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 Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  figures of the fees they charged and the standard of a barrister’s fees in Bengal and Bihar staggered me. ‘We gave Rs. 10,000 to so and so for his opinion,’ I was told. Nothing less than four figures in any case. The friends listened to my kindly reproach and did not misunderstand me. ‘Having studied these cases,’ said I, ‘I have come to the conclusion that we should stop going to law courts. Taking such cases to the courts does little good. Where the ryots are so crushed and fear- stricken, law courts are useless. The real relief for them is to be free from fear. We cannot sit still until we have driven #tinkathia# out of Bihar. I had thought that I should be able to leave here in two days, but I now realize that the work might take even two years. I am prepared to give that time, if necessary. I am now feeling my ground, but I want your help.’ I found Brajkishorebabu exceptionally coolheaded. ‘We shall render all the help we can,’ he said quietly, ‘but pray tell us what kind of help you will need.’ And thus we sat talking until midnight. ‘I shall have little use for your legal knowledge,’ I said to them. ‘I want clerical assistance and help in interpretation. It may be necessary to face imprisonment, but, much so far as you feel yourselves capable of going. Even turning yourselves into clerks and giving up your profession for an indefinite period is no small thing. I find it difficult to understand the local dialect of Hindi, and I shall not be able to read papers written in Kaithi or Urdu. I shall want you to translate them for me. We cannot afford to pay for this work. It should all be done for love and out of a spirit of service.’ Brajkishorebabu understood this immediately, and he now cross-examined me and his companions by turns. He tried to ascertain the implications of all that I had said how long their service would be required, how many of them would be needed, whether they might serve by turns and so on. Then he asked the vakils the capacity of their sacrifice. Ultimately they gave me this assurance. ‘Such and such a number of us will do whatever you may ask. Some of us will be with you for so much time as you may require. The idea of accommodating oneself to imprisonment is a novel thing for us. We will try to assimilate it.’ 140.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was expected to attend the lycée, the French high school, at the beginning of the school year that followed my bar mitzvah. This extraordinary happening was the consequence of an unexpected piece of luck. The road was straight and easy for sons of the middle class: first junior high school, then senior high school, then the university or their father’s business. If they branched off somewhere along the line, it was because they wanted to. But I knew nothing of my own future beyond the school certificate. Not that I had no exact dreams or ambitions but, beyond this certificate, all was still shrouded in darkness. I wanted very much to become a physician, after having been to the free dispensary at the hospital where we had waited for hours before being admitted finally into the presence of a doctor as distant and sure of his own authority as God Himself. I had been impressed by the prestige of the nurses, the humility of the poor patients. At home, in our eyes, the “Doctor” remained a magician, still inheriting much of the wonder inspired by a sorcerer and having all of the latter’s assurance. Often, with a hairpin, I gave imaginary injections to Kalla and Poupeia, the neighbors’ daughter, and then bound them up with a handkerchief. When they objected, I gravely reduced them to silence by invoking their inevitable recovery from illness. But all this was imaginary play. In due time I would realize how impossible it was for me to pursue my studies, and I would probably, like the other boys of my sort, have to bow before the inevitable, without any chance to revolt. After that, as an errand boy or an apprentice in a workshop, all my childhood ambitions would be forgotten. To encourage us all the better to study, one of my instructors later compared the school system to a series of sieves. In the first, with its coarser-grained holes, a first selection took place; in the second, and finer sieve, a second sorting, and so on. Only the very finest and best elements thus survived the whole screening process. The comparison was good, but unfortunately explains too little. To compete successfully, one needed, in addition to intelligence and the ability to work hard, some financial stability too. But a larger income was required at each test, for it had to make up for the student’s lack of any earnings, to counteract the jealousies of relatives, the nagging criticisms of his family, the low morale of the student who grows weary of having too many problems and is soon tempted by the first steady earnings of his former classmates. Nor should one forget school fees, schoolbooks, and clothes. Such, at least, is the problem that arises for students of my social background. The number of obstacles that ill luck made me contend with was really very considerable. But fate’s first gift to me was to open the doors of high school.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When Georg Frideric Handel set scripture passages to music in his oratorio Messiah, this text from Revelation was used in his “Hallelujah Chorus,” a powerful celebration of the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. But my point is not just this chorus itself. What matters even more is where the chorus comes in the work as a whole. The selection and arrangement of texts were not random. The oratorio divides into three parts: first, the hope for the Messiah, and his birth and public career; second, his death and resurrection and the worldwide preaching of the gospel; third, the resurrection of the dead and the joy of the new creation. The “Hallelujah Chorus” celebrates the fact that the true God now reigns over the whole world, so that their kingdoms have become his; and it is placed not at the end of the third and final part, but at the end of the second part. This reflects closely the view of mission held by many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the