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 4 of 48 · 20 per page

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot has shown that unlike modern philosophy, which tends to be purely notional, Athenian rationalism derived its insights from practical exercises and a disciplined lifestyle. 31 The conceptual writings of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle were either teaching aids or merely served as a preliminary guide for those looking for a new way of living. Unlike the phusikoi, Socrates was primarily interested in goodness, which, like Confucius, he refused to define. Instead of analyzing the concept of virtue, he wanted to live a virtuous life. When asked for a definition of justice, for example, Socrates replied: “Instead of speaking it, I make it understood in my acts.” 32 It was only when a person chose to behave justly that he could form any idea of a wholly just existence. For Socrates and those who came after him, a philosopher was essentially a “lover of wisdom.” He yearned for wisdom precisely because he realized that he lacked it. As Paul Friedlander has explained, there was “a tension between ignorance—that is, the impossibility ultimately to put into words ‘what justice is’—and the direct experience of the unknown, the existence of the just man, whom justice raises to the level of the divine.” 33 As far as we can tell from Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to have been reaching toward a transcendent notion of absolute virtue that could never be adequately conceived or expressed but could be intuited by such spiritual disciplines as meditation. Socrates was famous for his formidable powers of concentration. “Every now and then he just goes off,” a friend remarked, “and stands motionless, wherever he happens to be.” 34 Alcibiades, the famous Athenian politician, recalled that during a military campaign, Socrates had started thinking about a problem, could not resolve it, and to the astonishment of his fellow soldiers “stood there, glued to the spot,” all day and all night, leaving his station only at dawn, “when the sun came out and he made his prayers to the new day.” 35 Plato’s dialogues were a model for the type of meditation that Socrates and his followers practiced; it was nothing like yoga but took the form of a conversation with oneself—conducted either in solitude or together with others—that pushed thought to the very limit. But this type of internal dialogue was possible only if the self that you were conversing with was authentic. Socrates’ mission was to awaken genuine self-knowledge in the people who came to talk to him. He had invented what is known as dialectic, a rigorous discipline designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Hesychia was not what we call “mysticism” today. It was not a specialized form of prayer, characterized by impressive spiritual visions and available only to an elite group of practitioners. The monks were the professionals, certainly, because they could devote themselves to it full-time, but hesychia was also prescribed for the laity. All the regular Christian practices—theology, liturgy, exegesis, morality, and acts of kindness—were supposed to be informed by the silent, reticent attitude of hesychia. It was not just for solitaries but could also be experienced in public worship and human relationships.28 One of the most famous exponents of the new apophatic theology was a married man who had been a professional orator until he became bishop of the small Cappadocian town of Nyssa. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331–95) had become involved in the political turmoil of the Arian controversy with great reluctance. He was uneasy about these theological disputes, because it was impossible to adjudicate Christian teaching from a position of magisterial detachment. Theology depended on practice, and its truth could be assessed only by people who allowed its doctrines to change them. We could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all.29 We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity. After an initial frustration, the soul would realize that “the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.”30 You had to leave behind “all that can be grasped by sense or reason” so that “the only thing left for contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible.”31

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  But it worked! He hit upon the right formula and, for two weeks, it seemed to the world that the dark rocks had disappeared. They were nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile Aurelius had been in a state of panic and uncertainty. He did not know whether he would win or lose his love. He was waiting for a miracle. When he knew that it had occurred, and that the ragged rocks had vanished from sight, he went immediately to the magician and fell down at his feet. ‘To you, my lord,’ he said, ‘I owe everything. I was a woeful wretch, but you have saved me. Thank you, master. Together with my Lady Venus you have rescued me from a life of cold care.’ Thereupon he went to the local temple, where he knew that he would see Dorigen. And there she was. With much trembling he approached her. He greeted her timidly, and then began to speak. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘whom I most love and fear in all this world. I would never do anything to hurt or displease you. But I cannot disguise my love for you. I could die here at your feet. I cannot begin to tell you of my misery. Yet I know that I must either express my feelings for you or perish on the spot. Even though you are innocent of any crime, you are killing me! But even if you have no pity for my plight, take care that you do not forfeit your honour. Relent. Keep your oath, for the sake of God in heaven, and save my life. You know well enough what you promised me. Understand that I claim nothing by right, and that I am entirely dependent on your grace. You know that, in a garden on a spring morning, you made an oath to me on a certain subject. You gave me your hand on it. If the rocks were gone, then you would grant me your love. I was, and still am, unworthy of it. I know that. But you should not renege on your promise. I am more concerned with your honour than my life. I swear it. I have done as you ordered. If you don’t believe me, go to the shore and see for yourself. You must do as you like, of course, but once again I beg you. Do not forget your oath. Living or dead, I will be yours for ever. It lies in your power to decide my fate. I know only this. The dark rocks have gone.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  Once, going to Sally’s bar, I saw him closely. He looked at me; and realizing I had noticed, he quickly turned away. He resembled a highschool coach: neatly cropped hair, ruddy face, trim build. He was possibly in his late 30s. He didnt look like a score; he didnt look like a masculine homosexual (that is, his masculinity did not seem posed); he looked completely incongruous—and I suppose this is why I had first noticed him. After seeing him so often, standing in almost the same spot those afternoons—I began to be strongly intrigued by him. That afternoon, when I saw him again, I was lying on the beach with two fairies who had spotted me for a teahead and were trying to get me to go with them by telling me they had some marijuana at home—changing the subject when I kept referring to being “broke”: the standard hint when youre not entirely sure someone will pay you for making it.... Both of them were youngish and slender; they looked masculine, but their coy gestures, their rolling eyes, their suggestive, high-pitched comments canceled out their initial physical appearance. “Well, hon,” said one, “if you dig—uh—pod, we will—uh—turn you on—and have a—real smash—I mean blast—at our—uh—pad.” He spoke the jivewords as if he had memorized them. Im still looking at the man standing before the concrete ledge separating the beach from the sidewalk.... I said to the gushing fairy lying beside me on the sand: “Well, see, I would dig making it to your pad—but I dont know how far out you live, and I dont even have enough bread to make it back downtown.” “Well,” said the other one, “no problem there, honey—well be glad to give you a lift back!” They were either very dense or determinedly avoiding the hint—and I leaned heavily toward the latter theory. In a few minutes I would leave. I had stayed this long largely because the sun kept me glued to the beach—that lazy, pleasurable, sensual feeling hugging me as I felt my skin turn browner. “Who are you looking at?” the first fairy asked me. Startled to find that I had been so obviously staring at the man on the sidewalk, I turned quickly sideways—but following my gaze, the fairy had already discovered where I had been looking. “Look,” he said to the other one, “theres that strange man again. Hes here every weekend—just stands there. Ive never seen him go with anyone. He just stands there.” “I wouldnt be too Interested in him, hon,” the other one warned me. “He may be welldressed—but he doesnt look like a score.” And now I knew they had been hip to my scene all along, trying to con me with the weed. “Hes kinda cute, too—but not Young enough,” he added.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The gospels show Jesus undergoing an agonizing death and experiencing the extremity of despair while forgiving his executioners, making provision for his mother, and having a kindly word for one of his fellow victims. Instead of becoming stridently virtuous, aggressively orthodox, and contemptuous of the ungodly, these paradigmatic personalities became more humane. The rabbis were revered as avatars of the Torah, because their learning and practice enabled them to become living, breathing, and human embodiments of the divine imperative that sustained the world. Muslims venerate the Prophet Muhammad as the “Perfect Man,” whose life symbolizes the total receptivity to the divine that characterizes the archetypal, ideal human being. Just as the feats of a dancer or an athlete are impossible for an untrained body and seem superhuman to most of us, these people all developed a spiritual capacity that took them beyond the norm and revealed to their followers the untapped “divine” or “enlightened” potential that exists in any man or woman. From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals, and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfill their humanity. They were not religious simply because their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historically sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or merely