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 Argonauts (2015)

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

• From The Argonauts (2015)

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

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

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

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  H e m u s t l e a r n t o r i s e a b o v e p a r t i s a n s h i p a n d b e c o m e a “ p a r t y o f your own.” V. M o s t i m p o r t a n t a s a w a y o f d e a l i n g with exile, Dante must write the poem that will tell his readers what he has seen. A. T h u s , t h e Commedia itself is commissioned in this canto. B. I t i s t h e p o e m i t s e l f , t h i s p o e m , t h e Commedia, that will allow Dante to transmute his exile into a pilgrimage. C. D a n t e m u s t u s e t h e p o e m t o p r o p h e t i c a l l y d e n o u n c e a l l t h e e v i l s h e has learned about on his journey to the afterlife. His pilgrimage has given him a higher and wiser perspective. 1. D a n t e s h a r e s w i t h C a c c i a g u i d a h i s r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t h e m u s t n o t be timid when he writes about what he has seen. 2. L i k e a b i b l i c a l p r o p h e t , h e u n d e r stands that he must direct his words against those in the highest places, even though there is always a temptation to hold back. D. D a n t e r e a l i z e s t h a t h e i s w r i t i n g f o r t h o s e w h o w i l l “ l o o k b a c k a t these” as the old days.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But unless I draw attention to some of it, I may be oversimplifying, and the driver may resent my “simple” advice for being too simple by half when, stuck in a village somewhere, he reflects that a little complexity might actually have helped. I feel a bit like that with the present book. I set out to write a “simple” book about Jesus. But Jesus was not simple in his own time, and he is not simple now. One might have thought that it would be comparatively easy to take my earlier books, particularly Jesus and the Victory of God and The Challenge of Jesus, 1 and turn them into something quite “simple.” But I was surprised, in sketching out this book and then writing it, to discover how many new twists and turns I am now aware of that I did not deal with in those earlier works. It isn’t just that scholarship has moved on, though of course it has; this book, though, is not the place to explore those debates. It is, just as much, that I have spent most of the last decade working as a bishop in the Church of England, and, though in some popular imaginings bishops don’t have very much to do with Jesus, I found myself thinking, talking, and preaching about Jesus pretty much all the time. In particular, I was of course vitally interested in the way in which Jesus and the struggle to follow him might make a difference in real lives and real communities, from the old mining villages of County Durham, where I lived and worked from 2003 to 2010, right down to the corridors of power in Westminster. For most of that time I didn’t stop to ask how all that ministry, and the life of prayer and sacrament that sustained it, might be changing my view of Jesus. Now, however, when the car pulls up and someone says, “A simple question: tell me about Jesus,” I find myself wanting to explain about the river, the bridge, the high winds, the small towns, and the hills. I could just say, “Just start reading the gospels and try to follow Jesus,” and that might do the trick, like telling the traveler just to head west and south and hope for the best.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  These advance hints enable us to understand John’s explanation, the fullest in any of our accounts, of what is at stake when Jesus stands before the Roman governor. The scene in John 18–19 has the hallmarks of the kind of hearing we might expect in a Roman provincial court, and it is this confrontation that lies at the heart of both the political and the theological meaning of the kingdom of God. Jesus has announced God’s kingdom and has also embodied it in what he has been doing. But it is a different sort of kingdom from anything that Pilate has heard of or imagined: a kingdom without violence (18:36), a kingdom not from this world, but emphatically, through the work of Jesus, for this world. (The routine misunderstanding of the kingdom as “otherworldly” has been generated by the translation “My kingdom is not of this world”; but that is certainly not what John means, and it isn’t what Jesus meant either.) The Judaean leaders have a small part; we are still in this three-angled perfect storm, and this is where it reaches its height. But the main confrontation is between Jesus, representing God’s kingdom, and Pilate, representing the kingdoms of the world. The Judaean leaders, ultimately, cave in and accept the Roman way: “We have no king except Caesar” (19:15). But Jesus tells Pilate, in the teeth of his imperial skepticism, that he has come to bear witness to the truth.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Third, as we shall see, the explanation Jesus gave for what was going on was that something new was happening—something powerful, dramatic, different. If all he’d been doing was encouraging people to feel better about themselves and not actually transforming their real lives, there would have been no sign of anything new. There would have been nothing to explain. His explanations only make sense if the thing they are explaining is sufficiently startling to raise questions. Fourth, it may be time to be skeptical about skepticism itself. In Jesus’s own day, there were plenty of people who didn’t want to believe his message, because it would have challenged their own power or influence. It would have upset their own agenda. For the last two hundred years that’s been the mood in Western society too. By all means, people think, let Jesus be a soul doctor, making people feel better inside. Let him be a rescuer, snatching people away from this world to “heaven.” But don’t let him tell us about a God who actually does things in the world. We might have to take that God seriously, just when we’re discovering how to run the world our own way. Skepticism is no more “neutral” or “objective” than faith. It has thrived in the post-Enlightenment world, which didn’t want God (or, in many cases, anyone else either) to be king. Saying this doesn’t, of course, prove anything in itself. It just suggests that we keep an open mind and recognize that skepticism too comes with its own agenda. We should be prepared to follow where the story leads and see if these initially surprising bits of it make sense with the rest. To the voices that trumpet their support for a “supernatural” God doing “miracles” through his divine “Son,” I would just say, for the moment, “Be careful with your worldview. You’re in danger of reaffirming the very split-level cosmos that Jesus came to reunite.” Heralds of the King So where does the story lead? It leads straight to the announcement that Jesus was making: “God’s in charge now—and this is what it looks like!”