first performance of Messiah was in 1742). First would come the worldwide kingdom, achieved through the preaching of the gospel; then, and only then, the final resurrection. The aim of “mission” was therefore then to bring the nations into submission to God the Creator and to his Son, Jesus the Messiah. That is, after all, what Psalm 2 had indicated as the divine purpose. And Psalm 2, speaking of the dramatic divine victory over all enemies, was the text set immediately before the “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was quite clear what view of “mission” was being advocated. By the late eighteenth century, however, a very different mood began to prevail. Many Christians in Europe and America continued to pour energy into social and cultural reform. But many others saw this as a distraction from “preaching the gospel,” by which they meant “saving souls for heaven.” Had the texts of Messiah been selected a hundred years later, in the 1840s, one might imagine that the “Hallelujah Chorus” would have been placed at the very end, celebrating the worship of heaven—though the text from Revelation about the world’s kingdoms now belonging to the one God and his Messiah might then have looked strange, since the new mood insisted that the world’s kingdoms were irrelevant. Had not Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world”? (No, actually. What he said in John 18:36 was that his kingdom was not from this world, but the text, in its misleading King James Version, was quoted endlessly to show the folly of any kind of social, cultural, or political “mission.”) New mood, new mission: now the mission would try to snatch souls from the world, not to bring the kingdom of God into the world. This second mood contributed to the cultural movement that called itself the “Enlightenment.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Yet the great opening sequence of the Bible—the creation of heaven and earth and man and woman; the call of Abraham; the slavery in Egypt and the subsequent Exodus; the journey to the land of promise—all this seems to indicate that ancient Israel, at least in the view of those who compiled and edited the scriptures, was playing a critical role in a great drama, the drama of the Creator himself and his creation. But the drama wasn’t over yet. At the end of Deuteronomy, Israel is warned about rebellion, exile, and death. At the end of Chronicles, the exile was still continuing. At the end of Malachi, God was promising to come back and sort everything out, but it hadn’t happened yet. One cannot imagine Shakespeare playing this trick, working his way through the stages of a plot and then stopping in the middle without tying the narrative strands together and reaching a resolution. Israel and Adam In particular, the scriptures tell the story of how Israel went into exile . In a sense, the whole story is about little else. The larger story, in which there is a single great “exile” in Babylon, is shot through at point after point with other “exiles,” which lead the eye up to the eventual one. Abraham goes down into Egypt and nearly gets into deep trouble. So does his son Isaac. Isaac’s younger son, Jacob, escaping his brother’s anger, runs away and stays in the land of his ancestors fourteen years before returning to the territory God had promised to Abraham. Jacob’s family goes into Egypt to escape a famine, and the Israelites remain there for four centuries, ending up as slaves, before the dramatic events of Passover and Exodus through which they are set free and led at last to their promised land. Once there, they struggle for survival and independence. Even when that is briefly attained under the kingship of David, an internal rebellion forces David himself to flee into exile before returning to resume his throne. Then, after the kingdom is divided into “north” (with its own non-Davidic kings) and “south” (still under Davidic rule), the northern tribes are captured by the Assyrians and taken away, never to return. The southern tribes—Benjamin, Judah, and those Levites who live among them—are left. But they too eventually succumb to the might of Babylon, and most of them are taken there as captives. The Temple is destroyed. According to Ezekiel, this is made possible because YHWH himself has abandoned it to its fate, following the shocking behavior of priests and people alike. The Babylonian captivity is what is normally referred to as “the exile.” What follows is in a way the most puzzling moment of all. After two generations, some of the exiles in Babylon return to their land. They rebuild the Temple.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  that her iniquity is pardoned. (Isa 40:1-2) The discomforted are comforted. This is not a word in a vacuum or a general theory about a gracious God. The poet responds precisely and concretely. He responds to Jeremiah’s Rachel who refuses to be comforted (Jer 31:15). He speaks directly to and against the poems of Lamentations that found “none to comfort” (Lam 1:2, 16, 17, 21). To find comfort in exile is not thinkable, but in this remarkable beginning the poet refuses all that. The free God is ending that whole situation and now enacts an amnesty that was unthinkable before the speech. That speech let Israel know what she did not know before he spoke. Hope is created by speech, and before that speech Israel was always hopeless. Indeed, are we not all? Before we are addressed, we know no future and no possible newness. Where there is no speech we must live in despair. And exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God’s speech has been banished. But the prophetic poet asserts hope precisely in exile. The hope announced is not a nice feeling or a new inner spiritual state. Rather, it is grounded in a radical discernment of Israel’s worldly situation. The poet employs a radical political announcement twice. First he instructs the watchman to announce a new reality: Get you up to the high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah,

