Anxiety

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 The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The problem just mentioned in the epigraph links all the way back to earlier parts of this book. By the end of Part II, you knew that I had very little confidence in peasant memory or oral transmission as it is usually invoked to explain the early decades of the Jesus tradition. If there were only oral memory at work, then the historical Jesus would probably be lost to us forever. By the end of Part III, you knew that I considered certain early sources, such as the gospels of Q, Thomas , and Mark, to be independent of one another. But even if those sources had pointed back before themselves to orality rather than textuality, or at least to some delicate interface between orality and textuality, such oral memory had already been rendered questionable in Part II. This epigraph from Barry Henaut seems, therefore, an epitaph for historical Jesus research. It is taken, in fact, from a concluding chapter entitled “Oral Tradition: The Irrecoverable Barrier to Jesus,” which upgrades to imperative Rudolf Bultmann’s proposal to place “the name ‘Jesus’ always in quotation marks and let it stand as an abbreviation for the historical phenomenon with which we are concerned” (295, 305). I consider, as mentioned earlier, that suggestions to put the name of Jesus in quotation marks or to surround Jesus with a cloud of unknowing are attempts to protect him, alone in all the world, from publicly argued evidence and historically conditioned reconstruction. Historical Jesus agnosticism is simply epistemological uniqueness, the negative historical side of a positive theological issue. Why is Jesus more unknowable or less reconstructable than any other ancient person about whom data has survived? Leaving that aside, however, I agree absolutely that the invocation of an oral tradition about Jesus that is fortunately beyond disproof but unfortunately beyond proof is not a very good strategy of reconstruction. But notice those two phrases that I italicized in the epigraph: “spoken word” and “oral sayings.” It is this emphasis on words and sayings that I want to discuss here. I ask whether remembering his sayings or imitating his life is the primary mode of continuity from the historical Jesus to those who walked around with him and remained around after him. The Didache , as we have just seen, did not even cite his sayings as his . But it used as a criterion of authenticity the ways (tropoi ) rather than the words (logoi ) of the Lord. Continuity was in mimetics rather than in mnemonics, in imitating life rather than in remembering words. Let me take a concrete example. I think it is as likely as anything historical ever is that Jesus said, “Blessed are the destitute.” But even if that were a direct quotation, its meaning could have changed as the saying was cited and transmitted. It could, for example, have moved from ethical into ascetical or apocalyptic eschatology.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  First there was In Search of Excellence, Mary Karr brings us In Search of Incompetence. He was rich enough to be jovial about this, but I knew if I screwed up the presentation and lost this client’s fat retainer, I’d be dead, for without this expert’s benevolent referrals, I had zero credential. Can you help me with my notes? I said. But through the phone’s overseas hiss, I heard another phone start ringing, and he said, Maybe this other flight came through— Then the dial tone went retreating across the Asian oceans, and I resisted the impulse to pound the phone receiver on the first solid surface. Toward dawn in the hotel room, I pick up the legal pad and try to envision my solo presentation. Standing at the grease board, I’ll draw a horizontal line—an X axis—saying, This line represents your spending. It goes from spending zero on the left to shelling out shitloads of money on the right. My vertical Y axis measures returns on that money—from getting back zero at the bottom to making zillions at the top. I’m gonna tell the president of Company X and his minions that they need to spend as little as possible while making shitloads in return. The question is, how to stretch this expensive advice into a nine-hour meeting? I never have to find out. The next morning Mr. Consultant skids into the boardroom sideways from a flight I never knew he got on. He takes the laser pointer from my hand, and I sit sweatily at the conference table. Other than taking notes, I’m free of the babble floating over us. Free, that’s how being a poet looks to me, like freedom from the grind among pencil-necked office guys in clip-on ties. Sitting there, I fantasize about the birthday dinner my grad school guru planned in San Francisco before I catch the red-eye back. He’ll talk about translating the great Polish Nobel dude and about the ballads of Wordsworth and about his own drunk mother whose loony-bin demise he managed to live through. He knows the botanical names of plants and how to do carpentry work. In my mind, I picture his curious, becalmed expression the way certain saffron-robed acolytes do Buddha. His very stare will rebaptize me a writer, despite my business suit.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  40 Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory For over two years, Mother hounds me to let her read pages I’m scribbling about the worst patch of our family history, but I’m still x-ing out, deleting, starting over. She swears public opinion frets her not one whit. In fact, she and Lecia both signed off on a summary of the story before I set out. If I gave a big rat’s ass what anybody thought about me, Mother says, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA. Which I didn’t do. But I know reading it could hurt them, since writing it often wrings me out like a string mop. Some afternoons after I close my notebook—I’m working longhand—I just conk out on the floor of my study like a cross-country trucker. I see a shrink who says the naps don’t mean I’m repressing stuff. Don’t you know, he says, feeling all that stuff again is exhausting? So the prospect of dragging Mother and Lecia through it too feels like abuse. Mother’s sole focus is money. Whatever wounds I parade through the marketplace, she’s mostly just skippy I have a car, however far it is from paid off. In fact, she’s sure I’ve misunderstood the contract somehow. That’s your money though? That’s right, Mother. My money. What if they don’t like the book? Oh well. What if it doesn’t sell? What poet would plan for anything different? The next call she approaches head-on: There’s