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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  That voice lifted me up when I needed it most, and right then and there, I decided to become the CEO of my health, to build a game plan and team to support me. I called my new company “Save My Ass Technologies, Inc.,” and went about interviewing, hiring, and firing until I found the ideal candidate to be my second-in-command—an oncologist who saw me as a whole person and would go on to support me, body, mind, and spirit. They had to know the most about my rare shit pickle of an illness, have their finger on the pulse of research, and, of course, be kind. (No douchebags allowed.) After a long hunt, I finally found my wingman, Dr. D. With a positive and steady demeanor, he explained that sometimes my disease was slow growing and other times quite aggressive. How it would affect me would be a mystery, so he suggested a “watch and wait—let cancer make the first move” approach. We’d monitor my progress and hope for the slow-growing variety. If it became aggressive at some point, there might be treatment options available down the line. Fingers crossed. “And while we’re watching and waiting,” Dr. D. said, “you watch and live . Take care of yourself.” Was the good doctor high on his own stash? I had no idea how the hell to do that. To me, “healthy living” up until this point was forgoing the large fries for a medium at Burger King or bumming cigarettes instead of buying my own pack—habits that felt very necessary and comforting at the time. Even if I was lucky enough to have the slow-growing variety, living with never-ending cancer was like having anxiety on steroids. As I pondered Dr. D.’s parting words, I thought, How am I going to live with cancer without panicking about dying every day? At the time, I was still picking up the pieces of a broken engagement to the person I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with and was just figuring out how to be on my own again. I had no desire to embark on some Joseph Campbell–themed hero’s journey, which would require exploring some of life’s big questions, on top of my already aching heart. But thanks to the rupture, that’s not what happened. OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE FIRE After the meeting with Dr. D., I went directly to Whole Foods Market (which I quickly took to calling “Whole Paycheck Market”) and never looked back. I knew there would be so much coming my way that would be out of my control, but what I could impact was what I ate and how I cared for myself. So I took my fear and channeled it into a healing game plan. Action was progress. Action kept me operational. Action made me eat fiber.

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

  Luke was writing in the days when Christians were disliked and persecuted; and he told his story in such a way as to show that the Roman magistrates had always been perfectly fair to Christianity and that they had never regarded the Christians as evil. In fact, the very interesting suggestion has been made that Acts is nothing other than the brief prepared for Paul's defence when he stood trial before the Roman emperor. (2) One of Luke's aims was to show that Christianity was for all people of every country. This was one of the things the Jews found it hard to grasp. They had the idea that they were God's chosen people and that God had no use for any other nation. Luke sets out to prove otherwise. He shows Philip preaching to the Samaritans; he shows Stephen making Christianity universal and being killed for it; he shows Peter accepting Cornelius into the Church; he shows the Christians preaching to the Gentiles at Antioch; he shows Paul travelling far and wide winning men and women of every kind for Christ; and in Acts 15 he shows the Church making the great decision to accept the Gentiles on equal terms with the Jews. (3) But these were merely secondary aims. Luke's chief purpose is set out in the words of the risen Christ in r:8: `You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.' It was to show the expansion of Christianity - to show how that religion which began in a little corner of Palestine had in not much more than thirty years reached Rome. The Church historian C. H. Turner has pointed out that Acts falls into six panels, each ending with what might be called a progress report. The six panels are: (a) r:1-6:7; this tells of the church at Jerusalem and the preaching of Peter; and it finishes with the summary: `The word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.' (b) 6:8-9:31; this describes the spread of Christianity through Palestine and the martyrdom of Stephen, followed by the preaching in Samaria. It ends with the summary: `Meanwhile the church throughout Judaea, Galilee and Samaria had peace and was built up. Living in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.' (c) 9:32-12:24; this includes the conversion of Paul, the extension of the Church to Antioch, and the reception of Cornelius, the Gentile, into the Church by Peter. Its summary is: `The word of God continued to advance.' (d) 12:25-16:5; this tells of the extension of the Church through Asia Minor and the preaching tour of Galatia. It ends: `So the churches were strengthened in the faith and increased in numbers daily.'

