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 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.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I think it means that I must choose to define my difference as you must choose to define yours, to claim it and to use it as creative before it is defined for you and used to eradicate any future, any change. You must decide what it means to excel and to persevere beyond competence and why you do it. Or else this ability, this difference defined as good right now because it appears to promise a continuation of safety and sameness, this difference will be used to testify against your creativity, it will be used to cordon off those other differences defined/regarded as bad, improper, or threatening, those differences of race, sex, class, gender, and age, all those ways in which a profit economy defines its excess (different) people. And ultimately, it will be used to truncate your future and mine. The house of your difference is the longing for your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability. It is an indelible part of your life’s arsenal. If you allow your difference, whatever it might be, to be defined for you by imposed externals, then it will be defined to your detriment, always, for that definition must [be] dictated by the need of your society, rather than by a merging between the needs of that society and the human needs of self. But as you acknowledge your difference and examine how you wish to use it and for what—the creative power of difference explored—then you can focus it toward a future which we must each commit ourselves to in some particular way if it is to come to pass at all. This is not a theoretical discussion. I am talking here about the very fabric of your lives, your dreams, your hopes, your visions, your place upon the earth. All of these will help to determine the shape of your future as they themselves are born from your efforts and pains and triumphs of the past. Cherish them. Learn from them. Our differences are polarities between which can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine, when we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision, no matter how differently expressed; a vision which supposes a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices. We must define our differences so that we may someday live beyond them, rather than change them. So this is a call for each of you to remember herself and himself, to reach for new definitions of that self, and to live intensely.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  224 James Baldwin place,is all that can carryme out ofit. Andat lastI step out into the morningand I lockthe door behind me.I cross the road and drop the keys intotheold lady's mailbox.And I look up the road, where a few peoplestand, men and women, waitingforthe morning bus. They arevery vividbeneath the awakening sky, and the horizon beyond themis beginning to flame. The morningweighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope andI take theblue envelope which Jacques hassent me and tearit slowlyintomanypieces, watching them danceinthe wind, watching the v^nd carry themaway. Yet,asIturnand begin walk- ing toward thewaitingpeople, the wind blows some of them back on me. "A YOUNG AMERICAN INVOLVED WITH BOTHA WOMAN ANDA MAN....BALDWIN WRITES OF THESE MATTERS WITH UNUSUAL CANDOR AND YET WITH SUCH DIGNITY AND INTENSITY"* Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himselfcaught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldv^ins brilliant narrative delves intothe mystery of loving u^ith a sharp, probing imagination, and hecreates a moving, highly controversial story of deathand passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart. "Mn Baldv^inhas takena very special theme andtreated it u^ithgreat artistry and restraint," v^rites the Saturday Review. ''Exciting,"says The Atlantic; ''a book that belongs inthetop rank offiction." Alfred Kazincalls it"passionate and mature," vs/hile The Washington Post^ndsit ''absorbing" w^ith "immediate emotional impact." Until his death in 1987, James Baldv^inhad u^ritten fifteen books and coauthored four others. His vv^idely acclaimed u/orks have profoundly altered modern Americas social and literary consciousness. Among hisau/ards are the Partisan Review Fellowship,a National Instituteof Artsand Letters Award, anda Guggenheim Fellowship. *TheNew York Times 32881 "'71009"00495'" 5 N D-MMD-3Efifil-D»4TS Photo:MaxPetrus

