Yearning

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 11 of 48 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  But Jews who fell victim to the escalating anti-Semitism did not feel that they could afford this political disengagement. They could not sit back and wait for the Messiah or God to rescue them but must redeem their people themselves. In 1882, the year after the first pogroms in Russia, a band of Jews left Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine. They were convinced that Jews would remain incomplete, alienated human beings until they had a country of their own. The yearning for the return to Zion (one of the chief hills of Jerusalem) began as a defiantly secular movement, since the vicissitudes of history had convinced the Zionists that their religion and their God did not work. In Russia and Eastern Europe, Zionism was an offshoot of the revolutionary socialism that was putting the theories of Karl Marx into practice. The Jewish revolutionaries had become aware that their comrades were just as anti-Semitic as the Tsar and feared that their lot would not improve in a communist regime: events proved that they were correct. Accordingly ardent young socialists such as David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) simply packed their bags and sailed to Palestine, determined to create a model society that would be a light to the Gentiles and herald the socialist millennium. Others had no time for these Marxist dreams. The charismatic Austrian Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) saw the new Jewish venture as a colonial enterprise: under the wing of one of the European imperial powers, the Jewish state would be a vanguard of progress in the Islamic wilderness. Despite its avowed secularism, Zionism expressed itself instinctively in conventionally religious terminology and was essentially a religion without God. It was filled with ecstatic and mystical hopes for the future, drawing on the ancient themes of redemption, pilgrimage and rebirth. Zionists even adopted the practice of giving themselves new names as a sign of the redeemed self. Thus Asher Ginzberg, an early propagandist, called himself Ahad Ha’am (One of the People). He was now his own man because he had identified himself with the new national spirit, though he did not think that a Jewish state was feasible in Palestine. He simply wanted a “spiritual center” there to take the place of God as the single focus of the people of Israel. It would become “a guide to all the affairs of life,” reach “to the depths of the heart” and “connect with all one’s feelings.” Zionists had reversed the old religious orientation. Instead of being directed toward a transcendent God, Jews sought fulfillment here below. The Hebrew term hagshamah (literally, “making concrete”) had been a negative term in medieval Jewish philosophy, referring to the habit of attributing human or physical characteristics to God. In Zionism, hagshamah came to mean fulfillment, the embodiment of the hopes of Israel in the mundane world. Holiness no longer dwelt in heaven: Palestine was a “holy” land in the fullest sense of the word.

• From A History of God (1993)

  33 God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self. Augustine shared this insight not only with Plato and Plotinus but also with Buddhists, Hindus and Shamans in the nontheistic religions. Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the highly personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God had condescended to man’s weakness and gone in search of him: You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain that peace which was yours. 34 The Greek theologians did not generally bring their own personal experience into their theological writing, but Augustine’s theology sprang from his own highly individual story. Augustine’s fascination with the mind led him to develop his own psychological Trinitarianism in the treatise De Trinitate, written in the early years of the fifth century. Since God had made us in his own image, we should be able to discern a trinity in the depths of our minds. Instead of starting with the metaphysical abstractions and verbal distinctions that the Greeks enjoyed, Augustine began this exploration with a moment of truth that most of us have experienced. When we hear such phrases as “God is Light” or “God is truth,” we instinctively feel a quickening of spiritual interest and feel that “God” can give meaning and value to our lives. But after this momentary illumination, we fall back into our normal frame of mind, when we are obsessed with “things accustomed and earthly.” 35 Try as we might, we cannot recapture that moment of inarticulate longing. Normal thought processes cannot help us; instead we must listen to “what the heart means” by such phrases as “He is Truth.” 36 But is it possible to love a reality that we do not know? Augustine goes on to show that since there is a trinity in our own minds which mirrors God, like any Platonic image, we yearn toward our Archetype—the original pattern on which we were formed. If we start by considering the mind loving itself, we find not a trinity but a duality: love and the mind. But unless the mind is aware of itself, with what we should call self-consciousness, it cannot love itself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The whole of human life was directed toward the future: we experience our lives as incomplete and unfinished. Unlike animals, we are never satisfied but always want more. It is this which has forced us to think and develop, since at each point of our lives we must transcend ourselves and go on to the next stage: the baby must become a toddler, the toddler must overcome its disabilities and become a child, and so forth. All our dreams and aspirations look ahead to what is to come. Even philosophy begins with wonder, which is the experience of the not-knowing, the not-yet. Socialism also looks forward to a utopia, but, despite the Marxist rejection of faith, where there is hope there is also religion. Like Feuerbach, Bloch saw God as the human ideal that has not yet come to be, but instead of seeing this as alienating he found it essential to the human condition. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), the German social theorist of the Frankfurt school, also saw “God” as an important ideal in a way that was reminiscent of the prophets. Whether he existed or not or whether we “believe in him” is superfluous. Without the idea of God there is no absolute meaning, truth or morality: ethics becomes simply a question of taste, a mood or a whim. Unless politics and morality somehow include the idea of “God,” they will remain pragmatic and shrewd rather than wise. If there is no absolute, there is no reason that we should not hate or that war is worse than peace. Religion is essentially an inner feeling that there is a God. One of our earliest dreams is a longing for justice (how frequently we hear children complain: “It’s not fair!”). Religion records the aspirations and accusations of innumerable human beings in the face of suffering and wrong. It makes us aware of our finite nature; we all hope that the injustice of the world will not be the last word. The fact that people who have no conventional religious beliefs should keep returning to central themes that we have discovered in the history of God indicates that the idea is not as alien as many of us assume. Yet during the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of us. There is nothing new about this. As we have seen, the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call their “Old” Testament, show a similar process; the Koran saw al-Lah in less personal terms than the Judeo-Christian tradition from the very beginning.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Zionists wanted to create a fresh Jewish identity, a New Jew, liberated from the unhealthy, confining life of the ghetto. The New Jew would be autonomous, the controller of his own destiny in his own land. But this quest for roots and self-respect amounted to a declaration of independence from Jewish religion. The Zionists were, above all else, pragmatists, and this made them men of the modern era. Yet they were all profoundly aware of the explosive “charge” of the symbol of the Land. In the mythical world of Judaism, the Land was inseparable from the two most sacred realities, God and the Torah. In the mystical journey of the Kabbalah, the Land was linked symbolically to the last stage of the interior descent into the self, and was identical with the divine Presence the Kabbalist discovered in the ground of his being. The Land was thus fundamental to Jewish identity. However practical their approach, Zionists recognized that no other land could really “save” the Jews and bring them psychic healing. Peretz Smolenskin (1842–95), who was bitterly opposed to the rabbinic establishment, was convinced that Palestine was the only possible location for a Jewish state. Leo Pinsker (1821–91) was only converted to this idea slowly, and against his better judgment, but he finally had to admit that the Jewish state had to be in Palestine. Theodor Herzl had nearly lost the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Second Zionist Conference in Basel (1898) when he had suggested a state in Uganda. He was forced to stand before the delegates, raise his hand, and quote the words of the Psalmist: “Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right hand wither!” Zionists were ready to exploit the power of this mythos to make their wholly secular and even Godless campaign a viable reality in the real world. That they succeeded was their triumph. But their endorsement of this mythical, sacred geography would be as problematic as ever when they tried to translate it into hard fact. The first Zionists had very little understanding of the terrestrial history of Palestine during the previous two thousand years; their slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land!” showed a complete disregard for the fact that the land was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs who had their own aspirations for the country. If Zionism succeeded in its limited, pragmatic, and modern objective of establishing a secular Jewish state, it also embroiled the people of Israel in a conflict which, at this writing, shows little sign of abating. THE MUSLIMS of Egypt and Iran, as we have seen, had first experienced modernity as aggressive, invasive, and exploitative. Today Western people have become accustomed to hearing Muslim fundamentalists inveighing against their culture, denouncing their policies as satanic, and pouring scorn on such values as secularism, democracy, and human rights.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The first of these emanations was the “God,” which we know and pray to. Yet even “God” was inaccessible to us and needed further elucidation. Consequently new emanations proceeded from God in pairs, each of which expressed one of his divine attributes. “God” lay beyond gender but, as in the Enuma Elish, each pair of emanations consisted of a male and female—a scheme which attempted to neutralize the masculine tenor of more conventional monotheism. Each pair of emanations grew weaker and more attenuated, since they were getting ever further from their divine Source. Finally, when thirty such emanations (or aeons) had emerged, the process stopped and the divine world, the Pleroma, was complete. The Gnostics were not proposing an entirely outrageous cosmology, since everybody believed that the cosmos was teeming with such aeons, demons and spiritual powers. St. Paul had referred to Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties and Powers, while the philosophers had believed that these invisible powers were the ancient gods and had made them intermediaries between man and the One. There had been a catastrophe, a primal fall, which the Gnostics described in various ways. Some said that Sophia (Wisdom), the last of the emanations, fell from grace because she aspired to a forbidden knowledge of the inaccessible Godhead. Because of her overweening presumption, she had fallen from the Pleroma and her grief and distress had formed the world of matter. Exiled and lost, Sophia had wandered through the cosmos, yearning to return to her divine Source. This amalgam of oriental and pagan ideas expressed the Gnostics’ profound sense that our world was in some sense a perversion of the celestial, born of ignorance and dislocation. Other Gnostics taught that “God” had not created the material world, since he could have had nothing to do with base matter. This had been the work of one of the aeons, which they called the demiourgos or Creator. He had become envious of “God” and aspired to be the center of the Pleroma. Consequently he fell and had created the world in a fit of defiance. As Valentinus explained, he had “made heaven without knowledge; he formed man in ignorance of man; he brought earth to light without understanding earth.” 35 But the Logos, another of the aeons, had come to the rescue and descended to earth, assuming the physical appearance of Jesus in order to teach men and women the way back to God. Eventually this type of Christianity would be suppressed, but we shall see that centuries later Jews, Christians and Muslims would return to this type of mythology, finding that it expressed their religious experience of “God” more accurately than orthodox theology.