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 62 of 145 · 20 per page

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The cross is the cross of the “king of the Jews.” Our traditions, including our traditions of atonement theology, have separated themes that belonged inextricably together. Listening to the Evangelists In particular, all four gospels tell the story of Jesus as one of Israel’s God returning at last. This theme, so often ignored in the past, has come to the fore in recent scholarly analysis. When Mark opens his gospel by lining up John the Baptist with the prophetic messengers of Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40, the point is that those messengers are preparing the way not simply for a coming Messiah, but for YHWH himself. When John opens his gospel with multiple echoes of Genesis and Exodus, bringing the prologue to its climax in v. 14 with the Word becoming flesh and revealing the divine Glory and in v. 18 with the unveiling of the otherwise unseen Father through the divine Son, he is setting the stage for his readers to understand that Jesus is not simply “son of God” in the sense of the Davidic king of Psalm 2, 2 Samuel 7, and so on. John’s Jesus is the living embodiment of the one creator God, Israel’s covenant God. The messianic language of the divine “Son” is discerned as the perfect vehicle (going back, we may suppose, to Jesus himself) to express this. When Matthew has the angel tell Joseph that the child to be born will be “Emmanuel,” “God with us,” and then finishes his gospel with Jesus himself telling his followers that he will be “with them always,” alert readers know that the entire story ought to be read with this in mind. Luke’s birth narratives are still more explicit, designating the child in Mary’s womb as the “Holy One” who will be “God’s son” (Luke 1:35). When Luke’s gospel nears its climax, the coming of Jesus to Jerusalem is clearly to be seen as the moment when, at last, Israel’s God is “visiting his people,” that is, coming back in person to judge and to rescue (19:44). There is much more that could be said to fill in this picture. But this will suffice for our present purposes. We should not then be surprised when all four gospels tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to draw out, repeatedly, his sense of compassion and love, which we have already noted as a striking feature.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  It amazed me to see the white flesh and purple spines communicating across a gap no less enormous than deep space, a miracle in six inches of water. She touched me that way, my cheeks, my arms, and I too reached out to her. El cielo es azul . We were on Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women. I was a little girl in a faded dress, sunburned, barefoot, hair white as dandelion floss. The streets were crushed shell where we stood in line at the tortilla shop every morning with the Mexican women. ¿Cuál es su nombre? Su hija es más guapa, they said, Your daughter is too pretty, and touched my hair. My mother’s skin peeling like paint. Her eyes bluer than the sky, azul claro . In a big hotel colored pink and orange, a man with a dark mustache smelled like crushed flowers. There were taxis and music, and my mother went out in embroidered dresses pulled low off the shoulders. But then he was gone, and we moved on to the Island of Women. My mother was waiting for something there, I didn’t know what. We bought our tortillas every day, walked back to the little whitewashed bungalow with our string bag, past small houses with grated windows and the doors opened like frames. Inside were pictures on the walls, grandmothers with fans, sometimes there were books. We ate shrimp with garlic in outdoor restaurants on the beach. Camarones con ajo . Some fishermen caught a hammerhead shark and dragged it up onto the beach. It was twice the size of the little boats the fishermen used, and everyone came to the beach to look at it, to pose alongside its monstrous head, as wide as I was tall. Battalions of teeth showed in its humorless grin. I was afraid when my mother left me on the beach to swim out on the soft blue. What happened if the shark came, and the water turned red and the bones came through? WHENEVER I WOKE , there was Demerol. Doctors in masks, nurses with soft hands. Flowers. Their smiles like nectar. There were IVs and other children, dressings and Tom and Jerry on the TV, balloons and strangers. Just tell us, just tell. Schutzstaffel. Plainclothes. How could I begin to describe Starr, with her nightgown all twisted around, unloading a .38 into my room. I preferred to think about Mexico. In Mexico the faces were weathered and soft as soap. These buzzing noises in my room were only the mosquitoes in our bungalow on the Island of Women. ON A FULL MOON NIGHT , something moved her, and we left with only our passports and money in a belt under her dress. I threw up on the ferry. We slept on a new beach, far to the south.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And I had helped too by holding her hand, by improvising, by confirming the horror of her ordeal, and by promising to see it through with her. I bridled at such simplification. Surely my approach to therapy was more complex and sophisticated! But the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that Irene had it quite right. For sure she was right about “engagement”—the key concept in my psychotherapy. I had decided at the very onset that engagement was the most effective thing I could offer Irene. And that did not simply mean listening well, or encouraging catharsis, or consoling her. It meant rather that I would get as close as I could to her, that I would focus on “the space between us” (a phrase I used in virtually every hour I saw Irene), on the “here-and-now”: that is, on the relationship between her and me here (in this office) and now (in the immediate moment). Now, it is one thing to focus on the here-and-now with patients who seek therapy because of relationship problems but another matter completely for me to have asked Irene to examine the here-and-now. Think of it: Is it not both absurd and churlish to expect a woman in extremis (a woman whose husband lay dying of a brain tumor, who was also grieving for a mother, a father, a brother, a godson) to turn her attention to the most minute nuances of a relationship with a professional she hardly knows? Nonetheless, that was just what I did. I began it in the first sessions and never relented. In every session, without fail, I inquired about some aspect of our relationship. “How lonely do you feel in the room with me?” “How far from, how close to me do you feel today?” If she said, as she often did, “I feel miles away,” I was sure to address that feeling directly. “At what precise point of our session did you first notice that today?” Or, “What did I say or do to increase the distance?” And most of all, “What can we do to reduce it?” I tried to honor her responses. If she answered, “The best way for us to be closer is for you to give me the name of a good novel to read,” I always responded with a title. If she said that her despair was too overwhelming for words and the most I could do was simply to hold her hand, then I moved my chair closer and held her hand, sometimes for a minute or two, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes. I was sometimes uncomfortable about the hand-holding, though not because of all the legalistic proscriptions against ever touching a patient: to surrender one’s clinical and creative judgment to such concerns is deeply corrupting.

