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.

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He pulled a face. ‘Pooh, Nancy, the real thing not good enough for you any more?’Father leaned towards him. ‘Well, we are told it is Kitty Butler,’ he said. ‘If you ask me’ - and here he winked and rubbed his nose - ‘I think there’s a young chap in the orchestra pit what she’s got her eye on ...’‘Ah,’ said Joe, significantly. ‘Let’s hope poor Frederick don’t catch on to it, then ...’At that, everybody looked my way, and I blushed - and so seemed, I suppose, to prove my father’s words. Davy snorted; Mother, who had frowned before, now smiled. I let her - I let them all think just what they liked - and said nothing; and soon, as before, the talk turned to other matters.I could deceive my parents and my brother with my silences; from my sister Alice, however, I could keep nothing.‘Is there a feller you’ve got your eye on, at the Palace?’ she asked me later, when the rest of the house lay hushed and sleeping.‘Of course not,’ I said quietly.‘It’s just Miss Butler, then, that you go to see?’‘Yes.’There was a silence, broken only by the distant rumble of wheels and faint thud of hooves, from the High Street, and the even fainter sucking whoosh of sea against shingle from the bay. We had put out our candle but left the window wide and unshuttered. I saw in the gleam of starlight that Alice’s eyes were open. She was gazing at me with an ambiguous expression that seemed half amusement, half distaste.‘You’re rather keen on her, ain’t you?’ she said then.I looked away, and didn’t answer her at once. When I spoke at last it was not to her at all, but to the darkness.‘When I see her,’ I said, ‘it’s like - I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like I never saw anything at all before. It’s like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it’s filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing - they’re like dust. Then she walks on the stage and - she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet ... She makes me want to smile and weep, at once. She makes me sore, here.’ I placed a hand upon my chest, upon the breast-bone. ‘I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her ...’ My voice became a trembling whisper then, and I found that I could say no more.There was another silence.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But the theatre had had to be evacuated, and there had been problems with the exits; afterwards an inspector came, looked at the building, and said a new escape door must be added. He closed the theatre while the work was done: tickets were returned, apologies pasted up; and for a whole half-week we found ourselves on holiday.Urged on by Kitty - for she had grown suddenly gallant about letting me go - I took my chance. I wrote to Mother and told her that, if I was still welcome, I should be home the following day - that was Sunday - and would stay till Wednesday night. Then I went shopping, to buy presents for the family: there was something thrilling after all, I found, about the idea of returning to Whitstable after so long, with a parcel of gifts from London ...Even so, it was hard to part from Kitty.‘You will be all right?’ I said to her. ‘You won’t be lonely here?’‘I shall be horribly lonely. I expect you will come back and find me dead from loneliness!’‘Why don’t you come with me? We might catch a later train -’‘No, Nan; you should see your family without me.’‘I shall think about you every minute.’‘And I shall think of you ...’‘Oh, Kitty ...’She had been tapping at her tooth with the pearl of her necklace; when I put my mouth upon hers I felt it, cold and smooth and hard, between our lips. She let me kiss her, then moved her head so that our cheeks touched; then she put her arms about my waist and held me to her rather fiercely - quite as if she loved me more than anything. Whitstable, when I drew into it later that morning, seemed very changed - very small and grey, and with a sea that was wider, and a sky that was lower and less blue, than I remembered. I leaned from the carriage window to gaze at it all, and so saw Father and Davy, at the station, a moment or two before they saw me. Even they looked different - I felt a rush of aching love and strange regret, to think it - Father a little older, a little shrunken, somehow; Davy slightly stouter, and redder in the face.When they saw me, stepping from the train on to the platform, they came running.‘Nance! My dearest girl ... !’ This was Father. We embraced - awkwardly, for I had all my parcels with me, and a hat upon my head with a veil around it. One of the parcels fell to the ground and he bent to retrieve it, then hurried to help me with the others. Davy, meanwhile, took my hand, then kissed my cheek through the mesh of my veil.‘Just look at you,’ he said. ‘All dressed up to the ninety-nines !

