared with the capability of the man who hopes, other things besides may be arduous to him, so that he may have hope for such things in reference to its principal object. Whether one man may hope for another’s eternal happiness?Objection 1: It would seem that one may hope for another’s eternal happiness. For the Apostle says (Phil. 1:6): “Being confident of this very thing, that He Who hath begun a good work in you, will perfect it unto the day of Jesus Christ.” Now the perfection of that day will be eternal happiness. Therefore one man may hope for another’s eternal happiness. Objection 2: Further, whatever we ask of God, we hope to obtain from Him. But we ask God to bring others to eternal happiness, according to James 5:16: “Pray for one another that you may be saved.” Therefore we can hope for another’s eternal happiness. Objection 3: Further, hope and despair are about the same object. Now it is possible to despair of another’s eternal happiness, else Augustine would have no reason for saying (De Verb. Dom., Serm. lxxi) that we should not despair of anyone so long as he lives. Therefore one can also hope for another’s eternal salvation. On the contrary, Augustine says (Enchiridion viii) that “hope is only of such things as belong to him who is supposed to hope for them.”

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The group on Prozac did slightly better than the placebo group, but barely so. This is typical of most studies of drugs for PTSD: Simply showing up brings about a 30 percent to 42 percent improvement; when drugs work, they add an additional 5 percent to 15 percent. However, the patients on EMDR did substantially better than those on either Prozac or the placebo: After eight EMDR sessions one in four were completely cured (their PTSD scores had dropped to negligible levels), compared with one in ten of the Prozac group. But the real difference occurred over time: When we interviewed our subjects eight months later, 60 percent of those who had received EMDR scored as being completely cured. As the great psychiatrist Milton Erickson said, once you kick the log, the river will start flowing. Once people started to integrate their traumatic memories, they spontaneously continued to improve. In contrast, all those who had taken Prozac relapsed when they went off the drug. This study was significant because it demonstrated that a focused, trauma-specific therapy for PTSD like EMDR could be much more effective than medication. Other studies have confirmed that if patients take Prozac or related drugs like Celexa, Paxil, and Zoloft, their PTSD symptoms often improve, but only as long as they keep taking them. This makes drug treatment much more expensive in the long run. (Interestingly, despite Prozac’s status as a major antidepressant, in our study EMDR also produced a greater reduction in depression scores than taking the antidepressant.) Another key finding of our study: Adults with histories of childhood trauma responded very differently to EMDR from those who were traumatized as adults. At the end of eight weeks, almost half of the adult-onset group that received EMDR scored as completely cured, while only 9 percent of the child-abuse group showed such pronounced improvement. Eight months later the cure rate was 73 percent for the adult-onset group, compared with 25 percent for those with histories of child abuse. The child-abuse group had small but consistently positive responses to Prozac. These results reinforce the findings that I reported in chapter 9: Chronic childhood abuse causes very different mental and biological adaptations than discrete traumatic events in adulthood. EMDR is a powerful treatment for stuck traumatic memories, but it doesn’t necessarily resolve the effects of the betrayal and abandonment that accompany physical or sexual abuse in childhood. Eight weeks of therapy of any kind is rarely sufficient to resolve the legacy of long-standing trauma.