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

  With regard to practice and the groups’ own situation, Paul is equally clear. Speaking to both, he says, “Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them” (14:3). The common basis for unity even in that disagreement is this: Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God. (14:5–6) Therefore, he insists, the weak should not “pass judgment” on the strong, nor the strong “despise” the weak (14:4, 10, 13). While speaking to the weak, Paul never asks, advises, or commands them to abandon their kosher and calendar observances. Indeed, all he ever says to them is not “to pass judgment” on the strong (14:3, 4, 10, 13). Paul spends the most time speaking to the strong. He tells them repeatedly and emphatically, “If your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died” (14:15; also read 14:20–21; 15:1). If, in other words, kosher and calendar observances are not important for you, then neither is their negation. If all food is good, then so is kosher food. If every day is good, then so is the Sabbath. The strong ones are to adjust, get over it, grow up, “for the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (14:17). Paul asks each group to accept the other’s religious differences, so that they can worship together and share the Lord’s Supper (15:6–7). But he also insists that both observance and nonobservance must proceed from faith and not from, say, discrimination, contempt, or judgment (read 14:22–23). From Antioch to Rome. Recall, from Chapter 3, that bitter dispute between Paul, on the one side, and James, Peter, and “even Barnabas,” on the other (Gal. 2:1–14). At the end of the 40s CE, Paul, as we saw there, argued—and lost—against them all at Antioch over exactly that same subject as here in Rome. Was the eucharistic meal for a mixed community of Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles to be kosher for all or kosher for none?

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He still lay with his hand on her breast. But she had drawn both her hands from him. His words were small comfort. She sobbed aloud. "Nay, nay," he said. "Ta'e the thick wi' th' thin. This wor' a bit o' thin for once." She wept bitterly, sobbing: "But I want to love you, and I can't. It only seems horrid." He laughed a little, half bitter, half amused. "It isna horrid," he said, "even if tha thinks it is. An' tha canna ma'e it horrid. Dunna fret thysen about lovin' me. Tha'lt niver force thysen to 't. There's sure to be a bad nut in a basketful. Tha mun ta'e th' rough wi' th' smooth." He took his hand away from her breast, not touching her. And now she was untouched she took an almost perverse satisfaction in it. She hated the dialect: the _thee_ and the _tha_ and the _thysen_. He could get up if he liked, and stand there above her buttoning down those absurd corduroy breeches, straight in front of her. After all, Michaelis had had the decency to turn away. This man was so assured in himself, he didn't know what a clown other people found him, a half-bred fellow. Yet, as he was drawing away, to rise silently and leave her, she clung to him in terror. "Don't! Don't go! Don't leave me! Don't be cross with me! Hold me! Hold me fast!" she whispered in blind frenzy, not even knowing what she said, and clinging to him with uncanny force. It was from herself she wanted to be saved, from her own inward anger and resistance. Yet how powerful was that inward resistance that possessed her! He took her in his arms again and drew her to him, and suddenly she became small in his arms, small and nestling. It was gone, the resistance was gone, and she began to melt in a marvellous peace. And as she melted small and wonderful in his arms, she became infinitely desirable to him, all his blood-vessels seemed to scald with intense yet tender desire, for her, for her softness, for the penetrating beauty of her in his arms, passing into his blood. And softly, with that marvellous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire, softly he stroked the silky slope of her loins, down, down between her soft warm buttocks, coming nearer and nearer to the very quick of her. And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame. She let herself go. She felt his penis risen against her with silent amazing force and assertion, and she let herself go to him. She yielded with a quiver that was like death, she went all open to him. And oh, if he were not tender to her now, how cruel, for she was all open to him and helpless!