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Later, as I kissed them good-night, he cleared his throat. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘back up to London in the morning, and I’ve barely had time for a proper look at you.’ I smiled. ‘Have you had a nice time with us, Nance?’‘Oh yes.’‘And you will take care of yourself, in London?’ asked Mother. ‘It seems very far away.’I laughed. ‘It’s not so far.’‘Far enough,’ she said, ‘to keep you from us for a year and a half.’‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. ‘We have been terribly busy, both of us.’ She nodded, not much impressed: she had heard all this before, in letters.‘Just make sure it’s not so long before you come home again. It is very nice to get your parcels; it was very nice to get those gifts; but we would rather have you, than a hairbrush or a pair of boots.’ I looked away, abashed; I still felt foolish when I thought about the presents. Even so, I didn’t think she needed to be quite so rusty about it, quite so hard.Having made the decision to leave sooner, I grew impatient. I packed my bags that night, and rose, next morning, even earlier than Alice. At seven, when the breakfast things were cleared away, I was ready to go. I embraced them all, but my parting was not so sad, nor so sweet, as it had been the first time I had left them; and I had no premonition of anything to come, to make it sadder. Davy was kind, and made me promise I would come home for his wedding, and said I might bring Kitty if I liked, which made me love him all the more. Mother smiled, but her smile was tight; Alice was so chill that, in the end, I turned my back on her. Only Father hugged me to him as if really loath to get me go; and when he said that he would miss me, I knew he meant it.No one could be spared, this time, to walk me to the station, so I made my own way there. I didn’t look at Whitstable, or the sea, as my train pulled away from it; I certainly did not think, I shan’t see you again, for years and years - and if I had, I am ashamed to say it would not much have troubled me. I thought only of Kitty. It was still only half-past seven; she wouldn’t rise, I knew, till ten, and I planned to surprise her - to let myself into our rooms at Stamford Hill, and creep into her bed. The train rolled on, through Faversham and Rochester.

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

  I can still remember the excitement I felt during those evening trips, the enticement of darkness and the click of the cue ball, and the jukebox flashing its red and green lights, and the weary laughter that ran around the room. Yet even then, as young as I was, I had already begun to sense that most of the people in the bar weren’t there out of choice, that what my grandfather sought there was the company of people who could help him forget his own troubles, people who he believed would not judge him. Maybe the bar really did help him forget, but I knew with the unerring instincts of a child that he was wrong about not being judged. Our presence there felt forced, and by the time I had reached junior high school I had learned to beg off from Gramps’s invitations, knowing that whatever it was I was after, whatever it was that I needed, would have to come from some other source. TV, movies, the radio; those were the places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style. I couldn’t croon like Marvin Gaye, but I could learn to dance all the Soul Train steps. I couldn’t pack a gun like Shaft or Superfly, but I could sure enough curse like Richard Pryor. And I could play basketball, with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent. My father’s Christmas gift had come at a time when the University of Hawaii basketball team had slipped into the national rankings on the strength of an all-black starting five that the school had shipped in from the mainland. That same spring, Gramps had taken me to one of their games, and I had watched the players in warm-ups, still boys themselves but to me poised and confident warriors, chuckling to each other about some inside joke, glancing over the heads of fawning fans to wink at the girls on the sidelines, casually flipping layups or tossing high-arcing jumpers until the whistle blew and the centers jumped and the players joined in furious battle.

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

  She smiled back and sipped her coffee. I had seen her around before, usually sitting in the library with a book in hand, a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade, along with tinted, oversized glasses and a scarf always covering her head. I knew she was a junior, helped organize black student events, didn’t go out much. She stirred her coffee idly and asked, “What did Marcus call you just now? Some African name, wasn’t it?” “Barack.” “I thought your name was Barry.” “Barack’s my given name. My father’s name. He was Kenyan.” “Does it mean something?” “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim.” Regina repeated the name to herself, testing out the sound. “Barack. It’s beautiful.” She leaned forward across the table. “So why does everybody call you Barry?” “Habit, I guess. My father used it when he arrived in the States. I don’t know whether that was his idea or somebody else’s. He probably used Barry because it was easier to pronounce. You know—helped him fit in. Then it got passed on to me. So I could fit in.” “Do you mind if I call you Barack?” I smiled. “Not as long as you say it right.” She tilted her head impatiently, her mouth set in mock offense, her eyes ready to surrender to laughter. We ended up spending the afternoon together, talking and drinking coffee. She told me about her childhood in Chicago, the absent father and struggling mother, the South Side six-flat that never seemed warm enough in winter and got so hot in the summer that people went out by the lake to sleep. She told me about the neighbors on her block, about walking past the taverns and pool halls on the way to church on Sunday. She told me about evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter. Her voice evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing—a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history. As we were getting up to leave, I told Regina I envied her. “For what?” “I don’t know. For your memories, I guess.” Regina looked at me and started to laugh, a round, full sound from deep in her belly. “What’s so funny?” “Oh, Barack,” she said, catching her breath, “isn’t life something? And here I was all this time wishing I’d grown up in Hawaii.”