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

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

  I nodded vaguely, though I had little idea of what he meant. For me, epilepsy meant the grand mal seizures that I had seen in Jacob. I did not know that there could be any other kind. “Tell me, I know this was your first grand mal attack, but are you ever prone to fainting? Loss of consciousness—anything of that sort?” There was a moment when, as they say, the world stood still. I felt literally blank, and could not even begin to think what this might mean. There was a pause, and then I told him about the blackouts. “And you were about eighteen when this started?” Dr. Wolfe made a note and nodded, as if to himself. “This condition quite often appears in late adolescence—with the hormonal changes, you see. And the good nuns didn’t advise you to check these medically?” “No. We thought it was all due to emotional disturbance.” Dr. Wolfe sighed impatiently. “I do wish people wouldn’t play psychiatrist and make these facile assumptions!” he said, his lips taut with suppressed irritation. “It’s the current fashion to see every illness as psychosomatic, but epilepsy is a physical disease and needs physical treatment, though there are often quite traumatic emotional e fects. You see, I am interested in the fear that you say you experience, the distress, and the smell. This is what we call an aura, and it is associated with a particular kind of focal epilepsy, centered in the temporal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for the retention of memories, and for the senses of taste and smell.” So all that anguish about my feeble willpower had been entirely misdirected. I could have been as emotionally stolid as a sloth and it would have made no difference. I felt a dawning sense of vindication, but Dr. Wolfe’s next question took me completely by surprise. “Now—please don’t be afraid to speak honestly about this; nobody will think that you are mad or deranged in any way if the answer is yes, but have you ever had any hallucinatory experience, seen or heard things that aren’t there?” Again, the silence in the little consulting room vibrated and I sat, afraid almost to move or speak, in case the hope that I was beginning to feel should prove to be yet another delusion. But slowly, in response to his careful probing, I began to answer his questions. “And have you found things looking rather strange? Or have you done things without realizing it? Started to go to one place, perhaps, and ended up somewhere completely different?” Almost winded by the implications of what I was hearing, I answered, hesitantly at first, but then the words almost tumbled over one another in my eagerness to explain.