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

  It is true that the general assumption is that it ended in his condemnation and death; but there is a by no means negligible stream of tradition which tells that it ended in his release, his liberty for two or three further years, his reimprisonment and finally his execution about the year AD 67. 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.

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

  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! 16 Hebrews Access to God God 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. (3) To some, religion is the highest satisfaction of their minds. Their minds seek and seek until they find that they can rest in God. It was Plato who said that `the unexamined life is the life not worth living'. There are some people who have to understand things in order to make sense of life. On the whole, that is what religion was to John. The first chapter of his gospel is one of the greatest attempts in the world to state religion in a way that really satisfies the mind. (4) To some, religion is access to God. It is that which removes the barriers and opens the door to his living presence. That is what religion was to the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. His mind was dominated with that idea. He found in Christ the one person who could take him into the very presence of God. His whole idea of religion is summed up in the great passage in Hebrews 10:19-22: Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh) ... let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith.

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

  But they could not represent the whole poor population—or the future. It was not only pellagra or illiteracy that stood in the way of their rise; there was also the fear of the wealthier classes that poor whites, like blacks, might not be willing to stay in their place. Daniels refuted the “slander” that had been perpetuated by the educated classes, and he made sure his readers took heed: “The Southern Negro is not an incurably ignorant ape. The Southern white masses are not biologically degenerate.” 64 Daniels was unwavering in his belief that Jeffersonian democracy had long since died, only to be replaced by demagogues on the order of Huey Long, who, following on the heels of generations of southern patricians, plundered the people at will. He took up Odum’s cautionary advice, insisting that all planning for southern revival had to start at the bottom if it was to effect anything approaching real change. “Maybe still one Reb can beat ten Yankees,” wrote Daniels. But “it is irrelevant.” Rebel pride had blinded all classes. “The tyrants and the plutocrats and the poor all need teaching. One of them no more than the others.” Odum, Agee, and Daniels all wanted to see the South rescued from its ideological trap. They were not cynical; they were hopeful. They recognized that simple solutions—a smattering of prettified homesteads—were no cure. Something grander, on the scale of the TVA, represented the only chance to shake up the existing consensus and rearrange class structure. 65 In the 1930s, the forgotten man and woman became a powerful symbol of economic struggle all across America. A good number of voices paid special attention to poor whites who haunted the South. The problem was not: “No one knows what to do with him.” It was this: “No one wants to see him as he really is: one of us, an American.” CHAPTER TEN The Cult of the Country Boy M Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society I’m a self-confessed raw country boy and guitar-playing fool. —Elvis Presley (1956) Lyndon wasn’t upper class at all. Country boy, grown up in the hills. —Virginia Foster Durr, Alabama civil rights activist (1991) ost will remember the famous photograph of Elvis Presley standing alongside President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. But why is it forgotten that Presley gained the friendship of Lyndon Baines Johnson?

