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 looked at him, looked away. He put one hand on her arm; she bit her lip to control her trembling. “Come back to me, please. Don’t you love me any more? You can’t have stopped loving me. I can’t live without you. You’ve always been the only woman in the world for me.” She could keep silence and go into his arms, and the last few months would be wiped away—he would never know where she had been. The world would return to its former shape. Would it? The silence between them stretched. She could not look at him. He had existed for too long in her mind—now, she was being humbled by the baffling reality of his presence. Her imagination had not taken enough into account—she had not foreseen, for example, the measure or the quality or the power of his pain. He was a lonely and limited man, who loved her. Did she love him? “I don’t despise you,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve made you think that.” Then she said nothing more. Why tell him? What good would it do? He would never understand it, she would merely have given him an anguish which he would never be able to handle. And he would never trust her again . Did she love him? And if she did, what should she do? Very slowly and gently, she took her arm from beneath his hand; and she walked to the window. The blinds were drawn against the night, but she opened them a little and looked out: on the lights and the deep black water. Silence rang its mighty gongs in the room behind her. She dropped the blinds, and turned and looked at him. He sat, now, on the floor, beside the chair that she had left, his glass between his feet, his great hands loosely clasped below his knees, his head tilted up toward her. It was a look she knew, a listening, trusting look. She forced herself to look at him; she might never see that look again; and it had been her sustenance so long! His face was the face of a man entering middle age, and it was also—and always would be, for her—the face of a boy. His sandy hair was longer than usual, it was beginning to turn gray, his forehead was wet, and his hair was wet. Cass discovered that she loved him during the fearful, immeasurable second that she stood there watching him. Had she loved him less, she might have wearily consented to continue acting as the bulwark which protected his simplicity. But she could not do that to Richard, nor to his children. He had the right to know his wife: she prayed that he would take it. She said, “I have to tell you something, Richard.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  I will be forever grateful to him for seeing me when no one else seemed to, and for listening to me with his entire body when I spoke. He tried to teach me that I was valuable, but that was a lesson I wouldn’t absorb until long after we’d parted. At the root of everything, there was each person’s love for God. That was the greatest love story of all. If we hadn’t loved God, we wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Each person had such tremendous love for the divine, for the goodness in the universe, that they were willing to allow their own lives and spirits to be ripped to shreds in order to try to fulfill the promise of that love. The irony and tragedy of this lives with me every day and I shake my head and my fist at this paradox that allows people like Limori to use and abuse those who are pure of heart. That is the saddest part of this love story. Writing this book is also a gesture of love. By telling my story I am loving myself by giving myself back the voice that was silenced for so long. I am contradicting so much of what Limori taught me: that I didn’t matter, that she was the only person who had any significance or anything significant to say, that my feelings and thoughts meant nothing, and that I only mattered to God when I was pleasing Limori. All these things were lies, and by addressing them as such, I am trying to offer love to myself and to anyone else who has had the experience of being controlled and abused in this way. I received so much comfort, solace and, indeed, love from the books about cults that I read when I was ready to explore what had happened to me, that I wanted to find a way to pay that love forward, and say to anyone else who has had a similar experience, “It’s going to be alright, I promise you.” And, “I understand,” which were the two most comforting words in the world to me when I realized I’d been in a cult. Being able to name the experience and find that I was not alone in it was, all by itself, immeasurably healing. EpilogueW hy did it take me ten years to leave Limori’s cult? And why do some people continue to stay, in that group and in other, even more abusive groups? I found the most succinct and poignant explanation for this in, of all places, the animated film Kung Fu Panda . Panda’s teacher asks him why he doesn’t quit trying to be a Kung Fu master, when they both know he is ill-suited to the role, both physically and temperamentally. Panda replies that he stays with his master because the rigorous training he endures is less painful than being just himself, in his regular life, working at his father’s noodle shop.