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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Night falls. The Wart sleeps under a tree, and the next morning he comes across a high-gabled stone cottage in a clearing in the wood. Outside it, drawing water from a well, is a tall elderly man with spectacles and a long white beard, wearing a gown splashed with mutes and embroidered with stars and leaves and mystical signs. It is his teacher , Merlyn the magician, and when the Wart walks into his cottage he finds it is a treasury of wonderful things: thousands of books, stuffed birds, live grass snakes in an aquarium, baby badgers, an owl called Archimedes. There is Venetian glass, a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , paint-boxes, fossils, a bottle of Mastic varnish, purse-nets and rabbit-wires, a rod-box, salmon flies, and a fox’s mask mounted on the wall. Nearly all of these things were in White’s cottage as he wrote. The book was White’s ‘ Kingdom of Grammerie’, wrote Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘where there was room and redress for anything he liked to put in it’. But there is another way of reading this scene, one far less mundane than a writer’s amusement at putting in his book the things around him as he writes: it is that Merlyn’s cottage in the woods is his own. On White’s shelves were a whole clutch of books on human psychology. He’d read them, underlined passages, made notes in the margins on the pathology of sexual deviance. In Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology he’d found a whole chapter on homosexuality. It held that the attitude of homosexuals was ‘ that of people desirous of interfering with the flight of time’. Adler thought homosexuals were irresponsible because they refused to develop into heterosexual adulthood. But interfering with the flight of time? Words once read run deep . For White was certainly interfering with time. He was turning it backwards. In that green mound of a grave he had achieved invisibility, and after he emerged he felt he ‘had turned St Lucie’s day’, the shortest, darkest day of the year from which the earth rolls back toward spring. He spoke of that time as a rebirth: wrote that life ‘ seemed to be creating itself, seemed in the blank walls of chaos to be discovering an opening, or speck of light’. In his imagination, the grave was his dissolution. He had lost the war with Gos, and it had killed the man he was. But now, with his apocalyptic, child’s vision of redemption, he saw himself reborn into the world with wisdom. And reborn, too, as a man living backwards in time. I used to think Merlyn was a magnificent literary creation, but now I think of him as a much stranger invention – White’s imagined future self.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I hadn’t told him everything. I hadn’t confessed the unpaid bills, the letters from the bank, the impossible nights, the mornings in tears. But I had told him something. I looked at Mabel. Her head drooped forward. She looked indescribably mournful in her hood. I stroked her craggy, snake-scale toes. She was asleep. I touched the hood, very gently, and felt the whole weight of her sinking, sleeping head against my fingers. Perhaps I should ask Stuart to take us home, I thought. I was so impossibly tired; there seemed no point in flying her at all. But when I unhooded her out on the hill, Stuart, noticing her oddly upright stance, the pale feathers fluffed over her toes, the rising feathers on her crown, the shackly, possessive grasp of her feet on the glove, raised his eyebrows and asked, ‘What does she weigh?’ ‘One pound and fifteen ounces.’ ‘Look at her,’ he said. ‘She’s a different hawk today.’ She was. I called her. I had lost hope in her coming but I called her all the same. And she flew to me. She flew like a promise finally kept. She raced towards me, wings flickering across fifty yards of flint-strewn earth, hit the glove and stayed. I gave her back to Stuart and called her again. Three times she flew to my fist the whole length of the creance with total conviction. There was no hesitation, no faltering. The hawk flew to me as if I were home. ‘You’ve hit her flying weight,’ Stuart said approvingly. ‘A couple more days of this and we’ll get her flying free.’ Of course he was right. I had miscalculated her flying weight for weeks. But the narcissism of the bereaved is very great. I thought that the reason the hawk had flown to me was because I had confessed how bad things were. It had made me feel better – and it was this that had made me less offputting to my hawk. I must try to be happier, I told myself. For the hawk’s sake I must. 16 Rain

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I turn away. It is too unbearably kind. ‘Helen, we can help you,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘We really can.’ There’s a kind of tingling astonishment when I hear his words. It’s something like hope. I start to sob. I sob right through twenty minutes of delicate discussion, and agree to try a course of antidepressants. He is a good doctor. He tells me all about SSRIs, talks me through their side-effects, their history, their mode of operation. He draws little diagrams of neurons, adds dots and wavy lines for serotonin molecules and the action of re-uptake inhibitors. I peer at the pictures, fascinated. An hour later I’m walking down the street with a white paper bag in my hand. It weighs almost nothing. He says it will make things better. Which is ridiculous. How can this grey and mortified world be washed away by little dots and lines? Then I start to worry that the drugs will make me ill. Even more absurdly, I panic that they’ll stop me thinking clearly. That they’ll