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 Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  “The clitoris, while important,” wrote one mid-century therapist, “is not nearly as important as most of us have been taught to believe. It becomes erect during excitement and it bends down to make contact with the entering penis. With the penis penetrating, there should be sufficient lubrication to make the act enjoyable. In time the orgasm should occur.” This author cautions women with strong sex feelings not to masturbate, since doing so will condition her to enjoy “clitoris friction.” If she leaves her clitoris alone and has intercourse with her husband as much as possible, he assures us, with time the “normal channels” will develop. A woman therapist suggested that the vagina’s nerve endings and sensation must be awakened by way of clitoral sensation; the nerves “practice” sensation this way. Once the lesson is learned, the clitoris can be abandoned. Another therapist wrote that the failure of the clitoris to be adequately stimulated during intercourse “is one of the anomalies in the sexual physiology of the human female.” This author, a man, discusses how to fix this nagging problem, admitting that in extreme cases the husband might consider masturbating his wife to climax (“even after he has reached his own orgasm”) because otherwise tensions will develop in the marriage. But this counselor has a strong preference for another approach: Describing the missionary position as “the usual position for coitus,” he adds, “It is important to bear in mind, however, that in this position the knees of the woman would have to be bent and her thighs drawn up. ‘How far should the knees be drawn up?’ The knees may be flexed only slightly with the feet resting on the bed, or they may be drawn up so that the legs of the wife will encircle the husband’s body.” Another is confident that intercourse in the missionary position will result in simultaneous orgasm. “This is it. This is the moment of ecstasy when a woman soars along a Milky Way among stars all her own. This is the high mountaintop of love of which the poets sing. Her whole being is a full orchestra playing the fortissimo of a glorious symphony.” This kind of orgasm was tricky to obtain, but one had to try. Married women who don’t have orgasms suffer headaches, dizziness, “a general feeling of utter misery. Some women later become depressed, having weeping spells, digestive upsets and nervous prostration.” They may suffer arrhythmias, clammy skin, compulsive behavior, and phobias. Without knowing why, “they wake up in the morning unrefreshed by sleep, having a grouchy disposition, finding fault with their husbands, their children and everything in general.” (I know I do.)

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  After lunch, my friend who suggested the HARD TO GET tattoo invites me to her office, where she offers to Google you on my behalf. She’s going to see if the Internet reveals a preferred pronoun for you, since despite or due to the fact that we’re spending every free moment in bed together and already talking about moving in, I can’t bring myself to ask. Instead I’ve become a quick study in pronoun avoidance. The key is training your ear not to mind hearing a person’s name over and over again. You must learn to take cover in grammatical cul-de-sacs, relax into an orgy of specificity. You must learn to tolerate an instance beyond the Two, precisely at the moment of attempting to represent a partnership—a nuptial, even. Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is—simply the outline of a becoming. Expert as one may become at such a conversation, to this day it remains almost impossible for me to make an airline reservation or negotiate with my human resources department on our behalf without flashes of shame or befuddlement. It’s not really my shame or befuddlement—it’s more like I’m ashamed for (or simply pissed at) the person who keeps making all the wrong presumptions and has to be corrected, but who can’t be corrected because the words are not good enough. How can the words not be good enough? Lovesick on the floor of my friend’s office, I squint up at her as she scrolls through an onslaught of bright information I don’t want to see. I want the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person never need apply. “Look, here’s a quote from John Waters, saying, ‘She’s very handsome.’ So maybe you should use ‘she.’ I mean, it’s John Waters.” That was years ago, I roll my eyes from the floor. Things might have changed. When making your butch-buddy film, By Hook or By Crook, you and your cowriter, Silas Howard, decided that the butch characters would call each other “he” and “him,” but in the outer world of grocery stores and authority figures, people would call them “she” and “her.” The point wasn’t that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters’ preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters “he,” it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. The answer isn’t just to introduce new words (boi, cisgendered, andro-fag) and then set out to reify their meanings (though obviously there is power and pragmatism here). One must also become alert to the multitude of possible uses, possible contexts, the wings with which each word can fly. Like when you whisper, You’re just a hole, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  These three dimensions of the story of Jesus demonstrate the complete inadequacy of three ways of looking