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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I met Maria when she was at the tail end of a heartbreak. She’d just spent two years on the west coast with a man she thought she was going to marry, only to come home a disillusioned wreck. Her friends decided it was time for her to meet a nice man, a mensch. Enough of these himbos (for those of you unfamiliar with this new term, himbos are male bimbos sought by successful women). The friends organized a dinner party with a mission: a tasteful cover-up for a first date. It worked. For Maria, dating Nico was a reeducation in the art of love, a slow unfolding that was remarkably worry-free. She didn’t fall in love; she grew to love him. But a year after meeting him, she’s in my office, asking, “How important is sex, anyway? I keep going back and forth. I know you can’t build a life on passion. I’ve tried that. My grandma used to say, ‘What are you going to live on, love? Hah! You’ve got a lot to learn.’ My mother’s no better. Her line is, ‘Sweetheart, passion is doomed. Take my word for it, what you need is to find someone you can live with. Someone who’s like you, who shares your values. You know, money doesn’t hurt, either.’ I love Nico. I’ve never felt so secure, so trusting. And after years of being out there dating more than my share of jerks, I’m finally free to think about other things in my life. But I just don’t know. I don’t think we click sexually. It’s an issue. Or is it? Everyone says that the sex fades anyway, no matter how steamy it is in the beginning, so how important is it, really?” “You tell me,” I prompt her. “You know what I tell myself? ‘Girl, you had your fun. It’s time to grow up. He’s a great guy. Get over yourself.’” Three years after Maria asked me the question, “How important is sex, anyway?” she’s back again. Evidently, she hasn’t yet found her answer. In the beginning she was so taken up by the thrill of security that she was able to postpone dealing with her lack of sexual responsiveness to Nico. She held out some hope that the problem would take care of itself, that one day the block would lift and everything would fall into place. Nico, for his part, is a patient man. He wasn’t going to push, even though he is clearly less than jolly about their anemic sex life. Not pushing the issue is his way of forestalling rejection. In our sessions Maria had always displayed an approach-avoidance attitude to the topic of sex. On the few occasions that she brought it up directly, it was always at the end of the hour, when there was no time left for discussion. One week I decided to keep my foot on the gas and rev up the conversation. “Sex is hard, isn’t it?” I asked her.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For years, Jed avoided getting serious with women. Becoming close felt obliterating. Haunted by the timid little boy he once was, he dreaded feeling powerless and dependent. “Coral was the first woman I ever loved who I didn’t feel indebted to. I wasn’t constantly on guard not to be sucked up by the relationship.” Jed grew up as a loner, had few friends, and spent much of his adolescence reading science fiction and listening to heavy metal in his room. Coral, who grew up in the same neighborhood, barely remembers him from high school. She was popular, pretty, outgoing. She edited the yearbook. “I wasn’t on the A-list, but I had a perfectly respectable place.” Even today, Coral has many friends. She is the hub of her social circle, and she has plenty of interests to supplement her rising career as a documentary filmmaker. Eleven years after graduating from high school they ran into each other at a wedding. Jed had learned to mask his shyness with satire, and Coral was drawn to his perceptiveness and offbeat sense of humor. Not to be dismissed was the fact that he had turned into a really handsome guy. She made sure to leave the party with his phone number, for she knew it would be up to her to make the first move. They started dating, and they have been together for six years. Jed and Coral are wonderfully compatible in most areas of their life, but sexually they have very different sensibilities. “I don’t understand where his motives come from,” she says. “I’ve never come across this before, and I’ve been with plenty of men, and there are plenty of kinky things that excite me. I just don’t get this—maybe because I grew up in this very feminist world of political correctness and respect for women. In a way I feel disrespected. It feels cheap, tawdry, and it makes me feel like…” “Like a slut?” I ask her. “No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a slut. I was a slut for a long time. It just makes me feel less desirable. I don’t feel like it’s about me. It doesn’t have anything to do with me and therefore I don’t feel connected with it or motivated by it or interested in it. Does that makes sense?” “Yeah, it makes sense,” Jed answers, “but for me, I don’t see it as forgetting you, forgetting your identity. For me, I see it as I’m honoring you by being willing to completely step outside my armor of defense and say, ‘Well, I trust you enough to show you this.’”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Our desires are not exempt from conflict; nor are our passions free of contradictions. No amount of will or reason can dictate our love dreams. Reason doesn’t know the roots of our dreams; nor does it know the mysterious needs of the heart. We can’t always use the laws of profit and loss in our romantic and erotic lives. Applying the work ethos is tricky. Even the most logical approach cannot neutralize the ambivalence of love. I tell Ryan and Christine, “I have nothing new to offer in the ‘how to’ department. You’ve had dates, you’ve been burning incense, you’ve cracked into the Astroglide. And it’s landed you a steady diet of sex that’s satisfactory without being really satisfying. Do I get it?” “Yes, you get it, but what are you saying? That that’s it? Like the song, ‘Is That All There Is?’” Christine asks. “There’s no logic to this. Passion is unpredictable; it doesn’t follow the dictates of cause and effect. What works on Monday might not work on Thursday. The solution is often a surprise, not the result of the kind of work you’ve been doing