Longing

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 11 of 170 · 20 per page

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  are gone, they revert to their own ideas. We spend our lives butting up 224 • The Art of Seduction from an invisible vessel and against people, as if they were stone walls. But instead of complaining then drying them with an about how misunderstood or ignored you are, why not try something dif-invisible towel. When he ferent: instead of seeing other people as spiteful or indifferent, instead of finished, the host called out to his attendants: "Bring trying to figure out why they act the way they do, look at them through in the table!" • Numerous the eyes of the seducer. The way to lure people out of their natural in-servants hurried in and out tractability and self-obsession is to enter their spirit. of the hall, as though they were preparing for a meal. All of us are narcissists. When we were children our narcissism was My brother could still see physical: we were interested in our own image, our own body, as if it were nothing. Yet his host a separate being. As we grow older, our narcissism grows more psychologi-invited him to sit at the cal: we become absorbed in our own tastes, opinions, experiences. A hard imaginary table, saying, "Honor me by eating of shell forms around us. Paradoxically, the way to entice people out of this this meat." • The old man shell is to become more like them, in fact a kind of mirror image of them. moved his hands about as You do not have to spend days studying their minds; simply conform to though he were touching invisible dishes, and also their moods, adapt to their tastes, play along with whatever they send your moved his jaws and lips as way. In doing so you will lower their natural defensiveness. Their sense of though he were chewing. self-esteem does not feel threatened by your strangeness or different habits. Then said he to Shakashik: " E a t your fill, People truly love themselves, but what they love most of all is to see their my friend, for you must be ideas and tastes reflected in another person. This validates them. Their ha-famished." • My brother bitual insecurity vanishes. Hypnotized by their mirror image, they relax. began to move his jaws, to Now that their inner wall has crumbled, you can slowly draw them out, chew and swallow, as though he were eating, and eventually turn the dynamic around. Once they are open to you, it be-while the old man still comes easy to infect them with your own moods and heat. Entering the coaxed him, saying: "Eat, other person's spirit is a kind of hypnosis; it is the most insidious and effec-my friend, and note the excellence of this bread and tive form of persuasion known to man. its whiteness. " • "This In the eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Cham-man," thought Shakashik,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Iranian Shiism had always been motivated by two passions: for social justice and the Unseen (al-ghayb). Where Western people had, over the centuries, carefully cultivated a rational ethos which concentrated entirely on the physical world perceived by the senses, Iranian Shiis, like other premodern peoples, had nurtured a sense of the hidden (batin) world evoked by cult and myth. During the White Revolution, Iranians had acquired electricity, television, and modern transport, but the religious revival in the country showed that for many people these external (zaheri) achievements were simply not enough. Modernization had been too rapid and was inevitably skin-deep. Many Iranians still hungered for the batin and felt that without it their lives had neither value nor significance. As the American anthropologist William Beeman explained, an Iranian who believed himself to be trapped on the material surface of life felt that he had lost his soul. The drive for a pure inner life was still a supreme value in Iranian society, so much so that one of the greatest compliments one person could pay another was to say that “his/her inside (batin) and outside (zahir) are the same.”60 Without a strong sense of the spiritual, many Iranians felt utterly lost. During the White Revolution, some had become convinced that their West-toxicated society had been poisoned by the materialism, consumer goods, alien modes of entertainment, and the imposition of foreign values. Further, the shah, with the enthusiastic support of the United States, seemed determined to destroy Islam, the source of the nation’s spirituality. He had exiled Khomeini, closed the Fayziyyah Madrasah, insulted the clergy, cut their revenues, and killed theology students.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He had not died, but had been miraculously concealed by God; he would return one day shortly before the Last Judgment to inaugurate a reign of justice. He was still the infallible guide of the Shiah and the only legitimate ruler of the ummah , but he would no longer be able to commune with the faithful through agents, or have any direct contact with them. Shiis should not expect his speedy return. They would only see him again “after a long time has passed and the earth has become filled with tyranny.” 31 The myth of the “occultation” of the Hidden Imam cannot be explained rationally. It makes sense only in a context of mysticism and ritual practice. If we understand the story as a logos , one that should be interpreted literally as a plain statement of fact, all kinds of questions arise. Where in the world had the Imam gone? Was he on earth or in some kind of intermediate realm? What kind of life could he possibly have? Was he getting older and older? How could he guide the faithful, if they could neither see nor hear him? These questions would seem obtuse to a Shii who was involved in a disciplined cultivation of the batin , or secret sense of scripture, which bypassed reason and drew on the more intuitive powers of the mind. Shiis did not interpret their scriptures and doctrines literally. Their entire spirituality was now a symbolic quest for the Unseen (al-ghayb) that lies beneath the flux of outward (zahir) events. Shiis worshipped an invisible, inscrutable God, searched for a concealed meaning in the Koran, took part in a ceaseless but invisible battle for justice, yearned for a Hidden Imam, and cultivated an esoteric version of Islam that had to be secreted from the world. 