because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. They were not bludgeoned into faith by power-hungry priests or kings: indeed, religion often helped people to oppose tyranny and oppression of this kind. The point of religion was to live intensely and richly here and now. Truly religious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly, and justly, and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted, as Confucius suggested, to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A popular image, found in many cultures, imagined this fructifying, sacred energy welling up like a spring from these focal places and flowing, in four sacred rivers, to the four quarters of the earth. People would settle only in sites where the sacred had once become manifest because they wanted to live as closely as possible to the wellsprings of being and become as whole and complete as they had been before they were ejected from paradise. This brings us to the second principle of premodern religion. Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe” it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants. The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and has now become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. In the ancient world, it was inspired by an acute sense of the contingency and frailty of existence. Why had anything come into being at all, when there could so easily have been nothing? There has never been a simple or even a possible answer to this question, but people continue to ask it, pushing their minds to the limit of what we can know. One of the earliest and most universal of the ancient cosmologies is particularly instructive to us today. It was thought that one of the gods, known as the “High God” or “Sky God” because he dwelt in the farthest reaches of the heavens, had single-handedly created heaven and earth. 39 The Aryans called him Dyaeus Pitr, the Chinese Tian (“Heaven”), the Arabians Allah (“the God”), and the Syrians El Elyon (“Most High God”). But the High God proved to be an unviable deity, and his myth was jettisoned. It suffered from an internal contradiction. How could a mere being—even such a lofty one—be responsible for being itself? As if in response to this objection, people tried to elevate the High God to a special plane. He was considered too exalted for an ordinary cult: no sacrifices were performed in his honor; he had no priests, no temples, and virtually no mythology of his own. People called on him in an emergency, but otherwise he scarcely ever impinged on their daily lives.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Do you realize that a year ago in December I left New York and came to El Paso and went to Los Angeles and Pershing Square then went to San Diego and La Jolla in the sun and returned to Los Angeles and went to Laguna Beach to a bar on the sand and San Francisco and came back to Los Angeles and went back to the Orange Gate and returned to Los Angeles and Pershing Square and went to El Paso... and stopped in Phoenix one night and went back to Pershing Square and on to San Francisco again, and Monterey and the shadow of James Dean because of the movie, and Carmel where there’s a house like a bird, and back to Los Angeles and on to El Paso where I was born, then Dallas with Culture and Houston with A Million Population—and on to New Orleans where the world collapsed, and back, now, to El Paso grasping for God knows what?” The letter went on to evoke crowded memories of that Mardi Gras season, a culmination of the years I had spent traveling back and forth across the country—carrying all my belongings in an army duffel bag; moving in and out of lives, sometimes glimpsed briefly but always felt intensely. In that Carnival city of old cemeteries and tolling church bells, I slept only when fatigue demanded, carried along by “bennies” and on dissonant waves of voices, music, sad and happy laughter. The sudden quiet of Ash Wednesday, the mourning of Lent, jarred me as if a shout to which I had become accustomed had been throttled. I was awakened by silence, a questioning silence I had to flee. I walked into the Delta Airlines office and told a pretty youngwoman there that I had to return to El Paso immediately. Though I had left money with my belongings scattered about the city in the several places where I had been “living,” I didn’t have enough with me for the fare, and a plane would depart within an hour or so. Out of her purse, the youngwoman gave me the money I lacked, and added more, for the cab. I thanked her and asked her name so I might return the money. “Miss Wingfield,” she said in a moment of poetry not included in this novel because it is too “unreal” for fiction. I thought I had ripped up the letter I had written about that Carnival season; I knew I had not mailed it. A week later I found it, crumpled. I rewrote it, trying to shape its disorder. I titled it “Mardi Gras” and sent it out as a short story to the literary quarterly Evergreen Review.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality: Calling the lapsed Soul And weeping in the evening dew That might controll The starry pole And fallen, fallen light renew. 63 The Enlightenment had created a God of “fearful symmetry,” like the Tyger, remote from the world in “distant deeps and skies.” 64 The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus, 65 and become one with humanity. 