Contentment

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 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  and 50 cubits wide (approximately 165 x 84.5 feet). There were three main sections: the ulam , ‘ or vestibule, the hekal or main room (the same word is used for the temple as a whole), and the debir or inner sanctuary (the Holy of Holies). There were doors to the second and third chambers. Various small chambers were located along the sides of the temple. Two bronze pillars, called Jachin and Boaz, stood in front of the temple. There was also a molten sea, which was a circular object supported by twelve statues of oxen. The symbolism of these objects is not explained, but the sea recalls the prominence of Yamm (Sea) in the Ugaritic myths. In the inner sanctuary there were two enormous cherubim made of olivewood. These hovered over the ark, which represented the presence of God, who was often said to be enthroned above the cherubim. (The cherubim were hybrid, winged creatures, with features of various animals. Such hybrid creatures were popular in Near Eastern, especially Assyrian, art.) In the ancient world, a temple was thought to be the house of the god or goddess, and the deity was supposed to live there. While the god or goddess was present in the temple, no harm could befall the city. The Lament for the Destruction of Ur in the early second millennium B.C.E. complains that the various deities abandoned their temples ( ANET, 455–63). Later we shall find that Ezekiel has a vision of the glory of the Lord leaving Jerusalem before it is destroyed by the Babylonians. The theology associated with Solomon’s temple in the preexilic period can be seen in the Psalms. We do not know how far this theology was developed in the time of Solomon or how consistently it was maintained. Insofar as it coincides with common Near Eastern temple theology, we can assume that it was typical also of the Jerusalem temple. Conjectural cutaway reconstruction of Solomon’s temple. The psalmists sometimes speak unabashedly about the temple as the dwelling place of YHWH. “How lovely is your dwelling place, O L ORD of hosts! My soul longs, indeed it faints, for the courts of the L ORD ” (Ps 84:1-2; this psalm also notes, quaintly, that birds built their nests in the temple). According to Psalm 46, Jerusalem is “the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in her midst, she shall not be moved.” The presence of the Lord is a great source of

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  security: “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea” (46:2). Again, Mount Zion is said to be God’s holy mountain “in the far north” (Mount Zion was not in fact in the north, but traditionally the holy mountain of Baal, Mount Zaphon, was associated with the north). The psalmist supposes that any enemies who attack Jerusalem will flee in panic. It may be that this psalm was inspired by the fact that Jerusalem was not destroyed by the Assyrians, as Samaria was (see 2 Kings 18–19), but it is also possible that this belief in “the inviolability of Zion” was more ancient. The importance of the temple for the people of Judah is amply evident in the Psalms: “for a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than live in the tents of wickedness” (84:10). In light of the temple theology that we find in the Psalms, the theology attributed to Solomon in 1 Kings is modest indeed. The main articulation of this theology is found in his prayer in 1 Kings 8, and it is clearly the work of a Deuteronomistic writer. Solomon recalls the promise to David but understands it as conditional: “There shall never fail a successor before me to sit on the throne of Israel, if only your children look to their way, to walk before me” (8:25). He then goes on to reflect on the basic problem of a temple: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built” (8:27). This dilemma is resolved by the Deuteronomic compromise: God makes his name dwell there. The name still represents the presence of God, but it stops short of saying that God actually dwells in the temple, and so it protects the transcendence of God. Solomon goes on to explain the temple as a place where people can have access to God, to bring their requests and atone for their sins. Presumably, it would also be possible to pray to God elsewhere, but the temple provides a point of focus that is helpful to the people. Nothing is said to suggest that the city is protected by the presence of God in the temple. The temple has become a house of prayer, closer to the understanding of the later synagogue than to the ancient understanding of the house of God’s dwelling. Solomon’s prayer at the consecration of the temple may have been written in

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I brought him to Still River on numerous occasions, and he came to know by name the grand array of my “uncles and aunts,” so many of whom had attended Harvard or Radcliffe. I found myself wondering what my Center family thought of me and this relationship. Although I was fully relaxed and at home among the Big Brothers and Sisters, I had been careful to keep my social life separate from my Center life. Only now, nearly ten years after I’d been spirited out of the Center, did I bring a lover with me and it wasn’t without trepidation. But there was not a word of disapproval; to the contrary, my partner was embraced. Was I now above reproach because I was a sophisticated woman of the world, a successful businesswoman and a benefactor of the Center? Was my role as lover of an older man less shocking because he was gracious and respectful to them? Or because he hailed from Harvard as they did? The Center was now a far cry from the place I had exited a decade before. The outside world was no longer the enemy it had once been. It felt like home again, but better than before. My partner became an integral part of my large family, and he was particularly fond of my father. The three of us traveled together to places that included Haiti, Bermuda, and Mexico. While the two of them read and played chess together, I did things they thought insane—parasailing in Mexico (long before it was safe), trekking alone into the congested iron market of Port-au-Prince. The sybaritic atmosphere brought out the best in my father, and I reveled in the pleasure he took in acting like a man of leisure. I developed a deep friendship with my lover’s children, attending the weddings of three of his four children. But my closest relationship was with his