Confusion

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 Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Personally, I have always found the term “gender identity” to be rather misleading. After all, identifying as something, whether it be as a woman, a Democrat, a Christian, a feminist, a cat person, or a metalhead, seems to be a conscious, deliberate choice on our part, one that we make in order to better describe how we think we fit into the world. Thus, with regard to transsexuals, the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex. The main reason I make this distinction between gender identity and subconscious sex is that it best explains my own personal experiences. I did not have the quintessential trans experience of always feeling that I should have been female. For me, this recognition came about more gradually. The first memories I have of being trans took place early in my elementary school years, when I was around five or six. By this time, I was already consciously aware of the fact that I was physically male and that other people thought of me as a boy. During this time, I experienced numerous manifestations of my female subconscious sex: I had dreams in which adults would tell me I was a girl; I would draw pictures of little boys with needles going into their penises, imagining that the medicine in the syringe would make that organ disappear; I had an unexplainable feeling that I was doing something wrong every time I walked into the boys’ restroom at school; and whenever our class split into groups of boys and girls, I always had a sneaking suspicion that at any moment someone might tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, what are you doing here? You’re not a boy.” I wasn’t sure what to make of these feelings at the time. After all, I was obviously a boy—everybody thought so. And unlike other MTF spectrum children, I never really wanted to take part in girlish activities, such as playing house. Being that, like most elementary school children, my understanding of “girl” and “boy” was largely based on gender preferences in toys, activities, and interests, it wasn’t clear to me how to reconcile my vague, subconscious feelings with my passion for dinosaurs and my desire to be a major league baseball player when I grew up.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  25 Knowing Momma, I knew that I never knew Momma. Her African-bush secretiveness and suspiciousness had been compounded by slavery and confirmed by centuries of promises made and promises broken. We have a saying among Black Americans which describes Momma's caution. “If you ask a Negro where he's been, he'll tell you where he's going.” To understand this important information, it is necessary to know who uses this tactic and on whom it works. If an unaware person is told a part of the truth (it is imperative that the answer embody truth), he is satisfied that his query has been answered. If an aware person (one who himself uses the stratagem) is given an answer which is truthful but bears only slightly if at all on the question, he knows that the information he seeks is of a private nature and will not be handed to him willingly. Thus direct denial, lying and the revelation of personal affairs are avoided. Momma told us one day that she was taking us to California. She explained that we were growing up, that we needed to be with our parents, that Uncle Willie was, after all, crippled, that she was getting old. All true, and yet none of those truths satisfied our need for The Truth. The Store and the rooms in back became a going-away factory. Momma sat at the sewing machine all hours, making and remaking clothes for use in California. Neighbors brought out of their trunks pieces of material that had been packed away for decades in blankets of mothballs (I'm certain I was the only girl in California who went to school in watermarked moiré skirts and yellowed satin blouses, satin-back crepe dresses and crepe de Chine underwear). Whatever the real reason, The Truth, for taking us to California, I shall always think it lay mostly in an incident in which Bailey had the leading part. Bailey had picked up the habit of imitating Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall and George McCready. I didn't think it at all strange that a thirteen-year-old boy in the unreconstructed Southern town of Stamps spoke with an Englishy accent. His heroes included D'Artagnan and the Count of Monte Cristo and he affected what he thought were their swashbuckling gallantries. On an afternoon a few weeks before Momma revealed her plan to take us West, Bailey came into the Store shaking. His little face was no longer black but a dirty, colorless gray. As was our habit upon entering the Store, he walked behind the candy counter and leaned on the cash register. Uncle Willie had sent him on an errand to whitefolks’ town and he wanted an explanation for Bailey's tardiness. After a brief moment our uncle could see that something was wrong, and feeling unable to cope, he called Momma from the kitchen. “What's the matter, Bailey Junior?” He said nothing. I knew when I saw him that it would be useless to ask anything while he was in that state.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Without that—if someone were to suggest, for instance, that this “Christ” of whom Paul speaks never lived at all or never died on a cross—Paul’s whole “gospel” makes no sense. That, indeed, is what some people in the second century tried to say, offering instead a “Jesus” who was simply a teacher of spirituality. But is that all? Is “the gospel in the gospels” simply a matter of the bare fact of Jesus’s death, which Paul and others would then interpret as “good news” even though nobody saw it like that at the time? That, I think, is the problem to which I, in my invited address at Cambridge, was supposed to offer an answer. Sadly, once more, I can’t remember anything about what I said. Perhaps it’s still in a file somewhere, but to be honest I haven’t looked. There may even, for all I know, be a tape recording— though cassette tapes (remember them?) were still in their infancy in 1978, the year I gave the address. I might, though, hazard a guess at some of what I said. There are of course the famous passages, such as Mark 10:45: “The son of man...came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many.’” Ah, think readers, there we have it: a reference to Daniel 7, coupled with a reference to Isaiah 53:5, the famous