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 A History of God (1993)

  When the Israelites recounted the story of the Exodus, they were not as interested in historical accuracy as we would be today. Instead, they wanted to bring out the significance of the original event, whatever that may have been. Some modern scholars suggest that the Exodus story is a mythical rendering of a successful peasants’ revolt against the suzerainty of Egypt and its allies in Canaan. 15 This would have been an extremely rare occurrence at the time and would have made an indelible impression on everybody involved. It would have been an extraordinary experience of the empowerment of the oppressed against the powerful and the mighty. We shall see that Yahweh did not remain the cruel and violent god of the Exodus, even though the myth has been important in all three of the monotheistic religions. Surprising as it may seem, the Israelites would transform him beyond recognition into a symbol of transcendence and compassion. Yet the bloody story of the Exodus would continue to inspire dangerous conceptions of the divine and a vengeful theology. We shall see that during the seventh century BCE , the Deuteronomist author (D) would use the old myth to illustrate the fearful theology of election, which has, at different times, played a fateful role in the history of all three faiths. Like any human idea, the notion of God can be exploited and abused. The myth of a Chosen People and a divine election has often inspired a narrow, tribal theology from the time of the Deuteronomist right up to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism that is unhappily rife in our own day. Yet the Deuteronomist has also preserved an interpretation of the Exodus myth that has been equally and more positively effective in the history of monotheism, which speaks of a God who is on the side of the impotent and the oppressed. In Deuteronomy 26, we have what may be an early interpretation of the Exodus story before it was written down in the narratives of J and E. The Israelites are commanded to present the first fruits of the harvest to the priests of Yahweh and make this affirmation: My father was a wandering Aramaean. He went down to Egypt to find refuge there, few in numbers; but there he became a nation, great, mighty and strong. The Egyptians ill-treated us, they gave us no peace and inflicted harsh slavery upon us. But we called on Yahweh the God of our fathers. Yahweh heard our voice and saw our misery, our toil and our oppression; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. He brought us here [to Canaan] and gave us this land, a land where milk and honey flow. Here then I bring the first-fruits of the produce of the soil that you, Yahweh, have given me.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The achievements of one specialization were increased by their usage in another, and this in turn affected its own efficiency. Capital was systematically reinvested and multiplied on the basis of continued development. The interlocking changes acquired a progressive and apparently unstoppable momentum. More and more people of all ranks were drawn into the process of modernization in an increasing number of spheres. Civilization and cultural achievement were no longer the preserve of a tiny elite but depended upon factory workers, coal miners, printers and clerks, not only as laborers but also as buyers in the ever-expanding market. Ultimately it would become necessary for these lower orders to become literate and to share—to some degree—in the wealth of society if the overriding need for efficiency was to be preserved. The great increase in productivity, the accumulation of capital and the expansion of mass markets, as well as the new intellectual advances in science, led to social revolution: the power of the landed gentry declined and was replaced by the financial muscle of the bourgeoisie. The new efficiency was also felt in matters of social organization, which gradually brought the West up to the standards already achieved in other parts of the world, such as China and the Ottoman empire, and then enabled it to surpass them. By 1789, the year of the French Revolution, public service was judged by its effectiveness and utility. The various governments in Europe found it necessary to reconstitute themselves and engage in a continuous revision of their laws in order to meet the ever-changing conditions of modernity. This would have been unthinkable under the old agrarianate dispensation, when law was regarded as immutable and divine. It was a sign of the new autonomy that technicalization was bringing to Western society: men and women felt that they were in charge of their own affairs as never before. We have seen the profound fear that innovation and change had unleashed in traditional societies, where civilization was felt to be a fragile achievement and any break in continuity with the past was resisted. The modern technical society introduced by the West, however, was based upon the expectation of constant development and progress. Change was institutionalized and taken for granted. Indeed, such institutions as the Royal Society in London were dedicated to the collection of new knowledge to replace the old. Specialists in the various sciences were encouraged to pool their findings to aid this process. Instead of keeping their discoveries secret, the new scientific institutions wanted to disseminate knowledge in order to advance future growth in their own and other fields. The old conservative spirit of the Oikumene, therefore, had been replaced in the West by a desire for change and a belief that continual development was practicable. Instead of fearing that the younger generation was going to the dogs, as in former times, the older generation expected their children to live better than they.