32 This intense contemplative life was the setting that alone made sense of the Occultation. The Hidden Imam had become a myth; by his removal from normal history, he had been liberated from the confines of space and time and, paradoxically, he became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis than when he and the other Imams had lived a normal life in Medina or Samarra. The Occultation is a myth that expresses our sense of the sacred as elusive and tantalizingly absent. It is present in the world but not of it; divine wisdom is inseparable from humanity (for we can only perceive anything, God included, from a human perspective) but takes us beyond the insights of ordinary men and women. Like any myth, the Occultation could not be understood by discursive reason, as though it were a fact that was either self-evident or capable of logical demonstration. But it did express a truth in the religious experience of humanity. Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation. But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century.33 This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Haskalah was the creation of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), the brilliant son of a poor Torah scholar in Dessau, Germany, who, at the age of fourteen, had followed his favorite teacher to Berlin. There he fell in love with modern secular learning and, at prodigious speed, mastered German, French, English, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy. He longed to take part in the German Enlightenment, became a personal friend of Kant’s, and spent all his free time in study. His first book, Phaedon (1767), was an attempt to prove the immortality of the soul on rational grounds, and had nothing particularly Jewish about it. Against his will, however, Mendelssohn found himself obliged to defend Judaism when he encountered Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish faith. In 1769, Johan Casper Lavater, a Swiss pastor, challenged Mendelssohn to defend Judaism in public; if he could not refute the rational proofs of Christianity, Lavater declared, he should submit to baptism. Mendelssohn was also disturbed by the anti-Semitic prejudice in a pamphlet written by a Prussian state official, Christian Wilhelm Van Dohm, On the Civic Improvement of the Condition of the Jews (1781). In order to function effectively and competitively in the modern world, Van Dohm argued, a nation must mobilize the talents of as many people as possible, so it made sense to emancipate the Jews and integrate them more fully into society, even though they should not be granted citizenship or permitted to hold public office. The underlying assumption was that Jews were objectionable and their religion was barbaric.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Most of my childhood fantasies revolved around how I might acquire this little female person for my companion. I concentrated upon magical means, having gathered early on that my family had no intention of satisfying this particular need of mine. The Lorde family was not going to expand any more. The idea of having children was a pretty scary one, anyway, full of secret indiscretions peeked at darkly through the corner of an eye, as my mother and my aunts did whenever they passed a woman on the street who had one of those big, pushed-out-in-front, blouses that always intrigued me so. I wondered what great wrong these women had done, that this big blouse was a badge of, obvious as the dunce cap I sometimes had to wear in the corner at school. Adoption was also out of the question. You could get a kitten from the corner grocery-store man, but not a sister. Like ocean cruises and boarding schools and upper berths in trains, it was not for us. Rich people, like Mr. Rochester in the movie Jane Eyre , lonely in their great tree-lined estates, adopted children, but not us. Being the youngest in a West Indian family had many privileges but no rights. And since my mother was determined not to “spoil” me, even those privileges were largely illusory. I knew, therefore, that if my family were to acquire another little person voluntarily, that little person would most probably be a boy, and would most decidedly belong to my mother, and not to me. I really believed, however, that my magical endeavors, done often enough, in the right way, and in the right places, letter-perfect and with a clean soul, would finally bring me a little sister. And I did mean little. I frequently imagined my little sister and I having fascinating conversations together while she sat cradled in the cupped palm of my hand. There she was, curled up and carefully shielded from the inquisitive eyes of the rest of the world, and my family in particular. When I was three and a half and had gotten my first eyeglasses, I stopped tripping over my feet. But I still walked with my head down, all the time, counting the lines on the squares in the pavement of every street which I traveled, hanging onto the hand of my mother or one of my sisters. I had decided that if I could step on all the horizontal lines for one day, my little person would appear like a dream made real, waiting for me in my bed by the time I got home. But I always messed up, or skipped one, or someone pulled my arm at a crucial moment. And she never appeared. Sometimes on Saturdays in winter, my mother made the three of us a little clay out of flour and water and Diamond Crystal Shaker Salt. I always fashioned tiny little figures out of my share of the mixture.