Love

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 Another Country (1962)

  She saw the smoke from Eric’s cigarette curling up from the mantelpiece—she hoped it was still in the ashtray; the play script was beneath her head, the symphony was approaching its end. She was aware, as though she stood over them both with a camera, of how sordid the scene must appear: a married woman, no longer young, already beginning to moan with lust, pinned down on this untidy and utterly transient bed by a stranger who did not love her and whom she could not love. Then she wondered about that: love; and wondered if anyone really knew anything about it. Eric put one hand on her breast, and it was a new touch, not Richard’s, no; but she knew that it was Eric’s; and was it love or not? and what did Eric feel? Sex, she thought, but that was not really the answer, or if it was, it was an answer which clarified nothing. For now, Eric leaned up from her with a sigh and walked back to his cigarette. He leaned there for a moment, watching her; and she understood that the weight between them, of things unspoken, made any act impossible. On what basis were they to act? for their blind seeking was not a foundation which could be expected to bear any weight. He came back to the bed and sat down; and he said, “Well. Listen. I know about Richard. I don’t altogether believe you when you say that I don’t have anything to do with what’s happening between you and Richard, because obviously I do, I do now, anyway, if only because I’m here.” She started to say something, but he raised his hand to silence her. “But that’s all right. I don’t want to make an issue out of that, I’m not very well placed to defend—conventional morality.” And he smiled. “Something is happening between us which I don’t really understand, but I’m willing to trust it. I have the feeling, somehow, that I must trust it.” He took her hand and raised it to his unshaven cheek. “But I have a lover, too, Cass; a boy, a French boy, and he’s supposed to be coming to New York in a few weeks. I really don’t know what will happen when he gets here, but”—he dropped her hand and rose and paced his room again—“he is coming, and we have been together for over two years. And that means something. Probably, if it hadn’t been for him, I would never have stayed away so long.” And he turned on her now all of his intensity. “No matter what happens, I loved him very much, Cass, and I still do. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone quite like that before, and”—he shuddered—“I’m not sure I’ll ever love anyone quite like that again.” She felt not at all frightened by his lover. She remembered the name written in the margin: Yves.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Then their voices dropped. Yves came back into the room. He handed Eric his drink and sat again on the hassock, with his head on Eric’s knee. “I thought I would never get away,” he murmured. “I was thinking of going in to rescue you.” He leaned down and kissed Yves on the neck. Yves put one hand on Eric’s cheek and closed his eyes. They were still. A pulse beat in Yves’ neck. He turned and he and Eric kissed each other on the mouth. They pulled slightly away. Yves’ eyes were very black and bright in the unlit, leaping room. They stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, and kissed again. Then Eric sighed and leaned back and Yves rested once more against him. Eric wondered what Yves was thinking. Yves’ eyes had carried him back to that moment, nearly two years before, when, in a darkened hotel room, in the town of Chartres, he and Yves had first become lovers. Yves had visited the cathedral once, years before, and he had wanted Eric to see it. And this gesture, this desire to share with Eric something he had loved, marked the end of a testing period, signaled Yves’ turning out of that dark distrust with which he was accustomed to regard the world and with which he had held Eric at bay. They had known each other for more than three months and had seen each other every day, but they had never touched. And Eric had waited, attentive and utterly chaste. The change in him was like the change in a spendthrift when his attention is captured by something worth more than all his gold, worth more than all the baubles he has ever purchased; then, instead of scattering, he begins to assess and hoard and gather up; all that he has becomes valuable because all that he has may prove to be an unacceptable sacrifice. So Eric waited, praying that this violated urchin would learn to love and trust him. And he knew that the only way he could hope to bring this about was to cease violating himself: if he did not love himself, then Yves would never be able to love him, either. So he did what he alone could do, purified, as well as he could, his house, and opened his doors; established a precarious order in the heart of his chaos; and waited for his guest. Yves shifted and sat up and lit a cigarette, then lit one for Eric. “I am beginning to be quite hungry.” “So am I. But we’ll be eating soon.” The kitten wandered in and leapt into Eric’s lap. He stroked it with one hand. “Do you remember how we met?” “I will never forget it. I owe a great deal to Beethoven.” Eric smiled. “And to the wonders of modern science.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The creative power of sexual depiction isn’t rooted entirely in a craven desire to acquire filth, or even just in a desire for erotic stimulation—it also draws energy from a deep and powerful desire to find new ways to connect with other people on an intimate, passionate and sensual level. As a driving force, passionate love might seem a bit archaic— more appropriate to pre-Victorian erotic literature than today’s cutthroat, anything-goes digital society. But this is a misconception on two fronts. First, plenty of centuries-old material is every bit as hard-core as anything that exists today—today’s swingers and fetishists have nothing on those of past centuries. And second, the erotic material that drives even the latest technological developments is often based on emotional intimacy and passionate love. Not that it was all romantic. Huge quantities of pornography were changing hands on BBSs. Making money from such exchanges quickly became both an opportunity and a necessity. Images took up bandwidth, and pornographic pictures were being uploaded and downloaded