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

  I also knew that they could not begin to imagine my convent existence. Occasionally one of them would express astonishment if I inadvertently let something slip. “My nuns weren’t a bit like that!” Jane would insist stoutly. “Your lot must have been abnormally strict.” Pat would look even more bewildered, because she and I had lived with exactly the same community, but her perspective, as a secular, was different. “They were so modern and up-to-date, even sophisticated!” she would protest. “They drove cars, were starting to go to the cinema again, and were changing the habit!” Both girls would look at me reproachfully, because I was spoiling a cherished memory. Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as “particular friendships,” since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary. I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times with your arms in the form of a cross would seem sensationalist, exaggerated, and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence. So I did not speak of my old life to anybody, and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me. Much better out than in,” Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor, said decisively as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. “You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say, ‘Look, five children and a divorce!’ I shall still say that you were right to leave.”

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

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

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

  At best, they were simply foils to Jesus’ superior insight: they asked Jesus trick questions but failed to catch him out; they made obtuse and heartless remarks, which showed how impervious they were to true spiritual values. But now that I was thinking about these scenes in modern Israel, Judaism had moved from the periphery to the foreground, and made sense of the lives and careers of both Jesus and Paul. When we visited the Western Wall, the last relic of the temple planned by King Herod, which was nearing completion in Jesus’ lifetime, I stared fascinated at the crowds who were pressing forward to kiss the sacred stones. There were black-caftaned Orthodox, with their earlocks and huge fur hats, as well as men and women dressed in ordinary casual clothes. I watched a young Israeli soldier bind his tefillin to his arms with a thick strap as he bowed and prayed before the wall. Judaism was not the superseded faith of my blinkered meditations. It had a life and dynamism of its own, and was as multifarious as Christianity. It had continued to grow and develop, in ways that I had never considered, since Jesus had died in this city, some two thousand years ago. As I worked on the scripts, I was entering more and more deeply into a Jewish perspective. I was now engrossed in the books that Hyam Maccoby had recommended, trying to imagine the religious ambience which Paul and Jesus had imbibed. There were elements that were both familiar and, at the same time, revealingly different. Hyam had been right, of course. This truly was a religion of doing rather than believing, and the discipline of living according to the Law was, I could see, very similar to our observance of the rule in the convent. Or rather, in both cases, the ideal was the same. The 613 commandments of the Law brought God into the minutiae of daily life, whether one was eating, drinking, cooking, working, or making love. No activity, no matter how mundane, was without religious potential. Each was what Christians called a sacrament: it was an opportunity to encounter the divine, moment by moment. Every time a Jew observed one of the commandments (mitzvoth ), he or she was turning toward God, giving daily life a sacred orientation. Certainly, the Law could seem oppressive. Paul seemed to have found it so; it had ceased to project him into the divine presence, just as my convent rule had seemed stifling to me after a time.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But I have become convinced, the more I have read and studied and prayed the story of Jesus, that all these constructions need to be put within a larger one again—the larger one that the gospels themselves are trying to insist on and that seems to me exactly in line with the aims and motivations of Jesus himself. Somehow, Jesus’s death was seen by Jesus himself, and then by those who told and ultimately wrote his story, as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven. It was the ultimate Exodus event through which the tyrant was defeated, God’s people were set free and given their fresh vocation, and God’s presence was established in their midst in a completely new way for which the Temple itself was just an advance pointer. That is why, in John’s gospel, the “glory of God”—with all the echoes of the anticipated return of YHWH to Zion—is revealed in and through Jesus, throughout his public career, in the “signs” he performed, but fully and finally as he is “lifted up” on the cross. How can this be? How can the horrible, ugly, and brutal execution of a young prophet be the means of establishing God’s kingdom? What does it mean to say, as we have done throughout this book, that the point of the story is that God is now in charge, if the means by which that is accomplished is the death of the one who had gone about making it happen? There is of course much more that could be said on this subject. But, trying to boil it down and keep it simple, I think we can and must say at least this. In Jesus’s own understanding of the battle he was fighting, Rome was not the real enemy. Rome provided the great gale, and the distorted ambitions of Israel the high-pressure system, but the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin. The terrible thing is that this charge is true. All humans have indeed worshipped what is not divine and so have failed to reflect God’s image into the world. They, and creation, are therefore subject to corruption and death. At this level the Accuser is absolutely right.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But with Matthew 13 (and the parallels) something else is going on. Here we are faced not so much with “allegory” in some technical sense, but with something much more like an apocalyptic vision . As often, the book of Daniel is important here. In Daniel 2, the king has a dream, and Daniel first tells him the dream and then, point by point, interprets it: four kingdoms will all come crashing down and be replaced by a great new kingdom that will last forever. Another dream and its interpretation are provided in Daniel 4 (Nebuchadnezzar’s madness); then another strange vision, with a point-by-point interpretation, in chapter 5 (Belshazzar’s feast). Then, in chapter 7, we have the central vision of the book; only this time it’s Daniel himself who has the dream and an angel who interprets it for him. Again there are four kingdoms, which are followed by a fifth, a very different one, which will judge all the others and rule the world. These sharp, multicolored stories are all about what the whole book of Daniel is all about: the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world. And guess what? That’s what Jesus was talking about too. So we shouldn’t be surprised if he uses similar techniques to get his point across. The book of Daniel was designed to be subversive, to act as “resistance literature” to help the Jews as they faced persecution. Jesus seems to have designed his parables a bit like that too—though now to help his followers understand a deeper and stranger point, namely, that he was calling into being a renewed “Israel” over against not only the might of pagan empire, but the official structures of Judaism itself (Herod, the chief priests, and so on). The dreams or visions in Daniel follow exactly the pattern we have in Matthew 13 and parallels. First, a strange story; then a question about how to interpret it, about what it means; then, a point-by-point interpretation. And, before we get anywhere near the actual content, we must grasp a vital point if we are to understand the whole kingdom picture in the gospels. Apocalyptic visions are not simply special divine revelations for their own sake. Nor, on the other hand, are they about the “end of the world.” Apocalyptic visions of this sort are about the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. The point of “apocalyptic” is that the seer, the visionary—Daniel, Jesus—is able to glimpse what is actually going on in heaven and, by means of this storytelling technique, the strange-story-plus-interpretation, is able to unveil, and therefore actually to set forward, the purposes of heaven on earth.

