Surprise

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 White Oleander (1999)

  I told her I didn’t want to know about her preparations for trial, but her letters boasted of offers lined up—Amherst, Stanford, Smith. Dangling the carrot of green college campuses. I imagined myself a professor’s daughter, riding a bike to my classes. I could wear a camel’s hair coat at last, have a roommate, play intramural volleyball, all paid for in advance. How safe it would be, contained, everything decided for me. I could be a child again, I could start over. Sure I wouldn’t want to come home? I reached out and touched a tine of the barbed wire, rang the chimes. The beauty and the madness, wasn’t it. What was being weighed on the scales of the night. LATER , I LAY under the feather bed, fully clothed, not for sleep but just to stay warm. The space heater buzzed and threw out the familiar smell of burned hair. The windowpanes were frosted over, and I could see my breath in the room. I was listening to a tape, a band called Magenta, our friends thought it was far out we knew the singer, Niki Colette. They were playing in Frankfurt next month, we already had tickets, a place to crash. I still heard from Yvonne at Christmastime, she was living in Huntington Beach with an ex-Marine named Herbert, with whom she had a son, Herbert, Jr. I was waiting for Paul to come home, I was hungry. He was supposed to pick up some food after his appointment with a printer for his next graphic book. He was trying to get someone to print it cheap and take a piece of the sales. His last German publisher had OD’d in the fall, leaving us back at square one. But he had presold two hundred copies, not bad at all. He came home about nine, took off his boots and climbed under the covers. He had a greasy paper bag of kebabs from the local Turkish fast food. My stomach growled. Paul threw a newspaper on top of me. “Guess who?” he said. It was tomorrow’s International Herald Tribune, still smelling of wet ink. I looked at the front page. Croatia, OPEC, bomb threat at La Scala. I opened it and there she was on page three: JAILED POET FOUND INNOCENT AFTER NINE YEARS . Smiling her half-smile, waving like royalty returning from exile, happy but still mistrusting the masses. She had made it through trial without me. She was free. Paul ate his kebab sandwich, dropping pieces of salad back onto the bag as I quickly read the story, more shocked than I’d thought I would be. They’d taken the defense that Barry had committed suicide and made it look like murder. I was appalled that it worked. My mother was quoted saying how grateful she was that justice had been done, she looked forward to taking a bath, she thanked the jurors from the bottom of her heart.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The first thing to realize is that the crucifixion, by itself, carried no “meaning” whatever other than the depressingly normal one. Roman “justice” was once again doing what it did best, stamping out any sign of dissent. The Romans (we remind ourselves) crucified tens of thousands of young Jews over the course of the first century. It was a horribly familiar event. Nobody —neither Jesus’s followers, nor his mother, nor Pontius Pilate, nor the mocking crowds—were saying to themselves, as evening drew on and Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross for burial, “So he died for our sins!” Nobody was saying “All this has happened in accordance with the Bible!” Nobody, as far as our evidence goes, had been expecting Israel’s Messiah to die for the sins of the world. Nobody, on the evening of Jesus’s crucifixion, had any idea that a revolutionary event had just taken place. True, Matthew and Mark both record that the centurion in charge of the execution muttered something about Jesus really being “son of God.” (In Luke, he declares that Jesus was “in the right,” innocent, thus agreeing with what one of the brigands alongside Jesus had said moments before; 23:47, 41.) In the centurion’s world, the phrase “son of God” referred of course to Tiberius Caesar. The levels of irony detected by the gospel writers, and perhaps intended by the centurion himself, are profound, but they do not approach anything like the early Christian confession of faith. No. Despite Jesus’s repeated attempts to warn his followers of what was going to happen and even to explain to them something of what it would mean, his sudden arrest, trial, and execution came as a horrible shock that by itself carried no explanation, no hidden and perhaps consoling meaning. As we have seen, some people in the ancient Jewish world were hoping and praying for a Messiah. Jesus’s followers had even concluded that he was the one, despite the fact that he hadn’t been doing what many had expected a Messiah would do (leading the fight against the occupying pagan forces, for a start). But nobody thought a Messiah, even if one should appear, would die a horrible death at the hands of those same pagan forces. In the same way, as we noted in the previous part of the book, some people in the ancient Jewish world had pondered the fate of the martyrs of former generations. Perhaps, some had dared to suggest, their sufferings, torture, and horrible deaths would function within a strange, dark divine plan according to which the sufferings of the few would be the means of rescue for the many. But there is no evidence that anybody supposed such a suffering figure could be the Messiah. The elements of later Christian interpretation were to hand, but they required a new impetus in order to rush together into a new configuration.