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 Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  In every individual there is a tension; each one of us is a walking civil war, torn between the desire for good and the desire for evil; we hate our sins and love them at one and the same time. According to both Greek and Jewish thought in the time of Paul, this disharmony extends even to the heavenly places. A cosmic battle is raging between the powers of evil and the powers of good, between God and the demons. Worst of all, there is disharmony between God and human beings. Men and women, who were meant to be in fellowship with God, are estranged from him. So, in this world without Christ, there is nothing but disunity. That disunity is not God's purpose, but it can become a unity only when all things are united in Christ. As E. F. Scott has it in his commentary: `The innumerable broken strands were to be brought together in Christ, knotted again into one, as they had been in the beginning.' The central thought of Ephesians is the realization of the disunity in the universe and the conviction that it can become unity only when everything is united in Christ. The Origin of Paul's Thought How did Paul arrive at this great conception of the unity of all things in Jesus Christ? Most probably, he came to it in two ways. It is surely the inevitable outcome of his conviction, stated so vividly in Colossians, that Christ is all-sufficient. But it may well be that there was something else which moved Paul's mind in this direction. He was a Roman citizen and proud of it. In his journeys, Paul had seen a great deal of the Roman Empire, and now he was in Rome, the imperial city. In the Roman Empire, a new unity had come to the world. The pax Romana, the Roman peace, was a very real thing. Kingdoms and states and countries, which had struggled and been at war with each other, were gathered into a new unity in the empire which was Rome. It may well be that, in his imprisonment, Paul saw with new eyes how all this unity centred in Rome; and it may well have seemed to him a symbol of how all things must centre in Christ, if a disunited nature and world and humanity were ever to be gathered into a unity. Surely, far from being a conception that was beyond his thinking, all Paul's thinking and experience would lead him precisely to that. The Function of the Church It is in the first three chapters of the letter that Paul deals with this conception of the unity in Christ. In the last three chapters, he has much to say about the place of the Church in God's plan to bring about that unity.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  What possible choices do most of us have in the air we breathe and the water we must drink? Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor’s office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom. The real blessing is to be able to use whoever I am wherever I am, in concert with as many others as possible, or alone if needs be. This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light—that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation. Metabolized and integrated into the fabric of my days, that knowledge makes the particulars of what is coming seem less important. When I speak of wanting as much good time as possible, I mean time over which I maintain some relative measure of control. November 14, 1986 New York City One reason I watch the death process so acutely is to rob it of some of its power over my consciousness. I have overcome my earlier need to ignore or turn away from films and books that deal with cancer or dying. It is ever so much more important now for me to fill the psyches of all the people I love and who love me with a sense of outrageous beauty and strength of purpose. But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange. After my mastectomy, changing the ways I ate and struggled and slept and meditated also required that I change the external environment within which I was deciding what direction I would have to take. I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast. If any of my decisions have been in error, I must stand—not prepared, for that is impossible —but open to dealing with the consequences of those errors. Inside and outside, change is not easy nor quick, and I find myself always on guard against what is oversimplified, or merely cosmetic. November 15, 1986 New York City In my office at home I have created a space that is very special to me. It is simple and quiet, with beautiful things about, and a ray of sunlight cascading through a low window on the best of days. It is here that I write whenever I am home, and where I retreat to center myself, to rest and recharge at regular intervals.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/”* and of impotence. 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.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 53.The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It is a tiny alcove with an air mattress half-covered with bright pillows, and a low narrow table with a Nigerian tie-dye throw. Against one wall and central to this space is a painting by a young Guyanese woman called The Yard. It is a place of water and fire and flowers and trees, filled with Caribbean women and children working and playing and being. When the sun lances through my small window and touches the painting, the yard comes alive. The red spirit who lives at the center of the painting flames. Children laugh, a woman nurses her baby, a little naked boy cuts the grass. One woman is building a fire outside for cooking; inside a house another woman is fixing a light. In a slat-house up the hill, windows are glowing under the red-tiled roof. I keep company with the women of this place. Yesterday, I sat in this space with a sharp Black woman, discussing the focus of a proposed piece for a Black women’s magazine. We talked about whether it should be about the role of art and spirituality in Black women’s lives, or about my survival struggles with current bouts of cancer. As we talked, I gradually realized that both articles were grounded in the same place within me, and required the same focus. I require the nourishment of art and spirituality in my life, and they lend strength and insight to all the endeavors that give substance to my living. It is the bread of art and the water of my spiritual life that remind me always to reach for what is highest within my capacities and in my demands of myself and others. Not for what is perfect but for what is the best possible. And I orchestrate my daily anticancer campaign with an intensity intrinsic to who I am, the intensity of making a poem. It is the same intensity with which I experience poetry, a student’s first breakthrough, the loving energy of women I do not even know, the posted photograph of a sunrise taken from my winter dawn window, the intensity of loving. I revel in the beauty of the faces of Black women at labor and at rest. I make, demand, translate satisfactions out of every ray of sunlight, scrap of bright cloth, beautiful sound, delicious smell that comes my way, out of every sincere smile and good wish. They are discreet bits of ammunition in my arsenal against despair. They all contribute to the strengthening of my determination to persevere when the greyness overwhelms, or Reaganomics wears me down. They whisper to me of joy when the light is dim, when I falter, when another Black child is gunned down from behind in Crossroads or Newark or lynched from a tree in Memphis, and when the health orchestration gets boring or depressing or just plain too much. November 16, 1986 New York City