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was her daughter, but more. I was Karen, Cheryl, Leif. Karen Cheryl Leif. KarenCherylLeif. Our names blurred into one in my mother’s mouth all my life. She whispered it and hollered it, hissed it and crooned it. We were her kids, her comrades, the end of her and the beginning. We took turns riding shotgun with her in the car. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask us, holding her hands six inches apart. “No,” we’d say, with sly smiles. “Do I love you this much?” she’d ask again, and on and on and on, each time moving her hands farther apart. But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve. She grew up an army brat and Catholic. She lived in five different states and two countries before she was fifteen. She loved horses and Hank Williams and had a best friend named Babs. Nineteen and pregnant, she married my father. Three days later, he knocked her around the room. She left and came back. Left and came back. She would not put up with it, but she did. He broke her nose. He broke her dishes. He skinned her knees dragging her down a sidewalk in broad daylight by her hair. But he didn’t break her. By twenty-eight she managed to leave him for the last time. She was alone, with KarenCherylLeif riding shotgun in her car. By then we lived in a small town an hour outside of Minneapolis in a series of apartment complexes with deceptively upscale names: Mill Pond and Barbary Knoll, Tree Loft and Lake Grace Manor. She had one job, then another. She waited tables at a place called the Norseman and then a place called Infinity, where her uniform was a black T-shirt that said GO FOR IT in rainbow glitter across her chest. She worked the day shift at a factory that manufactured plastic containers capable of holding highly corrosive chemicals and brought the rejects home. Trays and boxes that had been cracked or clipped or misaligned in the machine. We made them into toys—beds for our dolls, ramps for our cars. She worked and worked and worked, and still we were poor. We received government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and medical assistance cards, and free presents from do-gooders at Christmastime. We played tag and red light green light and charades by the apartment mailboxes that you could open only with a key, waiting for checks to arrive.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  The great men of the race are they who are chiefly capable of a great sincerity. Other men may be entirely sincere, but the entire sincerity of great natures is of larger importance; of them it may be said that they are not relatively but absolutely and positively more sincere than the rest, And in nothing else, obviously, is a great sincerity so momentous as in religion. St. Augustine, St. Francis, Pascal have taken the narrowest way into self-knowledge, and have entered in at the straightest gate. No illusion, no substitute for experience, no substitute for life, no excuse against grief, no exaggeration, no self-sparing, no tradition, is able to cling to the man so secretly despoiled—despoiled of all except the difficult truth; but especially despoiled, St. Francis of hampering material circumstance, Pascal of the fictions of words, St. Augustine of the detaining tenderness of secondary loves. It is true that the intellectual imagination was also a barrier in his way, so that he needed to put it also to silence, before he was able to conceive the new idea of Divinity; but he, undeceived, discovered the turning aside, the pausing, of love to have been the thing that chiefly kept him for a while from the First and Only Fair. Nay, a company of other hindrances there were: for example, the partial, or heretical faith—the faith of a sect which during his earlier years offered him the little-realised idea of God—and much the idea of the modern world, and much the conception of the modern mind—against which he had the candor to revolt. In bereavement, he tells us, he had tried to persuade his soul to find consolation in God, but his soul had replied that she could not, for the friend she had lost, being a man, was better than this God. But more than heresy, more than a will unsacrificed, more than any other cause of delay in the ‘conversion’ of Augustine was the love astray that is assuredly, far more than the self-love involved in ambition, the infirmity of noble minds. St. Augustine, thinker, reasoner, dialectician, whose intellectual encounters left him a Father of the Church, is eminently the Saint of love. He loved love first and last. Feeling love, and in search of that which he should love, he found it ultimately to be love, and closed in the end with his early desire.