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Sometimes the material commonly known as Q (parallel traditions in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark) has been cited here too. Q, by definition, does not have a Passion narrative, since at that point Matthew, Mark, and Luke closely overlap, and some have therefore suggested that Q might be a document reflecting a version of early Jesus faith in which Jesus’s death was irrelevant. Such a suggestion represents a failure of logic as well as history. The fact that Mark overlaps with Matthew and Luke in the story of Jesus’s death can hardly be used to say that, therefore, a hypothetical document consisting of only the overlaps of Matthew and Luke either knew or cared nothing about Jesus’s death. When it comes to history, we must take very seriously what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:11, that the tradition that begins by saying, “The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible,” was the universal proclamation of all early Christians. The Corinthians knew of teachers other than Paul, perhaps in some respects opposed to Paul. Paul could not have said what he said had he expected the Corinthians to come back and say, “But, Paul, what about those Thomas Christians? What about those Q Christians? They don’t seem to bother about Jesus’s death.” No, Paul is saying: “Whether it was from me or them, that was the way we announced it, and that was the way you believed.” Resurrection Where, then, must we begin as we look at the gospels for interpretation of Jesus’s death? The first thing to realize is that the crucifixion, by itself, carried no “meaning” whatever other than the depressingly normal one. Roman “justice” was once again doing what it did best, stamping out any sign of dissent. The Romans (we remind ourselves) crucified tens of thousands of young Jews over the course of the first century. It was a horribly familiar event. Nobody—neither Jesus’s followers, nor his mother, nor Pontius Pilate, nor the mocking crowds—were saying to themselves, as evening drew on and Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross for burial, “So he died for our sins!” Nobody was saying “All this has happened in accordance with the Bible!” Nobody, as far as our evidence goes, had been expecting Israel’s Messiah to die for the sins of the world. Nobody, on the evening of Jesus’s crucifixion, had any idea that a revolutionary event had just taken place.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  amazement because they are the ones who had known the depths of grief. Thus amazement happened among them and not among those who had not yet grieved the death of the old age. The newness announced and observed is not a newness that fits the old categories, for it is precisely the old categories that are now shattered. So there is no easy categorizing of the event, as kings are inclined to do. The event will not be contained by the rationality of the king, ancient or contemporary. Rather, there is here a brooding, a wondering, and an amazement. The shepherds themselves are moved to a doxology (Luke 2:20), Mary is left with pondering (2:19), and the others are left in amazement (2:18). The praise, brooding, and astonishment are appropriate to the event, for it was not expected and it could not be understood on any conventional grounds. There is criticism here, for implicitly the old rulers are dismantled and have no access to the new future. A newness has begun, and it is a newness to the victimized ones. Invited to join are all those who have groaned under the ways of the old kings. The same energizing power from the birth is evident in the poems and songs with which the Lucan birth narrative is surrounded. The songs are about promises being kept just when all the promises appear to have failed. This is the character of the energy in the gospel; apparently failed promises are being kept just when we thought they were abandoned. So the song of Mary (the Magnificat; Luke 1:46-55) is about the unthinkable turn in human destinies when all seemed impossible: “For with God nothing will be impossible” (v. 37). The answering song of Zechariah (1:68-79) is a song of new possibilities given late, but not too late, possibilities of deliverance/forgiveness/mercy/light/peace. The old order had left nothing but enslavement/guilt/judgment/darkness and hostility, and no one could see how that could ever change. It will not be explained but only sung about, for the song penetrates royal reason. The song releases energy that the king can neither generate nor prevent. The transformation is unmistakable. Tongues long dumb in hopelessness could sing again. [3] The newness wrought by Jesus will not be explained, for to explain is to force it into old royal categories. And in any case the energizing hope comes precisely to those ill-schooled in explanation and understandings. It comes to those who will settle for amazements they can neither explain nor understand.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Everybody in that world, just like everybody in our world, knew that dead people don’t just come back to life, let alone reappear in a new, transformed body. Something must have happened to make that possible. If the prison door is standing open, someone must have unlocked it, perhaps overpowering the guards in the process. Something about Jesus’s death seems to have had that effect. According to Luke, Jesus himself began this process of interpretation when he explained to the puzzled disciples on the road to Emmaus that his death had not been simply a horrible accident, a tragic mistake, but had been the strange fulfillment of the long narrative of Israel’s scriptures. And within that narrative we find, as we shall discover step by step, the deep meaning of the claim that his death was “for our sins.” The formula in which the early Christians summarized their basic belief (“The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible”) is rooted in the story of what actually happened. The resurrection of Jesus did not immediately generate anything like an “atonement theology.” The resurrection stories in all four gospels and the similar passage at the start of Acts are full of dense and fascinating interpretation of what has just happened, but none of them even begins to offer any interpretation of Jesus’s death itself—with the important exception, as we saw in the previous part, that Luke’s Jesus explains that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer as part of the divine plan (24:26). But neither Luke’s Jesus nor anyone else explains why this might have been so. Nor, as we have seen, is any explanation of that sort forthcoming in the book of Acts. This is all the more striking not only because Acts was certainly produced after Paul had written all his letters (imagine the temptation to include a scene or two in which Paul or someone else expounds some of the theology of the letters), but also because, as we shall see, Luke himself did believe in quite a sophisticated understanding of the cross, which he has woven into the narrative rather than letting it appear as a formula. It looks for all the world as though the specific belief that “the Messiah died for our sins,” though it was the centerpiece of the commonly agreed formula by the early 50s, was not immediately deduced from the fact that after his death Jesus had been raised to new life. Only once we have probed into the explicit meanings that were given, very soon though not immediately, can we even guess at the stages by which those explicit meanings emerged. Certainly the resurrection convinced Jesus’s disciples that he really was Israel’s Messiah, despite his shameful death. They quickly discerned that any new meaning to be found would be found in the scriptures. But how they began that quest is another matter.