Joy

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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He has made himself a grave. It is a skeletal coracle of slim ash poles covered with a wet blanket sprouting with mustard and grass. He’d scattered the seeds on the wool and waited for them to grow. This morning he toiled like a tortoise with the shell on his forehead and shoulders, took it out to the wood, arranged the blanket over it and lay on the ground inside. He has no tobacco. He cannot smoke. He can barely move. He has been here for hours, shivering with cold, lying in wait for hawks that would not come. It is a vigil, an ordeal, just as those long nights with the hawk. Another thunderstorm crosses the Ridings. The sky is rusty water and the trees have blurred to ink. Fat raindrops hammer on the blanket and soak through his steaming clothes; there is wet wool and sweat and the electric scent of the storm carried in with the rising wind. He is closer to them now, those long dead men who understood him. He lies in a grave like them. He holds his breath as poachers walk past, men who know the forest in all its perfect parts, men who have the instinctive ability to read the landscape. They do not see him. He has become invisible. It is something like a miracle. The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen. 21 Fear It was always there, kneeling by Mabel on her prey, that the thoughts came, when I wondered how I could be doing this, how I could be hunting at all. I hate killing things. I’m loath to tread on spiders and get laughed at for rescuing flies. But now I understood for the first time what bloodthirstiness was all about. It was only when I was aligned with the hawk’s eye that it made sense, but then it made more sense than anything else in the world. When I saw birds fly overhead I’d turn my head and follow them with a kind of longing.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Knots and lines. Material reassurances. I play out fifteen feet more creance and stow the rest of it deep in a zipped-up pocket of my hawking waistcoat to keep it secure. Then I pull her leash free from the swivel and tuck it into another pocket. Hawking waistcoats, like those of fishermen or photographers, are hardly clothes at all, just pockets hung in rows. The one at my right hip is lined in vinyl, and inside it are three dead day-old chicks, each skinned and torn roughly in half. ‘Sit there – on you go.’ The hawk hops onto the rail of the wooden veranda and turns to face me in a low boxer’s crouch. I step back six feet, put half a chick in my glove, extend my arm and whistle. There is no hesitation. There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove. When she has finished eating we do it again, and this time I stand a little further away. Eight feet: three wingbeats, another reward. For a creature with the tactical intelligence of a goshawk this game is child’s play. The third time I put her on the railing she is already airborne as I turn my back: a skip of my heart, a hastily extended glove and she is at my side, wolfing down the rest of her food, crest raised, wings dropped, eyes blazing, a thing of perfect triumph. I thread her leash back through the swivel and untie the creance. That will do for today. She flew perfectly. And I’m so pleased with how the lesson has gone I start singing on the way home. I serenade my hawk with ‘My Favourite Things’, with whiskers and kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string. It strikes me that this must be happiness. That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps I am allergic to something. I wipe the tears away and go to make more tea in the kitchen, where a dead white rabbit is defrosting like a soft toy in an evidence bag, and the striplight flickers ominously, undecided whether to illuminate the room or cease working entirely. These calling-off lessons teach the hawk to fly immediately to an upraised glove and a whistle.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I opened the curtains the next morning. The brightness of the room made me clearer, which concerned her for a while. But when a broad stripe of sunlight fell across her back she raised her feathers to greet it. Now, standing in a shallow bath next to her perch, she nibbles her toes, takes precise and tiny bites of water. She jumps back onto her perch and begins to preen herself, contorting her body into the stylised shapes of Japanese paintings of courtly goshawks. She runs her beak through one feather after another in quick succession: the sound is of paper being scored, or a pack of cards being shuffled Then she stretches one broad wing behind her, drags it slowly back over her sunlit tail, and rouses, squeaking happily through her nose. I watch all this with a ravenous, gulping-down-champagne sense of joy. Look how happy she is, I think. This room is not a dungeon and I am not a torturer. I am a beneficent figure, one who crouches and stoops in anxious genuflection, bearing delicious treats of steak in my hand. It is hubris. Less than an hour later I am certain that my hawk hates me and I am the worst falconer in the history of the world. No matter that Mabel is far tamer than any of the boys or books had told me she would be. I’ve comprehensively failed her. The hawk is ruined. I know this is true because she doesn’t want to be hooded. Until now she has accepted the hood with equanimity. Earlier today I sensed a little thrum of disquiet in her heart and now it has exploded into outright rebellion. I bring the hood up to her head and she dodges it. Snakes her head. Contracts it into her neck. Ducks and runs. I know why this is happening. To begin with the hood was a welcome refuge, but now she’s decided I’m harmless it is merely something that stops her seeing, and she wants to see. Now, unhappy, unsettled, lifting one foot then the other, the hawk looks about the room for somewhere to go. Her mood is contagious; my heart flutters tightly, heavily in my chest. I have lost the ability to disappear. I try to remove myself by listening to the cricket on the radio but can’t understand what the commentator is saying. I can only turn my attention from my unhappy hawk by thinking about the hood I’m holding. It is all she is thinking of too. I remember hauling this hood out of my bag while looking for a pen before a university seminar a few months ago. ‘What’s that?’ asked a colleague. ‘A falcon hood,’ I said, not looking up. ‘Have you brought it in to show it to people?’ ‘No. It was just in my bag.’ ‘But can I look at it?’ ‘Absolutely, go ahead.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘Now, don’t let on about it yet, for it ain’t been properly settled. But your pal - Kitty - she’s due to leave the Palace, ain’t she, in a week or so?’ I nodded. ‘Well, she won’t be going - not for a good while, anyway. Uncle has offered her a sparkling new contract, till the New Year - said she was too good to lose to Broadstairs.’ The New Year! That was months away, months and months and weeks and weeks; I saw them all spread out before me, each one full of nights in Kitty’s dressing-room, and good-night kisses, and dreams. I gave a cry, I think; and Tony took a swig of Bass, complacently. Then Alice appeared, demanding to know what it was that must be talked about in whispers, and shrieked over, on the stairs ... ? I didn’t wait for Tony’s answer, I thundered down to the door and into the street, and ran to the station like a hoyden, with my hat flapping about my ears -because I had forgotten, after all, to pin it properly. I had hardly expected Kitty to swagger to Whitstable in her suit and her topper and her lavender gloves; but even so, when she stepped from the train and I saw that she was clad as a girl, and walked like a girl, with her plait fastened to the back of her head and a parasol over her arm, I felt a little pang of disappointment. This swiftly turned, however - as always - to desire, and then to pride, for she looked terribly smart and handsome on that dusty Whitstable platform. She kissed my cheek when I went up to her, and took my arm, and let me lead her from the station to our house, across the sea-front. She said, ‘Well! And this is where you were born, and grew up?’ ‘Oh yes! Look there: that building, beside the church, is our old school. Over there - see that house with the bicycle by the gate? - that’s where my cousins live. Here, look, on this step, I once fell down and cut my chin, and my sister held her handkerchief to it, the whole way home ...’ So I talked and pointed, and Kitty nodded, biting her lip. ‘How lucky you are!’ she said at last; and as she said it, she seemed to sigh. I had feared that the afternoon would be dismal and hard; in fact, it was merry. Kitty shook hands with everyone, and had a word for them all, such as, ‘You must be Davy, who works in the smack’, and ‘You must be Alice, who Nancy talks about so often, and is so proud of.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  We can easily follow him from place to place, on foot or on horseback, twenty or thirty miles a day, over green fields and barren rocks over hill and dale among flowers and thistles, under olive and fig-trees, pitching our tent for the night’s rest, ignoring the comforts of modern civilization, but delighting in the unfading beauties of God’s nature, reminded at every step of his wonderful dealings with his people, and singing the psalms of his servants of old. We may kneel at his manger in Bethlehem, the town of Judaea where Jacob buried his beloved Rachel, and a pillar, now a white mosque, marks her grave; where Ruth was rewarded for her filial devotion, and children may still be seen gleaning after the reapers in the grainfields, as she did in the field of Boaz; where his ancestor, the poet-king, was born and called from his father’s flocks to the throne of Israel; where shepherds are still watching the sheep as in that solemn night when the angelic host thrilled their hearts with the heavenly anthem of glory to God, and peace on earth to men of his good pleasure; where the sages from the far East offered their sacrifices in the name of future generations of heathen converts; where Christian gratitude has erected the oldest church in Christendom, the "Church of the Nativity," and inscribed on the solid rock in the "Holy Crypt," in letters of silver, the simple but pregnant inscription: "Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est." When all the surroundings correspond with the Scripture narrative, it is of small account whether the traditional grotto of the Nativity is the identical spot—though pointed out as such it would seem already in the middle of the second century.164

• From Educated (2018)

  tank could be safely removed with a cutting torch. Dad had devised a shortcut: an enormous skewer, eight feet tall, of thick iron. Dad would lift a car with the forklift, and Luke would guide him until the car’s tank was suspended directly over the spike. Then Dad would drop the forks. If all went well, the car would be impaled on the spike and gasoline would gush from the tank, streaming down the spike and into the flat-bottom container Dad had welded in place to collect it. By noon, they had drained somewhere between thirty and forty cars. Luke had collected the fuel in five-gallon buckets, which he began to haul across the yard to Dad’s flatbed. On one pass he stumbled, drenching his jeans in a gallon of gas. The summer sun dried the denim in a matter of minutes. He finished hauling the buckets, then went home for lunch. I remember that lunch with unsettling clarity. I remember the clammy smell of beef-and-potato casserole, and the jingle of ice cubes tumbling into tall glasses, which sweated in the summer heat. I remember Mother telling me I was on dish duty, because she was leaving for Utah after lunch to consult for another midwife on a complicated pregnancy. She said she might not make it home for dinner but there was hamburger