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 How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  No wonder God’s Kingdom will never arrive.” Imagine also this question put to Jesus: “Do you mean that without our participation, the Kingdom will never, ever appear, will never, ever exist here below upon a transformed earth?” And Jesus says, “Yes!” The best commentary on this, besides Emily Dickinson’s epigraph to this chapter, came from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, preaching at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, in 1999: “God, without us, will not; as we, without God, cannot.” Why did Jesus change from John’s vision of imminent intervention to his own vision of present collaboration? I can think of only one reason: John expected God to come imminently, but what came imminently was Antipas. John died and God did nothing. Maybe, thought Jesus, there was no divine intervention, not now, not soon, not ever. There was, is, and will be only a divine and human covenant, collaboration, and participation. I think that Antipas’s execution of John changed Jesus’s understanding of God’s Kingdom from one of intervention to one of collaboration. God’s Kingdom comes only in so far as people take it upon themselves or enter into it . It was a bilateral, participatory, collaborative, and covenantal program. For how can there be a kingdom without members, citizens, and communities? But confusion started immediately. In the face of such a paradigm shift, some will reject it emphatically, some will accept it enthusiastically, and others, maybe the majority, will accept it but understand it within the older paradigm (as some have seen, for instance, a car as a horseless carriage, a radio as a wireless, and a computer as a visual typewriter). The old paradigm imagined an imminent divine intervention; the new one envisioned a present divine and human collaboration. Those who accepted Jesus’s vision of the already present but only-if-collaborative Kingdom almost immediately added on an imminent consummation to that process. The lure of “how soon?” returned to haunt forever the new Christian-Jewish vision. Even those who, like Paul and Mark, insist on the Kingdom’s here-and-now presence and the challenge of entering it promise an imminent consummation, and so, as we see in the next chapter, does the book of Revelation. That “over soon” was wrong, of course. Maybe even Jesus himself imagined a swift conclusion to the Kingdom’s advent. But I myself am far from convinced on that point. My reason is not to claim that Jesus did not commit an error but because the strongest evidence of that belief seems to come not from the historical Jesus himself, but from what the earliest tradition placed on his lips.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  There will no longer be war or drought on earth, no famine or hail, damaging to fruits, but there will be great peace throughout the whole earth. King will be friend to king to the end of the age. The Immortal in the starry heaven will put in effect a common law for men throughout the whole earth. . . . And then, indeed, he will raise up a Kingdom for all ages among men, he who once gave the holy Law to the pious, to all of whom he promised to open the earth and the world and the gates of the blessed and all joys and immortal intellect and eternal cheer. From every land they will bring incense and gifts to the house of the great God. . . . Prophets of the great God will take away the sword for they themselves are judges of men and righteous kings. There will also be just wealth among men for this is the judgment and dominion of the great God” (3.751–758, 767–773, 781–784). It is quite easy—maybe with smile, smirk, or sneer—to dismiss such dreams of absolute physical fertility (no labor) or total animal benignity (no meat). It is quite easy to mock lions liking lettuce, panthers eating pasta, and jaguars choosing jam. Maybe, in reading such eschatological imaginings, it is prudent to distinguish between a rhapsodic and impossible utopia (Greek for “not-place”) and an ecstatic but possible eutopia (Greek for “good-place”). Eutopia imagines a social world of universal peace, a human world of nonviolent distributive justice where all get a fair and adequate share of God’s world as God’s Kingdom. If that is a silly fantasy or utopian delusion with no possible eventual advent, our human species may be as magnificent and doomed as was the saber-toothed tiger. The book of Proverbs warns that “where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:18 KJV ). But with the wrong vision, they perish even faster. Eutopia or eschatology may even be necessary if our species, protected by moral conscience rather than by animal instinct, is not ultimately to destroy itself—because escalatory human violence has never invented a weapon we did not use, never invented one less powerful than what it replaced, and never ceased to confuse lull with peace. Are those eschatological visions of distributive justice and universal peace nothing more than empty fantasies? Finally, here is another example of those Jewish Sibylline Oracles to bring that eschatological faith up to the time of Jesus. It imagines that transformed human world like this: “The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be equal together” (2.319–324).