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This was the religion of the Lutheran Bible. The painting was not displayed in church but Dürer donated it to Nuremberg’s town council, in homage to one of the first cities to have introduced the Reformation, in 1524. Like the peasants, Dürer used the word freedom to encapsulate Luther’s message. He hoped for a future where all, “Turks, heathens and Calicutts [Indians], may turn to us.” He saw Luther as a man who preached “clear and transparent doctrine,” and who helped people become “free Christians.” But Dürer does not seem to have made much of the corresponding concept of the absolute sinfulness of man, and where Luther looked inward, praising his fellow Germans over the hated Italians, Dürer was a citizen of Nuremberg, open to global commerce and exchange, who knew how much he had learned from his journeyman years in Italy. He also collected objects from around the world—feathers, weapons, “Indian cocoanuts and a very fine piece of coral,” curiosities of all kinds that found their way into his art. 42 Luther, by contrast, barely ever mentioned Africa, India, or the New World, either in his writings or his conversations. While he envisaged the Reformation as the struggle of the true Christians against the Pope and the Devil, for Dürer it meant the future coming together of all the religions and people of the world in peaceful unity. For Johann Eberlin von Günzburg, a Franciscan monk in southern Germany, Luther’s central message was his attack on monasticism. His three heroes were Erasmus, Luther, and Karlstadt, the trio who battled the monks and priests. Convinced that evangelical freedom must mean social liberation, he imagined a fictional land, Wolfaria, where there would be social justice and support for those in need. He wrote a series of pamphlets in support of the Reformation, the most famous of which was The Fifteen Confederates, where fifteen characters from various social estates explained why they supported Luther. When it came to monasticism, Günzburg wrote with extraordinary insight. It is probable that he had acted as confessor to a convent. His work went far beyond Luther’s simple insistence that nuns were sexual beings subject to lust, and he diagnosed what he saw as their miserable lives and twisted spirituality.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) saw the idea of God as natural to humanity. The whole of human life was directed toward the future: we experience our lives as incomplete and unfinished. Unlike animals, we are never satisfied but always want more. It is this which has forced us to think and develop, since at each point of our lives we must transcend ourselves and go on to the next stage: the baby must become a toddler, the toddler must overcome its disabilities and become a child, and so forth. All our dreams and aspirations look ahead to what is to come. Even philosophy begins with wonder, which is the experience of the not-knowing, the not-yet. Socialism also looks forward to a utopia, but, despite the Marxist rejection of faith, where there is hope there is also religion. Like Feuerbach, Bloch saw God as the human ideal that has not yet come to be, but instead of seeing this as alienating he found it essential to the human condition. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), the German social theorist of the Frankfurt school, also saw “God” as an important ideal in a way that was reminiscent of the prophets. Whether he existed or not or whether we “believe in him” is superfluous. Without the idea of God there is no absolute meaning, truth or morality: ethics becomes simply a question of taste, a mood or a whim. Unless politics and morality somehow include the idea of “God,” they will remain pragmatic and shrewd rather than wise. If there is no absolute, there is no reason that we should not hate or that war is worse than peace. Religion is essentially an inner feeling that there is a God. One of our earliest dreams is a longing for justice (how frequently we hear children complain: “It’s not fair!”). Religion records the aspirations and accusations of innumerable human beings in the face of suffering and wrong. It makes us aware of our finite nature; we all hope that the injustice of the world will not be the last word.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I know people needier and way more deserving have prayed far harder for stuff they needed more: to feed starving children, say, to get a negative biopsy result. Nonetheless, it’s a stone fact that—within a week or so of my starting to pray—a man I don’t know calls me from the Whiting Foundation to give me a thirty-five-thousand-dollar prize I hadn’t applied for. Some anonymous angel had nominated me and sent in both my poems and a hunk of a crappy autobiographical novel about my kidhood—maybe pinched from the writing group I’d once been in. But the call brings no celebration. If anything, I call Warren feeling awful I got the prize instead of him. Plus, the foundation insists on flying me to New York to pick up the check at a ceremony flanked by two mandatory cocktail parties—a small one before, a large one after. I know with clammy certainty that I won’t last fifteen minutes at a cocktail party without imbibing. Later, I cackle like a madwoman when Joan suggests my quote-unquote higher power orchestrated this. Horse dookey, I say. Surely you don’t believe that. The foundation probably started considering me back when I was drinking. With neck tipped to keep the phone against my ear, I scoop out Dev’s second helping of mac and cheese—plop—into his ABC bowl. You going to the meeting tonight? she asks. Warren’s got school, I say. Well, bring Dev. In fact, I’ll meet you both in the park across from the street in fifteen minutes. I start to argue, then remember my new Navy SEAL of Sobriety pledge and say okay. In the park, the wind is howling like around Dracula’s castle, the sky yellowing with dusk. Dev’s never out this time of day, and his face has the wonder of a scuba diver. He points overhead to charcoal-colored clouds mounting. We find Joan bundled in a navy peacoat and beret. She’s taken a seat on the merry-go-round, its candy-apple red barely visible in the waning light. Dev hops onto the sitting post opposite her, and I give the wheel a spin. Preach to me, I say to Joan. You have to consider prayer a factor in the grant. Oh, horseshit, I say, adding, Those wheels must’ve started to turn when I was still drinking like a fish. Joan and Dev rotate around one slow loop as she says, But the vote was taken the day before they called you, around the time you’d started praying your ass off. Wheeling past me, she leans back and asks, You’re certain you’d still have gotten the grant—prayer or no prayer? Faster, Mom, Dev hollers. Of course, I say. Feeling the cool metal post in my hands, I dig in to driving the merry-go-round, putting my back into it, sprinting a few steps. Is it at least possible, Joan says, that something—some force you’ve never looked for—could’ve invisibly tugged the vote in your direction? I mean, you’re a hundred percent positive?