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I just know I must not surrender my body to others unless I completely understand and agree with what they think should be done to it. I’ve got to look at all of my options carefully, even the ones I find distasteful. I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can’t lose. June 10, 1984 Berlin Dr. Rosenberg is honest, straightforward, and pretty discouraging. I don’t know what I’d do without Dagmar there to translate all her grim pronouncements for me. She thinks it’s liver cancer, too, but she respects my decision against surgery. I mustn’t let my unwillingness to accept this diagnosis interfere with getting help. Whatever it is, this seems to be working. We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. I wasn’t supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up white boys’ world. I want desperately to live, and I’m ready to fight for that living even if I die shortly. Just writing those words down snaps everything I want to do into a neon clarity. This european trip and the Afro-German women, the Sister Outsider collective in Holland, Gloria’s great idea of starting an organization that can be a connection between us and South African women. For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me. I have done good work. I see it in the letters that come to me about Sister Outsider , I see it in the use the women here give the poetry and the prose. But first and last I am a poet. I’ve worked very hard for that approach to living inside myself, and everything I do, I hope, reflects that view of life, even the ways I must move now in order to save my life. I have done good work. There is a hell of a lot more I have to do. And sitting here tonight in this lovely green park in Berlin, dusk approaching and the walking willows leaning over the edge of the pool caressing each other’s fingers, birds birds birds singing under and over the frogs, and the smell of new-mown grass enveloping my sad pen, I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all, on whatever terms I’m dealt, timely or not. Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-sized pieces, useful and warm and wet and delectable because they came out of my mouth. June 17, 1984 Berlin I am feeling more like an Audre I recognize, thank the goddess for Dr. Rosenberg, and for Dagmar for introducing me to her. I’ve been reading Christa Wolf’s The Search for Christa T. , and finding it very difficult. At first I couldn’t grapple with it because it was just too painful to read about a woman dying.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have a privileged life or else I would be dead by now. It is two and a half years since the first tumor in my liver was discovered. When I needed to know, there was no one around to tell me that there were alternatives to turning myself over to doctors who are terrified of not knowing everything. There was no one around to remind me that I have a right to decide what happens to my own body, not because I know more than anybody else, but simply because it is my body. And I have a right to acquire the information that can help me make those crucial decisions. It was an accident of circumstance that brought me to Germany at a critical moment in my health, and another which introduced me to one holistic/homeopathic approach to the treatment of certain cancers. Not all homeopathic alternatives work for every patient. Time is a crucial element in the treatment of cancer, and I had to decide which chances I would take, and why. I think of what this means to other Black women living with cancer, to all women in general. Most of all I think of how important it is for us to share with each other the powers buried within the breaking of silence about our bodies and our health, even though we have been schooled to be secret and stoical about pain and disease. But that stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are. November 12, 1986 New York City When I write my own Book of the Dead, my own Book of Life, I want to celebrate being alive to do it even while I acknowledge the painful savor uncertainty lends to my living. I use the energy of dreams that are now impossible, not totally believing in them nor their power to become real, but recognizing them as templates for a future within which my labors can play a part. I am freer to choose what I will devote my energies toward and what I will leave for another lifetime, thanking the goddess for the strength to perceive that I can choose, despite obstacles.