until now. So let’s not talk about work. Instead, let’s talk about freedom. Play.” “Huh?” “Try something with me,” I suggest to them. “It may seem off the beaten path; but since your path has become a dead end, you may as well give it a shot. What rigidifies desire is confinement. I’d like you to think about its opposite: freedom. Talk about it in the broad sense. When do you feel most free in your relationship? In what ways does being married make you more free, and in what ways does it make you less free? How much freedom are you comfortable giving each other? Giving yourselves?” I start the conversation in my office in the hope that they’ll continue it on their own. I like to make suggestions that might jolt people out of their complacency, or at least bring about a different way of thinking. I try to create some discomfort with the status quo. Although Ryan and Christine are unhappy with their situation, I’m not sure if they’re unhappy enough to brave change. In therapy I throw out a lot of ideas, never knowing where they’ll land or if they’ll take root. I let the idea of freedom sit for a while, to see if it will sprout. A few months later Ryan begins one session by announcing: “All right, you want to hear a real midlife story? You’re going to get one. My wife’s best friend from college came to visit us recently. You know I work from home, so we’ve had lunch together a few times with the babysitter and the kids— definitely not a pickup scene.” Barbara is a humanitarian worker in her mid-forties who runs programs in crisis situations all over the world.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  But it did matter, he said, I couldn’t stand it. I made them switch me, I said that I hated the other students, I said they were cruel to me. It wasn’t true but I made my mother believe it, I made her come to the school to complain, and after a few days they put me where I wanted to be. Everything should have been fine then but it wasn’t fine, I knew that it shouldn’t have made me so upset, I couldn’t understand why it had. But that’s not true, he said, shaking his head just slightly, I did understand, at least a little, I knew I felt something I shouldn’t feel. He lit another cigarette. For some time as he spoke he hadn’t been smoking, but now he took a deep drag and again I saw him relax as he exhaled. But really everything was fine, he said, I still had my place with my friends and I still had my friendship with B., I could do without the rest of it. B. dated a few girls, so did I, and it didn’t mean much more to him than to me, we were still the same thing to each other, all four of us, and now for the first time G. named the third member of the group, the female friend, what he had said about her to that point hadn’t been enough for me to be sure who she was. She was a beautiful girl, smart, kind, one of my favorite students; she was undemanding, by which I mean that she had never been a source of the worry that makes up so much of teaching, she was a student you could be sure of. Everything was fine, he said again, and this year was our big year, we were finally seniors. We’d been looking forward to it for so long, the trips we would take, the parties. There was a tradition of these celebrations, I knew, one each quarter and then a final post-prom bacchanalia at the seaside that lasted, for some of them, until they left for university in the fall. We arranged to rent a house together for the fall trip, he said, close enough to the others to join the parties at night but far enough away to have the days to ourselves. We were in the mountains, in a little village that’s empty most of the year, there was nothing else for kilometers around. We brought everything with us, alcohol, music, even little lights to hang up in one of the houses so we could dance.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  But it did matter, he said, I couldn’t stand it. I made them switch me, I said that I hated the other students, I said they were cruel to me. It wasn’t true but I made my mother believe it, I made her come to the school to complain, and after a few days they put me where I wanted to be. Everything should have been fine then but it wasn’t fine, I knew that it shouldn’t have made me so upset, I couldn’t understand why it had. But that’s not true, he said, shaking his head just slightly, I did understand, at least a little, I knew I felt something I shouldn’t feel. He lit another cigarette. For some time as he spoke he hadn’t been smoking, but now he took a deep drag and again I saw him relax as he exhaled. But really everything was fine, he said, I still had my place with my friends and I still had my friendship with B., I could do without the rest of it. B. dated a few girls, so did I, and it didn’t mean much more to him than to me, we were still the same thing to each other, all four of us, and now for the first time G. named the third member of the group, the female friend, what he had said about her to that point hadn’t been enough for me to be sure who she was. She was a beautiful girl, smart, kind, one of my favorite students; she was undemanding, by which I mean that she had never been a source of the worry that makes up so much of teaching, she was a student you could be sure of. Everything was fine, he said again, and this year was our big year, we were finally seniors. We’d been looking forward to it for so long, the trips we would take, the parties. There was a tradition of these celebrations, I knew, one each quarter and then a final post-prom bacchanalia at the seaside that lasted, for some of them, until they left for university in the fall. We arranged to rent a house together for the fall trip, he said, close enough to the others to join the parties at night but far enough away to have the days to ourselves. We were in the mountains, in a little village that’s empty most of the year, there was nothing else for kilometers around. We brought everything with us, alcohol, music, even little lights to hang up in one of the houses so we could dance.