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 Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  To those of you who sit here a little bemused and I hope very proud, I speak to you as a poet whose role is always to encourage the intimacy of scrutiny. For I believe that as each one of us learns to bear that intimacy those worse fears which rule our lives and shape our silences begin to lose their power over us. Last week I asked a number of you if you felt different in any way and each one of you said very quickly and in a similar tone, “Oh no, of course not, I don’t consider myself different from anybody else.” I think it is not by accident that each of you heard my question as “Are you better than . . .” Yet each of you is sitting here now because in some particular way and time, in some particular place and for whatever reason, you dared to excel, to set yourself apart. And that makes you in this particular place and time, different. It is that difference that I urge you to affirm and to explore lest it someday be used against you and against me. It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us. In a profit economy which needs groups of outsiders as surplus people, we are programmed to respond to difference in one of three ways: to ignore it by denying the testament of our own senses, “Oh, I never noticed.” Or if that is not possible, then we try to neutralize it in one of two ways. If the difference has been defined for us in our introductory courses as good, meaning useful in preserving the status quo, in perpetuating the myth of sameness, then we try to copy it. If the difference is defined as bad, that is revolutionary or threatening, then we try to destroy it. But we have few patterns for relating across differences as equals. And unclaimed, our differences are used against us in the service of separation and confusion, for we view them only in opposition to each other, dominant/subordinate, good/bad, superior/inferior. And of course, so long as the existence of human differences means one must be inferior, the recognition of those differences will be fraught with guilt and danger. Which differences are positive and which negative are determined for us by a society that has been already established, and so must seek to perpetuate itself, faults as well as virtues.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  They refuse to look for any other reason for the irregularities in the x-rays, and they’re treating my resistance to their diagnosis as a personal affront. But it’s my body and my life and the goddess knows I’m paying enough for all this, I ought to have a say. The flame is very dim these days. It’s all I can do to teach my classes at Hunter and crawl home. Frances and I will leave for Switzerland as soon as school is over next week. The Women’s Poetry Center will be dedicated at Hunter the night before I leave. No matter how sick I feel, I’m still afire with a need to do something for my living. How will I be allowed to live my own life, the rest of my life? December 9, 1985 New York City A better question is—how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to ensure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor! December 13, 1985 New York City There are some occasions in life too special to dissect, not only because they are everything they are supposed to be, but because they are also a sum of unexpected fantasies and deep satisfactions all come together at one point in time. Tonight the students of the Hunter College Women’s Poetry Center Club and the Returning Woman Newsletter dedicated the Audre Lorde Women’s Poetry Center. Walking into that hall, even thirty minutes late, was the beginning of exactly that kind of evening, and nothing I nor anyone else will ever do can lessen its meaning for me. Whatever happens to me, there has been a coming together in time and space of some of my best efforts, hopes, and desires. There is a tangible possibility to be built upon and strong young women committed to doing it. I wish them the power of their vision for what this center can be in their lives and in the life of a community of women’s culture in this city, the vision of a living women’s poetry as a force for social change. This evening brought together four of my deepest and longest-lasting interests—poetry, beautiful women, revolution, and me!

