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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  For some college men, treating a sexual partner—especially one who was not suitably hot or selective—with roughness or disinterest and then bragging about it the next day became a form of image management, a preemptive strike against potential ridicule, the loss of social currency. So, when boys assured me that their friends, their frat brothers, their classmates would never assault a girl (it was always those other boys), that could feel like a very low bar: having sex that is technically “legal” is hardly the same as sex that is ethical, mutual, reciprocal, or kind. “Casual sex can be great,” a sophomore at a Los Angeles college told me. “But you can forget to treat the other person as a human being.” Boys felt less strongly than girls that the game was rigged against them; still, few felt the competitive, detached nature of hookup culture fully served them. They struggled not only with unexpected feelings of connection and vulnerability, but with other emotions: inadequacy, anxiety, insecurity, confusion, disappointment, embarrassment—none of which, as guys, they felt permission to express. That was especially true in high school, where hookup culture, while less studied (academics tend to focus on college students), truly begins. Ws and Ls Nate, a high school junior from the Bay Area, recalled sinking deeper into the couch, trying to look chill, like he was such an insider that he didn’t need to prove it by standing around with the other kids gathered in Nicole’s living room. The party was slowly filling up with students from his high school: first the sophomores, then, later, other juniors and a few seniors. The table next to him was crowded with handles of liquor, beer bottles, and a fruit-flavored malt drink called Great America that was packaged like moonshine, in mason jars. Kids were drinking shots and moking. Some were Juuling. “People at my school like to get fucked up, because they have so much pressure on them,” he told me. “So at parties they just want to fucking destroy their bodies and feel like they have no inhibitions. There is a lot of getting drunk and there’s a lot of ‘fun’ I don’t completely understand.” Nate described himself as in the middle of his school’s social scene: friends with the “popular” kids, but also with the “lower” kids. “But the hierarchy really centers around who has access to the parties,” he explained. “And I do get invited to all the parties.” Nate didn’t drink much himself, and he never got high: he wasn’t morally opposed to it; he just didn’t like the feeling of being out of control. So he usually ended up as designated driver, or taking care of the guy who was puking on the sidewalk, or “protecting” a female friend from some wasted, creepy guy’s advances, slinging an arm around her shoulder as if making a claim.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Sameer phoned his roommate, who begrudgingly cleared out—they had a rule against bringing girls home after two a.m., but Sameer pleaded, “Come on, just this once, man!”—taking his bedding with him. When they got to his dorm, Anwen removed the shorts she’d worn to the party, leaving on her leggings and tank top. She popped her contact lenses into a shot glass filled with water (never a good idea). Then she went to the bathroom. Sitting in a stall, she racked her brain for any friends she had in common with Sameer, anyone whose number might be in his contacts. What are you doing? she thought. What are you doing? Maybe she could sleep in the dorm’s common room. “But I knew he’d say that was silly: there was a bed in his room, blankets.” Her mind reeled. It was so late. She was so tired. She just wanted to sleep. Looking back now, Anwen wishes she had thought to go to campus security. She wishes she had followed the two boys back to her dorm. She wishes her friends hadn’t abandoned her. She wishes the fraternity brother who locked her stuff in his room had told her that he was leaving. She wishes she lived in an era where people still memorized their friends’ phone numbers. “So many things,” she told me. “So many things.” But none of that is what happened. Chance and choice colluded: people don’t always make the decisions that seem patently obvious in hindsight. When she returned to Sameer’s room, he had queued up Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” which Anwen had said was one of her favorite songs. He began kissing her against the closed door, scooped her onto his bed, then climbed up after her. He knew her sexual experience was limited; his was, too, but the girls he’d been with before “liked it rough,” or at least appeared to, so he began rubbing Anwen between the legs, hard. It hurt. “Oh, fuck,” he said, “it would feel so good to fuck you.” “Remember, I don’t want to have sex,” she replied. “It’s okay, I don’t have a condom,” Sameer said again. A few minutes later he told her, “Take off your shirt”—more an order than a request. She had pulled her top halfway off when he grabbed a breast and squeezed. A wave of revulsion hit her, and she jerked away, blurting, “No!” “It’s okay,” he said. “That can come later.” Sameer figured he’d try again when Anwen was more comfortable: he attributed her hesitation to nerves and inexperience. He imagined he would be “the nice guy,” a “teacher” who would help her along without judgment. He took her hand, guided it to the crotch of his sweatpants, and began to rub, then he pulled out his penis. “You should play with it,” he said. “It doesn’t bite.