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them.” (6:11–13) In the Yahwist tradition the reason for God’s cosmic destruction is humanity’s “continual evil.” But in the Priestly tradition a similar general indictment of “corruption” is twice specified as “violence.” Furthermore, in that latter source the problem is not that “all flesh” has become violent, but that Earth itself has become contaminated—like the ground by Abel’s murdered blood in Genesis 4:10–11. In summary, therefore, the problem with Earth for the biblical God is not too much human “noise,” but too much human “violence.” “I Will Never Again Curse the Ground Because of Humankind”IT IS CLEAR THAT human violence has escalated exponentially from Cain to Lamech in Genesis 4 and thence to “the earth” in Genesis 6:11, 13. This is already bad enough, but one other factor renders the violence all the more devastating. In Genesis 6, as distinct from Genesis 2–3 or 4, God has been sucked completely into humanity’s escalatory violence. The transcendental solution for human violence is massive divine counterviolence: “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them” (6:7). And this decision is repeated several times thereafter (6:17; 7:4, 21–23). It is not just humanity but all of creation—except, perhaps, marine species—that are to be exterminated so Earth can start all over again from those saved within the ark. What began with Cain killing Abel escalated from humanity to divinity with God killing Earth. There is, however, one reason for hope—if not for us, then at least for the biblical God as this matrix of Genesis 1–11 concludes. In Atrahasis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Genesis 8:20, sacrifice is offered outside the great boat as the flood subsides, and in all three cases the “pleasing odor” was acceptable to divinity. But only the biblical God said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (8:21–22) Later, this divine decision is made into a solemn “covenant” between God and “every living creature”—that “never again” would God destroy life on Earth, and the rainbow would be the “sign” of that covenant between God and “all flesh that is on the earth” (9:9–17, note repetitions).

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Genesis 18:18 is a repetition of that promise. But the promise which God swore with an oath to keep comes in Genesis 22:16–18. The real meaning of this first sentence is: ‘God made many promises to Abraham, and in the end he actually made one which he confirmed with an oath.’ That promise was, as it were, doubly binding. It was God’s word which in itself made it sure, but in addition it was confirmed by an oath. Now, that promise was that all Abraham’s descendants would be blessed; therefore, that promise was to the Christian Church, for the Church was the true Israel and the true seed of Abraham. That blessing came true in Jesus Christ. Abraham certainly had to exercise patience before he received the promise. It was not until twenty-five years after he had left Ur that his son Isaac was born. He was old; Sarah was barren; the wandering was long; but Abraham never wavered from his hope and trust in the promise of God. In the ancient world, the anchor was the symbol of hope. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus says: ‘A ship should never depend on one anchor, or a life on one hope.’ Pythagoras the mathematician said: ‘Wealth is a weak anchor; fame is still weaker. What then are the anchors which are strong? Wisdom, great-heartedness, courage – these are the anchors which no storm can shake.’ The writer to the Hebrews insists that Christians possess the greatest hope in the world. That hope, he says, is one which enters into the inner court beyond the veil. In the Temple, the most sacred of all places was the Holy of Holies. The veil was what covered it. It was believed that anyone who entered the Holy of Holies entered into the very presence of God, and into that place only one man in all the world could go. That man was the high priest; and even he might enter that holy place on only one day of the year, the Day of Atonement. Even then, it was laid down, he must not linger in it, for it was a dangerous and a terrible thing to enter into the presence of the living God. What the writer to the Hebrews says is this: ‘Under the old Jewish religion, no one might enter into the presence of God but the high priest and he only on one day of the year; but now Jesus Christ has opened the way for every individual at every time.’ The writer to the Hebrews uses a most illuminating word about Jesus. He says that he entered the presence of God as our forerunner . The word is prodromos . It has three stages of meaning. (1) It means one who rushes on .