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Daughter’s philandering husband is an unsuccessful English professor, but they still live in a white-shingled house with trees, not in some rack-ass tenement on the Lower East Side or in Harlem for which they pay too much rent. Her private room in Lincoln Memorial Hospital has her mama’s Renoir on the wall. There are never any Black people at all visible in that hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, not even in the background. Now this may not make her death scenes any less touching, but it did strengthen my resolve to talk about my experiences with cancer as a Black woman. December 14, 1986 New York City It is exactly one year since I went to Switzerland and found the air cold and still. Yet what I found at the Lukas Klinik has helped me save my life. [Its manifestation is not only therapeutic. It is vital. Underlining what is joyful and life-affirming in my living becomes crucial. What have I had to leave behind? Old life habits, outgrown defenses put aside lest they siphon off energies to no useful purpose? One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future—to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now. This is my life. Each hour is a possibility not to be banked. These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living. They are my life. The feeling of the bedsheet against my heels as I wake to the sound of crickets and bananaquits in Judith’s Fancy. I am living my life every particular day no matter where I am, nor in what pursuit. It is the consciousness of this that gives a marvelous breadth to everything I do consciously. My most deeply held convictions and beliefs can be equally expressed in how I deal with chemotherapy as well as in how I scrutinize a poem. It’s about trying to know who I am wherever I am. It’s not as if I’m in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again. I visualize daily winning the battles going on inside my body, and this is an important part of fighting for my life. In those visualizations, the cancer at times takes on the face and shape of my most implacable enemies, those I fight and resist most fiercely. Sometimes the wanton cells in my liver become Bull Connor and his police dogs completely smothered, rendered impotent in Birmingham, Alabama, by a mighty avalanche of young, determined Black marchers moving across him toward their future. P.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  W. Botha’s bloated face of apartheid squashed into the earth beneath an onslaught of the slow rhythmic advance of furious Blackness. Black South African women moving through my blood destroying passbooks. Fireburn Mary sweeping over the Cruzan countryside, axe and torch in hand. Images from a Calypso singer: The big black boot of freedom Is mashing down your doorstep. I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine, no matter what. In fact, I am surrounded within my external living by ample examples of the struggle for life going on inside me. Visualizing the disease process inside my body in political images is not a quixotic dream. When I speak out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to save my life in every sense. Government research grants to the National Cancer Institute were cut in 1986 by the exact amount illegally turned over to the contras in Nicaragua. One hundred and five million dollars. It gives yet another meaning to the personal as the political. Cancer itself has an anonymous face. When we are visibly dying of cancer, it is sometimes easier to turn away from the particular experience into the sadness of loss, and when we are surviving, it is sometimes easier to deny that experience. But those of us who live our battles in the flesh must know ourselves as our strongest weapon in the most gallant struggle of our lives. Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle. But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition. I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more effective clarity . August 1987 Carriacou, Grenada Anguilla, British West Indies St. Croix, Virgin Island s * Ex-slave who led a workers’ revolt in St. Croix in 1848. † Alexis De Veaux, poet and biographer. ‡ Clare Cross, playwright, psychotherapist, and partner of Blanche Cook. § Blanche Cook, classmate of Lorde at Hunter College, historian, and partner of Clare Cross.

