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 23 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Where had they come from? He looked at Myrna, who was bent over, holding her head in her hands. How to respond? His head swam; he had an impish impulse to say, “Your tits aren’t too big.” But thank God, he didn’t. Bantering was not called for. He knew that he needed to take Myrna’s words with the greatest possible seriousness and respect. He snatched at the life vest that in the stormiest of seas, therapists always have available: process commentary, that is, to comment on the process, the relationship implications, of the patient’s utterance rather than on its content. “Lot of emotion in your words, Myrna,” he said quietly. “Sounds like you’ve wanted to say them for a long time.” “I guess so.” Myrna took a couple of deep breaths. “The words had a life of their own. They wanted to come out.” “A bushel of anger there toward me—maybe toward both of us.” “Both? At you and at myself? Probably true. But getting less. Maybe that’s why I could say those things today.” “Feels good that you trust me more.” “I had really wanted to talk about other things today.” “Such as?” Ernest leaped at the idea—anything to change direction. As Myrna paused to catch her breath, he reflected on her uncanny intuition, her chilling burst of words. Amazing that she had grasped so much of him! How had she known? Only one possibility: unconscious empathy. Just as Dr. Werner had said. So Werner was right all the time, he thought. Why didn’t I allow myself to learn from him? What a jerk, a twerp, I’ve been. How did Werner put it? That I’m an iconoclastic Katzenjammer Kid? Well, maybe it’s time to let go of some of my juvenile questioning and debunking of elders—not everything they say is bullshit. Never again will I doubt the power of unconscious empathy. Perhaps it was this type of experience that prompted Freud to take seriously the idea of telepathic communication. “Where are your thoughts going, Myrna?” he finally said. “So much to say. Not sure where to start. Here’s a dream I had last night.” She held up a spiral tablet. “See, I wrote it down—that’s a first.” “You are taking our work more seriously.” “Gotta get my one-fifty’s worth. Oops!” She covered her mouth with her hands. “Didn’t mean that—sorry—please press delete key.” “Delete key pressed. You caught yourself—that’s great. Perhaps you were flustered by my paying you a compliment.” Myrna nodded but hurried on and read her dream from her notepad: I go to have my nose reconstructed. They remove the bandages. My nose is okay, but the skin has puckered or pulled up and my mouth is locked open and is a huge gaping hole taking half my face. My tonsils are visible—huge, swollen, inflamed. Crimson. Then a doctor with a nimbus comes by. I am suddenly able to close my mouth. He asks me questions, but I won’t answer.

• From Story of O (1954)

  It was about this same time that a change took place in Jacqueline: perhaps O had counted too heavily both on Jacqueline’s indifference and her sensuality, perhaps Jacqueline herself naively felt that surrendering herself to O was dangerous for her relations with René; but whatever the reason, she suddenly ceased coming to O. At the same time, she seemed to be keeping herself aloof from René, with whom, however, she was spending almost every day and every night. She had never acted as though she were in love with him. She studied him coldly, and when she smiled at him, her eyes remained cold. Even assuming that she was as completely abandoned with him as she was with O, which was quite likely, O could not help thinking that this surrender was superficial. Whereas René was head over heels in love with her, paralyzed by a love such as he had never known before, a worrisome, uncertain love, one he was far from sure was requited, a love that acts not, for fear of offending. He lived, he slept in the same house as Sir Stephen, the same house as O, he lunched, he dined, he went on walks with Sir Stephen, with O, he conversed with them both: he didn’t see them, he didn’t hear what they said. He saw, he heard, he talked through them, beyond them, and, as in a dream when one tries to catch a departing train or clings desperately to the parapet of a collapsing bridge, he was forever trying to understand the raison d’être, the truth which must have been lurking somewhere inside Jacqueline, under that golden skin, like the mechanism inside a crying doll. “Well,” thought O, “the day I was so afraid would arrive is here, the day when I’d merely be a shadow in René’s past. And I’m not even sad; the only thing I feel for him is pity, and even knowing he doesn’t desire me any longer, I can see him every day without any trace of bitterness, without the least regret, without even feeling hurt. And yet only a few weeks ago I dashed all the way across town to his office, to beg him to tell me he still loved me. Was that all my love was, all it meant? So light, so easily gone and forgotten? Is solace that simple? And solace is not even the right word: I’m happy. Do you mean to say it was enough for him to have given me to Sir Stephen for me to be detached from him, for me to find a new love so easily in the arms of another?”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Okay, the truth is that I had two very different feelings about the painting.” Here I invoked a practice I always teach my students: when two opposing feelings put you in a dilemma, your best recourse is to express both feelings and the dilemma. “First, as I said, I admired it greatly. I have absolutely no artistic talent and am filled with respect for work of such quality.” I hesitated, and Irene nudged me: “But—” “But—well—uh—I’m so pleased with your finding pleasure in painting that I dread sounding even slightly critical, but I guess I was hoping that you might do something with your art that might be more—uh—how to put it?