passage in which the “servant of the LORD” is wounded, bruised, and killed “for our transgressions” and “for our iniquities.” That sounds—to some! —as though Mark had after all been taking lessons from Paul. That’s enough—there is our “atonement theology” in a nutshell, right there in Mark. There is a problem, though. Matthew has the same line (20:28), but when Luke has an opportunity to reproduce it, he appears to leave out the crucial element (22:27, where Jesus simply says, “I am with you here like a servant”). Some have even claimed, because of this and other features, that Luke has no “theology of the cross,” no doctrine of “atonement,” at all. I regard that as a grievous misunderstanding; I will explain why later. But, even if Luke had reproduced Mark’s phrase exactly, it doesn’t look as though the gospels really make “atonement,” in the sense the church has come to use that word, their main theme. When it comes to “justification,” there is one passage in Luke, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (18:9–14), in which the sinner is said to be “justified” in something like a Pauline sense. After all, he confessed his sins and trusted solely in God’s mercy, unlike the self-righteous Pharisee. And there are several sayings in John’s gospel, not usually discussed when people talk about “justification,” that might be regarded as relevant to the topic.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  35 The Well of Loneliness was my introduction to lesbianism and what I thought of as pornography. For months the book was both a treat and a threat. It allowed me to see a little of the mysterious world of the pervert. It stimulated my libido and I told myself that it was educational because it informed me of the difficulties in the secret world of the pervert. I was certain that I didn't know any perverts. Of course I ruled out the jolly sissies who sometimes stayed at our house and cooked whopping eight-course dinners while the perspiration made paths down their made-up faces. Since everyone accepted them, and more particularly since they accepted themselves, I knew that their laughter was real and that their lives were cheerful comedies, interrupted only by costume changes and freshening of make-up. But true freaks, the “women lovers,” captured yet strained my imagination. They were, according to the book, disowned by their families, snubbed by their friends and ostracized from every society. This bitter punishment was inflicted upon them because of a physical condition over which they had no control. After my third reading of The Well of Loneliness I became a bleeding heart for the downtrodden misunderstood lesbians. I thought “lesbian” was synonymous with hermaphrodite, and when I wasn't actively aching over their pitiful state, I was wondering how they managed simpler body functions. Did they have a choice of organs to use, and if so, did they alternate or play favorite? Or I tried to imagine how two hermaphrodites made love, and the more I pondered the more confused I became. It seemed that having two of everything other people had, and four where ordinary people just had two, would complicate matters to the point of giving up the idea of making love at all. It was during this reflective time that I noticed how heavy my own voice had become. It droned and drummed two or three whole tones lower than my schoolmates' voices. My hands and feet were also far from being feminine and dainty. In front of the mirror I detachedly examined my body. For a sixteen- year-old my breasts were sadly undeveloped. They could only be called skin swellings, even by the kindest critic. The line from my rib cage to my knees fell straight without even a ridge to disturb its direction. Younger girls than I boasted of having to shave under their arms, but my armpits were as smooth as my face. There was also a mysterious growth developing on my body that defied explanation. It looked totally useless. Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave information on the finished lesbian—and that woefully sketchy—but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Most devout Christians, when they think about it, are aware of the gentle prompting of the Spirit. This doesn’t necessarily happen all or even most of the time, but it is a reality. Most are happy to trust that even when they are not explicitly conscious of that work, the Spirit is getting on with the job behind the scenes. But most, however “orthodox,” are happy to leave it at that, to think of the Spirit as basically given to make us like Jesus, to help us to be holy, to teach us to pray. All that is true, of course. But the truth of which the creed speaks at this point is so much more. Likewise, most well-taught Christians know that “catholic” here doesn’t mean “Roman Catholic.” (When I worked at Westminster Abbey, with a few hundred or more tourists coming to services every day and hearing the creed, one of the most frequent questions I was asked afterwards was, “Is this a Catholic church?” “Yes,” I used to say, “but not in the sense I think you mean.”) The word “catholic” here has its proper sense of “universal,” “worldwide.” Many, however, have not been taught even that much about the “communion of saints” (though for some it means that we are still able to be in touch, in some sense or other, with those we have loved and see no more). Forgiveness is something most creedal Christians quietly and gratefully celebrate, without being quite clear why it occurs here in the creed at all. When it comes to “resurrection” and “the life everlasting,” we still have a major problem. Most Christians, certainly in the Western churches, still assume that the whole purpose of the Christian faith is so that we might “go to heaven when we die.” God wants to share fellowship with people, and those who have faith will be those people. For some, “resurrection” functions simply as a fancy metaphor for “eternal life,” seen in terms of a spiritual bliss outside the world of space, time, and matter. For others, this ultimate goal still dominates the horizon, not least because countless prayers and hymns reinforce it. The word “resurrection,” especially the resurrection “of the body,” remains a puzzle. As I heard one elderly man say, “I’ll be going to heaven when I die, and I certainly don’t want to take this old body with me.” It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus’s “divine” status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that I