Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Well, you know—complain, speak in a whiny voice, talk in a way that makes people want to get away from me. Do I?” “What do you think, Myrna?” “I don’t think so. And your opinion?” Unable to procrastinate indefinitely, or to lie, or to tell the truth, Ernest squirmed. “If by ‘whine’ you mean you tend to complain about your situation repetitively and unproductively—then, yes, I’ve heard you do that.” “An example, please.” “I promise to answer that,” said Ernest, deciding it was time for a process comment, “but let me say something first, Myrna. I’m struck by the change in you these last weeks. It’s been so fast. You aware of it?” “Change how?” “How? In almost every way. Look at what you’re doing—you’re direct, focused, challenging. Like you say, you’re keeping it in the room; you’re talking about what’s taking place between us.” “And that’s good?” “It’s great, Myrna. I’m delighted to see it. To be honest, there were times in the past when I felt you hardly noticed I was in the room with you. When I say it’s great, I mean you’re moving in the right direction. But still you seem so—what should I say? So one-sided, so—well, acerbic, as though you’re continually angry with me. Am I off base?” “I don’t feel angry with you, just frustrated with my whole life. But you said you’d give me examples of my whining.” Suddenly this woman who had been too slow for him was becoming almost too fast. Ernest had to concentrate all his attention on their discourse. “Not so fast. I’m not buying into that word, Myrna. I feel you’re trying to brand me with it. I said ‘repetitious,’ and I’ll give you an example of that: your feelings about your CEO. How he’s not efficient, how he should make the company leaner, how he should fire incompetent workers, how his softheartedness is going to cost you big money in your stock options—that’s the kind of thing I mean. You’ve discussed this over and over again, hour after hour. Just like your comments about the dating scene—you know what I mean. During those hours I’ve ended up feeling less engaged with you and less helpful as well.” “But those are the things that preoccupy me—you tell me to share what I’m thinking.” “You’re absolutely right, Myrna. I know it’s a dilemma, but it’s not what you say but how you say it. But I don’t want to detract from my earlier point. The mere fact that we’re talking so openly supports what I said a little while ago—that you’re different, working better and harder in therapy. “It’s time to stop for today, but let’s try to pick up from here next week. Oh, yes, here’s the bill for last month.” “Hmmm,” said Myrna, uncrossing her legs, not neglecting to swish them vigorously, and scanning the proffered bill before dropping it into her purse. “How disappointing!” “What do you mean?”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I don’t want to open my mouth and show him the big gaping hole. “Nimbus?” Ernest asked when she stopped. “You know, uh—radiance, holy light, halo.” “Oh, right. Yes, nimbus. So, Myrna, what are your thoughts about the dream?” “I think I know what you’ll say about it.” “Stay with your experience. Try to free-associate. What comes to you immediately as you think about the dream?” “The big hole in my face.” “What comes to mind as you think of it?” “Cavernous, abyssal, abysmal, inky black. More?” “Keep going.” “Gigantic, vast, stupendous, monstrous, Tartarean.” “Tartarean?” “You know, hell—or the abyss below Hades where the Titans were confined.” “Oh, right. Interesting word. Hmm—but back to the dream. You’re saying there’s something you don’t want doctors to see, and I guess I’m the doctor?” “Hard to quarrel with that. Don’t want you to see the big gaping hole, that emptiness.” “And if you open your mouth I’ll see it. So you guard yourself, guard your words. You still see the dream, Myrna? Still vivid?” She nodded. “Keep looking at it—what part of it draws your attention now?” “The tonsils—lot of energy there.” “Look at them. What do you see? What comes to mind?” “They’re hot, scalding.” “Keep going.” “Bursting, turgid, livid, distended, tumescent, turgescent—” “‘Tumescent, turgescent’? And that other one—‘Tartarean.’ These words, Myrna?” “I’ve been browsing in a thesaurus this week.” “Hmm, I’d like to hear more about that, but right now let’s stay with the dream. These tonsils; they’re visible if you open your mouth. Just like the emptiness. And they’re about to burst. What’ll come out?” “Pus, ugliness, something odious, hideous, loathsome, disgusting, execrable, abhorrent, rancid—” “More thesaurus browsing?” Myrna nodded. “So the dream suggests that you’re seeing a doctor—me—and our work is uncovering some things you don’t want seen, or you don’t want me to see it —a vast emptiness, and tonsils ready to burst and spew something vile. Somehow the scalding red tonsils make me think of just a few minutes ago when all those words burst out of you.” She nodded again. “I’m moved by your bringing in this dream,” Ernest said. “It’s a sign of trust in me and what we’re doing together. It’s good work—real, good work.” He paused. “Now can we talk thesaurus?”