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

  Matthew 27:56; John 19:25). Again nothing is known of him, and he cannot have had any connection with this letter. (4) There is James, the brother of John, and the son of Zebedee, a member of the Twelve (Matthew io:2; Mark 3:17; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13). In the gospel story, James never appears independently of his brother John (Matthew 4:21, 17:1; Mark i:i9, 1:29, 5:37, 9:2, 10:35, 10:41, 13:3, 14:33; Luke 5:10, 8:51, 9:28, 9:54). He was the first of the apostolic band to be martyred, for he was beheaded on the orders of Herod Agrippa I in the year AD 44. He has been connected with the letter. The fourth-century Latin Codex Corbeiensis, at the end of the epistle, has a note quite definitely attributing it to James the son of Zebedee. The only place where this view on the authorship was taken seriously was in the Spanish church, in which, down to the end of the seventeenth century, he was often held to be the author. This was due to the fact that St James of Compostella, the patron saint of Spain, is identified with James the son of Zebedee; and it was natural that the Spanish church should be predisposed to wish that their country's patron saint should be the author of a New Testament letter. But the martyrdom of James came too early for him to have written the letter, and in any case there is nothing beyond the Codex Corbeiensis to connect him with it. (5) Finally, there is James, who is called the brother of Jesus. Although the first definite connection of him with this letter does not emerge until Origen in the first half of the third century, it is to him that it has always been traditionally attributed. The Roman Catholic Church agrees with this view, for in 1546 the Council of Trent laid it down that James is canonical and is written by an apostle. Let us then collect the evidence about this James. From the New Testament, we learn that he was one of the brothers of Jesus (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55). We shall later discuss in what sense the word `brother' is to be taken. During Jesus' ministry, it is clear that his family did not understand or sympathize with him and would have wished to restrain him (Matthew 12:46-50; Mark 3:21, 3:31-5; John 7:3-9). John says bluntly: `For not even his brothers believed in him' (John 7:5). So, during Jesus' earthly ministry, James was numbered among his opponents. With the Acts of the Apostles, there comes a sudden and unexplained change.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  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. 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. Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 53.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing. It does not matter too much if it is in the radiation lab or a doctor’s office or the telephone company, the streets, the welfare department, or the classroom. The real blessing is to be able to use whoever I am wherever I am, in concert with as many others as possible, or alone if needs be. This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light—that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation. Metabolized and integrated into the fabric of my days, that knowledge makes the particulars of what is coming seem less important. When I speak of wanting as much good time as possible, I mean time over which I maintain some relative measure of control. November 14, 1986 New York City One reason I watch the death process so acutely is to rob it of some of its power over my consciousness. I have overcome my earlier need to ignore or turn away from films and books that deal with cancer or dying. It is ever so much more important now for me to fill the psyches of all the people I love and who love me with a sense of outrageous beauty and strength of purpose. But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange. After my mastectomy, changing the ways I ate and struggled and slept and meditated also required that I change the external environment within which I was deciding what direction I would have to take. I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast. If any of my decisions have been in error, I must stand—not prepared, for that is impossible—but open to dealing with the consequences of those errors. Inside and outside, change is not easy nor quick, and I find myself always on guard against what is oversimplified, or merely cosmetic. November 15, 1986 New York City In my office at home I have created a space that is very special to me. It is simple and quiet, with beautiful things about, and a ray of sunlight cascading through a low window on the best of days. It is here that I write whenever I am home, and where I retreat to center myself, to rest and recharge at regular intervals. It is here that I do my morning visualizations and my eurhythmics.

