Despair

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I’m blunted, muted, starved, yet stubbornly refusing the one suggestion everyone sober for very long makes: prayer. I recoil from any talk of spiritual crap, though I can’t fail to notice that the happier, less angry ex-drunks talk about such matters without any strapped-on, phony-sounding zeal. Joan the Bone claims some nonbelievers use the group as a higher power. Here, she says, are a bunch of people. They outnumber you, outearn you, outweigh you. They are, ergo—in some simplistic calculation—a power greater than you. They certainly know more about staying sober than you. She sips her coffee. If you have a problem, bring it to the group. You’re asking me to put my life in the hands of strangers who give not one real shit for my true well being? They probably care more than you do, Joan counters. She points out how many of my own bright ideas for solving life’s travails involve buying a flamethrower. Her jet hair is salted with gray, though a smattering of freckles conjures some twelve-year-old Joan I might’ve climbed a tree with. In truth, she’s written articulately about the most unpronounceable continental philosophers. I’m very astute, I say. Or paranoid, she says . I complain that lots of people in the room are crazy. Real wing nuts. You’re asking me to confide in crazy people. Fuckups, most of them. I chew my red coffee stirrer into a frightful state. No offense. Joan sighs. The fact that you’ve continued to drink—given your history of depression and family trauma—borders on the moronic. I sip coffee and blink. You’re not bringing a problem to one person, she adds. You’re asking the group. The group is guided by principles that the individuals in it don’t embody solo. It’s the one day at a time crap— So you never sat over a drink, thinking, I’ll quit tomorrow…. Every night. It’s no more nuts saying Just don’t drink today than saying I’ll quit tomorrow . Put your mind where your body is. One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never arrives. I quote something I’d heard at one of my first meetings: If you’ve got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you’re straddling today—pissing all over it rather than living in it . See, she says, you do listen. I sit inwardly grumbling in the muddy mind-set of the reluctantly unmedicated. I do not feel redeemed. I feel fallen, a long way fallen. Not drinking has chipped off some armor I’ve hardened over my softest aspects, and now I sit in a coffee shop niggling with a woman who most days feels like the only roadblock between me and a truckload of flaming horseshit. She says, You honestly think you’re gonna sit here with me and figure out how to conduct every day of your life henceforth without a drink? Why not? Because nobody graduates. Each day you’ll feel different.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  That system, in other words, may have passed from Jerusalem to Antioch, but it must have started with Jerusalem, and that pushes the process back before 70 C.E. My present point, however, depends not on how one explains that consensus but simply on its factual existence. The authority of that consensus, be it from dominant model or authoritative place, works alike for intracanonical and extracanonical gospels without distinction. The Egyptian desert, below the delta and above the water table, did not make any distinction between intracanonical and extracanonical gospels. Whatever the origins of the above-discussed consensus about the usage of the papyrus codex and the presence of sacred abbreviations, those early gospels came from a time when that consensus was accepted by all strands of the Christian scribal tradition presently available on papyrus manuscripts. Distinctions of intracanonical and extracanonical would come later and destroy that consensus forever. Thus, for instance, by the fourth century, we have, as mentioned earlier, twenty-two papyrus manuscripts of John’s gospel and eighteen of Matthew’s gospel but still only those three of the Gospel of Thomas and one of the Gospel of Peter . PART IVMethodology and AnthropologyDug in upon the back of a stony hill are about a hundred one-story houses, irregular and misshapen, blackened by time and crumbling away from wind and rain, their roofs ill covered by tiles and rubbish of every kind. Most of these hovels have only one opening, which serves as doorway, window, and chimney flue. In the unfloored interior with its dry walls live, sleep, eat and procreate together on the straw malting men, women, and their children, donkeys, pigs, goats and chickens…. The same sky, the same earth, the same rain, the same snow, the same houses, the same feast days, the same food, the same poverty: poverty handed down from fathers, who had inherited it from their grandfathers, who had received it from their forefathers. The life of men, beasts and earth always seeming shut in a motionless circle, dosed away from the changes of time. Closed in a natural circle of its own. First would come the sowing, then the weeding, then the pruning, then the sulphuring, then the reaping, then the harvest. And then? Then, once again. Sowing, weeding, pruning, sulphuring, reaping, harvest. Always the same thing, unchanging. Always. Years passed, years piled up behind, the young grew old, the old died, and they sowed, weeded, pruned, sulphured, reaped, and harvested. And then what? The same thing. And after that? Ever the same thing. Each year like the year before it, each season like the season before it. In bad weather months they arranged family affairs. That is, they quarreled about them. There are not two families … that are not related to each other. In little villages usually all the families are related to each other. For that reason all the families quarrel with each other.