Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 43 of 63 · 20 per page

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

  It seems that the inner dynamic of all these great religious traditions can work effectively only if you do not close your mind and heart to other human beings. For years, however, when traveling around the world and talking about these matters, I often felt rather a fraud. People would ask my advice about spiritual practice, clearly thinking that I was more enlightened than I really was. After all, I wasn’t a truly religious person. I never went near a church and did not belong to an official religious community. I could not really believe that the seconds of oratio that I experienced at my desk amounted to a real contact with the sacred. It was surely just a moment of delight in work that absorbed me. I was not directing prayer to anything or anybody. There was still emptiness where the personalized God used to be. 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.

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

  The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. The myths of the hero, for example, are not meant to give us historical information about Prometheus or Achilles— or for that matter, about Jesus or the Buddha. Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that we bring out our own heroic potential. In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering “the truth” or “the meaning of life” but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to “get to heaven” but to discover how to be fully human—hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being. Archetypal figures such as Muhammad, the Buddha, and Jesus become icons of fulfilled humanity. God or Nirvana is not an optional extra, tacked on to our human nature. Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves. A passing Brahmin priest once asked the Buddha whether he was a god, a spirit, or an angel. None of these, the Buddha replied; “I am awake!” By activating a capacity that lay dormant in undeveloped men and women, he seemed to belong to a new species. In the past, my own practice of religion had diminished me, whereas true faith, I now believe, should make you more human than before. 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.

