Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 18 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stared into the streets and thought—bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety—that, though he had been seeing them so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him. Now the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane—which was certainly why he never spoke to her—came in from her round of the bars and the coffee houses with yet another boneless young man. They were everywhere, which explained how she met them, but why she brought them home with her was a somewhat more sinister question. Those who wore their hair long wore beards; those who wore theirs short felt free to dispense with this useful but somewhat uneasy emphasis. They read poetry or they wrote it, furiously, as though to prove that they had been cut out for more masculine pursuits. This morning’s specimen wore white trousers and a yachting cap, and a paranoiac little beard jutted out from the bottom half of his face. This beard was his most aggressive feature, his only suggestion of hardness or tension. The girl, on the other hand, was all angles, bone, muscle, jaw; even her breasts seemed stony. They walked down the street, hand in hand, but not together. They paused before her stoop and the girl staggered. She leaned against him in an agony of loathing, belching alcohol; his rigidity suggested that her weight was onerous; and they climbed the short steps to the door. Here she paused and smiled at him, coquettishly raising those stony breasts as she pulled back her hair with her hands. The boy seemed to find this delay intolerable. He muttered something about the cold, pushing the girl in before him. Well, now, they would make it—make what? not love, certainly—and should he be standing at this window twenty-four hours hence, he would see the same scene repeated with another boy.

• From Little Women (1868)

  busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly to himself... "She is right! Talent isn't genius, and you can't make it so. That music has taken the vanity out of me as Rome took it out of her, and I won't be a humbug any longer. Now what shall I do?" That seemed a hard question to answer, and Laurie began to wish he had to work for his daily bread. Now if ever, occurred an eligible opportunity for 'going to the devil', as he once forcibly expressed it, for he had plenty of money and nothing to do, and Satan is proverbially fond of providing employment for full and idle hands. The poor fellow had temptations enough from without and from within, but he withstood them pretty well, for much as he valued liberty, he valued good faith and confidence more, so his promise to his grandfather, and his desire to be able to look honestly into the eyes of the women who loved him, and say "All's well," kept him safe and steady. Very likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, "I don't believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles." I dare say you don't, Mrs. Grundy, but it's true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings. Let the boys be boys, the longer the better, and let the young men sow their wild oats if they must. But mothers, sisters, and friends may help to make the crop a small one, and keep many tares from spoiling the harvest, by believing, and showing that they believe, in the possibility of loyalty to the virtues which make men manliest in good women's eyes. If it is a feminine delusion, leave us to enjoy it while we may, for without it half the beauty and the romance of life is lost, and sorrowful forebodings would embitter all our hopes of the brave, tenderhearted little lads, who still love their mothers better than themselves and are not ashamed to own it. Laurie thought that the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years, but to his great surprise he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first, got angry with himself, and couldn't understand it, but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie's heart wouldn't ache. The wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he

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

  How can that be, when Limori, whom I trust, told me that the consequence of thoughts like that would be deadly?” Over time, as I acquired more and more references to instances in which I was able to feel my feelings and think my thoughts and there were no biblical repercussions (no plagues descended, no earthquakes swallowed the city whole, I didn’t feel in the grip of a devilish possession), my curiosity naturally grew. Mary’s kind and gentle questions only reinforced this growing sense of safety in my own thoughts and feelings. “How does that feel to you?” she would ask, or, “What do you think is true?” For the first few months I would answer her with group rhetoric but then gradually I began to see her point, and I would travel inside, briefly and tentatively at first, and check with myself: “How do I feel?” Initially I had not the first clue about how I felt about anything, but with practice my confidence in naming my feelings began to grow. The only time we ever strayed close to using the word cult was many months into my work with her, when she loaned me a copy of a book called The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power . I was more than slightly confused about why she was loaning me this particular book, but I trusted her and took it home with me that night and began to read it. I was absolutely staggered by the time I got to the end of the first chapter; it was as though the authors of this book had been flies on the wall at all of Limori’s workshops and all of our Wednesday and Thursday night meditation circles. Some of the phrases that the authors used, as examples of ones that manipulative, coercive gurus use, were almost, word for word, things that Limori would say to us. I would be reading the book on my couch and have to put it down in my lap, simply to marvel at the information I was absorbing; it was all hitting so close to home. I returned the book to Mary at our next appointment, sharing with her how much I related to the material, and very soon went out and bought my own copy. Then I read it through again, this time using a pink highlighter to mark everything that rang true for me. After that I sat at my computer and typed up a document of everything I’d highlighted so that I could take it in to Mary and show her all the parallels between the what the authors were saying and what I’d experienced.