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Did you recognize it as a vision right away or did you have to grow into it? What images helped you? What words did you hear in a holy voice? What colors were there? What living creatures shared in your experience? How did you carry the vision with you? There are a thousand questions I would like to ask you. And there are a thousand ways you can answer as you tell me about your vision, about what it has meant, about how it has changed your life. And I believe, although the world may have always known you by a single name, the truth is you have been given many names. You have changed, been changed, and emerged from the dreamtime of vision to discover yourself anew. I want to be spiritually bold enough in this book to claim this territory of integrity for all of us who have received a vision in our lives. I want to do so to stake out our space, our story, in the realm of the religious. I do not do this only for any group of us, but for all of us, whether we are Christian or not, whether we are Native or not, whether we are religious or not. I believe there are no fences we can build around the vision of God to contain it or explain it. Instead, I think vision is a wild truth. It appears as it will to whomever it will. It arises in many different forms to many different people of many different walks of life. It has come to you, to me, and to countless others through the centuries. Vision is not a private club for the initiated few, but a wide spiritual sea on which any person may sail. You and I discovered that fact, and we are not alone. Many others were alongside us, even if we could not see them, or hear their story, or understand their experience. Like ships passing in the night, we may have missed many chances to realize just how full of mystery our lives are. We may have felt hindered by our own cultural and religious training from sending out signals into that night, openly sharing our own visions with others for fear of rejection. Therefore, we have sailed alone and we have sailed in silence. That is something we must change. Vine Deloria was right when he said that a story like Black Elk Speaks would be like water in a desert. He described our historical period very accurately. We do live in a time when vision is few and far between, not because vision has disappeared from our lives, but because we have been conditioned not to embrace it or speak of it. We have entered the silence of the cultural void that Vine describes, an age where celebrity passes for the heroic and the constant sensations flashed before us on screens fail to reach any deeper in us than entertainment.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  45 used of God, such as Supreme Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, Justice, etc. Using language that goes back to Plato, Dionysius says that God is not only beyond intelligibility but beyond being, literally “above essence” (hyper-ousios) or “super-essential.” Particularly inÀ uential is his description of God as “the Good that diffuses itself.” In contrast to Dionysius, Augustine, the great Christian neo Platonist of the West, conceived God as intelligible. For Augustine, the human mind is like an eye made to see the light of divine Truth. God is the Truth that contains all that is immutably true, the Mind containing Plato’s Ideas. Therefore every time the intellect sees the truth, it catches a partial and transitory glimpse of God. God is to be understood by the intellect, just as bodies are to be seen by the eyes. To use later terminology, for Augustine, it is natural for the human mind to see God. When Augustine says God is incomprehensible, he means something much less than Dionysius. Like Dionysius, Augustine frequently uses the metaphor of dazzled eyes to describe how God surpasses our understanding. But for Augustine, this dazzlement is due not to the incapacity of our nature to understand the incomprehensible God, but to the sinfulness of our hearts which corrupts our minds. It is as if our eyes are unhealthy and half blind. Grace, for Augustine, serves to heal, purify, and strengthen our minds so that we may see God. The sense in which God remains incomprehensible even to healthy eyes is parallel to the sense in which bodies cannot be seen from all sides at once. The concept of the supernatural arose when Western theologians in the Middle Ages had to reconcile Augustine and Dionysius. Their problem was to explain how there can be a beati ¿ c vision of an incomprehensible God. For Augustine, the ultimate goal of life is the ful¿ llment of the mind’s desire to see God, ¿ nding rest in God and “joy in the Truth.” Dionysius’s doctrine of incomprehensibility, on the other hand, means that the essence of God is beyond the capacity of any created being to see or understand. The concept of the supernatural arose when Western theologians in the Middle Ages had to reconcile Augustine and Dionysius.