mother, whom I came to adore, from that first visit in France and for years after when she moved back to New York and took up residency at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Tall and handsome, her daily attire was a pair of tan Chanel trousers topped with a white silk blouse and a hacking jacket. Her closely cropped white hair was complimented by elegant gold earrings and a bold shade of lipstick. [image file=Image00035.jpg] Me at the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti–1978. She was profoundly urbane, and we bonded despite our more than forty years’ difference in age. Sadly, I lacked the courage to share my childhood story with her. Given her own life, lived daringly and openly as a lesbian in the literary and cultural mecca of post–World War II Paris, she would most likely have lent a tolerant ear and provided words of support and wisdom. * * * Within a year of leaving the Center, I had shed much of the yoke of puritanism that had been engrained in me for nearly eighteen years.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I promise you I will be retired by the end of the year.” It was 1999. I had just celebrated my fifty-first birthday. I kept my promise. * * * And so I started the new millennium as a full-time mother, taking my children to school each morning, driving them to their skating lessons (peering over the top of my Wall Street Journal to catch their eyes as they twirled past me), their gymnastics classes, their playdates. These were novel activities for me, having never enjoyed them myself as a child. The experiences of childhood form the base of one’s own approach to parenting, and one either revisits those experiences with the next generation or eschews them. In my case, there were three elements of my upbringing that guided me immensely in raising my children, and they came with varying degrees of complexity. It took no soul-searching to be convinced that hitting a child served no purpose other than expressing one’s own frustration. More complex was a deep instinct within my mothering wellspring that related to food, and I was well aware that it reflected the agony I experienced during my childhood, as I watched and mostly was helpless to solve the eating problems of my sister Cathy (that started when she was only four years old). As an adult and a mother, I was emotionally incapable of forcing our children to eat anything if it didn’t appeal to them. So I let them pick their meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—each day. It was gratifying to observe that such a philosophy had a more salubrious outcome than might be expected—the child who liked white toast with the crusts cut off also loved raw green vegetables. The one who found it difficult to chew beef adored chicken. On occasion, dinner consisted of as many different meals as there were people at the table. It might be criticized as being overindulgent, but I was determined that mealtime would be stress-free. Growing up in the milieu of monasticism, I became accustomed to every facet of daily life being regulated and rule bound, strictures that chafed at my innate free spirit, and I fantasized about exploring the world unimpeded. Once out of the Center, both as a professional and as a parent, I made it my endeavor to say “Yes” rather than “No.” And when I had to say “No” to my children, I tried to find a way to keep a door open for the future. Was it simply in my DNA to engage in making things work out, or was it a sub-conscious response to years of disappointment? For the intellectual stimulation I craved, I maintained my crack-of-dawn appearances on CNBC to opine on the markets, and I’d rush into the city in the afternoon for Your World with Neil Cavuto , and I continued to sit on the board of an insurance company as I had for the past eight years.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  With my free hand holding on to my long, pleated skirt so as not to let it catch on the thorns from the barberry bushes, Leonard and I stomped down the brambles to make a path for the other children to follow. We stopped at a narrow brook that flowed from the hill above down toward the fields below and then gingerly made our way across the gentle rippling stream, with arms outstretched to balance ourselves atop the larger stones that poked through the running water. Once across, we scrambled up the gentle embankment, dotted with miniature gray patches of half-melted snow, into the wooded pine forest beyond. A broad, green bed of princess pine unfolded at our feet, under the shade provided by white pine trees that seemed to reach the sky. Leonard and I dropped down on the plush carpet to wait for the others to catch up. As we lay on our backs looking up at the sky, we played guessing games—how tall were the trees—thirty feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet? What birds were singing—was that a robin? A Baltimore oriole returning from a winter in the south? Then we were silent, and I inhaled the crisp spring air, with its mixture of the earthy scents from the forest floor and the tangy aroma of surrounding evergreens. In the bliss of that moment, I was content to lie in silence—a state of mind distinct from the coerced rule of silence that accompanied our daily lives. This is how heaven must be , I thought. Within a few moments, the rest of the children caught up with us, and Sister Maria Crucis led us on an expedition in search of pheasant and grouse nests. We tiptoed our way in silence through the woods, never so excited as when we startled a setting hen who squawked away, allowing us a peek at the many speckled eggs camouflaged among the sticks and down of the nest floor. At the end of the morning, Sister Maria Crucis promised to take us hunting for lady slippers, the rare wild orchid that grew in the dense New England forests, when the weather got warmer. In every way, it was a splendid day, and I could hardly wait for the next excursion. “Anastasia, I would like to see you in my office after dinner.” I was startled. Sister Catherine was addressing me in front of all the Little Brothers and Sisters as she stood in the doorway between our refectories. Although her voice was pleasant, my stomach instantly twisted into a knot. Had I done something wrong? I couldn’t fathom what. After dinner, I stood anxiously outside Sister Catherine’s office as I put my ear to the door and heard voices, too muffled to make out the words. When Sister Catherine responded to my timid knock, I entered. She swiveled in her chair and faced me. I looked for a sign of her mood, but I couldn’t judge.