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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Ten years. For ten years they had just had each other, each other and Morton—surely wonderful years. But what had they been thinking about all those years? Had they perhaps thought a little about Stephen? Oh, but what could she hope to know of these things, their thoughts, their feelings, their secret ambitions—she, who had not even been conceived, she, who had not yet come into existence? They had lived in a world that her eyes had not looked on; days and nights had slipped into the weeks, months and years. Time had existed, but she, Stephen, had not. They had lived through that time; it had gone to their making; their present had been the result of its travail, had sprung from its womb as she from her mother’s, only she had not been a part of that travail, as she had been a part of her mother’s. Hopeless! And yet she must try to know them, these two, every inch of their hearts, of their minds; and knowing them, she must then try to guard them—but him first, oh, him first—she did not ask why, she only knew that because she loved him as she did, he would always have to come first. Love was simply like that; it just followed its impulse and asked no questions—it was beautifully simple. But for his sake she must also love the thing that he loved, her mother, though this love was somehow quite different; it was less hers than his, he had thrust it upon her; it was not an integral part of her being. Nevertheless it too must be served, for the happiness of one was that of the other. They were indivisible, one flesh, one spirit, and whatever it was that had crept in between them was trying to tear asunder this oneness—that was why she, their child, must rise up and help them if she could, for was she not the fruit of their oneness? 4There were times when she would think that she must have been mistaken, that no trouble was overshadowing her father; these would be when they two were sitting in his study, for then he would seem contented. Surrounded by his books, caressing their bindings, Sir Philip would look carefree again and light-hearted. ‘No friends in the world like books,’ he would tell her. ‘Look at this fellow in his old leather jacket!’ There were times, too, out hunting when he seemed very young, as Raftery had been that first season. But the ten-year-old Raftery was now wiser than Sir Philip, who would often behave like a foolhardy schoolboy. He would give Stephen leads over hair-raising places, and then, she safely landed, turn round and grin at her. He liked her to ride the pick of his hunters these days, and would slyly show off her prowess. The sport would bring back the old light to his eyes, and his eyes would look happy as they rested on his daughter.

• From Trash (1988)

  “With what they’ve taken off me, off Granny, and your Aunt Grace—shit, you could almost make another person.” A woman, a garbage creation, an assembly of parts. When I drink I see her rising like bats out of deep caverns, a gossamer woman—all black edges, with a chrome uterus and molded glass fingers, plastic wire rib cage and red unblinking eyes. My mama, my grandmother, my aunts, my sister, and me—every part of us that can be taken has been. “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,” my mama sang for me once, and laughing added, “But we don’t need as much of it as we used to, huh?” When Mama talked, I listened. I believed it was the truth she was telling me. I watched her face as much as I listened to her words. She had a way of dropping her head and covering her bad teeth with her palm. I’d say, “Don’t do that.” And she’d laugh at how serious I was. When she laughed with me, that shadow, so gray under her eyes, lightened, and I felt for a moment—powerful, important, never so important as when I could make her laugh. I wanted to grow up to do the poor-kid-done-good thing, the Elvis Presley/Ritchie Valens movie, to buy my mama her own house, put a key in her hand and say, “It’s yours—from here to there and everything in between, these walls, that door, that gate, these locks. You don’t ever have to let anyone in that you don’t want. You can lay in the sun if you want to or walk out naked in the moonlight if you take the mood. And if you want to go into town to mess around, we can go do it together.” I did not want to be my mother’s lover; I wanted more than that. I wanted to rescue her the way we had both wanted her to rescue me. Do not want what you cannot have, she told me. But I was not as good as she was. I wanted that dream. I’ve never stopped wanting it.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  before, but she never got stuck on any one person. Allen was different. He was a returned missionary, and the Laffertys were the picture-perfect LDS family. Everybody in Provo seemed to know them. Plus, Allen is a charmer—all the Lafferty boys have this ability to charm the socks off you. They have this look in their eyes. And Brenda fell for it. Even from Argentina it was obvious she was really in love with Allen.” On April 22, 1982, Allen and Brenda were sealed for time and eternity as husband and wife in the Salt Lake City temple. She was twenty-one years old. At BYU, where Brenda majored in communications, she anchored a television newsmagazine program on KBYU—the local PBS affiliate broadcast throughout Utah on channel 11. According to Betty, “Her ambition was to become an anchorwoman like Michelle King. * We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them—that we shouldn’t go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities. “Then Brenda got married, and Allen didn’t want her to work, so she kind of put her broadcasting career on the shelf temporarily, and took a lower-profile job at Castleton’s, one of the nicer stores at the Orem Mall, just to get insurance and help support the family. But Allen started pressuring her to quit that job, too, because he wanted her to be a traditional, subservient wife. He wanted her to be totally reliant on him.” According to LaRae, “Brenda really wanted a career in broadcast journalism. We found out later, after the fact, that she had been offered a job at BYU, teaching in the communications department. Allen wouldn’t let her take it, though, so she became a housewife. It’s clear from her journals that within about two months after marrying Allen, she realized she had made a mistake. But then she got pregnant with Erica.” “When Allen first became part of our family,” says Betty, “there was this instant attachment. We all liked him. He was like a wonderful big brother to us. At the time, we had no idea that there was all this other stuff going on in his family. Then we started to notice how fanatical they all were.” Betty remembers visiting Brenda and Allen one night when her sister was pregnant with Erica: “Brenda wanted to go out and get something to eat, but