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” (Mark 3:22) The conspiracy formed quickly, for these wanted no new energy anyway. But the others! The ones from whom and for whom the gospel is written were aware of the staggering newness: And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching!” (Mark 1:27) And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41) And many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands!” (Mark 6:2) Mostly they were amazed, for more was going on than they could understand or account for, and so they marveled: And amazement seized them all, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, “We have seen strange things today.” (Luke 5:26) And all were astonished at the majesty of God. (Luke 9:43) When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces, and were filled with awe. (Matt 17:6) But marveling at his answer they were silent. (Luke 22:26) And they were astonished: And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. (Matt 7:28) And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching. (Matt 22:33) And he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded. (Mark 6:51) And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well; he even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak.” (Mark 7:37) It is such a curious summary. We are accustomed to his work among the blind and lame and deaf, even though it scarcely fits our presumed world. Mostly, we do not live in a world where blind see again, where lame walk freely, or where deaf hear. We do not live there, and the stories of Jesus are so old and familiar that the wonder is blunted. Along with those conventional matters (conventional for Jesus, that is), however, appears leprosy. It is in healing leprosy that Jesus contradicts the norms of society concerning clean and unclean. [4] And in causing

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and your shame shall be seen. (Isa 47:1-3) The poet engages in the kind of guerrilla warfare that is always necessary on behalf of oppressed people. First, the hated one must be ridiculed and made reachable, for then she may be disobeyed and seen as a nobody who claims no allegiance and keeps no promises. The big house yields no real life, need not be feared, cannot be trusted, and must not be honored. When the Babylonian gods have been mocked, when the Babylonian culture has been ridiculed, and when the dethroned king is re-enthroned, then history is inverted. Funeral becomes festival, grief becomes doxology, and despair turns to amazement. Perhaps it is no more than a cultic event, but don’t sell it short because cult kept close to historical experience can indeed energize people. For example, witness the African American churches and civil rights movements or the liberation resistance in Latin America. The cult may be a staging for the inversion that the kings think is not possible. It is the inversion that the grim royal middle class among us does not believe in, and it is the inversion that surprises people who are powerless. Inversions are not easy, not without cost, and never neat and clear. But we ought not underestimate the power of the poet. Inversions may begin in a change of language, a redefined perceptual field, or unaltered consciousness. So his poetry speaks about the inversion even in exile and the images tumble out. Three of them are of particular importance. New Song When the new king rules, it is new song time (Isa 42:10). It has always been new song time when the new king arrives and there is no more calling of the skilled mourners who know how to cry on call. The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. It is time for the children and for all who can sing new songs and discern new situations. The old songs had to be sung in the presence of mockers (Ps 137:3). And they were an embarrassment because they spoke about all that had failed. But new song time is a way to sing a new social reality as the freedom songs stood behind every freedom act. The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. New song time is when a new covenant inaugurates a new mode of reality.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  One of the first women I trained with neurofeedback had a long-standing cocaine addiction, in addition to a horrendous childhood history of sexual abuse and abandonment. Much to my surprise, her cocaine habit cleared after the first two sessions and on follow-up five years later had not returned. I had never seen anyone recover this quickly from severe drug abuse, so I turned to the existing scientific literature for guidance.[27] Most of the studies on this subject were done more than two decades ago; in recent years, very few neurofeedback studies for the treatment of addiction have been published, at least in the United States. Between 75 percent and 80 percent of patients who are admitted for detox and alcohol and drug abuse treatment will relapse. Another study by Peniston and Kulkosky—on the effects of neurofeedback training with veterans who had dual diagnoses of alcoholism and PTSD[28]—focused on this problem. Fifteen veterans received alpha-theta training, while the control group received standard treatment without neurofeedback. The subjects were followed up regularly for three years, during which eight members of the neurofeedback group stopped drinking completely and one got drunk once but became sick and didn’t drink again. Most of them were markedly less depressed. As Peniston put it, the changes reported corresponded to being “more warmhearted, more intelligent, more emotionally stable, more socially bold, more relaxed and more satisfied.”