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  It was a very intimate moment. I felt closer to her then than I’ve felt to some women who had their tongues in my mouth. When I was done, she wiped me neatly, took off my boots and socks, and told me to step out of my jeans. She hung all my clothes up behind the door. The leash (her scarf) was slipped off my throat and hung there as well. “Temporarily,” she reassured me. She handled and examined me, squeezing my breasts and buttocks, slapping me lightly a couple of times on the ass. When the tub was full, she handed me into the water, then settled back to watch me bathe. Jessie obviously spent a lot of time in her bathtub. There were several different brushes, washcloths, soaps, scrubbers, and sponges arranged on a bathwheel. There were enough towels around for four people. Enough room in the tub for them, too. I lathered myself thoroughly and slowly, rinsing with equal care. She made me stand up and face her to wash my cunt, smiled, and told me to wash it again. When I got out, she dried me, using a very soft towel. All she had to do was pat me gently all over, and the moisture vanished from my skin. She would not let me dress (or pee) again, just wrapped me in another towel and ordered me to kneel for the leash. I was so glad she did not forget that small detail. It is easy to forget a promise made to someone who is in your power. But it is by such small things that adoration flourishes or withers away. Using the silk leash, she guided me across the hall into another room. I was in candlelight again, so I couldn’t see clearly, but I picked out the vague shape of a piano in the corner. One wall was plastered with posters—no, they were blown-up photographs. I recognized Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, Girlschool. “Where did all those pictures come from?” I asked. “I’m a photographer,” she said briefly. “And a groupie.” “Oh.” What else could I say? I have to admit, if any of those women made her feel the way she made me feel, I didn’t want to know about it. At least, not right now. It was a long room, and she kept me going, toward the back. There was a balcony—no, a fire escape—on my right. The window let in some light from the street, and I could see potted plants sitting outside. A tape deck and stereo gear sat in front of the window. The floor was covered with several deep, soft Oriental and Navajo rugs, thrown on top of each other. To my left was her bed. It had four posts of even height, hand-carved statuettes of naked women. And there was a large wardrobe sitting against the back wall. It was here that she led me. “Drop the towel,” she said softly, and opened its doors.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “You do help others and you’re good at it. You’re a marvel, and I agree with Rosa, the hospital should hire you. But Magnolia,” I hesitated in order to give my words greater impact, “it would be good for others to be able to help you too. By being so totally giving, you don’t let others get help from helping you. When Rosa said she’d like to go home with you, I was thinking too how great it would be to be comforted by you all the time. I’d like that too. I’d love it. But then, when I thought more about it, I realized I’d never be able to repay your help, to help you, because you never complain; you never ask for anything. In fact,” I hesitated again, “I’d never get to have the pleasure of offering you something.” “Ah nevah thought about it jes’ like that.” Magnolia nodded thoughtfully. Her smile had vanished. “But it’s true, isn’t it? Maybe what we ought to do here in this group is help you learn to complain. Maybe you need the experience of being listened to.” “Mah momma always said I put myself last.” “I don’t always agree with mothers. In fact, I don’t usually agree with them, but in this case I think your mother was right. So why not practice complaining? Tell us, what hurts? What do you want to change about yourself?” “Mah health ain’t so good . . . these things crawlin’ around on mah skin. And these legs heah ain’t good. Ah can’t move ’em.” “That’s a start, Magnolia. And I know those are the real problems in your life now. I wish we could do something about those problems here in this group, but groups can’t do that. Try to complain about things we might be able to help you with.” “Ah feel bad about mah house. It’s nasty. Dey can’t, maybe dey won’t, fumigate it right. Ah don’ want to go back there.” “I know you feel bad about your house and your legs and your skin. But those things aren’t you. They are just things about you, not the real, the core you. Look at the center of you. What do you want to change there?” “Well, Ah ain’t real satisfied with mah life. I got mah regrets. Dat what you mean, Doctah?” “Right on.” I nodded vigorously. She continued, “Ah’ve disappointed myself. Ah always wanted to be a teachuh. Dat was mah dream. But Ah never did be one. Sometimes Ah gets down, and Ah think Ah never did nuthin’.” “But Magnolia,” Rosa implored, “look what you’ve done for Darnell or for all those foster kids. You call that nothing?” “Sometime it feel like nuthin’. Darnell ain’t gonna do nuthin’ with his life, ain’t goin’ nowhere. He jes’ like his father.