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

  We shall no doubt find this book difficult and bewildering; but doubtless, too, we shall find it infinitely worth while to wrestle with it until it gives us its blessing and opens its riches to us. Apocalyptic Literature In any study of Revelation, we must begin by remembering the basic fact that, although unique in the New Testament, it is nonetheless representative of a kind of literature which was the most common of all in the period between the Old and the New Testaments. Revelation is commonly called the Apocalypse - in Greek apokalupsis. Between the Old and the New Testaments, there grew up a great mass of what is called apocalyptic literature, the product of an indestructible Jewish hope. The Jews could not forget that they were the chosen people of God. To them, that involved the certainty that some day they would arrive at world supremacy. In their early history, they looked forward to the coming of a king of David's line who would unite the nation and lead them to greatness. A shoot was to come forth from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah God would raise up a righteous branch for David (Jeremiah 23:5). Some day, the people would serve David, their king (Jeremiah 30:9). David would be their shepherd and their king (Ezekiel 34:23, 37:24). The booth of David would be repaired (Amos 9:11); out of Bethlehem there would come a ruler who would be great to the ends of the earth (Micah 5:2-4). But the whole history of Israel contradicted these hopes. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom - small enough to begin with - split into two under Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and so lost its unity. The northern kingdom, with its capital at Samaria, vanished in the last quarter of the eighth century Bc before the assault of the Assyrians, never again reappeared in history and is now referred to as the lost ten tribes. The southern kingdom, with its capital at Jerusalem, was reduced to slavery and exile by the Babylonians in the early part of the sixth century BC. It later came under the rule of the Persians, the Greeks and finally the Romans. History for the Jews was a catalogue of disasters from which it became clear that no human deliverer could rescue them. The Two Ages Jewish thought stubbornly held to the conviction of the chosenness of the Jews but had to adjust itself to the facts of history. It did so by working out a scheme of history. The Jews divided all time into two ages.

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

  BEDE. Again, the people of the Gentiles, having heard of the fame of the name of Christ, sought to be made a partaker of Him, but many spoke against Him, first the Jews, then also the Gentiles, lest the world which was to be enlightened should call upon Christ. The fury of those who attacked Him, however, could not deprive of salvation those who were fore-ordained to life. And He heard the blind man’s cry as He was passing, but stood when He restored his sight, because by His Humanity He pitied him, who by the power of His Divinity has driven away the darkness from our mind; for in that Jesus was born and suffered for our sakes, He as it were passed by, because this action is temporal; but when God is said to stand, it means, that, Himself without change, He sets in order all changeable things. But the Lord calls the blind man, who cries to Him, when He sends the word of faith to the people of the Gentiles by preachers; and they call on the blind man to be of good cheer and to rise, and bid him come to the Lord, when by preaching to the simple, they bid them have hope of salvation, and rise from the sloth of vice, and gird themselves for a life of virtue. Again, he throws away his garment and leaps, who, throwing aside the bands of the world, with unencumbered pace hastens to the Giver of eternal light. PSEUDO-JEROME. Again, the Jewish people comes leaping, stripped of the old man, as a hart leaping on the mountains, that is, laying aside sloth, it meditates on Patriarchs, Prophets, and Apostles on high, and raises itself to heights of holiness. How consistent also is the order of salvation. First we heard by the Prophets, then we cry aloud by faith, next we are called by Apostles, we rise up by penitence, we are stripped of our old garment by baptism, and of our choice we are questioned. Again, the blind man when asked requires, that he may see the will of the Lord. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Therefore let us also imitate him, let us not seek for riches, earthly goods, or honours from the Lord, but for that Light, which we alone with the Angels can see, the way to which is faith; wherefore also Christ answers to the blind man, Thy faith hath saved thee. But he sees and follows who works what his understanding tells him is good; for he follows Jesus, who understands and executes what is good, who imitates Him, who had no wish to prosper in this world, and bore reproach and derision. And because we have fallen from inward joy, by delight in the things of the body, He shews us what bitter feelings the return thither will cost us.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  That evening I sat down to the Latin grammar, and in an hour or so had learned all the declensions and nearly all the adjectives and pronouns. Next day I was trembling with hope of praise and if the form-master had encouraged me or said one word of commendation, I might have distinguished myself in the class work, and so changed perhaps my whole life; but the next day he had evidently forgotten all about my backwardness. By dint of hearing the other boys answer I got a smattering of the lessons, enough to get through them without punishment, and soon a good memory brought me among the foremost boys, though I took no interest in learning Latin. Another incident fed my self-esteem and opened to me the world of books. Vernon often went to a clergyman’s who had a pretty daughter, and I too was asked to their evening parties. The daughter found out I could recite, and soon it became the custom to get me to recite some poem everywhere we went. Vernon bought me the poems of Macaulay and Walter Scott and I had soon learned them all by heart, and used to declaim them with infinite gusto: at first my gestures were imitations of Willie’s; but Vernon taught me to be more natural and I bettered his teaching. No doubt my small stature helped the effect and the Irish love of rhetoric did the rest; but every one praised me and the showing off made me very vain and—a more important result—the learning of new poems brought me to the reading of novels and books of adventure. I was soon lost in this new world: though I played at school with the other boys, in the evening I never opened a lesson-book; but devoured Lever and Mayne Reid, Marryat and Fenimore Cooper with unspeakable delight. I had one or two fights at school with boys of my own age: I hated fighting; but I was conceited and combative and strong and so got to fisticuffs twice or three times. Each time, as soon as an elder boy saw the scrimmage, he would advise us, after looking on for a round or two, to stop and make friends. The Irish are supposed to love fighting better than eating; but my school-days assure me that they are not nearly so combative or perhaps I should say, so brutal, as the English. In one of my fights a boy took my part and we became friends. His name was Howard and we used to go on long walks together. One day I wanted him to meet Strangways, the Vicar’s son, who was fourteen but silly, I thought; Howard shook his head: “he wouldn’t want to know me”, he said, “I am a Roman Catholic.” I still remember the feeling of horror his confession called up in me: “A Roman Catholic! Could anyone as nice as Howard be a Catholic?”