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

  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. 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.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Reformation was in the air. The educated classes could not escape its influence. The seed sown by Lefèvre had sprung up in France. The influence from Germany and Switzerland made itself felt more and more. The clergy opposed the new opinions, the men of letters favored them. Even the court was divided: King Francis I. persecuted the Protestants; his sister, Marguerite d’Angoulème, queen of Navarre, protected them. How could a young scholar of such precocious mind and intense studiousness as Calvin be indifferent to the religious question which agitated the universities of Orleans, Bourges, and Paris? He must have searched the Scriptures long and carefully before he could acquire such familiarity as he shows already in his first theological writings. He speaks of his conversion as a sudden one (subita conversio), but this does not exclude previous preparation any more than in the case of Paul.412 A city may be taken by a single assault, yet after a long siege. Calvin was not an unbeliever, nor an immoral youth; on the contrary, he was a devout Catholic of unblemished character. His conversion, therefore, was a change from Romanism to Protestantism, from papal superstition to evangelical faith, from scholastic traditionalism to biblical simplicity. He mentions no human agency, not even Volmar or Olivetan or Lefèvre. "God himself," he says, "produced the change. He instantly subdued my heart to obedience." Absolute obedience of his intellect to the word of God, and obedience of his will to the will of God: this was the soul of his religion. He strove in vain to attain peace of conscience by the mechanical methods of Romanism, and was driven to a deeper sense of sin and guilt. "Only one haven of salvation," he says, "is left open for our souls, and that is the mercy of God in Christ. We are saved by grace—not by our merits, not by our works." Reverence for the Church kept him back for some time till he learned to distinguish the true, invisible, divine essence of the Church from its outward, human form and organization. Then the knowledge of the truth, like a bright light from heaven, burst upon his mind with such force, that there was nothing left for him but to obey the voice from heaven. He consulted not with flesh and blood, and burned the bridge behind him.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He himself, in a tract soon afterwards written to a friend,1555 gives us the following oratorical description of his conversion: While I languished in darkness and deep night, tossing upon the sea of a troubled world, ignorant of my destination, and far from truth and light, I thought it, according to my then habits, altogether a difficult and hard thing that a man could be born anew, and that, being quickened to new life by the bath of saving water, he might put off the past, and, while preserving the identity of the body, might transform the man in mind and heart. How, said I, is such a change possible? How can one at once divest himself of all that was either innate or acquired and grown upon him?... Whence does he learn frugality, who was accustomed to sumptuous feasts? And how shall he who shone in costly apparel, in gold and purple, come down to common and simple dress? He who has lived in honor and station, cannot bear to be private and obscure .... But when, by the aid of the regenerating water,1556 the stain of my former life was washed away, a serene and pure light poured from above into my purified breast. So soon as I drank the spirit from above and was transformed by a second birth into a new man, then the wavering mind became wonderfully firm; what had been closed opened; the dark became light; strength came for that which had seemed difficult; what I had thought impossible became practicable." Cyprian now devoted himself zealously, in ascetic retirement, to the study of the Scriptures and the church teachers, especially Tertullian, whom be called for daily with the words: "Hand me the master!"1557 The influence of Tertullian on his theological formation is unmistakable, and appears at once, for example, on comparing the tracts of the two on prayer and on patience, or the work of the one on the vanity of idols with the apology of the other. It is therefore rather strange that in his own writings we find no acknowledgment of his indebtedness, and, as far as I recollect, no express allusion whatever to Tertullian and the Montanists. But he could derive no aid and comfort from him in his conflict with schism. Such a man could not long remain concealed. Only two years after his baptism, in spite of his earnest remonstrance, Cyprian was raised to the bishopric of Carthage by the acclamations of the people, and was thus at the same time placed at the head of the whole North African clergy. This election of a neophyte was contrary to the letter of the ecclesiastical laws (comp. 1 Tim. 3:6), and led afterwards to the schism of the party of Novatus. But the result proved, that here, as in the similar elevation of Ambrose, Augustin, and other eminent bishops of the ancient church, the voice of the people was the voice of God.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  From Les Recherches de la France, p. 769 (Paris, 1633). … "He [Calvin) wrote equally well in Latin and French, the latter of which languages is greatly indebted to him for having enriched it with an infinite number of fine expressions (enrichie d’une infinité de beaux traits), though I could have wished that they had been written on a better subject. In short, a man wonderfully conversant with and attached to the books of the Holy Scriptures, and such, that if he had turned his mind in the proper direction, he might have been ranked with the most distinguished doctors of the Church." Jacques Auguste de Thou (Thuanus, 1553–1617). President of the Parliament of Paris. A liberal Roman Catholic and one of the framers of the Edict of Nantes. From the 36th book of his Historia sui Temporis (from 1543–1607). "John Calvin, of Noyon in Picardy, a person of lively spirit and great eloquence (d’un esprit vif et d’une grande eloquence),379 and a theologian of high reputation among the Protestants, died of asthma, May 20 [27], 1564, at Geneva, where he had taught for twenty-three years, being nearly fifty-six years of age. Though he had labored under various diseases for seven years, this did not render him less diligent in his office, and never hindered him from writing." De Thou has nothing unfavorable to say of Calvin. Testimonies of Later French Writers. Charles Drelincourt (1595–1669). "In that prodigious multitude of books which were composed by Calvin, you see no words thrown away; and since the prophets and apostles, there never perhaps was a man who conveyed so many distinct statements in so few words, and in such appropriate and well-chosen terms (en des mots si propres et si bien choisis).... Never did Calvin’s life appear to me more pure or more innocent than after carefully examining the diabolical calumnies with which some have endeavored to defame his character, and after considering all the praises which his greatest enemies are constrained to bestow on his memory." Moses Amyraut (1596–1645). "That incomparable Calvin, to whom mainly, next to God, the Church owes its Reformation, not only in France, but in many other parts of Europe." Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704). From his Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes (1688), the greatest polemical work in French against the Reformation. "I do not know if the genius of Calvin would be found as fitted to excite the imagination and stir up the populace as was that of Luther, but after the movement had commenced, he rose in many countries, more especially in France, above Luther himself, and made himself head of a party which hardly yields to that of the Lutherans. By his searching intellect and his bold decisions, he improved upon all those who had sought in this century to establish a new church, and gave a new turn to the pretended reformation.