at Jesus that, however popular they have been, must be set aside at this point before we can proceed with yet more dimensions of this most extraordinary of stories. A New Kind of Revolution First, it will not do to suppose that Jesus came to teach people “how to get to heaven.” That view has been immensely popular in Western Christianity for many generations, but it simply won’t do. The whole point of Jesus’s public career was not to tell people that God was in heaven and that, at death, they could leave “earth” behind and go to be with him there. It was to tell them that God was now taking charge, right here on “earth”; that they should pray for this to happen; that they should recognize, in his own work, the signs that it was happening indeed; and that when he completed his work, it would become reality. In particular, we must be clear what is and isn’t meant when Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, speaks about the “kingdom of heaven.” Many have wrongly assumed that he was referring to a “kingdom” in the sense of a place called “heaven”—in other words, a heavenly realm to which people might aspire to go once their time on “earth” was over. That is simply not what the phrase meant in the first century—though, sadly, it doesn’t seem to have taken very long within the early church for the misunderstanding to creep in, doubtless because within a century or two the original Jewish meanings of Jesus’s words were being forgotten. Within Jesus’s world, the word “heaven” could be a reverent way of saying “God”; and in any case, part of the point of “heaven” is that it wasn’t detached, wasn’t a long way off, but was always the place from which “earth” was to be run. When, in the book of Daniel, people speak about “the God of heaven,” the point is that this God is in charge on earth, not that he’s a long way away and unconcerned about it. “The God of heaven” is precisely the one who organizes things on earth (Dan. 2:37) and will eventually set up his own kingdom there (2:44; see also 4:37; 5:23). Second, was Jesus, then, mounting some kind of quasi-military revolution? Some have thought so. Many, fed up with the way contemporary churches have colluded with corrupt and wicked establishments, have been eager to find in Jesus a different dream, a dream that perches uncomfortably halfway between the Sermon on the Mount and the sermons of Karl Marx. Attempts have then been made to ward off this proposal by insisting that Jesus’s message was “spiritual” rather than “political.” This has been, in my view, another dialogue of the deaf.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Let’s pause there and see how this short study of the role of humans in God’s plan and the opening of Acts have contributed to the discussion we listened to earlier. Andy, grudgingly, can see that Acts really does claim that Jesus is now the Lord of the world, but he still insists that it’s really all wishful thinking. Nothing has really changed; it’s still just a few fanatics rushing around the world thinking they’re doing God’s will. Billy is still looking for the final second coming when all will be fulfilled. That’s there in Acts 1 as well. But Billy too has to admit that Luke really does seem to have thought that Jesus’s resurrection and the sending of the Spirit meant the arrival—albeit not yet the full completion—of the kingdom of which Jesus had spoken during his public ministry. Perhaps it isn’t all postponed to the last day after all. But what sense can we make of this? Chris is unsure, not wanting to say that God was simply at work in the Roman Empire, yet pointing out that without Roman roads and magistrates Paul would not have been able to do half of what he did. God does seem to have provided, as it were, the infrastructure through the work of people totally outside Israel and the church, even if then the good news had to be taken by the apostles themselves. Davie is inclined to stress the “miraculous”—the sudden rush of wind at Pentecost, the dramatic divine “interventions.” Yet even here Luke’s story seems to be one not merely of something new, but of the deep-seated renewal of the old order, the old world. The disciples are rescued from further persecution by a leading, and still unbelieving, Jewish rabbi, Gamaliel. Paul is rescued from certain death by a Roman centurion. God seems to be at work not only through the church, but also in the world outside. How, once more, can we make sense of all of this? What is Jesus up to?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In this myth, a supernatural being called “God” has a supernatural “son” whom he sends, virgin-born, into our world, despite the fact that it’s not his natural habitat, so that he can rescue people out of this world by dying in their place. As a sign of his otherwise secret divine identity, this “son” does all kinds of extraordinary and otherwise impossible “miracles,” crowning them all by rising from the dead and returning to “heaven,” where he waits to welcome his faithful followers after their deaths. In the Catholic version of this classic Western myth, Jesus calls his close friend Peter to found the church; anyone who wants to be with Jesus, here or hereafter, must join Peter’s movement. In the Protestant version, Jesus commissions his followers to write the New Testament, which reveals the absolute truth about Jesus and, once more, how to get to heaven. (Already I hear that wind getting up. “What d’you mean it’s a myth? Don’t you believe that? Are you one of those dangerous liberals