Realization
A cognitive or emotional pivot—what was fuzzy suddenly lands as true.
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From The City of God
260 Books That Matter: The City of God Even the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, combining Roman psychology and Greek cosmology, were only able to imagine a rival alternative to contemporary social life in terms of the world that they saw around them. But none of them saw the world itself, the conditions that determined the fundamentals of our existence, as susceptible to radical transformation, a cosmic revolution, what Saint Paul calls a new creation. That imagining they left to Augustine. He was the first to see society as a whole, as an object of full analytic interest and possible of complete critique. This is really a very crucial moment in the development of what we can call a critical mindset towards the received and unreflective inhabitation of a given social world, and it is so in two ways. First, as a way to imagine the whole constellation of what we would recognize as human society as contingent, as able to be evaluated as better or worse for human flourishing, and as potentially changeable. Remember Augustine critiquing Varro’s sanctification of money and war, and even gruesome Roman sexual practices. Second, Augustine is unusual also in that he has a very historical framing of the issue. That is to say, we can all admit that there is a proximate history from which we derive—in Augustine’s case, the story of Rome—but for reasons of differences of value, that history is lost to us as a usable past: you can’t go home again. What do we do now? We can’t reattach ourselves to that past. Well, in fact, this is a very modern way to imagine the problem of historical change. It’s not always been that way. And, in a way, Augustine is the first person to imagine it so; he’s the first, in this sense, modern thinker. After him, we’re all asking versions of the following question: What do we do once Rome has fallen? Remember our earlier comments about the loss of innocence, moral or spiritual innocence. Augustine is the first one for whom the classical world is not simply an unquestionable context but a complicated legacy of inheritance. That past is gone. Something is lost, and we
From The City of God
367 Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) So he says that some stories should be read as vast, as expressive of fundamental historical themes. Thus the story of Babel is not just about Babylon, it’s about the fundamental contest between sin and grace in this world, and thus of his whole two cities schema. Here the moralizing energy helps us see the pathologies manifest in one instance are, in fact, abstractable from the details of that context and generalizable across many settings. We do this all the time, of course. So, for example, we consider building nuclear weapons kind of like opening Pandora ’s Box—there’s an analogy drawn right there. Now, note that although these reading strategies move tactically in opposite directions—one to diminish, one to expand the significance of these events—both are in the service of a single strategic aim. The first example diminishes the text; it makes it seem less important or central to the narrative. The second amplifies the text; it makes it seem larger, more allegorically revelatory than its literal details might suggest. But both tactics serve the single strategic aim of showing his audience how the Bible can offer a moral and spiritual frame within which the past, and the present, and the future should be understood. The aim here is to show how this imaginative framework displayed in the Bible can remarkably illuminate our world. Recall Augustine’s repeated attention to the pagan Roman poet Vergil throughout previous books of The City. He knew the power Vergil had over the imagination and the understanding of the Romans, Pagan and Christian alike, in his audience. He knew the power Vergil had over his own imagination, in fact. Here in these books, we see the fullest unfolding of the contrasting imaginative frame—the frame provided by the Bible. For Augustine, the Bible is the true moral lens that lets us see the world aright, whereas Vergil’s stories warp our vision and distort our affective responses. “To learn to accept God’s grace, we must replace the old Roman stories we were once taught,” he says, “with these new stories, for they are the true ones.” This is, in short, an allegorical mode of reading meant to cultivate in us what we can call a typological imagination.
From Notes of a Native Son (1955)
It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. (“You taught me language,” says Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.”) Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro’s progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer’s prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people.
From The City of God
The world had changed immeasurably since he was a boy and seemed very likely to change even more. And he was right. A man born early in Augustine's Christian career could have, as a child, seen and lauded Theodosius, the last great emperor, who died in 395; and then lived on into his 80s, this young man, to see the final Westerner with a claim to the title Imperator, Romulus Augustulus—little more than a boy of 14 or 15—be ignominiously deposed and sent contemptuously out of Ravenna into exile, to live in a castle, by the barbarian chief Odoacer in September of 476. People cope, of course, and what we imagine as tectonic changes were probably not felt in their full radicality at all moments by everyone who had managed to live through them. Historians who insist that the fall of Rome is too melodramatic, and ideologically and self-congratulatory a description for late antiquity, they have a point. Civilization went on. No one lived in caves huddled around open fires, wearing animal furs and Viking helmets. But then again, something did change—something momentous. The barbarians stopped becoming Roman. Cultural change became a two-way street. Roma turned out to be not so aeterna—eternal—after all. Furthermore, the barbarians were convertible to Christianity as a civilizing step up for them, not—as was the case with the old Roman pagans—as an embarrassing fall from some noble sublimity. So with the barbarians’ ascendancy came a change in Christianity’s cultural status. Legally it had been long allowed, then endorsed, then prescribed; but now it gained cultural status as tradition. And insofar as the barbarians wanted access to the political and existential
From The City of God
[302] Col. ii. 8. [303] Rom. i. 19, 20. [304] Acts xvii. 28. [305] Rom. i. 21-23. Chapter 11. --How Plato Has Been Able to Approach So Nearly to Christian Knowledge. Certain partakers with us in the grace of Christ, wonder when they hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion. Some have concluded from this, that when he went to Egypt he had heard the prophet Jeremiah, or, whilst travelling in the same country, had read the prophetic scriptures, which opinion I myself have expressed in certain of my writings. [306]But a careful calculation of dates, contained in chronological history, shows that Plato was born about a hundred years after the time in which Jeremiah prophesied, and, as he lived eighty-one years, there are found to have been about seventy years from his death to that time when Ptolemy, king of Egypt, requested the prophetic scriptures of the Hebrew people to be sent to him from Judea, and committed them to seventy Hebrews, who also knew the Greek tongue, to be translated and kept. Therefore, on that voyage of his, Plato could neither have seen Jeremiah, who was dead so long before, nor have read those same scriptures which had not yet been translated into the Greek language, of which he was a master, unless, indeed, we say that, as he was most earnest in the pursuit of knowledge, he also studied those writings through an interpreter, as he did those of the Egyptians,--not, indeed, writing a translation of them (the facilities for doing which were only gained even by Ptolemy in return for munificent acts of kindness, [307] though fear of his kingly authority might have seemed a sufficient motive), but learning as much as he possibly could concerning their contents by means of conversation. What warrants this supposition are the opening verses of Genesis:"In the beginning God made the heaven and earth. And the earth was invisible, and without order; and darkness was over the abyss:and the Spirit of God moved over the waters. " [308]For in the Timaeus, when writing on the formation of the world, he says that God first united earth and fire; from which it is evident that he assigns to fire a place in heaven. This opinion bears a certain resemblance to the statement, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth. "Plato next speaks of those two intermediary elements, water and air, by which the other two extremes, namely, earth and fire, were mutually united; from which circumstance he is thought to have so understood the words, "The Spirit of God moved over the waters. "For, not paying sufficient attention to the designations given by those scriptures to the Spirit of God, he may have thought that the four elements are spoken of in that place, because the air also is called spirit. [309]Then, as to Plato's saying that the philosopher is a lover of God, nothing shines forth more conspicuously in those sacred writings. But the most striking thing in this connection, and that which most of all inclines me almost to assent to the opinion that Plato was not ignorant of those writings, is the answer which was given to the question elicited from the holy Moses when the words of God were conveyed to him by the angel; for, when he asked what was the name of that God who was commanding him to go and deliver the Hebrew people out of Egypt, this answer was given:"I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, He who is sent me unto you;" [310] as though compared with Him that truly is, because He is unchangeable, those things which have been created mutable are not,--a truth which Plato zealously held, and most diligently commended. And I know not whether this sentiment is anywhere to be found in the books of those who were before Plato, unless in that book where it is said, "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, who is sent me unto you. "
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Just to be on the receiving end of a warm baked item while living so fenced off from husband and community brings me up short. Maybe, I think, I do belong among that peculiar company…. Well, maybe not those sad ladies who give their phone numbers out to strangers. What losers. I stuff the slips of paper in the car ashtray . Inside, with my small family abed, I pour my tumbler of whiskey and drink it on the back porch. Before staggering upstairs to pass out, I fix a second, since I’ll invariably wake around two or three, unable to cork off again without a few swallows. The next morning I take the half-empty tumbler of whiskey before grabbing Dev to piggyback downstairs. There, standing over the sink, I look at the watery drink and say to myself—as I do every morning—Seems wrong to pour it out. So I swill down those dregs. Only this time I hear my own voice from the night before, righteously claiming I never took a morning drink. It’s the first lie I caught myself in. In fact, I never poured the drink. Just drank it. It’s a snippet of a revelation, Dev’s solid weight on my hip the only force cementing me to earth. I feel flying through me like a hard-hit ball David’s phrase; I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease …but I’m not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that’s been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me—as one lady at the meeting said—and go on living without me.
From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)
Brenda Salter McNeil says there are five primary landmarks in the process of reconciliation.18 The first landmark is catalytic events , those moments when something dramatic happens that will either inspire change or encourage preservation. There are many examples. A pastor is tired of leading a church that doesn’t reflect its neighborhood and diversifies the ethnic background of the leadership team. The news media highlights the appalling levels of incarceration of black or indigenous youth. A college professor refuses to comply with racist and discriminatory policies. Saul is converted in Acts 9. This list could go on. These catalytic events either drive change and force a shift, or we regress back into preservation, depending on how we respond to them. The second landmark is realization . We become aware of the discrimination, inequity, lack of diversity, and injustice around us. This goes deeper than a cognitive understanding. We experience the reality of this in context and in the lives of specific people and groups. The third is identification. We identify with the other. We feel empathy for their pain, suffering, and marginalization. We understand, for instance, that for many African Americans it is plain that black lives don’t seem to matter. We hear these stories and we identify, forging a new identity together. The fourth is preparation. We make a conscious choice to change, and we prepare carefully and thoroughly for the change needed. We know change will be difficult and thoroughgoing, so we prepare fully. Finally, the fifth landmark is activation. We do justice together as we actively work for reconciliation. McNeil talks about embracing CARE: communication, advocacy, relationships, and education. 3. Embrace the practices of reconciliation. We’ve enjoyed reading Drew Hart, John de Gruchy, and Brenda Salter McNeil. These authors help us understand how churches and individuals can practice reconciliation. Today the church must break its allegiance and complicity with racist ideologies, systems, and practices. How do we do that? Drew Hart recommends sharing life with another racial group, practicing solidarity with those who suffer, seeing the world from below, subverting racial hierarchies in church and society, embracing a renewed social imagination (through the power of Scripture and the Spirit), seeking first God’s kingdom, and engaging in self-examination.19 But those aren’t the only practices we need.20 We restore justice and enable reconciliation when we create space for people to get to know others from different ethnic and cultural groups. John de Gruchy reminds us that we need to tell the truth about injustice, wrongdoing, and guilt, and to listen to the pain and fury of those who have suffered. We must learn to forgive, which can be very difficult—both the victim and the perpetrator have roles in this. We must pursue social justice, acknowledge guilt, and reconnect love, power, and justice. For too long love, power, and justice have been separated in Christian theology and in the Christian social imagination. It’s time to embrace the world-transforming power of hope.
Why, as my italics emphasize, is Jesus’ resurrection actually dependent on the general resurrection? It has often been said that Paul believed the end of the world was at hand. It is more accurate to say that he believed it had already begun , for that is his logic in the preceding passage. As a Pharisee he believed in the general resurrection at the end of time. But Jesus, he claims, has already risen as the start of the general resurrection. Notice his metaphor. Jesus is the “first fruits”—that is to say, the beginning of the harvest, the start of the general resurrection. That is why he can argue in either direction: no Jesus resurrection, no general resurrection; or, no general resurrection, no Jesus resurrection. They stand or fall together, and Paul presumes that only the mercy of God delays the final consummation, the ending of what has already started. The Titanic has, as it were, already hit the iceberg, and Paul’s mission is to waken the cabins as far and as wide as possible—while God gives time. In such a theological vision, resurrection is the only possible way to articulate the presence of Jesus for Paul, but it is also inextricably linked to the imminent general resurrection at the end of the world. But if the end is not imminent, is resurrection still the best way to put it? Is first fruits a credible metaphor if the harvest is long delayed? For Paul, in any case, bodily resurrection is the only way that Jesus’ continued presence can be expressed. But I repeat my question: Was that the only way other individuals and groups in earliest Christianity expressed their continuing and unbroken faith in Jesus? The question is not what it is that Paul means, because that is surely clear enough. The question is whether he speaks for all Christians then and thereafter. Is resurrection, so understood, the only way or just one of the ways to express faith in the continuing power and presence of Jesus in the world? Last of All to Me My point is not that Paul was wrong but that his emphasis on resurrection was but one way of expressing early Christian faith and should not be taken as normative for all others. Consider another section in 1 Corinthians 15:1–11, and focus especially on apparition to see, once again, how Paul’s own experience and expression have been taken as normative for all others rather than as one among many. Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Since my interests focus on the Anglo-American world in the early modern period, I naturally became aware of this kind of configuration in that connection. My first inkling of what would develop in this aspect of historical study came over twenty-five years ago in casual conversations with a colleague expert in the Scottish Enlightenment. It became apparent to us as we talked not simply that the leaders of Revolutionary America and of Enlightenment Scotland shared certain ideas but that the distinctively developing cultures in the two countries were fundamentally shaped by similar relationships to a single, central cultural core, in London. This common marginality—a similar distance from and involvement with the same central core—was a shaping element in the growth of each of these provincial cultures and was necessary to explain both. We tried to draw out the implications of this observation, convinced that the formulation was correct, but we did not then realize the magnitude of the issues. We did not know how our literary data related to an overall British Atlantic social system or what other kinds of events and documentation might be seen to be involved in this system. Indeed, we did not know what kind of a system, one small corner of which we were examining, this really was.4 At about the same time, David Quinn began publishing some unusually suggestive studies of England’s overseas expansion and settlement in the sixteenth century. In them he noted, first, that many of those who were involved in settlements in Ireland were also involved in settlements in America; and, second, that the attitude of the English to natives encountered in these two colonial areas was remarkably similar, and that experience gained in one area was automatically applied in the other. From Quinn’s writing alone one began to see the origins of England’s Atlantic empire, which included the British Isles themselves as well as overseas territories. What was involved was an expansion of the English, later British, world from its core in southeastern England out into a series of expanding alien peripheries—Wales and the North Country of England in the sixteenth century, Scotland, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. Phrases linking various British overseas territories, scarcely noticed before, suddenly took on heavy meaning: Ireland was described in a travel book of 1617, for example, as “this famous island in the Virginian sea.”5 One could envision a huge, outwardly expanding peripheral arc sweeping north and west from London and the Home Counties into Wales and Lowland Scotland, across Ireland, southwest through Newfoundland, then down the North American coast through Nova Scotia, New England, the Chesapeake, and the Carolinas, and ending in the many Anglo-American settlements in the Caribbean.
Later he changed his understanding of tax collectors (that is, toll or customs collectors), saying that they were condemned not as “collaborators” but as “charging too much, and thus of preying on the populace as a matter of course” (1993:229). The phrase “sinners and tax (toll) collectors” indicated those who were “systematically or flagrantly … living outside the law in a blatant manner,” those who “systematically and routinely transgressed the law” (1993:227, 236). They were, for example, “the wicked” who were oppressing “the weak, the orphan, the lowly, the destitute, and the needy” in Psalm 82 (cited in Chapter 12) as God deposed the gods from cosmic government for malpractice in office. With that I am in complete agreement. I also agree with the way he has cauterized, I hope forever, assertions that Jesus’ contemporary Judaism did not and would not accept repentance from and offer forgiveness to such people. He asks rhetorically, “Is it a serious proposal that tax collectors and the wicked longed for forgiveness, but could not find it within ordinary Judaism?” And he responds correctly, “There was a universal view that forgiveness is always available to those who return to the way of the Lord,” so that “if Jesus, by eating with tax collectors, led them to repent, repay those whom they had robbed, and leave off practicing their profession, he would have been a national hero…. It is simply inconceivable that Jewish leaders would have been offended if people repented, and this is a cliché which should be dropped from Christian scholarship” (1985:202–203, 272–273). That statement, long overdue, is absolutely true and deserves frequent quotation. Early-first-century Judaism, and any other Judaism before or after it, did not need lessons from Jesus on the elimination of impurities, the forgiveness of sins, or the mercy of God. It had had all of that firmly in place for a very long time. But what, then, was left for Jesus to do that caused trouble? Sanders makes three claims about Jesus in response to that question that are as “inconceivable” as those anti-Jewish claims he has rightly and justly condemned. First, he understands Jesus as a prophet of Jewish restoration. Despite that understanding, however, he repeatedly (varying the wording across several pages) makes this assertion: “There is very little evidence which connects Jesus directly with the motif of collective, national repentance in view of the eschaton…. [T]here is not a significant body of reliable sayings material which explicitly attributes to Jesus a call for national repentance…. [T]here is no firm tradition which shows that he issued a call for national repentance in view of the coming end, as did John the Baptist…. [I]t seems that he did not make thematic that Israel should repent and mend their ways so as to escape punishment at the judgment” (1985:108, in, 112, 115).
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
It’s a snippet of a revelation, Dev’s solid weight on my hip the only force cementing me to earth. I feel flying through me like a hard-hit ball David’s phrase; I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease…but I’m not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that’s been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me—as one lady at the meeting said—and go on living without me. 22Mass EyeEach spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole, and everything we know goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash the baby’s old… —Heather McHugh, “The Size of Spokane” Down in Texas, a botched cataract surgery has nearly blinded Mother, and I suggest she have the corneal transplant to repair it in Boston. Since Mr. Whitbread serves on New York Hospital’s board and likes to flex that helping muscle, Warren urges me to write him to find a doctor. I suspect (is this true?) Warren really fancies Mother’s presence will let him vanish further into work and daddy-hood. Still, I’m grateful when Mr. Whitbread right off cops for Mother an appointment with the pope’s own eye surgeon, who bumps Mother way up on the transplant list. That spring she comes to live in our dining room, waiting on a tissue match. I’ll help with my grandson, she says. I’ll look after him while you grade or write in your study. You’re blind, Mother. Not entirely. I mean, too blind to drive, but I can keep him away from sharp stuff. The first day she does babysit, but the second, Dev scampers into my study with Mother right behind, and do I want to go to the park? By the third day, Mother makes the most infuriating announcement: I don’t do kids. I sputter, You had four of them, Mother. Nobody helped me with mine. Bullshit. Daddy took me everywhere. She rolls her milky eyes toward the light fixture, saying, Here you go with that my sainted daddy shit. Your sister and I both wonder why he got a big pass for doing nothing whatsoever. Daddy never left us at the movies and didn’t pick us up. He never did anything whatsoever. He paid every bill. We lived in absolute squalor. He worked at an oil refinery, Mother. Did you fail to notice that? Ragging on Daddy is Mother’s de facto response to any complaint about our upbringing. She deftly pawns off her own failings on the desolation of her marriage. So she bitches that Daddy had been offered promotions but wouldn’t leave the union. And I counter that she’d been a Marxist when they married, and we dwindle into those niggling definitions until my fury boils over, and I lunge with the biggest weapon in my verbal sheath. I remind her that Daddy had never stood over me with a butcher knife.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
The mystery of the Bible passages, marked just for me, does that. I stay on my knees a long time, and sometime near dawn, my cell phone trills, and I ask my sister the math genius what are the odds—in terms of probability—that those two passages would’ve been marked of all the verses possible. And she says, Very slender. Seeing the marked Bible, Mother’s not in the least flabbergasted, saying, I knew we were born to be together a long time ago. Maybe you do now, too. Mock that experience as random chance if you like, but from then on, I start to arrive in the instant as never before, standing up in it as if pushed from behind like a wave, for it feels as if I was made—from all the possible shapes a human might take—not to prove myself worthy but to refine the worth I’m formed from, acknowledge it, own it, spend it on others. Easter, I visit Father Kane, recently ensconced in the home for retired priests, to make my confession. I sit weeping across from him, fully aware of the ingratitude I’ve occasionally nurtured and fertilized like a garden of black vines. Which posture rankles him. Oh, get up, Mary, he said, you know damn well God loves you. And I do. I (mostly) always do. I’d like to say I never waver from that place, but on a crowded subway, I still pine for a firearm some days. Though by the time Mother died, any of the old anger had been siphoned out of me like poison from a snakebite. Major organ system failure, the young doctors said. Old age, said the older ones. I’m sick of this shit, she said. She’d set her jaw to die fast, I think. To lodge one last cry of outrage against Daddy’s lingering five years’ death, she let go in as many days. I hate that you’re leaving, I said to her. I just got used to you. Well, I’m not doing it on purpose, she said with vigor. How old was she? She’d lied so much, nobody knew—eightyish, we’re guessing. Your husband’s outside, Miz Karr, the nurse said when one of her suitors showed up, hat in hand. He must look like hell. He’s been dead two decades. If Daddy lived his final years in a haze, Mother’s hazel eyes—when they were open those last days—stared at you sharp as a pair of ice picks. Who’s the president? the doctor said, to determine if she was cogent enough to say no to life support. Bill Clinton, she said.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Knowing more now about the greater eighteenth-century world than I did when I wrote the book and understanding the lives and thought of the Founders in greater detail, I now find the context of Hutchinson’s life more complex than I did before and his ordeal more revealing of the forces at work in the world at large in the late eighteenth century. I am more certain now that it was Hutchinson, of all the American writers of the time, who best understood the established wisdom, the rock-solid, sanctified truth in matters of politics and political thought as it was then known. It was he who saw most clearly the apparent flaws in the Founders’ arguments and did his best to convince them that what they were arguing was illogical, misguided, and certain to lead to disaster. That in the long run he was wrong is beside the point. At the time no one could have confidently predicted that. What he wrote and what he argued with increasing passion and ultimately despair was accurate, rational, and more logical than what his opponents staked their lives on. No crown official in America, or indeed in Britain, argued the government’s case more fully and more clearly than this dutiful provincial. And no one besides Hutchinson in the whole of colonial officialdom could have sustained the elaborate, learned public debate on constitutional principles he held in 1773 with the Massachusetts Assembly led by John Adams and James Bowdoin. At the heart of that remarkable series of exchanges, now republished with scholarly commentary as The Briefs of the American Revolution, and in Hutchinson’s other speeches and papers, lay an inverted relationship between power and liberty.5 Hutchinson argued that Britain’s power, expressed by Parliament, logically, systematically, and necessarily extended to its colonies, but that its liberties, in their entirety, did not. His opponents argued precisely the opposite: that Parliament’s power did not extend to its dominions, but that English liberties did. They were as valid in America as in the realm of England itself. This great problem—of the boundaries and location of power and liberty—was the central constitutional struggle of the developing revolution, and no one defined it more clearly than Hutchinson.
At the end there were about thirty seated people who had come to hear the talk and another thirty standing people who had arrived during it. I thought that some of the standers, drawn to the talk more by volume than interest, might be annoyed, and the first question seemed to confirm my expectations. It was clearly inimical in tone, but it was also absolutely fair and, in the long run, extremely helpful for my own understanding. It went something like this. Questioner: “You said that the Barabbas story was created by Mark because, as he saw it, the Jerusalem crowd had picked the wrong saviors, namely the brigand-rebels, in the war against Rome that started in 66 C.E. ?” Myself: “Yes.” Questioner: “Mark himself made it up? The choice of Barabbas over Jesus never happened? It’s not true?” Myself: “Yes.” Questioner: “Then why can’t you just call it what it is: a lie?” I cannot remember what I said in response, but it was probably defensive because I had never thought of the problem that way before. Why did I not call that incident or the many others created, in my view, by the traditions or the evangelists, lies? They were not true, so were they not lies? The question stuck with me over the following weeks, and it was in thinking about the Cross Gospel and not about any of the canonical accounts that I first saw the answer. I knew I was not afraid to call things, even gospel things, by their proper names. If I had thought lie was the proper term, I would have used it. So why not use it? What had always prevented me from doing so? I had called the claim that the Jews killed Jesus “the longest lie.” But did not the gospels say just that? Recall the number of times in this book that I have emphasized gospel as updated good news, rewriting the Jesus of the late 20s as the Jesus of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I knew, of course, that words and deeds of Jesus were updated to speak to new situations and problems, new communities and crises. They were adopted, they were adapted, they were invented, they were created. But then so, of course, were the friends and enemies of Jesus. That I had ignored. The community and author behind the Cross Gospel described the friends and enemies of Jesus at his execution as their own friends and enemies in the early 40s. The Romans were completely innocent then because that was how they appeared now . The house of Herod and the Jewish authorities were completely guilty then because that was how they appeared now . The “people of the Jews” were ready to convert then because that was how they appeared now . We may not like it, but that is what gospels do in Catholic Christianity. That is their generic destiny and compositional function. They are not straight history, straight biography, straight journalism.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Somebody born into his station. Maybe I don’t belong here, I say. But you are here, he says. What’s keeping you from joining us? You come to Mass, but you’re denying yourself the Sacraments. Those are the consolations of the Church. In Mass the next week, I enter and get on my knees like everybody else, saying the prayers I usually say at home. Opening my eyes, I actually tear up. There’s something different about praying in company—I can’t deny it—once you get over feeling like a poser . About a week later, Father Kane tells me he’s found a way for me to miss classes and still be baptized with Dev if I want to. I can meet with Toby and talk about the gospels one-on-one. Father Kane will personally fill in any gaps. Which is how one of my literary heroes winds up my godfather.
This debtor then went to another who owed him a mere “hundred denarii” and, despite his own experience with the king’s forgiveness, he disregarded the second debtor’s pleas for mercy and “threw him into prison until he would pay the debt” (18:30). Infuriated by the first debtor’s actions, the king “handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt” (18:34). Finally, Matthew ends the parable with this: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (18:35). In this case, literal debt is a parabolic metaphor for sin . In terms of divine and human forgiveness, Matthew moves from “debts” (6:12) to “trespasses” (6:24–15) to “sins” (18:15, 21–35). I conclude with Luke. His version of the Lord’s Prayer leaves out two sections present in Matthew and The Teaching (see the Appendix): “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven and “rescue us from the evil one.” But he also makes one very significant change in what he retains: And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. (Luke 11:4) Matthew works from “debts” through “trespasses” to “sins,” but Luke gets there right away. But, of course, he still retains “indebted to us” rather than “sinning against us.” I have three conclusions from all of that textual activity. One is that “debts” was originally intended quite literally. Jesus meant that eternal peasant dyad of enough bread for today and no debt for tomorrow. Were it originally and clearly metaphorical—“debts” meaning “sins”—everyone would have understood that intention and the progression in terminology from “debts” to “trespasses” to “sins” would not have been necessary. Another is that, from Mark through Matthew and into Luke, “debts” change to “trespasses” and then to “sins.” In its present format, therefore, it seems advisable to read Matthew’s text as including both debt and sin—not debt alone, not sin alone, and certainly not sin instead of debt, but both together. Indeed, the ultimate challenge may be to ponder their interaction. And, at least for the biblical tradition, when debt creates too much inequality, it has become sinful. Finally, I want to think one last time about “And forgive us our debts/sins, as we also have forgiven our debtors/sinners” in Matthew’s version of the Abba Prayer. For Matthew that seems to be not just a comparison —as God forgives, so must we forgive—but a condition —God will forgive, only if we forgive. That conditional aspect of forgiveness is made very explicit by the negative interpretation added at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew: For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (6:14–15) In the Lord’s Prayer the sequence is divine forgiveness and then human forgiveness, as a simple comparison.
Is Christ the incarnation and revelation of a nonviolent or a violent God? Since Jesus the Christ was clearly nonviolent (thank you at least for that correct judgment, Pilate), we Christians are called to believe in a nonviolent God. In other words, the nonviolent incarnational Christ challenges and judges the violent apocalyptic Christ. Our Christian Bible, therefore, tells a most strange story. It is one whose meaning is in the middle, not the end, one whose climax is in the center, not the conclusion. That is, by the way, why we Christians count time down to the incarnation of Christ and then back up from it. Unfortunately, then, our Christian Bible has itself succumbed to the great temptation of the evil one, namely, to make God violent and Jesus the revelation of that violent God. But the final and climactic unit of the Abba Prayer pleads against that desecration. It challenges us, first, to go back through our Bible and notice that other God, the God not of violent retributive justice and punitive righteousness, but of nonviolent distributive justice and restorative righteousness. And it challenges us, second, to think about Jesus as creator of the Abba Prayer and to ask ourselves: Do we find any divine violence in it? Or do we find in it—and in the life that produced it as its summary—a nonviolent vision that is still the last best hope for our species and our earth? The second major question or objection concerns that word justice itself, even when it is taken to mean equitable distribution rather than stern retribution. In public lectures, when I avoid anthropomorphic language and speak of God as Justice rather than of God as just, I very often get the objection that God is not Justice, but Love. I am told—quite correctly—that nowhere in the Christian Bible does it say that “God is Justice,” but it says twice in 1 John that “God is Love”: Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love . (4:8) So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (4:16) Should divine justice and divine love be played off against each other and, if not, how are they to be reconciled in Christian consciousness? Is it enough simply to combine them? Is it enough to note—quite correctly—that texts in the Christian Bible speak both of a God of justice in Isaiah 30:18 and Malachi 2:17 and of a God of love in 2 Corinthians 13:11? Is it enough to say—quite correctly—that “love” in the Bible is not just emotional but operational, not just about feeling but about acting? Is it enough to insist—quite correctly—that for John (e.g., 13:34) and Paul (e.g., Rom. 13:8) “loving one another” means “sharing” with one another? I think, however, that we must move toward a much closer correlation of justice and love than any of those suggestions.
Turn back, now, to that just cited two-part section in Luke 22:35–38. The general scholarly consensus is that the first part in 22:35–36 is a pre-Lukan unit. Jesus first recalls the time “when I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals.” That refers back to that Q unit in Luke 4:10: “no purse, no bag, no sandals.” But then he changes it: “Now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one” (22:35–36). Just as the tradition changed from no staff to staff for poorer Christians, so it changed from no sword to sword for better-off ones. In both cases it is the same transition, from allowing no weapons at all to allowing at least ones for defensive purposes. But Luke quotes this piece of pre-Lukan tradition in order to negate it. In other words, what is said in 22:35–36 is immediately denied by what follows it in 22:37–38. The disciples accept the permission on defensive weapons and start to take inventory. They reassure Jesus that they have two swords among them. What is his reply—for Luke? The Greek phrase hikanon estin should not be translated approvingly or even ambiguously as “It is enough,” but emphatically and disapprovingly as “Enough of that!” (which, by the way, is how the Greek phrase is translated in the recent monumental commentary on Luke’s gospel by Father Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J.).2 In other words, both the unit 22:35–38 at the Last Supper and the unit 22:49–51 in Gethsemane conclude with similar dismissive statements about even defensive violence from Jesus: “Enough of that!” (22:38) and “No more of this!” (22:51). All of those assertions and especially those rather tortured contradictions indicate that injunctions from Jesus against even personal defensive weapons—whether staffs or swords—were just a bit too much for his followers to accept. Accordingly, in very human fashion, they both admitted them in one place and reversed them in another. But, whether by affirmation or negation, they confirm for us that Jesus not only demanded nonviolent resistance, but that he also wanted it manifested externally, visibly, and symbolically. Finally, therefore, we can name “the last temptation” of the disciples in general and of their leader Peter in particular. It is defensive counter-violence. The disciples must continue in prayer—rather than in sleep—to avoid entering into that ultimate temptation. They must especially avoid being led into that temptation “by God,” that is, for Christ. We can easily imagine—and maybe even agree with—their protests. Even if offensive violence is forbidden by Jesus, surely at least defensive counter-violence must be allowed? But Jesus’s negation of that exception is shown most clearly in Gethsemane. No, it is not acceptable for the followers of Jesus to use defensive counter-violence even to defend Jesus himself. Five connected themes are interwoven throughout this book’s meditation on the Abba Prayer of Jesus.
From Come As You Are (2015)
She thwacked him on the arm with the back of her hand and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, “See?” He looked at me and he looked at her and he looked back at me and he opened his mouth to ask a question and then he closed it again. Then he said to Laurie, “Go away, honey.” She did—not before giving me a knowing glance. In a confidential whisper, he said to me, “If I can’t go by her genitals, how do I know she really wants me? Because she could totally just be saying she wants me when really she’s just trying to get it over with.” Johnny is a dude-bro, manly, fix-it kind of guy. I like him a lot, and often my role is to translate the science of women’s sexual well-being into Manly Fix-It Dude-Speak for him. So I started by saying, “Think about it this way: Arousal is not about her genitals, it’s about her brain.” Then I described the sexual response mechanism as a set of on and off switches, with each associated with a particular kind of input—genital sensations, relationship satisfaction, stress, attachment, etc.—that throws a switch on or off. Men’s and women’s sexual response mechanisms have the same set of dials and switches, but they tend to be tuned to different levels of sensitivity, so that just a little bit of genital stimulation throws an on switch for men, while just a little bit of stress throws an off switch for women. Laurie’s life, I explained, was throwing all the off switches. He said, “You’re saying I’ve got this strong input from my body, but her strongest input is from her… life?” “Yes!” “So to hack the system, what I need to be paying attention to is the stuff that’s hitting the brakes, because once those are off, the accelerator will take over. Is that what you’re saying?” “Yes. You’ve got it,” I said. “I think she wrote a list of stuff that hit her brakes—” “She did,” he said. “I’ve seen it. I didn’t know what to do with it, but now…” He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head and said, “This really changes everything. What this says is that the sexiest thing I can do isn’t some crazy erotic thing. The sexiest thing I can do is take away as many of the brakes as I can, which is… I mean, I can do that. Just… why did no one tell me this before?” “honey… I’m nonconcordant!”If you’ve got a body that doesn’t always match your mind, then you’ve got a body that defies conventional (and wrong) wisdom, and so you might find yourself in the position of having to correct your partner’s understanding. There are three things to remember, which can resolve any problem your nonconcordance may generate.
From Come As You Are (2015)
I thought Laurie, with her low desire, might be high SI. We wrote a list of things that activate her brakes: kid, full-time job with a rotten boss, her parents—not to mention the ways her body had changed since her pregnancy, which made her unhappy, and she also felt unhappy about feeling unhappy, since the feminist in her made her judge herself for not being able to let go of the arbitrary cultural ideal and just Love Her Body. Oh, and also? She was going back to school for a master’s degree. So no big deal. She didn’t have particularly sensitive brakes—she had an avalanche of stuff constantly putting pressure on very average brakes. “Just seeing all this written down makes me need a massage,” she groaned. “So ask Johnny to give you a massage,” I suggested. “Sure, and then I feel guilty if we don’t have sex after that.” “Oooh, good insight! Add that to the list of things that hit your brakes: feeling like you’re expected to have sex.” She did. And that’s when I saw the lights go on for her. She said, “So all the toys and games were hitting the accelerator, but at the same time all these things in my life were hitting the brakes in my brain… and it doesn’t matter how hard you hit the accelerator if the brake is on the floor. Huh.” “Right.” “So how do I stop hitting the brakes?” The million-dollar question. The short answer is: Reduce your stress, be affectionate toward your body, and let go of the false ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work, to create space in your life for how sex actually works. The full answer is… the rest of this book. My suggestion to Laurie was to stop trying to make herself want sex for a while. Take away the performance pressure. She did not follow my advice—not right away, anyway. What she tried instead was a clever shift in context, which is what the next chapter is about. To put it in terms of the garden metaphor I used in chapter 1, your accelerator and brakes are characteristics of the soil in your garden. So are your genitals and the rest of your body and brain. The innate sensitivity of your accelerator and brakes influences how your garden grows—which species of plants will thrive, how densely you can plant them—but other factors can have at least as much influence. Water, sun, choice of plants, even the addition of fertilizer—in other words, everything from stress to love to trust to a vibrator—can all influence the abundance of your garden. You can’t change the soil itself, but you can augment it and you can make smart decisions about how to manage it. And that’s what chapter 3 is about. tl;drYour brain has a sexual “accelerator” that responds to “sex-related” stimulation—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain has learned to associate with sexual arousal.