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I lay in the dark a long time and had just about forgotten Doonie was there at all when he tossed the azalea blossom over the backseat and it fell in the middle of me, as if dropped from a cloud. Within a week or so, the party the Ken doll had invited me to rolled around. It was my only day off from the T-shirt factory where I sewed on size labels with a bunch of Mexican ladies in their sixties. Before that, we’d starved, living on what we could fetch out of grocery store dumpsters plus some raids on local orange and avocado orchards. Walking the canyon roads that day, I couldn’t find the posh Laguna address, so I spent hours flip-flopping up and down, getting the occasional whiff of coconut oil and chlorine, overhearing the soft Spanish spoken by some pool cleaners. But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes…. (What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.) At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency. Parched, covered in dust, with blisters the size of half dollars on both feet, I finally stood on the coastal highway, having adopted the most desultory hitchhiking manner in history. Holding up a cardboard sign that read SAN CLEMENTE —where my pals had been surfing all day—I tried to look bored, like a girl who didn’t actually need a ride. I was a hitchhiker to aspire to. Toward dusk, a black Volkswagen pulled up, its driver a tattered-looking doper with sleek raven hair and pork-chop sideburns. He jumped out and ran around to open my door, announcing that Tennessee men were bred to manners. Sam-u-el, his name was—short version Sam—a guy old enough to be sporting an incipient widow’s peak flanked by bald spots. The car smelled like something left in an ice chest too long, and the back seat had been torn out, trash piled in. He claimed his old lady was gonna fry his ass if he didn’t get that mess cleaned up, but he’d driven down from Oregon and was wore out. I said my fiancée was the same way, thus believing we’d entered into some chaste understanding. We pulled from the road’s shoulder, peace-sign roach clip swinging from the rearview. He was a slow driver, puttering along at a tractor’s pace, and in that landscape, I had no reason for fear.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Before tasting God’s sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element: It cannot fix its mind’s eyes on that which it has with hasty glance seen within itself, because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavors to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness. 15 God could only be reached after “a great effort of the mind,” which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, “the soul could do nothing but weep.” “Tortured” by its desire for God, it only “found rest in tears, being wearied out.” 16 Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain. In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterized by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found worldwide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, “every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.” The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire “a certain sense of presence” that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person. 17 This attitude was called hesychia, “tranquillity” or “interior silence.” Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive. How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox, and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and his “energies” (energeiai) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the “energies” not the “essence,” that we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the “rays” of divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  1 Lost in the Golden State Here lies one whose name was writ in water —gravestone of John Keats A ge seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific Ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils. No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around. Easy and Quinn were unhooking their boards from the truck that had choked and sputtered through twelve hundred uncertain miles. Wasn’t that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted Robert Frost: The shattered water made a misty din. Great waves looked over others coming i n And thought of doing something to the shore Water had never done to land before… Pretty, Doonie said. Quinn spat in the sand and said, She’s always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she’s fine. He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger. My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison. That’s me, I said. Miss California. Quinn himself was no Adonis. We called him Quinn the Eskimo, since he’d just moved to Leechfield from the Alaskan oil fields where his daddy had worked. Blond as Jean Harlow, pimply, he was also skinny enough to crash a junior high dance. His sole source of pride was the obvious lie that his old man had invented the water bed, then tragically had his patent pinched by some California engineer. From the time we’d hit the state line, he’d been going into phone booths to skim directories for the guy’s name. Doonie tucked his board under his arm, saying, Y’all little bitches stand here and fight it out. I’m gonna carve those waves up like your mama’s Christmas turkey. Then they were running down the immaculate white sand with their boards—Doonie and Dave, Quinn and Easy and the quiet Forsythe. But by Orange County standards, the surf sucked. I overheard the California guys bitching about it as breaking in water too shallow: Not worth wasting the wax on, dude . They stood in small bands along the beach, tanned and bleached and orthodontured. And Lord, were they fetching, those boys. I spotted no stitches on anybody, no keloid scars from boiling water.