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The speaker’s named Joan—an elegant pageboyed social theorist at Harvard whose unlikely outlaw stint in Alaska involved going to the bar one night in subzero weather wearing a tutu under her arctic parka, just to stir things up. Since the night I woke up after puking, I’ve become semi-teachable, and I tell her that I’m ready to hear suggestions. She says, Do some volunteer work. So I start scrubbing coffee urns with the black marine, who tells me that, yes, even if I consider dosing the coffee with cyanide, the act of making it still constitutes spiritual progress. Joan also urges me to start praying to some half-baked higher power whose existence I argue against. No way, I say. Never happen, no offense. But her voice—speaking daily to me on the phone—keeps me postponing the drink I often feel myself barreling toward like a boulder rolling downhill. With her ministrations, I do not—for two months—drink: a white-knuckled, tooth-grinding effort that impresses no one outside the church basement I go to a few nights per week. The sun rises and sets. The moon makes two arcs over the house I fail to sleep in. I remember no intersecting days with Warren, aside from how he takes evening shifts with Dev when I go to meetings. It’s as if he doesn’t even live there, which can’t be right. I don’t write. I can barely read enough to grade the bushels of essays I lug around. And when I long to drive off to the liquor store to buy and suck down fiery elixirs, spiritual directress Joan the Bone—a nickname picked solely for the rhyme—tells me I can do it first thing I wake up: even before you brush your teeth. And while I mock her one-day-at-a-time ploy as a trick for the dim-witted, since it actually means no day dawns in which drinking is a good idea, I have to admit that—sixty days in—when she buys me a celebratory bagel with my coffee, I feel fresher inside, albeit a bit scooped out, like a gourd. Stick a candle in my mouth, and you could use me for Halloween decor. It’s September fifteenth. We sit at a nameless coffee shop I call Now Baking, for the neon sign in its window. It’s before the age of bottled water, when ordering a cappuccino gets you crap coffee dollopped with whipped cream, a zigzag of grenadine syrup, and a cherry on top. So we drink that day unadorned diner coffee, mine laced with fatty cream and enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma, sugar craving being the curse of the newly sober. (One

• From A History of God (1993)

  More critical acclaim for A History of God “Highly readable and ought to be read.… Karen Armstrong has read widely, has missed nothing, and gives us as solid a purview of the God of the past as it would be possible to find in a book.” —Anthony Burgess The Observer “She refreshes the understanding of what one knows, and provides a clear introduction to the unfamiliar … ‘Yearning,’ said Augustine, ‘makes the heart deep.’ That is the theme which runs through this lucid book, and the note of hope on which it ends.” —Robert Runcie Former Archbishop of Canterbury “An enormously intellectually challenging book. A fascinating way of approaching the subject.” —Rabbi Julia Neuberger “Magisterial and brilliant … An extraordinary survey, [a] superb kaleidoscopic history of religion … thorough, intelligent, and highly readable.” — Kirkus Reviews “Besides providing a great deal of religious history, [Armstrong] discusses the various philosophers, mystics, and reformers associated with these religions … An excellent and informative book.” — Library Journal “This searching, profound comparative history … fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate.” — Publishers Weekly A Ballantine Book Published by The Random House Publishing Group Copyright © 1993 by Karen Armstrong All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd., London, in 1993. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1993. This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Doubleday and Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd.: Excerpts from The Jerusalem Bible , copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Oxford University Press: Excerpts from The Confessions of St. Augustine , translated by Henry Chadwick, copyright © 1991 by Henry Chadwick. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Oxford, England. Peters Fraser & Dunlop: Excerpts from The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn (Secker & Warburg). Reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the author. Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. www.ballantinebooks.com Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-94285 eISBN: 978-0-307-79858-9 rh_3.1_140221745_c0_r6 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Maps Introduction 1. In the Beginning … 2. One God 3. A Light to the Gentiles 4. Trinity: The Christian God 5. Unity: The God of Islam 6. The God of the Philosophers 7. The God of the Mystics 8. A God for Reformers 9. Enlightenment 10. The Death of God ? 11.