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.

Page 24 of 145 · 20 per page

• From Shunned (2018)

  I know it’s not much, but it’s freedom,” he said. I could empathize. At the time, I was living with another pioneer in a one-bedroom house that we rented from a Witness family for one hundred dollars per month. It lacked a solid foundation, but the kitchen, bath, and woodstove were in good working order. It provided my first step toward independence from my parents’ home, and the low rent—offered exclusively to pioneers—was manageable on a part-time wage. Bill had finished discussing whatever intrigued the group about the pipes and electrical wiring, and we followed them all back up the stairs, spilling en masse into the yellow kitchen. Large boxes of fresh pizza were just arriving via delivery. As the group scattered around the dining and living rooms to eat, I stood off to the side of the kitchen sink, and Ross joined me. “Ross, how long have you known Bill?” “About two years,” he said. “The Kytes introduced me to him a few months before I got baptized.” He went on to describe his experience in high school, when he fell in love from a distance with the Kyte sisters, Emily and Paige, both of whom were Witnesses. Besides being beautiful young women, he was drawn to their wholesomeness. One day, he showed up on their doorstep for a friendly, unannounced visit. Michael, the girls’ father, greeted him. Michael was not a Witness but shared Ross’s interest in watching football and tennis on TV. The two became fast friends in a household dominated by women. Soon Ross was a dinner guest prior to all Monday-night football games. After the season ended, he remained a regular fixture at the table. All along, when she found an opening, Ellen the girl’s mother, witnessed to Ross. “Ellen told me later that she expected The Truth might turn me off and I’d run for the hills,” Ross said. “Instead, as I listened, she recognized my longing for something real to hold on to and freely offered what she had.” Over dinner dishes, Ellen told Ross the most amazing Bible stories. The stories turned into a weekly Bible study. Next he bought a suit, trimmed his bushy hair, and started showing up at the Kingdom Hall. By his senior year in high school, Ross was presenting himself for baptism, the outward expression of complete dedication to God. Because it is a symbolic gesture of a lifetime commitment, Witnesses do not baptize young children. “That was two years ago,” Ross continued, handing me a beer he’d retrieved from the fridge. “I’m the only member of my family who’s a Witness. Through Emily and Paige, I’ve made all kinds of new friends, including Bill. I always wanted brothers and sisters, and now I have them.” Listening to Ross’s story, I got a sense of how Michael and Ellen first experienced him. I saw how his unrelenting friendliness could win over the entire family.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Ross and I had grown up together and learned a lot along the way. “Can’t success be knowing when it’s time to move on, taking the best of what you learned?” I asked. “That’s a very enlightened view, especially for someone still going through the process,” Geoff said. “And what does your family think about it? Are they supportive?” There was no way to answer that question fully without telling him the scope of my situation, that I’d left not only an unhappy marriage but also a religion where divorce is rare and looked upon as a sign of spiritual weakness. I explained how devout my family was, how I’d disappointed them all, how my brother wasn’t talking to me. I’d wanted to share this with Geoff for some time. I could see by the way his eyes darkened that something protective was rising in him. “I’ve lost my appetite,” he said, and stopped eating, setting his fork down. He removed his wire-frame glasses and rubbed his eyes. He reached out and placed his hand on mine. “I had no idea all this was going on. You always seem so happy, so positive.” His warm touch resonated through my whole being. There was an intimacy and safety there that soothed the raw, vulnerable parts of me that felt guilty for all the pain I was causing and wondered where I might find redemption. “When I’m with you, I’m happy,” I said. Geoff smiled and continued holding my hand. “In the past, I’ve watched other Witnesses leave and thought they had flipped out. From a distance, it looks like a form of insanity. But I feel like I’ve flipped in, like I’m getting closer to who I really am. My heart and my gut feelings tell me I’m on the right track. So I keep going.” “If it feels good, do it,” Geoff said. “That’s my motto.” “I was taught that kind of thinking is dangerous and selfish,” I said. “My mom likes to quote a Scripture: ‘The heart is treacherous. Who can know it?’ But I’m following my heart now, learning to trust it, and it’s a huge relief.” The next day, Geoff had a bouquet of flowers delivered to my office, along with a handwritten note expressing his care for me. He invited me to dinner that Saturday night. Ah, romance! I sat at my desk and reread his note. I was going on my first date in eleven years, with a man I was attracted to and felt completely at home with. We had dinner at Papa Hayden on Twenty-First Street. Geoff had remembered my saying it was my favorite restaurant. He’d come by my apartment to pick me up, and I’d invited him to come early enough to have a glass of wine. I had never entertained a single man alone before and was surprised by how calm and composed I felt.