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

  “I’m sorry, madam,” the waiter said, “we don’t serve the Reuben any longer.” “Well,” Limori said, her tone and body language conveying the message Don’t you know who I am? , “that’s what I want for lunch. Ask the chef and I’m sure he’ll make the sandwich for me.” The rest of us at the table sat quietly, well used to this sort of performance. The waiter left our table to go into the kitchen to talk to the chef and was back in a few seconds. “I’m very sorry, madam, we’re just not set up to serve the Reuben since it’s been taken off the menu. May I offer you the club sandwich?” Limori thought about this for a second or two, her hands clasped over her vast midsection, rings sparkling in the light. Then she set her gaze so directly at the waiter that I was surprised she didn’t burn holes through to the back of his skull. “I want a Reuben sandwich,” she said. “I’ve been coming to this hotel for years and I always have a Reuben sandwich when I’m here. You tell the chef that I am the customer, and a regular customer at that, and that I know it’s possible for him to make me a Reuben sandwich and that’s what I want.” She held the waiter’s gaze when she’d finished and after a second or two he moved away toward the kitchen again. Limori got her Reuben sandwich. Are you surprised? I wasn’t, but what did surprise me was that when the waiter asked the rest of the table what we wanted for lunch, Michael looked at Limori, and then at the waiter and said, “I’ll have the Reuben sandwich as well.” This choice was mildly surprising to me because Michael was a health nut and was always fastidious about what he put in his mouth, and a sandwich laden with processed meat would not normally be a choice that he’d make. But more than that, it was the split-second attitude that came across when he placed his order that struck me. He was sucking up. He was sucking up to Limori in a way that, if I had witnessed it before, I had been too preoccupied or blind to notice. He wanted her to be pleased with him, I realized, and he wanted to be in with the in crowd. (Alice, Susan and Rosemarie seemed to follow Michael’s lead and also ordered the Rueben. I alone had something other than that for lunch.) Michael had always been a lion to me. He was the one person in our group who stood up to Limori. He’d had many an argument with her, both ones I’d witnessed and ones he’d described after they’d happened. Unlike me, he had never seemed afraid of her. I had always been able to see that he respected her, but this was the first moment I noticed that he wanted her approval, just as I did.