never “felt like a woman” before my transition. Even as a preteen struggling with the inexplicable and persistent desire to be female, I understood how problematic that popular cliché was. After all, how can anyone know what it’s like to “feel like a woman” or “feel like a man” when we can never really know how anybody else feels on the inside? Most people whose physical and subconscious sexes coincide generally fall rather seamlessly into womanhood or manhood; as a result, they take for granted the identity of woman or man. My gender identity always felt more like a puzzle that I had to put together myself, one in which many of the pieces were missing, where I had no clue as to what the final picture was supposed to be. And the twenty years between my conscious recognition that I wanted to be female and my eventual decision to transition was a time when I painstakingly ruled out the possibilities that my female inclinations were merely a manifestation of my sexuality or a desire to express femininity. And after many years of exploring and experimenting with femininity, masculinity, and androgyny, with crossdressing and role-playing, and with heterosexuality and bisexuality, I realized that for me, being trans had little to do with sexual desire or social gender; it was primarily about the physical experience of being in my own body. People often assume that transsexuals have some kind of idealized and unrealistic image of what it’s like to be the other sex, and that transitioning is our attempt to achieve that fantasy. Nothing could be further from the truth for me. When I decided to transition, I had no idea what it would actually be like to live as a woman, nor did I have any preconceived notions about what type of woman I might actually become. Hell, at the time, I didn’t even dare call myself a woman. That word, like the word “man,” seemed to have way too much baggage associated with it. At the time, I preferred the word “girl,” which seemed more playful and open to interpretation. Or I might say that I identified as female, since the word is more commonly associated with one’s anatomy than with any specific gender roles or regulations. But I completely avoided the word “woman” because it seemed to be too weighed down with other people’s expectations—expectations that I wasn’t sure I was interested in, or capable of, meeting.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  I want, for the moment, to concentrate on one enormously influential strand of twentieth-century scholarship that both reflects the problem I am outlining and then solidifies it in the imagination and implicit understanding of the Western church at least. The German Lutheran scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential New Testament scholars. For Bultmann and the generations of scholars and students who have been influenced directly or indirectly by his work, the story of Jesus himself formed no part of “New Testament theology”—it was merely the presupposition for such a thing. All that was needed was the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion; that was enough. Everything else one needed to know was contained not in his teaching or public career, but in the early church’s reflection on the meaning of the cross. Bultmann therefore read the gospels not as the story of why Jesus lived, not in order to find “the gospel in the gospels” in the way I have described, but in order to observe the early Christians expressing their faith by telling and retelling stories that appear to us to be “Jesus stories,” but that were, for the most part, “mythological” expressions of early Christian experience projected back onto the fictive screen of the history of Jesus. Bultmann’s whole project of form criticism, at least in the way he practiced it, was predicated on the assumption that if you could discover the “forms,” the characteristic shapes of the small anecdotes that make up much of the gospel material, you could thereby observe, as through a lens, the early church expressing its own faith. That, it was believed, was why the early gospel traditions were passed on: not to remember or celebrate something that had happened in the past (i.e., in Jesus’s public career), but to celebrate and sustain the continuing life of faith of the early community. Within the Bultmannian tradition—and, again, this has been very influential—it has often been assumed that the evangelists wrote from the same largely nonhistorical perspective. At least, it has often been assumed that Mark and John wrote not to tell their readers about what actually happened, but to express their own and their communities’ faith and experience. Luke, however, is sometimes accused of falsifying this “gospel,” since he at least clearly does believe that “what happened” matters and has significance in and of itself. Matthew, for his part, has often been seen as a “Jewish Christian” writer (though all the New Testament authors were “Jewish Christians”!) who likewise seems to have slipped up in terms of the “gospel” that one had been taught to expect (no doubt from a particular reading of Paul).

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  While I have found my subconscious sex to be impervious to conscious thought or social influence, my gender identity (i.e., the way I consciously relate to my gender) has been very much shaped by cultural norms and my own personal beliefs and experiences. For example, even though my initial realization of wanting to be female occurred prior to me experiencing sexual attraction and independent of any desire to take part in stereotypically girlish activities and interests, that realization led me to question (and eventually experiment with) my sexuality and gender expression. After all, like most children, I was raised to believe that men were supposed to be masculine and attracted to women, and that women were supposed to be feminine and attracted to men. The fact that I wanted to be female necessarily threw these other genderrelated facets into flux. In fact, the first thought that crossed my mind when I discovered that I wanted to be female was that I must be gay, an idea no doubt inspired by flamboyantly feminine gay male stereotypes that regularly appeared on TV in the ’70s. However, once I hit puberty and my sexual desire kicked in, I found myself attracted to women and not men, which only served to confuse me more, since at the time I hadn’t even heard the word “lesbian.