66 In 1812, the revolutionary young aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing an atheistic tract, but “The Necessity of Atheism” simply argued that God was not a necessary consequence of the material world. Shelley did not want to get rid of the divine altogether. Like his older contemporary William Wordsworth (1770–1850), he had a strong sense of a “Spirit,” an “unseen Power” that was integral to nature and inherent in all its forms. 67 Unlike the philosophes, the Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable. Nature was not an object to be tested, manipulated, and dominated but should be approached with reverence as a source of revelation. Far from being inactive, the material world was imbued with a spiritual power that could instruct and guide us. Since childhood, Wordsworth had been aware of a “Spirit” in nature. He was careful not to call it “God” because it was quite different from the God of the natural scientists and theologians; it was rather A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things. 68 Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth deliberately called this presence “something,” a word often used as a substitute for exact definition. He refused to give it a name, because it did not fit any familiar category. It bore little resemblance to the arid God of the scientists that had retreated from nature but was strongly reminiscent of the immanent force of being that people in the ancient world had experienced within themselves and in animals, plants, rocks, and trees. The Romantic poets revived a spirituality that had been submerged in the scientific age. By approaching nature in a different way, they had recovered a sense of its numinous mystery.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 65 E. The account of her death in the arena is then narrated by an editor who took her diary and incorporated it into a longer martyrology, popular down through the ages until today. IV. Why were such Christians as Blandina in Lyons, Polycarp in Smyrna, and Perpetua in North Africa so firm in refusing to recant, so stalwart in the face of death? A. We can never know their personal reasons. But we do have some indications from the writings about them (by the Christians left behind) concerning why Christians preferred public torture, humiliation, and death to release and long life. B. It appears that many Christians were convinced that as bad as the torments of the present were, they were not nearly so bad as the torments awaiting those who rejected Christ in the world to come (as explicitly stated in the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne). 1. This view is rooted in a theodicy that maintained that God would reward the righteous but punish the unrighteous. 2. This message became one of the central features of Christian preaching and related closely to its exclusivistic claims. Not only were Christians right in what they believed, but those who chose not to agree would be punished with horrific torments eternally. C. Moreover, some Christians saw that a violent death at the hands of the authorities was a way to imitate Christ, who had died a similar death. 1. This view can be seen most clearly in the writings of one of the first Christians known to be martyred after the New Testament period, Ignatius of Antioch. 2. Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch, arrested for Christian activities, and sent to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts. 3. En route, he wrote six letters to various churches that had sent representatives to greet him on the way. He wrote one other letter to the Christians in Rome, urging them not to interfere with the proceedings against him once he arrived, because it was by a violent death that he would be united with Christ and, thus, “attain to God.” 4. The longing of Ignatius for violent death may seem pathological to modern ears, but it was only logical for him:

• From The Case for God (2009)

  From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals, and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfill their humanity. They were not religious simply because their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historically sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or merely because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. They were not bludgeoned into faith by power-hungry priests or kings: indeed, religion often helped people to oppose tyranny and oppression of this kind. The point of religion was to live intensely and richly here and now. Truly religious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly, and justly, and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted, as Confucius suggested, to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life. They tried to honor the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that protected and welcomed the stranger, the alien, the poor, and the oppressed. Of course, they often failed, sometimes abysmally. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women to live on a higher, divine, or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A junzi was not born but crafted; he had to work on himself as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty. “How can I achieve this?” asked Yan Hui, Confucius’s most talented disciple. It was simple, Confucius replied: “Curb your ego and surrender to ritual ( li ).” 