Shame

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When they share —a word that right off makes me want to dip snuff—about how hard it is to make the rent or whether the exhaust system wired together by a coat hanger will hold, I realize how far I’ve moved from the people I grew up around. The next instant a gray-haired lady in pearls smiles at me, and I turn away, thinking, I’m not like you, lady…. Nonetheless, I raise my hand a few inches, but when I don’t get called on, I yank it down and start sitting on it again. How far I’ve fallen from the hand-flapping freshman, how saturated in shame. That flip-flop keeps going on inside, as if opposing inner judo masters take turns body-slamming each other. One minute I’m thinking, They’re not all that strange. The next, their laughter bounces off me like bullets from a Kevlar vest. I go outside to smoke. In the common across from me, the bare trees are twisted into agonized forms. The bronze cannons seem aimed straight at my sternum. I look back at the lighted windows and hear a woman’s unintelligible voice. The door opens a crack, and in the spilled, triangular glow, a tall kid wearing a red bandana over his streaming brown hair slips out. He stops six feet away and bends slightly forward—almost a butler’s bow—saying, Excuse me, Miss Karr. Mind if I join you? Who is he? With his formal demeanor and gold granny glasses, he could be a student—some Ivy League suck-up. Join away, I say, adding as I flash my wedding ring, I’m a miz. My goodness gracious, ma’am, he says, those are some seriously blinding stones you’re flaunting. We met before… And we had. David was a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in philosophy I’d once been introduced to at the back of a reading by mutual pals. Some kind of genius, David’s meant to be, though his red bandana is the flag of gangster or biker, ditto the unlaced Timberland work boots. I ask him how long he’s been coming, and he says not hardly any time, and I say it’s my first go, and he asks if I get it, and I say if I got it, I wouldn’t be out here smoking. He says same with him, adding while he drank a lot, he mostly did marijuana, which can’t be so bad because it’s natural. I say—cleverly, I think—Strychnine’s natural. He concedes that’s true but also points out how, since the average pot smoker doesn’t tend to steal your TV, people don’t frown on it like they do, say, smoking crack, then plowing over the crossing guard. We stare at the cannons facing us, both agreeing we really have better places to be as we grind our cigarettes with our boot heels. Climbing the steps back to the lighted doorway, he holds the door, bowing as he says from his scruffily bearded face (this is the pre-scruff U.S.A.), After you, Miz Karr.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I resist the urge to step back five yards and head-butt it repeatedly. By fumbling around on the side, I locate some kind of handle and pull. I stare at the machine’s innards. For one thousand years I could ponder here before any useful action came to me. There appears behind me another young poet with tortoiseshell glasses and a striped scarf. He’s a real professor with the right to get his copies done who therefore knows how to clear the machine jam with a few arcane moves. It hums to life again. Celery-green light starts sliding across my face, and I can feel how massive my pores must look—real moon craters. Exfoliate, I think. When did I last exfoliate? Buy a scrub or grind up some almonds—was it almonds? An autodidact from a poor Irish family, yards smarter than I am, this young prof sports the countenance of an choirboy. You can jump in, I say. But he says I should go ahead before the secretary gets in and runs me off. Then he asks when my poetry book will be out, and it’s like he’s bringing up a wart or goiter I’ve secretly had taken off, since the book came out two years ago, with grossly underwhelming response. Even I barely noticed, being stuck in the muddy trench of Dev’s sleepless infancy when the box hit the porch. Tearing it open, I’d lifted a copy, thumbed it, and tried to tell myself it was some worthy stone added to poetry’s great mountain. But I hid it out of eyeshot in my study—the sight of it made me sick. First books rarely get the attention they deserve, the other poet says with a kind look. I explain that virtually all copies sold were, I’m guessing, bought by my sister, who gave twenty or thirty for Christmas that year. He tells me the story of a writer who—on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore—opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad.... He gestures behind me, where the secretary is making her way up the hall, and I grab my armload of contraband copies before scuttling off like a burglar with the house silver. A few people are starting to trickle through the halls, and I seize up, overcome with a sense of inadequacy to teach anybody anything. I simply can’t be the only dumb person in this place one more instant. Before I can stop myself, I loudly say, Let’s start a contest for who hasn’t read the most important book. I raise my hand like a testifying evangelist to shout, I haven’t read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Who hasn’t read a greater book? A friend pokes his head from an office, yelling, I never read Moby-Dick. Somebody behind me says, I haven’t read Byron’s Don Juan. A passing scholar corrects the pronunciation to what I guess must be super-anglicized Oxfordese, saying, Don Jew-wan.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The sense of shame and humiliation was acute. The Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that this was exacerbated by their memory of past greatness: “In the gulf between [the modern Arab] and, for instance, the modern American, a matter of prime significance has been precisely the deep difference between a society with a memory of past greatness and a sense of present greatness.” 