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 Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  186 LECTURE 28 Self-Giving Love According to John I n the first half of John, the writer tells us of Jesus’s signs, but the meaning of these actions is often unclear. The narrative identifies conflicting points of view and, through the interplay of different perspectives, points to the central idea that Jesus is the giver of life. In this lecture, we’ll look at the second half of the gospel, where the challenge of discerning meaning continues. Here, the central question is this: If Jesus is the giver of life, what should we make of his crucifixion? As we read John’s final chapters, we will explore how the writer relates the crucifixion to self-giving love, the continuation of relationship, the completion of Jesus’s work, and the dynamics of faith. Self-Giving Love ‹The first sentence of John 13 tells us that even before the Passover meal, Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to depart from this world. Thus, “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” The writer knows that he is about to describe Jesus doing things that can be construed in different ways. To prepare readers to see the meaning of these events differently, John asks them to interpret everything that Jesus does as an expression of love. ‹The main action in the opening scene is remarkably simple: Jesus washing and drying the feet of his disciples. But in terms of ordinary practice, everything about this is disorienting. Jesus interrupts the meal to engage in foot washing, assumes the attire of a slave by putting on a servant’s towel, and does the work of a slave by washing his disciples’ feet. ‹When Peter asks why their teacher is acting as a slave toward his followers, Jesus responds that what he is doing is essential for their relationship. As readers, we see foot washing as an expression of utter devotion. By taking on the role of a slave, Jesus conveys the extent of his love.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 28—Self-Giving Love According to John 187 ●The fact that Judas, who has already decided to betray Jesus, is still in the room gives the foot washing a more radical quality. The devil has already put betrayal into Judas’s heart, yet Jesus responds by washing Judas’s feet, which is a gesture of love. The narrative also tells us that Jesus knows which of the disciples will betray him. By washing the feet of Judas, along with those of the other disciples, Jesus transforms love into an act of resistance. It confronts evil and the hatred it represents. ●In John’s Gospel, this kind of militant love defines Jesus’s course of action, and it will come to full expression in the crucifixion. In John 15:13, Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus conveys love in a preliminary way by washing the feet of his friends and his betrayer. And he will convey love in a more radical way when he confronts hostility again and lays down his life through the crucifixion. ‹This kind of love also defines the disciples’ actions. After washing their feet, Jesus says he has given an example, which he then he puts as a commandment: “Just as I have loved you, you are to love one another.” Unlike the earlier commandment to love others as we love ourselves, the disciples are to love others as Jesus loves them. They are to see themselves as recipients of a love that comes from outside themselves and, in turn, to bring that love to expression. The Continuation of Relationship ‹In all four gospels, Jesus spends time in conversation with the disciples during the Last Supper. In John, the main issue in this section (John 14–17) is the threat of separation. Jesus tells the disciples that it is time for him to depart. Yet in the face of his impending departure, he speaks about ways in which his relationship with them will continue. ‹Jesus hones in vividly on the issue of separation when he says, “I will not leave you orphaned.” On one level, being orphaned depicts the immediate situation of the disciples, who will soon experience the trauma of Jesus’s crucifixion. But on another level, it also speaks to the situation of later readers, who lived decades after Jesus’s ministry had ended. They were a minority group in a society where most people did not share their beliefs, and they felt marginalized or orphaned.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 216 ‹For Paul, the cross conveys the extremity of divine love. If love is shown by giving and if the greatest gift one can give is one’s life, then the crucifixion shows God in the act of utmost self-giving. Crucifixion does not follow conventional patterns of equating love with beauty or romantic ideals. Conveying love through crucifixion shows a willingness to give up dignity, status, and life itself for the sake of another. That is how crucifixion reveals divine love—by revealing the extent to which God gives himself to restore relationships with humans. ‹By ordinary human standards, the message of the cross was repugnant. It should have turned people away. Thus, the fact that the Corinthians had been drawn to God through it is astonishing. Paul insists that neither he nor Apollos nor Cephas can take credit for the Corinthians’ faith. And that means that none of them can have the central place in the community. The unifying center of the congregation must be Christ. The Spirit ‹Another issue that concerned the Christians at Corinth was “spiritual things.” This issue posed similar questions as it does today: Is spirituality necessarily linked to a religious tradition, or can it be understood as something more private? ‹As in our time, there were some in Corinth who felt that God’s Spirit inspired them to speak with ecstatic words or utter prophetic messages. Yet there were still others who did not have these spiritual experiences, and that created tension, because some thought that spiritual experiences gave them a higher status in the community. ‹Paul responds by telling them that they can’t discern the presence of God’s Spirit simply by looking for emotional intensity. Instead, the principal manifestation of the Spirit’s work is faith, and faith is what everyone in the congregation has in common. ●Paul’s assumption is that faith is a relationship of trust. It’s a sense of trust in God that comes about through an encounter with God—and that’s where the Spirit comes in. We’ve seen that Paul told the Corinthians about the self- sacrificing love of God being conveyed through the crucified man named Jesus. And he acknowledged that words alone could not make them believe this.