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Half of the cavernous space was like a living room, with sofas and comfortable chairs. The rest was organized with tables and folding chairs, where the adults met for their classes. While they studied, I’d play on the floor with the Maluf children. Mariam Maluf was the first child born to the Center parents. At nearly six years old, she was a full two-and-a-half years older than I was. She had large brown eyes like her father’s and long, straight, almost black hair. Her skin color was darker than mine. Mariam said with pride that it was “olive colored,” and she explained why to me. “I’m a Semite,” she said in her all-knowing way, “and you’re a Japhethite.” Then she went into detail about how her father, Fakhri, who was from Syria, was descended from Sem, the oldest son of Noah from the Old Testament. I, on the other hand, was descended from Japheth, Noah’s youngest son, whose offspring settled in Europe. She made it sound as though that was inferior to coming from the Middle East. “That’s why you have blue eyes, and I have brown eyes,” Mariam said with authority. Fakhri had told her these things, she said, and, at three years old, I believed whatever she told me. But I was happy to have blue eyes. Sometimes Mariam seemed like an older sister because she knew so much more than I did. She had an answer for everything, and I didn’t dare question her authority. Her two younger brothers were Peter, who was nine months older than I was, and Leonard, who was nine months younger. Leonard was my best friend and we were never far apart—playing together, sharing everything, and racing each other, whether it be up and down the stairs between our apartments or along the banks of the river. When the adults’ morning classes were over, Father would sit in the middle of the Center on what seemed like his throne, a vast, low-slung armchair of crinkly, cracked red leather. Slouched in his seat, he’d stretch his legs out and rest his feet on a matching footstool. He was old (just like the chair, I thought), the oldest person at the Center, and unlike the rest of the adults, who wore colorful clothes or suits with ties, he was always dressed in black, except for the white Roman collar that signified he was a priest. As Father reclined, the women would gather around him, some sitting at his feet and others kneeling at his side. They all seemed to wait for him to say something, and while he spoke, the room was silent. If he said something funny, everyone laughed; if he was serious, so were they.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  When he finished talking, and it was time to leave the Center for lunch or dinner, there was always a hand for me to grab as we headed back through the streets of Cambridge to the house on Putnam Avenue where everyone at the Center gathered for meals. We called that house Sacred Heart Hall. While dinner was being prepared, some of the adults would gather in the parlor room upstairs, where sofas and comfortable chairs were scattered around a coffee table. The women wore lipstick and pretty dresses, and the men smoked cigarettes as they sipped iced drinks and talked about what they did during “the war.” Their peals of laughter floated toward me as I’d sit at the top of the stairs with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I was mesmerized. [image file=Image00013.jpg] Father and Catherine with me (lower left), Mariam, and another Center child, on the lawn of Sacred Heart Hall, November 1950. Sometimes Leonard joined me. Together we’d sit in silence, absorbed in the adults’ revelry and awaiting the clang of the bell that signaled dinner was ready. Then, holding hands, we’d sprint down the stairs and into the refectory. That’s what everyone called the makeshift dining room, where three long picnic tables were set up with folding chairs. We sat anywhere we wanted, adults and children side by side. I needed a stack of books underneath me, and still my chin barely came over the top of the table. But there was always a friendly “aunt” or “uncle” ready to help cut my food. If the weather was hot, we’d have our dessert sitting on the miniature rectangle of lawn between Sacred Heart Hall and the white picket fence that bordered the sidewalk. Father himself would often bring it to me. “What kind of ice cream would you like, dear?” he’d ask. “Strawberry, please, Father,” I’d say. Always strawberry, and always “please” and “thank you,” as I took the bowl with both hands. I’d let the ice cream melt in the summer’s heat, then slurp down the liquid—careful not to spill any on my white summer dress. [image file=Image00014.jpg] The grownup women as I remembered them before they discarded their “worldly” clothes. It was around this time that the women at the Center stopped wearing their colorful clothes. Floral patterned dresses, royal-blue jackets, and cinched waist suits were replaced by long black skirts and white blouses covered by a black jacket. Instead of a pocketbook, my mother now carried a small black fabric satchel. Her shoes were lace-up—no longer the heels and open-toed shoes she used to wear. The men wore identical black suits and white shirts, except when they were working and had to wear overalls. Even my own clothes changed. Now I wore the same kind of blouse and jumper as the other little girls. But I was unfazed by the new wardrobe.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  With my free hand holding on to my long, pleated skirt so as not to let it catch on the thorns from the barberry bushes, Leonard and I stomped down the brambles to make a path for the other children to follow. We stopped at a narrow brook that flowed from the hill above down toward the fields below and then gingerly made our way across the gentle rippling stream, with arms outstretched to balance ourselves atop the larger stones that poked through the running water. Once across, we scrambled up the gentle embankment, dotted with miniature gray patches of half-melted snow, into the wooded pine forest beyond. A broad, green bed of princess pine unfolded at our feet, under the shade provided by white pine trees that seemed to reach the sky. Leonard and I dropped down on the plush carpet to wait for the others to catch up. As we lay on our backs looking up at the sky, we played guessing games—how tall were the trees—thirty feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet? What birds were singing—was that a