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

  My parents named me Lynda Alexandra when I was born, but at 19 I decided I liked Alexandra better and began using it. (I’m astonished that he remembered that; the name change happened a few years before I met him.) What I can’t figure out is why he changed my name and no one else’s. Is it because he doesn’t want to drive traffic to this book? That’s my best guess. I’m not sure he’s read this book, but he does mention it (not by name) and says that in his opinion I wrote it in order to destroy Limori and Wolf’s Den. This is categorically untrue, and one of the reasons I changed everyone’s name was specifically to protect the privacy of those I discuss, including his and Limori’s. I’ve been asked at author readings and other events to give Limori’s real name and have always refused. We all have blind spotsReading Michael’s book helped me to see that I was entirely blind to how devoted he was to Limori and to the fact that his spiritual journey was the primary focus of his life. In his book, he mentions that he had an insightful, spiritual, world-dissolving moment of blinding light before he met Limori, which he describes in part by saying “…the world was going to change in huge and dramatic ways, and … I had a part to play in it.” He had shared this story with me a number of times when we were friends, and I heard him but clearly didn’t really understand how that experience informed his character and defined him, in a deep and lasting way. He was and is still willing to do anything to fulfill the promise of that experience. In hindsight, I was also utterly blind to how much that pivotal spiritual experience mattered to him and how deeply he felt the drive to fulfill the destiny that he felt was calling him. Even when I wrote this book, I hadn’t connected those dots. It is only now, in 2019, having read his story from his point of view, that I finally get it. He describes in his book how, after that moment of blinding light, he searched for years for a teacher before finding Limori. I do remember him telling me that he searched for so long that he thought he’d missed the thing he was supposed to find. I remember him saying that when he found Limori, he was hugely relieved. He decided that she was The One. Why now?When I tell people that Michael has written his book, often the first question out of their mouths is “Why?” Of course, I can’t know for sure, but here are my thoughts on that. Limori died in January 2013, as I detailed in a previous update. As of this writing, six years have passed since her death.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  For a couple of months, Devon turned that idea over in his mind, recognizing and resisting it, knowing it was true but not wanting it to be so. He worried about telling his parents. He worried about swimming. He worried about what he called “losing lesbians” (when some members of a lesbian empowerment board posted that trans men were tools of the patriarchy, “that fucked me up for a couple of weeks,” Devon recalled). Finally, he enrolled in a workshop on gender where he could meet some trans people, “and this kid walks in,” Devon said, “about thirteen years old, and I’m double-taking because I can see myself in him. The way he walks that’s a little more feminine than you’d expect. His chest was bound, which I used to do. He wore cargo pants, just like I would. But he had facial hair and this low voice. And when he started talking about being a trans person, I started bawling and I couldn’t stop. Every other line felt like, ‘This is me! This is me!’ It tore my world apart. And it gave me the spark to start a new one.” In the fall, Devon began hormone therapy. He wanted to have top surgery immediately, but his parents, who he said have supported him fully, were nonetheless reluctant for him to rush into having his breasts removed (most transgender people, whether male or female, do not transition surgically, either out of choice or due to lack of funds and discrimination by health insurers). Devon’s father accompanied him to a facility in Florida that specialized in female-to-male transition—the staff told them it was the first time that a patient came with a male rather than a female parent. Devon wept with relief when he woke from the surgery. “It was a huge weight off my chest—ha ha,” he quipped. “I was passing before, but now I pass all the time.” His only real concern was swimming—according to NCAA rules, the hormones made him ineligible to swim as a woman. It took some negotiation and advocacy by his parents, but by the time he started school the following fall, he’d been accepted on the men’s team.