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  form and vocabulary for mystical theology. In Teresa’s mystical theology, the consciousness of God comes to us by grace, not through our own effort. For Teresa, the inward finding of God is not an act of understanding or intellectual vision but a prayer of love. Teresa combines mystical theology with an Augustinian inward turn. Like Augustine, she describes the soul as an inner space, an interior castle, a sort of inner building of the soul, which one must enter to find God. For both Augustine and Teresa, the essence of prayer is desire for God. 123 Lecture 34: Catholic Mystical Theology The lower stages of the spiritual life consist of mental prayer. The soul begins with meditation, which involves the work of the intellect and its many thoughts. Through recollection, withdrawing its faculties within itself, the soul comes to the prayer of quiet, the first stage of supernatural or infused contemplation. The soul proceeds through a sleep of the faculties to a suspended state of the faculties as it enters the prayer of union. Beyond these levels of prayer, Teresa describes extraordinary raptures or ecstasies. A key feature of these experiences is that they center around Christ in his humanity. In her most famous experience, called the “transverberation,” an angel pierces her heart with a golden spear that sets her afire with love for God. The most famous concept of John of the Cross is the dark night of the soul. Like Teresa, John finds God in the inmost being of the soul. The dark night is the soul’s loss of all that is not God, which is necessary for it to find God. The highest level of mystical theology is the spiritual marriage, for both Teresa and John. It is a permanent union in love, the closest This statue of Saint Teresa is inside thing to beatific vision that is St. Peter’s Basilica. possible in this life. The union is of two who remain distinct, not an absorption like a drop into the ocean. As with Teresa, the soul’s ultimate finding of God is a spiritual marriage, which John depicts as a mutual self-giving. Both in Spain and in France mystics went further than the church could approve. Quietism, condemned in 1687, made the passivity of infused contemplation into the whole of Christian life. Quietism contended that the perfect spiritual life involved eliminating all activity of the soul. Once the 124 © Hemera/Thinkstock. pure passivity of inner contemplation was achieved, lower forms of prayer and meditation, as well as the pursuit of virtue, were useless. Quietism picked up on Spanish themes, especially the concept of dejamiento, abandonment, or letting go, which may have entered the Keswick movement from Madame Guyon, a semi-Quietist writer admired by Wesley and other evangelicals.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  vb.denom. muse, complain, poet.‏ שיח talk (of) ;—Qal Impf. 3 ms. MY 119%; 3 fs.‏ etc.; Imv.‏ , יז ד ו DWN‏ .8 ז sf. 5 yea Pr fe‏ ms. ‘TY Jb 12% mpl. my 4 "+; ees estr.‏ y119'8;— 1. complain: + 55 77* (both‏ שיח Th 7" (WII), + 67 (rd. can 0‏ , (ְהָמָה | muses *222-DY 777;‏ .2 .(אַשָחָה for‏ on‏ || על ילות meditate upon, study, God's‏ DPT v8; niNdD? v7; TION‏ ;*'119 פקורים a. talk‏ .3 .145° 127" נִפְלְאתי ,7% acc.‏ ₪ ליק (about), sing (of): ‘abs. Ju 5°(ode); c. 2 rei, y105?‏ so SS Gerber, but poss.‏ ;1 ,שיר ||( 169 =1Ch‏ so Dr), ¥ 69% (3 pers. against; || N22,‏ ,2= of mocking words). b. c. sf. pers. talk (with)‏ speak to Jb 128 (Di ‘sprich‏ ל Pr 65 (del. Toy); c.‏ sinnend’; HiBurd. 72; Kau N° (so Bu as‏ altern.), B6 81. sub 11. MY), Pél‘el meditate,‏ consider : Impf. 3 ms. NNW Is 53° (abs.); 1 =.‏ rei; || 729)—Gn 24" v. 1, Dw,‏ ב) DMS y143°‏ [nv] a. [m.] thought ;—sf. "7 OND 130 שחל‎ Am 4"; read prob. שחל‎ (against Ba*®™ *( unless otherwise corrupt. of foll.; ef. perh. As. 30% grow,‏ /) שיח .זז grow up (of trees), Xhtu, appar. a shoot, sprout ;‏ Syr. Ku artemisia‏ ; שח NH = BH; Pun.‏ Judaica, cf. Wetzst® * * Low, so Ar.‏ Lane (cf. Lag ®*™)).‏ »= Tro גג ] .בג‎ . | bush, shrub, plant ;--- ₪ abs. coll. Jb 30%, estr. 770 ש'‎ Gn 25(J); pl. שִיחִים‎ Jb 30%, הַשִיחֶם‎ IOS Gn 21° (E). 4 2°. 967 שכך .שום .11 etc., 2 I,‏ שימה OW,‏ .זז ,1 .שכך.11 .+ שף' | WW, TDW v. IV. yaw.‏ of foll.; NH 3D look out, Aram.‏ /( שכה 83D look out, hope, 18130 watchman, SDD (for‏ outlook-point ; hae Pa. lage jor;‏ (מִצְפָּה Heb.‏ Ar. (XE (5, s) is complazn (i.e. disclose grief 1),‏ lamp-niche, Eth. ant; window).‏ שי TD מ‎ n.[m.] perh. a celestial appearance, phenomenon(Rabb.Thesmind ; De(afterTalm.) cock (cf. NH “3% cock, ANDY hen, foreign words acc. Dalm), Di‘ Wolkengebilde’ );—abs. ₪ perh. of clouds (ef. || NiNd) It b 38° (RV™ meteor). 1 [Dw] 5-מ‎ very dub., only pl. estr. NPI 7709 Is 25 perh. gen. term, 99 quod visu pul- chrum est, Ges™™ ‘kGstliche Anblicke,’ cf. De ; others refer to zmagery (cf. מַשְכִּית‎ ; as attract- ing the gaze) Che°™™ RV Du; watchtowers (v. Aram.) Ew Di RV™; standards (as con- spicuous) Thes; ships (id.) (Bennett [private letter], and now Gunk*™?™s*° Che #"* Marti, cf, || PIX; SS ליט‎ *** prop. NXDY=’D ships).