stop me flying Mabel. That whoever I’ll become under their chemical influence will be so strange and alien she won’t fly to me any more. The worries are a tedious avalanche but I put them to one side for long enough to swallow the drugs with water. There is an almost immediate effect: a tiredness so vast I can hardly walk, and my skull is empty, tight and painful. I don’t sleep that night. I lie in bed. The next morning I drink coffee. I drink more coffee. I keep on flying the hawk. Those books about people running to the wild to escape their grief and sorrow were part of a much older story, so old its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing. When I was a student slogging through the first years of my degree, I read a long and beautiful thirteenth-century poem called Sir Orfeo. No one knows who wrote it, and I had forgotten it existed. But one morning while pulling a handful of chicks out of the freezer the poem came to mind, turned out of the ground in one of those strange excavations of the disordered mind. Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and the underworld by way of traditional Celtic songs about the otherworld, the Land of Faery. In Celtic myth that otherworld is not deep underground; it is just one step aside from our own. Things can exist in both places at once – and things can be pulled from one to the other. In the poem, Heurodis sleeps in an orchard under a grafted fruit tree – an imptree – and dreams that the next day she will be stolen away by the King of Faery. Terrified, she tells her husband the King. Orfeo surrounds her with armed knights, but they cannot protect her from this otherworldly threat: she slips through the air and vanishes.

• From Educated (2018)

  had never heard of the Weavers; he never talked about the Illuminati. He’d enrolled his three oldest sons in school, and even though he’d pulled them out a few years later, vowing to teach them at home, when Tony had asked to go back, Dad had let him. Tony had stayed in school through high school, although he missed so many days working in the junkyard that he wasn’t able to graduate. Because Tyler was the third son, he barely remembered school and was happy to study at home. Until he turned thirteen. Then, perhaps because Mother was spending all her time teaching Luke to read, Tyler asked Dad if he could enroll in the eighth grade. Tyler stayed in school that whole year, from the fall of 1991 through the spring of 1992. He learned algebra, which felt as natural to his mind as air to his lungs. Then the Weavers came under siege that August. I don’t know if Tyler would have gone back to school, but I know that after Dad heard about the Weavers, he never again allowed one of his children to set foot in a public classroom. Still, Tyler’s imagination had been captured. With what money he had he bought an old trigonometry textbook and continued to study on his own. He wanted to learn calculus next but couldn’t afford another book, so he went to the school and asked the math teacher for one. The teacher laughed in his face. “You can’t teach yourself calculus,” he said. “It’s impossible.” Tyler pushed back. “Give me a book, I think I can.” He left with the book tucked under his arm. The real challenge was finding time to study. Every morning at seven, my father gathered his sons, divided them into teams and sent them out to tackle the tasks of the day. It usually took about an hour for Dad to notice that Tyler was not among his brothers. Then he’d burst through the back door and stride into the house to where Tyler sat studying in his room. “What the hell are you doing?” he’d shout, tracking clumps of dirt onto Tyler’s spotless carpet. “I got Luke loading I-beams by himself—one man doing a two-man job—and I come in here and find you sitting on your ass?” If Dad had caught me with a book when I was supposed to be working, I’d have skittered, but Tyler was steady. “Dad,” he’d say. “I’ll w-w-work after l-l-lunch. But I n-n-need the morning to s-st-study.” Most mornings they’d argue for a few minutes, then Tyler would surrender his pencil, his

• From Educated (2018)

  an unbeliever. I was Anna Mathea’s heir: she had given me her voice. Had she not given me her faith, also? — I WAS PUT ON A SHORT LIST for the Gates scholarship. There would be an interview in February in Annapolis. I had no idea how to prepare. Robin drove me to Park City, where there was an Ann Taylor discount outlet, and helped me buy a navy pantsuit and matching loafers. I didn’t own a handbag so Robin lent me hers. Two weeks before the interview my parents came to BYU. They had never visited me before, but they were passing through on their way to Arizona and stopped for dinner. I took them to the Indian restaurant across the street from my apartment. The waitress stared a moment too long at my father’s face, then her eyes bulged when they dropped to his hands. Dad ordered half the menu. I told him three mains would be enough, but he winked and said money was not a problem. It seemed the news of my father’s miraculous healing was spreading, earning them more and more customers. Mother’s products were being sold by nearly every midwife and natural healer in the Mountain West. We waited for the food, and Dad asked about my classes. I said I was studying French. “That’s a socialist language,” he said, then he lectured for twenty minutes on twentieth-century history. He said Jewish bankers in Europe had signed secret agreements to start World War II, and that they had colluded with Jews in America to pay for it. They had engineered the Holocaust, he said, because they would benefit financially from worldwide disorder. They had sent their own people to the gas chambers for money. These ideas were familiar to me, but it took me a moment to remember where I’d heard them: in a lecture Dr. Kerry had given on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, published in 1903, purported to be a record of a secret meeting of powerful Jews planning world domination. The document was discredited as a fabrication but still it spread, fueling anti-Semitism in the decades before World War II. Adolf Hitler had written about the Protocols in Mein Kampf, claiming they were authentic,

