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.

Page 48 of 299 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  This is not as bleak as it sounds. Philo described a passionate, joyful voyage into the unknown, which brought him liberation and creative energy. Like Plato, he saw the soul as in exile, trapped in the physical world of matter. It must ascend to God, its true home, leaving passion, the senses and even language behind, because these bind us to the imperfect world. Finally, it will achieve an ecstasy that lifts it above the dreary confines of the ego to a larger, fuller reality. We have seen that the conception of God has often been an imaginative exercise. Prophets had reflected upon their experience and felt that it could be ascribed to the being they called God. Philo shows that religious contemplation had much in common with other forms of creativity. There were times, he says, when he struggled grimly with his books and made no headway, but sometimes he felt possessed by the divine: I … have suddenly become full, the ideas descending like snow, so that under the impact of divine possession, I have been filled with Corybantic frenzy and become ignorant of everything, place, people, present, myself, what was said and what was written. For I acquired expression, ideas, an enjoyment of life, sharp-sighted vision, exceedingly distinct clarity of objects such as might occur through the eyes as a result of clearest display.76

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I shrug at her, and her napkin seems to wipe off her own smile. Walking behind Warren, I’m approaching execution, till he stops and draws from his breast pocket a small blue velvet box. It holds a platinum ring with a sapphire the size of a chiclet flanked by diamonds of equal size, which—with all the drinks in me—makes me wobble. He slides it onto my shaking finger, saying, They’re family stones. Mother had it made. I joke I’ll need a bodyguard to wear it in public. When I lean back to stare into his green eyes, I resist the urge to kiss him—a public display he’d hate. But our gazes are so interwoven, I feel neither Texas trash nor WASP-itude can touch us. It doesn’t matter that my mother-in-law sobs through much of the meal, not—I’m guessing—from joy. Warren’s brother Dev says with genuine puzzlement as we head down the grand staircase, She was crying? And I think How do they block this stuff out? Nor does it matter that Mother offered to paint Mr. Whitbread in the nude and quote fix anything you need fixed close quote. The next day, at the inn we took over for the wedding, I swallow enough expensive champagne to float me effortlessly to the altar, toward the only lover I’ve ever both adored and admired. Around us, the green lawns of New England spread away into a fresh geography. Warren slides my mother’s mother’s rose gold band on my finger next to the blinding platinum and jewels from his, and it’s a transforming sensation. The ties of both our families unloose us. We are, by my measure, free of them all, our disparate homesteads. Our small family circle will be impenetrable.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  You didn’t say it might not take , I say. You said…You promised …You PROMISED I’d be numb from the WAIST DOWN! ! I bang on a thigh. My LEG is like a rump roast !! Not much later, Warren’s face leans down through the haze, saying, I need a sandwich. WHAT! I say. A fucking SANDWICH? It won’t take long, he says. He’s gone for what seems a long stretch but can’t be even an hour. He comes back just as they start wheeling me spread-eagled and undraped down a public hall, with me saying, No man gets to see this who hasn’t bought me dinner —a joke the doctor doesn’t get, followed by, to Warren, Where the everloving fuck were you? Sleeping, it turns out, on the front lawn of the hospital after a turkey sandwich. He’s now loping alongside my gurney toward the delivery room, his face masked. An eternity later, I feel a cataclysmic movement, and—in one massive thunderclap of pain—all my innards seem to exit. I feel abruptly vacated. Warren shouts up at me, It’s a boy. I lie there throbbing while some space bar in the action gets hit, and there’s an interval of quiet, then the baby’s throaty cry. All the attending humans seem busily focused elsewhere till they hand Dev to me—short for Devereux—a family name of the Whitbread’s. This new Dev is squinty and crimson, and they’ve stretched a little white knit cap on his head. As he leans over me, Warren’s face is damp, too, and his ocean-lit eyes fixed on me with wondrous attention, and in that interval I first hold our bundled son, I feel us all stitched inside a glorious tapestry, breathing the same antiseptic air, cool as pine—a rare atmosphere conscribes us—the family I’ve pined for, an end to the perennial estrangement I’ve powered through the world running from. Warren and I both address Dev in coos and smooches and clicks. Dev squints up with dark blue eyes as if trying to make us out through smoke, and from the instant his gaze brushes by me, some inner high beams flip on. Never have I felt such blazing focus for another living creature. I can’t stop looking at him. Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self—delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. I feel such untrammeled love for these two beings. Back in my room, the nurse hands Dev to me again, and boy, is he hollering to blow the hair off your head. This one has a set of lungs, the nurse says, and a strong opinion. But soon as I open my seersucker gown to his velvety face, the crying snaps off. Dev nuzzles toward the only spot on my body soft enough to accommodate him, and blessed silence ensues. Look at him latch on, Warren says.