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Without prolonged theoria, it was not possible to understand his exegesis fully. Origen had longed to be a martyr as a young man. But after the conversion of Constantine, when Christianity became a legitimate religion in the Roman empire, there was no further opportunity for martyrdom and the monk became the chief Christian exemplar. During the early fourth century, ascetics started to retire to the deserts of Egypt and Syria to engage in a life of solitary prayer. One of the greatest of these monks was Antony of Egypt (250–356), who had felt unable to reconcile his wealth with the gospels. One day, he had heard read aloud in church the story of the rich young man who refused Jesus’s invitation: ‘go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor . . . then come, follow me’. 48 Like the rabbis, Antony experienced this scripture as a miqra, a ‘summons’. That very afternoon, he gave all his possessions away and set off for the desert. Monks were revered as doers of the Word. 49 In their desert caves, the monks recited the scriptures, learned texts by heart and meditated on them. As these biblical passages became part of a monk’s interior world, their original meaning became less important than this personal significance. Monks believed that Jesus showed them how to read the Bible: in the Sermon on the Mount, he had given scripture new meaning, emphasizing some portions of the Bible more than others. He also stressed the importance of charity. Monks were pioneers of a new Christian lifestyle, which required a different reading of the gospel. They had to allow the texts they had learned to reverberate in their minds, until they achieved the self-forgetfulness of apatheia, a lack of concern about their personal well-being that gave them the freedom to love. As a modern scholar explains: They could be ignored enough, invited outside themselves enough, to love and be loved in a way that met the deepest social needs of the tension- filled world of late antiquity. Loving God, loving other people, loving the created world in which they were placed – this was the great and hoped-for conclusion of apatheia – the sublime indifference that ended in love. 50 Origen had concentrated on the love of God in his commentary on the Song; the monks stressed love of neighbour. Living together in community, they had to dethrone themselves from the centre of their lives and put others there. Monks did not turn their backs on the world: literally thousands of Christians descended upon them from nearby towns and villages to seek their counsel.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Origen had longed to be a martyr as a young man. But after the conversion of Constantine, when Christianity became a legitimate religion in the Roman empire, there was no further opportunity for martyrdom and the monk became the chief Christian exemplar. During the early fourth century, ascetics started to retire to the deserts of Egypt and Syria to engage in a life of solitary prayer. One of the greatest of these monks was Antony of Egypt (250–356), who had felt unable to reconcile his wealth with the gospels. One day, he had heard read aloud in church the story of the rich young man who refused Jesus’s invitation: ‘go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor . . . then come, follow me’.48 Like the rabbis, Antony experienced this scripture as a miqra, a ‘summons’. That very afternoon, he gave all his possessions away and set off for the desert. Monks were revered as doers of the Word.49 In their desert caves, the monks recited the scriptures, learned texts by heart and meditated on them. As these biblical passages became part of a monk’s interior world, their original meaning became less important than this personal significance. Monks believed that Jesus showed them how to read the Bible: in the Sermon on the Mount, he had given scripture new meaning, emphasizing some portions of the Bible more than others. He also stressed the importance of charity. Monks were pioneers of a new Christian lifestyle, which required a different reading of the gospel. They had to allow the texts they had learned to reverberate in their minds, until they achieved the self-forgetfulness of apatheia, a lack of concern about their personal well-being that gave them the freedom to love. As a modern scholar explains: They could be ignored enough, invited outside themselves enough, to love and be loved in a way that met the deepest social needs of the tension-filled world of late antiquity. Loving God, loving other people, loving the created world in which they were placed – this was the great and hoped-for conclusion of apatheia – the sublime indifference that ended in love.50 Origen had concentrated on the love of God in his commentary on the Song; the monks stressed love of neighbour. Living together in community, they had to dethrone themselves from the centre of their lives and put others there. Monks did not turn their backs on the world: literally thousands of Christians descended upon them from nearby towns and villages to seek their counsel. Living in silence had taught monks how to listen.