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For White was certainly interfering with time. He was turning it backwards. In that green mound of a grave he had achieved invisibility, and after he emerged he felt he ‘had turned St Lucie’s day’, the shortest, darkest day of the year from which the earth rolls back toward spring. He spoke of that time as a rebirth: wrote that life ‘seemed to be creating itself, seemed in the blank walls of chaos to be discovering an opening, or speck of light’. In his imagination, the grave was his dissolution. He had lost the war with Gos, and it had killed the man he was. But now, with his apocalyptic, child’s vision of redemption, he saw himself reborn into the world with wisdom. And reborn, too, as a man living backwards in time. I used to think Merlyn was a magnificent literary creation, but now I think of him as a much stranger invention – White’s imagined future self. Merlyn was ‘born at the wrong end of Time’. He must ‘live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind’. This backwards life is what gives Merlyn his ability to predict the future – for him, it is always his past. In White’s 1941 conclusion to The Once and Future King, published much later as The Book of Merlyn, Arthur awaits his final battle. He is elderly now, tired and despairing, and when Merlyn appears he wonders if the wizard is a dream. Merlyn rebukes him. ‘When I was a third-rate schoolmaster in the twentieth century,’ he snaps, ‘every single boy I ever met wrote essays for me which ended: Then he woke up.’ Being Merlyn was White’s dream, and it makes The Sword in the Stone not just a work of fiction, but a prophecy. All White must do is stay put, wait four hundred years and the Wart will appear at his door. Merlyn’s cottage, and all the things inside it, are souvenirs of the distant future. ‘I have always been afraid of things,’ White had written. ‘Of being hurt and death.’ But now he was recreating himself as someone who would become – who was already – immortalised in legend.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And in this secret foxhole, nose an inch from the ground, breathing crushed bracken and acid soil, I’d look down on the world below, basking in the fierce calm that comes from being invisible but seeing everything. Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It’s a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn’t serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn’t. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world. The confidence with which I sat there with the hawk was absolute. I know how to do this , I thought. I am good, at least, at this. I know all the steps to this dance . First the hawk will feed on my gloved fist. Then as the days pass she’ll grow tamer, partly because I am keeping her indoors and constantly in my presence, just as fifteenth-century falconers had done. Soon she will step to my fist for food, and later she will jump to it. We’ll go for long walks to accustom her to cars and dogs and people. And then she’ll fly to me when I call her, first on a line, the creance, and then free. And then. And then. I’d instructed my friends to leave me alone. I’d filled the freezer with hawk food and unplugged the phone. Now I was a hermit with a hawk in a darkened room with books on three walls, a faded Afghan rug, and a sofa of stained yellow velvet. A mirror hung over the boarded-up fireplace, and a Shell poster from the 1930s on the wall above me was reflected backwards and watery in the old glass. YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL, it said, along with a scumble of stormclouds and a part of the Dorset coast. There was an old television, a mint-green vinyl cloth on the floor with the hawk’s perch on it, and a pair of deep green curtains printed with flowers that shut out the world. The goal was to be motionless, the mind empty, the heart full of hope. But as the minutes stretched I had to move, just slightly: angle my foot to stop it sleeping; wrinkle my nose if it itched, and each time I did so I felt the hawk flinch in fear . But I also saw from the corner of my eye that she was pulling herself up incrementally from that sprung-to-fly crouch. Her stance was more upright. There was a little less fear in the room. The old falconers called the manning of a hawk like this watching . It was a reassuringly familiar state of mind, meditative and careful and grave.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The church of Smyrna (a very ancient, still flourishing commercial city in Ionia, beautifully located on the bay of Smyrna) was externally poor and persecuted, and had still greater tribulation in view, but is cheered with the prospect of the crown of life. It was in the second century ruled by Polycarp, a pupil of John, and a faithful martyr. Philadelphia (a city built by king Attalus Philadelphus, and named after him, now Ala-Schär), in the province of Lydia, a rich wine region, but subject to earthquakes, was the seat of a church likewise poor and small outwardly, but very faithful and spiritually flourishing—a church which was to have all the tribulations and hostility it met with on earth abundantly rewarded in heaven. 