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  10 Lecture 3: Pauline Eschatology return. The key expectation (that is, what is yet to be) is the resurrection of all the dead in Christ. When Christ returns, the dead are raised, for Christ’s own resurrection makes him “the ¿ rst fruits” of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15). The picture is not of us going to heaven after we die, but of Christ coming from heaven to earth, bringing life for the dead. Likewise, the picture is not of our souls leaving our bodies behind, but of our mortal bodies “putting on” immortality. Paul calls this a “spiritual body” and speaks of a heavenly dwelling which will clothe us. “Heaven” in Pauline eschatology does not mean the place to which we go but the place where Christ is, hidden from our sight but having the power of eternal life, with which we long to be clothed. The life of believers (that is, what is already) is in Christ, which is to say in his Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit. As at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is the source of prophecy, teaching, and all sacred speech, including “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19). It is also the source of holy or righteous living, “walking by the Spirit” and “the fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:16, 22). Paul writes that the Spirit of God dwells in the plural you, be you all, meaning ¿ rst of all the community of believers, which he calls the Church (Rom. 8:9). Paul describes the Church as the Body of Christ, one body made up of many members. As head of the Body, Christ is “the beginning, ¿ rstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18) and “head of all things for the Church” (Eph. 1:22). Baptism marks the inauguration of this new life, as well as the death of the old self. For Paul, both Gentiles and Jews are justi¿ ed by faith in Christ. The early Christian movement was Jewish. They did not immediately know what to do when Gentiles started believing in Jesus. Who was the Messiah after all? King of the Jews! The crucial question was: Do Gentiles need to be circumcised and become Jews to join the Body of Christ? Paul’s answer, which came to be accepted by the whole church, was no: Gentiles were justi¿ ed, set right with God, simply by believing in Jesus, without converting to Judaism. Thus, Paul conceived of the Body of Christ as a place of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles. Paul’s famous doctrine Pauline eschatology is about life in Christ between his exaltation and his return.

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

  I agreed and took out my lighter. As I pulled at the flame, our great-aunt hooted and spoke rapidly to Auma. “She wants to know where the fire comes from.” I handed Dorsila the lighter and showed her how it worked as she continued to speak. Auma explained, “She says that things are changing so fast it makes her head spin. She says that the first time she saw television, she assumed the people inside the box could also see her. She thought they were very rude, because when she spoke to them they never answered back.” Dorsila chuckled at herself good-humoredly, while Zeituni went into the cooking hut. A few minutes later, Zeituni came out with a mug in her hand. I asked her what had happened to Sayid and Bernard. “They’re asleep,” she said, handing me the cup. “Here. Drink this.” I took a sniff of the steaming green liquid. It smelled like a swamp. “What is it?” “It’s made from a plant that grows here. Trust me … it will firm up your stomach in a jiffy.” I took a tentative first sip. The brew tasted as bad as it looked, but Zeituni stood over me until I had gulped down the last drop. “That is your grandfather’s recipe,” she said. “I told you he was a herbalist.” I took another puff from my cigarette and turned to Auma. “Ask Granny to tell me more about him,” I said. “Our grandfather, I mean. Roy says that he actually grew up in Kendu, then moved to Alego on his own.” Granny nodded to Auma’s translation. “Does she know why he left Kendu?” Granny shrugged. “She says that originally his people came from this land,” Auma said. I asked Granny to start from the beginning. How did our great-grandfather Obama come to live in Kendu? Where did our grandfather work? Why did the Old Man’s mother leave? As she started to answer, I felt the wind lift, then die. A row of high clouds crossed over the hills. And under the fanning shade of the mango tree, as hands wove black curls into even rows, I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story …. First there was Miwiru. It’s not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma, Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo. The women who bore them, their names are forgotten, for that was the way of our people.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  Semi-Quietism is the label given to the Francois Fénelon’s theology of pure love, condemned by Rome. Fénelon picked up the notion of not willing salvation from the writing of Saint Francis de Sales. Francis’s focus is on love rather than intellect. He develops an Augustinian psychology of love as the desire for union with God. He raises new and un-Augustinian questions, however, when he suggests that the higher forms of love involve a holy indifference to anything but God’s will. “Pure love,” for Fénelon, meant loving God without the selfish desire to find happiness in God. To condemn the aspiration for such pure love is to insist, with Augustine and Aquinas, that the desire to find happiness in God as one’s ultimate goal is not only necessary but morally right and essential. The appeal of pure love theology is a symptom of a key challenge posed to Catholic theology by modernity, with its denial of inherent teleology in nature—so that pursuing the goal of ultimate fulfillment, which is the essence of medieval Christian ethics, comes to seem selfish. m Suggested Reading de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle. , [he