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “So, when we make love, devushka ?” “You sleazebag,” Niki said, pointing her fork at him. “I ought to tell Rena.” “Anyway, Astrid’s got a boyfriend,” Yvonne said. “An artist. He lives in New York.” I’d told her all about Paul Trout. I’d finally picked up his letters from Yellow Brick Road in Hollywood, on the same street where I pulled the knife on the girl who thought I was Wendy. Niki took me there after school, on the way to meeting some guys who needed a singer. I felt bad I hadn’t written to him before, I’d thought of it many times, but I was afraid. Chances were he never looked back. On the drive into Hollywood, I looked nervously at the envelope, marked Hold for Paul Trout. The hope implied. It was a mistake already. I thought of a song Rena played that I hated like death, “Love the One You’re With.” It was the tune life kept forcing on me, and yet there I was, hope fluttering like a bird in my hand. The shop was tiny, more crowded even than Rena’s. Comic books everywhere. Niki and I leafed through the stacks. Some of the comics were jokey, like Zippy the Pinhead and old Mr. Natural. Others were dark and expressionist, Sam Spade meets Murnau. There were racks of homemade magazines full of bad poets. Comics in Japanese, many of them pornographic. Tongue-in-cheek stories of career girls and supermodels drawn in the Lichtenstein pop style. A Jewish rodent trapped in a Blackshirt paranoid nightmare. They sold everything from the standard DCs to locally drawn, Xeroxed, staple-spined ’zines. While Niki read a gangster girl tale, I went to the counter, told myself there’d be nothing for me. A skinny guy in a burgundy bowling shirt doodled on the counter, pale arms covered with tattoos. I cleared my throat until he looked up. His eyes were pot-hazed. “I’m a friend of Paul Trout’s. Did he leave anything for me?” He smiled a little shyly, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “He went to New York, didn’t you hear?” He rummaged under the counter and came up with two letters, the envelopes so heavily illustrated you could barely see the Yellow Brick Road address. The outside was marked Hold for Astrid Magnussen. “No return address?” “He moves a lot. Don’t be surprised.” I left one for Paul, illustrating my life on Ripple Street. Trashpicking, our living room. I didn’t know what else to do with it. He was gone. In the corner booth at the rock ’n’ roll Denny’s on Sunset, I sat with Niki as she negotiated with the boys from the band, two bleached blonds and a hyperactive brunet—the drummer, I knew without asking. I was afraid to open the letters. Instead, I sketched some of the other customers. Goth girls in black tights and black ratted hair, conspiring over Diet Pepsis and double orders of onion rings.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Somme, Battle of the (1916), 187 soothing, arousal and, 115 Sophocles, 334 South Africa, 215–16, 335, 351 Southborough Report, shell-shock diagnosis rejected by, 187 Southwick, Steve, 30 Sowell, Nancy, 293 speech centers (brain), 42, 43 Sperry, Roger, 51 Spinazzola, Joseph, 158, 341, 353 Spitzer, Robert, 144 Sroufe, Alan, 162–63, 168 Steel, Kathy, 283 Sterman, Barry, 317 Stern, Jessica, 7 Stickgold, Robert, 262, 263 stimuli: adjustment to, 32 hypersensitivity to, see threat, hypersensitivity to Story of My Life, The (Keller), 236 Strange Situation, 117 stress: gene expression and, 154 immune function and, 242 see also trauma stress hormones, 30, 42, 46, 60, 61, 66–67, 160, 164, 219, 235 structural dissociation model, 283 structures, in psychomotor therapy, 300–10 subcortical brain structures, 97 submissiveness, 99, 220 subpersonalities, 282–97 substance abuse, 70, 122, 148, 153, 227, 268 neurofeedback and, 329–30 withdrawal and, 32, 329 suicidal behavior and thoughts, 24, 28, 90, 122, 140, 143, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 258, 289, 318, 334 suicide by cop, 184 Summit, Roland, 133, 138 Suomi, Stephen, 155–56, 162 superior temporal cortex, 388n sympathetic nervous system (SNS), 79, 84, 84, 211, 268–69 Szyf, Moshe, 154 Ttai chi, 209–10 talk therapy (talking cure), 22, 27, 36, 72, 183–84, 232–39, 255 experience vs. telling in, 237–38 TAQ, see Traumatic Antecedents Questionaire (TAQ) Tavistock Clinic, 111 Teicher, Martin, 142, 151, 418n temporal lobe abnormalities, 418n temporal parietal junction, 102 tension, in trauma survivors, 102–3, 267–68 terrorism: PTSD from, 350 see also September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks testosterone, 165 thalamocortical networks, 419n thalamus, 60, 70–71, 178, 326 theater, in trauma recovery, 216, 332–34, 336–48, 357 conflict and, 337 emotions and, 337, 346–47 feeling safe in, 338–39 Theater of War, 334 Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 108–9 therapists, in trauma recovery, 214–15, 246 theta waves, 323, 328, 419n Thorazine (chlorpromazine), 22–23 thoughts, physical sensations and, 211 threat: confusion of safety and, 87, 99, 121, 166 hypersensitivity to, 2, 11, 17, 33, 45–47, 68, 86, 97, 104, 145, 160, 163, 165, 198–99, 227, 267, 312, 329, 330, 410n social engagement as response to, 82–83, 84, 90 whole-body response to, 53–55, 53, 60–62, 61 see also fight/flight response; freeze response (immobilization) time, sense of, 274 Tourette, Gilles de la, 179 trance (hypnagogic) states, 119, 189, 240, 304, 307, 328 transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), 419n trauma: articulation of, 234–36 brain changes from, 2–3, 21, 59, 349 growing awareness of, 349 as most urgent public health issue, 150, 151–52, 358 narratives of, 7, 43, 46, 70, 132, 137, 177, 178, 196, 221, 222, 233, 252, 254–55, 263–64; see also traumatic memory physiological changes from, 2–3, 21, 53, 53, 72 prevalence of, 1 reactivation of, 2 risk of, socioeconomic status and, 350 trauma, healing from, 205–31 animal therapy in, 82, 152–53, 215 ARC model in, 403n art and, 244–45 body therapies for, 3, 26, 72, 88, 91, 209–10, 217–19, 230–31, 247; see also specific therapies calming and relaxation techniques in, 133, 205–6; see also breathing; mindfulness; yoga CBT in, 184, 196, 222–23 community in, 215–16, 246, 333–36, 357