after all? Aren’t you a bishop?” Okay, okay, I hear you. Please wait. Patience is a Christian virtue.) The second myth, prevalent in the skeptical “western wind” of our perfect storm, is the new classic modernist myth, which is widely believed in secular society and in several mainline churches too. In this new myth of Christian origins, Jesus was just an ordinary man, a good first-century Jew, conceived and born in the ordinary way. He was a remarkable preacher and teacher, but he probably didn’t do all those “miracles.” Some people seem to have felt better after meeting him, but that was about it. He certainly didn’t think he would die for the sins of the world. He was simply trying to teach people to live differently, to love one another, to be kind to old ladies, small children, and (that blessed postmodern category) the “marginalized.” He was talking about God, not about himself. The idea of being a supernatural “son of God” never occurred to him; he’d have been horrified to hear such a thing and even more to have had a “church” founded in his memory. He certainly didn’t rise from the dead; yes, his followers, feeling that his work would continue, used careless language that seemed to imply that that’s what had happened, but of course it didn’t. Then these followers began to tell stories about him that snowballed into legends, which then sprouted fresh interpretations.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Haley also suggested that, to better understand sex and masculinity, Devon should watch porn. Huge mistake. “I don’t blame her. We didn’t know any better, but I definitely, definitely did not learn anything positive from that.” Before watching porn, Devon said, he never had a picture in his head of what sex—any sort of sex—looked like. “What I’d called ‘sex’ when I was presenting as a woman was what I’d done with a girl in high school: we made out and touched each other in places that felt nice. I didn’t have an image or a judgment. It was sloppy, but we were figuring it out together. Once you watch porn, there is a clear image of what is normal and desired and what sex should be. And I’m wondering: Is that what I’m supposed to look like? Is that what I’m supposed to do? Is that what masculinity means? Those images are damaging to a trans person who will never have the body parts, but I think they’re actually equally damaging to people who have the parts because those ideas aren’t realistic for anyone.” After Haley and he broke up, Devon tried to join in the campus hookup culture, but he grappled with the ethics of disclosure. “It’s like, do I tell a girl after I get drunk?” he said. “Before? Do I keep my clothes on so she won’t know? If I don’t tell her, is that wrong? If I do, will she yell at me?” The potential for disaster felt too high. Devon tried downloading Tinder, but, again, hesitated over how to list his gender. As male? As trans? As trans male? He eventually settled on “trans” (some other trans boys I met preferred “male”), and although he matched with a few girls and went on a couple of dates, nothing panned out. At one point, he even tried hooking up with another trans guy, thinking they might understand one another’s bodies. “The sex made me feel violated,” Devon said. “I stripped my bed right away after he left and washed the sheets. It wasn’t that he did anything wrong, but it confirmed for me that I wasn’t interested in men, whether or not they had a penis.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But unless I draw attention to some of it, I may be oversimplifying, and the driver may resent my “simple” advice for being too simple by half when, stuck in a village somewhere, he reflects that a little complexity might actually have helped. I feel a bit like that with the present book. I set out to write a “simple” book about Jesus. But Jesus was not simple in his own time, and he is not simple now. One might have thought that it would be comparatively easy to take my earlier books, particularly Jesus and the Victory of God and The Challenge of Jesus, 1 and turn them into something quite “simple.” But I was surprised, in sketching out this book and then writing it, to discover how many new twists and turns I am now aware of that I did not deal with in those earlier works. It isn’t just that scholarship has moved on, though of course it has; this book, though, is not the place to explore those debates. It is, just as much, that I have spent most of the last decade working as a bishop in the Church of England, and, though in some popular imaginings bishops don’t have very much to do with Jesus, I found myself thinking, talking, and preaching about Jesus pretty much all the time. In particular, I was of course vitally interested in the way in which Jesus and the struggle to follow him might make a difference in real lives and real communities, from the old mining villages of County Durham, where I lived and worked from 2003 to 2010, right down to the corridors of power in Westminster. For most of that time I didn’t stop to ask how all that ministry, and the life of prayer and sacrament that sustained it, might be changing my view of Jesus. Now, however, when the car pulls up and someone says, “A simple question: tell me about Jesus,” I find myself wanting to explain about the river, the bridge, the high winds, the small towns, and the hills. I could just say, “Just start reading the gospels and try to follow Jesus,” and that might do the trick, like telling the traveler just to head west and south and hope for the best.