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

  There was a great battle in heaven; Michael with his Angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his Angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And that great dragon was cast out, the old serpent who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world; and he was cast to the earth, and his Angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in Heaven, saying, Now is come salvation and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ; because the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb, and by the word of the testimony, and they loved not their lives to the death. Apoc. 12:7–11. b. It impetrates grace; Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, … according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, unto the sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ, grace unto you, and peace be multiplied. 1 St. Pet. 1:1, 2. You are come … to Jesus, the Mediator of the new testament, and to the sprinkling of Blood which speaketh better things than that of Abel. Heb. 12:22, 24. c. It gives perseverance; He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up in the last day. St. John 6:55. The life of all flesh is in the blood. Lev. 17:14. My Blood is drink indeed. St. John 6:56. Prayer O Jesus, Thou art the living Water; be in me, dear Lord, a well of water springing up to everlasting life. O Soul of my Jesus, help me to pray. O most beautiful Soul, most glorious Soul, most majestic Soul, ever to be loved, ever to be reverenced, ever to be adored, in the hypostatic union, with the Eternal Word. Soul once sorrowful to death, now glad with the gladness of the everlasting espousals, enlighten me, strengthen me, help me to pray. Eternal Father, water in me all that is dry. I am a desert of sand: make me a watered garden, bringing forth flowers of Paradise, and fruits of the tree of life. Eternal Son, as one like Thee walked with the Three Children in the burning fiery furnace, softening the breath of the flame, and stilling the rage of the fire, so be with me, my Saviour, in this fiery furnace of the world, that its flame may not scorch me, and that not even the breath of its fire may pass upon my raiment. Quench in me by Thy Blood all evil desires and all thoughts of sinful longing.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  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. I have a privileged life or else I would be dead by now. It is two and a half years since the first tumor in my liver was discovered. When I needed to know, there was no one around to tell me that there were alternatives to turning myself over to doctors who are terrified of not knowing everything. There was no one around to remind me that I have a right to decide what happens to my own body, not because I know more than anybody else, but simply because it is my body. And I have a right to acquire the information that can help me make those crucial decisions. It was an accident of circumstance that brought me to Germany at a critical moment in my health, and another which introduced me to one holistic/homeopathic approach to the treatment of certain cancers. Not all homeopathic alternatives work for every patient.

