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 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)

  One recent hymn puts it like this: And on the cross, when Jesus died, The wrath of God was satisfied— (This makes it sound like hunger that is satisfied by a good meal.) The line of thought goes like this, usually based on a particular arrangement of biblical texts: a.All humans sinned, causing God to be angry and to want to kill them, to burn them forever in “hell.” b.Jesus somehow got in the way and took the punishment instead (it helped, it seems, that he was innocent—oh, and that he was God’s own son too). c.We are in the clear after all, heading for “heaven” instead (provided, of course, we believe it). Many preachers and teachers put it much more subtly than this, but this is still the story people hear. This is the story they expect to hear. In some churches, if you don’t tell this story more or less in this way, people will say that you aren’t “preaching the gospel.” The natural reaction to this from many who have grown up hearing this message and feeling they had to believe it (if they didn’t, they would go to hell) is that its picture of God is abhorrent. This God, such people instinctively feel, is a bloodthirsty tyrant. If there is a God, we must hope and pray that he (or she, or it) isn’t like that at all. So they react in one of a number of predictable ways. Some people reject the whole thing as a horrible nonsense. Others, puzzled, go back to their Bibles and to the great teachers of the early church, and there they find all sorts of other things being said about the cross, for instance, that it was the means by which God’s rescuing love won the ultimate victory over all the forces of darkness. Or they find early writers urging Christians to imitate the self-giving love of Jesus, and they seize upon that as the “answer”: the cross, they say, wasn’t about God punishing sin; it was about Jesus giving us the ultimate example of love. Thus many different interpretations have arisen, affecting the ways in which people have been taught the Bible and the Christian faith. This has been a recipe for confusion. This confusion, as I shall be suggesting, gets in the way of what is arguably the most important thing. The New Testament insists, in book after book, that when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place. And the early Christians insisted that when people are caught up in the meaning of the cross, they become part of this difference.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Few patients are indifferent to the prospect of obtaining feedback from their therapist. “One of my major feelings is a certain frustration—I think it has to do with your being a trifle stingy.” “Stingy?” “Stingy—word-stingy. You don’t give me much. Whenever I ask you a question, you send me back a terse telegram. That is, you give me as few words, as few descriptive details, as few personal revelations as possible. And it is for this very reason that I have tried to establish a more intimate relationship between us. My approach to therapy depends on my patients’ sharing their deepest feelings. In my experience, formal roles slow down that process, and that’s my reason—my sole reason—for shucking them. And that’s also why I often ask you to look at your feelings toward me.” “Everything you say is eminently reasonable—I’m sure you know what you’re doing. But I can’t help it—the California touchy-feely culture sets my teeth on edge. That’s the way I am. ” “One question about that. Are you satisfied with the way you are?” “Satisfied?” Halston looked baffled. “Well, when you say that’s the way you are, I believe you’re saying too that that’s the way you choose to be. So I’m asking, are you satisfied with that choice? With keeping such distance, remaining so impersonal?” “I’m not sure it’s a choice, Doctor. That,” he repeated, “is the way I am—my innermost constitution.” Ernest considered two alternatives. He could either attempt to persuade Halston of his own responsibility for his remoteness or launch one final major investigation of a specific crucial episode of Halston’s withholding. He chose the latter. “Well, let me go back once again to the very beginning, to the night you entered the emergency room. Let me tell you my side of it. At about four in the morning, I received a call from the emergency room physician describing a patient in a state of great panic touched off by a nightmare. I told the physician to start you on medication for the panic and arranged to meet with you two hours later, at six. When we met you could recall neither the nightmare nor any of the events of the previous evening. In other words, I had no content, nothing to go on.” “That’s the way it was; everything about that evening remains a blackout.” “And so I’ve tried to work around it, and I agree with you—we’ve made little headway. But in our three hours together, I’ve been struck by your general remoteness from others, from me, possibly from yourself.