72 A junzi must submit every detail of his life to the ancient rites of consideration and respect for others. This was the answer to China’s political problems: “If a ruler could curb his ego and submit to li for a single day, everyone under Heaven would respond to his goodness.” 73 The practice of the Golden Rule “all day and every day” would bring human beings into the state that Confucius called ren , a word that would later be described as “benevolence” but that Confucius himself refused to define because it could be understood only by somebody who had acquired it. He preferred to remain silent about what lay at the end of the religious journey. The practice of ren was an end in itself; it was itself the transcendence you sought. Yan Hui expressed this beautifully when he spoke of the endless struggle to achieve ren “with a deep sigh.” The more I strain my gaze towards it, the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front, but suddenly it is behind. Step by step, the Master skilfully lures one on. He has broadened me with culture, restrained me with ritual. Even if I wanted to stop, I could not. Just when I feel that I have exhausted every resource, something seems to rise up, standing over me sharp and clear. Yet though I long to pursue it, I can find no way of getting to it at all. 74 Living a compassionate, empathetic life took Yan Hui beyond himself, giving him momentary glimpses of a sacred reality that was not unlike the “God” worshipped by monotheists. It was both immanent and transcendent: it welled up from within but was also experienced as an external presence “standing over me sharp and clear.” Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible. The ultimate reality was not a Supreme Being—an idea that was quite alien to the religious sensibility of antiquity; it was an all-encompassing, wholly transcendent reality that lay beyond neat doctrinal formulations.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Before I died, became too old or consumed with everyday minutiae, I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places. And its most sacred. Of course I wanted to taste other foods, hear other languages, dive into other cultures, but what I really craved was connection with a capital C. I wanted to experience what the Chinese call Tao, the Greeks call Logos, the Hindus call Jñāna, the Buddhists call Dharma. What the Christians call Spirit. Before setting out on my own personal life voyage, I thought, let me first understand the greater voyage of humankind. Let me explore the grandest temples and churches and shrines, the holiest rivers and mountaintops. Let me feel the presence of... God? Yes, I told myself, yes. For want of a better word, God. But first, I’d need my father’s approval. More, I’d need his cash. I’d already mentioned making a big trip, the previous year, and my father seemed open to it. But surely he’d forgotten. And surely I was pushing it, adding to the original proposal this Crazy Idea, this outrageous side trip—to Japan? To launch a company? Talk about boondoggles. Surely he’d see this as a bridge too far. And a bridge too darned expensive. I had some savings from the Army, and from various part-time jobs over the last several summers. On top of which, I planned to sell my car, a cherry black 1960 MG with racing tires and a twin cam. (The same car Elvis drove in Blue Hawaii.) All of which amounted to fifteen hundred dollars, leaving me a grand short, I now told my father. He nodded, uh-huh, mm-hmm, and flicked his eyes from the TV to me, and back again, while I laid it all out. Remember how we talked, Dad? How I said I want to see the World? The Himalayas? The pyramids? The Dead Sea, Dad? The Dead Sea? Well, haha, I’m also thinking of stopping off in Japan, Dad. Remember my Crazy Idea? Japanese running shoes? Right? It could be huge, Dad. Huge. I was laying it on thick, putting on the hard sell, extra hard, because I always hated selling, and because this particular sell had zero chance. My father had just forked out hundreds of dollars to the University of Oregon, thousands more to Stanford. He was the publisher of the Oregon Journal, a solid job that paid for all the basic comforts, including our spacious white house on Claybourne Street, in Portland’s quietest suburb, Eastmoreland. But the man wasn’t made of money. Also, this was 1962. The earth was bigger then. Though humans were beginning to orbit the planet in capsules, 90 percent of Americans still had never been on an airplane.