in the freezer. I remember laughing the whole hour. Dad lay on the kitchen floor cracking jokes about an ordinance that had recently passed in our little farming village. A stray dog had bitten a boy and everyone was up in arms. The mayor had decided to limit dog ownership to two dogs per family, even though the attacking dog hadn’t belonged to anybody at all. “These genius socialists,” Dad said. “They’d drown staring up at the rain if you didn’t build a roof over them.” I laughed so hard at that my stomach ached. Luke had forgotten all about the gasoline by the time he and Dad walked back up the mountain and readied the cutting torch, but when he jammed the torch into his hip and struck flint to steel, flames burst from the tiny spark and engulfed his leg. The part we would remember, would tell and retell so many times it became family folklore, was that Luke was unable to get out of his gasoline-soaked jeans. That morning, like every morning, he had hitched up his trousers with a yard of baling twine, which is smooth and slippery, and needs a horseman’s knot to stay in place. His footwear didn’t help,

• From City of Night (1963)

  More than twenty years and seven books later, how do I feel about City of Night ? It thrills me—not only for myself but for the many lives it contains, those always remembered faces and voices—that within my lifetime this book, so excoriated when it first appeared, has come to be referred to frequently as a “modern classic.” And I no longer feel the guilt I battled so long, about the “real people” I thought I would “leave behind.” No—they are a permanent part of my life, of that part of me—the writer—who tells of his journey as a “youngman.” John Rechy Los Angeles, 1984 2 Times Square, New York, is an electric island floating on a larger island of lonesome parks and lonesome apartment houses and knifepointed buildings stretching Up. (I will think dazedly one night: Someday this city will tear its wharf-lined fringes from the ocean and soar in desperation to the Sky....) Times Square is the magnet for all the lonesome exiles jammed into this city.... And this is how I found that world of Times Square. In the incessantly running showers of the Sloane House YMCA the day I arrived in New York, the big hairy man made conversation with me; where am I from and what am I doing and am I working yet (“No? Good. I mean good that you dont have to be anywhere at a set time.”), and will I come to his room and he’ll buy hamburgers. Hes a merchant marine, tanned from a recent Voyage to somefarwhere—on his way now to Boston with I imagine a roll of money big enough to make me greedy. Unfairly, Im almost broke—$20.00 when I left Chicago, and one phone number what said nervously we must have lunch sometime. And no prospect of a job which will pay me before the money runs out. In the tiny cubicle-room facing the courtyard across which a lonesome youngman, also undoubtedly just arrived in the City, played a doleful guitar by his window, we sit eating oniony greaseburgers and ignoring the persistent sound of the running showers. For a moment, I think it’s the hurricane. Outside, in the hallway, doors open and close. The sound of feet walking up and down never stops. A hurried conversation outside, a door closes. Even before this man speaks it, I know that something of what Ive come to find in this city will soon be revealed in this room. “They dont call this Y the French Embassy for nothing,” the merchant marine laughs. He has sized me up slyly: broke and green in the big city—and he said: “You wouldnt be broke if youd been at Mary’s last night—thats a place in the Village and everything goes.”

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Native American theology pays attention to these issues of kinship and exile because they are so central to the spiritual content of the larger story. If Jesus and John are exiles, the power of their story takes on a much deeper meaning for Native America. As a community built on acceptance and inclusion, where exile is the very worst form of punishment, the kinship of the two brothers to their clan and nation makes a great deal of difference. If John was an outcast, then as a contrary he would have been presenting Jesus as the alternative: the opposite of rejection. The embodied message of the Native Messiah from the very beginning of the story would have been: no more exiles. This notion of radical inclusion in the John-Jesus story leads us to consider the fundamental issues of community. Both brothers are intimately connected to the Covenant tradition of Native America. If they were exiles, then this focus on traditional values becomes even more intensified. As a sacred clown and a medicine man, they represent a vision that is special, demanding, and ultimately sacrificial. The function of the Native vision quest is to show the person making the quest how to give away self to help others. The vision of the sacred clown and the medicine person is doubly demanding. Both clowns and medicine people are the spiritual core of Native community. They embody the traditional virtues to an exemplary degree. Therefore, they must live only for the sake of their people. In some cases, like Sitting Bull, they have to die for the people. By virtue of their vision quests, John and Jesus understand what they are being asked to do. They risk rejection and even exile. They accept that risk for a higher purpose: the ultimate value of kinship. They sacrifice themselves to make a give-away for the good of the people. Give-away theology is one of the most foundational theologies of the Native Covenant. My ordination as a priest at Wakpala on the Standing Rock Reservation was one of the most important days of my life. After such a long journey searching for how the two paths of my life might become one, it was a celebration not only of affirmation, but healing. The service was held in St. Elizabeth’s Church, one of the historic mission churches in the Dakotas. The evening of the ordination the church was crowded with people: other priests and deacons; Traditional and Christian Native people; the bishop; and a medicine person with the sacred pipe. The ceremony marked both my commitment to Christian priesthood and to Native tradition. It was a moment when I received a new name, one that I hold quietly in my heart to this day. But of all the memories I have of that special occasion, the one I remember most fondly is what happened after the service. All of the people gathered in the parish hall.