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Occultation completed the mythologization of Shii history which had begun when the Sixth Imam gave up political activism and separated religion from politics. Myth does not provide a blueprint for pragmatic political action but supplies the faithful with a way of looking at their society and developing their interior lives. The myth of Occultation depoliticized the Shiah once and for all. There was no sense in Shiis taking useless risks by pitting themselves against the might of temporal rulers. The image of an Imam, a just political leader who could not exist in the world as it was but had to go into hiding, expressed the Shiis’ alienation from their society. From this new perspective, any government had to be viewed as illegitimate, because it usurped the prerogatives of the Hidden Imam, the true Lord of the Age. Nothing could be expected of earthly rulers, therefore, though in order to survive, the Shiis must cooperate with the powers-that-be. They would live a spiritual life, yearning for a justice that could only return to earth in the Last Days “after a long time has passed.” The sole authority they would accept was that of the Shii ulema, who had taken the place of the former “agents” of the Imams. Because of their learning, their spirituality, and their mastery of the divine law, the ulema had become the deputies of the Hidden Imam and spoke in his name. But because all governments were illegitimate, ulema must not hold political office.34

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Most striking of all Constantine’s symbolic associations with the new religion was his founding of a new capital for his empire. He had no emotional investment in the city of Rome. It is likely that he had hardly if ever visited it before his victory at the Milvian Bridge, and he found the city problematic. Its ruling class was unsympathetic to his new faith and clung to their ancient temples, and it was difficult to change the face of the city itself with monumental building for his new-found friends.9 Instead he looked to the eastern part of the empire to create a city which would be peculiarly his own, and would also mark his victory over the former ruler in the East, Licinius.10 He had considered refounding the city of Troy, original home of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, as his New Rome, but this association with pre-Christian Roman origins did not prove enough of an incentive.11 The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander’s precedent: Constantinople. The old name persisted, eventually modified in academic Latin to Byzantium. It was destined to provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine Empire.12 But for countless numbers of people of the eastern Mediterranean over that millennium and beyond, Constantinople would simply be ‘the City’, the dominant presence in their society, their religious practice and their hopes for the future. Constantine quadrupled Byzantium in size, and although virtually none of the buildings which he provided survive, the Great Palace of the emperors remained on the same site from its first completion in 330 until the death of the last emperor in 1453. This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others. Traditional religion was put in a subordinate place: the core centres of worship were Christian churches of great magnificence. They included a church in which Constantine proposed to gather the bodies of all twelve Apostles to accompany his own corpse: a mark of how he now saw his role in the Christian story, although the coffins alongside his own had to remain mainly symbolic in default of enough relics of the Twelve.13 For the most part the city churches were not exactly congregational or parish churches. They were designed like the contemporary temples of non-Christians with specific dedications or commemorations in mind, to concentrate on a particular saint or aspect of the Christian holiness. One of the greatest, close to the Imperial Palace, was dedicated to Holy Peace (Hagia Eirēnē). It was soon outclassed when Constantine’s son put up an even greater church right beside it dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), whose successor building was to

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Chapter Twenty NONE OF THE HEALINGS I WITNESSED GROWING UP HAD EVER FELT SO immediate, so personal. Maybe it was having contact with the boy and his mother before and after Brother Terrell prayed for them. Maybe it was because I didn’t know how to live without Brother Terrell and his ministry at the center of everything. Or maybe it was because I was sixteen and longed to go home. With the miracle of the deaf boy, God seemed to beckon me. “You belong here,” he seemed to say. “Here” was among the Terrellites. My husband agreed. He continued going to law school but swore off atheist philosophers. I swore off pot, scoured the scriptures for obscure references to the end-time, tried to like Richard Nixon (an honest man chosen to lead the country, according to Brother Terrell), and switched the radio station in my car from rock and roll to country and western. We bought and stored extra food in our pantry to prepare for the famine. I burned my jeans and wore long, hippie-looking dresses. When my mother called, I told her of my conversion experience and she gave me her phone number. We both agreed it was best that the whereabouts of her ranch remain a secret, if only to thwart the devil. I tied a blessed handkerchief around the steering column of the car and we began making the three-hundred-and-sixty-mile round-trip between Groesbeck and Bangs on most weekends. Located at the western edge of Brown County, ten miles outside the county seat of Brownwood, Bangs is situated in a sort of borderland along which the rolling gentility of the central Texas landscape gives way to the windswept desolation that eventually becomes west Texas. Until the big tent came to town in 1972, a truck stop and a convenience store were the most visible landmarks along Highway 84 West. The wind blew all winter long, and in the summer, the sun beat the land into