Tenderness

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 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Uncle Tommy, who was gruff and chewed his words like Grandfather, was my favorite. He strung ordinary sentences together and they came out sounding either like the most profane curses or like comical poetry. A natural comedian, he never waited for the laugh that he knew must follow his droll statements. He was never cruel. He was mean . When we played handball on the side of our house, Uncle Tommy would turn the corner, coming from work. He would pretend at first not to see us, but with the deftness of a cat he would catch the ball and say, “Put your minds where your behinds are, and I'll let you on my team.” We children would range around him, but it was only when he reached the steps that he'd wind up his arm and throw the ball over the light post and toward the stars. He told me often, “Ritie, don't worry 'cause you ain't pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.” They bragged often about the binding quality of the Baxter blood. Uncle Tommy said that even the children felt it before they were old enough to be taught. They reminisced over Bailey's teaching me to walk when he was less than three. Displeased at my stumbling motions, he was supposed to have said, “This is my sister. I have to teach her to walk.” They also told me how I got the name “My.” After Bailey learned definitely that I was his sister, he refused to call me Marguerite, but rather addressed me each time as “Mya Sister,” and in later more articulate years, after the need for brevity had shortened the appellation to “My,” it was elaborated into “Maya.” We lived in a big house on Caroline Street with our grandparents for half the year before Mother moved us in with her. Moving from the house where the family was centered meant absolutely nothing to me. It was simply a small pattern in the grand design of our lives. If other children didn't move so much, it just went to show that our lives were fated to be different from everyone else's in the world. The new house was no stranger than the other, except that we were with Mother. Bailey persisted in calling her Mother Dear until the circumstance of proximity softened the phrase's formality to “Muh Dear,” and finally to “M'Deah.” I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary. But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding? Mother had prepared a place for us, and we went to it gratefully.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  He put his hand behind that dark recess and took his cane in the strong fist and shifted his weight on the wooden support. He thought he had pulled it off. I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of a whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock. He must have tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high-topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them. I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since. During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois' “Litany at Atlanta.” But it was Shakespeare who said, “When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.” It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more. Bailey and I decided to memorize a scene from The Merchant of Venice, but we realized that Momma would question us about the author and that we'd have to tell her that Shakespeare was white, and it wouldn't matter to her whether he was dead or not. So we chose “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson instead.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  “What you doing sitting here by yourself, Marguerite?” She didn't accuse, she asked for information. I said that I was watching the sky. She asked, “What for?” There was obviously no answer to a question like that, so I didn't make up one. Louise reminded me of Jane Eyre. Her mother lived in reduced circumstances, but she was genteel, and though she worked as a maid I decided she should be called a governess and did so to Bailey and myself. (Who could teach a romantic dreamy ten-year-old to call a spade a spade?) Mrs. Kendricks could not have been very old, but to me all people over eighteen were adults and there could be no degree given or taken. They had to be catered to and pampered with politeness, then they had to stay in the same category of lookalike, soundalike and beingalike. Louise was a lonely girl, although she had plenty of playmates and was a ready partner for any ring game in the schoolyard. Her face, which was long and dark chocolate brown, had a thin sheet of sadness over it, as light but as permanent as the viewing gauze on a coffin. And her eyes, which I thought her best feature, shifted quickly as if what they sought had just a second before eluded her. She had come near and the spotted light through the trees fell on her face and braids in running splotches. I had never noticed before, but she looked exactly like Bailey. Her hair was “good”—more straight than kinky-and her features had the regularity of objects placed by a careful hand. She looked up—“Well, you can't see much sky from here.” Then she sat down, an arm away from me. Finding two exposed roots, she laid thin wrists on them as if she had been in an easy chair. Slowly she leaned back against the tree. I closed my eyes and thought of the necessity of finding another place and the unlikelihood of there being another with all the qualifications that this one had. There was a little peal of a scream and before I could open my eyes Louise had grabbed my hand. “I was falling”—she shook her long braids—“I was falling in the sky.” I liked her for being able to fall in the sky and admit it. I suggested, “Let's try together. But we have to sit up straight on the count of five.” Louise asked, “Want to hold hands? Just in case?” I did. If one of us did happen to fall, the other could pull her out. After a few near tumbles into eternity (both of us knew what it was), we laughed at having played with death and destruction and escaped.