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Let me be fodder for the wild beasts [said Ignatius to the Roman Christians]. That is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to be made a pure loaf of bread for Christ. I would rather that you fawn the beasts, so that they may be my tomb, and no scrap of my body be left. Thus, when I have fallen asleep, I shall be a burden to no one. Then, I shall be a real disciple of Christ. Then, the world will see my body no more. What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts that are ready for me. I hope they will make short work of me. I shall coax them on to eat me up, all at once, and not hold off, as sometimes happens. Now is the moment I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come, fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil. Only let me get to Jesus Christ. Thus, he went on, talking about how he wanted to imitate the passion of Christ, the death of Christ, so that he would be worthy of meeting Christ in the afterlife. As I pointed out—well, I didn’t need to point it out—this longing for violent death may sound pathological to our ears, but for him, it was only logical. This world was of no importance to Ignatius. What mattered was the other world, the world of God, which he could attain by imitating the martyrdom of Christ himself. This appears to have been a view of many of the early Christian martyrs. Not only were they thinking that the afterlife would be much better for them if they suffered this torment, but if they refused to suffer, they themselves would go through the torment. They were also thinking about imitating Christ’s own martyrdom. To sum up, it is difficult to actually know how many Christians went to face their deaths in this way. We don’t know what the numbers are because nobody recorded the numbers. The church father Eusebius, who recorded some of these incidents, sometimes said that six people were killed here, ten 207 people killed there. By and large, though, we don’t know how many people actually died, and I should point out that the people writing the accounts of the martyrdoms were always Christians who survived, so that these persecutions were not going after every Christian; a lot of people were left to witness the event, and wrote about it. It is difficult to know, then, how many Christians had to face death this way.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A felt desire for God can be only an ego need, born of the images we use to fill our emptiness. Any “God” we find in this way is an idol that would actually alienate us from ourselves: For if you love God as he is God, as he is spirit, as he is person, and as he is image—all this must go! Then how should I love him? You should love him as he is nonGod, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage, but as he is—pure, unmixed, bright “One” separated from all duality; and in that One we should sink eternally down, out of “something” into “nothing.” 93 Eckhart’s exuberant language, which swings so enthusiastically from the affirmative to the apophatic, demonstrates that precisely because this transformation is not an emotional “experience,” it cannot be described in words. Despite the new scholasticism, Denys’s dialectical method was still ingrained in European theology. We see it in two very different English writers of the fourteenth century. Julian of Norwich, who was not a trained theologian, has a perfect grasp of the apophatic, even at her most affirmative. When she speaks of Christ, for example, she alternates between male and female imagery to push the reader beyond these mundane categories. “In our Mother, Christ, we grow and develop; in his mercy he reforms and restores us; through his passion, death and resurrection he has united us to our being. So does our Mother work in mercy for all his children who respond to him and obey him.” 94 And even though the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing , who translated Denys’ Mystical Theology into English, is taking the apophatic tradition in a new, fourteenth-century direction, he still sees it as fundamental to the religious life. 95 If we want to know God, all thoughts about the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the life of Christ, and the stories of the saints—which are perfectly good in themselves—must be cast under a thick “cloud of forgetting.” 96 At first, the author explains, a beginner would encounter only darkness “and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing.” 97 If he asked: “How am I to think of God himself and what is he?” our author replied: “I cannot answer you, except to say ‘I do not know!’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!” 98 We can think about all kinds of things, but “of God himself can no man think.”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? Worse, like the same shy, pale, rail-thin kid I’d always been. Maybe because I still hadn’t experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette, hadn’t tried a drug. I hadn’t broken a rule, let alone a law. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadn’t yet rebelled. I couldn’t think of one time I’d cut loose, done the unexpected. I’d never even been with a girl. If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best. I’d have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all... different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose. And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the word. The secret of happiness, I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. At different times I’d fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman. But the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. At twenty-four I was finally resigned to that fact. I’d run track at Oregon, and I’d distinguished myself, lettering three of four years. But that was that, the end. Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six-minute mile after another, as the rising sun set fire to the lowest needles of the pines, I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel?