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  —When group ended I stayed back a minute to talk to Dr. Jude. “Lucy,” she said, blowing the dust off a book called Low Self-Esteem and Addiction: The Siamese Twins. “It’s good to see you back. I’m sorry you are suffering.” “Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose. She offered me a tissue. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Sure.” “When you said that you were content without anyone—that a person could be content without anyone—did you mean it?” “Oh, Lucy,” she said. “Because I just feel like that’s a lie. I think everyone is looking for someone. And I think that if they aren’t, they’re just pretending.” “That isn’t necessarily true,” she said. “Me, I’m just happy to be alive. Do you really want to know what I think? Well, let me tell you something that you don’t know about me. I’m a breast cancer survivor.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s okay,” she said. “I had stage-three breast cancer when I was only forty-nine. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. In fact, I didn’t think I would. But after a number of very grueling years of chemo and radiation, as well as a double mastectomy, I was declared cancer-free. And I’m still in remission.” “That’s great.” “It is,” she said. “But after the cancer, going through that horrible experience, I took a good look at my life. I thought about what I wanted the next years of my life to look like, however many I had left. And one thing I realized was that I no longer wanted to be with my husband. It was a very hard thing to come to terms with. I have no children. My family lives on the East Coast. He was my family and had seen me through the whole ordeal. He still loved me very much. But I was no longer in love with him. And I realized then that I would rather be by myself, even if it meant never finding anyone again, even with my body looking the way it did postsurgery, than spend the rest of my life with someone I didn’t love.” “How did you know you weren’t in love with him anymore?” I asked. “I just knew,” she said. “Over time I realized.” “I get so confused,” I said. “There were moments when I felt like I was no longer in love with Jamie at all. But after we broke up I wanted him back more than anything. So maybe it was the lust that had faded.” “Lust is lust,” she said. “Any woman can have sex. It’s not hard to find a man to sleep with you.” This was true. I’d never thought of it like that before. With Garrett and Adam, and even Theo, I’d felt like it was a sign that I was special when they’d wanted to have sex with me.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Reformation during its first five years was a battle of words, not of deeds. It scattered the seeds of new institutions all over Germany, but the old forms and usages still remained. The new wine had not yet burst the old skin bottles. The Protestant soul dwelt in the Catholic body. The apostles after the day of Pentecost continued to visit the temple and the synagogue, and to observe circumcision, the sabbath, and other customs of the fathers, hoping for the conversion of all Israel, until they were cast out by the Jewish hierarchy. So the Protestants remained in external communion with the mother Church, attending Latin mass, bowing before the transubstantiated elements on the altar, praying the Ave Maria, worshiping saints, pictures, and crucifixes, making pilgrimages to holy shrines, observing the festivals of the Roman calendar, and conforming to the seven sacraments which accompanied them at every step of life from the cradle to the grave. The bishops were still in charge of their dioceses, and unmarried priests and deacons performed all the ecclesiastical functions. The convents were still occupied by monks and nuns, who went through their daily devotions and ascetic exercises. The outside looked just as before, while the inside had undergone a radical change. This was the case even in Saxony and at Wittenberg, the nursery of the new state of things. Luther himself did not at first contemplate any outward change. He labored and hoped for a reformation of faith and doctrine within the Catholic Church, under the lead of the bishops, without a division, but he was now cast out by the highest authorities, and came gradually to see that he must build a new structure on the new foundation which he h ad laid by his writings and by the translation of the New Testament. The negative part of these changes, especially the abolition of the mass and of monasticism, was made by advanced radicals among his disciples, who had more zeal than discretion, and mistook liberty for license. While Luther was confined on the Wartburg, his followers were like children out of school, like soldiers without a captain. Some of them thought that he had stopped half way, and that they must complete what he had begun. They took the work of destruction and reconstruction into their own inexperienced and unskillful hands. Order gave way to confusion, and the Reformation was threatened with disastrous failure. The first disturbances broke out at Erfurt in June, 1521, shortly after Luther’s triumphant passage through the town on his way to Worms. Two young priests were excommunicated for taking part in the enthusiastic demonstrations. This created the greatest indignation. Twelve hundred students, workmen, and ruffians attacked and demolished in a few days sixty houses of the priests, who escaped violence only by flight.482 The magistrate looked quietly on, as if in league with the insurrection. Similar scenes of violence were repeated during the summer.