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

  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. It was Saint Paul, not Jesus, who was the founder of Christianity, and even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters. I now discovered that Paul’s epistles are the earliest extant Christian documents and that the gospels, all written years after Paul’s own death, were penned by men who had adopted Paul’s version of Christianity. Far from Paul perverting the gospels, the gospels, it seemed, owed their vision to Paul. The only Jesus we knew was the Jesus bequeathed to us by Paul. Further, it appeared that not all the epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him. And this radically altered my view of Paul himself. Some of the most misogynist passages, for example, were almost certainly written by Christians some sixty years after Paul’s death. Perhaps he wasn’t the monster I had imagined. John and I decided that we would call the series The First Christian. After only a few weeks’ exposure to modern New Testament criticism, I realized that I needed an expert adviser. I was completely unschooled, and in my zeal to expose the truth as I saw it, I could easily make serious mistakes. After some inquiries, John produced Michael Goulder of Birmingham University, a charming and learned scholar who had recently resigned his Anglican orders because he no longer believed in God. John assumed that he would, therefore, be a kindred spirit, but Michael quickly joined the ranks of those who thought that I should not be writing this series, because, he said, I simply did not know enough. And of course, he was quite right. He wrote John a long and extremely scathing letter about me, which John airily cast to one side. Michael was very, very tough. As I produced my draft scripts, he ripped them apart verbally over the telephone, sentence by jejune sentence, line by naïve line, and page by uninformed page. I needed this, and I learned fast. By the end we had become friends, and one of the best moments of the whole project was when Michael viewed the final version of the film and agreed to allow his name to appear alongside mine among the credits, saying that, much to his surprise, he could find no errors of fact.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  At the wedding in Cana He administered to her, though leniently and respectfully, a rebuke for premature zeal mingled perhaps with maternal vanity.766 On a subsequent occasion he put her on a level with other female disciples, and made the carnal consanguinity subordinate to the spiritual kinship of the doing of the will of God.767 The well-meant and in itself quite innocent benediction of an unknown woman upon His mother He did not indeed censure, but He corrected it with a benediction upon all who hear the word of God and keep it, and thus forestalled the deification of Mary by confining the ascription within the bounds of moderation.768 In striking contrast with this healthful and sober representation of Mary in the canonical Gospels are the numerous apocryphal Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical foundation for an unscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry.769 The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal literature so early as the Decrees of Gelasius;770 yet many of the fabulous elements of it—such as the names of the parents of Mary, Joachim (instead of Eli, as in Luke iii. 23) and Anna,771 the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and her mock marriage with the aged Joseph772—passed into the Catholic tradition. The development of the orthodox Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry originated as early as the second century in an allegorical interpretation of the history of the fall, and in the assumption of an antithetic relation of Eve and Mary, according to which the mother of Christ occupies the same position in the history of redemption as the wife of Adam in the history of sin and death.773 This idea, so fruitful of many errors, is ingenious, but unscriptural, and an apocryphal substitute for the true Pauline doctrine of an antitypical parallel between the first and second Adam.774 It tends to substitute Mary for Christ. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, are the first who present Mary as the counterpart of Eve, as a "mother of all living" in the higher, spiritual sense, and teach that she became through her obedience the mediate or instrumental cause of the blessings of redemption to the human race, as Eve by her disobedience was the fountain of sin and death.775 Irenaeus calls her also the "advocate of the virgin Eve," which, at a later day, is understood in the sense of intercessor.776 On this account this father stands as the oldest leading authority in the Catholic Mariology; though with only partial justice; for he was still widely removed from the notion of the sinlessness of Mary, and expressly declares the answer of Christ in John ii.

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

  This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict one another, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta, I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it. It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle. But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident.