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  By the end of the year I’d left no Stern untoned.” Not only did Carla refrain from laughing, she didn’t even react. “Stern,” I explained. “Stern untoned.” “I’m trying to ignore it,” Carla replied. “You are a menace. You scare little paper boys and you make dumb puns. You watch out.” She smiled. “You’re gonna get it.” “It,” of course, was exactly what I wanted. She talked about working in a record store in Chicago and about all the records she left with her brothers and sisters back home. “It’s hard to believe people really live this kind of life,” she said, swinging her arm out the window toward the fields and farmhouses. “Nobody next door and nobody across the street. Dogs and cats probably live long enough to die natural deaths here.” “A lot of ’em get killed on the highway,” I said. “The more room you’ve got, the farther you roam.” That sounded like a song, so I started to sing it to the tune of “Momma Tried,” which was playing at the time. I don’t sing nearly as pretty as Merle Haggard, so I shut up after the first few lines. Carla was mellowing. She was also probably about to have kidney failure from the truck’s bouncing. A straight hour of that old Ford suspension was all anybody but a bronc rider could comfortably take. We were almost to Aunt Lola’s place, so there wasn’t much use to stop and rest. To ease Carla’s fluttering kidneys I decided to tell her about the time I introduced the entire Turn family to dope. “It was shortly after my assignment toning up the Sterns,” I began, “that I embarked on my life of crime.” Carla blew a few wisps of hair out of her eyes and looked over at me. “You mugged the milkman,” she said. “Worse,” I replied. I looked penitently into my lap and wrung my hands in contrition. I also had a hard-on to conceal. “I led a good middle-American family into intercourse with the evil weed.” “No,” Carla said. “Oh, my.” “The Turn family,” I continued. “Friends of the Sterns. They wanted to take up hiking, too. They already had muscle tone, but they couldn’t stand each other’s company long enough to walk together from the davenport to the TV. Mr. Turn came to me one day for help. He saw how I’d brought the Sterns around. It sounded to me like a case of familiarity having bred contempt, so I prescribed alteration in their psychic landscape. I got fifteen fat numbers from Otto and laid them on Mr. Turn, with the instruction to have a boot-oiling and dope-smoking session in the family room while watching a National Geographic special. That was three numbers for each patient. All it took was one apiece before they forgot their boots were warming in the oven. After two they trooped arm in arm through the house, singing Sierra Club songs.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this deification was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced consciously here below. He taught a method of concentration that involved breathing: as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: “Jesus Christ, Son of God”; they should exhale to the words: “have mercy upon us” Later hesychasts refined this exercise: contemplatives should sit with head and shoulders bowed, looking toward their heart or navel. They should breathe ever more slowly in order to direct their attention inward, to certain psychological foci like the heart. It was a rigorous discipline that must be used carefully; it could only be safely practiced under an expert director. Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and the hesychast would feel totally one with the prayer. Greek Christians had discovered for themselves techniques that had been practiced for centuries in the oriental religions. They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body. Maximus the Confessor had insisted: “The whole man should become God, deified by the grace of the God-become-man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole god, soul and body, by grace.”21 The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine. As we have seen, the Greeks saw this “deification” as an enlightenment that was natural to man. They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha, who had attained the fullest realization of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an “epiphany,” a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary.

• From A History of God (1993)

  While, with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.5 This vision came from the heart and the affections rather than what Wordsworth called “the meddling intellect” whose purely analytic powers could destroy this kind of intuition. People did not need learned books and theories. All that was required was a “wise passiveness” and “a heart that watches and receives.”6 Insight began with a subjective experience, although this had to be “wise,” not uninformed and self-indulgent. As Keats would say, a truth did not become true until it was felt upon the pulse and carried alive into the heart by passion. Wordsworth had discerned a ‘spirit’ which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena: A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things.7 Philosophers such as Hegel would find such a spirit in the events of history. Wordsworth was careful not to give this experience a conventionally religious interpretation, though he was quite happy to talk about “God” on other occasions, especially in an ethical context.8 English Protestants were not familiar with the God of the mystics, which had been discounted by the Reformers. God spoke through the conscience in the summons of duty; he corrected the desires of the heart but seemed to have little in common with the “presence” that Wordsworth had felt in Nature. Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth would only call it “something,” a word which is often used as a substitute for exact definition. Wordsworth used it to describe the spirit which, with true mystical agnosticism, he refused to name because it did not fit into any of the categories he knew. Another mystical poet of the period sounded a more apocalyptic note and announced that God was dead. In his early poetry, William Blake (1757–1827) had used a dialectical method: terms such as “innocence” and “experience,” which seemed diametrically opposed to one another, were discovered to be half-truths of a more complex reality. Blake had transformed the balanced antithesis, which had characterized the rhymed couplets of poetry during the Age of Reason in England, into a method of forging a personal and subjective vision. In Songs of Innocence and Experience, two contrary states of the human soul are both revealed to be inadequate until they are synthesized: innocence must become experience and experience itself fall to the lowest depths before the recovery of true innocence. The poet has become a prophet, “Who Present, Past, & Future, sees” and who listens to the Holy Word that spoke to humanity in primordial time:

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  And her family, who’d done two interventions, kept rifling laundry hampers and closets, looking to no avail for her stash. Then one night, she tells us in a demure voice, the frost had built up so deep she couldn’t midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it . She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don’t drink like this. Rather than scorn her like schoolmarms for the sin, the room roars—myself among them—while she gives a startled smile. And because I’ve never drained vodka from an icy bird, I think I’m nowhere near as bad as that crazy bitch. Another guy talks about burying bottles all over his mother’s yard before being dragged into rehab. Fresh out, he needed only to secret inside his Speedo bathing suit a plastic straw. Then he’d grab a towel and some tanning oil and step outside, saying he wanted to catch some rays. His mother would study him all day through the sliding door, totally flummoxed when he came crab-walking in—drunk and beet-red—at sundown. More laughter, and I hear myself join in since the company is more raucously alive than most dance clubs. Was it this same meeting where a man told the story of trying to hang himself? The rope was too green, and at dusk, his wife tilted open the garage door to find him twisting drunk, on tiptoes, half conscious. She cut him down, called him a bastard, and packed her bags. He then went into the kitchen and blew out the pilot light and stuffed towels around the edges of the room. He emptied a bottle of sleeping pills into his mouth and finished the last of the whiskey. Three days later, he woke with a crushing headache, and his first thought was, Boy do I need a cigarette. So he patted around on the front of his shirt and pulled out a stogie. Then he drew the Bic lighter from his pants pocket and rubbed up a single flame. He didn’t hear the explosion as the walls of the room were blown out. In his next conscious instant, he was smoldering in his neighbor’s yard with his brows singed off. When have I laughed so hard in company at the specter of human frailty? Not since the last great poetry reading I’d sat through, when some outcast put a fresh name on the unnamable. I don’t know what I expected here—a bunch of guys who crawled out from alleys or under bridges looking for hot coffee and a bowl of soup. But the folks around me look mostly present and clear-eyed. Among the academics and guys in suits sit working people—chamber maid, garage mechanic, diner waitress. I recognize the Latino guy who pours my coffee at the local donut shop.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Israel ben Eliezer was not a scholar. He preferred to walk in the woods, singing songs and telling stories to children, to studying the Talmud. He and his wife lived in abject poverty in southern Poland in a hut in the Carpathian Mountains. For a time he dug lime and sold it to the people of the nearby town. Then he and his wife became innkeepers. Finally, when he was about thirty-six years old, he announced that he had become a faith healer and an exorcist. He journeyed through the villages of Poland, healing the illnesses of the peasants and townsfolk with herbal remedies, amulets and prayers. There were many healers at this time, who claimed to cure the afflicted in the Name of the Lord. Israel had thus now become a Baal Shem Tov, a Master of the Good Name. Even though he had never been ordained, his followers began to call him Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, or, simply, the Besht. Most of the healers were content with magic, but the Besht was also a mystic. The Shabbetai Zevi episode had convinced him of the dangers of combining mysticism with Messianism, and he returned to an earlier form of Kabbalism, which was not to be for an elite, however, but for everybody. Instead of seeing the fall of the divine sparks to the world as a disaster, the Besht taught his Hasidim to look on the bright side. These sparks were lodged in every item of creation, and this meant that the whole world was filled with the presence of God. A devout Jew could experience God in the tiniest action of his daily life—while he was eating, drinking or making love to his wife—because the divine sparks were everywhere. Men and women were not surrounded by hosts of demons, therefore, but by a God who was present in every gust of wind or blade of grass: he wanted Jews to approach him with confidence and joy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But there was no anxiety. Luria insisted that before he began his spiritual exercises, the Kabbalist must achieve peace of mind. Happiness and joy were essential: there was to be no breast-beating or remorse, no guilt or anxiety about one’s performance. Vital insisted that the Shekinah cannot live in a place of sorrow and pain—an idea that we have seen to be rooted in the Talmud. Sadness springs from the forces of evil in the world, whereas happiness enables the Kabbalist to love God and cleave to him. There should be no anger or aggression in the Kabbalist’s heart for anybody whatsoever—even the goyim. Luria identified anger with idolatry, since an angry person is possessed by a “strange god.” It is easy to criticize Lurianic mysticism. As Gershom Scholem points out, the mystery of God En Sof, which was so strong in The Zohar, tends to get lost in the drama of tsimtsum, the Breaking of the Vessels and