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It requires long training with an expert and a considerable investment of time. The mystic has to work hard to acquire this sense of the reality known as God (which many have refused to name). Mystics often insist that human beings must deliberately create this sense of God for themselves, with the same degree of care and attention that others devote to artistic creation. It is not something that is likely to appeal to people in a society which has become used to speedy gratification, fast food and instant communication. The God of the mystics does not arrive ready made and prepackaged. He cannot be experienced as quickly as the instant ecstasy created by a revivalist preacher, who quickly has a whole congregation clapping its hands and speaking in tongues. It is possible to acquire some of the mystical attitudes. Even if we are incapable of the higher states of consciousness achieved by a mystic, we can learn that God does not exist in any simplistic sense, for example, or that the very word “God” is only a symbol of a reality that ineffably transcends it. The mystical agnosticism could help us to acquire a restraint that stops us rushing into these complex matters with dogmatic assurance. But if these notions are not felt upon the pulse and personally appropriated, they are likely to seem meaningless abstractions. Secondhand mysticism could prove to be as unsatisfactory as reading the explanation of a poem by a literary critic instead of the original. We have seen that mysticism was often seen as an esoteric discipline, not because the mystics wanted to exclude the vulgar herd but because these truths could only be perceived by the intuitive part of the mind after special training. They mean something different when they are approached by this particular route, which is not accessible to the logical, rationalist faculty. Ever since the prophets of Israel started to ascribe their own feelings and experiences to God, monotheists have in some sense created a God for themselves. God has rarely been seen as a self-evident fact that can be encountered like any other objective existent. Today many people seem to have lost the will to make this imaginative effort. This need not be a catastrophe. When religious ideas have lost their validity, they have usually faded away painlessly: if the human idea of God no longer works for us in the empirical age, it will be discarded. Yet in the past people have always created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality. Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In his famous prayer, Anselm reflected on the words of Isaiah: “Unless you have faith, you will not understand”: I yearn to understand some measure of thy truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to have faith but I have faith in order to understand ( credo ut intellegam ). For I believe even this: I shall not understand unless I have faith. 29 The oft-quoted credo ut intellegam is not an intellectual abdication. Anselm was not claiming to embrace the creed blindly in the hope of its making sense some day. His assertion should really be translated: “I commit myself in order that I may understand.” At this time, the word credo still did not have the intellectual bias of the word “belief” today but meant an attitude of trust and loyalty. It is important to note that even in the first flush of Western rationalism, the religious experience of God remained primary, coming before discussion or logical understanding. Nevertheless, like the Muslim and Jewish Faylasufs, Anselm believed that the existence of God could be argued rationally, and he devised his own proof, which is usually called the “ontological” argument. Anselm defined God as “something than which nothing greater can be thought” ( aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit ). 30 Since this implied that God could be an object of thought, the implication was that he could be conceived and comprehended by the human mind. Anselm argued that this Something must exist. Since existence is more “perfect” or complete than nonexistence, the perfect being that we imagine must have existence or it would be imperfect. Anselm’s proof was ingenious and effective in a world dominated by Platonic thought, where ideas were believed to point to eternal archetypes. It is unlikely to convince a skeptic today. As the British theologian John Macquarrie has remarked, you may imagine that you have $100, but unfortunately that will not make the money a reality in your pocket. 31 Anselm’s God was Being, therefore, not the Nothing described by Denys and Erigena. Anselm was willing to speak about God in far more positive terms than most of the previous Faylasufs. He did not propose the discipline of a Via Negativa but seemed to think it possible to arrive at a fairly adequate idea of God by means of natural reason, which was precisely what had always troubled the Greeks about the Western theology. Once he had proved God’s existence to his satisfaction, Anselm set out to demonstrate the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, which the Greeks had always insisted defied reason and conceptualization.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Khidr was also important to the Ismailis. Despite the fact that Ibn al-Arabi was a Sunni, his teachings were very close to Ismailism and were subsequently incorporated into their theology—yet another instance of mystical religion being able to transcend sectarian divisions. Like the Ismailis, Ibn al-Arabi stressed the pathos of God, which was in sharp contrast to the apatheia of the God of the philosophers. The God of the mystics yearned to be known by his creatures. The Ismailis believed that the noun ilah (god) sprang from the Arabic root WLH: to be sad, to sigh for. 46 As the Sacred Hadith had made God say: “I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them.” There is no rational proof of God’s sadness; we know it only by our own longing for something to fulfill our deepest desires and to explain the tragedy and pain of life. Since we are created in God’s image, we must reflect God, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call “God” must, therefore, mirror a sympathy with the pathos of God. Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing, but this sigh ( nafas rahmani ) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings, who became logoi , words that express God to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner. Each one of these divine logoi are the names that God has called himself, making himself totally present in each one of his epiphanies. God cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It also follows that the revelation that God has made in each one of us is unique, different from the God known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his logoi . We will only know our own “ God” since we cannot experience him objectively; it is impossible to know him in the same way as other people. As Ibn al-Arabi said: “Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole.” He liked to quote the hadith: “Meditate upon God’s blessings, but not upon his essence ( al-Dhat).” 47 The whole reality of God is unknowable; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being.