[29] In contrast, all of those given standard treatment were readmitted to the hospital within eighteen months.[30] Since that time a number of studies on neurofeedback for addictions have been published,[31] but this important application needs much more research to establish its potential and limitations. The Future of NeurofeedbackDuring the past few years my lab has studied the effects of neurofeedback in traumatized children and adults. Our findings confirm the vast potential of neurofeedback to make a substantial difference in people’s lives. Twenty sessions of neurofeedback resulted in a 40 percent decrease in PTSD symptoms in a group of participants with chronic histories of trauma who had not significantly responded to talking or drug therapy. Most intriguing was the marked effect of neurofeedback on executive functioning, the capacity to plan activities, to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions, to move easily between one task and another, and to feel in control over one’s emotions,[32] about a 60 percent increase. To my knowledge no other treatment has achieved such marked improvement in executive functioning, which predicts how well a person will function in relationships, in school performance, and at work.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  that rethinking of clean and unclean, Jesus was in fact calling into question all the moral distinctions upon which society was based. With the moral distinctions called into question, all the sanctions for justifying the political and economic inequities are gone. The list is more staggering, for with these “conventional” healings comes the unthinkable and ultimate energizing of human persons out of death. Neither Luke nor the early church nor any of us understand what this means. It will not do to reason or argue or explain or calculate, for we are in the realm of the lyrical. We are called to doxology, for only doxology can adequately speak about the newness that came in Jesus. That strangeness of life from death should have been the last word, but the summary is kept securely in daily reality, for the last act is economic rehabilitation. [5] The poor have their debts canceled and their property restored. The last Messianic act is the end of royal confiscation. That supreme and most dangerous political act is more radical than life from death. On every imaginable front, Jesus is restoring the victims of the royal consciousness. If the managers of cleanness and uncleanness, the overseers of debt laws, and the officers of death have their verdicts overridden, they are obviously no longer in power. Surely this doxology contains a criticism, and that is evident in Luke 7:23. The actions of Jesus are a scandal, for they violate propriety, reason, and good public order. But the narrative moves as quickly as possible from criticism to energy. The narrative does not want to linger with those who cannot face the news, and it does not grieve long for what is old and over. It looks to the future. It is a future given precisely where none was thinkable, an energizing that is in the tradition of Moses and Second Isaiah, though surely more radical in its historical concreteness: They feared him because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching. (Mark 11:18) The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. (Luke 11:38) Those words cover a variety of responses, which for our purposes do not need to be distinguished. They range from awe to surprise to terror to indignation. In general, Jesus’ healings evoke amazement of a celebrative kind because they give life where all seemed hopeless. At the same time, his teaching evokes

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  True, Matthew and Mark both record that the centurion in charge of the execution muttered something about Jesus really being “son of God.” (In Luke, he declares that Jesus was “in the right,” innocent, thus agreeing with what one of the brigands alongside Jesus had said moments before; 23:47, 41.) In the centurion’s world, the phrase “son of God” referred of course to Tiberius Caesar. The levels of irony detected by the gospel writers, and perhaps intended by the centurion himself, are profound, but they do not approach anything like the early Christian confession of faith. No. Despite Jesus’s repeated attempts to warn his followers of what was going to happen and even to explain to them something of what it would mean, his sudden arrest, trial, and execution came as a horrible shock that by itself carried no explanation, no hidden and perhaps consoling meaning. As we have seen, some people in the ancient Jewish world were hoping and praying for a Messiah. Jesus’s followers had even concluded that he was the one, despite the fact that he hadn’t been doing what many had expected a Messiah would do (leading the fight against the occupying pagan forces, for a start). But nobody thought a Messiah, even if one should appear, would die a horrible death at the hands of those same pagan forces. In the same way, as we noted in the previous part of the book, some people in the ancient Jewish world had pondered the fate of the martyrs of former generations. Perhaps, some had dared to suggest, their sufferings, torture, and horrible deaths would function within a strange, dark divine plan according to which the sufferings of the few would be the means of rescue for the many. But there is no evidence that anybody supposed such a suffering figure could be the Messiah. The elements of later Christian interpretation were to hand, but they required a new impetus in order to rush together into a new configuration. On the evening of the first Good Friday, nobody was coming up with anything that would look like even the first stirrings of an “atonement theology.” The first impetus for such a thing came, by all accounts, on the third day after Jesus’s execution. Just as his followers had not at all been expecting him to be crucified, so, after his crucifixion, they were certainly not anticipating that he would be bodily raised from the dead. The shock, the initial incomprehension, the lingering doubts, and the breathless excitement of the stories at the end of all four gospels convey perfectly both what seems to have happened and the fact that nobody was expecting it.