• From Educated (2018)

  The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given. I had never made my peace with it. As a girl I had often imagined myself in heaven, dressed in a white gown, standing in a pearly mist across from my husband. But when the camera zoomed out there were ten women standing behind us, wearing the same white dress. In my fantasy I was the first wife but I knew there was no guarantee of that; I might be hidden anywhere in the long chain of wives. For as long as I could remember, this image had been at the core of my idea of paradise: my husband, and his wives. There was a sting in this arithmetic: in knowing that in the divine calculus of heaven, one man could balance the equation for countless women. I remembered my great-great-grandmother. I had first heard her name when I was twelve, which is the year that, in Mormonism, you cease to be a child and become a woman. Twelve was the age when lessons in Sunday school began to include words like purity and chastity. It was also the age that I was asked, as part of a church assignment, to learn about one of my ancestors. I asked Mother which ancestor I should choose, and without thinking she said, “Anna Mathea.” I said the name aloud. It floated off my tongue like the beginning of a fairy tale. Mother said I should honor Anna Mathea because she had given me a gift: her voice. “It was her voice that brought our family to the church,” Mother said. “She heard Mormon missionaries preaching in the streets of Norway. She prayed, and God blessed her with faith, with the knowledge that Joseph Smith was His prophet. She told her father, but he’d heard stories about the Mormons and wouldn’t allow her to be baptized. So she sang for him. She sang him a Mormon hymn called ‘O My Father.’ When she finished singing, her father had tears in his eyes. He said that any religion with music so beautiful must be the work of God. They were baptized together.” After Anna Mathea converted her parents, the family felt called by God to come to America and meet the prophet Joseph. They saved for the journey, but after two years they could bring only half the family. Anna Mathea was left behind. The journey was long and harsh, and by the time they made it to Idaho, to a Mormon settlement called Worm Creek, Anna’s mother was sick, dying. It was her last wish to see her daughter again, so her father wrote to Anna, begging her to take what money she had and come to America. Anna had fallen in love and was to be married, but she left her fiancé in Norway and crossed the ocean. Her mother died before she reached the American shore.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  All the regular Christian practices—theology, liturgy, exegesis, morality, and acts of kindness—were supposed to be informed by the silent, reticent attitude of hesychia . It was not just for solitaries but could also be experienced in public worship and human relationships. 28 One of the most famous exponents of the new apophatic theology was a married man who had been a professional orator until he became bishop of the small Cappadocian town of Nyssa. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331–95) had become involved in the political turmoil of the Arian controversy with great reluctance. He was uneasy about these theological disputes, because it was impossible to adjudicate Christian teaching from a position of magisterial detachment. Theology depended on practice, and its truth could be assessed only by people who allowed its doctrines to change them. We could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all. 29 We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity. After an initial frustration, the soul would realize that “the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.” 30 You had to leave behind “all that can be grasped by sense or reason” so that “the only thing left for contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible.” 31 Gregory could see this process at work in the life of Moses. His first encounter with God had been the revelation of the Burning Bush, where he had learned that the God that called itself “I Am” was being itself. Everything else in the universe “that the senses perceive or intelligence contemplates” could only participate in the being that sustained it at every second. 32 After this initial revelation, Moses, like the great philosophers, had engaged in a disciplined contemplation of the natural world. But while nature could lead us to the Logos, through whom the world was made, it could not bring us to God itself. When Moses climbed Mount Sinai and entered the impenetrable darkness on its summit, however, he was in the place where God was—even though he could not see anything. He had at last left normal modes of perception behind and achieved an entirely different kind of seeing. Pushing his reason to the point where it could go no further, he had intuited the silent otherness that existed beyond the reach of words and concepts. Once the hesychast understood this, he realized that any attempt to define God clearly “becomes an idol of God and does not make him known.”