no way you’ll have to give the money back? No ma’am. No way, no how. Right. But do they know you’ve spent it already? Once she tries to finagle a peek at the book by threatening to die: saying, What if my heart fails before you finish it? I’ll just have to regret it the rest of my life. I remind her that as a portrait painter, she never turned the canvas around for view till it was dried, never signed it till she knew what she was endorsing. The summer it’s done, I fly her up to Syracuse. Right off, she drops her purse in the hall and falls on the manuscript like a harpie. No, she doesn’t want to come to the park with Dev and me. She waves us on. I’m not going anywhere, she says. She takes up a lounge chair in the backyard with pages in her lap while I obsessively assemble cold soups and dips and marinades for the grill nearby, trying not to vulch over her. What am I waiting for? Given that she takes in books the way a junkie shoots dope, I want it to mesmerize her, which—since she’s its subject—is pretty much a slam dunk. I’m also hoping she’ll confirm in detail what she’s agreed in broad stroke is true.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Even after I rent out my attic to a grad student—a motorcycle-driving lesbyterian who sets my Republican neighbors’ tongues wagging—I can’t make ends meet. At first Warren and I plan to sell the house to give back Mr. Whitbread’s small down payment, till Warren figures out my engagement ring could buy the whole place outright, so I fork that over instead. That’s the kind of stuff we bicker about. Maybe he feels, as I do, that he’s given too much up—in furniture and car (on my part), house (on his part), or time with our son (on both parts). But when two different lawyers urge us separately to chase payouts we both know don’t exist, we fire them. With a mediator, we hammer out a deal neither of us can imagine surviving on, then we sign it. The Whitbread family tree sports nary a divorce, and it shames Warren to break the news. Once he does, the channels between the family and me snap so totally shut, I don’t hear the fallout. While my clan views the split as a done deal, Mother can’t feature me without Warren’s solidity. The boat I row (financially speaking) is fully loaded and taking water, but so’s Warren’s. Warren loans me our sole vehicle pretty much on demand, but it galls me to ask him. Facing walls of ice at my drive’s end, I try to tell myself that not having a car to shovel out is a bonus, but climbing over slippery, filthy edifices to reach a bus stop, Dev’s mittened hand in mine, I curse the oyster-gray sky and the fat flakes that Dev never tires of catching on his tongue. The bus to Dev’s after-school takes a full hour each way, and pulling him in a red wagon to and from the grocery store leaves me feeling stranded as a polar explorer. (People who’ve never seen a credit-union employee roll her eyes when you request a two-thousand-dollar car note will say, Just borrow.) In Syracuse, I find another circle of identical shit-brown chairs occupied by sober strangers, and I call Joan the Bone to complain about the mildewy carpet and the chilblains I get wearing wet boots in the unheated room. She says, Uh-huh. Are they sober? While Joan’s never more than a phone call away, she can’t be my polestar at such a remove. Before I moved, we’d agreed I’d have to find a local contender. You’re irreplaceable, I tell her on the phone. I am, aren’t I? she says, nudging me by phone to court Patti—a former English teacher who helps run an outpatient rehab—a petite woman with a

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Defecation is forbidden anywhere in Jerusalem, as is sexual intercourse: “Anyone who lies with his wife and has an ejaculation, for three days shall not enter anywhere in the city of the temple in which I shall install my name” (1QTa 45:11–12). Locations, directions, and measurements in the Temple Scroll should not be pressed too far, as if one could correlate its details with actual Jerusalem topography. The point is not that the Temple Scroll ’s ideal latrines need to be equated with actual Bethso any more than that its ideal city gates (which were twenty-one feet wide [11QTa 41:14]) need to be equated with the actual Essene Gate (which was nine feet wide). The point is this: the presence of the Essene Gate at that rather difficult topographical location and of latrines outside the walls and to the northwest is best explained by postulating an Essene Quarter immediately inside the southwestern corner of the city’s old first wall. That Herodian-style Essene Gate may even have been constructed specially for them so that they could observe the Law as faithfully as they desired. ESSENES IN HISTORY You will recall from the beginning of Chapter 12 that for 372 years the Jewish homeland had been not a king-state but a Temple-state. It was ruled externally by first the Persian Empire and then, after Alexander, by its Greco-local replacements in Egypt or Syria. It was ruled internally by Jewish high priests legitimated by traditional dynastic descent from Aaron at the time of Moses through Zadok at the time of Solomon. After Alexander had Hellenized their world, the Jewish homeland was caught between those warring Hellenistic empires to its south and north, but it was also threatened even more insidiously by Hellenistic mono-culturalism and international commercialism. That placed increasing external and internal strain on the very existence of the Jewish people in covenant with a God of justice and purity in a land of justice and purity. And it placed the high priesthood itself in the very eye of the Hellenistic storm. In the early decades of the second century B.C.E. , the Jewish homeland was under Syrian control. But the Syrian Empire was under military pressure from Rome, steadily expanding on Syria’s western front, and from Egypt, always threatening on Syria’s southern front. The Jewish homeland was vital to Syria, both for tribute to pay off Rome and for security to ward off Egypt. But attempts to integrate it economically and politically into the Syrian Empire kept foundering on religious and theological obstacles. In the 170s the legitimate high priest was Onias III, but rivals—first Jason from within his own family and then Menelaus from outside it—promised Antiochus IV Epiphanes of Syria greater tax revenues if they were appointed high priest and allowed to turn Jerusalem into a full Greek city (Antioch South, as it were). What follows is a rather terse summary of the situation, but there is a fuller account in 2 Maccabees 4.