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 Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In these pages, I am intentionally bringing academics into conversation with experiential experts, to show the patterns of aligned interest and learning happening across the language barriers that exist between us. I am bringing together a lot of different styles of expression in order to weave this tale. I asked contributors to share themselves as whole people, in the spirit of the Combahee River Collective, who taught me that “from the personal, the striving toward wholeness individually and within the community, comes the political, the struggle against those forces that render individuals and communities unwhole. The personal is political, especially for Black women.”11 Each person in this text is whole, complex, and brave in how they are shaping the world around them. We are in a time of fertile ground for learning how we align our pleasures with our values, decolonizing our bodies and longings, and getting into a practice of saying an orgasmic yes together, deriving our collective power from our felt sense of pleasure. I think a result of sourcing power in our longing and pleasure is abundant justice—that we can stop competing with each other, demanding scarce justice from our oppressors. That we can instead generate power from the overlapping space of desire and aliveness, tapping into an abundance that has enough attention, liberation, and justice for all of us to have plenty. We’re going to keep learning together. These pages are a space to ask shameless questions, to love what we love and explore why we love it, to increase the pleasure we feel when we are doing things that are good for the species and the planet, to cultivate our interest in radical love and pleasure, and to nourish the orgasmic yes in each of us. What Is Pleasure Activism? Pleasure is a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment. Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental reform or stasis with the desire to make improvements in society. Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression. Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and/or eating, music and other arts, and so much more. Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I believe in transformative justice—that rather than punishing people for surface-level behavior, or restoring conditions to where they were before the harm happened, we need to find the roots of the harm, together, and make the harm impossible in the future. I believe that the roots of most harm are systemic, and we must be willing to disrupt vicious systems that have been normalized. I believe that we are at the beginning of learning how to really practice transformative justice in this iteration of species and society. There is ancient practice, and there will need to be future practices we can’t yet foresee. But I believe that with time it must become an incredible pleasure to be able to be honest, expect to be whole, and to know that we are in a community that will hold us accountable and change with us. I am in this practice in as many spaces as I can be in my life. I believe that transformative justice is actually a crucial element in moving toward the kind of large-scale societal healing we need—transformative justice is a way we can begin to believe that the harm that has come to us won’t keep happening, that we can uproot it, and that we can seed some new ways of being with each other. I also believe that I am not creating the ideas in this book but observing a beautiful pattern of pleasure shifting the ground beneath us, inside us, and transforming what is possible between us. I have learned from so many teachers living and dead. To that end, I have an extended section of this book that is lineage, tracing the streams that are flowing into this particular river in ways that I hope create common ground, even a common titillation, between you and me. Finally, I am constantly discovering new parts of myself to bring into the light, and that feels like an essential aspect of pleasure activism. I am discovering things as I write this book, and I will keep discovering things afterward. As I gather this book together I am sitting in a quiet house, off season, on Martha’s Vineyard. Right now, I am watching two massive swans slowly extend their long necks, bobbing in icy water, reaching toward each other, equal parts tentative and persistent. It is that energy in me as I take the tentative steps into this realm of the erotic, of the sensual, and ask us to explore together all of the power we potentially wield together.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Now, after the meeting in Altgeld, Will had a new idea. “These mixed-up Negroes inside St. Catherine’s ain’t never gonna do nothing,” he said. “If we wanna get something done, we gonna have to take it to the streets!” He pointed out that many of the people who lived in the immediate vicinity of St. Catherine’s were jobless and struggling; those were the people we should be targeting, he said. And because they might not feel comfortable attending a meeting hosted by a foreign church, we should conduct a series of street corner meetings around West Pullman, allowing them to gather on neutral turf. I was skeptical at first, but unwilling as I was to discourage any initiative, I helped Will and Mary prepare a flyer, for distribution along the block closest to the church. A week later, the three of us stood out on the corner in the late autumn wind. The street remained empty at first, the shades drawn down the rows of brick bungalows. Then, slowly, people began to emerge, one or two at a time, women in hair nets, men in flannel shirts or windbreakers, shuffling through the brittle gold leaves, edging toward the growing circle. When the gathering numbered twenty or so, Will explained that St. Catherine’s was part of a larger organizing effort and that “we want you to talk to your neighbors about all the things y’all complain about