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  T 4 He Died to Save his Lover HE SEA SUDDENLY BEGAN TO RAGE , AND the waves hurled themselves angrily upon the coast. The sky was covered with big black clouds, and the Storm rushed down from Mount Muko. A violent rain began to fall, and people walking were seized with panic. Among these was a certain samurai, the ambassador of the Lord of Akashi to another Lord of a neighbouring Province. He took shelter with his servant under a big tree, and a boy, about thirteen years old, passed by them carrying a paper umbrella. Seeing the samurai under the tree, the lad gave his umbrella to the servant. The samurai, whose name was Sakon Horikoshi, said: 'Thank you, dear child, for your kindness; but tell me, do you not need the umbrella yourself? 'The boy's only answer was to Start weeping. Sakon asked him the reason of his grief, and, drying his tears, the other replied: 'I am the son of Sluyuzen Magasaka, and my name is Korin. My father left his Lord of the Province of Kai, and we came to the Province of Buzen; but he died suddenly on the boat, and my mother and I buried him in this village. Since then we have lived here in a little house which we built with the help of the obliging villagers, and we make umbrellas for a living. But I cannot use this poor umbrella to protect myself from the rain without sorrowfully thinking that my mother made it with her unfortunate, delicate hands.' Sakon was greatly touched by this sad Story, and went to the village and learned from the mother that the boy's tale was true. When he gave his message to the Governor of the Province, he spoke to him also of Korin. The Lord was moved and commanded Sakon to bring the lad before him; so Sakon very joyfully presented the boy and his mother to that Lord. Korin was very beautiful: his young, untroubled face was like a serene moon in the autumn sky: his black hair was a lotus, and his voice had the love-murmuring of the nightingale amid young peach blossom. The Lord made Korin his page and loved him greatly. Time passed and, one evening when Korin was on guard, the Lord tenderly caressed him and whispered: 'Dear sweet Korin, I would even give you my life if you desired it.'But Korin answered: 'Your flatteries give me little pleasure, my Lord, since it is no true love for a samurai to have an affair with a Lord who is all-powerful. It is even a dishonour for one who esteems a selfless and sincere male love. I would rather have a man of some class for my lover, it is true, but he would have to be devoted and utterly true; a man whom I could love all my life. That would be my greatest pleasure.' The Lord said to him: 'Come, you are not serious!

• From The Pisces (2018)

  When he came he looked like he might cry. I felt him gush inside me and in that moment experienced the most maternal surge I have ever felt toward another human being. I felt both lusty and maternal. Then he lay there after with his bloody cheek pressed against my breasts, shaking. My breasts, which never were ample enough, suddenly seemed all I could need. Now I felt I understood that the heart was not the breast itself—it was the current underneath. You did not nurse from the breast itself, but from a place beyond it. The breast was only the bridge. Grown men needed nursing too. Perhaps he needed nursing most of all. So I nursed him and tried to sustain that gift I had given, which was to disappear in the nothingness and thus no longer have to be aware of it. 43.Every other day at dawn it started again: me pulling up to the rock with my wagon, Theo dragging himself up and in, the return to my sister’s house, where he assumed I would continue to live long after the summer. He didn’t ask when my sister would be coming back and I stopped worrying if I would see him again. We now had just enough permanence for me to have faith—a sense of knowing that he would be there. Yet there was still a feeling of wonder and mystery brought on by the gaps in between visits and my knowledge that in a month I could be gone. It was the perfect balance of love and longing, or lust and longing, or lust and love: what I had always sought. I felt more at ease, because I knew that it could be me who would create the ending if I wanted. I would be the one returning to the desert if I chose. I would never be left. Only leaving. I already contained the answer. When I thought of the thing itself—the actual end—I felt a sense of impending dread. I didn’t want to go. But I made no plans to stay either. I lived in what was there—keeping the date of my supposed departure in a corner of my mind, like a little magic peach pit. It radiated just enough control as to the way our future could unfold that I no longer feared rejection or his retreat.