• From Educated (2018)

  I found the science book, with its colorful illustrations, and the math book I remembered from years before. I even located a faded green book of history. But when I sat down to study I nearly always fell asleep. The pages were glossy and soft, made softer by the hours I’d spent hauling scrap. When Dad saw me with one of those books, he’d try to get me away from them. Perhaps he was remembering Tyler. Perhaps he thought if he could just distract me for a few years, the danger would pass. So he made up jobs for me to do, whether they needed doing or not. One afternoon, after he’d caught me looking at the math book, he and I spent an hour hauling buckets of water across the field to his fruit trees, which wouldn’t have been at all unusual except it was during a rainstorm. But if Dad was trying to keep his children from being overly interested in school and books—from being seduced by the Illuminati, like Tyler had been—he would have done better to turn his attention to Richard. Richard was also supposed to spend his afternoons making tinctures for Mother, but he almost never did. Instead, he’d disappear. I don’t know if Mother knew where he went, but I did. In the afternoons, Richard could nearly always be found in the dark basement, wedged in the crawl space between the couch and the wall, an encyclopedia propped open in front of him. If Dad happened by he’d turn the light off, muttering about wasted electricity. Then I’d find some excuse to go downstairs so I could turn it back on. If Dad came through again, a snarl would sound through the house, and Mother would have to sit through a lecture on leaving lights on in empty rooms. She never scolded me, which makes me wonder if she did know where Richard was. If I couldn’t get back down to turn on the light, Richard would pull the book to his nose and read in the dark; he wanted to read that badly. He wanted to read the encyclopedia that badly. —TYLER WAS GONE. There was hardly a trace he’d ever lived in the house, except one: every night, after dinner, I would close the door to my room and pull Tyler’s old boom box from under my bed. I’d dragged his desk into my room, and while the choir sang I would settle into his chair and study, just as I’d seen him do on a thousand nights. I didn’t study history or math. I studied religion. I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly, then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross-reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had studied for himself and himself only.

• From Educated (2018)

  After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers—Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut. I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud. I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first—Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called. I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right . That my dreams were perversions. That voice had many timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father’s voice; more often it was my own. I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman. —IN DECEMBER, AFTER I had submitted my last essay, I took a train to London and boarded a plane. Mother, Audrey and Emily picked me up at the airport in Salt Lake City, and together we skidded onto the interstate. It was nearly midnight when the mountain came into view. I could only just make out her grand form against the inky sky. When I entered the kitchen I noticed a gaping hole in the wall, which led to a new extension Dad was building.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  “Oh,” she said, looking down at her feet. “Well. Okay. Okay.” She hurried onto the elevator, and as the doors closed she never lifted her gaze from her shoes. I TOOK HER to the Oregon Zoo. I don’t know why. I guess I thought walking around and gazing at animals would be a low-key way of getting to know each other. Also, Burmese pythons, Nigerian goats, African crocodiles, they would give me ample opportunities to impress her with tales of my travels. I felt the need to brag about seeing the pyramids, the Temple of Nike. I also told her about falling ill in Calcutta. I’d never described that scary moment, in detail, to anyone. I didn’t know why I was telling Miss Parks, except that Calcutta had been one of the loneliest moments of my life, and I felt very unlonely just then. I confessed that Blue Ribbon was tenuous. The whole thing might go bust any day, but I still couldn’t see myself doing anything else. My little shoe company was a living, breathing thing, I said, which I’d created from nothing. I’d breathed it into life, nurtured it through illness, brought it back several times from the dead, and now I wanted, needed, to see it stand on its own feet and go out into the world. “Does that make sense?” I said. Mm-hm, she said. We strolled past the lions and tigers. I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful. She nodded. Like basic accounting principles, she grasped it all intuitively, right away. I asked if she was seeing anyone. She confessed that she was. But the boy—well, she said, he was just a boy. All the boys she dated, she said, were just that—boys. They talked about sports and cars. (I was smart enough not to confess that I loved both.) “But you,” she said, “you’ve seen the world. And now you’re putting everything on the line to create this company…” Her voice trailed off. I stood up straighter. We said good-bye to the lions and tigers.