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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  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. But the Law could also bring joy. This was clear in the psalms that described the Law as luminous and liberating. I was beginning to understand why Jesus’ first disciples had been so angry when Paul, the brilliant newcomer, told them that God had now abrogated the Law and that Jesus had become God’s primary revelation of himself to the world. They did not feel that Jesus had set them free from the Torah, but had experienced Paul’s vision as a potential deprivation. They were fighting for something very precious that gave meaning and value to their lives.

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

  Thenceforth, hatred of Judaism became a chronic disease in Europe. Every time a Crusade was summoned to the Middle East to fight Muslims, Christians who could not take part in the expedition did their part by killing Jews at home. I began to read histories of the Western anti-Semitism that had culminated in Hitler’s death camps. With two friends, I spent a long, cold day in our local cinema watching Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s chilling twelve-hour documentary about the Holocaust. How could we process this horror? And how could we make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again? But the principal target of the Crusaders had been Islam, and now I had to come to terms with the third Abrahamic religion. Without knowing anything about it, I had always assumed that the Muslim faith was inherently violent and fanatical. It was a religion of the sword, and had established itself only by means of warfare. I had been instinctively moved by Islam when I had visited the Middle East, but I assumed that I would find the theology as repellent as the crusading ethos. But yet again—as with The First Christian— once I was confronted with the facts, I found the reality to be quite different. Islam might have become more intolerant during the last half century; this seemed to be due to the peculiar strains of our modernity. In general, however, it had been far more respectful of other faiths than Christianity. During the Crusades, Muslim generals, such as Nur ad-Din and Saladin, who led the Islamic riposte, had behaved with greater restraint and compassion than their Christian counterparts. Increasingly—just as I had done with Saint Paul—I had to dismantle my old position, which I could now see to be ignorant, prejudiced, and deeply conditioned by the culture into which I happened to have been born. Westerners had needed to hate Islam; in the fantasies they created, it became everything that they hoped that they were not, and was made to epitomize everything that they feared that they were. Islam had become the shadow self of the West, and even in the 1980s, I noticed, we seemed to find it difficult to regard Muslim faith and civilization with fairness and objectivity. The stereotypical view of Islam, first developed at the time of the Crusades, was in some profound sense essential to our Western identity. This was a sobering discovery, and it changed my thinking forever. I would never again be able to assert blithely that West was best. Since Auschwitz, the civilized West had become the culture that had massacred its Jewish inhabitants, and this act of genocide tarnished all our other achievements. If we had cultivated a vicious hatred of both Judaism and Islam for so many centuries, what other mistakes had we made and what other misapprehensions had we nurtured? It suddenly seemed important to find out about other cultures and traditions. I was struck by the nihilism of crusading.

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

  Writing Through the Narrow Gate, some twelve years later, was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past, and I learned a great deal. Most important, I realized how precious and formative this period of my life had been, and that despite my problems, I would not have missed it for the world. Then I attempted a sequel: Beginning the World was published in 1983. It is the worst book I have ever written and I am thankful to say that it has long been out of print. As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I never could have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence: I had indeed “begun the world.” But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with “the world,” although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavors, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that in superficial ways, my present life is light-years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house, and money. I travel, have a lot of fun, and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking, and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion, and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant. As soon as it was published, I realized that Beginning the World had been a mistake and that I would probably have to rewrite it one day.

• From Wild (2012)