submission. Wind, dust, and truck-stop grease. Still, one person’s hell is another’s Promised Land, or at the very least, Blessed Area. The Terrellites descended on Bangs like a biblical plague. They came in their broken-down trucks and leaky campers and station wagons that rattled when they rolled. A few drove new cars, all that remained of the middle-class life they had abandoned. The women, in their high-necked, ankle-length dresses and bird’s-nest hair, resembled refugees from the Grand Ole Opry. The men,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Swaggart was a Pentecostalist. In its early days, Pentecostalism had been the polar opposite of fundamentalism, attempting to bypass reason and give voice to the ineffability of divine truth. As such, it had always courted the danger of an undisciplined entry into the unconscious world and the perils that always attend an abdication of reason. But early Pentecostalism at its best had been characterized by inclusion and a compassionate breaking down of racial and class barriers. Swaggart, however, preached a religion of hatred. He had become famous for his foulmouthed attacks on homosexuals, an obsession that almost certainly revealed buried anxieties about his own sexual proclivities. He had also turned viciously on other ministers and rival televangelists, and joined the judgmental crusade of Moral Majority. By casting off the restraints imposed by the discipline of charity as well as those of reason, Swaggart had embraced a religiosity that was, in its way, as self-destructive and nihilistic as some of the other movements we have considered. American journalist Lawrence Wright found himself attracted to Swaggart’s emotional preaching style. He sensed that Swaggart was rebelling against the strictures of rational modernity; it was “defiantly emotional,” light-years away from the “arid intellectual refinements” of Wright’s own childhood religion. He found that a part of himself craved Swaggart’s “ecstatic abandonment of my own busy, judgmental, ironic mentality.”117 And so did Swaggart’s audience, who responded ecstatically to his orgasmic preaching: He would sink deeper and deeper into his subconscious, he would journey past reason and conscious meaning into the slashing emotions and buried fears and unnamed desires that bubble below. His voice would rise and tremble, his grammar would fall away, but still he stumbled toward that cowering raw nerve of longing. He knew where it was. One watched him with both dread and desire, because this is the nerve that is attached to faith. Longing to be loved and saved—it is when he finally touches this nerve that the tears flow and the audience stands with its hands upraised, laughing, wailing, praising the Lord, speaking in unknown languages and quivering with the pain and pleasure of this thrilling public exposure.118

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In its early days, Pentecostalism had been the polar opposite of fundamentalism, attempting to bypass reason and give voice to the ineffability of divine truth. As such, it had always courted the danger of an undisciplined entry into the unconscious world and the perils that always attend an abdication of reason. But early Pentecostalism at its best had been characterized by inclusion and a compassionate breaking down of racial and class barriers. Swaggart, however, preached a religion of hatred. He had become famous for his foulmouthed attacks on homosexuals, an obsession that almost certainly revealed buried anxieties about his own sexual proclivities. He had also turned viciously on other ministers and rival televangelists, and joined the judgmental crusade of Moral Majority. By casting off the restraints imposed by the discipline of charity as well as those of reason, Swaggart had embraced a religiosity that was, in its way, as self-destructive and nihilistic as some of the other movements we have considered. American journalist Lawrence Wright found himself attracted to Swaggart’s emotional preaching style. He sensed that Swaggart was rebelling against the strictures of rational modernity; it was “defiantly emotional,” light-years away from the “arid intellectual refinements” of Wright’s own childhood religion. He found that a part of himself craved Swaggart’s “ecstatic abandonment of my own busy, judgmental, ironic mentality.” 117 And so did Swaggart’s audience, who responded ecstatically to his orgasmic preaching: He would sink deeper and deeper into his subconscious, he would journey past reason and conscious meaning into the slashing emotions and buried fears and unnamed desires that bubble below. His voice would rise and tremble, his grammar would fall away, but still he stumbled toward that cowering raw nerve of longing. He knew where it was. One watched him with both dread and desire, because this is the nerve that is attached to faith. Longing to be loved and saved—it is when he finally touches this nerve that the tears flow and the audience stands with its hands upraised, laughing, wailing, praising the Lord, speaking in unknown languages and quivering with the pain and pleasure of this thrilling public exposure. 118 The best premodern spirituality, such as that of John of the Cross, Isaac Luria, or Mulla Sadra, had eschewed such emotional excess, claiming that it had nothing to do with religion; they had insisted that the interior journey was calm, disciplined, and complemented by reason. No one was initiated into the Kabbalah until he was at least forty years old and married, and had achieved sexual equilibrium. The modern world, which had neglected the more intuitive paths to knowledge, had for the most part lost this mystical lore. Swaggart’s success shows that people longed for ecstasy in an over-rationalized world, but also shows that such a quest can become unbalanced. Swaggart’s frenzy seemed to have more to do with the sexual needs that drove him (to use Wright’s words in a different context) to the “thrilling public exposure” in the Baton Rouge motel than with spirituality.

