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.

Page 153 of 184 · 20 per page

• 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).

• 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)

  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. 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.

• 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)

  Now I found myself in a position where I had no agenda. There was no point in thinking up barbed remarks about a Jewish mystical idea or revealing the hopeless irrationality of a Greek Orthodox doctrine, because there was nobody to hear it. In the past, my literary agent and publishers had wanted me to be ceaselessly entertaining and topical in order to make the seriously uncool subject of religion accessible. But my new agents and publishers seemed content to let me to be an egghead, and nobody wanted to talk about God at a London dinner party. I could immerse myself in the silence, allow it to open up wide spaces in my head, and listen to the undercurrent of these new ideas. This, I am now convinced, is the only way to study religion. I think that I was lucky not to have studied theology or comparative religion at university, where I would have had to write clever papers and sit examinations, get high marks, and aim for a good degree. The rhythm of study would have been wrong—at least for me. In theology, I am entirely self-taught, and if this makes me an amateur, that need not necessarily be all bad. After all, an amateur is, literally, “one who loves,” and I was, day by solitary day, hour by silent hour, falling in love with my subject. I discovered that I could scarcely wait to get to my desk each morning, open my books, and pick up my pen. I anticipated this moment as eagerly as a tryst with a lover. I would lie in bed at night waiting for sleep, delightedly reviewing what I had learned that day. Occasionally, while sitting at my desk or poring over a dusty tome in the British Library, I would experience miniseconds of transcendence, awe, and wonder that gave me some sense of what had been going on in the mind of the theologian or mystic I was studying. At such a time I would feel stirred deeply within, and taken beyond myself, in much the same way as I was in a concert hall or a theater. I was finding in study the ecstasy that I had hoped to find in those long hours of prayer as a young nun. When I shared this with my students at the Leo Baeck College, Rabbi Lionel Blue, my boss in the comparative religion department, told me with amusement that this was very Jewish. It was what Jews experienced when they studied Torah or Talmud. I also learned that Saint Benedict had instructed his monks to spend part of the day in lectio divina (divine study), during which they would experience moments of oratio, or prayer.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He was the one who looked beautiful to me when we fucked, the others all looked like men with contorted faces—best not to look. He didn’t grunt, or groan, or squeak during sex. He beamed and glowed, eyes wide open, shaking his head, saying, “Wow! Wow!” and then he’d fuck me some more. He was the thirty-third man, and the only one I really liked to fuck. The others were just men and I allowed it. Resentfully. Most men fuck in and out, in and out, in and out, on and on. But he fucked like he was actually going somewhere. And he was. He was the only one who took time to be friends with my cat. The others regarded my little fur ball as a hindrance, an obstacle, even a threat. They just didn’t get it: love me, love my pussy. He was my blood. He was the one who never got real. He was the one I never conquered. He was one I had the most fun with. He had the only cock I worshiped. He was the one with whom I couldn’t tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure. With the others my pleasure was the only pleasure. He was the guy who could fuck for three hours . . . and still not come. He was the one who showed me real physical joy. The others just made me come. With him I came to . . . the Kingdom. He was sweet-sweet-sweet. He was the one who oozed love. Through his fingertips, his movement, his skin, and his cock. He gave me nothing outside of bed. In bed he gave me everything that I, as a woman, could ever desire. He fucked like a rolling ocean. I didn’t have those powerful but so brief and geographically specific outward climaxes with him, it was the building of an inward tidal wave that flooded my body, my brain, and then spilled into my soul. He never, unlike the others, asked me to be “his”—but I was. He was the one who treated me like his—in bed. All the others treated me like theirs out of bed, but in bed I could smell their fear. With him sex was about transcendence, with the others power. He swooped in and out of my pussy, my ass, my life. Others smothered, wishing, foolishly, to colonize what they coveted. Fucking him was like breathing in wide open space. If I never loved again I would die having known a big, big love. There was always that moment when he fucked me when all my thoughts ceased and turned to God: I was entering His territory. He didn’t please me. He possessed me. He, you see, was the one I really loved. Having now imagined its demise, I mustered the courage to proceed with the affair. #101