• From Shunned (2018)

  “But when you have that meeting with the elders, I think you should start by telling them about this,” I said, then formed a mock smile and blinked both eyes. He nodded his head in agreement. “Guess I deserved that one.” I stood up to leave. “Stop,” he said, and grabbed my hand. “Please sit down for a minute. I have something important to say.” He kept hold of my hand, steering me to sit next to him. The tangy smell of alcohol and warm skin floated through his crumpled shirt. My instinct was to pull away, but intuition told me to take a breath and sit tight. “Linda, I’ve been up all night. Yes, I acted like an idiot, and not just last night.” He took a deep breath. “I know you’ve been going through a lot of soul searching lately. And I know that you have doubts about our faith. What you don’t know is that ever since you brought it up, I, too, have been soul searching, checking the teachings, reviewing where I stand.” “I didn’t know that.” I was genuinely surprised, touched, even. “I can honestly say, unlike you, I don’t have any doubts. None at all.” He continued to hold my hand as he spoke, and his palms were getting hot. “You’ve never said it out loud, but I suspect you’ve thought about becoming completely inactive. That’s the direction you’re headed, anyway.” “Yes,” I said. “I love you so much, I even thought about whether or not I could become inactive, too. But I know in my heart that this is The Truth, and I’m sticking with it. I empathize with your predicament. I really do. And I know that putting up with me hasn’t made it any easier. And I want you to know”—he paused and took a deep breath—“that I have struggled a lot with how to help you. And it seems to me that you don’t really want my help, or anyone else’s, for that matter. That fierce, independent streak of yours has gotten the better of you.” For the first time in months, I felt as if he acknowledged the depths of my desperation, even if he didn’t fully understand it. As he faced his limits and admitted them aloud for the first time, his demeanor was one of surrender, shoulders rolled down, head hanging. And for several moments we sat together in the muck of it all. “And I’m wondering,” he continued, “if you wouldn’t be better off, happier, with some space between us.” I pulled my hand away. “What are you suggesting?” “Divorce.” Saying the word out loud opened up a black hole we would never emerge from. “Are you serious?” “You tell me,” Ross answered. “We’re going in two different directions. I hate it. If we carry on this way, we’re just going to make each other miserable.” His frankness was mystifying. Witnesses sanction divorce only if one party has committed adultery.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Dad judged other men by the firmness of their handshake, which was what he received from Bob as he offered his condolences. “I’m sorry our first meeting is not under more pleasant circumstances,” Bob said. Dad nodded his head in agreement. “We’ll take it when we can get it.” “It’s a full house in there, but we saved you a seat near the front with us,” Mom said. “I’ll take you in while Dad stays here.” I looked through the double doors that opened into the main hall. The seats were filled with people facing the front. In the back were a fireplace, two couches that formed a large seating area, a row of serving tables, and an organ, and just to my right was a video projector pouring light onto a wall screen. Three people were standing in back—my sister, Ove, and Uncle Jess—and watching a looping series of pictures of Grandma T. throughout her life. Ove saw us entering the hall and approached Bob with a warm smile and an extended hand. “Welcome, Bob. I’m Ove,” he said. “I’m the other son-in-law.” “How do you do?” Bob said. Until that moment, I had never thought of Bob as a member of this family. Of course, he’d always felt like my family, but I’d not connected that this technically made him a son-in-law, a brother-in-law, an uncle. Lory remained standing at Uncle Jess’s side and watched their exchange. “Please excuse me. I’m a bit distracted right now,” Ove continued. “Frank asked me to say a few words here, and I want to focus on what I’m going to say. We’ll have more of a chance to visit at dinner.” Without saying another word, he gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, then vanished to his seat. Lory approached us, wearing a long black wool skirt and a loose blazer. “Hi, Bob. I’m Lory,” she said, as she shook his hand. A clenched jaw and forced smile betrayed her nervousness. Bob spoke to her in muted tones while I approached Uncle Jess, standing alone and captivated by the passing images of his big sister. My heart was grateful for his presence. Here was one of the family sages, and he had no cause to rebuff me. As I got closer, Uncle Jess looked up through thick square glasses and, after a split second of cognitive reaction, threw open his arms. “Lindy,” he said in a lion-like whisper, wrapping his arms around me with unabashed affection. I squeezed him back, then pulled back to look at his face, noticing his laugh lines. “I’ll introduce you and Aunt Mary to my husband after the service,” I whispered. Mom touched my shoulder from behind, signaling that it was time to take our seats. Every row was filled with people, some whispering to each other, while a tedious melody piped in through the speaker system.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  [image "2. T he Scholar" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_011_r1.jpg] [image "2. T he Scholar" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_011_r1.jpg] WHEN YOUNG MARTIN left Mansfeld in 1497 to go to school in Magdeburg, he was in his fourteenth year and his father’s future as a substantial smelter-master still looked rosy. He went with Hans Reinicke, the mining inspector’s son; ambitious as ever, his father wanted the same education for Martin as that enjoyed by the son of the most prominent man in town. Young Martin lodged with the archbishop’s official, Dr. Paul Moshauer, who also came from a mining family.1 The careers of the two bright young lads offer a telling contrast. Martin went on to university at Erfurt, becoming a monk, while Reinicke followed in the family business, and married in 1511, aged around twenty-eight. By 1512, Luther had risen to become subprior and director of study for the monastery, while Reinicke ran his first two smelters.2 In 1519, when Martin was a famous but penniless monk, Hans inherited the family house in Mansfeld, and by 1522 he had become one of the wealthiest mine owners in the town.3 Luther, meanwhile, had made his famous appearance at the Diet of Worms, and in 1522 he was hiding in the Wartburg Castle. Throughout the 1520s and 