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have periods of persistent and distracting visceral discomfort that are totally intrusive and energy-consuming. I say this rather than simply use the word pain, because there are too many gradations of effect and response that are not covered by that one word. Self-hypnosis seemed a workable possibility for maintaining some control over the processes going on inside my body. With trial and inquiry, I found a reliable person to train me in the techniques of self-hypnosis. It’s certainly cheaper than codeine. Self-hypnosis requires a concentration so intense I put myself into a waking trance. But we go into those states more often than we realize. Have you ever been wide awake on the subway and missed your station because you were thinking about something else? It’s a question of recognizing this state and learning to use it to manipulate my consciousness of pain. One of the worst things about intrusive pain is that it makes me feel impotent, unable to move against it and therefore against anything else, as if the pain swallows up all ability to act. Self-hypnosis has been useful to me not only for refocusing physical discomfort, it has also been useful to me in helping effect other bargains with my unconscious self. I’ve been able to use it to help me remember my dreams, raise a subnormal body temperature, and bring myself to complete a difficult article. I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes—not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected—a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance. December 7, 1986 New York City I’m glad I don’t have to turn away any more from movies about people dying of cancer. I no longer have to deny cancer as a reality in my life. As I wept over Terms of Endearment last night, I also laughed. It’s hard to believe I avoided this movie for over two years. Yet while I was watching it, involved in the situation of a young mother dying of breast cancer, I was also very aware of that standard of living, taken for granted in the film, that made the expression of her tragedy possible. Her mother’s maid and the manicured garden, the unremarked but very tangible money so evident through its effects. Daughter’s philandering husband is an unsuccessful English professor, but they still live in a white-shingled house with trees, not in some rack-ass tenement on the Lower East Side or in Harlem for which they pay too much rent. Her private room in Lincoln Memorial Hospital has her mama’s Renoir on the wall. There are never any Black people at all visible in that hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, not even in the background. Now this may not make her death scenes any less touching, but it did strengthen my resolve to talk about my experiences with cancer as a Black woman.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  If all this is true, we have still another explanation. Why did this little slip of a letter, this single papyrus sheet, survive; and how did it ever get itself into the collection of Pauline letters? It deals with no great doctrine; it attacks no great heresy; it is the only one of the letters universally accepted as having been written by Paul that is addressed to an individual. It is practically certain that the first collection of Paul's letters was made at Ephesus, about the turn of the century. It was just then that Onesimus was Bishop of Ephesus; and it may well be that it was he who insisted that this letter be included in the collection, short and personal as it was, in order that all might know what the grace of God had done for him. Through it, the bishop tells the world that once he was a runaway slave and that he owed his life to Paul and to Jesus Christ. Did Onesimus come back to Paul with Philemon's blessing? Did the young man who had been the runaway slave become the great Bishop of Ephesus? Did he insist that this little letter be included in the Pauline collection to tell what Christ, through Paul, had done for him? We can never tell for certain; but it is a lovely story of God's grace in Christ - and we hope that it is true! 16Hebrews Access to GodGod Fulfils Himself in Many Ways Religion has never been the same thing to everyone. `God', as Tennyson said in Mort d'Arthur, `fulfils himself in many ways.' The Irish writer George Russell said: `There are as many ways of climbing to the stars as there are people to climb.' There is a saying which tells us very truly and very beautifully that `God has his own secret stairway into every heart.' Broadly speaking, there have been four great conceptions of religion. (i) To some, it is inward fellowship with God. It is a union with Christ so close and so intimate that Christians can be said to live in Christ and Christ to live in them. That was Paul's conception of religion. To him, it was something which mystically united him with God. (2) To some, religion is what gives us a standard for life and a power to reach that standard. On the whole, that is what religion was to James and to Peter. It was something which showed them what life ought to be and which enabled them to attain it.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I am on the cusp of change, and the curve is shifting fast. In the bleakest days I am kept afloat, maintained, empowered, by the positive energies of so many women who carry the breath of my loving like firelight in their strong hair. May 23, 1986 New York City I spoke with Andrea in New Orleans this morning. She and Diana are helping to organize a Black Women’s Book Fair. Despite its size, there is not one feminist bookstore in the whole city. She’s very excited about the project, and it was a real charge talking to her about it. There are so many young Black women across this country stepping out wherever they may be and making themselves felt within their communities in very real ways. These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I don’t have to do it all. It’s a two-way street, and even I don’t always realize it. Like the little sister from AA who stood up at my poetry reading last week and talked about how much courage I’d given her, and I was quaking in my boots because when she began I’d thought she was about to lay a heavy cancer rap on me in public, and I just wasn’t quite ready for that yet. I feel very humbled behind that little episode. I want to acknowledge all those intricate connections between us by which we sustain and empower each other. June 20, 1986 Bonnieux, France How incredibly rich to be here in the south of France with the Zamani Soweto Sisters from South Africa. Gloria and I became acquainted with them through Ellen Kuzwayo and our fundraising work with the Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa. They are one of the groups we help support through contributions. I’m only sorry that Ellen couldn’t be here also, but at least I had a chance to share time and space with her in London on June 16, the anniversary of the Soweto uprising. I learn tremendous courage from these women, from their laughter and their tears, from their grace under constant adversity, from their joy in living which is one of their most potent weapons, from the deft power of their large, overworked bodies and their dancing, swollen feet. In this brief respite for us all made possible by Betty Wolpert’s kindness, these women have taught me so much courage and perspective. June 21, 1986 Bonnieux