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  To start the session, she asked me if there was anything I needed to feel embodied and comfortable in the present moment. Did I need to change the way I was sitting, or move somewhere else? Was the temperature okay? Did I need a glass of water or a bite of something? Was I hungry, thirsty, cold, uncomfortable? This line of questioning jarred me. I don’t ask myself these questions, nor does anyone else, at least not since my Italian grandmother was alive. I fidgeted in my seat, genuinely unsure. I felt numb and sensation-free. Was I uncomfortable? What is uncomfortable … Was I hungry? What is hunger … I could eat, that much I knew. That much I always knew. I strained to locate hunger in my body but couldn’t find it, so no, I wasn’t hungry. But I felt a little cold! I think? That tingling on my feet was cold, yes? I counted this as progress—the ability to recognize I was cold. The bar was low. I let my mind run wild with the implications this had on my sex life, which obviously was the point of the exercise: How many times during sex have I not felt right in my body, but ignored the messages my body was giving me? I was on the precipice of spiraling. “I’m cold,” I said, and grabbed a blanket to wrap around my shoulders. I couldn’t tell if I was thirsty, so I said I was fine otherwise; I didn’t want to waste her time, even though I was paying her and she was begging me to take the time I needed to decide if I was thirsty. Weissfeld has just three rules in her sessions, which, like everything else under the sun, apply to sex: 1. Take care of yourself. 2. Listen to your body. 3. Don’t endure. Don’t endure, don’t endure, don’t endure. Yet again I had been viciously attacked! Enduring is my way of life. It’s my heritage, my religion, my lifestyle, my sexual ethos: if something doesn’t feel quite right, I wait it out, because that’s easier. He’s going down on me and I say faster and he goes faster but then he loses the clit and the wave of pleasure dissipates. Well, I’ve already said my one thing, better now to endure; enduring costs me nothing, or at least costs my partner nothing. What does it cost me? We began with breath work. She referred to breath as my “inner lover” and invited me to imagine it as such. “It’s carrying this nourishing oxygen to all these different parts of your body. It’s like giving you a little massage from the inside. It’s a nourishing touch.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  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. In the story the Bible is telling, humans were created for a purpose, and Israel was called for a purpose, and the purpose was not simply “to keep the rules,” “to be with God,” or “to go to heaven,” as you might suppose from innumerable books, sermons, hymns, and prayers. Humans were made to be “image-bearers,” to reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator and to reflect the Creator’s wise and loving stewardship into the world. Israel was called to be the royal priesthood, to worship God and reflect his rescuing wisdom into the world. In the Bible, “sin”—for which there are various words in Hebrew—is the outworking of a prior disease, a prior disobedience: a failure of worship .

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Nor is this simply a metaphor or a type that would point forward, like a signpost, to something quite different. (A signpost may offer a symbol of a particular building, perhaps a hospital or a restaurant. The symbol doesn’t need to look at all like what you will see when you arrive at the destination. By itself, the signpost will give you neither medication nor food; but it will point you in the right direction. That is how many Christians have seen the biblical story of exile and the promise of restoration: a truthful signpost, but a signpost to something essentially different.) Western culture has been so wedded to the platonic idea that God’s purpose for humans is to leave this world and go to “heaven” to be with him—as opposed to the biblical idea that God’s purpose for humans is to reflect the praises of creation back to him and to reflect his image in the world, so that ultimately heaven and earth will be one—that many who hear and understand the point I have been making will still try to see it as an “illustration” rather than as part of the story in which Jesus and his followers were still living. Such people, perhaps the most frustrating of dialogue partners, will at once insist on “translating” the Israel-specific historical and biblical context into an abstract idea, as though Israel itself were simply an example of something else rather than the people through whom the divine project of restoration was to be taken forward. Such readers will then have to create a new context for Jesus and his death. It will only be “in accordance with the Bible” in a thin, twisted sense. The new context will distort what the Bible itself—both Old and New Testaments—actually says. This has happened time and again. But if we keep our nerve, we may perhaps be able to get things straight at last. If exile is the result of Israel’s sin, and if this exile is therefore to be understood as death, it is not simply that Israel happens to have done on a grand scale what the human race, symbolized in Adam and Eve, had done all along. Israel—the people called by God for the unique role in his purposes—could never be merely an example, even a large-scale example, of something else . Israel’s idolatry and exile, Israel’s sin and death are seen in Israel’s scriptures themselves not just as the quintessence, but also as the radical deepening of the human plight. It is as if the lifeboat sent to rescue drowning sailors from a stricken ship has itself been submerged under a giant wave before it has reached those in need of it. But the project continues nonetheless.