by the millions. System operators had to keep upgrading their equipment and installing new lines as demand grew. And fans of pornography were more than willing to foot the bill via access charges. There were two money-making models at work on BBSs, both of which would be replicated many times over as the Internet took over the world. First, phone companies, modem makers, computer manufacturers and others (vendors of image scanners, for instance) benefited directly from the BBS porn trade. Porn was not the only reason people sunk their money into these things, but it was a big one. Second, BBS operators made money selling content itself. Forty years later, mainstream media companies are still trying to find viable ways to get people to pay for online content. Pornography distributors figured out how to do it almost immediately. According to Frederick Lane in Obscene Profits, by 1992, there were forty-five thousand BBSs in the United States alone, servicing twelve million computer users. BBS subscribers paid $100 million in fees, and required nearly five million new phone lines, which generated more than $850 million in revenues for local phone companies. Pornography was paying for the infrastructure of the information age. Soon those same phone lines also began to connect people with the Internet itself. Rather than connecting to a single remote computer running a BBS, people could now connect to a “network of networks” that gave them access to thousands of servers all over the world. Digital file exchanges and online communities very quickly became global operations, with files and messages circulating around the globe virtually instantaneously.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At last - she gave a yawn, and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was just a girl’s: melodious and strong and clear, but just a Kentish girl’s voice, like my own.Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary: I am in love with you.Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to her hair. ‘I had better change,’ she said, almost shyly. I took the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the couple of steps with me to the door.‘Thank you, Miss Astley,’ she said - she already had my name from Tony - ‘for coming to see me.’ She held out her hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips.I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler’s nose! I felt ready to die of shame.I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret.‘You smell,’ she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like -’‘Like a herring!’ I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.‘Not at all like a herring,’ she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid ...’ And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.I put my glove back on. My fingers seemed to tingle against the cloth. ‘Will you come and see me again, Miss Mermaid?’ she asked. Her tone was light; incredibly, however, she seemed to mean it.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She laughed, but there was something sad and lonely in the sound. There was something sad and lonely in her whole aspect, which obscurely troubled him. And he began to watch her closely, without quite knowing that he was doing so. She said, “Poor Vivaldo. I’ve given you a hard time, haven’t I, baby?” “I’m not complaining,” he said, carefully. “No,” she said, half to herself, running her fingers thoughtfully through a bowl of dry rice, “I’ll say that much for you. I dish it out, but you sure as hell can take it.” “You think maybe,” he said, “that I take too much?” She frowned. She dumped the rice into the boiling water. “Maybe. Hell, I don’t think women know what they want, not a damn one of them. Look at Cass—do you want a drink,” she asked, suddenly, “before dinner?” “Sure.” He took down the bottle and the glasses and took out the ice. “What do you mean—women don’t know what they want? Don’t you know what you want?” She had taken down the great salad bowl and was slicing tomatoes into it; it seemed that she did not dare be still. “Sure. I thought I did. I was sure once. Now I’m not so sure.” She paused. “And I only found that out—last night.” She looked up at him humorously, gave a little shrug, and sliced savagely into another tomato. He set her drink beside her. “What’s happened to confuse you?” She laughed—again he heard that striking melancholy. “Living with you! Would you believe it? I fell for that jive.” He dragged his work stool in from the other room and teetered on it, watching her, a little above her. “What jive, sweetheart, are you talking about?” She sipped her drink. “That love jive, sweetheart. Love, love, love!” His heart jumped up; they watched each other; she smiled a rueful smile. “Are you trying to tell me—without my having to ask you or anything—that you love me?” “Am I? I guess I am.” Then she dropped the knife and sat perfectly still, looking down, the fingers of one hand drumming on the table. Then she clasped her hands, the fingers of one hand playing with the ruby-eyed snake ring, slipping it half-off, slipping it on. “But—that’s wonderful.” He took her hand. It lay cold and damp and lifeless in his. A kind of wind of terror shook him for an instant. “Isn’t it? It makes me very happy—you make me very happy.” She took his hand and rested her cheek against it. “Do I, Vivaldo?” Then she rose and walked to the sink to wash the lettuce. He followed her, standing beside her, and looking into her closed, averted face. “What’s the matter, Ida?” He put one hand on her waist; she shivered, as if in revulsion, and he let his hand fall. “Tell me, please.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She bucked, and the bed gave an answering creak; her own hands began to chafe distractedly at the flesh of my shoulders. There seemed no motion, no rhythm, in all the world, but that which I had set up, between her legs, with one wet fingertip.At last she gasped, and stiffened, then plucked my hand away and fell back, heavy and slack. I pressed her to me, and for a moment we lay together quite still. I felt her heart beating wildly in her breast; and when it had calmed a little she stirred, and sighed, and put a hand to her cheek.‘You’ve made me weep,’ she murmured.I sat up. ‘Not really, Kitty?’‘Yes, really.’ She gave a twitch that was half laughter, half a sob, then rubbed at her eyes again, and when I took her fingers from her face I could feel the tears upon them. I pressed her hand, suddenly uncertain: ‘Did I hurt you? What did I do that was bad? Did I hurt you, Kitty?’She shook her head, and sniffed, and laughed more freely. ‘Hurt me? Oh no. It was only - so very sweet.’ She smiled. ‘And you are - so very good. And I -’ She sniffed again, then placed her face against my breast and hid her eyes from me. ‘And I - oh, Nan, I do so love you, so very, very much!’I lay beside her, and put my arms about her. My own desire I quite forgot, and she made no move to remind me of it. I forgot, too, Gully Sutherland - who three hours before had put a gun to his own heart, because a man had sat through his routine unsmiling. I only lay; and soon Kitty slept. And I studied her face, where it showed creamy pale in the darkness, and thought She loves me, She loves me — like a fool with a daisy-stalk, endlessly exclaiming over the same last browning petal. The next morning we were shy together, at first - and Kitty, I think, was the shyest of all.‘How much we drank, last night!’ she said, not gazing at me; and for a terrible second I thought it might really have been only the champagne that made her cling to me, and say that she loved me, so very very much ... But as she spoke she blushed. I said, before I could stop myself: ‘If you unsay all those things you said last night, oh Kitty, I’ll die!’ and that made her raise her eyes to mine, and I saw that she had simply been anxious, that I might only have been drunk... And then we gazed and gazed at one another; and for all that I had gazed at her a thousand times before, I felt now that I was looking at her as if for the first time.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  I had done my best to follow him, to get to know him, to find out what he wanted me to do. He wasn’t an undemanding friend; he was always a disturbing, challenging presence, warning against false trails and grieving when I went that way anyway. But he was also a sigh-of-relief healing presence; like Bunyan’s hero, I knew what it was to see burdens roll away. I had been many times around the cycle we find in the gospels in the character of Peter: firm public declarations of undying loyalty, followed by miserable failure, followed by astonishing, generous, forgiving love. But as my bride and I moved in to our basement apartment, I listened to Superstar . Andrew Lloyd Webber was then still a brash young pup, not a Peer of the Realm, and Tim Rice was still writing lyrics with real force and depth. Some were worried about Superstar . Wasn’t it cynical? Didn’t it raise all kinds of doubts? I didn’t hear it that way. I heard the questions: “Who are you? What have you sacrificed? . . . Do you think you’re what they say you are?” These were the proper next questions, the other side of the story I had learned (or at least an other side of the story). It was as though all the energy of the popular culture of the 1960s had suddenly swung around, away from its preoccupation with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and was looking again at the Jesus it had almost forgotten. There was a sense of, “Oh, you’re still there, are you? Where do you fit? What was it all about anyway?” Western culture bounced back at Jesus the question with which he had teased his own followers. Instead of “Who do you say that I am?” we were asking him, “Who do you say that you are?” Rice and Lloyd Webber didn’t give an answer. That wasn’t their aim. I often point out to students that they come to a university not to learn the answers, but to discover the right questions. The same was true of Superstar. And the question it asked was, I am convinced, right and proper. It’s not the only question about Jesus, not the only question we should ask of Jesus, but it’s utterly appropriate in its own way. And necessary. Unless you ask this question (“Are you who they say you are?”), your “Jesus” risks disappearing like a hot-air balloon off into the mists of fantasy. This problem remains enormously important. It is the question of who Jesus actually was. What he did, what he said, what he meant. It is, by implication, the question that any grown-up Christian faith must address.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  She knows, deep inside herself, that she’s been forgiven. That’s why there’s so much love coming out of her. And if she’s a forgiveness person, perhaps that shows that she is already enjoying the fact that God is becoming king, whereas people who aren’t forgiveness people don’t believe it. These stories, and others like them, resonate not only with the sense of a long-awaited jubilee, a much-anticipated rescue from a sin-caused exile, but also with a sense that another aspect of the great Exodus story is being invoked. Both times when Jesus declares that someone’s sins are forgiven, there are mutterings about his doing so. Those in the Pharisee’s house ask, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” and the legal experts observing the paralytic man point out that forgiving sins is something only God can do (Mark 2:7). We shouldn’t skip the stages in that implicit argument. How does God normally forgive sins within Israel? Why, through the Temple and the sacrifices that take place there. Jesus seems to be claiming that God is doing, up close and personal through him, something that you’d normally expect to happen at the Temple . And the Temple—the successor to the tabernacle in the desert—was, as we saw, the place where heaven and earth met. It was the place where God lived. Or, more precisely, the place on earth where God’s presence intersected with human, this-worldly reality. The Temple was also the place where the high priest had supreme authority. Already we can see what we should have expected if it was indeed true that Jesus was going around telling people that a new government was taking over, that God was in charge from now on. His healings, his celebrations, his forgiving of those in dire need of it—all these were the up-close-and-personal versions of the larger picture he knew his hearers would pick up on whenever he spoke of God becoming king. These actions and sayings were ramming home the point, dangerous though it was, that the present rulers were being called to account and were indeed being replaced. This was the time for God to take charge, to fix and mend things, to make everything right. Starting with you here, and this person there. Whether or not the authorities liked it. Whether or not the self-appointed pressure groups approved. John and Herod If the Temple, and by implication the high priest, were standing in the background when Jesus was forgiving sins, the other local authority was moving into the foreground. Jesus’s own cousin, John the Baptist, sent a message to him—from prison. His own fearless preaching, not least his attack on Herod Antipas, had brought about his arrest.