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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Evan. ii. 25) But Matthew writes this miracle as if it were done in the city of the Lord, whilst Mark places it in Capernaum, which would be more difficult of solution, if Matthew had also named Nazareth. But seeing that Galilee itself might be called the city of the Lord, who can doubt but that the Lord did these things in His own city, since He did them in Capernaum, a city of Galilee; particularly as Capernaum was of such importance in Galilee as to be called its metropolis? Or else, Matthew passed by the things which were done after He came into His own city, until He came to Capernaum, and so adds on the story of the paralytic healed, subjoining, And, behold, they presented to him a man sick of the palsy, after he had said that He came into His own city. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Vict. Aut. e Cat. in Marc.) Or else, Matthew called Capernaum His city because He went there frequently, and there did many miracles. It goes on: And it was noised that he was in the house, &c. For the desire of hearing Him was stronger than the toil of approaching Him. After this, they introduce the paralytic, of whom Matthew and Luke speak; wherefore there follows: And they came unto him bearing one sick of the palsy, who was carried by four. Finding the door blocked up by the crowd, they could not by any means enter that way. Those who carried him, however, hoping that he could merit the grace of being healed, raising the bed with their burden, and uncovering the roof, lay him with his bed before the face of the Saviour. And this is that which is added: And when they could not lay him before him, &c. There follows: But when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. He did not mean the faith of the sick man, but of his bearers; for it sometimes happens, that a man is healed by the faith of another. BEDE. (ubi sup.) It may indeed be seen, how much each person’s own faith weighs with God, when that of another had such influence that the whole man at once rose up, healed body and soul, and by one man’s merit, another should have his sins forgiven him. THEOPHYLACT. He saw the faith of the sick man himself, since he would not have allowed himself to be carried, unless he had had faith to be healed.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Furthermore, this prayer is even more worthy of confidence in that He who taught us how to pray, graciously hears our prayer together with the Father, as it is said in the Psalm: “He shall cry to Me, and I will hear him.” Thus writes St. Cyprian: “It is a friendly, familiar, and devout prayer to ask of the Lord in His own words.” And so no one goes away from this prayer without fruit. St. Augustine says that through it our venial sins are remitted. Moreover, our prayer must be suitable, so that a person asks of God in prayer what is good for him. St. John Damascene says: “Prayer is the asking of what is right and fitting from God.” Many times our prayer is not heard because we seek that which is not good for us: “You ask and you do not receive, because you ask amiss.” To know, indeed, what one ought to pray for is most difficult; for it is not easy to know what one ought to desire. Those things which we rightly seek in prayer are rightly desired; hence the Apostle says: “For we know not what we should pray for as we ought.” Christ Himself is our Teacher; it is He who teaches us what we ought to pray for, and it was to Him that the disciples said: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Those things, therefore, which He has taught us to pray for, we most properly ask for. “Whatsoever words we use in prayer,” says St. Augustine, “we cannot but utter that which is contained in our Lord’s Prayer, if we pray in a suitable and worthy manner.” Our prayer ought also to be ordered as our desires should be ordered, for prayer is but the expression of desire. Now, it is the correct order that we prefer spiritual to bodily things, and heavenly things to those merely earthly. This is according to what is written: “Seek ye first therefore the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Here Our Lord shows that heavenly things must be sought first, and then things material.