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

  The New Deal’s mission was to make individualism available to those ordinarily deprived of it, freeing the many from their virtual imprisonment at the hands of the few. Like Thomas Jefferson, and like Henry Wallace, Tugwell believed that concentration of power at the top destroyed democracy. But like James Madison, the founder he most admired, he remained confident that the state could act as a neutral arbiter among contending interests—bound, in this emergency, to intercede so as to prevent a hardening of class distinctions. 38 Tugwell felt that the extension of loans to farmers was the most successful part of the Resettlement Administration, and most Americans agreed: a Gallup poll of 1936 found that 83 percent of respondents heartily endorsed the program. But the experimental communities, nearly two-thirds of which were in the South, did not do at all well. Though not under the supervision of the Resettlement Administration, Arthurdale, in the abandoned coal-mining region of Reedsville, West Virginia, was one notable lightning rod. Constantly in the news because it was the pet project of Eleanor Roosevelt, this experimental community was accused of wasting money and Works Progress Administration man-hours. A reporter for the Saturday Evening Post argued that the community was not even functioning as an organ of relief because the screening process was geared toward accepting only those applicants whose success seemed assured, rather than bringing in the folks who most needed government assistance. In the end, Congress ensured the failure of Arthurdale by refusing to support a factory that would have produced furniture for the U.S. Post Office while providing the community with a steady source of employment. 39 Arthurdale cast a long shadow. The bad publicity it received colored the reception of other planned communities, as the FSA director testified before Congress in 1943. But the deeper problem of Arthurdale was rooted in its emphasis on home ownership. Even successful communities such as those outside Birmingham and Jasper, Alabama, failed in their mission to help the poorest, ultimately retaining only middle-class residents. Without subsidies, poorer families were not a worthy credit risk. A resident of Palmerdale who worked at the Birmingham News-Age Herald explained that he actually had two jobs instead of one: he worked at the newspaper from 9 p.m. until early morning, and then went home to care for his fields.

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

  But one may merit the first grace for another congruously; because a man in grace fulfils God’s will, and it is congruous and in harmony with friendship that God should fulfil man’s desire for the salvation of another, although sometimes there may be an impediment on the part of him whose salvation the just man desires. And it is in this sense that the passage from Jeremias speaks. Reply to Objection 1: A man’s faith avails for another’s salvation by congruous and not by condign merit. Reply to Objection 2: The impetration of prayer rests on mercy, whereas condign merit rests on justice; hence a man may impetrate many things from the Divine mercy in prayer, which he does not merit in justice, according to Dan. 9:18: “For it is not for our justifications that we present our prayers before Thy face, but for the multitude of Thy tender mercies.” Reply to Objection 3: The poor who receive alms are said to receive others into everlasting dwellings, either by impetrating their forgiveness in prayer, or by meriting congruously by other good works, or materially speaking, inasmuch as by these good works of mercy, exercised towards the poor, we merit to be received into everlasting dwellings. Whether a man may merit restoration after a fall?Objection 1: It would seem that anyone may merit for himself restoration after a fall. For what a man may justly ask of God, he may justly merit. Now nothing may more justly be besought of God than to be restored after a fall, as Augustine says [*Cf. Ennar. i super Ps. lxx.], according to Ps. 70:9: “When my strength shall fail, do not Thou forsake me.” Hence a man may merit to be restored after a fall. Objection 2: Further, a man’s works benefit himself more than another. Now a man may, to some extent, merit for another his restoration after a fall, even as his first grace. Much more, therefore, may he merit for himself restoration after a fall. Objection 3: Further, when a man is once in grace he merits life everlasting by the good works he does, as was shown above [2251](A[2]; Q[109], A[5]). Now no one can attain life everlasting unless he is restored by grace. Hence it would seem that he merits for himself restoration. On the contrary, It is written (Ezech. 18:24): “If the just man turn himself away from his justice and do iniquity . . . all his justices which he hath done shall not be remembered.” Therefore his previous merits will nowise help him to rise again. Hence no one can merit for himself restoration after a fall.