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  The day of visitation is expected (2:12). The end of all things is at hand (4:7). Those who suffer with Christ will also rejoice with Christ when his glory is revealed (4:13). Judgment is to begin at the household of God (4:17). The writer himself is sure that he will be a sharer in the glory to come When the chief shepherd shall appear, the faithful Christian will receive a crown of glory (5:4). From beginning to end of the letter, the second coming is in the forefront of the writer's mind. It is the motive for steadfastness in the faith, for the loyal living of the Christian life and for gallant endurance amid the sufferings that have come and will come upon them. It would be untrue to say that the second coming ever dropped out of Christian belief; but it did recede from the forefront of Christian belief as the years passed and Christ did not return. It is, for instance, significant that in Ephesians, one of Paul's later letters, there is no mention of it. On this basis, it is reasonable to suppose that i Peter is early and comes from the days when the Christians vividly expected the return of their Lord at any moment. Simplicity of Organization It is clear that i Peter comes from a time when the organization of the Church is very simple. There is no mention of deacons, nor of the episkopos, the bishop, who begins to emerge in the Pastoral Epistles and becomes prominent in Ignatius' letters in the first half of the second century. The only church officials mentioned are the elders. `As an elder myself ... I exhort the elders among you' For this reason, also, it is reasonable to suppose that i Peter comes from an early date. The Theology of the Early Church What is most significant of all is that the theology of i Peter is the theology of the very early Church. E. G. Selwyn has made a detailed study of this in his commentary, and he has proved beyond all question that the theological ideas of i Peter are exactly the same as those we meet in the recorded sermons of Peter in the early chapters of Acts. The preaching of the early Church was based on five main ideas. One of the greatest contributions of C. H. Dodd to New Testament scholarship was his formulation of these. They form the framework of all the sermons of the early Church, as recorded in Acts, and they are the foundation of the thought of all the New Testament writers. The summary of these basic ideas has been given the name kerugma, which means the announcement or the proclamation of a herald.

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

  But it will go far in muting the children’s fears, suffering, and loneliness at the crisis. It will set the stage for a new relationship in which parents protect their children by conveying that they continue to be in control, that the children continue to be protected, that the parents have made a difficult decision for which they take responsibility, and that no one in this family is a helpless victim of bad luck or the behavior of a villainous spouse. Parents taking either path—those who decide to stay together in a troubled marriage and those who decide on divorce—will both convey to the listening child how much they value marriage and family. In both circumstances, they will have shown their capacity to deal honestly and bravely with life’s problems, sharing the hard-won wisdom that human relationships are both bitter and sweet. Most of all, they will have made clear to the child and future adult what family is about. All of us need courage and the will to keep trying. Are all divorcing parents capable of this? Of course not. No one knows better than I how difficult this assignment is for angry, unhappy, even tormented people to do. However, I’m repeatedly surprised by how much parents are willing to do if they’re convinced that it’s in their children’s interest. I have no doubt that many parents can have honest conversations with their children, whether they decide to leave or stay in a troubled marriage. To Stay or Go I LOOKED BACK at Gary. “Tell me, do you think your parents were right to stay in the marriage or should they have divorced? How would it have been different for you?” “Wow, that’s a humdinger.” “You mean you haven’t thought about it?” “As a matter of fact I have. For me it was definitely better that they stayed together. But that’s because they were great parents. My brother, sister, and I had a good home. We never doubted that they loved us. I’ll never really know if Dad was unfaithful. My mom was lonely and, as I look back, probably depressed, but she continued to be very interested in us and our schoolwork and our activities. We never doubted that we’d go on to college with substantial financial support or even to grad school if we opted for that. In other words, our world was protected. But if they had split up, I’d lay you bets that my father would have been remarried in a flash. And maybe had a couple more kids. We would have definitely lost out.” “How?” “I can imagine that if my dad had a new wife and kids, he wouldn’t have been around for me.