1530s, alone of all the mine owners of his generation, Hans Reinicke made a success of it, joining the capitalists of the Steinacher Saigerhandelsgesellschaft, dominating the silver production of Mansfeld, and acting as spokesperson for the mine owners; in the same decades, Luther became world famous.4 Reinicke’s was the life that Luther could have led and had chosen not to. The two men remained friends and kept in contact, the friendship a powerful anchor in both their lives. Reinicke visited Luther during the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, while the reformer was suffering from loneliness in Coburg Castle. It was Reinicke who broke the news of Hans Luder’s death: When a letter arrived from his friend shortly afterward, Luther took one look and said, “Now I know that my father is dead.” As Melanchthon put it: “There was exceptional mutual kindness between these two, Luther and Reinicke, whether by some concord of nature or whether rising from that companionship of boyhood studies.” When Reinicke died in 1538, Luther lay ill, and the news of the loss of “my best friend” was kept from him for some months, because those around him knew how serious a blow it would be.5 Their experiences together as boys had bound the two men throughout their lives.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Laminit was consequently drummed out of town. For the later Luther, Laminit was a fraud, a “whore” and schemer, but whether he saw through her or not at the time we cannot know. It may be that he, like others, was already beginning to have doubts about this extreme and exhibitionistic mortification of the flesh, a skepticism that would color his later theology and that was fostered by his relationship with his confessor, Johann von Staupitz. 46 — A T least fifteen years older than Luther, Staupitz was utterly different in background, well traveled, and at home among the nobility and at court. 47 A patrician who had grown up with Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, he was initially vicar general of the observant wing of the order, but would also become head of the conventuals in Saxony, those Augustinians who took a laxer line. 48 He and Luther probably met in April 1506 when Staupitz was in Erfurt; it would have been Staupitz who gave Luther formal permission to become a priest—monks were not automatically priests—deciding too that he should study theology. Being Luther’s confessor was a most demanding task. The young monk’s relentless pursuit of perfection meant that he once confessed for six hours at a time, and Staupitz must have been at his wits’ end. Staupitz had a relaxed attitude to sin—he once joked that he had given up making vows, for he was simply unable to keep them—but what worried Luther were not the usual sins but the “real knots”: his lack of love of God and his fear of judgment. On one occasion when confronted with Luther’s overscrupulous confessing, Staupitz told him: “I don’t understand you”—which, as Luther later remarked, was hardly comforting. Staupitz believed that temptations were good because they taught one theology. For his part, Luther believed Staupitz thought he was largely battling against the sin of pride, but his own later view was that the opposite was true: The Anfechtungen were the Devil’s “thorn in the flesh”; they were not warnings against arrogance. Like a good father, Staupitz consistently tried to calm Luther’s fears, reminding the young monk that God loved him. He toned down Luther’s perfectionist streak and countered his vehemence and anger with a mild self-deprecation and a little teasing. He was probably just the kind of steady interlocutor Luther needed, but both men realized that Staupitz did not truly grasp his passionate religiosity. Staupitz was also different from Luther in that he enjoyed the good things in life.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Indeed, it was Luther, fearing for the small and sickly-looking Melanchthon, who had found him a wife. “Philipp is marrying Catharina Krapp,” he had written to Johannes Lang in August 1520, “which they say I was the author of. I do for men whatever is best if there are means.” He added insouciantly that he was “not at all bothered by the universal clamor.” 28 Catharina brought only a small dowry and was not especially good-looking. It seems that the first years of the union were not happy, with Melanchthon describing marriage as a “servitude.” 29 Yet for all his bluster that sexuality was not a problem for him, and his insistence that “flesh” was a broad term, one senses that Luther was confronting his own “flesh.” It is surely significant that here he chose the married man Melanchthon as his confidant, and not the bachelor Spalatin (to whom, by contrast, he had been remarkably frank about his constipation). Moreover, Luther was beginning to discuss his sexual identity by way of examining the relationship with his father. — T HESE musings would find their way into the treatise De votis monasticis ( On Monastic Vows ), which Luther finished in November 1521. Its preface took the form of a “letter” to his father, in which Luther developed the ideas he had explored in the letter to Melanchthon, sometimes in the very same words. It was a letter only in a fictional sense: Since it was written in Latin, his father could not have read it, nor could he have read the treatise itself, which was dedicated to him. It is a remarkably compact, emotional, and dramatic piece of writing. Luther now offered his father an apology. I disobeyed your wishes, he confessed, and I know that you had other plans for me: “you were determined, therefore, to tie me down with an honorable and wealthy marriage.” He told the story of his first Mass, and he recalled that even after they had made their peace with each other, his father had again exploded: “Have you not also heard…that parents are to be obeyed?” Yet at the time, Luther wrote, “I hardened my heart as much as I could against you and your word”—a revealing terminology that would have reminded the reader of Christ and the true Word. Now, Luther wrote, he realized that the apparition in the storm could not have been from God, because his decision to enter the monastery was against his father’s will.