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Good verbal communication is one of the keys to a good sex life. When couples share their thoughts and emotions freely throughout the day, they create between them a high degree of trust and emotional connection, which gives them the freedom to explore their sexuality more fully. Intimacy begets sexuality. For many people, a loving, committed relationship is indeed a great enhancer of sexual desire, a fillip. They feel accepted and swaddled, and that safety allows them to feel free. The trust that comes with emotional closeness enables them to unleash their erotic appetites. But what about John and Beatrice? They don’t fill the bill. They have a beautiful, intimate, loving relationship (they communicate); and, according to this view, that should form the basis for sustained desire. But it doesn’t. And if it’s any consolation to them, it doesn’t work this way for a lot of people. Ironically, what makes for good intimacy does not always make for good sex. It may be counterintuitive, but it’s been my experience as a therapist that increased emotional intimacy is often accompanied by decreased sexual desire. This is indeed a puzzling inverse correlation: the breakdown of desire appears to be an unintentional consequence of the creation of intimacy. I can think of many couples whose opening lines in my office go something like this: “We really love each other. We have a good relationship. But we don’t have sex.” Joe relishes Rafael’s intense interest in him but doesn’t like being engulfed physically—Joe will only be a “top.” Susan and Jenny feel closer than ever after they adopt their first child together, but that closeness does not translate into sensuality. Adele and Alan refer to their nights away at a hotel as intimate, but not particularly passionate. Despite their erotic frustrations, these couples seem to share a fine intimacy, not a lack thereof. Andrew and Serena are clear that sex has been an issue from the beginning, and that regardless of how much their relationship has flourished, it is never enough to charge them erotically. Before she met Andrew, Serena had experienced a luscious sexual life in a number of long-term relationships. In her experience, mounting intimacy had consistently led to better sex, so she was surprised when it didn’t work that way with Andrew. When I asked her why she stayed with him when from the first date she didn’t feel desired by him, she answered, “I thought we’d work on it. That with love it would get better.” “Sometimes it is the love that stands in the way,” I explained, “so just the opposite happens.” Listening to these men and women has led me to rethink what I had long assumed about the correlation between intimacy and sexuality. Rather than looking at sex as an exclusive outgrowth of the emotional relationship, I’ve come to see it as a separate entity. Sexuality is more than a metaphor for the relationship—it stands on its own as a parallel narrative.

• From Story of O (1954)

  O realized that through the medium of her body, shared between them, they attained something more mysterious and perhaps more acute, more intense than an amorous communion, the very conception of which was arduous but whose reality and force she could not deny. Still, why was this division in a way abstract? At Roissy, O had, at the same time and in the same place, belonged both to René and to other men. Why did René, in Sir Stephen’s presence, refrain not only from taking her, but from giving her any orders? (All he ever did was pass on Sir Stephen’s.) She asked him why, certain beforehand of the reply. “Out of respect,” René replied. “But I belong to you,” O said. “You belong to Sir Stephen first.” And it was true, at least in the sense that when René had surrendered her to his friend the surrender had been absolute, that Sir Stephen’s slightest desires took precedence over René’s decisions as far as she was concerned, and even over her own. If René had decided that they would dine together and go to the theater, and Sir Stephen happened to phone an hour before he was to pick up O, René would come by for her at the studio as agreed, but only to drive her to Sir Stephen’s door and leave her there. Once, and only once, O had asked René to please ask Sir Stephen to change the day, because she so much wanted to go with René to a party to which they were both invited. René had refused. “My sweet angel,” he had said, “you mean you still haven’t understood that you no longer belong to me, that I’m no longer the master who’s in charge of you?” Not only had he refused, but he had told Sir Stephen of O’s request and, in her presence, asked him to punish her harshly enough so that she would never again dare even to conceive of shirking her duties. “Certainly,” Sir Stephen had replied.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And in this safe place we can examine the way we relate to one another. Why is this so hard to understand? So let’s look again at your feelings toward me here.” “I already said ‘frustrating.’” “Try to make that more personal, Myrna.” “Frustrating is personal.” “Yeah, in a way it’s personal, it tells me about your inner state. Things go ‘round in a circle in your mind, I know. And they go around in a circle when you’re here too. And I get dizzy with you. And I feel your frustration. But the word frustrating doesn’t tell me about us. Think of the space here between us. Try to stay there for a minute or two. What’s the space like today? What about your comment a couple of minutes ago about getting more out of dating me than being in therapy?” “Told you already, nothing. The space is empty. Just frustration.” “This—what’s going on now, this moment—is precisely what I mean when I say that you shy away from real contact with me.” “I’m confused, lost.” “Our time’s about up, Myrna, but try something before we stop—the same exercise I asked you to do a couple of weeks ago. Just for a minute or two, think about something you and I could be doing together. Close your eyes; let some scene, any scene, appear. Describe it as it’s happening.” [Silence] “What do you see?” “Nothing.” “Force it. Make something happen.” “Okay, okay. I see us walking along. Talking. Enjoying ourselves. Some street in San Francisco, maybe Chestnut. I take your hand and lead you into a singles bar. You’re reluctant, but you come in with me. I want you to see it . . . see the scene . . . see with your own eyes that there are no suitable men there. It’s either singles bars or the