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

  The perspective of this long-term study has enabled me to observe an incredible amount of fluctuation in parent-child relationships in the postdivorce family. Of course, all families change as parents age and children grow up, but the changes in divorced families are more dramatic. It starts with the breakup, when children feel abandoned by their parents, continues with the changing cast of characters that come in and out of the family, and moves into phases of reassessment when children grow up, sustain their own disappointments, and decide that maybe they had judged their parents too harshly. Parents, seeing their children struggle as adults, are newly worried and want to help. As a result, families that are estranged for decades may come back together during a serious crisis. As both generations mellow, they can turn to one another and discover what they had lost. This finding, which is just now emerging after twenty-five years, bodes well for our divorce culture. It means that forgiveness is possible—and that it’s never too late for parents and children to regain mutual love. That’s the encouraging side of our story. But there is an equally powerful discouraging side. Researchers now say that elderly people with a history of divorce will get less care from their children than people who have never been divorced. They will get even less care from stepchildren. People who have been divorced are much less likely to reside with a child in their old age and less likely to receive care from a child, even if they are disabled, compared with the elderly who have never divorced. When divorced parents get help from their children, it is more often in the form of cash and not personal attention. The trend is true for mothers and fathers, especially for those who remarried. However, widowed parents receive more than twice as much financial help as divorced parents. Who will step in when the Baby Boomers reach old age? In the generation that ushered in our divorce culture, the safety net traditionally offered to aging parents is not likely to be in place. Society may well pick up the tab through higher taxes to pay for Medicare, but that will not be commensurate with the sense of abandonment and loss that long-divorced parents are about to experience. This we surely did not anticipate.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  We are the hyphenated people of the diaspora whose self-defined identities are no longer shameful secrets in the countries of our origin, but rather declarations of strength and solidarity. We are an increasingly united front from which the world has not yet heard. June 1, 1984 Berlin My classes are exciting and exhausting. Black women are hearing about them and their number is increasing. I can’t eat cooked food and I am getting sicker. My liver is so swollen I can feel it under my ribs. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds. That’s a switch, worrying about losing weight. My friend Dagmar, who teaches here, has given me the name of a homeopathic doctor specializing in the treatment of cancer, and I’ve made an appointment to see her when I come back from the feminist book fair in London next week. She’s an anthroposophic doctor, and they believe in surgery only as a last resort. In spite of all this, I’m doing good work here. I’m certainly enjoying life in Berlin, sick or not. The city itself is very different from what I’d expected. It is lively and beautiful, but its past is never very far away, at least not for me. The silence about Jews is absolutely deafening, chilling. There is only one memorial in the whole city and it is to the Resistance. At the entrance is a huge grey urn with the sign, “This urn contains earth from German concentration camps.” It is such a euphemistic evasion of responsibility and an invitation to amnesia for the children that it’s no wonder my students act like Nazism was a bad dream not to be remembered. There is a lot of networking going on here among women, collectives, and work enterprises as well as political initiatives, and a very active women’s cultural scene. I may be too thin, but I can still dance! June 7, 1984 Berlin Dr. Rosenberg agrees with my decision not to have a biopsy, but she has said I must do something quickly to strengthen my bodily defenses. She’s recommended I begin Iscador injections three times weekly. Iscador is a biological made from mistletoe which strengthens the natural immune system, and works against the growth of malignant cells. I’ve started the injections, along with two other herbals that stimulate liver function. I feel less weak. I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the front lines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency. “What are you getting so upset about, anyway?” a student asked in class. “You’re not Jewish!” So what if I am afraid? Of stepping out into the morning? Of dying?

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

  But I had more questions than answers about what lay ahead for him. After years of rage in childhood and adolescence, can a young man fully turn his life around? Can he set new goals and sustain his progress by his own efforts? Can he decide to be his own father and carry it off? Larry had been propelled far by his disappointment and anger at his father. His decision to adopt his father as a negative image had energized his grueling work and school program and kept him going. But how would that affect his future relationships with women and in making the important life choices that lay ahead? Considering the view of man-woman relationships that he had experienced in his family, would he be able to become the good husband and father that he aspired to be? Although the lives of all these young people were full of unexpected turns, Larry’s history so far was baffling. I also had many concerns about his younger sister, who had been so demeaned by her father. How had she negotiated the transition to young womanhood? Had her mother been able to rally enough to really help her? I looked forward eagerly to seeing her as well, but I was worried about the long-lasting impact of her father’s efforts to humiliate her. ELEVEN Undoing the Past W hile he was telling me about Anja, Larry got an urgent phone call from one of his partners about an emergency on a job site. He listened attentively, quickly assessed the situation, and offered a solution to be implemented in three phases. I was impressed by his decisiveness and ability to plan—and told him so after he got off the phone. This clearly struck a chord. His eyes became very bright as he replied, “I believe in planning. I’m always thinking about ten years ahead. It’s the best way I know of to make your life turn out the way you want it to. All the important things in my life—my education, my career, and even my marriage—have turned out because I’ve figured out what I wanted ahead of time. Sometimes it took me a while. I was pretty dumb about the marriage part, but after a while I caught on.” I decided to tease him a little. “So, you tried to plan your love life? Tell me about it.” Larry flung himself back in his chair and laughed. “I figured we’d get to that.” He settled himself and thought for a moment. “It really goes back to my mother. She told me that she knew, after one year, that her marriage was wrong but she ended up staying for ten years anyway.