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

  But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors, and psychologists in order to reassert the church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the pill by unmarried people, and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the gate hours issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks before, I would probably have done this without hesitation. But I was no longer an official representative of the Catholic Church, and while I listened to the arguments from the Common Room floor, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I felt no desire to support those students who fought against the abolition of the gate hours on Christian grounds. My indifference was in part the result of anxious preoccupation with my own personal drama. I was drained and exhausted by the events of the past few weeks, and had little energy to spare for this battle. But there was more to it than that. When I thought about the issue, I found only a question mark where the old conviction should have been. I had experienced this time and again recently; it seemed as though I had discarded a good deal of my old religious self when I had taken off my habit. Beliefs and principles that I had taken so completely for granted that they seemed part of my very being now appeared strangely abstract and remote. In fact (I reflected uneasily) I did not seem to think or feel anything very strongly anymore. I had now been studying at Oxford for nearly eighteen months, and for two years before that I had been preparing for the rigorous entrance examinations to the university.

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

  Academia had its own disciplines that were as exacting in their own way as those of the convent. One of these was already ingrained in my heart and mind: do not pronounce on subjects that you know nothing about. I had now acquired a healthy respect for the limits of my own knowledge and expertise. One of the chief effects of my education so far had been an acute consciousness of everything that I did not know. What did I know about sex? I asked myself during the explosive Common Room debates. What did I know about men, relationships, or love? What did I know about the brave new world of the sixties? I knew nothing at all, and was not, therefore, entitled to an opinion. And remembering my own protests against an outworn system only a few months earlier, I felt that I should listen carefully to those who demanded change. In the meantime, there seemed no need for me to contribute. But I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines. The college had appointed a new dean of discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest and had decreed not only that there would be no change in the current gate hours, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favorite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar. “Of course, this is quite absurd,” Mrs. Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. “The silly woman is out of her mind. The virgin vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.” “The virgin vote?” I asked. “Oh—the conservative wing on the college governing body,” Mrs. Bednarowska replied. “You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?” “We’re sending a deputation to the dean, asking her to reconsider,” I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line. Mrs. Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. “ That won’t work—though it’s very correct, of course,” she opined as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms. What I had not realized was that, as secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin.

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

  “So in the future,” Dr. Piet said pointedly as he drew the session to a close, “let’s not waste any more time. Let us have no more agonizing about unimportant details. Let’s get right in there to the basic difficulties, which are the cause of all these symptoms. And do me a favor—let’s have no more histrionics about perfectly normal absentmindedness. After all, Karen”—he smiled to soften his bleak conclusions—“it’s not as if you ever did anything very dreadful at these times. Making a cup of coffee? Going to a library? Come on! You of all people, with your Gothic imagination, can do better than that! Let’s see what you’re really like when you lose control. Surprise me!” And so, a few weeks later, in the autumn of 1971, I did just that. I woke up in hospital throwing up an overdose of sleeping pills. Again, I have no recollection of what happened. I do remember pouring myself a glass of the sherry that Jane had given to me for my twenty-seventh birthday. I had wanted to forget myself, to escape from the hallucinations, the fear, and the perplexity, and to give myself a little treat. But I don’t recall swallowing a large number of the purple sleeping tablets that Dr. Piet had prescribed for my insomnia. I certainly cannot remember deciding to end it once and for all. There was nothing conscious or deliberate about the act. I could recall the sweet stickiness of the sherry—but of the pills, my discovery by Jane, the alarm, the ambulance, I had no memory, no recollection at all. So the forced vomiting, the pain, the indignity, and the curt orders of the doctors were devastating. I had no notion of what had happened or where I was. A nurse asked peremptorily for my name. Did I know how old I was? What was the date? Who was the prime minister? I remember Jane’s anxious face, the succession of ceilings and doors, as I was wheeled down one corridor after another, and a numbing cold. As I was lifted onto a bed in the ward, I heard one of the other patients shouting officiously: “She’ll be cold! She’ll need another blanket, nurse! She’ll be cold!” “Mind your own business, Brenda! Get back into bed,” somebody replied sharply. “We can deal with this, thank you.” But I reached gratefully for the word, which had eluded me, and was able to croak: “I’m so cold!” I could hear Jane giggle and say wryly, “Spot on, Brenda.” Then a nurse leaned over my bed, her face lit grotesquely by the harsh beam of light. “Where’s your sponge bag, dear?” I stared at her, bewildered. “Your sponge bag! Surely you didn’t forget to bring it with you?”