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I felt my eyes, that had been so wide and dazzled, grow small again in the gloom of the coach, and I began to feel, not thrilled, but rather nervous. I wondered what kind of lodgings he had found for us, and what kind of lady Mrs Dendy would be. I hoped that neither would be very grand.I need not have worried. Once we had left the West End and crossed the river, the streets grew greyer and quite dull. The houses and the people here were smart, but rather uniform, as if all crafted by the same unimaginative hand: there was none of that strange glamour, that lovely, queer variety of Leicester Square. Soon, too, the streets ceased even to be smart, and became a little shabby; each corner that we passed, each public house, each row of shops and houses, seemed dingier than the one before. Beside me, Kitty and Mr Bliss had fallen into conversation; their talk was all of theatres and contracts, costumes and songs. I kept my face pressed to the window, wondering when we should ever leave behind these dreary districts and reach Greasepaint Avenue, our home.At last, when we had turned into a street of tall, flat-roofed houses, each with a line of blistered railings before it and a set of sooty blinds and curtains at its windows, Mr Bliss broke off his talk to peer outside and say that we were almost there. I had to look away from his kind and smiling face, then, to hide my disappointment. I knew that my first, excited vision of Brixton - that row of golden make-up sticks, our house with the carmine-coloured roof - was a foolish one; but this street looked so very grey and mean. It was no different really, I suppose, from the ordinary roads that I had left behind in Whitstable; it was only strange - but therefore slightly sinister.As we stepped from the carriage I glanced at Kitty to see if she, too, felt any stirrings of dismay. But her colour was as high, and her eyes as damp and shining, as before; she only gazed at the house to which our chaperon now led us, and gave a little, tight-lipped smile of satisfaction.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But I decided to answer the simple question by putting together, layer upon layer, in as simple a fashion as I could, what I thought might help someone who really wanted to find the way to Jesus, to Jesus as he really was, and so to find the way through Jesus both to God himself and to a life in which “following Jesus” would make sense. The book then falls, more or less, into three parts. Part One consists of the first five chapters, in which I try to explain what the key questions are, why they matter, and why we today find them difficult to answer. Then, in the central part of the book, Part Two (Chapters 6–14), I try, as simply as I can, to say what I think Jesus’s public career was all about, what he was trying to accomplish, and how he went about it. At this point, to be honest, the material is so rich and dense that I have found myself, like a gardening expert given half an hour to guide a visitor around the Chelsea Flower Show, both spoiled for choice as to what to talk about and anxious about maintaining some shape and direction to the conducted tour. I found it necessary, here and there, to indulge in the cinematic technique of “flashbacks,” and indeed “flash-forwards,” taking readers away from Jesus for a moment to remark on other leaders or would-be leaders in Jewish movements of the period. (I didn’t want to put those up front, or readers might have become tired, and might have despaired of ever arriving at Jesus himself. By placing them where I have, I trust they illuminate Jesus rather than distract attention from him.) In this section I ask readers to try various thought experiments. This is absolutely necessary, because first-century Jews thought very differently from the way we do now—and, indeed, from the ways in which other first-century people such as the Greeks and the Romans thought. We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about. All this brings us, in the end, to Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension and the meaning of those events. Throughout the whole book, as will quickly become apparent, I have done my best to explore the meaning of the phrase Jesus used as the great slogan for his whole project, the “kingdom of God.”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  The bus came to a stop in the church parking lot, and Will walked to the front of the bus. He thanked everybody for coming and urged them to stay involved. “It’s a long road we’re traveling,” he said, “but tonight showed me what we can do when we put our minds to it. That good feeling you got right now, we got to keep it going till we got this neighborhood back on its feet.” A few people smiled and offered an amen. But as I stepped off the bus, I heard a woman behind me whispering to her friend, “I don’t need to hear about the neighborhood, girl. Where these jobs they talking about?” The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion. For the next three weeks, I worked day and night, setting up and conducting my interviews. It was harder than I’d expected. There was the internal resistance I felt whenever I picked up the phone to set up the interviews, as images of Gramps’s insurance sales calls crept into my mind: the impatience that waited at the other end of the line, the empty feeling of messages left unreturned. Most of my appointments were in the evening, home visits, and the people were tired after a full day’s work. Sometimes I would arrive only to find that the person had forgotten our appointment, and I’d have to remind him or her of who I was as I was eyed suspiciously from behind a half-opened door. Still, these were minor difficulties. Once they were overcome, I found that people didn’t mind a chance to air their opinions about a do-nothing alderman or the neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. The more interviews I did, the more I began to hear certain recurring themes. I learned, for example, that most of the people in the area had been raised farther north or on Chicago’s West Side, in the cramped black enclaves that restrictive covenants had created for most of the city’s history. The people I talked to had some fond memories of that self-contained world, but they also remembered the absence of heat and light and space to breathe—that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in physical labor.