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Witness how you experience resistance and even lean in toward it. I can guarantee there’s more to learn by leaning in than from turning away. When you avoid a challenge like this, you forfeit opportunities for experiential learning that yields wisdom. Yet when you approach these areas of resistance, your return on this investment is better awareness and understanding, both of yourself and of love. Knowing that it can be all too easy to zoom past using yourself as your target as you begin your LKM practice, you might decide up front that you’ll focus exclusively on yourself for several weeks. Even mark off this time on your calendar. This is in fact how LKM has been taught to the participants in my team’s research studies. The very first guided meditation our study participants are offered focuses exclusively on the self, and they are instructed to stay working with this particular meditation daily, for the first two weeks. This is not self-indulgence. Rather, many LKM teachers find that exploration of self-love provides a solid foundation from which to later expand love’s reach. You can use this reasoning if you need to justify this level of self-focus to yourself: Self-focus has been part of LKM practice for millennia, and it will help you deepen your skills for extending your experiences of love to many, many others. You can start in small ways simply by becoming aware of your body. Your body has its own pace, your mind another. Simply attending to your body coaxes you to slow down. Once you tune in to your physical sensations, you might discover a need to shift positions, stretch, or give yourself a few minutes of massage. Doing so is a form of self-love that instantly creates more comfort and ease. Just as eye contact is a key channel for making a connection with another person, awareness of your own body sensations is a key channel for self-love. It’s the platform from which you can offer yourself compassionate attention. Try This Meditation Practice: Self-Love Find a comfortable place to sit where you won’t be disturbed. If you’re in a chair, make your way to the back of the chair so that your lower back is well supported. Ground both of your feet flat on the floor. Sit upright, with your spine, neck, and the crown of your head pulled skyward. Gently pull your shoulder blades backward and downward, raising your rib cage slightly. These postural shifts will create a true physical openness for your heart, an openness consistent with the positive emotions you aim to cultivate. Gently lower your gaze to reduce visual distractions. If you’re comfortable, close your eyes. Begin by taking two or three deep breaths, and bring your awareness to your heart. Visualize how each in-breath affects your heart physically.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Jordan —susurro contra su piel. No sé por qué digo su nombre, pero creo que tengo miedo de que no esté realmente aquí y todo esto sea un sueño. Sus dedos se enredan en mi cabello, y me deslizo sobre ella. Alejando el sudor de su frente, la miro fijamente, observando sus mejillas sonrojadas y sus ojos brillantes, su pequeña camisa se ha levantado, exponiendo sus hermosos pechos y pezones. Bajo, tomando uno en mi boca, chupando y arrastrándolo como a su clítoris. Gime y sus manos regresan para envolverse alrededor de mi nuca. Cambio al otro, arrastrando una mano por su cuerpo e intentando asimilarla tanto como pueda. Sé que todo lo que hacemos está mal, y no sé cómo voy a explicar esto a alguien, pero aquí mismo —en este momento— no quiero estar en ningún otro lado. Ojalá pudiera morir tan feliz como lo estoy ahora. Aquí, en la oscuridad de la noche, en esta habitación oscura, detrás de una puerta cerrada, no necesitamos explicarle nada a nadie. Porque solo este momento, es nuestro. Me levanto de la cama y me pongo de pie, desabrochando mi cinturón y abriendo mis jeans. Busco en la mesita de noche y saco un condón de la caja, volviendo a levantarme y mirándola. Tiene las piernas cerradas, una rodilla ligeramente arqueada y las manos a los costados, frotando el edredón mientras me mira. —¿Estás segura de esto? —le pregunto. Asiente. Me quito las botas y el resto de la ropa, poniéndome de pie otra vez. Al abrir el paquete, la miro, pero sus ojos se han reducido a otra cosa, su respiración se hace cada vez más superficial. Siento una sonrisa curvar las comisuras de mis labios, preguntándome cuántas otras palabras adultas sabe. Pero no tengo la oportunidad de preguntar. Se sienta, balanceando sus piernas sobre el borde de la cama, y va por mi polla, llevándosela a la boca. Gimo y jadeo al mismo tiempo, su lengua está húmeda y caliente cuando se retira y chupa la punta. —Jordan, por favor. —Agarro la parte posterior de su cabello, tratando de alejarla suavemente—. Eso me pondrá al borde, y quiero que te corras de nuevo. Empujándola hacia atrás en la cama, me poso sobre ella, derritiéndome en su boca y besándola profundamente. Me acurruco entre sus piernas, y dobla sus rodillas mientras desliza sus uñas por mi espalda. Deslizando mi mano debajo de su cuerpo, agarro su culo y presiono nuestros cuerpos, el mundo gira detrás de mis ojos cerrados. Tenerla debajo de mí, piel sobre piel... mi polla está tan dura que no puedo soportarlo. Esto es mío. Recostándome sobre mis talones, me coloco el condón, sin apartar la vista de ella. —Estoy un poco asustada —dice, la preocupación arrugando su frente. Me detengo, tratando de no apretar el puño alrededor de mi polla con demasiada fuerza. ¿Asustada? —¿Qué pasa si hago demasiado ruido? —susurra.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had friends and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on Whitstable Bay. And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall songs and the singing of them. If you have visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent. The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre ; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes - I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief. That, however, is to get ahead of my story. I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and scents of the Canterbury Palace - in the period, at least, of which I am thinking, that final summer in my father’s house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at knock-down prices or for free.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Toward this end, consider the spiritual lessons from Buddhism. In his acclaimed 1995 book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that he resonated with how a Catholic priest once described to him the Holy Spirit as “energy sent by God.” Nhat Hanh shared that this phrasing both pleased him and deepened his conviction that the most reliable way to approach the Christian Trinity was through the doorway of the Holy Spirit. Integrating this with his Buddhist perspective, he likened the Holy Spirit to mindfulness and its fruits: understanding, love, and compassion. When you purposely tune in to the present moment, this view holds, and see and listen deeply in an open, accepting manner, you open a door to divine oneness. As does Armstrong, then, Nhat Hanh sees both Christian and Buddhist spirituality in the doing. From this vantage point, love, compassion, and other deeply moving spiritual experiences become holy states that you can cultivate through your own intentional efforts to be present, grounded, and mindfully aware of both yourself and others. Learning to trust that your deepest emotions can lead you somewhere good is what my collaborator and American Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg calls faith in her 2002 spiritual memoir by the same name. Faith, or alternatively trust or confidence, is the usual translation of the ancient Pali word saddha, which Salzberg points out literally means “to place the heart upon.” Like Armstrong and Nhat Hanh, Salzberg emphasizes that faith is a verb, an action—something you do—not a received definition of reality or belief system that explains away life’s mysteries. In Buddhism, to have faith is to open your heart to your experiences, or as Salzberg puts it, to be willing “to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.” Faith is a way of leaning in toward your feelings of love and oneness, trusting that—somehow—they will nourish you and lead you closer to your spiritual higher ground. Faith, according to Salzberg, is “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.” It draws you out of the safe and familiar territory of labels and constructs, and into the more challenging and always changing flux of your own inner experience. From what I’ve highlighted so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that I especially resonate with how my friend and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, an expert in adult development, defines spirituality. In his 2009 book, Spiritual Evolution, he equates spirituality with positive emotions, noting that these states are what connect you to others, to the divine, and over time help you attain wisdom and maturity. Succinctly, he concludes, “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I see no need to improve upon this definition.