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  How did Jesus prepare his followers for this gigantic, previously unimagined vision? Once again so many strands of story, symbol, and meaning are woven together that it is hard for us to follow a single thread without realizing how tightly it belongs with the others as well. Jesus had tried, again and again, to explain to his closest followers that he was going to Jerusalem to fulfill his kingdom work by being handed over to the pagans and dying a shameful death. On at least one occasion he tried to show them that this was the way in which the powers of the world would be called to account and that by giving “his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45, echoing Isa. 53:11–12) he was putting into operation a different way of life entirely, a different way of power. But this was (not surprisingly) so far outside their worldview that they couldn’t understand it. They didn’t even appreciate the fact that when he spoke of his forthcoming death, he meant it in a literal, concrete sense. If they had, they might have decided not to follow him any farther. It is, perhaps, one explanation for the treachery of Judas that he did indeed understand it when Jesus, after his dramatic gesture in the Temple, failed to follow this up with some kind of full-scale assault, but contented himself with teaching and debating and waiting for Passover. But when Passover approached—the exact chronology remains a matter of debate, but there is no doubt that Jesus intended his action to resonate with all those great Passover themes, those Exodus themes we have seen repeatedly—he no longer contented himself with telling his followers what was to happen and hinting at what it would mean. When he wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Instead of that, Davie proposes, what we need is a fresh word from God, a word from outside, a fresh summons to worship Jesus and so to be fortified in our stand against all human power systems and idolatries. The church must not collude with the world! Jesus is driving the car, not merely steering a toboggan carried downhill by its own weight. And sometimes the car has to go in the opposite direction to the rest of the traffic. This isn’t dualism, Davie insists. This is how Jesus is claiming what is rightfully his own in the first place, but has been under enemy rule. This is what it looks like for Jesus to be king today. Andy, of course, listens to this discussion and thinks it’s a waste of time. Billy, naturally, thinks it’s a category mistake, since, though Jesus does care about the way the world is at the moment, the only way he’s going to fix it is by coming back once and for all. Chris, meanwhile, is uncomfortably aware of leaving open the question of which of the movements of history we claim as the work of God. Communism or capitalism? Rationalism or Romanticism? Modernism or postmodernism? Davie, similarly, is uncomfortably aware that, among those who look for a fresh word from God to say no to the idols of our time, some of those “fresh words” sound like Christian versions of the ideology of the Right and some like Christian versions of today’s Left. Others, again, call for a plague on both houses and see the “fresh word” as a summons to Christians to abandon the structures and to live a holy, detached, separate life. Chris and Davie are both convinced that Jesus is, in some sense, already Lord of the world. But they can’t agree on how that lordship, that sovereign, saving rule, is to make its way in the world. Sharp-eyed readers will have spotted that Chris and Davie are playing out a much older debate. The ancient Stoics thought that God and the world were more or less the same thing, so that the inner workings of the world were the inner workings of the divine itself. The ancient Epicureans believed that the gods, having set the world in motion, had left it to its own devices and that they seldom if ever stepped in to redirect traffic, to perform strange “interventions” or “miracles.” The Stoics and the Epicureans were successful precisely because these are the two “natural” positions toward which people who reflect about the nature of reality can easily be drawn. Either God and the world collapse into one another, or they are divided by a great gulf. Just as one of W. S.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Can the Messiah come from Galilee? Why are you behaving unlawfully? Who then is this? Aren’t we right to say that you’re a Samaritan and have a demon? What do you say about him? By what right are you doing these things? Who is this Son of Man? Should we pay tribute to Caesar? And climactically: Are you the king of the Jews? What is truth? Where are you from? Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One? Then finally, too late for answers, but not too late for irony: Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us! If you’re the Messiah, why don’t you come down from that cross? Whatever we say about Jesus, there can be no doubt that his actions and his teaching raised these questions wherever he went. And Jesus had his own questions. Who do you say I am? Do you believe in the Son of Man? Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? How do the scribes say that the Messiah is David’s son? Couldn’t you keep watch with me for a single hour? And finally and horribly: My God, my God, why did you abandon me? The answers come too in more or less equal profusion. But, like all the best answers to the hardest questions, they come themselves as a set of sparkling puzzles, as though to remind people both ancient and modern that the questions are questions precisely because something is going on that demands a collapse of categories, a breaking of boundaries, a widening of worldview to the point where the new thing, whatever it is, will make the sense it does. The reason there were so many questions, in both directions, was that—as historians have concluded for many years now—Jesus fitted no ready-made categories. To be sure, the categories were themselves flexible. They were flexible enough to allow significantly different visions of kings and prophets, as we see both from the relevant texts and from the actual movements of the period. But even at their most flexible, Jesus both fitted and didn’t fit. Messiah? Well, Jesus wasn’t doing the things you would expect a messiah to do, and yet so much of what he did and said seemed irresistibly messianic. Rabbi? Clearly, he wasn’t simply a rabbi with a different message, and yet he was a teacher, interpreting and expounding the scriptures and applying them urgently to what he believed was their moment of ultimate fulfillment. Priest? Well, priests taught people the law, and Jesus was doing that in a sense, though it wasn’t like anything they’d heard before. And priests also went up to Jerusalem to serve their turn in the Temple.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  I was not yet ready, in the autumn of 1971, to do the latter. But within a few years I had realized that I could no longer put it off. By then, in the late 1970s, I was ordained, preaching regularly, leading Confirmation classes, organizing worship. I was finishing my doctorate and teaching undergraduates. My wife and I had two children and more on the way. We were facing the challenges of “real life” on several levels. Why should I avoid the challenge of the real Jesus? Every time I opened the gospels and thought about my next sermon, I was faced with questions. Did he really say that? Did he really do that? What did it mean? There were plenty of voices around to say he hadn’t said it, he didn’t really do it, and that the only “meaning” is that the church is a big confidence trick. If I was going to preach and, for that matter, if I was going to counsel people to trust Jesus and get to know him for themselves, I couldn’t do it with integrity unless I had faced the hard questions for myself. It’s been a long journey. No doubt there is much more to discover. But this book will tell you, as simply as possible, what I’ve found out so far. The Challenge to the Churches With Jesus, it’s easy to be complicated and hard to be simple. Part of the difficulty is that Jesus was and is much, much more than people imagine. Not just people in general, but practicing Christians, the churches themselves. Faced with the gospels—the four early books that give us most of our information about him—most modern Christians are in the same position I am in when I sit down in front of my computer. My computer will, I am reliably informed, do a large number of complex tasks. I only use it, however, for three things: writing, e-mail, and occasional Internet searches. If my computer were a person, it would feel frustrated and grossly undervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized. We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing sermons on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and meditation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computer, have every right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  And for most people the phrase “son of God” carries with it all the connotations of that first myth, in which the supernatural being swoops down to reveal secret truth, do extraordinary “miracles” to prove his “divinity,” die a redemptive death, and get back to heaven at once, enabling others to get there too. And if I say—as I’m going to—that I don’t think that story is the right way to talk about Jesus, some will say, “So you don’t think he’s the Son of God, then?” and condemn me as a hopeless liberal. Whereas if I say—as I’m going to—that I do think Jesus was and is the “son of God,” albeit within a very different sort of story, others will condemn me as a hopeless conservative. The Problem of Historical Complexity And now at last we are ready to take up the third element in the perfect storm we face today when we talk about Jesus. Out in the Atlantic, but heading for shore fast, is a hurricane. It was coming anyway, but when it meets these two winds we should expect a storm of what people today, perhaps confusingly, call “apocalyptic” proportions . The third element is the sheer historical complexity of speaking about Jesus. The world of first-century Palestinian Judaism—his world—was complex and dense in itself. Anyone who has tried to understand today’s Middle Eastern problems can be assured that life was every bit as complicated in the first century as it is now. We have a thousand sources on which to draw for constructing a picture of today’s problems, everything from newspaper reports to Facebook and Twitter postings. But for historians of the first century—and if we want to talk about Jesus himself, as opposed to making up fantasies about him, we are all bound to become to some extent historians of the first century—we are faced with a strange challenge. Take an example. John F. Kennedy is perhaps one of the best-known Americans of the mid-twentieth century. His presidency was of course cut short by his sudden and violent death, a death that had, and perhaps still has, iconic significance for many Americans and others around the world. Those of us alive at the time all still remember where we were when we heard the news.