— resonant with our therapy.” “Resonant?” “One thing I like about our work together is that you invariably respond with substance whenever I ask about what’s passing through your mind. Sometimes it’s a thought, but even more commonly you describe some mental image. With your extraordinary visual sense, I was hoping you could combine your art and therapy in some synergistic manner. I don’t know—possibly I was hoping the painting might be more expressionistic, or cathartic, or illuminating. Maybe you could even work through some painful issues on canvas. But the still life, while technically wonderful, is so—so—serene, so far removed from conflict and pain.” Seeing Irene’s eyes rolling up, I added, “You asked for my feelings, and there they are. I’m not defending them. In fact, I suspect I’m making a mistake by being critical of any activity that provides you an interlude of peace.” “Irv, I don’t think you know much about painting. Do you know what the French call a still life?” I shook my head. “Nature morte.” “Dead nature.” “Right. To paint a still life is to meditate on death and decay. When I paint fruit, I can’t avoid observing how my still-life models are dying and decomposing day after day. When I paint I am very close to our therapy, pointedly aware of Jack’s passage from life into dust, very aware of the presence of death and the smell of decay in everything that lives.” “Everything?” I ventured. She nodded. “You? Me?” “Everything,” she replied. “Especially me.” At last! I had been scratching for Irene’s last statement, or something like it, since the very beginning of our work. It heralded a new phase in therapy, as I recognized from the strong dream she brought in a couple of weeks later. I am sitting at a table—like an executive board table. There are others there as well, and you are sitting at the head of the table. We are all working on something—perhaps reviewing grant proposals. You ask me to bring some papers to you. It is a small room, and to get to you I have to pass very close to a row of windows that are open and reach all the way to the floor.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old. (63:5, 9) It would be impossible to scoop up all the passages we have looked at in this part of the book and turn them by some alchemy into the theology of the New Testament. Nothing in the Second Temple world encourages us to suppose that Jews before the time of Jesus were composing the kind of fresh construct we discover among the early Christians. But when we find those early Christians saying that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible” and telling the story of the Passover-time death of Jesus both to make that point and to sustain the freshly narrated world in which they themselves were living, we should be in no doubt that these were the themes they intended to evoke. These were the narratives they saw rushing together into a new, decisive, revolutionary dénouement. This is the context in which they glimpsed the nonplatonic goal of salvation and declared, in Jewish rather than pagan terms, that this goal had been won. By the evening of the first Good Friday, sins had been dealt with and the powers defeated in fulfillment of the ancient divine promise. The Messiah had died for sins in accordance with the Bible. We now turn, therefore, to the key early Christian texts in which this revolutionary message was spelled out. PART THREE The Revolutionary Rescue 8 New Goal, New Humanity THE TWO DISCIPLES who met the risen Jesus, without recognizing him, on the road to Emmaus said plaintively, “We were hoping that he was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). When Jesus, still incognito, began to explain to them what was going on, he was not saying, in effect, “You’ve got it wrong. Forget all that stuff about redeeming Israel. I’ve had a better idea.” No. In fact he said, “This is what had to happen: the Messiah had to suffer, and then come into his glory!” After that, “He began with Moses, and with all the prophets, and explained to them the things about himself throughout the whole Bible” (24:26–27). His answer was, to be sure, a radical redefinition of the “redemption of Israel.” It brought the entire expectation into a new focus, namely, his own unique role. The story of the Bible as a whole, he insisted, had been rushing forward toward the events of his own death and resurrection. The recent happenings were to be seen as fulfillment, not simply as a shocking turn of events. But to redefine is not to abandon. Many Jews of Jesus’s day had been praying and pondering what it might mean for God to fulfill his ancient promises at long last. There was no single template. Many groups, many teachers, many would-be prophets offered different interpretations.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  one’s own popularity was baffling to me. These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else. I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn’t gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work. I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  His life’s work eventually led to a new denomination, now the second largest Protestant denomination in America. Thus hundreds of millions of Protestants around the world, whether they know it or not, have Paul as their primary theological ancestor. To say the obvious, Paul matters. But how he matters and how much he matters vary greatly among Christians. There are very diverse understandings of Paul’s importance, message, and character. To some extent, the same could be said of Jesus, for he is diversely interpreted as well. But all Christians agree that Jesus was admirable, attractive, and appealing. Not so with Paul. THE CATHOLIC PAUL AND THE PROTESTANT PAUL Catholics and Protestants see Paul’s importance quite differently. For Protestants (at least historically—we’re not sure