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

  Mummy, did you see me?” Geoffrey cut the ceremony to a minimum. There was no complicated creed for me to recite on Jacob’s behalf, an affirmation of faith that, as Geoffrey knew, I could not honestly make and which had no relevance in Jacob’s case. The exorcisms were omitted: Jacob was not to be frightened by the idea of a demon trapped inside him. Instead, we had just the bare essentials. I stood behind Jacob and made the responses; Jacob knelt on a prie-dieu, bolt upright, his hands joined and his eyes fixed sternly ahead. “What do you ask of the church of God?” Geoffrey asked. “Faith!” I replied in Jacob’s stead, catching Geoffrey’s eye for a moment. He smiled at me, kindly, accepting the irony. What did faith really mean? If you could leave out the creed, as we had just done, could faith be liberated from belief? Could it mean that we sought the kind of trust and confidence we feel when we say that we have faith in a person or an ideal? Maybe the church could give Jacob this kind of faith—I looked at his rapt face—but it had signally failed with me. “What does faith bring to you?” Geoffrey continued. “Life everlasting,” I replied. No, I couldn’t believe in the prospect of immortality. But could faith not simply bring an enhanced life, here and now? A more abundant life, as Jesus had promised, even though my so-called faith seemed to have diminished my own mind and heart? “If, then, you desire to enter into life,” Geoffrey went on, “keep the commandments: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Put like that, it sounded so simple. Why had we tied ourselves up in such knots, sewing at needleless machines, performing archaic penances, and treating one another so coldly? And how could we have loved our neighbors and sisters in religion, when we had been taught to despise ourselves? At each phrase, Jacob nodded to himself. There was poignancy in the phrase “with your whole mind,” but Jacob did know how to love, and Blackfriars had welcomed him lovingly. He approached Geoffrey slowly and stood quite still, while Geoffrey made the sign of the cross on his forehead and breast. I quailed slightly when he put a few grains of salt on Jacob’s tongue: at any other time, he would have spat it out with scant ceremony, but now he swallowed it gravely, while Geoffrey said the prescribed words: “Grant, we pray you, Lord, that your servant who tastes the savor of salt may no longer hunger but be filled with heavenly nourishment.”

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  191 Life Together “in Christ” responses give us glimpses of what he thought life “in Christ” embodied. CHRIS TIAN JEWS AND CHRISTIAN GENTILES IN GALATIA Our first case study focuses on the best-known verse from Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek [Gen- tile], there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). We already saw the importance of this verse in Chapter 4. But, although it is very familiar, its full weight and radical meaning can be seen only be contextualizing it within Galatians and the confl ict in Galatia as a whole. Paul’s community in Galatia was in Asia Minor, probably in ancient Ancyra, Ankara in modern Turkey. Paul had established a community there apparently without planning to do so—he mentions that it was only because of a physical affl iction that he stopped there: “You know that it was because of a physical infirmity that I first announced the gospel to you” (4:13). The Galatians had received him with great hospitality: Though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn me or despise me, but welcomed me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. . . . For I testify that, had it been possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. (4:14–15) As we said in Chapter 3, we can only guess at the nature of this affl iction, but our best scholarly conjecture is that Paul suffered from chronic malaria. But during his absence, things changed. The central issue was circumcision. Did male gentile converts need to be circumcised

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

  As I walked down Mortimer Street that day, I knew that I had a viable future. Later that year, I traveled up to Oxford one afternoon and walked through the city streets to Blackfriars to meet Jenifer Hart. She wanted Jacob to be baptized. “But why?” I had asked. “You don’t believe in any of it! Why do this?” Jenifer had sighed. “I want him to have the whole thing” was all she could say. “I want him to do it properly.” Jacob wouldn’t understand the theology of baptism, of course, but maybe the rite could speak to him at some other level. The Dominicans, who were no fools, had agreed to the christening, and the ceremony was to be held that afternoon. As a final twist in this strange story, I was to be Jacob’s godmother. I had been the person who had brought him into this world of religion, even though I had done it at a time when I was losing my own faith. Jacob seemed doubly my alter ego. I had now discovered that we were also bound together by an illness that could make our environment appear demonic, and was grateful that the experience of looking after him had prepared me for my own diagnosis. Now he was taking my place in the church. Geoffrey Preston had decided to perform the ceremony in a small chapel upstairs. Jenifer was already waiting there, tense, hands clenched tightly in her lap, and clearly ill at ease. But Jacob was sitting quietly, his head to one side in a listening posture, his face thoughtful. “This is a special occasion, isn’t it, Karen?” he hissed as I went and sat beside him. Nobody else was present. We made a strange quartet of belief, unbelief, and—for Jacob—something else that had nothing to do with theological conviction. “Jacob,” Geoffrey said, “would you like some incense for your baptism?” His eyes lit up. “Oh, Geoffrey,” he breathed, “can I make it?” I smiled at Geoffrey. We both knew that this was a long-cherished dream. “Come over here.” With his hands on his knees, Jacob bent low over the thurible, his blond head close to Geoffrey’s tow-colored one. “Snap, crackle, and pop!” he whispered gleefully as the charcoal spluttered. “Karen, watch this! Just watch me now!” He carefully spooned incense onto the glowing pellet, and a cloud of fragrance rose up and filled the small room. I glanced warily at Jenifer, fearful that this popish flummery might be one step too far. But she was watching Jacob, as he swung the thurible to and fro, with a rather sad smile, acknowledging that he had gone to a place where she could not follow. His face was transfigured, his head flung back as he snuffed histrionically. “Right.” Geoffrey nodded, and Jacob instantly replaced the thurible on the stand. “Did you see me, Karen?