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer: presumption seems to imply immoderate hope. The object of hope is a good which is arduous and yet possible, but there are two ways in which a thing may be possible for a man. It may be possible for him through his own power, and it may be possible only through the power of God. Now in either case there can be presumption through immoderate hope. The hope whereby one relies on one ’ s own power is presumptuous, if one aims at a good beyond one ’ s capacity as if it were possible for one to attain it, after the manner referred to in Judith 6:15 (Vulgate): “ Thou humblest those that presume of themselves. ” Such presumption is opposed to the virtue of magnanimity, which holds to the mean in hope of this kind. But hope whereby one relies on the power of God can also be presumptuous through immoderation, if one looks for some good thing as if it were possible through the divine power and mercy, when it is not possible. It would be presumptuous, for example, for a man to hope to obtain pardon without penitence, or glory without merit. Such presumption is indeed a kind of sin against the Holy Spirit, since one who so presumes takes away or despises the aid whereby the Holy Spirit calls him back from sin. On the first point: as we said in Q. 20, Art. 3, and in 12ae, Q. 73, Art. 3, a sin against God is more serious than other sins, owing to its kind. The presumption with which one relies on God in an inordinate manner is therefore a more serious sin than the presumption with which one relies on one ’ s own power. To rely on the divine power for the purpose of obtaining what it is unbecoming for God to give is to deprecate the divine power, and it is obvious that one who deprecates the power of God sins more seriously than one who exalts his own power more than he ought. On the second point: the presumption with which one presumes on God in an inordinate manner includes the love of oneself whereby one inordinately desires one ’ s own good. For when we desire something excessively, we readily think that it is possible through others, when it is not so. On the third point: presumption on the mercy of God includes turning to changeable good, in so far as it is the outcome of inordinate desire for one ’ s own good. It also includes turning away from unchangeable good, in so far as it attributes to the divine power what is unbecoming to it. This means that a man turns away from the divine power. ARTICLE TWO

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Now it has been stated above [2436](A[1]) that hope has the character of virtue from the fact that it attains the supreme rule of human actions: and this it attains both as its first efficient cause, in as much as it leans on its assistance, and as its last final cause, in as much as it expects happiness in the enjoyment thereof. Hence it is evident that God is the principal object of hope, considered as a virtue. Since, then, the very idea of a theological virtue is one that has God for its object, as stated above ([2437]FS, Q[62], A[1]), it is evident that hope is a theological virtue. Reply to Objection 1: Whatever else hope expects to obtain, it hopes for it in reference to God as the last end, or as the first efficient cause, as stated above [2438](A[4]). Reply to Objection 2: In things measured and ruled the mean consists in the measure or rule being attained; if we go beyond the rule, there is excess, if we fall short of the rule, there is deficiency. But in the rule or measure itself there is no such thing as a mean or extremes. Now a moral virtue is concerned with things ruled by reason, and these things are its proper object; wherefore it is proper to it to follow the mean as regards its proper object. On the other hand, a theological virtue is concerned with the First Rule not ruled by another rule, and that Rule is its proper object. Wherefore it is not proper for a theological virtue, with regard to its proper object, to follow the mean, although this may happen to it accidentally with regard to something that is referred to its principal object. Thus faith can have no mean or extremes in the point of trusting to the First Truth, in which it is impossible to trust too much; whereas on the part of the things believed, it may have a mean and extremes; for instance one truth is a mean between two falsehoods. So too, hope has no mean or extremes, as regards its principal object, since it is impossible to trust too much in the Divine assistance; yet it may have a mean and extremes, as regards those things a man trusts to obtain, in so far as he either presumes above his capability, or despairs of things of which he is capable. Reply to Objection 3: The expectation which is mentioned in the definition of hope does not imply delay, as does the expectation which belongs to longanimity. It implies a reference to the Divine assistance, whether that which we hope for be delayed or not. Reply to Objection 4: Magnanimity tends to something arduous in the hope of obtaining something that is within one’s power, wherefore its proper object is the doing of great things. On the other hand hope, as a theological virtue, regards something arduous, to be obtained by another’s help, as stated above [2439](A[1]).

