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

  “And yet consider once again the painting before us. Hope! Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens. She dares to hope …. She has the audacity … to make music … and praise God … on the one string … she has left!” People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters. As I watched and listened from my seat, I began to hear all the notes from the past three years swirl about me. The courage and fear of Ruby and Will. The race pride and anger of men like Rafiq. The desire to let go, the desire to escape, the desire to give oneself up to a God that could somehow put a floor on despair. And in that single note—hope!—I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shamed about, memories more accessible than those of ancient Egypt, memories that all people might study and cherish—and with which we could start to rebuild. And if a part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us and would fulfill its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams. “The audacity of hope! I still remember my grandmother, singing in the house, ‘There’s a bright side somewhere … don’t rest till you find it ….’” “That’s right!” “The audacity of hope! Times when we couldn’t pay the bills. Times when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to amount to anything … at the age of fifteen, busted for grand larceny auto theft … and yet and still my momma and daddy would break into a song … Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Je-sus, Thank you, Lo-ord. You brought me fro-om A mighty long way, mighty long way.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  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. In the imagination, everything can be restored, everything mended, wounds healed, stories ended. White could not trap his lost hawk, but as Merlyn he does, with a ring of upturned feathers and a fishing line, and brings it in triumph back to the castle with the Wart. And thus White gives himself a new pupil to train: not a hawk, but the boy who will be king. He will educate him in the morality of power, inspire him to found the Round Table, to fight, always, for Right over Might. ‘A good man’s example always does instruct the ignorant and lessens their rage, little by little through the ages, until the spirit of the waters is content,’ says the grass snake to the king at the end of The Book of Merlyn. For a little boy who stood in front of a toy castle convinced he would be killed, being Merlyn is the best dream of all. He will wait, he will endure, and one day he will be able to stop the awful violence before it ever started. 27 The new world It is Christmas Eve. Outside my window is an icy tidal river. Everything not fringed with silver and limned lamp-black is white or Prussian blue. Those moving dots are wintering ducks and a loon slides past them on a low, submarine-profile cruise to the sea. Everything is heavy with snow. I’m stuffed to the gills with pancakes and maple bacon and I’m feeling quiet inside, quieter now than at any time since my father died. It is a deep and simple hush. My mother is asleep in the room next door, my brother is home with his in-laws, and Mabel is at Stuart and Mandy’s, three thousand miles away. Mum and I are spending Christmas in America through the kindness of my friend Erin and his parents Harriet and Jim, who run a bed-and-breakfast inn on the coast of southern Maine. I met Erin years ago when I worked breeding falcons in Wales; a young surfer and falconer, he’d turned up at Carmarthen station looking wildly out of place, like a clean-shaven Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. He’d been drawn to Britain by dreams of flying falcons, only to be put to work jetwashing aviaries in driving rain. But he survived the gloom, and we became friends. Proper friends. The kind people say you only make once, twice in a life.