Tikkun.6 In the next chapter, we shall see that it contributed to a disastrous and embarrassing episode in Jewish history. Yet Luria’s conception of God was able to help Jews to cultivate a spirit of joy and kindness, together with a positive view of humanity at a time when the guilt and anger of the Jews could have caused many to despair and to lose faith in life altogether. The Christians of Europe were not able to produce such a positive spirituality. They too had endured historical disasters that could not be assuaged by the philosophical religion of the scholastics. The Black Death of 1348, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the ecclesiastical scandals of the Avignon Captivity (1334–42) and the Great Schism (1378–1417) had thrown the impotence of the human condition into vivid relief and brought the Church into disrepute. Humanity seemed unable to extricate itself from its fearful predicament without God’s help. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, therefore, theologians like Duns Scotus of Oxford (1265–1308)—not to be confused with Duns Scotus Erigena—and the French theologian Jean de Gerson (1363–1429) both emphasized the sovereignty of God, who controlled human affairs as stringently as an absolute ruler. Men and women could contribute nothing to their salvation; good deeds were not meritorious in themselves but only because God had graciously decreed that they were good. But during these centuries, there was also a shift in emphasis. Gerson himself was a mystic, who believed that it was better to “hold primarily to the love of God without lofty enquiry” rather than to “seek through reasons based on the true faith, to understand the nature of God.”7 There had been an upsurge of mysticism in Europe during the fourteenth century, as we have seen, and the people were beginning to appreciate that reason was inadequate to explain the mystery they called “God.” As Thomas à Kempis said in The Imitation of Christ:

• From A History of God (1993)

  1825) used to eat huge meals to reclaim the divine sparks in his food. 56 One can, however, see the Hasidic enterprise as an attempt to find meaning in a cruel and dangerous world. The disciplines of devekuth were an imaginative attempt to strip the veil of familiarity from the world to discover the glory within. It was not dissimilar to the imaginative vision of the contemporary English Romantics William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who sensed the One Life that unites the whole of reality in everything they saw. The Hasidim also became aware of what they saw as a divine energy coursing through the whole created world which transformed it into a glorious place, despite the sorrows of exile and persecution. Gradually the material world would fade into insignificance and everything would become an epiphany: Moses Teitelbaum of Ujhaly (1759–1841) said that when Moses had seen the Burning Bush, he had simply seen the divine presence which burns in every single bush and keeps it in existence. 57 The whole world seemed appareled in celestial light, and the Hasidim would shout with joy in their ecstasy, clapping their hands, and break into song. Some even used to turn somersaults, demonstrating that the glory of their vision had turned the whole world upside down. Unlike Spinoza and some of the Christian radicals, the Besht did not mean that everything was God but that all beings existed in God, who gave them life and being. He was the vital force that kept everything in existence. He did not believe that the Hasidim would become divine through the practice of devekuth or even achieve unity with God—such temerity seemed extravagant to all Jewish mystics. Instead, the Hasidim would draw close to God and become aware of his presence. Most were simple, unsophisticated men, and they often expressed themselves extravagantly, but they were aware that their mythology was not to be taken literally. They preferred stories to philosophic or Talmudic discussion, seeing fiction as the best vehicle for conveying an experience which had little to do with facts and reason. Their vision was an imaginative attempt to depict the interdependence of God and mankind. God was no external, objective reality: indeed, the Hasidim believed that in some sense they were creating him by building him up anew after his disintegration.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Reformers like Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, shared the Protestant emphasis on direct experience of God and the need to appropriate revelation and make it uniquely one’s own. The Spiritual Exercises which he evolved for his first Jesuits were intended to induce a conversion, which could be a wracking, painful experience as well as an extremely joyful one. With its emphasis on self-examination and personal decision, this thirty-day retreat undertaken on a one-to-one basis with a director was not dissimilar to Puritan spirituality. The Exercises represent a systematic, highly efficient crash course in mysticism. Mystics had often evolved disciplines that were similar to those used today by psychoanalysts and it is, therefore, interesting that the Exercises are also being used today by Catholics and Anglicans to provide an alternative type of therapy. Ignatius was aware of the dangers of false mysticism, however. Like Luria, he stressed the importance of serenity and joy, warning his disciples against the extremes of emotion that pushed some Puritans over the edge in his Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. He divides the various emotions that the exercitant is likely to experience during his retreat into those which were likely to come from God and those which came from the devil. God was to be experienced as peace, hope, joy and an “elevation of mind,” while disquiet, sadness, aridity and distraction came from “the evil spirit.” Ignatius’s own sense of God was acute: it used to make him weep with joy, and he once said that without it he would be unable to live. But he distrusted violent swings of emotion and stressed the need for discipline in his journey to a new self. Like Calvin, he saw Christianity as an encounter with Christ, which he plotted in the Exercises: the culmination was the “Contemplation for Obtaining Love,” which sees “all things as creatures of the goodness of God and reflections of it.” 40 For Ignatius the world was full of God. During the canonization process, his disciples recalled: We often saw how even the smallest things could make his spirit soar upwards to God, who even in the smallest things is the Greatest. At the sight of a little plant, a leaf, a flower or a fruit, an insignificant worm or a tiny animal Ignatius could soar free above the heavens and reach through into things which lie beyond the senses. 