• From Wild (2012)

  As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the “green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain. California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT again. It was sunny and clear but the air was cool, and it grew progressively cooler with each day as I passed into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, where the trail stayed above 6,000 feet. The views opened up again as I walked along a ridgeline of volcanic rocks and boulders, glimpsing lakes occasionally below the trail and the land that spread beyond. In spite of the sun, it felt like an early October morning instead of a mid-August afternoon. I had to keep moving to stay warm. If I stopped for more than five minutes the sweat that drenched the back of my T-shirt turned icy cold. I’d seen no one since I left Ashland, but now I encountered a few day hikers and overnight backpackers who’d climbed up to the PCT on one of the many trails that intersected it, which led to peaks above or lakes below. Mostly I was alone, which wasn’t unusual, but the cold made the trail seem even more vacant, the wind clattering the branches of the persevering trees. It felt colder too, even colder than it had been up in the snow above Sierra City, though I saw only small patches of snow here and there. I realized it was because back then the mountains had been moving toward summer, and now, only six weeks later, they were already moving away from it, reaching toward autumn, in a direction that pushed me out.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  l68 A THEOLOGY FORTHESOCIAL GOSPEL of God is brought toa people ignorant and accustomed to superstitious methods of winning the favour or help of higher beings, it will soon be coarsened and materialized. The changes inthe Hebrew conception ofGod were the resultof the historical experiences ofthe nationand its leaders. The Christian idea of God hasalso had its ups anddowns in the long and varied history of Chris- tian civilization. A fineand high conception of God is asocial achieve- mentand a social endowment. It becomes part of the spiritual inheritancecommon to all individuals inthat religious group. If every individual had towork outhis ideaofGodon thebasis ofhisown experiences and in- tuitions only, it would be a groping quest, and mostof us wouldsee only the occasional flitting of a distant light. By the end of our lifewe might havearrived atthe stage ofvoodooismor necromancy.Entering intoa high conception of God, suchas theChristian faith offers us, is like entering a public park or a public gallery of artand sharing the common wealth. Wheti we learn fromthe gospels, for instance, thatGod ison the side of the poor, andthat he proposes toview anything done or not done tothemas having been doneor not doneto him, such a revelation of solidarity and humanity comeswitha re- generating shock to our selfish minds. Any one studying life as it ison the basisof real estate and bank clearings, would come tothe conclusionthatGod isonthe sideof the rich.It takes a revelation tosee itthe other way. Whereverwe encounter sucha strain ofsocial feeling in our conceptions of God, itisalmostsure torun straight

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

  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.

• From Wild (2012)

  Perhaps Clarke’s most important contribution to the trail was making the acquaintance of Warren Rogers, who was twenty-four when the two met in 1932. Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and in some cases construct what would become the PCT. Though initially reluctant, Rogers soon became passionate about the trail’s creation, and he spent the rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal, financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way. Rogers lived to see Congress designate the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, but he died in 1992, a year before the trail was finished. I’d read the section in my guidebook about the trail’s history the winter before, but it wasn’t until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they’d been imagining me. It didn’t matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  When once theology concentrated on the story it was expanded by exegetical inferences, by allegorical embel- lishments, and by typology, until it conveyed far more than it actually contained. It comes as a shock to real- ize, for instance, that the story in Genesis itself does not indicate that the writer understood the serpent to be Satan, or Satan to be speaking through the serpent. Moreover, we find so few traces of any belief in Satan in Hebrew thought before the Exile that it seems doubt- ful if contemporary readers would have understood him to be meant unless further indications made the refer- ence clear. Here, then, we have two different methods of treat- ing the story of the fall. Theology has given it basic importance. It has built its entire scheme of thought on the doctrine of the fall. Jesus and the prophets paid little or no attention to it. They were able to see sin clearly and to fight it with the highest energy without depending on the doctrine of the fall for a footing. Only with Paul is the story clearly of religious import- ance, and even with him it is not as central as for in- stance the antagonism between spirit and flesh. It of- fered him a wide spiritual perspective and a means of glorifying Christ. Two things seem to follow. First, that the tradi- tional doctrine of the fall is the product of speculative interest mainly, and that the most energetic conscious- ness of sin can exist without drawing strength from this 42 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL doctrine. Second, that if -the substance of Scriptural thought, the constant and integral trend of biblical con- victions, is the authoritative element in the Bible, the doctrine of the fall does not seem to have as great an authority as it has long exercised. How does this affect the social gospel? What doc- trinal teaching on this point is able to give it the most effective backing? The social gospel is above all things practical. It needs religious ideas which will release energy for heroic opposition against organized evil and for the building of a righteous social life. It would find entire satisfac- tion in the attitude of Jesus and the prophets who dealt with sin as a present force and did not find it necessary to indoctrinate men on its first origin. It would have no motive to be interested in a doctrine which diverts at- tention from the active factors of sin which can be influ- enced, and concentrates attention on a past event which no effort of ours can influence. Theology has made the catastrophe of the fall so complete that any later addition to the inheritance of sin seems slight and negligible. What can be worse than a state of total depravity and active enmity against God and his will ? ^ Consequently theology has had little to say about the contributions which our more recent fore-