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This would be the great jubilee moment, completing the achievement outlined in Nazareth and at the price that was nearly demanded on that occasion. This would usher in the new era of blessing announced in the Sermon on the Mount and achieved by the same means that was explained on that occasion. Jesus, as the servant, turned the other cheek; Jesus, carrying his cross, went the extra mile at the behest of his Roman executioners; Jesus, finally, ended up enthroned, set on a hill, unable to be hidden, the light of the world shining out at the darkest moment in history. Part of the point of the meal is that Jesus’s followers would then be able to share in its benefits by sharing, in a new way, in his own life. The gifts of bread and wine, already heavy with symbolic meaning, acquire a new density: this is how the presence of Jesus is to be known among his followers. Sacrifice and presence. This is the new Temple, this strange gathering around a quasi-Passover table. Think through the Exodus themes once more. The tyrant is to be defeated: not Rome, now, but the dark power that stands behind that great, cruel empire. God’s people are to be liberated: not Israel as it stands, with its corrupt, money-hungry leaders and its people bent on violence, but the reconstituted Israel for whom the Twelve are the founding symbol. The battle is to be won, the Red Sea crossed, not by force of arms, but by a different power, the power that John’s gospel names most accurately: having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end (13:1). Jesus thereby leads the way to a new vocation. Instead of the frantic pressure to defend the identity of people, land, and Temple, Jesus’s followers are, through the renewal of hearts and lives, to recover the initial vision of being a royal priesthood for the whole world, which is the Messiah’s inheritance and now will become theirs as well. Behind it all is the sacrifice by which Jesus will offer the one he called “Abba, father” the obedience in which Israel’s vocational obedience, for so long in default, is at last made good. Jesus has taken Israel’s destiny upon himself and will now take Israel’s fate upon himself, so that Israel’s vocation can be accomplished. Around and within it all is the presence, the presence of Israel’s God himself, no longer in the pillar of cloud and fire, no longer in a wilderness tabernacle or an ornate stone-and-timber Temple, but in and as a human being, the Human Being, the Image-bearer, Jesus himself.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He tells them not to be afraid. He explains what’s going on. He deals with them individually. The meeting with the two on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) is one of the most gently powerful stories ever written. The brief conversation between Jesus and Peter in John 21 is one of the most moving human encounters ever recorded. There is a love, a deep, moving warmth that goes out from Jesus. But this love is strong, powerful, life-changing, life-directing. New creation has begun; and its motivating power is love. That is why, in Luke’s gospel, the risen Jesus tells his followers to go and announce to the world that a new way of life has been opened, the way of “repentance” and “forgiveness” (24:47). To us Westerners, that sounds a bit gloomy, as though it’s a perpetual act of contrition, dredging up our “sins” in order to hear someone declare them forgiven (until next time!). But it’s far, far bigger than that. The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We’ve been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope. It’s a way nobody’s ever tried before, a way that is as unthinkable to most human beings and societies as—well, as resurrection itself. Precisely. That’s the point. Welcome to Jesus’s new world. Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean, “It’s all right. We’re going to heaven now.” No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn’t mean, “So there is a life after death.” Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an “end.” They are about a beginning. The beginning of God’s new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God’s “being-in-charge” is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it. Ascension and Enthronement If Easter is about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation, his ascension is about his enthronement as the one who is now in charge. Easter tells us that Jesus is himself the first part of new creation; his ascension tells us that he is now running it. Once more, you can only understand the ascension if you push out of your mind the idea of “heaven” you began with and try to imagine a more biblical picture instead.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The key to it all, as the earliest Christian writers saw clearly, is the belief that, as Israel’s Messiah, Jesus did indeed represent his people. The life of the nation is bound up in the king. As, once more, with David fighting Goliath, the one stands in for the many, so that his victory becomes theirs. The representative is thus the only fitting substitute (despite generations of theologians playing those two categories off against one another). And the point, then, is that Israel is the representative of the world; God called Abraham’s family in the first place to be the people through whom the whole world would be blessed, would finally be released from the ancient curse. If you skip the middle stage, the Israel stage, as so many Christian theologians have done, forgetting the vital role of Abraham’s descendants in the whole saving plan, you will have to force your categories to make sense of Jesus in some other way. You may even try to make his “divinity” accomplish this, though this is not what the New Testament says. What we have, rather, is the extraordinary story