2. Churches which were in a predominantly evil and critical condition, viz., those of Sardis and Laodicea. Here accordingly we find severe censure and earnest exhortation to repentance. The church at Sardis (till the time of Croesus the flourishing capital of the Lydian empire, but now a miserable hamlet of shepherds) had indeed the name and outward form of Christianity, but not its inward power of faith and life. Hence it was on the brink of spiritual death. Yet Rev. 3:4 sq., distinguishes from the corrupt mass a few souls which had kept their walk undefiled, without, however, breaking away from the congregation as separatists, and setting up an opposition sect for themselves. The church of Laodicea (a wealthy commercial city of Phrygia, not far from Colosse and Hierapolis, where now stands only a desolate village by the name of Eski-Hissar) proudly fancied itself spiritually rich and faultless, but was in truth poor and blind and naked, and in that most dangerous state of indifference and lukewarmness from which it is more difficult to return to the former decision and ardor, than it was to pass at first from the natural coldness to faith. Hence the fearful threatening: "I will spew thee out of my mouth." (Lukewarm water produces vomiting.) Yet even the Laodiceans are not driven to despair. The Lord, in love, knocks at their door and promises them, on condition of thorough repentance, a part in the marriage-supper of the lamb (3:20). 3. Churches of a mixed character, viz., those of Ephesus, Pergamum, and Thyatira. In these cases commendation and censure, promise and threatening are united. Ephesus, then the metropolis of the Asian church, had withstood, indeed, the Gnostic errorists predicted by Paul, and faithfully maintained the purity of the doctrine delivered to it; but it had lost the ardor of its first love, and it is, therefore, earnestly exhorted to repent. It thus represents to us that state of dead, petrified orthodoxy, into which various churches oftentimes fall. Zeal for pure doctrine is, indeed, of the highest importance, but worthless without living piety and active love. The Epistle to the angel of the church of Ephesus is peculiarly applicable to the later Greek church as a whole.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Accepting this viewpoint gives us a place to start. It positions us in the context of the Native American understanding of a vision quest. It says that we can open up the New Testament and begin to read it as if it were emerging directly from the history, culture, and spirituality of Native America. Jesus, therefore, becomes a Native American Messiah, a spiritual figure clothed in the religious outlook of the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. Although the events and characters mentioned in his story were originally people of Israel under the Roman occupation, they can be translated into Native people under the American occupation. As we try to imagine the vision of the Christ, the universal Messiah of all people, we start to see Jesus as an Arapaho, a Cheyenne, a Paiute. What does the New Testament look like if it is seen as the Jesus story that arises from the “old testament” of Native America? It tells us that the Native Messiah, Jesus, went on four sacred vision quests. Four times he was purified. Four times he was accompanied by his friends to a lonely place. Four times he made his lament. Four times he received a sacred vision. Four times he showed us how his name would be changed, and because of that, how we would be changed too. The four vision quests of Jesus are the cardinal points on the compass of Christology. They each tell us something important about the person and the message of Jesus. Moreover, they tell us these things in a Native American way. They help us to make new discoveries about who Jesus is as a spiritual teacher emerging from the heart of Native American tradition. The words are unchanged from the gospel narrative with which we are familiar, but the voice is different. It is the voice of a great and wise medicine person, a holy person of Native tradition, who has returned from the quest to share a vision that will transform and heal us. This medicine person is neither male nor female, neither Arapaho nor Cree, Apache nor Ojibwe, but the embodiment of all Native people, a bearer of our shared longing and hope. Our search for the Christ in Native spiritual tradition opens up our ability to read the New Testament from a perspective that is respectful of and inclusive of all Native American communities. Therefore, we will find the echoes of different Native religious teachings in the vision quests of Jesus. There will be some of the Longhouse tradition of the woodland peoples, the Kiva traditions of the desert peoples, the Sun Dance traditions of the Plains peoples. Just as the New Testament itself is a many layered story of and about Jesus, with a wide number of different cultures and classes of people included, so is the Native American reading of that story inclusive of a variety of communities. The common thread that holds it all together is the vision quest.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  We infer then, that the Christianity of the Nicene and post-Nicene age, though naturally conservative and decidedly opposed to social revolution and violent measures of reform, yet in its inmost instincts and ultimate tendencies favored the universal freedom of man, and, by elevating the slave to spiritual equality with the master, and uniformly treating him as capable of the same virtues, blessings, and rewards, has placed the hateful institution of human bondage in the way of gradual amelioration and final extinction. This result, however, was not reached in Europe till many centuries after our period, nor by the influence of the church alone, but with the help of various economical and political causes, the unprofitableness of slavery, especially in more northern latitudes, the new relations introduced by the barbarian conquests, the habits of the Teutonic tribes settled within the Roman empire, the attachment of the rural slave to the soil, and the change of the slave into the serf, who was as immovable as the soil, and thus, in some degree independent on the caprice and despotism of his master.