27 This had crucial religious implications. Christianity is supremely a religion of suffering and adversity and, in the West at least, has arguably been most authentic in times of trouble: it is not easy to square earthly glory with the image of Christ crucified. Islam, however, is a religion of success. The Koran taught that a society which lived according to God’s will (implementing justice, equality, and a fair distribution of wealth) could not fail. Muslim history had seemed to confirm this. Unlike Christ, Muhammad had not been an apparent failure but a dazzling success. His achievements had been compounded by the phenomenal advance of the Muslim empire during the seventh and eighth centuries. This had naturally seemed to endorse the Muslim faith in God: al- Lah had proved to be extremely effective and had made good his word in the arena of history. Muslim success had continued. Even such catastrophes as the Mongol invasions had been overcome. Over the centuries, the ummah had acquired an almost sacramental importance and had disclosed the presence of God. Now, however, something seemed to have gone radically wrong with Muslim history, and this inevitably affected the perception of God. Henceforth many Muslims would concentrate on getting Islamic history back onto the rails and making the Koranic vision effective in the world. The sense of shame was exacerbated when closer acquaintance with Europe revealed the depth of Western contempt for the Prophet and his religion. Muslim scholarship was increasingly devoted to apologetics or to dreaming of past triumphs—a dangerous brew. God was no longer center stage. Cantwell Smith traces this process in a close examination of the Egyptian Journal Al-Azhar from 1930 to 1948. During that time, the journal had two editors. From 1930 to 1933 it was run by Al-Khidr Husain, a traditionist of the best sort, who saw his religion as a transcendent idea rather than a political and historical entity. Islam was an imperative, a summons to future action, rather than a reality which had been fully achieved. Because it is always difficult—even impossible—to incarnate the divine ideal in human life, Husain was not dismayed by past or present failures of the ummah. He was confident enough to criticize Muslim behavior, and the words “ought” and “should” run through all the issues of the journal during his time in office.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Then he asks when my poetry book will be out, and it’s like he’s bringing up a wart or goiter I’ve secretly had taken off, since the book came out two years ago, with grossly underwhelming response. Even I barely noticed, being stuck in the muddy trench of Dev’s sleepless infancy when the box hit the porch. Tearing it open, I’d lifted a copy, thumbed it, and tried to tell myself it was some worthy stone added to poetry’s great mountain. But I hid it out of eyeshot in my study—the sight of it made me sick. First books rarely get the attention they deserve, the other poet says with a kind look. I explain that virtually all copies sold were, I’m guessing, bought by my sister, who gave twenty or thirty for Christmas that year. He tells me the story of a writer who—on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore—opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad…. He gestures behind me, where the secretary is making her way up the hall, and I grab my armload of contraband copies before scuttling off like a burglar with the house silver. A few people are starting to trickle through the halls, and I seize up, overcome with a sense of inadequacy to teach anybody anything. I simply can’t be the only dumb person in this place one more instant. Before I can stop myself, I loudly say, Let’s start a contest for who hasn’t read the most important book. I raise my hand like a testifying evangelist to shout, I haven’t read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Who hasn’t read a greater book? A friend pokes his head from an office, yelling, I never read Moby-Dick. Somebody behind me says, I haven’t read Byron’s Don Juan. A passing scholar corrects the pronunciation to what I guess must be super-anglicized Oxfordese, saying, Don Jew-wan. Pompous effing fop, I think. You should be shot. Another voice hasn’t read a word by Virginia Woolf. Students are starting to gape. Later, in my shared cubicle along a line of hissing radiators, I spread dozens of copies and start assembly-line stapling Mr. Nabokov’s memoir, the sentences I once worshipped now streaming in a hieroglyphic blur off my eyeballs, flooding me with gall. 19The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind…oh how oddly the drinker seems to withdraw from the act of drinking. —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (trans. David Young) I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself that I’m taller, faster, funnier. Instead, it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other—it blurs time.

• From A History of God (1993)

  These objective studies depended upon a literal understanding of scripture and ignored the symbolic or metaphorical nature of the faith. One might object that this kind of criticism was as irrelevant as it might be to art or poetry. But once the scientific spirit had become normative for many people, it was difficult for them to read the Gospels in any other way. Western Christians were now committed to a literal understanding of their faith and had taken an irrevocable step back from myth: a story was either factually true or it was a delusion. Questions about the origin of religion were more important to Christians than, say, to Buddhists because their monotheistic tradition had always claimed that God was revealed in historical events. If Christians were to preserve their integrity in the scientific age, therefore, these questions had to be addressed. Some Christians who held more conventional beliefs than Tindal or Reimarus were beginning to question the traditional Western understanding of God. In his tract Wittenburg’s Innocence of a Double Murder (1681), the Lutheran John Friedmann Mayer wrote that the traditional doctrine of the atonement, as outlined by Anselm, which depicted God demanding the death of his own Son, presented an inadequate conception of the divine. He was “the righteous God, the angered God” and “the embittered God,” whose demands for strict retribution filled so many Christians with fear and taught them to recoil from their own “sinfulness.”19 More and more Christians were embarrassed by the cruelty of so much Christian history, which had conducted fearful crusades, inquisitions and persecutions in the name of this just God. Coercing people to believe in orthodox doctrines seemed particularly appalling to an age increasingly enamored of liberty and freedom of conscience. The bloodbath unleashed by the Reformation and its aftermath seemed the final straw.