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Alternately, if the cross is given a positive value (“He died for our sins so we could go to heaven”), then what was the “kingdom” theme all about? But in all four gospels the two themes clearly belong together. They explain one another. The kingdom comes through Jesus’s entire work, which finds its intended fulfillment in his shameful death. The cross is the cross of the “king of the Jews.” Our traditions, including our traditions of atonement theology, have separated themes that belonged inextricably together. Listening to the Evangelists In particular, all four gospels tell the story of Jesus as one of Israel’s God returning at last . This theme, so often ignored in the past, has come to the fore in recent scholarly analysis. When Mark opens his gospel by lining up John the Baptist with the prophetic messengers of Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40, the point is that those messengers are preparing the way not simply for a coming Messiah, but for YHWH himself. When John opens his gospel with multiple echoes of Genesis and Exodus, bringing the prologue to its climax in v. 14 with the Word becoming flesh and revealing the divine Glory and in v. 18 with the unveiling of the otherwise unseen Father through the divine Son, he is setting the stage for his readers to understand that Jesus is not simply “son of God” in the sense of the Davidic king of Psalm 2, 2 Samuel 7, and so on. John’s Jesus is the living embodiment of the one creator God, Israel’s covenant God. The messianic language of the divine “Son” is discerned as the perfect vehicle (going back, we may suppose, to Jesus himself) to express this. When Matthew has the angel tell Joseph that the child to be born will be “Emmanuel,” “God with us,” and then finishes his gospel with Jesus himself telling his followers that he will be “with them always,” alert readers know that the entire story ought to be read with this in mind. Luke’s birth narratives are still more explicit, designating the child in Mary’s womb as the “Holy One” who will be “God’s son” (Luke 1:35). When Luke’s gospel nears its climax, the coming of Jesus to Jerusalem is clearly to be seen as the moment when, at last, Israel’s God is “visiting his people,” that is, coming back in person to judge and to rescue (19:44). There is much more that could be said to fill in this picture. But this will suffice for our present purposes. We should not then be surprised when all four gospels tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to draw out, repeatedly, his sense of compassion and love, which we have already noted as a striking feature.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Mother, why did you let my hand slip from yours on the bus, your arms so full of packages? I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon. “So funny, you know,” Yvonne said. “I was sure I was going to hate you. When you came, I thought, who needs this gringa, listen to her, who she thinks she is, Princess Diana? That’s what I say to Niki. This is all we need, girlfriend. But now, you know, we did. Need you.” I squeezed her hand. I had Yvonne, I had Niki. I had this Raphael sky. I had five hundred dollars and an aquamarine from a dead woman and a future in salvage. What more could a girl want. THAT SUMMER we flogged our stuff at swap meets from Ontario to Santa Fe Springs. Rena got a deal on zebra-striped contact paper, so I zebra-striped barstools, bathroom scales, shoebox “storage units.” I striped the hospital potty chair, the walker, for the zingy seniors. The cats hid. “Display,” was Rena’s new catchword. “We have to have display.” Our dinette set already went, striped and varnished. She got four hundred dollars for it, gave me a hundred. She said I could stay as long as I wanted, pay room and board like Niki. She meant it as a compliment, but it scared me to death. At the Fairfax High swap meet, we had a blue plastic tarp stretched over our booth, so the ladies could come in and look at our clothes without having sunstroke. They were like fish, nibbling along the reef, and we were the morays, waiting patiently for them to come closer. “Benito wants me to move in,” Yvonne said when Rena was busy with a customer, adjusting a hat on the woman, telling her how great it looked. “You’re not going to,” Niki said. Yvonne smiled dreamily. She was in love again. I saw no reason to dissuade her. These days, I had given up trying to understand what was right or wrong, what mattered or didn’t. “He seems like a nice guy,” I said. “How many people ask you to come share their life?” Yvonne said. “People who want a steady screw,” Niki said. “Laundry and dishes.” I shared a mug of Russian Sports Mix with Yvonne, a weak brew of vodka and Gatorade that Rena drank all day long. Rena brought a sunburned woman over to meet me, hoisted the striped American Tourister hardsider onto the folding table. “This is our artist,” Rena said, lighting one of her black Sobranies. “Astrid Magnussen. You remember name. Someday that suitcase worth millions.” The woman smiled and shook my hand. I tried not to breathe Sports Mix on her. Rena handed me a permanent marker with a flourish, and I signed my name along the bottom edge of the suitcase. Sometimes being with Rena was like doing acid. The artist.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The Buddhist book I’d found on trash day said you accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand. I looked at the zebra bar and barstools, the suitcase disappearing with the sunburned woman. They looked good. I liked making them. Maybe if that was all I did my entire life, wasn’t that good enough? The Buddhists thought it shouldn’t matter whether it’s contact paper or Zen calligraphy, brain surgery or literature. In the Tao, they were of equal value, if they were done in the same spirit. “Lazy girls,” Rena said. “You have to talk to customer. Work up sale.” She saw a young man in shorts and Top-Siders looking at the barstools, turned on her smile and went out to hook him. She saw those Top-Siders fifty feet off. Niki finished her mug of Gatorade cocktail, made a face, poured some more while Rena had her hands full. “The things we do for a high.” “When are you going?” I asked Yvonne. “Tomorrow,” she whispered, half-hiding behind her curtain of smooth hair. I stroked her hair back with my hand, tucked it behind her small, multipierced ear. She looked up at me and smiled, and I hugged her. She burst into tears. “I don’t know, Astrid, do you think I should? You always know what to do.” I laughed, caught unaware. I squatted down by her seat on a rickety director’s chair. “Me? I know less than nothing.” “I thought you didn’t lie,” she said, smiling, holding