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Daring to Tell the TruthI recently led another group structure with a twenty-six-year-old man named Mark, who at age thirteen had accidentally overheard his father having phone sex with his aunt, his mother’s sister. Mark felt confused, embarrassed, hurt, betrayed, and paralyzed by this knowledge, but when he tried to talk with his father about it, he was met with rage and denial: he was told that he had a filthy imagination and accused of trying to break up the family. Mark never dared to tell his mom, but henceforth the family secrets and hypocrisy contaminated every aspect of his home life and gave him a pervasive sense that nobody could be trusted. After school, he spent his isolated adolescence hanging around neighborhood basketball courts or in his room watching TV. When he was twenty-one his mother died—of a broken heart, Mark says—and his father married the aunt. Mark was not invited to either the funeral or the wedding. Secrets like these become inner toxins—realities that you are not allowed to acknowledge to yourself or to others but that nevertheless become the template of your life. I knew none of this history when Mark joined the group, but he stood out by his emotional distance, and during check-ins he acknowledged that he felt separated from everyone by a dense fog. I was quite worried about what would be revealed once we started to look behind his frozen, expressionless exterior. When I invited Mark to talk about his family, he said a few words and then seemed to shut down even more. So I encouraged him to ask for a “contact figure” to support him. He chose a white-haired group member, Richard, and placed Richard on a pillow next to him, touching his shoulder. Then, as he began to tell his story, Mark placed Joe, as his real father, ten feet in front of him, and directed Carolyn, representing his mother, to crouch in a corner with her face hidden. Mark next asked Amanda to play his aunt, telling her to stand defiantly to one side, arms crossed over her chest—representing all the calculating, ruthless, and devious women who are after men.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Alexandre, Mordekhai, Benillouche. Benillouche or, in Berber-Arabic dialect, the son of the lamb. From what mountain tribe did my ancestors descend? Who am I, after all? I sought — in everything from official documents to my own sharply defined features — some thread which might lead me to the knowledge of who I am. For a while, I believed my forebears had been a family of Berber princes converted to Judaism by Kahena, the warrior-queen and founder of a Jewish kingdom in the middle of the Atlas Mountains. It pleased me to think that I came from the very heart of the country. But then, another time, I found I was descended from an Italian Renaissance painter. I tore the article from the big Larousse encyclopedia and displayed reproductions of my ancestor’s paintings to all my friends. Philology could explain away what changes the name had undergone, and my friend Sitboun, the star Latin student, backed me up and even discovered that the patron of a Latin poet had had a similar name. But philology is a fragile science, and the past is much too far away. Could I be descended from a Berber tribe when the Berbers themselves failed to recognize me as one of their own? I was Jewish, not Moslem; a townsman, not a highlander. And even if I had borne the painter’s name, I would not have been acknowledged by the Italians. No, I’m African, not European. In the long run, I would always be forced to return to Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe. Had I believed in signs, might I not have said that my name holds all the meaning of life? How is it possible to harmonize so many discords in something as smooth as the sound of a flute? My native city is after my own image. Through Tarfoune Street, our alley led to the Alliance School; and between home and the schoolyard, the atmosphere remained familiar, all of a piece. We were among Jews of the same class, and we had no painful awareness of our situation, no pretenses. At school, we persisted in speaking our own dialect despite the director’s posters which demanded French. Sometimes I crossed a Moslem quarter as if I were fording a river. It was not until I began attending the lycée that I really became acquainted with the city. Until then, I had believed that, by some special privilege, the doors of the world were being opened to me and that I need only walk through them to be greeted with joy. But I discovered I was doomed forever to be an outsider in my own native city. And one’s home town can no more be replaced than one’s mother.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  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.” “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.