• From Little Women (1868)

  to gif you. I came to see if you could care for it, and I waited to be sure that I was something more than a friend. Am I? Can you make a little place in your heart for old Fritz?" he added, all in one breath. "Oh, yes!" said Jo, and he was quite satisfied, for she folded both hands over his arm, and looked up at him with an expression that plainly showed how happy she would be to walk through life beside him, even though she had no better shelter than the old umbrella, if he carried it. It was certainly proposing under difficulties, for even if he had desired to do so, Mr. Bhaer could not go down upon his knees, on account of the mud. Neither could he offer Jo his hand, except figuratively, for both were full. Much less could he indulge in tender remonstrations in the open street, though he was near it. So the only way in which he could express his rapture was to look at her, with an expression which glorified his face to such a degree that there actually seemed to be little rainbows in the drops that sparkled on his beard. If he had not loved Jo very much, I don't think he could have done it then, for she looked far from lovely, with her skirts in a deplorable state, her rubber boots splashed to the ankle, and her bonnet a ruin. Fortunately, Mr. Bhaer considered her the most beautiful woman living, and she found him more "Jove-like" than ever, though his hatbrim was quite limp with the little rills trickling thence upon his shoulders (for he held the umbrella all over Jo), and every finger of his gloves needed mending. Passers-by probably thought them a pair of harmless lunatics, for they entirely forgot to hail a bus, and strolled leisurely along, oblivious of deepening dusk and fog. Little they cared what anybody thought, for they were enjoying the happy hour that seldom comes but once in any life, the magical moment which bestows youth on the old, beauty on the plain, wealth on the poor, and gives human hearts a foretaste of heaven. The Professor looked as if he had conquered a kingdom, and the world had nothing more to offer him in the way of bliss. While Jo trudged beside him, feeling as if her place had always been there, and wondering how she ever could have chosen any other lot. Of course, she was the first to speak—intelligibly, I mean, for the emotional remarks which followed her impetuous "Oh, yes!" were not of a coherent or reportable character. "Friedrich, why didn't you..." "Ah, heaven, she gifs me the name that no one speaks since Minna died!" cried the Professor, pausing in a puddle to regard her with grateful delight.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  As I removed my coat at the entrance, I looked across the restaurant and could see him sitting at the table he’d been given. I was delighted to discover, as I joined him, that the indelible connection between us was there, as strong as ever. I was at once excited and nervous to see him. Excited because I longed to hear and see how he was and catch up on all the things I didn’t know about his life. Nervous because I knew that our interactions were always tainted with the shadow of his guru’s mind control. And because I knew what his beliefs told him about me and my negative energy. Our visit had been prompted by a Christmas card. Earlier in the month I had sent him a card, which was not something I had done since we’d broken up. Though we had been apart for five years, I had acknowledged to myself that I loved him as much as ever and wanted to say hello, even if it was via a greeting card. He called me a few days after he’d received the card and requested that we get together for this meal. I confess that I jumped at the opportunity to see him. Yes, I had logged thousands of hours of therapeutic and recovery work at this point and knew without question that it was a cult he was involved in; my head was so shrunk I was often surprised it was still visible on top of my shoulders. But the truth was that I loved him still, despite everything, and needed no convincing at all to spend an evening with him. Five years had passed, almost to the day, since our relationship had been severed. We chatted for hours, although it seemed like minutes, about his business and mine, our lives and our friends and family and ourselves. Our waitress finally came and requested that we pay our bill because she wanted to finish her shift. We looked up from the deeply pleasurable well of reconnection, stunned to find that it was almost midnight and that we were the last customers in the restaurant. His face was so familiar to me, and so beloved, and yet as we talked I realized that he was now a stranger. He was quite obviously more deeply attached to Limori and her other followers than ever. For the first time, he was referring to her as Lady Limori, saying that she had claimed a royal title that was rightfully hers. I could barely stop myself from snorting and rolling my eyes. The good news was that I had done enough of my own healing and recovery work that I could listen to the cultic pronouncements that snuck into his conversation with a measure of detachment and compassion.