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  energy, Moses takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people; he has not yet grown cynical with the “double speak” of imperial talk and so dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking. The affirmation whispered in the barracks is that Moses is “up front” about his commitments, and Pharaoh is not going to like it. Seen at a distance, this bald statement is high theology. It is the gospel; God is for us . In an empire no god is for anyone. They are old gods who don’t care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues. For Moses and Israel, energizing comes not out of sociological strategy or hunches about social dynamic, but out of the freedom of God. And so the urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who God is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points in human community. Third, the great Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1-18) and Song of Miriam (Exod 15:21) are the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated songs in Israel. The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free one and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom. In his recent typology, David Noel Freedman places this song at the head of the period of militant Mosaic Yahwism. [16] By a study of divine names, he observes the repeated use of the name, the very name of freedom Egypt couldn’t tolerate and slaves couldn’t anticipate. The speaking of the name already provides a place in which an alternative community can live. So prophets might reflect on the name of God, on what his name is, on what it means, on where it can be spoken, and by whom it might be spoken. There is something direct and primitive about the name in these most primal songs of faith and freedom. Egypt is inclined to hedge the name with adjectives and all manner of qualifiers, but the community of justice practicing the freedom of God cannot wait for all that. It is of course the case that Moses dominates the tradition and surely has crowded Miriam out of the picture. It is likely that the Song of Moses in Exod 15:1 quotes the Song of Miriam, so that she has priority in the tradition. In the final form of the text it may be that masculine power has crowded out her earlier prominence. In recent time there has been an important scholarly effort to

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  “Take him away!” they shouted out all together. “Release Barabbas for us!” (Barabbas had been thrown into prison because of an uprising that had taken place in the city, and for murder.) . . . Pilate gave his verdict that their request should be granted. He released the man they asked for, the one who’d been thrown into prison because of rebellion and murder, and gave Jesus over to their demands. (23:18–19, 24–25) In case we missed the point, Luke says it again, this time through the strange conversation between the two brigands crucified alongside Jesus: One of the bad characters who was hanging there began to insult him. “Aren’t you the Messiah?” he said. “Rescue yourself—and us, too!” But the other one told him off. “Don’t you fear God?” he said. “You’re sharing the same fate that he is! In our case it’s fair enough; we’re getting exactly what we asked for. But this fellow hasn’t done anything out of order.” (23:39–41) This time Luke takes the whole question a giant step forward. Jesus is dying the death that others deserved and he did not. The man who has seen that strange but powerful truth then turns to Jesus himself: “Jesus,” he went on, “remember me when you finally become king.” (23:42) This in turn elicits the famous response from Jesus, promising him, as he had promised the disciples at the Last Supper, that the kingdom would be arriving sooner than anyone had expected, because Jesus’s death would bring it about. “Paradise” here is not, of course, the final resting place of either Jesus or the man asking the question. Nor does Jesus’s “kingdom” consist in people “going to heaven after they die,” though this passage has often been mistakenly read that way. Luke is most emphatic, in his gospel and then over and over again in Acts, that the ultimate destination of God’s people is the resurrection. But “paradise,” the interim state, the blissful garden of refreshment prior to that final destination, will be won that very day for all who trust in Jesus, because through his death, the innocent dying the death of the guilty, the sovereign rule of God will come to birth in a whole new way, with results as personal and intimate as they are cosmic and global: “I’m telling you the truth,” replied Jesus, “you’ll be with me in paradise, this very day.” (23:42–43)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  If we are talking about Jesus winning the victory over the dark powers and thereby starting the long-awaited revolution, it will be much easier for people to believe it if we are working to show what we mean in art and music, in song and story. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “It is love that believes the resurrection,” and hearts can be wooed by glorious or poignant music, art, dance, or drama into believing for a moment that a different world might after all be possible, a world in which resurrection, forgiveness, healing, and hope abound. Gifts that stir the imagination can frequently unblock channels of understanding that had remained stubbornly clogged when addressed by reasoned words. And those who are working for justice and beauty, just like those who are working to bring a fresh new articulation of the good news so that people may believe, must themselves have the same things etched, perhaps nailed, into their own lives. It will be painful. That is part of the point, not that we seek the pain, but that we seek to follow Jesus. Holiness and mission are two sides of the same coin. Both involve bringing the reign of Jesus to bear in places where up to now the powers have had held sway. The powers will not give in without a fight. But, exactly as with Jesus himself and exactly as he told his first followers, the fight itself and the suffering it involves (of whatever sort) are not incidental. The insight at the heart of Jesus’s own vocation was that suffering would not simply be the dark tunnel through which Israel would pass to God’s future. It would somehow be the means by which that future would be achieved. Most Christians today do not see things like this. Once we realize that we are part of the revolutionary movement that began at the cross, it may become clear once again, as it was to the first generation of Jesus’s followers. Cruciform Mission The message of the cross, as I have outlined it in this book, thus challenges the normal ideas of eschatology. If we start with the idea simply of “going to heaven,” what the New Testament says about the cross won’t quite fit, but if we start instead with the new creation, it all makes sense.