Internet match services you mentioned last week. The Internet—that’s worse than the bars. Talk about impersonality! I can’t believe you’re really suggesting that to me. You expect me to form a relationship on the monitor screen, not even seeing the other person . . . not even—” “Go back to your fantasy. What do you see next?” “Fade to black—gone.” “So fast! What stopped you from staying with it?” “Don’t know. Felt cold and alone.” “You were with me. You took my hand. What feelings came up?” “Still felt alone.” “Got to stop, Myrna. One last question. Were the last few minutes different from the first part of the hour?” “No. It was the same. Frustrated.” “I felt more engaged—less space between us. You didn’t feel any of that?” “Maybe. Not sure. And I still don’t see the point of what we’re doing.” “Why do I keep feeling that there’s something in you that fights against seeing the point? Same time next Thursday?” Myrna heard chairs being moved, her footsteps crossing the room, the closing of the door.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “So I failed again today. Took your money and didn’t help. Tell me something, Myrna; see if you can go back over our hour together and answer this question: What could I have done today?” “How should I know? That’s what you get paid for, isn’t it? And paid well too.” “I know you don’t know, Myrna, but I want you to dip into your fantasy. How could I have helped you today?” “You could have introduced me to one of your rich single patients.” “You see ‘Dating Bureau’ on my T-shirt?” “You bastard,” she muttered, punching the “stop” button. “I pay you one-fifty an hour for this smart-ass shit?” She pressed “rewind” and replayed the exchange. “. . . could I have helped you today?” “You could have introduced me to one of your rich single patients.” “You see ‘Dating Bureau’ on my T-shirt?” “Not funny, Doctor.” “No, you’re right. Sorry. What I should have said is that you stay so far away from me—from saying anything about how you feel about me.” “You, you, you. Why always my feelings toward you? You’re not the issue, Dr. Lash. I’m not going to be dating you—though maybe I’d get more out of that than from what we’re doing.” “Let’s go over it again, Myrna. You originally came in to see me saying you wanted to do something about your relationships with men. In our very first session, I said I could best help you examine your relationships with others by focusing on our relationship right here in this office. This space here in my office is, or should be, a safe place, where I hope you can talk more freely than elsewhere. And in this safe place we can examine the way we relate to one another. Why is this so hard to understand? So let’s look again at your feelings toward me here.” “I already said ‘frustrating.’” “Try to make that more personal, Myrna.” “Frustrating is personal.” “Yeah, in a way it’s personal, it tells me about your inner state. Things go ‘round in a circle in your mind, I know. And they go around in a circle when you’re here too. And I get dizzy with you. And I feel your frustration. But the word frustrating doesn’t tell me about us. Think of the space here between us. Try to stay there for a minute or two. What’s the space like today? What about your comment a couple of minutes ago about getting more out of dating me than being in therapy?” “Told you already, nothing. The space is empty. Just frustration.” “This—what’s going on now, this moment—is precisely what I mean when I say that you shy away from real contact with me.” “I’m confused, lost.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  The word also means “freedom” in Hebrew.) “Who are you?” he asks. “I am Haruta,” she answers. “I want you,” he commands. “Bring me the pomegranate on the uppermost branch,” she demands in turn. He brings her the pomegranate, and takes her. When he returns home his wife is tending the fire. He rises, and tries to throw himself in. She asks, “Why are you doing so?” “Because thus and thus happened,” he confesses. “But it was I,” she responds. “I, however, intended the forbidden.” Monolithic Monogamy The moment two people become a couple, they begin to deal with boundaries—what is in and what is out. You choose one among all others, then draw the lines around your blissful union. Now the questions begin. What am I free to do alone and what do I have to share? Do we go to bed at the same time? Will you be joining my family at every Thanksgiving? Sometimes we negotiate these arrangements explicitly, but more often we proceed by trial and error. You see how much you can get away with before tripwiring on sensitivities. Why didn’t you ask me to join you? I thought we’d travel together. A look, a comment, a bruised silence—these are the clues we have to interpret. We intuit how often to see each other, how often to talk, and how much sharing is expected. We sift through our respective friendships and decide how important they’re allowed to be now that we have each other. We sort out ex-lovers—do we know about them, talk about them, see them? Whether aboveboard or below, we delineate zones of privacy as well as zones of togetherness. The mother of all boundaries, the reigning queen, is fidelity, for she more than any other confirms our union. Traditionally, monogamy was viewed as one sexual partner for life, like swans and wolves. Today, it has come to mean having one sexual partner at a time. (As it turns out, even swans and wolves only appear to be monogamous.) The woman who marries, divorces, is single for a while, has several lovers, remarries, divorces, then marries for a third time can nonetheless meet the criteria for monogamy provided that she remains sexually exclusive within each relationship. Yet a man who is committed to the same woman for fifty years, but allows himself a one-night tryst in the fifteenth year, is readily consigned to the category of the infidel. If you’ve cheated, you’ve cheated. As Bob Dylan sang “The times they are a-changing.” In the past fifty years we have opened ourselves to a wealth of new marital and family configurations. We can have straight, gay, or transgender marriages. We can have domestic partnerships. We can be single parents, stepparents, adoptive parents, or child-free. Successive marriages and blended families are common.