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  131IN 1919, by way of the Crimea and Greece, a flock of Nabokovs—three families in fact—fled from Russia to western Europe. It was arranged that my brother and I would go up to Cambridge, on a scholarship awarded more in atonement for political tribulations than in acknowledgement of intellectual merit. The rest of my family expected to stay for a while in London. Living expenses were to be paid by the handful of jewels which Natasha, a farsighted old chambermaid, just before my mother’s departure from St. Petersburg in November 1917, had swept off a dresser into a nécessaire and which for a brief spell had undergone interment or perhaps some kind of mysterious maturation in a Crimean garden. We had left our northern home for what we thought would be a brief wait, a prudent perching pause on the southern ledge of Russia; but the fury of the new regime had refused to blow over. In Greece, during two spring months, braving the constant resentment of intolerant shepherd dogs, I searched in vain for Gruner’s Orange-tip, Heldreich’s Sulphur, Krueper’s White: I was in the wrong part of the country. On the Cunard liner Pannonia which left Greece on May 18, 1919 (twenty-one years too soon as far as I was concerned) for New York, but let us off at Marseilles, I learned to foxtrot. France rattled by in the coal-black night. The pale Channel was still oscillating inside us, when the Dover-London train quietly came to a stop. Repetitive pictures of gray pears on the grimy walls of Victoria Station advertised the bath soap English governesses had used upon me in my childhood. A week later I was already shuffling cheek-to-cheek at a charity ball with my first English sweetheart, a wayward willowy girl five years my senior. My father had visited London before—the last time in February 1916, when, with five other prominent representatives of the Russian press, he had been invited by the British Government to take a look at England’s war effort (which, it was hinted, did not meet with sufficient appreciation on the part of Russia’s public opinion). On the way there, being challenged by my father and Korney Chukovski to rhyme on Afrika, the poet and novelist Aleksey Tolstoy (no relation to Count Lyov Nikolaevich) had supplied, though seasick, the charming couplet Vizhu pal’mu i Kafrika. Eto—Afrika. (I see a palm and a little Kaffir. That’s Afrika.)

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, We can hope for something in two ways: first, absolutely, and thus the object of hope is always something arduous and pertaining to the person who hopes. Secondly, we can hope for something, through something else being presupposed, and in this way its object can be something pertaining to someone else. In order to explain this we must observe that love and hope differ in this, that love denotes union between lover and beloved, while hope denotes a movement or a stretching forth of the appetite towards an arduous good. Now union is of things that are distinct, wherefore love can directly regard the other whom a man unites to himself by love, looking upon him as his other self: whereas movement is always towards its own term which is proportionate to the subject moved. Therefore hope regards directly one’s own good, and not that which pertains to another. Yet if we presuppose the union of love with another, a man can hope for and desire something for another man, as for himself; and, accordingly, he can hope for another eternal’s life, inasmuch as he is united to him by love, and just as it is the same virtue of charity whereby a man loves God, himself, and his neighbor, so too it is the same virtue of hope, whereby a man hopes for himself and for another. This suffices for the Replies to the Objections. Whether a man can lawfully hope in man?Objection 1: It wold seem that one may lawfully hope in man. For the object of hope is eternal happiness. Now we are helped to obtain eternal happiness by the patronage of the saints, for Gregory says (Dial. i, 8) that “predestination is furthered by the saints’ prayers.” Therefore one may hope in man. Objection 2: Further, if a man may not hope in another man, it ought not to be reckoned a sin in a man, that one should not be able to hope in him. Yet this is reckoned a vice in some, as appears from Jer. 9:4: “Let every man take heed of his neighbor, and let him not trust in any brother of his.” Therefore it is lawful to trust in a man. Objection 3: Further, prayer is the expression of hope, as stated above (A[2], OBJ[2]). But it is lawful to pray to a man for something. Therefore it is lawful to trust in him. On the contrary, It is written (Jer. 17:5): “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man.”