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I know a lot of people who’re drunks. I even know a lot of drunks with guns—and grudges. Our mother’s the only person I know ever shot at anybody. It seems a nasty side effect of sleeping with her. In fairness to her, Lecia says, she sounds contrite. Maybe we could check her in the same place as Harold, I say. They could go in on the buddy system, like the navy. Later, Tex calls to announce he’s shepherding Harold through the hospital’s recovery meetings, with Mother visiting every day (such loyalty makes me wonder if she makes her alleged weekly visits to Daddy in the home—though they no doubt barely register on him.) Tex can’t keep the bemusement out of his voice when he adds, You’ll never guess what she wound up doing this morning? Going to one of those supportive-wives’ meetings? Yes, ma’am. Like a witch in church, I say. Some lady put her off by talking about wiping her husband’s ass, and Mother claimed she got sick to her stomach. Anyway, Harold and I were in the meeting across the hall with all the drunks. Everybody laughing and raising hell. So she wound up crossing over. She went to a meeting of sober drunks? She did. Will wonders never cease, I say. If this winds up taking, I owe you big. She’s going to another meeting tonight. You’re expecting too much, I say. She’s only there because he is— Don’t be too sure, he says. They give out these white chips to anybody sober a day. Desire chip, it’s called. Looks like a poker chip. She raised her hand and stood up in front and got herself one. She raised her hand and said, I’m Charlie, and I’m an alcoholic. Tomorrow she’ll wake up and say, I’m Charlie, and I’m the fire chief. Tex says one of the lecturers at the detox was the very guy she’d called thirty years back, the guy who said she wasn’t sick enough to be an alcoholic. I’d like to give that bastard a piece of my mind, I say. But cynical as I try to sound about Mother’s stab at normalcy, I hang up to dial my sister, and together our tough talk gets thinner, the pauses in the conversation longer. We’re starting—reluctantly—to hope. Afterward, I go into Warren’s study and lean on the door frame, saying, Mother’s getting sober. He glances up, saying, I never thought she drank that much. I gape at him, and he says, I know when you were little, she was bad. Later, Mother calls, sounding chastened, and I scold her and hang up, for when she’s in no immediate danger of killing herself, I get to spill onto her the black bile I feel.

• From A History of God (1993)

  For six years, he sat at the feet of various Hindu gurus and undertook fearful penances, but made no headway. The doctrines of the sages did not appeal to him, and his mortifications had simply made him despair. It was not until he abandoned these methods completely and put himself into a trance one night that he gained enlightenment. The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced. Yet again, as in the pagan vision, the gods, nature and mankind were bound together in sympathy. There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. At first, the demon Mara tempted him to stay where he was and enjoy his newfound bliss: it was no use trying to spread the word because nobody would believe him. But two of the gods of the traditional pantheon—Maha Brahma and Sakra, Lord of the devas—came to the Buddha and begged him to explain his method to the world. The Buddha agreed and for the next forty-five years he tramped all over India, preaching his message: in this world of suffering, only one thing was stable and firm. This was Dharma, the truth about right living, which alone could free us from pain. This was nothing to do with God. The Buddha believed implicitly in the existence of the gods since they were a part of his cultural baggage, but he did not believe them to be much use to mankind. They too were caught up in the realm of pain and flux; they had not helped him to achieve enlightenment; they were involved in the cycle of rebirth like all other beings and eventually they would disappear. Yet at crucial moments of his life—as when he made the decision to preach his message—he imagined the gods influencing him and playing an active role. The Buddha did not deny the gods, therefore, but believed that the ultimate Reality of nirvana was higher than the gods. When Buddhists experience bliss or a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being. Such states are natural to humanity; they can be attained by anybody who lives in the correct way and learns the techniques of Yoga. Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves. When he met his first disciples at Benares after his enlightenment, the Buddha outlined his system, which was based on one essential fact: all existence was dukkha. It consisted entirely of suffering; life was wholly awry. Things come and go in meaningless flux. Nothing has permanent significance. Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  David strokes his beard, saying, That is genuinely terrifying. Why’d he go out drinking? Gerry shakes his head, saying, Mood and happenstance don’t drive us to drink. Turning to Jack, he says, Explain it to the newcomers. He got drunk, Jack says, because he’s an alcoholic. We are given a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition. Without spiritual help, the lure of the drink is too much for most of us. Is he quoting something? I ask David. It’s their book, he says. The once über-logical David tells me with aficionado’s conviction that at the halfway house where he’s a current resident—and Jack a former one—there’s a hard-core book study every Sunday. I should go. Riding back to Lexington in the backseat, I sit between passed-out, openmouthed James—his breath on the side window spreading and receding like a tide—and curly-headed Jack. I think with rue of Joan the Bone’s injunction to ask the first person I saw about my marriage. I’m still angling to prove what crazy bullshit her much vaunted surrender-to-the-group concept is. Whatever Jack’s brief spells of clarity, he rarely goes to a meeting without jabbering out something nutty. So I start whispering my tale of marital woe to Jack, who sits in the hunched posture of somebody tensing against a blow. Occasionally, he’ll tug a red curl over the crease in his forehead. Eventually, I wind down and ask, what should I do? And I wait for the word salad of his scrambled cortex to spew forth. Instead, his eyes meet mine evenly, and he says—as it seems everybody says—You should pray about it. But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope… What if I get no answer there?