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

  Undoing habits and attitudes which are now engrained. I don’t know how to do this. You and Mother Walter made me a nun, but how do I reverse that? I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself, and I don’t think I can do it alone.” “Still as dramatic as ever, I see.” Mother Frances sounded bored, as she often did when, I suspected, she felt on uncertain ground. “It’s bound to be difficult at first. Of course it is.” She smiled brightly, and in an effort, perhaps, to avoid my eye, she started to brush away the crumbs scattered on the gleaming tabletop. “But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.” There was finality in her tone. Subject closed, and I felt pushed back into myself, locked into my perplexity. I could almost hear her turn the key. “So tell me about your plans,” she went on briskly. “You have your final exams soon. This term, isn’t it?” “Six weeks away.” I nodded. I had been accepted to do postgraduate work, provided that I obtained a first-class degree and secured the state scholarship that would give me funding for a further three years’ study. “Well, we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed,” Mother Frances pronounced. “You seem to be able to do your work all right. I don’t think there can be much the matter with you, do you.” It was not a question. Have it your own way, I thought wearily. I could see that she didn’t want to admit that there might be a real difficulty; if I had been somehow disabled by the regime, this would raise some very hard questions. As if she were reading my thoughts, Mother Frances’s eyes narrowed slightly as she looked at me again. “And how do you find Sister Rebecca?” “Dreadful, Reverend Mother. She needs to see a doctor. At once.” “She has seen a doctor. As you know.” There was a new coldness and more than a hint of reproof. “I’m still hoping that we’ll find that it’s all due to an overactive thyroid. This other possibility”— she broke off rather than name the disease—“well, that would be quite unacceptable.” “Unacceptable?” I stared at her. “But it’s entirely irrelevant whether you accept it or not. It’s just a fact. She’ll die if this goes on. ” “For heaven’s sake, Karen.” Mother Frances laughed that dismissive laugh again, her eyes wary. She got up to go and looked quizzically at me, her hands resting on the table. “There you go again.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The third element is the sheer historical complexity of speaking about Jesus. The world of first-century Palestinian Judaism—his world—was complex and dense in itself. Anyone who has tried to understand today’s Middle Eastern problems can be assured that life was every bit as complicated in the first century as it is now. We have a thousand sources on which to draw for constructing a picture of today’s problems, everything from newspaper reports to Facebook and Twitter postings. But for historians of the first century—and if we want to talk about Jesus himself, as opposed to making up fantasies about him, we are all bound to become to some extent historians of the first century—we are faced with a strange challenge. Take an example. John F. Kennedy is perhaps one of the best-known Americans of the mid-twentieth century. His presidency was of course cut short by his sudden and violent death, a death that had, and perhaps still has, iconic significance for many Americans and others around the world. Those of us alive at the time all still remember where we were when we heard the news. Now suppose we had four books containing very detailed accounts of what Kennedy did and said during his three-year presidency, with only a brief glance at what went before. Suppose it was quite clear that these were put together by people who believed that what Kennedy had done and said had lasting importance for their own day. But suppose as well that, instead of the overwhelming multitude of sources we actually possess for the decades before his day, we simply had a history book written in the early years of the twenty-first century (i.e., forty years after his death) plus a scattering of other material—a few letters, tracts, coins, souvenir artifacts, that kind of thing—to help us reconstruct the world within which what Kennedy did and said made the sense it did at the time, and particularly to get some idea of why some thought him a hero and others thought he had to be killed. One can imagine all the theories—the reconstructions of the Cold War mentality, the social and cultural tensions of 1960s United States, the state of the main political parties at the time, the dynastic ambitions of Kennedy’s father, and so on. There would be plenty of wiggle room for interpretation. That is more or less our challenge with the historical evidence for Jesus.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  An example may help. In today’s Western world it’s common for young adults to ask their parents for financial help to get them started in life. If well-to-do parents refused such a request, we might think them mean. But when Jesus told a story about a younger son asking his father for his inheritance while the father was still alive, his hearers would have been shocked. They would have seen the son’s action as putting a curse on the father, saying, in effect, “I wish you were dead.” That gives the whole story a different flavor. You can’t assume that things worked in those days the way they work now. But if the first reason for the puzzle is that Jesus’s world is strange to us, the second is that Jesus’s God is strange to us. That idea may itself seem odd. Isn’t God simply God? Isn’t it just a matter of whether you believe in God or not? No. The word “God” and its various equivalents in other languages, ancient and modern, may mean “the supreme or ultimate reality” or “a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship.” Those are, actually, the two basic definitions offered by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But a brief study of the world’s great religions, including those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Chinese, or