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

  It was Fred Burnham, the director of Trinity Institute, Wall Street, who made me rethink this. We had both spent a week at Chautauqua, that quintessentially American utopia in New York State, in the summer of 2001, just two months before the catastrophe of September 11, in which Fred was nearly killed. Each afternoon I had lectured on the theme of “The Human Person” in the Hall of Philosophy, and Fred had come from Trinity to introduce me and to moderate the sessions. On our last evening, sitting on the porch of the Hall of Missions, Fred with a vodka on the rocks and I with a glass of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, Fred had said: “You always claim that you have never had a religious experience. But I disagree. I think you are constantly living in the dimension of the sacred. You are absorbed in holiness all the time!” I waved this aside, thinking that Fred was telling me that I was a holy person. But Fred is not given to such exuberant or inaccurate remarks, and that was not what he meant. His words stayed with me, and now I see what he was getting at. Insofar as I spend my life immersed in sacred writings, living with some of the best and wisest insights that human beings have achieved, constantly moved and stirred by them, I am indeed in constant contact with holiness. The fact that my “prayer” seems directed toward no person, no end, is something that many of the theologians I have studied had experienced. This, after all, was what I had been writing and talking about for the past seven years. I had constantly explained that the greatest spiritual masters insisted that God was not another being, and that there was Nothing out there. Yet for all this, at some level I had not relinquished the old ideas. I was still seduced by the realistic supernatural theism that I thought I had left behind, still childishly waiting for that clap of thunder, that streak of lightning, and the still, small voice of calm whispering in my ear. I thought that I had renounced “the blessèd face” but I was still hankering to drink “where trees flower, and springs flow.” I had not truly accepted the hard, irreducible fact that “there is nothing again.” The Greek Fathers of the church had loved the image of Moses going up the mountain and on the summit being wrapped in an impenetrable cloud. He could not see anything, but he was in the place where God was. This cloud of unknowing was precisely that. It offered no knowledge: “I know I shall not know,” as Eliot had put it. I had been expecting the thick mist to part, just a little, and had not really known, with every fiber of my being, that I would never know, would never see clearly. I was still hankering for the “one veritable transitory power.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When you were born, you were Wendy Malone. Perhaps you were Wendy Malone for but minutes, or hours. We don’t know. Your adoption had been arranged prior to your birth, and at three weeks old, you were delivered to your parents, whereupon you became Rebecca Priscilla Bard. Which is who you were for the next twenty-odd years. Becky. In college, you made a loose stab at renaming yourself Butch, though, hilariously, you didn’t really know what it meant. It had just been a nickname for you, used by your father. After you knew, you could tell who was gay by introducing yourself. “I’m Butch,” you’d say, swinging your long blond hair. “No you’re not,” those in the know would chuckle. Then, after dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco, in a Judy Chicago—style rebirth, you renamed yourself Harriet Dodge. After you had a child, you inched toward the state and made the change official: you placed an ad in the paper, filed the paperwork at the courthouse. (Until then, you’d kept your distance from “affairs of the state”: no one had your correct Social Security number until you were thirty-six; you’d never had a bank account.) Over time you became Harriet “Harry” Dodge: an attempt to conjure the feeling of and, or but. Now you are simply Harry, the Harriet a distasteful but sometimes indicative appendage.