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

  She frowned, and I felt a sudden wave of affection for her. There was something heroic in what she was doing. She was sacrificing all her most cherished principles; her clever, skeptical friends would be merciless to her face and probably lethal behind her back. But what mattered most to Jenifer was what was best for Jacob. “You see,” she continued, “it’s all very well for people like Herbert and me to reject religion. But Jacob—he needs something—he needs some kind of support.” “What you mean is,” I said caustically, “that religion is really just for idiots, weaklings, and defectives.” “Oh dear.” Jenifer grinned rather nervously at me. “How awful. But yes . . . yes, if I’m honest, I suppose that is what I think . . .” she trailed off and looked at me sheepishly. I couldn’t in all conscience take issue with her. Had I not just dismissed God myself as an illusion? But Jacob deserved some consolation. “All right,” I said at last, “I’ll take him.” In finally relinquishing the last vestiges of religious belief, I had come closer to the mainstream than ever before in my life. During the 1960s, religion had died in Britain, and church attendance plummeted. England was fast becoming one of the most secular countries in the world, topped only by the Netherlands. The Harts’ principled rejection of religion had once seemed daring and iconoclastic, but it was now unremarkable, especially among intellectuals. But although the Harts regarded Catholicism as ludicrous, they were not crusading atheists. They were both admirers of the utilitarianism first enunciated by the nineteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Jenifer’s pragmatic approach to Jacob’s churchgoing was essentially utilitarian. Actions are not intrinsically good or evil, but should be judged by their consequences. Right acts are those that produce the best results. There was nothing in itself wrong with attending Mass, so even though it was the product of a belief system that was palpably false, if it helped Jacob, then he should go to Blackfriars. Many of their friends, whose repudiation of faith was more militant, would find this faintly reprehensible. The idea that somebody like Jacob might get something out of Catholic liturgy without accepting the creed that supported it was novel to me. As far as I was concerned, religion consisted essentially of belief, and now that I could no longer subscribe to a creed, I could not be a religious person. And yet all around me, at the same time as people were casting off the trammels of institutional Christianity, they were turning to alternative forms of faith.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  some sun that day; the blue of the turquoise seemed especially vivid, and so did the blue of her eyes. She dabbed perfume behind her ears, in the crook of her elbow, on her wrists. She rubbed her wrists together and touched them to her neck and chest. She turned from side to side, checking herself in the mirror. Then she stopped turning and studied herself head-on in a sober way. Without taking her eyes from the mirror she asked me how she looked. Really pretty, I told her. “That’s what you always say.” “Well, it’s true.” “Good,” she said. She gave herself one last look and we went downstairs. Marian and Kathy came in while my mother was cooking dinner for me. They had her turn around for them, both of them smiling and exclaiming, and Marian pushed her away from the stove and finished making my dinner so she wouldn’t get stains on her blouse. My mother was cagey with their questions. They teased her about this mystery man, and when the horn honked outside they followed her down the hall, adjusting her clothes, patting her hair, issuing final instructions. “He should have come to the door,” Marian said when they were back in the kitchen. Kathy shrugged, and looked down at the table. She was hugely pregnant by this time and may have felt unsure of her right to decide the finer points of dating. “He should have come to the door,” Marian said again. I SLEPT BADLY that night. I always did when my mother went out, which wasn’t often these days. She came back late. I listened to her walk up the stairs and down the hall to our room. The door opened and closed. She stood just inside for a moment, then crossed the room and sat down on her bed. She was crying softly. “Mom?” I said. When she didn’t answer I got up and went over to her. “What’s wrong, Mom?” She looked at me, tried to say something, shook her head. I sat beside her and put my arms around her. She was gasping as if someone had held her underwater. I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this and happy doing it, not because she was unhappy but because she needed me, and to be needed made me feel capable. Soothing her soothed me. She exhausted herself, and I helped her into bed. She became giddy then, laughing and making fun of herself, but she didn’t let go of my hand until she fell asleep. In the morning we were shy with each other. I somehow managed not to ask her my question. That night I continued to master myself, but my self-mastery seemed like an act; I knew I was too weak to keep it up. My mother was reading. “Mom?” I said. She looked up. “What about the Raleigh?” She went back to her book without answering. I did not ask again.