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The writer to the Hebrews has a flash of insight – despising the shame , he says. Jesus was sensitive; never had any individual so sensitive a heart. A cross was a humiliating thing. It was for criminals, for those whom society regarded as the dregs of humanity – and yet he accepted it. The sixteenth-century saint Philip of Neri encourages us ‘to despise the world, to despise ourselves, and to despise the fact that we are despised’ ( spernere mundum, spernere te ipsum, spernere te sperni ). If Jesus could endure like that, so must we. (6) In the Christian life, we have a presence , the presence of Jesus. He is both the goal of our journey and the companion of our way; at the same time, the one whom we go to meet and the one with whom we travel. The wonder of the Christian life is that we press on surrounded by the saints, oblivious to everything but the glory of the goal and always in the company of the one who has already made the journey and reached the goal, and who waits to welcome us when we reach the end. THE DISCIPLINE OF GOD Hebrews 12:5–11 Have you forgotten the appeal, an appeal which reasons with you as sons? ‘My son, do not treat lightly the discipline which the Lord sends; Never lose heart when you are put to the test by him; For the Lord disciplines the man whom he loves, and scourges every son whom he receives.’ It is for the sake of discipline that you must endure. It is because he is treating us as sons that God sends these things upon us. What son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline – that discipline which everyone must share – then you are bastards and not sons. Surely it is true that we have human fathers who discipline us, and we pay heed to them. Surely we are still more bound to submit to the Father of the spirits of men, for that is the only way in which we can find real life. It was only for a short time that our human fathers disciplined us, and they did it as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our highest good, and he does so to make us fit to share his own holiness. No discipline seems to be a thing of joy when we are actually undergoing it, but afterwards it yields a fruit which is all to our highest welfare – the fruit of a righteous life – to those who are trained by it. T HE writer to the Hebrews sets out yet another reason why people should cheerfully bear affliction when it comes to them. He has urged them to bear it because the great saints of the past have borne it.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Most of us live a cautious life on the principle of safety first; but, to live the Christian life, it is necessary to have a certain reckless willingness to be adventurous. If faith can see every step of the way, it is not really faith. It is sometimes necessary for Christians to take the way to which the voice of God is calling them without knowing what the consequences will be. Like Abraham, they have to go out not knowing where they are going. (2) Abraham’s faith was the faith which had patience. When he reached the promised land, he was never allowed to possess it. He had to wander in it, a stranger and a tentdweller, as the people of Israel were some day to wander in the wilderness. For Abraham, God’s promise was never fully fulfilled; and yet he never abandoned his faith. It is a characteristic of the best of us that we are in a hurry. To wait is even harder than to be adventurous. The hardest time of all is the time in between. At the moment of decision, there is the excitement and the thrill; at the moment of achievement, there is the glow and glory of satisfaction; but, in the intervening time, it is necessary to have the ability to wait and work and watch when nothing seems to be happening. It is then that we are most liable to give up our hopes and lower our ideals and sink into an apathy whose dreams are dead. Men and women of faith are people whose hope is flaming brightly and whose effort is intensely strenuous even in the grey days when there is nothing to do but to wait. (3) Abraham’s faith was the faith which was looking beyond this world. The later legends believed that, at the moment of his call, Abraham was given a glimpse of the new Jerusalem. In the Apocalypse of Baruch, God says: ‘I showed it to my servant Abraham by night’ (4:4). In 2 Esdras [4 Ezra], the writer says: ‘And when they were committing iniquity in your sight, you chose for yourself one of them, whose name was Abraham; you loved him, and to him alone you revealed the end of times, secretly by night’ (3:13–14). No one ever did anything great without a vision which made it possible to face the difficulties and discouragements of the way. To Abraham there was given the vision; and, even when his body was wandering in Palestine, his soul was at home with God. God cannot give us the vision unless we allow him to; but, if we are patient and look to him, even in earth’s desert places he will send us the vision, and with it the toil and trouble of the way all become worth while. BELIEVING THE INCREDIBLEHebrews 11:11–12

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The wise will pass over it but will not build a house upon it.’ Christians regard themselves as the pilgrims of eternity. (2) In spite of everything, these men never lost their vision and their hope. However long that hope might be in coming true, its light always shone in their eyes. However long the way might be, they never stopped tramping along it. Robert Louis Stevenson said: ‘It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.’ They never wearily gave up the journey; they lived in hope and died in expectation. (3) In spite of everything, they never wanted to go back. Their descendants, when they were in the desert, often expressed a wish to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt. But not the patriarchs. They had begun, and it never struck them to turn back. In flying, there is what is called the point of no return . When the aircraft has reached that point, it cannot go back . Its fuel supply has reached such a level that there is no option but to go on. One of the tragedies of life is the number of people who turn back just a little too soon. One further effort, a little more waiting, a little more hoping, would make the dream come true. Immediately a Christian has set out on some enterprise sent by God, he or she should feel that the point of no return has already been passed. (4) These men were able to go on because they were haunted by the things beyond. People with the urge to travel are lured on by the thought of the countries they have not yet seen. Great artists or composers are driven by the thought of the performance they have not yet given and the wonder they have not yet produced. Robert Louis Stevenson tells of an old farmworker who spent all his days amid the muck of the cowshed. Someone asked him if he never got tired of it all. He answered: ‘He that has something ayont [beyond] need never weary.’ These men had the something beyond – and so may we. (5) Because these men were what they were, God was not ashamed to be called their God. Above all things, he is the God of the brave adventurer. He loves the person who is ready to venture for his name. The prudent, comfort-loving individual is the very opposite of God. The one who goes out into the unknown and keeps going on will in the end arrive at God. THE SUPREME SACRIFICE Hebrews 11:17–19 It was by faith that Abraham offered up Isaac when he was put to the test. He was willing to offer up even his only son, although it had been said to him: ‘It is in Isaac that your descendants will be named.’ He was willing to do this, for he reckoned that God was able to raise him even from the dead.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Here, however, is how the Kingdom of God is more fully described in other eschatological descriptions within the earlier biblical tradition. “No One Shall Make Them Afraid”THE EXPECTATION OF THE Kingdom of God was not original with Daniel 7. Israel had long believed in an eventual great Divine Cleanup of the World, an Extreme Makeover: World Edition, in which justice and peace would replace injustice and violence. The biblical tradition marched inevitably to this chanted mantra: God will overcome—someday. Here are some earlier biblical equivalents to the Kingdom of God, and I insist that the vision, however it is named, is always about a renewed creation here below heaven in a radically changed world: 1. The Harvest of God The time is surely coming, says the Lord when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. (Amos 9:13) 2. The Feast of God On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isa. 25:6–8) 3. The Community of God In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. (Mic. 4:1–2 = Isa. 2:2–3; see also Zech. 8:20–23) 4. The Peace of God i. Between animals The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. (Isa. 11:6–7) ii. Between animals and humans The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isa. 11:8–9) iii.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Bailey and I tore the stuffing out of the doll the day after Christmas, but he warned me that I had to keep the tea set in good condition because any day or night she might come riding up.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  ONE thing links these three examples of faith together. In each case, it was the faith of someone to whom death was very near. The blessing which Isaac gave is in Genesis 27:28– 9, 39–40. Given after Isaac had said: ‘See, I am old; I do not know the day of my death’ (Genesis 27:2), it was: ‘May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you.’ The blessing of Jacob is given in Genesis 48:9–22. The story has just said that ‘the time of Israel’s death drew near’ (Genesis 47:29). The blessing was: ‘In them let my name be perpetuated, and the name of my ancestors Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude on the earth’ (Genesis 48:16). The incident from the life of Joseph comes from Genesis 50:22–6. When Joseph was near to death, he made the Israelites take an oath that they would not leave his bones in Egypt but would take them with them when they went out to possess the promised land, which in due course they did (Exodus 13:19; Joshua 24:32). The point which the writer to the Hebrews wishes to make is that all three men died without having entered into the promise that God had made, the promise of the promised land and of greatness to the nation of Israel. Isaac was still a nomad, Jacob was an exile in Egypt, Joseph had attained to greatness but it was the greatness of a stranger in a strange land; and yet they never doubted that the promise would come true. They died not in despair but in hope. Their faith defeated death. There is something of permanent greatness here. The thought in the minds of all these men was the same: ‘God’s promise is true, for he never breaks a promise. I may not live to see it, death may come to me before that promise becomes a fact; but I am a link in its fulfilment. Whether or not that promise comes depends on me.’ Here is the great function of life. Our hopes may never become reality, but we must live in such a way that we shall hasten their coming. It may not be given to everyone to enter into the fullness of the promises of God, but it is given to every one of us to live with such faithfulness as to bring nearer the day when others will enter into it. To all of us is given the tremendous task of helping God make his promises come true. FAITH AND ITS SECRETHebrews 11:23–9

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  The ability to destroy one’s enemies by “word” alone is a transcendental ability akin to the creative word of God in Genesis 1. The other example is from a Dead Sea Scroll fragment found in Cave 4 at Qumran: He [the Messiah] will be called Son of God, and they will call him Son of the Most High. Like sparks of a vision, so will their Kingdom be; they will rule several years over the earth and crush everything; a people will crush another people, and a city another city. Until the people of God arises [or: until he raises up the people of God] and makes everyone rest from the sword. His Kingdom will be an eternal Kingdom, and all his paths in truth and uprightness. The earth will be in truth and all will make peace. The sword will cease in the earth, and all the cities will pay him homage. He is a great god among the gods [or: the great God will be his strength]. He will make war with him; he will place the peoples in his hand and cast away everyone before him. His Kingdom will be an eternal Kingdom. Once again, if God “will make war” with this Messiah, he is hardly a pacifist. But with a transcendental figure, one could still wonder how exactly that “rest from the sword” would be accomplished. Granted all that, one point, mentioned already in the preceding chapter, needs emphatic repetition. Israel against