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  There is no place for people who want to go charging off to implement some social, cultural, or political agenda but who think that this absolves them from the challenge to personal holiness. There is always a danger of using large public issues to stop our ears against the nagging problems within—just as there is an opposite danger, of being so obsessed with our own struggles for sanctity that we fail to notice the plight of the poor. Holiness is multidimensional. And holiness will always be shaped by the cross. Paul speaks of “putting to death” the impulses and deeds that bubble up from within us and distort our genuine human vocation. His letters are full of sharp practical counsel of this sort. Financial corruption, sexual immorality, evil and malicious speaking—all must be killed off (see, for instance, Col. 3:1–11). Easier said than done, of course, but once more the victory of the cross is central. And note carefully: this is not a matter of saying, “Now that you’re a Christian, you must follow the rules.” Rules matter, but they matter because they are one of the guardrails within the much larger vocation, to worship the true God and work for his kingdom. Every time you are tempted to sin, you are being asked to hand over to some alien force a little bit of your own God-given power, which is supposed to be exercised over yourself, your life, and the parts of the world you touch. You are being drawn into the sphere in which some “power” is at work, under the control of the satan. At that moment you are also being called (did you but know it) to exercise your true power as a genuine human being, to practice your vocation as part of the royal priesthood. Sin is a distraction from our true tasks, a distortion (at best) of our true vocation. It keeps the powers in power. Resisting it—especially when we have allowed habit to take us effortlessly in that direction—will be difficult, sometimes painful, sometimes profoundly depressing. That is part of taking up the cross. When you or I, faced with a major miscarriage of justice or mercy in our world or a major crisis in global politics or in the life of our own community, can praise the God we know in Jesus as the one who has already won the victory over all the powers of evil, we are able to go to our work, in whatever sphere it is, in a totally different spirit from the one full of fear and frustration that might otherwise accompany us. The combined ministry of intercession and “glory,” of which Paul speaks in Romans 8, is ours for the taking, given in the gift of the Spirit, though always—Paul warns us explicitly—in the context of suffering.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  liturgic imagination by an appeal to the novel of Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina. [19] In the novel, the key character, Carlos Rueda, is visited with “a peculiar miraculous gift,” the capacity to create futures by acts of anticipatory imagination. Cavanaugh summarizes: What is especially astonishing is that Carlos’s gift is more than just the gift of seeing; his stories about people can actually alter reality. Men appear in the middle of the night to give back babies snatched with their mothers. Holes open in solid concrete walls, and tortured prisoners walk through to freedom. Carlos’s imagination actually finds people who have disappeared. . . . Confronted with evidence of the miraculous, Carlos’s friends nevertheless remain skeptical, convinced that Carlos cannot confront tanks with stories, helicopters with mere imagination. They can only see the conflict in terms of fantasy versus reality. Carlos, on the other hand, rightly grasps that the contest is not between imagination and the real, but between two types of imagination, that of the generals and that of their opponents. The nightmare world of torture and disappearance of bodies is inseparable from the generals’ imagination of what Argentina and Argentines are. Carlos realizes that “he was being dreamed by [General] Gusman and the others, that he had been living inside their imagination.” [20] Cavanaugh then quotes from the novel itself: They remember a time before the regime, but they do not take their imaginations beyond memory because hoping is too painful. So long as we accept what the men in the car imagine, we’re finished. . . . We have to believe in the power of imagination because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs. [21] Cavanaugh then concludes in a reflection on the novel: To refer to torture as the “imagination of the state” as I have done is obviously not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscrib-ing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state. Likewise, in Imagining Argentina, Carlos’s imagination is manifested in real effects; escaping the imagination of the state means that bodies go free. The imagination is defined as nothing less than “the magnificent cause of being.” Thornton’s novel provides us with a glimpse of what it means to make the odd claim that the Eucharist is the key to Christian resistance to torture. To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God’s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ’s corpus verum, they resist the state’s ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture. [22] Hardly anything remains to be said about imagination as theological force. Except to note that clearly the need for Eucharistic imagination in the United