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  In this choice too I see something fortuitous, born of impulses which I am forced to regard as outside the range of my own nature. And yet, strangely enough, it is only here that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends; to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself — or so I hope. Here at least I am able to see their history and the city’s as one and the same phenomenon. But strangest of all: I owe this release to Pursewarden — the last person I should ever have considered a possible benefactor. That last meeting, for example, in the ugly and expensive hotel bedroom to which he always moved on Pombal’s return from leave … I did not recognize the heavy musty odour of the room as the odour of his impending suicide — how should I? I knew he was unhappy; even had he not been he would have felt obliged to simulate unhappiness. All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness. And being Anglo-Saxon there was a touch of maudlin self-pity and weakness which made him drink a bit. That evening he was savage, silly and witty by turns; and listening to him I remember thinking suddenly: ‘Here is someone who in farming his talent has neglected his sensibility, not by accident, but deliberately, for its self-expression might have brought him into conflict with the world, or his loneliness threatened his reason. He could not bear to be refused admittance, while he lived, to the halls of fame and recognition. Underneath it all he has been steadily putting up with an almost insupportable consciousness of his own mental poltroonery. And now his career has reached an interesting stage: I mean beautiful women, whom he always felt to be out of reach as a timid provincial would, are now glad to be seen out with him. In his presence they wear the air of faintly distracted Muses suffering from constipation. In public they are flattered if he holds a gloved hand for an instant longer than form permits. At first all this must have been balm to a lonely man’s vanity; but finally it has only furthered his sense of insecurity. His freedom, gained through a modest financial success, has begun to bore him. He has begun to feel more and more wanting in true greatness while his name has been daily swelling in size like some disgusting poster. He has realized that people are walking the street with a Reputation now and not a man. They see him no longer — and all his work was done in order to draw attention to the lonely, suffering figure he felt himself to be. His name has covered him like a tombstone. And now comes the terrifying thought perhaps there is no one left to see? Who, after all, is he?’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her maid was an older woman in a plain brown dress; I saw her tugging at the frock, and thought nothing of it. But when she had the hooks fastened tight, she leaned and gently blew upon the singer’s throat, where the power had clogged; and then she whispered something to her, and they laughed together with their heads very close ... and I knew, as surely as if they had pasted the words upon the dressing-room wall, that they were lovers..The knowledge made me blush like a beacon. I looked at Kitty, and saw that she had caught the gesture, too; her eyes, however, were lowered, and her mouth was tight. When the comic singer passed us on her way to the stage, she gave me a wink: ‘Off to please the public,’ she said, and her dresser laughed again. When she came back and took her make-up off, she wandered over with a cigarette and asked for a light; then, as she drew on her fag, she looked me over. ‘Are you going,’ she said, ‘to Barbara’s party, after the show?’ I said I didn’t know who Barbara was. She waved her hand: ‘Oh, Barbara won’t mind. You come along with Ella and me: you and your friend.’ Here she nodded - very pleasantly, I thought - to Kitty. But Kitty, who had had her head bent all this time, working at the fastenings of her skirt, now looked up and gave a prim little smile.‘How nice of you to ask,’ she said; ‘but we are spoken for tonight. Our agent, Mr Bliss, is due to take us out to supper.’I stared: we had no arrangement that I knew of. But the singer only gave a shrug. ‘Too bad,’ she said. Then she looked at me. ‘You don’t want to leave your pal to her agent, and come on alone, with me and Ella?’‘Miss King will be busy with Mr Bliss,’ said Kitty, before I could answer; and she said it so tightly the singer gave a sniff, then turned and went over to where her dresser waited with their baskets. I watched them leave - they didn’t look back at me. When we returned to the theatre the next night, Kitty chose a hook that was far from theirs; and on the night after that, they had moved on to another hall ...At home, in bed, I said I thought it was a shame.‘Why did you tell them Walter was coming?’ I asked Kitty.She said: ‘I didn’t care for them.’‘Why not? They were nice. They were funny. They were - like us.’I had my arm about her, and felt her stiffen at my words. She pulled away from me and raised her head. We had left a candle burning and her face, I saw, was white and shocked.‘Nan!’ she said. ‘They’re not like us! They’re not like us, at all. They’re toms.’‘Toms?’ I remember this moment very distinctly, for I had never heard the word before.