of Israel’s Messiah taking upon himself the Accuser’s sharpest arrow and, dying under its force, robbing the Accuser of any further real power. We must stress, in closing this account of Jesus’s death, that the earliest testimony insists on its being an act, primarily, of love. “He loved me,” wrote Paul within twenty years of the event, “and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). “No one has a love greater than this,” says Jesus himself in John 15:13, “to lay down your life for your friends.” Take the outpouring of care and concern for the sick, the weak, the vulnerable, and the sinners that were characteristic of Jesus’s public career. Wrap them all together in a single bundle. Then remind yourself that this whole bundle was what it looked like when the living God began to reign on earth as in heaven, began to roll back the sickly tide of the rule of sin and death. Then remind yourself once more that the announcement only made sense if it was to be backed up by the final victory, the final reestablishment of God’s presence and rule. As with the brief rule of Simon the Star, Jesus’s short public career, his inauguration of God’s kingdom, needed to be completed with the last battle and the rebuilding of the Temple. Thus the compassion that overflowed in all directions in the first part of Jesus’s work was the same compassion with which he went to his death. Having loved his own who were in the world, wrote John, he loved them to the end. To the uttermost.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  And when I’ve been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (12:31–32). Somehow, Jesus’s forthcoming death will constitute his victory, God’s victory, over “this world’s ruler,” who seems to be not merely Caesar, but the power that stands behind Caesar and uses him for its dark, destructive purposes. Then, during the “farewell discourses,” which are John’s way of exploring the meaning of Jesus’s final evening with his followers—his unfolding, piece by piece, of what it means to say that to be with Jesus is now to be the true Temple people—we find the same theme coming through again and again. “I haven’t got much more to say to you,” says Jesus. “The ruler of the world is coming. He has nothing to do with me. But all this is happening so that the world may know that I love the father, and that I’m doing what the father has told me to do” (14:30–31). This is cryptic indeed, but the force of it is to say that Jesus’s forthcoming conflict with Caesar, and with the powers that stand behind Caesar, will not take place because Caesar has wanted it, but because the Father has wanted it. What Jesus will now do is an act of obedience and love. The “world” has hated him and will hate his followers too (15:18–16:4). But when the “Advocate” comes, the spirit of truth, that spirit will prove the world wrong in three things, sin, righteousness, and judgment. The “ruler of this world” is to be judged, convicted, condemned (16:11). These advance hints enable us to understand John’s explanation, the fullest in any of our accounts, of what is at stake when Jesus stands before the Roman governor. The scene in John 18–19 has the hallmarks of the kind of hearing we might expect in a Roman provincial court, and it is this confrontation that lies at the heart of both the political and the theological meaning of the kingdom of God. Jesus has announced God’s kingdom and has also embodied it in what he has been doing. But it is a different sort of kingdom from anything that Pilate has heard of or imagined: a kingdom without violence (18:36), a kingdom not from this world, but emphatically, through the work of Jesus, for this world. (The routine misunderstanding of the kingdom as “otherworldly” has been generated by the translation “My kingdom is not of this world”; but that is certainly not what John means, and it isn’t what Jesus meant either.) The Judaean leaders have a small part; we are still in this three-angled perfect storm, and this is where it reaches its height. But the main confrontation is between Jesus, representing God’s kingdom, and Pilate, representing the kingdoms of the world.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Many readers have managed to ignore this theme in the Fourth Gospel and have simply read John as a “spiritual” or (in that sense) “theological” tract, encouraging them into a personal spirituality and the hope of an otherworldly salvation. But John is quite clear. When the power of Rome and the betrayal of Israel’s leaders meets the love of God, the great whirlpool that results will bring about God’s kingly victory, the victory of the kingdom of God over the kingdoms of the world. Watch how John builds the sequence up. Some foreigners come to see Jesus during the preparations for the Passover festival, and at the heart of Jesus’s answer to them is the remarkable promise: “Now comes the judgment of this world! Now this world’s ruler is going to be thrown out! And when I’ve been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (12:31–32). Somehow, Jesus’s forthcoming death will constitute his victory, God’s victory, over “this world’s ruler,” who seems to be not merely Caesar, but the power that stands behind Caesar and uses him for its dark, destructive purposes. Then, during the “farewell discourses,” which are John’s way of exploring the meaning of Jesus’s final evening with his followers—his unfolding, piece by piece, of what it means to say that to be with Jesus is now to be the true Temple people—we find the same theme coming through again and again. “I haven’t got much more to say to you,” says Jesus. “The ruler of the world is coming. He has nothing to do with me. But all this is happening so that the world may know that I love the father, and that I’m doing what the father has told me to do” (14:30–31). This is cryptic indeed, but the force of it is to say that Jesus’s forthcoming conflict with Caesar, and with the powers that stand behind Caesar, will not take place because Caesar has wanted it, but because the Father has wanted it. What Jesus will now do is an act of obedience and love. The “world” has hated him and will hate his followers too (15:18–16:4). But when the “Advocate” comes, the spirit of truth, that spirit will prove the world wrong in three things, sin, righteousness, and judgment. The “ruler of this world” is to be judged, convicted, condemned (16:11).