• From Action (2014)

  (Brafe, if you’re reading this: Thanks for the follow-up texts, dude, but I didn’t want to see you again because it was so gargantuanly perfect that one time that I didn’t want to risk altering the memory, which… I’m now infuriated by how ferociously boneheaded that decision was. I still can’t believe you post-coitally played me Backstreet Boys on the piano while singing along in perfect pitch. The sex was also that perfect, times about 72.) (Brafe, were you even real?) (Call me, Brafe.) • The fried chicken spot near my house. At Palace Fried, the guys behind the counter call me “Miss Spicy” and can recite my phone number from memory, but not because I use this place as a pick-up spot. It’s because I order a spicy chicken sandwich three to four times a week when my vegetarianism is lapsing particularly exceptionally… wait, wait. No. It’s definitely because of this. Goddamnit. Any solid nickname is borne of a reputation. I first earned this one on some summer night. I had just come from a tepid party next door and was in no great rush to return—I had dipped for chicken upon hearing a cluster of bona fide adults literally talking about their SAT scores, shudder. A guy was in front of me in line, and as we waited for our respective three-piece and characteristic spicy chicken, I noticed that he was wearing a Hüsker Dü shirt. Since I am, apparently, still of the seventh-grade mindset that if a person likes what you’re into musically, they are definitely meant to come home and neck with you, I complimented it. We got to talking. Then we got to eating our drumsticks together, and I decided to see what would happen if I told him that my apartment was around the corner if he might like to drop by real quick. Smash cut to us smashing, then cheerily parting forever. (Dear Hüsker Dü: I love you even more now, which I did not think previously possible. Ever yours, Miss Spicy.) • Concerts. If I am willing to come out and advocate for capitalizing on common musical tastes as shared at a scrappy purveyor of breaded poultry, please trust I find it even easier to do so at venues that more straightforwardly celebrate the musical acts I love. Just go up to some hot person and talk about the lineup, or related acts, or other shows you’ve seen at the outlet in which you’re both standing. I have gotten laid via this brand of taxonomizing/cultural fetishism more times than I can now recall.

• From Action (2014)

  If I do like them a lot straight out of the gate, I might say, “Sure, we can go out. I think I’m free in eight days?” I have meant this every single last solitary time I’ve said it. That’s because I have a life to lead—meeting a cute person doesn’t have to crown them the monarch of your head. You still have friends to see later that night/some sleep to catch (the taxi goodbye)/a business trip to California to make (Hanukkah-length SEE YA LATER)/or other people to break it off with in order to respect their feelings (the guy who texted me, “Wow your super anti huh,” which no one says unless they are profoundly about it, while I took my time kindly ending things with another person—which I was doing anyway, I solemnly swear). If you would like to stretch this to longer than a night without having to employ these pretenses and have shared a significant deal of interesting and intriguing time together already, just fail to say goodbye when you leave. Nothing incubates a fledgling crush like ghosting out on it. If they don’t sleuth you down by the next evening, follow or friend them on social media, or otherwise bat-signal, “Hiiiiiiii thar.” If another day passes, write a brief note: “You have a funny way of saying goodbye.” This is the only subterfuge I am willing to recommend, and only because it works so well. On the off chance they don’t write back, leave it—rejection is the condom of the universe &c. If they do, WE’VE GOT A LIVE ONE HERE. What you do now is all on you, McBeautiful. Introducing Everyone [image file=image_316.jpg] Online dating can be a laborious hell-venture. It can also get you VERY laid if you simply prod at your cell phone a few times. The latter might sound like an appealing premise, but it’s also one of the reasons that I don’t recommend it unless you live somewhere remote, are queer (homos tend to be more capable at acting like actual humans on the cold, vast internet—we often need to, because of scarcity and safety, even in big cities)—or are a thick-skinned pillar of resilience who doesn’t mind being told to “show me ur ass cheexz.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The best premodern spirituality, such as that of John of the Cross, Isaac Luria, or Mulla Sadra, had eschewed such emotional excess, claiming that it had nothing to do with religion; they had insisted that the interior journey was calm, disciplined, and complemented by reason. No one was initiated into the Kabbalah until he was at least forty years old and married, and had achieved sexual equilibrium. The modern world, which had neglected the more intuitive paths to knowledge, had for the most part lost this mystical lore. Swaggart’s success shows that people longed for ecstasy in an over-rationalized world, but also shows that such a quest can become unbalanced. Swaggart’s frenzy seemed to have more to do with the sexual needs that drove him (to use Wright’s words in a different context) to the “thrilling public exposure” in the Baton Rouge motel than with spirituality.