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

  This was startling information, but once I had been introduced to these ideas, I read the gospels and epistles with new eyes. All kinds of anomalies and contradictions in the text, which were easily overlooked when you read it piecemeal or heard it recited in a liturgical setting, now made sense. I could see why this had not been included in my diploma course, however. This was dynamite. It gravely undermined many of the theological assumptions of my Catholic years. I had realized that much Christian theology was man-made, but I had not appreciated how shaky were its very foundations. All my original ideas for the television series had to be revised. It was Saint Paul, not Jesus, who was the founder of Christianity, and even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters. I now discovered that Paul’s epistles are the earliest extant Christian documents and that the gospels, all written years after Paul’s own death, were penned by men who had adopted Paul’s version of Christianity. Far from Paul perverting the gospels, the gospels, it seemed, owed their vision to Paul. The only Jesus we knew was the Jesus bequeathed to us by Paul. Further, it appeared that not all the epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him. And this radically altered my view of Paul himself. Some of the most misogynist passages, for example, were almost certainly written by Christians some sixty years after Paul’s death. Perhaps he wasn’t the monster I had imagined.

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

  So that evening, when at 7:20 p.m. I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly, and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all—if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all. As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns had knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner! As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner, when the community gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only “a few words in a low voice.” Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene— black-and-white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader—there was a riot of color, bursts of exuberant laughter, and shouts of protest. But whether I liked it or not, this was my world now.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When you were born, you were Wendy Malone. Perhaps you were Wendy Malone for but minutes, or hours. We don’t know. Your adoption had been arranged prior to your birth, and at three weeks old, you were delivered to your parents, whereupon you became Rebecca Priscilla Bard. Which is who you were for the next twenty-odd years. Becky. In college, you made a loose stab at renaming yourself Butch, though, hilariously, you didn’t really know what it meant. It had just been a nickname for you, used by your father. After you knew, you could tell who was gay by introducing yourself. “I’m Butch,” you’d say, swinging your long blond hair. “No you’re not,” those in the know would chuckle. Then, after dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco, in a Judy Chicago—style rebirth, you renamed yourself Harriet Dodge. After you had a child, you inched toward the state and made the change official: you placed an ad in the paper, filed the paperwork at the courthouse. (Until then, you’d kept your distance from “affairs of the state”: no one had your correct Social Security number until you were thirty-six; you’d never had a bank account.) Over time you became Harriet “Harry” Dodge: an attempt to conjure the feeling of and, or but. Now you are simply Harry, the Harriet a distasteful but sometimes indicative appendage.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  In Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece 100 Blow Jobs, Sprinkle—who worked for many years as a prostitute—kneels down on the ground and gives head to several dildos nailed to a board in front of her, while recorded male voices yell degrading things like “Suck it, bitch.” (Sprinkle has said that out of the approximately 3,500 customers she had as a sex worker, there were about 100 bad ones; the sound track to 100 Blow Jobs derives from the bad ones.) She sucks and sucks, she chokes and gags. But just when someone might be thinking, This is exactly what I imagined sex work to be like—haunting, woman-hating, traumatizing—Sprinkle gets up, pulls herself together, gives herself an Aphrodite Award for sexual service to the community, and performs a cleansing masturbatory ritual. Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy. The realization that I could incorporate the stalker into my talk about Sedgwick eventually became an incitement for me to get back to work. Yes, get back to work. It even became a source of comfort, as if bringing such an episode into the orbit of Eve would neutralize its negative force. Not everyone believes in the magical powers of such an approach. When I told my mother that I was thinking of including the stalker in a public talk, for example, she said, “Oh honey, are you sure that’s a good idea?”—meaning that she didn’t think it was a good idea at all. Who could blame her? She’s spent over forty years warding off the specter of wingnuts with attaché cases who tell women they deserve their violent deaths before they occasion them. Why give them any more attention than they deserve? Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don’t. Often I watch myself gravitating toward the bad idea, as if the final girl in a horror movie, albeit one sitting in a Tuff Shed at a desk sticky with milk. But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.