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The story of Simon the Star, coming three hundred years after Judah the Hammer, indicates a remarkable common pattern, even though the end results were so different. The story line is once more the same, echoing the Exodus, David and Solomon, and the return from Babylon: the wicked pagan king, suffering and persecution, the emergence of a hero, victories, the cleansing and restoration of the Temple, and the establishment of the new regime. In Judah’s case, all went according to plan. It was only gradually, in the years that followed, that people began to doubt whether this had been after all the long-awaited divine liberation. In Simon’s case, all went according to plan for three years; then, instead of the final victory and rebuilding, there occurred a disaster so great that for many generations it was spoken of, if at all, with a shudder. The great gale of Roman imperial power had quenched the high-pressure system of Jewish aspiration, leaving a disturbing question mark over the third element: what was Israel’s God up to? But the story in which Simon and his followers had lived was the same story. It was, they believed, the scriptural story, the story in which the scriptural promises would be fulfilled. It was the story that was in the heads and the hearts of those who first heard Jesus of Nazareth speaking about God finally becoming king. It was the story that they turned into song as he rode into Jerusalem. Before we can come back to Jesus himself, though, we need to look at two other kings. Both failed, though for quite different reasons. Herod the Great When you take a guided tour in the Holy Land today, you are likely to be struck by one name that comes up again and again. I have heard tourists complain that they came to find out about Jesus and ended up learning more about Herod. Herod the Great (the notorious Herod who, according to Matthew’s gospel, killed all the babies in Bethlehem in a vain attempt to get rid of a potential rival to his throne) was indeed a famous leader in his own day and remained thereafter a name to conjure with. If anyone was “king of the Jews” around the time of Jesus, it was Herod. Herod the Great fulfilled at least some of the story we have been tracking. He began his career as a successful warlord. A century or so after the time of Judah the Hammer, there was once again a power vacuum in the Middle East. The Hasmonean royal house was in disarray. The Romans were gaining power, and their famous general Pompey captured Jerusalem in 63 BC . As we saw earlier, the Romans preferred, where possible, to rule their subject nations through local elites, so they allowed the Hasmonean family to carry on as high priests. But the Roman world was about to be plunged into chaos. Pompey was killed in 48 BC .

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben said she’d tried installing birdfeeders and bottle-caps full of water, but the shadow-bird didn’t hunger or thirst or grow. It never tried to leave. For the rest of the hour, while our classmates dissolved in the heat outside, we stood side by side. Not facing each other, just watching the shadow-bird in the mirror. Not naming it either. Though in my mind, I had already given it many names: Mouth with wings. Night in a body. Setting the cage down in the sink, Ben turned on the faucet and the water gathered black at the bottom of the cage. I turned to Ben and looked her in the mouth, said I had something to show her too. It was something I couldn’t name either. It was the sum of my body and its predecessors. Ben let the water run out of words. I pulled her by the wrists back into the stall and turned around, sloughing off my pants. Silent, Ben reached down. Touched the knotted tip of my tail as if it were a bird that would startle. Lifted it to her nose and stroked it once across her face, as if she could tell its species by scent. What is it? I asked her. Ben dropped my tail, watched it hang. Teethed her pendant-key. Tigers are natural predators, Ben said. When I asked how she defined a predator, she said, Something that eats other things for a living. But wasn’t that everything? Ben said I should look at the food chain, but the only chain I’d memorized was the pendant-string around her neck: I lived inside its radius. Cats and birds are natural enemies, Ben said, pointing at me and then herself. Do you mean we’re enemies? Shaking her head, she said we were many species, many bodies. But what am I becoming? I said. I wondered if she’d ever feared I’d hurt her, if she knew how I’d once tried hunting my father. If I ate her someday, she had to forgive me. Ben said she couldn’t forgive anyone if she didn’t have a body. Can bodies cross into other bodies? Ben said I was always asking the wrong questions. I told her I knew about evolution and finches, knew all the concepts we were taught, but she said my tail wasn’t shaped like a line: It was shaped like a life, circling itself, growing backward from tip to root. The sinks outside were overflowing, flooding us to the ankles, water-rings coiling like snakes. Ben said it didn’t take generations to change, to adapt to a new predator or environment. Sometimes one body could do it. She talked like a scientist of survival. I told her that there was no evolutionary line between tigers and people, and if there was, it still meant I was moving backward.