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  How drunk had Yale been? What had happened, exactly, and on what bed and when? He’d been careful about himself, protecting Roman. They hadn’t been careful the other way. Because Roman was a virgin. Because Roman was a virgin. Yale said, “Tell me.” “He’s not that hot, chill out. I met him last year at my friend Michael’s lecture at the Cultural Center. He’s got this whole tortured artist thing going on, like he just suddenly has to leave the room and be alone.” “Oh.” Yale relaxed. “I thought you met him at a bathhouse or something.” “God, Yale, I go other places. I mean—” he laughed, leaned close “—I ploughed him like a fresh spring field, but we definitely met at the Cultural Center.” Yale let Teddy step ahead of him in line. The park was more sound than color now, more vibration than reality. If he opened his eyes, he’d be in bed next to Charlie, and it would be last summer. He told Teddy he’d be back and he stepped toward Roman’s group, which was still quite far away. He needed to see that it wasn’t Roman. The mayor was still talking, and the air still smelled like hot dogs, and yes, it was Roman standing there looking bored, just like his bored and beautiful friends. Yale might have run home and hidden under his blankets, but instead he made his way past a pack of leatherdykes, past the guy with the bird, and straight to Roman. Roman tried to angle his body away, a teenager who didn’t want his friends knowing that this embarrassing person was his dad. Yale said, “May I have a word?” One of the boys in black hooted; the other said, “Who is she?” Roman opened his mouth as if he wanted to make an excuse not to talk, but then he wiped his brow with the back of his arm and stepped away with Yale. Yale didn’t care if Teddy looked over and saw them together. He was far beyond caring. He said, “We’ll make this really quick. Did you misrepresent yourself?” “I’m sorry?” “I should have been—I should have asked you more questions. I should have made you take some kind of written exam. Is this what you do? You go around doing the confused Mormon act? Like, role-playing?” Roman said, “What are you talking about?” His friends were watching, snickering. They were too far away to hear. “I’m a Mormon. That wasn’t a lie.” “But you’re a Mormon who sleeps with a lot of men. Who’s been doing this for a long time.” “Well, no. Not a lot. I mean, I used to. I was trying to be monogamous.” For a second Yale thought Roman meant monogamy with him, that their hazy midnight assignations were meant to be some kind of steady relationship, but that made no sense. And Roman kept talking. “Or, like, I had been, and then he was—like, he felt kind of suffocated, I guess.

• From The Art of Memoir

  feet wet. You’ll work up to it. Let’s face it: you dread this scene as the rich dread tax time, as demons dread Jesus. It’s a haunter. You’re going to write it now. Don’t get me wrong: your goal is not to finish these pages. The opposite. This draft will land in a folder you keep. I want you to suffer through sitting in a room for some hours with your worst memories. But you’ll start with a centering exercise in an attempt to get underneath your normal ego and into some deeper place, more receptive to the truth. Meditation as a technique to loosen creative powers fills boatloads of books. There are millions of techniques: counting your breaths one to ten, following your breath, a mantra, visualization, studying a passage of sacred writing. In getting tough-guy undergrads to meditate, I found the story of Zen basketball master Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops useful. Students who’d otherwise refuse to close their eyes and get woo-woo in class went along behind Jackson’s example. Phil writes about playing as a young man from a warrior’s ego— all rage for dominance. But in the NBA, as he reaches the far edge of his natural physical talent, he chooses to cultivate a mental edge. Through Zen meditation, Jackson starts to notice how much noise is in his head during a game, including anger (“That #$%^& Chamberlain. Next time he’s dead meat.”) and self-blame (“Phil, a sixth-grader could’ve made that shot!”). The litany was endless. However the simple act of becoming mindful in the frenzied parade of thoughts, paradoxically, began to quiet my mind down. . . . Yogi Berra once said about baseball: “How can you think and hit at the same time?” The same is true with basketball, except everything’s happening much faster. The same is true of writing. To tap in to your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little. For me, my mind is constantly checking where I am in line— comparing myself to others, or even to a former self, racing, fretting, conniving to get ahead. But underneath that is another self that quietly notices all that. A friend called to say she was going crazy

• From Wild (2012)

  Within an instant, I was among them, hopping, scrambling, leaping, and hurling myself, my pack, my tarp, and everything that sat on it into the brush beyond the beach, swatting frogs from my hair and the folds of my T-shirt as I went. I couldn’t help but squash a few beneath my bare feet. Finally safe, I stood watching them from the frog-free perimeter, the frantic motion of their little dark bodies apparent in the blazing moonlight. I checked my shorts pockets for errant frogs. I gathered my things into a little clear patch that seemed flat enough for my tent and pulled it from my pack. I didn’t need to see what I was doing. My tent was up with the flick of my wrist. I crawled out of it at 8:30 the next morning. Eight thirty was late for me, like noon in my former life. And this 8:30 felt like noon in my former life too. Like I’d been out drinking into the wee hours. I half stood, looking around groggily. I still didn’t have to pee. I packed up and pumped more filthy water and walked north beneath the scorching sun. It was even hotter than it had been the day before. Within an hour, I almost stepped on another rattlesnake, though it too warned me off politely with its rattle. By late afternoon any thought of making it all the way to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park by day’s end had been shot down entirely by my late start, my throbbing and blistered feet, and the staggering heat. Instead, I took a short detour off the trail to Cassel, where my guidebook promised there would be a general store. It was nearly three by the time I reached it. I took off my pack and sat on a wooden chair on the store’s old-fashioned porch, nearly catatonic from the heat. The big thermometer in the shade read 102 degrees. I counted my money, feeling on the verge of tears, knowing that no matter how much I had, it wouldn’t be enough for a Snapple lemonade. My desire for one had grown so large that it wasn’t even a longing anymore. It was more like a limb growing from my gut. It would cost 99 cents or $1.05 or $1.15—I didn’t know how much exactly. I knew I had only 76 cents and that wouldn’t be enough. I went into the store anyway, just to look. “You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked. “Yeah,” I said, smiling at her. “Where you from?