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  At some level the therapist’s feelings about the patient are invariably transmitted. I’ve never seen it fail !?” he said, waving his pipe for emphasis. “And this is why we must understand, and work through, and reduce our neurotic responses to patients. “But here, in this—this T-shirt instance,” Dr. Werner continued, “we’re not even considering nuances ; we’re not dealing with the patient’s subtle perceptions of the therapist’s feelings. Dr. Lash insulted the patient openly—no nuanced guesswork required here. I can’t shirk my responsibility to label that an egregious therapeutic error—an error that threatens the foundations of the therapeutic alliance. Don’t let the California ethos of ‘anything goes, everything is permitted’ contaminate your therapy. Anarchy and therapy are not mutually compatible. What is your first step in therapy? You’ve got to establish a safe frame. How in the world, after this incident, can Dr. Lash’s patient free-associate? How can she trust the therapist to consider her words with evenly suspended attention?” “Is evenly suspended attention possible for any therapist?” asked Ron, a heavily bearded and intense therapist, and one of Ernest’s closest friends; they had been linked since medical school by their mutual iconoclasm. “It wasn’t for Freud. Look at his cases—Dora, the rat man, Little Hans. He always entered into his patients’ lives. I don’t believe it’s humanly possible to maintain a position of neutrality—that’s what Donald Spence’s new book argues. You never really apprehend the patient’s real experience.” “That doesn’t mean you give up trying to listen without letting your personal feelings contaminate the scene,” said Dr. Werner. “The more neutral you are, the closer you approximate the patient’s original meaning.” “Original meaning? Discovery of another’s original meaning is an illusion,” Ron shot back. “Look at the leaky communicational pathway. First, some of the patients’ feelings are transformed into their own images and then into their favorite vocabulary—” “Why do you say ‘some’?” asked Dr. Werner. “Because many of their feelings are ineffable. But let me finish. I was talking about the patients transforming images into words: even that process is not pure—the choice of words is heavily influenced by the individual’s imagined relationship with the audience. And that’s just the transmitting part. Then the reverse has to take place: if therapists are to grasp the meaning of the patients’ words, they must retranslate the words into their own private images and then into their own feelings. By the end of the process, what kind of match is possible? What’s the chance that one person can really understand the other’s experience? Or to put it another way, that two different people will hear another person in the same manner?” “It’s like that word game ‘Telephone’ we played as kids,” Ernest chipped in. “One person whispers a phrase into another’s ear, and that person whispers to another, and so on around the circle.

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

  He concludes the section with sarcasm (whose etymology is “a gashing of flesh”): “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!” (5:12). Why this passion about circumcision? Because requiring circumcision for gentile male converts countered Paul’s most foundational sense of his mission as well as his vision of what “in Christ” meant. His vocation was to be an apostle to the Gentiles—and for him that did not mean first converting Gentiles to Jews through circumcision so that they could then be baptized into Christ. For him to have accepted that notion would have meant a betrayal of his calling. And it would have countered his vision of what life “in Christ” in “the new creation” was like. Paul’s counterarguments (note the plural) are not really addressed to his opponents. We assume he was aware that he didn’t have much chance of changing their minds. Rather, he sought to persuade those in the community who were wavering, uncertain about what to think. He begins his defense of his apostleship by reminding them of his Damascus experience and call (1:11–24). He continues by reporting that Christian leaders in Jerusalem had approved his mission to the Gentiles (“the uncircumcised”) without requiring that they be circumcised (2:1–10). Then he turns to the strongest point of his opponents’ argument: the biblical text requiring circumcision of Abraham and his offspring. He mounts a number of counterarguments, only some of which we mention. He appeals to another text about Abraham from a few chapters earlier in Genesis, before the text requiring circumcision. “Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’” (Gal. 3:6, quoting Gen. 15:6). Paul also uses this argument in Romans 4:9–10, where he explicitly adds that faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness before he was circumcised. Then he continues: “So, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham…. Those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed” (Gal. 3:7, 9). Believing—faith—is what makes a person a descendant of Abraham, not circumcision. We hasten to add that believing and faith are not about a set of beliefs, but a relationship of commitment and trust. Paul’s point about Abraham is central also to his contrast between justification by “works of the law” versus “through faith in Jesus Christ,” treated more fully in our previous chapter on Romans. We note in passing a rather curious argument that Paul makes about Abraham. He writes that, according to Genesis: God’s promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ as of many; but it says, ‘And to your offspring,’ that is, to one person, who is Christ. (3:16)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this was still true several centuries later when people went out from the Jewish into the pagan world with the news of a different lord, a different empire, a different salvation—and perhaps also a different wrath. When we turn to the Roman equivalent of Homer, we find a striking parallel. Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid , begins not with wrath, but with arms: Arma virumque cano , “I sing of arms and the man.” Virgil can also write poems of great pastoral beauty, just as Homer gives us wonderfully rich natural imagery. But it is no accident that the greatest and best-known poems of pagan antiquity begin with the words “wrath” and “arms.” That was the world everyone knew, even if they reacted against it: war and violence, and the human and divine rage that smoldered or flamed beneath them. Wrath and arms! With the gods themselves sharing in the wrath and urging on the violence, what escape could there be? And—we cannot help commenting already—is it not against this world of wrath and arms and its all too apparent reflection in various theories or models of “atonement” that so much recent theology and popular opinion has reacted? Readers of the New Testament might want to say, and in a more nuanced fashion, that we believe in a different sort of wrath, a different kind of battle, and indeed a very different vision of God and of salvation. Yes, indeed. But it is within the world of the Greeks and the Romans that Jesus was crucified; and it was within that same world that the originally Jewish message about Jesus received its wider airing and, arguably, its early shaping. The world of wrath and arms helps to explain why anyone would want to execute a fellow human being in so brutal a fashion. A brief reminder of what crucifixion entailed—necessary sooner or later in this book—will make the point, lest we take for granted or gloss over what was actually involved in the event whose meaning we are discussing. Few readers of this book are likely to have seen, except on screen, the kind of violence that was common in the first century. Even those who watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ might either screen out the gratuitous horror of it all or be so overwhelmed by the physical brutality as to miss the point that such a death was designed to degrade as well as kill. Crucifixion was one of the central ways in which authorities in the ancient world set out quite deliberately to show subject peoples who was in charge and to break the spirit of any resistance. Crucifixion was, after all, one of the most horrible fates that humans could devise. That isn’t a modern overstatement. It was the considered opinion of the Roman orator Cicero and the Jewish historian Josephus, two men who had seen plenty of crucifixions, and also another who knew what he was talking about, the church father Origen.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  She was angry at me for attempting to help her to detach from Jack and direct her energy elsewhere and for encouraging her to meet other men. And angry at me for not being Jack. As a result of our deep engagement, our intimate exchanges, our fighting, our mutual caring, it was with me that she most approximated the feelings she had had with her husband. And then, at the end of the hour, she hated having to go back to a life with neither me nor Jack. That’s what made the ending of every session so tumultuous. She hated the reminder that our relationship had formal boundaries, and no matter how I signaled that we were at the end of our hour, she often exploded: “You call this a real relationship? This is not real! You look at the clock and just kick me out, throw me away!” Sometimes she sat there at the end of the hour, glaring and refusing to budge. Any appeals to reason—to pointing out the necessity for schedules, to her own scheduling of patients, to suggestions that she watch the clock and end the hour, to repeating that my ending the hour was not a signal of rejection—all these fell on deaf ears. Far more often than not, she left my office angry. She was angry at me for being important to her and angry that I wouldn’t do some of the things Jack had done; for example, compliment her on all her good points—her appearance, her resourcefulness, her intelligence. We often had pitched battles about compliments. I felt that a recitation of compliments would infantilize her, but she put so much emphasis on it, was so insistent, that I often complied. I asked her what she wanted me to say and practically repeated her words back, always trying to include some original observation. Yet what seemed like a bizarre charade to me almost without fail raised her spirits. But only temporarily: she had holes in her pockets, and by the next session she insisted that I do it again. She was angry at my presuming to understand her. If I tried to combat her pessimism by reminding her that she was in the midst of a process that had a beginning and an end and by offering reassurance from some of the results of my research, she responded angrily, “You’re depersonalizing me. You’re disregarding what’s unique in my experience.” Any optimism I expressed about her recovery she invariably turned into an accusation that I wanted her to forget Jack.

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

  In Paul’s communities (and generally among early Christians), the Lord’s Supper was a real meal, a “share meal,” and not simply a ritual involving a morsel of bread and a sip of wine. From what Paul says in this chapter, the Lord’s Supper began with the breaking of the bread, which was followed by the meal, and concluded with the passing of the cup after the meal (11:24–25; note “after supper” in v. 25). The meal was framed by bread and wine in remembrance of the final meal of Jesus. But this was not what was happening at Corinth. Paul’s comments in this section of Corinthians presume that the meal was being hosted by those in the community who were wealthy and powerful, most likely in a villa. At the beginning of the section on the Lord’s Supper, Paul writes: I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you…. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s Supper. (11:17–18, 20) Why this judgment? Why is what they are doing “not really” the Lord’s Supper? Paul continues: Each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? (11:21–22) The issue here is that not everybody got to eat the same food. The wealthy had their own food and drink, and others had little or nothing. This practice was common in the Roman world when a wealthy patron hosted a meal that included people from lower social classes. The patron would serve finer food and wine to others from his social rank and less fine food and wine to those of lower rank. Meals, even when they crossed social boundaries, would nevertheless mirror those boundaries. Paul’s counsel near the end of the section suggests an additional problem: “So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another ” (11:33). The implication is clear: some arrived early and began to eat and drink at once. Who would arrive early? Not those who had to work for a living, but those who had leisure—that is, the wealthy and powerful.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  THE BRITISH ARE noted for their sense of irony, often applied particularly to themselves. Self-deprecating humor is, at least in theory, our stock in trade. One current example is a brilliant and rightly popular BBC sitcom called W1A, which is the postal code for the headquarters of the BBC itself. The satire, created by people who themselves work for the organization they are sending up, is often telling as well as very funny. In one now famous episode, while a middle-aged broadcasting executive is trying to figure out how to solve a particular problem about a program, he is being badgered by a young, sassy eager beaver of a PR agent who has her own agendas. The man keeps trying to explain to her that she doesn’t understand the question, and she keeps trying to explain to him how her proposals are going to solve everything and make the program a roaring success. Eventually, exasperated, he turns on her. “You’re just not listening!” Back comes the answer, pitch-perfect for the character: “I totally am listening! What it is—you guys aren’t saying the right stuff!” I was reminded of that moment when reflecting on the ways in which the four gospels have routinely been ignored by people trying to construct a vision of the atonement, trying to understand the meaning of Jesus’s death. The long tradition of in-house church discussions about such things, swapping theories and schemes for how precisely to understand what happened on Good Friday, has emerged—especially in popular culture—from a world where it was assumed, as we saw earlier, that the point of Christianity was how to go to heaven granted that we are all sinners deserving hell. That is the agenda: How do we get to that goal? The four gospels have very little to say about this topic. Almost nobody talks about “going to heaven.” When Jesus talks about the “kingdom of heaven,” he doesn’t mean a place called “heaven,” but the rule of “heaven,” that is, God’s reign, coming to birth on earth. Almost nobody in the gospels warns about “going to hell.” The dire warnings in the four gospels are mostly directed toward an imminent this-worldly disaster, namely, the fall of Jerusalem and other events connected with that. There are occasional sayings that go beyond that, such as Matthew 10:28 and its parallel in Luke 12:4–5, but this dimension seems to be taken for granted rather than made central. And despite a wealth of detail in the buildup to Jesus’s death, so much detail in fact that the gospels have sometimes been described as “Passion narratives with extended introductions,” the four writers do not seem particularly concerned with building into their accounts any kind of answer to the expected question of how this death somehow enables sinners to be forgiven and to go to heaven after all.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She’d had her revenge, she had won, but it was like she didn’t even know it. She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness. How lovingly she arranged the dark leaves, the white blooms. A POLICE OFFICER showed up at our apartment. The officer, Inspector Ramirez, informed her that Barry was accusing her of breaking and entering and of trying to poison him. She was completely calm. “Barry is terribly angry with me,” she said, posing in the doorway, her arms crossed. “I ended our relationship several weeks ago, and he just can’t let go of it. He’s obsessed with me. He even tried to break into this apartment. This is my daughter, Astrid, she can tell you what happened.” I shrugged. I didn’t like this. It was going way too far. My mother kept going without missing a comma. “The neighbors even called the police that night. You must have a record of it. And now he’s accusing me of breaking into his house? That poor man, really, he’s not all that attractive, it must be hard for him.” Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway. Oh Inspector Ramirez, her eyes said, you’re a good-looking man, how could you understand someone as desperate as Barry Kolker? After he left, how she laughed. THE NEXT TIME we saw Barry was at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, where he liked to shop for ugly gag gifts for his friends. My mother wore a hat that dappled her face with light. He saw her and turned away quickly, fear plain as billboards, but then he thought again, turned back, smiled at us. “A change of tactic,” she whispered. “Here he comes.” He walked right over to us, a papier-mâché Oscar in his hands. “Congratulations on your performance with Ramirez,” he said, and held it out to her. “Best actress of the year.” “I don’t know what you mean,” my mother said. She was holding my hand, squeezing it too tight, but her face was smiling and relaxed. “Sure you do,” he said. He tucked Oscar under his arm. “But that’s not why I came over. I thought we could bury the hatchet. Look, I’ll admit I went too far calling the cops. I know I was an asshole, but for Christ’s sake, you tried to destroy the better part of a year’s work. Of course my agent had a preliminary draft, thank God, but even so. Why don’t we just call it a draw?” My mother smiled, shifted to the other foot. She was waiting for him to do something, say something. “It’s not like I don’t respect you as a person,” he said. “And as a writer. We all know you’re a great poet. I’ve even talked you up at some of the magazines.