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  CARING FOR YOURSELF IN TIMES OF RUPTUREThere’s no “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong” way to handle ruptures. What matters is that you pay attention to the pleas of your heart. Here are a few more ideas to help ground and nourish you as you navigate this storm. Create a sacred physical space: Taking inspiration from my mom’s altar, I invite you to create a sacred space or area to help you connect with yourself. My mom makes the most beautiful altars with photos of family members, orchids and amaryllis plants, precious mementos, and prayer cards. Her altar holds spiritual text, runes, and soulful sayings that remind her that the universe is always loving, supporting, and guiding us, especially on our darkest days. Let your altar or sacred space be a respite for you. A place that allows you to hear and heed the voice of your inner wisdom. Anoint it with symbols of what matters most in your life. Take time out of your day to visit this space, allowing it to replenish you. Ask “What” instead of “Why”: I know I discussed this earlier in the chapter, but it bears repeating. Life is full of uncertainties, and we may never know the reasons for some of the challenging situations we face. Rather than assigning blame and dwelling on the past, remember that it’s more productive to focus on taking care of our mental and physical health in the present moment. Instead of asking “why,” we should focus on “what” we can do now. And what we need in order to feel supported. By doing so, we become more adaptable, creative, and at ease with the natural ups and downs of life. Get support before you think you need it: I’ll repeat this suggestion later in the book, because it’s so important. I know you’re probably amazing at putting on your cape and caring for the world, but . . . you may underestimate the toll this experience will take on you, your health, and your mental well-being. It’s OK to ask for help and start lining up support. To tell people what’s happening and let them know that you may need a hand along the way. I wish I did this sooner, but when the next rupture comes along (and it will), I’ll make sure to reread my own advice. CHAPTER 3FEAR & ANXIETY [image file=image_rsrc1VT.jpg] I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened. — MARK TWAIN

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Learning to live with cancer was my first big experience with acceptance. Learning to live with loss was my second. Like it or not, I couldn’t change either situation. But I could use both of these experiences as catalysts for a more connected way of living. If you are wrestling with fire-breathing dragons like this in your own life, this next story might help you expand your perspective. HEALING VS. CURING At many cancer hospitals, there’s a beautiful closing ceremony and rite of passage for patients who make it to the other side of sick. The staff gather on the patient’s last day of treatment to applaud them and ring a congratulatory bell, celebrating a clean bill of health, while honoring the team effort it took to get there. At long last, the patient is able to check the coveted “survivor” box—even if just temporarily. But there are no boxes to check for people who live outside of them, and boy does this mess with our culture, which is far more comfortable with clear- cut (and often traditional) definitions. Man or woman. Married or single. Black or white. Fat or skinny. Healthy or sick, and on and on. You can’t even get a frickin’ bikini wax without offering up your health status. Focus on my bush, please; my tumors are none of your business. In the beginning, I was caught up in the conventional medical paradigm, where you’re either a patient in treatment or a survivor (aka “winner”; only losers lose their battle, after all—or so the unhelpful metaphors would have us believe). Naturally, I wanted to be a winner. What would it take for that bell to ring for me? I wondered. I’ve since discovered that true healing doesn’t come from a finish line, bell, or box. It also doesn’t come from a relentless drive to fix yourself—as if you’re broken unless your life looks perfect. For so many years, I tried everything I could to be in remission. When conventional medicine didn’t have any options for me, I thought, Screw this, I’ll do it myself (just like everything else). I changed my diet and lifestyle. I fasted, cleansed, and detoxed. I left my toxic job. I spent long stretches at a Zen monastery to learn to calm the fuck down. I moved out of the city to the country, where the air was fresher and life was healthier. And I did a ton of soul-searching. All these changes were good in so many ways, improving my health, my well-being, and my overall quality of life.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Vict. Ant. e Cat. in Marc. sed v. Chrys. ubi sup.) His meaning is; such a plenitude of virtue is there in Me, that not only can I do this, but I will make others to have that power; where fore if thou canst believe as thou oughtest to do, thou shalt be able to cure not only him, but many more. In this way then, He endeavoured to bring back to the faith, the man who as yet speaks unfaithfully. There follows, And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. But if he had already believed, saying, I believe, how is it that he adds, help thou mine unbelief? We must say then that faith is manifold, that one sort of faith is elementary, another perfect; but this man, being but a beginner in believing, prayed the Saviour to add to his virtue what was wanting. BEDE. (ubi sup.) For no man at once reaches to the highest point, but in holy living a man begins with the least