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Piet took a more bracing line—“you really mustn’t take yourself so seriously. You’ve probably just been working too hard. Or it could be a side effect of the medication. I’ll take you off the Largactil for a while and we’ll have a go at Librium. But I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense about padded cells and the rest of it. Believe me, if I committed everyone in Oxford who had periods of forgetfulness, the hospitals would be full to overflowing and city life would grind to a halt. This kind of mental abstraction is an occupational hazard for scholars. You’ve all got your minds on higher things, supposedly. You’re just not focused on mundane reality. Try to get a sense of perspective about this.” I stared mutinously at the carpet, unconvinced. I was not and never had been in the least absentminded. I didn’t forget things; I had an almost abnormally good memory. I could—and still can— recount entire conversations years after they have taken place, recall exactly what everybody was wearing and what we had eaten for lunch. I didn’t float around in an academic haze. These were not bouts of forgetfulness but lapses into a form of unconsciousness, when I was quite compos mentis enough to boil a kettle or cross a road safely, but seemed unaware of what I was doing. This must, surely, be a symptom of something sinister. And yet a part of me longed to believe Dr. Piet. It would be so wonderful if I really were simply behaving like a regular scholar. It would be such a relief to be typical for a change, instead of a freak. And Dr. Piet seemed to have no doubts at all; maybe he really did see a lot of this. “And in any case,” he was saying, taking off his glasses and leaning seriously across the desk, “all these symptoms that you’re producing are just a smoke screen. They’re distractions from the real issue: the problems that drove you into the convent in the first place. You’re taking refuge in the dramatic and the exotic because they make you feel important, whereas, in truth, there is nothing very special about your difficulties. They all spring from identity issues, gender problems, and parental conflicts that are very common indeed. Shared by half the population, in fact. But you can’t bear to be so banal. No, you have to turn it all into some kind of Gothic trauma: convents, visions, voices, satanic terror—and now sleepwalking! Anything rather than be ordinary. Because as long as you keep producing these ‘interesting’ psychic states, you are postponing the moment when you have to accept the unwelcome fact that when push comes to shove, you’re not that interesting! You’re just another brainy girl who is having problems accepting her femininity.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I needed a rest. I was in a convalescent state, and was simply not fit enough for anything more ambitious. I had been fortunate to get this job, I repeated to myself over and over again, and I must just settle for what I had. Not hope to turn again. Find strength in what remains behind. Yet the location of my new flat showed that I had not really settled for this at all. Highbury, in North London, on the other side of the city, was miles from my new school. There were, I thought, sensible reasons for my choice. Because of my epilepsy, my doctors told me firmly, driving was out of the question. Southeast London is badly served by public transport: Dulwich is not connected to the underground railway, and without a car, life is very difficult there. Most of the new friends I had made during the last few months lived in North London, and, I argued, they were going to be very important to me now. If I could not have a satisfying career, at least I could have a good social life. But the real reason for choosing Highbury was that I did not want to live anywhere near the school. In the evening, as I headed north, my heart became lighter with every mile, and when the bus finally lurched into Rosebury Avenue, passed the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and began the approach to Islington, I felt a new woman. Conversely, as the bus crept through the morning traffic, passed the Houses of Parliament, and crossed the Thames at Westminster Bridge, I felt gloomier by the minute. In one sense, it was crazy to live so far away from my work. The journey was horrendous. Because the mortgage gobbled up much of my meager salary, I could not afford to travel either by tube or by the overground train, which would have cut the trip in half. Instead, I had to rely on a most unreliable bus that took me to Southeast London by an extraordinarily circuitous route. In the morning, I had to leave the house shortly after 6:30, looking most peculiar in a moth-eaten fur coat, which had once belonged to my grandmother (I could not afford a new winter coat), my face glistening with baby oil to protect my skin from the elements (I could not afford to waste makeup on the other passengers of bus 172). If all went well (and all too often the journey did not go well—the bus would fail to arrive, and once even broke down), I would arrive in Herne Hill at about 8:15, and then had to walk a mile to the school. In the evening, I sometimes had to wait for over an hour for the wretched bus. But I felt that all this was worthwhile. I wanted to put myself at some distance from my new job, because I knew that it was doing me no good at all.