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  as a continuation of the Jewish Sabbath. It observed it as the day of the commemoration of the resurrection or of the now spiritual creation, and hence as a day of sacred joy and thanksgiving, standing in bold contrast to the days of humiliation and fasting, as the Easter festival contrasts with Good Friday. So long as Christianity was not recognized and protected by the state, the observance of Sunday was purely religious, a strictly voluntary service, but exposed to continual interruption from the bustle of the world and a hostile community. The pagan Romans paid no more regard to the Christian Sunday than to the Jewish Sabbath. In this matter, as in others, the accession of Constantine marks the beginning of a new era, and did good service to the church and to the cause of public order and morality. Constantine is the founder, in part at least, of the civil observance of Sunday, by which alone the religious observance of it in the church could be made universal and could be properly secured. In the year 321 he issued a law prohibiting manual labor in the cities and all judicial transactions, at a later period also military exercises, on Sunday.692 He exempted the liberation of slaves, which as an act of Christian humanity and charity, might, with special propriety, take place on that day.693 But the Sunday law of Constantine must not be overrated. He enjoined the observance, or rather forbade the public desecration of Sunday, not under the name of Sabbatum or Dies Domini, but under its old astrological and heathen title, Dies Solis, familiar to all his subjects, so that the law was as applicable to the worshippers of Hercules, Apollo, and Mithras, as to the Christians. There is no reference whatever in his law either to the fourth commandment or to the resurrection of Christ. Besides he expressly exempted the country districts, where paganism still prevailed, from the prohibition of labor, and thus avoided every appearance of injustice. Christians and pagans had been accustomed to festival rests. Constantine made these rests to synchronize, and gave the preference to Sunday, on which day Christians from the beginning celebrated the resurrection of their Lord and Saviour. This and no more was implied in the famous enactment of 321. It was only a step in the right direction, but probably the only one which Constantine could prudently or safely take at that period of transition from the rule of paganism to that of Christianity.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’ that appeared on the posters; and ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’ that began to rise, rather steadily, from middle-billing, to second-billing, to top-of-the-list. Not just at the Camberwell hall but, over the next few months, at all the lesser London halls and - slowly, slowly - some of the West End ones, too ... I cannot say what it was that made the crowds like Kitty and me together, more than they had liked Kitty Butler on her own. It may just have been, as Walter had foreseen, that we were novel: for though in later years we were rather freely imitated, there was certainly no other act like ours in the London halls in 1889. It may also have been - again, as Walter had predicted - that the sight of a pair of girls in gentlemen’s suits was somehow more charming, more thrilling, more indefinably saucy, than that of a single girl in trousers and topper and spats. We did, I know, go handsomely together -Kitty with her nut-brown crop, me with my head blonde and smooth and gleaming; she raised a little on her one-inch slippers, me in my flat effeminate shoes, my cleverly tailored suits that masked the slender angularity of my frame with girlish curves.Whatever it was that made the change, however, it worked, and worked extraordinarily. We became not just rather popular, as Kitty had been, but really famous. Our wages rose; we worked three halls a night - four, sometimes - and now, when our brougham was caught in traffic, our driver would yell, ‘I’ve got Kitty Butler and Nan King in here, due at the Royal, Holborn, in fifteen minutes! Clear a way there, can’t you ? - and the other drivers would shift a little to let us through, and smile and raise their hats to the windows as we passed! Now there were flowers for me, as well as for Kitty; now I received invitations to dinner, for requests and autographs, and letters...It took me weeks to understand that it was really happening, and to me; weeks to let myself believe in it, and to trust the crowd that liked me. But when at last I learned to love my new life, I loved it fiercely. The pleasures of success, I suppose, are rather easy to understand; it was my new capacity for pleasure - for pleasure in performance, display and disguise, in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs - that shocked and thrilled me most. I had been content till now to stand in the wings, looking on while Kitty dallied, in the lime-light, with the vast, rumbustious crowd. Now, suddenly, it was I who wooed it, me at whom it gazed in envy and delight. I could not help it: I had fallen in love with Kitty; now, becoming Kitty, I fell in love a little with myself. I admired my hair, so neat and so sleek.