when you’re sitting at the kitchen table.” “Well, all I can say is, it’s about time,” one woman said. For almost an hour, people talked about potholes and sewers, stop signs and abandoned lots. As the afternoon fell to dusk, Will announced that we’d be moving the meetings to St. Catherine’s basement starting the following month. Walking back to the church, I heard the crowd still behind us, a murmur in the fading light. Will turned to me and smiled. “Told you.” We repeated these street corner meetings on three, four, five blocks—Will at the center with his priest’s collar and Chicago Cubs jacket, Mary with her sign-in sheets circling the edges of the crowd. By the time we moved the meetings indoors, we had a group of close to thirty people, prepared to work for little more than a cup of coffee. It was before such a meeting that I found Mary alone in the church hall, making a pot of coffee. The evening’s agenda was neatly printed on a sheet of butcher’s paper taped to the wall; the chairs were all set up. Mary waved at me while searching a cupboard for sugar and creamer, and told me Will was running a little late. “Need any help?” I asked her. “Can you reach this?” I pulled down the sugar from the top shelf. “Anything else?” “No. I think we’re all set.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi. In thinking about burlesque as a liberation practice, I’ve also been thinking about that just because you are taking your clothes off doesn’t mean liberation is a given. In some ways, I feel like burlesque has everything to do with liberation—the stripping down, stripping off, freeing, revealing of bodies or truths, the use of satire and political critique. I feel like the structure offers a lot if you are trying to get free. But, you know, just because I am on vacation doesn’t mean I’m relaxing! The body might be there, but if the mind and heart aren’t there with it, then it may not feel like a freeing, self-loving experience. I feel like what makes it a liberatory practice is a lot in the intention we bring to it. Like in ritual, there are deliberate steps to help induce a state or experience, the structure offers all these gateways, but you have to actually bring your own intention as you walk through it, so just taking your clothes off doesn’t mean you’re going to be liberating yourself if you’re still— Una. Hating the body you’re in, or doing it just to please the audience. Michi. Yes, yes. But, burlesque does offer us these opportunities to practice it, because it’s not like the first time you get on stage and get naked for an audience that it’s just gonna be all easy, breezy “I love myself and I’m at peace with systems of oppression that have made me internalize the hatred in the world” and so on and so forth! Sometimes, even when we are performing sexy self-love liberation, we may not feel that way. But doing the performance will remind us that part of us does feel that way, and by performing it, practicing that love for ourselves and all people, I feel like it can strengthen our ability to get there. Una. And it’s especially vulnerable because it’s our bodies that are up there. Doing burlesque is not like a play we wrote that someone else is performing. We’re up there, embodying the story. Michi. You have mentioned that it’s been a journey to pace yourself and not take your clothes off all at once. People think of burlesque performers as these super sexually comfortable people, but I feel like you taking all of your clothes off at once is in some way being afraid of your own sexiness. Do you want to talk about that? Una. Yeah, it’s like, here, I’m aggressively showing my body before you can reject me. When I was younger and liked people who didn’t like me back, I found that all the power I felt like I had was in being able to confront them, asking them directly “do you like me?” They would be like, “Umm, I don’t even know you to know if I’m into you,” so that wouldn’t go very far.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  129 speak of “concretely graced human nature” and point out that it is of this that the church fathers typically speak. Karl Rahner, perhaps the most inÀ uential Catholic theologian of the 20 th century, speaks of a “supernatural existential,” an offer of grace that is intrinsic not to human nature but to concrete human existence. The supernatural existential makes possible a turn to experience in Rahner’s theology, making him the fountainhead of Catholic Liberal theology. The ideas of de Lubac and Rahner were very in À uential in the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII, who called the council, described its task as aggiornamiento (updating), bringing the church up to date. The central document of the council was the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (which begins with a reference to Christ as the “Light of the Nations”). Rejecting clericalism, the council de ¿ ned the church as the people of God, not just the hierarchy. More deeply, the council described the church itself as a sacrament, a sign and instrument of communion with God and unity among human beings. The Pastoral Constitution on the church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”) made the church a sharer in the hopes and fears of the modern world. The council took a much more positive attitude than the Roman church earlier had toward the world, other churches, and other religions. Taking a strikingly different attitude than Pius IX a century earlier, the council af ¿ rmed the right to religious freedom, based on the dignity of the human person. The council af ¿ rmed that the Jews are not rejected by God, who does not take back the choice he has made. In a move that changed the Christian world, the council committed the Roman church to the ecumenical movement seeking to restore the unity of all the churches. The Roman church recognized other churches and ecclesial communities as genuinely Christian, describing them as “separated brethren” in real but imperfect communion with the true church, which “subsists in” the Roman Catholic church but also is present in some ways outside it. Ŷ Rejecting clericalism, the council de¿ ned the church as the people of God, not just the hierarchy.