• From Story of O (1954)

  O did not dare to pursue the matter any further. This Anne-Marie whom they had threatened her with intrigued her more than Norah. Sir Stephen had already mentioned her when they had lunched together at Saint-Cloud. And it was quite true that O knew none of Sir Stephen’s friends, nor any of his acquaintances. In short, she was living in Paris locked in her secret as though she had been locked in a brothel; the only persons who had the key to her secret, René and Sir Stephen, at the same time had the only key to her body. She could not help thinking that the expression “open oneself to someone,” which meant to give oneself, for her had only one meaning, a literal, physical, and in fact absolute meaning, for she was in fact opening every part of her body which was capable of being opened. It also seemed to her that this was her raison d’être and that Sir Stephen, like René, intended it should be, since whenever he spoke of his friends as he had done at Saint-Cloud, it was to tell her that those to whom he might introduce her would, needless to say, be free to dispose of her however they wished, if indeed they did. But in trying to visualize Anne-Marie and imagine what it might be that Sir Stephen expected from Anne-Marie as far as she, O, was concerned, O was completely at sea, and not even her experience at Roissy was of any help to her. Sir Stephen had also mentioned that he wanted to see her caress another woman; could that be it? (But he had specified that he was referring to Jacqueline.…) No, it wasn’t that. “To show you,” he had just said. Indeed. But after she left Anne-Marie, O knew no more than before. Anne-Marie lived not far from the Observatoire in Paris, in an apartment flanked by a kind of large studio, on the top floor of a new building overlooking the treetops. She was a slender woman, the same age more or less as Sir Stephen, and her black hair was streaked with gray. Her eyes were such a deep blue they looked black. She offered O and Sir Stephen some coffee, a very strong, bitter coffee which she served steaming hot in tiny cups, and which reassured O. When she had finished her coffee and got up from her chair to put down her empty cup on a coffee table, Anne-Marie seized her by the wrist and, turning to Sir Stephen, said: “May I?” “Please do,” Sir Stephen said. Then Anne-Marie, who till then had neither spoken to nor smiled at O, even to greet her or to acknowledge Sir Stephen’s introduction, said to her softly, with a smile so tender one would have thought she were giving her a present: “Come, my child, and let me see your belly and backside. But better yet, why don’t you take off all your clothes.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Myrna shivered, yanking herself out of her reverie. How unlike her it was—these thoughts. The language, the search for beautiful words. And the memories of her father? That too was strange: she rarely visited him in her mind. And where was her resolve to concentrate on Dr. Lash? She tried again. For a moment she imagined him sitting at his rolltop desk, but then another image from the past superimposed itself. Late at night. She should have been long asleep. Tiptoeing down the hall. A crack of light streaming from under her parents’ door. Soft, intimate voices. Her name murmured. “Myrna.” They would be lying under the thick, downy comforter. Pillow talk. Talk about her. She flattened on the floor, scrunching her cheek against the icy beet-red linoleum, straining to see under the door, to hear her parents’ secret words about her. And now, she thought, glancing at her Walkman, I’ve captured the secret; I own the words. Those words at the end of the session—what were they again? She slipped in the cassette, rewound for a few seconds, and listened: “. . . Myrna. Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.” Making withdrawals from a “data bank.” She nodded. Maybe he’s right. She started her car, eased back onto the 101 south freeway. *​*​*​ Myrna sat in silence at the beginning of the next session. Impatient as always, Ernest tried to prod her: “Where have your thoughts been these last few minutes?” “I think I’ve been wondering how you’ll begin the session.” “What would be your preference, Myrna? If a genie granted your wish, how would you like me to start? What’s the perfect statement or question?” “You might say, ‘Hello, Myrna; I’m really glad to see you.’” “Hello, Myrna; I’m really glad to see you today,” Ernest immediately repeated, concealing his astonishment at Myrna’s response. In past meetings with her, such clever opening gambits had invariably flopped, and he had thrown out his question now with little hope of success. What a marvel that she had become so audacious! And that he was really glad to see her—that was even more of a marvel. “Thank you. That was nice of you, even though you didn’t do it perfectly.” “Huh?” “You stuck in an extra word,” Myrna said. “The word today.” “The implications being . . . ?” “Remember Dr. Lash, how you always used to say to me, ‘A question ain’t a question if you know the answer.’” “You’re right, but humor me. Remember, Myrna, sometimes a therapist has special conversational privileges.” “Well, it seems clear to me that ‘today’ implies you often haven’t been glad to see me.