  I walked down to the empty little beach along Elk Lake with the two pennies in my hand, wondering if I should toss them into the water and make a wish. I decided against it and put them in my shorts pocket, just in case I needed two cents between now and the Olallie Lake ranger station, which was still a sobering hundred miles away. Having nothing more than those two pennies was both horrible and just the slightest bit funny, the way being flat broke at times seemed to me. As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off. But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn’t calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been here, eighty-some days out on the PCT, broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn’t afford to do it. I hiked on, ascending to a 6,500-foot viewpoint from which I could see the peaks to the north and east: Bachelor Butte and glaciated Broken Top and—highest of them all—South Sister, which rose to 10,358 feet. My guidebook told me that it was the youngest, tallest, and most symmetrical of the Three Sisters. It was composed of over two dozen different kinds of volcanic rock, but it all looked like one reddish-brown mountain to me, its upper slopes laced with snow. As I hiked into the day, the air shifted and warmed again and I felt as if I were back in California, with the heat and the way the vistas opened up for miles across the rocky and green land.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In particular, we must be clear what is and isn’t meant when Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, speaks about the “kingdom of heaven.” Many have wrongly assumed that he was referring to a “kingdom” in the sense of a place called “heaven”—in other words, a heavenly realm to which people might aspire to go once their time on “earth” was over. That is simply not what the phrase meant in the first century—though, sadly, it doesn’t seem to have taken very long within the early church for the misunderstanding to creep in, doubtless because within a century or two the original Jewish meanings of Jesus’s words were being forgotten. Within Jesus’s world, the word “heaven” could be a reverent way of saying “God”; and in any case, part of the point of “heaven” is that it wasn’t detached, wasn’t a long way off, but was always the place from which “earth” was to be run. When, in the book of Daniel, people speak about “the God of heaven,” the point is that this God is in charge on earth, not that he’s a long way away and unconcerned about it. “The God of heaven” is precisely the one who organizes things on earth (Dan. 2:37) and will eventually set up his own kingdom there (2:44; see also 4:37; 5:23). Second, was Jesus, then, mounting some kind of quasi-military revolution? Some have thought so. Many, fed up with the way contemporary churches have colluded with corrupt and wicked establishments, have been eager to find in Jesus a different dream, a dream that perches uncomfortably halfway between the Sermon on the Mount and the sermons of Karl Marx. Attempts have then been made to ward off this proposal by insisting that Jesus’s message was “spiritual” rather than “political.” This has been, in my view, another dialogue of the deaf.

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

  But by unwittingly putting into practice two of the essential principles of religion, I had already, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual quest. First, I had set off by myself on my own path. Second, I had at last been able to acknowledge my own pain and feel it fully. I was gradually, imperceptibly being transformed. All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms—teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. Hyam had quoted Hillel’s Golden Rule, which tells you to look into your own heart, find out what distresses you, and then refrain from inflicting similar pain on other people. That, Hillel had insisted, was the Torah, and everything else was commentary. This, I was to discover, was the essence of the religious life. In 1989, my heart newly sensitized to pain, I found that I was constantly jolted out of my bitter, frustrated introspection by the spectacles of suffering that assailed me every time I turned on my television or opened a newspaper. I knew what it was like when people ignored your needs, but my little woes paled into insignificance when compared with the suffering of the Lebanese, the people of El Salvador or South Africa. I was beginning to act according to the Golden Rule, even though my new awareness of the world’s pain did not seem religious to me, because I didn’t associate religion with this type of sympathy. But it was not sufficient simply to emote in front of the television screen. This habit of empathy had to become a regular part of my life, and it had to find practical expression. It could easily degenerate into self-indulgence, and would not have changed me had I not acted upon it . These were momentous months. During the autumn and winter of 1989 one Communist government in the former Soviet Union fell after another. Crowds smashed the Berlin Wall and danced upon this hated symbol of a divided Europe. On December 22 the Brandenburg Gate was ceremonially opened, uniting East and West. The world that had come into being after the Second World War seemed to be undergoing radical change. I was still feeling frightened and depressed about my own circumstances, but it was impossible not to feel stirrings of hope. The Berlin Wall had seemed an unshakable reality; it had been an image of nearly everything that had gone wrong in Europe, but now it was no more. If unthinkable change could take place on this scale, could not something—anything—move for me?