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We knew we must keep Kitty‘s, for the sake of her successes of the past half-year; but Walter said ‘Astley’ was rather too common, and could we think of a better one? I didn’t mind, only said I should like to keep ‘Nan’ - since Kitty herself had re-christened me that; and we took our lunch, in consequence, with everybody volunteering names they thought would match it. Tootsie said ‘Nan Love’, Sims ‘Nan Sergeant’. Percy said, ‘Nan Scarlet - no, Nan Silver - no, Nan Gold ...’ Every name seemed to offer me some new and marvellous version of myself; it was like standing at the costumier’s rail and shrugging on the jackets. None, however, seemed to fit - till the Professor tapped the table, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Nan King’. And although I should like to be able to say - as other artistes do - that there was some terribly clever or romantic story behind the choosing of my stage-name - that we had opened a special book at a certain place, and found it there; that I had heard the word ‘King’ said in a dream, and quivered at it - I can give no better account of the matter than the truth: which was only that we needed a name, and the Professor said ‘Nan King’, and I liked it. It was as ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’, therefore, that we returned to Camberwell that evening - to renew, and improve upon our success of the night before. It was ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’ that appeared on the posters; and ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King’ that began to rise, rather steadily, from middle-billing, to second-billing, to top-of-the-list. Not just at the Camberwell hall but, over the next few months, at all the lesser London halls and - slowly, slowly - some of the West End ones, too ... I cannot say what it was that made the crowds like Kitty and me together, more than they had liked Kitty Butler on her own. It may just have been, as Walter had foreseen, that we were novel: for though in later years we were rather freely imitated, there was certainly no other act like ours in the London halls in 1889. It may also have been - again, as Walter had predicted - that the sight of a pair of girls in gentlemen’s suits was somehow more charming, more thrilling, more indefinably saucy, than that of a single girl in trousers and topper and spats. We did, I know, go handsomely together -Kitty with her nut-brown crop, me with my head blonde and smooth and gleaming; she raised a little on her one-inch slippers, me in my flat effeminate shoes, my cleverly tailored suits that masked the slender angularity of my frame with girlish curves. Whatever it was that made the change, however, it worked, and worked extraordinarily. We became not just rather popular, as Kitty had been, but really famous.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Our wages rose; we worked three halls a night - four, sometimes - and now, when our brougham was caught in traffic, our driver would yell, ‘I’ve got Kitty Butler and Nan King in here, due at the Royal, Holborn, in fifteen minutes! Clear a way there, can’t you ? - and the other drivers would shift a little to let us through, and smile and raise their hats to the windows as we passed! Now there were flowers for me, as well as for Kitty; now I received invitations to dinner, for requests and autographs, and letters... It took me weeks to understand that it was really happening, and to me; weeks to let myself believe in it, and to trust the crowd that liked me. But when at last I learned to love my new life, I loved it fiercely. The pleasures of success, I suppose, are rather easy to understand; it was my new capacity for pleasure - for pleasure in performance, display and disguise, in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs - that shocked and thrilled me most. I had been content till now to stand in the wings, looking on while Kitty dallied, in the lime-light, with the vast, rumbustious crowd. Now, suddenly, it was I who wooed it, me at whom it gazed in envy and delight. I could not help it: I had fallen in love with Kitty; now, becoming Kitty, I fell in love a little with myself. I admired my hair, so neat and so sleek. I adored my legs - my legs which, while they had had skirts about them, I had scarcely had a thought for; but which were, I discovered, rather long and lean and shapely. I sound vain. I was not - then - and could never have been, while Kitty existed as the wider object of my self-love. The act, I knew, was still all hers. When we sang, it was really she who sang, while I provided a light, easy second. When we danced, it was she who did the tricky steps: I only strolled or shuffled at her side. I was her foil, her echo; I was the shadow which, in all her brilliance, she cast across the stage. But, like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, the crucial definition, that she had lacked before. It was very far from vanity, then, my satisfaction. It was only love; and the better the act became, I thought, the more perfect that love grew.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  While the assembled multitude wondered at this miracle with widely various emotions, St. Peter, the Rock-man, appeared in the name of all the disciples, and addressed them with remarkable clearness and force, probably in his own vernacular Aramaic, which would be most familiar to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, possibly in Greek, which would be better understood by the foreign visitors.279 He humbly condescended to refute the charge of intoxication by reminding them of the early hour of the day, when even drunkards are sober, and explained from the prophecies of Joel and the sixteenth Psalm of David the meaning of the supernatural phenomenon, as the work of that Jesus of Nazareth, whom the Jews had crucified, but who was by word and deed, by his resurrection from the dead, his exaltation to the right hand of God, and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, accredited as the promised Messiah, according to the express prediction of the Scripture. Then he called upon his hearers to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus, as