Life of Teresa of Jesus. PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat 125 From Vatican | to Vatican Il Lecture 35 Sa The First Vatican Council is famous as the council which defined the pope as infallible. The Second Vatican Council is famous as the council in which the church opened itself in a new to the modern world. Council (1870), grew out of a new exercise of the pope’s responsibility to determine Catholic teaching. In the papal bull /neffabilis Deus in 1854, Pope Pius IX defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The doctrine teaches that from the very beginning of her existence Mary was free from the guilt of original sin. The view of Thomas Aquinas, that she was cleansed in the womb after being conceived in sin like the rest of us, was thereby rejected. ik doctrine of papal infallibility, as defined by the First Vatican The Immaculate Conception was not a new doctrine but it was newly defined as doctrine. The pope has no authority to make new doctrines. In fact Pius insisted that there is no such thing as new doctrines of the Catholic church. To define a doctrine is to declare that it is henceforth a doctrine to be held by all the faithful. What is new about Ineffabilis Deus is that a doctrine was defined by the pope rather than by an ecumenical council. Pius’s pronouncement includes an account of how he consulted other bishops and consulting the faithful, and defined the doctrine in response to their joyous request that he do so.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The shilling was nothing compared to the pleasure of having you here among us all.’‘Shall we see you here again, Nan?’ her friend with the tattoo called then. I nodded: ‘I hope so.’‘But you must sing us a proper song next time, on your own, in all your gentleman’s toggery.’‘Oh yes, you must!’I made no answer, only smiled, and took a step away from them; then I thought of something, and beckoned to Jenny again.‘That picture,’ I said quietly when she was close. ‘Do you think - would Mrs Swindles mind - do you think that I might have it, for myself?’ She put her hand to her pocket at once, and drew out the creased and faded photograph, and passed it to me.‘You take it,’ she said; then she could not help but ask, a little wonderingly, ‘But have you none of your own? I should’ve thought...’‘Between you and me,’ I said, ‘I left the business rather fast. I lost a lot of stuff, and never cared to think of it till now. This, however — ’ I gazed down at the photo. ‘Well, it won’t hurt me, will it, to have this little reminder?’‘I hope it won’t, indeed,’ she answered kindly. Then she looked past me, to Florence and the others. ‘Your girl is awaiting for you,’ she said with a smile. I put the picture in the pocket of my coat.‘So she is,’ I said absently. ‘So she is.’I joined my friends; we picked our way across the crowded room, and hauled ourselves up the treacherous staircase into the aching cold of the February night. Outside The Frigate the road was dark and quiet; from Cable Street, however, came a distant row. Like us, the customers of all the other publics and gin palaces of the East End were beginning to make their tipsy journeys home.‘Is there never trouble,’ I said as we started to walk, ‘between women at the Boy and local people, or roughs?’Annie turned her collar up against the cold, then took Miss Raymond’s arm. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes. Once some boys dressed a pig in a bonnet, and tipped it down the cellar stairs...’‘No!’‘Yes,’ said Nora. ‘And once a woman got her head broken, in a fight.’‘But this was over a girl,’ said Florence, yawning, ‘and it was the girl’s husband who hit her...’‘The truth is,’ Annie went on, ‘there is such a mix round these parts, what with Jews and Lascars, Germans and Poles, socialists, anarchists, salvationists... The people are surprised at nothing.’Even as she spoke, however, two fellows came out of a house at the end of the street and, seeing us - seeing Annie and Miss Raymond arm-in-arm, and Ruth with her hand in Nora’s pocket, and Florence and I bumping shoulders - gave a mutter, and a sneer.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Other would-be martyrs cited the ekstasis of battle that gives life meaning and purpose, a feeling that is close to religious exaltation, as we have seen. In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion ... but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ” 94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight. 95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage. 96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes: 97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation ... and calm of mind, all passion spent.” 99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen. 100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.” 101 We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber’s targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  As you approach eight years old, you play with the girls too. It’s no longer acceptable to play with boys all the time, your mother tells you. Or maybe you just understand by watching everyone else. You hate Barbie, but My Little Pony is alright. House is better. You like the sensuality of playing with girls. The way it feels to brush and braid each other’s hair. To giggle nonstop. The way it feels to make friendship bracelets and beaded jewelry. The way you can feel each strand, each bead against your tiny fingers. You can feel. You love the precision and concentration girls can engage in, creating entire role-play worlds together with nothing but some stuffed animals and the great outdoors. Your best friend and you dig a huge, deep hole just east of the kickball field. You work on it every day at recess, for weeks. You two have decided you are digging to Australia, not China, because it seems more accurately on the other side of the world. The hole gets filled up by the custodians one weekend, but you don’t care. You have found a friend who shares