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

  “I can understand the idea of God—at a pinch,” he told me afterward, still shocked by this revelation of the aberrations of the human mind, “but I simply cannot—cannot—understand how anybody can imagine that he has a personal relationship with Jesus .” I could only agree, especially since the historical Jesus would have been more likely to tell the couple to give all their possessions to the poor rather than helping them to convey their worldly goods around the country in heavily insured vans. Yet it was in part due to this godless family that, even while I was recoiling from the very idea of faith, I had already taken the first step in a process that would, without my fully realizing what was happening, bring me back to religion. The Cockburns were great writers. Each one of them kept a diary, in which every evening they recorded the events of their day; it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives. Sally had kept her diary since she was eight years old, and I used to marvel at the thick volumes, one for each year, lined up on her shelves. “I don’t know how anybody manages without a diary,” she used to say. “You should have kept one in the convent. I bet you would have got out sooner; you see things so much more clearly when you write them down.” Both Sally and her parents constantly urged me to write about my years in the convent. “After all, it’s over ten years since you left,” Sally argued. “You’ll forget it all, and that would be such a pity.” In fact, I had been thinking along these lines myself. I was growing uneasy about the way these years were being trivialized, reduced to a series of funny stories to tell at dinner parties. It had been a crucial period and I needed to find out what it had really meant to me. I used to look thoughtfully at Sally’s diaries, which had clearly been a means of creative self-appraisal and discovery. Maybe I should try something similar. My mother agreed. She had recently given me a typewriter, which had been thrown out of her office. “But you can only have it on one condition,” she said. “Use it to write your story!” As it happened, I even had a literary agent lined up. Charlotte had invited me to a dinner party in her flat to meet June, who had edited an anthology of short stories to which Charlotte had contributed. June had become professionally alert as soon as she heard that I had been a nun. “You should write about that,” she said immediately. “That could be a terrific book!” “You could call it I Was a Teenage Nun!” her husband, Greg, quipped caustically.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jews who had studied Isaiah 53 had thought of the servant either as a suffering figure, but not a messiah, or as a messiah, but not a suffering one. If they thought of the servant as the Messiah, the suffering was reversed, since it was the Messiah’s task to inflict suffering on God’s enemies, not to suffer it himself. If they went with the natural flow of the text and saw the servant as a suffering figure, they concluded he couldn’t be the Messiah. He would be, whether individually or (more likely) corporately, the martyr people of God who would in the end be vindicated (e.g., Dan. 12). And, though the scriptures were taken to indicate that Israel’s God would work his salvation through these figures, we have no evidence prior to the time of Jesus that anyone supposed that when God returned to his people he would return as the Messiah or as the servant. But Jesus brought these vocations together. When he submitted to John’s baptism, expressing the repentance necessary before the great coming restoration and symbolically reenacting the crossing of the Jordan and the entry into the promised land, he identified with his people in their humiliation and penitence, in their longing for God’s kingdom. This double strand of meaning (sorrow for sin, on the one hand, launching the kingdom, on the other) points directly to the double meaning of the voice from heaven. The servant vocation and the royal vocation became fused together in his mind and heart. This was what he had to do, and this was the time at which he had to do it. He became, in a new and deeper way, what he already was, much as a king’s firstborn son, born to rule after his father, would still be anointed for the task when the time came. “You are my son! You are the one I love!”: the lifelong sense of intimate closeness to the one he called “Abba, father” took shape with a new clarity, a new sense of direction, a new God-given energy. It was this newly shaped vision that was tested in the desert. What sort of a messiah should he be? He knew the stories as well as anyone, but he wouldn’t follow the line of David or Solomon or indeed of Judah the Hammer or Herod the Great. His secret wilderness victory, however, played the same role in his career that David’s killing of Goliath played in his. It indicated that the anointing at his baptism, like David’s anointing by Samuel, had been real, had not been a fantasy or an empty gesture. The initial victory pointed ahead to the tasks that now had to be accomplished. Sure enough, we see the same battle quickly joined as Jesus’s public career generated opposition and even plots against his life.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  All of these questions have been the subject of intensive study over the last two hundred years. But the present book isn’t the place to address any of them. I have written about them myself in various other places and hope to do so more in the future. But actually all such questions are themselves not “neutral.” There is no place where we can gain a “fixed point” from which to begin. The way you treat the sources will reflect the way you already understand Jesus, just as the way you understand Jesus will reflect the way you understand the sources. This isn’t a vicious circle. The same would be true in the study of Napoleon, or John F. Kennedy, or indeed Margaret Thatcher. It just means that we have to go forward carefully, around and around the loop, checking that we’re talking sense about both the subject and the sources. The present book represents one part of one journey around one element in that loop. In fact, I increasingly suspect that a good deal of the “methods” developed within professional biblical scholarship over the last two hundred years have been, themselves, the product of a worldview that may not have been truly open to discovering the real Jesus. The worldview of post-Enlightenment Europe and North America was determined, often enough, to see Jesus as a religious teacher and leader offering a personal spirituality and ethic and a heavenly hope. It had no intention of seeing him as someone who was claiming to be in charge of the world; some might say that the “methods” of supposedly “historical scholarship” were designed, whether accidentally or not, to screen out that possibility altogether. This doesn’t mean that those “methods”—the study of the sources, the forms of the early Jesus stories, the motives of the gospel writers—have nothing to say. On the contrary, they have a great deal to say. But there comes a time when it may be appropriate to stand back, having heard it all, and to have another shot at saying, “Actually, I think this was what was going on.” This, I think, is one of those times. So if we are going to approach Jesus himself in a fresh way and ask the right questions instead of the wrong ones, we need to get our minds and imaginations into Jesus’s own day by examining another “perfect storm,” the one into which Jesus himself was walking. What were the winds that gathered speed just then, rushing in upon him from various directions? What did it mean for him to be caught in the eye of this storm? As he rode into Jerusalem that fateful spring day, what did he think he was doing? 3 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration News, 16 June 2000.Chapter 4 The Making of a First-Century Storm