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  Then, just as I moved toward closing my work on this Foreword, I came across another gift, one that seemed to open the possibilities of a connection between Howard Thurman and a new generation of his (and my) children. Again the gift I found was a book, Testimony, a moving and impressive collection of essays and poetry edited by Natasha Tarpley and published in 1994. It was written by a group of some forty young African-American writers, most of whom were likely just entering elementary school when Thurman left us in the spring of 1981. What I sensed in their deeply reflective anthology was a level of integrity, self-examination, and social concern that would have brought one of those characteristically broad and deep smiles to the face of our father in the faith. (And when I noted that Testimony was also published by Beacon it seemed very likely that our dear mentor was up to one of his familiar creative tricks.) Surely some of the gifted and committed young people of Testimony could find a vital connection with Jesus and the Disinherited, even if their walls are different from the ones Thurman and his grandmother knew. That is a cause for real joy, but much more has changed in this country than the character of the walls and the number of people who now escape their harsh pressures. So any serious reflection on the possible future of this landmark work from the past must take at least two of those essential changes into consideration. First, we need to recall the fact that in the years when Thurman was most actively wrestling with the issues and spirits that emerged in Jesus and the Disinherited, the Black people who provided his major points of reference in this country often gathered in and around places and events where Jesus of Nazareth was celebrated and at least nominally recognized and followed. Today, at the close of Thurman’s century, those people who live most obviously with their backs against the wall—for instance, the homeless, the working and jobless poor, the substance abused and abusers, the alienated, misguided, and essentially abandoned young people—are rarely within hearing or seeing range of the company of Jesus’ proclaimed followers. The keepers of the faith of the master often find it very difficult, and very dangerous, to follow him into the hard places inhabited by the disinherited of America. And those wall-bruised people find no space for their presence in the places where the official followers are comfortably at worship, unless they happen to find themselves among such exceptions as the young, downwardly mobile worker-believers of the Azuza church fellowship in Dorchester, Massachusetts, or the interracial community of hope in Washington, D.C., the Abyssinian Sojourners. On an even more complicated level, in this increasingly pluralistic nation Thurman’s “religion of Jesus” and its strange mutation, American Christianity, are no longer considered the automatic, official possessors of any privileged monopoly on the truth of God or humanity.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  At the outset, he seems humble without seeming bent or cowed. As a kid, I’d been dragged to a Mass by neighbors, where the priest downshifted in prayer into this slow, syrupy—extra-holy—way of talking, as the congregation no doubt prayed to get home in time for kickoff. When Father Kane breaks up the bread, the movements are simple, stripped of any show—with the solemn dignity of an enlightened master mechanic adjusting a carburetor—nothing pro forma about it. The process somehow erases him so he’s a clear conduit, and the keen quality of his attention draws me in. Toward the end of Mass, Dev whispers, Is that a yarmulke on his head? Since Dev goes to a Jewish after-school—the best in town—he’s covetous enough of a yarmulke that he once lopped the ears off his Mickey Mouse hat to make his own. I shush him, but Toby says under his breath, What is that? The priest has taped to the top of his scalp a round piece of wire mesh. From my vantage, I’d thought it was some holy hat, but now it looks like nothing so much as a small inverted sink-drain catcher. Father Kane tips the microphone and says sheepishly, I normally wouldn’t mention this, but I had a growth taken off my head. He pauses, almost blushing as he adds, I didn’t want you to think I’d joined the Hair Club for Men. Which draws hoots. Walking to the parking lot, I realize I forgot my paperback. For the first time since God-shopping, I haven’t cracked it open. Maybe I’m getting softheaded, I think, driving home. Or the burden of single-motherhood is making me a crackpot. Since Warren’s moved to New Haven for love and work, a church community seems like necessary parenting ballast, though twice a month, he drives in all weather to see Dev, even staying at our house, both alone and with his sweetheart. Still, if Dev loses the bow to his school-owned bass the night before a concert or needs his basketball hoop set to regulation height the night before his birthday party, it falls to me. And I won’t say the venal thought doesn’t flit through me that church folk look like they might have wrenches and lawn mowers to loan. On Halloween, Dev joins the line of Sunday school kids costumed as various saints and taking turns telling brief, sanitized stories of martyrdom. The tiny St. George—visor askew, plastic breastplate listing—comes last, announcing, You can be a saint, too! like a used-car salesman, which brings down the house.