• From Mystical Tradition: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2008)

  Lecture Thirty Early Sufi Masters Scope: In this sampling of Sufi passages from the 8th–10th centuries, we see how the Qur’an was mystically interpreted and how the quest for Allah could be captured by the form of traditional Arabic poetry (the qasida). This lecture discusses traditions associated with the famous female Sufi R(cid:407)bi’a al-‘Adawiyya, al-Muhasibi, Abu Yazid al-Bistami, and Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd and concludes with the controversial figure of Mansur al-Hallaj, who was executed for heresy. Outline I. In the remaining lectures, we will examine some of the many writings produced by mystics in the Sufi tradition. Two important sources for the symbolism of Sufi Mysticism are pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’an and Hadith. A. Of special importance is the nasib, the first part of the Arabic poetic form called the qasida, which tropes the meeting of lovers, the separation of lovers, and the recollection of the beloved. 1. The qasida also supplies the imagery of stages and stations in the quest for the beloved. 2. This love poetry provides the framework for Sufi Mysticism; a 7th-century example of this kind of poem, “To the encampments of Máyya,” gives us a sense of it. B. Early Sufis paid special attention to the Isra and miraj of the Prophet, which are only intimated in the Qur’an (in Suras 17:1 and 53) but are elaborated dramatically by early Hadith. C. The imagery is given a systematic structure by the Sufi path of knowledge, love, and prayer toward “the real” (al-haqq), as we see, for example, in “On Annihilation” (fana) by Abu al-Qasim al- Junayd (d. 910). II. The example of two early Sufis demonstrates the complexity of the traditions that grew up around such saints. A. R(cid:407)bi’a al-‘Adawiyya al-Qaysiyya (d. 801) is the most notable early female Sufi, whose sayings and deeds are memorialized, among 120 ©2008 The Teaching Company.

• From Wild (2012)

  The same could not be said of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, or rather the thin portion of the book I still had in my pack. I’d torn off the cover and all the pages I’d read the night before and burned them in the little aluminum pie pan I’d brought to place beneath my stove to safeguard against errant sparks. I’d watched Faulkner’s name disappear into flames feeling a bit like it was a sacrilege—never had I dreamed I’d be burning books—but I was desperate to lighten my load. I’d done the same with the section from The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California that I’d already hiked. It hurt to do it, but it had to be done. I’d loved books in my regular, pre-PCT life, but on the trail, they’d taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear. When I made camp in the evenings, I rushed through the tasks of pitching my tent and filtering water and cooking dinner so I could sit afterwards inside the shelter of my tent in my chair with my pot of hot food gripped between my knees. I ate with my spoon in one hand and a book in the other, reading by the light of my headlamp when the sky darkened. In the first week of my hike, I was often too exhausted to read more than a page or two before I fell asleep, but as I grew stronger I was reading more, eager to escape the tedium of my days. And each morning, I burned whatever I’d read the night before. As I held my unspoiled copy of O’Connor’s short stories, Albert emerged from his tent. “Looks to me like you could stand to lose a few things,” he said. “Want some help?” “Actually,” I said, smiling ruefully at him, “yes.” “All right, then. Here’s what I want you to do: pack up that thing just like you’re about to hike out of here for this next stretch of trail and we’ll go from there.” He walked toward the river with the nub of a toothbrush in hand—the end of which he’d thought to break off to save weight, of course.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But for what fruit would they hear this? Do they desire to joy with me, when they hear how near, by Thy gift, I approach unto Thee? and to pray for me, when they shall hear how much I am held back by my own weight? To such will I discover myself For it is no mean fruit, O Lord my God, that by many thanks should be given to Thee on our behalf, and Thou be by many entreated for us. Let the brotherly mind love in me what Thou teachest is to be loved, and lament in me what Thou teachest is to be lamented. Let a brotherly, not a stranger, mind, not that of the strange children, whose mouth talketh of vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity, but that brotherly mind which when it approveth, rejoiceth for me, and when it disapproveth me, is sorry for me; because whether it approveth or disapproveth, it loveth me. To such will I discover myself: they will breathe freely at my good deeds, sigh for my ill. My good deeds are Thine appointments, and Thy gifts; my evil ones are my offences, and Thy judgments. Let them breathe freely at the one, sigh at the other; and let hymns and weeping go up into Thy sight, out of the hearts of my brethren, Thy censers. And do Thou, O Lord, he pleased with the incense of Thy holy temple, have mercy upon me according to Thy great mercy for Thine own name’s sake; and no ways forsaking what Thou hast begun, perfect my imperfections.