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

  “You know the story?” I shook my head. “Some pagans came to Hillel and told him that they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said: ‘Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’ ” “Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you,’ didn’t he?” I asked, stirring my large mug of milky coffee. Hyam shrugged. “Same difference.” He tended to talk very quickly and you had to listen hard to keep up. And these ideas were very strange and new. “I think Hillel’s version is better than Jesus’, though. It takes more discipline to refrain from doing harm to others. It’s easier to be a do-gooder and project your needs and desires onto other people.” “When they might need something quite different.” Hyam nodded. But something was still troubling me. “But how could Hillel say that his Golden Rule represented the whole of Jewish teaching? That everything else was just commentary?” I asked. “What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe?” “Easy to see that you were brought up Christian.” Hyam didn’t have a high opinion of Christianity, I noticed. “Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like.” I stared at him. I could not imagine a religion without belief. Ever since I had grown up and started to think, my Christian life had been a continuous struggle to accept the official doctrines. Without true belief you could not be a member of the church, you could not be saved. Faith was the starting point, the sine qua non, the indispensable requirement, and for me it had been a major stumbling block. “No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas—about God, salvation, and so on—as a basis?” “We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “ ‘Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don’t bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead.”

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  When we go to God in prayer, He doesn’t usually put us on blast quite as intensely as He did Job and his friends. For one thing, we (hopefully) don’t spend so much time eloquently mouthing off about stuff we don’t really understand. What God does for us, and what prayer does for us, is provide perspective. At those lunchtime prayer meetings at my high school, I remember watching kids leave the room with a completely different posture than when they had come in. They would tell us later how those fifteen minutes changed their outlook on what they were going through. They gained perspective. I remember wandering the San Gabriel hills of LA, feeling both small and loved at the same time. That’s perspective. FROM DESPAIR TO DESTINY Life (and traffic) have a way of skewing our perspective. Difficult, overwhelming circumstances can cause our emotions and thoughts to spiral out of control. I’m not saying those feelings and thoughts are not real. They absolutely are. But they are not the whole picture. And they aren’t designed to make our decisions for us. Which of these things have you felt lately? Or maybe even right now? LonelyFrustratedBitter BetrayedDiscouragedAnxious OverwhelmedConfusedGuilty UselessRejectedIgnored HurtAbandonedUsed LostHopelessPowerless Those feelings, if left unchecked, will affect your actions and decisions. You might find yourself doing or saying things that you later regret—things that don’t align with who you are, what you value, what you believe, or how you want to live. Again, the feelings are valid. Don’t ignore them. But don’t define yourself by them either. Don’t let them tell you who you are. They are feelings, and feelings