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Birth to the Barren A second image is birth to the barren one. The notion of “barrenness” of course refers to a biological problem of having no children. It is clear, however, that the motif also is treated metaphorically, as in Isa 54:1-3, to refer to a loss of a future and therefore to hopelessness. Thus “barrenness” can refer to a variety of social circumstances; conversely, “birth” then comes to be taken metaphorically as the opening of a future and the generation of an alternative by the miraculous power of God. The notion of barrenness may be taken as a condition of despair in our society. Thus, for example, “eunuchs” of both genders have their manhood and womanhood taken away by the pressure and demand of the corporation, the academy, or the church. Indeed, it is clear that professors and pastors often have their energies and family lives taken from them just as effectively as corporate types. They have insufficient energy to bear or to beget, and who wants to birth new children for Babylon? Our history always begins with the barren, with Sarah (Gen 11:30), with Rebekah (Gen 25:21), with Rachel (Gen 29:31), with Hannah (1 Sam 1:2), and with Elizabeth (Luke 1:7). Among those, always as good as dead (Heb 11:12), the wondrous gift is given. The inability to bear is a curious thing, and we know that for all our science the reasons most often are historical, symbolic, and interpersonal. It is often news—good news, doxology —that brings the new future to effect and the new energy to birth. So the inversion is the occasion for the poet to speak Israel into a new future: Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; bring forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in travail! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord. (Isa 54:1) The oldest promises are again set in motion, and Babylon cannot stop them. Whenever the issues are set so that it is God’s promises against Babylon, it is no contest. Babylon cannot stop the energizing of God. He will keep even the promises to mother Sarah. Nourishment A third image is that of nourishment. If you eat the bread of Babylon for very long, you will be destroyed. Some liked the bread of Babylon, and they became Babylonians; but Israelites who are exiles will not accommodate that imperial bread. So the poet in his statement about alternative bread dismantles the Babylonian bakery: Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, . . . buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That is clear. It hasn’t gone away. It hasn’t, as some suppose, been displaced by all this talk of the covenant, of Israel’s vocation. Nor, however, should we forget that the problem with “sin” was not just the breaking of moral laws, but idolatry and the consequent failure to grasp the truly human vocation and reflect God’s glory into the world: “All sinned, and fell short of God’s glory” (3:23). Sin matters; so, behind it, does idolatry. All this must be dealt with if God is to put the world right. But, second, there is the problem of God’s faithfulness to the covenant. Faced with the problem of idolatry and sin (1:18–2:16), God called Israel to be the light of the world (2:17–24), having established by his covenant with Abraham that he would give him a worldwide family (4:1–25). It would be very strange if God made solemn promises to rescue the world through Israel, through Abraham’s family, and then responded to Israel’s faithlessness by himself being faithless to those promises. Romans 4 is all about the covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. It is not a detached statement about someone in the ancient scriptures who was “justified by faith.” It is not simply a “proof from scripture” of the “doctrine” that Paul has stated in Romans 3. Abraham is not simply an “example” of either the way God’s grace operates or the way some humans have faith. When Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 in Romans 4:3 (“Abraham believed God, and it was calculated in his favor, putting him in the right”), he invokes the entire chapter, as his frequent references and quotations make clear. To be sure, Paul insists that Abraham’s faith (in the God who raises the dead) is in its essence the same as Christian faith (that God raised Jesus from the dead). But this takes place within the larger covenantal context. Genesis 15, after all, is where God establishes with Abraham the covenant: he will give him a family of many nations, which involves not just the single “promised land,” but the whole world . That is what Paul says in Romans 4:13, implying that he is reading Genesis in the light of psalms such as Psalms 2 and 72, where the “inheritance” is extended under the Messiah’s rule from a single piece of territory to the entire creation. And this in turn depends, as he says in 4:5, on taking the Abrahamic promise to mean that God would “justify the ungodly,” in other words, that God would take “sinners” from throughout the world and bring them, forgiven, into his family. (The vital note of forgiveness of sins is emphasized in the quote from Ps.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Some Greeks had come to Jerusalem for Passover, and they wanted to see Jesus. Instead of going to meet them, however (perhaps he did, but John does not say so), Jesus made a comment that implied that he saw their request as a sign that it was time for the great victory to be won, the victory through which non-Jews would be set free from the dark power that had hitherto enslaved them, free to worship the one true God. “This is the moment,” he says, “for the son of man to be glorified. . . . Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains all by itself. If it dies, though, it will produce lots of fruit” (12:23–24). And then, after another interruption, he explains the point: Now comes the judgment of this world! Now this world’s ruler is going to be thrown out! And when I’ve been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself. (12:31–32) In other words, Jesus will die on the cross; this will be the way in which his glory is fully revealed (a major theme in the gospel); and it will also be the victory over “this world’s ruler,” the dark power that has held the nations captive. This is Jesus’s answer to the arrival of the Greeks. Once he has died on the cross, “all people” will be free to come to him and so discover the living and true God. This is the secret of the “Gentile mission,” which began with Peter’s visit to Cornelius in Acts 10 and continued spectacularly, in practice and also in theory, in the work of Paul. People have often imagined that Paul’s mission to the non-Jewish world was undertaken simply because, finding his Jewish contemporaries unwilling to stomach such an odd message, he was desperate to win a few followers, so he went to non-Jews instead, offering them a less demanding message. That demeaning analysis misses the point. The Gentile mission was neither a pragmatic reaction to supposed Jewish intransigence nor a mere opportunistic attempt to boost recruitment for a strange new sect. From the earliest writings we have, it was seen as the direct and necessary result of the creator God overthrowing on the cross the powers that had kept the nations captive. Up to now the nations had been enslaved; the cross had opened the gates to freedom.