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  11 Like the quotation from Hosea, this proved that practical compassion was as important as the Torah and temple worship. Loving kindness was, as it were, an essential leg of the tripod that supported the entire world, and now that the temple had gone, Torah and charity were more important than ever before. To back up this insight, R. Johanan quoted – or slightly misquoted – the psalmist: ‘The world is built by love.’ 12 In juxtaposing these three unrelated texts, R. Johanan had shown that, as Hillel claimed, charity was indeed central to scripture: it was the exegete’s job to elucidate this hidden principle and bring it to light. The horoz was essential to rabbinic midrash. It gave the exegete an intuition of wholeness and completeness that was similar to the shalom that Jews had found in the temple and the coincidenia oppositorum that Christians experienced in their pesher exegesis. Like the Christians, the rabbis were reading the Law and the prophets differently, giving them a meaning that often bore little relationship to the original authors’ intention. R. Akiba perfected this innovative midrash. His pupils liked to tell a story about him. The fame of R. Akiba’s genius reached Moses in heaven, and one day he decided to come down to earth to attend one of his classes. He sat in the eighth row behind the other students, and to his dismay found that R. Akiba’s exposition was incomprehensible to him, even though it was said to have been part of the revelation he had received on Mount Sinai. ‘My sons have surpassed me,’ Moses mused ruefully but proudly as he made his way back to heaven. But why, he asked, had God entrusted the Torah to him, when he could have chosen a man of Akiba’s intellectual stature? 13 Another rabbi put it more succinctly: ‘Matters that had not been disclosed to Moses were disclosed to R. Akiba and his colleagues.’ 14 Revelation had not happened once and for all on Mount Sinai; it was an ongoing process and would continue for as long as skilled exegetes sought out the inexhaustible wisdom hidden in the text. Scripture contained the sum of human knowledge in embryonic form: it was possible to find ‘everything in it.’ 15 Sinai had just been the beginning. Indeed, when God had given the Torah to Moses, he knew that future generations would have to complete it. The written Torah was not a finished object; human beings were supposed to use their ingenuity to bring it to perfection, just as they extracted flour from wheat and weaved a garment from flax. 16 Some of the rabbis thought that R. Akiba went too far. His colleague R. Ishmael accused him of imposing his own meaning on scripture: ‘Indeed, you say to the text “Be silent until I interpret”.’

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Bernard (1090–1153), abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in Burgundy (1090–1153), dominated Pope Eugene II and King Louis VII of France and was as charismatic in his own way as Abelard. Scores of young men had followed him into the new Cistercian Order, a reformed branch of Benedictine monasticism. He accused Abelard of ‘attempting to bring the Christian faith to naught because he supposes that human reason can comprehend all that is God’.19 Quoting Paul’s hymn to charity, he claimed that Abelard ‘sees nothing as an enigma, nothing as in a mirror, but looks on everything face to face’.20 In 1141, Bernard summoned Abelard, who by this time was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, to the Council of Sens, and attacked him so ferociously that he collapsed and died the following year. Even though Bernard could not be described as a charitable man, his exegesis and spirituality were based on the love of God. His most famous work was his exposition of the Song of Songs, eighty-six sermons delivered to the monks of Clairvaux between 1135 and 1153, which mark the apogee of lectio divina.21 ‘It is desire that drives me,’ he insisted, ‘not reason.’22 In the incarnation of the Logos, God had descended to our level so that we could ascend to the divine. In the Song, God shows us that we make this ascent in three stages. When the bride cried: ‘The king has brought me into his chambers’, this referred allegorically to the senses of scripture. There were three ‘chambers’: the garden, the storeroom and the bedchamber. ‘Let the garden . . . represent the plain, unadorned sense of scripture,’ Bernard suggested, ‘the storeroom its moral sense, and the bedroom the mystery of divine contemplation.’23 We began by reading the Bible as a simple story of creation and redemption but we must then progress to the storerooms, the moral sense which teaches us to modify our behaviour. In the ‘storerooms’, the soul was refined by the practice of charity. She became ‘pleasant and temperate’ to others; ‘an earnest zeal for the works of love’ leads her ‘to forgetfulness of self and indifference of self-interest’.24 When the bride looked for her groom ‘by night’ in her bedchamber, she showed us the importance of modesty. It was better to avoid ostentatious piety and pray in the privacy of one’s cell because ‘if we pray when others are present, their approbation may rob our prayer of . . . its effect’.25 There would be no sudden illumination; by dint of regular lectio divina and the practice of charity, monks would make steady, unobtrusive and incremental progress.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Origen’s commentary could only place them in the correct spiritual posture; he could not do the meditation for them. Without prolonged theoria, it was not possible to understand his exegesis fully. Origen had longed to be a martyr as a young man. But after the conversion of Constantine, when Christianity became a legitimate religion in the Roman empire, there was no further opportunity for martyrdom and the monk became the chief Christian exemplar. During the early fourth century, ascetics started to retire to the deserts of Egypt and Syria to engage in a life of solitary prayer. One of the greatest of these monks was Antony of Egypt (250–356), who had felt unable to reconcile his wealth with the gospels. One day, he had heard read aloud in church the story of the rich young man who refused Jesus’s invitation: ‘go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor . . . then come, follow me’. 