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  In order to grasp the depth of pharaonic enslavement we must reflect on what surely must have happened to those who were hopelessly locked into the debt system of Pharaoh and who knew that there is no exit from pharaonic enslavement. We can imagine that as Hebrews they eventually forfeited their self-consciousness and their historical identification. Many of them must have lived in unrelieved despair and submitted without resilient possibility, finally going through endless motions of brick making without any future at all. Surely they were indeed tired of living, if not scared of dying, and they saw that every day of work left them deeper in debt and without recourse of any kind. Thus, Hebrews without right or prospect is exactly what the predatory economy of Pharaoh required. For good reason the slaves were reduced to despair and therefore to silence. At most they could quarrel among themselves but never emit a peep against the regime, for that was too much to dare (Exod. 5:20–21). THE SLAVES GROANED But then he died! The unimaginable happened! The kingpin of predation was gone! He lasted, in the biblical narrative, from Exodus 1:8 to 2:23; it must have seemed an eon to the slaves. When such a brutal predator dies, something of the system of predation dies with him, and new possibilities become imaginable. This moment of Pharaoh’s death is a pivotal moment in the biblical story. Indeed, it is a pivotal moment in the history of the world. It is always a pivotal moment in the history of the world when a pharaoh dies. Because what happens is that “the Hebrews” are able to remember and compute the truth that they are “Israelites.” And their status as “left-behind” Hebrews is abruptly moved to a re-embrace of their true status as Israelites. Thus in our verse it is not the Hebrews who cried out but the Israelites. It is a moment, in the rhetoric of critical theory, when the victims become conscious, when the slaves become aware that they may be actors in their own history and agents of their own future. Until this moment the Hebrew victims had no consciousness, no sense of being subject, no capacity to be agent. The move to embrace the identity of Israelite is indeed naive, but that naiveté becomes the origin and foundation of thinking critically about history and about one’s place in it. Everything depended on that moment of coming to consciousness. The cry and the groan are the beginning of that process that eventuated in a departure from Pharaoh’s system.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I will, but what you will.” (14:32–36) How could God “will” the execution of Jesus? And how can Jesus—or anyone else—pray “your will be done” to a God who “wills” such unjust imperial violence? In Mark a connection between the prayer of Jesus and his execution is seen not only in the address to “Abba, the Father” and the mention of God’s “will,” but also in one other significant link, to be seen more fully in Chapter 8. The prayer concludes with “lead us not into temptation,” and Jesus warns Peter in Gethsemane: “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (14:37–38) Whether you translate it “temptation” (KJV) or “time of trial” (NRSV), the Greek word is the same. I am inclined, therefore, to conclude that Mark may have known a fuller version of the Lord’s Prayer, but reserved it for use in the Gethsemane narrative. That made the Lord’s Prayer a fervently actual prayer of the Lord. It is even more certain that Luke made that precise transition. And here is why. One of the major differences between the versions of the Abba Prayer in Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4 is that Luke completely omits “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” However, Luke rephrases Mark’s Gethsemane prayer of Jesus into this: He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22:41–42) Luke’s Greek has the same noun for God’s “will” and the same imperative verb for “be done” as Matthew’s version of the Abba Prayer does. I conclude that Luke knew that challenge about God’s will in the Lord’s Prayer, but omitted it in 11:2–4 to hold it over for inclusion on the lips of Jesus himself in 22:42. All of that simply emphasizes my question: Does God will the execution of Jesus and is that at least implicitly included in the Lord’s Prayer itself? For millions of Christians the answer to that question has been and still is an emphatic: “Yes, of course, God willed the death of Jesus.” The theology that grounds that response was visually portrayed in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ . That is why it received such enthusiastic approval and financial support from so many Christians. Their theological interpretation of Christian faith goes like this. Humans sinned against God, but no punishment was adequate to that infinite dishonor. Jesus, however, was both human (like us) and divine (like God). He was therefore the only adequate subject for divine punishment.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Here is Scene 1: King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to make a proclamation of liberty to them, that all should set free their Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should hold another Judean in slavery. And they obeyed, all the officials and all the people who had entered into the covenant that all would set free their slaves, male or female, so that they would not be enslaved again; they obeyed and set them free. But afterward they turned around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free, and brought them again into subjection as slaves. (Jer. 34:8–11) That’s a rather heavy-handed scene, and at this point in this chapter you can probably write the next ones for yourself. In Scene 2, God, as expected, emphasizes that the divine model for this covenant of release from debt slavery is the release from Egyptian bondage: Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I myself made a covenant with your ancestors when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, saying, “Every seventh year each of you must set free any Hebrews who have been sold to you and have served you six years; you must set them free from your service.” But your ancestors did not listen to me or incline their ears to me. (34:13–14) Clearly, of course, the