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  What does this mean for each one of us? I think it means that I must choose to define my difference as you must choose to define yours, to claim it and to use it as creative before it is defined for you and used to eradicate any future, any change. You must decide what it means to excel and to persevere beyond competence and why you do it. Or else this ability, this difference defined as good right now because it appears to promise a continuation of safety and sameness, this difference will be used to testify against your creativity, it will be used to cordon off those other differences defined/regarded as bad, improper, or threatening, those differences of race, sex, class, gender, and age, all those ways in which a profit economy defines its excess (different) people. And ultimately, it will be used to truncate your future and mine. The house of your difference is the longing for your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability. It is an indelible part of your life’s arsenal. If you allow your difference, whatever it might be, to be defined for you by imposed externals, then it will be defined to your detriment, always, for that definition must [be] dictated by the need of your society, rather than by a merging between the needs of that society and the human needs of self. But as you acknowledge your difference and examine how you wish to use it and for what—the creative power of difference explored—then you can focus it toward a future which we must each commit ourselves to in some particular way if it is to come to pass at all. This is not a theoretical discussion. I am talking here about the very fabric of your lives, your dreams, your hopes, your visions, your place upon the earth. All of these will help to determine the shape of your future as they themselves are born from your efforts and pains and triumphs of the past. Cherish them. Learn from them. Our differences are polarities between which can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine, when we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision, no matter how differently expressed; a vision which supposes a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices. We must define our differences so that we may someday live beyond them, rather than change them. So this is a call for each of you to remember herself and himself, to reach for new definitions of that self, and to live intensely. To not settle for the safety of pretended sameness and the false security that sameness seems to offer. To feel the consequences of who you wish to be, lest you bring nothing of lasting worth because you have withheld some piece of the essential, which is you.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult? The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel. As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros , the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession.

• From Self (1996)

  tional equity programs for educationally and financially disadvantaged students of all ages that this study was conducted through University College. Indeed, the results may suggest that what we provide is more important than attributes they may bring with them when initially selected. Frank E. Funk Dean, University College Syracuse University FOREWORD The Higher Education Opportunity Program and ‘és sister programs at the local, state and national levels around the country rest on several key premises: that disproportionately low enrollments in our postsecond- ary institutions of persons from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds are intolerable from an economic, social and--most importantly--an ethi- cal perspective; that the ability to succeed in college resides in people from all circumstances, if only we have the commitment and ingenuity to provide them the tools; and that traditional instruments for screening college admissions have little to do with discovering innate abilities, but a lot to do with identifying the degree of fortune in an applicant's previous life circumstances. Because of the latter tenet, the special opportunity or access pro- grams have encouraged college and university decision-makers to place less emphasis than has been customary on students' previous academic records of performance or achievement--high school grades, patterns of coursework, rank in secondary school graduating class, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and other similar measures--and instead to look for other indicators of a student's likelihood of having a successful college experience. The process of determining whether a particular student from a dis- advantaged background is likely to succeed in college, even given adequate Support systems, is hardly an exact science. Practitioners typically rely on letters of reference; evidence of "maturity" as manifested in ability to get and keep a job, support a family, hold office in an organization; a personal interview which often seeks to determine how clear this appli- cant is about motivation and sacrificing short-term for long-term gains; and evidence of various affect characteristics. The construct of "positive self-concept" has frequently been one such characteristic. The report which follows is very helpful insofar as it demonstrates with some force that self-concept, for this population, is not related to persistence. The possible ‘rend is intriguing; as more and more prior-to-college factors are found as not having influence over the postsecondary success of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the more we must speculate that it is the college experience itself which controls. If this is so, those of us involved in programs for this population have a special respon- sibility to investigate the variability of results among such programs, and to identify, publicize and strengthen those elements which contribute to SuCCeSsS. It is for these reasons this major ypsearch paper has made a valuable contribution to furthering the achievement of equity at the postsecondary level. Stephen H. Adolphus, Chief Bureau of Higher Education Opportunity Programs New York State Education Department iv INTRODUCTION