Rome was never simply the standard conflict of the conquered against the conqueror, a colony against an empire. Instead, it was a clash between eschatological visions as Israel proclaimed a still-future Golden Age and Rome an already-present Golden Age. A just, peaceful, and nonviolent world was the still-future eschaton for Israel but the already-present empire for Rome. By the first century CE , it was for many in the Jewish homeland a time of choice between Roman and Jewish versions of that fifth and final Kingdom of Earth. It was, for many, a time for courageous decision between God and Rome, between fidelity and infidelity to covenantal law. Finally, therefore, this question presses: How precisely was the ruling style of God different from that of Rome; how exactly were God’s justice and peace different from those of Rome? If, as was certainly the case, the Pax Romana was established by war and conquest, violence and victory, was the Pax Divina to be established by similar but far, far superior force? Enter John and Jesus in the next chapter. Where Are We Now and What Comes Next?I THINK, AND NOT just with easy hindsight, that any Jewish teachers or thinkers, sages or prophets in early-first-century Roman Israel who did not wonder how to react to Roman imperialism failed their history, their tradition, their covenant, and their God. Reaction could be a withdrawal or a participation, an acceptance or a resistance, violence or nonviolence.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Part 2, Trans Women, Femininity, and Feminism, brings together my experiences and observations—pre-, during, and post-transition—to discuss the many ways fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape societal attitudes toward trans women and influence the way trans women often come to view ourselves. In the last two chapters of this section, I bring together several of the main themes in this book to suggest new directions for gender-based activism. In chapter 19, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,” I make the case that feminist activism and theory would be best served by working to empower and embrace femininity, rather than eschewing or deriding it, as it often has in the past. Such an approach would allow feminism to both incorporate transgender perspectives and reach out to the countless feminine-identified women who have felt alienated by the movement in the past. And in chapter 20, “The Future of Queer/Trans Activism,” I show how certain taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions that are prevalent in contemporary queer and transgender theory and politics ensure that trans women’s perspectives and issues will continue to take a back seat to those of other queers and transgender people. I argue that, rather than focusing on “shattering the gender binary”—a strategy that invariably pits gender-conforming and non-gender-conforming people against one another—we work to challenge all forms of gender entitlement (i.e., when a person privileges their own perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of other people’s genders over the way those people understand themselves). After all, the one thing that all forms of sexism share—whether they target females, queers, transsexuals, or others—is that they all begin with placing assumptions and value judgments onto other people’s gendered bodies and behaviors. Trans Woman Manifesto THIS MANIFESTO CALLS FOR the end of the scapegoating, deriding, and dehumanizing of trans women everywhere. For the purposes of this manifesto, trans woman is defined as any person who was assigned a male sex at birth, but who identifies as and/or lives as a woman. No qualifications should be placed on the term “trans woman” based on a person’s ability to “pass” as female, her hormone levels, or the state of her genitals—after all, it is downright sexist to reduce any woman (trans or otherwise) down to her mere body parts or to require her to live up to certain societally dictated ideals regarding appearance.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The unleavened bread had to be made; the Passover lamb had to be slain; the doorpost had to be smeared with the blood of the lamb so that the Angel of Death would see the blood and pass over that house and not slay the first-born in it. But the really amazing thing is that, according to the Exodus story, Moses not only made these regulations for the night on which the children of Israel were leaving Israel; he also laid it down that they were to be observed annually for all time . That is to say, he never doubted the success of the enterprise, never doubted that the people would be delivered from Egypt and that some day they would reach the promised land. Here was a band of wretched Israelite slaves about to set off on a journey across an unknown desert to an unknown promised land, and here was the whole power of Egypt hot upon their heels; yet Moses never doubted that God would bring them safely through. He was supremely the man who had the faith that, if God gave his people an order, he would also give them the strength to carry it out. Moses knew very well that God does not summon his servants to a difficult and challenging task and leave it at that; he goes with them every step of the way. (5) There was the momentous act of the crossing of the Red Sea. The story is told in Exodus 14. There, we read of how the children of Israel were wondrously enabled to pass through and of how the Egyptians were engulfed when they tried to do the same. It was at that moment that the faith of Moses communicated itself to the people and drove them on when they might well have turned back. Here, we have the faith of a leader and of a people who were prepared to attempt the impossible at the command of God, realizing that the greatest barrier in the world is no barrier if God is there to help us to get over it. Moses possessed the faith to attempt what appeared to be the most insurmountable barriers, in the certainty that God would help the one who refused to turn back and insisted on going on. Finally, this passage not only tells us of the faith of Moses; it also tells us of the source of that faith . Verse 27 tells us that he was able to face all things as one who sees the God who is invisible. The outstanding characteristic of Moses was the close intimacy of his relationship with God. In Exodus 33:9–11, we read of how he went into the tabernacle: ‘Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.’