the founder and head of the heavenly kingdom, that even they, though they had crucified him, the Lord and the Messiah, might receive the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost, whose wonderful workings they saw and heard in the disciples. This was the first independent testimony of the apostles, the first Christian sermon: simple, unadorned, but full of Scripture truth, natural, suitable, pointed, and more effective than any other sermon has been since, though fraught with learning and burning with eloquence. It resulted in the conversion and baptism of three thousand persons, gathered as first-fruits into the garners of the church. In these first-fruits of the glorified Redeemer, and in this founding of the new economy of Spirit and gospel, instead of the old theocracy of letter and law, the typical meaning of the Jewish Pentecost was gloriously fulfilled. But this birth-day of the Christian church is in its turn only the beginning, the type and pledge, of a still greater spiritual harvest and a universal feast of thanksgiving, when, in the full sense of the prophecy of Joel, the Holy Spirit shall be poured out on all flesh, when all the sons and daughters of men shall walk in his light, and God shall be praised with new tongues of fire for the completion of his wonderful work of redeeming love. Notes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Pentecost, i.e. the fiftieth day after the Passover-Sabbath,253 was a feast of joy and gladness, in the loveliest season of the year, and attracted a very large number of visitors to Jerusalem from foreign lands.254 It was one of the three great annual festivals of the Jews in which all the males were required to appear before the Lord. Passover was the first, and the feast of Tabernacles the third. Pentecost lasted one day, but the foreign Jews, after the period of the captivity, prolonged it to two days. It was the "feast of harvest," or "of the first fruits," and also (according to rabbinical tradition) the anniversary celebration of the Sinaitic legislation, which is supposed to have taken place on the fiftieth day after the Exodus from the land of bondage.255 This festival was admirably adapted for the opening event in the history of the apostolic church. It pointed typically to the first Christian harvest, and the establishment of the new theocracy in Christ; as the sacrifice of the paschal lamb and the exodus from Egypt foreshadowed the redemption of the world by the crucifixion of the Lamb of God. On no other day could the effusion of the Spirit of the exalted Redeemer produce such rich results and become at once so widely known. We may trace to this day not only the origin of the mother church at Jerusalem, but also the conversion of visitors from other cities, as Damascus, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, who on their return would carry the glad tidings to their distant homes. For the strangers enumerated by Luke as witnesses of the great event, represented nearly all the countries in which Christianity was planted by the labors of the apostles.256 The Pentecost in the year of the Resurrection was the last Jewish (i.e. typical) and the first Christian Pentecost. It became the spiritual harvest feast of redemption from sin, and the birthday of the visible kingdom of Christ on earth. It marks the beginning of the dispensation of the Spirit, the third era in the history of the revelation of the triune God. On this day the Holy Spirit, who had hitherto wrought only sporadically and transiently, took up his permanent abode in mankind as the Spirit of truth and holiness, with the fulness of saving grace, to apply that grace thenceforth to believers, and to reveal and glorify Christ in their hearts, as Christ had revealed and glorified the Father.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But when a broad stripe of sunlight fell across her back she raised her feathers to greet it. Now, standing in a shallow bath next to her perch, she nibbles her toes, takes precise and tiny bites of water. She jumps back onto her perch and begins to preen herself, contorting her body into the stylised shapes of Japanese paintings of courtly goshawks. She runs her beak through one feather after another in quick succession: the sound is of paper being scored, or a pack of cards being shuffled Then she stretches one broad wing behind her, drags it slowly back over her sunlit tail, and rouses, squeaking happily through her nose. I watch all this with a ravenous, gulping-down-champagne sense of joy. Look how happy she is, I think. This room is not a dungeon and I am not a torturer. I am a beneficent figure, one who crouches and stoops in anxious genuflection, bearing delicious treats of steak in my hand. It is hubris. Less than an hour later I am certain that my hawk hates me and I am the worst falconer in the history of the world. No matter that Mabel is far tamer than any of the boys or books had told me she would be. I’ve comprehensively failed her. The hawk is ruined. I know this is true because she doesn’t want to be hooded. Until now she has accepted the hood with equanimity. Earlier today I sensed a little thrum of disquiet in her heart and now it has exploded into outright rebellion. I bring the hood up to her head and she dodges it. Snakes her head. Contracts it into her neck. Ducks and runs. I know why this is happening. To begin with the hood was a welcome refuge, but now she’s decided I’m harmless it is merely something that stops her seeing, and she wants to see. Now, unhappy, unsettled, lifting one foot then the other, the hawk looks about the room for somewhere to go. Her mood is contagious; my heart flutters tightly, heavily in my chest. I have lost the ability to disappear. I try to remove myself by listening to the cricket on the radio but can’t understand what the commentator is saying. I can only turn my attention from my unhappy hawk by thinking about the hood I’m holding. It is all she is thinking of too.