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Four days sober, I leave the infirmary feeling very shaky, on an Indian summer day. At home, I’m meant to be fixing dinner for the three of us, but I cut myself peeling a carrot, which leads me to some burst of undefended incompetence as wife and mother. So I swipe all the unwashed vegetables off the drain board and into the sink and throw myself into a chair. Poor Mommy, Dev says. He puts his hand on my leg. You need to relax! You shouldn’t have to take care of me. I’m supposed to take care of you. My mouth’s so parched, and—seeing Warren’s seldom used bottle of valium above the sink—I instinctively grab it. Before I can open it, I do have the sense to phone Joan the Bone, who’s on her way to the theater and can’t talk. This, she tells me, is a test of your new willingness. You’ve gotta keep calling till you reach somebody. I hang up and stare again at the medicine bottle. Raising it to eye level, I study the small blue pills, now glowing ethereally. Are you sick? Dev wants to know. He’s holding a matchbox car, studying me with the intensity I no doubt brought to my own mother, whose invisible engines of misery could—at the slightest spark—ignite and blast her off into the stratosphere. That level stare of his guides my hand to put the valium back above the sink, where the bottle pulses and throbs. That night I ask Warren to hide it from me. I phone Lux, who’s barbecuing for his family. They have us over. It’s a freakishly warm day, so they’ve gotten the wading pool out. He pokes at meat splayed on the grill while Dev splashes around the water. I ask Lux, Do you actually pray? I couldn’t imagine it—Lux, that dismal sucker. Ever taciturn, Lux tells me: I say thanks for all kinds of things. For what? I want to know, for I’m a habitually morbid bitch. Even my poetry is obsessed with our collective hurtle toward death—the prospect of my own death seeming specially tragic and unsung. For me, everything’s too much and nothing’s enough. I honestly can’t think of anything to be grateful for. I tell Lux something like I’m glad I still have all my limbs. (Why—I now wonder—couldn’t I register the privilege of tossing my wriggling blond boy off the pool float?) Lux stands in his baggy blue swim trunks at the barbecue, turning sausages and chicken with one of those diabolical-looking forks. In the considerable smoke, he looks like a bronzed Satan at the devil’s cauldron. Say thanks for the sky, Lux says, say it to the floorboards. This isn’t hard, Mare. What’re you so miserable about?

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  It is in order to quote these paragraphs from a recently published book, The Protestant Church and the Negro, by Frank S. Loescher: There are approximately 8,000,000 Protestant Negroes. About 7,500,000 are in separate Negro denominations. Therefore, from the local church through the regional organizations to the national assemblies over 93 per cent of the Negroes are without association in work and worship with Christians of other races except in interdenominational organizations which involves a few of their leaders. The remaining 500,000 Negro Protestants—about 6 per cent—are in predominantly white denominations, and of these 500,000 Negroes in “white” churches, at least 99 per cent, judging by the surveys of six denominations, are in segregated congregations. They are in association with their white denominational brothers only in national assemblies, and, in some denominations, in regional, state, or more local jursdictional meetings. There remains a handful of Negro members in local “white” churches. How many? Call it one-tenth of one per cent of all the Negro Protestant Christians in the United States—8,000 souls—the figure is probably much too large. Whatever the figure actually is, the number of white and Negro persons who ever gather together for worship under the auspices of Protestant Christianity is almost microscopic. And where interracial worship does occur, it is, for the most part, in communities where there are only a few Negro families and where, therefore, only a few Negro individuals are available to “white” churches. That is the over-all picture, a picture which hardly reveals the Protestant church as a dynamic agency in the integration of American Negroes into American life. Negro membership appears to be confined to less than one per cent of the local “white” churches, usually churches in small communities where but a few Negroes live and have already experienced a high degree of integration by other community institutions—communities one might add where it is unsound to establish a Negro church since Negroes are in such small numbers. It is an even smaller percentage of white churches in which Negroes are reported to be participating freely, or are integrated. The same pattern appears to be true for other colored minorities, that is, Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans. Regarding the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, for example, a director of home missions work in a great denomination says his experience leads him to believe that “generally there is little, if any, discrimination here though in a community which has a large Mexican population it is quite true that they have their own churches.”1 The enormity of this sin cannot be easily grasped. The situation is so tragic that men of good will in all the specious classifications within our society find more cause for hope in the secular relations of life than in religion. The religion of Jesus says to the disinherited: “Love your enemy. Take the initiative in seeking ways by which you can have the experience of a common sharing of mutual worth and value.