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  We live in what he called “that strange isolation.”23 Vision can break that spell. It can release us from our isolation. Not because it is magic, but because it is so human. When we reclaim the ancient human experience of receiving spiritual vision, when we openly acknowledge that we live in a world of deep mystery, when we tell our stories to one another, when we are able to celebrate the fact that even the most ordinary person can be shaped by the most extraordinary encounters, then we can shatter the silence of an age that sits before a screen and waits for digital data to tell it what is real. If I speak openly of my own humble vision and ask you directly about yours, I do so with a purpose. My intent in this book is not only to convey a Native American approach to the study of Jesus, but to invite my readers into an insurrection. I seek to solicit each of you into the subversion of spiritual silence. I want you to join me in honoring the vision that has helped to shape your life. I encourage you to be bold in claiming these visions and, more than that, in finding ways to share them with others. I do so because I believe the more we can open the dialogue of visionary experience, the more we can discover the deep bonds of our common humanity. God has not spoken only to a handful of us. God has not spoken only to the few. The whole reason for the Incarnation is so that God could enter into the vision quest and speak to us all. The experience God had as a human being is the same experience you and I have as human beings: We enter the world of vision. We see and hear in a new way. We understand more deeply. We are transformed. The borders of our sacred space are widened; we open up to an awareness of new possibilities. Vision does not take away the struggles of our existence, but it does show us how to cope with those struggles with confidence and hope. My first vision was small: a single bird, a single message, all in a single moment. I walked out alone to make my lament many years ago. I was a deeply troubled young man who felt that he had to choose between two parts of himself. I was coming apart spiritually. I cried to God to help me understand. I saw a vision. I heard a holy voice. Afterward, I felt whole and I had a sense of direction. On the surface this simple narrative may not seem that important, but stop to consider the wonder it reveals. With a single image, a fragment of vision, a brief word, God was able to overcome generations of suspicion. When I stepped out onto that roof, my ancestors stepped out with me.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  There are covenants made with the tribal peoples of every continent and every culture. They are all fulfilled, confirmed, and corrected by the same Messiah in the same way. Each has something important to tell us about the nature of God. They each inform us about the New Covenant. To deepen our understanding we are all called to undertake our vision quests, just as Jesus did. We are invited to make our lament, to approach God in great humility and even greater hope. We are asked to follow certain disciplines in doing so, to stand before God to make our confession and seek our blessing. The visions we receive are as many and varied as we are, but they all share one thing in common: They are not for our benefit alone, but for the healing, nurture, and enlightenment of our people. Therefore, we learn from one another, we need one another, we are never fully complete without one another. The visions we have are not static or legalistic. They move and grow and change. They call us to step out into a catholicity of covenants. Jesus followed one of these paths. He was raised in a covenant. He believed he heard the voice of God. He prepared himself as best he could. Then one day he went out to a lonely place to make his vision quest. He was filled with humility. He had no idea where it might end. He was supported by his friends. He learned from each quest and kept going. He lived into the quests set before him by God. He understood them as his role as a healer of others. Jesus made four vision quests and, by so doing, left us a legacy to follow. Now we are making our quests. We are becoming healers. We are listeners to the voice of God, speaking to us across all time and all history, through many of our own ancestors and the ancestors of other generations, teaching us what we need to know, welcoming us to learn more. The voice is within us, but it is also calling to us. It speaks our language. It knows our heart. If we trust it, we will see visions, and if we see visions, we will live. The people will live. Chapter 4THE MESSIAHOn January 1, 1889 a solar eclipse occurred. On that same day a Northern Paiute medicine man had a vision. Like Black Elk, he was taken up to heaven and shown an alternate reality where Native American communities would be at peace. He saw the dead, those thousands of Native people lost to war and disease, brought back to life and living happily in their traditional ways. Also like Black Elk, he was given instructions for his role as a healer. He was told to return to teach his people to live righteous lives according to the old values.