people have acknowledged their duty, accepted it, and then, to make matters much, much worse, retracted and defaulted on it. It is, as I say, heavy-handed, but thereby also quite clear. After that, God warns that their action of taking back the slaves has “profaned” God’s name (34:16)—remember God’s name from Chapter 3? And then comes Scene 3: Therefore, thus says the Lord: You have not obeyed me by granting a release to your neighbors and friends; I am going to grant a release to you, says the Lord—a release to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine. I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth…. [Your] corpses shall become food for the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth…. The towns of Judah I will make a desolation without inhabitant. (34:17–22) In that parable the very reason for the Babylonian exile was an alleged acceptance and then a rejection of the Sabbath year “release” from debt and debt slavery. In that parable the Sabbath year’s release from debt slavery is judged so important that defaulting on it is the specific reason for Babylon’s imperial devastation of Israel. Recall that incident on debt release seen above in Nehemiah 5? The Zedekiah and Nehemiah stories frame the Babylonian exile by citing the nonremission of debt as its cause beforehand and the remission of debt as its remedy afterward.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  John died in lonely isolation at Machaerus, the southernmost fortress in Antipas’s territories. And God did nothing to stop it. That was something—for Jesus—to think about. Next, we must see the general contrast between John and Jesus even within the gospel tradition before attempting to specify the precise contrast that I see between them. Those who opposed both John and Jesus agreed that, although they were both strange, they were strange in opposite directions: “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (Matt. 11:18–19). We can bracket those name-calling interpretations—John as demon-possessed and Jesus as a drunken glutton—and still conclude that John and Jesus struck their opponents as being somehow opposites. One can, after all, abstain from food because of committed asceticism or demand food because of distributive justice. But the differences between John and Jesus are more complicated than that simple summary by their adversaries. On the one hand, since Jesus was definitely baptized by John in the Jordan, he must have accepted his message of apocalyptic eschatology, his vision of God’s imminent and avenging intervention for the Great Divine Cleanup of the World. We can be sure about John’s baptism of Jesus, because of the gathering embarrassment about it as the tradition developed: Mark accepted it (1:9); Matthew protested it (3:13–15), Luke hurried it (3:21a), and John omitted it entirely (1:29–34). Furthermore, the Spirit’s descent on Jesus and God’s address to Jesus render somewhat irrelevant anything that happened between John and Jesus—as all four evangelists attest (Mark 1:10–11; Matt. 3:16–17; Luke 3:21b–22; John 1:32–34). On the other hand, when we hear Jesus speaking with his own voice and out of his own vision, he speaks and acts very differently from John. Jesus neither denigrates nor agrees with John . Think, for example, of this comment by Jesus about John: Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. (Matt. 11:11) I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. (Luke 7:28) The supreme accolade in the first half of each of those verses yields to a supreme indifference in the second half. Another caution. The phrase “kingdom of heaven” is not about heaven, but about earth or, better, it is about God’s kingdom coming down from heaven to earth.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  When you read “kingdom of God,” therefore, mentally rephrase it as the “ruling style of God.” It imagines how the world would be if the biblical God actually sat on an imperial throne down here below. It dreams of an earth where the Holy One of justice and righteousness actually gets to establish—as we might say—the annual budget for the global economy. (By the way, the word “economy” comes from the Greek words oikos, “household,” and nomos, “law.” “Economy” means the law of the household.) Deep below our geological earth are giant tectonic plates that grind against one another along fault lines and produce the surface disturbances of volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Deep below our historical world are the tectonic plates of empire and eschaton, and we have just seen their seismic clash in Daniel 7. Empire is easy enough to understand. It has been the way of the world throughout the last six thousand years of recorded history. We can trace imperialism back to the invention of irrigated agriculture on the floodplains of rivers like, for example, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Annual snowmelts from distant mountains sent rich alluvial sediment downstream, and irrigated farming enhanced by dikes and canals vastly increased fertility, prosperity—and population. We call it the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, Revolution. We also call it the dawn of civilization. With that magnificent Mesopotamian dawn we got not only irrigated farming, but also written records, walled cities, and permanent temples. We also got control and manipulation of grains, animals—and people—since irrigation demands organization of the many by the few. We also got imperialism. As prosperity and population increased, the farmer “haves” pressed outward and the nomad “have-nots” pressed inward. How far, then, would borders have to extend to ensure safety and security? Outward, ever outward—maybe outward to the whole world. The dawn of civilization was also the birth of empire. Eschaton is not quite so easy to understand. The Old Testament’s faith was that God was just, in control of the world, and in covenant with Israel to establish justice worldwide. But the Old Testament’s experience was that the world was unjust and under the control of evil, and that Israel received far more than its fair share of oppressive violence. How could you possibly reconcile that faith and that experience? By eschaton ? The word eschaton is an ordinary Greek word for “the end.” So its meaning always depends on context. The end, yes, but the end of what? First, a negative. It is not—emphatically not—about the end of the world. That unfortunate misunderstanding arises especially from reading Matthew, who speaks a few times about “the end of the world” (13:39, 49; 24:3, 20) in the King James Version. But his Greek term is actually not “world” (kosmos ), but “age” (ai [image "image" file=Image00053.jpg] n )—Matthew refers to the end of this age, period, or time of evil, war, violence, injustice, and oppression.