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  A. will lend us the money to go to Switzerland, and Frances will come with me. I think they will be able to find out what is really wrong with me at the Lukas Klinik, and if they say these growths in my liver are malignant, then I will accept that I have cancer of the liver. At least there they will be able to adjust my Iscador dosage upward to the maximum effect, because that is the way I have decided to go and I’m not going to change now. Obviously, I still don’t accept these tumors in my liver as cancer, although I know that could just be denial on my part, which is certainly one mechanism for coping with cancer. I have to consider denial as a possibility in all of my planning, but I also feel that there is absolutely nothing they can do for me at Sloane [sic] Kettering except cut me open and then sew me back up with their condemnations inside me. December 7, 1985 New York City My stomach x-rays are clear, and the problems in my GI series are all circumstantial. Now that the doctors here have decided I have liver cancer, they insist on reading all their findings as if that were a fait accompli. They refuse to look for any other reason for the irregularities in the x-rays, and they’re treating my resistance to their diagnosis as a personal affront. But it’s my body and my life and the goddess knows I’m paying enough for all this, I ought to have a say. The flame is very dim these days. It’s all I can do to teach my classes at Hunter and crawl home. Frances and I will leave for Switzerland as soon as school is over next week. The Women’s Poetry Center will be dedicated at Hunter the night before I leave. No matter how sick I feel, I’m still afire with a need to do something for my living. How will I be allowed to live my own life, the rest of my life? December 9, 1985 New York City A better question is—how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to ensure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor! December 13, 1985 New York City

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  5.​Openness (receptivity) Perceive even what is unpleasant in an unfettered, nonprejudiced way. 6.​Harmony (perseverance) Work toward balancing the other five. As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces—growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying—and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces. December 16, 1985 Arlesheim I brought some of my books with me, and reading The Cancer Journals in this place is like excavating words out of the earth, like turning up a crystal that has been buried at the bottom of a mine for a thousand years, waiting. Even Our Dead Behind Us—now that it has gone to the printer—seems prophetic. Like always, it feels like I plant what I will need to harvest, without consciousness. This is why the work is so important. Its power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as in the heart’s blood pumping behind the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all [of] the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do. December 17, 1985 Arlesheim When I read in Basel last June, I never imagined I would be here again, four miles away, in a hospital. I remember the women in the bookstore that night, and their questions about survival rates that I could not answer then. And certainly not now. Even in the bleak Swiss winter, the grounds of the Lukas Klinik are very beautiful. Much care has been given by the builders to the different shades of winter scenery, so there is a play of light and dark that hits the eye from the room’s windows as well as from the beds. My private room is good-sized, spacious by american hospital standards. It is one of the few single rooms with a private bath, and they are usually for very sick or very rich people. I think the administration was not sure which category I fit into when I called from New York. Even when it is not sunny, the room is light because everything in it is light. Not white, except for the bedsheets, but very light. Even the furniture is solid hand-hewn blond wood, made in one of the sheltered workshops run in conjunction with an anthroposophic school for developmentally handicapped people. The Rudolf Steiner schools have had great success in the area of special education.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I hope for an International Conference of Black Feminists, asking some of these questions of definition of women from Amsterdam, Melbourne, the South Pacific, Kentucky, New York, and London, all of whom call ourselves Black feminists and all of whom have different strengths. To paraphrase June Jordan, we are the women we want to become. August 1, 1984 New York City Saints be praised! The new CAT scan is unchanged. The tumor has not grown, which means either Iscador is working or the tumor is not malignant! I feel relieved, vindicated, and hopeful. The pain in my middle is gone, as long as I don’t eat very much and stick to fruits and veggies. That’s livable. I feel like a second chance, for true! I’m making myself a new office upstairs in Jonathan’s old room. It’s going to be a good year. October 10, 1984 New York City I’ve been thinking about my time in Germany again, unencumbered by artificial shades of terror and self-concern. I don’t want my involvement with health matters to obscure the revelation of differences I encountered. The Afro-European women. What I learned about the differences when one teaches about feeling and poetry in a language that is not the original language of the people learning, even when they speak that language fluently. (Of course, all poets learn about feeling as children in our native tongue, and the psychosocial strictures and emotional biases of that language pass over into how we think about feeling for the rest of our lives.) I will never forget the emotional impact of Raja’s poetry, and how what she is doing with the German language is so close to what Black poets here are doing with English. It was another example of how our Africanness impacts upon the world’s consciousness in intersecting ways. As an African-American woman, I feel the tragedy of being an oppressed hyphenated person in america, of having no land to be our primary teacher. And this distorts us in so many ways. Yet there is a vital part that we play as Black people in the liberation consciousness of every freedom-seeking people upon this globe, no matter what they say they think about us as Black americans. And whatever our differences are that make for difficulty in communication between us and other oppressed peoples, as Afro-Americans we must recognize the promise we represent for some new social synthesis that the world has not yet experienced. I think of the Afro-Dutch, Afro-German, Afro-French women I met this spring in europe, and how they are beginning to recognize each other and come together openly in terms of their identities, and I see that they are also beginning to cut a distinct shape across the cultural face of every country where they are at home.