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

  In every individual there is a tension; each one of us is a walking civil war, torn between the desire for good and the desire for evil; we hate our sins and love them at one and the same time. According to both Greek and Jewish thought in the time of Paul, this disharmony extends even to the heavenly places. A cosmic battle is raging between the powers of evil and the powers of good, between God and the demons. Worst of all, there is disharmony between God and human beings. Men and women, who were meant to be in fellowship with God, are estranged from him. So, in this world without Christ, there is nothing but disunity. That disunity is not God's purpose, but it can become a unity only when all things are united in Christ. As E. F. Scott has it in his commentary: `The innumerable broken strands were to be brought together in Christ, knotted again into one, as they had been in the beginning.' The central thought of Ephesians is the realization of the disunity in the universe and the conviction that it can become unity only when everything is united in Christ. The Origin of Paul's Thought How did Paul arrive at this great conception of the unity of all things in Jesus Christ? Most probably, he came to it in two ways. It is surely the inevitable outcome of his conviction, stated so vividly in Colossians, that Christ is all-sufficient. But it may well be that there was something else which moved Paul's mind in this direction. He was a Roman citizen and proud of it. In his journeys, Paul had seen a great deal of the Roman Empire, and now he was in Rome, the imperial city. In the Roman Empire, a new unity had come to the world. The pax Romana, the Roman peace, was a very real thing. Kingdoms and states and countries, which had struggled and been at war with each other, were gathered into a new unity in the empire which was Rome. It may well be that, in his imprisonment, Paul saw with new eyes how all this unity centred in Rome; and it may well have seemed to him a symbol of how all things must centre in Christ, if a disunited nature and world and humanity were ever to be gathered into a unity. Surely, far from being a conception that was beyond his thinking, all Paul's thinking and experience would lead him precisely to that. The Function of the Church It is in the first three chapters of the letter that Paul deals with this conception of the unity in Christ. In the last three chapters, he has much to say about the place of the Church in God's plan to bring about that unity.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  What possible choices do most of us have in the air we breathe and the water we must drink? Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor’s office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom. The real blessing is to be able to use whoever I am wherever I am, in concert with as many others as possible, or alone if needs be. This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light—that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation. Metabolized and integrated into the fabric of my days, that knowledge makes the particulars of what is coming seem less important. When I speak of wanting as much good time as possible, I mean time over which I maintain some relative measure of control. November 14, 1986 New York City One reason I watch the death process so acutely is to rob it of some of its power over my consciousness. I have overcome my earlier need to ignore or turn away from films and books that deal with cancer or dying. It is ever so much more important now for me to fill the psyches of all the people I love and who love me with a sense of outrageous beauty and strength of purpose. But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange. After my mastectomy, changing the ways I ate and struggled and slept and meditated also required that I change the external environment within which I was deciding what direction I would have to take. I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast. If any of my decisions have been in error, I must stand—not prepared, for that is impossible —but open to dealing with the consequences of those errors. Inside and outside, change is not easy nor quick, and I find myself always on guard against what is oversimplified, or merely cosmetic. November 15, 1986 New York City In my office at home I have created a space that is very special to me. It is simple and quiet, with beautiful things about, and a ray of sunlight cascading through a low window on the best of days. It is here that I write whenever I am home, and where I retreat to center myself, to rest and recharge at regular intervals.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/”* and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 53.The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It is a tiny alcove with an air mattress half-covered with bright pillows, and a low narrow table with a Nigerian tie-dye throw. Against one wall and central to this space is a painting by a young Guyanese woman called The Yard. It is a place of water and fire and flowers and trees, filled with Caribbean women and children working and playing and being. When the sun lances through my small window and touches the painting, the yard comes alive. The red spirit who lives at the center of the painting flames. Children laugh, a woman nurses her baby, a little naked boy cuts the grass. One woman is building a fire outside for cooking; inside a house another woman is fixing a light. In a slat-house up the hill, windows are glowing under the red-tiled roof. I keep company with the women of this place. Yesterday, I sat in this space with a sharp Black woman, discussing the focus of a proposed piece for a Black women’s magazine. We talked about whether it should be about the role of art and spirituality in Black women’s lives, or about my survival struggles with current bouts of cancer. As we talked, I gradually realized that both articles were grounded in the same place within me, and required the same focus. I require the nourishment of art and spirituality in my life, and they lend strength and insight to all the endeavors that give substance to my living. It is the bread of art and the water of my spiritual life that remind me always to reach for what is highest within my capacities and in my demands of myself and others. Not for what is perfect but for what is the best possible. And I orchestrate my daily anticancer campaign with an intensity intrinsic to who I am, the intensity of making a poem. It is the same intensity with which I experience poetry, a student’s first breakthrough, the loving energy of women I do not even know, the posted photograph of a sunrise taken from my winter dawn window, the intensity of loving. I revel in the beauty of the faces of Black women at labor and at rest. I make, demand, translate satisfactions out of every ray of sunlight, scrap of bright cloth, beautiful sound, delicious smell that comes my way, out of every sincere smile and good wish. They are discreet bits of ammunition in my arsenal against despair. They all contribute to the strengthening of my determination to persevere when the greyness overwhelms, or Reaganomics wears me down. They whisper to me of joy when the light is dim, when I falter, when another Black child is gunned down from behind in Crossroads or Newark or lynched from a tree in Memphis, and when the health orchestration gets boring or depressing or just plain too much. November 16, 1986 New York City