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

  Thus, the myth of the hero shows that it is psychologically damaging to live in the wasteland. If you slavishly follow somebody else’s ideas, you will be impoverished and impaired. I had certainly found this to be the case in my own life. Blind obedience and unthinking acceptance of authority figures may make an institution work more smoothly, but the people who live under such a regime will remain in an infantile, dependent state. It is a great pity that religious institutions often insist on this type of conformity, which is far from the spirit of their founders, who all, in one way or another, rebelled against the status quo. The heroes of myth and religion do not preach unbridled individualism, of course. There are, as I would discover, checks and restraints. But unless you act upon this heroic myth and allow it to change your behavior, it will remain opaque and incredible. But back in 1989, when I started to research A History of God, I didn’t know any of this. For me, religion was still essentially about belief. Because I did not accept the orthodox doctrines, I considered myself an agnostic—even an atheist. But by unwittingly putting into practice two of the essential principles of religion, I had already, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual quest. First, I had set off by myself on my own path. Second, I had at last been able to acknowledge my own pain and feel it fully. I was gradually, imperceptibly being transformed. All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms—teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. Hyam had quoted Hillel’s Golden Rule, which tells you to look into your own heart, find out what distresses you, and then refrain from inflicting similar pain on other people. That, Hillel had insisted, was the Torah, and everything else was commentary. This, I was to discover, was the essence of the religious life.

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

  The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else’s, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life. Thus transfigured, he (or she) can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind. But if the knight finds himself riding along an already established track, he is simply following in somebody else’s footsteps and will not have an adventure. In the words of the Old French text of The Quest of the Holy Grail, if he wants to succeed, he must enter the forest “at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.” The wasteland in the Grail legend is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect. The myth of the Holy Grail was a watershed in the spiritual development of the West. It turned the crusading ethos on its head. Instead of marching to their adventure in the huge, massed armies of the Crusades, the Grail knights embarked on a solitary quest, riding into the forest alone. The destination of the Grail knights is not the earthly city of Jerusalem but the heavenly city of Saras, which has no place in this world. The forest represents the interior realm of the psyche, and the Grail itself becomes a symbol of a mystical encounter with God. By the thirteenth century, when the Grail legend began to take root in Europe, the people of the West were finally ready to develop a more spiritualized form of Christianity. And when I started to work on A History of God, I too began to focus on my inner life. This was not initially a conscious choice, but whether I liked it or not, I was now much more alone than before. Henceforth I would often be very busy indeed—researching, writing, lecturing, traveling, having fun, seeing friends—but increasingly that was no longer where the action was. There were plenty of events in my external life, but I cannot— at least at present—find a narrative there. The real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself.

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

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

• From Wild (2012)

  When I woke the next morning to the soft sound of Spanish Needle Creek, I dallied in my tent, watching the sky brighten through the mesh ceiling. I ate a granola bar and read my guidebook, bracing myself for the trail ahead. I rose finally and went to the creek and bathed in it one last time, savoring the luxury. It was only nine in the morning, but it was hot already, and I dreaded leaving the shady patch along the creek. As I soaked in the four-inch-deep water, I decided I wasn’t going to hike to Kennedy Meadows. Even that was too far at the rate I was going. My guidebook listed a road the trail would cross in twelve miles. On it, I’d do what I’d done before: walk down it until I found a ride. Only this time I wasn’t going to come back. As I prepared to depart, I heard a noise to the south. I turned and saw a bearded man wearing a backpack coming up the trail. His trekking pole made a sharp clicking sound against the packed dirt with each step. “Hello!” he called out to me with a smile. “You must be Cheryl Strayed.” “Yes,” I said in a faltering voice, every bit as stunned to see another human being as I was to hear him speak my name. “I saw you on the trail register,” he explained when he saw my expression. “I’ve been following your tracks for days.” I’d soon become used to people approaching me in the wilderness with such familiarity; the trail register served as a kind of social newsletter all summer long. “I’m Greg,” he said, shaking my hand before he gestured to my pack: “Are you actually carrying that thing?” We sat in the shade talking about where we were going and where we’d been. He was forty, an accountant from Tacoma, Washington, with a straitlaced, methodical accountant’s air. He’d been on the PCT since early May, having started where the trail begins at the Mexican border, and he planned to hike all the way to Canada. He was the first person I’d met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn’t need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