your secret desire: escape. You write love notes to your friends, give them cards and chocolates on Valentine’s Day. You love playing hand games at recess, relish the feeling of lungs full of song, punctuated by hand slapping. In your own way, you try to tell. Wonder if it’s happening to them too. Look sideways at everyone’s father during slumber parties. When you play house, you are the husband. You tell Leah you could make her pregnant so she can give birth to a Cabbage Patch doll, and she says okay. You tell her to lie down. You lie down too, with the soles of your feet touching the soles of Leah’s, heads pointing in opposite directions. You place your foot on top of her vagina and rub her through her clothes, just once or twice. “That’s where babies come from,” you say. She nods like she already knows. It doesn’t feel good or bad. Just factual. A reenactment. She passes the Cabbage Patch doll between her legs. You always understand exactly what is happening to you, even when you don’t know the words to tell. It’s hard to talk about pleasure when most of your life before leaving home at seventeen is a careful balancing act: hide the trauma, hide the truth, learn how to pass in the world as a “normal” kid, a kid who isn’t being tortured at home. Make your escape plan. Aim your compass at a distant destination: something called “college.” Act accordingly. Believe your father’s shame is your own. Act accordingly. Survive. Survive. Survive.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I calculate that the road trip from Arkansas to California is four days total if we don’t pee. Jie and Ba and Ma and I are going to do it in three. Four is a bad omen to begin on. Our new city is east of LA, where some cousin of a cousin of a cousin has promised Ma a job at a skirt factory. Ba will be a fry cook. When the river here gets thick in the middle, he fries us a pyre of riverfish, blackening the bones till they’re strands of our hair. After three years, we paid off our debts—half in labor, half in gold—to the missionaries who did our papers, who bought our plane tickets and rented us the house that’s so thick with mice we call them the carpet, who convinced the Sunday school to let Jie stay even after she began taking money with her mouth. She told me she was blowing boys in the woods, and for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees. The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies. We pack in the dark, take the moon with us. Leave the frying pan with its bottom scarred like a palm. The doorknobs we sold for nickels. Take the bucket we used to shower with, threading water through one another’s bones, going to bed wet as newborns. Ma stewed riverfish in our leftover bathwater. We taste of what has touched us. Ma tells us not to take everything, as if we own more than these bodies. Ba spends the rest of the gold on a used car, domestic, painted the purple of a bruised knee. Jie drives, and the ghostboy who taught her is standing on our driveway the entire time we load up. He’s the same sand color all over, his hair matching his lips. The boy tries to kiss her goodbye, just like the pastor did, but Jie veers her face away and the kiss sprawls dead on her neck. The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum. The car has a dent in the passenger door that looks human-shaped. Jie spends a whole minute petting the wheel like she’s taming it. Ma is shotgun. Ba and I sit in the backseat, windows down, suitcases trunked, a Spanish song on the radio that we all somehow know the chorus to.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You try to sing along to the radio, but there’s only static on. Your brother once convinced you that static is an alien language spoken by the moonborn, so you listen as if it means something. You bob up and down in the backseat like a buoy. A warning: The water ahead will wreck me. Keep away. The only thing that keeps my hands on the wheel: If I don’t look at the city ahead, if I watch your face in the rearview mirror instead, I can pretend I’m driving toward you, you: the only home that owns me. Look-look, you say, you sing sweet as toothache: Here’s the city, the honeydew moon above it, waiting for us to bash it open and begin. DAUGHTERRabbit moon (II) [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] When my brother propped his penis in his palm and peed out the door, wetting a mile of highway with rain, my mother said he must have the bladder of a horse. I asked how she knew about the anatomies of horses and she said she knew what it is to be ridden. We rode up the highway to a city of factories: concrete buildings converted into showrooms, the upper windows blacked out, headless mannequins haunting the sidewalks. We circled twice around Ama’s block. Hers was a house sitting on its haunches, afraid to stand all the way up. Its pelt of paint was perpetually wet, and all kinds of creatures got stuck to the sides of the house: squirrels, pigeons, a collage of flies. Our mother drove with her elbows while she smoked out the window, spitting into the cup holder. When she spoke of her father now, he was no longer our agong, just her ba, which meant he belonged to her and not to us. Our blood was borrowed. When we reached Ama’s driveway, the moon was not yet nailed in the sky. Ama always said the moon was the corpse of the sun, meaning every night is a funeral. During our week as nocturnal animals, my brother and I had trained our eyes to adjust to any density of dark, and now neither of us tripped on Ama’s root-risen driveway. Our mother didn’t ring the doorbell, which had been taped over. She pounded on the door. When no one answered, she told my brother to get the flashlight from the glove box. She went up to the front window, the flashlight flaccid-looking in her hands. Her arm coiled back. My brother grabbed her wrist, but the flashlight was already through the glass. We waited for the alarm, waited to run like she wasn’t our mother and the night didn’t know us, but there was no sound except for a neighbor’s dog, barking like we’d come just to kill it.