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The sense of shame was exacerbated when closer acquaintance with Europe revealed the depth of Western contempt for the Prophet and his religion. Muslim scholarship was increasingly devoted to apologetics or to dreaming of past triumphs—a dangerous brew. God was no longer center stage. Cantwell Smith traces this process in a close examination of the Egyptian Journal Al-Azhar from 1930 to 1948. During that time, the journal had two editors. From 1930 to 1933 it was run by Al-Khidr Husain, a traditionist of the best sort, who saw his religion as a transcendent idea rather than a political and historical entity. Islam was an imperative, a summons to future action, rather than a reality which had been fully achieved. Because it is always difficult—even impossible—to incarnate the divine ideal in human life, Husain was not dismayed by past or present failures of the ummah. He was confident enough to criticize Muslim behavior, and the words “ought” and “should” run through all the issues of the journal during his time in office. Yet it is also clear that Husain could not imagine the predicament of a person who wanted to but found that he could not believe: the reality of al-Lah is taken for granted. In one early issue, an article by Yusuf al-Dijni had outlined the old teleological argument for the existence of God. Smith notes that the style was essentially reverential and expressed an intense and lively appreciation of the beauty and sublimity of nature which revealed the divine presence. Al-Dijni had no doubt that al-Lah existed. His article is a meditation rather than a logical demonstration of God’s existence, and he was quite unconcerned that Western scientists had long since exploded this particular “proof.” Yet this attitude was outdated. The circulation of the magazine slumped. When Farid Wajdi took over in 1933, the readership doubled. Wajdi’s prime consideration was to assure his readers that Islam was “all right.” It would not have occurred to Husain that Islam, a transcendent idea in the mind of God, might require a helping hand from time to time, but Wajdi saw Islam as a human institution under threat. The prime need is to justify, admire and applaud. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out, a profound irreligiousness pervades Wajdi’s work. Like his forebears, he constantly argued that the West was only teaching what Islam had discovered centuries earlier but, unlike them, he scarcely referred to God. The human reality of “Islam” was his central concern: and this earthly value had in some sense replaced the transcendent God. Smith concludes: A true Muslim is not a man who believes in Islam—especially Islam in history; but one who believes in God and is committed to the revelation through his Prophet. The latter is there sufficiently admired. But commitment is missing. And God appears remarkably seldom throughout these pages.28

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  As he’s locking up, he says—color blazing high on his flared cheekbones—And you quit your job. With your school loans and your father sick. Are you crazy? This is a buzzword with me, since deep down I know I’m crazy, my chief fear being that everybody’ll find out. So I do the only thing I can think of: I run. I run onto the sidewalk and drop to my knees, sobbing like a banshee. A bratty move, but Warren takes the bait and comes to help me up. Then a few things happen in an order I can’t recall. He asks me please to go inside. I start to vomit in the snow—three cognacs in those days being a heavy dose. A policeman shows up to check out the seedy scene, and from Warren’s arms, I jabber, I’m fine, Officer, just too much to drink. My boyfriend’s taking me home. Back in the apartment, I lie in bed next to him, circled by the night’s chaos as if by gnats. Our fight’s antithetical to Warren’s penchant for order and routine—his alphabetical file folders and meticulously typed drafts, the paper clip always in the same spot. (How like my daddy that was.) If he hates a book on page one, he’ll nonetheless finish it, for he’s made the commitment. And I hope he’ll commit to me that way and be as loath to leave me undone. I lie there pondering his fiscal prickliness, wholly mysterious to me. Back home, nobody had any money, so we swapped the same few bucks back and forth with open hands. (Those without money don’t grasp right off having to discipline yourself against sycophants.) Listening to his even breath, I sense the oppressive weight of my old self inside me pressing to run wild again. My old mother I’m trying to keep in. Snow pecks at the window screens. And then the sound of our upstairs neighbor playing the ukelele— plunka plunka plunka . There is no instrument goofier nor more insidious. The guy can play for hours, and while I can sack out during a train wreck, Warren heaves over and swears. He reaches his arm out and flips on the white noise machine that blocks all sound. It makes a cocoon of rushing noise meant to mimic an air conditioner or waterfall. To me, it sounds like the sucking of a dentist’s drain. Warren needs absolute silence, absolute dark to sleep, and with the entire racket in my head, I know myself to be an inadvertent force for pandemonium. For a long time, I lie studying in the blue dark Warren’s angled jaw and ski-slope cheekbones. It’s shallow, I confess, but the architecture of his face never fails to transfix me. It’s the kind of face people on the street invariably asked for directions—the face of the army officer, the team captain, the star professor. Without Warren’s hands cupping my own face, I’m almost faceless.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Whitbread was the only man he ever saw talk down to the Supreme Court.) At dinner, I’d seen my lover’s fine jaw flex as he studied his plate, and I’d felt the liquid warmth of our time together evaporate as he braced himself for his father’s scrutiny. Now I long for some definitive gesture to free him, to throw my port glass into the fireplace and stalk out with a poor kid’s piety, riding off with him in his Mazda into a life with nary a polo divet to stomp. But the house’s disabling comfort saps resolve. And by the time we’re in the library, I’ve begun to breathe in the parents’ gentility. The conversation is so adroit—the nonchalance so juicy—I lap it up as Tiger did our fatty scraps, steel bowls rattling on the kitchen tiles. I want to believe I’m at home with these composed individuals. They’re liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. At some point Mrs. Whitbread says casually, What religion does your family practice, Mary? Which I take as interest in my strangely compelling history. I think of my mother, who studied every faith and—with her