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  Such is also the attitude of the Ku Klux Klan toward Negroes. Even within the disinherited group itself artificial and exaggerated emphasis upon not being killed tends to cheapen life. That is to say, the fact that the lives of the disinherited are lightly held by the dominant group tends to create the same attitude among them toward each other. We come now to the third alternative—a complete and devastating sincerity. I have in my possession a copy of a letter from Mahatma Gandhi to Muriel Lester. The letter says in part: “Speak the truth, without fear and without exception, and see everyone whose work is related to your purpose. You are in God’s work, so you need not fear man’s scorn. If they listen to your requests and grant them, you will be satisfied. If they reject them, then you must make their rejection your strength.” The acceptance of this alternative is to be simply, directly truthful, whatever may be the cost in life, limb, or security. For the individual who accepts this, there may be quick and speedy judgment with attendant loss. But if the number increases and the movement spreads, the vindication of the truth would follow in the wake. There must always be the confidence that the effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. There is no substitute for such a faith. Emphasis upon an unwavering sincerity points up at once the major challenge of Jesus to the disinherited and the power of his most revolutionary appeal. “Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, … but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.” What does he mean? Does he mean that factors having to do with physical survival are trivial or of no consequence? Is this emphasis merely the counsel of suicide? It seems inescapable that either Jesus was infinitely more realistic than we dare imagine or, taking his words at their face value, he is talking as one who has no understanding of the basic facts of life that touch this central problem. From our analysis of the life of Jesus it seems clear that it was from within the framework of great social pressures upon him and his group that he taught and lived to the very end. It is reasonable to assume, then, that he speaks out of understanding and that his words cannot be lightly disregarded, however devastating they may seem. It may be argued that the insistence upon complete sincerity has to do only with man’s relation to God, not with man’s relation to man. To what does such a position lead?

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  So Jesus’ guidance for the disinherited may be available only through some direct, creative, perhaps disguised encounters between those whose wounded backs and spirits testify to the continuing reality of the walls and those who may no longer be forcibly pressed against them but who know the walls and the continuing struggle against the hounds of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, and have determined to overcome. In unofficial, unprivileged, and dangerous encounters at the wall: perhaps that is the way Thurman would prefer us to meet his Jesus at the close of the twentieth century. Of course, even in his somewhat less complicated time Thurman recognized that it would not be easy to develop models of hope from among the disinherited, and he quickly, quietly declared toward the end of his statement that “A profound piece of surgery has to take place in the very psyche of the disinherited before the great claim of the religion of Jesus can be presented. The great stretches of barren places in the soul must be revitalized, brought to life, before they can be challenged.” Fortunately, he lived long enough to encounter a generation of pioneers in the 1960s (some of whom he had helped inspire) that was ready—at least for a time—to break away from the wall and take on the challenge of confrontation, healing, re-creation, and hope for themselves, for the nation, and for the world. If he had continued in this life long enough to see Nelson Mandela walk in graceful triumph through the prison gates, away from the walls, Thurman would surely have recognized a living testimony to the power of the human spirit to overcome the hounds of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, to resist the crippling calls for vengeance. In the light of such a life it may even be possible for us to return to the original 1935 pilot essay, to remember that the revitalization of the souls of the oppressed was never an end in itself for Thurman. For there, at the beginning of this long publishing path, the Black pilgrim reminded us of the larger social purposes of such creative disciplines of the spirit. Overlooking, or forgiving, his heavy tendency toward the male pronouns that were so much a part of his time, we are able to grasp Thurman’s grandest contextual goal for the disinherited/underprivileged when he writes: Often there are things on the horizon that point logically to a transformation of society, especially for the underprivileged, but he cannot co-operate with them because he is spiritually and intellectually confused. He mistakes fear for caution and caution for fear. Now, if his mind is free and his spirit unchained, he can work intelligently and courageously for a new day.