things that he may reach the great; for the beginning of virtue is different, from the progress and the perfection of it. Because then faith mounts up through the secret inspiration of grace, by the steps of its own meritsh, he who had not yet believed perfectly was at once a believer and an unbeliever. PSEUDO-JEROME. By this also we are taught that our faith is tottering, if it lean not on the stay of the help of God. But faith by its tears receives the accomplishment of its wishes; Wherefore it continues, When Jesus saw that the multitude came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee come out of him, and enter no more into him. THEOPHYLACT. The reason that He rebuked the foul spirit, when He saw the crowd running together, was that he did not wish to cure him before the multitude, that He might give us a lesson to avoid ostentation. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Vict. Ant. e Cat. in Marc.) And His rebuking him, and saying, I charge thee, is a proof of Divine power. Again, in that He says not only, come out of him, but also enter no more into him, He shews that the evil spirit was ready to enter again, because the man was weak in faith, but was prevented by the command of the Lord. It goes on, And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him; and he was as one dead, insomuch that many said, He is dead. For the devil was not able to inflict death upon him, because the true Life was come.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult? The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel. As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Which does not mean I give in to the belief, arrogant or naive, that I know everything I need to know in order to make informed decisions about my body. But attending my own health, gaining enough information to help me understand and participate in the decisions made about my body by people who know more medicine than I do, are all crucial strategies in my battle for living. They also provide me with important prototypes for doing battle in all other arenas of my life. Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable. And all power is relative. Recognizing the existence as well as the limitations of my own power, and accepting the responsibility for using it in my own behalf, involve me in direct and daily actions that preclude denial as a possible refuge. Simone de Beauvoir’s words echo in my head: “It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change.” November 10, 1986 New York City Building into my living—without succumbing to it—an awareness of this reality of my life, that I have a condition within my body of which I will eventually die, comes in waves, like a rising tide. It exists side by side with another force inside me that says no you don’t, not you, and the x-rays are wrong and the tests are wrong and the doctors are wrong. There is a different kind of energy inherent within each one of these feelings, and I try to reconcile and use these different energies whenever I need them. The energy generated by the first awareness serves to urge me always to get on with living my life and doing my work with an intensity and purpose of the urgent now. Throw the toys overboard, we’re headed into rougher waters. The energies generated by the second force fuel a feisty determination to continue doing what I am doing forever. The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together. November 11, 1986 New York City I keep observing how other people die, comparing, learning, critiquing the process inside of me, matching it up to how I would like to do it. And I think about this scrutiny of myself in the context of its usefulness to other Black women living with cancer, born and unborn.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. And it is never without fear—of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing—their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  32 “ I fell prey to water intoxication or low sodium, which is characterized by hallucination, memory loss, and corporeal ineptness; a veritable cornucopia of psychoses. I could hear voices, see four different images on the television at one time, read a book in which each word cd separate to fill the page. I’d ask people on the phone who they thought they were talking to cause i certainly didn’t know. & I fell constantly. On top of this phantasmagoric experience, I had a stroke.” So wrote the playwright Ntozake Shange, in In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life After 50 , about the maladies that struck her from the blue in her fifties. “The stroke put an end to nanoseconds of images & left a body with diminished vision, no strength, immobile legs, slurred speech, and no recollection of how to read.” She learned to remember how to read . She learned to remember how to write. She learned to remember how to walk, how to talk. She became the person Quintana dreamed of becoming, the person who, by not dwelling on it , wakes one morning and finds her revised circumstances corrected. “I am not dead, I am older,” she tells us from this improved perspective. “But I can still memorize a stanza or two. What I have memorized is my child’s face at different