robin? A Baltimore oriole returning from a winter in the south? Then we were silent, and I inhaled the crisp spring air, with its mixture of the earthy scents from the forest floor and the tangy aroma of surrounding evergreens. In the bliss of that moment, I was content to lie in silence—a state of mind distinct from the coerced rule of silence that accompanied our daily lives. This is how heaven must be , I thought. Within a few moments, the rest of the children caught up with us, and Sister Maria Crucis led us on an expedition in search of pheasant and grouse nests. We tiptoed our way in silence through the woods, never so excited as when we startled a setting hen who squawked away, allowing us a peek at the many speckled eggs camouflaged among the sticks and down of the nest floor. At the end of the morning, Sister Maria Crucis promised to take us hunting for lady slippers, the rare wild orchid that grew in the dense New England forests, when the weather got warmer. In every way, it was a splendid day, and I could hardly wait for the next excursion. “Anastasia, I would like to see you in my office after dinner.” I was startled. Sister Catherine was addressing me in front of all the Little Brothers and Sisters as she stood in the doorway between our refectories. Although her voice was pleasant, my stomach instantly twisted into a knot. Had I done something wrong? I couldn’t fathom what. After dinner, I stood anxiously outside Sister Catherine’s office as I put my ear to the door and heard voices, too muffled to make out the words. When Sister Catherine responded to my timid knock, I entered. She swiveled in her chair and faced me. I looked for a sign of her mood, but I couldn’t judge.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I promise you I will be retired by the end of the year.” It was 1999. I had just celebrated my fifty-first birthday. I kept my promise. * * * And so I started the new millennium as a full-time mother, taking my children to school each morning, driving them to their skating lessons (peering over the top of my Wall Street Journal to catch their eyes as they twirled past me), their gymnastics classes, their playdates. These were novel activities for me, having never enjoyed them myself as a child. The experiences of childhood form the base of one’s own approach to parenting, and one either revisits those experiences with the next generation or eschews them. In my case, there were three elements of my upbringing that guided me immensely in raising my children, and they came with varying degrees of complexity. It took no soul-searching to be convinced that hitting a child served no purpose other than expressing one’s own frustration. More complex was a deep instinct within my mothering wellspring that related to food, and I was well aware that it reflected the agony I experienced during my childhood, as I watched and mostly was helpless to solve the eating problems of my sister Cathy (that started when she was only four years old). As an adult and a mother, I was emotionally incapable of forcing our children to eat anything if it didn’t appeal to them. So I let them pick their meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—each day. It was gratifying to observe that such a philosophy had a more salubrious outcome than might be expected—the child who liked white toast with the crusts cut off also loved raw green vegetables. The one who found it difficult to chew beef adored chicken. On occasion, dinner consisted of as many different meals as there were people at the table. It might be criticized as being overindulgent, but I was determined that mealtime would be stress-free. Growing up in the milieu of monasticism, I became accustomed to every facet of daily life being regulated and rule bound, strictures that chafed at my innate free spirit, and I fantasized about exploring the world unimpeded. Once out of the Center, both as a professional and as a parent, I made it my endeavor to say “Yes” rather than “No.” And when I had to say “No” to my children, I tried to find a way to keep a door open for the future. Was it simply in my DNA to engage in making things work out, or was it a sub-conscious response to years of disappointment? For the intellectual stimulation I craved, I maintained my crack-of-dawn appearances on CNBC to opine on the markets, and I’d rush into the city in the afternoon for Your World with Neil Cavuto , and I continued to sit on the board of an insurance company as I had for the past eight years.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I joined the church choir and a choral group, satisfying my long-held desire to sing, something that a Wall Street career was unable to accommodate. Pro bono work crept into the vast empty spaces of time I now had, those hours in the day when the children were at school. It was a new and rewarding world for me—committing serious time, talent, and treasure for the benefit of others, sharing learned skills for the common good. It resonated with many of the values of my childhood—living a communal life inevitably meant sharing, relinquishing claim to personal achievement, rejoicing in the success of others. The more I became involved, the more doors opened—and it wasn’t solely in the eleemosynary world. I became an expert witness for a number of cases that dealt with the financial crisis of the moment—the collapse of Enron in 2001 and the fraud that was perpetrated by that and other companies on unwitting investors. It wasn’t long before search firms were knocking on my door—would I consider going on corporate boards? Slowly a second career was unfolding in front of me, one that allowed me to keep my promise to my children that I would be home to make them breakfast and drive them to school, at least most of the time. In fact, they were more than agreeable to my accepting one new board position when they discovered they could come with me each spring to Bermuda for the annual meeting. [image file=Image00038.jpg] With my husband, John, and children, Caroline and Jim. When my husband retired while the children were still in grade school, we’d laugh together and ask ourselves, Do our children think that this is the way all families are—both parents home all day? Being “older” parents certainly had its benefits as well as its eccentricities. One day, after my husband and I attended a school play, our daughter said, in a tone of voice that had an edge of disdain, “You know, Mom and Dad, you’re the oldest parents in the whole school!” I was quick with my comeback, “That may be true,” I said, “but we surely don’t act like the oldest—right?” [image file=Image00039.jpg] With my siblings and their families, celebrating my 70th birthday, in the summer of 2018. She agreed without hesitation and was pleased to point out some of the benefits of having “old” parents, most particularly the array of world traveling we did together as a family. The children were entering high school when I began to write my memoir. They had been visiting the Center since their infancy and came to know my “uncles” and “aunts” as extended family. However, they knew nothing of the history of my family’s life there, until it started spilling out as they asked questions. They were astonished, then curious, and soon became skeptical, most particularly my daughter, as she matured, graduated from high school, and attended college.