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

  Friend, I want to do the same for you. Please hear me: no matter how your life looks today, no matter what tomorrow holds, God does care for us. Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!22 O we of little faith. We are seen and cared for, and there is nothing to fear because God has us. [image file=Image00040.jpg] 11 A Beautiful Interruption I Choose to Delight in God My team from IF:Gathering and I eat Tex-Mex together a lot. Recently, we were at Matt’s El Rancho, eating queso and discussing optimism. I had been studying the subject and thinking that we all—both as individuals and as a team—needed more of it. My IF:Gathering team feels more like the best of war buddies than office mates. We have been through a few battles together. That afternoon at Matt’s, we were talking specifically about the opposite of optimism: cynicism. My research into negative thinking had confirmed that, as with all spiral thought patterns, we always have a choice. We may not choose the situations and the people in our lives, but we can choose how we react. We get to choose how our minds, and therefore our lives, will go. Here is the analogy I shared with them to try to make my point. If we went together to a party one evening and the people we sat next to were complaining about the tasteless food, the lame playlist, and the rude hosts, we’d come away with the impression that the party had been a bad experience. Truth be told, we might not have minded the food or the environment, but those gripes would sway us to that negative side. We would walk away thinking, That was a terrible party. But if we went to the same party and instead sat next to people who were raving about the delicious food, the energetic music, the thoughtful seating, and the kind and generous hosts, we would leave saying, “What a fun party!” What if instead of a party we were talking about our lives? How often have we chosen to be unhappy? Rather than seeing the best and celebrating the good, we have chosen to see only the struggles and complain about the bad. I wondered aloud how choosing to see the best in all situations might bring all of us a lot more joy. One of my colleagues commented, “Jennie, I hear you. But if I choose to see the best in life, I am going to get taken advantage of.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But then there is an explosive, tearing waterfall of rearing flame that bursts into appalling brightness. Erin’s eyebrows go up. He steps back a good few paces. And now I am laughing so much I can hardly stand. ‘Jesus, Erin,’ I shout. It’s as if he’s set light to the whole of the world: a twenty-foot pyramid of flame lighting the lawn, the house, the river, the far side of the river, sending black shadows out from trees that a moment ago were lost in darkness, and our faces are gilded with fierce, orange fire. What the hell have we done? The smoke mixes with the fog so that everything, everywhere is on fire. The incandescent tree, black twigs sintering, clicking, crumbling, and smoke, and Erin and I now wearing the faces of people who are going to be in serious trouble. ‘I think we might be seeing the fire truck any moment now,’ Erin shouts, and we’re both of us children again, delighted at what we have made and fearful of disaster. And then the fire is out. The skeleton stands in the snow, all its complexity gone. Just a thin trunk with a few charcoal branches, already damp in the steaming air. And I stare at the remains of the tree and breathe the smoke and fog from the air and Erin makes a face at me and I make one back. ‘That,’ he says, ‘was excellent.’ It was. A ritual burn, a ceremony of strange, protective magic. Bad things had fled from that burning tree. We laugh all the way back to the house, leaving the skeleton upright in the snow. And later that day Mum and I fly back to London. I drive her home, promise to see her soon, then make my way to Cambridge, and Stuart and Mandy’s house. I run to their door. I cannot wait to see my hawk. There she is, perched in their garden, fat and happy in a crowd of pointers with wagging tails. I thank Stuart for looking after her while I was gone. He stands by the patio doors, strangely drawn and tired. ‘No worries,’ he says. ‘I’ve not done much with her, to be honest. I’ve had flu. It’s been terrible. I’ve been in bed all Christmas. Just thrown her food.’ ‘Poor Stu,’ Mandy says, coming towards the table with three cups of coffee and a packet of open biscuits. ‘He’s really been in the wars.’ I look at my friends and my heart crumples. They have spent so many hours helping me, have shown me so much love. And I had taken it all for granted. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘I love you guys. I really do.’ I say it with as much feeling as I can. I am not just thanking them for looking after my hawk. I get up to give Stuart a hug. ‘Don’t catch it,’ he says, backing away. I hug him anyway.

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

  We followed Yusuf and Sayid down a path running perpendicular to the main road, until we crossed a wall of tall hedges and entered a large compound. In the middle of the compound was a low, rectangular house with a corrugated-iron roof and concrete walls that had crumbled on one side, leaving their brown mud base exposed. Bougainvillea, red and pink and yellow with flowers, spread along one side in the direction of a large concrete water tank, and across the packed earth was a small round hut lined with earthenware pots where a few chickens pecked in an alternating rhythm. I could see two more huts in the wide grass yard that stretched out behind the house. Beneath a tall mango tree, a pair of bony red cows looked up at us before returning to feed. Home Squared. “Eh, Obama!” A big woman with a scarf on her head strode out of the main house drying her hands on the sides of her flowered skirt. She had a face like Sayid’s, smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes. She hugged Auma and Roy as if she were going to wrestle them to the ground, then turned to me and grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake. “Halo!” she said, attempting English. “Musawa!” I said in Luo. She laughed, saying something to Auma. “She says she has dreamed about this day, when she would finally meet this son of her son. She says you’ve brought her a great happiness. She says that now you have finally come home.” Granny nodded and pulled me into a hug before leading us into the house. Small windows let in little of the afternoon light, and the house was sparsely furnished—a few wooden chairs, a coffee table, a worn couch. On the walls were various family artifacts: the Old Man’s Harvard diploma; photographs of him and of Omar, the uncle who had left for America twenty-five years ago and had never come back. Beside these were two older, yellowing photographs, the first of a tall young woman with smoldering eyes, a plump infant in her lap, a young girl standing beside her; the second of an older man in a high-backed chair. The man was dressed in a starched shirt and a kanga; his legs were crossed like an Englishman’s, but across his lap was what appeared to be some sort of club, its heavy head wrapped in an animal skin. His high cheekbones and narrow eyes gave his face an almost Oriental cast. Auma came up beside me. “That’s him. Our grandfather. The woman in the picture is our other grandmother, Akumu. The girl is Sarah. And the baby … that’s the Old Man.”