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Nor was it just about affection, though affection was of course involved. It was more—it was “new family” language, describing what social historians sometimes call a “fictive family” to distinguish it from a biological family. The use of new family language implies that members of the community have the same obligations to each other as biological brothers and sisters do. In the urban world of Paul, where extended biological families had been broken apart, diminished, and sometimes lost completely because of migration to the cities and high death rates, these communities were “new families” in which members had the same responsibility to care for each other that biological families did. These were to be communities of caring and sharing. All of these images had their home in Paul’s conviction that the “new age” had begun. The term “new age” in our time is sometimes associated with “New Age” movements that are negatively regarded by many Christians. But the language is biblical and eschatological. Paul was convinced that the eschaton, God’s dream for the world, had begun in Christ and that it was a process already under way. God’s great cleanup of the world had begun, and his communities were part of the “new creation,” of the way the world is meant to be. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17). He also uses the language of “new creation” in the midst of a conflict that we shall soon look at more closely: “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! ” (Gal. 6:15). “New creation” language is not just about new individuals, but about a new world, a new era, a new age. This, for Paul, was what life “in Christ,” “in the Spirit,” “in the body of Christ” was about. SHARE COMMUNITIES We presume, though Paul never says so, that his communities “in Christ” were what we call “share communities.” By this we mean communities in which there was a sharing of material as well as spiritual resources. We do not imagine that this involved what the book of Acts says about at least one of the earliest Christian communities in Jerusalem: All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. (2:44–45) We leave that aside for now, but will return to it in more detail in this book’s Epilogue. From Paul’s letters, it is clear that his converts did not sell all that they had and give the proceeds to the community. There were people in his communities who were better off financially than others. And yet there are compelling reasons for imagining that his communities were “share communities.” The first is grounded in what we know about Jesus. Bread—meaning the material basis of existence—mattered greatly to him.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  With no support or assistance from anyone, Antiphilus’s imprisonment was quite terrible: His health was beginning to give way under the strain, and no wonder: his bed was the bare ground, and all night he was unable so much as to stretch his legs, which were then secured in the stocks; in the daytime, the collar and one manacle sufficed, but at night he had to submit to be ing bound hand and foot. The stench, too, and the closeness of the dungeon, in which so many prisoners were huddled together gasping for breath, and the difficulty of getting any sleep, owing to the clanking of chains—all combined to make the situation intolerable to one who was quite unaccustomed to endure such hardships. (29) That, by the way, gives us a glimpse of what jail would have been like for Paul, were he not significant enough to be chained to a soldier in the barracks and supported by the presence of at least seven friends. When Demetrius returned, he went straight to the prison, found Antiphilus, and at first was allowed to minister to his needs. He went to work as a porter in the harbor and gave half of his wages to bribe the guard and half to help his friend. But then the jailer forbade any more such visits for anyone, and Demetrius had to make a dangerous decision: Demetrius…could think of no other means of obtaining access to his friend than by going to the Prefect and professing complicity in the temple robbery. As the result of this declaration, he was immediately led off to prison, and with great difficulty prevailed upon the jailer after many entreaties to place him next to Antiphilus, and under the same collar. It was now that his devotion to his friend appeared in the strongest light. Ill though he was himself, he thought nothing of his own sufferings: his only care was to lighten the affliction of his friend, and to procure him as much rest as possible; and the companionship in misery certainly lightened his load. (32) That is no doubt the hyperbole of parable rather than the precision of history, but we have to imagine something similar—if less extreme—with Epaphras and Paul. Epaphras chose to live inside the prison alongside Paul as if he were his personal slave—not as a fellow criminal prisoner ( sundesmios ), but as a fellow prison inmate ( sunaichmalōtos ), accepting freely all the dangers to health and even life entailed in that decision. When you read the letter to Philemon, therefore, do not think only about Onesimus; think also of Epaphras (Epaphroditus).