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Is that spiritual bypassing? No. Well, not in and of itself. Prayer is not the problem. We should always pray. The problem is when we don’t take personal responsibility for what we need to do. The moment we use prayer, faith, Bible, church, tithing, God, heaven, or any other spiritual belief or practice to avoid personal responsibility, we’ve crossed the line into spiritual bypassing. On a practical level, what does spiritual bypassing look like? Usually, it means substituting internal growth or tangible action with a cheap appeal to: Prayer: “Just pray about it.” Faith: “If you just had more faith . . .” Heaven: “This earth is sinful and broken; all will be made right in heaven.” God’s sovereignty: “His ways are higher than ours, so don’t try to understand.” Spiritual disciplines: “If you would give/fast/volunteer, you would be blessed.” Forgiveness: “You have to forgive, forget, and move on.” Unity: “If you disagree or complain, you’re causing division.” Vision: “I know you’re suffering, but you are part of something bigger, so it’s worth it.” Love: “Love covers a multitude of sins; love keeps no record of wrongs.” The difficult thing with spiritual bypassing is that it sounds so, well, spiritual. It’s hard to object when the person doing the bypassing is quoting the Bible or appealing to your generous, compassionate nature. The bulleted list above consists of good things, after all. And most of the phrases in quotes come from the Bible or can be supported biblically. The difference, though, is how they are being used. Are we quoting the Bible and talking about spiritual things in order to serve others and to follow God wholeheartedly? Or are we using them to avoid change, escape accountability, or control people?

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  These social realities which lay back of the theories gave them their influence and convincing power at the time they originated and for a long time thereafter, but when these social realities disappear, the theories of the atonement based on them become artificial and un- convincing, and sometimes repulsive. Analogies and il- lustrations taken from the priestly slaughtering of ani- mals or the ritual functions of the Jewish high-priest are remote from our imagination, and instead of clarifying the facts, they themselves need elaborate explanation. Forensic methods and the dealings of autocratic rulers arouse our moral antagonism and have brought the teach- ings about the atonement under suspicion. Our dominant ideas are personality and social soli- darity. The problems which burden us are the social problems. Has the death of Christ any relation to these? Have we not just as much right to connect this supreme religious event with our problems as Paul and Anselm and Calvin, and to use the terminology and methods of our day? In so far as the historical and social sciences have taught our generation to comprehend solidaristic facts, we are in a better situation to understand the atone- ment than any previous generation. As Christian men we believe that the death of our Lord concerns us all. Our sins caused it. He bore the sin of the world. In turn his death was somehow for our good. Our spiritual situation is fundamentally changed in consequence of it. But how? How did he bear our sins? How did his death affect God? How did it af- feefus? These three questions we shall discuss. THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND THE ATONEMENT 245 How did Jesus bear sins which he did not commit? The old theology replied, by imputation. But guilt and merit are personal. They can not be transferred from one person to another. We tamper with moral truth when we shuffle them about. Imputation is a legal device to enable the law to hold one man responsible for the crime committed by another. Imputation sees man- kind as a mass of individuals, and the debts of every individual are transferred to Christ. The solution does not lie in that way. Neither is it enough to say that Jesus bore our sins by sympathy. His contact with sin was a matter of expe- rience as well as .sympathy, and experience cuts deeper. Child-birth and travail reveal the realities of life to a woman more than sympathetic observation. How did Jesus bear our sins? The bar to a true un- derstanding of the atonement has been our individualism. The solution of the problem lies in the recognition of solidarity.