• From A History of God (1993)

  God was all in all, and lesser beings only existed insofar as they participated in the absolute being of the One. 50 The outward flow of emanation was arrested by a corresponding movement of return to the One. As we know from the workings of our own minds and our dissatisfaction with conflict and multiplicity, all beings yearn for unity; they long to return to the One. Again, this is not an ascent to an external reality but an interior descent into the depths of the mind. The soul must recollect the simplicity it has forgotten and return to its true self. Since all souls were animated by the same Reality, humanity could be compared to a chorus standing around a conductor. If any one individual were distracted, there would be dissonance and disharmony, but if all turned toward the conductor and concentrated on him, the whole community would benefit, since “they would sing as they ought, and really be with him.” 51 The One is strictly impersonal; it has no gender and is entirely oblivious of us. Similarly Mind ( nous ) is grammatically masculine and Soul ( psyche ) feminine, which could show a desire on Plotinus’s part to preserve the old pagan vision of sexual balance and harmony. Unlike the biblical God, it does not come out to meet us and guide us home. It does not yearn toward us, or love us, or reveal itself to us. It has no knowledge of anything beyond itself. 52 Nevertheless, the human soul was occasionally rapt in ecstatic apprehension of the One. Plotinus’s philosophy was not a logical process but a spiritual quest: We here, for our part, must put aside all else and be set on This alone, become This alone, stripping off all our encumbrances; we must make haste to escape from here, impatient of our earthly bonds, to embrace God with all our being, that there may be no part of us that does not cling to God. There we may see God and ourself as by law revealed: ourself in splendor, filled with the light of Intellect, or rather, light itself, pure, buoyant, aerial, become—in truth, being—a god. 53 This god was not an alien object but our best self. It comes “neither by knowing, nor by Intellection that discovers the Intellectual beings [in the Mind or nous ] but by a presence ( parousia ) overpassing all knowledge.” 54 Christianity was coming into its own in a world where Platonic ideas predominated. Thereafter, when Christian thinkers tried to explain their own religious experience, they turned naturally to the Neoplatonic vision of Plotinus and his later pagan disciples. The notion of an enlightenment that was impersonal, beyond human categories and natural to humanity was also close to the Hindu and Buddhist ideal in India, where Plotinus had been so keen to study.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I need his body in bed and his books on my shelves anchoring me to the planet. I need him ahead of me to complete a two-mile run, else I give up and light a smoke. I need his editing skills. When he draws his pen through clunky lines, I cut them. I need his unbudgeable integrity. I mean, when a big-deal magazine requested changing some of his poems, he pulled them rather than compromise. I’d have typed mine backward in Urdu to see them into print . Underneath the worries with Warren and money and how to live runs a humming current of hurt—Daddy lying wordless, eyes cloudy. They said he wouldn’t live off the respirator, but it’s over a year now. He’s being calcified, his empty shape pressed into the sheets like a fern in lava. Ask him if he wants more juice, and he might shout out, Bacon! Part of me believes I should catch the next bus down there to start spoon-feeding him—that’s my fantasy—a daughterly sacrifice I lack the maturity to pull off, for my patience with bedpans and bent straws rarely lasts an hour. Carrying the warm jar of piss his catheter linked him to, even the short distance to the caged hospital bed set up in my girlhood room, felt like bearing death itself. Lying alongside Warren that night, I again resolve to generate income, really get serious about it, to chip in on Daddy’s nursing and still meet school loans, without ever pestering Warren again, lest that gap between our backgrounds yawn open. Money can finalize my change, I tell myself. Also, I have to never, never, never drink hard stuff. Long as I stick to beer or wine, I’ll be fine. In the morning, when Warren stirs, I’ve already gone to the bank. The mug of coffee I bring him has a twenty-dollar bill rubber-banded to the handle. If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones. But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water. Not long after, though, some of his doubts about me leak out again, and again the topic’s a disparity in how we want to live. We’ve jogged five miles around Fresh Pond and are stretching out when he says, You know what my sister noticed about you first ? I cling to the fence and am bending my knee to loosen the quad, wheezing out, My rapier wit? Warren’s quick smile skids past my joke. He says, That you had really nice luggage.