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  When he returned for his appointment, I eagerly asked Tom how the medicines had worked. He told me he hadn’t taken any of the pills. Trying to conceal my irritation, I asked him why. “I realized that if I take the pills and the nightmares go away,” he replied, “I will have abandoned my friends, and their deaths will have been in vain. I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam.” I was stunned: Tom’s loyalty to the dead was keeping him from living his own life, just as his father’s devotion to his friends had kept him from living. Both father’s and son’s experiences on the battlefield had rendered the rest of their lives irrelevant. How had that happened, and what could we do about it? That morning I realized I would probably spend the rest of my professional life trying to unravel the mysteries of trauma. How do horrific experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past? What happens in people’s minds and brains that keeps them frozen, trapped in a place they desperately wish to escape? Why did this man’s war not come to an end in February 1969, when his parents embraced him at Boston’s Logan International Airport after his long flight back from Da Nang? Tom’s need to live out his life as a memorial to his comrades taught me that he was suffering from a condition much more complex than simply having bad memories or damaged brain chemistry—or altered fear circuits in the brain. Before the ambush in the rice paddy, Tom had been a devoted and loyal friend, someone who enjoyed life, with many interests and pleasures. In one terrifying moment, trauma had transformed everything. During my time at the VA I got to know many men who responded similarly. Faced with even minor frustrations, our veterans often flew instantly into extreme rages. The public areas of the clinic were pockmarked with the impacts of their fists on the drywall, and security was kept constantly busy protecting claims agents and receptionists from enraged veterans. Of course, their behavior scared us, but I also was intrigued. At home my wife and I were coping with similar problems in our toddlers, who regularly threw temper tantrums when told to eat their spinach or to put on warm socks. Why was it, then, that I was utterly unconcerned about my kids’ immature behavior but deeply worried by what was going on with the vets (aside from their size, of course, which gave them the potential to inflict much more harm than my two-footers at home)? The reason was that I felt perfectly confident that, with proper care, my kids would gradually learn to deal with frustrations and disappointments, but I was skeptical that I would be able to help my veterans reacquire the skills of self-control and self-regulation that they had lost in the war.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  In 2007 I met Sebern Fisher at a conference on attachment-disordered children. Sebern was the former clinical director of a residential treatment center for severely disturbed adolescents, and she told me that she’d been using neurofeedback in her private practice for about ten years. She showed me before-and-after drawings made by a ten-year-old. This boy had had such severe temper tantrums, learning disabilities, and overall difficulties with self-organization that he could not be handled in school.[3] His first family portrait (on the left opposite), drawn before treatment started, was at the developmental level of a three-year-old. Less than five weeks later, after twenty sessions of neurofeedback, his tantrums had decreased and his drawing showed a marked improvement in complexity. Ten weeks and another twenty sessions later, his drawing took another leap in complexity and his behavior normalized. I had never come across a treatment that could produce such a dramatic change in mental functioning in so brief a period of time. So when Sebern offered to give me a neurofeedback demonstration, I eagerly accepted. Seeing the Symphony of the BrainAt Sebern’s office in Northampton, Massachusetts, she showed me her neurofeedback equipment—two desktop computers and a small amplifier—and some of the data she had collected. She then pasted one electrode on each side of my skull and another on my right ear. Soon the computer in front of me was displaying rows of brain waves like the ones I’d seen on the sleep-lab polygraph three decades earlier. Sebern’s tiny laptop could detect, record, and display the electrical symphony of my brain faster and more precisely than what had probably been a million dollars’ worth of equipment in Hartmann’s lab. [image "Three sets of family drawings by a ten-year-old boy showing progression after neurofeedback therapy. The first set (1) depicts stick figures. The second set (2), drawn after 20 sessions, shows human figures with defined features and clothing. The third set (3), drawn after 40 sessions, illustrates detailed, proportionate figures with facial expressions and hairstyles." file=image_rsrc782.jpg] From stick figures to clearly defined human beings. After four months of neurofeedback, a ten-year-old boy’s family drawings show the equivalent of six years of mental development. As Sebern explained, feedback provides the brain with a mirror of its own function: the oscillations and rhythms that underpin the currents and crosscurrents of the mind. Neurofeedback nudges the brain to make more of some frequencies and less of others, creating new patterns that enhance its natural complexity and its bias toward self-regulation.[4] “In effect,” she told me, “we may be freeing up innate but stuck oscillatory properties in the brain and allowing new ones to develop.