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But where in my memory residest Thou, O Lord, where residest Thou there? what manner of lodging hast Thou framed for Thee? what manner of sanctuary hast Thou builded for Thee? Thou hast given this honour to my memory, to reside in it; but in what quarter of it Thou residest, that am I considering. For in thinking on Thee, I passed beyond such parts of it as the beasts also have, for I found Thee not there among the images of corporeal things: and I came to those parts to which I committed the affections of my mind, nor found Thee there. And I entered into the very seat of my mind (which it hath in my memory, inasmuch as the mind remembers itself also), neither wert Thou there: for as Thou art not a corporeal image, nor the affection of a living being (as when we rejoice, condole, desire, fear, remember, forget, or the like); so neither art Thou the mind itself; because Thou art the Lord God of the mind; and all these are changed, but Thou remainest unchangeable over all, and yet hast vouchsafed to dwell in my memory, since I learnt Thee. And why seek I now in what place thereof Thou dwellest, as if there were places therein? Sure I am, that in it Thou dwellest, since I have remembered Thee ever since I learnt Thee, and there I find Thee, when I call Thee to remembrance. Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee? For in my memory Thou wert not, before I learned Thee. Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee, but in Thee above me? Place there is none; we go backward and forward, and there is no place. Every where, O Truth, dost Thou give audience to all who ask counsel of Thee, and at once answerest all, though on manifold matters they ask Thy counsel. Clearly dost Thou answer, though all do not clearly hear. All consult Thee on what they will, though they hear not always what they will. He is Thy best servant who looks not so much to hear that from Thee which himself willeth, as rather to will that, which from Thee he heareth. Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace.

• From Little Women (1868)

  I was half afraid to put the idea into your head, lest you should write and congratulate them before the thing was settled." "I'm not the scatterbrain I was. You may trust me. I'm sober and sensible enough for anyone's confidante now." "So you are, my dear, and I should have made you mine, only I fancied it might pain you to learn that your Teddy loved someone else." "Now, Mother, did you really think I could be so silly and selfish, after I'd refused his love, when it was freshest, if not best?" "I knew you were sincere then, Jo, but lately I have thought that if he came back, and asked again, you might perhaps, feel like giving another answer. Forgive me, dear, I can't help seeing that you are very lonely, and sometimes there is a hungry look in your eyes that goes to my heart. So I fancied that your boy might fill the empty place if he tried now." "No, Mother, it is better as it is, and I'm glad Amy has learned to love him. But you are right in one thing. I am lonely, and perhaps if Teddy had tried again, I might have said 'Yes', not because I love him any more, but because I care more to be loved than when he went away." "I'm glad of that, Jo, for it shows that you are getting on. There are plenty to love you, so try to be satisfied with Father and Mother, sisters and brothers, friends and babies, till the best lover of all comes to give you your reward." "Mothers are the best lovers in the world, but I don't mind whispering to Marmee that I'd like to try all kinds. It's very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want. I'd no idea hearts could take in so many. Mine is so elastic, it never seems full now, and I used to be quite contented with my family. I don't understand it." "I do," and Mrs. March smiled her wise smile, as Jo turned back the leaves to read what Amy said of Laurie. "It is so beautiful to be loved as Laurie loves me. He isn't sentimental, doesn't say much about it, but I see and feel it in all he says and does, and it makes me so happy and so humble that I don't seem to be the same girl I was. I never knew how good and generous and tender he was till now, for he lets me read his heart, and I find it full of noble impulses and hopes and purposes, and am so proud to know it's mine. He says he feels as if he 'could make a prosperous voyage now with me aboard as mate, and lots of love for ballast'.