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Instead of prophets, the Shaitan was quite happy with fortune-tellers, his mosque was the bazaar, he was most at home in the public baths, and instead of seeking God, his quest was for wine and women. 58 He was, in fact, incurably trivial, trapped forever in the realm of the exterior (zahir) world and unable to see that there was a deeper and more important dimension of existence. For many Iranians, America, the Great Shaitan, was “the Great Trivializer.” The bars, casinos, and secularist ethos of West-toxicated North Tehran typified the American ethos, which seemed deliberately to ignore the hidden (batin) realities that alone gave life meaning. Furthermore, America, the Shaitan, had tempted the shah away from the true values of Islam to a life of superficial secularism. 59 Iranian Shiism had always been motivated by two passions: for social justice and the Unseen (al-ghayb) . Where Western people had, over the centuries, carefully cultivated a rational ethos which concentrated entirely on the physical world perceived by the senses, Iranian Shiis, like other premodern peoples, had nurtured a sense of the hidden (batin) world evoked by cult and myth. During the White Revolution, Iranians had acquired electricity, television, and modern transport, but the religious revival in the country showed that for many people these external (zaheri) achievements were simply not enough. Modernization had been too rapid and was inevitably skin-deep. Many Iranians still hungered for the batin and felt that without it their lives had neither value nor significance. As the American anthropologist William Beeman explained, an Iranian who believed himself to be trapped on the material surface of life felt that he had lost his soul. The drive for a pure inner life was still a supreme value in Iranian society, so much so that one of the greatest compliments one person could pay another was to say that “his/her inside (batin) and outside (zahir) are the same.” 60 Without a strong sense of the spiritual, many Iranians felt utterly lost. During the White Revolution, some had become convinced that their West-toxicated society had been poisoned by the materialism, consumer goods, alien modes of entertainment, and the imposition of foreign values. Further, the shah, with the enthusiastic support of the United States, seemed determined to destroy Islam, the source of the nation’s spirituality. He had exiled Khomeini, closed the Fayziyyah Madrasah, insulted the clergy, cut their revenues, and killed theology students. The Iranian Revolution was not merely political. Certainly, the cruel and autocratic regime of the shah and the economic crisis were crucial: there would have been no uprising without them. Many secularist Iranians who did not experience this spiritual malaise would eventually join the ulema simply to get rid of the shah, and without their support, the Revolution would not have succeeded. But it was also a rebellion against the secularist ethos which excluded religion and which many ordinary Iranians felt was being imposed upon them against their will.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Our room became Study Central for the four of us, with Takumi and Lara over till all hours of the night talking about The Sound and the Fury and meiosis and the Battle of the Bulge. The Colonel taught us a semester’s worth of precalc, although he was too good at math to teach it very well—“Of course it makes sense. Just trust me. Christ, it’s not that hard”—and I missed Alaska. And when I could not catch up, I cheated. Takumi and I shared copies of Cliffs Notes for Things Fall Apart and A Farewell to Arms (“These things are just too damned long!” he exclaimed at one point). We didn’t talk much. But we didn’t need to. one hundred twenty-two days after A COOL BREEZE had beaten back the onslaught of summer, and on the morning the Old Man gave us our final exams, he suggested we have class outside. I wondered why we could have an entire class outside when I’d been kicked out of class last semester for merely glancing outside, but the Old Man wanted to have class outside, so we did. The Old Man sat in a chair that Kevin Richman carried out for him, and we sat on the grass, my notebook at first perched awkwardly in my lap and then against the thick green grass, and the bumpy ground did not lend itself to writing, and the gnats hovered. We were too close to the lake for comfortable sitting, really, but the Old Man seemed happy. “I have here your final exam. Last semester, I gave you nearly two months to complete your final paper. This time, you get two weeks.” He paused. “Well, nothing to be done about that, I guess.” He laughed. “To be honest, I just decided once and for all to use this paper topic last night. It rather goes against my nature. Anyway, pass these around.” When the pile came to me, I read the question: How will you—you personally—ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? Now that you’ve wrestled with three major religious traditions, apply your newly enlightened mind to Alaska’s question. After the exams had been passed out, the Old Man said, “You need not specifically discuss the perspectives of different religions in your essay, so no research is necessary. Your knowledge, or lack thereof, has been established in the quizzes you’ve taken this semester. I am interested in how you are able to fit the uncontestable fact of suffering into your understanding of the world, and how you hope to navigate through life in spite of it. “Next year, assuming my lungs hold out, we’ll study Taoism, Hinduism, and Judaism together—” The Old Man coughed and then started to laugh, which caused him to cough again. “Lord, maybe I won’t last. But about the three traditions we’ve studied this year, I’d like to say one thing. Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism each have founder figures—Muhammad, Jesus, and the Buddha, respectively.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  2 Israel (c. 1000 BCE–100 CE) A PEOPLE AND THEIR LAND Along the south-eastern end of the Mediterranean coast lies a land difficult to name. In a very remote past it was called Canaan, but its later turbulent history left it with two names, Israel and Palestine, both of which are in use today, and both of which carry a heavy weight of emotion and contested identity. For one people, the Jews, the land is the Promised Land, granted to them in solemn pronouncements made by God to a succession of their forefathers; Jews are so called from what was originally the southern part of it, Judah or in Greek Judaea, which contrived to keep its independence from great empires longer than its rival northern kingdom, which had arrogated to itself the name of Israel. Christians have their own name for Palestine or Israel: they call it the Holy Land, because Jesus Christ was born and died here. He was executed outside the city of Jerusalem, once briefly the capital of a united kingdom of Israel. The name Jerusalem (often called Zion after its citadel) echoes through the sacred songs of the Jews, in accents of longing or joy, and Christians have sung the same texts. Jerusalem has preserved its ancient and medieval walls intact, and even with the extensions to their area made in the Roman period, the old city usually surprises those who visit it for the first time by how small it is. Yet great human longing and passions are focused on that small compass. Medieval Christians made maps of the world with Jerusalem at the centre, and it is the setting for one of the most ancient and revered shrines of Islam, built on the site of the Temple which long before had been the centre of Jewish worship. So Jerusalem is resonant for all three linked monotheistic faiths, often with tragic consequences as they have fought each other to gain exclusive control over this small city.1 Jerusalem is the contested heart of Palestine or Israel, whose modest overall extent, no more than 150 miles by 100 miles when undivided, belies its importance in the history of the world. Those without some idea of its geography and climate will not fully understand the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, whose horizons it sets.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  But now, in this cold and raucous country called america, Linda missed the music. She even missed the annoyance of the early Saturday morning customers with their loose talk and slurred rhythms, warbling home from the rumshop. She knew about food. But of what use was that to these crazy people she lived among, who cooked leg of lamb without washing the meat, and roasted even the toughest beef without water and a cover? Pumpkin was only a child’s decoration to them, and they treated their husbands better than they cared for their children. She did not know her way in and out of the galleries of the Museum of Natural History, but she did know that it was a good place to take children if you wanted them to grow up smart. It frightened her when she took her children there, and she would pinch each one of us girls on the fleshy part of our upper arms at one time or another all afternoon. Supposedly, it was because we wouldn’t behave, but actually, it was because beneath the neat visor of the museum guard’s cap, she could see pale blue eyes staring at her and her children as if we were a bad smell, and this frightened her. This was a situation she couldn’t control. What else did Linda know? She knew how to look into people’s faces and tell what they were going to do before they did it. She knew which grapefruit was shaddock and pink, before it ripened, and what to do with the others, which was to throw them to the pigs. Except she had no pigs in Harlem, and sometimes those were the only grapefruit around to eat. She knew how to prevent infection in an open cut or wound by heating the black-elm leaf over a wood-fire until it wilted in the hand, rubbing the juice into the cut, and then laying the soft green now flabby fibers over the wound for a bandage. But there was no black-elm in Harlem, no black oak leaves to be had in New York City. Ma-Mariah, her root-woman grandmother, had taught her well under the trees on Noel’s Hill in Grenville, Grenada, overlooking the sea. Aunt Anni and Ma-Liz, Linda’s mother, had carried it on. But there was no call for this knowledge now; and her husband Byron did not like to talk about home because it made him sad, and weakened his resolve to make a kingdom for himself in this new world. She did not know if the stories about white slavers that she read in the Daily News were true or not, but she knew to forbid her children ever to set foot into any candystore. We were not even allowed to buy penny gumballs from the machines in the subway.