about the present), an interpretation of Paul’s theology and language is foundational for understanding Christianity. Not so for Catholics. Though they see Paul as a saint and his letters as sacred scripture, they have not made Paul central in the way that Protestants have. This difference can easily be seen in the history of Protestant and Catholic theology since the Reformation. But we illustrate it by speaking autobiographically. Borg: In the Lutheran form of Christianity in which I grew up, Paul was more important than Jesus. Of course, none of my pastors or Sunday school teachers ever said this. Indeed, they would be puzzled by the statement. But as I look back on my experience of growing up Lutheran, it is clear that I was taught to see Jesus, God, and the Christian gospel through a Pauline lens as mediated by Luther. I was blissfully unaware of this, of course. I took it for granted that our way of seeing Jesus, God, and Christianity was not a way of seeing them, but the way. For me as a Lutheran, the foundational Christian message was “justification by grace through faith,” a Pauline and Lutheran phrase often shortened to “justification by faith.” What this meant to me was that I would be accepted by God “by faith”—and faith meant believing in Jesus and God as understood by Paul and Luther. Not until I went to seminary in my early twenties did I realize how Lutheran my way of seeing Paul and the gospel was. Not that the Lutheran view is simply wrong—it’s much better than some. But I learned that there are other vantage points for seeing Paul, some that add greatly to his richness and fullness. In another seminary decades later, I encountered the difference between Catholic and Protestant perceptions of Paul firsthand. While I was a visiting professor of New Testament in a theological consortium that included three Catholic seminaries, a number of Catholic students attended my courses. As I was lecturing about Paul’s understanding of justification by grace, I noticed that several of the Catholic students looked puzzled, and then one asked, “What’s all this about ‘justification by grace’? Why is this important?” I realized that the phrase was largely foreign to them.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Justification: transformation, not imputation. If you misread the justice of Paul’s God as retributive, the only good news might be that God would pretend, as it were, that we were just, that God would impute to us a justice we did not have. Such an “as if” treatment would have horrified Paul. There is nothing, for example, about fictional imputation of justice, but everything about factual transformation by justice in these claims from 2 Corinthians: All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (3:18) We do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. (4:16) If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (5:17). That is transformation, not imputation. Sacrifice: participation, not substitution. We saw in Chapter 5 that Paul’s understanding of sacrificial atonement must be emphatically distinguished from Anselm’s interpretation of it as substitutionary sacrificial atonement. Indeed, Paul’s own interpretation of Christ’s execution was as a participatory sacrificial atonement. That is why, in Romans, having mentioned “Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” in just one verse (3:25), Paul does not develop that further, yet spends a whole chapter on our participation in Christ (6:1–23). Humanity’s universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization’s drug of choice, and our addiction now threatens creation itself. Christ’s life was the incarnate revelation of a nonviolent God, and it was consummated by his death from the violent injustice he had opposed justly and nonviolently. His death was a sacrifice, was something “made sacred,” as we saw above, because it was the ultimate witness to the character of his God and the ultimate invitation for us to participate with him. And we participate by dying—metaphorically and really—to civilization’s violent normalcy or by dying—literally and really (unfortunately often still necessary)—from the same dominational evil we oppose. JUSTIFIED BY GOD’S GRACE AS A GIFT Grace as free gift. We are now “justified by God’s grace as a gift” (3.24). What does that mean? In Romans, Paul’s Greek word charis is usually translated “grace” and understood to mean a free gift. He speaks about being “justified by his grace as a gift” (3:24), about “the free gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ” (5:15), and, like a drumbeat, about “the free gift…the grace of God and the free gift…the free gift…the free gift…the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness” (5:15–17). But be very careful here. There is no such thing as a free gift.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  SO HOW DID the first Christians interpret the death of Jesus? What did they say about it, what did they mean, and how did they arrive at that view? This brings us at last to the heart of our investigation. I have insisted that we cannot jump straight in with the normal Western assumptions about what “dying for our sins” or even “in accordance with the Bible” might actually mean. We need to go back, as we have now done, and investigate, first, the set of first-century Jewish assumptions within which those phrases meant what they meant and, second, how the very first Christians went about putting this new vision into practice. But, having done all that, we must return to the underlying question. Already by the time of Paul, the early Christians believed that something had happened on the cross itself, something of earth-shattering meaning and implication, something as a result of which the world was now a different place. A revolution had been launched. We must remind ourselves that for a full account of “atonement”—as we