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I joined the church choir and a choral group, satisfying my long-held desire to sing, something that a Wall Street career was unable to accommodate. Pro bono work crept into the vast empty spaces of time I now had, those hours in the day when the children were at school. It was a new and rewarding world for me—committing serious time, talent, and treasure for the benefit of others, sharing learned skills for the common good. It resonated with many of the values of my childhood—living a communal life inevitably meant sharing, relinquishing claim to personal achievement, rejoicing in the success of others. The more I became involved, the more doors opened—and it wasn’t solely in the eleemosynary world. I became an expert witness for a number of cases that dealt with the financial crisis of the moment—the collapse of Enron in 2001 and the fraud that was perpetrated by that and other companies on unwitting investors. It wasn’t long before search firms were knocking on my door—would I consider going on corporate boards? Slowly a second career was unfolding in front of me, one that allowed me to keep my promise to my children that I would be home to make them breakfast and drive them to school, at least most of the time. In fact, they were more than agreeable to my accepting one new board position when they discovered they could come with me each spring to Bermuda for the annual meeting. [image file=Image00038.jpg] With my husband, John, and children, Caroline and Jim. When my husband retired while the children were still in grade school, we’d laugh together and ask ourselves, Do our children think that this is the way all families are—both parents home all day? Being “older” parents certainly had its benefits as well as its eccentricities. One day, after my husband and I attended a school play, our daughter said, in a tone of voice that had an edge of disdain, “You know, Mom and Dad, you’re the oldest parents in the whole school!” I was quick with my comeback, “That may be true,” I said, “but we surely don’t act like the oldest—right?” [image file=Image00039.jpg] With my siblings and their families, celebrating my 70th birthday, in the summer of 2018. She agreed without hesitation and was pleased to point out some of the benefits of having “old” parents, most particularly the array of world traveling we did together as a family. The children were entering high school when I began to write my memoir. They had been visiting the Center since their infancy and came to know my “uncles” and “aunts” as extended family. However, they knew nothing of the history of my family’s life there, until it started spilling out as they asked questions. They were astonished, then curious, and soon became skeptical, most particularly my daughter, as she matured, graduated from high school, and attended college.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  For the intellectual stimulation I craved, I maintained my crack-of-dawn appearances on CNBC to opine on the markets, and I’d rush into the city in the afternoon for Your World with Neil Cavuto, and I continued to sit on the board of an insurance company as I had for the past eight years. I joined the church choir and a choral group, satisfying my long-held desire to sing, something that a Wall Street career was unable to accommodate. Pro bono work crept into the vast empty spaces of time I now had, those hours in the day when the children were at school. It was a new and rewarding world for me—committing serious time, talent, and treasure for the benefit of others, sharing learned skills for the common good. It resonated with many of the values of my childhood—living a communal life inevitably meant sharing, relinquishing claim to personal achievement, rejoicing in the success of others. The more I became involved, the more doors opened—and it wasn’t solely in the eleemosynary world. I became an expert witness for a number of cases that dealt with the financial crisis of the moment—the collapse of Enron in 2001 and the fraud that was perpetrated by that and other companies on unwitting investors. It wasn’t long before search firms were knocking on my door—would I consider going on corporate boards? Slowly a second career was unfolding in front of me, one that allowed me to keep my promise to my children that I would be home to make them breakfast and drive them to school, at least most of the time. In fact, they were more than agreeable to my accepting one new board position when they discovered they could come with me each spring to Bermuda for the annual meeting. With my husband, John, and children, Caroline and Jim. When my husband retired while the children were still in grade school, we’d laugh together and ask ourselves, Do our children think that this is the way all families are—both parents home all day? Being “older” parents certainly had its benefits as well as its eccentricities. One day, after my husband and I attended a school play, our daughter said, in a tone of voice that had an edge of disdain, “You know, Mom and Dad, you’re the oldest parents in the whole school!” I was quick with my comeback, “That may be true,” I said, “but we surely don’t act like the oldest—right?” With my siblings and their families, celebrating my 70th birthday, in the summer of 2018. She agreed without hesitation and was pleased to point out some of the benefits of having “old” parents, most particularly the array of world traveling we did together as a family.