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Here is Mark’s version—and watch the purpose of the sour wine: At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. (15:33–37) That drink of sour wine is to revive Jesus and keep him alive long enough to see if Elijah comes to his aid. For Mark, Jesus dies amid external mockery and internal—how strong should the word be—despair? But that must, of course, be balanced for Mark by what also happens externally: “The curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (15:38–39). In any case, the parallel scene in John is—as you expect by now—the precise opposite of Mark’s. For John, Jesus is once again in total and final control even of his own death. Watch that incident of the sour wine: When Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (19:28–30) The proffered wine is now given not to mock Jesus, but to obey him. Jesus is portrayed as in control of his arrest by his commanding the arresters and of his execution by commanding the executioners, so that the scriptures are all fulfilled. And, needless to say, there is no loud death cry in John. Jesus dies when all is finished, and he is ready to give up his spirit. The Jesus of Mark dies in human agony. The Jesus of John dies in divine radiance. With regard to entombment, in Mark, Jesus is buried swiftly and somewhat inadequately, “since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath” (15:42). It is not a dishonorable burial, because Joseph of Arimathea “bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb” (15:46). But there was no time for proper anointing or full mourning, so “when the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him” (16:1).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  So, about six thousand years ago it was possible that, as Rodgers and Hammerstein said in Oklahoma, “the farmer and the cowman should be friends.” That is not, however, how the Bible records its own version of that same Neolithic Revolution and its dispute between ancient nomadic herding and newly invented irrigated farming. The fascinating biblical parable of Genesis 4 details what first happened when humans left the secure precincts of the Garden of Eden and emerged out onto those baked Mesopotamian plains, that “cradle of civilization” now known as Iraq. First, says Genesis 4, the farmer Cain killed the herder Abel. The opening sin of human history, the beginning of an escalatory process undergirding human history, was the violence of fratricidal murder. Or as God said to Cain: “Sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (4:7). That is, of course, the first mention of “sin” in the Bible, and it is in the singular. Next, we expect some form of divine penalty. Maybe God will now invent capital punishment and execute Cain for his murder of Abel? But here is what we get: The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear!” (4:10–13) The earth is a living being, and Cain has defiled and desecrated it by shedding murdered human blood upon it. The result is the earth’s revulsion, as it were, so that Cain is “cursed” from—or by—the earth itself. Is that human consequence or divine punishment? Then comes the first city: “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he [Cain] built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch” (4:17). And, as we now know, if the farmer dooms the herder, the city dooms the farmer. But that would take a long time. Finally, there is an exponential growth in murderous violence throughout that chapter. In the first stage, Cain kills Abel, and God acknowledges, “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (4:10). But there is no violent punishment from God. In the next stage, God warns of the inevitable escalation of the tribal blood feud: “Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance” (4:15). In the final stage, the blood feud reaches epidemic proportions. Five generations after Cain, his descendant Lamech boasts: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (4:23–24) My tribe, says Lamech, will take exponentially escalating vengeance for my murder.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  I myself knew a man who claimed that he had often suffered these punishments, and in fact over a very brief period of time. Yet they were so great and so much like hell that no tongue could adequately express them, no pen could describe them, and one who had not himself experienced them could not believe them. And so great were they that, if they had been sustained or had lasted for half an hour, even for one-tenth of an hour, he would have perished completely and all of his bones would have been reduced to ashes. At such a time God seems so terribly angry, and with him the whole creation. At such a time there is no flight, no comfort, within or without, but all things accuse. . . . In this moment, it is strange to say, the soul cannot believe that it can ever be redeemed.9 Here was the central difficulty of late medieval Catholic theology: that one was brought to the place of understanding one’s sinfulness and one’s unworthiness before God but was not told what to do at that moment of understanding except to lie paralyzed with hopelessness, to confess and try harder. At some point, the sinner—and Luther chief among them—came to feel that he wholly deserved