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Over the last generation or so, therefore, the Western world, including the church, has found the language of “sin” sorely inadequate, not least because, as Jesus said about the Pharisees, it often cleans up things on the surface while hiding a deep rottenness within. But we haven’t yet decided what to put in its place. Some critics have suggested, with a certain amount of justification, that the whole point of talking about “sin” was really a way of controlling people. Sin talk is a power game, people have said; it is the moral equivalent of an overly fussy “health and safety” culture. It is designed to quench free spirits and to play a safety-first game with other people’s lives. It reflects an outdated and probably neurotic refusal to embrace the random indeterminacy of life and the radical freedom for which humans are born. Some in the churches, fearful of moral anarchy, have tried to cling to the old rules. Others have switched attention to newer, more fashionable issues, still thumping the pulpit, but now warning against fossil fuels rather than fornication. The older “sins” have been replaced by newer ones; the fierce energy of earlier moralisms has been transferred now to issues like ecology, feminism, and international debt. Others again have thrown over the whole idea, so that self-righteousness—the idea that “our way of life” is superior to “theirs”—is the only “sin” left. (This, of course, produces an infinite regress in which we congratulate ourselves because we are not self-congratulatory.) We cannot here go into the question of how we got into this muddle. Far more important for our present purposes is to see how to get out of it. Fortunately, the answer lies close at hand, and it offers a direct route to what the early Christians meant when they said that the Messiah had died “for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” As always, words mean what they mean within the larger story that is being told. In this case, the word “sin” means what it means within the story the Bible is telling. Taking it out of that context generates the difficulties just outlined. Actually, the Bible has several different words for sin: “wickedness,” “transgression,” and other terms for inappropriate or illegal behavior. These words all converge on the idea we sketched in the previous chapter: that humans were made for a purpose, that Israel was made for a purpose, and that humans and Israel alike have turned aside from that purpose, distorted the vision, and abused their vocation. The normal Greek word for “sin,” namely hamartia, means “missing the mark”: shooting at a target and failing to hit it. This is subtly but importantly different from being given a long and fussy list of things you must and mustn’t do and failing to observe them all.

• From Story of O (1954)

  Sir Stephen’s piercing gray eyes were fixed firmly upon her, as were René’s, and in them she was lost, slowly repeating after him the phrases he was dictating to her, but like a lesson of grammar, she was transposing them into the first person. “To Sir Stephen and to me you grant the right …” The right to dispose of her body however they wished, in whatever place or manner they should choose, the right to keep her in chains, the right to whip her like a slave or prisoner for the slightest failing or infraction, or simply for their pleasure, the right to pay no heed to her pleas and cries, if they should make her cry out. “I believe,” said René, “that at this point Sir Stephen would like me to take over, both you and I willing, and have me brief you concerning his demands.” O was listening to her lover, and the words which he had spoken to her at Roissy came back to her: they were almost the same words. But then she had listened snuggled up against him, protected by a feeling of improbability, as though it were all a dream, as though she existed only in another life and perhaps did not really exist at all. Dream or nightmare, the prison setting, the lavish party gowns, men in masks: all this removed her from her own life, even to the point of being uncertain how long it would last. There, at Roissy, she felt the way you do at night, lost in a dream you have had before and are now beginning to dream all over again: certain that it exists and certain that it will end, and you want it to end because you’re not sure you’ll be able to bear it, and you also want it to go on so you’ll know how it comes out. Well, the end was here, where she least expected it (or no longer expected it at all) and in the form she least expected (assuming, she was saying to herself, that this really was the end, that there was not actually another hiding behind this one, and perhaps still another behind the next one). The present end was toppling her from memory into reality and, besides, what had only been reality in a closed circle, a private universe, was suddenly about to contaminate all the customs and circumstances of her daily life, both on her and within her, now no longer satisfied with signs and symbols—the bare buttocks, bodices that unhook, the iron ring—but demanding fulfillment.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  If certain “punishment” models of atonement are perceived to license abusive or aggressive behavior, whether in families or between nations, does that mean we should rule them out of order, even if they seem to be sanctioned by some passages of scripture? Or—to look at things from the other end of the telescope—if such models of atonement are deemed after all to be central to scripture and to the preaching of the gospel itself, so that to soft-pedal such ideas would be to give up on an element of vital spiritual power, ought we instead to regard the sort of objections I have described as a diabolical trick to distract the church from its core message? Sadly, these questions often get bundled up with other ones, including ones about cultural, political, and social problems. At that point, clear-headed fresh readings of scripture can be seen receding over the horizon. But if you take the first line—that “punishment” models of atonement are to be ruled out because of their horrible view of God or their equally horrible social consequences—what are the alternatives? Traditionally there have been two, both with strong claims to some kind of biblical basis. First, as we saw earlier, there is the remarkable and paradoxical idea that on the cross Jesus won a