48 Like the rabbis, Antony experienced this scripture as a miqra, a ‘summons’. That very afternoon, he gave all his possessions away and set off for the desert. Monks were revered as doers of the Word. 49 In their desert caves, the monks recited the scriptures, learned texts by heart and meditated on them. As these biblical passages became part of a monk’s interior world, their original meaning became less important than this personal significance. Monks believed that Jesus showed them how to read the Bible: in the Sermon on the Mount, he had given scripture new meaning, emphasizing some portions of the Bible more than others. He also stressed the importance of charity. Monks were pioneers of a new Christian lifestyle, which required a different reading of the gospel. They had to allow the texts they had learned to reverberate in their minds, until they achieved the self-forgetfulness of apatheia, a lack of concern about their personal well-being that gave them the freedom to love. As a modern scholar explains: They could be ignored enough, invited outside themselves enough, to love and be loved in a way that met the deepest social needs of the tension-filled world of late antiquity. Loving God, loving other people, loving the created world in which they were placed – this was the great and hoped-for conclusion of apatheia – the sublime indifference that ended in love. 50 Origen had concentrated on the love of God in his commentary on the Song; the monks stressed love of neighbour. Living together in community, they had to dethrone themselves from the centre of their lives and put others there.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  69 Righteous condemnation is not only unkind but smacks of the self-satisfaction and self-congratulation that is a major impediment to our understanding of scripture. So ‘we must meditate on what we read, until an interpretation be found that tends to establish the reign of charity,’ Augustine urged. ‘Scripture teaches nothing but charity, nor condemns anything except cupidity, and in this way shapes the minds of men.’ 70 Irenaeus had insisted that exegesis must conform to the ‘rule of faith’. For Augustine, the ‘rule of faith’ was not a doctrine but the spirit of love. Whatever the author had originally intended, a biblical passage that was not conducive to love must be interpreted figuratively, because charity was the beginning and end of the Bible: Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived. 71 Exegesis was a discipline that trained us in the difficult art of charity. By habitually seeking a charitable explanation of disturbing texts, we could learn to do the same in our daily lives. Like the other Christian exegetes, Augustine believed that Jesus was central to the Bible: ‘Our whole purpose when we hear the Psalms, the Prophets and the Law,’ he explained in a sermon, ‘is to see Christ there, to understand Christ there.’ 72 But the Christ he found in scripture was never simply the historical Jesus, but the whole Christ, who, as St Paul had taught, was inseparable from humanity. 73 After finding Christ in scripture, the Christian must return to the world and learn to seek him in loving service to the community. Augustine was not a linguist. He knew no Hebrew and could not have encountered Jewish midrash, but he had come to the same conclusion as Hillel and Akiba. Any interpretation of scripture that spread hatred and dissension was illegitimate; all exegesis must be guided by the principle of charity. CHAPTER 6 Lectio Divina In 430, the last year of his life, Augustine had watched the Vandals besieging the city of Hippo, as the western provinces of the Roman empire fell helplessly before the invading barbarian tribes. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s work during these final years, and is especially evident in his interpretation of the fall of Adam and Eve.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Dumpling,” she called him back, “sugar tit,” and when no one could hear, “manchild.” She loved him like a baby, whispered to her sisters about the soft blond hairs on his belly, the way he slept with one leg thrown over her hip, the stories he told her about all the places he wanted to take her. “He loves Bone, he really does,” she told Aunt Ruth. “Wants to adopt her when we get some money put by.” She loved to take pictures of him. The best of them is one made at the gas station in the bright summer sun with Lyle swinging from the Texaco sign and wearing a jacket that proclaimed “Greenville County Racetrack.” He’d taken a job out at the track where they held the stock-car races, working in the pit changing tires at high speed and picking up a little cash in the demolition derby on Sunday afternoon. Mama didn’t go out there with him much. She didn’t like the noise or the stink, or the way the other men would tease Lyle into drinking warm beer to see if his work slowed down any. As much as she liked taking pictures, she only took one of him out at the track, with a tire hugged against his left hip, grease all over one side of his face, and a grin so wide you could smell the beer. It was a Sunday when Lyle died, not at the track but on the way home, so easily, so gently, that the peanut pickers who had seen the accident kept insisting that the boy could not be dead. There’d been one of those eerie summer showers where the sun never stopped shining and the rain came down in soft sheets that everybody ignored. Lyle’s truck had come around the curve from the train crossing at a clip. He waved at one of the pickers, giving his widest grin. Then the truck was spinning off the highway in a rain-slicked patch of oil, and Lyle was bumped out the side door and onto the pavement. “That’s a handsome boy,” one of the pickers kept telling the highway patrolman. “He wasn’t doing nothing wrong, just coming along the road in the rain—that devil’s rain, you know. The sun was so bright, and that boy just grinned so.” The old man wouldn’t stop looking back over to where Lyle lay still on the edge of the road. Lyle lay uncovered for a good twenty minutes. Everybody kept expecting him to get up. There was not a mark on him, and his face was shining with that lazy smile. But the back of his head flattened into the gravel, and his palms lay open and damp in the spray of the traffic the patrolmen diverted around the wreck.