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  They believed this, of course, because of Jesus’s resurrection—just as it was disbelief in the bodily resurrection that made scholars from Reimarus to Bultmann and beyond assume that there must still be some great coming event to which the evangelists were referring. Such scholars have normally supposed this great coming event to be the Parousia. The word parousia is a Greek term meaning “royal presence” or “divine appearing,” or perhaps both. It has become the regular technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to Jesus’s “second coming” and its supposed attendant phenomena, which, they maintain, the early church believed to be “imminent.” Early Christians thought, say these scholars, that the Parousia would be the final kingdom-bringing moment. That scholarly mistake has fused with the dispensationalism of popular (mostly American) subculture and speculation to give the present state of confusion about the “end-times” that is so prominent a feature of today’s American church life. The four gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom’s arrival—that is, the claim that God was already king of the world and had become so in a dramatic new way through the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus—was highly paradoxical in their own context, as indeed it has remained so to our day. Then, as now, a claim about God’s kingdom being already present was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder: “Of course God’s kingdom hasn’t arrived—just look out the window!” The problem was more acute for them, facing hostility and often persecution. However, they were in no danger of having what today we might call an overrealized eschatology, imagining (as some today have suggested, absurdly in my view) that the entire new creation had now arrived and that there was nothing more to hope for. There is, actually, a secular parody of this that was quite popular in the Western world, at least until the events of September 11, 2001: the belief that history had now developed as far as it was going to do, that Western capitalism and liberal democracy had “won” the Cold War, and that the whole world would now come into line with the brave new “enlightened” world. One does not hear this proposal so often today. But again, we may here be looking at one of the reasons why critics in the modern period were unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that the evangelists might really have believed that God had become king through the work of Jesus. It may not have been objective historical analysis on the critics’ part. It could just as easily have been because their whole culture, that of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Europe and America, believed implicitly that some kind of utopia had now arrived— through the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideology. The fact of continuing intractable evil in today’s world has highlighted the necessity to think again.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But the evangelists did not need to think again, because the claim that they were making was never susceptible to falsification on the grounds of continuing evil, corruption, violence, and death. On the contrary, this merely reminds us that, for all the evangelists in their different ways, the kingdom was precisely not to be expected whole and entire, all at once. They highlighted, after all, those parables in which Jesus stressed that the kingdom was coming like a seed growing slowly and secretly or that it would involve strange reversals as well as sudden vindications. The kingdom was not, they insisted, arriving in the way people had imagined. That is Luke’s explicit point in 19:11, and it does not appear that he is out on a limb. They constantly remind us that Jesus’s kingdom work generated angry opposition from both human and nonhuman (i.e., demonic) sources, that the shadow of the cross hung over the narrative from the start, and that Jesus warned about the need for his followers too to put aside any dreams of an immediate utopia and to be prepared to drink the cup that he was to drink. That leads us once again to Mark 10, where, in response to the request from James and John that they might sit at his right and his left “in his kingdom” (a request partly echoed, in Luke 23:42, by the dying brigand), Jesus asks a question in return: “You don’t know what you’re asking for!” Jesus replied. “Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? Can you receive the baptism I’m going to receive?” “Yes,” they said, “we can.” “Well,” said Jesus, “you will drink the cup I drink; you will receive the baptism I receive. But sitting at my right hand or my left—that’s not up to me. It’s been assigned already.” (10:38–40) The significance of this in our present discussion is massive. For Mark, it is clear that the two brigands on Jesus’s right and left, as described in 15:27, are the ones to whom “it’s been assigned already.” But that means, as we might have concluded from other evidence too, that Jesus’s crucifixion is the moment when he becomes king, when, as James and John say, he is “there in all [his] glory” (10:37). That is the powerful—if deeply paradoxical!—“coming of the kingdom” as spoken of in Mark 9:1. But the arrival of the kingdom in that way will not mean that James and John, and many others too, can look forward to an easy utopia thereafter. On the contrary, they will still have to drink Jesus’s cup and be baptized with his baptism, in other words, to share his suffering and quite possibly his death. (This happened to James quite quickly, as we discover in Acts 12:2.)

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But you haven’t yet figured out how to adjust them individually, and the sound is strange and distorted. Each of the four needs to be sorted out. Otherwise, when you’re listening to orchestral music, you’ll get too much violin or perhaps woodwind and no cello or brass. Now, one of the reasons the gospels are such a challenge to read is that there are four strands, four dimensions, that contribute to what they are saying, which in much modern reading have become distorted in something like the same way. Some of them have been turned way down or even silenced altogether. Others have been turned up too loud, so that they are shrill and crackly. One way or another, the music is out of balance. Some parts are almost inaudible, and other parts are all too audible, blasting out at top volume, distorted in themselves and drowning out everything else. Of course, this isn’t the same in all readings of the gospels. Different Christian traditions have twiddled the knobs on these four speakers, making this or that one louder or softer. But the point I want to make in this part of the book is that we only get the correct sound when all four are properly adjusted. Part of our difficulty, in fact, is that so many people have become used to hearing the gospels in a distorted fashion that when the speakers are adjusted properly, they are likely to object. “We never heard it this way before,” they will say. It reminds me of the time when, as a young teenager, I sat for the first time in the back row of the school orchestra (I had been drafted to learn the trombone on the quite reasonable grounds that I could sing in tune and blow hard, which are the first and principal requirements for that splendid instrument). Whereas before I had always experienced classical orchestral music through a radio or record player (this was long before any of us had stereo systems), from which the music all came out in an undifferentiated composite sound, for the first time I was able to appreciate the almost geographical as well as tonal difference between the woodwinds and the cellos, the brass and the violas, and so on. It was disconcerting to begin with, but ultimately revelatory. So, when people object that they haven’t “heard” the gospels before in the way I am now going to suggest, the best answer is to invite them to listen more closely and to see if the things they have always “heard” in the gospels might actually be enhanced, given more depth and body, in this new multilayered reading.