her hand in front of her mouth, a habit to conceal her bad teeth. Maybe Benito would marry her. Maybe he would take her to the dentist. Maybe he would hold her in the night and love her. Who was to say he wouldn’t? “I’m going to miss you,” I said. She nodded, couldn’t talk, crying while she was smiling. “God, I must look like such a mess.” She swiped at her mascara that was running down her cheeks. “You look like Miss America,” I said, hugging her. It was what women said. “You know, when they put the crown on? And she’s crying and laughing and taking her walk.” That made her laugh. She liked Miss America. We watched it and got stoned and she took some dusty silk flowers Rena had lying around and walked up and down the living room, waving the mechanical beauty queen wave. “If we get married, you can be maid of honor,” she said. I saw the cake in her eyes, the little bride and groom on top, the icing like lace, layer after layer, and a dress like the cake, white flowers glued to the car and everybody honking as they drove away. “I’ll be there,” I said. Imagining the wedding party, not a soul over eighteen, each one planning a life along the course of the lyrics of popular songs. It made me sad to think of it.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Suddenly a flock of wild geese flew up and distracted him. When he had recovered his wits he opened his mouth to sing again but found he had forgotten the song. So he turned back to the sunny clearing in the forest. But by this time the locust had molted, left his empty skin sunning on the same hollow log, and flown onto a tree branch. The coyote wasted no time making sure he had the song permanently inside him. In one gulp he swallowed the locust skin, thinking that the locust was still within. Starting home, again he discovered he did not know the song. He realized he could not learn it from ingesting the locust. He would have to let the locust out and force it to teach him. Taking a knife, he cut into his abdomen to release the locust. He cut so deep that he died . “And so, Irv,” Paula said, giving me her lovely, beatific smile, reaching out for my hand and then whispering into my ear, “you’ve got to find your own song to sing.” I was very moved: her smile, her mystery, her stretch for wisdom—that was the Paula I loved so much. I liked the parable. It was vintage Paula; it felt like old times. I took the meaning at face value—that I should sing my own song—and pushed away the story’s darker, more disturbing implications about my relationship with her. I have refused even to this day to examine it too deeply. And so we each sang our songs separately. My career progressed: I conducted research, wrote many books, received the academic rewards and promotions I so coveted. Ten years went by. The breast cancer project that Paula had helped launch had long been completed and the findings from it published. We had offered group therapy to fifty women with metastatic breast cancer and found that, compared with thirty-six control patients, the group had vastly improved the quality of the patients’ remaining lives. (Years later, in a follow-up study published in Lancet, my colleague Dr. David Spiegel, whom I had asked many years before to become the project’s principal investigator, ultimately demonstrated that the group had significantly lengthened the lives of the members.) But the group was now history; all of the thirty women in the original Bridge Group and the eighty-six women in the metastatic breast cancer study had died. All but one. One day in the hospital corridor, a young woman with red hair and a flushed face hailed me and said, “I bear greetings from Paula West.” Paula! Could it be? Paula still alive? And I hadn’t even known. I shuddered to think that I had become a person who was unaware whether a spirit like hers still dwelled on earth. “Paula? How is she?” I stammered. “How do you know her?” “Two years ago, when I was diagnosed as having lupus, Paula came to visit me and introduced me into her lupus self-help group.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BEDE. (in Marc. i. 9) And because the Lord said that He came not to destroy the Law but to fulfill, (Matt. 5:17) he who was excluded by the Law, inferring that he was cleansed by the power of the Lord, shewed that that grace, which could wash away the stain of the leper, was not from the Law, but over the Law. And truly, as in the Lord authoritative power, so in him the constancy of faith is shewn; for there follows, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. He falls on his face, which is at once a gesture of lowliness and of shame, to shew that every man should blush for the stains of his life. But his shame did not stifle confession; he shewed his wound, and begged for medicine, and the confession is full of devotion and of faith, for he refers the power to the will of the Lord. THEOPHYLACT. For he said not, If thou wilt, pray unto God, but, If thou wilt, as thinking Him very God. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Moreover, he doubted of the will of the Lord, not as disbelieving His compassion, but, as conscious of his own filth, he did not presume. It goes on; But Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will, be thou clean. It is not, as many of the Latins think, to be taken to mean and read, I wish to cleanse thee, but that Christ should say separately, I will, and then command, be thou clean. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 25. in Matt) Further, the reason why He touches the leper, and did not confer health upon him by word alone, was, that it is said by Moses in the Law, that he who touches a leper, shall be unclean till the evening; that is, that he might shew, that this uncleanness is a natural one, that the Law was not laid down for Him, but on account of mere men. Furthermore, He shews that He Himself is the Lord of the Law; and the reason why He touched the leper, though the touch was not necessary to the working of the cure, was to shew that He gives health, not as a servant, but as the Lord. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Another reason why He touched him, was to prove that He could not be defiled, who freed others from pollution. At the same time it is remarkable, that He healed in the way in which He had been begged to heal. If thou will, says the leper, thou canst make me clean. I will, He answered, behold, thou hast My will, be clean; now thou hast at once the effect of My compassion.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Somehow, in the dark and mayhem of that terrible night, that theme of the “tribulation” was remembered, as was the saying reported by John (18:8) in which Jesus insists that if it is him they have come to arrest, the others should be allowed to leave. Skeptics can of course quibble about any element in such a reconstruction (as one can about any reconstruction of motive for any figure of history). But once we grant the solid evidence in the middle of the picture from Jesus’s choice of Passover on, fragments like these can be seen as forming a coherent and even plausible picture of the way Jesus had construed his own vocation, perhaps from as far back as his baptism by John, when the voice from heaven (“This is my son, my beloved one; I am delighted with him,” Matt. 3:17) drew together the royal vocation of Psalm 2:7 (“You are my son; today I have begotten you”) and the “servant” vocation from Isaiah 42:1 (“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights”). Even if that too were to be deemed a later idea read back into the texts, one would still have to explain why anyone in the early church would begin to think down those lines if the seeds of such beliefs were not already present in things that Jesus himself said and did. Behind all this there stands one feature of the gospel portrait of Jesus that is often noted, but not so often brought into this specific discussion. The impression made by Jesus on one person after another, one village after another, one community after another, seems to have been constant. Wherever he went, he was celebrating the arrival of God’s kingdom, as often as not by partying with people who would normally be excluded because of their apparently shady moral background. Wherever he went, he healed people of all kinds of diseases, including particularly the strange inner corruption associated with the presence of dark nonhuman forces. (However we want to interpret this, there should be no question that Jesus was an effective exorcist, if only so can we explain the charges hurled at him that he was himself in league with the dark powers [e.g., Matt. 12:24]—a charge the early church certainly did not invent.) And, wherever he went, Jesus was offering forgiveness of sins, which we have now learned to recognize both as something one might normally get on an individual basis by going to the Temple and as shorthand for the larger blessing of covenant renewal, return from exile, and so on. In all of this and much, much more, Jesus comes across—the portrait is remarkably coherent even through four very different presentations—as a man of powerful compassion or, as we might say, compassionate power.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But in the Bible it extends farther than this to include, for instance, in Romans 8 or the whole Letter to the Hebrews, the work of Jesus the Messiah not only in his crucifixion, but also in his resurrection and particularly in his ascension, where (we are told) he continually offers intercession to the Father on behalf of his people. And if “atonement” can thus be, as it were, extended forward, it can also be extended backward. The book of Revelation speaks mysteriously of the Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” (13:8, KJV ). Whatever that means, the four gospels certainly present Jesus throughout his public career and as far back as the prophecies given before his birth as the one who would “save his people from their sins.” Because of all this, I shall use the word “atonement” sparingly as my argument proceeds. These larger questions are extremely important, but I want to try to maintain the focus on the ultimate question, the question that has to do with the launch of the revolution. By six in the evening on the first Good Friday, according to the early Christians, the world was a different place. What was different? Why was it different? And how might that revolutionary difference challenge us today, summoning us to our own vocation as followers of the shameful, scandalous crucified Jesus? SCRIPTURE INDEX The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She lay still. He softly opened the door. The sky was dark blue, with crystalline, turquoise rim. He went out, to shut up the hens, speaking softly to his dog. And she lay and wondered at the wonder of life, and of being. When he came back she was still lying there, glowing like a gypsy. He sat on the stool by her. "Tha mun come one naight ter th' cottage, afore tha goos; sholl ter?" he asked, lifting his eyebrows as he looked at her, his hands dangling between his knees. "Sholl ter?" she echoed, teasing. He smiled. "Ay, sholl ter?" he repeated. "Ay!" she said, imitating the dialect sound. "Yi!" he said. "Yi!" she repeated. "An' slaip wi' me," he said. "It needs that. When sholt come?" "When sholl I?" she said. "Nay," he said, "tha canna do't. When sholt come then?" "'Appen Sunday," she said. "'Appen a' Sunday! Ay!" He laughed at her quickly. "Nay, tha canna," he protested. "Why canna I?" she said. He laughed. Her attempts at the dialect were so ludicrous, somehow. "Coom then, tha mun goo!" he said. "Mun I?" she said. "Maun Ah!" he corrected. "Why should I say _maun_ when you said _mun_," she protested. "You're not playing fair." "Arena Ah!" he said, leaning forward and softly stroking her face. "Tha'rt good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha'rt willin'!" "What is cunt?" she said. "An' doesn't ter know? Cunt! It's thee down theer; an' what I get when I'm i'side thee, and what tha gets when I'm i'side thee; it's a' as it is, all on't." "All on't," she teased. "Cunt! It's like fuck then." "Nay nay! Fuck's only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot beside an animal, aren't ter? even ter fuck! Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!" She got up and kissed him between the eyes, that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unbearably beautiful. "Is it?" she said. "And do you care for me?" He kissed her without answering. "Tha mun goo, let me dust thee," he said. His hand passed over the curves of her body, firmly, without desire, but with soft, intimate knowledge. As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive. CHAPTER XIII On Sunday Clifford wanted to go into the wood. It was a lovely morning, the pear blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in the world, in a wonder of white here and there.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries to the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that. So this is the paradigm I suggest for the prophetic imagination: a royal consciousness committed to achievable satiation. [18] An alternative prophetic consciousness devoted to the pathos and passion of covenanting. The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness, and it has done that to all of us. It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction. It has denied the legitimacy of tradition that requires us to remember, of authority that expects us to answer, and of community that calls us to care. It has so enthroned the present that a promised future, delayed but certain, is unthinkable. The royal program of achievable satiation: Is fed by a management mentality that believes there are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. This, the Solomonic evidence urges, was not a time of great leadership, heroic battles, or bold initiatives. It was a time governed by the cost-accounting of a management mentality. Is legitimated by an “official religion of optimism,” [19] which believes God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living, ensuring his own place in his palace. Requires the annulment of the neighbor as a life-giver in our history; it imagines that we can live outside history as self-made men and women. It is mind-boggling to think that, of the Mosaic innovation, only the prophetic word is mobilized against this compelling reality. 1 . John Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity, Prentice-Hall Studies in Religion Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975). ↵ 2 . Robert W. Friedrichs has shrewdly described the interests of sociologists and the influence of

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and embodiment all the hurt, human pain, and grief that the dominant royal culture has tried so hard to repress, deny, and cover over. It is instructive that in the teaching of Jesus it is precisely his two best-known parables that contain the word under discussion. First, in the narrative of the good Samaritan it is the Samaritan who has compassion (Luke 10:33). [13] Second, in the story of the prodigal son, it is precisely the father who has compassion (Luke 15:20). Clearly the key person in each of these parables embodies the alternative consciousness from which the dominant consciousness is criticized. Both the Samaritan and the father are Jesus’ peculiar articulation against the dominant culture, and so they stand as a radical threat. The Samaritan by his action judges the dominant way by disregard of the marginal. The ones who pass by, obviously carriers of the dominant tradition, are numbed, indifferent, and do not notice. The Samaritan expresses a new way that displaces the old arrangements in which outcasts are simply out. The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution. In similar fashion, the father, by his ready embrace of his unacceptable son, condemns the “righteousness of the law” by which society is currently ordered and by which social rejects are forever rejected. Thus the stories, if seen as radical dismantling criticism, bring together the internalization of pain and external transformation . The capacity to feel the hurt of the marginal people means an end to all social arrangements that nullified pain by a remarkable depth of numbness. Jesus is remembered and presented by the early church as the faithful embodiment of an alternative consciousness. In his compassion, he embodies the anguish of those rejected by the dominant culture, and as embodied anguish, he has the authority to show the deathly end of the dominant culture. Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So the structures of competence and competition stand helpless before the one who groaned the groans of those who are hurting. And in their groans they announce the end of the dominant social world. The imperial consciousness lives

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I knew it would feel cool on her hot skin. My mother used to do this when I was sick, I suddenly remembered, and for a moment I could feel it distinctly, the touch of her cool hands. Yvonne lifted her head to see the horse still prancing in the moonlight, then lay back on the pillow. “I wish this was over.” I knew what Rena would say. The sooner the better . A few months ago, I’d have gone her one further. I would have thought, what was the difference? When she gave birth to the baby, once it had been given away, there would always be something more to lose, a boyfriend, a home, a job, sickness, more babies, days and nights rolling over each other in an ocean that was always the same. Why hurry disaster? But now I had seen her sitting cross-legged on her bed whispering to her belly, telling it how great the world was going to be, that there were horses and birthdays, white cats and ice cream. Even if Yvonne wouldn’t be there for roller