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Never have been able to sleep past sunrise,” she told me. “No matter how little sleep I’ve had, I just come awake.” Her face was haggard. She hugged me to her hip and laid her chin on the top of my head. It was as if I was her mother now, holding her safe, and she was my child, happy to lean on my strong, straight back. I closed my eyes, wanting time to stop, wishing the moment would go on forever, the day never begin. But inevitably Daddy Glen would get up, or Reese, and Mama would rinse her coffee cup and go put on her uniform. Afternoons after school, Mama insisted Reese and I go over to Aunt Alma’s and stay until she came to get us. I’d help Aunt Alma with her garden or her canning, and while we worked I would make up stories in my head. My cousins loved my stories—especially the ones that featured bloodsuckers who consumed only the freshly butchered bodies of newborn babies, green-faced dwarfs promising untold riches to children who would bring them the hearts of four and forty grown men. Grey told me that I had “a very interesting mind for a girl.” But Aunt Alma came to the porch one day when I was telling one of the boys’ favorites and got so upset she looked like she would piss herself. If she had heard it all she would probably have beaten me harder than Daddy Glen. My stories were full of boys and girls gruesomely raped and murdered, babies cooked in pots of boiling beans, vampires and soldiers and long razor-sharp knives. Witches cut off the heads of children and grown-ups. Gangs of women rode in on motorcycles and set fire to people’s houses. The ground opened and green-black lizard tongues shot up to pull people down. I got to be very popular as a baby-sitter; everyone was quiet and well-behaved while I told stories, their eyes fixed on my face in a way that made me feel like one of my own witches casting a spell. “Girl,” Cousin Grey told me, “sometimes your face is just scary!” “Bone’s gotten almost mean-hearted,” Aunt Alma told Mama. “Something’s got to be done.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “You’re Anney’s girl, an’t you?” one of them said to me. “Your little sister looks just like her, don’t she? You must look like your daddy.” I nodded carefully. When Glen Waddell came, Mama would get him a beer and sit with him when she could. Sometimes, if she was busy, he would carry us out to her car when Reese got sleepy, holding us in his big strong arms with the same studied gentleness as when he touched Mama. I always wanted to wait till Mama could tuck us into our bed of blankets, but she seemed to like for Glen to carry us out with all the truckers watching. I’d see her look over as he went out with us, see her face soften and shine. Maybe that was love, that look. I couldn’t tell. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] My mama dated Glen Waddell for two years. People said it took her time to trust men again after Lyle Parsons died. Mama would occasionally take Reese and me with her to pick Glen up from his new job at the RC Cola plant. Sometimes he would still be working, lifting flats of soda bottles to stock his truck for the next morning’s route. All those full cases had to be loaded and the empties pulled off and transferred to the conveyor belt for cleaning and shipment to the bottling plant. He would shift each case of twenty-four bottles above his head and onto the truck with a grunt, swinging from his hips with his whole weight, arms extended and mouth sucked in against his tongue with concentration. His collar was open, his pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt was limp, and it stuck to his back in a dark stripe down his spine. Mama would still be in her waitress dress, smelling of salt and fried food, and just as sweaty and tired as he was, but Glen would smile at her like he knew she sweat sugar and cream. Mama would lean out the window of the car and call his name softly, and he would blush dark red and start moving a little faster, either to show off his strength or to get out of there sooner, we weren’t sure.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  25 The Torah was no longer confined to the celestial world; once it had been promulgated on Mount Sinai, it no longer belonged to God but was the inalienable possession of every single Jew. So, commented a later rabbi, ‘We pay no attention to a heavenly voice.’ And furthermore, it had been decreed at Sinai: ‘By a majority you are to decide’, 26 so R. Eliezer, a minority of one, could not override the popular vote. When God heard that his opinion had been overruled, he laughed and said: ‘My children have conquered me.’ 27 Any limitations in a midrash were due to the weakness of the exegete, who lacked the ability to make sense of a text in a given situation or to find fresh meaning. 28 The Golden Rule also meant any midrash that spread hatred was illegitimate. A mean-spirited interpretation that poured scorn on other sages and sought to discredit them must be avoided. 29 The purpose of midrash was to serve the community, not to inflate the ego of the exegete, who should, R. Meir explained, study the Torah for ‘its own sake’, not for his own benefit. A good midrash, the rabbi continued, sowed affection rather than discord, because anyone who studied scripture properly was full of love and brought joy to others: he ‘loves the Divine Presence and all creatures, makes the Divine Presence glad and makes glad all creatures’. Torah study transformed the exegete, robing him with humility and fear, making him upright, pious, righteous and faithful, so that everybody around him benefited. ‘The mysteries of the Torah are revealed to him,’ R. Meir concluded, ‘he becomes like an overflowing fountain and ceaseless torrent . . . And it makes him great and lifts him above the entire creation.’ 