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Actually, at the level of mere speech and challenged as I was, I would have said anything. I couldn’t see immediately what this would all imply if acted out in life. Yes, I told them, I rejected everything that anyone wanted to impose upon me gratuitously; the vanity of these practices seemed to me quite obvious. Great problems, true values, and a serious philosophy of life were elsewhere; I found them each day at school, in books, in literature, philosophy, and politics. Were we heading toward a Socialist society? Is poetry rooted in mysticism? Would the machine age bring social justice? Are art and morality bound together? Here were problems that were far more noble than whether one should ride a streetcar on the Sabbath. It exasperated me that I must, in spite of myself, concern myself with absurdly small matters, be involved in sacred triviality. My mother put her finger to her forehead, rolled her eyes, and simulated intense joy. This signified that I was either joking or insane. That was clear. But it was wrong of me to have carried this thing so far on a Sabbath, especially in front of my father, a good but irritable man. “Shut up,” she said. “You’re beginning to get everything mixed up!” That was her final statement, meaning that I was delirious, that I couldn’t distinguish one thing from another, one value from the next. In her hierarchical universe, this was the worst folly. My father hesitated. Should I go on talking? What was there left to lose? Ignoring my mother’s sideplay and her efforts to save the situation, my father brought out his final test: “I suppose you wouldn’t even circumcise your sons!” I was unable to give tit for tat. I hesitated. Not that I didn’t want to shout: yes, yes, yes! But I was impressed by the gravity of their attitudes and an awareness of their horror. Deeply upset, my mother and the children were silent. My father waited, bewildered by the turn in the situation. “I don’t know,” I muttered at last. We stopped there, my father certainly regretting that he had pushed me so far, and I troubled by my temerity and my ambiguous compromise. My mother was relieved that the interlude was over. Nothing could destroy her animal attachment to her children; although she no longer understood me, this did not bother her, no more than if I had been deaf or blind or dumb. She felt I belonged to her as chicks do to the hen: I was an extension of her own body. The anger and sadness of my father were clear-sighted. We had other channels of communication, but he saw that more of them were being condemned each day.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The bed, Artemis, and the rest of the room had vanished. Merges stopped hissing. He looked up at Ernest, spittle dripping from his fangs, his muscles tensed. Ernest reached into his overnight bag. “Won’t you have something to eat, Merges?” he said, opening some of the dinner containers he had carried upstairs. Merges peered cautiously into the first container. “Five Mushroom Beef! I hate mushrooms. That’s why she always makes them. That chanterelle ragout!” He uttered these last words in a high-pitched, mocking singsong, then repeated them: “Chanterelle ragout! Chanterelle ragout!” “Here, here,” Ernest said in the soothing drone he used sometimes in therapy sessions. “Let me pick out the beef pieces for you. Oh, my God, I am so sorry! I could have gotten the whole baked cod. Or the Peking Duck. Even the Hunan Meatballs. Perhaps the Pork Shue Mai. Or the Beggar’s Chicken. Or the Ming’s Beef. Or the—” “All right, all right,” Merges snarled. He swiped at the chunks of beef and devoured them in a single gulp. Ernest droned on: “Or I could have gotten the Seafood Delight, the salted shrimp, the whole roasted crab, the—” “You could have, you could have, you could have, but you didn’t, did you? And even if you had, then so what? Is that what you think? That some stale scraps would redress the wrong? That I would settle for leftovers? That I am nothing but brute appetite?” Merges and Ernest stared silently at each other for a moment. Then Merges nodded toward the container with the Rolling Chicken and Cilantro in Lettuce Cups. “And what’s in there?” “It’s called Rolling Chicken. Delicious. Here, let me pick out the chicken for you.” “No, leave it be,” said Merges, batting the container out of Ernest’s hand. “I like the green stuff. I come from a family of Bavarian grass eaters. Hard to find good grass that’s not soaked in dog piss.” Merges gobbled down the cilantro and chicken, then licked the lettuce cups clean. “Not bad. So you could’ve gotten roast crab?” “I only wish I had, but as it was, I got too much meat. Turns out Artemis is a vegan.” “Vegan?” “A vegetarian who eats no animal products at all—not even dairy products.” “So she’s stupid as well as a murdering bitch. And I remind you again that you’re stupid too if you think you’ll redress the wrong by courting my stomach.” “No, Merges, I don’t think that. But I fully understand why you’d be suspicious of me or anyone who approaches you in a friendly fashion. You haven’t been treated well in your life.” “Lives—not life. I’ve had eight of them, and every one, without exception, has ended the same way—in unspeakable cruelty and murder. Look at the last one! Artemis murdered me!