husbands—committed to none. We’re not anything, really, I say. But I find myself dredging up a few childhood visits to the Presbyterian church, for I know a joke punch line about Episcopalians being Presbyterians with trust funds. But I catch Mrs. Whitbread’s unmet glance toward Warren, and it dawns on me that had he brought home his classmate Caroline Kennedy, her being a Catholic might have been a mark against her. In a mind shift, I’m a schoolgirl again in summer, and my half-Indian daddy has just come in the back door at dawn with grime under his nails from a double shift. How carefully he draws five one-dollar bills from his weathered billfold to give Mother for two pairs of school shoes—one for me, one for Lecia. While I wait for her to bring the car around, he slips off his shirt, showing a chest pale as paper where his worker’s tan runs out. He steps out of his khakis, and jutting through his baggy boxers, his legs are knobby and thin. One thigh’s pronounced hunk of shrapnel is royal blue. The long scar up his right shinbone where a horse he was breaking threw and dragged him looks freshly scabby. He sits down on the bed’s edge, staring at his brown forearms. Daddy , I whisper, and that greedy call for him snaps the connection to the past. The voltage drops, and he’s gone, reabsorbed into the shriveled form in my mother’s house, tended days by a male nurse we can’t afford, nights by Mother, who resents it. In an instant I’m back in the Whitbreads’ library, and Daddy lies uninsured, half paralyzed.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  45 My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell . —John Milton, Paradise Lost T hat night I’m driving back to Mother’s condo not having prayed, which seems no accident from this juncture. Cleaning out the childhood home that day had been heavy duty. Plus, it’s a dark time in terms of the Exercises—the season of Lent, atonement—when you daily pray to be shown your own sinfulness in all its ugliness. Over bayous my rental car goes low-flying like a steel-coated bat. Since I didn’t quite believe that spiritual forces for good and evil tug us to and fro, I fancied that failing to pray was understandable, an accident, for I’d risen at four to catch a plane down to Houston. In the rental car, I fly over foggy blacktop alone, with the sciatic kink in my lower back keeping me edged toward the phosphorescent dash. But swelling in my chest is—what unknown sense—pride? I’ve been able to help Mother for once with more than a check in the mail. My sister hasn’t borne the burden alone. And the company of my Leechfield brothers has left me feeling all shiny inside. Sister Margaret had warned me that praying to know your own sins may prompt an arid season, with no consolations. Which makes you—in her scary parlance—a juicy morsel for the Adversary. Okay, I said, if a guy in a red suit with horns and a long scaly tail appears, I’ll shake a crucifix at him. Margaret told me, He might appear as future pleasure, or he’ll appeal to your intellectual vanity. Asked what I should do to prevent these dark assaults, she said, During Lent, don’t miss a single minute of prayer, no matter what comes up. Err on the side of overkill, even if you feel yourself only going through the motions. That night driving from the homestead, the black sky sliding off my windows, I don’t consider sending up any hosanna of thanks, nor do Margaret’s warnings echo through me. I feel exhausted, sure, but contrarily swell about myself, like the best daughter. Sin? What sin? The hours spent cleaning out the house have left me in weary ease—proud of the good works I’ve done. The fog holds me in the car’s hull, and I drive suspended in time. Reaching Mother’s condo about eleven, I climb the stairs swinging a light garment bag, expecting to find her asleep. But she’s ensconced in her mushroom-colored recliner, a giant magnifying lamp burning like a halo alongside her. An old movie with the sound muted unrolls across the screen. I ready myself for the praise and approbation she’ll heap on me for squiring her into this luxury. She says, Did you have fun? I see from the set of her jaw she’s fired up and ask her what’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong. How could anything be wrong? I’m here in the little white hole you and your sister have buried me in.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The myth of Marduk and Tiamat seems to have influenced the people of Canaan, who told a very similar story about Baal-Habad, the god of storm and fertility, who is often mentioned in extremely unflattering terms in the Bible. The story of Baal’s battle with Yam-Nahar, the god of the seas and rivers, is told on tablets that date to the fourteenth century BCE. Baal and Yam both lived with El, the Canaanite High God. At the Council of El, Yam demands that Baal be delivered up to him. With two magic weapons, Baal defeats Yam and is about to kill him when Asherah (El’s wife and mother of the gods) pleads that it is dishonorable to slay a prisoner. Baal is ashamed and spares Yam, who represents the hostile aspect of the seas and rivers which constantly threaten to flood the earth, while Baal, the Storm God, makes the earth fertile. In another version of the myth, Baal slays the seven-headed dragon Lotan, who is called Leviathan in Hebrew. In almost all cultures, the dragon symbolizes the latent, the unformed and the undifferentiated. Baal has thus halted the slide back to primal formlessness in a truly creative act and is rewarded by a beautiful palace built by the gods in his honor. In very early religion, therefore, creativity was seen as divine: we still use religious language to speak of creative “inspiration” which shapes reality anew and brings fresh meaning to the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet it is also clear that Husain could not imagine the predicament of a person who wanted to but found that he could not believe: the reality of al-Lah is taken for granted. In one early issue, an article by Yusuf al-Dijni had outlined the old teleological argument for the existence of God. Smith notes that the style was essentially reverential and expressed an intense and lively appreciation of the beauty and sublimity of nature which revealed the divine presence. Al- Dijni had no doubt that al-Lah existed. His article is a meditation rather than a logical demonstration of God’s existence, and he was quite unconcerned that Western scientists had long since exploded this particular “proof.” Yet this attitude was outdated. The circulation of the magazine slumped. When Farid Wajdi took over in 1933, the readership doubled. Wajdi’s prime consideration was to assure his readers that Islam was “all right.” It would not have occurred to Husain that Islam, a transcendent idea in the mind of God, might require a helping hand from time to time, but Wajdi saw Islam as a human institution under threat. The prime need is to justify, admire and applaud. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out, a profound irreligiousness pervades Wajdi’s work. Like his forebears, he constantly argued that the West was only teaching what Islam had discovered centuries earlier but, unlike them, he scarcely referred to God. The human reality of “Islam” was his central concern: and this earthly value had in some sense replaced the transcendent God. Smith concludes: A true Muslim is not a man who believes in Islam—especially Islam in history; but one who believes in God and is committed to the revelation through his Prophet. The latter is there sufficiently admired. But commitment is missing. And God appears remarkably seldom throughout these pages. 28 Instead, there is instability and lack of self-esteem: the opinion of the West has come to matter too desperately. People like Husain had understood religion and the centrality of God but had lost touch with the modern world. People who were in touch with modernity had lost the sense of God. From this instability would spring the political activism which characterizes modern fundamentalism, which is also in retreat from God. The Jews of Europe had also been affected by hostile criticism of their faith. In Germany, Jewish philosophers developed what they called “the Science of Judaism,” which rewrote Jewish history in Hegelian terms to counter the charge that Judaism was a servile, alienating faith. The first to attempt this reinterpretation of the history of Israel was Solomon Formstecher (1808–89). In The Religion of the Spirit (1841), he described God as a world Soul, immanent in all things. This Spirit did not depend upon the world, however, as Hegel had argued. Formstecher insisted that it lay beyond the reach of reason, reverting to the old distinction between God’s essence and his activities.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Abraham Cardazo taught a doctrine that was similar to St. Paul’s belief in the glorification of Jesus after his resurrection: when the redemption had begun at the time of his apostasy, Shabbetai had been raised to the Trinity of parzufim: “the Holy One [ Malka Kadisha ] blessed be He, removed himself upward and Shabbetai Zevi ascended to be God in his place.” 49 He had, therefore, somehow been promoted to divine status and had taken the place of the God of Israel, the second parzuf . Soon the Donmeh , who had converted to Islam, took the idea a step further and decided that the God of Israel had descended and been made flesh in Shabbetai. Since they also came to believe that each of their leaders was a reincarnation of the Messiah, it followed that they became avatars too, in rather the same way, perhaps, as the Shii Imams. Each generation of apostates, therefore, had a leader who was an incarnation of the divine. Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who led his Ashkenazic disciples to baptism in 1759, had implied that he was God incarnate at the very beginning of his career. He has been described as the most frightening figure in the entire history of Judaism. He was uneducated and proud of it but had the ability to evolve a dark mythology that attracted many Jews who had found their faith empty and unsatisfying. Frank preached that the Old Law had been abrogated. Indeed, all religions must be destroyed so that God could shine forth clearly. In his Slowa Panskie (The Sayings of the Lord), he took Sabbatarianism over the edge into nihilism. Everything had to be broken down: “Wherever Adam trod, a city was built, but wherever I set foot all will be destroyed, for I have come into this world only to destroy and annihilate.” 50 There is a disturbing similarity to some of the sayings of Christ, who had also claimed that he had come to bring not peace but the sword. Unlike Jesus and St. Paul, however, Frank proposed to put nothing in the place of the old sanctities. His nihilistic creed was not too dissimilar, perhaps, to that of his younger contemporary the Marquis de Sade. It was only by descending to the depths of degradation that men could ascend to find the Good God. This meant not only the rejection of all religion but the commission of “strange acts” that resulted in voluntary abasement and utter shamelessness. Frank was not a Kabbalist but preached a cruder version of Cardazo’s theology.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  21 The Grinning Skull The grinning skull begins to take on skin — —Wislawa Szymborska, “An Old Story” (trans. Stanislav Baranczak) T he next night, still hungover, I sullenly drag in to the therapy group for people trying to quit. Maybe they know ways to cut back that won’t make me too itchy. It’s a Cambridge church basement—a musty yellow room whose ancient carpet smells of wet gym socks. Hung from the walls are giant posters like you’d expect at a high school pep rally, splattered with cornball slogans. There are rows of aluminum folding chairs, baby-shit brown in color. I warp my mouth into a stiff rictus and begin trying to impersonate a good and sober person who’s only wandered in through curiosity and happenstance. Here the coffee costs a dime, and you can read the styrofoam cup’s manufacturer embossed backward on the bottom. Standing at the urn, I hear a tweedy classics professor say to a big black marine with patches from Khe Sanh on his bulging arms: It’s hard to be an articulate ghost. Illogically, as I hear this, some frozen inner aspect thaws enough that a small surge of pity swells through me. I heap my watery coffee with powdered cream and stop thinking about myself long enough to come alive a little. I notice in the professor’s baggy face his red-rimmed eyes, and the care in the marine’s gaze starts to plug me in to something invisible