41 Like the Puritans, Jesuits experienced God as a dynamic force which, at its best, could fill them with confidence and energy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Sometimes he suggests that Logos is one of the powers; at other times he seems to think it is higher than the powers, the highest idea of God that human beings can attain. When we contemplate the Logos, however, we form no positive knowledge of God: we are taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to an intuitive apprehension which is “higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything which is merely thought.” 75 It was an activity similar to Plato’s contemplation ( theoria ). Philo insisted that we will never reach God as he is in himself: the highest truth we can apprehend is the rapturous recognition that God utterly transcends the human mind. This is not as bleak as it sounds. Philo described a passionate, joyful voyage into the unknown, which brought him liberation and creative energy. Like Plato, he saw the soul as in exile, trapped in the physical world of matter. It must ascend to God, its true home, leaving passion, the senses and even language behind, because these bind us to the imperfect world. Finally, it will achieve an ecstasy that lifts it above the dreary confines of the ego to a larger, fuller reality. We have seen that the conception of God has often been an imaginative exercise. Prophets had reflected upon their experience and felt that it could be ascribed to the being they called God. Philo shows that religious contemplation had much in common with other forms of creativity. There were times, he says, when he struggled grimly with his books and made no headway, but sometimes he felt possessed by the divine: I … have suddenly become full, the ideas descending like snow, so that under the impact of divine possession, I have been filled with Corybantic frenzy and become ignorant of everything, place, people, present, myself, what was said and what was written. For I acquired expression, ideas, an enjoyment of life, sharp-sighted vision, exceedingly distinct clarity of objects such as might occur through the eyes as a result of clearest display. 76 Soon it would be impossible for Jews to achieve such a synthesis with the Greek world. In the year of Philo’s death there were pogroms against the Jewish community in Alexandria and widespread fears of Jewish insurrection. When the Romans had established their empire in North Africa and the Middle East in the first century BCE they had themselves succumbed to the Greek culture, merging their ancestral deities with the Greek pantheon and adopting Greek philosophy with enthusiasm. They had not, however, inherited the Greek hostility to the Jews. Indeed, they often favored the Jews over the Greeks, regarding them as useful allies in Greek cities where there was residual hostility to Rome. Jews were given full religious liberty: their religion was known to be of great antiquity, and this was respected.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (Lecia and I sent her—separately, it turns out—cash to buy an extra mattress.) My sister’s deaf to this. She’s forking up saucy meat with a beatific expression. Such a token might not exactly undo past hurts, but they might reshape our mouths to savor what’s now being served up. That night, at opposite ends of the bulbous sofa, Lecia and I have lain our respective heads like characters in a storybook rowboat under tinfoil stars, with a faded blue quilt covering our middles. In the saggy double bed we used to share, our boys have sacked out—Dev blond like her, Case dark like me. At the schoolyard basketball court today, we’d watched Dev drag in Case’s wake as I had Lecia’s. Just thirteen, Case can just barely palm the ball for a second or two, his hand like a giant spider holding it aloft as Dev gapes. Ready? Case said, and he bounce-passed it to the smaller boy. Dev two-stepped through a layup, the orange ball slipping through the white net, which prompted Case to shout out swish . Leaping for the rebound, Case stepped back and started to lecture, detailing proper form for a shot with the rigor of a ballet master. Bend your knees. Hold it here. Finish with the tips of your fingers right over the front rim. That night on Mother’s sofa, Lecia asks, Who does Case remind you of? In terms of the need to expound? You and Daddy, I say . Frightening, she says. About then Mother stumps in, hair every which way, a piece of cheese disappearing into her maw. She says, What’re y’all talking about so late? Our deep and abiding love for you, Lecia says. Mother slumps down on the facing chair, staring at the grassy shag carpet. When she lifts her head, there are tears in her eyes. I wish your daddy was here for this, she says, us all together this way. Look at both those boys, Lecia says, Pete Karr times two. He’s the only person who ever really loved me. What are we? I say. Mother shrugs. The only man, I mean. I miss him like crazy. He did adore you, I say. He felt sorry for me, she says, but he stood by, thick or thin. She runs a hand over her spiky hair, asking, Does this haircut look like feathers? In the library the next day, Mother’s bridge club marches in—a troop of ladies bearing into the small room trays of baked goods big as coffee tables. The day unfolds like that old TV show This Is Your Life , where producers conspire to drag before you the past’s every character. In aging form, they parade. There’s the doctor who examined me the night Mother went to the hospital; my first-grade teacher; the principal who told me I’d be no more than a common prostitute. John Cleary, the first boy I ever kissed, is there with his daughters.