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The wisest person is a fool in the sight of God; and the strongest person is weak in the moment of temptation. There is no one who can live the Christian life and neglect the fellowship of the Church. If people feel that they can do so, let them remember that they come to church not only to get but also to give . If they think that the Church has faults, it is their duty to come in and help to correct them. (3) We must encourage one another . One of the highest of human duties is that of encouragement. There is a regulation in the Royal Navy which says: ‘No officer shall speak discouragingly to another officer in the discharge of duties.’ Eliphaz unwillingly paid Job a great tribute. As Moffatt translates it: ‘Your words have kept men on their feet’ (Job 4:4). The writer J. M. Barrie somewhere wrote to Cynthia Asquith, the wife of the Liberal statesman: ‘Your first instinct is always to telegraph to Jones the nice thing Brown said about him to Robinson. You have sown a lot of happiness that way.’ It is easy to laugh at people’s ideals, to pour cold water on their enthusiasm, to discourage them. The world is full of discouragers; we have a Christian duty to encourage one another. So many times, words of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer have kept people on their feet. Blessed are those who speak such words. Finally, the writer to the Hebrews says that our Christian duty to each other is all the more pressing because the time is short. The day is approaching. He is thinking of the second coming of Christ when things as we know them will be ended. The early Church lived in that expectation. Whether or not we still do, we must realize that none of us knows when the summons to rise and go will come to us also. In the time we have, it is our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can. THE DANGER OF DRIFTING Hebrews 10:32–9 Remember the former days. Remember how, after you had been enlightened, you had to go through a hard struggle of suffering, partly because you yourselves were held up to insult and involved in affliction and partly because you had become partners with people whose life was like that. For you gave your sympathy to those in prison; you accepted the pillaging of your goods with joy; for you knew that you yourselves hold a possession which is better and which lasts. Do not throw away your confidence, for it is a confidence that has a great reward. You need fortitude so that, after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  In the two short blocks before it reached its destination, the street housed two day-and-night restaurants, two pool halls, four Chinese restaurants, two gambling houses, plus diners, shoeshine shops, beauty salons, barber shops and at least four churches. To fully grasp the never-ending activity in San Francisco's Negro neighborhood during the war, one need only know that the two blocks described were side streets that were duplicated many times over in the eight-to ten-square-block area. The air of collective displacement, the impermanence of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of the more recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging. In San Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something. Not that I identified with the newcomers, nor with the rare Black descendants of native San Franciscans, nor with the whites or even the Asians, but rather with the times and the city. I understood the arrogance of the young sailors who marched the streets in marauding gangs, approaching every girl as if she were at best a prostitute and at worst an Axis agent bent on making the U.S.A. lose the war. The undertone of fear that San Francisco would be bombed which was abetted by weekly air raid warnings, and civil defense drills in school, heightened my sense of belonging. Hadn't I, always, but ever and ever, thought that life was just one great risk for the living? Then the city acted in wartime like an intelligent woman under siege. She gave what she couldn't with safety withheld, and secured those things which lay in her reach. The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grownup. Friendly but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness. To San Franciscans “the City That Knows How” was the Bay, the fog, Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Top o' the Mark, Chinatown, the Sunset District and so on and so forth and so white. To me, a thirteen-year-old Black girl, stalled by the South and Southern Black life style, the city was a state of beauty and a state of freedom. The fog wasn't simply the steamy vapors off the bay caught and penned in by hills, but a soft breath of anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveler. I became dauntless and free of fears, intoxicated by the physical fact of San Francisco. Safe in my protecting arrogance, I was certain that no one loved her as impartially as I. I walked around the Mark Hopkins and gazed at the Top o' the Mark, but (maybe sour grapes) was more impressed by the view of Oakland from the hill than by the tiered building or its fur-draped visitors. For weeks, after the city and I came to terms about my belonging, I haunted the points of interest and found them empty and un-San Francisco.