• From Educated (2018)

  “You’ve said that before.” “I’m going to.” “Maybe,” Tyler said. “But as long as you live under Dad’s roof, it’s hard to go when he asks you not to, easy to delay just one more year, until there aren’t any years left. If you start as a sophomore, can you even graduate?” We both knew I couldn’t. “It’s time to go, Tara,” Tyler said. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.” “You think I need to leave?” Tyler didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate. “I think this is the worst possible place for you.” He’d spoken softly, but it felt as though he’d shouted the words. “Where could I go?” “Go where I went,” Tyler said. “Go to college.” I snorted. “BYU takes homeschoolers,” he said. “Is that what we are?” I said. “Homeschoolers?” I tried to remember the last time I’d read a textbook. “The admissions board won’t know anything except what we tell them,” Tyler said. “If we say you were homeschooled, they’ll believe it.” “I won’t get in.” “You will,” he said. “Just pass the ACT. One lousy test.” Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.” — THE NEXT DAY I drove to the hardware store in town and bought a slide- bolt lock for my bedroom door. I dropped it on my bed, then fetched a drill from the shop and started fitting screws. I thought Shawn was out— his truck wasn’t in the driveway—but when I turned around with the drill, he was standing in my doorframe. “What are you doing?” he said. “Doorknob’s broke,” I lied. “Door blows open. This lock was cheap but it’ll do the trick.” Shawn fingered the thick steel, which I was sure he could tell was not cheap at all. I stood silently, paralyzed by dread but also by pity. In that moment I hated him, and I wanted to scream it in his face. I imagined the way he would crumple, crushed under the weight of my words and his own self-loathing. Even then I understood the truth of it: that Shawn hated himself far more than I ever could. “You’re using the wrong screws,” he said. “You need long ones for the wall and grabbers for the door. Otherwise, it’ll bust right off.” We walked to the shop. Shawn shuffled around for a few minutes, then emerged with a handful of steel screws. We walked back to the house and he installed the lock, humming to himself and smiling, flashing his baby teeth.

• From Educated (2018)

  liberty, and of what it might mean to self-coerce, until my head thrummed with a dull ache. I called home. Mother answered. Her voice rose with excitement when she recognized my weepy “Hello, Mom.” I told her I shouldn’t have come to Cambridge, that I didn’t understand anything. She said she’d been muscle-testing and had discovered that one of my chakras was out of balance. She could adjust it, she said. I reminded her that I was five thousand miles away. “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll adjust the chakra on Audrey and wing it to you.” “You’ll what it to me?” “Wing it,” she said. “Distance is nothing to living energy. I can send the corrected energy to you from here.” “How fast does energy travel?” I asked. “At the speed of sound, or is it more like a jetliner? Does it fly direct, or will it have to lay over in Minneapolis?” Mother laughed and hung up. — I STUDIED MOST MORNINGS in the college library, near a small window. I was there on a particular morning when Drew, a friend from BYU, sent me a song via email. He said it was a classic but I had never heard of it, nor of the singer. I played the song through my headphones. It gripped me immediately. I listened to it over and over while staring out at the north cloister. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds I scratched those lines into notebooks, into the margins of the essays I was writing. I wondered about them when I should have been reading. From the Internet I learned about the cancer that had been discovered on Bob Marley’s foot. I also learned that Marley had been a Rastafarian, and that Rastafari believe in a “whole body,” which is why he had refused surgery to amputate the toe. Four years later, at age thirty-six, he died.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I hoped that I could transcend my limited reality and be shown the path to follow to make me the disciple I wanted to be. My intention in this way was not very different from countless other human beings who have sought a transcendent moment. Such moments are possible. Transcendence can occur. People can have the scales fall from their eyes, be swept up in a rapture divine, be given a glimpse of eternity. The only problem is: we have no formula for making that happen. Transcendent experience, from my perspective, is wholly at the initiative of God. It is not something we can obtain through our own diligence or by virtue of our own deserving. The quest is not a tool of transcendence. It is a method of transformation. It begins very much with our own initiative. It truly is a case of our going out to find God, not God coming to find us. It is humble in expectation, an experience truly bounded by our finite nature and located in our earthy reality, which is why it is our lament. Looking back, my choice of an urban rooftop for my first quest was more than appropriate because fewer places could be more mundane. I did not go up to Sinai to find my God. I went up to the roof of my house. The transformation of the quest begins in this celebration of the human. The fact that a fragile, finite creature would take the initiative to “find” God is the first stage of the quest’s transformative experience. It is the hinge point, the turning toward transformation. The quest begins with the mystery of our own self-awareness: we understand that we are fragile and limited creatures, and we also understand that there is something greater than ourselves. The spiritual audacity of a quest is that we want to connect the two. We