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I took her to the restaurant at the Meridien. As we walked there, we followed some deep unwritten law adapted from business practice, a law that enjoins against any discussion of the main subject until a certain number of random-seeming conversational topics have arisen and been dealt with and a context of cool detachment thereby established. We talked about the rise and fall of shoe-store chains and the merits of various kinds of women’s shoes and whether women’s shoe salesmen were invariably fetishists. (Joyce’s own shoes were great-looking gray flats with sexy side-buckles.) But as soon as we got some wine, Joyce said. “Now: I want you to explain to me in detail how you did that tape so fast.” “If I tell you, will you tell anyone?” I asked. “You can’t know this about me,” Joyce said, “but I never, ever tell anyone anything that was revealed to me in confidence.” “Good—I want to believe you. I’ve listened to your voice so much transcribing your tapes that I think I have unusual insights into your character.” “You should believe me,” said Joyce. “I do. No—I think the problem really is whether you will believe me.” “The only way to find out is to try me,” said Joyce. So I told her that at various periods in my life, starting way back in fourth grade, I’d been able to disengage myself from time. I told her briefly about the race-track transformer, the thread going through my callus into the washing machine, about the rubber-band stretcher and the mechanical pencil, and about pushing up my glasses. Joyce laughed. “And this morning? How did you do it this morning?” “I just snapped my fingers. I won’t do it now, but whenever I snap my fingers, the entire universe immediately pauses for me, like a stretch limo waiting for me on the street while I run some errand. I spent probably, oh, an hour and a half doing your tape, with the universe in pause-mode, and then I snapped my fingers to turn it back on again and I went over to your desk and delivered the work. And before that I’d snapped and taken over an hour to go for a walk. I went down to the Gap and browsed a little. So it’s really around ten o’clock at night for me.” “You must be starving,” said Joyce. “I know I am. Some bread?” “Thanks.” Chewing, she regarded me. “Do you have more to say?” “Yes.” I had felt confident, even cocky, moments before, but I now noticed that my hands were unsteady as I stuffed a piece of bread in my mouth. “I’ve never told anyone what I’m telling you,” I said. “I tried to tell someone obliquely, but it wasn’t a success.” Joyce said, “Why are you telling me, then? I mean, I’m delighted that you are—I think. But don’t you want to continue to keep all this to yourself if you’ve kept it to yourself for this long?”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Find someone to sweep me away somewhere. The problem is that I have no time to do interesting stuff, because I’m so busy doing stuff that’s uninteresting. Actually, on Saturdays I go to a botanical drawing class at the Arnold Arboretum.” “Oh, well there, that’s a positive step,” I said. “I haven’t drawn a plant in years. Is it fun?” “Yes,” said Joyce. “Plants sit still. It’s like meditation, but it’s better, because you’re thinking about the plant, and not about yourself.” I shook my head sadly. “I wish I had more art in my life right now. I did allow some medical researchers to paint reflective paint on several parts of my body a few months ago. Does that count as an artistic experience?” “I should think so,” said Joyce. She asked what the researchers were trying to find out. I told her it had to do with my carpal-tunnel problem. “They were trying to figure out how much of my problem was due to typing and how much was due to other factors.” “Like what other factors? You know I have a touch of carpal, too,” she confided. “I’m sorry. The other main factor was—well—it’s this hobby of mine, something I do in my spare time.” “Oh?” she said. “In fact,” I said, “I have to talk to you about it.” “About—?” It was definitely time to ask Joyce out. Her expression had identifiable elements of puzzled, provoked interest. Her eyes were—I think this is the only word for what they were doing—they were shining. Yet what would the look on her face be when she learned that I had already Dropped in on her apartment?I needed a moment to collect my thoughts. Without blinking, I softly snapped my fingers. I relaxed. The easy thing to do would be to undress her now: if I undressed her now and stood on the desk and touched the tip of her nose with my erect stain-stick or stroked her cheek with it in a friendly way, I knew that I would phrase my request for a date more confidently. But I didn’t want to cheat and do that. I could go back to her apartment and lie on her bed and gain strength and confidence from having been there again. But no—the whole point of this date was for me not to trespass unasked. I needed a distraction.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  He wandered into the kitchen, where his friend Kyle, who was definitely cross-faded (that is, both drunk and stoned), stood on a chair aiming the contents of a can of Sprite at a shot glass on the floor below and, much to the amusement of everyone around him, missing entirely. Nate took out his phone and made a Snapchat video. At sixteen, reputation meant everything to Nate, specifically his reputation as a guy. Certain things, he explained, could cement your status: playing sports, posting funny videos, getting drunk, and, of course, hooking up. “The whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it,” he said. “And there’s this race for ‘experience,’ because if you get behind, then by the time you do have the opportunity to hook up with a girl she’ll have hit it with, like, five guys already. Then she’s going to know how to do things and you won’t and that’s a problem if she tells people you’ve got floppy lips or don’t know how to get her bra off. “So, yeah, if you have a girlfriend, that’s okay,” he continued. “Maybe that’s a nine out of ten. But if you can hook up with random girls? That’s a ten out of ten. So it’s like you need to be hooking up to be a man, and you need to be good at hooking up to be a man. But how am I supposed to learn how to be ‘good’ at hooking up without hooking up?” Nate was a lanky boy with dark, liquid eyes and hair that resisted all attempts at taming: not