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  And Amram of the tribe of Levi went forth and took a wife of his tribe, and it was so when he took her, that the residue did after him and took their wives…. And the spirit of God came upon Maria [Miriam] by night, and she saw a dream, and told her parents in the morning saying: I saw this night, and behold a man in a linen garment stood and said to me: Go and tell your parents: behold, that which shall be born of you shall be cast into the water, for by him water shall be dried up, and by him will I do signs, and I will save my people, and he shall have the captaincy thereof always. In that version Amram refuses to join in the general divorce and Miriam’s prophetic function is simply to proclaim the future. But in the much later and more detailed Book of Remembrances Amram actually joined in the general divorce and it took Miriam’s prophecy to change his mind. There are three scenes in this act. [1 Divorce .] When the Israelites heard the decree ordained by Pharaoh that their male children be thrown into the river part of the people divorced their wives but the rest stayed married to them…. [2 Reassurance .] And then at the end of three years the Spirit of God descended on Miriam and she went and prophesied in the centre of the house saying: “Behold, the son will be born to my father and my mother at this time who will save Israel from the power of Egypt.” [3 Remarriage .] So when Amram had heard the words of the child he went and remarried his wife whom he had divorced after the decree of Pharaoh ordering the destruction of every male of the house of Jacob. And in the third year of the divorce he slept with her and she conceived by him. Those three scenes reappear in Matthew 1:18–25, although the virgin conception greatly changes the actual content. Notice especially the resemblances between Miriam’s prophetic and Gabriel’s angelic reassurance concerning the destined savior . [1 Divorce .] When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. [2 Reassurance .] But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  All of those questions came to a head in two incidents recorded by Paul in Galatians 1–2, with all original animosities fully displayed, and by Luke in Acts 15, with any original animosities firmly removed. We saw the details of those incidents above—details that are now background for my present concern. The last item from the Jerusalem Council recorded by Paul is this agreement: They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor (pt [image "image" file=Image00029.jpg] ch [image "image" file=Image00029.jpg] n ), which was actually what I was eager to do. (Galatians 2:10) If we had only that single sentence, it would be hard to know exactly what it meant. But it is clear from other texts that money from Christian pagan communities was to be collected for the benefit of the Christian Jewish community of Jerusalem. That is the easy part. The difficult part is whether this was simple poor-relief—monies intended to relieve destitution among Jerusalem’s Christian Jews and, beyond them, non-Christian Jews—or whether it was intended to support the Jerusalem community itself under the theologically charged name of the Poor Ones. If we are speaking only of poor-relief, why should the poor of Jerusalem take precedence over the poor of Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, or any other Christian pagan community? Why would the Christian poor of Jerusalem be in any worse straits than the Christian poor of any other city? I am inclined, therefore, to consider that the collection was primarily for the Jerusalem community itself and that they called themselves the Poor Ones. It seems to me, however, that such a title required some form of commonality, some type of communal lifestyle, some degree of difference between the Jerusalem community and other Christian communities. Think, for a moment, of the annual Jewish collection for the Temple at Jerusalem. The money involved was the annual half-shekel or didrachmon “tax levied on all Jews over the age of twenty, including freedmen and proselytes” (GLAJJ 1.198) for the Temple in Jerusalem. That annual subvention was for the public cult of the Temple. It was not a collection for the poor of Jerusalem, and, if such had been proposed, the same obvious question would probably have been asked: Were there not Jewish poor in every city, and should not each city take care of its own? Similarly, I would argue, the collection for the Poor Ones was in support of something quite public: the Jerusalem community as eschatological ideal, with its paradigmatic lifestyle of communal sharing. Only something as important as that can account for the amount of space given to the collection. The references in Paul’s letters are explicit and extensive. Those found in the Acts of the Apostles are once again problematic, however. Luke certainly knows traditions about the collection, but he either does not know what he has or he does not want to admit what he knows.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I find myself cornered by a drunk writer of substantial reputation at a party. His expectant leer scares me out the door. At the car, I have keys in my hand but no purse. Where’s my purse? I find myself squatting in the bedroom closet with two incongruent bottles, whiskey and Listerine—the latter with accompanying spit bowl. Despite the dark, it feels safe in here, leaning against the back wall with clothes before my face. On one of Warren’s school nights, friends I once taught with ring my doorbell holding a twelve-pack, the ambush making me giddy as a prom queen. They pore over my shoe box of Dev’s baby pictures while regaling me with their new projects—a play at Yale, a book of short stories. But even as I giggle and suck down beers, I know Warren’s headlights are gonna swipe the house silent again. Sure enough, he comes in the back door and stops in the living room to shake hands before excusing himself. About eleven, he calls from upstairs, and I find him on the landing, shirtless in boxers. He whispers, I can’t sleep from the noise. If you don’t ask them to leave, I’ll have to. I hiss at him, You’re such a control freak. He says, You knew I was like this when you married me. The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it’s a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won’t: both dead wrong. So I send them home, then stay up nearly all night drinking and staring past the edges of the yard like a rabbit through chicken wire. What happened to those great poems I was going to set the world weeping with? Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. Tomorrow, I will rise at three A.M . and log two hours writing before Dev stumps out. I’ll take a five-mile jog, start a cheap but nutritious stew, submit a query letter to The American Scholar for an essay. If only I could be left alone for a few days to drink like I want to, I could get my papers graded. Every mom trails undone chores—dishes in the sink, laundry going wrinkly in the dryer. I lug from room to office to playground reams of ungraded essays. With one hand, I use a fork to fiddle with chicken in a skillet. With the other, my red pen marks comma blunders on the counter. The papers I hand back sport grease stains and grass stains and smudges of homemade applesauce.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  pandemonium. For a long time, I lie studying in the blue dark Warren’s angled jaw and ski-slope cheekbones. It’s shallow, I confess, but the architecture of his face never fails to transfix me. It’s the kind of face people on the street invariably asked for directions—the face of the army officer, the team captain, the star professor. Without Warren’s hands cupping my own face, I’m almost faceless. I need his body in bed and his books on my shelves anchoring me to the planet. I need him ahead of me to complete a two-mile run, else I give up and light a smoke. I need his editing skills. When he draws his pen through clunky lines, I cut them. I need his unbudgeable integrity. I mean, when a big-deal magazine requested changing some of his poems, he pulled them rather than compromise. I’d have typed mine backward in Urdu to see them into print. Underneath the worries with Warren and money and how to live runs a humming current of hurt—Daddy lying wordless, eyes cloudy. They said he wouldn’t live off the respirator, but it’s over a year now. He’s being calcified, his empty shape pressed into the sheets like a fern in lava. Ask him if he wants more juice, and he might shout out, Bacon! Part of me believes I should catch the next bus down there to start spoon-feeding him—that’s my fantasy —a daughterly sacrifice I lack the maturity to pull off, for my patience with bedpans and bent straws rarely lasts an hour. Carrying the warm jar of piss his catheter linked him to, even the short distance to the caged hospital bed set up in my girlhood room, felt like bearing death itself. Lying alongside Warren that night, I again resolve to generate income, really get serious about it, to chip in on Daddy’s nursing and still meet school loans, without ever pestering Warren again, lest that gap between our backgrounds yawn open. Money can finalize my change, I tell myself. Also, I have to never, never, never drink hard stuff. Long as I stick to beer or wine, I’ll be fine. In the morning, when Warren stirs, I’ve already gone to the bank. The mug of coffee I bring him has a twenty-dollar bill rubber-banded to the handle. If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones. But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water. Not long after, though, some of his doubts about me leak out again, and again the topic’s a disparity in how we want to live.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  This gives me a sick feeling in my chest. I look toward the door Warren disappeared through, his presence an antivenin to the snakebite of Mother’s disarray. Our family’s so inadequately small compared to the profligate Whitbreads. My own daddy’s so out of things, he probably doesn’t actually know I’m getting married. Inside, I keep trying to squash down the image of my blear-eyed daddy, since a buried part of me longs for him to be reborn all tall and sober, to loop my arm in his, to wrap my hand on his biceps, then squire me to Warren’s side. A father walks his daughter down the aisle. Such a wholly unoriginal wish could dismantle me if I permit myself to dip into it. In my head, I shoo it off like an insect. Warren gets back in the car, handing me a small paper bag over his shoulder. I fish through it for the eyedrops. Mother has her Shalimar out and is studying the cap for where the nozzle is. I tell her, They’ll be unfailingly polite. They always are. She squirts behind her ear, and the scent of rose attar touches some reptilian area of my brain, where lies whatever faint recollection of beauty I have. Warren, she says, you know what they say a mother-in-law’s job is at a wedding? I don’t, he says, pushing his glasses up his nose. Just shut up and wear beige. He actually snorts at the prospect. Mother takes my hand in her scented one. My heart was thumping so bad in my chest. I was scared to take another valium in case there was a toast or something because I’d fall into my plate. I take no comfort in sharing anxiety with my once towering, powerful mother, for any ways we favor each other feel distinctly un-bridal. I show her my throat, adding, Make me smell like you. Then we draw up into the gilded light of the Ritz, and the doorman helps me out. We enter the paneled bar to find the Whitbreads plural—six siblings, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law—scattered among the low tables. Taken together, they’re the tallest people in the room, and possibly the best looking. My chic sister and her lawyer boyfriend have been chatting equably with them over drinks when we bluster in. There’s the hubbub of shaken hands, and I can see Mother’s turned out nice and smiling. The martini that lands before me gets tossed down. Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes. The next thing I know, Lecia’s grabbing my arm as we stride up the stairs to the table, saying, What is she on? Then we’re seated at enormous tables draped with enough linen to clothe a convent.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  (Pliny, Letters 10.96) At this point Pliny was doubly alarmed. The numbers involved were very large, and interrogations, even under torture, had produced nothing of a criminal nature. There was no evidence of magic, orgy, incest, cannibalism, or any of those evils usually attributed to deviant cults by mainstream pagan religion. It was time to refer the whole matter to Trajan and his advisers back in Rome. Pliny asked three questions. Rome gave three answers—but not exactly to the same three questions. There was also one question that Pliny did not ask but Trajan answered, rebuking him implicitly and somewhat condescendingly in the process (Radice 1969:2.400–407, numbers added). Pliny to Trajan: Having never been present at any trials of the Christians, I am unacquainted with the method and limits to be observed either in examining or punishing them. [1] Whether any difference is to be made on account of age, or no distinction allowed between the