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  It feels like he is propelling himself into me and I am too focused on not clumsily toppling over to really feel much excitement myself. It’s not unpleasant exactly, but it is decidedly athletic and more physical than erotic. Soon he wraps his arm around my waist from behind and flips me onto my back again, taking one of my legs high in the air and placing it on his shoulder and continuing his energetic penetration. A physical sensation builds in me quite suddenly and when I come a moment later, the tightening of my muscles is so intense that when they release, it feels like every single muscle in my body goes slack and I jolt upright, squeezing my legs tightly together to stop myself from peeing on his bed. I am appalled and too scared to see if I really did pee or if I just felt like I was going to, but he doesn’t seem to take notice. What just happened? I wonder with alarm. I felt absolutely nothing and then this? Did I not just pee in his bathroom ten minutes ago? On top of having to worry about sagging boobs and spider veins on my legs, am I now going to have to add incontinence to my list of middle-aged indignities? After subtly verifying that there is in fact not a wet spot on the sheets beneath me, I lie back and within seconds, he is inside me again, vigorously pumping. I feel like a contortionist, with my legs high in the air while he presses my thighs back even further toward my head. Suddenly, I feel so tired, physically spent. I don’t want to lie dormant like a rag doll, but I cannot match his vigor and size. I have, for better or for worse, been outmatched. When he closes his eyes, gasps and then collapses on top of me, I feel nothing so much as relief. He rolls off me, pulling off the used condom and disposing of it in the bathroom. When he returns, he lies next to me on the bed so that we are now both on our backs, staring up at the ceiling. “You’re quite flexible,” he says, smiling and glancing at me. “Clearly doing yoga or a lot of stretching.” “Nah, just having a lot of sex,” I say with a coy smile. “Ha, OK then. Speaking of a lot of sex, I haven’t told you about the sex party yet,” he says. “Oh yes, I’ve been waiting for a full report. Please start at the very beginning, when you walked in the door with your blue cashmere sweater. Was everyone else already naked?” “Not at all, in fact it kind of felt like a support group. We sat in a circle and went around the room saying what we wanted to get out of the night,” he says. “And when they said what they wanted, was it like a sharing circle?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Perhaps you have a hose?” “Ugh, sorry, I should have warned you not to walk around here barefoot,” he says, grimacing. “It’s OK. I just pretend to be a country girl, but in real life I’m as city as they come,” I say laughing. When I hear the late evening chirps of the crickets start to swell, I tell him that as much as I want to stay, it’s way past time for me to head home. Michael has to return to the city, so I need to get back to Georgia. He leans against my car door as we draw out our goodbye, asking when he can see me again. We tentatively set a date for the following weekend, when Michael will take Georgia to the beach and Hudson will still be in Israel. I make him promise that he will let me cook for him on our next date, and with one last kiss through the car window, I am once again on my way back home. CHAPTER 8A Hug Won’t Fix ThisI’ve added #3’s contact information in my phone under the name Jen. Since I have a handful of friends and a sister named Jen, I hope that when his texts pop up on my phone the kids won’t think twice about who it is. I’m not ready to tell them that I have started dating, but sneaking around makes me feel like I’m doing something illicit. I’m confused about my status with Michael, moving further and further away from him as the summer progresses but unwilling to commit to staying apart. If the kids know I’m dating they’ll feel it is a definitive statement about our future; given my own ambivalence, the last thing I need is for them to throw their own addled feelings into the mix. Like a woman on the run who has to be in motion all the time now, I take Georgia to Pennsylvania for a few days to visit our friends at their lake house. I have always been a busy person, working on messy baking or craft projects or cleaning out closets. I claim that I want to be left alone with a good book but given the opportunity to do so, I rarely let myself relax. Now it’s like I’m on speed. When I read, my eyes aimlessly scan pages without taking words in and I start books only to give up on them a few pages in. If I’m sitting still, chances are that I’m keeping myself busy with disconcerting thoughts about my past and unanswerable questions about my future. My mind is in a constant, unpleasant state of overdrive. One night as we lounge in my friend Alexandra’s living room with a bottle of Prosecco after putting the kids to sleep, I ask her 80-year-old mom how she first met her husband fifty years earlier.