• 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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The whole band was in a frenzy, in response to the clashing cymbals that never ceased sounding. The door was literally vibrating as I knocked on it, at first with my fists, then with my feet too. They must all have become quite deaf, if not insane, from this awful music. At last, someone opened the door for me and the din was at once unbelievably louder, swelling to fill the whole staircase, right up to the glass roof at the top. I dived into this weird mixture of hysterical flutes, wild cymbals, tom-tom drums, and darbouka bagpipes, all seasoned with the babble of excited women. The air seemed tropical, damp and warm, heavy with human breath and incense. With great difficulty, I forced my way through the throng of women, all of them familiar faces, aunts, cousins, neighbors, but each one of them now a stranger under the spell that had overcome her. They stood there motionless, their hair disheveled, their eyes aglow, rigid as statues, or perhaps like stupid cows that I had to push aside, as if they couldn’t understand me. They even seemed not to recognize me. But I had still not penetrated into the room where the dance was being held, beyond a broad doorway that was cloudy with smoke. To get there, I had to make my way through a tangled throng of women who were watching, some of them standing on chairs, stools, even tables, leaning against the walls, clinging together in clusters, all peering deep into the cloud of smoke. How could they see anything at all? Close to me, I recognized my Aunt Noucha, dressed for the occasion in Bedouin costume. I shouted into her ear: “Where is Mother?” When I got no answer, I grasped hold of her arm and shook it roughly. It was oily and sticky with sweat, and seemed to slither out of my grasp. “Where is Mother,” I shouted again. “I want our keys!” She smiled absently at me and pointed toward the living-room. The closer I seemed to get to the heart of all this mysterious din, the more crowded it was. The women who were watching were treading on each other’s feet, almost melting into a mass of compact flesh. I had to be really rough to reach the blue-gray cloud that was so thick that I could scarcely distinguish, through the smoke, the red embers of an earthenware brazier, like a shepherd’s fire in a fog. My eyes smarted from the smoke and became clouded with soothing tears. The noise was so loud, so full, that I seemed no longer to hear anything at all. One moment, I felt I was in sheer void, with no shapes or sounds around me any longer. Then my eyes grew accustomed to it and began to distinguish with difficulty what was going on.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Albert Memmi Paris, May 2013 Preface Here’s a French writer from Tunisia who is neither French nor Tunisian. He’s barely a Jew because, in a way, he doesn’t want to be one. The odd subject of this book is precisely the impossibility of being anything at all for a Tunisian Jew formed by French culture. The young man whose story is told here can define himself only by adding to the rejections of others his own rejections of the world. He is Jewish (with a Berber mother, which does not simplify things) and a Tunisian subject, that is to say a subject of the Bey of Tunis. But, as a pogrom during which Arabs massacre Jews shows him, he is not really Tunisian. His culture is French and he is the only one in his class who understands Racine properly. However, Vichy France delivers him to the Germans and Free France, when he wants to fight for her, asks him to change his Jewish-sounding name. There would be no question of being a Jew if, to be so, he didn’t need to accept a faith he does not share and traditions he views as ridiculous. What will he become in the end? One is tempted to say a writer as Mr. Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt proves that he is one, and also because a writer defines himself by his inability, nostalgic in fact, to blend into the anonymity of a class or race. In any case, there is no doubt that writing was the road to Damascus for this non-believing Paul. In terms of language at least, he wanted to be French. After reading about the father’s coughing fit, the mother’s dance, the son’s sexual initiation, the reader will surely conclude that Mr. Memmi is a novelist. But that’s not all he is. The mere fact of having described so precisely and sensitively the rending condition of a young Jew becoming aware through sheer intelligence and will of who he is, and is not, demonstrates a deeper choice. By writing about the difficulty of being a Jew, the author finally chooses to be one (and that’s good), replacing the traditional religious sensibility of his forebears with a sensibility that is more modern, dramatic, intelligent, loyal without illusions. This allows him to remain