30 ‘Does not my word burn like fire?’ Yahweh had asked Jeremiah. 31 Midrash released the divine spark that lay dormant in the written words of the Torah. One day, R. Akiba heard that his pupil Ben Azzai was caught in a nimbus of flame that flashed around him while he was expounding the Torah. He hurried off to investigate and Ben Azzai told him that he had simply been practising horoz: I was only linking up the words of the Torah with one another and then with the words of the Prophets, and the Prophets with the Writings, and the words rejoiced, as when they were delivered at Sinai, and they were sweet, as at their original utterance.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Glen was a small man but so muscular and strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. There were bottle fragments on the pavement, crushed shards ground into the tarmac, and all the men wore heavy work boots with thick rubber soles. Glen Waddell’s feet were so fine that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall men’s specialty stores. He would pivot on those boy-size feet, turning his narrow hips and grunting with his load, everything straining and forceful, while his hands cradled cases and flats as delicately as if they were soft-shelled eggs. His palms spread so wide he could easily span half a case’s width, keeping every bottle level no matter how high he had to throw the flat. People talked about Glen’s temper and his hands. He didn’t drink, didn’t mess around, didn’t even talk dirty, but the air around him seemed to hum with vibration and his hands were enormous. They hung like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled arms. On his slender, small-boned frame, they were startling, incongruous, constantly in motion, and the only evidence of just how strong he was. When he reached for Reese and me, he would cup his palms around the back of our heads and drop down to look into our faces, his warm, damp fingers tangling gently in our hair. He was infinitely careful with us, gentle and slow with those hands, but he was always reaching for Mama with sudden, wide sweeps of his arms. When he hugged her, he would lay his hands on her back so that he covered it from neck to waist, pulling her as tight to him as he could. Mama was always taking Glen’s hands between hers, her fingers making his seem even bigger, harder, and longer. “He’s a gentle man,” she told her sisters. “You should see how tender he gets, the way he picks Reese up when she falls asleep in the back of the car, like she was so delicate, so fine—like that glass that chimes when you click it against your teeth.” My aunts would nod, but not with much conviction. But I could tell that Mama had begun to love Glen. I saw how she blushed when he looked at her or touched her, even in passing. A flush would appear on her neck, and her cheeks would brighten until her whole face glowed pink and hot. Glen Waddell turned Mama from a harried, worried mother into a giggling, hopeful girl.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  One afternoon Glen dropped the last case onto the truck and turned to look at Mama, Reese, and me waiting in Mama’s old Pontiac. The sun caught his sweat, shiny beads and rivulets, so that he seemed to glitter in the light. He wiped his face, but the sweat kept coming down in tracks, and he looked as if he were weeping. He walked toward us slowly, dropped by the door in a crouch, and reached through the window to take Mama into a tight embrace. “Oh Anney,” he whispered. “Anney, Anney.” His voice was a husky tremolo. “You know. You know, I love you so. I can’t wait no more, Anney. I can’t. I love you with all my heart, girl.” His arms stretched over the seat and pulled Reese and me forward, pressing us into Mama’s neck and back. “And your girls, Anney. Oh, God! I love them. Our girls, Anney. Our girls.” He sobbed then, pulling us in tighter so that Reese’s bird bones crunched into my shoulder and the haze of his sweat drifted all around us. His face slid past Mama’s hair, pressed into mine, his mouth and teeth touched my cheek. “Call me Daddy,” he whispered. “Call me Daddy ‘cause I love your mama, ‘cause I love you. I’m gonna treat you right. You’ll see. You’re mine, all of you, mine.” His shoulders shook, his body reaching through the window seemed to rock the whole car. “Oh, Anney.” He shuddered. “Don’t say no. Please, Anney, don’t do that to me!” “Glen,” Mama breathed. “Oh, Glen. I don’t know.” She trembled and slowly stretched her own arms up and around his shoulders. “Oh, God. All right, I’ll think about it. All right, honey. All right.” Glen jumped back. He slammed his hands down on the car top, once, twice, three times. The echoes were like shots. Mama was crying quietly, her shoulders heaving back against Reese and me. “Goddam,” he screamed. “Goddam, Anney!” He spun in a circle, whooping. “I knew you’d say yes. Oh, what I’m gonna do, Anney! I promise you. You an’t never even imagined!” He spread his arms wide and whooped again. His face looked like someone was shining a hot pink light on it. He pulled the door open and reached for Mama, his hands still shaking as they wrapped around her back. He drew her in so close that she came off her feet, and then he swung her around in the air, laughing and shouting. Reese put her hands on my shoulders and held on. I could feel the vibration as she shook gently to the echo of Glen’s shouts. We both smiled and held on to each other while Glen danced Mama around the parking lot in the shelter of his arms.