have seen, more of a complex word than we often recall—we need to speak of resurrection, ascension, the Spirit, the life of faith, the ultimate resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of all things. But we must still insist that it is proper, necessary, and vital to ask: By six o’clock on the first Good Friday evening, what had changed and how had that happened? That is the task to which we must now give attention. Right away we meet something very peculiar. You might suppose that if Christian theologians were going to trace the meaning of Jesus’s death, they would begin with Jesus himself. Mostly, they do not. I possess many books on the “atonement.” Few give much attention to the gospels. None, as far as I recall, starts with Jesus himself. They may sooner or later highlight one famous saying, Mark 10:45 (“The son of man . . . came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’”), but they do not normally go much beyond that. They seldom if ever link the meaning of Jesus’s death with Jesus’s announcement of God’s kingdom coming “on earth as in heaven.” They seldom highlight the fact that Jesus chose to go to Jerusalem and (so it seems) force some kind of a showdown with the authorities not on the Day of Atonement, not at the Festival of Tabernacles, the Festival of Dedication, or any other special day on the sacred calendar, laden with meaning as they were, but at Passover.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  As the story continues, the theme of illumination appears again. The light was so brilliant that it blinded Paul (Acts 9:9). Then, three days later, he was led to a Christian Jew in Damascus named Ananias. Ananias laid his hands on Paul and said, “The Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored” (Acts 9:17–18; all italics in biblical quotations have been added). Paul now saw differently—the light that was Jesus, and the Spirit with which he was now filled, had brought enlightenment: “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” The story in Acts 9 ends with Paul being baptized, the early Christian rite of incorporation. Paul had become “in Christ,” as he puts it in his letters. “In Christ” was for Paul a new identity that involved a new community and way of being. So decisive was this experience that it divided Paul’s life into two parts, the pre-Damascus Paul and the post-Damascus Paul. Commonly called his conversion experience, it is and it is not, depending upon what we mean by “conversion.” In a religious context, the word has three meanings, not all of which apply to Paul. The first is conversion from being nonreligious to being religious, the second is conversion from one religion to another, and the third is conversion within a religious tradition. Paul’s experience was neither of the first two. Clearly, he was deeply religious before his Damascus experience. In his own words, he was filled with religious passion: “zealous for the traditions of my ancestors”; “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Gal. 1:14; Phil. 3:5–6). Moreover, he did not convert from one religion to another. Not only was Christianity not yet a religion separate from Judaism, but Paul thought of himself as a Jew after his conversion and for the rest of his life. Paul’s was a conversion within a tradition: from one way of being Jewish to another way of being Jewish, from being a Pharisaic Jew to being a Christian Jew. Paul’s Damascus experience was his “call” to the rest of his life. It called him to his vocation, just as the “call stories” of the great Jewish prophets were calls to a vocation. All three accounts in Acts report that his Damascus experience was his commissioning to his vocation as an apostle to the Gentiles. Paul’s genuine letters confirm the picture created by Acts. Paul had experiences of Jesus as a living reality, and these experiences transformed him. We begin with Galatians 1:13–17, simply because it is one of only two places in Paul’s letters in which he mentions Damascus. He describes his earlier life as a zealous persecutor of the Jesus movement. Then he writes:

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Paul’s conviction that God had raised Jesus was grounded in his own experience of the risen Christ. It was not based upon stories such as those reported in the gospels. The pre-Damascus Paul had almost certainly heard the claim that God had raised Jesus. The claim had no persuasive power until his Damascus experience. Moreover, what he says about what a resurrected body is like does not fit well with a literal-factual reading of the gospel stories. Again, this does not mean that the gospel stories should be set aside, but it should affect how we hear those stories. The resurrection of Jesus as an imperative. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus not only was an experience; it also contained an imperative. The imperative is seen very clearly in the immediate meaning of his experience: “Jesus is Lord.” God had vindicated Jesus and thus said “no” to the authorities responsible for his execution. The conviction that “Jesus is Lord” is not an abstract theological claim, but an affirmation with an imperative: it calls for commitment, allegiance, loyalty. If Jesus is Lord, the imperative follows immediately that we should follow him, not the would-be lords of this world. There is a second reason for the imperative as well. As Paul writes about the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, he also writes about the general bodily resurrection—not just about the resurrection of Jesus by itself, but about his resurrection in the context of the Jewish hope for the resurrection of the dead. The hope for a general resurrection is not, however, an inference drawn from the resurrection of Jesus; rather, it is the premise for Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s resurrection. Twice he emphasizes this: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised…. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised” (15:13, 16). Understanding this requires introducing the word “eschatology.” Though used with a bewildering variety of meanings by scholars and theologians, its basic meaning is quite simple. “Eschatology” comes from the Greek word eschaton, which means “end.” It has often been understood to mean the “end of the world,” as if it referred to the end of the space-time universe and thus also the evacuation of the faithful to another world, namely, heaven. But, as we saw in Chapter 4, in Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, eschatology was not about the end of the physical world, but about the end of this age—the end of “this world,” a world of domination, injustice, and violence. Jewish eschatology, the premise of Paul’s claims about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, was about a transformed world. The hope for the general resurrection was a hope for what we call “God’s great cleanup of the world.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “One thing I like about our work together is that you invariably respond with substance whenever I ask about what’s passing through your mind. Sometimes it’s a thought, but even more commonly you describe some mental image. With your extraordinary visual sense, I was hoping you could combine your art and therapy in some synergistic manner. I don’t know—possibly I was hoping the painting might be more expressionistic, or cathartic, or illuminating. Maybe you could even work through some painful issues on canvas. But the still life, while technically wonderful, is so—so—serene, so far removed from conflict and pain.” Seeing Irene’s eyes rolling up, I added, “You asked for my feelings, and there they are. I’m not defending them. In fact, I suspect I’m making a mistake by being critical of any activity that provides you an interlude of peace.” “Irv, I don’t think you know much about painting. Do you know what the French call a still life?” I shook my head. “Nature morte.” “Dead nature.” “Right. To paint a still life is to meditate on death and decay. When I paint fruit, I can’t avoid observing how my still-life models are dying and decomposing day after day. When I paint I am very close to our therapy, pointedly aware of Jack’s passage from life into dust, very aware of the presence of death and the smell of decay in everything that lives.” “Everything?” I ventured. She nodded. “You? Me?” “Everything,” she replied. “Especially me.” At last! I had been scratching for Irene’s last statement, or something like it, since the very beginning of our work. It heralded a new phase in therapy, as I recognized from the strong dream she brought in a couple of weeks later. I am sitting at a table—like an executive board table. There are others there as well, and you are sitting at the head of the table. We are all working on something—perhaps reviewing grant proposals. You ask me to bring some papers to you. It is a small room, and to get to you I have to pass very close to a row of windows that are open and reach all the way to the floor. I could easily fall out the window, and I woke up with a powerful thought in my mind: How could you have exposed me to such great danger? This general theme—her being in danger and my failing to protect her—soon gathered steam. A few nights later she had two companion dreams, one following immediately upon the heels of the other. (Companion dreams may convey the same message. Our friend the dream-writing homunculus often amuses himself by composing several variations on a particularly arresting theme.) The first:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Paul has built into this narrative of Adam and the Messiah the darker theme of the Jewish law: “The law came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent” (5:20). What does that mean? Older theologies, including the “works contract” as often understood, saw the Jewish law as the equivalent of the original commands given to Adam and Eve. It was, so people thought, the moral standard Israel was expected to keep in order to be God’s people. It was the high moral bar that people in general, and Israel in particular, had to clear in order to be ruled “all right” in God’s sight. Then, in this same works-contract analysis, it became clear that Israel could not keep the law. The “law” was then seen as a negative, dangerous, perhaps even demonic power. According to some, God gave the law in order to terrify people with the prospect of judgment, so that they would run to the gospel for relief. That appears to make some sense, provided you approach the whole thing from the works-contract point of view. But this is not, however, the sense Paul has in mind. What Paul has in mind is a longer and more complex story, which he will unfold in chapter 7. This story is about the strange, unexpected divine purpose in giving the law, and this is what he has woven, as a foretaste, into the Adam-and-Messiah story of chapter 5. “The law,” he says, “came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent.” The phrase “so that,” italicized here, is vital. Paul is hinting that the often dark and sad history of Israel, the long descent into the “curse” of Deuteronomy, was not itself outside the divine purpose. That descent under the law was to be the means by which redemption would come. Even the exile itself, the long sojourn under the law’s curse, was part of the eventual saving purpose. The “so that” indicates that this was God’s intention. It was not an accident. Nor was it a demonic intrusion into the divine purpose. We note in particular at the end of Romans 5 that Paul in his distinctive way has done exactly what we saw in the four gospels. He has told the story of “how God became king” in such a way as to demonstrate that the death of Jesus was the clue to that result. At this point we seem to be very close to a central and more or less universal early Christian perception of what the gospel was all about and how its power was unleashed. If that is so, we should be less than surprised that Paul, like the gospels in describing Jesus’s last days, discerns the meaning of those days as the new Passover, the new Exodus. Romans 6–8: The New Exodus