what he is while paying attention to the contradictions of others, French or Arab. Somehow, he will no longer deny anything in himself or others. The book, indeed, ends with the hero’s flight to South America. But that is novelistic artifice. This kind of hero never leaves or, if he does, leaves unchanged. All of us, French and born in North Africa, also remain who we are, faced with contradictions that today bloody our cities, and which we will not overcome by fleeing them, but by living them out. That is why I so much value Mr. Memmi’s beautiful book. Albert Camus PROLOGUE This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It flattens out Paul’s careful statement of the vocation of “the Jew” (to be the light of the world) into simply another aspect of the general truth that “all have sinned.” This in turn leaves 3:1–9 high and dry, or at least very difficult. This short passage consists of a rapid-fire series of questions and answers that make excellent sense if we read 2:17–29 in the way I am suggesting, but very little sense any other way. Again, many commentators and preachers have noticed this; some very careful and “conservative” expositors declare that the passage is too complex and puzzling to be much help. This in turn results in a failure to see what Paul is getting at in 3:21–26. Finally, the “problem” Paul is addressing is assumed to be simply human wrongdoing (“sin”). However, in Romans 1:18–23 and in the summary of that passage in 3:23 we find a deeper element as well. “Sin” is rooted in idolatry, the swapping of the divine Glory for images. Here Paul is exactly on the map of Second Temple Jewish writings. But many today, eager to talk about “sin,” have forgotten that it is the second-order problem. The root cause of the trouble is the worship of idols. These exegetical problems point to the underlying theological difficulties with the usual reading. This usual reading is all about how we get “right with God” in order to “go to heaven”; but Paul never mentions “going to heaven,” here or elsewhere in Romans, and the idea of being “right with God,” though related to Paul’s theme, is usually taken out of the specific context he intends. Ironically, the usual reading takes “going to heaven” (or some near equivalent) for granted and then complains if, instead, someone tries to reintroduce into these chapters the themes that Paul demonstrably is expounding. It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, “I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.” Further, the usual reading assumes that the problem Paul is facing is divine wrath and that in 3:24–26, and in particular with the key term hilastērion , he is explaining how this wrath is somehow dealt with. This is lexically possible, but there are four problems with it.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  In the “normal” group key parts of the brain worked together to produce a coherent pattern of filtering, focus, and analysis. (See left image below.) In contrast, the brain waves of traumatized subjects were more loosely coordinated and failed to come together into a coherent pattern. Specifically, they did not generate the brain-wave pattern that helps people pay attention to the task at hand by filtering out irrelevant information (the upward curve, labeled N200). In addition, the core information-processing configuration of the brain (the downward peak, P300) was poorly defined; the depth of the wave determines how well we are able to take in and analyze new data. This was important new information about how traumatized people process nontraumatic information that has profound implications for understanding day-to-day information processing. These brain-wave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment. [image "Diagram comparing brainwave patterns in normal individuals (left) versus individuals with PTSD (right). The left side shows synchronized brainwave activity, while the right side displays less coordinated brainwaves, indicating difficulty filtering irrelevant information and attending to stimuli." file=image_rsrc781.jpg] Normal versus PTSD. Patterns of attention. Milliseconds after the brain is presented with input it starts organizing the meaning of the incoming information. Normally, all regions of the brain collaborate in a synchronized pattern (left), while the brainwaves in PTSD are less well coordinated; the brain has trouble filtering out irrelevant information and has problems attending to the stimulus at hand. Sandy McFarlane’s study reminded me of what Pierre Janet had said back in 1889: “Traumatic stress is an illness of not being able to be fully alive in the present.” Years later, when I saw the movie The Hurt Locker, which dealt with the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, I immediately recalled Sandy’s study: As long as they were coping with extreme stress, these men performed with pinpoint focus; but back in civilian life they were overwhelmed having to make simple choices in a supermarket. We are now seeing alarming statistics about the number of returning combat veterans who enroll in college on the GI Bill but do not complete their degrees. (Some estimates are over 80 percent.) Their well-documented problems with focusing and attention are surely contributing to these poor results. McFarlane’s study clarified a possible mechanism for the lack of focus and attention in PTSD, but it also presented a whole new challenge: Was there any way to change these dysfunctional brain-wave patterns? It was seven years before I learned that there might be ways to do that.