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  These two had been lovers from the days of their childhood, from the days when away in their Highland village the stronger child had protected the weaker at school or at play with their boisterous companions. They had grown up together like two wind-swept saplings on their bleak Scottish hill-side so starved of sunshine. For warmth and protection they had leaned to each other, until with the spring, at the time of mating, their branches had quietly intertwined. That was how it had been, the entwining of saplings, very simple, and to them very dear, having nothing mysterious or strange about it except inasmuch as all love is mysterious. To themselves they had seemed like the other lovers for whom dawns were brighter and twilights more tender. Hand in hand they had strolled down the village street, pausing to listen to the piper at evening. And something in that sorrowful, outlandish music would arouse the musical soul in Jamie, so that great chords would surge up through her brain, very different indeed from the wails of the piper, yet born of the same mystic Highland nature. Happy days; happy evenings when the glow of the summer lingered for hours above the grim hills, lingered on long after the flickering lamps had been lit in the cottage windows of Beedles. The piper would at last decide to go home, but they two would wander away to the moorland, there to lie down for a space side by side among the short, springy turf and the heather. Children they had been, having small skill in words, or in life, or in love itself for that matter. Barbara, fragile and barely nineteen; the angular Jamie not yet quite twenty. They had talked because words will ease the full spirit; talked in abrupt, rather shy broken phrases. They had loved because love had come naturally to them up there on the soft, springy turf and the heather. But after a while their dreams had been shattered, for such dreams as theirs had seemed strange to the village. Daft, the folk had thought them, mouching round by themselves for hours, like a couple of lovers. Barbara’s grand-dame, an austere old woman with whom she had lived since her earliest childhood—Barbara’s grand-dame had mistrusted this friendship. ‘I dinna richtly unnerstan’ it,’ she had frowned; ‘her and that Jamie’s unco throng. It’s no richt for lass-bairns, an’ it’s no proaper!’ And since she spoke with authority, having for years been the village post-mistress, her neighbours had wagged their heads and agreed. ‘It’s no richt; ye hae said it, Mrs. MacDonald!’