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “Did they break?” “That bastard-assed dwarf Thuringer stole them,” I explain as little Katzenburger crawls inside my coat, curls near my heart, and falls asleep, purring like a diesel, healthier than she appears. “Why would Damon do something like that?” Carla asks as we crunch off toward the hotel. “Vendetta,” I answer. “Otto and I tied him up and hid him under his blankets. He missed practice. Coach didn’t even notice he was gone. If Coach hadn’t sat on him by accident when we started our wrestle-offs, Sausage might never have been discovered. We just wanted to temper his hubris a little.” “But you said he has a tough match on Tuesday.” “It’s not wise to take such things too seriously,” I say. “It’s only a game.” “Someone should knock hell out of you.” Carla smiles. “Somehow I feel that at this very moment just such an act is being planned.” I sink deep into the comfort of our good old car. Katzenburger squeaks. Carla pulls to the curb and examines her, curled in the downy fold of my parka. “She’s not very well,” Carla says, pulling back into traffic. “But she’s better than when we got her.” “When did we get her?” I ask. “Dad brought her home this afternoon. He sent someone up to some valley to deliver a car and Katzen was in the car the guy brought back.” Dad’s Honda dealership is going fairly strong now. About the only people who buy them are college types, Dad says. But there are six colleges around Spokane, so that should give him enough customers to stay in business until a few more of our countrymen decide they’ve got better things to do with their money than spend it on gas. Dad sometimes wishes there were a little American car as good as the Honda he could sell. But I tell him to forget it, that he can’t afford that kind of economic patriotism. During the season I don’t get much time to hang around the store, so I don’t know all his salesmen yet. I do know he sent someone up to the Okanogan Valley to deliver a Honda Civic and pick up an Olds. The reason I know this is because the guy was also supposed to pick up a box of apples from Dad’s mom. She cooks for the pickers in an apple orchard there. The orchard owners are the ones who bought the Civic. Grandma turned them onto Dad. Apple-picking is long over, of course, but she stays up there anyway. Most of our communication takes the form of boxes of apples. Okanogan Grandma is a little like Columbia River Grandpa. They’re separated and they don’t like each other much, but they’re a lot alike. Grandma won’t leave her cabin in the Okanogan, and Grandpa won’t leave his cabin on the upper Columbia. Grandma talks to us in apples, and Grandpa speaks in venison steaks.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  He began to tell me how shitty the new cars were, about how there were so many piddly little things always going wrong with them, and about how they would come from the factory with the armrests half off and the plastic “wood” on the dash coming unglued. He complained to the factory representative that nothing manual could be ordered anymore—no standard transmissions, brakes, or steering, not even a station wagon back window that could be rolled by hand. The factory man, this young college-educated guy of whom Dad had been in awe, told Dad that people didn’t want to do things by hand anymore. Dad, who was getting less and less awed all the time, said, “In a pig’s ass they don’t!” Then I began seeing books on the nightstand with Dad’s Time : Future Shock , The Assassin Automobile , The Human Use of Human Beings , Power and Innocence . He began to wear his older, plainer clothes. He’s got two closets full of clothes. He must have a hundred shoes. He quit smoking, and to fight his nervousness he built a working model of the Wankel engine. He tried to talk Mom into quitting smoking. He tried to talk her into selling the Buick and buying a little Honda car. He wanted to try walking to work a couple days a week. Mom was having none of it. One evening after I got home from working overtime I heard Mom and Dad talking. Dad was nearly pleading with her to stop smoking. She smokes about three packs a day. I was surprised at Dad’s tone. I’d have to call it “tender.” I wouldn’t call him mean, but I don’t usually call him tender, either. It made me happy in a sad way. Not that it turned out well. Mom said she loved smoking and could never quit. The tone in which she said it made me feel strange and good. I would have to call it tender, too. She also said it would break her heart to sell the convertible. She said she’d never drive “one of those little toilet bowls.” Dad hasn’t smoked a cigarette since. But he did return to cigars, of which he smokes probably fifteen a day. Either Mom and Dad ended their twenty-year marriage quietly or they did all their yelling when I wasn’t around. The first I knew about it was one day in the middle of August when Mom asked me to meet her for lunch. We sat in a booth in the Bon Marché cafeteria and Mom told me she was moving to Seattle. I focused on the way she held her cigarette. So casual—elbow out, wrist cocked, a little kiss of lipstick on the filter. I thought back to the picture I’d seen of Mom in her teens, when her hair was long in what they called a “page boy.” And in my mind I could see her practice holding her cigarette.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  43 It was inept and self-destructive of the regime to choose that date to make its move. Constantly, in the course of the long struggle with Khomeini, the shah seemed to go out of his way to cast himself as a tyrannical ruler and the enemy of the Imams. Why did Khomeini choose this moment to speak out? Throughout his life, he had practiced the mystical disciplines of irfan, as taught by Mulla Sadra. For Khomeini, as for Sadra, mysticism and politics were inseparable. There could be no social reformation of society unless it was accompanied by a spiritual reformation. In the very last testimony he made to the people of Iran before his death, Khomeini begged them to continue to study and practice irfan, a discipline which the ulema had tended to neglect. For Khomeini, the mystical quest associated with mythos must always accompany the practical activities of logos. People who met Khomeini were always struck by his obvious absorption in the spiritual. His withdrawn demeanor, inward-looking gaze, and the studied monotone of his delivery (which Westerners found repellent) were easily recognizable by Shiis as the mark of a “sober” mystic. Where some Sufis and mystical practitioners were known as “drunken” mystics because they surrendered to the emotional extremes that are often unleashed in the course of this interior journey, the “sober” mystic cultivated an iron self-control as a means of keeping extremity at bay. Mulla Sadra had described the spiritual progress of a leader (imam) of the ummah. Before he could begin his political mission, he must first journey from man to God, expose himself to the transforming vision of the divine, and strip himself of the egotism that impedes his self-realization. Only at the end of this long and disciplined process, could he, as it were, return to the world of affairs, preach the word of God, and implement the divine law in society. The American scholar Hamid Algar suggests that when he began to speak against the shah in 1963, Khomeini had completed the preliminary and essential “journey to God,” and felt ready to take an active role in politics. 