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “I thought I could find peace here, but since this wind has started it is as though it has stirred everything that I want to forget. “I was born in one of the most uninteresting of western towns in America. I spent my days reading about foreign countries and was determined to live abroad at all cost. I was in love with my husband even before I met him because I had heard that he lived in China. When he fell in love with me, I expected it, as if it had all been planned beforehand. I was marrying China. I could barely see him as an ordinary man. He was tall, lean, about thirty-five, but he looked older. His life in China had been hard. He was vague about his occupations—he had worked at many things to earn money. He wore glasses and looked like a student. Somehow I was in love with the idea of China, so much that it seemed to me that my husband was no longer a white but an Oriental. I thought he smelled different from other men. “We soon went to China. When I arrived there I found a lovely, delicate house full of servants. That the women were exceptionally beautiful did not seem strange to me. That is how I had pictured them. They waited on me slavishly, adoringly, I thought. They brushed my hair, taught me to arrange flowers, to sing and write and speak their language. “We slept in separate rooms but the partitions were like cardboard. The beds were hard, low, with thin mattresses, so that at first I did not sleep well at all. “My husband would stay a little while with me and then leave me. I began to notice sounds that came from the next room, like the wrestling of bodies. I could hear the rustle of the mats, occasionally a stifled murmur. At first I did not realize what it was. I got up noiselessly and opened the door. I saw then that my husband was lying there with two or three of the servant girls, caressing them. In the semidarkness their bodies were completely entangled. When I came in he chased them away. I wept. “My husband said to me, ‘I have lived so long in China I am used to them. I married you because I fell in love with you, but I cannot enjoy you as I do the other women . . . and I can’t tell you why.’ “But I pleaded with him to tell me the truth, pleaded and begged him. After a moment he said, ‘They are so small sexually, and you are larger . . .’ “‘What will I do now?’ I said. Are you going to send me home? I can’t live here with you making love to other women in the room next to mine.’ “He tried to console me, comfort me. He even caressed me, but I turned away and fell asleep weeping.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “I refuse to help a drunken Jesus freak.” “Jest,” I replied, “frivolity”—bucking up against the pain. “It was probably Him got me into this. He finds ways to get even, even if He doesn’t exist.” Carla began to walk on things. I thought I was dreaming. She got up on the other davenport and walked along the top, spreading her arms wide to balance herself. She walked atop the old oak table, then the bar. Her blue hat flopped. Her breasts, which had become amazingly smaller, bobbed in her tank top. After turning off the lights, she walked along above me, singing a little song called “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” I yearned for a peek at her pussy. I squinted through the night-light dark. It’s not true that seeing a girl naked a few times makes you lose interest in her body. “Let’s be friends,” I offered before losing consciousness. “You hardly ever talk to me,” Carla replied. “What do you expect? I thought you were just a dumb jock. I couldn’t understand how you could have such a nice father.” “I am just a dumb jock,” I said. “But I have a nice father. I’m a little shy,” I explained more seriously. “You never talk to me, either.” We had nearly formulated a friendship pact when I changed the subject to Grand Coulee Dam and lost consciousness in the middle of invective. Carla avoided me for a couple weeks after that. She was convinced I was just a dumb jock. VIIIIn a way it was the Columbia that finally got Carla and me together, and in a way it was Dad. Dad read in the New Kettle Falls newspaper that Lake Roosevelt was being lowered because of some work on the dam, and he told Carla and me that if we drove up there we might get to see the river and the falls. Carla was fired up to go, even if it was with me. I traded my days off to match hers and we were set. Carla wanted to get an early start. I heard the basement door open and close and then footsteps across the patio. I opened one eye for a second and saw Carla’s boots at the edge of my cot. It was still dark. She nudged my shoulder through the sleeping bag. “Louden,” she said. “Louden. Time to get up.” Her voice was soft. I kept my eyes closed and thought of waking up beside her. “Louden.” “Good morning,” I said, opening my eyes. “Thanks for waking me.” “You’re sure you’re awake?” “I’m awake. I’ll be in in just a sec.” Carla went back in and I sat up and rubbed my eyes and peered at my watch. I had to cup my hand around it to read the dim luminous dial. It was four thirty. I checked around to see if she was looking out the door, then jumped up, grabbed my jeans, and ran to the grass behind the house.