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

  geistliche Leben nach der Lehre d. hl. Bernard, Freib., 1906, p. 327. The works of Bernard which present his mystical theology are the Degrees of Humility and Pride, a sermon addressed to the clergy, entitled Conversion, the treatise on Loving God, his Sermons on the Canticles, and his hymns. The author’s intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures is shown on almost every page. He has all the books at his command and quotation follows quotation with great rapidity. Bernard enjoyed the highest reputation among his contemporaries as an expounder of the inner life, as his letters written in answer to questions show. Harnack calls him the religious genius of the twelfth century, the leader of his age, the greatest preacher Germany had ever heard. In matters of religious contemplation he called him a new Augustine, Augustinus redivivus.1425 The practical instinct excluded the speculative element from Bernard as worldly ambition excluded the mystical element from Abaelard. Bernard had the warmest respect for the Apostle Paul and greatly admired Augustine as "the mightiest hammer of the heretics" and "the pillar of the Church."1426 Far more attractive is he as a devotional theologian, descanting on the excellencies of love and repeating Paul’s words. "Let all your things be done in love," 1 Cor. 16:14, than as a champion of orthodoxy and writing, "It is better that one perish than that unity perish."1427 Prayer and personal sanctity, according to Bernard, are the ways to the knowledge of God, and not disputation. The saint, not the disputant, comprehends God.1428 Humility and love are the fundamental ethical principles of theology. The conventual life, with its vigils and fastings, is not an end but a means to develop these two fundamental Christian virtues.1429 Every convent he regarded as a company of the perfect, collegium perfectorum, but not in the sense that all the monks were perfect.1430 The treatise on Loving God asserts that God will be known in the measure in which He is loved. Writing to Cardinal Haimeric, who had inquired "why and how God is to be loved," Bernard replied. "The exciting cause of love to God, is God Himself. The measure of love to God is to love God without measure.1431 The gifts of nature and the soul are adapted to awaken love. But the gifts involved in the soul’s relation to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom the unbeliever does not know, are inexpressibly more precious and call upon man to exercise an infinite and measureless love, for God is infinite and measureless. The soul is great in the proportion in which it loves God."1432 Love grows with our apprehension of God’s love. As the soul contemplates the cross it is itself pierced with the sword of love, as when it is said in the

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  We were best friends.” Popular, active in school government, and a member of the drill team, Brenda was an ambitious student who excelled at almost everything she tried. She was also beautiful, in the wholesome, all-American farm-girl idiom: in 1980 she was first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant. After graduating from high school with honors, Brenda enrolled at the University of Idaho, where she was elected president of her sorority. “But,” says her mother, “that wasn’t the kind of life she wanted to lead, so she came back home to Twin Falls and went to the College of Southern Idaho for two years, then transferred to Brigham Young University.” While attending BYU, Brenda joined a “young adult ward”—an LDS student congregation—where she met Allen Lafferty. “Allen wasn’t a student, but for some reason he started attending that student ward in Provo,” LaRae explains. “He had a lot of charisma, they hit it off, and they just started going together.” “When Brenda started going out with Allen, I was out of the country, on a mission in Argentina,” her sister Betty says. “But she wrote to me every week, and I could tell she was pretty serious about this guy. She’d dated a lot of boys before, but she never got stuck on any one person. Allen was different. He was a returned missionary, and the Laffertys were the picture-perfect LDS family. Everybody in Provo seemed to know them. Plus, Allen is a charmer—all the Lafferty boys have this ability to charm the socks off you. They have this look in their eyes. And Brenda fell for it. Even from Argentina it was obvious she was really in love with Allen.” On April 22, 1982, Allen and Brenda were sealed for time and eternity as husband and wife in the Salt Lake City temple. She was twenty-one years old. At BYU, where Brenda majored in communications, she anchored a television newsmagazine program on KBYU—the local PBS affiliate broadcast throughout Utah on channel 11. According to Betty, “Her ambition was to become an anchorwoman like Michelle King. * We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them—that we shouldn’t go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities. “Then Brenda got married, and Allen didn’t want her to work, so she kind of put her broadcasting career on the shelf temporarily, and took a lower-profile job at Castleton’s, one of the nicer stores at the Orem Mall, just to get insurance and help support the family. But Allen started pressuring her to quit that job, too, because he wanted her to be a traditional, subservient wife. He wanted her to be totally reliant on him.” According to LaRae, “Brenda really wanted a career in broadcast journalism. We found out later, after the fact, that she had been offered a job at BYU, teaching in the communications department.