44 Khomeini was released after spending a few days in custody, but he returned at once to the offensive. Forty days after SAVAK’s attack on the Fayziyah Madrasah, the students held the traditional mourning ceremonies for those who had been killed. Khomeini delivered a speech in which he compared the assault to Reza Shah’s violation of the shrine of Mashhad in 1935, when hundreds of protesters had died. Throughout the summer, he continued to denounce the regime, until finally, on the feast of Ashura, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husain at Kerbala (June 3, 1963), Khomeini delivered a mourning eulogy, while the people sobbed and wept, as was customary during a rawdah. The shah, Khomeini claimed, was like Yazid, the villain of Kerbala.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  for ceremonies such as baptism and ordination which is known as the Liturgy of Addai and Mari. That lends it an association with those whom the Syrian Church reveres as its founders, but there is little doubt that it was the form of eucharistic prayer used in the Church of Edessa and it may be as early as the late second century. Nothing else preserved from anywhere in the Christian world has survived the austere scrutiny of modern liturgical scholars, to be authenticated as a form of worship that would have been familiar to very early Christians week by week.70 It is a rare privilege to have been welcomed as I was to a congregation of exiled Christians from Baghdad in their refuge in Damascus, still mourning those murdered in the latest agonies of the Syriac Church, and to know that words were being solemnly sung as so many centuries ago they had first been chanted in Edessa: Your majesty, O Lord, a thousand thousand heavenly beings worship, and myriad myriads of angels, hosts of spiritual beings, ministers of fire and spirit with cherubim and holy seraphim, glorify your name, crying out and glorifying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, God almighty, Heaven and earth are full of his glories’… Since Syrians lived either side of the shifting frontier between Rome and its eastern neighbours, the Church was naturally as liable to spread eastwards as westwards. At the beginning of the third century, Bar-Daisan could speak of Christian communities in the sprawling regions of Central Asia which now form such ex-Soviet Republics as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while from further south Christian graves have been found on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf which can be dated to the mid-third century. The Parthians showed little hostility to this new religion, but there was a significant shift with the founding of the Sassanian Empire in the 220s; the first restored shah, Ardashir, was the grandson of a high priest of the Zoroastrian faith and a Zoroastrian restoration became a keynote of the new empire’s drive to restore Iranian tradition.71 Relations between episcopal Christians and Manichaeans were tense enough, but that was because they had much in common in the role which they assigned to Jesus Christ. Zoroastrianism, by contrast, was an ancient religion which looked with contempt on the Christian revelation and its developing doctrine of the Trinity. Like Manichaeism, it was a dualist faith, but it was not the dualism which led Manichees and gnostics to regard the world and matter as evil. The Zoroastrian dualist struggle was between being and non-being, in which the world created by the ‘Wise Lord’ (Ahura Mazda) was the forum for a struggle between the creator and an uncreated ‘Evil Spirit’ (Ahriman). The Zoroastrians’ experience of the world was therefore shot through with divinity; Zoroastrians made animal sacrifices to Ahura Mazda and paid reverence to fire. They despised Christian and Manichaean asceticism, which were developing in Syria just as the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At a time when Reform, Conservative, and Neo-Orthodox Jews were discarding parts of the law or trying to find a more relaxed and rational religious life, the more rigorous observance of the Haredim refused to compromise with the norms of mainstream society. On his visit to Bnei Brak, Rabbi Elburg noted that it had become “a world in itself”; 33 Haredi Jews were not only withdrawing from modern society, but from other, less punctilious Jews. They needed different slaughterers, shops that were stricter about kosher food, and their own ritual baths. They were cultivating a distinct identity in opposition to the temper of the times. Similarly, in the yeshivot, Jews did not study, like students in secular colleges, to acquire information that could later be put to practical use. Many of the laws of the Torah, such as those concerned with the rituals of the Temple and animal sacrifice, could no longer be implemented; the laws of torts and damages could be restored only by the Messiah when he established the Kingdom. Yet students spent hours, days, and even years immersed in intense discussion of this apparently obsolete legislation with their teachers, because these were God’s laws. The repetition of the Hebrew words that God had—in some sense—spoken when he had given the law to Moses on Mount Sinai was a form of communion with the divine. Exploring every detail of the laws enabled a student to enter symbolically into the mind of God. In an age which had so horrifically cast the divine law aside, Jews would observe it more accurately than ever before. Familiarizing himself with the legal opinions of the great rabbis of the past was a way for the student to take the tradition into his own mind and heart, and commune with the sages. In the yeshivot, the methods of study were just as crucial as the material itself, and the object of yeshiva education was not greater facility in this world but a quest for the divine in a society which had tried to exclude God. Everything about the yeshiva world was different from the secularist world outside. In mainstream society, men (still considered the superior sex in the 1950s) went out to engage in business, while women stayed in the seclusion of the home. Among the Haredim, it was the inferior sex who went out into what the goyim considered the “real” world of affairs (tacitly proclaiming its secondary status), while the men led an enclosed, protected life with the true Reality in the yeshiva. In secular Israel, the army was becoming almost a sacred institution; national service was obligatory for both sexes, and a man would remain in his army unit for reserve duty for the whole of his active life.