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  That is how you experience a new mind, a new identity, a new way to live, one that’s Spirit empowered. The world understands that no progress can be made without doing the work. They understand it better than many Christians do. But self-help can offer only a better version of yourself; Christ is after a whole new you. God in you. The mind of Christ. The fruit of the Spirit coming through you. You go from a dying, withered spruce tree to a thriving fruit tree producing pears. It’s a completely new creation. This work, this shift we’re going to make, might be the most important thing we’ve ever done. But we don’t do it merely as another self-improvement project. We do it because we want to live a new-creation kind of life, a life that truly matters, a life in Christ that God has promised. [image "Part Two: Taking Down the Enemies of Our Minds" file=Image00029.jpg] 7 Drawing Battle Lines As we head into this part, I want to pull you super close and tell you what’s about to happen and why. I’m going to train you to fight. Remember, the greatest spiritual battle of our generation is being fought between our ears. This is the epicenter of the battle. Before Eve ate the fruit, she had a thought: it was “pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” And then “she took some and ate it.”1 David, before he sinned with Bathsheba and had her husband killed, had a thought: “The woman was very beautiful.”2 Before Mary birthed Jesus, she had a thought: “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.”3 Before Jesus chose to go to the cross, He had a thought: “Father…not my will, but yours, be done.”4 How we think shapes our lives. Every great or horrible act we see in history and in our lives is preceded by a thought. And that one thought multiplies into many thoughts that develop into a mind-set, often without our even realizing it. Our goal is to be aware of our thoughts and deliberately build them into mind-sets that lead to the outcomes we want and the outcomes God wants for us. One God-honoring thought has the potential to change the trajectory of both history and eternity. Just as one uninterrupted lie in my head has the potential to bring about unimaginable destruction in the world around me. The battleground is not you yelling at your kids or cheating on your taxes or staring at your phone for hours on end. The battleground is not even you serving at the local homeless shelter or joining the parking team at your church. The epicenter of the battleground—the source of every word and deed that comes out of your mouth and life—begins in your thought life. You aren’t what you eat. You aren’t what you do.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  How many of us, even as we hone a feminist or womanist or post-gender or otherwise radical politics around who we are relative to power, regress in bed into submission practices we are taught are biological, primal, even spiritual? To say it plainly, I suspect many of the most powerful women in the species are still convinced that in bed we need to be dragged by our hair into a cave and ravaged by a lover who plays a traditionally patriarchal role of dominance. I suspect a key aspect of succeeding in the work of #metoo and smashing the patriarchy will be examining not just true rape culture but our culture of desire. Not with shame or with righteousness but with deep curiosity: What turns us on, and can we change it if it doesn’t align with what we believe? How many of us can even imagine desire that is liberated from patriarchy? The next few sections are going to focus on how we can grow our desires to align more closely with our dignity, using celibacy, fantasy, pornography, and communication to cultivate new possibilities for desire within ourselves and between us and others. Celibacy is intentionally refraining from sexual relations. This means not having sex with other people. It can include not cultivating sexual energy with others. Some people also limit their masturbation practices during celibacy. I’ve intentionally practiced celibacy a few times in my life and find it to be a glorious way to reconnect with what matters in my body, to slow and deepen my pace and relationships outside the paradigm of desire, to decolonize my longings and remember my sacred sensual self. We are still learning all the strategies we will need to truly dismantle patriarchy. Strategy is just a plan of action toward a goal. To use celibacy as part of our strategy to dismantle patriarchy, we must have a clear goal, a clear intention, a clear process. Here are a few steps for a strategic celibacy. Why Get clear on why you might need an intentional period of celibacy. Do you suspect you are in patterns of sexual relationship that sustain patriarchy? Are you regularly engaging in sex that hurts, that is confusing, that your body isn’t saying an ecstatic yes to? Maybe you’ve never even considered it and you are just curious to learn more about your desire. Know your own reasons. Generate questions on the front end that you would like to understand better by the end of your celibacy. How Long Set a time period. How long do you want to be in this practice? You are ideally practicing long enough to let your body take a break from any harmful or unclear erotic behavior. The time period should feel doable but long enough to really observe yourself. Put it on your calendar. Get Curious and Reflective