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

  and Urban VI., gave words of counsel, set forth at length measures and motives of action, used the terms of entreaty and admonition, and did not hesitate to employ threats of divine judgment, as in writing to the Queen of Naples. They abound in wise counsels. The correspondence shows that Catherine had some acquaintance with the New Testament from which she quotes the greater precepts and draws descriptions from the miracle of the water changed into wine and the expulsion of the moneychangers from the temple and such parables as the ten virgins and the marriage-feast. One of her most frequent expressions is the blood of Christ, and in truly mystical or conventual manner she bids her correspondents, even the pope and the cardinals, bathe and drown and inebriate themselves in it, yea, to clothe and fill themselves with it, "for Christ did not buy us with gold or silver or pearls or other precious stones, but with his own precious blood."370 To Catherine the religious life was a subjection of the will to the will of God and the outgoing of the soul in exercises of prayer and the practice of love. "I want you to wholly destroy your own will that it may cling to Christ crucified." So she wrote to a mother bereft of her children. Writing to the recluse, Bartolomea della Seta, she represented the Saviour as saying, "Sin and virtue consist in the consent of the will, there is no sin or virtue unless voluntarily wrought." To another she wrote, "I have already seen many penitents who have been neither patient nor obedient because they have studied to kill their bodies but not their wills."371 Her sound religious philosophy showed itself in insisting again and again that outward discipline is not the only or always the best way to secure the victory of the spirit. If the body is weak or fallen into illness, the rule of discretion sets aside the exercises of bodily discipline. She wrote, "Not only should fasting be abandoned but flesh be eaten and, if once a day is not enough, then four times a day." Again and again she treats of penance as an instrument. "The little good of penance may hinder the greater good of inward piety. Penance cuts off," so she wrote in a remarkable letter to Sister Daniella of Orvieto, "yet thou wilt always find the root in thee, ready to sprout again, but virtue pulls up by the root." Monastic as Catherine was, yet no evangelical guide-book could write more truly than she did in most particulars. And at no point does this noble woman rise higher than when she declined to make her own states the standard for others, and condemned those "who, indiscreetly, want to measure all bodies by one and the same measure, the measure by which they measure themselves." Writing to her niece, Nanna Benincasa, she compared the heart to a lamp, wide above and narrow below.

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

  This woman, the daughter of one of the leading men of Zürich, was an inmate of the convent of Tosse, near Winterthur. When Suso discovered that she had committed his conversations to writing, he treated her act as "a spiritual theft," and burnt a part of the manuscript. The remainder he preserved, in obedience to a supernatural communication, and revised. Suso appears in the book as "The Servant of the Eternal Wisdom." The Autobiography is a spiritual self-revelation in which the author does not pretend to follow the outward stages of his career. In addition to the facts of his religious experience, he sets forth a number of devotional rules containing much wisdom, and closes with judicious and edifying remarks on the being of God, which he gave to Elsbet in answer to her questions.481 The Book of the Eternal Wisdom, which is in the form of a dialogue between Christ, the Eternal Wisdom, and the writer, has been called by Denifle, who bore Suso’s name, the consummate fruit of German mysticism. It records, in German,482 meditations in which use is made of the Scriptures. Here we have a body of experimental theology such as ruled among the more pious spirits in the German convents of the fourteenth century. Suso declares that one who is without love is as unable to understand a tongue that is quick with love as one speaking in German is unable to understand a Fleming, or as one who hears a report of the music of a harp is unable to understand the feelings of one who has heard the music with his own ears. The Saviour is represented as saying that it would be easier to bring back the years of the past, revive the withered flowers or collect all the droplets of rain than to measure the love—Minne — he has for men. The Servant, after lamenting the hardness of heart which refuses to be moved by the spectacle of the cross and the love of God, seeks to discover how it is that God can at once be so loving and so severe. As for the pains of hell, the lost are represented as exclaiming, "Oh, how we desire that there might be a millstone as wide as the earth and reaching to all parts of heaven, and that a little bird might alight every ten thousand years and peck away a piece of stone as big as the tenth part of a millet seed and continue to peck away every ten thousandth year until it had pecked away a piece as big as a millet seed, and then go on pecking at the same rate until the whole stone were pecked away, so only our torture might come to an end; but that cannot be." Having dwelt upon the agony of the cross and God’s immeasurable love, the bliss of heaven and the woes of hell, Suso proceeds to set forth the dignity of suffering.