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Abdu had been involved in the Urubi revolt and was exiled after the British victory. He joined Afghani in Paris. The two men had much in common. Abdu had been initially drawn into Afghani’s circle by his love of mystical religion (irfan), which, he used to say, was “the key to his happiness.” 71 But Afghani had also introduced Abdu to the Western sciences and, later, Abdu read Guizot, Tolstoy, Renan, Strauss, and Herbert Spencer. Abdu felt quite at home in Europe and enjoyed the company of Europeans. Like Afghani, he was convinced that Islam was compatible with modernity and argued that it was an eminently rational faith, and that the habit of taqlid was corrupting and inauthentic. But, also like Afghani, Abdu was committed to rational thinking from within a mystical perspective. It was not as yet emancipated from the spirituality of the old world. Eventually, Abdu quarreled with Afghani about politics. He believed that Egypt needed reform more than revolution. He was a deeper thinker than his master, and could see that there could be no shortcut to modernization and independence. Instead of joining Afghani in his dangerous, pointless schemes, he wanted to rectify some of Egypt’s immense problems by means of education, and in 1888 he was allowed to return. He became one of the most beloved men in the country, remained on good terms with both Egyptians and British, and became a personal friend of both Lord Cromer and the khedive. By this time there was considerable frustration in the country. At first, many educated Egyptians had been forced to admit that, unwelcome as the British occupation undoubtedly was, Lord Cromer ruled the country far more efficiently than Khedive Ismail had done. But by the 1890s, relations with the British had deteriorated. The British officials were often of lower caliber than before and made less effort to cement relations with the Egyptians. They created their own privileged colonial enclave in the Gezira district. Egyptian civil servants found that their promotions were blocked by young Britons, and there was resentment of the privileges accorded the British and other foreigners by the Capitulations, which exempted them from the law of the land. 72 More and more people listened to the fiery rhetoric of the nationalist Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), who called for the immediate evacuation of the British. Abdu regarded Kamil as an empty demagogue. He could see that before Egyptians were able to run a modern independent state, they would have to deal with some serious social problems, which had been exacerbated by the occupation. In Abdu’s view, secularist ideas and institutions were being introduced far too rapidly into a deeply religious country.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Pascal was brutally honest with himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that there was no way of proving the existence of God. When he imagined himself arguing with somebody who was constitutionally unable to believe, Pascal could find no arguments to convince him. This was a new development in the history of monotheism. Hitherto nobody had seriously questioned the existence of God. Pascal was the first person to concede that, in this brave new world, belief in God could only be a matter of personal choice. In this, he was the first modern. Pascal’s approach to the problem of God’s existence is revolutionary in its implications, but it has never been accepted officially by any church. In general, Christian apologists have preferred the rationalistic approach of Leonard Lessius, discussed at the end of the last chapter. Such an approach, however, could only lead to the God of the philosophers, not to the God of revelation experienced by Pascal. Faith, he insisted, was not a rational assent based on common sense. It was a gamble. It was impossible to prove that God exists but equally impossible for reason to disprove his existence: “We are incapable of knowing either what [God] is or whether he is.... Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager?” 4 This gamble is not entirely irrational, however. To opt for God is a win-win solution. In choosing to believe in God, Pascal continued, the risk is finite but the gain infinite. As the Christian progresses in the Faith, he or she will become aware of a continuous enlightenment, an awareness of God’s presence that is a sure sign of salvation. It is no good relying on external authority; each Christian is on his own. Pascal’s pessimism is countered by a growing realization in the Pensées that once the wager has been made, the hidden God reveals himself to anyone who seeks him. Pascal makes God say: “You would not seek me, if you had not already found me.” 5 True, humanity cannot batter its way to the distant God by arguments and logic or by accepting the teaching of an institutional church. But by making the personal decision to surrender to God, the faithful feel themselves transformed, becoming “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a true friend.” 6 Somehow the Christian will find that life has acquired meaning and significance, having created faith and constructed a sense of God in the face of meaninglessness and despair. God is a reality because he works. Faith is not intellectual certainty but a leap into the dark and an experience that brings a moral enlightenment.