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I just know I must not surrender my body to others unless I completely understand and agree with what they think should be done to it. I’ve got to look at all of my options carefully, even the ones I find distasteful. I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can’t lose. June 10, 1984 Berlin Dr. Rosenberg is honest, straightforward, and pretty discouraging. I don’t know what I’d do without Dagmar there to translate all her grim pronouncements for me. She thinks it’s liver cancer, too, but she respects my decision against surgery. I mustn’t let my unwillingness to accept this diagnosis interfere with getting help. Whatever it is, this seems to be working. We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. I wasn’t supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up white boys’ world. I want desperately to live, and I’m ready to fight for that living even if I die shortly. Just writing those words down snaps everything I want to do into a neon clarity. This european trip and the Afro-German women, the Sister Outsider collective in Holland, Gloria’s great idea of starting an organization that can be a connection between us and South African women. For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me. I have done good work. I see it in the letters that come to me about Sister Outsider , I see it in the use the women here give the poetry and the prose. But first and last I am a poet. I’ve worked very hard for that approach to living inside myself, and everything I do, I hope, reflects that view of life, even the ways I must move now in order to save my life. I have done good work. There is a hell of a lot more I have to do. And sitting here tonight in this lovely green park in Berlin, dusk approaching and the walking willows leaning over the edge of the pool caressing each other’s fingers, birds birds birds singing under and over the frogs, and the smell of new-mown grass enveloping my sad pen, I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all, on whatever terms I’m dealt, timely or not. Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-sized pieces, useful and warm and wet and delectable because they came out of my mouth. June 17, 1984 Berlin I am feeling more like an Audre I recognize, thank the goddess for Dr. Rosenberg, and for Dagmar for introducing me to her. I’ve been reading Christa Wolf’s The Search for Christa T. , and finding it very difficult. At first I couldn’t grapple with it because it was just too painful to read about a woman dying.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have a privileged life or else I would be dead by now. It is two and a half years since the first tumor in my liver was discovered. When I needed to know, there was no one around to tell me that there were alternatives to turning myself over to doctors who are terrified of not knowing everything. There was no one around to remind me that I have a right to decide what happens to my own body, not because I know more than anybody else, but simply because it is my body. And I have a right to acquire the information that can help me make those crucial decisions. It was an accident of circumstance that brought me to Germany at a critical moment in my health, and another which introduced me to one holistic/homeopathic approach to the treatment of certain cancers. Not all homeopathic alternatives work for every patient. Time is a crucial element in the treatment of cancer, and I had to decide which chances I would take, and why. I think of what this means to other Black women living with cancer, to all women in general. Most of all I think of how important it is for us to share with each other the powers buried within the breaking of silence about our bodies and our health, even though we have been schooled to be secret and stoical about pain and disease. But that stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are. November 12, 1986 New York City When I write my own Book of the Dead, my own Book of Life, I want to celebrate being alive to do it even while I acknowledge the painful savor uncertainty lends to my living. I use the energy of dreams that are now impossible, not totally believing in them nor their power to become real, but recognizing them as templates for a future within which my labors can play a part. I am freer to choose what I will devote my energies toward and what I will leave for another lifetime, thanking the goddess for the strength to perceive that I can choose, despite obstacles.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  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. 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.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  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. I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine, no matter what. In fact, I am surrounded within my external living by ample examples of the struggle for life going on inside me. Visualizing the disease process inside my body in political images is not a quixotic dream. When I speak out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to save my life in every sense. Government research grants to the National Cancer Institute were cut in 1986 by the exact amount illegally turned over to the contras in Nicaragua. One hundred and five million dollars. It gives yet another meaning to the personal as the political. Cancer itself has an anonymous face. When we are visibly dying of cancer, it is sometimes easier to turn away from the particular experience into the sadness of loss, and when we are surviving, it is sometimes easier to deny that experience. But those of us who live our battles in the flesh must know ourselves as our strongest weapon in the most gallant struggle of our lives. Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle. But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition. I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more effective clarity . August 1987 Carriacou, Grenada Anguilla, British West Indies St. Croix, Virgin Island s * Ex-slave who led a workers’ revolt in St. Croix in 1848. † Alexis De Veaux, poet and biographer. ‡ Clare Cross, playwright, psychotherapist, and partner of Blanche Cook. § Blanche Cook, classmate of Lorde at Hunter College, historian, and partner of Clare Cross.