for that matter a glance at the different religious movements in the Western world over the last few centuries, will show that there are many different views of what this “supreme or ultimate reality” is like. It isn’t enough to ask whether someone believes or does not believe in “God.” The key question is which God we’re talking about. Part of the reason why Jesus puzzled the people of his day was that he was talking about “God” most of the time, but what he was saying both did and did not make sense in relation to the “God” his hearers had been thinking of. We need, then, to get inside Jesus’s world. And, as we do so, we need to try to catch a glimpse of what he meant when he spoke of God. These are two of the key puzzles. Once we grapple with these two puzzles, though, we begin to discover something much of our world, including much of today’s church, has ignored or forgotten altogether. This is the hidden puzzle behind the other two. Throughout his short public career Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  As for Liam, he’ll never know whether or not he harmed his partner. As someone who has interviewed many girls, I can imagine a scenario in which she did feel violated—women often freeze in response to unwanted advances—and then, to regain some sense of control, had sex with him consensually several more times until she felt in a position of strength before dumping him. I can also imagine that, as a girl socialized to value male needs over her own, she passively consented, even though she neither wanted nor desired sex. It’s possible she was fine with it, that she wanted to have sex with Liam as some form of validation or just to see what it was like, and once she got that, she simply moved on. Or maybe she decided she didn’t like him or the chemistry was wrong. In so many of the encounters boys described to me, I couldn’t know, though sometimes it seemed like the shadow of a girl hovered behind them, a girl who was furious or traumatized or rolling her eyes, one who would have told the same story very differently. The question was how to get the boys to see that, too. “Honestly,” Liam said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about it. I don’t know if I should call the girl this morning as soon as we finish talking and apologize. That’s what I probably should do. But you and I both know I won’t.” Chapter 7All Guys Want It. Don’t They?Maybe if Dylan hadn’t been so distraught, he wouldn’t have drunk so much. Earlier in the day, he’d visited a friend in the hospital who’d been in a car accident, and he was a little freaked out by the other boy’s pain. So when he got to the party, a typical Friday-night banger, he downed nine, maybe ten shots of vodka. Then again, maybe he would’ve done that anyway. He was seventeen, a junior in high school, a straight-A student, captain of the soccer team. He ran with a good-looking, athletic, popular crowd, the kind of kids who defined success by acceptance to the narrowest slice of selective colleges. They worked hard. So when the weekend came, who could blame them for wanting to blow off a little steam: drinking, smoking weed, hooking up? Dylan dropped onto a couch and immediately passed out. That’s where Julia found him. The two had become friends earlier that fall; she was funny and friendly, and Dylan considered them to be pretty close. She shook him awake, at least long enough to drag him, stumbling, to the bathroom. After that, Dylan’s memory fractures. He recalls Julia, who was sober, fumbling with his pants. Julia, touching his penis. He must’ve gotten an erection, though he doesn’t remember that. His head ached, that he can say for sure. And then . . . nothing. “I had to call her the next day and—oh God—ask if we’d had sex,” he told me.

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

  “Oh heavens, yes!” she breathed. “I used to love the liturgy at school. Last Christmas, Mark and I were in Paris and went to midnight Mass in Notre Dame. You can imagine . . . Mark couldn’t believe that I had been able to give all that up. ‘You’re a heroine,’ he said. Though I can’t say I believe in much of it anymore, frankly.” I wondered how much of a Catholic I really was. No one would ever have admitted to doubts in the convent, and it was somehow liberating to have Jane do it for me. “But that’s enough about me!” Jane got up and reached for her books. “I’m going to get the college nurse to have a look at you—I know, I know, she really is perfectly awful, but I promised Mr. Jones. And it is sensible, you must admit, even if it is all due to stress. Mr. Jones was right. That really was a very long faint.” Before she left, Jane looked around the room. A typically modern box: shiny cork flooring, matching orange curtains and bedspread, desk and dressing table combined. “You ought to try to put your own stamp on this,” she said appraisingly. “It looks anonymous. Have some of your own things around. Whoops!” She laughed. “You probably haven’t got any things. Well, you’d better acquire some. You’re not a nun now. No more holy poverty for you. What about a record player? You like music and you won the Violet Vaughan Morgan last year. You must have some of that prize money stashed away in the bank. Go on, treat yourself.” “Yes,” I replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps I will.” The college nurse was brisk and matter-of-fact. Yes, the fainting almost certainly was due to stress. I had had a confusing time and it was bound to take its toll. But worse things happened at sea. Mustn’t give in or feel sorry for yourself. Get back into the swing of things. Put your best foot forward. I listened to this string of clichés with mounting irritation. It was easy to be brisk and bracing about other people’s difficulties. I was quite aware that leaving a convent must rank very low on the scale of human suffering. Certainly, a bad divorce or bereavement must be even more painful, but after all, it was not a competition. “Do make an appointment with your GP, however,” the nurse concluded. “Always wise to get these things checked out, especially if it’s happened before.”