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 4BUT—I DO LIKE TRANSCRIBING MICROCASSETTES. I MENTION this because only a few days after I wrote that very first sur le vif chunk about Joyce’s exuberant pubic hair, I was immersed in one of her tapes, dog-paddling along in the moonlit scum-less lily pond of her consciousness, my eyes fixed on the green letters that she called forth from my fingertips, when I glanced up to see her walking briskly toward me, wiggling a pen and looking to one side as if preoccupied. I made a move to take off my headphones, but she held up her palms, indicating that I should continue transcribing, evidently feeling a twinge of the guilt which considerate people often feel when they drop off an unusual amount of work for a temp to do in a short interval of time. Obedient, I kept on transcribing. “Subject indicated that high credit was in the low six figures,” etc. Joyce meanwhile wrote something on a scrap of paper and affixed it with one of the rubber bands from my rubber-band tray to the cassette and put it on top of my monitor. It said, “No rush, thanks.” I nodded, making my mouth into a downward U of conspiratorial assent. I didn’t tell her that I was typing her own earlier tape. I let her walk away. And the sight of her diminishing figure, while at the same time her voice talked so tiredly and yet evenly in my ear of high credit and low credit (this bank job was beneath her, surely), made my interest in her, my love for her, flare up. I loved her, for instance, for not writing “Thanx” on her note and not using an exclamation point. I watched her go back to her desk and sit down and pull in her chair and pick up the phone. She was a woman. Though I’m thirty-five, as I seem to want to point out on every page, I am often surprised by the simple observation that there are women, that they wear rustly layers of clothing, that they have lips and teeth which on occasion they employ to smile at me. They take their existence for granted, but I don’t, by any means. I think, too, in all modesty, that I have an unusually good instinct for detecting when an average-looking woman senses herself entering a new phase of attractiveness. I can detect better than others when a woman feels that she is looking unusually good that day, or when something like a new haircut, or the discovery of a store that has the kind of clothes that she looks best in, reminds her of the fact that romance and flirtation are part of life, too. Joyce is perhaps not, objectively considered, stunning, though she is pretty—but these happen to be, I think, miracle weeks for her, as she learns to her surprise how she can be beautiful in a thirty-year-old rather than a twenty-three-year-old sort of way. The French braid is part of it. I doubt very much that anyone at work has said that to her—“You are entering a new phase of beauty, Joyce”—but some of them must have noticed it, too.

• From Wild (2012)

  There was no house. No one had ever had a house on that land. Our forty acres were a perfect square of trees and bushes and weedy grasses, swampy ponds and bogs clotted with cattails. There was nothing to differentiate it from the trees and bushes and grasses and ponds and bogs that surrounded it in every direction for miles. Together we repeatedly walked the perimeter of our land in those first months as landowners, pushing our way through the wilderness on the two sides that didn’t border the road, as if to walk it would seal it off from the rest of the world, make it ours. And, slowly, it did. Trees that had once looked like any other to me became as recognizable as the faces of old friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves beckoning like identifiable hands. Clumps of grass and the edges of the now-familiar bog became landmarks, guides, indecipherable to everyone but us. We called it “up north” while we were still living in the town an hour outside of Minneapolis. For six months, we went up north only on weekends, working furiously to tame a patch of the land and build a one-room tarpaper shack where the five of us could sleep. In early June, when I was thirteen, we moved up north for good. Or rather, my mother, Leif, Karen, and I did, along with our two horses, our cats and our dogs, and a box of ten baby chicks my mom got for free at the feed store for buying twenty-five pounds of chicken feed. Eddie would continue driving up on weekends throughout the summer and then stay come fall. His back had healed enough that he could finally work again, and he’d secured a job as a carpenter during the busy season that was too lucrative to pass up. KarenCherylLeif were alone with our mother again—just as we’d been during the years that she’d been single. Waking or sleeping that summer, we were scarcely out of one another’s sight and seldom saw anyone else. We were twenty miles away from two small towns in opposite directions: Moose Lake to the east; McGregor to the northwest. In the fall we’d attend school in McGregor, the smaller of the two, with a population of four hundred, but all summer long, aside from the occasional visitor—far-flung neighbors who stopped by to introduce themselves—it was us and our mom. We fought and talked and made up jokes and diversions in order to pass the time. Who am I? we’d ask one another over and over again, playing a game in which the person who was “it” had to think of someone, famous or not, and the others would guess who it was based on an infinite number of yes or no questions: Are you a man? Are you American? Are you dead? Are you Charles Manson?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  She brought an alabaster jar of ointment. Then she stood behind Jesus’s feet, crying, and began to wet his feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. The Pharisee who had invited Jesus saw what was going on. “If this fellow really was a prophet,” he said to himself, “he’d know what sort of a woman this is who is touching him! She’s a sinner!” “Simon,” replied Jesus, “I have something to say to you.” “Go ahead, Teacher,” he replied. “Once upon a time there was a money-lender who had two debtors. The first owed him five hundred dinars; the second a tenth of that. Neither of them could pay him, and he let them both off. So which of them will love him more?” “The one he let off the more, I suppose,” replied Simon. “Quite right,” said Jesus. Then, turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “You see this woman? When I came into your house, you didn’t give me water to wash my feet—but she has washed my feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t give me a kiss, but she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet from the moment I came in. You didn’t anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. “So the conclusion