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

  Matthew 27:56; John 19:25). Again nothing is known of him, and he cannot have had any connection with this letter. (4) There is James, the brother of John, and the son of Zebedee, a member of the Twelve (Matthew io:2; Mark 3:17; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13). In the gospel story, James never appears independently of his brother John (Matthew 4:21, 17:1; Mark i:i9, 1:29, 5:37, 9:2, 10:35, 10:41, 13:3, 14:33; Luke 5:10, 8:51, 9:28, 9:54). He was the first of the apostolic band to be martyred, for he was beheaded on the orders of Herod Agrippa I in the year AD 44. He has been connected with the letter. The fourth-century Latin Codex Corbeiensis, at the end of the epistle, has a note quite definitely attributing it to James the son of Zebedee. The only place where this view on the authorship was taken seriously was in the Spanish church, in which, down to the end of the seventeenth century, he was often held to be the author. This was due to the fact that St James of Compostella, the patron saint of Spain, is identified with James the son of Zebedee; and it was natural that the Spanish church should be predisposed to wish that their country's patron saint should be the author of a New Testament letter. But the martyrdom of James came too early for him to have written the letter, and in any case there is nothing beyond the Codex Corbeiensis to connect him with it. (5) Finally, there is James, who is called the brother of Jesus. Although the first definite connection of him with this letter does not emerge until Origen in the first half of the third century, it is to him that it has always been traditionally attributed. The Roman Catholic Church agrees with this view, for in 1546 the Council of Trent laid it down that James is canonical and is written by an apostle. Let us then collect the evidence about this James. From the New Testament, we learn that he was one of the brothers of Jesus (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55). We shall later discuss in what sense the word `brother' is to be taken. During Jesus' ministry, it is clear that his family did not understand or sympathize with him and would have wished to restrain him (Matthew 12:46-50; Mark 3:21, 3:31-5; John 7:3-9). John says bluntly: `For not even his brothers believed in him' (John 7:5). So, during Jesus' earthly ministry, James was numbered among his opponents. With the Acts of the Apostles, there comes a sudden and unexplained change.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child. Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 53.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor’s office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom. The real blessing is to be able to use whoever I am wherever I am, in concert with as many others as possible, or alone if needs be. This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light—that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation. Metabolized and integrated into the fabric of my days, that knowledge makes the particulars of what is coming seem less important. When I speak of wanting as much good time as possible, I mean time over which I maintain some relative measure of control. November 14, 1986 New York City One reason I watch the death process so acutely is to rob it of some of its power over my consciousness. I have overcome my earlier need to ignore or turn away from films and books that deal with cancer or dying. It is ever so much more important now for me to fill the psyches of all the people I love and who love me with a sense of outrageous beauty and strength of purpose. But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange. After my mastectomy, changing the ways I ate and struggled and slept and meditated also required that I change the external environment within which I was deciding what direction I would have to take. I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast. If any of my decisions have been in error, I must stand—not prepared, for that is impossible—but open to dealing with the consequences of those errors. Inside and outside, change is not easy nor quick, and I find myself always on guard against what is oversimplified, or merely cosmetic. November 15, 1986 New York City In my office at home I have created a space that is very special to me. It is simple and quiet, with beautiful things about, and a ray of sunlight cascading through a low window on the best of days. It is here that I write whenever I am home, and where I retreat to center myself, to rest and recharge at regular intervals. It is here that I do my morning visualizations and my eurhythmics.