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women • to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion; • to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; • to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures; • to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity; • to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies. We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.” The charter was launched on November 12, 2009, in sixty different locations throughout the world; it was enshrined in synagogues, mosques, temples, and churches as well as in such secular institutions as the Karachi Press Club and the Sydney Opera House. But the work is only just beginning. At this writing, we have more than 150 partners working together throughout the globe to translate the charter into practical, realistic action. But can compassion heal the seemingly intractable problems of our time? Is this virtue even feasible in the technological age? And what does “compassion” actually mean? Our English word is often confused with “pity” and associated with an uncritical, sentimental benevolence: the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines “compassionate” as “piteous” or “pitiable.” This perception of compassion is not only widespread but ingrained. When I gave a lecture in the Netherlands recently, I emphatically made the point that compassion did not mean feeling sorry for people, but the Dutch translation of my text in the newspaper De Volkskrant consistently rendered “compassion” as “pity.” But “compassion” derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo, or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of a royal elite. Over the centuries of trials and bizarre disasters to afflict the Ethiopian Church, they are the constant underlying force which has preserved its unique life against the odds. King Ezana may have renounced traditional gods, but the worship of the Church over which he first presided has remained unique and unmistakably African in character. Since church buildings are often temple-like in character rather than congregational spaces, much of the liturgy is conducted in the open air, accompanied by a variety of drums and percussive and stringed instruments, and with the principal clergy and musicians shaded from the weather by elaborately decorated umbrellas. Instead of church bells, sonorous echoes struck on stones hanging from trees summon worshippers to prayer (see Plate 20). The Church’s liturgical chant, inseparable from its worship, is attributed to the sixth- century Court musician Yared. According to legend, his genius rather backfired on him when Gabra Maskel, the then king of Aksum, was so entranced by Yared’s singing that he failed to notice that the spear on which he was leaning had pierced the singer’s foot. Yared himself was (perhaps diplomatically) too absorbed in his own art to comment.29 It was not surprising that during the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Church, which derived its fragile link to the wider episcopal succession via Alexandria, followed the Egyptian Church into the Miaphysite camp. One of the concepts which remain central in Ethiopian theology is täwahedo, ‘union’ of humanity and divinity in the Saviour who took flesh. Nevertheless, despite the crucial role of the abun, the Ethiopian Church did not become Coptic in character. Far more all-pervasive were its links with the Semitic world, already evident before the coming of Christianity in Ethiopian language and even place names in the coastal regions of Tigray and Eritrea.30 It was one of those Semitic languages, Ge’ez, which became the liturgical and theological language of the Ethiopian Church, and remains so, even though it is not otherwise in current use. The arrival of Miaphysite faith is also connected to the Semitic world, because in legend it is associated with ‘Nine Saints’ of mostly Syriac background, who are said to have arrived as refugees from Chalcedonian persecution in the late fifth century and to have been instrumental in establishing the Ethiopian monastic system. Ethiopia’s Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity. This is reminiscent of the distinctively close relationship with Judaism in early Syriac Christianity (see pp. 178–9), but over a much longer period the character has become much more pronounced in Ethiopia. This may not originally have arisen so much from direct contacts with Jews as from Ethiopian pride in that foundation episode in the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The charter was launched on November 12, 2009, in sixty different locations throughout the world; it was enshrined in synagogues, mosques, temples, and churches as well as in such secular institutions as the Karachi Press Club and the Sydney Opera House. But the work is only just beginning. At this writing, we have more than 150 partners working together throughout the globe to translate the charter into practical, realistic action. But can compassion heal the seemingly intractable problems of our time? Is this virtue even feasible in the technological age? And what does “compassion” actually mean? Our English word is often confused with “pity” and associated with an uncritical, sentimental benevolence: the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines “compassionate” as “piteous” or “pitiable.” This perception of compassion is not only widespread but ingrained. When I gave a lecture in the Netherlands recently, I emphatically made the point that compassion did not mean feeling sorry for people, but the Dutch translation of my text in the newspaper De Volkskrant consistently rendered “compassion” as “pity.” But “compassion” derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo, or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. The first person to formulate the Golden Rule, as far as we know, was the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE), who when asked which of his teachings his disciples could practice “all day and every day” replied: “Perhaps the saying about shu (“consideration”). Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” This, he said, was the thread that ran right through the spiritual method he called the Way (dao) and pulled all its teachings together. “Our Master’s Way,” explained one of his pupils, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).” A better translation of shu is “likening to oneself”; people should not put themselves in a special, privileged category but relate their own experience to that of others “all day and every day.” Selected titles available from Karen Armstrong In the Beginning Jerusalem The Battle for God A History of God The Case for God The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life [image file=images/image_image-5.jpg]