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

  35. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 77.) Because He had said that these things should come to pass immediately after the tribulation of those days, they might ask, How long time hence? He therefore gives them an instance in the fig JEROME. As much as to say, When the tender shoots first shew themselves in the stem of the fig tree, and the bud bursts into flower, and the bark puts forth leaves, ye perceive the approach of summer and the season of spring and growth; so when ye shall see all these things that are written, do not suppose that the end of the world is immediate, but that certain monitory signs and precursors are shewing its approach. CHRYSOSTOM. He shews that the interval of time shall not be great, but that the coming of Christ will be presently. By the comparison of the tree He signifies the spiritual summer and peace that the just shall enjoy after their winter, while sinners on the other hand shall have a winter after summer. ORIGEN. As the fig has its vital powers torpid within it through the season of winter, but when that is past its branches become tender by those very powers and put forth leaves; so the world and all those who are saved had before Christ’s coming their vital energies dormant within them as in a season of winter. Christ’s Spirit breathing upon them makes the branches of their hearts soft and tender, and that which was dormant within burgeons into leaf, and makes shew of fruit. To such the summer and the coming of the glory of the Word of God is nigh at hand. CHRYSOSTOM. This analogy also adds credit to His foregoing discourse; for wherever He speaks of what must by all means come to pass, Christ ever brings forward parallel physical laws. AUGUSTINE. (Ep. 199, 22.) That now from the Evangelic and Prophetic signs that we see come to pass, we ought to look that the Lord’s coming should be nigh, who is there that denies? For daily it draws ever more and more near, but of the exact time it is said, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons. (Acts 1:7.) See how long ago the Apostle said, Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. (Rom. 13:11.) What he spoke was not false, and yet how many years have elapsed, how much more may we not say that the Lord’s coming is at hand now, that so great an accession of time has been made? HILARY. Mystically; The Synagogue is likened to the fig treeg; its branch is Antichrist, the son of the Devil, the portion of sin, the maintainer of the law; when this shall begin to swell and to put forth leaves, then summer is nigh, i. e. the approach of the day of judgment shall be perceived.

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

  PSEUDO-JEROME. Morally also it may be interpreted; we also, drawn aside from the fleeting world by the smell and purity of flowers, run with the young maidens after the bridegroom, (v. Cant. 1:2. 3.) and are washed in the sacrament of baptism, from the two fountains of the love of God, and of our neighbour, by the grace of remission, and mounting up by hope gaze upon heavenly mysteries with the eyes of a clean heart. Then we receive in a contrite and lowly spirit, with simplicity of heart, the Holy Spirit, who comes down to the meek, and abides in us, by a never-failing charity. And the voice of the Lord from heaven is directed to us the beloved of God; Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God; (Matt. 5:9) and then the Father, with the Son and the Holy Spirit, is well-pleased with us, when we are made one spirit with God. 1:12–1312. And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. 13. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom in Matt. xiii) Because all that Christ did and suffered was for our teaching, He began after His baptism to dwell in the wilderness, and fought against the devil, that every baptized person might patiently sustain greater temptations after His baptism, nor be troubled, as if this which happened to Him was contrary to His expectation, but might bear up against all things, and come off conqueror. For although God allows that we should be tempted for many other reasons, yet for this cause also He allows it, that we may know, that man when tempted is placed in a station of greater honour. For the Devil approaches not save where he has beheld one set in a place of greater honour; and therefore it is said, And immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. And the reason why He does not simply say, that He went into the wilderness, but was driven, is, that thou mayest understand that it was done according to the word of Divine Providence. By which also He shews, that no man should thrust himself into temptation, but that those who from some other state are as it were driven into temptation, remain conquerors. BEDE. (in Marc. i. 5) And that no one might doubt, by what spirit he said that Christ was driven into the wilderness, Luke has on purpose premised, that Jesus being full of the Spirit returned from Jordan, (Luke 4:12) and then has added, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness; lest the evil spirit should be thought to have any power over Him, who, being full of the Holy Spirit, departed whither He was willing to go, and did what He was willing to do.