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Her body kept shaking and he felt her tears on his hands. He raised her hands to his lips and kissed them. He tried to look into her face, but she kept her face turned away. “Ida. Ida, please.” “I don’t know any of these people,” she said, “I don’t care about them. They think I’m just another colored girl, and they trying to be nice, but they don’t care. They don’t want to talk to me. I only stayed because you asked me, and you’ve been so nice, and I was so proud of you, and now you’ve spoiled it all.” “Ida,” he said, “if I’ve spoiled things between you and me, I don’t know how I’m going to live. You can’t say that. You’ve got to take it back, you’ve got to forgive me and give me another chance. Ida.” He put one hand to her face and slowly turned it toward him. “Ida, I love you, I do, more than anything in this world. You’ve got to believe me. I’d rather die than hurt you.” She was silent. “I was jealous and I was scared and that was a very dumb thing I said. But I was just afraid you didn’t care about me. That’s all. I didn’t mean anything bad about you.” She sighed and reached for her purse. He gave her a handkerchief. She dried her eyes and blew her nose. She looked very tired and helpless. He moved and sat beside her on the bed. She avoided looking at him but she did not move. “Ida—” and he was shocked by the sound of his voice, it contained such misery. It did not seem to be his voice, it did not seem to be under his control. “I told you, I love you. Do you care about me?” She rose and walked to the mirror. He watched her. “Please tell me.” She looked into the mirror, then picked up her handbag from the bed. She opened it, closed it, then looked in the mirror again. Then she looked at him, “Yes,” she said, helplessly, “yes, I do.” He took her face between his hands and kissed her. At first she did not answer him, seemed merely to be enduring him, seemed suspended, hanging, waiting. She was trembling and he tried to control her trembling with the force of his arms and hands. Then something seemed to bend in her, to give, and she put her arms around him, clinging to him. Finally, he whispered in her ear, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go.” “Yes,” she said, after a moment, “I guess it’s time to go.” But she did not step out of his arms at once. She looked at him and she said, “I’m sorry I was so silly. I know you didn’t mean it.” “I’m sorry, too. I’m just a jealous, no-good bastard, I can’t help it, I’m crazy about you.” And he kissed her again.

• From Another Country (1962)

  His face was the face of a man entering middle age, and it was also—and always would be, for her—the face of a boy. His sandy hair was longer than usual, it was beginning to turn gray, his forehead was wet, and his hair was wet. Cass discovered that she loved him during the fearful, immeasurable second that she stood there watching him. Had she loved him less, she might have wearily consented to continue acting as the bulwark which protected his simplicity. But she could not do that to Richard, nor to his children. He had the right to know his wife: she prayed that he would take it. She said, “I have to tell you something, Richard. I don’t know how you’ll take it, or where we can go from here.” She paused, and his face changed. Be quick! she told herself. “I have to tell you because we can never come back together, we can never have any future if I don’t.” Her stomach contracted again, dryly. She wanted to run to the bathroom, but she knew that that would do no good. The spasm passed. “Vivaldo and I have never touched each other. I’ve”—be quick!—“been having an affair with Eric.” His voice, when he spoke, seemed to have no consciousness behind it, to belong to no one; it was a mere meaningless tinkle on the air: “Eric?” She walked to the bar and leaned on it. “Yes.” How the silence rang and gathered! “Eric?” He laughed. “Eric?” It’s his turn now, she thought. She did not look at him; he was rising to his feet; he stumbled, suddenly drunken, to the bar. She felt him staring at her—for some reason, she thought of an airplane trying to land. Then his hand was on her shoulder. He turned her to face him. She forced herself to look into his eyes. “Is that the truth?” She felt absolutely cold and dry and wanted to go to sleep. “Yes, Richard. That’s the truth.” She moved away and sat down in the chair again. She had, indeed, delivered herself up: she thought of the children and fear broke over her like a wave, chilling her. She stared straight before her, sitting perfectly still, listening: for no matter what else was lost, she would not give up her children, she would not let them go. “It’s not true. I don’t believe you. Why Eric? Why did you go to him?” “He has something—something I needed very badly.” “What is that, Cass?” “A sense of himself.” “A sense of himself,” he repeated, slowly. “A sense of himself.