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I crawl against her, playing with the enflanneled, warm, rubber bag, pummeling it, tossing it, sliding it down the roundness of her stomach to the warm sheet between the bend of her elbow and the curve of her waist below her breasts, flopping sideward inside the printed cloth. Under the covers, the morning smells soft and sunny and full of promise. I frolic with the liquid-filled water bottle, patting and rubbing its firm giving softness. I shake it slowly, rocking it back and forth, lost in sudden tenderness, at the same time gently rubbing against my mother’s quiet body. Warm milky smells of morning surround us. Feeling the smooth deep firmness of her breasts against my shoulders, my pajama’d back, sometimes, more daringly, against my ears and the sides of my cheeks. Tossing, tumbling, the soft gurgle of the water within its rubber casing. Sometimes the thin sound of her ring against the bedstead as she moves her hand up over my head. Her arm comes down across me, holding me to her for a moment, then quiets my frisking. “All right, now.” I nuzzle against her sweetness, pretending not to hear. “All right, now, I said; stop it. It’s time to get up from this bed. Look lively, and mind you spill that water.” Before I can say anything she is gone in a great deliberate heave. The purposeful whip of her chenille robe over her warm flannel gown and the bed already growing cold beside me. “Wherever the bird with no feet flew she found trees with no limbs.” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 4 When I was around the age of four or five, I would have given anything I had in the world except my mother, in order to have had a friend or a little sister. She would be someone I could talk to and play with, someone close enough in age to me that I would not have to be afraid of her, nor she of me. We would share our secrets with each other. Even though I had two older sisters, I grew up feeling like an only child, since they were quite close to each other in age, and quite far away from me. Actually, I grew up feeling like an only planet, or some isolated world in a hostile, or at best, unfriendly, firmament. The fact that I was clothed, sheltered, and fed better than many other children in Harlem in those Depression years was not a fact that impressed itself too often upon my child’s consciousness.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  consisted in the nature of their deaths: not exactly martyrdom for the faith, but political murder by their half-brother Prince Sviatopolk in his effort to ensure that he inherited power after Vladimir died in 1015. The real story of what happened in a murky set of political manoeuvres is unclear and in any case irrelevant to the spirit in which the murdered princes were commemorated: they were reverenced because it was said that they had refused to resist their murderers to avoid wider bloodshed, so their suffering was both entirely innocent and inspired by compassion and non-violence.15 Boris and Gleb can be seen as an example of a phenomenon common in the popular religion of medieval northern Europe generally, Latin as well as Orthodox: the feeling that those who met a violent and premature end for no good reason deserved to be regarded as saints. In western Europe, the authorities in Rome objected strongly to this idea – rightly in terms of Christian tradition – and issued bitter if usually futile condemnations of such local cults.16 The official reaction in Kiev was much less hostile. That reflected a strand in Russian spirituality which remained strong in later centuries: its ‘kenotic’ emphasis on the example which Christ gave of his emptying of the self, his humiliation and compassion for others. If Christ was passive, both in the modern usage of the word and (in a closer sense to the original Latin verb patior, ‘to suffer’) accepting of his suffering, so followers of Christ should imitate his self- emptying. A parish priest in Moscow familiar with both East and West once observed to me that the Western reaction to a problem is to look for a solution; the Orthodox are more inclined to live with it.17 It was easier for the Eastern tradition of ‘synergy’, or cooperation with divine grace, to warm to the theme of self-emptying than for Westerners drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s crystallization of the doctrine that original sin had irredeemably tainted all human effort. Yet kenotic thinking has repeatedly crept back in Western Christianity. The last century’s industrial production of innocent human death worldwide suggests that the theme has a Christian relevance wider than its original setting amid the frequent violence and cruelty of Russian history. Linked to the kenotic concept of innocence and denial of self-esteem was the new popularity which from very early on an old genre of Eastern saint enjoyed in the Christianity of Kievan Rus’, and which has endured into modern Russian Orthodoxy: the Holy Fool. Perhaps real Holy Fools capered their way up the trade routes of eastern Europe to Kiev, but it is more likely that they were discovered by Kievan monks in the pages of Byzantine and Bulgarian saints’ lives, and the idea fused with the growing local devotion to innocence and unreason. The first recorded local fool was Isaakii (d. 1090), who thoroughly disrupted life in Kiev’s Caves Monastery before lapsing into passive

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  individual and intimate sacred art which sought to transcribe a visual reality into painting or sculpture – very different from what had gone before in the West, let alone the carefully prescribed traditions of Orthodox art. The Franciscan devotional style – the celebration of the everyday proclaimed in Francis’s Christmas crib – was an inspiration for one of the first artists in the Western tradition to be remembered as an individual personality and to project a personal vision in his artistic achievement: Giotto. One of Giotto’s earliest commissions, in the last years of the thirteenth century, was to oversee and take the leading role in painting a sequence of frescoes in the basilica in Assisi dedicated to Francis and his shrine. When in the Arena Chapel in Padua slightly later Giotto painted the Nativity scene which de Caulibus would soon paint in words, his vision was equally a projection beyond scripture: it has a realism which at the time was revolutionary, but it also went beyond a snapshot of the everyday (see Plate 25). Giotto’s Nativity provides a scene for our meditation as unobserved external observers and worshippers, just like the Poor Clare nun reading her text. He portrays the intense gaze of a