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  We had a very fruitful discussion”—he chose his words with the precision of a Sunday school teacher—“She understands completely. There is a time in every man's life when he must push off from the wharf of safety into the sea of chance … Anyway, she is arranging with a friend of hers in Oakland to get me on the Southern Pacific. Maya, it's just a start. I'll begin as a dining-car waiter and then a steward, and when I know all there is to know about that, I'll branch out … The future looks good. The Black man hasn't even begun to storm the battlefronts. I'm going for broke myself.” His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol and age, but his face believed the freshness of his words, and I had no heart nor art to drag him back to the reeking reality of our life and times. Whores were lying down first and getting up last in the room next door. Chicken suppers and gambling games were rioting on a twenty-four-hour basis downstairs. Sailors and soldiers on their doom-lined road to war cracked windows and broke locks for blocks around, hoping to leave their imprint on a building or in the memory of a victim. A chance to be perpetrated. Bailey sat wrapped in his decision and anesthetized by youth. If I'd had any suggestion to make I couldn't have penetrated his unlucky armor. And, most regrettable, I had no suggestion to make . “I'm your sister, and whatever I can do, I'll do it.” “Maya, don't worry about me. That's all I want you to do. Don't worry. I'll be okey-dokey.” I left his room because, and only because, we had said all we could say. The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no craft to verbalize, and crowded the room to uneasiness.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The greatest barrier preventing us from fully challenging sexism is the pervasive antifeminine sentiment that runs wild in both the straight and queer communities, targeting people of all genders and sexualities. The only realistic way to address this issue is to work toward empowering femininity itself. We must rightly recognize that feminine expression is strong, daring, and brave—that it is powerful—and not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way that facilitates openness, creativity, and honest expression. We must move beyond seeing femininity as helpless and dependent, or merely as masculinity’s sidekick, and instead acknowledge that feminine expression exists of its own accord and brings its own rewards to those who naturally gravitate toward it. By embracing femininity, feminism will finally be able to reach out to the vast majority of feminine women who have felt alienated by the movement in the past. The movement would also be able to reach those who are not female (whether male and/or transgender) who regularly face effemimania or trans-misogyny, but who have not been able to seek refuge or have a voice in the feminist movements of the past. Indeed, a feminist movement that encompasses both those who are female and those who are feminine has the potential to become a majority, one with the strength in numbers to finally challenge and overturn both traditional and oppositional sexism. 20 The Future of Queer/Trans Activism THE MAJORITY OF MY EXPERIENCES as a trans activist and spoken word artist have taken place in what is increasingly becoming known as the “queer/trans” community. It is a subgroup within the greater LGBTIQ community that is composed mostly of folks in their twenties and thirties who are more likely to refer to themselves as “dykes,” “queer,” and/or “trans” than “lesbian” or “gay.” While diverse in a number of ways, this subpopulation tends to predominantly inhabit urban and academic settings, and is skewed toward those who are white and/or from middle-class backgrounds. In many ways, the queer/trans community is best described as a sort of marriage of the transgender movement’s call to “shatter the gender binary” and the lesbian community’s pro-sex, pro-kink backlash to 1980s-era Andrea Dworkinism. Its politics are generally antiassimilationist, particularly with regard to gender and sexual expression. This apparent limitlessness and lack of boundaries lead many to believe that “queer/trans” represents the vanguard of today’s gender and sexual revolution. However, over the last four years in which I’ve been a part of this community, I’ve become increasingly troubled by a trend that, while not applicable to all queer/trans folks, seems to be becoming a dominant belief in this community, one that threatens to restrict its gender and sexual diversity. I call this trend subversivism.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And her words had the strangest effect on Puddle who quite suddenly beamed at Stephen and kissed her—Puddle who never betrayed her emotions, quite suddenly beamed at Stephen and kissed her. 2People gossiped a little because of the freedom allowed Martin and Stephen by her parents; but on the whole they gossiped quite kindly, with a great deal of smiling and nodding of heads. After all the girl was just like other girls—they almost ceased to resent her. Meanwhile Martin continued to stay on in Upton, held fast by the charm and the strangeness of Stephen—her very strangeness it was that allured him, yet all the while he must think of their friendship, not even admitting that strangeness. He deluded himself with these thoughts of friendship, but Sir Philip and Anna were not deluded. They looked at each other almost shyly at first, then Anna grew bold, and she said to her husband: ‘Is it possible the child is falling in love with Martin? Of course he’s in love with her. Oh, my dear, it would make me so awfully happy—’ And her heart went out in affection to Stephen, as it had not done since the girl was a baby. Her hopes would go flying ahead of events; she would start making plans for her daughter’s future. Martin must give up his orchards and forests and buy Tenley Court that was now in the market; it had several large farms and some excellent pasture, quite enough to keep any man happy and busy. Then Anna would suddenly grow very thoughtful; Tenley Court was also possessed of fine nurseries, big, bright, sunny rooms facing south, with their bathroom, there were bars to the windows—it was all there and ready. Sir Philip shook his head and warned Anna to go slowly, but he could not quite keep the great joy from his eyes, nor the hope from his heart. Had he been mistaken? Perhaps after all he had been mistaken—the hope thudded ceaselessly now in his heart. 