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  for all of us. If thousands of people read this book and start to shift, this way of thinking can become contagious—and we could see a generation freed. I believe it is possible. I pray it will be so. Press on, sweet friend. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that...you may discern what is the will of God.” 4 Why? Why would that matter so much—to discern the will of God? Because He isn’t just after your freedom. He prepared good works in advance for you so that a whole lot of other people could be set free. 5 When we take every thought captive and reclaim our thinking patterns from the lies of the enemy, we are set free to set others free. May we steward our freedom well. God, I pray that You would set this reader free. God, in Your power would You help us fight the enemy hell-bent on destroying us and help us remember that the power to choose a different way is ours in You? And then help us give that away to a world aching for a new way to think and live. In Jesus’s name, amen. To the guy who always gets me out of my head. Zac Allen, you rescue me from myself constantly and always point me to Jesus. I love you and I like you.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  The auditorium was almost filled by this time, two thousand people in all, maybe a third of them blacks bused in from the city. At seven o’clock, a choir sang two gospel songs, Will took a roll call of all the churches represented, and a white Lutheran from the suburbs explained the history and mission of CCRC. A procession of speakers then mounted the stage: a black legislator and a white legislator, a Baptist minister and Cardinal Bernardin, and finally the governor, who offered his solemn pledge of support for the new job bank and recited evidence of his tireless efforts on behalf of the working men and women of Illinois. To my mind the whole thing came off a bit flat, like a political convention or a TV wrestling match. Still, the crowd seemed to be enjoying itself. Some people hoisted bright banners bearing the name of their church. Others broke into boisterous cheers as a friend or relative was recognized from the stage. Seeing all these black and white faces together in one place, I, too, found myself feeling cheered, recognizing in myself the same vision driving Marty, his confidence in the populist impulse and working-class solidarity; his faith that if you could just clear away the politicians and media and bureaucrats and give everybody a seat at the table, then ordinary people could find common ground. When the rally was over, Marty mentioned that he had to give some people a ride home, so instead of riding with him I decided to take one of the buses heading back to the city. As it turned out, there was an empty seat next to Will on the bus, and in the glow of the freeway lights, he began to tell me a little about himself. He had grown up in Chicago, he said, and served in Vietnam. After the war, he had found a job as an executive trainee at Continental Illinois Bank and had risen fast, enjoying the trappings of the work—the car, the suits, the downtown office. Then the bank had reorganized and Will was laid off, leaving him shaken and badly in debt. It was the turning point in his life, he said, God’s way of telling him to get his values straight. Rather than look for another job in banking, he turned to Christ. He joined St. Catherine’s parish in West Pullman and took a job as the janitor there. The decision had put some strain on his marriage—his wife was “still adjusting,” he said—but according to Will, the ascetic lifestyle suited his new mission: to spread the Good News and puncture some of the hypocrisy he saw in the church.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Then time and place began to conspire, transforming potential misfortune into something tolerable, even a source of pride. Sharing a few beers with my father, Gramps might listen to his new son-in-law sound off about politics or the economy, about far-off places like Whitehall or the Kremlin, and imagine himself seeing into the future. He would begin to read the newspapers more carefully, finding early reports of America’s newfound integrationist creed, and decide in his mind that the world was shrinking, sympathies changing; that the family from Wichita had in fact moved to the forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Dr. King’s magnificent dream. How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage? One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders as the astronauts from one of the Apollo missions arrived at Hickam Air Force Base after a successful splashdown. I remember the astronauts, in aviator glasses, as being far away, barely visible through the portal of an isolation chamber. But Gramps would always swear that one of the astronauts waved just at me and that I waved back. It was part of the story he told himself. With his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age. And what better port for setting off on this new adventure than Hawaii, the Union’s newest member? Even now, with the state’s population quadrupled, with Waikiki jammed wall to wall with fast-food emporiums and pornographic video stores and subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green hill, I can retrace the first steps I took as a child and be stunned by the beauty of the islands. The trembling blue plane of the Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sound of invisible birds. The North Shore’s thunderous waves, crumbling as if in a slow-motion reel. The shadows off Pali’s peaks; the sultry, scented air.