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

  Lady Phyl would exclaim. “Let the poor girl get her coat off first!” Yet ironically Sir Bob seemed to inspire the confidences of religious people. To the derision of his wife, in order to save a few pence, he would repair to the local unisex hairdressing salon, somewhat ambiguously called Blow Heads, on Thursday afternoons, when there was a cheap rate for senior citizens. He looked an incongruous figure, having his short back and sides amidst the youthful stylists with their Mohicans. One afternoon, when he had as usual been lugubriously lamenting the lack of honor in public life, the greed and triviality of the times, and looming ecological disaster, one of the stylists, with purple hair, tattoos down his bare arms, and clothes duly festooned with safety pins and razor blades, wordlessly thrust a card into his hand. Sir Bob stared at it with blank astonishment: it was an invitation to a special mission at the Church of the Lamb the following week. Then there was the time when he had paid a friendly visit to an elderly couple who were moving into the house next door. “Moving is hell, isn’t it?” he had commiserated affably to his new neighbor. “Terrible.” The old man nodded in agreement. “But fortunately I have a friend who makes the whole thing bearable.” “Oh really?” Sir Bob rumbled amiably, assuming that he was speaking of a helpful chum, but to his amazement, the friend turned out to be Jesus. Sir Bob returned home shaking his head in utter perplexity. “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.

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

  They were marginal figures, lurking in the wings in a rather sinister way. 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. But the Law could also bring joy. This was clear in the psalms that described the Law as luminous and liberating. I was beginning to understand why Jesus’ first disciples had been so angry when Paul, the brilliant newcomer, told them that God had now abrogated the Law and that Jesus had become God’s primary revelation of himself to the world.

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

  So by the time I flew out to Tel Aviv on that cold January day, I was convinced that my mission in life was to unmask the dogmatic intolerance of the churches. But there had been one slightly unsettling incident just a few weeks earlier. I had quickly become aware that if I wanted to understand Saint Paul, I needed to know a great deal more about Judaism. So far I had simply regarded it as a mere prelude to Christianity, superannuated and superseded by the later, more inspiring faith. I had accepted without question the portrait of Judaism in the New Testament, derived in large part (I now realized) from Paul’s early polemic with Jesus’ disciples, who had wanted Christianity to remain a strictly Jewish sect. From my earliest years I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith: wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension, it was a religion that had lost its heart. Jews staggered under the burdensome requirements of the Law of Moses but could no longer understand the spirit that had originally inspired these now soulless commandments. No wonder Jesus had lambasted the Pharisees, comparing them to gleaming white tombs that looked beautiful from the outside but contained only corruption and decay! The Pharisees had constantly clashed with Jesus, castigated him for breaking the Law by healing the sick on the Sabbath or eating with people who did not observe their pointless purity laws. But I was now beginning to learn that many of Jesus’ teachings about charity and loving-kindness were almost identical with those of the leading rabbis of his day. Clearly I would have to revise my childhood view of Judaism. Nick put me in touch with Hyam Maccoby, who, like me, had done a piece for Opinions. He had delivered a swingeing attack on the New Testament view of the Pharisees, pointing out not only that they were among the most liberal Jews of their time but that in all likelihood Jesus had been a Pharisee himself. Michael Goulder was slightly dismissive of Hyam’s ideas about Christianity, but I found Hyam’s depiction of Judaism compelling and we agreed to meet for lunch. He worked as the librarian at the Leo Baeck College in North London, and I warmed to him immediately as he escorted me round the library, pulling books off the shelves, recommending some authors, and warning me against others. It was over egg-and-tomato sandwiches at a small greasy-spoon café near the tube station that Hyam delivered his bombshell. He was arguing that Jesus could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, one of the leading Pharisees. Jesus had, after all, taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule.