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  187 Life Together “in Christ” “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (12:13). Near the end of the chapter, Paul puts it in a sentence: “You are the body of Christ” (12:27). Chris tian communities were the “body of Christ” animated by the “Spirit of Christ.” Their identity and their life together “in the body” were grounded in Christ, in the Spirit, in the Spirit of God as known in Christ, and not in “this world.” We add one more image—implicit this time in a single word, not a phrase. Paul regularly addressed his communities as “brothers” (“brothers and sisters,” in the inclusive language of recent translations of the New Testament). The term appears more than fifty times in his genuine letters. To address people as brothers (and sisters) was not just social convention. Nor was it just about affection, though affection was of course involved. It was more—it was “new family” language, describing what social historians sometimes call a “fictive family” to distinguish it from a biological family. The use of new family language im- plies that members of the community have the same obligations to each other as biological brothers and sisters do. In the urban world of Paul, where extended biological families had been bro- ken apart, diminished, and sometimes lost completely because of migration to the cities and high death rates, these communi- ties were “new families” in which members had the same re- sponsibility to care for each other that biological families did. These were to be communities of caring and sharing. All of these images had their home in Paul’s conviction that the “new age” had begun. The term “new age” in our time is sometimes associated with “New Age” movements that are neg- atively regarded by many Chris tians. But the language is biblical and eschatological. Paul was convinced that the eschaton, God’s dream for the world, had begun in Christ and that it was a process already under

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I’m thinking now about the rock fight one summer’s afternoon long long ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My cousin Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the park. We didn’t know which side we were fighting for but we were fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of being sissies. That’s how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the same age as us. What they would have done to us if they had caught us I don’t know. Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home; we had cleaned up a bit on the way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when we had left the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the house, in the big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with our little friend Joey Kasselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute understanding, Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dress and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them, that it was almost like coming from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it any more for the other boys—we were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight. When I left my cousin the end of the summer I didn’t see him again for twenty years or more.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  The buildings are humble in scale and don’t try to intimidate you. Gay giants stride past on hypertrophied thighs, swathed in leather and chains, and they do intimidate you. Vicky stops in front of an antique shop window on Bleecker and points to a wooden carousel horse, painted red and white, mounted on a pedestal. “I’d like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn’t be out of place in the living room.” “How about a jukebox?” “Oh, definitely. There’s always room for a jukebox. And maybe a pinball machine. A really old one with Buck Rogers stuff.” As you resume your walk she describes the house in which she grew up. A rambling Tudor affair on the shore in Marblehead, which started out early in the century as a summer house and, despite the formal dining room, never quite lost its wet-towel ambience. There were empty rooms to play in, and a closed alcove under the stairs which no one could enter without her permission. Pets galore. A gazebo where the four girls had tealess tea parties presided over by Vicky’s eldest sister. Their father kept chickens in the boathouse and spent years trying to bring a vegetable patch to life. Every morning he woke up at five and went for a swim. Mother stayed in bed till her daughters and the pets gathered in her room. What she tells you is enhanced by the increasing animation of her gestures and facial expressions and becomes a vivid image of this childhood Arcadia. You notice for the first time that she has freckles. You didn’t know they still made them. You imagine her as a child carrying a bucket of sand down to the beach. You see yourself watching from the bluff, through a time warp, saying: Someday I will meet this girl . You want to watch over her through the interval, protect her from the cruelty of schoolchildren and the careless lust of young men. The irrevocable past tense of the narration suggests to you some intervening tragedy. You suspect a snake in the vegetable garden. “Your parents?” you say. “Divorced three years ago. Yours?” “Happy marriage,” you say. “You’re lucky.” Lucky is not the word you would have chosen, except maybe out of a hat. “Do you have any brothers or sisters,” she asks. “Three brothers. The youngest are twins.” “That’s nice. Symmetrical, I mean. I’ve got three sisters. Boys were very mysterious to us.” “I know what you mean.” “Listen. Do we have to meet Tad later?” “Tad has no intention of meeting us. Or, rather, he has good intentions, but he won’t be there.” “Did he tell you that?” “No, it’s just that I know him. Tad is always on his way, but he seldom arrives.” “What did he tell you about me,” she asks, after you have been seated in the courtyard of a café on Charles Street. She has a conspiratorial smile.