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  Yves locked their door behind them and Eric walked to the window and looked at the sky, at the mighty towers. He heard the murmur of the water and then Yves called his name. He turned. Yves stood on the other side of the room, between the two beds, naked. “Which bed do you think is better?” he asked. And he sounded genuinely perplexed, as though it were a difficult decision. “Whichever you prefer,” Eric said, gravely. Yves pulled back the covers of the bed nearest the window and placed himself between the sheets. He pulled the covers up to his chin and lay on his back, watching Eric. His eyes were dark and enormous in the dark room. A faint smile touched his lips. And this look, this moment, entered into Eric, to remain with him forever. There was a terrifying innocence in Yves’ face, a beautiful yielding: in some marvelous way, for Yves, this moment in this bed obliterated, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, all the sordid beds and squalid grappling which had led him here. He was turning to the lover who would not betray him, to his first lover. Eric crossed the room and sat down on the bed and began to undress. Again, he heard the murmur of the stream. “Will you give me a cigarette?” Yves asked. He had a new voice, newly troubled, and when Eric looked at him he saw for the first time how the face of a lover becomes a stranger’s face. “Bien sûr.” He lit two cigarettes and gave one to Yves. They watched each other in the fantastic, tiny glow—and smiled, almost like conspirators. Then Eric asked, “Yves, do you love me?” “Yes,” said Yves. “That’s good,” said Eric, “because I’m crazy about you. I love you.” Then, in the violent moonlight, naked, he slowly pulled the covers away from Yves. They watched each other and he stared at Yves’ body for a long time before Yves lifted up his arms, with that same sad, cryptic smile, and kissed him. Eric felt beneath his fingers Yves’ slowly stirring, stiffening sex. This sex dominated the long landscape of his life as the cathedral towers dominated the plains. Now, Yves, as though he were also remembering that day and night, turned his head and looked at Eric with a wondering, speculative, and triumphant smile. And at that moment, Madame Belet entered, with a sound of knives and forks and plates, and switched on the lights. Yves’ face changed, the sea vanished. Yves rose from the hassock, blinking a little. Madame Belet put the utensils on the table, carefully, and marched out again, returning immediately with a bottle of wine, and a corkscrew. She placed these on the table. Yves went to the table and began opening the wine. “She thinks you are going to abandon me,” said Yves. He poured a tiny bit of wine into his own glass, then poured for Eric.

• 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)

  But I hadn’t expected this one. A friend lent me the album Jesus Christ Superstar. I had known about Jesus all my life. Indeed, I venture to say that I had known Jesus all my life; better still, perhaps, to say that he had known me. He was a presence, a surrounding love, whispering gently in scripture, singing at the top of his voice in the beauty of creation, majestic in the mountains and the sea. 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 another 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.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Michael Goulder’s meticulous scholarship had disabused me of my early antipathy, and living with Paul day by day, and following (roughly) in his footsteps, I started to love the genius and pathos of the man. I was moved by his passion, his brilliance, his inventiveness, and the affection that he clearly felt for his converts. The second epistle to the Corinthians showed his extraordinary vulnerability, and when we finally got to Tre Fontane, just outside Rome, where —legend has it—Paul was executed by the emperor Nero, I found that I was almost tearful. We were filming in a tiny, dark little chapel—a national monument and a place of pilgrimage—and there was no time for sentiment. The crew had rigged up some temporary and highly dangerous lighting for me. “Karen! This really has to be one take only!” Joel shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here before the whole place explodes!” So I hurried in and spoke about Paul’s death. Was he a disappointed man at the end? He had really expected Jesus to return in glory in his own lifetime, and the new faith to spread to the ends of the earth. But he had died an obscure, anonymous death, and none of those extravagant hopes had been realized. If he had been able to foresee the next two thousand years of church history, which he had set in motion, he would, I was certain, have come close to despair. I stood in the flickering light for a moment after Yossi had yelled, “It’s a wrap!” and realized that this had been another important journey. Paul, a difficult, prickly genius, had stormed his way into my affections, and I now felt so much at one with him that I could almost share his convictions. Almost—but not quite. When The First Christian was screened in January 1984, it was a minor success. People liked the raw quality of the film, which, many felt, had freshness and originality. In secular Britain, my criticism of organized religion was also popular, and though, as expected, I received a lot of hate mail, a significant number of people wrote to tell me that after seeing the series, they felt that they could go back to church. I did not understand this. Had I not shown conclusively that the very foundations of Christian doctrine had been undermined by modern biblical scholarship? Why did people feel that their beliefs had been renewed by this onslaught? Again, I recalled Hyam Maccoby’s insistence that intellectual assent was not the same as faith, and that theology was not very important for Jews. I still could not see how this would work in practice, yet it appeared that some of my Christian audience had come to a similar conclusion. John had predicted that The First Christian would make me a television star.