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Johnnie stopped talking; the traffic cleared. I started thinking about those posters back in Asante’s office—posters of Nefertiti, regal and dark-hued in her golden throne; and Shaka Zulu, fierce and proud in his leopard-skin tunic—and then further back to that day years ago, before my father came for his visit to Hawaii, when I had gone to the library in search of my own magic kingdom, my own glorious birthright. I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders. “He was there,” I said to Johnnie. “Who?” “Your father. He was there for you.” Johnnie scratched his arm. “Yeah, Barack. I guess he was.” “You ever tell him that?” “Naw. We’re not real good at talking.” Johnnie looked out the window, then turned to me. “Maybe I should though, huh.” “Yeah, John,” I said, nodding. “Maybe you should.” Over the next two months, Asante and Dr. Collier helped us develop a proposal for a youth counseling network, something to provide at-risk teenagers with mentoring and tutorial services and to involve parents in a long-term planning process for reform. It was an exciting project, but my mind was elsewhere. When the proposal was finished, I told Johnnie that I’d be gone for a few days but that he should go ahead with some of the meetings we’d scheduled, to start lining up broader support. “Where’re you going?” he asked me. “To see my brother.” “I didn’t know you had a brother.” “I haven’t had one that long.” The next morning, I flew down to Washington, D.C., where my brother Roy now lived. We had first spoken to each other during Auma’s visit to Chicago; she had told me then that Roy had married an American Peace Corps worker and had moved to the States. One day we had called him up just to say hello. He had seemed happy to hear from us, his voice deep and unruffled, as if we had talked only yesterday. His job, his wife, his new life in America—everything was “lovely,” he said. The word rolled out of him slowly, the syllables drawn out. “Looove-leee.” A visit from me would be “fan-taaas-tic.” Staying with him and his wife would be “nooo prooob-lem.” After we got off the phone, I had told Auma that he sounded well. She looked at me doubtfully. “Yah, you never know with Roy,” she had said. “He doesn’t always show his true feelings. He’s like the Old Man in that way. In fact, although they didn’t get along, he really reminds me of the Old Man in many ways. At least that’s how he was in Nairobi. I haven’t seen him since David’s funeral, though, so maybe marriage has settled him down.”

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Jeremiah 1:5 I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. John 15:16 I am he who blots out your transgressions. I will not remember your sins. Isaiah 43:25 To all who receive Me, who believe in My name, I give the right to become children of God. John 1:12 Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? 1 Corinthians 3:16 My Spirit is within you. Ezekiel 36:27 I will not leave you. Deuteronomy 31:8 I will equip you for every good work I’ve planned. Hebrews 13:21 I gave you a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. 2 Timothy 1:7 I will build my church through you, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. Matthew 16:18 I will comfort you as you wait. Isaiah 66:13 I will remind you this is all real. John 14:26 I am on my way. Revelation 3:11 My steadfast love endures forever. Psalm 138:8 In just a little while… I am coming and I will take you to the place where I am. Hebrews 10:37; John 14:3 You will inherit the earth. Psalm 25:13 You will be with Me. I will wipe every tear from your eyes, and death will be no more. Behold, I am making all things new. Revelation 21:3–5 My kingdom is coming. My will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:10 God has declared these truths about Himself and about me. All these things are true for you and for anyone who loves and follows Jesus. This is who we are because of whose we are. We make our choices based on these truths. And our God doesn’t change and always delivers on His promises. 16 Dangerous Thinking Today as I realized how close I was to finishing this book, I rallied a dozen people who love me to pray. I may never have met you, yet I care deeply about your freedom. I hope you can read that motivation in my words. I care deeply, yet I recognize that the freedom I’m referring to comes only by a work of God, by His Spirit, by His divine intervention in your life. Separate from that prayer rally, my friend Jess, who has no idea what I’m up to today, just sent me a text. She doesn’t know that I’m working on a chapter just now about how contagious our minds are and about how, when we’re conformed to the mind of Christ, we can influence everyone around us for powerful, almost indescribable good. She doesn’t know the prayers being prayed, that you’d be set totally free.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then she gazed at me, and rubbed her eyes.‘What a help you’ve been to me, Nance, these past few months!’ she said.‘I only help,’ I answered truthfully, ‘to stop you wearing yourself out. You do too much.’‘There’s so much to do!’‘I can’t believe that all of it should fall to you, though. Do you never weary of it?’‘I get tired,’ she said, yawning again, ‘as you can see! But never of it.’‘But Flo, if it’s such an endless task, why labour at all?’‘Why, because I must! Because how could I rest, when the world is so cruel and hard, and yet might be so sweet... The kind of work I do is its own kind of fulfilment, whether it’s successful or not.’ She drank her tea. ‘It’s like love.’Love! I sniffed. ‘You think love is its own reward, then?’‘Don’t you?’I gazed into my cup. ‘I did once, I think,’ I said. ‘But...’ I had never told her about those days. Cyril wriggled, and she kissed his head and murmured in his ear, and for a moment all was very still - perhaps she thought me wondering about the gent I said I had lived with in St John’s Wood. But then she spoke again, more briskly.‘Besides, I don’t believe it is an endless task. Things are changing. There are unions everywhere - and women’s unions, as well as men’s. Women do things today their mothers would have laughed to think of seeing their daughters doing, twenty years ago; soon they will even have the vote! If people like me don’t work, it’s because they look at the world, at all the injustice and the muck, and all they see is a nation falling in upon itself, and taking them with it. But the muck has new things growing out of it - wonderful things! - new habits of working, new kinds of people, new ways of being alive and in love ...’ Love again. I put a finger to the scar upon my cheek, where Dickie’s doctor’s book had caught it. Florence bent her head to gaze at the baby, as he lay sighing upon her chest.