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  These common meals persisted for centuries, though changed in character. The ritual act of the “Lord’s Supper” became more ceremonial, mysterious, and awe-inspiring, and a meal where people were heartily satisfying their physical hunger did not seem the fit environment for the mystery of the eucharist. Hence that part was transferred to the morning service. But the evening meal continued. As wealthy men entered the churches, they often defrayed the expenses of a meal and made it an act of charity to the poor. The rich paid and the poor ate. That was a complete departure from the democracy of the common meal at the beginning. But the persistence of the custom, even when all the conditions had so completely changed, proves how deeply it was embedded in the traditions coming down from the origin of Christianity. The provisions for the common meal were brought by each family, as in our basket picnics. When the Lord’s Supper was transferred to the Sunday morning service, it still remained customary for the people to bring provisions along, and the material for the eucharist was taken from these offerings. What was left was distributed to all who were in need. As time went on, regular monthly offerings of money were introduced and under the ascetic enthusiasm of almsgiving, large properties were often turned over to the churches. It is significant that for a long time the churches did not accumulate property. If real estate was given, it was sold and the proceeds used up. If there was any special need, a collection had to be taken to meet it. In the Greek fraternal associations the accumulation of income-bearing property was essential. The later Church, too, derived its chief income from landed wealth. The primitive Church on principle was without property. Moreover, the income of the Church was wholly for those in need. In modern church life the bulk of the income goes for the support of the clergy and the expenses of worship, and even of the expenses for benevolence only a small fraction is for charitable help of the needy. In the primitive Church the officers were not paid, unless they temporarily went without earnings to serve the Church. In that case they were supported because they were needy, and not because they were officers. As the Church was ecclesiasticized and clericalized, an increasing clergy was needed to do what the people at first had done for themselves. The clergy became a separate and priestly class, for whom secular employment was not fitting, and who had to be maintained.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They make much of the fact that we have no other instance of communism among the other churches of the New Testament, and that even at Jerusalem the mother of Mark still had a house of her own to live in. They seem more anxious to emphasize that it did not occur twice than to show that it did occur once. But many an ecclesiastical body would be happy if it had as much Scripture to quote for its favorite church practices, and would treat with scorn any suggestion that after all it had “occurred only once.” As a result of this anxiety, it is commonly asserted that the later poverty of the church at Jerusalem was due to its communism. The assertion has been made so often that it is accepted almost as self-evident. Yet there is not the slightest statement in the Bible connecting the two things; it is pure inference. Luke, who is our sole source of information, has not a breath of disapproval. To him it is evidently a beautiful fact, a wonderful demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit in the Church. It is hard to escape the feeling that the bias of Luke and of modern Christians is somewhat divergent. At the outset the disciples at Jerusalem simply continued the life they had lived with the Master. They went on doing as they had done with him. They had had a common purse. He had cared for the wants of his family like a father, and they acknowledged that they had never been in want while under him. They were now away from their old homes and occupations in Galilee. So they continued a family life among themselves and shared what they had. As their number increased, the problem of providing for the common meals and for the poor and sick became difficult. Those who were better off, in the glow of brotherly love and religious self-sacrifice, and probably in the expectation of the speedy return of Christ, replenished the common purse by larger offerings. In a few memorable cases they even parted with real estate for this purpose. It is worthy of note that Luke was able to mention only a single instance of such generosity by name, and that was by a man of remarkable largeness of heart, Barnabas. All evidence indicates that Luke was not an eye-witness of this early life at Jerusalem.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The results achieved were by no means ideal. But the religious power of the new faith did succeed in gathering these people into organizations where such moral teachings were urged with immense determination, and where the irresistible force of public opinion exerted its disciplinary power on all who manifestly contradicted in their living the ideals accepted in their faith. The first generation of Christian teachers had to make a strenuous fight against the grosser forms of sexual evil within the churches. In the following generations we hear less about them in exhortations addressed to Christians and more in writings addressed to the general public. Probably the moral standard had been effectively raised within the Christian community, and these outstanding vices had been practically left behind, much as intoxication and profanity in the American churches. A body of seasoned Christians had grown up under life-long Christian influences, and their combined influence was more steady and powerful than the occasional warnings of the early apostles. To curb the strongest and therefore the most destructive physical desire; to put an edge on conscience in regard to honesty and generosity in the use of property; to soften the hateful and factious spirit by a lovable gentleness—even a slight success in these directions would be an invaluable contribution to social life. But to draw men out of their social environment into an organization expressly dedicated to the achievement of this high moral standard, is a wonderful testimony to the society-making power of the new religion. Most social organizations follow natural lines of cleavage. Blood kinship, tribal sympathies, neighborhood, financial profit, social protection or advancement—these are some of the forces that bind