victory—or at least God won a victory through Jesus—over the shadowy “powers” that had usurped his rule over the world. That idea was popular in some quarters during the first few Christian centuries. Many thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present day have advocated some version of this, partly as a way of warding off what they see as those dangerous ideas about punishment. But this simply pushes the question around the circle rather than answering it directly. What or who are these “powers”? Why would someone’s death—anyone’s death, the Messiah’s death, the death of the Son of God himself—why would such an event defeat these “powers”? Why would that be a revelation of divine love? And—perhaps the most pressing question of all—if these “powers” have been defeated, why does evil still appear to carry on as before, to reign unchecked? Did anything actually happen on the cross that made a real difference in the world, and if so what account can we give of it? Has the revolution really begun, or is it all wishful thinking? Second, there’s another idea that comes through prominently in the Bible that many have advocated as the “real meaning” of Jesus’s death. In this view, on the cross Jesus offered the supreme example of love, the ultimate display of what love will do. He thus transformed the world by offering a uniquely powerful example, a pattern for others to imitate. Now, of course, the New Testament does indeed insist on this line of thought.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The usual “Romans road” reading of the letter assumes that the only point Paul is making between 1:18 and 3:20 is that “all humans are sinful.” This then leads us into the “works contract”: we are moral failures; we need to get “right with God” if we’re going to get to heaven; Jesus dies in our place; the job is done. And at one level this is better than nothing. The glass may be one-third full. But something vital has been left out, like a cocktail without the all-important shot of bourbon. You can still drink it. Some important flavors are really there. But the intended meaning, the real “kick” to Paul’s argument, is missing. Actually, there are two missing meanings. First, the usual reading ignores the implicit Temple theme, evident in the second half of Romans 3:23: “All sinned, and fell short of God’s glory.” This is not a coded way of saying “they failed to qualify for the ‘glory’ of “heaven.” It refers back, rather, to 1:21–23: “They knew God, but didn’t honor him as God” (literally, “They did not glorify him as God”), and “they swapped the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of the image of mortal humans.” This echo (via Ps. 106:20) of the story of the golden calf indicates that, as we see in 1:18–32 as a whole, behind “sin” itself there lies idolatry. Humans have turned away from the creator God and have worshipped and served created things instead. They have even created for themselves second-order images of created things, thus worshipping objects twice removed from the creator God and thereby abusing their own God-given human powers for a purpose that reverses and undercuts their genuine human vocation. Human skill and ingenuity were designed to work for God’s purposes in the world, not to generate alternate gods for people to worship instead. “Sin,” then, is not simply the breaking of God’s rules. It is the outflowing of idolatry.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “You must get dressed now,” he said, “we’re leaving.” She took a hasty bath, he brushed her hair, handed her powder and lipstick to her. When she returned to her cell, her suit, her blouse, her slip, her stockings, and her shoes were on the foot of the bed, as were her gloves and handbag. There was even the coat she wore over her suit when the weather turned brisk, and a square silk scarf to protect her neck, but no garter belt or panties. She dressed slowly, rolling her stockings down to just above her knees, and she did not put on her suitcoat because it was very warm in her cell. Just then, the man who had explained on the first evening what would be expected of her, came in. He unlocked the collar and bracelets which had held her captive for two weeks. Was she freed of them? or did she have the feeling something was missing? She said nothing, scarcely daring to run her hands over her wrists, not daring to lift them to her throat. Then he asked her to choose, from among the exactly identical rings which he showed to her in a small wooden box, the one which fit her left ring finger. They were strange iron rings, banded with gold inside, and the signet was wide and as massive as that of an actual signet ring, but it was convex, and for design bore a three-spoked wheel inlaid in gold, with each spoke spiraling back upon itself like the solar wheel of the Celts. The second ring she tried, though a trifle snug, fit her exactly. It was heavy on her hand, and the gold gleamed as though furtively in the dull gray of the polished iron. Why iron, and why gold, and this insignia she did not understand? It was impossible to talk in this room draped in red, where the chain was still on the wall above the bed, where the black, still rumpled cover was lying on the floor, this room into which the valet Pierre might emerge, was sure to emerge, absurd in his opera outfit, in the dull light of November.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In high school, I began to suffer because they forced me to ask myself what I was. This problem never could have arisen at the Alliance School where we had all been Jews, all but a tiny minority which had soon been reduced to discretion. But in high school a constant flow of remarks made me ponder the problem of the ideal Jew and forced me to study myself in order to discover in me the typical characteristics. Such introspection calls up ghosts, and through sheer rebelliousness, I defended my own ghosts and thus assured them an existence of their own. I, an artisan’s son and poor, defended merchants and financiers in the presence of non-Jews, trying to explain historically why some Jews went into trade as though I had personally been responsible for Jewish trade and believed that non-Jewish trades were indeed more acceptable. As I condemned Jewish trade, I attacked it in the face of Jews, too, but far more virulently than the anti-Semites did and more openly.