youngest and the adult; [2] whether repentance admits to a pardon, or if a man has been once a Christian it avails him nothing to repent; [3] whether the mere profession of Christianity, albeit without crimes, or only the crimes associated therewith are punishable—in all these points I am greatly doubtful…. I therefore adjourned the proceedings, and betook myself at once to your counsel. For the matter seemed to me well worth referring to you,—especially considering the numbers endangered. Persons of all ranks and ages, and of both sexes are, and will be, involved in the prosecution. For this contagious superstition is not confined to the cities only, but has spread through the villages and rural districts; it seems possible, however, to check and cure it…. [M]ultitudes may be reclaimed from this error, if a door be left open to repentance. (Pliny, Letters 10.96) Trajan to Pliny: The method you have pursued, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those denounced to you as Christians is extremely proper. It is not possible to lay down any general rule which can be applied as the fixed standard in all cases of this nature. [1] No search should be made for these people; when they are denounced and found guilty they must be punished; [2] with the restriction, however, that when the party denies himself to be Christian, and shall give proof that he is not (that is, by adoring our Gods) he shall be pardoned on the ground of repentance, even though he may have formally incurred suspicion. [3] Informations without the accuser’s name subscribed must not be admitted in evidence against anyone, as it is introducing a very dangerous precedent, and by no means agreeable to the spirit of the age. (Pliny, Letters 10.97) That description by Pliny is rather extraordinary. If I had read it in a Christian writing, I probably would have attributed it to missionary exuberance or numerical propaganda. Christian numbers are said to be large enough to damage pagan economy and society.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther knew that Müntzer presented a diabolical challenge. For one thing, he was spreading his bizarre doctrines in the friendly territory of electoral Saxony. If he had tried such things in Duke George’s territory, he would not have gotten farther than the nearest dungeon. Frederick, however, was inclined to let things ride without worrying too much, but here was a case where a little more worrying might have been advisable. Luther knew that what Müntzer was preaching would likely lead to violence, and when a chapel dedicated to Mary was burned down at Mallerbach, it became clear Müntzer’s vitriolic sermons had incited it. He had already by then organized thirty members into his “secret league.” Their goal was “to stand up for the gospel, to pay no more assessments to monks and nuns, and to help expel and destroy them.”6 Müntzer eventually succeeded in persuading most of the town to follow him. He got five hundred to join his “league” before it was all over and had them swear a formal oath. Many of those who did so were not Allstedters but miners from Mansfeld or peasants from the surrounding towns. Müntzer even carved them up into military units, who prepared to repulse the princes, should they dare to step in. Luther knew that Müntzer’s time in Wittenberg had set him on this course, just as it had set Karlstadt on his, and it bothered him deeply that what was born of his own good efforts could lead to such madness. But it bothered him the more that he could not rein in what so many on the Catholic side would surely end up attributing to him. Any violence that was a result of his ideas—even if those ideas were twisted into unrecognizable pretzels that would have their own ramifications—would be traced to him, and the blame for them laid at his feet. Luther could not do much to suppress these things, but he would do what he could to clarify the difference between his position and theirs, hoping to prevent further harm. So that July, Luther published his Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit, which he dedicated to Frederick and Duke John. He knew that at some point the governing authorities would need to face the inevitable violence and he hoped to rouse them to the gathering threat. Still, Luther did not advocate the use of force against Müntzer because of his ideas. Although he would deviate from this principle in the years ahead, Luther believed in the relative freedom of religion and ideas, and he felt that the good ideas—meaning the true Word of God—would win out over the counterfeits. But he knew Müntzer was soon to step from the world of ideas into the world of action and would then have crossed the line into that territory in which the governmental authorities had the right—and much more than that, the solemn duty before God—to act.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  For as they looked about them at the condition of industrial mass society in America they could only think that the patriotic historians’ optimism had been romantic and naive. What struck these writers—amateur historians for the most part, leading figures in the many patriotic, genealogical, and historical societies that were then reaching the height of their importance in the eastern states—what struck them most forcibly was not the relentless march of progress and the broadening amplitudes of freedom but the opposite: the loss of essential qualities that had once created a more agreeable, better-ordered, freer, more comprehensible way of life. Some basic source of integrity must have been destroyed. At some point in the past a profound retrogression must have been set in motion. When and how had it happened? Some men of cosmic vision, broad learning, and imagination—most notably Henry Adams—reached beyond the whole of the modern world and located the source of the decline in such vague and distant events as the destruction of the unity of medieval culture in the twelfth century. But more ordinary American historians turned to their own recent past and found a new meaning in the earliest years of American history and in the Revolution. What a strange, anxious lot they were, these now obscure but then popular antiquarian scholars, and what romantic things they wrote. Sydney George Fisher, of Philadelphia, for example, a wealthy lawyer and sportsman descended on one side from an original Quaker founder of Pennsylvania and on the other from a Connecticut loyalist: he was obsessed with the menace of the immigrants and wrote article after article with such titles as “Alien Degradation of American Character,” “Immigration and Crime,” “Has Immigration Dried Up Our Literature?” “Has Immigration Increased Population?”