that rivers among these strangers. It’s like running from my cardiac area, I’ve been dragging a long extension cord unplugged from all compassion, and it’s suddenly found a socket. The room comes breathing to life. I’m standing by a book cart loaded with navy blue hymnals, and through the tall windows, I can see dusk falling. The leaves of the oaks are dabbed with orange paint. A woman in a snug yellow sweater is polishing her tortoiseshell glasses with a red silk square. We’re asleep most of the time, I once heard the writer George Saunders say, but we can wake up. In that instant, for no reason I can discern, I wake up. Faces cease to be blurs and grow distinct features. Coming toward me from the door is a buff musician whose CDs I own. He’s carrying a plate covered in foil, talking to a handsome, mustachioed friend whose leather jacket must’ve cost more than our rusting vehicle. I stand aside as he lowers the plate to the table and peels off the foil—homemade chocolate chip cookies melting into each other. People from around the room come up, and I snatch one and head to my seat, sinking my teeth into the buttery dough and warm chocolate. Pleasure, I feel—mouth to spine to head. A small uprush of pleasure. This, I think, is why other people aren’t screaming. I’ve briefly forgotten to feel sorry for myself, to worry, to generate any kind of report on my own performance.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Monday at nine o’clock I was to be at the studio of a well-known painter; at one, at the studio of an illustrator; at four o’clock, at the studio of a miniaturist, and so on. There were women painters too. They objected to our using make-up. They said that when they engaged a made-up model and then got her to wash her face before posing, she did not look the same. For that reason posing for women did not attract us very much. My announcement at home that I was a model came like a thunderbolt. But it was done. I could make twenty-five dollars a week. My mother wept a little, but was pleased deep down. That night we talked in the dark. Her room connected with mine and the door was open. My mother was worrying about what I knew (or did not know) about sex. The sum of my knowledge was this: that I had been kissed many times by Stephen, lying on the sand at the beach. He had been lying over me, and I had felt something bulky and hard pressing against me, but that was all, and to my great amazement when I came home I had discovered that I was all wet between the legs. I had not mentioned this to my mother. My private impression was that I was a great sensualist, that this getting wet between the legs at being kissed showed dangerous tendencies for the future. In fact, I felt quite like a whore. My mother asked me, “Do you know what happens when a man takes a woman?” “No,” I said, “but I would like to know how a man takes a woman in the first place.” “Well, you know the small penis you saw when you bathed your brother—that gets big and hard and the man pushes it inside of the woman.” That seemed ugly to me. “It must be difficult to get it in,” I said. “No, because the woman gets wet before that, so it slides in easily.” Now I understood the mystery of the wetness. In that case, I thought to myself, I will never get raped, because to get wet you have to like the man. A few months before, having been violently kissed in the woods by a big Russian who was bringing me home from a dance, I had come home and announced that I was pregnant. Now I remembered how one night when several of us were returning from another dance, driving along the speedway, we had heard girls screaming. My escort, John, stopped the car. Two girls ran to us from the bushes, disheveled, dresses torn, and eyes haggard. We let them into the car. They were mumbling chaotically about having been taken for a ride on a motorcycle and then attacked. One of them kept saying: “If he broke through, I’ll kill myself.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Some historians deny that men like Robbins and Franklin were Ranters, noting that we only hear about their activities from their enemies, who may have distorted their beliefs for polemical reasons. But some texts by notable Ranters like Jacob Bauthumely, Richard Coppin and Laurence Clarkson have survived which show the same complex of ideas: they also preached a revolutionary social creed. In his treatise The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650), Bauthumely speaks of God in terms that recall the Sufi belief that God was the Eye, Ear and Hand of the man who turns to him: “O God, what shall I say thou art?” he asks. “For if I say I see thee, it is nothing but thy seeing of thy selfe; for there is nothing in me capable of seeing thee but thy selfe: If I say I know thee, that is no other but the knowledge of thy selfe.” 39 Like the rationalists, Bauthumely rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and, again like a Sufi, qualifies his belief in the divinity of Christ by saying that while he was divine, God could not become manifest in only one man: “He as really and substantially dwells in the flesh of other men and Creatures, as well as in the man Christ.” 40 The worship of a distinct, localized God is a form of idolatry; Heaven is not a place but the spiritual presence of Christ. The biblical idea of God, Bauthumely believed, was inadequate: sin is not an action but a condition, a falling short of our divine nature. Yet mysteriously, God was present in sin, which was simply “the dark side of God, a mere privation of light.” 41 Bauthumely was denounced as an atheist by his enemies, but his outlook is not far in spirit from Fox, Wesley and Zinzenburg, though it is expressed far more crudely. Like the later Pietists and Methodists, he was trying to internalize a God who had become distant and inhumanly objective and to transpose traditional doctrine into religious experience. He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart. Bauthumely was flirting with the deeply exciting and subversive doctrine of the holiness of sin. If God was everything, sin was nothing —an assertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current sexual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so fearfully that she trembled for hours afterward. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind.