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  December 14, 1986 New York City It is exactly one year since I went to Switzerland and found the air cold and still. Yet what I found at the Lukas Klinik has helped me save my life. [Its manifestation is not only therapeutic. It is vital. Underlining what is joyful and life-affirming in my living becomes crucial. What have I had to leave behind? Old life habits, outgrown defenses put aside lest they siphon off energies to no useful purpose? One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future—to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now. This is my life. Each hour is a possibility not to be banked. These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living. They are my life. The feeling of the bedsheet against my heels as I wake to the sound of crickets and bananaquits in Judith’s Fancy. I am living my life every particular day no matter where I am, nor in what pursuit. It is the consciousness of this that gives a marvelous breadth to everything I do consciously. My most deeply held convictions and beliefs can be equally expressed in how I deal with chemotherapy as well as in how I scrutinize a poem. It’s about trying to know who I am wherever I am. It’s not as if I’m in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again. I visualize daily winning the battles going on inside my body, and this is an important part of fighting for my life. In those visualizations, the cancer at times takes on the face and shape of my most implacable enemies, those I fight and resist most fiercely. Sometimes the wanton cells in my liver become Bull Connor and his police dogs completely smothered, rendered impotent in Birmingham, Alabama, by a mighty avalanche of young, determined Black marchers moving across him toward their future. P. W. Botha’s bloated face of apartheid squashed into the earth beneath an onslaught of the slow rhythmic advance of furious Blackness. Black South African women moving through my blood destroying passbooks. Fireburn Mary sweeping over the Cruzan countryside, axe and torch in hand. Images from a Calypso singer: The big black boot of freedom Is mashing down your doorstep.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Hostile as the world is, it is doomed. The world and all its desires are passing away (2:17). That, indeed, is why it is folly to give one's heart to the world; the world is coming to an end. Although Christians live in a hostile world which is passing away, there is no need for despair and fear. The darkness is past; the true light now shines (2:8). God in Christ has broken into time; the new age has come. It is not yet fully brought to fruition, but the consummation is sure. Christians live in an evil and a hostile world, but they possess the means to overcome it; and, when the destined end of the world comes, they will be safe, because they already possess that which makes them members of the new community in the new age. The Fellowship of the Church John does more than move in the high realms of theology; he has certain most practical things to say about the Christian Church and the Christian life. No New Testament writer stresses more consistently or more strenuously the necessity of Christian fellowship. Christians, John was convinced, are not only bound to God; they are also bound to each other. When we walk in the light, we have fellowship with each other (1:7). Those who claim to walk in the light but who hate their brothers and sisters are in reality walking in darkness; those who love their brothers and sisters are the ones who are in the light (2:9-II). The proof that people have passed from darkness to light is the fact that they love one another. To hate a fellow human being is in essence to be a murderer, as Cain was. If we are able out of our own wealth to help another's poverty and do not do so, it is ridiculous for us to claim that the love of God dwells in us. The essence of religion is to believe in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and to love one another (3:11-17, 3:23). God is love; and, therefore, those who love are kin to God. God has loved us, and that is the best reason for loving each other (4:7-12). If we say that we love God and at the same time hate another person, we are liars. The command is that all who love God must love others too (4:20-I). It was John's conviction that the only way in which anyone can prove love for God is by loving other people, and that that love must be not only a sentimental emotion but also a dynamic towards practical help. Christian Righteousness

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  One columnist praised him for “digging down deeply into the basic urges of ordinary people.” Country-boy traits treated as liabilities before 1963 suddenly became an asset as the nation grieved the loss of its young president. 79 In 1963, LBJ’s tour in Kentucky included photographs of the president conversing with poor Appalachian families. #215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas Johnson’s signature set of programs known as the Great Society attached to a different, and positive, variant of his southern identity. Upon passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the president flew to Stonewall, Texas, to sign the bill at the one-room schoolhouse where he had taught during the Great Depression. While there, he referred to himself as the “son of a sharecropper.” His willingness to tackle poverty could be traced to his embrace of a modern South. In 1960, when he first ran for president, he echoed Howard Odum’s creed: his goal was to prevent a “waste of resources, waste of lives, or waste of opportunity.” By the time he launched the Great Society, the legislation he promoted focused on two distinct classes: the poor urban black population and the mountain folk of Appalachia. Seeing the Great Society as the new New Deal, Johnson connected his reform to the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, invoking her sentimental appeal to hillbillies. Lady Bird Johnson went to the Kentucky hills, where she distributed lunches and dedicated a new school gym; her husband sat himself down and talked with families. 