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  T 62 Back to Normal 1971–1974 hat fall, my parents bought a four-bedroom house in the Boston suburb of Watertown—a cottage kind of house with border gardens and a back lawn that was perfect for family picnics. To me, that purchase was evidence that my parents were now part of the American middle class—a giant step from the world of celibacy, communal living, and religious zealotry. It didn’t take long for their home to become the gathering place for many of the Center children, young adults by then, who had been flooding out of Still River for the past six months. Saturday nights at Jim and Betsy’s were an open invitation to them, providing an opportunity for conviviality and good food. My mother would spend the afternoon cooking a meal to rival any at the Center—roast beef with mounds of mashed potatoes or a giant bowl of pasta with salad and garlic bread, always topped off with a glorious chocolate cake or strawberry shortcake or angel food cake. Cooking for throngs of people was second nature to her after her years at the Center. The oval dining room table could comfortably seat ten, but we’d nearly always be cramming fourteen or more. The longer the evening went, the more boisterous the conversations became— often ending in jovial arguments about the finer points of English or Latin grammar. Jolly was the way to describe the household, and my parents seemed in their element creating the atmosphere of a home away from home for anyone who had been part of the Center.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  But I also like myself, my personality, my weirdness, my sense of humor, my wild and deep romantic streak, how I love, how I write, my kindness and my mean streak. It is only now, in my forties, that I am able to admit that I like myself, even though I am nagged by this suspicion that I shouldn’t. For so long, I gave in to my self-loathing. I refused to allow myself the simple pleasure of accepting who I am and how I live and love and think and see the world. But then, I got older and I cared less about what other people think. I got older and realized I was exhausted by all my self-loathing and that I was hating myself, in part, because I assumed that’s what other people expected from me, as if my self-hatred was the price I needed to pay for living in an overweight body. It was much, much easier to just try and shut out all of that noise, and to try and forgive myself for the mistakes I made in high school and college and throughout my twenties, to have some empathy for why I made those mistakes. I don’t want to change who I am. I want to change how I look. On my better days, when I feel up to the fight, I want to change how this world responds to how I look because intellectually I know my body is not the real problem. On bad days, though, I forget how to separate my personality, the heart of who I am, from my body. I forget how to shield myself from the cruelties of the world. IV42I hesitate to write about fat bodies and my fat body especially. I know that to be frank about my body makes some people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable too. I have been accused of being full of self-loathing and of being fat-phobic. There is truth to the former accusation and I reject the latter. I do, however, live in a world where the open hatred of fat people is vigorously tolerated and encouraged. I am a product of my environment. Oftentimes, the people who I make uncomfortable by admitting that I don’t love being fat are what I like to call Lane Bryant fat. They can still buy clothes at stores like Lane Bryant, which offers sizes up to 26/28. They weigh 150 or 200 pounds less than I do. They know some of the challenges of being fat, but they don’t know the challenges of being very fat. To be clear, the fat acceptance movement is important, affirming, and profoundly necessary, but I also believe that part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t reached a place of peace and unconditional self-acceptance.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  It’s really cute how everything is labeled and packaged. There are knickknacks that include things like tiny bottles of champagne vinegar and a little ramekin of mayonnaise. As someone who loves tiny things, I always considered unpacking the box something of an event. The ingredients are accompanied by full-color, full-page recipe cards with step-by-step instructions and pictures. There is little room for error, and yet there is still the human factor. I am the one who is left to prepare the meals, and my fallibility is particularly pronounced in the kitchen. My first meal was a cannellini bean and escarole salad with crispy potatoes. I wasn’t at all sure what escarole is, but I decided it was spicy lettuce, a better, more accurate name. The amount of spicy lettuce Blue Apron sent was laughable, so I added a head of romaine hearts because lettuce has no calories or nutritional value but it can take up some space on a plate. The recipe was simple enough. I washed and peeled two potatoes, sliced them, boiled them for the prescribed amount of time. While that was happening, I made the dressing—mayonnaise, fresh squeezed lemon, garlic. The recipe also called for capers but I hate them, so slimy and ugly, and while I was trying to work through my pickiness, there was only so much progress to be made in one sitting. When the potatoes were ready, they went onto a baking sheet and I drizzled them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. They baked at 500 degrees for twenty-five minutes and my kitchen got unbearably hot. I began thinking about the melancholy of cooking for yourself when you are single and living alone. One of the many reasons it took me so long to learn how to cook and learn to enjoy cooking is that it often feels like such a waste to go to all that trouble for myself. Dinner would not wait for melancholy, so after rinsing and draining the beans, I softened a yellow onion, then assembled the salad, adding tomato, the beans, the lettuce, the dressing, all served over the crispy potatoes. It all turned out fine even though I had the saddest collection of kitchen tools aiding me in the process. It was the first time in my life something I prepared bore any resemblance to the recipe from whence it came. In another box, there were ingredients for an English pea ravioli dish. I began by softening four cloves of garlic and some onion. The onion looked hideous because I do not have knife skills. What should have been orderly diced onion was a quantity of awkwardly shaped onion chunks. When the onion and garlic were softened, I added the English peas, some salt and pepper. It all smelled good. I felt accomplished, and maybe even a little powerful, the mistress of my culinary domain.