‘In another twenty years,’ she went on quietly, ‘imagine how the world will be! It will be a new century. Cyril will be a young man - nearly, but not quite, as old as I am now. Imagine the things he’ll see, the things he’ll do ...’ I looked at her, and then at him; and for a moment I felt almost able to see with her across the years to the queer new world that would have Cyril in it, as a man...As I looked, she shifted in her seat, reached a hand out to the bookcase at her side, and drew a volume from the bulging shelves. It was Leaves of Grass: she turned its pages, and found a passage that she seemed to know.‘Listen to this’ she said.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  With the plucking of the pigeon came more revelations, as if with its uncovering other things were uncovered. I thought of the dreams I’d had that spring of the hawk slipping away into air. I’d wanted to follow it, fly with it, and disappear. I had thought for a long while that I was the hawk – one of those sulky goshawks able to vanish into another world, sitting high in the winter trees. But I was not the hawk, no matter how much I pared myself away, no matter how many times I lost myself in blood and leaves and fields. I was the figure standing underneath the tree at nightfall, collar upturned against the damp, waiting patiently for the hawk to return. Mabel was cutting through the crisp ribcage of the pigeon now. She was pulling at the thin intercostal membrane. Snap. I thought of my father shading a pencil over ghostly impressions on the page. Snap. I thought of White and the reasons why his book had haunted me all this time. Snap. Another breaking rib. It wasn’t just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn’t die. Gos never died. He was only lost. For all White’s certainty that his hawk was dead, there was always a chance, even to the very end of the book, even further, that the hawk might return. In the childish depths of my mind the hawk was out there, still in the wood, his yellow toes clutching rough bark and his pale eyes watching me from a dark tangle of branches somewhere in the multitudinous sea of a hundred thousand trees. Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude. The training of a hawk mirrored the education of the public schoolboy. In both, a wild and unruly subject was shaped and moulded, made civilised; was taught good manners and obedience. But the methods were different, and this gave White much pleasure. ‘I had been a schoolmaster for so long,’ he wrote, ‘in which profession the standard way of meeting a difficult situation was by punishment. It was nice after this to discover a profession of education where punishment was treated as ridiculous.’ It was the perfect kind of education, he decided, for him and for the hawk. He would call his book The Austringer, and in its pages he and his readers would take a ‘patient excursion into the fields and back into the past’. That excursion wasn’t just back into an imagined English past; it was also a journey back into his own. White had ‘dropped out of the curious adult heterosexual competition’, had become again ‘a monastic boy’. In those long hours of psychoanalysis with Bennet, White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power. Now he was going back in time with the hawk. He’d already empathised with the fledgling in the basket, had seen the hawk as himself. Now he was unconsciously re-enacting his childhood – with the hawk standing in for himself as a boy, and the grown-up White playing the role of an enlightened teacher who could not, would not, must not beat or hurt the child in his care. He considers falconry the most glorious of mysteries. He has no one to teach him and two books to learn from, not counting the description in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he has almost by heart. There is Blaine’s Falconry, published the previous year, and Coursing and Falconry by Gerald Lascelles, from 1892. But the book White cleaves to is much older; it was published in 1619. Called An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, it is all about goshawks, and it was written by Edmund Bert, Gentleman. White didn’t yet possess a copy of his own, for it was a rare volume; but he’d read it. Perhaps he’d read the copy kept at the Cambridge University Library. Perhaps it was the very same copy I’d pored over as a student. As White was seduced by Bert’s book, so was I. It is bloody marvellous. Bert is the seventeenth-century counterpart of some of the blunter Yorkshire goshawkers of my acquaintance on whom something of the hawk’s character has rubbed off.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  129 speak of “concretely graced human nature” and point out that it is of this that the church fathers typically speak. Karl Rahner, perhaps the most inÀ uential Catholic theologian of the 20 th century, speaks of a “supernatural existential,” an offer of grace that is intrinsic not to human nature but to concrete human existence. The supernatural existential makes possible a turn to experience in Rahner’s theology, making him the fountainhead of Catholic Liberal theology. The ideas of de Lubac and Rahner were very inÀ uential in the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII, who called the council, described its task as aggiornamiento (updating), bringing the church up to date. The central document of the council was the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (which begins with a reference to Christ as the “Light of the Nations”). Rejecting clericalism, the council de¿ ned the church as the people of God, not just the hierarchy. More deeply, the council described the church itself as a sacrament, a sign and instrument of communion with God and unity among human beings. The Pastoral Constitution on the church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”) made the church a sharer in the hopes and fears of the modern world. The council took a much more positive attitude than the Roman church earlier had toward the world, other churches, and other religions. Taking a strikingly different attitude than Pius IX a century earlier, the council af¿ rmed the right to religious freedom, based on the dignity of the human person. The council af¿ rmed that the Jews are not rejected by God, who does not take back the choice he has made. In a move that changed the Christian world, the council committed the Roman church to the ecumenical movement seeking to restore the unity of all the churches. The Roman church recognized other churches and ecclesial communities as genuinely Christian, describing them as “separated brethren” in real but imperfect communion with the true church, which “subsists in” the Roman Catholic church but also is present in some ways outside it. Ŷ Rejecting clericalism, the council de¿ ned the church as the people of God, not just the hierarchy. 