3Came a day when winter must give place to spring, when the daffodils marched across the whole country from Castle Morton Common to Ross and beyond, pitching camps by the side of the river. When the hornbeam made patches of green in the hedges, and the hawthorn broke out into small, budding bundles; when the old cedar tree on the lawn at Morton grew reddish pink tips to its elegant fingers; when the wild cherry trees on the sides of the hills were industriously putting forth both leaves and blossoms; when Martin looked into his heart and saw Stephen—saw her suddenly there as a woman.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  They were very unlike each other, these negroes; Lincoln, the elder, was paler in colour. He was short and inclined to be rather thick-set with a heavy but intellectual face—a strong face, much lined for a man of thirty. His eyes had the patient, questioning expression common to the eyes of most animals and to those of all slowly evolving races. He shook hands very quietly with Stephen and Mary. Henry was tall and as black as a coal; a fine, upstanding, but coarse-lipped young negro, with a roving glance and a self-assured manner. He remarked: ‘Glad to meet you, Miss Gordon—Miss Llewellyn,’ and plumped himself down at Mary’s side, where he started to make conversation, too glibly. Valérie Seymour was soon talking to Lincoln with a friendliness that put him at his ease—just at first he had seemed a little self-conscious. But Pat was much more reserved in her manner, having hailed from abolitionist Boston. Wanda said abruptly: ‘Can I have a drink, Jamie?’ Brockett poured her out a stiff brandy and soda. Adolphe Blanc sat on the floor hugging his knees; and presently Dupont the sculptor strolled in—being minus his mistress he migrated to Stephen. Then Lincoln seated himself at the piano, touching the keys with firm, expert fingers, while Henry stood beside him very straight and long and lifted up his voice which was velvet smooth, yet as clear and insistent as the call of a clarion: ‘Deep, river, my home is over Jordan. Deep river—Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground. . . .’ And all the hope of the utterly hopeless of this world, who must live by their ultimate salvation, all the terrible, aching, homesick hope that is born of the infinite pain of the spirit, seemed to break from this man and shake those who listened, so that they sat with bent heads and clasped hands—they who were also among the hopeless sat with bent heads and clasped hands as they listened. . . . Even Valérie Seymour forgot to be pagan. He was not an exemplary young negro; indeed he could be the reverse very often. A crude animal Henry could be at times, with a taste for liquor and a lust for women—just a primitive force rendered dangerous by drink, rendered offensive by civilization. Yet as he sang his sins seemed to drop from him, leaving him pure, unashamed, triumphant. He sang to his God, to the God of his soul, Who would some day blot out all the sins of the world, and make vast reparation for every injustice: ‘My home is over Jordan, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground.’

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

  Apostle Andrew. This highly prized treasure was brought to Italy by Thomas Palaeologus, who, in recognition of his pious benevolence toward the holy see, was given the Golden Rose, a palace in Rome and an annual allowance of 6,000 ducats. The relic was received with ostentatious signs of devotion. Bessarion and two other members of the sacred college received it at Narni and conveyed it to Rome. The pope, accompanied by the remaining cardinals and the Roman clergy, went out to the Ponte Molle to give it welcome. After falling prostrate before the Apostle’s skull, Pius delivered an appropriate address in which he congratulated the dumb fragment upon coming safely out of the hands of the Turks to find at last, as a fugitive, a place beside the remains of its brother Apostles. The address being concluded, the procession reformed and, with Pius borne in the Golden Chair, conducted the skull to its last resting-place. The streets were decked in holiday attire, and no one showed greater zeal in draping his palace than Rodrigo Borgia. The skull was deposited in St. Peter’s, after, as Platina says, "the sepulchres of some of the popes and cardinals, which took up too much room, had been removed." The ceremonies were closed by Bessarion in an address in which he expressed the conviction that St. Andrew would join with the other Apostles as a protector of Rome and in inducing the princes to combine for the expulsion of the Turks.746 In his closing days, Pius II. continued to be occupied with the crusade. He had written a memorable letter to Mohammed II. urging him to follow his mother’s religion and turn Christian, and assuring him that, as Clovis and Charlemagne had been renowned Christian sovereigns, so he might become Christian emperor over the Bosphorus, Greece and Western Asia. No reply is extant. In 1458, the year before the Mantuan congress assembled, the crescent had been planted on the Acropolis of Athens. All Southern Greece suffered the indignity and horrors of Turkish oppression. Servia fell into the hands of the invaders, 1459, and Bosnia followed, 1462. Pius’ bull of 1463, summoning to a crusade, was put aside by the princes, but the pontiff, although he was afflicted with serious bodily infirmities, the stone and the gout, was determined to set an example in the right direction. Like Moses, he wanted, at least, to watch from some promontory or ship the battle against the enemies of the cross. Financial aid was furnished by the discovery of the alum mines of Tolfa, near Civita Vecchia, in 1462, the revenue from which passed into the papal treasury and was specially devoted by the conclave of 1464 to the crusade. But it availed little. Pius proceeded to Ancona on a litter, stopping on the way at Loreto to dedicate a golden cup to the Virgin. Philip of Burgundy, upon whom he had placed chief reliance, failed to appear. From Frederick III. nothing was to be expected.