are aware of our reality and the reality of the sacred; where the two come into contact is the location of the quest. Whether we physically choose to carry out our quest on a mountain top or a rooftop makes no difference. The real location is the nexus point of spiritual awareness. We do not leave the finite. We do not enter the infinite. We stand at the place of intersection. We do not transcend our own reality, much less the reality of the infinite, but we are positioned for transformation because when the mundane becomes a vehicle for the sacred, things change. The quest is sacramental. It is the process by which the substance of our everyday reality becomes transformed. How this happens is a mystery. Why it happens is a mystery. But in effect, we take the initiative to place ourselves at this hinge point because we believe that something wonderful happens when the two are brought together.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  55 Grace is thus the basis for a distinct set of supernatural or theological virtues. Whereas the moral virtues are based on reason in the soul, the supernatural virtues are based on sanctifying grace, which is a created supernatural form in the soul. One does have to be a Christian to have the three supernatural theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Faith means speci ¿ cally faith in Christ. Hope means speci ¿ cally hope for eternal life in Christ. Charity means loving God with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself. In addition to making supernatural virtues possible, sanctifying grace strengthens the moral virtues, such as prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Sanctifying grace in itself is gratia gratum faciens, a grace that makes a person acceptable to God. Created supernatural grace is important at three stages of human existence. In the beginning, as “original righteousness,” it was the supernatural gift of righteousness that maintained the soul of Adam and Eve in sinless innocence before it was lost in the Fall. In the course of the Christian life, this grace is the basis of the three theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity. Ultimately, as the “light of glory,” it is the supernatural elevation of human nature that makes the beati¿ c vision possible. Ŷ Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, Question 13 (on analogy), found in Pegis’s Introduction to Thomas Aquinas as well as the complete edition of Summa Theologica. ———, Summa Theologica I–II (“First Part of the Second Part”), Question 110 (on grace as habit) found only in the complete edition of Summa Theologica. Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, chaps. 3, 4, 13, and 14. Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas. Suggested Reading 56 Lecture 16: Scholastic Theology 1. Is all speech about God non-literal—either analogical or metaphorical? 2. Why does Roman Catholic theology want to think of grace as a quality of the soul? Questions to Consider

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

  The publicity was nice, of course. The evening after we got back from the CHA office, Sadie’s face was all over the television. The press, smelling blood, discovered that another South Side project contained pipes lined with rotting asbestos. Aldermen began calling for immediate hearings. Lawyers called about a class-action suit. But it was away from all that, as we prepared for our meeting with the CHA director, that I began to see something wonderful happening. The parents began talking about ideas for future campaigns. New parents got involved. The block-by-block canvass we’d planned earlier was put into effect, with Linda and her swollen belly waddling door-to-door to collect complaint forms; Mr. Lucas, unable to read the forms himself, explaining to neighbors how to fill them out properly. Even those who’d opposed our efforts began to come around: Mrs. Reece agreed to cosponsor the event, and Reverend Johnson allowed some of his members to make an announcement at Sunday service. It was as though Sadie’s small, honest step had broken into a reservoir of hope, allowing people in Altgeld to reclaim a power they had had all along. The meeting was to be held in Our Lady’s gymnasium, the only building in Altgeld that could accommodate the three hundred people we hoped would turn up. The leaders arrived an hour early, and we went over our demands one last time—that a panel of residents work with CHA to assure containment of asbestos, and that CHA establish a firm timetable for making repairs. As we discussed a few last-minute details, Henry, the maintenance man, waved me over to the public address system. “What’s the matter?” “System’s dead. A short or something.” “So we don’t have a microphone?” “Not outta here. Gonna have to make do with this thing here.” He pointed to a solitary amplifier, the size of a small suitcase, with a loose microphone that hung by a single, frayed cord. Sadie and Linda came up beside me and stared down at the primitive box. “You’re joking,” Linda said. I tapped on the mike. “It’ll be okay. You guys will just have to speak up.” Then, looking down at the amp again, I said, “Try not to let the director hog the microphone, though. He’ll end up talking for hours. Just hold it up to him after you’ve asked the questions. You know, like Oprah.” “If nobody comes,” Sadie said, looking at her watch, “we won’t need no mike.” People came. From all across the Gardens, people came—senior citizens, teenagers, tots. By seven o’clock five hundred people had arrived; by seven-fifteen, seven hundred. TV crews began setting up cameras, and the local politicians on hand asked us for a chance to warm up the crowd. Marty, who had come to watch the event, could barely contain himself. “You’ve really got something here, Barack. These people are ready to move.”