80 As they followed him on his five-state tour, cameramen captured images of the president on the porches of run-down shacks, affectionately listening to the mountain people—it was nothing if not a James Agee/Walker Evans flashback to the thirties. The problems facing Appalachia were acute: a high rate of joblessness compared to the rest of the country (in some places three or four times the national average); deteriorating housing; an uneducated workforce; and a ravaged environment wrought by strip mining. Mountain farm families had been stripped of the legal right to their property when coal-mining companies, aided by state courts, were given the prerogative to ruin fields, destroy forests, build roads wherever they chose, and pollute the water supply. In the end, the Johnson administration secured passage of the Appalachian Regional Development Act, providing infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. The president subsequently stated that seeing the poverty there firsthand had convinced him of the necessity of the Medicare amendment. And so fighting rural poverty remained a central plank in Johnson’s overall “War on Poverty.” But even these bold policies proved inadequate to manage the massive devastation that the blighted regional economy had already experienced. 81 Lyndon Johnson was aware of every detail as he went about fashioning his public image. The hat he wore was not a ten-gallon cowboy, but a modified five- gallon version with a narrower brim. This was LBJ: a modified, modernized southerner.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Let us look at this question, for it is of considerable interest. First, it is clear that, when Paul was in prison in Rome, he did not regard release as impossible; in fact, it looks as if he expected it. When he wrote to the Philippians, he said that he was sending Timothy to them, and goes on: `And I trust in the Lord that I will also come soon' (Philippians 2:24). When he wrote to Philemon, sending back the runaway Onesimus, he says: `One thing more - prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you' (Philemon 22). Clearly he was prepared for release, whether or not it ever came. Second, let us remember a plan that was very dear to Paul's heart. Before he went to Jerusalem on that journey on which he was arrested, he wrote to the church at Rome, and in that letter he is planning a visit to Spain. `When I go to Spain ... I do hope to see you on my journey', he writes. `I will set out by way of you', he writes, `to Spain' (Romans 15:24, 15:28). Was that visit ever paid? The letter known as i Clement, which was sent from the Roman church to the Christians at Corinth in about AD 90, said of Paul that he preached the gospel in the east and in the west, that he instructed the whole world (that is, the Roman Empire) in righteousness, and that he went to the extremity (terma, the terminus) of the west before his martyrdom. What did Clement mean by the extremity of the west? There are many who argue that he meant nothing more than Rome. Now, it is true that someone writing some distance away in the east in Asia Minor would probably think of Rome as the extremity of the west. But Clement was writing from Rome, and it is difficult to see that for anyone in Rome the extremity of the west could be anything other than Spain. It certainly seems that Clement believed that Paul reached Spain. The greatest of all the early Church historians was Eusebius, who was writing early in the fourth century. In his account of Paul's life, he writes: `Luke, who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, brought his history to a close at this point, after stating that Paul had spent two whole years at Rome as a prisoner at large, and preached the word of God without constraint. Thus, after he had made his defence, it is said that the Apostle was sent again on the ministry of preaching, and that on coming to the same city a second time he suffered martyrdom' (Ecclesiastical History, 2:22:2). Eusebius has nothing to say about Spain, but he did know the story that Paul had been released from his first Roman imprisonment.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Besides, he proposed we should occupy the cabin alternate afternoons; for example, he’d take it next day and I mustn’t come near it, and if at any time one of us found the door locked, he was to respect his chum’s privacy. I agreed to it all with enthusiasm and went to sleep in a fever of hope. Would Jessie risk her father’s anger and come to me? Perhaps she would: at any rate I’d write and ask her and I did. In one hour the same sailor came back with her reply. It ran like this: “Dear love, father is mad, we shall have to take great care for two or three days: as soon as it’s safe, I’ll come—your loving Jess”, with a dozen crosses for kisses. That afternoon, without thinking of my compact with Ponsonby, I went to our cabin and found the door locked: at once our compact came into my head and I went quietly away. Had he succeeded so quickly? and was she with him in bed? The half certainty made my heart beat. That evening Ponsonby could not conceal his success but as he used it partly to praise his mistress. I forgave him. “She has the prettiest figure you ever saw”, he declared, “and is really a dear. We had just finished when you came to the door. I said it was some mistake and she believed me. She wants me to marry her but I can’t marry. If I were rich I’d marry quick enough. It’s better than risking some foul disease”, and he went on to tell about one of his colleagues, John Lawrence, who got Black Pox, as he called syphilis, caught from a negress. “He didn’t notice it for three months”, Ponsonby went on, “and it got into his system; his nose got bad and he was invalided home, poor devil. Those black girls are foul”, he continued, “they give everyone the clap and that’s bad enough, I can tell you; they’re dirty devils.” His ruttish sorrows didn’t interest me much, for I had made up my mind never at any time to go with any prostitute. I came to several such uncommon resolutions on board that ship, and I may set down the chief of them here very briefly. First of all, I resolved that I would do every piece of work given to me as well as I could, so that no one coming after me could do it better. I had found out at school in the last term that if you gave your whole mind and heart to anything, you learned it very quickly and thoroughly. I was sure even before the trial that my first job would lead me straight to fortune. I had seen men at work and knew it would be easy to beat any of them. I was only eager for the trial.