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  ) The morning after this sane visit, I lift my just-scrubbed face from the towel to meet my own gaze in the metal mirror, and I almost see a bold outline around myself, as if inked with magic marker. Alive, I am, a living, breathing Mary of myself. Hello, stranger, I actually say out loud. In occupational therapy, the other women in the ward—who’ve been vague holograms viewed through a scrim of tears when I checked in—have turned into full-fledged human units whose stories I begin to follow like daytime soaps. We’re supposed to be fashioning decorative wreaths, those circles of dried flowers and herbs that happy housewives hang in suburban kitchens from grosgrain ribbon. A grassy aroma rises around us as we work. I sit before a styrofoam ring, concentrating on the dumb task of wrapping florist’s tape on a green wire. Across the art table from me sits Pam, a strapping blond psychopath—a diagnosis she stays volubly pissed off about. Pam claims her broke-dick husband has slam-dunked her for partying with truckers at roadhouses, which is preferable to folding his effing socks and stuffing the faces of her five mouthy kids. In group therapy that day, Pam got called out for wearing a Please Kill Me T-shirt. This message terrorized the only guy on the ward, a schizophrenic kid named Willy. Willy has scarlet acne emblazoning both cheeks, as if he’s being continuously slapped from the inside. He’s at the next table hunched over watercolor paper, meticulously painting a Greek keyhole pattern using black ink and a brush made up of only a few hairs. Two seats down from him is beautiful Flora, whose raving red hair hangs a torch in any room she enters. Often screaming in psychosis, Flora spends a lot of time in a padded room, tied down by leather four-point restraints. Medicated into a stupor, Flora is that day, and a nurse helps her odd crafts projects of gluing together hunks of foam into a kind of arctic-looking city. Pam says, You know what we should call this? The Maniacs’ Art Club? Tina says . Crafts for Cunts, Pam says. Please don’t use that word, says skinny Betty. Lovely Betty with the swan neck and the shiny black hair. St. Betty of the Perpetually Ducked Head. Age about thirty, looks sixty. As a child, Betty was consistently raped by her famous professor father, which kept her ever after starving herself almost to death. She’s assembling a wreath of fragrant eucalyptus using shades of muted green with faded yellow roses. You’ve gotten really good at this, Betty, I say, and it’s true she’s found a meticulous but subtly tinted order. You should work in a florist’s shop, Tina says. What do you do, anyway, I mean, for a living? She shrugs. (I’d later find out she took care of the wheelchair-bound father who’d raped her.) Do you find it morbid, Tina says, that we’re making wreaths? What does that conjure for you?

• From A History of God (1993)

  Muhammad died unexpectedly after a short illness in June 632. After his death, some of the Bedouin tried to break away from the ummah, but the political unity of Arabia held firm. Eventually the recalcitrant tribes also accepted the religion of the one God: Muhammad’s astonishing success had shown the Arabs that the paganism which had served them well for centuries no longer worked in the modern world. The religion of al-Lah introduced the compassionate ethos which was the hallmark of the more advanced religions: brotherhood and social justice were its crucial virtues. A strong egalitarianism would continue to characterize the Islamic ideal. During Muhammad’s lifetime, this had included the equality of the sexes. Today it is common in the West to depict Islam as an inherently misogynistic religion, but, like Christianity, the religion of al-Lah was originally positive for women. During the jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic period, Arabia had preserved the attitudes toward women which had prevailed before the Axial Age. Polygamy, for example, was common, and wives remained in their father’s households. Elite women enjoyed considerable power and prestige—Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, for example, was a successful merchant—but the majority were on a par with slaves; they had no political or human rights, and female infanticide was common. Women had been among Muhammad’s earliest converts, and their emancipation was a project that was dear to his heart. The Koran strictly forbade the killing of female children and rebuked the Arabs for their dismay when a girl was born. It also gave women legal rights of inheritance and divorce: most Western women had nothing comparable until the nineteenth century. Muhammad encouraged women to play an active role in the affairs of the ummah, and they expressed their views forthrightly, confident that they would be heard. On one occasion, for example, the women of Medina had complained to the Prophet that the men were outstripping them in the study of the Koran and asked him to help them catch up. This Muhammad did. One of their most important questions was why the Koran addressed men only when women had also made their surrender to God. The result was a revelation that addressed women as well as men and emphasized the absolute moral and spiritual equality of the sexes.35 Thereafter the Koran quite frequently addressed women explicitly, something that rarely happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ignatius was aware of the dangers of false mysticism, however. Like Luria, he stressed the importance of serenity and joy, warning his disciples against the extremes of emotion that pushed some Puritans over