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

  Because, Cantwell Smith believed, you could not understand the truth of a religion by simply reading about its beliefs. The tradition became alive only when you lived it and observed those rituals that were designed to open a window on transcendence. But (I can almost hear an exasperated reader ask) what is this truth? Does this woman believe in God, or not? Is there, or is there not, anything out there ? Does she believe that the God of the Bible exists? Does she, or does she not, worship a personal God? These are surely the truth claims of religion, and all this talk about compassionate empathy and religion as an art form is merely a distraction from the real issue. To believe or not to believe: that is surely the religious question, is it not? Well . . . no. To my very great surprise, I was discovering that some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God. Many of them preferred to say that God was Nothing, because this was not the kind of reality that we normally encountered. It was even misleading to call God the Supreme Being, because that simply suggested a being like us, but bigger and better, with likes and dislikes similar to our own. For centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had devised audacious new theologies to bring this point home to the faithful. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, was crafted in part to show that you could not think about God as a simple personality. The reality that we call God is transcendent—that is, it goes beyond any human orthodoxy—and yet God is also the ground of all being and can be experienced almost as a presence in the depths of the psyche. All traditions went out of their way to emphasize that any idea we had of God bore no absolute relationship to the reality itself, which went beyond it. Our notion of a personal God is one symbolic way of speaking about the divine, but it cannot contain the far more elusive reality. Most would agree with the Greek Orthodox that any statement about God had to have two characteristics.

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

  But the Law could also bring joy. This was clear in the psalms that described the Law as luminous and liberating. I was beginning to understand why Jesus’ first disciples had been so angry when Paul, the brilliant newcomer, told them that God had now abrogated the Law and that Jesus had become God’s primary revelation of himself to the world. They did not feel that Jesus had set them free from the Torah, but had experienced Paul’s vision as a potential deprivation. They were fighting for something very precious that gave meaning and value to their lives. I was also intrigued by the role of study in the religious life of Jews. As a woman, I could not visit the Orthodox yeshivas in Jerusalem where Jews studied Torah and Talmud, but Joel had some film of these noisy, lively sessions, which we were going to use in our series. I watched the men bent over the scrolls, swaying rhythmically in prayer, as they spoke the sacred words aloud and argued passionately with one another. Those gospel scenes suddenly sprang into new life. Those “scribes and Pharisees” excoriated by the evangelists were not simply trying to trap Jesus when they questioned him about the greatest commandment of the Torah, about what Moses would say about paying tribute to the Romans, or about Sabbath observance. They were like these modern Jews in the yeshivas. This argumentation was a form of worship. Certainly the rabbis who compiled the Talmud, some of whom were Jesus’ contemporaries, insisted over and over again that “when two or three study the Torah together, the Divine Presence is in their midst”—words that were strangely echoed in one of Jesus’ own maxims. Study of the Law was not a barren, cerebral exercise. It brought Jews into the presence of God. I might have liked that, I reflected as I watched those films. Studying in that intense way might have suited me a great deal better than Ignatian meditation. It seemed suddenly shameful to me that I had grown up in such ignorance of Judaism, the parent faith of Christianity. The more I read about first- century Judaism, the more intensely Jewish Jesus appeared; and even Saint Paul, who was such a rebel, was really arguing about a New Israel, a fresh way of being Jewish in the modern world of his day. I knew that because of this project, I would never again be able to think about Christianity as a separate religion. I would have to develop a form of double vision. Increasingly, Judaism and Christianity seemed to be one faith tradition which had gone in two different directions. But there was a third factor. Every time we visited the Western Wall, my eyes were drawn upward to the golden Islamic dome on the site formerly occupied by Herod’s temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans.

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

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

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

  This was a sobering discovery, and it changed my thinking forever. I would never again be able to assert blithely that West was best. Since Auschwitz, the civilized West had become the culture that had massacred its Jewish inhabitants, and this act of genocide tarnished all our other achievements. If we had cultivated a vicious hatred of both Judaism and Islam for so many centuries, what other mistakes had we made and what other misapprehensions had we nurtured? It suddenly seemed important to find out about other cultures and traditions. I was struck by the nihilism of crusading. Instead of reaching out to the Jews in their midst, instead of trying to learn from Islam (a far more advanced civilization than their own), the Crusaders had been unable to govern their fears and resentment. They had killed, maimed, burned, desecrated, and destroyed what they were psychologically incapable of understanding. And in doing so, they had vitiated their own integrity and their own moral vision. Auschwitz showed where such calculated hatred could lead, but I realized that as long as Western people continued to accept the old distorted portrait of Islam, they would simply compound the original error. Perhaps this series could show the viewers that Islam was not the demon that haunted their imaginations, and that Muslims could be as flawed, imperfect, courageous, and idealistic as their own heroes. If we could achieve this, we would do something important.