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  S Lewis wrote his famous History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, he naturally included a section on the writers of the English Reformation, not least the great translator William Tyndale. Writing for a nontheological audience, Lewis had to explain one point that had obviously puzzled other readers. When William Tyndale, one of England’s earliest Protestants, a disciple of Martin Luther, wrote about “the gospel,” he didn’t mean “the gospels”—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He meant “the gospel” in the sense of the message: the good news that, because of Jesus’s death alone, your sins can be forgiven, and all you have to do is believe it, rather than trying to impress God with doing “good works.” “The gospel” in this sense is what the early Reformers believed they had found in Paul’s letters, particularly Romans and Galatians—and particularly Romans 3 and Galatians 2–3. Now, you can explain that “gospel” in Paul’s terms. You can make it more precise, fine-tuning the interpretation of this or that verse or technical term. But the point is that you can do all of that without any reference whatever to “the gospels,” to the four books that, along with Acts, precede Paul in the New Testament as we have it. Thus in many classic Christian circles, including the plethora of movements that go broadly under the label “evangelical” (and we should remember that in German the word evangelisch means, more or less, “Lutheran”), there has been the assumption, going back at least as far as the Reformation, that “the gospel” is what you find in Paul’s letters, particularly in Romans and Galatians. This “gospel” consists, normally, of a precise statement of what Jesus achieved in his saving death (“atonement”) and a precise statement of how that achievement could be appropriated by the individual (“justification by faith”). Atonement and justification were assumed to be at the heart of “the gospel.” But “the gospels”—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—appear to have almost nothing to say about those subjects. Now of course at one level “the gospels” contain this “gospel,” simply because they tell the story of the death of Jesus. Without that—if someone were to suggest, for instance, that this “Christ” of whom Paul speaks never lived at all or never died on a cross—Paul’s whole “gospel” makes no sense. That, indeed, is what some people in the second century tried to say, offering instead a “Jesus” who was simply a teacher of spirituality. But is that all? Is “the gospel in the gospels” simply a matter of the bare fact of Jesus’s death, which Paul and others would then interpret as “good news” even though nobody saw it like that at the time?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  For example, I had lived and was treated as a man for many years, yet I always felt rather ambivalent about belonging to that class. Sometimes when my female friends would go off on a tirade about men in general, I would join in with them, not because I hated men or enjoyed making generalizations about people, but as a way of expressing the fact that I did not feel like a man. That identity never made sense to me given my constant struggles with gender dissonance, the persistent body feelings I experienced that informed me that there was something not quite right with my being physically male, and my personal history of consciously exploring and expressing my femaleness and femininity both in my imagination and in public. I gravitated toward genderqueer identities for most of the years that I was male-bodied—at different points, viewing myself as a boy who wanted to be a girl, a crossdresser, and bigender—because they resonated with the myriad of gendered experiences that I had had up to that point. They captured the fact that, at the time, I really did feel like I was straddling both maleness and femaleness in some way. Genderqueer identities no longer resonate with my experiential gender in the same way. This is not to say that I now denounce them altogether, as I know firsthand just how rewarding and empowering it can be to see yourself as being outside, in between, or transcending both femaleness and maleness. It’s just that at this point in my life, I don’t feel genderqueer anymore. Experiencing the world (and my own body) as female makes the word “woman” feel like a far better fit for me now. Unfortunately, I have met a few genderqueer-identified people who have expressed suspicion or have been dismissive of the idea that someone could “transition” from genderqueer to unapologetically woman or man. Such assertions are clearly the product of gender entitlement, of these individuals projecting their own perspectives and beliefs onto other people’s gendered bodies, identities, and experiences. However, the majority of the transgender people I know understand that our experiential gender is potentially fluid and often changes over time as we accumulate new experiences.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Such scholars have normally supposed this great coming event to be the Parousia. The word parousia is a Greek term meaning “royal presence” or “divine appearing,” or perhaps both. It has become the regular technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to Jesus’s “second coming” and its supposed attendant phenomena, which, they maintain, the early church believed to be “imminent.” Early Christians thought, say these scholars, that the Parousia would be the final kingdom-bringing moment. That scholarly mistake has fused with the dispensationalism of popular (mostly American) subculture and speculation to give the present state of confusion about the “end-times” that is so prominent a feature of today’s American church life. The four gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom’s arrival—that is, the claim that God was already king of the world and had become so in a dramatic new way through the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus—was highly paradoxical in their own context, as indeed it has remained so to our day. Then, as now, a claim about God’s kingdom being already present was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder: “Of course God’s kingdom hasn’t arrived—just look out the window!” The problem was more acute for them, facing hostility and often persecution. However, they were in no danger of having what today we might call an overrealized eschatology, imagining (as some today have suggested, absurdly in my view) that the entire new creation had now arrived and that there was nothing more to hope for. There is, actually, a secular parody of this that was quite popular in the Western world, at least until the events of September 11, 2001: the belief that history had now developed as far as it was going to do, that Western capitalism and liberal democracy had “won” the Cold War, and that the whole world would now come into line with the brave new “enlightened” world. One does not hear this proposal so often today. But again, we may here be looking at one of the reasons why critics in the modern period were unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that the evangelists might really have believed that God had become king through the work of Jesus. It may not have been objective historical analysis on the critics’ part. It could just as easily have been because their whole culture, that of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Europe and America, believed implicitly that some kind of utopia had now arrived—through the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideology. The fact of continuing intractable evil in today’s world has highlighted the necessity to think again. But the evangelists did not need to think again, because the claim that they were making was never susceptible to falsification on the grounds of continuing evil, corruption, violence, and death.