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The elements of later Christian interpretation were to hand, but they required a new impetus in order to rush together into a new configuration. On the evening of the first Good Friday, nobody was coming up with anything that would look like even the first stirrings of an “atonement theology.” The first impetus for such a thing came, by all accounts, on the third day after Jesus’s execution. Just as his followers had not at all been expecting him to be crucified, so, after his crucifixion, they were certainly not anticipating that he would be bodily raised from the dead. The shock, the initial incomprehension, the lingering doubts, and the breathless excitement of the stories at the end of all four gospels convey perfectly both what seems to have happened and the fact that nobody was expecting it. In the languages of the day, “resurrection” didn’t mean “going to heaven”; it didn’t mean that Jesus, or perhaps his “soul,” had “survived” in some nonbodily sense. That was precisely what it did not mean. There were words to denote that kind of non-bodily postmortem survival. Many people in many cultures would have found it quite normal to envisage such a survival for someone recently dead. The word ‘resurrection’ was different. It meant a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead. Many first-century Jews believed in “the resurrection of the body” in this sense. But for them it was to be a great final event in which all God’s people would be raised from the dead in the end. It would be the launching point of God’s new world, his new creation, the “age to come.” It would happen to all God’s people in the end , not to one person, inconveniently and out of sequence (as it were) in the middle of history, with all the muddle and mess of the world still going on around it. As I and others have argued in detail elsewhere, the only way we can make sense of the first century is to say that Jesus’s first followers really did believe he had been bodily raised from the dead and that this meant that God’s “new age” had somehow begun.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  astonishment that includes a tone of negativity, resistance, and indignation, for Jesus contends with the conventions of his contemporaries. On the one hand, there is surprise that futures can be given to people who seemed to have no future. On the other hand, there is resentment that he would say and do as he did. In either case, his ministry evoked a passion and an energy that had disappeared in the old helplessness. Both his adherents and his enemies sensed the same thing: An unmanaged newness was coming, and it created a future quite different from the one that royal domination intended to permit. Jesus’ Teachings The teachings of Jesus, of course, cannot be separated from the actions of his ministry. His teachings evoked radical energy, for they announced as sure and certain what had been denied by careful conspiracy. If anything, his teachings were more radical than his actions, for his teachings played out the implications of the harsh challenge and radical transformation at which his actions hinted. It was one thing to eat with outcasts, but it was far more radical to announce that the distinctions between insiders and outsiders were null and void. It was one thing to heal/forgive but quite another to announce that the conditions which had made one sick/guilty were now irrelevant. Of course the teachings cannot be separated from the actions, for it is the actions that give concreteness and reality to the teachings. The teachings, like the actions, are shattering, opening, and inviting. They conjure futures that had been closed off, and they indicate possibilities that had been defined as impossibilities. For our consideration it will be adequate to focus on the Beatitudes because they form an appropriate counterpart to the woes, especially as Luke has presented them (Luke 6:20-26). [6] For our purposes, the juxtaposition of woes and blessings is appropriate. The woes constitute the most radical criticism, for they are announcements and anticipations of death. The woes of Luke are pronounced against the rich (v. 24), the full (v. 25a), the ones who laugh (v. 25b), and the ones who enjoy social approval (v. 26)—which is to say that the death sentence is upon those who live fully and comfortably in this age without awareness or openness to the new future coming. In sharp contrast, the blessings are speeches of new energy, for they promise future well-being to those who are without hope. In the deathly world of riches, fullness, and uncritical laughter, those who now live in poverty, hunger, and grief are hopeless. They are indeed nonpersons consigned to nonhistory. They have no public existence, and so the public well-being can never extend to them. But the blessings open a new possibility. So the speech of Jesus, like the speech of the entire prophetic tradition, moves from woe to blessing, from judgment to hope, from criticism to energy. The alternative

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  The Language of Amazement The hope-filled language of prophecy, in cutting through the royal despair and hopelessness, is the language of amazement. It is a language that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate. The language of amazement is against the despair just as the language of grief is against the numbness. I believe that, rightly embraced, no more subversive or prophetic idiom can be uttered than the practice of doxology, which sets us before the reality of God, of God right at the center of a scene from which we presumed he had fled. Indeed, the language of amazement is the ultimate energizer in Israel, and the prophets of God are called to practice that most energizing language. Second Isaiah serves as the peculiar paradigm for a prophet of hope to kings in despair. This great poet of the exile understood that speech that rearranges the pieces and that echoes the management mentality of its contemporaries is not worth the bother. Second Isaiah presumably lived through and knew about the pathos of Lamentations and the rage of Job. [8] Nevertheless, he goes beyond pathos and rage to speeches of hope and doxology. Second Isaiah has indispensable precursors in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as Thomas Raitt has made clear. But more than these or any other, it is Second Isaiah who announces to exiled Judah a genuine innovation. His announcement depends first of all on the audacity of his person and his poetry. He must have been a remarkable person to say things that violated the entire perceptual field of his community. Second, his speaking depends on the reality that his time was indeed a newness of time in which all the old certitudes were becoming unglued. Babylon was going and Persia was coming, and this poet knew precisely what time it was. Third, and most important, his speaking depends on the reality and confession of God’s radical freedom, freedom not only from the conceptions and expectations of his people but from God’s own past actions as well. God, much like Reinhold Niebuhr, does have courage to change. [9] His freedom is not some pious or spiritual event, for God’s freedom is visible in the public place. In speaking of forgiveness Raitt says: “Jeremiah and Ezekiel commenced communicating a revolutionary shift in God’s will and plan for his people in history . . . a new ‘game’ or dispensation has begun. . . . God is operating under a new plan.” [10] This is Second Isaiah’s first word to the exiles, a word of forgiveness: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended,