130 Lecture 35: From Vatican I to Vatican II Decrees of Vatican I, in Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2, 234– 271; Creeds of the Churches, in Leith, 447–457 (contains only the decree on papal infallibility.) Flannery, Vatican Council II, “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (Lumen Gentium). ———, Vatican Council II, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes). Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, in Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2, 213–233. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith. 1. When you think of Catholicism, is it the Catholicism of Pius IX or the Catholicism of Vatican II that ¿ rst comes to mind? 2. How deep do you think is the difference between the two? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  When I had my experience on the roof I did not outwardly appear any different, but by an inward working of grace, by a touch of the mystery of God, I was changed. My substance shifted. My spiritual location shifted, even if only by inches, pointing me to a new trajectory toward the sacred. The quest, therefore, is the reverse of intentionally placing ourselves in harm’s way. It is an act of placing ourselves in grace’s way. We are looking for that point of intersection where we think we are most likely to encounter God. These locations, which we sometimes call the thin places of our reality, are not defined by geography, but by intention. While I understand that there are many geographical locations that people revere, I do not believe that any of these places are magical portals to transformation. The key to the seeker’s quest is not in finding just the right piece of holy real estate on which to stand, but rather in so preparing his or her awareness that any space he or she occupies can become thin through faith. The quest is the sacrament of the seeker. It is the embodiment of, the celebration of, the ordinary in communion with the truly transcendent, the presence of the God who cannot be fully known much less manipulated. It is the numinous point of contact where transformation can occur because the initiative of the finite person meets the initiative of the infinite Person. The quest is the action of the seeker to move into this spiritual space. The shift to the location where the mind can be receptive to an encounter with God begins in the inner reality of the seeker. It begins in the interior landscape of perception, awareness, and consciousness. There is a mindset to the quest, an awareness that must be in place no matter what the physical location of the seeker may be. Long ago The Buddha helped us to understand this aspect of the quest. He told us that no matter where we were in time and space, we could sit down, be quiet, and open our minds to a transformative level of awareness. The meditation that he taught is this internal form of the quest. In the same way Native American tradition says that we must purify our awareness if we are going out to seek the holy. The cleansing act of letting go of daily chatter, of distractions and desires, takes place in Zen meditation as surely as it does in the Native American sweat lodge. The first step of the quest begins inside. It begins in preparation. It is the seeker’s intentional effort to enter into the real so deeply that he or she comes out on the other side. The physical setting of the quest can be helpful to the seeker because it is conducive to this level of calm concentration, but there is no magic door through which he or she passes into transcendence.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Choose one physical activity that you might take for granted right now—hugs, handshakes, flirtatious touch, blow jobs, or sex, and track your consent in this activity for a week. You can keep doing what you normally do, but start to really pay attention to the signals in your body—are you a total yes to this contact? If not, why are you doing it? If yes, give yourself an internal high five. Learn your own landscape of consent. 51 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “The Pleasure Dome: From #Metoo to #Weconsented: Reclaiming the Pleasure of Consent,” October 25, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-pleasure-dome/me-too-reclaiming-consent.52 Transformative justice goes beyond calling for punishment or even restoring the original conditions, which were often imbalanced and unhealthy in the first place. Transformative justice asks us to dive deep to understand and transform the underlying conditions that allowed the harm to happen.53 One thing to add here is that consent changes. I recently had an experience of grinding up on a friend at a party, a friend who I have often ground on before. She said “not right now.” Later, sober, we checked in about what had shifted in terms of her needs. It reminded me that consent is a present moment offering.It’s about Your GameBeloveds, I’m observing a pattern in the flood of #metoo and #itwasme stories: a lot of us don’t know how to articulate what we really want and don’t want in real time.54 The pressure of desire unexpressed can blow out a system and lead