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

  I was also intrigued by the role of study in the religious life of Jews. As a woman, I could not visit the Orthodox yeshivas in Jerusalem where Jews studied Torah and Talmud, but Joel had some film of these noisy, lively sessions, which we were going to use in our series. I watched the men bent over the scrolls, swaying rhythmically in prayer, as they spoke the sacred words aloud and argued passionately with one another. Those gospel scenes suddenly sprang into new life. Those “scribes and Pharisees” excoriated by the evangelists were not simply trying to trap Jesus when they questioned him about the greatest commandment of the Torah, about what Moses would say about paying tribute to the Romans, or about Sabbath observance. They were like these modern Jews in the yeshivas. This argumentation was a form of worship. Certainly the rabbis who compiled the Talmud, some of whom were Jesus’ contemporaries, insisted over and over again that “when two or three study the Torah together, the Divine Presence is in their midst”—words that were strangely echoed in one of Jesus’ own maxims. Study of the Law was not a barren, cerebral exercise. It brought Jews into the presence of God. I might have liked that, I reflected as I watched those films. Studying in that intense way might have suited me a great deal better than Ignatian meditation. It seemed suddenly shameful to me that I had grown up in such ignorance of Judaism, the parent faith of Christianity. The more I read about first-century Judaism, the more intensely Jewish Jesus appeared; and even Saint Paul, who was such a rebel, was really arguing about a New Israel, a fresh way of being Jewish in the modern world of his day. I knew that because of this project, I would never again be able to think about Christianity as a separate religion. I would have to develop a form of double vision. Increasingly, Judaism and Christianity seemed to be one faith tradition which had gone in two different directions.

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

  So by the time I flew out to Tel Aviv on that cold January day, I was convinced that my mission in life was to unmask the dogmatic intolerance of the churches. But there had been one slightly unsettling incident just a few weeks earlier. I had quickly become aware that if I wanted to understand Saint Paul, I needed to know a great deal more about Judaism. So far I had simply regarded it as a mere prelude to Christianity, superannuated and superseded by the later, more inspiring faith. I had accepted without question the portrait of Judaism in the New Testament, derived in large part (I now realized) from Paul’s early polemic with Jesus’ disciples, who had wanted Christianity to remain a strictly Jewish sect. From my earliest years I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith: wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension, it was a religion that had lost its heart. Jews staggered under the burdensome requirements of the Law of Moses but could no longer understand the spirit that had originally inspired these now soulless commandments. No wonder Jesus had lambasted the Pharisees, comparing them to gleaming white tombs that looked beautiful from the outside but contained only corruption and decay! The Pharisees had constantly clashed with Jesus, castigated him for breaking the Law by healing the sick on the Sabbath or eating with people who did not observe their pointless purity laws. But I was now beginning to learn that many of Jesus’ teachings about charity and loving-kindness were almost identical with those of the leading rabbis of his day. Clearly I would have to revise my childhood view of Judaism. Nick put me in touch with Hyam Maccoby, who, like me, had done a piece for Opinions. He had delivered a swingeing attack on the New Testament view of the Pharisees, pointing out not only that they were among the most liberal Jews of their time but that in all likelihood Jesus had been a Pharisee himself. Michael Goulder was slightly dismissive of Hyam’s ideas about Christianity, but I found Hyam’s depiction of Judaism compelling and we agreed to meet for lunch. He worked as the librarian at the Leo Baeck College in North London, and I warmed to him immediately as he escorted me round the library, pulling books off the shelves, recommending some authors, and warning me against others. It was over egg-and-tomato sandwiches at a small greasy-spoon café near the tube station that Hyam delivered his bombshell.

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

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