the best-looking guy among his classmates, maybe, but certainly not the worst. Still, he’d hooked up with only three girls since ninth grade—making out for maybe ten or fifteen minutes with each of them, maybe lifting their shirts—and none had wanted a repeat. That had left him shaken, worried about his skills. “I’m afraid of intimacy,” he told me earnestly. “It’s a real self-esteem thing.” “Intimacy” was, perhaps, a poor choice of word; it would be more accurate to say that Nate was uncomfortable having drunken sexual interactions with girls he did not know or trust. Yet that was the only form of “intimacy” that genuinely counted among his friends. While girls struggled to find the magic middle ground between “prude” and “slut,” boys were pushed to be as sexually active as possible, to knock out their firsts regardless of the circumstances or how they felt about their partners. It was all about checking the right boxes, credentialing oneself. “Guys need to prove themselves to their guys,” Nate said. “So to do that, you’re going to be dominating. You’re going to maybe push. Because it’s like the girl is just there as a means for him to get off and a means for him to brag. That’s what you’ve been taught by your friends.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But that is what the stories in the Bible are all about. That’s what the story of Jesus was, and is, all about. That is the real challenge, and skeptics aren’t the only ones who find clever ways to avoid it. Once we begin to see beyond these three distracting angles of vision, then, and grasp the story in its own terms, we find ourselves compelled forward into the narrative again. If the time is fulfilled, what will happen to bring even this fulfilled-time moment to its proper conclusion? If Jesus is behaving as though he were the Temple in person, what will this mean both for the existing Temple and for his followers? And if, through his work, new creation is breaking into the world, how is it going to make any headway against the apparently still all-powerful forces of corruption, evil, and death itself? 8 From V. Sander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, trans. Sr. Gabriel Anne (London: SPCK, 1975), pp. 15–16, as quoted in Roger Pooley and Philip Seddon, The Lord of the Journey (London: Collins, 1986), p. 51. W Chapter 12 At the Heart of the Storm ITH ALL OF THIS now on the table, we return to the perfect storm: to the buildup of pressure from the Roman Empire in one direction, the thousand-year hope of Israel from another direction, and the cyclone itself, the strange and powerful purposes of God, sweeping in from yet a third angle. The gale of imperial pressure was bearing down on the Middle East. Some Jews, long before, had seen the Romans as potential allies against more immediate and localized enemies, but most now recognized Rome as the latest and perhaps the nastiest in a long sequence of pagan overlords stretching back half a millennium to Babylon and, a millennium before that again, to Egypt. But that recognition simply increased the high- pressure system of Jewish hopes, since the great Exodus story, celebrated time and time again, reminded Israel that when the tyrants did their worst, God would win the victory, liberate his people, and come to live among them once more. How easy, then, to assume that the hurricane of divine purpose would swing around and simply reinforce the high-pressure system of Jewish hope, instead of coming into the picture from a worryingly oblique angle, as had happened all too often in the past. How convenient it would be if God, coming back at last to launch his kingdom on earth as in heaven, were simply to validate and fulfill the national hope as it stood!

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Just as the early church refused to collapse its faith into a dualism in which the created order itself, the world of space, time, and matter, was evil and to be shunned, so it refused to collapse its witness to Jesus’s kingdom into a political dualism in which the rulers and authorities were straightforwardly wicked and to be condemned (or, as in Gnosticism and much modern Western spirituality, irrelevant and to be ignored). The only exception—which is obviously important—comes where the rulers actually divinize themselves; then they become demonic and shift into a different category altogether, as we see happening in Revelation 13. Of course, the church will sometimes get it wrong. The church must exercise a prophetic gift toward the world, but this will require further prophetic ministries within the church itself, to challenge and correct as well as to endorse what has been said. And all would-be prophetic ministries are subject to further scrutiny; not for nothing does John warn his readers to “test the spirits,” since many false prophets have gone out into the world (1 John 4:1–6). The rule of thumb, interestingly enough, is to look back to Jesus himself. Do the voices that are being raised confess him as Messiah, as having “come in the flesh”? Do these would-be prophecies, in other words, reflect the truth of Jesus’s kingdom really arriving “on earth as in heaven,” or do they lead the church away from that reality and into the seductively safe space of detached “religion”? There was, after all, plenty of “religion” around in the ancient world, and much of it was of a sort that was deeply out of tune with the dangerous message of Jesus. The Roman Empire could tolerate any number of spiritualities, mysticisms, and otherworldly hopes. They threatened nobody. John, in line with the other New Testament writings, was holding on to the confession of faith according to which the one true God had acted uniquely and decisively in the world, the material world, in and as Jesus, Israel’s Messiah. That was, and is, fighting talk. This, then, is a central and often ignored part of the meaning of Jesus’s kingdom for today. Each generation and each local church needs to pray for its civic leaders. Granted the wide variety of forms of government, types of constitutions, and so forth that obtain across the world, each generation and each local church needs to figure out wise and appropriate ways of speaking the truth to power.