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I believe this remoteness, and your discomfort about my challenging it, is the major factor motivating your wish to terminate. “Let me share a second observation: I’m struck by your lack of curiosity about yourself. I feel that I have to supply the curiosity for both of us—that I alone must carry the entire burden of our work.” “I’m not deliberately concealing anything from you, Doctor. Why would I do that intentionally? That is just the way I am,” Halston repeated in his wooden way . “Let’s try one last time, Halston. Humor me. I want you to review again the events of the day preceding the evening of the nightmare. Let’s go over it with a fine-tooth comb.” “As I told you, a normal day at the bank, and that night a horrible nightmare, which I’ve forgotten—the drive to the emergency room—” “No, no, we’ve done that. Let’s try another approach. Get your date book out. Let’s see,” Ernest checked his calendar, “our first meeting was May 9. Go over your appointments the day before. Start with the morning of May 8.” Halston took out his week-at-a-glance date book, turned to May 8, and squinted. “Mill Valley,” he said, “now why on earth was I in Mill Valley? Oh, right—my sister. I remember now. I wasn’t in the bank that morning after all. I was investigating Mill Valley.” “What do you mean, ‘investigating’?” “My sister lives in Miami, and her firm is transferring her to the Bay area. She’s considering a house in Mill Valley, and I offered to reconnoiter the town for her—you know, morning traffic patterns, parking, shopping, the best residential areas.” “Good. Excellent start. Now take me through the rest of the day.” “Everything is strangely hazy—it’s almost eerie. I can’t recall anything.” “You live in San Francisco—do you remember driving to Mill Valley across the Golden Gate Bridge? What time?” “Early, I think. Before the traffic. Maybe seven.” “Then what? Had you eaten breakfast at home? Or in Mill Valley? Try to picture it. Let your mind wander freely back to that morning. Close your eyes, if it helps.” Halston closed his eyes. After three or four minutes of silence, Ernest wondered whether he had fallen asleep and in a soft voice prodded, “Halston? Halston? Don’t move, stay where you are, but try to think aloud. What are you seeing in your mind?” “Doctor”—Halston slowly opened his eyes—“did I ever tell you about Artemis? ” “Artemis? The Greek goddess? No, not a word.” “Doctor,” said Halston, blinking his eyes and shaking his head as if to clear it, “I’m a little shaken. I’ve just now had the oddest experience. As though a rent suddenly appeared in my mind, letting all the uncanny events of that day pour through. I don’t want you to think I’ve been deliberately withholding this from you.” “Rest assured, Halston. I’m with you.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is not the place for any detailed exposition of this much-discussed phrase. It echoes, often explicitly and sometimes implicitly, the scenario in Daniel 7, in which a sequence of four monsters culminates in the “little horn” that grows out of the fourth and final one; whereupon the scene changes to the divine throne room, in which judgment is pronounced and “one like a son of man” is brought to the Ancient One and seated beside him in judgment. To this figure is given “dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (7:14). The horn is silenced, the monsters are condemned, and the kingdom of God, exercised through the human figure, is inaugurated at last. Josephus tells us that, in the first century, an oracle in Israel’s scriptures propelled the Jews to war against the Romans: it seems clear that he has the book of Daniel in mind. Daniel 2 contains the messianic prophecy of the “stone” that will smash the idolatrous statue and become, in its turn, a great mountain. Daniel 9 contains the prophecy about the extended exile, at the end of which “an anointed one shall be cut off” (v. 26), though this will be the time “to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity” (v. 24). Put these together with Daniel 7, and the composite picture seems clearly to be the one that all four evangelists are offering. Jesus is the true Messiah, whose inaugurated rule will overthrow the rule of the powers of the world. It will, in other words, be the new Passover, though seen now in the lurid colors of mythological metaphor. But it will achieve this by putting an end to sin, which as we have frequently seen means the ending of exile and the return of YHWH. We have said enough to make it clear that for all four evangelists the meaning of Jesus’s death is found in the big picture of the narrative they are telling, moving as it does from Jesus’s kingdom-inaugurating work to his crucifixion, with “King of the Jews” written above his head. They are all, in their different ways, highlighting this combination of kingdom and cross. Luke says several times, in one way or another, that Jesus has been the one through whom God’s liberation of Israel has taken place, even if not in the form that people at the time were expecting or necessarily wanting.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Unfortunately, nothing in my psychiatric training had prepared me to deal with any of the challenges that Tom and his fellow veterans presented. I went down to the medical library to look for books on war neurosis, shell shock, battle fatigue, or any other term or diagnosis I could think of that might shed light on my patients. To my surprise the library at the VA didn’t have a single book about any of these conditions. Five years after the last American soldier left Vietnam, the issue of wartime trauma was still not on anybody’s agenda. Finally, in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, I discovered The Traumatic Neuroses of War, which had been published in 1941 by a psychiatrist named Abram Kardiner. It described Kardiner’s observations of World War I veterans and had been released in anticipation of the flood of shell-shocked soldiers expected to be casualties of World War II.[1] Kardiner reported the same phenomena I was seeing: After the war his patients were overtaken by a sense of futility; they became withdrawn and detached, even if they had functioned well before. What Kardiner called “traumatic neuroses,” today we call posttraumatic stress disorder—PTSD. Kardiner noted that sufferers from traumatic neuroses develop a chronic vigilance for and sensitivity to threat. His summation especially caught my eye: “The nucleus of the neurosis is a physioneurosis.”[2] In other words, posttraumatic stress isn’t “all in one’s head,” as some people supposed, but has a physiological basis. Kardiner understood even then that the symptoms have their origin in the entire body’s response to the original trauma. Kardiner’s description corroborated my own observations, which was reassuring, but it provided me with little guidance on how to help the veterans. The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them—and from our own experience. This sounds so simple, but even as Semrad pushed us to rely upon self-knowledge, he also warned us how difficult that process really is, since human beings are experts in wishful thinking and obscuring the truth. I remember him saying: “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.” Working at the VA I soon discovered how excruciating it can be to face reality. This was true both for my patients and for myself.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  He felt no vibration of social hope in the preaching of John the Baptist and in the shouts of the crowd when Jesus entered Jerusalem. He caught no revolutionary note in the Book of Revelation. The social movement had not yet reached him. Jesus knew human nature when he reiterated: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” We see in the Bible what we have been taught to see there. We drop out great sets of facts from our field of vision. We read other things into the Bible which are not there. During the Middle Ages men thought they saw their abstruse scholastic philosophy and theology amid the simplicity of the gospels. They found in the epistles the priests and bishops whom they knew, with robe and tonsure, living a celibate life and obeying the pope. When the Revival of Learning taught men to read all books with literary appreciation and historic insight, many things disappeared from the Bible for their eyes, and new things appeared. A new language was abroad and the Bible began to speak that language. If the Bible was not a living power before the Reformation, it was not because the Bible was chained up and forbidden, as we are told, but because their minds were chained by preconceived ideas, and when they read, they failed to read. We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. It is accompanied by a reinterpretation of nature and of history. The social movement has helped to create the modern study of history. Where we used to see a panorama of wars and strutting kings and court harlots, we now see the struggle of the people to wrest a living from nature and to shake off their oppressors. The new present has created a new past. The French Revolution was the birth of modern democracy, and also of the modern school of history. The Bible shares in that new social reinterpretation. The stories of the patriarchs have a new lifelikeness when they are read in the setting of primitive social life. There are texts and allusions in the New Testament which had been passed by as of slight significance; now they are like windows through which we see miles of landscape. But it is a slow process. The men who write commentaries are usually of ripe age and their lines of interest were fixed before the social movement awoke men. They follow the traditions of their craft and deal with the same questions that engaged their predecessors. Eminent theologians, like other eminent thinkers, live in the social environment of wealth and to that extent are slow to see. The individualistic conception of religion is so strongly fortified in theological literature and ecclesiastical institutions that its monopoly cannot be broken in a hurry. It will take a generation or two for the new social comprehension of religion to become common property.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have periods of persistent and distracting visceral discomfort that are totally intrusive and energy-consuming. I say this rather than simply use the word pain, because there are too many gradations of effect and response that are not covered by that one word. Self-hypnosis seemed a workable possibility for maintaining some control over the processes going on inside my body. With trial and inquiry, I found a reliable person to train me in the techniques of self-hypnosis. It’s certainly cheaper than codeine. Self-hypnosis requires a concentration so intense I put myself into a waking trance. But we go into those states more often than we realize. Have you ever been wide awake on the subway and missed your station because you were thinking about something else? It’s a question of recognizing this state and learning to use it to manipulate my consciousness of pain. One of the worst things about intrusive pain is that it makes me feel impotent, unable to move against it and therefore against anything else, as if the pain swallows up all ability to act. Self-hypnosis has been useful to me not only for refocusing physical discomfort, it has also been useful to me in helping effect other bargains with my unconscious self. I’ve been able to use it to help me remember my dreams, raise a subnormal body temperature, and bring myself to complete a difficult article. I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes—not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected—a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance. December 7, 1986 New York City I’m glad I don’t have to turn away any more from movies about people dying of cancer. I no longer have to deny cancer as a reality in my life. As I wept over Terms of Endearment last night, I also laughed. It’s hard to believe I avoided this movie for over two years. Yet while I was watching it, involved in the situation of a young mother dying of breast cancer, I was also very aware of that standard of living, taken for granted in the film, that made the expression of her tragedy possible. Her mother’s maid and the manicured garden, the unremarked but very tangible money so evident through its effects. Daughter’s philandering husband is an unsuccessful English professor, but they still live in a white-shingled house with trees, not in some rack-ass tenement on the Lower East Side or in Harlem for which they pay too much rent. Her private room in Lincoln Memorial Hospital has her mama’s Renoir on the wall. There are never any Black people at all visible in that hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, not even in the background. Now this may not make her death scenes any less touching, but it did strengthen my resolve to talk about my experiences with cancer as a Black woman.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse. In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity—the abuse of feeling. When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before. But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation. Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I remember only snippets from the rest of that weekend. Sailing on his boat. A walk in the woods. Finding a clamshell on the beach (that sits in my bathroom with a candle in it to this day). Telling him I wanted to be an actress. Him telling me I should be a writer instead. Noticing how we crossed our legs the same way and had a similar sense of humor. Moments that made me understand that I am a product of both BD and Ken, of nature and nurture. BD and I had another thing in common: he first met his father when he was a teenager, too. Being born into absence was our shared DNA, and so was the trauma that came with it. BD wasn’t a villain, after all. He was a victim of rejection, just like me. And as such, he did what he was taught to do. There’s a growing body of scientific literature to support that grief and trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. In epigenetics, researchers study how gene expression is modified based on behavior and environment. In terms of trauma, that means that people who’ve experienced war, famine, or other forms of extreme stress can pass down genetic modifications to their offspring. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and director of Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, has been at the forefront of this research. She and her team conducted a study of 32 Jewish men and women who had endured or observed torture, been interned at concentration camps, or went into hiding during the war. They also examined the genes of their adult children, finding that both parents and offspring had lowered cortisol levels compared to Jewish families who resided outside of Europe during the war. This is significant, as cortisol is the stress hormone that helps to counter adrenaline and calm the system. Yehuda concludes, “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents.” Research like Yehuda’s suggests that our ancestors’ life experiences have the power to leave lasting imprints for generations. It wouldn’t surprise me if on some very old branches of my paternal family tree there were ancestors who had also experienced abandonment and neglect. Living in these conditions creates a whole bunch of behavioral issues: codependency; fear of being left; insecurity and low selfworth; difficulty saying no and trouble self-regulating, especially big feelings like—you guessed it—anger. As a result, it can be hard to form healthy relationships, because it’s difficult to trust others and even yourself.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Automatically I took down the volume and it opened of itself at the last page of Emerson’s advice to the scholars of Dartmouth College. Every word is still printed on my memory: I can see the left-hand page and read again that divine message: I make no excuse for quoting it almost word for word: “Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the scholar’s place and hope, because I thought that standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you seek? what is this beauty!’ men will ask, with derision. If nevertheless God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season’;—then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates the extreme need of the priests of science.... Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.” The truth of it shocked me: “then perish the buds of art and poetry and science in you as they have perished already in a thousand, thousand men!” That explained why it was that there was no Shakespeare, no Bacon, no Swinburne in America where, according to population and wealth there should be dozens. There flashed on me the realization of the truth, that just because wealth was easy to get here, it exercised an incomparable attraction and in its pursuit “perished a thousand, thousand” gifted spirits who might have steered humanity to new and nobler accomplishment.