God’s fierce anger. For Staupitz, who had a remarkably healthy view of God for that time and place, God was someone who loved us and had mercy on us, but for Luther, God was still and only the harsh judge whose righteousness condemned us with withering fierceness. Staupitz saw Luther’s agonies and took a personal and fatherly interest in him. His importance in the life of Martin Luther cannot be exaggerated. He early on saw the genius and potential in Luther and wanted to do all he could to help him find his way. Staupitz—and his connections and relationships, most important with Frederick the elector and with the university at Wittenberg—would play such a significant role in Luther’s life that we cannot imagine Luther without him. And yet where he seemingly and ultimately helped Luther to go, he would never himself end up following, which is another curious detail in a story composed almost exclusively of them. [image file=image_rsrc6KK.jpg] A portrait of Johannes von Staupitz. CHAPTER THREEThe Great ChangeWhat if it’s not true? —Martin Luther THE JOURNEY THAT Luther made from being a devoted son of the church toward becoming the face of the Reformation that broke away from that church took place over many years and was a gradual transformation. It was not as though a second thunderbolt caused him to leap from the Middle Ages right into the Reformation, as though the two epochs were separated by a prostrate broomstick. Nonetheless, in 1517 something happened during which he would find himself on the far side of a great theological divide.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Our scripts or maps include clear ideas about what the goal, effort, and timelines of our sexuality “should” be—easily orgasmic, with spontaneous desire, all of those myths. And what does it mean if we don’t function the way we “should”? It means we’re broken. Sometimes, for some people, having a sexuality that doesn’t match the map doesn’t just mean you’re different, it means you’re a failure. A freak. “Abnormal.” Diseased, disgusting, inadequate, all these terrible words that mean we are not normal. We tie our identities to our sexuality, our sense of whether we’re a “good woman” or a “good girl.” If that’s you, letting go of the myths may feel similar to letting go of self-criticism, as I described in chapter 5. On some level, we feel that letting go of those goals is giving up hope; it feels like failure. This is as true for sex-related goals like desire style, orgasm, and pleasure as it is for goals in the rest of life—ending a relationship, deciding not to complete a degree or go to grad school, accepting that your body shape doesn’t match the cultural ideal. Letting go of “shoulds”—feelings and thoughts like, “I shouldn’t be this way” and, “I wish my sexuality were different”—requires that your little monitor recognize that your previous goal is unattainable and then… fall into the pit of despair we encounter when our monitor decides a goal is not attainable. In short, it requires a kind of “failure,” accepting that you will probably never be the sexual person you were taught to be your whole life. This is what can make changing your map so difficult, and it may be the single greatest obstacle standing between women and their own optimal sexual wellbeing. Embracing pleasure may require that we acknowledge desires and curiosities and sensations that we were taught all our lives were shameful. Embracing responsive desire may require that we abandon all hope that we’ll ever conform to the model of sexual relationships we have always believed is the one and only “right” kind of sexual relationship. Once you know what’s true, can you let go of what’s false? Can you abandon the goals to which you have tied aspects of your identity? It requires a journey through the pit of despair, grieving for the map that was wrong and all the places you missed as a result. How can people survive that kind of apparent “failure”? Where do they go, once they’re in that pit? The way to get through is to stay very still, to notice all the aspects of your identity that were tied to the lies you were told, to notice all the grief you feel in letting go of the self you spent your life trying to be. Notice, too, the anger you feel at having been lied to for so long. Notice all of these with nonjudgment. Allow them to be true.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  By contrast, Ms. B.’s little monitor is deeply dissatisfied, convinced that there is a wide gulf between where she is and where she ought to be—and furthermore, she feels utterly helpless to do anything about it. She’s in the pit of despair. She has collapsed into the hopeless grief that comes when the little monitor is convinced that a particular goal is unattainable. Did she try to create change and fail and try again and fail again, or, when her sexuality fell short of the mark (a mark set by cultural standards that have nothing to do with reality), did her body go right to shutdown? I don’t know. But I do know that her little monitor can learn, and Ms. B. can teach it—if she chooses to. She can change her goal, her effort, or her expectations. For example, suppose you’re not reliably orgasmic from intercourse. Because you’ve read chapter 8, you know you’re normal and you’ve learned about other ways to have orgasms, especially from clitoral stimulation. Knowledge! But what if you still feel frustrated about your lack of orgasms with intercourse? Or ashamed? Or sad? Or judgmental? Will that make it easier or more difficult to try out new ways to access pleasure and orgasm? Yeah. This is when it’s time for a reality check. What is your goal? What effort are you investing? What are your expectations for how much effort it will take to attain this goal? For many of us, the goals we have in mind—such as spontaneous desire or orgasm with intercourse—are not goals we have chosen consciously for ourselves. We absorbed them from our culture in the form of sexual scripts. These scripts provide the structure for the beliefs through which we interpret the sexual world. These scripts, too