• From Shunned (2018)

  The men included a pediatrician who lived in my building and hinted at giving me a mink coat for Christmas; a mortgage broker I rendezvoused with whenever I traveled to Houston; a ponytailed graphic artist who tended bar at night; Harper, who’d become a cherished friend and steady cycling partner; and Andrew, a seductive man, eight years my junior, from my beach volleyball team. (Because of our age difference, David referred to him as my “boy toy.”) “Do you even have a type?” David asked one day, as we steered our bikes out of his garage and toward the lakefront. I laughed at the question as I put my helmet on. Ever attentive to doing things the “right way,” I’d been honest with each beau about my level of commitment, declaring I was newly divorced and not interested in getting tied down. Everyone proclaimed acceptance of my terms, a few finding my detachment liberating, others seeing it as an irresistible challenge to win me over. I told myself as long as I was practicing safe sex, no harm would come to me. David was right. These men couldn’t have been more different, in their ages, their accomplishments, their politics, their boundaries, and the way they made love. It was fascinating to observe the different sensations, techniques, and positions each one favored. Every encounter provided a place to experiment, seeking some hint of who I was in the reflection of each lover’s eyes. Around this time, my work friend Debbie invited me to rent the top-level apartment of her three-story brownstone. The apartment was huge, with two bedrooms, a separate dining room, and a sitting area off the living room that led through French doors to a spacious balcony. It oozed with architectural charm, hardwood floors, high ceilings, and a claw-foot tub. Accepting her offer allowed me to triple my living space and reduce my rent expense by hundreds of dollars each month. The more I settled into my work and home, the more I noticed the lack of spirituality in my life and an ever-present yearning to find meaning in my situation. I continued listening to the taped lectures on a Course in Miracles but wanted to branch out in my quest for understanding. Seeking a replacement for my lifelong habit of reading the Society’s literature, I picked up the book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success , by Deepak Chopra, to read at bedtime. Chopra spoke of energy and spirit in a fresh, approachable way and introduced me to the novel idea that we can be in the presence of divinity without a godhead. In the past, this would have struck me as blasphemy, but now I was intrigued. It was also the first time I heard an explanation of karma directly from a Hindu practitioner. Up until that point, my sole exposure to that principle had come from Watchtower discussions, which dismissed karma as unnecessary if you exercised faith in the redeeming value of Christ’s ransom.

• From Shunned (2018)

  The TV cabinet and bookshelf were there, too. In between the books, stereo, and CDs were small frames containing family photos. Dad joined with his coffee cup in hand just as I came across a recent photograph of Bob and me. “You have our wedding picture here,” I said, surprised at first, then relaxing as particles of joy sprang up inside my heart. It felt like a talisman to unexpectedly see my dear husband and me, out of doors in our wedding finery, smiling under the shade of a tree on the banks of Richardson Bay, Mount Tam in the background. There was a solace in being included, a sense of being honored, even, to be displayed in such a prominent place in my parents’ home, a room they sat in every day. Mom and Dad had declined the invitation to attend our wedding. As soon as we’d set a wedding date, I’d dispatched a letter to them, announcing our engagement and plans to marry. They would be receiving a formal invitation, I assured them, but I wanted to share enough details of our plans that if they chose to join us, they’d be prepared. We expected about ninety guests. I made a point to “warn” them the ceremony would be officiated by a woman who had become a spiritual mentor and friend to me. Though the ceremony would be nondenominational, I told them Bob and I would be actively involved in seeing that it reflected our spiritual values. I’d been careful to keep my language warm yet unattached to the outcome. It would mean a lot to me if you would come share in our happiness. Your attendance would not be interpreted as anything more than a wish to meet my community of friends and remain connected despite our different choices. Over the many weeks that followed, however, I realized I’d fooled myself as their silence obliterated my so-called unattachment. My yearning for their presence and participation was excruciating. Every day I’d listen for the postal delivery and open the mailbox with the same expectation a child brings to Christmas morning. Day after day, the mailman failed me. As our wedding plans proceeded, the dangling question of their presence clouded my joy. I was wishing for a wedding exemption, a truce for one day when we could simply rejoice in our shared humanity. A month before the wedding, I received this letter: Dear Linda [she used my given name, rather than the more familial Lindy]: I apologize for being so late in writing this letter. I have agonized over how to tell you that Dad and I will not be attending your wedding. We know you will be very disappointed. In thinking it over, we feel that our being there would be even more painful to you as it would be to us, as we would not be comfortable under the circumstances. It’s better that we just not attend.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  31 The myth of the “occultation” of the Hidden Imam cannot be explained rationally. It makes sense only in a context of mysticism and ritual practice. If we understand the story as a logos, one that should be interpreted literally as a plain statement of fact, all kinds of questions arise. Where in the world had the Imam gone? Was he on earth or in some kind of intermediate realm? What kind of life could he possibly have? Was he getting older and older? How could he guide the faithful, if they could neither see nor hear him? These questions would seem obtuse to a Shii who was involved in a disciplined cultivation of the batin, or secret sense of scripture, which bypassed reason and drew on the more intuitive powers of the mind. Shiis did not interpret their scriptures and doctrines literally. Their entire spirituality was now a symbolic quest for the Unseen (al-ghayb) that lies beneath the flux of outward (zahir) events. Shiis worshipped an invisible, inscrutable God, searched for a concealed meaning in the Koran, took part in a ceaseless but invisible battle for justice, yearned for a Hidden Imam, and cultivated an esoteric version of Islam that had to be secreted from the world. 32 This intense contemplative life was the setting that alone made sense of the Occultation. The Hidden Imam had become a myth; by his removal from normal history, he had been liberated from the confines of space and time and, paradoxically, he became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis than when he and the other Imams had lived a normal life in Medina or Samarra. The Occultation is a myth that expresses our sense of the sacred as elusive and tantalizingly absent. It is present in the world but not of it; divine wisdom is inseparable from humanity (for we can only perceive anything, God included, from a human perspective) but takes us beyond the insights of ordinary men and women. Like any myth, the Occultation could not be understood by discursive reason, as though it were a fact that was either self-evident or capable of logical demonstration. But it did express a truth in the religious experience of humanity. Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation.