I draw is this: she must have been forgiven many sins! Her great love proves it! But if someone has been forgiven only a little, they will love only a little.” Then he said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.” “Who is this,” the other guests began to say among themselves, “who even forgives sins?” “Your faith has saved you,” said Jesus to the woman. “Go in peace.” (Luke 7:36–50) There are many interesting features to the passage—notice, for instance, the way in which Simon, the Pharisee, is mentally criticizing Jesus for not knowing what sort of a woman this is, whereupon Jesus shows that he knows what’s going on, not only in the woman’s heart, but in Simon’s too. But we focus here on forgiveness itself. Jesus, as usual, tells a story to explain what he is doing. This time it’s about a man who had two debtors, one owing him a huge sum and the other a small sum. Neither could pay, so he forgave them both. So, he asks his host, which of the two will love him the more? Clearly, comes the answer, the one for whom he forgave the greater debt. Precisely so, says Jesus, explaining that this is why this woman had poured out love so richly upon him—unlike the host, who hadn’t even begun to show Jesus any love at all. In other words, Jesus is saying, you can tell that this woman has been forgiven, has indeed been forgiven a great deal.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I looked at Kitty and remembered that I had another, more pressing, reason to be gay and giddy, and I began to wish that Walter would leave us. That, and my tiredness, made me dull with him: I believe he thought he had overworked me. So very soon he did leave; and when the door was closed on him I rose and went to Kitty, and put my arms about her. She wouldn’t let me kiss her in the parlour; but after a moment she led me up through the darkening house, back to our bedroom. Here the suit - which I had, indeed, grown rather used to while strolling in it for Walter - began to feel strange again. When Kitty undressed I pulled her to me; and it was lewd to feel her naked hip come pressing in between my trousered legs. She ran her hand once, very lightly, over my buttons, until I began to shake with the wanting of her. Then she drew the suit from me entirely and we lay together, naked as shadows beneath the counterpane; and then she touched me again.We lay until the front door slammed, and we heard Mrs Dendy’s cough, and Tootsie laughing on the stair. Then Kitty said we should rise, and dress, or the others might wonder; and for the second time that day I lay and watched her wash, and pull on stockings and a skirt, through lazy eyes.As I did so, I put a hand to my breast. There was a dull movement there, a kind of pulling or folding, or melting, exactly as if my chest were the hot, soft wall of a candle, falling in upon a burning wick. I gave a sigh. Kitty heard, and saw my stricken face, and came to me; then she moved my hand away and placed her lips, very softly, over my heart.I was eighteen, and knew nothing. I thought, at that moment, that I would die of love for her. We did not see Walter, and there was no more talk about his plan to put me on the stage at Kitty’s side, until two evenings later, when he arrived at Mrs Dendy’s with a parcel, marked Nan Astley. It was the last night of the year: he had come to supper, and to stay to hear the chimes of midnight with us. When at last they came - struck out upon the bells of Brixton church - he raised his glass. ‘To Kitty and Nan!’ he cried.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It was, undoubtedly, a Passover meal. But it was, undoubtedly, a Passover meal with a radical difference. Like everything else Jesus did, he filled the old vessels so full that they overflowed. He transformed the old mosaics into a new, three-dimensional design. Instead of Passover pointing backward to the great sacrifice by which God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, this meal pointed forward to the great sacrifice by which God was to rescue his people from their ultimate slavery, from death itself and all that contributed to it (evil, corruption, and sin). This would be the real Exodus, the real “return from exile.” This would be the establishment of the “new covenant” spoken of by Jeremiah (31:31). This would be the means by which “sins would be forgiven”—in other words, the means by which God would deal with the sin that had caused Israel’s exile and shame and, beyond that, the sin because of which the whole world was under the power of death. This would be the great jubilee moment, completing the achievement outlined in Nazareth and at the price that was nearly demanded on that occasion. This would usher in the new era of blessing announced in the Sermon on the Mount and achieved by the same means that was explained on that occasion. Jesus, as the servant, turned the other cheek; Jesus, carrying his cross, went the extra mile at the behest of his Roman executioners; Jesus, finally, ended up enthroned, set on a hill, unable to be hidden, the light of the world shining out at the darkest moment in history. Part of the point of the meal is that Jesus’s followers would then be able to share in its benefits by sharing, in a new way, in his own life. The gifts of bread and wine, already heavy with symbolic meaning, acquire a new density: this is how the presence of Jesus is to be known among his followers. Sacrifice and presence. This is the new Temple, this strange gathering around a quasi-Passover table. Think through the Exodus themes once more. The tyrant is to be defeated: not Rome, now, but the dark power that stands behind that great, cruel empire. God’s people are to be liberated: not Israel as it stands, with its corrupt, money-hungry leaders and its people bent on violence, but the reconstituted Israel for whom the Twelve are the founding symbol. The battle is to be won, the Red Sea crossed, not by force of arms, but by a different power, the power that John’s gospel names most accurately: having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end (13:1).