—until at the age of forty he discovered history and found in a peculiar reading of the past an effective leverage over the unpleasantness of his own time which he employed relentlessly through eleven volumes. Many have “True” in their titles (The True Benjamin Franklin, The True History of the American Revolution), as if everything that had been written before was false and it had been left to him to reveal for the first time the unmythologized, unvarnished, quite miserable truth about where the American people had gone wrong.13 Or the more judicious and scholarly land conveyancer, lawyer, and judge, Mellen Chamberlain of Chelsea, Massachusetts, who became a prince, a Borgia, among American autograph collectors, and whose antiquarian and bibliographical interests led eventually to the directorship of the Boston Public Library and to innumerable small, disconnected publications in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society in which he verified signatures, dated and edited documents, traced ancient land titles, argued about the origins of the New England towns, and memorialized such neglected notables as the loyalist Daniel Leonard.14

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Throughout this entire era the colonies were Britain’s safety valves, just as later the American West would be seen as a safety valve for the relatively deprived of the eastern states. All sorts of social and political problems were involved. As early as the 1570s plans were made to transport Lancashire Catholics to Ireland to serve the queen in that borderland in exchange for toleration; and shortly thereafter a plan was floated to settle three thousand Puritans on that same frontier. Nothing came of those schemes, but in 1597 a more realistic plan was devised to settle the dissenting separatists, the Brownists, some of whom would later become famous as the American Pilgrims, on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Lord Burghley himself was interested, and the queen licensed the Pilgrims to settle there, to fish and to hunt walruses and whales—so long as they agreed to stay there, safely out of England, until they were willing to conform in religion. An advance party made it safely to the Magdalens but was fought off by hostile Basque and French fishermen, and the project was abandoned. By then the precedent was established. In the seventeenth century the government similarly acquiesced in the Pilgrims’ plan to emigrate to Virginia (their settling in Plymouth was not planned) and then to charter the Puritans’ exodus to Massachusetts. Later, the crown was even more active in chartering Penn’s extensive colony in America, in part to relieve the country of the equally obnoxious Quakers. But religious dissent was a problem of decreasing importance in the eighteenth century. Its place was taken by poverty and crime, and again the government turned to the colonies for relief. The chartering of the colony of Georgia in 1732 was an official endorsement of the strenuous efforts that philanthropists like James Oglethorpe and the Earl of Egmont were making to solve, or at least relieve, the growing problem of poverty. The Georgia colony’s twenty-one trustees were close students of Britain’s social problems; ten of them had been members of the Commons’ committee on the state of the jails (1729), and most of them were involved in efforts to relieve imprisoned debtors. By shipping the deserving poor—that is, exporting the problem—to the southern borderland of Britain’s mainland territories, they and the government hoped to ease the social problem for which they had no domestic solution, and at the same time to build a barrier against Spanish and French expansion in the South and improve Britain’s trade balance by increasing the production of colonial goods. It was a mixture of motives that would be repeated fifty-six years later in the settlement of Australia.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Instead, she had her partner, Carol, look—which in some ways is even braver than looking herself—and she looked at her partner’s. And they talked about what they saw and about how they had never before taken the time to deliberately look at and talk about their sexual bodies. And Merritt learned something remarkable, which she told me about the following week: “Carol told me she’d looked at her vulva! She was part of a feminist consciousness-raising group in the ’80s, and they all got together in a circle with their hand mirrors.” “Wow!” I said, and meant it. She held her hands out, palms up, weighing her feelings. “I don’t know why this kind of thing is so much harder for me than it is for her. When it comes to sex, I always feel like I’m teetering at the edge of a cliff with my arms windmilling around me.” The ambivalence Merritt experienced is absolutely normal for anyone whose family of origin taught them that sex should fit into a certain prescribed place in life and nowhere else. But it made sense for Merritt for other reasons, too, having to do with the way her brain is wired. I’ll talk about that in chapter 2. lips, both great and smallFemale inner labia (labia minora or “small lips”) may not be very “inner” at all, but extend out beyond the big lips—or they may tuck themselves away, hidden inside the vulva until you go looking for them. And the inner labia may be all one homogeneous color, or they may show a gradient of color, darkening toward the tips. All of that is normal and healthy and beautiful. Long, short, pink, beige, brown—all normal. The outer labia, too, vary from person to person. Some are densely hairy, with the hair extending out onto the thigh and around the anus, while others have very little hair. Some lips are quite puffy while others are relatively flush with the body. Some are the same color as the surrounding skin, and some are darker or lighter than the surrounding skin. All normal, all beautiful. As with the clitoris, the cultural view of labia doesn’t match the biological reality. Vulvas in soft-core porn may be digitally edited to conform to a specific standard of “tucked-in” labia and homogeneous coloring, to be “less detailed.”3 This means that cultural representations of vulvas are limited to a pretty narrow range. In reality, there is a great deal of variety among genitals—and there is no medical condition associated with almost any of the variability. But such limited representations of women’s bodies may actually be changing women’s perceptions of what a “normal” vulva looks like.4 So if you decide to have a look at someone else’s vulva—which I highly recommend, by the way, but only with their enthusiastic consent— you’ll notice how very, very different they all are from each other. Only rarely do you find the tidily tucked-in vulvas you see in Playboy.