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  My point here is not that some ways of addressing global terrorism are more morally justified or more effective than others. These are complex issues. Easy “solutions” are bound to be oversimplifications. I want to say simply this: that many have observed an apparent connection between ways in which people have described the meaning of Jesus’s death and ways in which others have seen fit to try to “solve” problems in the world. If God needs to punish, then perhaps we do as well. If God solves problems by using violence, maybe he wants us to do so too. However, the shift if not toward pacifism itself, then at least toward a strict limitation on military responses to global problems in certain sectors of public opinion in the Western world as a whole over the last century, has caused some in the churches to suggest views of the death of Jesus in which divine punishment plays no role at all. Some have even suggested that the connection between divine punishment and Jesus’s death is a comparatively modern invention, though in truth we can find the same theme stated (in a different context, as I shall show) in the Bible itself. We also find it in the early church fathers, and we should note that many of them were strongly opposed to the death penalty at a time when it was taken for granted in the violent world of the Roman Empire. We should not too quickly assume that theories of atonement are directly reflected in or reflective of social practice. All this points to the complexity of recent debates about the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion, about the “Why?” that haunts the whole subject. 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.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  This made me wonder: Our patients had hallucinations—the doctors routinely asked about them and noted them as signs of how disturbed the patients were. But if the stories I’d heard in the wee hours were true, could it be that these “hallucinations” were in fact the fragmented memories of real experiences? Were hallucinations just the concoctions of sick brains? Could people make up physical sensations they had never experienced? Was there a clear line between creativity and pathological imagination? Between memory and imagination? These questions remain unanswered to this day, but research has shown that people who’ve been abused as children often feel sensations (such as abdominal pain) that have no obvious physical cause; they hear voices warning of danger or accusing them of heinous crimes. There was no question that many patients on the ward engaged in violent, bizarre, and self-destructive behaviors, particularly when they felt frustrated, thwarted, or misunderstood. They threw temper tantrums, hurled plates, smashed windows, and cut themselves with shards of glass. At that time I had no idea why someone might react to a simple request (“Let me clean that goop out of your hair”) with rage or terror. I usually followed the lead of the experienced nurses, who signaled when to back off or, if that did not work, to restrain a patient. I was surprised and alarmed by the satisfaction I sometimes felt after I’d wrestled a patient to the floor so a nurse could give an injection, and I gradually realized how much of our professional training was geared to helping us stay in control in the face of terrifying and confusing realities. Sylvia was a gorgeous nineteen-year-old Boston University student who usually sat alone in the corner of the ward, looking frightened to death and virtually mute, but whose reputation as the girlfriend of an important Boston mafioso gave her an aura of mystery. After she refused to eat for more than a week and rapidly started to lose weight, the doctors decided to force-feed her. It took three of us to hold her down, another to push the rubber feeding tube down her throat, and a nurse to pour the liquid nutrients into her stomach. Later, during a midnight confession, Sylvia spoke timidly and hesitantly about her childhood sexual abuse by her brother and uncle. I realized then our display of “caring” must have felt to her much like a gang rape. This experience, and others like it, helped me formulate this rule for my students: If you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating a trauma from the patient’s past.