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “No, listen to me. I an’t gonna tell you to leave him. He’s your husband, and it’s clear he thinks the sun rises and sets in your smile. I an’t sure whether he’s crazy jealous of Bone like Granny thinks, or if it’s something else. But he an’t never gonna be easy with her, and she an’t never gonna be safe with him.” “He does love her. I know he does.” Mama’s whisper was fierce. “Maybe. Still, I look at Glen and I can see he an’t never been loved like he needed to be. But the boy’s deeper and darker than I can figure out. It’s you I worry about. I know the kind of love you got in you. I know how you feel about Glen. You’d give your life to save him, and maybe that’ll make it come out right, and maybe it won’t. That’s for God to fix. Not me.” “Ruth, think about what you said about him. Anybody can see how Glen got bent, what his daddy’s done to him. I an’t never seen a boy wanted his daddy’s love so much and had so little of it. All Glen really needs is to know himself loved, to get out from under his daddy’s meanness.” My teeth ached with the cold from the ice in Mama’s glass. I knew I should push through the door, let them know I could hear them, but I stood unmoving, listening to Mama. “You never saw him when he used to come down and wait for me to get off work at the diner. That was when I started to love him, when I saw him look at Bone and Reese with his face so open I could see right into his soul. You could see the kind of man he wanted to be so plain. It was like looking at a little boy, a desperate hurt little boy. That’s when I knew I loved him.” “Oh, Anney.” I pushed the door open with my foot and stepped through. Their heads turned to me, Mama leaning forward on her chair close to Ruth’s bent neck, Ruth looking paler and more worn than when I had gone into the kitchen. “Took you long enough.” Aunt Ruth’s glance was too intent. “I sliced the lemon the way Mama likes. You can see right through those slices.” My face felt frozen. I gave Mama her glass and went back to the overturned bucket and the broken mass of roots. I tore one half free and dumped it back in the bucket and then just as roughly started breaking out four equal sections of roots and top growth. As I worked I kept my face down, my eyes on the plant. “I was telling your aunt Ruth that Daddy Glen’s started a new job over at the Sunshine Dairy. He’s real pleased about going to work for his daddy, and it looks like this job is going to work out pretty good.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  You must look like your daddy.” I nodded carefully. When Glen Waddell came, Mama would get him a beer and sit with him when she could. Sometimes, if she was busy, he would carry us out to her car when Reese got sleepy, holding us in his big strong arms with the same studied gentleness as when he touched Mama. I always wanted to wait till Mama could tuck us into our bed of blankets, but she seemed to like for Glen to carry us out with all the truckers watching. I’d see her look over as he went out with us, see her face soften and shine. Maybe that was love, that look. I couldn’t tell. My mama dated Glen Waddell for two years. People said it took her time to trust men again after Lyle Parsons died. Mama would occasionally take Reese and me with her to pick Glen up from his new job at the RC Cola plant. Sometimes he would still be working, lifting flats of soda bottles to stock his truck for the next morning’s route. All those full cases had to be loaded and the empties pulled off and transferred to the conveyor belt for cleaning and shipment to the bottling plant. He would shift each case of twenty-four bottles above his head and onto the truck with a grunt, swinging from his hips with his whole weight, arms extended and mouth sucked in against his tongue with concentration. His collar was open, his pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt was limp, and it stuck to his back in a dark stripe down his spine. Mama would still be in her waitress dress, smelling of salt and fried food, and just as sweaty and tired as he was, but Glen would smile at her like he knew she sweat sugar and cream. Mama would lean out the window of the car and call his name softly, and he would blush dark red and start moving a little faster, either to show off his strength or to get out of there sooner, we weren’t sure. Glen was a small man but so muscular and strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. There were bottle fragments on the pavement, crushed shards ground into the tarmac, and all the men wore heavy work boots with thick rubber soles. Glen Waddell’s feet were so fine that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall men’s specialty stores.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He would pivot on those boy-size feet, turning his narrow hips and grunting with his load, everything straining and forceful, while his hands cradled cases and flats as delicately as if they were soft-shelled eggs. His palms spread so wide he could easily span half a case’s width, keeping every bottle level no matter how high he had to throw the flat. People talked about Glen’s temper and his hands. He didn’t drink, didn’t mess around, didn’t even talk dirty, but the air around him seemed to hum with vibration and his hands were enormous. They hung like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled arms. On his slender, small-boned frame, they were startling, incongruous, constantly in motion, and the only evidence of just how strong he was. When he reached for Reese and me, he would cup his palms around the back of our heads and drop down to look into our faces, his warm, damp fingers tangling gently in our hair. He was infinitely careful with us, gentle and slow with those hands, but he was always reaching for Mama with sudden, wide sweeps of his arms. When he hugged her, he would lay his hands on her back so that he covered it from neck to waist, pulling her as tight to him as he could. Mama was always taking Glen’s hands between hers, her fingers making