young mother on her son, but the son fixes her with a gaze equally intensely focused and beyond that of a newly born baby. The ox’s eye is also firmly fixed on the Virgin as it strains forward up to the manger with the ass. This is a study of relationships which are familiar to us from our daily lives, but in which the haloes of Mother and Son, and our knowledge of the sacred story, pull us beyond our own experience, to the relationships of love which form the heart of Christianity’s story of salvation.34 If we read John de Caulibus’s Meditations on the Life of Christ, what is immediately apparent is the concentration of their narrative particularly on the extremes of Christ’s earthly life: his infancy and Passion. In this set of choices, de Caulibus was simply echoing much contemporary preaching of his contemporaries in the Franciscan Order. Infancy and Passion privilege the role of Mary, both in Christ’s birth and in her agony at his final sufferings. Once more, this Marian devotion was a development from popular twelfth-century devotional themes (see pp. 393–4) – but with a new element: it was in the later thirteenth century that Mary too became not a benevolent but distant monarch, a model for queen dowagers and empresses everywhere, but a wretchedly mourning mother (see Plate 30). Indeed from the early fourteenth century she was commonly depicted throughout Europe as ‘Our Lady of Pity’ or Pietà, cradling her dead son in her arms after he had been taken down from the Cross.35 Christ too was now first depicted in art not as a King in Majesty or serene Good Shepherd, but as the ‘Man of Sorrows’, with the wounds of his crucifixion exposed and his face twisted in pain. The emphasis continued

• From Action (2014)

  Figure out not only what you like and believe, but the specifics of why you like/believe it—and allow that others might not agree. Take stock of yourself and your tastes, but don’t consider your viewpoints immovably “correct.” This makes you a person who allows for imperfection, aka a good conversationalist and also not a pigheaded, essentialist nimrod. The minute you decide that you’re impermeably right about everything is the minute you shut yourself off to other kinds of interpersonal osmosis, which limits the social world around you and closes you off to all kinds of possibility and understanding. Plus, you stop learning, so you commit double homicide by also deciding it’s a wrap for the development of your brain. You don’t have to and probably won’t buck your opinion the second you’re presented with a variant one. Rather, you might become more certain of your prior conviction, and see how you communicate it in a new context, which exemplifies respect for what you believe. If you think something worthwhile and true, you are probably inclined to spread that idea, right? Some years back, it became clearer than ever that I didn’t need to mutually agree about every last one—or even most—of my beliefs, opinions, or tastes with a person in order to connect our two brains and bodies. This was thanks to a great extended sexual friendship with a Republican audio engineer named Rex. He took my boots off for me each time we got undressed, and when I was like, “Huh, dude?” he scoffed and said, “What, guys don’t take your shoes offa you? You’re too good for those idiots.” (?!??!!! This is not a thing… as far as I know?) Rex sent my mom flowers after casually spending time with her once and taught me about Ray Charles. If I had written him off because I thought he wasn’t “on the same page as me” in terms of politics, et cetera, I would have missed out on a lot, including the time we were fucking and he craned his gorgeous, craggy nose down right into my face, observing it like he was seeing me for the first time. (Told you it’s really appreciated when you make eye contact!) After, he said that that was the distance, or lack thereof, at which I was most beautiful to him. REX! Rex ruled. Keep your mind flung wide open. Treat people like they’re smart enough to understand you by being smart enough to take in, and allow for, their difference.

• From Action (2014)

  This can speak to a diffuse range of considerations: Maybe the third has known one of the players in question since goon-times, or perhaps shares a CSA with another. Most commonly, though, this is going to boil down to good old-fashioned gender essentialism. When I’m closer with the male figure of an equation, I am persuaded that a situation is cool, on the level, and a potentially entertaining passage of a Thursday evening when the female arm of a twosome reaches out to me. Since we’re going to be, for a time, body doubles playing an at least somewhat similar role, no matter how disparate our interpretations of it, I want to know that we’re countrywomen—that we’re each heading into the threesome knowing what the other’s deal is, and how to make her feel good and psychically protected. If you are all three of diverse, or identical, genders, go ahead and dispatch the person who speaks to them most effortlessly about how wild the ninth grade was, or this week’s CSA selection of root vegetables, or whatever point of connection you’ve decided is basis enough for a bout of group sex. (Both topics have worked fine for me in the past.) • Do it with ANOTHER couple. Having sex with another allied force means that everyone is approaching the four-way with just as much to lose!! Hee, I kid—look at it the other way, and you are viewing it correctly. Empathy will come more easily to a couple in your same romantic situation, and close friends might be more considerate of one another’s feelings and careful not to homewreck your shit. • Three strangers or loose acquaintances are least messy after the fact. I love a threesome comprising three randeaux. There are no lingering love-politics about which to have Serious Check-Ins (aka the WORST part of relationships, even though I know it’s, yes, necessary and healthy—hard conversations are the vegetables of romance). Each and all parties are equal, and equally ready to party. • In any case: GET KINDA DRUNK. But not too drunk, doye. • A note on asking a previously platonic friend to take part in a threesome: You’re always going to face some risk of offending someone when you make a pass at them. A unilateral truth: That risk winnows when you hint at your interest and gauge if the other person reciprocates it with genuine curiosity and levelheadedness (rather than going, “Oh, he smiled back—SHAGADELIC”). If they’re freaked out? They have the right to be surprised, but they also have to respect your sexual realité as much as you do theirs, so end the conversation if they decide that a cool way to respond is by insulting or berating you. I have never had that happen, and I hope you don’t either!