• From A History of God (1993)

  After centuries of persecution, exile and humiliation, there was hope. All over the world, Jews had experienced an inner freedom and liberation that seemed similar to the ecstasy that the Kabbalists had experienced for a few moments when they contemplated the mysterious world of the sefiroth. Now this experience of salvation was no longer simply the preserve of a privileged few but seemed common property. For the first time, Jews felt that their lives had value; redemption was no longer a vague hope for the future but was real and full of meaning in the present. Salvation had come! This sudden reversal made an indelible impression. The eyes of the whole Jewish world were fixed on Gallipoli, where Shabbetai had even made an impression on his captors. The Turkish vizier housed him in considerable comfort. Shabbetai began to sign his letters: “I am the Lord your God, Shabbetai Zevi.” But when he was brought back to Istanbul for his trial, he had fallen once again into a depression. The sultan gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death: Shabbetai chose Islam and was immediately released. He was given an imperial pension and died as an apparently loyal Muslim on September 17, 1676.

• From A History of God (1993)

  To find this God, Abulafia taught that it was necessary “to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it.” The phrase “untying the knots” is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide. The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokhmah ha-Tseruf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters), which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine Name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline—which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider—appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and kefitsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modern analytic practice of free association. Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from “the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere.”57 In this way, the “seals” of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart. In rather the same way as a psychoanalytic patient needs the guidance of his therapist, Abulafia insisted that the mystical journey into the mind could only be undertaken under the supervision of a master of Kabbalah. He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair. Today patients will often internalize the person of the analyst in order to appropriate the strength and health that he or she represents. Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often “see” and “hear” the person of his spiritual director, who became “the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him.” He felt a new surge of power and an inner transformation that was so overwhelming that it seemed to issue from a divine source. A disciple of Abulafia gave another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah. In ecstasy he was confronted with a vision of his own liberated and enlightened self:

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  64 His followers were engaged in a war against all religious rules: “I say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own power.” 65 Like many radical secularists today, Frank regarded all religion as harmful. As the movement progressed, Frankists turned to politics, dreaming of a great revolution that would sweep away the past and save the world. They saw the French Revolution as a sign that their vision was true and that God had intervened on their behalf. 66 Jews had anticipated many of the postures of the modern period. Their painful brush with the aggressively modernizing society of Europe had led them into secularism, skepticism, atheism, rationalism, nihilism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith. For most Jews, the path to the new world that was developing in the West led through religion, but this religion was very different from the kind of faith we are used to in the twentieth century. It was more mythically based; it did not read the Scriptures literally, and was perfectly prepared to come up with new solutions, some of which seemed shocking in their search for something fresh. To understand the role of religion in premodern society we should turn to the Muslim world, which was undergoing its own upheavals during this early modern period and evolving different forms of spirituality that would continue to influence Muslims well into the modern period. 2. Muslims: The Conservative Spirit (1492–1799) IN 1492 the Jews had been one of the first casualties of the new order that was slowly coming to birth in the West. The other victims of that momentous year had been the Muslims of Spain, who had lost their last foothold in Europe. But Islam was by no means a spent force. During the sixteenth century it was still the greatest global power. Even though the Sung dynasty (960–1260) had raised China to a far higher degree of social complexity and might than Islamdom, and the Italian Renaissance had initiated a cultural florescence that would eventually enable the West to pull ahead, the Muslims were at first easily able to contain these challenges and they remained at a political and economic peak. Muslims comprised only about a third of the planet’s population, but they were so widely and strategically located throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that at this moment, Islamdom could be seen as a microcosm of world history, expressing the preoccupations of most areas of the civilized world in the early modern period.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The ideal of personal transcendence was embodied in the Yogi, who would leave his family and abandon all social ties and responsibilities to seek enlightenment, putting himself in another realm of being. In about 538 BCE, a young man named Siddhartha Gautama also left his beautiful wife, his son, his luxurious home in Kapilavashtu, about 100 miles north of Benares, and became a mendicant ascetic. He had been appalled by the spectacle of suffering and wanted to discover the secret to end the pain of existence that he could see in everything around him. For six years, he sat at the feet of various Hindu gurus and undertook fearful penances, but made no headway. The doctrines of the sages did not appeal to him, and his mortifications had simply made him despair. It was not until he abandoned these methods completely and put himself into a trance one night that he gained enlightenment. The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced. Yet again, as in the pagan vision, the gods, nature and mankind were bound together in sympathy. There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. At first, the demon Mara tempted him to stay where he was and enjoy his newfound bliss: it was no use trying to spread the word because nobody would believe him. But two of the gods of the traditional pantheon—Maha Brahma and Sakra, Lord of the devas—came to the Buddha and begged him to explain his method to the world. The Buddha agreed and for the next forty-five years he tramped all over India, preaching his message: in this world of suffering, only one thing was stable and firm. This was Dharma, the truth about right living, which alone could free us from pain.