often, are barriers between us and joy. Over the last few decades, research has followed how sexual scripts have changed in Western culture. Recent cultural scenario scripts may include, “Men’s sexuality is simple and women’s sexuality is complex,” or, “Women don’t have as strong a sex drive as men,” or, “Orgasm is central to a positive sexual encounter.”2 The scripts are written into your brain early, by your family and culture—remember the Moral Message, the Medical Message, and the Media Message from chapter 5? But scripts aren’t about what we intellectually believe is true. They act as a template for our emotional One Ring and for our little monitor to filter and organize information. You can disagree with a script and still find yourself behaving according to it and interpreting your experience in terms of it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Anyone who has experienced depression may have an idea. For Luther, it seems to have manifested itself as a widening hole of sheerest hopelessness, an increasing cacophony of devils’ voices accusing him of a thousand things, and all of them true or true enough—and no way out of it. This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton’s famous phrase, it is “darkness visible,”15 a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.16 We may also think of the words graven on the gate of Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”17 So for Luther, this Anfechtungen was a vivid picture of the nightmare of hell itself, a place in which one had indeed been utterly forsaken by God, with no end to the hopelessness. And perhaps it was even something worse than that. Perhaps it was not merely a vivid and horrifying picture of hell but the actual beginning of hell itself, a black tendril that would in time put him down to Sheol itself. It was not something Luther could easily ignore. He was somehow determined to understand it all, to get solid answers. Whether it was already in the back of his mind now, or would simply arise in the next few years, we don’t know, but at some point the idea must have struck him that the Bible itself—apart from the obscuring glosses and the bad translations—might hold the key to this puzzle, if it was a puzzle that could ever actually be solved. But he was not able to study the Bible as such. For him, it was the law he must now study. But we can hardly doubt that the profound agony of this depression, this Anfechtungen, would have driven him in fits and starts at first and then in a kind of wild, single-minded quest to find the problem and slay it. That much he believed was possible. His faith made it possible. And if we wonder in the future chapters of his life and this book what it was that made Luther more than anyone else persist and persist where others had failed, it is this despair that must be our answer. He had no patience for theological bromides and had no fear of being burned at the stake. That would have been less painful than the deep soul agony of his Anfechtungen, and the inescapable tortures of hell itself, so he rode on and on and would get where he meant to go or would die riding. • • •

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The Reformation “Breakthrough,” Aetatis 33Just a year before his death, Luther wrote a preface to his collected Latin works. In it he tells how on the path to his great breakthrough, he had actually come to despise God: Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love . . . yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God. . . . Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless I beat importunately upon St. Paul at that place [Romans 1:17] most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.4 One of the iconic moments from Luther’s life has come to be called “the tower experience.” As the story comes to us, it was during this world-changing year of 1517 that Luther’s struggles with that verse in the book of Romans came to fruition. But as with so much else with Luther’s story, it is the Luther legend that obscures our view of the actual events of his life—and the legend almost always comes to us via Luther’s later recollections of what took place decades earlier. Nonetheless, the moment in which the Middle Ages buckled under their own weight and thus gave way to the Reformation and the future seems to have occurred when a single tremendous insight came to Luther, who was at that moment in the so-called Cloaca Tower at the Black Cloister in Wittenberg. In 1532 and then again in 1545, Luther mentioned what happened at that point, sometime in early 1517.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But by God, I could outdrink the little suckers, and when the dashed lines around my body felt sharp enough to be visible, I might take up a held-out bottle. Faced with a boy I had a crush on—a bow-legged Missouri cowboy with the face and form of young Marlon Brando—I eagerly took the tequila his friend handed me. Forgoing lime and salt, I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed back a shot. As that one went down like bleach, I was holding up my glass for another. Whoa, Brando said, looks like you’ve done this before. Absolutely, I said. She’s from Texas, a kid from my physics class said. Texas girl? Brando said over his shoulder, before turning back to the two girls who’d presented themselves to him like dinner mints. I threw back another shot, which scalded a little channel through me. The boys cheered. By the third shot, the tequila seemed less poisonous. By the fourth, I felt a cool blue moon rising in my chest. Though I’d vowed not to drink that week (I had an anthro paper to finish), I’d spied Brando doing shots with his pals and wedged into the group. He cut me a smile before squatting down to unlatch his guitar case, and as he started to strap on the instrument, I saw in the case’s blue velvet bottom a weathered copy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, which felt like a further sign that we were carved from the same wood. That novel was one I innately knew to be unreservedly great, and whose