skates and the first day of school, it had to count for something. She had it now, that sweetness, that dream. “Yeah, when it’s time, you’ll think it’s too soon,” I said. Yvonne held my hand to her hot forehead. “You’re always cool. You don’t sweat at all. Oh, the baby’s moving,” she whispered. “You want to feel it?” She shoved up her T-shirt and I put my hand on her bare belly, round and hot as rising dough, to feel the odd distortions of the baby’s movements against my palm. Her smile was lopsided, divided, delight warring with what she knew was coming. “I think it’s a girl,” she whispered. “The other one was a girl.” She talked about her babies only late at night when we were alone. Rena wouldn’t let her talk about them, she told her not to think about them. But Yvonne needed to talk. The father of this one, Ezequiel, drove a pickup truck. They had met at Griffith Park, and she fell in love when he put her on the merry-go-round. I tried to think of something to say. “She’s got a good kick. Maybe she’ll be a ballerina, ese .” The simple melody line of the electric guitar bounced off the hills and fed in through the window, and the mound of Yvonne’s stomach danced in time, the tiny bumps of hands and feet. “I want her to do Girl Scouts. You’re gonna do Girl Scouts, mija, ” she said to the mound. She looked back up at me. “Did you ever do it?” I shook my head. “I always wanted to,” she said, tracing figure eights on the damp sheet. “But I couldn’t ask. My mom would’ve laughed her head off. ‘Your big ass in the damn Girl Scouts?’” We sat there for the longest time, not saying anything. Hoping her daughter would have all the good things.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Compassion Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. In the arrangement of “lawfulness” in Jesus’ time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion. The norms of law (social control) are never accommodated to persons, but persons are accommodated to the norms. Otherwise the norms will collapse and with them the whole power arrangement. Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of his social context. Empires live by numbness. Empires, in their militarism, expect numbness about the human cost of war. Corporate economies expect blindness to the cost in terms of poverty and exploitation. Governments and societies of domination go to great lengths to keep the numbness intact. Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual. Thus compassion that might be seen simply as generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies that produce the hurt. Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it. The characteristic Greek word for compassion, splagchnoisomai, means to let one’s innards embrace the feeling or situation of another. [12] Thus Jesus embodies the hurt that the marginal ones know by taking it into his own person and his own history. Their hurt came from being declared outside the realm of the normal, and Jesus engages with them in a situation of abnormality. Concretely, his criticism as embodied hurt is expressed toward the sick: “As he went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion on them, and healed them” (Matt 14:14). And toward the hungry:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  These questions demonstrate rather sharply something that is always going to be true: whatever we say about the cross will sooner or later involve us in discussions of the Trinity and the incarnation in the questions of who God really is and who Jesus really was and is. Having mentioned earlier the ways in which Western hymnody has struggled to articulate the meaning of the cross, I note that at least one recent writer has expressed this new emphasis memorably: And when human hearts are breaking Under sorrow’s iron rod , Then they find that self-same aching Deep within the heart of God. 2 Perhaps it all depends what you mean by “love” and by the love of God in particular. But to explore this any further we must go back to the primary evidence: the remarkably varied picture of the cross we find in the New Testament itself. What might happen if, instead of an ultimate vision of saved souls going to heaven, we were to start with the eschatology of Ephesians 1:10, with God’s plan to sum up all things in heaven and earth in the Messiah? What if, instead of a disembodied “heaven,” we were to focus on the biblical vision of “new heavens and new earth,” with that renewal and that fusion of the two created spheres taking place in and through Jesus himself? What if, instead of the bare “going to heaven,” we were to embrace (along with theologians like John Calvin) the biblical vocation of being the “royal priesthood”? What would happen if we thought through the ongoing cross-shaped implications, writ large as they are in the New Testament, of the once-for-all event of Jesus’s death? What difference might that make to our view of salvation—including once more its philosophical and political dimensions? How, in other words, does the cross fit into the larger biblical narrative of new creation? What would happen if, instead of seeing the resurrection (both of Jesus and of ourselves) as a kind of happy addition to an otherwise complete view of salvation, we saw it as part of its very heart? 10 The Story of the Rescue T HE BRITISH ARE noted for their sense of irony, often applied particularly to themselves. Self-deprecating humor is, at least in theory, our stock in trade. One current example is a brilliant and rightly popular BBC sitcom called W1A , which is the postal code for the headquarters of the BBC itself. The satire, created by people who themselves work for the organization they are sending up, is often telling as well as very funny. In one now famous episode, while a middle-aged broadcasting executive is trying to figure out how to solve a particular problem about a program, he is being badgered by a young, sassy eager beaver of a PR agent who has her own agendas.