• 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

  I have found something interesting in a book here on active meditation as a form of self-control. There are six steps: 1.Control of Thought Think of a small object (i.e., a paper clip) for five minutes, exclusively. Practice for a month. 2.Control of Action Perform a small act every day at the same time. Practice, and be patient. 3.Control of Feeling (equanimity) Become aware of feelings and introduce equanimity into experiencing them—i.e., be afraid, not panic-stricken. (They’re big on this one around here.) 4.Positivity (tolerance) Refrain from critical downgrading thoughts that sap energy from good work. 5.Openness (receptivity) Perceive even what is unpleasant in an unfettered, nonprejudiced way. 6.Harmony (perseverance) Work toward balancing the other five. As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces—growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying—and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces. December 16, 1985 Arlesheim I brought some of my books with me, and reading The Cancer Journals in this place is like excavating words out of the earth, like turning up a crystal that has been buried at the bottom of a mine for a thousand years, waiting. Even Our Dead Behind Us—now that it has gone to the printer—seems prophetic. Like always, it feels like I plant what I will need to harvest, without consciousness. This is why the work is so important. Its power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as in the heart’s blood pumping behind the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all [of] the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do. December 17, 1985 Arlesheim When I read in Basel last June, I never imagined I would be here again, four miles away, in a hospital. I remember the women in the bookstore that night, and their questions about survival rates that I could not answer then. And certainly not now. Even in the bleak Swiss winter, the grounds of the Lukas Klinik are very beautiful. Much care has been given by the builders to the different shades of winter scenery, so there is a play of light and dark that hits the eye from the room’s windows as well as from the beds. My private room is good-sized, spacious by american hospital standards. It is one of the few single rooms with a private bath, and they are usually for very sick or very rich people.

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

  They perceived southern Unionists and freedmen as the most loyal element. The issue for Republicans was simply put: would poor whites help to transform the South into a literate society and free-market economy, or would they resist change and drag the South down? 6 President Andrew Johnson contributed to the debate when he issued his plan for restoration of the Union. He included in his requirements disfranchisement of the wealthiest slaveholders, so that, as the New York Herald reported in 1865, the oligarchs of the South would be “shorn of their strength,” while—and here the newspaper underscored the class dynamic—“the ‘poor white trash’ heretofore compelled to walk behind them and to do their bidding, are made masters of the situation.” Yes, masters. Johnson expressed the same opinion in an address to a delegation from South Carolina: “While this rebellion has emancipated a great many negroes,” he said, “it has emancipated still more white men.” He would elevate the “poor white man” who struggled to till barren, sandy soil for subsistence, and who were looked down upon by the Negro and elite planter alike. 7 The president imagined a three-tiered class system in the reconstructed states. The disenfranchised planter elite would keep their land and a certain social power, but would be deprived of any direct political influence until they regained the trust of Unionists. The middle ranks would be filled by a newly dominant poor white class. In exercising the vote and holding office, they would hold back the old oligarchy, while preventing a situation from arising in which they themselves would have to compete economically (or politically) with the freedmen. On the bottom tier, then, Johnson placed free blacks and freed slaves —the latter emancipated in fact, yet treated as resident aliens, bearing rights but still denied the franchise. The plan Lincoln’s unloved successor had in mind was not a “restoration” of the old order, nor did it promise to establish a democracy. Instead, it offered America something entirely original. So let us call the Johnson plan what it would have been if actually undertaken: a white trash republic. The Tennessean decidedly saw black suffrage as a low priority. He was still intent, however, on redefining the old planter elite. Despite disfranchisement, the aristocracy retained some wealth and, just as important, the power to persuade others. They would turn their former slaves, now employees, into political pawns. This was a prospect that President Johnson looked upon with some disapproval. Yet he would undermine his own design by granting individual pardons to representatives of the former ruling elite, which he may have done because he felt he needed them to win reelection. 8 Something more dangerous loomed if blacks obtained political equality. Long-standing animosities would resurface between the two lower classes in Johnson’s construct (blacks and poor whites), triggering a “war of races.” Andrew Johnson’s race war was not Thomas Jefferson’s, however.