men together. Christianity cut across these natural and conventional lines. It tore down the existing barriers with irresistible force and brought men together by a new principle of stratification. Jews were wrenched loose from the firm hold of their race and religion; Greeks from their culture and pleasures; and both joined on a footing of equality. Spiritual affinity triumphed over the strongest bonds that hold men together. The call of Jesus to give up home and property, reputation and life, for his sake, was treasured in the collection of his sayings because it corresponded to the actual experience of so many of his followers. The society-making force can be measured by the obstacles it had to overcome. It was the Christian policy to minimize the contact with the unhallowed life outside. It was this withdrawal which evoked so much hatred and resentment and brought on the Christians, as on the Jews, the charge of an odium generis humani , a general hatred for human kind. But within the charmed circle of the Christian name the love was all the more intense. Its strength was novel, inexplicable, and awakened sinister suspicions in outsiders.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If they are used as such, they become unworkable and ridiculous. They are simply the most emphatic expressions of the determination that the fraternal relation which binds men together must not be ruptured. If a child can be saved from its unsocial self-will only by spanking it, parental love will have to apply that medicine. If a rough young fellow will be a happier member of society for being knocked down, we must knock him down and then sit down beside him and make a social man of him. The law of love transcends all other laws. It does not stop where they stop, and occasionally it may cut right across their beaten tracks. When Mary of Bethany broke the alabaster jar of ointment, the disciples voiced the ordinary law of conduct: it was wasteful luxury; the money might have fed the poor. Jesus took her side. While the disciples were thinking of the positions they were to get when their master became king, her feminine intuition had seen the storm-cloud lowering over his head and had heard the mute cry for sympathy in his soul, and had given him the best she had in the abandonment of love. “This is a beautiful deed that she has done.” The instinct of love had been a truer guide of conduct than all machine-made rules of charity. Jesus was very sociable. He was always falling into conversation with people, sometimes in calm disregard of the laws of propriety. When his disciples returned to him at the well of Samaria, they were surprised to find him talking with a woman! Society had agreed to ostracize certain classes, for instance the tax-collectors. Jesus refused to recognize such a partial negation of human society. He accepted their invitations to dinner and invited himself to their houses, thereby incurring the sneer of the respectable as a friend of publicans and a glutton and wine-drinker. He wanted men to live as neighbors and brothers and he set the example. Social meals are often referred to in the gospels and furnished him the illustrations for much of teaching. His meals with his disciples had been so important a matter in their life that they continued them after his death. His manner in breaking the bread for them all had been so characteristic that they recognized him by it after his resurrection. One of the two great ritual acts in the Church grew out of his last social meal with his friends. If we have ever felt how it brings men together to put their feet under the same table, we shall realize that in these elements of Christ’s life a new communal sociability was working its way and creating a happy human society, and Jesus refused to surrender so great an attainment to the ordinary laws of fasting. Pride disrupts society. Love equalizes.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The spirit of Christ is to hallow all the natural relations of men and give them a divine significance and value. This process, too, is never complete. The kingdom of God is always but coming. The situation is changed when the individual presents not only the obstacles of raw human nature, a will sluggish to good, a preference for pleasure rather than duty, and the clogging influence of evil habits, but a spirit and principles consciously hostile to the influence of Christianity, and sets defiant pride and selfishness against the gentleness and unselfishness urged by the spirit of Jesus. In the same way the situation is changed when the social relations are dominated by a principle essentially hostile to the social conceptions of Christ. Then the condition is not that of a stubborn raw material yielding slowly to the higher fashioning force, but of two antagonistic spirits grappling for the mastery. The more such a hostile principle dominates secular society, the more difficult will be the task of the Church when it tries to bring the Christ-spirit to victorious ascendency. Christianity bases all human relations on love, which is the equalizing and society-making impulse. The Golden Rule makes the swift instincts of self-preservation a rule by which we are to divine what we owe to our neighbor. Anything incompatible with love would stand indicted. Christ’s way to greatness is through preeminent social service. Self-development is desirable because it helps us to serve the better. So far as the influence of the Christian spirit goes, it bows the egoism of the individual to the service of the community. It bids a man live his life for the kingdom of God. In urging the social duty of love, Christianity encounters the natural selfishness of human nature. But this is not a hostile force. It is the instinct of self-preservation without which no child would survive. In a well-trained child the frank egoism of the baby is steadily modified by a growing sense of duty and of solidarity with the family and the little social group in which it moves. With the change of adolescence comes a powerful instinct of self-devotion to society. If the influence of Christianity accompanies the child during this development, and comes to conscious adoption in the adolescent period, it gives an immense reënforcement to the moralizing influence of the family and the school, and creates a character ready for real social life and service.