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

  The next contention, viz. that men should not be bribed to enter religion, is answered by the very chapter quoted in support of it. For it declares that “unless someone has the intention of feeding the poor, no one of any profession whatsoever is to be refused maintenance.” Hence it appears that the practice of burses for poor scholars, and of supporting them during their studies in order that they may be more fit to enter religion, is by no means to be condemned. Neither is it unlawful to bestow some material benefit upon a man, in order that he may be encouraged, by such a favour, to do better; but it would be unlawful to enter into a compact or agreement with him. Hence in the same chapter, it is laid down that all compacts and agreements must be avoided. Were it unlawful to encourage persons to spiritual good by means of material assistance, the custom, prevalent in certain churches, of giving a largesse to those who assist at the divine office, would be unjustifiable. The eighth argument, viz. that it leads to unfaithfulness to persuade young persons to adopt such painful practices as fasting, watching, and the like, contains a fallacy which may easily be detected. For those who are received to the religious life, or who are bound by vow to enter it, are, from the very outset, shown its hardships. It does not lead men to unfaithfulness if, in order to persuade them to embrace a life whose sufferings are manifest, we, after the example of Christ, hold out to them the prospect of spiritual consolations. “Take my yoke upon you,” said our Lord, “and learn of Me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest for your soul” (Mt 11:29). In these words, physical labour is symbolised by the “yoke,” and spiritual consolation by the “rest” promised to those that bear it. Hence St. Augustine, in De verbis Domini, says, “They who bravely submit to the yoke of the Lord, undergo such dangers and difficulties that they appear to be called, not from labour to rest, but from rest to labour. But the Holy Spirit who is with them by the abundance of heavenly delights and the hope of future blessedness, sweetens all present bitterness and lightens all present loads.” Therefore, they who judge that men deceive themselves by undertaking hardships for Christ’s sake, merely show that they have had no experience of heavenly delights. The ninth argument is quite irrelevant to the matter in hand. The statute of Pope Innocent, which is quoted, refers to solemn vows made at professions, not to simple vows whereby people bind themselves out of devotion to go intoreligion.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: As Augustine says (Enchiridion viii), “faith is about things, bad or good, past, present, or future, one’s own or another’s; whereas hope is only about good things, future and concerning oneself.” Hence it is possible for lifeless faith to be in the damned, but not hope, since the Divine goods are not for them future possible things, but far removed from them. Reply to Objection 3: Lack of hope in the damned does not change their demerit, as neither does the voiding of hope in the blessed increase their merit: but both these things are due to the change in their respective states. Whether there is certainty in the hope of a wayfarer?Objection 1: It would seem that there is no certainty in the hope of a wayfarer. For hope resides in the will. But certainty pertains not to the will but to the intellect. Therefore there is no certainty in hope. Objection 2: Further, hope is based on grace and merits, as stated above (Q[17], A[1]). Now it is impossible in this life to know for certain that we are in a state of grace, as stated above ([2456]FS, Q[112], A[5]). Therefore there is no certainty in the hope of a wayfarer. Objection 3: Further, there can be no certainty about that which may fail. Now many a hopeful wayfarer fails to obtain happiness. Therefore wayfarer’s hope has no certainty. On the contrary, “Hope is the certain expectation of future happiness,” as the Master states (Sent. iii, D, 26): and this may be gathered from 2 Tim. 1:12, “I know Whom I have believed, and I am certain that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him.” I answer that, Certainty is found in a thing in two ways, essentially and by participation. It is found essentially in the cognitive power; by participation in whatever is moved infallibly to its end by the cognitive power. In this way we say that nature works with certainty, since it is moved by the Divine intellect which moves everything with certainty to its end. In this way too, the moral virtues are said to work with greater certainty than art, in as much as, like a second nature, they are moved to their acts by the reason: and thus too, hope tends to its end with certainty, as though sharing in the certainty of faith which is in the cognitive faculty. This suffices for the Reply to the First Objection. Reply to Objection 2: Hope does not trust chiefly in grace already received, but on God’s omnipotence and mercy, whereby even he that has not grace, can obtain it, so as to come to eternal life. Now whoever has faith is certain of God’s omnipotence and mercy.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, "if survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work." It has now become an imperative decree: "Survival shall occur, and therefore organs must so work!" Real ends appear for the first time now upon the world's stage. The conception of consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which is the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic-modern as well as ancient schools, is thoroughly anti- psychological, as the remainder of this book will show. Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not. Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself, and it will help an instable brain to compass its proper ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot of other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the proper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. The brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and which away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or indifferent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through the cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened by the fact of their awaking one consciousness and dampening by awakening another. How such reaction of the consciousness upon the currents may occur must remain at present unsolved: it is enough for my purpose to have shown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matter is less simple than the brain-automatists hold. All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend color to this view. Consciousness, for example, is only intense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid, automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum. Nothing could be more fitting than this, if consciousness have the teleological function we suppose; nothing more meaningless, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no danger of going astray from their end, need no extraneous help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative possibilities of final nervous discharge. The feeling awakened by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Here is the background of Revelation. All over the Empire, men and women had to call Domitian god - or die. Caesarworship was the deliberate policy; all must say: `Caesar is Lord.' There was no escape. What were the Christians to do? What hope did they have? Not many of them were wise, and not many of them were powerful. They had no influence or status. Against them had risen the might of Rome, which no nation had ever resisted. They were confronted with the choice - Caesar or Christ. It was to encourage men and women in such times that Revelation was written. John did not shut his eyes to the terrors; he saw dreadful things, and he saw still more dreadful things on the way; but beyond them he saw glory for those who defied Caesar for the love of Christ. Revelation comes from one of the most heroic ages in all the history of the Christian Church. It is true that Domitian's successor Nerva (AD 96-8) repealed the savage laws; but the damage was done, the Christians were outlaws, and Revelation is a clarion call to be faithful to death in order to win the crown of life. The Book Worth Studying We cannot shut our eyes to the difficulty of Revelation. It is the most difficult book in the Bible; but its study brings infinite rewards, for it contains the blazing faith of the Christian Church in the days when life was an agony and people expected the end of the heavens and the earth as they knew them but still believed that beyond the terror was the glory and above human raging was the power of God. Scripture Index [image file=img/page0531_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0531_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0531_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0532_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0532_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0532_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0533_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0533_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0533_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0534_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0534_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0534_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0535_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0535_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0535_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0536_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0536_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0536_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0537_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0537_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0537_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0538_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0538_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0538_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0539_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0539_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0539_0002.svg] [image file=img/page0540_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0540_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0540_0002.svg] Subject Index [image file=img/page0541_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0541_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0542_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0542_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0543_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0543_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0544_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0544_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0545_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0545_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0546_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0546_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0547_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0547_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0548_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0548_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0549_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0549_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0550_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0550_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0551_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0551_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0552_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0552_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0553_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0553_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0554_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0554_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0555_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0555_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0556_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0556_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0557_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0557_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0558_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0558_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0559_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0559_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0560_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0560_0001.svg] [image file=img/page0561_0000.svg] [image file=img/page0561_0001.svg] [image file=img/img0001.jpg] [image file=img/img0002.jpg]