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  You don’t need the sabbath when the time is fulfilled. It was completely consistent with Jesus’s vision of his own vocation that he would do things that said, again and again from one angle after another, that the time had arrived, that the future, the new creation, was already here, and that one no longer needed the sabbath. The sabbath law was not, then, a stupid rule that could now be abolished (though some of the detailed sabbath regulations, as Jesus pointed out, had led to absurd extremes, so that you were allowed to pull a donkey out of a well on the sabbath, but not to heal the sick). It was a signpost whose purpose had now been accomplished. It was a marker of time pointing forward to the time when time would be fulfilled; and that was now happening. Notice how this theme then ties in with others we have already observed. If the sabbath now has a purpose, it won’t be for rest from the work of creation, but rather for celebrating God’s victory over the satan: “And isn’t it right,” asks Jesus, “that this daughter of Abraham, tied up by the satan for these eighteen years, should be untied from her chains on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16). Victory in the real battle is closely connected with the healings that reveal that God is in charge. “My father is going on working,” declares Jesus, “and so am I” (John 5:17). And these things happen, of course, in the moment when the time is fulfilled. If Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath. But this means that the time of Jesus’s public career, taken as a whole, also acquires a special significance. He spoke about this special significance when he insisted that the wedding guests can’t fast while the bridegroom is still at the party. Something new is happening; a new time has been launched; different things are now appropriate. Jesus has a sense of a rhythm to his work, a short rhythm in which he will launch God’s kingdom, the God’s-in-charge project, and complete it in the most shocking and dramatic symbolic act of all. “Look here,” he says to those who have warned him that Herod wants to kill him, “I’m casting out demons today and tomorrow, and completing my healings. I’ll be finished by the third day. But I have to continue my travels today, tomorrow, and the day after that! It couldn’t happen that a prophet would perish except in Jerusalem” (Luke 13:32–33). This follows hard on the heels of some sharp little sayings about God’s kingdom. It’s like mustard seed, which starts small and grows to a great shrub for the birds to nest in; it’s like yeast mixed into dough, transforming the whole lump.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I have thus far been unable to stop the universe using it, or using the remote-control PAUSE buttons of VCRs or CD players, which would seem obvious actuators. I had, as I mentioned, only a brief success in college with a garage-door opener. It may be that to engage time effectively and stop it cold, a mechanism has to have some quality that links it uniquely with me, with my own emotional life, which is why, for example, the toggle-switch transformer for my race-track only worked as a chronoclutch after my fallen hand brushed against it, discovering its warmth, in the middle of the night. This could also explain why the general trend in my Fold-actuators, with a few important exceptions, has been away from hardware and toward simpler, purely bodily spurs like a finger-snap or the pushing up of my glasses on my nose. The most elaborate piece of fermational equipment I ever developed was a custom-made piece of machinery I called a Solonoid (with three 0’s). I had it built for me by an MIT undergraduate four or five years ago. I still have it, though it stopped working after a week of Fold-hours. It is very bulky and it made a loud chuffing noise when it was idling, although I’m sure it could be miniaturized and redesigned for quietness. All it did was stretch and unstretch three rubber bands oriented in the x, y, and z directions. I was able to tune the oscillatory frequency of each rubber band by pushing a rheostat on a small mixing board. I had it built simply because I knew one morning, just after I awoke, after many dry Fold-free months, that this design would work. My uncle loaned me fifteen hundred dollars (I told him that it was to take several months off from temping and see if I could get interested in my master’s thesis again), and I put an ad in the MIT student newspaper and interviewed a number of students. I chose the sole woman respondent, naturally. She used three small motors. I told her that I was a post-doc in philosophy working on a monograph about a turn-of-the-century American metaphysician named Matthias Batchelder, who had postulated that three India-rubber bands, when alternately stretched and slackened at a particular frequency in the three Cartesian planes, would insert null placeholders into the stream of Becoming, effectively pausing the universe for all but the operator of the mechanism. Though Batch-elder had written to G. E. Moore, C. S. Pierce, and A.

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

  But as I started to read a little more deeply, I found that the role of Paul in early Christianity had been even more significant. I had stumbled unawares into the minefield of New Testament scholarship, whose findings astounded me. In the convent, I had been introduced to the rudiments of modern biblical criticism while working for my theology diploma, but this had been a very ladylike syllabus, which had excluded most of the really challenging material. Now, reading in my flat in the weeks before my departure for Israel, while June was arguing with Channel 4 about my contract, I made some startling discoveries. A disturbing number of eminent scholars agreed that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He had preached only to his fellow Jews, and there was nothing strikingly original about his teaching, which was in line with other strands of first-century Judaism. Jesus certainly never claimed to be God, but preferred the title “Son of Man,” which emphasized his humanity. After the scandal of his crucifixion, his traumatized disciples had had visions of him risen from the tomb and concluded that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, who would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. But the early Christians still regarded themselves as forming an exclusively Jewish sect. It was Saint Paul, who had never known the historical Jesus, who had first marketed the faith for the non-Jewish world of the Roman Empire. But even Paul had not seen Jesus as divine in any simplistic way. When he called him “Son of God,” he used the phrase in its strictly Jewish sense: Jesus was an ordinary human being who had been given a special mission by God; as a result of his obedience and devotion, he had been elevated to a position of unique intimacy with God and given the title “Lord,” or kyrios. But (I now read) there is always a clear distinction in the New Testament between the kyrios Christos and God the Father. This was startling information, but once I had been introduced to these ideas, I read the gospels and epistles with new eyes. All kinds of anomalies and contradictions in the text, which were easily overlooked when you read it piecemeal or heard it recited in a liturgical setting, now made sense. I could see why this had not been included in my diploma course, however. This was dynamite. It gravely undermined many of the theological assumptions of my Catholic years. I had realized that much Christian theology was man-made, but I had not appreciated how shaky were its very foundations. All my original ideas for the television series had to be revised.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I’m still working,” he said, flicking the ash of his cigarette into a planter. “But I’ll be off in a bit. My trailer’s just across the way, if you wanna come over and party. I can get a whole bottle of that pinot gris you liked.” “Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got to get up early and hike in the morning.” He took another drag of his cigarette, the end burning brightly. I’d watched him a bit after he’d brought me the wine. I guessed he was thirty. He looked good in his jeans. Why shouldn’t I go with him? “Well, you’ve got time to think about it, if you change your mind,” he said. “I’ve got to hike nineteen miles tomorrow,” I replied, as if that meant anything to him. “You could sleep at my place,” he said. “I’d give you my bed. I could sleep on the couch, if you wanted. I bet a bed would feel good after you’ve been sleeping on the ground.” “I’m all set up over there.” I gestured toward the meadow. I walked back to my camp feeling queasy, equal parts flustered and flattered by his interest, a shot of bald desire quaking through me. The women had zipped themselves into their tents for the night by the time I returned, but Brent was still awake, standing in the dark, gazing up at the stars. “Beautiful, huh?” I whispered, gazing up with him. As I did so, it occurred to me that I’d not cried once since I’d set foot on the trail. How could that be? After all the crying I’d done, it seemed impossible that it was true, but it was. I almost burst into tears with the realization, but I laughed instead. “What’s so funny?” Brent asked. “Nothing.” I looked at my watch. It was 10:15. “I’m usually sound asleep by now.” “Me too,” said Brent. “But I’m wide awake tonight.” “It’s ’cause we’re so excited to be in town,” he said. We both laughed. I’d been savoring the company of the women all day, grateful for the kinds of conversation that I’d seldom had since starting the PCT, but it was Brent I felt oddly the closest to, if only because he felt familiar. As I stood next to him, I realized he reminded me of my brother, who, in spite of our distance, I loved more than anyone. “We should make a wish,” I said to Brent. “Don’t you have to wait till you see a shooting star?” he asked. “Traditionally, yes. But we can make up new rules,” I said. “Like, I want boots that don’t hurt my feet.” “You’re not supposed to say it out loud!” he said, exasperated. “It’s like blowing out your birthday candles. You can’t tell anyone what your wish is. Now it’s not going to come true. Your feet are totally fucked.” “Not necessarily,” I said indignantly, though I felt sick with the knowledge that he was right.

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

  Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen. I felt as though I had been plugged in, like an electrical appliance, and suddenly come to life. To paraphrase my friend Saint Paul, instead of experiencing reality as through a glass darkly, I could now see it face-to-face. This meant that nothing now interposed itself between the material I was studying and my emotional and intellectual reflexes. It was also true that, working as I was in Israel, I was out of my usual environment, and could no longer operate on automatic pilot. Removed from the reflexive skepticism of Channel 4, I could not simply dismiss the Crusaders as “bonkers.” This new sensitivity was not always comfortable, because I found that I could hear a kind of crusading aggression all around me in contemporary society. I heard it in Israel, when I listened to the Israelis and Palestinians condemning each other, wholly unable to appreciate each other’s position. It was there again when British politicians attacked their opponents with bitter relish, and even in apparently civilized debates between intellectuals and literary critics on the radio. There was an edge of unpleasant self-righteousness as people gleefully demolished their opponents. I heard it all the time in London, when even my most liberal friends inveighed wittily—and often unkindly—against this or that. I certainly heard it in Mrs. Thatcher. So my study of the Crusades changed me, making me determined always to try to listen to the other side, and at least try to understand where the enemy was coming from. Had the Crusaders done that, a moral catastrophe could have been averted. Studying the Crusades had confirmed me in my conviction that stridently parochial certainty could be lethal, especially in religious matters. We lived in a global age now, and it was dangerous to assume, without question, that “we” had the monopoly of truth and justice. We had started working on the television series in the summer of 1985, and the project was initially supposed to take a year—two at the most. Three years later, however, the film was still unfinished, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me. Something had gone badly wrong. I could hear it in Joel’s muttered imprecations, and in the uneasy behavior of the crew. Our old camaraderie had gone, and been replaced by a high level of tension.