• From Wild (2012)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Is our sense of Jesus as a presence, disturbing but also healing, confronting but also comforting, simply a figment of our imagination? Was Freud right to see it as just a projection of our inner desires? Was Marx right to say that it was just a way of keeping the hungry masses quiet? Was Nietzsche right to say that Jesus taught a wimpish religion that has sapped the energy of humankind ever since? And—since those three gentlemen are now a venerable part of the cultural landscape in their own right—are today’s shrill atheists right to say that God himself is a delusion, that Christianity is based on a multiple mistake, that it’s all out of date, bad for your health, massively disproved, socially disastrous, and ridiculously incoherent? Faced with these questions, whether from Rice and Lloyd Webber, Richard Dawkins, or anybody else, Christians have a choice. They can go on talking about “Jesus,” worshipping him in formal liturgy or informal meetings, praying to him, and finding out what happens in their own lives and communities when they do so—and failing to address the question that has been in the back of everyone else’s mind for the last century at least. Or they can accept the question (even if, like many questions, it needs redefining, the closer you get to it) and set about answering it. I was not yet ready, in the autumn of 1971, to do the latter. But within a few years I had realized that I could no longer put it off. By then, in the late 1970s, I was ordained, preaching regularly, leading Confirmation classes, organizing worship. I was finishing my doctorate and teaching undergraduates. My wife and I had two children and more on the way. We were facing the challenges of “real life” on several levels. Why should I avoid the challenge of the real Jesus? Every time I opened the gospels and thought about my next sermon, I was faced with questions. Did he really say that? Did he really do that? What did it mean? There were plenty of voices around to say he hadn’t said it, he didn’t really do it, and that the only “meaning” is that the church is a big confidence trick. If I was going to preach and, for that matter, if I was going to counsel people to trust Jesus and get to know him for themselves, I couldn’t do it with integrity unless I had faced the hard questions for myself. It’s been a long journey. No doubt there is much more to discover. But this book will tell you, as simply as possible, what I’ve found out so far.