points in her life.” 33 I ll health, which is another way of describing what it can cost to maintain momentum, overtakes us when we can imagine no reason to expect it. I can tell you to the hour when it overtook me—a Thursday morning, August 2, 2007—when I woke with what seemed to be an earache and a reddened area on my face that I mistook for a staph infection. I remember thinking of this as trying, time-consuming, the waste of a morning I could not afford. Because I had what I mistook for an earache I would need that morning to see an otolaryngologist. Because I had what I mistook for a staph infection I would need that morning to see a dermatologist. Before noon I had been diagnosed: not an earache, not a staph infection, but herpes zoster, shingles, an inflammation of the nervous system, an adult recurrence, generally thought to have been triggered or heightened by stress, of the virus responsible for childhood chickenpox. “Shingles”: it sounded minor, even mildly comical, something about which a great-aunt might complain, or an elderly neighbor; an amusing story tomorrow. Tomorrow. When I will be fine. Restored. Well. Telling the amusing story. You’ll never guess what it turned out to be. “Shingles,” imagine. Nothing to worry about then, I remember saying to the doctor who made the diagnosis. Zoster can be a pretty nasty virus, the doctor said, guarded.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  21 Listen carefully, the LORD is about to come out of His [heavenly] place To punish the inhabitants of the earth for their wickedness [their sin, their injustice, their wrongdoing]; The earth will reveal the [innocent] blood shed upon her And will no longer cover her slain. Isaiah 27 The Deliverance of Israel 1 I N THAT day the Lord will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent With His fierce and great and mighty sword [rescuing Israel from her enemy], Even Leviathan the twisted serpent; And He will kill the dragon who lives in the sea. 2 In that day [it will be said of the redeemed nation of Israel], “A vineyard of a wine, sing in praise of it! 3 “I, the LORD , am its Keeper; I water it every moment. So that no one will harm it, I guard it night and day. 4 “I have no wrath. Should anyone give Me briars and thorns in battle, I would step on them, I would set them all on fire. 5 “Or let him (Israel) cling to My strength and rely on My protection [My stronghold], Let him make peace with Me, Let him make peace with Me.” 6 b In the generations to come Jacob will take root; Israel will blossom and sprout, And they will fill the surface of the world with fruit. [Hos 14:1–6 ; Rom 11:12 ] 7 Like the striking c by Him who has struck them, has He struck them? Or like the slaughter of His slain, have they been slain? 8 You contended with them by exile, by driving them away [from Canaan]; He has expelled them with His fierce wind on the day of the east wind. 9 Therefore through this the wickedness [the sin, the injustice, the wrongdoing] of Jacob (Israel) will be atoned for and forgiven; And this will be d the full price [that God requires] for taking away his sin: When Israel makes all the stones of the [pagan] altars like crushed chalk stones; When the Asherim and the incense altars will not stand. 10 For the fortified city is isolated, A settlement deserted and abandoned like the desert; There the calf will graze, And there it will lie down and e feed on its branches. 11 When its branches are dry, they are broken off; The women come and f make a fire with them. For they are not a people of understanding, Therefore He who made them will not have compassion on them, And He who created them will not be gracious to them. 12 In that day the LORD will thresh [out His grain] from the flowing stream of the River [Euphrates] to the Brook of Egypt, and you will be gathered up one by one, O sons of Israel.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I hope for an International Conference of Black Feminists, asking some of these questions of definition of women from Amsterdam, Melbourne, the South Pacific, Kentucky, New York, and London, all of whom call ourselves Black feminists and all of whom have different strengths. To paraphrase June Jordan, we are the women we want to become. August 1, 1984 New York City Saints be praised! The new CAT scan is unchanged. The tumor has not grown, which means either Iscador is working or the tumor is not malignant! I feel relieved, vindicated, and hopeful. The pain in my middle is gone, as long as I don’t eat very much and stick to fruits and veggies. That’s livable. I feel like a second chance, for true! I’m making myself a new office upstairs in Jonathan’s old room. It’s going to be a good year. October 10, 1984 New York City I’ve been thinking about my time in Germany again, unencumbered by artificial shades of terror and self-concern. I don’t want my involvement with health matters to obscure the revelation of differences I encountered. The Afro-European women. What I learned about the differences when one teaches about feeling and poetry in a language that is not the original language of the people learning, even when they speak that language fluently. (Of course, all poets learn about feeling as children in our