• From A History of God (1993)

  38 Like Spinoza, the Ranters were accused of atheism. They deliberately broke Christian taboos in their libertarian creed and blasphemously claimed that there was no distinction between God and man. Not everybody was capable of the scientific abstraction of Kant or Spinoza, but in the self-exaltation of the Ranters or the Inner Light of the Quakers it is possible to see an aspiration that was similar to that expressed a century later by the French revolutionaries who enthroned the Goddess of Reason in the Panthéon. Several of the Ranters claimed to be the Messiah, a reincarnation of God, who was to establish the new Kingdom. The accounts that we have of their lives suggest mental disorder in some cases, but they still seem to have attracted a following, obviously addressing a spiritual and social need in the England of their time. Thus William Franklin, a respectable householder, became mentally ill in 1646 after his family had been smitten by plague. He horrified his fellow Christians by declaring himself to be God and Christ, but later recanted and begged pardon. He seemed in full possession of his faculties, but he still left his wife and began to sleep with other women, leading an apparently disreputable, mendicant life. One of these women, Mary Gadbury, began to see visions and hear voices, prophesying a new social order which would abolish all class distinctions. She embraced Franklin as her Lord and Christ. They seem to have attracted a number of disciples but in 1650 were arrested, whipped and imprisoned in Bridewell. At about the same time, one John Robbins was also revered as God: he claimed to be God the Father and believed that his wife would shortly give birth to the Savior of the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The sense of shame and humiliation was acute. The Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that this was exacerbated by their memory of past greatness: “In the gulf between [the modern Arab] and, for instance, the modern American, a matter of prime significance has been precisely the deep difference between a society with a memory of past greatness and a sense of present greatness.” 27 This had crucial religious implications. Christianity is supremely a religion of suffering and adversity and, in the West at least, has arguably been most authentic in times of trouble: it is not easy to square earthly glory with the image of Christ crucified. Islam, however, is a religion of success. The Koran taught that a society which lived according to God’s will (implementing justice, equality, and a fair distribution of wealth) could not fail. Muslim history had seemed to confirm this. Unlike Christ, Muhammad had not been an apparent failure but a dazzling success. His achievements had been compounded by the phenomenal advance of the Muslim empire during the seventh and eighth centuries. This had naturally seemed to endorse the Muslim faith in God: al-Lah had proved to be extremely effective and had made good his word in the arena of history. Muslim success had continued. Even such catastrophes as the Mongol invasions had been overcome. Over the centuries, the ummah had acquired an almost sacramental importance and had disclosed the presence of God. Now, however, something seemed to have gone radically wrong with Muslim history, and this inevitably affected the perception of God. Henceforth many Muslims would concentrate on getting Islamic history back onto the rails and making the Koranic vision effective in the world. The sense of shame was exacerbated when closer acquaintance with Europe revealed the depth of Western contempt for the Prophet and his religion. Muslim scholarship was increasingly devoted to apologetics or to dreaming of past triumphs—a dangerous brew. God was no longer center stage. Cantwell Smith traces this process in a close examination of the Egyptian Journal Al-Azhar from 1930 to 1948. During that time, the journal had two editors. From 1930 to 1933 it was run by Al-Khidr Husain, a traditionist of the best sort, who saw his religion as a transcendent idea rather than a political and historical entity. Islam was an imperative, a summons to future action, rather than a reality which had been fully achieved. Because it is always difficult—even impossible—to incarnate the divine ideal in human life, Husain was not dismayed by past or present failures of the ummah . He was confident enough to criticize Muslim behavior, and the words “ought” and “should” run through all the issues of the journal during his time in office.

• From A History of God (1993)

  30 The Incarnation expressed the mystery of the new birth of an individual Christian, when Christ became “the King of the heart.” This emotive type of spirituality had also surfaced in the Roman Catholic Church in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which established itself in the face of much opposition from the Jesuits and the establishment, who were suspicious of its frequently mawkish sentimentality. It has survived to the present day: many Roman Catholic churches contain a statue of Christ baring his breast to display a bulbous heart surrounded by a nimbus of flames. It was the mode in which he had appeared to Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647–90) in her convent in Paray-le-Monial, France. There is no resemblance between this Christ and the abrasive figure of the Gospels. In his whining self-pity, he shows the dangers of concentrating on the heart to the exclusion of the head. In 1682 Marguerite-Marie recalled that Jesus appeared to her at the beginning of Lent: covered all over with wounds and bruises. His adorable Blood was streaming over Him on every side: “Will no one,” He said in a sad and mournful tone, “have pity on Me and compassionate Me, and take part in My sorrow, in the piteous state to which sinners reduce Me especially at this time.” 31 A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of sex, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy masochistic acts to prove her “love” for the Sacred Heart, Marguerite-Marie shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry. Her Christ is often nothing more than a wish fulfillment, whose Sacred Heart compensates her for the love she had never experienced: “You shall be for ever Its beloved disciple, the sport of Its good pleasure and the victim of Its wishes,” Jesus tells her. “It shall be the sole delight of all your desires; It will repair and supply for your defects, and discharge your obligations for you.” 32 Concentrating solely on Jesus the man, such a piety is simply a projection which imprisons the Christian in a neurotic egotism. We are clearly far from the cool rationalism of the Enlightenment, yet there was a connection between the religion of the heart, at its best, and Deism. Kant, for example, had been brought up in Königsburg as a Pietist, the Lutheran sect in which Zinzendorf also had his roots. Kant’s proposals for a religion within the bounds of unaided reason is akin to the Pietist insistence on a religion “laid down in the very constitution of the soul” 33 rather than in a revelation enshrined in the doctrines of an authoritarian church. When he became known for his radical view of religion, Kant is said to have reassured his Pietist servant by telling him that he had only “destroyed dogma to make room for faith.” 34 John Wesley was fascinated by the Enlightenment and was especially sympathetic to the ideal of liberty.