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Of the eighty bereaved men and women I had studied in my research before seeing Irene, not one was like her. None suffered the same constellation of recent (and cumulative) losses—husband, father, mother, friend, godson. None had been traumatized in just the way she had by the earlier loss of a dearly loved sibling. None had had the interdependent relationship she had had with her husband. None had watched a spouse deconstitute, bit by bit, cruelly devoured by a brain tumor. None had been a physician who understood all too well the nature of her husband’s pathology and its prognosis. No, Irene was unique and required a unique therapy, one she and I had to construct together. And it wasn’t that she and I constructed a therapy and then set about employing it—quite the contrary: the project of constructing a new, unique therapy was the therapy itself. I looked at my watch. Where was Irene? I walked to the door of the café and peered out. There she was, a block away, walking hand in hand with a man who must be Kevin. Irene and a man hand in hand. Was it possible? I thought of all the countless hours I had spent trying to reassure her that she was not doomed to being alone, that ultimately there would be another man in her life. God, she had been stubborn! And the opportunities had been legion: early in her bereavement there had been a long queue of attractive and appropriate suitors. She had rejected each man quickly for one or more of what seemed an endless list of reasons. “I don’t dare love again because I can’t endure another loss” (that attitude, always at the top of the list, resulted in her rejecting out of hand any man even slightly older than herself or any man not in the best possible physical condition). “I don’t want to doom any man by loving him.” “I refuse to betray Jack.” She compared every man unfavorably to Jack, who was the perfect and predestined mate for her (he had known her family; had been hand-chosen by her brother; and represented a last link with her dead brother, her father, and her dying mother). Furthermore, Irene was convinced that there was no man who could ever understand her, no man who would not, like Frost’s farmer, bring the shovel into the kitchen. Except, possibly, a member of the society of the recently bereaved, someone who had an acute awareness of his or her ultimate destination and the preciousness of life.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  To announce God’s kingdom is to say that, as in Isaiah 52:7–12, God himself is coming back to display his Glory in person and in power. Each of these three themes can be shown to be characteristic of Jesus’s public teaching and activity, his healings (particularly the exorcisms), his celebrations with outcasts and “sinners,” his call of the Twelve (as an obvious sign of reconstituting the people Israel around himself), and his telling of stories that seemed to have an obvious reference to what God was doing as a way of explaining what he himself was doing. To be sure, a lot of this was oblique, and necessarily so. We must not try to shortcircuit the historical investigation, pass by the Jewish context and the messianic overtones, and jump straight into a picture of Jesus “claiming to be God.” Many theologians and preachers have tried that; it leaves vital questions unasked, let alone unanswered, and it all too easily collapses into a different narrative altogether. When, however, we put the bits of the puzzle back together, the overtones of Isaiah 52 are clear at numerous points, especially when Jesus himself is making his final journey to Jerusalem and telling stories about the master who comes back—an obvious allusion to the much-anticipated return of Israel’s God after the long years of exile. In any case, what matters for our purposes is that Jesus chose Passover to do what had to be done and indeed to suffer what had to be suffered. This alone already tells us that he had in mind a highly dramatic and story-laden climax to his public career: this, it seems, was how he believed Israel’s God would become king. With Passover as the context and his repeated clashes with hostile forces both human and nonhuman during his public career, there is every reason to suppose that he saw the task as paralleling the liberation of Israel from Egypt, an event preceded by clashes with Pharaoh and his entourage and by the “plagues” visited on Egypt. We do not need to propose exact typological matches for elements in the Exodus narrative and elements in Jesus’s work and teaching. Indeed, to do so might be to miss the point. What matters is that the entire Passover context made sense of the entire event that Jesus envisaged as he went up to Jerusalem for that final visit. Passover said, “Freedom—now!” and “Kingdom—now!” This seems to be exactly what Jesus wanted to convey or, better, what Jesus believed would happen. He was not, after all, offering a new theory for people to get their minds around. He was announcing that something was happening and that it would happen immediately, an event through which freedom and kingdom would become realities in a whole new way.