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AMBROSE. According to the letter of the law, a woman is compelled to marry, however unwilling, in order that a brother may raise up seed to his brother who is dead. The letter therefore killeth, but the Spirit is the master of charity. THEOPHYLACT. Now the Sadducees resting upon a weak foundation, did not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection. For imagining the future life in the resurrection to be carnal, they were justly misled, and hence reviling the doctrine of the resurrection as a thing impossible they invent the story, There were seven brothers, &c. BEDE. (ut sup.) They devise this story in order to convict those of folly, who assert the resurrection of the dead. Hence they object a base fable, that they may deny the truth of the resurrection. AMBROSE. Mystically, this woman is the synagogue, which had seven husbands, as it is said to the Samaritan, Thou hadst five husbands, (John 4:18.) because the Samaritan follows only the five books of Moses, the synagogue for the most part seven. And from none of them has she received the seed of an hereditary offspring, and so can have no part with her husbands in the resurrection, because she perverts the spiritual meaning of the precept into a carnal. For not any carnal brother is pointed at, who should raise seed to his deceased brother, but that brother who from the dead people of the Jews should claim unto himself for wife the wisdom of the divine worship, and from it should raise up seed in the Apostles, who being left as it were unformed in the womb of the synagogue, have according to the election of grace been thought worthy to be preserved by the admixture of a new seed. BEDE. Or these seven brothers answer to the reprobate, who throughout the whole life of the world, which revolves in seven days, are fruitless in good works, and these being carried away by death one after another, at length the course of the evil world, as the barren woman, itself also passes away. THEOPHYLACT. But our Lord shews that in the resurrection there will be no fleshly conversation, thereby overthrowing their doctrine together with its slender foundation; as it follows, And Jesus said unto them, The children of this world marry, &c. AUGUSTINE. (de Quæst. Ev. l. ii. cap. 49.) For marriages are for the sake of children, children for succession, succession because of death. Where then there is no death, there are no marriages; and hence it follows, But they which shall be accounted worthy, &c. BEDE. Which must not be taken as if only they who are worthy were either to rise again or be without marriage, but all sinners also shall rise again, and abide without marriage in that new world. But our Lord wished to mention only the elect, that He might incite the minds of His hearers to search into the glory of the resurrection.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The question, “What exactly happened?” is of course ambiguous. At one level the answer is relatively clear: betrayal, arrest, nighttime hearings, rough Roman justice, violence, beating, weeping, death, burial. But the question underneath that (as with almost all narratives, we should always be alert for the “underneath” bit, the probing of motives and meanings) is: What was going on in regard to God and the world? What did this mean for the fulfillment (or the failure) of Jesus’s hopes, of his kingdom announcement? How does this event either complete his work or destroy it? Had Jesus been intending to continue preaching, healing, and teaching for several more years, only to find himself caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was this horrible end somehow envisaged within his own vocational awareness? And, whatever answer we give to that, what can we say about the divine intention and indeed the divine accomplishment? This is the same double set of questions and answers that we find if we ask, “Why did Jesus die?” You can give historical reasons: the chief priests were angry because of what he did in the Temple; the Romans were suspicious that he might be some kind of rebel leader; the Pharisees hated him because his kingdom vision clashed at several points with their own. Or, still within historical reasons, you could say that Jesus died because his followers failed to defend him, and one of them actually betrayed him to the authorities. The question “Why,” even at the historical level, can get quite complicated. But we can also ask the theological “Why?” What was the divine reason? Already in Acts we find the strange combination: God meant it, but you (the Jewish leaders) were wicked in carrying it out by handing Jesus over to the pagans (2:23; 4:27–28). And here is the point: the Western church, looking for the “theological” answer to the question “Why?” (“How did Jesus’s death mean that sins could be forgiven so we could go to heaven?”), has largely ignored the historical answer, and indeed the historical questions. They have been regarded as irrelevant circumstantial details. But are they? The answer, clearly, is no. The historical questions and answers are the place to go if we want to find the theological answer. If we cannot see it there, that might be an indication that we are trying to answer the wrong question. If the gospels do not seem to be “saying the right stuff,” maybe it is our idea of the “right stuff” that needs adjusting. The main theme that makes this point graphically is the relationship, which we have already noted in relation to Jesus’s own understanding of his vocation, between the proclamation of the kingdom, on the one hand, and the crucifixion, on the other. In much reading, teaching, preaching, and indeed scholarship, these have appeared to be almost contradictory: the positive message and moment of the kingdom program followed by the negative and disastrous moment of the cross.