native tongue, and the psychosocial strictures and emotional biases of that language pass over into how we think about feeling for the rest of our lives.) I will never forget the emotional impact of Raja’s poetry, and how what she is doing with the German language is so close to what Black poets here are doing with English. It was another example of how our Africanness impacts upon the world’s consciousness in intersecting ways. As an African-American woman, I feel the tragedy of being an oppressed hyphenated person in america, of having no land to be our primary teacher. And this distorts us in so many ways. Yet there is a vital part that we play as Black people in the liberation consciousness of every freedom-seeking people upon this globe, no matter what they say they think about us as Black americans. And whatever our differences are that make for difficulty in communication between us and other oppressed peoples, as Afro-Americans we must recognize the promise we represent for some new social synthesis that the world has not yet experienced. I think of the Afro-Dutch, Afro-German, Afro-French women I met this spring in europe, and how they are beginning to recognize each other and come together openly in terms of their identities, and I see that they are also beginning to cut a distinct shape across the cultural face of every country where they are at home.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  My friend Wayne Muller, author and minister, captures my cleaning mania beautifully: “We take refuge in speed, we avoid the searing burning in the heart by chasing swiftly this way and that, we become a moving target, so it is more difficult for those unbearable feelings to find us. We refrain from rest, refuse to even pause. Faster feels better because it allows us to avoid accepting what we need.” When I’m trying to outrun my feelings, that’s exactly what I do. I give what energy I have to others or to my work, and if there’s any left, I tidy, I clean, I move at a supersonic pace to avoid myself. Maybe you can relate. But you know what helps me stop (beside back pain?): understanding what my body needs and why. Though it may not always feel like it, our bodies do so much for us while asking for little in return. Let’s get to know our beautiful beings a bit more. Doing so may reinspire you to care for yourself. TEND TO YOUR GARDENYour body is an extraordinary ecosystem, and you are the custodian of your delicate inner terrain. Pretty amazing, right? Take a moment and visualize this with me. Imagine that inside your body, there’s a beautiful garden. A lush space full of all kinds of budding life—all working in harmony. Standing in that garden, we begin to realize that there’s no single choice that’s going to determine whether it’s healthy or not. Instead, there are dozens of factors that make a difference: the quality of the soil, the quality of the water, whether there’s enough sunlight, the presence or absence of pollutants, the presence or absence of nutrients, and so on. Whether you’re aware of it or not, there are dozens of decisions you make every day that help your garden either thrive or lose its vibrancy. The scientific study of the choices and conditions that determine whether your garden thrives is called epigenetics. Epi- literally means “above.” So these are the factors that have nothing to do with your genes but can still determine how they behave. Now, it’s true that your genes influence many aspects of your well-being. They’re like the seeds that were planted in your garden long before you ever got there. You had no control over those early seeds. But thankfully, those inherited seeds don’t have to determine your future. Your genes are not your destiny. Which is why self-care is health care—it’s that important. Even more so when we’re shells of our former selves. Regardless of the DNA blueprint you were born with, you can help determine where your health goes from here. Once I learned about epigenetics, I never looked back. True, cancer was still in my body, but now I had an answer as to what I could do to help. I could create an environment in my body where cancer and other diseases were less likely to thrive and health was more likely to flourish.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Others sit alone and brood because they are not as outgoing or pleasant. Although we can’t wave a magic wand that will make all families sensitive and protective of children after divorce, we can promote a culture that helps people understand how and why their children are vulnerable after divorce. There’s no question that Paula would have had a much easier time if she hadn’t lost her stable home and her mother to a full-time job in one fell swoop. Billy would have benefited enormously from a careful transition between his life before and after divorce. For every Little Engine That Could there is a Little Engine That Couldn’t. Many children need special care accepting the powerful changes that divorce brings. We have an obligation to help parents to provide it. As we have also seen, many adults cannot do it by themselves, either. Notes I NTRODUCTION 1. J. Guidubaldi, H. K. Cleminshaw, J. D. Perry, and C. S. McLoughlin, “The Impact of Parental