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In most popular Christianity, “heaven” (and “fellowship with God” in the present) is the goal, and “sin” (bad behavior, deserving punishment) is the problem. A Platonized goal and a moralizing diagnosis—and together they lead, as I have been suggesting, to a paganized “solution” in which an angry divinity is pacified by human sacrifice. The zealous theological Boy Scouts have gotten it wrong. Humans are made not for “heaven,” but for the new heavens and new earth. And the equally zealous theological doctors have produced the wrong diagnosis. The human problem is not so much “sin” seen as the breaking of moral codes—though that, to be sure, is part of it, just as the headaches and blurry vision really were part of the medical problem—but rather idolatry and the distortion of genuine humanness it produces. These two mistakes go together, reinforcing the basic heaven-and-earth dualism that continues to haunt Western theology. They lead some to suppose that the human problem has to do, after all, with our “earthly” and “bodily” selves and that our ultimate aim is for our “souls” to escape this body and find rest in an existence outside space, time, and matter altogether. I have argued elsewhere, and will continue here, that this is highly misleading. The “goal” is not “heaven,” but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward. In particular, much thinking and preaching about the cross has assumed a tradition that, in the seventeenth century, came to be known by some as the “covenant of works.” This idea, enshrined in the famous 1646 Westminster Confession, is central to much popular belief. Here we must be careful. There are many varieties of Protestantism, and even many varieties of “Reformed” doctrine within that larger category. Some of the varieties have seen the same problems that I see here and have responded in ways not too far, though still different, from what I am recommending. Some of those who agree with me in wanting to avoid those problems have used the phrase “covenant of works” in a way significantly different from the view I am opposing. Laying all that out would be a task for another time, and I shall try to avoid getting tangled up in all this by referring to the view I am opposing as the “works contract.” The “works contract” functions in the popular mind like this. God told his human creatures to keep a moral code; their continuing life in the Garden of Eden depended on their keeping that code perfectly. Failure would incur the punishment of death. This was then repeated in the case of Israel with a sharpened-up moral code, Mosaic law. The result was the same. Humans were therefore heading for hell rather than heaven.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Jesus’s death is regularly appealed to as the gold standard of “love.” In John’s gospel, Jesus commands his followers to love one another and declares, “No one has a love greater than this, to lay down your life for your friends” (15:13). The First Letter of John insists on the same point, as do Paul and many other early writers. But this too runs into problems. Unless there was a reason for Jesus to die, and perhaps even a reason for him to die that particular and horrible kind of death, it is hard to see how this death could actually be an example of love. If Bill’s dearest friend falls into a fast-flowing river and Bill leaps in to try to save him, risking his own life in the process, that would indeed provide an example of love (as well as heroic courage) for anyone who witnesses the event or hears about it. But if Fred, wishing to show his dearest friend how much he loves him, leaps into a fast-flowing river when the friend is standing safely beside him on the bank, that would demonstrate neither love nor courage, but meaningless folly. My point is this: unless Jesus’s death achieved something—something that urgently needed to be done and that couldn’t be done in any other way—then it cannot serve as a moral example. The “exemplary” meaning must always depend on something prior. As John puts it: “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the sacrifice that would atone for our sins . Beloved, if that’s how God loved us, we ought to love one another in the same way” (1 John 4:10–11). John does not expect his readers to offer themselves as the sacrifice to atone for one another’s sins. That has already been done. They are expected to copy the self-sacrificial love through which Jesus did something unique, something that urgently needed doing. So our question presses: What was that “something”? At this point other questions have come into the contemporary discussion. First, as we have seen, the wars and genocides of the last century have generated a new kind of Christian pacifism in which all violence is to be rejected outright, including the apparent violence of some traditional atonement theories (God using violence against Jesus, and so on). Second, at the same time and perhaps with similar motivation, many have embraced the previously unthinkable idea that the suffering of the cross is the suffering not only of the Son, but also of the Father. Others, again, have reacted by proposing new versions of the old idea that though the “human” Jesus suffered on the cross, the “divine” Jesus did not. Whether that makes any sense is difficult to say.