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

  What distinguished these happily married people? After years of trial-and-error, they finally acquired the judgment to choose a mate carefully and wisely. And then they mustered the courage to pursue that person for a long-term commitment. This was a major achievement that reflected their greater maturity and increased self-esteem. As these same men and women entered their twenties, most were terrified of being alone—a feeling directly related to their fear of being abandoned or lost during the turmoil of their parents’ breakup and divorce. But as every young adult needs to learn, the only way to reject an unsuitable lover is to be able to face being alone. This is a hard lesson for everyone, but it’s especially difficult for children of divorce. Several of the women in the study told me candidly about their first breakthrough in therapy: they were finally able to go to a party and return home alone, without panicking. In another milestone, they also managed to loosen their ties to their parents. Instead of running home to help their moms and dads deal with every minor crisis in life, they were at last able to separate emotionally. Only then could they give up the expectation that they were doomed to share their parents’ fate. Only by separating were they free to look forward to a better marriage than their parents had achieved. Of course, it helped that many of these young adults were doing well in their careers and in other areas of their lives. They had learned that they really could trust themselves to get what they wanted. Karen’s story shows these many steps in poignant detail. For most of her childhood and young adult life, she refused to consider her own needs. She took care of her parents, siblings, and a lover who disappointed her every single day. Then, in an act of supreme courage, she broke away from them all and began a journey toward independence and an increased sense of self-worth. Once she stood on this new foundation, Karen was able to call an attractive young man a few days after they met and open the door to a relationship. Smiling happily, she told me, “I finally figured out what I wanted.” Like the others, she said, “I decided to take a chance.” This triumph over her fears was the key to Karen’s success as she reached her mid-thirties. She was able to gamble because she fully realized that her chances of success were at least fair. Because she was no longer afraid, she could take a chance on love and commitment.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  H. Streeter. He thinks that i Peter is composed of a baptismal sermon and a pastoral letter written by Aristion, Bishop of Smyrna. Originally the pastoral letter was written to comfort and strengthen the people of Smyrna in AD 90 when the persecution mentioned in the Book of Revelation threatened the church. These writings of Aristion became the devotional classics and the cherished possessions of the church at Smyrna. Rather more than twenty years later, a much wider and more far-reaching persecution broke out in Bithynia and spread throughout northern Asia Minor. Someone remembered the letter and the sermon of Aristion, felt that they were the very thing the Church needed in its time of trial, and sent them out under the name of Peter, the great apostle. An Apostle's Letter We have stated in full both views of the origin, date and authorship of i Peter. There is no doubt about the ingenuity of the theory which B. H. Streeter has produced, nor that those who favour a later date have produced arguments which have to be considered. For our own part, however, we see no reason to doubt that the letter is the work of Peter himself, and that it was written not long after the great fire of Rome and the first persecution of the Christians with the object of encouraging the Christians of Asia Minor to stand fast when the onrushing tide of persecution sought to engulf them and take their faith away. 19 2 Peter Against Immoral Teachers The Neglected Book and its Contents Second Peter is one of the neglected books of the New Testament. Very few people will claim to have read it, still less to have studied it in detail. The New Testament scholar E. F. Scott says: `it is far inferior in every respect to i Peter', and goes on: `it is the least valuable of the New Testament writings'. It was only with the greatest difficulty that 2 Peter gained entry into the New Testament, and for many years the Christian Church seemed to be unaware of its existence. But, before we approach its history, let us look at its contents. The Threat of the Lawless Life Second Peter was written to combat the beliefs and activities of a group of people who were a threat to the Church. It begins by insisting that Christians are people who have escaped from the corruption of the world (1:4) and must always remember that they have been purged of their past sins (i:9). There is laid upon them the duty of moral goodness, which culminates in the great Christian virtue of love (i :5-8). Let us set out the characteristics of those whom 2 Peter rebukes. They twist Scripture to make it suit their own purpose (1:20, 3:16).