his seem even bigger, harder, and longer. “He’s a gentle man,” she told her sisters. “You should see how tender he gets, the way he picks Reese up when she falls asleep in the back of the car, like she was so delicate, so fine—like that glass that chimes when you click it against your teeth.” My aunts would nod, but not with much conviction. But I could tell that Mama had begun to love Glen. I saw how she blushed when he looked at her or touched her, even in passing. A flush would appear on her neck, and her cheeks would brighten until her whole face glowed pink and hot. Glen Waddell turned Mama from a harried, worried mother into a giggling, hopeful girl. One afternoon Glen dropped the last case onto the truck and turned to look at Mama, Reese, and me waiting in Mama’s old Pontiac. The sun caught his sweat, shiny beads and rivulets, so that he seemed to glitter in the light. He wiped his face, but the sweat kept coming down in tracks, and he looked as if he were weeping. He walked toward us slowly, dropped by the door in a crouch, and reached through the window to take Mama into a tight embrace. “Oh Anney,” he whispered. “Anney, Anney.” His voice was a husky tremolo. “You know. You know, I love you so. I can’t wait no more, Anney. I can’t. I love you with all my heart, girl.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  But pumping gas and changing tires in his cousin’s Texaco station, he made barely enough to pay the rent. Mama tried working part-time in a grocery store but gave it up when she got so pregnant she couldn’t lift boxes. It was easier to sit a stool on the line at the Stevens factory until Reese was born, but Lyle didn’t like that at all. “How’s that baby gonna grow my long legs if you always sitting bent over?” he complained. He wanted to borrow money or take a second job, anything to keep his pretty new wife out of the mill. “Honey girl,” he called her, “sweet thing.” “Dumpling,” she called him back, “sugar tit,” and when no one could hear, “manchild.” She loved him like a baby, whispered to her sisters about the soft blond hairs on his belly, the way he slept with one leg thrown over her hip, the stories he told her about all the places he wanted to take her. “He loves Bone, he really does,” she told Aunt Ruth. “Wants to adopt her when we get some money put by.” She loved to take pictures of him. The best of them is one made at the gas station in the bright summer sun with Lyle swinging from the Texaco sign and wearing a jacket that proclaimed “Greenville County Racetrack.” He’d taken a job out at the track where they held the stock-car races, working in the pit changing tires at high speed and picking up a little cash in the demolition derby on Sunday afternoon. Mama didn’t go out there with him much. She didn’t like the noise or the stink, or the way the other men would tease Lyle into drinking warm beer to see if his work slowed down any. As much as she liked taking pictures, she only took one of him out at the track, with a tire hugged against his left hip, grease all over one side of his face, and a grin so wide you could smell the beer. It was a Sunday when Lyle died, not at the track but on the way home, so easily, so gently, that the peanut pickers who had seen the accident kept insisting that the boy could not be dead. There’d been one of those eerie summer showers where the sun never stopped shining and the rain came down in soft sheets that everybody ignored. Lyle’s truck had come around the curve from the train crossing at a clip. He waved at one of the pickers, giving his widest grin. Then the truck was spinning off the highway in a rain-slicked patch of oil, and Lyle was bumped out the side door and onto the pavement. “That’s a handsome boy,” one of the pickers kept telling the highway patrolman. “He wasn’t doing nothing wrong, just coming along the road in the rain—that devil’s rain, you know.

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

  A. Hilgenfeld: Petrus in Rom und Johannes in Kleinasien. In his "Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theol." for 1872. Also his Einleitung in das N. T., 1875, pp. 618 sqq. W. Krafft: Petrus in Rom. Bonn, 1877. In the "Theol. Arbeiten des rhein. wissenschaftl. Predigervereins, " III. 185–193. Joh. Friedrich (Old Cath.): Zur ältesten Gesch. des Primates in der Kirche. Bonn, 1879. William M. Taylor: Peter the Apostle. N. York, 1879. The congregation of Jerusalem became the mother church of Jewish Christianity, and thus of all Christendom. It grew both inwardly and outwardly under the personal direction of the apostles, chiefly of Peter, to whom the Lord had early assigned a peculiar prominence in the work of building his visible church on earth. The apostles were assisted by a number of presbyters, and seven deacons or persons appointed to care for the poor and the sick. But the Spirit moved in the whole congregation, bound to no particular office. The preaching of the gospel, the working of miracles in the name of Jesus, and the attractive power of a holy walk in faith and love, were the instruments of progress. The number of the Christians, or, as they at first called themselves, disciples, believers, brethren, saints, soon rose to five thousand. They continued steadfastly under the instruction and in the fellowship of the apostles, in the daily worship of God and celebration of the holy Supper with their agapae or love-feasts. They felt themselves to be one family of God, members of one body under one head, Jesus Christ; and this fraternal unity expressed itself even in a voluntary community of goods—an anticipation, as it were, of an ideal state at the end of history, but without binding force upon any other congregation. They adhered as closely to the temple worship and the Jewish observances as the new life admitted and as long as there was any hope of the conversion of Israel as a nation. They went daily to the temple to teach, as their Master had done, but held their devotional meetings in private houses.281