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

  Here, then, was a large field of usefulness for a preacher. The convent library afforded special facilities for study. Zwingli made considerable progress in his knowledge of the Scriptures and the Fathers. He read the annotations of Erasmus and the commentaries of Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and Chrysostom. He made extracts on the margin of his copies of their works which are preserved in the libraries at Zurich. He seems to have esteemed Origen, Jerome, and Chrysostom more, and Augustin less, than Luther did; but he also refers frequently to Augustin in his writings.32 We have an interesting proof of his devotion to the Greek Testament in a MS. preserved in the city library at Zurich. In 1517 he copied with his own hand very neatly the Epistles of Paul and the Hebrews in a little book for constant and convenient use. The text is taken from the first edition of Erasmus, which appeared in March, 1516, and corrects some typographical errors. It is very legible and uniform, and betrays an experienced hand; the marginal notes, in Latin, from Erasmus and patristic commentators, are very small and almost illegible. On the last page he added the following note in Greek: — "These Epistles were written at Einsiedeln of the blessed Mother of God by Huldreich Zwingli, a Swiss of Toggenburg, in the year one thousand five hundred and seventeen of the Incarnation, in the month of June.33 Happily ended."34 At the same time he began at Einsiedeln to attack from the pulpit certain abuses and the sale of indulgences, when Samson crossed the Alps in August, 1518. He says that he began to preach the gospel before Luther’s name was known in Switzerland, adding, however, that at that time he depended too much on Jerome and other Fathers instead of the Scriptures. He told Cardinal Schinner in 1517 that popery had poor foundation in the Scriptures. Myconius, Bullinger, and Capito report, in substantial agreement, that Zwingli preached in Einsiedeln against abuses, and taught the people to worship Christ, and not the Virgin Mary. The inscription on the entrance gate of the convent, promising complete remission of sins, was taken down at his instance.35 Beatus Rhenanus, in a letter of Dec. 6, 1518, applauds his attack upon Samson, the restorer of indulgences, and says that Zwingli preached to the people the purest philosophy of Christ from the fountain.36 On the strength of these testimonies, many historians date the Swiss Reformation from 1516, one year before that of Luther, which began Oct. 31, 1517. But Zwingli’s preaching at Einsiedeln had no such consequences as Luther’s Theses. He was not yet ripe for his task, nor placed on the proper field of action. He was at that time simply an Erasmian or advanced liberal in the Roman Church, laboring for higher education rather than religious renovation, and had no idea of a separation. He enjoyed the full confidence of the abbot, the bishop of Constance, Cardinal Schinner, and even the Pope. At Schinner’s