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

  “Other women?” Amy laughed and winked at Roy. “I tell you honestly, I don’t care about that.” She swung her fleshy arm over Roy’s shoulder. “As long as he treats me well, he can do what he likes. Right, baby?” Roy maintained a poker face, as if the conversation didn’t concern him. Both he and Amy had the sheen of too many beers, and I saw Jane sneak an anxious look at Kezia. I decided to change the subject, and asked Zeituni if she’d been to Garden Square before. “Me?” Zeituni raised her eyebrows at my impertinence. “Let me tell you, Barry—if there is dancing somewhere, then I have been to that place. These people here will tell you that I am the champion dancer. What do you say, Auma?” “Zeituni’s the best.” Zeituni tilted her head proudly. “You see? Really, Barry, your auntie can dance! And you want to know who was always my best partner? Your father! That guy, he really loved to dance. We entered many contests together when we were young. In fact, I’ll tell you this story about his dancing. It was when he had come home to Alego one time to visit with your grandfather. He had promised that evening to do some chore for the old man—I don’t remember what it was—but instead of doing his work, he went out to meet Kezia and take her dancing. You remember, Kezia? This is before they were married. I wanted to go with them, but Barack said I was too young. “Anyway, they came home late that night, and Barack had had a few too many beers. He tried to sneak Kezia into his hut, but the old man was still awake and heard their footsteps in the compound. Even as an old man, your grandfather’s hearing was very keen. So right away he shouts for Barack to come. When Barack comes in, the old man doesn’t say a word. He just looks at Barack and snorts like an angry bull. Hmmmph! Hmmmph! And this whole time, I am peeking through the window of the old man’s house, because I’m sure that the old man will cane Barack and I’m still angry at Barack, for not letting me go to the dance hall. “What happened next, I couldn’t believe. Instead of apologizing for coming home late, Barack walked over to the old man’s phonograph and started to play a record! Then he turned and shouted to Kezia, who was hiding outside. ‘Woman!’ Barack shouted. ‘Come here!’ Right away Kezia came into the house, too frightened to refuse, and Barack took her in his arms and began to dance with her, around and around in the old man’s house, as if he were dancing in a palace ballroom.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘Now, don’t let on about it yet, for it ain’t been properly settled. But your pal - Kitty - she’s due to leave the Palace, ain’t she, in a week or so?’ I nodded. ‘Well, she won’t be going - not for a good while, anyway. Uncle has offered her a sparkling new contract, till the New Year - said she was too good to lose to Broadstairs.’ The New Year! That was months away, months and months and weeks and weeks; I saw them all spread out before me, each one full of nights in Kitty’s dressing-room, and good-night kisses, and dreams. I gave a cry, I think; and Tony took a swig of Bass, complacently. Then Alice appeared, demanding to know what it was that must be talked about in whispers, and shrieked over, on the stairs ... ? I didn’t wait for Tony’s answer, I thundered down to the door and into the street, and ran to the station like a hoyden, with my hat flapping about my ears -because I had forgotten, after all, to pin it properly. I had hardly expected Kitty to swagger to Whitstable in her suit and her topper and her lavender gloves; but even so, when she stepped from the train and I saw that she was clad as a girl, and walked like a girl, with her plait fastened to the back of her head and a parasol over her arm, I felt a little pang of disappointment. This swiftly turned, however - as always - to desire, and then to pride, for she looked terribly smart and handsome on that dusty Whitstable platform. She kissed my cheek when I went up to her, and took my arm, and let me lead her from the station to our house, across the sea-front. She said, ‘Well! And this is where you were born, and grew up?’ ‘Oh yes! Look there: that building, beside the church, is our old school. Over there - see that house with the bicycle by the gate? - that’s where my cousins live. Here, look, on this step, I once fell down and cut my chin, and my sister held her handkerchief to it, the whole way home ...’ So I talked and pointed, and Kitty nodded, biting her lip. ‘How lucky you are!’ she said at last; and as she said it, she seemed to sigh. I had feared that the afternoon would be dismal and hard; in fact, it was merry. Kitty shook hands with everyone, and had a word for them all, such as, ‘You must be Davy, who works in the smack’, and ‘You must be Alice, who Nancy talks about so often, and is so proud of.