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  This was only the second case of incest Felitti had encountered in his twenty-three-year medical practice, and yet about ten days later he heard a similar story. As he and his team started to inquire more closely, they were shocked to discover that most of their morbidly obese patients had been sexually abused as children. They also uncovered a host of other family problems. In 1990 Felitti went to Atlanta to present data from the team’s first 286 patient interviews at a meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. He was stunned by the harsh response of some experts: Why did he believe such patients? Didn’t he realize they would fabricate any explanation for their failed lives? However, an epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encouraged Felitti to start a much larger study, drawing on a general population, and invited him to meet with a small group of researchers at the CDC. The result was the monumental investigation of Adverse Childhood Experiences (now known as the ACE study), a collaboration between the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, with Robert Anda, MD, and Vincent Felitti, MD, as co–principal investigators. More than fifty thousand Kaiser patients came through the Department of Preventive Medicine annually for a comprehensive evaluation, filling out an extensive medical questionnaire in the process. Felitti and Anda spent more than a year developing ten new questions[14] covering carefully defined categories of adverse childhood experiences, including physical and sexual abuse, physical and emotional neglect, and family dysfunction, such as having had parents who were divorced, mentally ill, addicted, or in prison. They then asked 25,000 consecutive patients if they would be willing to provide information about childhood events; 17,421 said yes. Their responses were then compared with the detailed medical records that Kaiser kept on all patients. The ACE study revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence are far more common than expected. The study respondents were mostly white, middle class, middle aged, well educated, and financially secure enough to have good medical insurance, and yet only one-third of the respondents reported no adverse childhood experiences. One out of ten individuals responded yes to the question “Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you, insult you, or put you down?” More than a quarter responded yes to the questions “Did one of your parents often or very often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you?” and “Did one of your parents often or very often hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?” In other words, more than a quarter of the U.S. population is likely to have been repeatedly physically abused as a child.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  work of Jesus, was not dismantling but the inauguration of a new thing. This imagination and action stood against all the discerned data and in the face of the doubt and resistance of those to whom he came. That ultimate energizing gave people a future when they believed that the grim present was the end and the only possible state of existence. That new future in which no one believed was born in staggering amazement, for it was correctly perceived as underived and unextrapolated and therefore beyond human understanding (Phil 4:7) and human control. It is the task of every would-be prophet to present such underived and unextrapolated newness. It is the claim of every would-be prophet that the newness is possible only because God is God, and God is faithful to the promised newness. So the argument of this chapter is simply that Jesus of Nazareth is the fulfillment and quintessence of the prophetic tradition. He brought to public expression the newness given by God. The response to his work and person is amazement, for it is amazing that anything should be unextrapolated in our history. That amazement gave energy, the only kind of energy that gives newness.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But she seemed, when I next saw her, to have already forgotten the fabulous experience that we shared in common. All my references to it called forth no response, and my enthusiasm remained fruitless, matched by no admission, on her part, of any complicity or of any tenderness. At all of our meetings that followed, I scarcely dared remind her of our wonderful Saturday, and I had to return to my old devices and random hints. One day, we had reached the end of a long walk in a public park. It had been raining, and the autumn shower had summoned forth heavy and deeply moving scents from the damp earth. I love the smell of the afternoon, the damp breath of plants, the leaves shining with drops of rain that quiver, the flowers that are ready to droop. We had been very talkative about everything except what mattered to me, and I at last broached this subject too, affirming, though in an abstract manner, as usual: “If only a girl would really trust me, I would be ready to do anything for her!” Without any hesitation, she answered me: “Well, you can count on me, for always!” She had come to this decision reasonably and was expressing her consent: we would now be able to marry. But I remained speechless with surprise, though I had prepared everything and had long been expecting this confirmation. Ginou was ready to accept me as her husband! I scarcely knew what to do, what to say, how to express my joy. “And to think that you waited until now to say so,” I remarked reproachfully. “We have been together for the past two hours. Don’t you think it was selfish of you to deprive me of two hours of sheer happiness?”