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We have the four “gospels,” written later by people who believed passionately that what Jesus had done and said, coupled with his death and what happened afterwards, were of massive ongoing significance. The gospels are highly detailed; one of the problems of writing the present book has been trying to decide what to leave out. They are clearly written from particular (pro-Jesus) points of view. But, unlike today’s historian studying JFK in his actual context, we have simply a history book written forty or fifty years later (by Josephus, an aristocratic Jew who went over to the Roman side in the war of AD 66–70) and a scattering of other material, bits and pieces, tracts, coins, letters, and so forth. Out of these very disparate sources we have to reconstruct the setting in which what Jesus did and said made the sense it did, so much sense that some thought he was God’s Messiah and others thought he had to be killed at once. If we don’t make the effort to do this reconstruction, we will, without a shadow of doubt, assume that what Jesus did and said makes the sense it might have made in some other context—perhaps our own. That has happened again and again. I believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as skepticism itself. This tropical storm—the challenge of writing history about Jesus—would be threatening enough even without the cultural pressures of the western wind (modernist skepticism) and the high-pressure system to the north (would-be “Christian” conservatism). Or, if you like, angry voices from the left, angry voices from the right, and a major historical puzzle sweeping in on us with full force. If, trying to make things simple, we fail to recognize this multilayered complexity, we will simply repeat the age-old mistake of imagining Jesus in our own image or at least placing him, by implication, in our own culture. And part of the whole point of the Christian message is that what happened back then, what happened to Jesus, what happened through him, was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated piece of history. Hence the perfect storm of present-day discussion. I have on my desk as I write two brand-new books about Jesus, one written by the pope himself and another by a well-known English skeptic. Both are learned, sophisticated, engaging. They cannot both be true. Behind me are twenty shelves of books about Jesus and the gospels written over the last two hundred years. They cannot all be true either. What are we to do? Faced with this massive storm brewing, some earnestly advise us to stay in the harbor.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  How easy, then, to assume that the hurricane of divine purpose would swing around and simply reinforce the high-pressure system of Jewish hope, instead of coming into the picture from a worryingly oblique angle, as had happened all too often in the past. How convenient it would be if God, coming back at last to launch his kingdom on earth as in heaven, were simply to validate and fulfill the national hope as it stood! But one prophet after another, one psalm after another had indicated that things were not necessarily going to work quite that neatly, and indeed that they might not work that way at all. Israel had had, in the past, a bad habit of allowing national expectation and aspiration to get out of line with the divine purpose; perhaps that had happened again. Certainly John the Baptist had thought so. All the signs are that Jesus thought so too and had no hesitation in saying so. His kingdom-of-God movement was then aimed not only (like all kingdom-of-God movements) against the might of pagan empire and the forces of greedy paganized behavior within Israel itself; it was also aimed at subverting the way in which the national hope was being conceived and expressed. Jesus spoke for a divine hurricane that was approaching from quite a different angle to both the Roman gale and the Jewish high-pressure system. He was therefore walking into the perfect storm. Rome was brooding in the background, its imperial needs and ambitions ready to enforce themselves in the usual way. Israel was celebrating yet another Passover, another freedom festival, and longing for national liberty and victory over paganism. And God, the God whom Jesus called “Abba, father,” was apparently sending him on a mission that was neither of the above, that would be opposed by both, and that would appear to end in abject and horrible failure. If we can hold this picture in our minds, we are well on the way to understanding who Jesus was and why he did what he did. The best description of how this storm reached its height is, I think, the account in John 18–19 of what happens when Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, engages in conversation with Jesus. It seems to be, in theory, a kind of judicial hearing, but the conversation constantly threatens to lapse into a sharp-edged discussion about worldviews, with the chief priests looking on and giving their point of view as well. That gives us the three-angled picture I am talking about. But before we can come back to that, we must look at two other pictures. First, in the present chapter, we must examine the key places in Israel’s scriptures where the perfect storm seems to be anticipated or even predicted. Second, in the next chapter, we must look at Jesus’s own actions over the course of the last few days before his execution. Isaiah’s Servant