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Louisa had agreed to let her go and live with Phil and Ella. I was just grateful she was still alive. I started going back to Mass on Sundays for a while, and found an out-of-the-way church on the East side and went to confession. Autumn came very quickly. Gennie and I saw less of each other since we were at different schools. I told her I missed her over the phone. Life over at Phil and Ella’s was very different, I sensed, from living with Louisa, but Gennie didn’t like to talk about it much. Sometimes I’d visit her there, and we sat on the daybed in Phil and Ella’s room and drank Champale and ate marshmallows toasted on a pencil with a match. You have to keep blowing the flame around the candy. But there was an uneasy feeling about that house for me, and Gennie always seemed different around there, probably because I heard Ella always listening outside the closed door from where she was sweeping or dusting. It seemed Ella was always cleaning house, with carpet slippers on and a rag around her head, humming the same little tune over and over and over and over under her breath. We could never go over to my house because my parents didn’t allow visitors when they were not home. They didn’t approve of friends in general, and they did not care much for Gennie because my mother thought she was too “loud.” So we usually made dates to meet at Columbus Circle or in Washington Square Park, and for a while the golden leaves near each fountain hid the harshness of the confused and alien colors that were sweeping up over our paths. Without Gennie, Hunter was another set of worlds. Mostly, that autumn, it was Maxine and her music and her acne treatments and her desperate crush on the chairwoman of the music department. It matched my own on the latest addition to the english faculty who wore suits and flats and had a most charming malocclusion. And it was our getting into constant trouble for hanging out in the lockers after school. We never really knew what we were being accused of doing down there. We just knew that we weren’t supposed to be there, and that it was the only place where we could be totally alone, meaning without our mothers. Neither one of us ever wanted to go home to the family wars. The lockers were a private world for Maxine and me. Sometimes, when we roamed through the locker room, we crossed the private worlds of other fugitives from the warlight, whispering animatedly two by two in the aisles of lockers, as we ran by. I played gallant swain and stepped boldly and fearlessly upon the hard swift waterbugs that seemed to ride back and forth on horseback.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  thoughts of a Dutch Reformed monopoly. It was New York that first experienced the bewildering diversity of settlers which, during the eighteenth century, swelled into a flood, and made any effort to reproduce old Europe’s compartmentalized and discrete confessional Churches seem ludicrous. Rather than the colonies of north and south which had been English from the beginning, this Dutch settlement pointed to the future diverse religious pattern of North America.26 Further religious experiments intersected with the crises of mid-seventeenth- century England in different ways from New England and Virginia. In 1632 Roman Catholic aristocrats friendly with Charles I sponsored a colony in a region known as the Chesapeake north of Virginia, and named it Maryland after the King’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. In fact the Royalists’ defeat in the English civil wars meant that Catholics did not take the leading role in Maryland. Feeling that their already tenuous position was under threat, in 1649 they seized on a brief moment of local strength and sought to create a unique freedom to practise their religion by outmanoeuvring their Protestant opponents in a huge concession. They guaranteed complete toleration for all those who believed in Jesus Christ. They ordered fines and whipping for anyone using the normal religious insults of seventeenth-century England, elaborately specified in a list: ‘heretic, schismatic, idolator, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian, Popish priest, Jesuit, Jesuited Papist, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist’.27 This was an extraordinary effort to blot out the bitterness of the Reformation; it approached Rhode Island’s universal toleration by a very different route. Maryland showed the limitations of its vision by still ordering property confiscation and execution for anyone denying the Trinity, and Anglicans seized control of the colony in the 1690s, doing their best to restrict Roman Catholic rights — an ironical outcome of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which is seen in English history as a milestone in the development of public religious toleration (see pp. 733–6). Nevertheless, amid the steadily encroaching diversity of the whole colonial seaboard, the Maryland example was not forgotten. A new chance for the hard-pressed Quakers came when one of their number, William Penn, became interested in founding a refuge for them. He was the son of an English admiral, and friendly with the Catholic and nautically minded heir to the throne, the future James II. Drawing on these useful connections, he got a royal charter in 1682 for a colony to be called Pennsylvania, in territories lying between Maryland and New England. His plan was bold and imaginative: going further than the Catholic elite of Maryland, he renounced the use of coercion in religion, and granted free exercise of religion and political participation to all