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The “hero” narrative associated with a “quest” borrows from the Bible. Galahad and Jesus have similar attributes and associations. The hero must be pure in heart. The hero must face temptations. The hero must discover what no one else can find. In the religious context of the Europeans, the quest becomes more and more the territory of the special person. Not just anyone can decide to go looking for the Holy Grail. Not just anyone can perform a true vision quest. Only people like Jesus or Galahad may be “good enough” to take this epic journey. I highlight this tendency in Western spirituality not as a definitive statement about the European experience in myth, but as a point of comparison to Native American concepts of a “quest.” Like Europeans, Native communities could interpret the quest as a specialized endeavor. Some nations understood it as a shamanic quest, although not with the same emphasis on the nobility of such a person. However, far more Native nations understood the quest to be something almost every person could pursue. This is significant because it changes the way we think about a “quest.” To capture the Native American understanding of a vision quest, it is necessary to let go of some of the European interpretations attached to that term. Even more importantly, unless we can separate Galahad and Jesus in our minds, we may miss the Native perspective on who Jesus was, what he experienced, and what he taught as a Native messiah. To understand the Native American concept of a sacred quest, we can pick up where the Western scholars have left off: from Gilgamesh to Frodo, the quest is the process, defined by every culture, by which human beings search for the holy. The object of that search may be God, or wisdom, or a Holy Grail. Each religious tradition sets the destination for those who believe, and each tradition creates a roadmap for how to get there. Some quests require physical endurance, some require mental concentration. Some can last for days, some for a lifetime. The definitions are as varied as the destinations. As the ancient idea of the quest spread around the world different communities developed their own understanding of not only how the quest should be undertaken, but who could attempt it. In some cultures the quest increasingly became the realm of religious specialists and the type of person who practiced the vision quest narrowed: sha-mans, mystics, saints, knights of valor. In Native America, however, the door remained much more open. Prior to 1492, the vision quest was a threshold accessible to millions of Native people. While there are variations on the theme of a quest in the many different traditions of Native America, there are some basic elements that are constant and appear over and over again. First, there is a time of preparation. The quest is intentional. It is a planned movement toward the sacred. Therefore, the person must be ready for this journey.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  After I fed Ama’s parable to the 口, its mouth unbuttoned. The hole hummed, spitting pebbles like teeth, and when I pressed my ear to it, I could hear static like a radio, punctuated by the sound of Dayi’s voice. Bits of words, none born whole. I wondered if this was her mouth now, if I had tuned in to the frequency of ghost speech. Beneath us there was a pipeline of voices, intersecting where we stood. Calling down into the hole, I told Dayi that I missed her, that sometimes I felt her fingers pinning words to my tongue, her breath guitaring the strands of my hair. In the morning, I found two letters flapping loose around the yard, spat out by the 口, and I chased them down, my tail perked for the hunt. Pinning them down with my feet, I took the letters home and soaked them in the bathroom sink. In the water, the words thrashed like fish, stilling only when I said them aloud.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Agong scoured our walls for salt, shucking away the plaster with his nails. When he found my mother’s salt bowl in a cabinet next to the sink, he pickled his palms in it. One night when he was asleep on the sofa, I spooned salt onto his face, his neck, his belly button. He shrilled with pain when I sprinkled his bed sores, each one as big and pink as a slice of baloney. In the morning, when my mother saw what I’d done, she propped him up in the yard and rinsed him off with the hose. I said salt would preserve him like jerky, drying his flesh to threads. But my mother said if I ever did that again she’d pickle my feet and feed them back to me. When he was my size, Agong sanded salt into blocks and shipped them down the river. He dreamed of tossing the blocks overboard, salting the river into a bloodstream. Agong was told not to taste the salt, but he licked every block when the crew was asleep, unable to resist their glow. As punishment for stealing, the merchants lashed both his hands until his skin ribboned off. This evening, I saw Agong crawling in the yard, hounding the soil for salt he’d buried, but the holes gave nothing back. The sofa cushions grew crowns of crystals. Salt icicles clung to the ceiling above his sleep. My mother shattered them with a broom and collected the saltcicles in buckets. We cooked with pinches of his powdered sweat. Sucking on saltshards, we preserved our mouths in the shape of his name. _ I tell Ben to bring me the letters. I live their translations, but she owns the originals. When she gets to my door, I pull her in and she licks me everywhere like a dog. My name is whatever she calls me. In the yard, I feed the letters one by one back into the 口, all the holes scabbing over before picking themselves open again, empty. Ben asks what I’m doing. I say I’m sending them back to Ama. I unfold a sixth sheet from my pocket, the letter creased so many times it’s tender with lines. A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama,