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.

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• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 58 < Lecture 8  The Conversion of Paul `The first way concerned his eschatological conclusions—that is, his understanding of the end times. Paul had already thought that at the end of this age, which was coming soon, there would be a judgment of God on the powers of evil, and all the dead would be raised alive again. y What was he to think when someone had been raised alive again? The resurrection had started. That’s why Paul maintained throughout his letters that he and his readers were living at the end of history. `The second shift in his views concerned his Christological conclusions— that is, his understanding of Christ. yBecause it was specifically Jesus who was raised, Paul concluded that Christ really must have been the one specially favored by God. Christ was not a mere mortal but was divine. `The third shift in his views concerned his soteriological conclusions—that is, his understanding of salvation. yIf Christ was the one chosen by God, but he had suffered such an ignominious death, it must have been part of God’s plan. yThat meant God wanted his messiah to die, contrary to all human expectation. And by raising Jesus from the dead, God showed that the death was meaningful. yIn the Jewish as well as the pagan tradition, living creatures were killed for God as sacrifices. If God wanted Jesus to die, his death must have been a sacrifice. yPaul concluded that just as animals were sacrificed in the temple to restore a right relationship with God, so too with Jesus. He was the perfect sacrifice God himself had provided to atone for the sins of others. `Paul’s fourth shift in thinking involved his ecclesiological conclusions— that is, his understanding of the people of God. ySince the death of Jesus was the sacrifice that brought about salvation, it was only by trusting that God had made this sacrifice that a person could be brought into a restored relationship with God. < 59 < Lecture 8  The Conversion of Paul yThat means nothing else mattered for salvation. For Paul that especially meant it was not Jewish law that mattered ultimately before God. It was the death and resurrection of his son. yThat also meant that salvation could come to anyone, whether they were Jewish or not. A person did not have to convert to Judaism to accept the salvation God had provided to the world. `It was this realization that transformed Paul’s life, convincing him that he had to take the message to the world at large. Others would work to convince Jews. He would take the gospel to non-Jews, so he called himself the apostle to the Gentiles. Reading Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, chapter 2. Harrill, Paul the Apostle. Meeks, The First Urban Christians. Sanders, Paul. Questions ̧How important was the conversion of Paul for the history of the Christian faith? What difference(s) did he make?

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  It’s not a question of Luke fending him off. You are witnessing the arrogance of the blessed, and Bader is merely the person on the other end of the exchange today. For all the talk of the crucial difference a weight class can make, that difference is often neutralized by the truly great wrestler. Dan is no less a load at 145 pounds than he would have been at 140. He will win again. It is the pool of candidates to finish second that has changed. If you were going to draw up a blueprint for the construction of a wrestling body, Dan’s shape would be one of the first you would reach for. He is squat; with the same low center of gravity his father has, Dan is virtually impossible to knock off stride. His muscles are in all the right places, with tremendous strength through his legs and hips and a chiseled upper body. He is big enough to hold off other 140-pound wrestlers who occasionally appear at first glance to outsize him. His forearms are taut, thick ropes of strength. And his neck, while not a thing of artistic beauty, is of itself a brilliant wrestling tool. Dan sometimes pummels opponents into submission almost strictly by using that neck strength to drive his chin into their backs or threaten to puncture that vulnerable soft spot between the shoulder and the clavicle. (Try it sometime. You’d be surprised how quickly you can make somebody cry uncle.) And yet he is not invincible. As a freshman, Dan suffered his one defeat to a fellow Iowa high school wrestler; he was beaten fair by a very good opponent named Cory Kalina, a kid from Belle Plain. Dan can tell you about that match today, in detail, at the slightest prompting. He was just starting out in his high school career, and Cory was a senior; and it hurt like hell to lose. Dan remembers vividly the feeling of losing and the rare sense of being outmaneuvered on the mat, the flushing of his cheeks at the defeat, all of it. And yet that match, the loss to Kalina, was the match at which it first really occurred to Dan that he could compete at the high school level—“compete,” naturally, meaning “win.” He was a punk ninth-grader losing to a senior—he barely knew what he was doing, in hindsight—and yet he was mixing it up with the older boy, staying close. “Once you go to the next level, from junior high to high school—I was good in junior high, but what am I in high school? I didn’t really know until I wrestled that match,” Dan says. “It’ll probably be the same way in college. I really won’t know where I’m at until I wrestle in competition somewhere.” Dan’s first title, at 119 pounds, came later that freshman year only after he had defeated a brutally tough wrestler in the championship match at the State Finals—Cory Kalina.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 57 < Lecture 8  The Conversion of Paul ` Paul did not know Jesus personally. He was raised in a different part of the Mediterranean. That was outside of Israel, probably in a Jewish community in a major urban area, possibly in what is now southeastern Turkey. His native language was Greek, not Aramaic. ` Evidence indicates that Paul became a follower of Jesus only after he had been an unusually ardent opponent of the faith. It appears that at first, he considered the very central claim of Jesus’s followers completely ludicrous: the idea that a man crucified by his enemies was God’s powerful messiah. y For most Jews, as this was just the opposite of what was supposed to happen to the messiah. y He was supposed to destroy his enemies, not be tortured to death by them. ` Then there occurred a complete turnaround that altered the course of history. From the time frame that Paul himself sets out in his letters, it appears his conversion must have occurred something like three years after the death of Jesus. y He situates the event around Damascus in the context of his persecuting Christians. In one place, he says that he had a revelation: “God revealed his Son to me” (Galatians 1:16). y In other places, he says that he saw Jesus alive. Examples include the phrases “Christ appeared to me” (from 1 Corinthians 15:8) and “I have seen the Lord” (from 1 Corinthians 9:1). y These references are apparently to the same event. ` Paul concluded that Jesus was alive, even though he knew full well Jesus had been executed several years earlier. As an apocalyptic Jew, Paul could only draw one conclusion: If Jesus was dead but now was alive, God must have raised him from the dead. ` Once Paul thought that, he completely changed his mind about a number of things, in highly significant ways. He did not stop being an apocalyptic Jew, but there are four big ways Paul’s views changed.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 58 < Lecture 8  The Conversion of Paul ` The first way concerned his eschatological conclusions—that is, his understanding of the end times. Paul had already thought that at the end of this age, which was coming soon, there would be a judgment of God on the powers of evil, and all the dead would be raised alive again. y What was he to think when someone had been raised alive again? The resurrection had started. That’s why Paul maintained throughout his letters that he and his readers were living at the end of history. ` The second shift in his views concerned his Christological conclusions— that is, his understanding of Christ. y Because it was specifically Jesus who was raised, Paul concluded that Christ really must have been the one specially favored by God. Christ was not a mere mortal but was divine. ` The third shift in his views concerned his soteriological conclusions—that is, his understanding of salvation. y If Christ was the one chosen by God, but he had suffered such an ignominious death, it must have been part of God’s plan. y That meant God wanted his messiah to die, contrary to all human expectation. And by raising Jesus from the dead, God showed that the death was meaningful. y In the Jewish as well as the pagan tradition, living creatures were killed for God as sacrifices. If God wanted Jesus to die, his death must have been a sacrifice. y Paul concluded that just as animals were sacrificed in the temple to restore a right relationship with God, so too with Jesus. He was the perfect sacrifice God himself had provided to atone for the sins of others. ` Paul’s fourth shift in thinking involved his ecclesiological conclusions— that is, his understanding of the people of God. y Since the death of Jesus was the sacrifice that brought about salvation, it was only by trusting that God had made this sacrifice that a person could be brought into a restored relationship with God.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  For me, Trendy Writer coming to town was the beginning of something. It was the beginning of my authentic Christianity. Trendy Writer, Khwaja Khandir, and Tony the Beat Poet were the seeds of change. I knew Christ, but I was not a practicing Christian. I had the image of a spiritual person, but I was bowing down to the golden cows of religiosity and philosophy. It was one of those enlightenments, one of those honest looks in the mirror in which there is no forgetting who you are. It was a moment without make-believe. After that moment, things started to get interesting. 9 Change New Starts at Ancient Faith THERE IS A TIME WHEN EVERY PERSON WHO encounters Jesus, who believes Jesus is the Son of God, decides that they will spend their life following Him. Some people, like the Apostle Paul, make this decision the minute they meet Him, the minute they become a Christian. Others, like the Apostle Peter, endure years of half-hearted commitment and spiritual confusion before leaping in with all their passion. Still others may enjoy some benefits of God’s love and grace without entering into the true joy of a marriage with their maker. Not long after I graduated from high school, I found myself leading a college group at a large church just outside Houston. I cherished the role, at first, because it was a place of honor. I studied the Bible for hours, putting talks together that students enjoyed. It started as a substitute teaching job. The college minister couldn’t be there one week, so he asked me to fill in. When I was asked to speak again, I jumped at the chance like Homer Simpson at a donut. Pretty soon I was teaching all the time. I swam in the attention and the praise, I loved it, I lusted for it, I almost drowned in it. The more attention I got, the stranger I became. I was on my way to having my own religious television show. Okay, that’s a bit much, but you know what I mean. I was a smiler, a hand-shaker, a baby-kisser, a speech-giver. I said things like “God be with you,” and “Lord bless you.” I used clichés like a bad novelist. I led the college group for a couple of years and enjoyed it at first, but it wasn’t long before I felt like a phony. I got tired of myself. I didn’t like to hear my own voice because I sounded like a talk-show host. One afternoon I made an appointment with my pastor and told him I was leaving, that I was going into the world to get my thinking straight. “How long will you be gone?” he asked. “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Are you okay?” “I think so. Maybe,” I told him. “Can you talk about it?” He looked concerned. “No, not really.” “I understand you need a break. Why don’t you take a couple weeks off.”

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  His mother, she began, and then interrupted herself, as she would do often, saying Do you already know this? But my father’s past had always been opaque to me, he spoke of it so seldom and it seemed so complex, a tangle of half brothers and cousins, too many to track. And he didn’t speak to most of them; Bad blood, he would say whenever their names came up, cutting off any conversation. Do you know how young she was, my sister said, when our father was born she was still just a kid, only fourteen, can you imagine? When our father started school they rode the bus together, she for her final year and he for his first. There were other children too, three sons, and a daughter who died, none of them by the same father. She was a scandal, my sister said, can you imagine what it must have been like for her in that place? I couldn’t reconcile what G. said with the small woman I had known, always at a remove, who seemed so proper and content when we visited her once a year or so in the house she shared with a man I thought of as my grandfather, though I guess I knew he wasn’t, or not by blood, since my father only ever called him by his first name. My sister was right, she must have been a scandal in that town, and to her parents something worse than a scandal. They were the ones who took care of my father, especially his grandmother, who alone among his relations was spared his future scorn. He always called her Ma, the single syllable, and even now I have no other name for the woman I remember seeing only once, slight to the point of disappearance, with her beautiful white hair spread about her on the sheets in whatever hospital or facility she had been taken to to die in. I don’t remember what time of year it was, or how far we had traveled, or why I was alone with my father, who lifted me up to set me gingerly on the bed next to that woman who was impossibly old, older than anyone I had ever seen, and whose image, though so much else is lost, remains vivid to me as day.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 125 < Lecture 19  The Conversion of Constantine ` The next year, Constantius was dying. His junior colleague was named Severus, and he would ascend to the senior role. The new junior emperor to take Severus’s place was to be chosen based purely on merit and was not to be related to any of the other ruling three emperors. However, in a surprise move prior to his death, Constantius appointed his son Constantine for the position. ` The original senior emperor of the west, Maximian, had a son, Maxentius, who wanted the imperial rule for himself. Maxentius took imperial office by seizing power over the city of Rome itself. ` He called himself an emperor and claimed he was on equal status with the other four. Over some years, the two senior emperors of east (Galen) and west (Severus) both unsuccessfully tried to dislodge Maxentius from his fortified city. Severus eventually died in the effort. He was not replaced. Constantine ruled the west alone. ` Finally in 312 CE, Constantine marched his army across the Alps and made for Rome. In anticipation of the assault, Maxentius had all the bridges across the Tiber that provided access to the city destroyed. ` However, he then made a poor decision: He decided to come out in force to face Constantine’s army in the field. With the bridges out, there was no way to cross the Tiber north to favorable battlegrounds. ` Maxentius had a temporary pontoon bridge build next to the recently destroyed Milvian Bridge, marched his army across it, and engaged in battle. Constantine’s forces outmaneuvered him. His soldiers were backed up against the river. They desperately tried to cross the pontoons in a beeline for the city, but under the crushing weight, the bridge collapsed. ` Many of the soldiers, and Maxentius himself, drowned in the Tiber. Constantine entered Rome the next day as its ruler and as the emperor of the entire western half of the empire. ` As significant as the military event was in the political history of Rome, there was another outcome that was far more significant for the history of the West, down to today: Constantine believed that it was the Christian God who had assisted him and ensured his victory over Maxentius. He later claimed that it was on that day—October 28, 312—that he converted to become a Christian. The empire was never the same again.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug is so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction. In the spring of my year at Graceland, when the ground was beginning to dry at Laurelhurst Park, a friend and I traveled to Salem to hear Brennan Manning speak. Manning is a former Catholic priest and a wonderful writer who has struggled with alcoholism and speaks frankly about matters of Christian spirituality. We sat so close I could see the blue in Brennan’s eyes and that quality of sincerity you find in people who have turned trial into service. Brennan grew up in New York and speaks with a slight East Coast bite that has been sanded down by years of smoking. An ear has to work a bit to keep his pace. He opened his talk with the story of Zacchaeus. Brennan talked about how an entire town, with their ridicule and hatred, could not keep the little man from oppressing them through the extravagant financial gains he made as a tax collector. Christ walked through town, Brennan said, and spotted the man. Christ told Zacchaeus that He would like to have a meal with him. In the single conversation Christ had with Zacchaeus, Brennan reminded us, Jesus spoke affirmation and love, and the tax collector sold his possessions and made amends to those he had robbed. It was the affection of Christ, not the brutality of a town, that healed Zacchaeus. Manning went on to speak of the great danger of a harsh word, the power of unlove to deteriorate a person’s heart and spirit, and how, as representatives of the grace and love of God, our communication should be seasoned with love and compassion. While Manning was speaking, I was being shown myself, and I felt like God was asking me to change. I was being asked to walk away from the lies I believed about the world being about me. I had been communicating unlove to my housemates because I thought they were not cooperating with the meaning of life, that meaning being my desire and will and choice and comfort. There was nothing fun about going home that night. I went with new eyes, seeing my housemates as people. For the first time I saw them as people, and I could sense God’s love for them. I had been living with God’s prized possessions, His children, the dear ones to Him, and had considered them a bother to this earth that was mine, this space and time that were mine.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 59 < Lecture 8  The Conversion of Paul y That means nothing else mattered for salvation. For Paul that especially meant it was not Jewish law that mattered ultimately before God. It was the death and resurrection of his son. y That also meant that salvation could come to anyone, whether they were Jewish or not. A person did not have to convert to Judaism to accept the salvation God had provided to the world. ` It was this realization that transformed Paul’s life, convincing him that he had to take the message to the world at large. Others would work to convince Jews. He would take the gospel to non-Jews, so he called himself the apostle to the Gentiles. Reading Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, chapter 2. Harrill, Paul the Apostle. Meeks, The First Urban Christians. Sanders, Paul. Questions ¸ How important was the conversion of Paul for the history of the Christian faith? What difference(s) did he make? < 60 < TABLE OF CONTENTS Lecture 9 Paul: The Apostle Paul: The Apostle of the Gentilesof the Gentiles T he conversion of the apostle Paul marked a major turning point in the history of earliest Christianity. Paul was almost immediately convinced that faith in Jesus alone brought salvation. This did not require adherence to the Jewish law. That opened the door for Gentiles to enter the faith. Paul’s Self-Understanding ` Paul’s conversion played a key role in his self-understanding, especially in how he understood his own role in the history of salvation. Prior to becoming a follower of Jesus, Paul was completely committed to the Jewish scriptures. ` One particularly influential writing for Paul was the book of the prophet Isaiah. Some of the most important passages of Isaiah describe a time in the future when the message of salvation that had come to the Jews would go forth to the entire world, when Gentiles too would flock to worship the God of Israel and accept the salvation that he brings. ` Isaiah also indicated that God would raise up a messenger to bring the future news of this salvation far and wide throughout the world. This messenger would enlighten the gentiles, leading to worldwide salvation.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I heard him shifting his weight in his chair, and then he exhaled, it wasn’t quite a sigh, it wasn’t angry or sad but emotionless, and he spoke for the first time since his greeting. If, he said, staying just a moment longer the sentence he would pronounce, if what you say about yourself is true, you’re not welcome in my house. It was my turn to be silent now, at first because I didn’t understand what he meant, and then because I did. I had a sense of something beginning, of a great weight dislodged and moving in the single direction it could. What are you talking about, I said finally, and my father answered, he told me that they had found, my stepmother and he, a notebook in my room. I knew the notebook he meant, a journal I had started keeping not long before, in which I had written about K. and what I had felt in his room, what I had learned about myself there. I had been careful to hide the journal; if they had come across it it was because they had searched, though my father gave no account or explanation of this. They had found it and seen what I had written, he said simply, they had read it weeks ago. What they learned about me had brought the two of them together, I realized, they were a united front, and I imagined they had spent weeks plotting how best to use what they knew. I was sure it was my stepmother who had searched my room, my father would never have bothered, and as he spoke I realized how entirely I had played into her hand. Is it true, he asked when he had finished speaking, giving me a choice, or the semblance of a choice. He presented it to me as if it were something that might be spoken away and made right, but I couldn’t speak it away, I realized; to speak it away would have been to speak myself away, what else could it have meant, and so Yes, I said, laying claim to myself, it is true, yes.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  There was a gate in the wall, two large wooden wings interrupting the stone. It was closed, but in each of these doors there was an opening in the shape of a cross, and as the ringing of the bell stopped, I peered through at the grounds within, a series of small buildings and paths through green spaces. It was a community, not a church but a monastery, which predated the district and must have been built when the neighborhood was nothing but countryside, when Sofia must have seemed at once accessible and comfortably far away. I had heard a summons for prayer, then, though I saw no movement within. There are monasteries all over the country, in most of which a single monk keeps watch, or two, they’re dying out here like everywhere else; but there was still someone ringing a summons for prayer, even if no one was around to answer it. I set off again, intending to follow the path up to the road and then to find my way home. I had decided not to go back to school, I would go straight home, but after another turn in the path I stopped again. There was a clearing to the left and at the side of the path a horse was grazing, still hitched to its cart. Horses are common in Mladost, gypsies use them on their rounds, but I had never seen one unattended before. There was no one in sight; maybe someone had been called by the summons after all. It was a pitiful creature, sickly and thin, its skin hanging loose over protruding ribs; it might have been a portrait of misery, I thought as I stepped closer, but it was grazing sedately enough, pulling at the sparse tufts of grass in the rocky soil. I watched it for a few minutes, and then I laid my hand on its flank, which was dark and broiling with sun, almost too hot to touch. I felt it give a sudden sigh, a quick unburdening of breath as it shifted its frame a little. It wasn’t tied up, I saw, it could have wandered off anytime it chose; but there was nowhere for it to go, of course, and the cart I supposed was heavy, and there was something however meager to be had there where it stood. III POX When the knock came, quick and assured, I heard it without surprise, my hand steady at the stove where I was warming the simple meal I had made. It wasn’t late, despite the darkness beyond the windows at my back; it was February, the dark came early, and what had been an unnervingly mild season had turned sharp and bitter, the coldest winter on record, with a fierce wind that burned whatever skin one left uncovered.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And the child who was my father yelled at him to come, that the man was hurting his mother and his brother, that he (my father) was frightened, and his grandfather grabbed one of the tools around him, a heavy wrench, my sister said, and set off to the field and approached the man and brought the wrench down on him, beating the man who had been beating his daughter, not furiously but with an eerie calm, repeatedly, as his daughter cried for him to stop and my father felt a different fear. So did he kill him too, my other sister asked, but G. couldn’t answer us; like all of her stories this one was patchworked and incomplete. But she did know that my father’s grandfather bore a mark from that day, that the palm of his hand was welted and scarred where he had gripped the wrench, which had been resting on the engine and was red-hot, she said. It didn’t even slow him down, she went on, can you imagine, for the rest of his life he was disfigured, the fingers on that hand were always a little bit curled, he couldn’t open them all the way. But when he grabbed it it didn’t even slow him down, he just took it in his hand like this—and here she raised her own hand, lifting it with her palm up and her fingers curled around an imaginary wrench, turning her wrist slightly as if it were dragged down by the weight of it. And though nothing in her story had been familiar to me I felt a sudden vertigo at the sight of it; I could see my father making that gesture, the very same, and I knew I must have heard the story before, that he must have told it to me when I was a child. It was my story too, I realized as my sister went on, and I wondered how much else I had forgotten about my father, how much I might still remember, how much was totally lost. As I sat by the water in Mladost, I held two images of my father in mind, weighing them against what I felt: in one he was a child, vulnerable and finally blameless as all children are blameless, and in the other he was old and in need and trying to repair what he had broken.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I have a very good actress friend. I began to watch her, as if she were going to play the part. How would she walk into the door with groceries, and how would she look at their child: how would she look at her husband whom she loves, whom she understands, whom she knows to be a murderer? How would she do it? And I began to sec that there would be very small things she would do and very peculiar things that she would say to reveal her torment. I began to sec that this is what we all do, all of the time, all of us , including you and me. Tl:!_at whatever is rcallv drivi1�g u� i-s what ca!!_!!£vt;_r.1 _ n�\'cr, never be hiddc_ n aqg. _ i�_thcre _t Q sc0f onc_ �-m�JQZ_c it. The trouble is, of course, that most of us arc afraid of that level of reality. It seems to threaten us, because we think we can be safe. And this brings me to something much deeper; for when you 'vc gotten this far, you sec something which every writer is really seeing over and over and over again, at pressures of varying intensity. And he is reall_v telling the same story over and over and over again, trying different ways to tell it and 712 OTH ER ESS AYS trying to get more and more and more of it out. As I write this, I am trying to tell it in a play set in the deep South. But one afternoon in Harlem I under stood something more about n1y sfoi-)' and about myscl ( My br�ther and som;m her people andn1),-nq)lie\v were on-the block where I grew up. It hasn't changed much in these last 38 years of progress. And we also visited a fu neral parlor nearby. A boy had died, a boy of 27 who had been on the needle and who was a friend of my nephew's. I don't know why this struck me so much to day, but it did. Perhaps because my nephew was there ! don't know. We walked to the block where we grew up. There 's a railing on that block, an iron railing with spikes. It's green now, but when I was a child, it was black. And at one point in my childhood-I must have been very, very young -I watched a drunken man falling down, being teased by chil dren, falling next to that railing. I remember the way his blood looked against the black, and for some reason I've never for gotten that man. Today I began to sec why.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Cassius says: "THIS NE TTLE, DA NGER .. " Stoop then, and JVash.-Hmv many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accent s yet ttnknoJVn! 689 What I suddenly heard, for the first time, was manifold. It was the voice of lo nely , dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose lif e had never been real for me before-! suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him. But beneath and be yond that voice I also heard a note yet more rigorous and impersonal-and contemporary: that "lofty scene," in all its blood and necessary folly , its blind and necessary pain, was thrown into a perspective which has never left my mind. Ju st so, indeed, is the heedless state overthrown by men, who, in order to overthrow it, have had to achieve a desperate single mindedness. And this single-mindedness, which we think of (why?) as ennobling, also operates, and much more surely, to distort and diminish a man-to distort and diminish us all even, or perhaps especially, those whose needs and whose en ergy made the overthrow of the state inevitable, necessary and just. And the terrible thing about this pl ay, for me-it is not necessarily my favorite pl ay, whatever that means, but it is the play which I first, so to speak, discovered-is the tension it relentlessly sustains between individual ambition, self -con scious, deluded, idealistic or corrupt, and the blind, mindless passion which drives the individual no less than it drives the mob. "I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinn a the poet ... I am not Cinna the conspirator"-that cry rings in my ears. And the mob's response: "Tear him for his bad verses!" And yet-though one howled with Cinna and felt his terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at once howling and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the only receptacles of nobilit y to be found in all the universe. But the pla y does not even sug gest that we have the perception to know evil from good or that such a distinction can ever be clear: "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones .... " Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world-once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is OTH ER ESS AYS not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is-some of the self-protective veils between oneself and rc alit)• begin to tall away. It is probably of some significance, though we cannot pursue it here, that my first real apprehen sion of Shakespeare came when I was living in France, and thinking and speaking in French.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He seemed to say it guilelessly enough; but as he did so I saw Tootsie smile and give a sideways glance at Percy - and, worse! saw Kitty blush and turn her face away - and all at once I understood what they all knew, and cursed to think I had not guessed it sooner. A half-hour later, when Walter presented himself at the parlour door, offering a gleaming cheek to Kitty and crying ‘Kiss me, Kate!’, I didn’t smile, but only bit my lip, and wondered.He was a little in love with her; perhaps, indeed, rather more than a little. I saw it now - saw the dampness of the looks he sometimes turned upon her, and the awkwardness of the glances which, more hastily, he turned away. I saw how he seized every foolish opportunity to kiss her hand, or pluck her sleeve, or place his arm, heavy and clumsy with desire, about her slender shoulders; I heard his voice catch, sometimes, or grow thick, when he addressed her. I saw and heard it all, now, because - it was the very reason that had kept me blind and deaf to it before! - because his passion was my own, which I had long grown used to thinking unremarkable, and right.I almost pitied him; I almost loved him. I did not hate him - or if I did, it was only as one loathes the looking-glass, that shows one one’s imperfect form in strict and fearful clarity. Nor did I now begin to resent his presence on those strolls and visits that I should otherwise have made with Kitty on my own. He was my rival, of sorts; but in some queer way it was almost easier to love her in his company, than out of it.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Upon arriving home DeLoy considered the enormity of what had just occurred: “Uncle Rulon spoke to God on a continual basis. All his wisdom and knowledge supposedly came straight from the Lord. But in a matter of moments it had become apparent to me that this man wasn’t really communicating with God, or he would have known that what he accused me of was a lie. Right then and there I decided to leave the Work, even though I knew it would mean the end of my life as I knew it.” When DeLoy failed to show up for the weekly priesthood meeting on the following Sunday, within twenty-four hours Uncle Rulon dispatched someone to DeLoy’s house to take away his wives and children. According to UEP dogma, wives do not belong to their husbands, nor do children belong to their parents; all are property of the priesthood and may be claimed at any time. Uncle Rulon decreed that DeLoy’s wives and progeny were to be given to another, worthier man immediately. But both of DeLoy’s wives declined to leave him. Uncle Rulon was flabbergasted. “The priesthood means far more than family or anything else,” explains DeLoy. “For my wives to defy Uncle Rulon and stick with me, even though I was going straight to hell—that was unheard of.” DeLoy’s spouses, and all his children except the three oldest, thus became apostates, too. In Colorado City, the faithful are taught that apostates are more wicked than Gentiles, or even mainline Mormons. * In a sermon preached on July 16, 2000, Bishop Warren Jeffs (Uncle Rulon’s son and heir apparent) emphasized that an apostate “is the most dark person on earth.” Apostates, he explained, have “turned traitor on the priesthood and their own existence, and they are led about by their master: Lucifer. . . . Apostates are literally tools of the devil.” When DeLoy apostatized, relatives who remained in the religion were forbidden to speak to him, his wives, or his apostate children ever again. And although DeLoy had built and paid for his home, the UEP owns all the land within the city limits, including the lot on which DeLoy’s house was built. Uncle Rulon and the UEP have filed a legal action to take possession of DeLoy’s house and are currently trying to evict him from Colorado City.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  But Abdulla Sheth was not the man to let me sail without a send-off. He gave a farewell party in my honour at Sydenham. It was proposed to spend the whole day there. Whilst I was turning over the sheets of some of the newspapers I found there, I chanced to see a paragraph in a corner of one of them under the caption ‘Indian franchise’. It was with reference to the Bill then before the House of Legislature, which sought to deprive the Indians of their right to elect members of the Natal Legislative Assembly. I was ignorant of the Bill, and so were the rest of the guests who had assembled there. I inquired of Abdulla Sheth about it. He said: ‘What can we understand in these matters? We can only understand things that affect our trade. As you know all our trade in the Orange Free State has been swept away. We agitated about it, but in vain. We are after all lame men, being unlettered. We generally take in newspapers simply to ascertain the daily market rates, etc. What can we know of legislation? Our eyes and ears are the European attorneys here.’ ‘But,’said I, ‘there are so many young Indians born and educated here, Do not they help you?’ ‘They!’ exclaimed Abdulla Sheth in despair. ‘They never care to come to us, and to tell you the truth, we care less to recognize them. Being Christians, they are under the thumb of the white clergymen, who in their turn are subject to the Government.’ This opened my eyes. I felt that this class should be claimed as our own. Was this the meaning of Christianity? Did they cease to be Indians because they had become Christians? But I was on the point of returning home and hesitated to express what was passing through my mind in this matter. I simply said to Abdulla Sheth: ‘This Bill, if it passes into law, will make our lot extremely difficult. It is the first nail into our coffin. It strikes at the root of our self-respect.’ ‘It may,’ echoed Sheth Abdulla. ‘I will tell you the genesis of the franchise question. We knew nothing about it. But Mr. Escombe, one of our best attorneys, whom you know, put the idea into our heads. It happened thus. He is a great fighter, and there being no love lost between, him and the Wharf Engineer, he feared that the Engineer might deprive him of his votes and defeat him at the election. So he acquainted us with our position, and at his instance we all registered ourselves as voters, and voted for him. You will now see how the franchise has not for us the value that you attach to it. But we understand what you say. Well, then, what is your advice?’ The other guests were listening to this conversation with attention. One of them said: ‘Shall I tell you what should be done?

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Whenever I said so, the grownups would laugh at first, but then, wondering if they were not being tricked, they would look distastefully at the pallid face of that unchildlike child. Sometimes I happened to say so in the presence of callers who were not close friends of the family; then my grandmother, fearing I would be taken for an idiot, would interrupt in a sharp voice and tell me to go somewhere else and play. While they were still smiling from their laughter, the grownups would usually set about trying to confute me with some sort of scientific explanation. Trying to devise explanations that a child's mind could grasp, they would always start babbling with no little dramatic zeal, saying that a baby's eyes are not yet open at birth, or that even if his eyes are completely open, a newborn baby could not possibly see things clearly enough to remember them. "Isn't that right?" they would say, shaking the small shoulder of the still-unconvinced child. But just then they would seem to be struck by the idea that they were on the point of being taken in by the child's tricks: Even if we think he's a child, we mustn't let our guard down. The little rascal is surely trying to trick us into telling him about "that," and then what is to keep him from asking, with still more childlike innocence: "Where did I come from? How was I born?" And in the end they would look me over again, silently, with a thin smile frozen on their lips, showing that for some reason, which I could never understand, their feelings had been deeply hurt. But their fears were groundless. I had not the slightest desire to ask about "that." Even if I had wanted to ask, I was so fearful of hurting adult feelings that the thought of using trickery would never have occurred to me. No matter how they explained, no matter how they laughed me away, I could not but believe I remembered my own birth. Perhaps the basis for my memory was something I had heard from someone who had been present at the time, or perhaps it was only my own willful imagination. However that may have been, there was one thing I was convinced I had seen clearly, with my own eyes. That was the brim of the basin in which I received my first bath.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  The’Rebellion’ did not occupy me for more than six weeks, but this brief period proved to be a very important epoch in my life. The importance of vows grew upon me more clearly than ever before. I realized that a vow, far from closing the door to real freedom, opened it. Up to this time I had not met with success because the will had been lacking, because I had had no faith in myself, no faith in the grace of God, and therefore, my mind had been tossed on the boisterous sea of doubt. I realized that in refusing to take a vow man was drawn into temptation, and that to be bound by a vow was like a passage from libertinism to a real monogamous marriage. ‘I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows,’ is the mentality of weakness and betrays a subtle desire for the thing to be avoided. Or where can be the difficulty in making a final decision ? I vow to flee from the serpent which I know will bite me, I do not simply make an effort to flee from him. I know that mere effort may mean certain death. Mere effort means ignorance of the certain fact that the serpent is bound to kill me. The fact, therefore, that I could rest content with an effort only, means that I have not yet clearly realized the necessity of definite action.’But supposing my views are changed in the future, how can I bind myself by a vow ? ‘ Such a doubt often deters us. But that doubt also betrays a lack of clear perception that a particular thing must be renounced. That is why Nishkulanand has sung ‘Renunciatfon without aversion is not lasting.’ Where therefore the desire is gone, a vow of renunciation is the natural and inevitable fruit. 64BRAHM ACHARYA - IIAfter full discussion and mature deliberation I took the vow in 1906. I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of taking the vow. She had no objection. But I had great difficulty in making the final resolve. I had not the necessary strength. How was I to control my passions? The elimination of carnal relationship with one’s wife seemed then a strange thing. But I launched forth with faith in the sustaining power of God. As I look back upon the twenty years of the vow, I am filled with pleasure and wonderment. The more or less successful practice of self-control had been going on since 1901. But the freedom and joy that came to me after taking the vow had never been experienced before 1906. Before the vow I had been open to being overcome by temptation at any moment. Now the vow was a sure shield against temptation. The great potentiality of brahmacharya daily became more an more patent to me. The vow was taken when I was in Phoenix.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  The teaching of the Bible was to him child’s play. Its beauty lay in its simplicity. Let all, men, women and children, he would say, have faith in Jesus and his sacrifice, and their sins were sure to be redeemed. This friend revived my memory of the Plymouth Brother of Pretoria. The religion that imposed any moral restrictions was of the whole of this discussion. Why should I not eat meat, or for that matter beef? Had not god created all the lower animals for the enjoyment of mankind as, for instance, he had created the vegetable kingdom? These questions inevitably drew us into religious discussion. We could not convince each other. I was confirmed in my opinion that religion and morality were synonymous. The Captain had no doubt about the correctness of his opposite conviction. At the end of twenty-four days the pleasant voyage came to a close, and admiring the beauty of the Hooghly, I landed at Calcutta. The same day I took the train for Bombay. 52IN INDIAOn my way to Bombay the train stopped at Allahabad for forty-five minutes. I decided to utilize the interval for a drive through the town. I also had to purchase some medicine at a chemist’s shop. The chemist was half asleep, and took an unconscionable time in dispensing the medicine, with the result that when I reached the station, the train had just started. The Station Master had kindly detained the train one minute for my sake, but not seeing me coming, had carefully ordered my luggage to be taken out of the train. I took a room at Kellner’s, and decided to start work there and then. I had heard a good deal about The Pioneer published from Allahabad, and I had understood it to be an opponent of Indian aspirations. I have an impression that Mr. Chesney Jr. was the editor at that time. I wanted to secure the help of every party, so I wrote a note to Mr. Chesney, telling him how I had missed the train, and asking for an appointment so as to enable me to leave the next day. He immediately gave me one, at which I was very happy especially when I found that he gave me a patient hearing. He promised to notice in his paper anything that I might write, but added that he could not promise to endorse all the Indian demands, inasmuch as he was bound to understand and give due weight to the viewpoint of the Colonials as well. ‘It is enough,’ I said, ‘that you should study the question and discuss it in your paper. I ask and desire nothing but the barest justice that is due to us.’ The rest of the day was spent in having a look round admiring the magnificent confluence of the three rivers, the Triveni, and planning the work before me.