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation46 Worship ‹ In the final part of the story, the covenant relationship takes shape in worship. While the people were building the golden calf, Moses was on the mountain receiving instructions about the building of a sanctuary. This tabernacle was to be a kind of tent so that it could be carried by the people on their journey through the desert. ‹ The narrative describes the building of this sanctuary as the people’s response to God’s reaffirmation of the covenant. Chapter 35 tells us that people contributed whatever they could to the project because their hearts were stirred and their spirits were willing. It’s portrayed as a voluntary effort, a collective response by the people, reflecting their own renewed commitment to the covenant. ‹ The design of the sanctuary was to reflect the structure of relationships. It was a rectangle, divided into two parts, and its inner room was the most sacred. It was called the Holy of Holies and was where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. In considering this design, it’s helpful to think about the way that space orients relationships. ● In many Christian churches, the buildings are orientated toward the front, where there is a cross. That orientation conveys a relationship to God that is centered on Jesus, especially his death and resurrection. ● For Muslims, the worship space is a mosque, which has a niche or mihrab in the front wall. That niche shows the direction toward Mecca, where Muhammad initially delivered his message and toward which people are to pray. ● The book of Exodus describes a sanctuary in which the box containing the covenant is in the most important place, and that space was not accessible to everyone. But Exodus says that the sanctuary was in the center of the camp, with people living all around it. And when they broke camp and moved to another location, they took this tent-like sanctuary with them. This portable sanctuary reflects the idea that God was not bound to a place but to a people. What defined their relationship was not location but commitments. Lecture 6—Freedom and Law at Mount Sinai 47 Suggested Reading Meyers, Exodus. Miller, The T en Commandments. Questions to Consider 1. In what ways do the T en Commandments limit freedom? T o what extent to they protect freedom? 2. In the book of Exodus, the golden calf exemplifies false worship and the tabernacle or tent-sanctuary is identified with true worship. How does the narrative distinguish what is acceptable from what is unacceptable worship?

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Ina Garten makes cooking seem easy, accessible. She loves good ingredients—good vanilla, good olive oil, good everything. She is always offering helpful tips—very cold butter makes pastry dough better, and a cook’s best tools are clean hands. She uses an ice cream scoop for the dough when she’s making muffins and reminds the audience of this trick with a conspiratorial grin. When she shops in town, she always asks the butcher or fishmonger or baker to put her purchases on her account. She doesn’t sully herself with cash. One day, she invites some construction workers who are rehabbing a windmill over for lunch and she decorates the table with construction accessories like a tarp and some paintbrushes and a bucket. As she prepares their meal, she makes sure to provide man-sized portions, to be followed by a brownie pie, a decadent affair I would eventually try to bake. What I love most about Ina is that she teaches me about fostering a strong sense of self and self-confidence. She teaches me about being at ease in my body. From all appearances, she is entirely at ease with herself. She is ambitious and knows she is excellent at what she does and never apologizes for it. She teaches me that a woman can be plump and pleasant and absolutely in love with food. She gives me permission to love food. She gives me permission to acknowledge my hungers and to try and satisfy them in healthy ways. She gives me permission to buy the “good” ingredients she is so fond of recommending so that I might make good food for myself and the people for whom I enjoy cooking. She gives me permission to embrace my ambition and believe in myself. In the case of Barefoot Contessa, a cooking show is far more than just a cooking show. 64I am not the kind of person who can survey the pantry, identify four or five random ingredients, and assemble a delicious meal. I need the protection and comfort of recipes. I require gentle instruction and guidance. On a good day, I can experiment with a recipe, try to mix things up, but I need a foundation of some kind. There is, I must admit, something very satisfying about making things from scratch, to know every dish in a meal was made by your own hands. As a lazy person, I’m a fan of premade things, but it was a lot of fun and deeply relaxing to make, for example, my own dough and my own cherry filling for a beautiful cherry pie. I felt productive and capable. What has fascinated me about cooking, and coming to it in the middle of my life, is how it’s actually a really good endeavor for a control freak. There are rules, and to succeed, at least in the early going, those rules need to be followed. I am good at following rules when I choose to.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 88 Ecclesiastes ‹Throughout Proverbs, we have the sense that people can take steps that will lead to a better and more satisfying life. But our second book, Ecclesiastes, challenges that approach. The writer of Ecclesiastes is a person who has been successful and achieved a good life yet finds it meaningless. The book is a stark and disturbing reflection on the emptiness of success. ‹Ecclesiastes 1:2 states the theme: “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, all is vanity.” That word vanity is the traditional translation, but it is actually better to translate that key word as “pointless” or “meaningless.” The Hebrew word is hebel, which refers to vapor or breath. Life is like a puff of smoke that the wind blows away into nothingness. ‹The book of Proverbs tells us to work hard to get ahead, but Ecclesiastes asks, “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” The writer says that each generation is born, then dies and is forgotten. Verse 14 reads, “I’ve looked at everything that’s done under the sun, and I can see it’s all pointless. It’s chasing after wind.” ‹In chapter 2, the author recalls that he spent his life doing the things he liked. He built houses and planted vineyards; he had livestock and gold. But in the end, he found that all his success was pointless because nothing lasts. All our striving adds up to nothing but a castle made of sand that is washed away by time. ‹If everything is transient, and no successes have ultimate meaning, then how do we face life each day? Ecclesiastes responds with two points. ●One is an attitude of acceptance that we belong to the ongoing cycle of life and death. This is reflected in the most famous part of the book (Eccles. 