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

  We shall no doubt find this book difficult and bewildering; but doubtless, too, we shall find it infinitely worth while to wrestle with it until it gives us its blessing and opens its riches to us. Apocalyptic Literature In any study of Revelation, we must begin by remembering the basic fact that, although unique in the New Testament, it is nonetheless representative of a kind of literature which was the most common of all in the period between the Old and the New Testaments. Revelation is commonly called the Apocalypse - in Greek apokalupsis. Between the Old and the New Testaments, there grew up a great mass of what is called apocalyptic literature, the product of an indestructible Jewish hope. The Jews could not forget that they were the chosen people of God. To them, that involved the certainty that some day they would arrive at world supremacy. In their early history, they looked forward to the coming of a king of David's line who would unite the nation and lead them to greatness. A shoot was to come forth from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah God would raise up a righteous branch for David (Jeremiah 23:5). Some day, the people would serve David, their king (Jeremiah 30:9). David would be their shepherd and their king (Ezekiel 34:23, 37:24). The booth of David would be repaired (Amos 9:11); out of Bethlehem there would come a ruler who would be great to the ends of the earth (Micah 5:2-4). But the whole history of Israel contradicted these hopes. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom - small enough to begin with - split into two under Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and so lost its unity. The northern kingdom, with its capital at Samaria, vanished in the last quarter of the eighth century Bc before the assault of the Assyrians, never again reappeared in history and is now referred to as the lost ten tribes. The southern kingdom, with its capital at Jerusalem, was reduced to slavery and exile by the Babylonians in the early part of the sixth century BC. It later came under the rule of the Persians, the Greeks and finally the Romans. History for the Jews was a catalogue of disasters from which it became clear that no human deliverer could rescue them. The Two Ages Jewish thought stubbornly held to the conviction of the chosenness of the Jews but had to adjust itself to the facts of history. It did so by working out a scheme of history. The Jews divided all time into two ages.

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

  BEDE. Again, the people of the Gentiles, having heard of the fame of the name of Christ, sought to be made a partaker of Him, but many spoke against Him, first the Jews, then also the Gentiles, lest the world which was to be enlightened should call upon Christ. The fury of those who attacked Him, however, could not deprive of salvation those who were fore-ordained to life. And He heard the blind man’s cry as He was passing, but stood when He restored his sight, because by His Humanity He pitied him, who by the power of His Divinity has driven away the darkness from our mind; for in that Jesus was born and suffered for our sakes, He as it were passed by, because this action is temporal; but when God is said to stand, it means, that, Himself without change, He sets in order all changeable things. But the Lord calls the blind man, who cries to Him, when He sends the word of faith to the people of the Gentiles by preachers; and they call on the blind man to be of good cheer and to rise, and bid him come to the Lord, when by preaching to the simple, they bid them have hope of salvation, and rise from the sloth of vice, and gird themselves for a life of virtue. Again, he throws away his garment and leaps, who, throwing aside the bands of the world, with unencumbered pace hastens to the Giver of eternal light. PSEUDO-JEROME. Again, the Jewish people comes leaping, stripped of the old man, as a hart leaping on the mountains, that is, laying aside sloth, it meditates on Patriarchs, Prophets, and Apostles on high, and raises itself to heights of holiness. How consistent also is the order of salvation. First we heard by the Prophets, then we cry aloud by faith, next we are called by Apostles, we rise up by penitence, we are stripped of our old garment by baptism, and of our choice we are questioned. Again, the blind man when asked requires, that he may see the will of the Lord. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Therefore let us also imitate him, let us not seek for riches, earthly goods, or honours from the Lord, but for that Light, which we alone with the Angels can see, the way to which is faith; wherefore also Christ answers to the blind man, Thy faith hath saved thee. But he sees and follows who works what his understanding tells him is good; for he follows Jesus, who understands and executes what is good, who imitates Him, who had no wish to prosper in this world, and bore reproach and derision. And because we have fallen from inward joy, by delight in the things of the body, He shews us what bitter feelings the return thither will cost us.