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Actually I believe myself to be just above these two signs, providing a ratio between them which expresses itself plastically, non-ethically, in writing. I believe that one has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself. Most artists are defeating life by their very attempt to grapple with it. They have split the egg in two. All art, I firmly believe, will one day disappear. But the artist will remain, and life itself will become not “an art,” but art , i.e., will definitely and for all time usurp the field. In any true sense we are certainly not yet alive. We are no longer animals, but we are certainly not yet men . Since the dawn of art every great artist has been dinning that into us, but few are they who have understood it. Once art is really accepted it will cease to be. It is only a substitute, a symbol-language, for something which can be seized directly. But for that to become possible man must become thoroughly religious, not a believer, but a prime mover, a god in fact and deed. He will become that inevitably. And of all the detours along this path art is the most glorious, the most fecund, the most instructive. The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one. And the trend is towards awareness, towards that blinding consciousness in which no present form of life can possibly flourish, not even art. To some this will sound like mystification, but it is an honest statement of my present convictions. It should be borne in mind, of course, that there is an inevitable discrepancy between the truth of the matter and what one thinks, even about himself: but it should also be borne in mind that there exists an equal discrepancy between the judgment of another and this same truth. Between subjective and objective there is no vital difference. Everything is illusive and more or less transparent. All phenomena, including man and his thoughts about himself, are nothing more than a movable, changeable alphabet. There are no solid facts to get hold of. Thus, in writing, even if my distortions and deformations be deliberate, they are not necessarily less near to the truth of things. One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. The truth is in no way disturbed by the violent perturbations of the spirit.

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

  17 Unlike Arkansas tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the Tulsa colonists owned the land, albeit land of little value, which lowered them to the level of subsistence farmers. The common pattern in Arkansas was different. Here, nearly 63 percent of farmers worked as tenants. The Arkies were unlike the Tulsans, many of whom were educated, willing to work collectively, and devised a plan for the future. They might be slumming as white trash and living in shanties, but when the economy improved, the city folk would return to their former lives. For them the land was a “refuge,” not a permanent source of class identity. 18 The “Back to the Land” movement had a marked influence on New Deal policy. So it made sense when Milburn Lincoln Wilson, a trained social scientist and expert in agriculture, became the first director of the Subsistence Homesteads Division in 1933. The government’s goal was to give tenants and sharecroppers the resources and skills to rise up the agricultural ladder and help city folk without jobs. Like the soil, the dispossessed had to be rehabilitated. Land, he insisted, was not just a source of profit, but was part of a “well integrated democracted [sic] community,” one that knit people together by attending to the resilience of families. In Wilson’s grand scheme, the homestead community was a laboratory, a demonstration of how government could ease the impact of a flagging economy and make it possible for low-income rural and urban families to become self-sufficient homeowners. The families involved were given long-term loans so that they could buy their homes. The program contributed better housing for the unemployed while acting to humanize living conditions for poor whites. 19 At its most visionary, Wilson saw rehabilitation as the process of taking stranded coal miners in abandoned towns, displaced factory workers without jobs, and tenants trapped on unproductive land and helping them all adopt a new way of life. The modern homestead of his design was a source of a genuine democracy, producing “a sturdy rather than servile citizenry.” If ever there was a proactive policy for creating the yeoman republic of Thomas Jefferson’s imagination, this was it. It was inevitable that poor southerners became a greater concern for the agency. Wilson directed attention to the South’s one-crop system and “rural slum areas” in the countryside, which guaranteed the pernicious cycle of poor white and black sharecroppers’ poverty from one generation to the next. Two- thirds of the nation’s tenant farmers were in the South, and two-thirds were white. These facts cannot be overstated. The agricultural distress of the Depression exposed the South’s long-standing dependence on submarginal land and submarginal farmers. 20 In this way, the federal government drew national attention to the South’s oppressive class environment. The homestead became a symbol of class security, sustenance, and normalcy.