first paragraph somebody started slurrily to recite: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. Next thing I knew, I was earping onto the frozen earth, then girls were steering me loop-legged to my door. Which was the end of that night and more than a few others. Come Christmas, I caught a ride to Dallas, then took the silver bullet-shaped bus into the Leechfield station, where Daddy stood in creased khakis with comb marks in his black hair. The neck I threw my arms around had gone loose and leathery. For the first time, he smelled old. He took my duffel bag, saying, You could use a few pounds. Passing through the greenish neon of the station, I felt time curve back, and us in it. The place seemed coated with chicken grease. Even the pinball glass was smoky. A man sat on his shoeshine box listening to a big transistor radio with a coat-hanger antenna. In his raised-up chair was a thin lady with conked hair slicked alongside her head . Outside, Daddy threw my duffel into the truck bed. The door he opened groaned with rust, the hollow timbre of it tolling my arrival better than church bells.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The trouble from which I was suffering at Worms has not left me but rather has increased. I am more constipated than ever in my life, and despair of remedy. The Lord thus afflicts me, that I may not be without a relic of the cross. May he be blessed. Amen.11 The condition became so severe that Luther desperately hoped he could get permission from Frederick to travel to Erfurt, where he might see a doctor. But because of the danger involved all around—that he might actually be kidnapped and brought before the emperor as an outlaw—Spalatin said this was not possible. Spalatin was, however, able to procure special medicine from the doctors at Frederick’s court, which he quickly sent to Luther. After Luther received and used this medicine, on July 15, he wrote to Spalatin: I tried the pills according to the prescription. Soon I had some relief and elimination without blood or force, but the wound of the previous rupture isn’t healed yet, and I even had to suffer a good deal because some flesh extruded, either due to the power of the pill, or I don’t know what.12 Two weeks later, he wrote with an update: Concerning my health, I have easier elimination now, due to the strong and powerful medications, but the way my digestion functions has not changed at all. The soreness continues, and I am afraid it may develop into a worse evil with which the Lord afflicts me, according to his wisdom.13 Most have seen Luther’s constipation for precisely what it was, which is to say constipation. But we should return once more to Erik Erikson’s excruciatingly Freudian view of Luther’s gastrointestinal gestalt, because for decades many Luther scholars seemed to feel the need to take Erikson’s views seriously. Here is a vintage passage on this vital topic: One could say that Luther was compulsively retentive, or even that he was mentally and spiritually “constipated”—as he was apt to be physically all his life. But this retentive tendency (soon to alternate with an explosive one) was part of his equipment; and just as we assume that psychosexual energies can be sublimated, we must grant that a man can (and must) learn to derive out of the modes of his psychobiological and psychosexual make-up the prime modality of his creative adaptation.14 And all God’s people said: Amen.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Staupitz’s frustration with Luther grew. Luther seemed some kind of unprecedented moral madman on a never-ending treadmill of confession. Instead of looking upward and outward toward the God who loved him, he zealously and furiously fixated on himself and his own troubling thoughts. Staupitz, on more than one occasion, tried to shock Luther out of his downward spiral of navel-gazing. “God is not angry with you!” he once said. “You are angry with God! Don’t you know that God commands you to hope?” Another time he said, “Look here. If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive—parricide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all these peccadilloes.” Luther would confess negative thoughts about one of his brethren, or his impatience with something that morning, or his poor attitude toward prayer. And if he had not had any such sins to confess, he would confess his pride at not having had any such sins. Staupitz was an important and busy man, and he didn’t have time for this niggling ridiculousness. Give him a big fat juicy sin, one that anyone could see was a sin, and then repent of it and be gone! But Luther brought him gnat after gnat, with nary a camel to be seen. The taxonomy of Luther’s sins seemed never to tend toward anything sizable that Staupitz might grab with both hands. He could see that Luther was chasing his own tail, making both of them winded and dizzy. It is clear that Luther’s struggles had little to do with concupiscence. There are many things he said as a young man and later in life that suggest he didn’t struggle particularly in this area. His struggles instead usually had to do with his own doubts that he could ever be good, no matter how he tried, that he could ever be worthy of God’s mercy, grace, and salvation. He knew that the life of a monk was designed to free one from temptation, to keep one so busy with praying and singing and doing that there was no room for the sorts of things he might have been able to do if he had continued as a lawyer. But for Luther, the more he tried to be holy, the more he saw that he couldn’t be. The more he cleaned, the more furniture he moved, the more dirt he saw. He was leagues past fretting over sexual temptations. Such things were small beer compared with what he called the “real knots.” He didn’t know what to do to untangle them, and this led to tremendous problems for him, but he was determined to wrestle and wrestle with them until at last he had an answer. Nonetheless, any real answer still lay years in the future. Meanwhile the agonies of Anfechtungen he experienced as a result of this hopeless quest persisted. But here is what Luther wrote about these experiences some years later, in 1518:*