• From Shunned (2018)

  We continued to believe in the imminent arrival of the Great Battle, when the faceless hooded riders would come to cleanse the earth of all nonbelievers, evil people, governments, and structures that did not hail Jehovah. We were not clear exactly how all of that would shake out—whether there would be literal fire and brimstone–like destruction—but the Scriptures were clear in predicting it. Ask any god-fearing Witness—it was right there in the book of Revelation. Every war, earthquake, and political scandal was evidence of how far we were into the Last Days. It was an axiom from my childhood. As I was growing up, I remember Mom’s heavy sighs with each passing year. Near Labor Day, as we purchased new school supplies and mourned the end of summer, she would say, “It’s hard to believe another year has passed in this old system.” Through the years, the milestones changed, but never the sentiment. When Lory received her high school diploma, Mom became reflective and said, “I never thought my oldest would graduate in this system.” Six years later, the lament became “I never thought Lindy, my baby, would graduate in this system.” At each new year, she’d wonder aloud, “Will this be the year we see Armageddon?” A natural outcome of this belief is a willingness to postpone the normal activities of life, such as marriage and having children, until the promised New System. That New System was the be-all and end-all, when all the Armageddon dust would settle and God would restore the earth to a literal paradise. The Triple A Club was an inside joke, yes, but also a statement of faith. Jesus and the Apostle Paul had both spoken of singleness as a gift, leaving anyone who chose it free to concentrate on Jehovah God’s interests, like preaching and teaching, without the distractions of matrimony. If you declared yourself a Triple A Club member, you also chose to forgo dating, since Witnesses believe that dating should be done only with a view toward marriage. Recreational dating was frowned upon, as it could lead to premarital sex, which was, as you can imagine, a big no-no. “I will neither confirm nor deny membership,” I said to Ross, unable to resist a little flirting. At that time in my life, I felt marriage was several years away. I often dreamed about the possibility of applying to live and work at Bethel, the world headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in New York, or going on a missionary assignment, evangelizing amid exotic adventures in faraway lands. Settling down in Portland, Oregon, was not my long-term plan, and pioneering was my first step in a career that would allow me to serve others while seeing the world. I’d imagined that, somewhere along the way, years down the road, I would meet an equally adventurous and dedicated brother who would sweep me off my feet and marry me. “What about you, Ross?

• From Shunned (2018)

  Other cyclists passed from time to time, and there was a constant stream of headlights leaving Michigan Avenue for the Drive. The sun was just starting to push dawn our way as we completed the ride at the corner edge of Buckingham Fountain, stopping between two of the bronze seahorses casting their waters outward. A fine mist sprinkled my face and arms. Mellow rock was thumping from the XRT stage, and sweaty riders were scattered throughout the gardens of the park, laughing, lying around. I watched over our bikes while Steve retrieved the orange juice and granola bars provided for all those who crossed the finish line. I moved closer to the fountain and pulled a quarter from my back pocket. Better odds than a penny . In God we trust. Please let me find whatever it is I’m looking for. Please help me ask the right questions. I tossed the coin into the sparkly waters just as the fountain’s center spires surged. Then I grabbed our bikes and pushed them toward Steve, who was waving me over to a bench that overlooked Monroe Harbor and the rising sun. Chapter 10 [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step. —Martin Luther King, Jr. H arris Bank was headquartered downtown in the Loop, smack dab in the center of banking and commerce, a few blocks from city hall and the Board of Trade. Unfortunately, the division I worked in was housed in the northern suburbs, one hour’s drive from where I lived. I was committed to living in the city and reluctantly joined the hordes of people who spent hours each day in their cars. My first apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a modern high-rise on Clark Street. What it lacked in architectural character, it made up for with features I thought critical to ease my transition: an assigned parking place in a covered garage, central air-conditioning, a doorman, and a small outdoor patio with a lake view. On summer mornings I would step into the muggy breeze of that patio, my first cup of coffee in hand, bare feet against cool concrete, and gaze at the lake, a quarter mile away, glistening between other tall buildings in the neighborhood. Looking down, I could see the green lawns of Lincoln Park and the bike path behind Diversey Harbor. On the rooftops of some of the brownstones were beautifully appointed patios with seating areas and terraces shaded by large swaths of bougainvillea. I pondered this human tendency to add grace and beauty throughout Chicago, softening the edges, connecting us to the simple pleasures of the natural world. I purchased outdoor chairs and petunias and often spent evenings on that patio, watching the parade: apartments showing life, lights twinkling in the distance, people walking their dogs one last time before sleep. The building had two doormen to watch over the lobby.