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  I like to believe that once our society truly focuses on the needs of children, all forms of social support for families—a policy that remains so controversial in this country—will gradually come to seem not only desirable but also doable. What difference would it make if all American children had access to high-quality day care where parents could safely leave their children as they went off to work or school? What would our school systems look like if all children could attend well-staffed preschools that cultivated cooperation, self-regulation, perseverance, and concentration (as opposed to focusing on passing tests, which will likely happen once children are allowed to follow their natural curiosity and desire to excel, and are not shut down by hopelessness, fear, and hyperarousal)? I have a family photograph of myself as a five-year-old, perched between my older (obviously wiser) and younger (obviously more dependent) siblings. In the picture I proudly hold up a wooden toy boat, grinning from ear to ear: “See what a wonderful kid I am and see what an incredible boat I have! Wouldn’t you love to come and play with me?” All of us, but especially children, need such confidence—confidence that others will know, affirm, and cherish us. Without that we can’t develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: “This is what I believe in; this is what I stand for; this is what I will devote myself to.” As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value. But if we feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. In order to have a healthy society we must raise children who can safely play and learn. There can be no growth without curiosity and no adaptability without being able to explore, through trial and error, who you are and what matters to you. Currently more than 50 percent of the children served by Head Start have had three or more adverse childhood experiences like those included in the ACE study: incarcerated family members, depression, violence, abuse, or drug use in the home, or periods of homelessness.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  First Peter explains this in considerable detail, perhaps because the audience of that sparkling little letter had somehow imagined that the Messiah had done all the suffering, so that there was no more for them to face. The book of Revelation emphasizes the same point in its own ways. At one level all this continues to be perplexing, especially when we ourselves are facing that suffering (in other words, when the problem ceases to be merely theoretical and becomes urgent and personal). But when we pause for a moment we can, I think, glimpse something of why all this should be necessary. It has to do with Jesus’s own sense of vocation and with the redefinition of power itself which he modeled, embodied, and exemplified. Jesus was not the kind of revolutionary who would call for twelve legions of angels, sweep all his enemies away in a moment, and leave nothing to do thereafter. As we have seen throughout this book, the revolution he accomplished was the victory of a strange new power, the power of covenant love, a covenant love winning its victory not over suffering, but through suffering. This meant, inevitably, that the victory would have to be implemented in the same way, proceeding by the slow road of love rather than the quick road of sudden conquest. That is part of what the Sermon on the Mount was all about. Did we really imagine that, while Jesus would win his victory by suffering, self-giving love, we would implement that same victory by arrogant, self- aggrandizing force of arms? (Perhaps we did. After all, James and John, as close to Jesus as anyone, made exactly this mistake in Luke 9:54 and again in Mark 10:35–40. Perhaps even Jesus’s mother thought the same way; her great Magnificat, in Luke 1:46–55, sounds quite like a battle hymn.) Once you understand the kind of revolution Jesus was accomplishing, you understand why it would then go on being necessary for it to be implemented step by step, not all at one single sweep, and why those steps have to be, every one of them, steps of the same generous love that took Jesus to the cross. Love will always suffer. If the church tries to win victories either all in a rush or by steps taken in some other spirit, it may appear to succeed for a while. Think of the pomp and “glory” of the late medieval church. But the “victory” will be hollow and will leave all kinds of problems in its wake. I think many, if not most, Christians understand this instinctively, without needing to see the theological or biblical underpinnings. Such people do not need a book like this to explain it all to them. One might as well give someone a flashlight to go and see if the sun had risen.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the first of these passages Paul explores the inner dynamic of suffering. This is how it works, so to speak, inside the person concerned: We also celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope. Hope, in its turn, does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us. (5:3–5) But then, in the other passage, he explains that sharing the Messiah’s sufferings is the means by which, already in the present and then ultimately in the future, those who belong to him will share his rule in the new creation: If we’re children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, and fellow heirs with the Messiah, as long as we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. This is how I work it out. The sufferings we go through in the present time are not worth putting in the scale alongside the glory that is going to be unveiled for us. Yes: creation itself is on tiptoe with expectation, eagerly awaiting the moment when God’s children will be revealed. Creation, you see, was subjected to pointless futility, not of its own volition, but because of the one who placed it in this subjection, in the hope that creation itself would be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. Let me explain. We know that the entire creation is groaning together, and going through labor pains together, up until the present time. Not only so: we too, we who have the first fruits of the spirit’s life within us, are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body. We were saved, you see, in hope. But hope isn’t hope if you can see it! Who hopes for what they can see? But if we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it eagerly—but also patiently. (8:17–25) This rich, vivid portrayal of the present time—with creation groaning in expectation like a pregnant woman about to give birth, and with the Messiah’s people groaning within themselves as they long for their new resurrection bodies—is perhaps the finest description in the New Testament not only of what it means to share the Messiah’s sufferings, but also of why that is necessary.