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At the beginning of December Kitty got a spot on the bill at a hall in Marylebone, and played there twice a night, all month. It was pleasant to sit gossiping in the green room between shows, knowing that we had no frantic trips to make across London in the snow; and the other artistes - a juggling troupe, a conjuror, two or three comic singers and a dwarf husband-and-wife team, ‘The Teeny Weenies’ - were all as complacent as we, and very jolly company.The show ended at Christmas. I should, perhaps, have passed the holiday in Whitstable, for I knew my parents would be disappointed not to have me there. But I knew, too, what Christmas dinner would be like at home. There would be twenty cousins gathered around the table, all talking at once, all stealing the turkey from one another’s plates. There would be such a fuss and stir they could not possibly, I thought, miss me - but I knew that Kitty would if I left her for them; and I knew, besides, that I should miss her horribly and only make the occasion miserable for everybody else. So she and I spent it together - with Walter, as ever, in attendance - at Mrs Dendy’s table, eating goose, and drinking toast after toast to the coming year with champagne and pale ale.Of course, there were gifts: presents from home, which Mother forwarded with a stiff little note that I refused to let shame me; presents from Walter (a brooch for Kitty, a hat-pin for me). I sent parcels to Whitstable, and gave gifts at Ma Dendy’s; and for Kitty I bought the loveliest thing that I could find: a pearl - a single flawless pearl that was mounted on silver and hung from a chain. It cost ten times as much as I had ever spent on any gift before, and I trembled when I handled it. Mrs Dendy, when I showed it to her, gave a frown. ‘Pearls for tears,’ she said, and shook her head: she was very superstitious. Kitty, however, thought it beautiful, and had me fasten it about her neck at once, and seized a mirror to watch it swinging there, an inch beneath the hollow of her lovely throat. ‘I’ll never take it off,’ she said; and she never did, but wore it ever after - even on the stage, beneath her neck-ties and cravats.She, of course, bought me a gift. It came in a box with a bow, and wrapped in tissue, and turned out to be a dress: the most handsome dress I had ever possessed, a long, slim evening dress of deepest blue, with a cream satin sash about the waist, and heavy lace at the bosom and hem; a dress, I knew, that was far too fine for me.

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

  It was in such an age of universal egotism that Christianity first revealed the true spirit of love to man as flowing from the love of God, and exhibited it in actual life. This cardinal virtue we meet first within the Church itself, as the bond of union among believers, and the sure mark of the genuine disciple of Jesus. "That especially," says Tertullian to the heathen, in a celebrated passage of his Apologeticus, "which love works among us, exposes us to many a suspicion. ’Behold,’ they say, ’how they love one another!’ Yea, verily this must strike them; for they hate each other. ’And how ready they are to die for one another!’ Yea, truly; for they are rather ready to kill one another. And even that we call each other ’brethren,’ seems to them suspicious for no other reason, than that, among them, all expressions of kindred are only feigned. We are even your brethren, in virtue of the common nature, which is the mother of us all; though ye, as evil brethren, deny your human nature. But how much more justly are those called and considered brethren, who acknowledge the one God as their Father; who have received the one Spirit of holiness; who have awaked from the same darkness of uncertainty to the light of the same truth?... And we, who are united in spirit and in soul, do not hesitate to have also all things common, except wives. For we break fellowship just where other men practice it." This brotherly love flowed from community of life in Christ. Hence Ignatius calls believers "Christ-bearers" and "God-bearers."666 The article of the Apostles’ Creed: "I believe in the communion of saints;" the current appellation of "brother" and "sister;" and the fraternal kiss usual on admission into the church, and at the Lord’s Supper, were not empty forms, nor even a sickly sentimentalism, but the expression of true feeling and experience, only strengthened by the common danger and persecution. A travelling Christian, of whatever language or country, with a letter of recommendation from his bishop,667 was everywhere hospitably received as a long known friend. It was a current phrase: In thy brother thou hast seen the Lord himself. The force of love reached beyond the grave. Families were accustomed to celebrate at appointed times the memory, of their departed members; and this was one of the grounds on which Tertullian opposed second marriage.