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  V63In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child writes, “Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. But like any art it requires practice and experience. The most important ingredient you can bring to it is a love of cooking for its own sake.” I did not think it was possible for me to love cooking. I did not think such a love was allowed. I did not think I could love food or indulge in the sensual pleasures of eating. It did not occur to me that to cook for myself was to care for myself or that I was allowed to care for myself amidst the ruin I had let myself become. These things were forbidden to me, the price I paid for being so wildly undisciplined about my body. Food was fuel, nothing more, nothing less, even if I overindulged in that fuel whenever I could. But then I moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and lived in a town of about four thousand while attending graduate school. And after that I took my job in Charleston, Illinois, another small town. I became a vegetarian and realized that if I wanted to eat, I was going to have to prepare meals for myself or I would be relegated to a diet of iceberg lettuce and French fries. Around that same time, I started watching Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten’s cooking show on the Food Network, every day from four to five p.m., just after I got home from campus. It was a time to let the world go and relax. I love the show. I love everything about Ina. Her hair is always glossy and smooth in a perfectly coiffed dark bob. She wears a variation on the same shirt every day. I learned from the FAQs on her website that her shirt is custom-made, but she won’t divulge by whom. She is married to a man named Jeffrey who has a fondness for roast chicken, and if the show is any indication, their relationship is an adoring one. She is intelligent and wealthy and wears these traits comfortably but inoffensively. Ina loves rhetorical questions. “How good is that?” she’ll ask while sampling one of her delicious dishes. Or, “Who wouldn’t want that for their birthday?” while planning a surprise for one of her coterie of elegant Hamptons friends. Or, “We need a nice cocktail for breakfast, don’t we?” when preparing brunch for some of her many always attractive, wealthy, and often gay friends. There is one episode where she takes food (bagels and lox) on a trip to Brooklyn to eat more food (at a farmer’s market or some such). I love Ina Garten so much one of my wireless networks at home is named Barefoot Contessa. It’s like she’s watching over me that way.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Everyone was so worried about me when I broke my ankle and it confused me. I have a huge, loving family and a solid circle of friends, but these things were something of an abstraction, something to take for granted, and then all of a sudden, they weren’t. There were people calling me every day and hovering over my hospital bed and sending me things just to cheer me up. There were lots of concerned texts and e-mails, and I had to face something I’ve long pretended wasn’t true, for reasons I don’t fully understand. If I died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don’t have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time. When I broke my ankle, love was no longer an abstraction. It became this real, frustrating, messy, necessary thing, and I had a lot of it in my life. It was an overwhelming thing to realize. I am still trying to make sense of it all even though it has always been there. It has now been more than two years. There is a throbbing in my left ankle that reminds me, “Once, these bones were shattered.” I always wonder what healing really looks like—in body, in spirit. I’m attracted to the idea that the mind, the soul, can heal as neatly as bones. That if they are properly set for a given period of time, they will regain their original strength. Healing is not that simple. It never is. Years ago, I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no more flashbacks. I wouldn’t wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn’t smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn’t come, and I am no longer waiting for it. A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don’t always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses. In my novel, An Untamed State, after Miri, my protagonist, has been through hell, she thinks about how sometimes broken things need to be broken further before they can truly heal. She wants to find something that will break her in that necessary way so she can get back to the life she had before she was kidnapped.

• 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)

  “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)

  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

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Some, then, of my censurers say that I do ill, young ladies, in studying overmuch to please you and that you please me overmuch. Which things I do most openly confess, to wit, that you please me and that I study to please you, and I ask them if they marvel thereat,--considering (let be the having known the dulcet kisses and amorous embracements and delightsome couplings that are of you, most sweet ladies, often gotten) only my having seen and still seeing your dainty manners and lovesome beauty and sprightly grace and above all your womanly courtesy,--whenas he who had been reared and bred on a wild and solitary mountain and within the bounds of a little cell, without other company than his father, no sooner set eyes on you than you alone were desired of him, you alone sought, you alone followed with the eagerness of passion. Will they, then, blame me, back bite me, rend me with their tongues if I, whose body Heaven created all apt to love you, I, who from my childhood vowed my soul to you, feeling the potency of the light of your eyes and the sweetness of your honeyed words and the flame enkindled by your piteous sighs,--if, I say, you please me or if I study to please you, seeing that you over all else pleased a hermitling, a lad without understanding, nay, rather, a wild animal? Certes, it is only those, who, having neither sense nor cognizance of the pleasures and potency of natural affection, love you not nor desire to be loved of you, that chide me thus; and of these I reck little.

• From Augustine: Philosopher and Saint (2005)