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  It is a shadowy world within a world, deep and hidden from view. When the Hopi enter the kiva , they are entering a place of mystery. They are acknowledging that there is a power, a wisdom greater than our own intellect. As wise as our ancestors have been in putting together the intricate pieces of the puzzle we call life, they were still only stewards of the mystery of God. When the cloud comes down on the disciples, it does so to illustrate our spiritual blindness. The desire to keep God’s vision for ourselves is short-sighted. Only when we give up the desire to control the power of God do we truly understand our role in creation. The Hopi knew that human beings can make things better or we can make things worse. We can work with the katsinas or we can ignore them. We have free will and our choices matter. How we respect our traditions and attend to our rituals matters, but it does not elevate us above the Creator. We are the technicians of grace, not the source. We must always remember that we are living in this world, but there have been others in the past. There will be more in the future. This is our time, our moment of choice. The mystery of God is not ours to own, only to serve, which is why the Voice in the second vision quest of Jesus simply tells us to do what any good Hopi knows to do when it comes to God: be quiet and pay attention. Through all their years of suffering, the Hopi remained quiet, but they paid attention. They kept their eye on the vision of the transfiguration entrusted to their ancestors. They continued to perform the vital ceremonies that kept life in balance. They never forgot the katsinas and they never lost hope in the future of humanity. At the end of his second vision quest, Jesus comes to his friends and tells them, “Get up. Don’t be afraid.” Those few words of strength are part of the vision because they represent what sustains human beings. The spirit of the Hopi could not be broken by the Spanish or in later years by other conquerors. I wish I could write an end to this chapter by saying that the Hopi threw off the yoke of their oppression and lived forever as free people, but that is not the case. In 1700, the Spanish returned. They forced the Pueblo people back into submission and they returned to their efforts to convert the Hopi to Christianity. Once again, the Hopi resisted. Generation after generation, they held on to their beliefs. Perhaps, in their own way, they whispered to one another: “get up, don’t be afraid.” By 1849 the Spanish had been supplanted by the Americans. Protestant and Mormon missionaries joined the Catholics. Still the Hopi resisted. By 1875 a boarding school was built to teach Hopi children.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The New Testament is a vision quest story, an invitation to us to step into the vision quest of God. This quest is transformative. It is not the transcendent myth of a shaman far removed from human experience, doing things we could never hope to do, flying away from us into an ethereal realm reserved only for the few; instead, it is the earth-bound story of a flesh and blood seeker who lives in the midst of the mundane, using what is at hand to turn the common into the extraordinary. The quest is not an escape, but a rooting into reality: a celebration of the everyday, the physical, the sensual, and the experiential. Because of God’s vision quest, our quests can take on a deeper dimension. We can follow the story of the incarnate seeker to focus our own search into an interior geography of faith that can bring us closer to our goal, intimacy with God. No matter where we are, we can step into the space once occupied by Jesus and find a real presence there to speak to us. God’s quest can transform us, not by lifting us out of ourselves but by grounding us into the joy and struggle of being human. Therefore, walking the way of Christ is walking the stations of the quest as much as those of the cross. We follow Jesus into the place of transformation. As a young man I tried to find faith in the midst of doubt. I instinctively sought some way to transform my reality from a painful experience into a healing vision. I turned to the wisdom of my own ancestors to perform a quest in the spirit of Native American tradition. I tried to create a sacred space with the most mundane things I had at hand: a rooftop and a box of cornmeal. I did not know if my quest would take me away from my faith in Jesus. I did not know if I would discover myself to be a hypocrite, but I decided to take that risk. I walked out to a lonely place to find intimacy with God. I experienced transformation by meeting transcendence. I joined the story of incarnation. What follows in this book is a description of vision, the mystery at the heart of the quest, and of the visions of God as I have come to understand them as a Native American theologian. In sharing my thoughts I have no sense of having an experience that is rare or unique. As a Native person, I believe we are all called to make our own vision quests. We are called by our doubts or our hope. We are called by ancient myths or new mysteries. In answering that call, we each make our vision quest in our own way. We have our own traditions. And yet, we walk a similar path: 1. We prepare ourselves to answer the call to a quest. 2.