to harmful behaviors such as abuse of power, harassment, molestation, assault, and rape. It also shows up in misogyny on the internet. Repression is at the root of so much sexual transgression. It’s a story—that desire is to be fully contained as an indication of purity, moral supremacy, or maturity. The story gets upheld in very old social, political, and religious norms that aim to control us. The story gets upheld by those who have survived harm and want to regenerate safety with impenetrable boundaries, who go so far that any desire shocks the system. Last year, I went to a hot spring with a loved one who wasn’t raised in the United States. It was a naked space, and there was a big sign on the wall in the changing room that said bathers were not to extend any sexual attention toward others. I nodded, not really noticing it. My friend pointed at the sign and laughed at how unnatural and American it was: come be naked and wet and sweating, but make sure you don’t see each other at all.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Despite what I think is an accelerated pace. Like you said, it’s uncovering, it’s being revealed, it was always right there at the surface. I think it’s a little more accelerated too because some of these right-wing people are getting righteous. They’re like, I’ve been waiting to just show you my real colonizer self.43 But what I’ve been most moved by, especially working at an intergenerational political organizing center in New York City, is a newer generation of organizers and an older generation of organizers coming together and saying, “What are we going to build? What are we going to create?” And that to me is the erotic as power. That is understanding that we are collectively capable of calling on ancestral traditions for our resilience and also building some new shit. Knowing that we have made mistakes, what we have learned from them, how do we transform sexual violence, how do we transform state violence, how do we transform criminal violence? And no, wait, let’s take a moment to reflect, to release what we want to release and understand that we can choose what we desire. And we could choose what we want to build. And it doesn’t have to come from this place of scarcity and fear. And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in the imagination and creation of our organizing. Of our political work. Of putting our bodies on the line against fascism, our queer bodies, trans, lesbian, gay, bi, two-spirit bodies. I feel inspired. amb. I do too. And having a different level of conversation about risk. I don’t think that she even uses the word “risk.” But Audre Lorde talks about how we are providing energy for change. And considering the erotic as a source of power and information. Like this is, we are, constantly communicating what is possible. And people are also identifying the level of risk they are willing to take. It does feel different to me, a different kind of measurement or temperature check, or assessment of who can be up front, who’s in the back, who’s in the middle, who’s on the side. And that can transform. You can alternate. You can shift roles. You don’t have to be the same person, in the same line, every time. We can metamorphosize as we’re doing this. This feels very powerful to me. This is what I’m witnessing. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened before. But it’s happening now. This is a moment.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved— and who now walk the long stormy summer.” Fitzgerald is referring to the Lost Generation, and the quote struck me as so counterintuitive—we often think of that generation as so jaded and worldly. The parallels between that generation and the generation we lost in the ’80s is something I explore in the novel. In particular, I was struck by the similarities between the way Paris was a refuge for so many misfit artists, and the role big American cities like Chicago have played for young LGBTQ people. The arts scene in Paris was interrupted by World War I, and between the war and the influenza of 1918, a whole generation was decimated. I was particularly interested in those who regrouped in Paris after the war, who tried to recreate some of what had been lost. The lines we can draw between that time and the ’80s are fascinating to me. What do you want people to take away from reading The Great Believers? Ultimately, I do think The Great Believers is a defiantly hopeful book—or at least that my characters are defiantly hopeful. That’s one of the meanings of the title, I think. As their lives fall apart, they also take on greater direction and conviction. We’re living in a difficult time, and life is hard enough to begin with, but I drew so much inspiration in the past few years from talking to survivors, listening to the stories of how they fought for their lives and for each other even when it seemed utterly hopeless. If my characters can do for readers just a fraction of what these people did for me, I’ll be satisfied. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Yale’s group of friends is very close. In a sense, they are his “chosen family.” How is this explored in the book? How does each character relate to their family, biological and chosen? Do you have a “chosen family,” and if so, what brings you all together? 2. How has the culture changed regarding LGBTQ+ voices and stories since the 1980s? 3. Chicago is such a powerful presence in this novel that it is almost a character in itself. Have you ever been to or lived in a place that exerted a strong influence on you? 4. Nora, the elderly woman donating the 1920s pieces, seems completely removed from the rest of Yale’s life, yet her story contains elements that can be compared and contrasted with Yale’s. What similarities between his and her life are there? How has her past affected the present? 5. Fiona has suffered many losses in her life. How do you think that affected her as a mother? What are the ways in which trauma and loss are passed down through generations?