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I translated this comment at once for Poinsot. After that, they both remained silent and waited again. I was trying to find some other verbal link between them when I suddenly felt with real anguish how impossible any communication would be. It was like an access of vertigo. When I find myself at the foot of a wall and look up at the top and see it rising above me endlessly toward the sky, I feel this same vertigo, as if the sky had suddenly become an abyss. The two parts of my being spoke two different languages and would never understand each other. Thus, I allowed the conversation to die. My mother retired into her kitchen, accustomed to being excluded. Poinsot calmly filled his pipe and waited for the end of the storm, without asking me any questions about my nervousness and my sudden silence. It had always been his habit to wait for me to reveal my preoccupations to him. But an explanation, this time, was beyond me. I felt as if walled in. Besides, he would interpret my explanations as useless histrionics, believing that the obstacle could be overcome if one found out first what the whole problem really was. But would I ever be strong enough to survive this split in my being? I was beginning to understand that, however much I might want to become a second Poinsot, the chances were stronger that I would become but another Marrou. Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose. And it was Poinsot whom I chose passionately, with all the strength of my being. One day, as I entered a café, I suddenly saw myself in a mirror and was terribly scared. I was both myself and a stranger. The mirror ahead of me covered the whole wall, so completely that I could see no frame. Each day, I thus became more alien to myself. I had to stop watching myself, I had to step out of this mirror. Toward the end of my high-school years, I began to know what I did not want to become and, if only in a confused manner, what I wanted. I did not want to be Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, I wanted to escape from myself and go out toward the others. I was not going to remain a Jew, an Oriental, a pauper; I belonged neither to my family nor to my religious community; I was a new being, utterly transparent, ready to be completely remade into a philosophy instructor. It had to be done, and I would reconstruct the whole universe, with simple and clear elements, like all the philosophers who were my masters, and as Poinsot too had done.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AMBROSE. Nor without meaning has one Evangelist spoken of a new tomb, another of the tomb of Joseph. For the grave is prepared by those who are under the law of death; the Conqueror of death has no grave of His own. For what fellowship hath God with the grave. He alone is enclosed in this tomb, because the death of Christ, although it was common according to the nature of the body, yet was it peculiar in respect of power. But Christ is rightly buried in the tomb of the just, that He may rest in the habitation of justice. For this monument the just man hews out with the piercing word in the hearts of Gentile hardness, that the power of Christ might extend over the nations. And very rightly is there a stone rolled against the tomb; for whoever has in himself truly buried Christ, must diligently guard, lest he lose Him, or lest there be an entrance for unbelief. BEDE. Now that the Lord is crucified on the sixth day and rests on the seventh, signifies that in the sixth age of the world we must of necessity suffer for Christ, and as it were be crucified to the world. (Gal. 6:14.) But in the seventh age, that is, after death, our bodies indeed rest in the tombs, but our souls with the Lord. But even at the present time also holy women, (that is, humble souls,) fervent in love, diligently wait upon the Passion of Christ, and if perchance they may be able to imitate Him, with anxious carefulness ponder each step in order, by which this Passion is fulfilled. And having read, heard, and called to mind all these, they next apply themselves to make ready the works of virtue, by which Christ may be pleased, in order that having finished the preparation of this present life, in a blessed rest they may at the time of the resurrection meet Christ with the frankincence of spiritual actions. CHAPTER 24 24:1–121. Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. 2. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. 3. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. 4. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: 5. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? 6. He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, 7. Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. 8. And they remembered his words,