Divorce on Children: Report of the Nationwide NASP Study,” School Psychology Review 12 (1983): 300–23; N. Zill and C. Schoenborn, Developmental, Learning and Emotional Problems: Health of Our Nation’s Children, United States, 1988. Advance Data, Vital and Health Statistics of the National Center for Health Statistics (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Health Statistics, no. 190, November 16, 1990); S. McLanahan, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 2. A. J. Cherlin, P. L. Chase-Lansdale, and C. McRae, “Effects of Parental Divorce on Mental Health Throughout the Life Course,” American Sociological Review, 63 (April 1988): 239—49; J. S. Wallerstein and J. B. Kelly, Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope with Divorce (New York: Basic Books, 1980); N. Zill, D. R. Morrison, and M. J. Coiro, “Long-Term Effects of Parental Divorce on Parent-Child Relationships, Adjustment and Achievement in Young Adulthood,” Journal of Family Psychology 7, no. 1 (1993): 91—103. 3. National Center for Health Statistics, Births, Marriages and Deaths for 1996. Monthly Vital Statistics Report, vol. 45, no. 12 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1997). 4. According to figures estimated from the 1995 National Survey of Families and Households and the 1997 Statistical Abstract of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. 5. General Social Survey, 1996 (National Sample). 6. Wallerstein and Kelly, Surviving the Breakup; J. S. Wallerstein and S. Blakeslee, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade after Divorce (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 7. The Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition was established in Marin County in 1980 in response to findings reported in Surviving the Breakup and rising community concern. The initial grant from the San Francisco Foundation was for $3.5 million over a five-year period. Known nationally and internationally for its research and its training programs for mental health professionals, educators, pediatricians, ministers, and attorneys, the center has served as a model for research, intervention, and social policy addressing the changes in the American family. O NE 1. J.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  In 1935, the Subsistence Homesteads Division produced a pamphlet that contrasted West Virginia coal miners’ dark and dismal shacks with bright new homesteads (portrayed through a published image of children playing outside on grass). A year later, the President’s Committee on Tenancy made the point clearer by comparing the rungs of the agricultural ladder to prison bars. Tenancy was a cage, class status a jail. Chains tied poor whites to rotten soil and locked them away in abysmal shacks that weren’t really homes at all. There was more than one chain gang in the South. 21 Arthur Raper, one of the leading authorities on tenancy in the South, explained conditions in his 1936 study Preface to Peasantry. Most southern tenants were in debt to landlords, had little cash, no education; hookworm and pellagra still haunted them. Unlike the fugitive James Allen, they had no place to run. Rarely did poor whites stay on a single plantation for more than two or three years; in the winter months, they could be seen filling carts with their children and their junk and moving on. This annual phenomenon of southeastern tenant dispersion was already occurring before the mass western exodus of Okies and Arkies. 22 The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed. No one—neither tenants nor their landlords—had any problem making children and women work in the fields. For all the above reasons, then, education remained crucial to the subsistence homestead program. Prospective clients required not only guidance in modern agricultural practices, but also schools, churches, and training in the methods of home food production. Wilson introduced a psychological element often lacking in traditional forms of charity. For poor whites, this meant they had to overcome the feeling that they were “just trash,” a breed lacking the capacity for change. The homestead program would prove above all that poor whites were completely normal people. 23 Wilson’s fellow Iowan, Henry Wallace, had a similar outlook. Inferior heredity had nothing to do with rural poverty. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace predicted that if at birth one hundred thousand poor white children were taken from their “tumble-down cabins” and another hundred thousand were taken from the wealthiest families, and both groups were given the same food, education, housing, and cultural experiences, by the time they reached adulthood there would be no difference in mental and moral traits. “Superior ability” was not “the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class,” he said. Reacting to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan fantasy, Wallace predicted that even a “master breeder” might over generations raise a group of people with the same skin, hair, or eye color, but he would just as likely produce a group of “blond morons.” 24 Both Wilson and Wallace dismissed the notion that class (or even race) was biologically preordained.