  32 ecarG dna ,evoL ,htiaF :7 erutceL road to get to the destination. We love the road (this earth, this mortal life) for the sake of the destination. • Enjoying means using with delight, clinging to something for its own sake, trying to (cid:191) nd our happiness in it. • Cupidity means trying to (cid:191) nd our ultimate happiness by enjoying something other than God. It makes us miserable, as the Confessions illustrates. • Enjoying God is the only thing that can make us ultimately happy. • Love unites us with what we love: hence enjoying God means being united with him. • We can enjoy our neighbors in God, i.e., being joined to them as one body joined to God (like spokes of a wheel all joined at one hub). Beauty and will: Augustine’s concept of Charity owes a great deal to Plato’s concept of eros in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, especially in the following respects: • We love what we see as beautiful. • Love aspires upward to eternal Beauty. • Love is at the deepest desire of our souls. • Love is beyond the control of our will (as anyone who has ever fallen in love knows). Grace • Justi(cid:191) cation by Grace: (cid:405) De(cid:191) nitions: justi(cid:191) cation (= being made righteous), righteousness (= justice), grace (= gift of God). (cid:405) For Paul and Augustine, “righteousness” means Charity (i.e., obedience to Jesus’ twofold command of love). (cid:405) Augustine’s key treatise on the doctrine of justi(cid:191) cation (i.e., on how we become righteous) is On the Spirit and the Letter. (cid:405) The key contrast in this treatise is slavish obedience versus (cid:191) lial obedience, i.e., obeying God’s law out of fear or obeying it out of love.

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

  But Peter was as quick in returning to his right position as in turning away from it. He most sincerely loved the Lord from the start and had no rest nor peace till he found forgiveness. With all his weakness he was a noble, generous soul, and of the greatest service in the church. God overruled his very sins and inconsistencies for his humiliation and spiritual progress. And in his Epistles we find the mature result of the work of purification, a spirit most humble, meek, gentle, tender, loving, and lovely. Almost every word and incident in the gospel history connected with Peter left its impress upon his Epistles in the way of humble or thankful reminiscence and allusion. His new name, "Rock," appears simply as a "stone" among other living stones in the temple of God, built upon Christ, "the chief corner-stone."293 His charge to his fellow-presbyters is the same which Christ gave to him after the resurrection, that they should be faithful "shepherds of the flock" under Christ, the chief "shepherd and bishop of their souls."294 The record of his denial of Christ is as prominent in all the four Gospels, as Paul’s persecution of the church is in the Acts, and it is most prominent—as it would seem under his own direction—in the Gospel of his pupil and "interpreter" Mark, which alone mentions the two cock-crows, thus doubling the guilt of the denial,295 and which records Christ’s words of censure ("Satan"), but omits Christ’s praise ("Rock").296 Peter made as little effort to conceal his great sin, as Paul. It served as a thorn in his flesh, and the remembrance kept him near the cross; while his recovery from the fall was a standing proof of the power and mercy of Christ and a perpetual call to gratitude. To the Christian Church the double story of Peter’s denial and recovery has been ever since an unfailing source of warning and comfort. Having turned again to his Lord, who prayed for him that his personal faith fail not, he is still strengthening the brethren.297

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  10:25–2825. And, behold, a certain Lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? 26. He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? 27. And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. 28. And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. BEDE. Our Lord had told His disciples above that their names were written in Heaven; from this it seems to me the lawyer took occasion of tempting our Lord, as it is said, And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. For there were in fact certain men who then went about the whole country of the Jews bringing charges against Christ, and saying that He spoke of the commands of Moses as useless, and Himself introduced certain strange doctrines. A lawyer then, wishing to entrap Christ into saying something against Moses, comes and tempts Him, calling Him Master, though not bearing to be His disciple. And because our Lord was wont to speak to those who came to Him concerning eternal life, the lawyer adopts this kind of language. And since he tempted Him subtly, he receives no other answer than the command given by Moses; for it follows, He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? AMBROSE. For he was one of those who think themselves skilled in the law, and who keep the letter of the law, while they know nothing of its spirit. From a part of the law itself our Lord proves them to be ignorant of the law, shewing that at the very first the law preached the Father and the Son, and announced the sacraments of the Lord’s Incarnation; for it follows, And he answering said, Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. BASIL. (in Ps. 44.) By saying, with all thy mind, he does not admit of any division of love to other things, for whatever love you cast on lower things necessarily takes away from the whole. For as a vessel full of liquid, whatever flows therefrom must so much diminish its fulness; so also the soul, whatever love it has wasted upon things unlawful, has so much lessened its love to God.