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Prophetic Criticism The alternative consciousness wrought through Moses is characterized by criticizing and energizing. I will pursue this in more detail later, but these comments are in order now. The narrative of the Exodus is designed to show the radical criticism and radical delegitimizing of the Egyptian empire. At the beginning (Exod 5:7-10) the Egyptians are in full flower and full power. They “wheel and deal” and are subject to none: Let heavier work be laid upon the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words. So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people went out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh.” Notice how the language is shaped to evoke anger and bring to expression the deep resentment at this whole system. But the story moves. At the end, these same masters, taskmasters, and foremen are vanquished, humiliated, and banished from history: The Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. (14:13) Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. (14:30) From beginning to end the narrative shows, with no rush to conclude, how the religious claims of Egyptian gods are nullified by this Lord of freedom. The narrative shows, with delighted lingering, how the politics of oppression is overcome by the practice of justice and compassion. And between the beginning and the end, the moment of dismantling is the plague cycle, a narrative that cannot be told too often, for it testifies to what cannot be explained, surely not the reason of the empire. It happens in this way: In the first two plagues, concerning the turn of the Nile and the frogs, the powerful work of Moses and Aaron is matched by Egyptian “research and development” people. Two plagues into the scene nothing is changed and the power of Egypt is not challenged. The empire knows how to play “anything you can do, I can do better.” But then comes the third plague:

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Surprise showed on Ernest’s face. He looked at Myrna. She stared back unflinchingly. “Well,” he said, “I wondered whether you might have had any feelings. Maybe some reactions to my comment about my T-shirt and the dating bureau?” “Did you have any feelings about that comment, Dr. Lash?” Ernest straightened in his chair—he had the oddest feeling about her boldness today. “Yes, I had a lot of feelings about it,” he said hesitantly. “And none of them good feelings. I felt I was disrespectful to you. I can imagine you being pretty angry with me.” “Well, I was angry.” “And hurt?” “Yes, hurt too.” “Think of that hurt feeling. Does it take you to some other place? Some other time?” Oh no, you don’t, you worm, Myrna thought. Trying to squirm away. And all these weeks lecturing me on staying in the present. “Can we stay with you, Dr. Lash, here in this office?” she said with her new directness. “I’d like to know why you said it—why you were, as you put it, disrespectful.” Ernest took another look at Myrna. A longer one. He pondered his options. Duty to his patient, that came first. Today, finally, Myrna seemed willing to engage him. For months he had been urging, exhorting, begging her to stay in the here-and-now. So encourage her efforts, he told himself. And remain honest. Honesty above all. A devout skeptic in all other matters, Ernest believed with fundamentalist fervor in the healing power of honesty. His catechism called for honesty—but tempered, selective honesty. And responsible, caring honesty: honesty in the service of caring. He would never, for example, reveal to her the harsh, negative—but honest—feelings toward her he had expressed two days earlier when presenting Myrna’s case at his countertransference seminar. That seminar had started a year ago as a biweekly study group of ten therapists who met to deepen their understanding of their personal reactions to their patients. At each meeting one member would discuss a patient by focusing almost entirely on the feelings that patient had evoked in him or her during their therapy hours. Whatever their feelings toward particular patients—irrational, primitive, loving, hateful, sexual, aggressive—the members committed themselves to expressing them candidly and exploring their meaning and roots. Among the many purposes the seminar served, none was more important than the sense of community it provided. Isolation is the leading occupational hazard of the psychotherapist in private practice, and therapists combat it by membership in organizations: study groups such as this countertransference seminar, advanced training institutes, hospital staff associations, and a variety of local and national professional organizations.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He thought he was funny, and the Europeans laughed noisily while the others smiled to show their willingness to play the game. We would then stare at each other and swallow our pride. The history teacher, a retired lieutenant with a wooden left leg which thumped on the floor with a martial sound, would slyly imply: “The destruction of French hierarchy and of its traditional values.” I did not even quite know what he meant, but he managed to make us Africans loathe all hierarchies and their values. Every morning he would force us to stand at attention and to say: “His Majesty the King of England,” or “His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,” which made me link race prejudice with authority in my aversions. Several of my history instructors were at the same time anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, and politically reactionary, so that I learned to identify anti-Semitism with prejudice and with reactionary political opinions. The school forced this conclusion on me: that no Jew, unless it be as a result of blindness or of the lowest kind of false self-interest, can ever be a reactionary, and that this attitude is forced on us by our situation and not by choice. The fact that the same contempt was felt for Mohammedans made me feel a sense of community with them. Anxiously, my eyes would sometimes scan the class for allies and would catch the gaze of a young Moslem bourgeois by the name of Ben Smaan. But I felt that such a gulf separated us Jewish boys from our Moslem classmates and that the impetus that bore me toward the West was so strong that these encounters could be but accidents. I believed, firmly but not very clearly, that our future lay with Europe. Two inconceivable acts of treachery on the part of the West were necessary before I ceased to associate my life too closely with it. By then, however, I had already broken with the East too. Life in school slowly taught me my exact position, making the picture clearer each year. Our Alsatian teacher was an example of ordinary anti-Semitism arising from incompatibility. As a man of the North, he disliked living on the Mediterranean, and he reproached us with liking all the things he detested, such as speaking loud, or living on the streets, or being sunburnt, whereas his complexion was milky-white. Then there was the traditional and stupid race prejudice of Naud, the retired lieutenant with the missing leg who taught us history. Another historian also tried to give race prejudice a scientific basis. What complexes drove him to devote his doctrinal dissertation and many years of his life to nonsensical gossip? He forced himself to demonstrate his theories calmly, without ever raising his voice.