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The doctor dismissed these worries as excessive but agreed that I was not very well. He talked sagely about anxiety attacks, told me that these things happened, were fairly common, and could easily be dealt with. After all, I had been under a strain; I was probably working too hard. In my final year now, was I? Exams next summer? Yes, people often got het up about these things. But in view of my . . . er . . . history, it might be a good idea to go and see a specialist. He knew a very good chap at the Littlemore Hospital. Somebody would write to me in due course to set up an appointment. Good idea to talk things over, perhaps take some medication—only temporarily, of course—to get rid of these bouts of panic, and then I’d soon be on my feet. The Littlemore. One of Oxford’s two psychiatric hospitals. My heart sank. I had seen it coming, but now that the process had been set in motion, it felt like a real defeat. Psychiatry had certainly not been part of the convent ethos. The very idea of “talking things over” with anyone was anathema. But I could see no alternative. The way both the doctor and the college nurse had taken refuge immediately in cliché when confronted with my predicament indicated that they felt out of their depth. I needed expert help, but I still shrank from exposing the mess of my life to a stranger, who would examine it clinically and make his own appraisal, and I hated the prospect of being known to be mentally ill. It was partly to prevent this, I suppose, that I started to become more reclusive and reserved. I was afraid of experiencing one of these uncanny episodes when I was with other people. I had lost confidence. Where previously I had felt only shy and socially inhibited, I could now place no trust in either my body or my mind. I no longer took it for granted that I could get through a party or a quiet evening with friends without succumbing to this malady, and indeed, I had noticed that the flickering lighting to which people seemed so strangely addicted these days made me feel very odd indeed. And so, just as I had started to put out feelers to the world, I began to withdraw again.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Hence the tub I had permitted myself tonight. For lunch I consumed two pieces of crispbread covered with cottage cheese (again, one carton had to last the week). So I never actually stopped eating—just cut it back, and the results were gratifying. I had really started to lose weight. This had begun quite deliberately. I knew that I was not anorexic like Rebecca, because that was an illness that was beyond one’s conscious control. I, however, was choosing of my own free will not to eat. I was often ravenously hungry, and would sometimes allow myself a piece of real toast and butter, which, if I had been truly anorexic, I told myself, would have been quite impossible. And I was not driven by any ulterior or unconscious motive. My purpose was, I believed, simple and pragmatic: I wanted to save money. Money had become a major issue. I had never handled money much before. In the convent, we had owned nothing but everything had been provided, and the same had been true while I had lived in St. Anne’s as an undergraduate. At the beginning of each term, when we received our grant checks from the government, we paid a fixed sum to the college for bed and board. Our rooms were cleaned for us and meals were served three times a day. But now I had to buy my own food and manage my own budget, and I found this obscurely frightening. I had started to panic about the future. Academic jobs were notoriously hard to get and my present scholarship would last for only three years. What would happen then? If I couldn’t get a post as a university teacher, whatever would become of me? I was trained for nothing else, and at twenty-six, I was really too old to start again. There was school teaching, of course, but I knew that I did not want to do that. There was one precaution that I could take, however: I could save money. If I built up a reserve fund, I could perhaps hang on for a few years until I finished my doctorate and was eligible for the coveted academic post. Then I would be set up for life and could eat and spend whatever I wanted. I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Yes, I would continue to take him to Blackfriars. I did not believe in any of it anymore; God had finally departed from my life; but it would do me no harm to sit for a while every week with those good people. And giving Jacob this new chance would be a positive thing to do. He had so few pleasures, and when he had found something that he so clearly relished, it would be cruel to take it away from him. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do on Sunday mornings. In fact, I really didn’t have anything else to do in my life at all. 4. Consequently I Rejoice I have no idea how it happened, but it was the result of a wor-rying new development. At least, it was of concern to me. Dr. Piet had greeted the news with his usual nonchalance, but this latest symptom had been yet another sign to me that my mind was breaking down completely. I had started to lose control over my actions—only for a short period of time, and only infrequently, but I still found it very disturbing. The first time it occurred, I had been working in my room in Manor Place and decided that it was time for coffee. “Another cup, Karen?” Nanny smiled as I came into the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle. “You must be thirsty this morning!” “Sorry, Nanny? What do you mean?” Nanny looked puzzled, as well she might. “Well, you were here just half an hour ago.” I must have looked blank. “I saw you going upstairs with your mug while I was tidying the drawing room. Surely you remember, Karen?” she added, disturbed about her own powers of memory. “I saw you quite distinctly,” she added, to convince herself as much as anything. “Oh yes, of course. I do apologize, Nanny. I was miles away.” Poor Nanny, I thought, as I returned to my room. She was getting on in years, and old people were notoriously forgetful. But when I opened the door to my room, I saw the mug on the windowsill; when I examined it, I found it full of coffee that was not yet entirely cold. Try as I would, I could not recall making it. I must have gone downstairs, boiled the water, poured it onto the coffee granules, and returned to my desk. And I had no recollection at all of any of this. Then, a few weeks later, I found myself unexpectedly sitting in the English Faculty Library. There I was, at a table in the upstairs reading room, with a copy of the journal Notes and Queries (known to us irreverently as Quotes and Drearies) open in front of me. And again, I had no recollection of leaving the house, taking the short walk down Manor Place, crossing the road, and entering the library. No recollection at all.