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther would endeavor with all of his considerable might to achieve salvation, would follow as best he could all of the prescribed rules, neglecting neither jot nor tittle, and he would fail. He would climb the Tower of Babel toward the blue vault of the heavens, aching to touch it with his hand, and when he had reached the top, exhausted from his efforts, he would see that it was every bit as far from him as it was before he had begun. And he would then realize that either there was no way for man to touch God—or there must be another way than the one they had been following. Either salvation was universally impossible or the whole current system—including the fearsome God behind it—was a diabolical hoax. It was that simple. But the endless writhings he would go through before he could see this! In his famous 1950 Luther biography, Here I Stand, Roland Bainton writes, “The meaning of Luther’s entry into the monastery is simply this, that the great revolt against the medieval church arose from a desperate attempt to follow the way by her prescribed.”3 • • • Martin’s year as a supplicant and monk-to-be followed the same path as that of all monks at the monastery. With them, he was awakened by a bell at 2:00 a.m., making the sign of the cross and then quickly putting on his white robe and scapular* before hustling out of his cell to the chapel, where he prayed at the high altar and took his place in the choir stalls to sing and pray Matins, the first of the seven “hours” prayed in monasteries throughout the world. Matins consisted of singing hymns and psalms antiphonally and lasted about forty-five minutes. At the end of Matins, the monks prayed the Salve Regina (Latin for “Save us, O Queen”) to Mary: “Save O Queen, Our Mother of Mercy, our delight, and our hope. To thee we exiled Sons of Eve lift up our cry. To thee we sigh as we languish in this vale of tears. Be Thou our advocate, sweet Virgin Mary, pray for us, Thou holy Mother of God.” After singing the Salve Regina, the monks sang the Ave Maria (“Hail Mary”) and Pater Noster (“Our Father”). Then they rose and filed out of the chapel.4

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Which is normal. The context of stress plus sex doesn’t bring with it an increase in pleasure. On the contrary, when she’s stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, Olivia said, “I feel this drive to orgasm, but it’s a drive that disconnects me from my body and from Patrick. I hate it. It’s like I’m a visitor in my body. Out of control.” It’s a perfect example of wanting without liking. “Ah, so it’s a challenge in your relationship and also it’s uncomfortable for you individually,” I said. “It’s pretty simple to change—simple, though not always easy.” They both said, “How?” you can’t make themI use italics when I describe wanting, liking, and learning in order to be clear that I don’t mean wanting, liking, or learning in the usual sense of, “Hey, what do you want for dinner?” or “Did you like the movie?” There is no deliberate intention—and often not even any awareness—accompanying the activation of these brain systems.18 On the contrary. In a study of cocaine addicts, research participants’ mesolimbic systems responded to images related to cocaine that flashed on a screen for thirty-three milliseconds. If you asked them what they saw, they wouldn’t be able to tell you, because the images flashed too fast to be “seen” consciously, but it was long enough to light up the addicts’ wanting systems.19 The research subjects were not aware of having seen the images, yet their emotional brains responded. In terms of the garden, this is the difference between what the gardener does to the garden… and what the garden does all on its own. The gardener can weed and water and fertilize, but she doesn’t actually make the plants grow. Your wanting, liking, and learning systems are what make the plants grow. All kinds of things influence them, including how well you tend them, the weather (that is, the external circumstances of your life), and how well suited your plants are to your particular soil (your body and your brakes and accelerator). But the gardener can’t grit her teeth and make the garden grow; she can only create the best possible environment for the garden to thrive, and then let the garden do its thing. Chapters 4, 5, and 9 are about how to create that sex-positive context. “is something wrong with me?” (answer: nope)Sexual arousal, desire, and orgasm change all the time. Sometimes they change in ways that delight us, and sometimes they change in ways that puzzle or worry us. Sometimes these changes happen in response to a change in our sexual hardware—our genitals and the dual control mechanism. But more often they change in response to a change in our context—our environment and our mental states. Our mood. Our relationships. Our lives.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It can’t have been sleeting or snowing every second of those years, but that’s my memory of it—the hood was always up on my parka, with some weather going tick tick tick tick against the waterproofing. There’s snow in my head, too. Wide blizzards of bad news blowing sideways. My few hopes are desperate ones. One key fantasy on the porch—no kidding—is winning the magazine sweepstakes I’ve never entered. I habitually filch sweepstakes forms from doctor’s-office magazines or shopping circulars. Sitting outside by flashlight—have to change that overhead porch bulb—I meticulously fill them out, imagining the limo pulling up with balloons and champagne. Such a good story we’ll be: two poets win a jackpot.... The night ends with a black smudge, and come dawn, I stand in a cloud of shower steam, the former night’s conviction to quit solid, though it’s daunting to face unmedicated whatever’s beyond the plastic curtain I’m scared to draw aside. By afternoon I can’t abide Mr. Rogers asking me to be my neighbor without a cocktail.