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Over the years, a number of people—particularly young women—have emailed me or approached me at breaks during a workshop to ask if they could talk to me in private. Without meeting my eyes, they tell me they’ve had anxiety since they were children. They tell me they’ve been in therapy since high school. And they tell me they’ve never been able to tell any therapists about the grotesque, disturbing, sometimes violent sexual thoughts that swamp their minds. One young woman told me the hidden thoughts had interfered with her relationships with close family members, from whom she felt she had to hide the thoughts at all costs—even if it meant never seeing beloved members of her immediate family. People with such intrusive thoughts are hoping I can explain how these thoughts don’t make them bad people. And I can! Such intrusive thoughts are generally viewed as a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, with anxiety manifesting not as repetitive behaviors but as repetitive thoughts. Some people have violent intrusions, some sexual, some disgusting, some religious or immoral. They don’t want to do the things they think about; on the contrary, their distress comes from the very fact that they absolutely do not want to do these things, and they’re worried that they might or that the thoughts mean that some hidden, awful part of them does want to. I learned about intrusive thoughts from comedian Maria Bamford, who produced an internet show featuring a song called “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” a cheery little ditty that celebrates how normal it is to have dark, unwanted things in our minds. Indeed, research has found that nearly everyone experiences some form of intrusive or unwanted thoughts sometimes, and about a third of people with OCD specifically have sexual intrusions. It’s anxiety manifesting as all the things we’ve been taught to fear about sex.9 And effective interventions exist. A quick internet search will offer a number of different approaches that generally involve gradually reducing the level of anxiety people feel in response to the thoughts, which in turn reduces the frequency, intensity, and perceived importance of those thoughts. If you have unwanted, intrusive, or obsessive sexual thoughts, know that you can disclose them to a qualified therapist and get evidence-based treatment.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  This level of mutual acceptance and self-acceptance is itself a specific and vital characteristic of the most exuberantly sex-positive context. It requires not simply being aware of how each person’s sexuality works, but also accepting and welcoming those sexualities, just as they are. It’s not how your sexuality works that matters; it’s how you feel about your sexuality. How your partner feels about theirs. And how you both feel about each other’s. That right there is the ultimate sex-positive context. And it’s what chapter 9 is about. But before we get there, we need to talk about orgasm. tl;drSome people have a spontaneous desire style—they want sex out of the blue. Some have a responsive desire style—they want sex only when something pretty pleasurable is already happening. The rest, about half of women, experience some combination of the two, depending on context. If partners have different levels of sexual desire, the higher desire partner doesn’t have the “right” amount of desire and the lower desire partner doesn’t have the “wrong” amount of desire, and vice versa. People vary. If spontaneous desire goes away, it’s because the context changed, not because someone is “broken.” To bring spontaneous desire back, change the context. The most important thing to know about desire is that it’s not what matters. Pleasure is what matters. If you create a context that allows your brain to interpret the world as a safe, fun, sexy, pleasurable place, you’ll create sex worth wanting. part 4ecstasy for everybodyeightorgasmPLEASURE IS THE MEASURESpectatoring is the art of worrying about your body and your sexual functioning while you’re having sex, and Merritt was a master practitioner. Rather than paying attention to the pleasant, tingly things going on in her body, her head would fill with anxious thoughts about how her breasts were moving or how she didn’t have an orgasm the last time they had sex or what her inability to focus on pleasure meant about her as a sexual person. She worried about the sex she was having, instead of liking the sex she was having. And worry is the opposite of pleasure. Worry hit the brakes. And when the brakes are on, orgasm doesn’t happen. Which is why she could easily count the number of orgasms she had had with Carol in their two decades together. And which also is why she decided that orgasm was the perfect way to practice the pleasure—and the trust in herself that pleasure required—that she wanted to build in her life. “Okay so tell me how,” she said to me. “How do I make orgasm happen?” “Ah, you don’t make orgasm happen. You allow it,” I said. She nodded—then shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  It’s also true for equilibrioception (sense of balance): Anyone who’s gotten off a ship after a week-long cruise knows that our brains adapt to movement—you spend two days wondering why the ground is moving under your feet. Nociception (sense of pain): People who’ve experienced serious pain develop a higher tolerance for future pain.9 And chronoception (sense of time): Time does indeed seem to fly when you’re having fun—or rather, when you’re in a state of “flow.”10 These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11 Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry. It’s also true for sexual stimuli. In chapter 2, I described how the dual control mechanism responds to stimuli that are either sex-related or a threat, and I talked about how we learn what stimuli goes into which category—remember the rat with a lemon fetish? But just as the smell of cheese or the taste of fat is influenced by our mental state and the external circumstances, whether a particular stimulus is interpreted as sex-related or a threat depends on the context in which we perceive it. Tickling is one example of this. Watching your partner do chores is another. If you feel overall supported and connected in your relationship, then seeing your partner doing the laundry may act as a cue for erotic thoughts. But if you’ve been feeling resentful because you’ve been doing a disproportionate amount of the chores lately, then seeing your partner do laundry may feel satisfying—“It’s about time!”