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Or is it simply that I feel indebted to my age for not having been carted off to hell or had my nails torn out of my fingers or lost a leg or an arm in a slave-labor camp? This is required by the times, whether one be the hangman or the victim. I don’t feel victimized enough, and it tortures my conscience. Historians today tell how, one afternoon, as the red and purple dusk lingered on, the big Junker planes of the Nazis started landing on El-Aouina Airfield. I did not see the aircraft, and nobody told me about it. I believe that I was reading my newspaper that evening, just as I am today. Later, I learned that a few wise people had left the country in time; the army, it seems, had arranged a train service for those wishing to join the Allied Forces. I never had any connections in the army and was living in the closed world of the Jewish artisans. But even if I had known of the Junkers’ landing, I would not have realized the necessity of escaping. In fact, I understood so little that I was convinced that, between the Jews, the Germans, and the French, it was all a matter of pride. When Pétain came to power in France, the new anti-Semitic laws were applied to us but with some delay. When the decrees were published, I was not so much struck by the material side of the catastrophe as disappointed and angry. It was the painful and astounding treason, vaguely expected but so brutally confirmed, of a civilization in which I had placed all my hopes and which I so ardently admired. With a crash, the reassuring idea that colonial Frenchmen and those from metropolitan France were not the same was now demolished. The whole of Europe had revealed its basic injustice. I was all the more hurt in my pride because I had been so uncautious in my complete surrender to my faith in Europe. I reacted impetuously and without a moment’s thought. I did not wait to find out how the new laws were to be applied. Instantly I wrote a letter of resignation which I handed to the principal of the school. I have no idea what he thought of the young man who was handing in his resignation from a so unimportant post with the grandest of manners. I still felt a pupil’s respect for him, and my indignation and the difficulty of explaining myself all gave me an appearance of great solemnity. In any case, he played the part I expected of him perfectly. This retired commander of a Spahi regiment, tall and straight in spite of his age, impressed us by his physical presence and his firm and elegant muscles which he carefully kept in condition on the tennis courts. He accepted my letter, adding that he approved of my gesture and would have done the same himself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  1–2 is Paul’s own story, highlighting the points of special relevance to the urgent problem in Galatia) reaches its climax with the confrontation in Antioch, where Paul opposed Peter for his church-dividing behavior. Peter, anxious about the impression given to visitors from Jerusalem when they saw him eating alongside Messiah-believing but uncircumcised non-Jews, had separated himself from the Gentiles. We must, it seems, assume that this resulted in the Jewish believers eating at one table (or perhaps in one room) and the non-Jewish believers eating somewhere else. Since the unity of the church has not until comparatively recently been a topic of apparent urgency in modern Western Christianity, this passage has been read as though it is about something else, perhaps about the mechanism of “salvation.” But Paul’s emphasis is on the fact that the Messiah has one family, not two, and that to deny this is to deny the gospel itself, to suggest that the Messiah did not need to be crucified. To make this point, Paul takes himself as the example of what happens when someone comes to be “in the Messiah.” He is not describing “his own experience” as though it was special or as though it set a standard of “spiritual experience” that others ought to imitate. He is describing what is true of himself, as a Jew who has come to believe that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, in order to make it clear to Peter and anyone else listening, and now also to the Galatians as they hear this letter, that the Messiah’s death and resurrection have the effect of putting to death all earlier identities as belonging to the “present evil age” and of creating a new identity in which all previous identities are left behind: Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (2:19–20) We should not miss the strong resonance in the final decisive and climactic phrase of the first phrase of Galatians 1:4: “who gave himself for our sins.” Nor should we miss the equally emphatic sequel: if one could belong to God’s people simply by observing the Jewish law—as Peter was implying by his behavior and as the Galatians would be implying if they were to get circumcised—then the Messiah would not have needed to die (2:21). Paul’s whole logic is working outward from the central messianic events. If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then he really is God’s Messiah (Rom. 1:3–4); but if he really was and is God’s Messiah, then his death was not simply a shameful tragedy, but rather a saving triumph, or rather the ultimate saving triumph.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Alternatively, they might have an attacking/counterattacking fight that culminates in her remembering something he did to upset her two years ago … To this perceived blaming he replies that he doesn’t even remember what she is talking about; and so far as he is concerned it never even happened. “What is wrong with you?” he murmurs under his breath. He is unaware that (1) when a woman becomes (emotionally) activated, she remains stressed for a much longer time than a man. The woman’s pounding heart and racing thoughts remain stuck. And (2) in her racing thoughts, Jane tries to locate an explanation for her runaway heart, believing that if she can find the cause (identifying it as a real external threat—as is biologically intended), then she could settle down. In scanning her memory banks in this activated state, she stumbles across the time when (she perceived) Bob hurt her. Seizing on this “explanation” for her distress, she feels compelled to act upon it, “throwing it in Bob’s face.” In this way, Jane is doing what her physiology compels while he perceives that “she is blaming him for nothing.” This dance of daggers intensifies his defensiveness and seething anger. Locked in mortal combat, they both reach for a Valium. As the Valium (which relaxes their muscles) kicks in, they both feel better—it seems to both of them that the blowup was over nothing. Bob hopes that tomorrow will be a clean slate, and Jane wonders why in the world she dragged up that two-year-old event, no less beating Bob over the head with it. However, when they awake the next morning, they are disconnected physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Furthermore, research shows that this type of unresolved conflict impairs the couple’s immune system, depressing it and reducing the capacity for wound healing over the next several days.‖