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Even as she moved on in her romantic life with her soon-to-be husband, I understood implicitly that we would always come first: it was the ultimate act of maternal devotion, attending to her needs only after ours were managed. In books and movies I run through in my memory, it seems women who move on from their spouse’s death or from divorce are often able to seamlessly fold their new husbands into the mix – after a bumpy start, the dust settles and the kids accept it as a given that their mother has moved on. Sometimes the dust endlessly floats through space and the kids hate their stepfathers forever, but this rarely stops the mother. Why does this challenge have me flummoxed when other women seem to manage it without such intense turmoil and inner strife? My kids aren’t rebelling against anyone at this point and they’re not the ones throwing up roadblocks – I am. I cannot wrap my head around how logistically this is supposed to work. If I am to continue to be a good mother in the way I perceive good mothers to be, it means abrogating myself outside of my maternal duties. But the experiences of the past few weeks – flirting with men, talking to them, having sex, imagining the possibilities – has unleashed a previously forbidden side of myself I am unwilling to bottle back up. I am torn between what I have always believed a good mother to represent – complete devotion – and what I now think I need to be a complete person, which includes, but is not limited to, being a good mother. * The day I return to the city is cool and gloomy with relentless rain. I drive two hours with windshield wipers methodically thumping from side to side, and all the produce I bought at local farm stands tucked in the seat beside me so that I can prepare the dinner I had planned for #3. He texts me throughout the day. The heavy downpours are slowing traffic to a halt and his ETA keeps getting later and later. He has his dog with him and has to make frequent stops to let her out. I feel guilty that I’m the reason for this disastrous trip, and when he finally arrives well into the evening after countless delays, it feels decidedly anticlimactic. I wait for him under an umbrella in front of his friend’s apartment building, ready to apologize for everything from the weather to the traffic to the difficulty of parking in the city. I see him emerge from his car before he spots me and I am struck by how out of place he looks here, a country boy in the city. I am enamored of him in his bucolic milieu, but here, in my hometown, he looks out of his element, as if he might be consumed whole by the carefully styled bearded hipsters and lithe women pushing thousand-dollar strollers.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  He gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about him. (8:27–30) This functions as the midpoint in Mark, looking back to the voice at the baptism and forward to the paradoxical question of Caiaphas at the trial (“Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” 14:61, which is a statement in Greek; it gets turned into a question by the punctuation and presumably the tone of voice) and then the centurion’s statement at the foot of the cross (“This fellow really was God’s son,” 15:39). Matthew’s gospel is more complex in its structure, but this incident is still right in the middle. Luke’s equivalent scene (9:18–27) is equally dramatic, but doesn’t play the same structural role in Luke’s narrative; for him the equivalent is 9:51, where Jesus “settled it in his mind to go to Jerusalem,” following what Moses and Elijah had discussed with him during the transfiguration in 9:31. Here, in any case, we see the evangelists welding together the two elements, messiahship and cross, even while explaining that the disciples, at the time, found such a combination just as puzzling and off-putting as the church has done for much of its history. Jesus asks his followers who they think he is, and they declare that they believe him to be the Messiah. He then tells them that he must suffer, die, and be raised—and that they must suffer as well if they want to follow him. The Messiah is to come into his kingdom through a horrible death; and those who not only follow him, but are called to implement his work must expect that their royal task—for such it is—will be accomplished in the same way, by the same means. There is every sign that the earliest church understood this very well indeed, just as there is every sign (alas) that today’s church does not—except, of course, in those parts of the world, like China and the Sudan, where there has been no choice. As we contemplate the scene at Caesarea Philippi, it is vital that we do not short-circuit the messianic meaning in our quest for creedal affirmations about Jesus’s “divinity.” Yes, the four gospels do indeed affirm, often in subtle and profound ways (not so often in the rather clunky and obvious ways that some would clearly prefer), that Jesus is the embodiment of Israel’s God, come back at last to rescue his people. But the meaning of Peter’s confession of Jesus’s messiahship is not, “You are the second person of the Trinity,” but “You are Israel’s Messiah.” The phrase “son of God” in this connection is of course once more an echo of the messianic passages in Psalm 2, 2 Samuel 7, and elsewhere. And in those contexts its primary meaning is “Israel’s messiah, adopted and anointed by God as his own son.” The much fuller meanings that the phrase “son of God” came to carry quite early in the Christian movement (as early as Paul; see, e.g., Rom.