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

  [They] make their bellies their gods.... All they can think of is their appetites. But there’s far more to life for us. We’re citizens of high heaven! We’re waiting the arrival of the Savior, the Master, Jesus Christ, who will transform our earthy bodies into glorious bodies like his own. He’ll make us beautiful and whole with the same powerful skill by which he is putting everything as it should be, under and around him. 1 Nothing has more impact to shift our minds and lives than knowing who we are and the power and authority we have been given. Thinking with the Mind of Christ “When the fullness of time had come,” Galatians 4:4–7 reminds us, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. We moved from being slaves to sin to being children of God. We will probably be trying to wrap our minds around this astonishing truth until we get to heaven. But we must try, because it shifts everything about us. As God’s children, filled with the Holy Spirit, we have the mind of Christ, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:16; the issue is whether we’re using it to think the thoughts that Jesus might think. Are we taking every thought captive and training our minds daily to think like Christ? Part 2 of this book was all about the choices we can make to help shift our thinking from self-defeating, self-denigrating thoughts to the truth about God and the truth about us. It was all about training our minds to make a choice—a choice empowered by the same Spirit that led Jesus to make the choices He made.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  fIL [TS] vb. only Pi. 59.722, 722, 22 =mollify, appease, entreat the favour of, lit. make the face of any one sweet or pleasant (cf. Ar. = = be sweet, pleasant, Aram. wd», DM, zd., adj. 990 sweet); Pi. PAIN 2Ch33%, PN rSx gH ab I tee sm) consec. Jb r1”, awn Dn 9”; Impf. on Ex 32" +4 3t., bm + 45" Pr 19°; Imv. Nyon DAES חַלוְּנָא‎ Mal 1°; Inf. estr. nibnd Ze 7*+2+¢.;—1. :ח'" אתרפנוהי"‎ a. mollify, pacify, appease’, i.e. induce him to shew favour in place of wrath and chastisement Ex 32” (JE), 1 K 13°(4 928M), יש‎ 2K 13! Je 26" (+ DNB), 2 Ch 33” (|| "9822 מאד‎ Y3N), Dn 9 also פנידאָל‎ / Mal x? (sq. 330") that he may be gracious to us). b. entreat the favour of ”, 1.6. aim at success, prosperity, etc., through his favour, 1813” (in anticipation of war), Ze 8" אֶתדי'ן|)‎ wipap ; of cities and nations assembling at Jerusalem for worship), Ze 7? )| אֶתי‎ vipa?) of worship at Jerusalem; quite gen., as habit of God-fearing man, I 19% (4297793), 2. en- treat favour of men (in sense of 1 b)—N* רבִּים‎ 27275 Pr 19° many entreat a prince's favour (|| 7 (ְוְכֶלָרְע לאיש‎ ; PB יח'‎ y 45” of favour of king’s bride ; D°D2 3338 וח"‎ Jb 11° favour of Job when absolved and restored. 1 מחזלת‎ af. only in + titles על"מ'‎ y 53% 881; appar. a catchword in a song, giving name to tune; mng. dub.; Aq. Symm. B מחלת‎ dance; Vv. Ol Psalmen, p. 27 Bae Psalmen, p. xviii (adorn 2 ef. Ar. (dé adorn, 5‏ חלה זז (neck-)ornament). + דזלי.ז‎ nm. ornament, a3 5m any oy Pr 25” a (nose- or ear-) ring of gold and (neck- = or breast-) ornament of fine gold ; pl. חַלְאִים‎ Ct 7, in sim. of grace and beauty. {iu son n.pr.loc. in Asher Jos 19”, site unknown (v. conject. in Di). t [dn] n.f. jewelry, MPM AY Ho2™ (v. Now Che). tnbn n.pr.loc. a city or district under Assyr. control, whither Isr. captives were taken 2K 17%= 1815 1 Ch 5”, cf. Halahhu in Meso- חלהול potamia, Schr “7 on 2 K 17°; > Hal ית‎ Spier. 164,70 Cilicia (=Ph. bn, Lag™!4, As. Hilakku, yon ett) Lag BN 7, T חַלחוּל‎ n.pr.loc. town in Judah, Jos 15" eae 15 [מהך‎ in tribu luda, ef. Alula juxta Chebron; mod. Halhil, 13 hour (33 miles) .א‎ fr. Hebron, v. Di (and reff.) Bla Rob BR iii. 21f Guérin Judée iii. 234 ff. - חול .1 .ד nf.‏ חַלְחָלֶה + מז‎ 217] vb. only 3207 3PM + א‎ 20%,rd. prob. 3D myn) (cf. G dvédeéav tov Aé6yov 0 Tov oTdpatos avvov and Sta cay and they snatched it from him, caught the word fr. his lips; Sta *5*ל‎ as Qal; Ké**! Ges *5* and most as Hiph., with — om. 11ש.ע\. of 1011.; poss. (si vera 1.) cf.‏ /)חל

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  You can’t control when the anxiety sprouts, but you do get to decide what you do with it. Perhaps it’s time to see your fear as simply data rather than as a sole determinant of your life’s outcomes. So, step into your water. I know something has been stirring in you as you’ve been reading this book. You know what you need to do. You know what conversation you need to have—what choice you need to make. So do it. You’re never going to feel fully ready—neither did Grace when she decided to set an ultimatum and when she later told Ryan that the relationship needed to end. Accept the situation as it is—including the fear that you have surrounding it. You don’t need to change it or make the fear go away. All that you need to do is take a step forward. This is your empowered action. This is where your power lies—and, not coincidentally, where your joy, your purpose, and your values also lie. I think you owe it to yourself to see that through. You never know what could be waiting on the other side. Don’t you think it’s time to find out? CONCLUSION YOU’RE DOING IT ALREADY If there’s one thing I’ve learned when it comes to anxiety, it’s this: we never give ourselves enough credit for getting through it. As much as people scoff at the “worried well” or the “worrywarts” of the world, anxiety—no matter why you have it—is really freaking tough. It’s an exhausting mental battle that we have to show up for. It’d be much easier to run away, and yet, in our own little and big ways, we continue to face our lives. Even with anxiety tearing down the door and trying to drag us down, we’ve still found a way to get ourselves to this point. It may not feel like it, but we’ve come a long way. Are you acknowledging all that you’ve done to get this far? Are you taking a moment to recognize just how amazing it is that you’re doing what you’re doing? If you haven’t told yourself, hear it from me: I’m inspired by you. I sometimes struggle to get through the day myself, and it’s not lost on me just how hard you’re working to get yourself here. I hope you can see the bravery that you’re living out. You might be diminishing yourself as you read this. “You’re telling me to be proud of myself for brushing my hair today and ordering my groceries online? You’re saying I’m winning because I got through my shifts at work this week, even though I’m at a job that makes me feel like I’m a loser compared to everyone else I went to school with?” Yes, I am. This isn’t about comparing your progress to someone else’s. You faced your life in your own way today.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

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

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

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

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

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

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

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

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

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

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