—without feeling sexy. The same goes for whether something hits the brakes. For example, the extent to which a person’s sexual brakes are engaged because of fear of an STI changes depending on the perceived likelihood of infection and the perceived impact of that STI. Using a condom? Know your partner’s health history and sexual history? Trust that you’re both being monogamous? Less threat. No condom? No history? Potential for betrayal? More threat. It’s the same with social consequences, too: Potential damage to your social status, your reputation, or your relationship all act as threats, depending on how likely they seem and how negative they would be if they happened.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  I am not sure I understand that application, but the association with Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America” does not seem a compliment. Finally, Koester concludes another recent article like this: “Political, social, and environmental problems of our age will not be cured through the ever renewed search for the exemplary personality of Jesus and his wisdom, in order to legitimize the individual’s search for perfection and success. A new paradigm that defines the perimeters of a new world that is not exploitative and that also includes the voices of people outside of the Western world may eventually liberate us from the quest for the historical Jesus. It may appear then that the comparison of Paul’s proclamation of God’s failure in the world of human affairs as the turning point of the ages in comparison with the success of Augustus’s eschatological imperialism is a more worthwhile topic than the quest for the historical Jesus” (1994b:544–545). That is clear enough and quite correct about Paul’s proclamation. Rome had officially crucified Jesus under a governor’s legally mandated and imperially approved right-to-execute. But the Jewish God of cosmic justice was on the side of Jesus and therefore against Rome, despite all its utopian propaganda about Augustus’s divine descent, his personal divinization, and his establishment of Roman fertility, prosperity, and peace. Divergent eschatological visions were at war with one another, Christian gospel at war with Roman gospel. Koester is perfectly right about that. But why set the historical Paul against the historical Jesus? What if historical Jesus research is not about the “individual’s search for perfection and success” or about Jesus’ own “exemplary personality” but is about the “new world” of the Jewish God incarnated as human justice opposing the pagan God incarnated as Roman imperialism? Why set the historical Jesus, because we have to reconstruct him, against the historical Paul, as if we did not have to reconstruct him? In making those comments, however, I am deeply aware of divergent sensibilities between Koester and myself. I am Irish and Roman Catholic; he is German and Lutheran. Furthermore, we lived in very different worlds in the 1940s, and I was in the far safer (but not necessarily the more honorable) location, the protected lee of a rejected empire. That does not make either of us right and the other wrong, but it gives us different religious, political, and autobiographical sensitivities. I do not undertake historical Jesus research as a quest for “the great human or even superhuman personality” (1992:13) or for the “‘uniqueness’ of Jesus’ words and ministry” (1994b:541). Nor do I see, as Koester does, the specter of Hitler inevitably haunting such study. As an example, he rejects the term “Jesus movement” with this explicit comparison: “The word ‘church’ seems to have very negative connotations; ‘movement’ seems to be preferable today. I cannot help but remember that Hitler and the National Socialists called their endeavor a ‘movement’ (1992:6 note 14).

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Later, I’m called onto the stage, where I’m supposed to stand immobile while they read my résumé—skimpy compared to every other. Then I’m meant to shake hands with one paw while I take the check with the other. Instead, I’ve fallen into such a flop sweat that a pause in the speech causes me to grab the check, thus failing to strike for the photographers the pose of humble gratitude I’d practiced for weeks in front of a mirror. At the party, Toby introduces me to his agent, a whippet-thin blonde with silver bangles up her muscled arm. She wears a raw-silk size-zero pencil skirt and is almost exactly my sister’s height in pricey heels. She lets Lux and me tag along to the expensive dinner for Toby. At the table, I feel conspicuous not ordering a drink, and—since water glasses haven’t shown up—as everybody else hoists a glass at Toby, I feebly hold an invisible glass in the air, as my head says, Do you think they are convinced by the nonexistent drink you are faux-lifting? I look at Toby, and the fact that his eyes don’t meet mine makes me wonder if he actually asked the agent whether Lux and I could come, or are we crashing? Am I supposed to pay for this meal? Next I know, Toby holds his glass aloft again, saying, And to my old pal Mary. A few minutes after everybody’s gone back to their conversations, I blurt out to nobody special, Thanks for having us . I say it loud enough that neighboring diners look over, but nobody says anything back. Lux keeps talking to the woman on his left. About that time, a passing waiter stops beside me to lift my napkin and lower it into my lap. I keep sweatily waiting for somebody to ask me why I’m not drinking so I can fire off one of the salvos Joan and I came up with, for to an alcoholic, not drinking is conspicuously freakish. (Now I realize nobody would notice except another sot.) Maybe I’ll just say Fuck you or On second thought, maybe I will…Waiter! I look at my watch. Fewer than ten minutes have elapsed since we sat down, and the night yawns before me. I slip off to the pay phone to call Joan the Bone—no answer. Ditto Deb. Coming back to face a full wineglass, I see Lux isn’t in his seat. I stare around at Toby, his agent, his editor—their faces are at the pinched end of a telescope. At one point, I think, What if somebody says something to me? The next instant, What if somebody doesn’t ? In the bathroom, I splash some water on my neck and study how pasty I’ve gone. Plus, my nose has grown gargantuan pores—I never exfoliated! And boy am I shiny. I shift the pins at the back of my head around, but a tendril keeps springing loose on one side.