the edge in his Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. He divides the various emotions that the exercitant is likely to experience during his retreat into those which were likely to come from God and those which came from the devil. God was to be experienced as peace, hope, joy and an “elevation of mind,” while disquiet, sadness, aridity and distraction came from “the evil spirit.” Ignatius’s own sense of God was acute: it used to make him weep with joy, and he once said that without it he would be unable to live. But he distrusted violent swings of emotion and stressed the need for discipline in his journey to a new self. Like Calvin, he saw Christianity as an encounter with Christ, which he plotted in the Exercises: the culmination was the “Contemplation for Obtaining Love,” which sees “all things as creatures of the goodness of God and reflections of it.”40 For Ignatius the world was full of God. During the canonization process, his disciples recalled: We often saw how even the smallest things could make his spirit soar upwards to God, who even in the smallest things is the Greatest. At the sight of a little plant, a leaf, a flower or a fruit, an insignificant worm or a tiny animal Ignatius could soar free above the heavens and reach through into things which lie beyond the senses.41 Like the Puritans, Jesuits experienced God as a dynamic force which, at its best, could fill them with confidence and energy. As Puritans braved the Atlantic to settle in New England, Jesuit missionaries traveled the globe: Francis Xavier (1506–1552) evangelized India and Japan, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) took the Gospel to China and Robert de Nobili (1577–1656) to India. Like the Puritans again, Jesuits were often enthusiastic scientists, and it has been suggested that the first scientific society was not the Royal Society of London or the Accademia del Cimento but the Society of Jesus.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Hasidism spread quickly, however, because it brought the disaffected Jews a message of hope: many of the converts seem to have been former Sabbatarians. The Besht did not want his disciples to abandon the Torah. Instead he gave it a new mystical interpretation: the word mitzvah (commandment) meant a bond. When a Hasid performed one of the commandments of the Law while practicing devekuth , he was binding himself to God, the Ground of all being, at the same time as he was reuniting the divine sparks in the person or thing he was dealing with at the moment to the Godhead. The Torah had long encouraged Jews to sanctify the world by the performance of the mitzvot , and the Besht was simply giving this a mystical interpretation. Sometimes the Hasidim went to somewhat dubious lengths in their zeal to save the world: many of them took to smoking a great deal to rescue the sparks in their tobacco! Baruch of Medzibozh (1757–1810), another of the Besht’s grandsons, had a splendid court with wonderful furniture and tapestries, which he justified by claiming that he was only concerned for the sparks in these magnificent trappings. Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt (d. 1825) used to eat huge meals to reclaim the divine sparks in his food. 56 One can, however, see the Hasidic enterprise as an attempt to find meaning in a cruel and dangerous world. The disciplines of devekuth were an imaginative attempt to strip the veil of familiarity from the world to discover the glory within. It was not dissimilar to the imaginative vision of the contemporary English Romantics William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who sensed the One Life that unites the whole of reality in everything they saw. The Hasidim also became aware of what they saw as a divine energy coursing through the whole created world which transformed it into a glorious place, despite the sorrows of exile and persecution. Gradually the material world would fade into insignificance and everything would become an epiphany: Moses Teitelbaum of Ujhaly (1759–1841) said that when Moses had seen the Burning Bush, he had simply seen the divine presence which burns in every single bush and keeps it in existence. 57 The whole world seemed appareled in celestial light, and the Hasidim would shout with joy in their ecstasy, clapping their hands, and break into song. Some even used to turn somersaults, demonstrating that the glory of their vision had turned the whole world upside down. Unlike Spinoza and some of the Christian radicals, the Besht did not mean that everything was God but that all beings existed in God, who gave them life and being. He was the vital force that kept everything in existence. He did not believe that the Hasidim would become divine through the practice of devekuth or even achieve unity with God—such temerity seemed extravagant to all Jewish mystics. Instead, the Hasidim would draw close to God and become aware of his presence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This would be succeeded by an equally extreme elation, when they felt suddenly saved. They used “to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping. Sometimes they have not been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.” 42 We are clearly far from the calm control that mystics in all the major religious traditions have believed to be the hallmark of true enlightenment. These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God. The Awakening spread like a contagion to surrounding towns and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually scorched by the flames of religious fervor. While in this exalted state, Edwards noted that his converts felt that the whole world was delightful. They could not tear themselves away from their Bibles and even forgot to eat. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their emotion died down, and about two years later Edwards noted that “it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us.” Again, he was not speaking metaphorically: Edwards was a true Western literalist in religious matters. He was convinced that the Awakening had been a direct revelation of God in their midst, the tangible activity of the Holy Spirit as on the first Pentecost. When God had withdrawn, as abruptly as he had come, his place was—again, quite literally—taken by Satan. Exaltation was succeeded by suicidal despair. First one poor soul killed himself by cutting his throat and: “After this multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, to do as this person had done. Many had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’ ” Two people went mad with “strange, enthusiastic delusions.” 43 There were no more conversions, but the people who survived the experience were calmer and more joyful than they had been before the Awakening, or so Edwards would have us believe. The God of Jonathan Edwards and his converts, who revealed himself in such abnormality and distress, was clearly just as frightening and arbitrary in his dealings with his people as ever. The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealings with “God.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  His was a spirituality of light, optimism and joy. Step by step, a Christian could ascend the chain of being until he reached God, his natural element and home. As a Platonist, Origen was convinced of the kinship between God and the soul: the knowledge of the divine was natural to humanity. It could be “recollected” and awakened by special disciplines. To adapt his Platonic philosophy to the Semitic scriptures, Origen developed a symbolic method of reading the Bible. Thus the virgin birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not primarily to be understood as a literal event but as the birth of the divine Wisdom in the soul. He also adopted some of the ideas of the Gnostics. Originally, all the beings in the spiritual world had contemplated the ineffable God who had revealed himself to them in the Logos, the divine Word and Wisdom. But they had grown tired of this perfect contemplation and fallen from the divine world into bodies, which had arrested their fall. All was not lost, however. The soul could ascend to God in a long, steady journey that would continue after death. Gradually it would cast aside the fetter of the body and rise above gender to become pure spirit. By means of contemplation ( theoria ), the soul would advance in the knowledge ( gnosis ) of God, which would transform it until, as Plato himself had taught, it would itself become divine. God was deeply mysterious and none of our human words or concepts could adequately express him, but the soul had the capacity to know God, since it shared his divine nature. Contemplation of the Logos was natural to us, since all spiritual beings ( logikoi ) had originally been equal to one another. When they had fallen, only the future mind of the man Jesus Christ had been content to remain in the divine world contemplating God’s Word, and our own souls were equal to his. Belief in the divinity of Jesus the man was only a phase; it would help us on our way, but would eventually be transcended when we would see God face to face. In the ninth century, the Church would condemn some of Origen’s ideas as heretical. Neither Origen nor Clement believed that God had created the world out of nothing ( ex nihilo ), which would later become orthodox Christian doctrine. Origen’s view of the divinity of Jesus and the salvation of humanity certainly did not conform to later official Christian teaching: he did not believe that we had been “saved” by the death of Christ, but that we ascended to God under our own steam.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  He’d hire me to clean rat and pigeon cages, which would free me from the food service’s vile hairnet. (As he had for who knows how many others, Walt had decided to lift me up. The therapy—when I showed up—involved sitting in a cozy office, trying to look sane enough not to be kicked out. But every now and then I’d blubber about being lonesome for home or scared to fail, and I mostly left breathing deeper.) Buoyed up after talking to Walt, I set out for my dorm. The cold had polished and clarified the sky into onyx. The stars seemed close enough to scoop up. Crossing the quad, I felt some wormhole into my skull finally get bored. There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer’s broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense (in the paperback of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it): The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language. He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion—not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards. I moved through the lung-scalding air, no longer a misplaced cracker but a by-God symbolic animal who’d puzzled out—over a week’s time—the meaning of a hard sentence. But checking my P.O. in the student union the next day, brushed past by the sons and daughters of the professional class—my down-jacketed (alleged) peers—I sensed a dashed line around me where invisible scissors would soon clip me away. Fair-minded, straight-toothed, impossibly clear-skinned, these kids were nothing if not democratically inclined vis-à-vis the likes of me. They blew pot smoke from their joints into my pursed lips and paid my way to Dylan and the Grateful Dead. They gave me rides in paid-for cars. Their parents steered me under restaurant awnings and through doors where the maître d’s looked at my soaking tennis shoes long and hard. They passed menus featuring appetizers that cost more than the whole chicken-fried steak dinners Daddy bought us on paycheck night. They invited me home for Thanksgiving and Easter. They seemed to trust my scrappy climb out of the lower class would allow me to handle on first sight all manner of eating utensil by imitating, chimpanzeelike, their movements. Their bottomless cool—their cynical postures grown from privilege they were ungrateful for—could make me hate them. Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and think they hit a home run.