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  Aquinas conceives of indivisibility from the perspective of the parts, not from the perspective of the whole. This makes a crucial difference. If we look at a human being and ask whether the body is separable from the whole person, it looks as if the answer is yes. We can lose legs and arms, organs and tissue without the person’s being destroyed. Moreover, we lose and gain cells on a constant basis: liver cells are replaced within five days (van Inwagen 1990, p. 94). From this perspective, it looks as if the body is eminently separable from the whole person. Aquinas looks from the opposite perspective. Rather than focusing on whether the whole survives without some part, he asks whether the parts can survive without the whole. In the case of a living substance, they cannot. The cells of the liver cease to exist when they pass out of the body. They no longer function as they once did, contributing in a certain way to a living organism. From the perspective of the parts, then, the substance is an indivisible whole. From this perspective, living substances appear to have a unity fundamentally different from that of nonliving aggregates. This account has much to offer. It is highly plausible to suppose that the unity of a living substance is qualitatively different from the unity of objects that can be dissolved and divided without destroying their parts. It is perhaps surprising to find Aquinas committed to the view that these other objects are not substances at all, and that substances are found in nonliving objects only at the atomic level. Yet once one sees the sort of unity he claims for living substances, one should be struck by the absence of that unity in mere artifacts and aggregates. In denying that artifacts and aggregates possess this sort of unity, the unity of substances, Aquinas is not denying that such things are real or that they exist. Houses and statues exist, and so do forests, beaches, and pints of strawberries. But all of these objects have a weaker claim to be single, individual things.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Our train reached Tunis at eleven in the morning. The city was full of soldiers of all kinds and all races, and they seemed foreign to me. The unusual and limitless nonchalance of the crowd gave one the erroneous impression of a fair. The merchants had organized their business accordingly, with English inscriptions and banners across the streets and exhibits of the most heterogeneous wares. The soldiers were buying as souvenirs all the junk that had not been sold for years. So it was time for me to get out of this dry rot too. In our Passage, the children were playing on the sidewalk as they waited for lunch. On the stairs, I met my mother, who kissed me joyfully, as usual. I was surprised to find her all made up at this hour, her eyelids black with kohl and her lips blood-red. She was also wearing a new apron. Did I want something to eat? No, I would rather sleep. Not even an egg? No, not even an egg. I was very tired. She asked if I would mind sleeping at Uncle Aroun’s; it had all been arranged with him. Before I could inquire into these new arrangements, she excitedly told me she was serving meals to soldiers, in partnership with the second-floor neighbors who had a large flat. The neighbors had put all their beds in one room, and since our own flat was smaller it was used as a pantry and kitchen. Proudly, she announced that in this way she earned more than my father and the shop. She seemed so happy and so sure that she deserved my admiration that I dared say nothing. My legs were giving way and, in spite of myself, I could not hear her chattering away. I left her and knocked at the door on the first floor. Kalla opened it and blurted out that she had been expecting me. I noticed now that she had our mother’s thin lips, bloodless and tight when she was sad or angry. She was angry and ashamed of Mother’s commercial enterprise and was now living with our uncle: “And you don’t know the latest invention of the neighbors’ son? He mixes wine and bitter almond syrup and sells it at a huge price as a special local beverage.” A month earlier, I would have joined forces with my sister in disapproving of these scandalous goings on. Now, I only saw in her my own ridiculous and irritating simple-mindedness. I vaguely promised Kalla I would look into this business and, without taking further notice of her disappointment, went to bed. When I awoke, it was striking five but the sun was still warm. I had slept perfectly, for four hours in a deep sleep such as I had not known for a very long time. Kalla had disappeared, but on the table I found some letters addressed to me.