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The psalm continues by declaring that God has established his Messiah, who will then judge the world and call all rulers to account—a passage well known and often expounded in various other Jewish traditions of the period. The whole psalm is clearly in mind at this point. And here it has acquired a particular significance. Evil—in the persons of Herod and Pilate—has gathered itself together, as the psalm always said it would, and God in response has raised up his true king, who will bring justice to the whole world. This will happen not least through the strange healing ministry that comes by the powerful name of Jesus: So now, Master, look on their threats; and grant that we, your servants, may speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand for healing, so that signs and wonders may come about through the name of your holy child Jesus. (4:29–30) The same point—of evil gathering itself together and then being overthrown—comes out clearly in the striking parallel between the challenges and claims made by the satan in the temptation narratives in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 and the mocking of Jesus on the cross: “If you’re God’s son . . .” (Matt, 27:40; 4:3, 6; Luke 4:3, 9). We are clearly meant to hear, in the crucifixion scene, the earlier whispered voice in Jesus’s head now turning into a public mockery from the chief priests and other bystanders. Jesus had spoken of an initial victory over the “strong man,” because of which he was now enabled to plunder his house—referring presumably to an initial victory in the battle with the satan, resulting in the exorcisms in his subsequent public career (Matt. 12:29). Now the battle is resumed and comes to a head. “This is your hour,” he says to the soldiers coming to arrest him. “Your moment has come at last, and so has the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). Directly linked to this is the claim of the satan to possess all authority over the kingdoms of the world, implicit in Matthew 4:9 and explicit in Luke 4:6, and then explicitly reversed in Matthew 28:18, where all authority in heaven and on earth is claimed by Jesus himself. Something has happened to dethrone the satan and to enthrone Jesus in its place. The story the gospels think they are telling is the story of how that had happened.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As the successful parent knows, this strategy works well with children. Rather than suppress the child, encouraging a habit of repression, these parents help the child by providing a timely interruption, while guiding the child to feel his anger and source his needs and desires. This is what healthy aggression is about. On the other hand, we have the permissive parent who lets the child go out-of-control with temper tantrums, as the samurai was about to do but with lethal consequences. The effective parent, however, provides and channels the child’s aggression in a useful way. They do this by both allowing the child to feel her anger and then helping the child to understand what she is mad about. If emotions are not too extreme and are approached with a certain stance, they can serve the function of guiding our behaviors—even moving them toward positive goals. Here’s an example with which most of us can identify. Bob comes home from work and finds his house in chaos. He is furious and wants to yell at Jane and the kids, but he “stuffs” his rage. By bedtime he cannot unwind and has an acute attack of gastric reflux. His wife, after a trying day herself, wishes to make some contact with her husband. She wants him to share something about his day or how he is feeling and asks if anything is wrong. He utters, “Nothing, I’m just tired,” and turns his attention to the raw, sour, burning taste of gastric juices in his throat. Jane smolders, accusing him of being distant and remote. She laments that she cannot get a feel for where he is at; she complains that she “cannot feel him.” He withdraws further.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  John’s Jesus is a marked man from as early as the Temple incident in chapter 2 and the healing on the Sabbath in chapter 5. There is no “Galilean springtime” to correspond to the nineteenth-century fantasy of a happy, early ministry for Jesus before the storm clouds gathered. The storm clouds were there from the start. This is all part of the “why” to which the gospels are giving their answer. Jesus’s announcement of God’s kingdom did not check the boxes his fellow Jews were expecting. His very birth was perceived as a threat to the (insecure) ruling elite. His actions connected with the holy place (the Temple), the holy law (the Torah), and the holy day (the Sabbath) were perceived as dangerous and subversive, for the very good reason that they were. Nor was the opposition confined to rulers and official bodies. From early on the Pharisees, a populist pressure group aiming at rigorously applying the ancestral traditions as part of their own hopes for the long-awaited new age, were opposed to Jesus’s announcement of the kingdom. This is hardly surprising. Here an analogy may help. Those of us who live in Scotland are getting used to politicians campaigning for independence. Now suppose you belonged to a political party agitating for that goal, but then another party arose saying they were launching their own independence movement, but they didn’t consider the national dress (the kilt), the symbolic national food and drink (haggis and whisky), or the national musical instrument (the bagpipes) to be of any importance. Suppose such a new party seemed to be gaining widespread support. Your reaction would be a combination of jealousy and righteous indignation (“Who do they think they are?”). That is what happened in Jesus’s case. He was talking about the kingdom of God, but he was appearing to ignore all the things that marked the Jews out as God’s people! Behind this we can sense, as in the reaction of the synagogue congregation in Nazareth and elsewhere, a settled resistance to this new kingdom teaching and a determination not to be taken in with Jesus’s talk of peace, reconciliation, turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and so on. That wasn’t what they wanted or expected. When Jesus warned Jerusalem of the things that would come upon the city because they had refused the way of peace (Luke 19:42), we have a sense that the implacable hostility to his proposed new way of being God’s people had reached its height at last.