3): “To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” The writer describes the endless cycle of life that God has created. God’s work will endure; ours will not. And accepting our own transience is essential. ●The second point is that even if we can’t find ultimate meaning in things, we can have moments of satisfaction. Ecclesiastes 5:18 says, “It is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun, in the few days God gives us, for this is our lot.” This theme of finding

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Over at Aunt Alma’s we could listen to Garvey and Grey fight, to Little Earle giggle and squeak, to Uncle Wade drink and cuss, to the radio playing and the chickens clucking outside the windows. Over there we got to slide around on a big tarp with the sprinkler shooting cold water up in a shower. At Aunt Ruth’s we could watch Uncle Travis cut up potatoes for her, a beer at his side and a cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, ashes occasionally dropping into the peels. Aunt Ruth even let us play in just our panties, though after Reese got ringworm Mama insisted we keep our clothes on, and after we got chiggers she made us scrub down as soon as we came home. Reese and I didn’t mind. We still wanted to go visiting at every chance. It was alive over at the aunts’ houses, warm, always humming with voices and laughter and children running around. The quiet in our own house was cold, no matter that we had a better furnace and didn’t leave our doors open for the wind to blow through. There was something icy in Daddy Glen’s houses that melted out of us when we were over at our aunts’. Daddy Glen’s brothers lived in big houses they owned, with fenced-in yards and flowering bushes. “This is how people ought to live,” he told us when he drove us over to visit his brothers. More than anything Daddy Glen wanted a house like Daryl and James had—a new house with a nice lawn and picture windows framed in lined curtains. The houses he chose for us were always shabby imitations. Mama sewed curtains, washed windows, and polished floors. Daddy Glen mowed the grass and sent us out with scissors to dig up the weeds along the driveway. He yelled at Earle and Beau if they drove up on the grass, and he chased the dogs that came and knocked over our garbage cans in the night. “Nobody wants me to have nothing nice,” he’d complain, and then get in one of his dangerously quiet moods and refuse to talk to anybody. He brooded so much Reese and I patrolled the yard, picking up windblown trash and dog turds—anything that would make him mad. Every new house made him happy for a little while, and we tried to extend that period of relative calm as much as possible, keeping everything sparkling clean and neat. “Things are gonna be different here,” he’d tell Mama. Reese and I would keep our faces expressionless and stay out of his way. Neither of us believed things would ever change, but we knew better than to say so. Sometimes it seemed Daddy Glen could almost read the thoughts we were trying to hide, catch us with his eyes thinking that nothing he did was going to make any difference. “It eats a man’s heart out,” he told Mama one time, “knowing no one trusts him.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  You be careful of your back, Bone, or it’ll be damn stiff when you get old.” She told me to go down to the river to pull in whatever trash had accumulated in the tree roots. I came home with fresh tomatoes, okra, two jars of chow-chow, and the head off a Betsy Wetsy doll, the one with the silly rubber curl on her forehead. Raylene told Mama I was the kind of girl she liked, quiet and hardworking, and said she’d pay in kind for my help a couple of days a week. So I started spending all my time with Raylene while Reese went off to afternoon Bible classes at the Jesus Love Academy. Every day I dragged stuff up from the river—baby-carriage covers, tricycle wheels, shoes, plastic dishes, jump-rope handles, ragged clothes, and once the headlight off a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “This is good stuff,” Aunt Raylene usually said. “You got an eye for things, girl. I can clean and patch those clothes up. We’ll just soak the dishes in bleach and give the rest of it a scrubbing. Saturday morning we’ll put out blankets and sell it off the side of the road. You get your mama to send you over on the weekend and I’ll give you a tenth of everything we earn.” I loved her praise more than the money, loved being good at something, loved hearing Aunt Raylene tell Uncle Beau what a worker I was. Sometimes she’d come down to the river and watch me climb around the tree roots. “You’re pretty sure on your feet,” she told me. “Looks like you an’t scared of falling in.” “Why should I be?” I watched her light a cigarette the same way Uncle Earle did, striking the match against her thumbnail. “A little river water an’t gonna hurt me.” “No, it won’t. It won’t. But you’d be surprised how silly some people get about the notion of falling in, or getting their pants wet, or bumping themselves on an old river rock. I had Alma’s girl Temple out here once after she quit school, and it turned out she was scared of snapping turtles. Girl was convinced they were waiting for her just under the surface of the water, waiting to snap her little toes off and eat them up! Can you imagine?” She took a drag on her cigarette, cupping it in her hand away from the river breeze. “Oh, Lord.” She arched her back and then sank down in a squat on the bank, her black serge skirt bunching up under her. “I am so tired of people whining about what might happen to them, never taking no chances or doing anything new. I’m glad you an’t gonna be like that, Bone. I’m counting on you to get out there and do things, girl. Make people nervous and make your old aunt glad.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked off down the river.