Disappointment

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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Valentinus or Valentine857 is the author of the most profound and luxuriant, as well as the most influential and best known of the Gnostic systems. Irenaeus directed his work chiefly against it, and we have made it the basis of our general description of Gnosticism.858 He founded a large school, and spread his doctrines in the West. He claimed to have derived them from Theodas or Theudas, a pupil of St. Paul.859 He also pretended to have received revelations from the Logos in a vision. Hippolytus calls him a Platonist and Pythagorean rather than a Christian. He was probably of Egyptian Jewish descent and Alexandrian education.860 Tertullian reports, perhaps from his own conjecture, that he broke with the orthodox church from disappointed ambition, not being made a bishop.861 Valentine came to Rome as a public teacher during the pontificate of Hyginus (137–142), and remained there till the pontificate of Anicetus (154).862 He was then already celebrated; for Justin Martyr, in his lost "Syntagma against all Heresies," which he mentions in his "First Apology" (140), combated the Valentinians among other heretics before A.D. 140. At that time Rome had become the centre of the church and the gathering place of all sects. Every teacher who wished to exercise a general influence on Christendom naturally looked to the metropolis. Valentine was one of the first Gnostics who taught in Rome, about the same time with Cerdo and Marcion; but though he made a considerable impression by his genius and eloquence, the orthodoxy of the church and the episcopal authority were too firmly settled to allow of any great success for his vagaries. He was excommunicated, and went to Cyprus, where he died about A.D. 160. His system is an ingenious theogonic and cosmogonic epos. It describes in three acts the creation, the fall, and the redemption; first in heaven, then on earth. Great events repeat themselves in different stages of being. He derived his material from his own fertile imagination, from Oriental and Greek speculations, and from Christian ideas. He made much use of the Prologue of John’s Gospel and the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians; but by a wild exegesis he put his own pantheistic and mythological fancies into the apostolic words, such as Logos, Only Begotten, Truth, Life, Pleroma, Ecclesia.

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

  But it was easy to remain in ignorance of this in Britain, which was going in the opposite direction, even though people there certainly shared the widespread disappointment with modernity. The depression that had festered in London during the mid-seventies had now exploded into the absolute nihilism of punk. Young men and women made themselves as ugly and cadaverous as possible. They sported wild Mohican hairstyles, caked their faces with white makeup, mutilated their bodies with razors and safety pins, and destroyed their minds with drugs. The Sex Pistols, the chief punk rock group, vomited onstage and denounced the queen, God, and Jesus Christ, loudly proclaiming the death of all values, all principles. This was a public flouting of belief per se, but like the religious fundamentalists, other Britons were looking for certainty. The old ways had been dismantled, but as yet nothing new had appeared to take their place. Traditional boundaries and markers had come down, and many lacked a clear sense of identity. In America such people followed Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; in Iran they turned to Ayatollah Khomeini. In Britain they voted for Margaret Thatcher, who became prime minister on May 4, 1979. Margaret Thatcher went into Downing Street with the prayer of Saint Francis on her lips: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” In fact, she was highly combative and played on tabloid fears of internal decay. In her very first press conference, she issued a ringing attack on those “who gnaw away at our self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of gloom, oppression, and failure.” She was going to put the “Great” back into Great Britain. To many she seemed the answer to the long decline of the seventies, but to me she was a symbol of the dangers of certainty. With her hectoring rhetoric, upholstered, buttoned-up clothes, rigidly upswept hair, and unfaltering propriety, she seemed to epitomize an attitude of unquestioned and unquestioning superiority. I remembered my flickering distaste when confronted with certainty in the person of poor, ineffective Miss Franklin. But watching Mrs. Thatcher, I knew that I wanted no such certainty in my own life. Under the influence of Thatcherism, British people became preoccupied by money as never before; some prospered, but others were impoverished. For the first time, large numbers of homeless men and women started sleeping rough on the streets of London. An underpass near Waterloo station, where people erected shelters out of boxes, became known as Cardboard City; there was a soup kitchen for the destitute on the South Bank. In the Middle East, religious certainty led to such atrocities as the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981; in Britain, Thatcher’s economic and political certainty had pushed people onto the streets.

• From Wild (2012)

  I’d never set foot on the AT, but I’d heard much about it from the guys at Kennedy Meadows. It was the PCT’s closest kin and yet also its opposite in many ways. About two thousand people set out to thru-hike the AT each summer, and though only a couple hundred of them made it all the way, that was far more than the hundred or so who set out on the PCT each year. Hikers on the AT spent most nights camping in or near group shelters that existed along the trail. On the AT, resupply stops were closer together, and more of them were in real towns, unlike those along the PCT, which often consisted of nothing but a post office and a bar or tiny store. I imagined the Australian honeymooners on the AT now, eating cheeseburgers and guzzling beer in a pub a couple of miles from the trail, sleeping by night under a wooden roof. They’d probably been given trail names by their fellow hikers, another practice that was far more common on the AT than on the PCT, though we had a way of naming people too. Half the time that Greg, Matt, and Albert had talked about Brent they’d referred to him as the Kid, though he was only a few years younger than me. Greg had been occasionally called the Statistician because he knew so many facts and figures about the trail and he worked as an accountant. Matt and Albert were the Eagle Scouts, and Doug and Tom the Preppies. I didn’t think I’d been dubbed anything, but I got the sinking feeling that if I had, I didn’t want to know what it was. Trina, Stacy, Brent, and I ate dinner in the bar that adjoined the Belden store that evening. After paying for a shower, laundry, the Snapple, and a few snacks and incidentals, I had about fourteen bucks left. I ordered a green salad and a plate of fries, the two items on the menu that both were cheap and satisfied my deepest cravings, which veered in opposite directions: fresh and deep-fried. Together they cost me five dollars, so now I had nine left to get me all the way to my next box. It was 134 miles away at McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, which had a concessionaire’s store that allowed PCT hikers to use it as a resupply stop. I drank my ice water miserably while the others sipped their beers. As we ate, we discussed the section ahead. By all reports, long stretches of it were socked in. The handsome bartender overheard our conversation and approached to tell us that rumor had it that Lassen Volcanic National Park was still buried under seventeen feet of snow. They were dynamiting the roads so they could open it for even a short tourist season this year. “You want a drink?” he said to me, catching my eye. “On the house,” he added when he saw my hesitation.

• From Bold Move

  As I wrote about earlier in this part of the book, there came a time when I knew that things were not working for me in terms of my career, yet I had refused to really address this until I hit a huge pain point. It came in the form of a clash of values between myself and those who lead the institution where I work. The reality is, there were many moments that could have illustrated why I no longer fit, but I will share one here that I think will illustrate the pattern and how pain can reveal our compromised values. During my career I had a difficult boss—I’ll call him Robert. Robert was a physician and senior leader at the hospital where I work. Basically, he’s a big deal in our world, and I had looked up to him for more than a decade. A few years ago, he offered me a challenging but fantastic position to work directly with him, and because I idolized him, I jumped at the opportunity. As time went on, however, I noticed I would feel a pang whenever Robert would make one of his little comments to me. There wasn’t any single thing he said that killed my spirit, but it was just a pattern of paper cuts that eventually bled me dry. They were the kinds of statements that people of a certain age make without noticing, full of gender stereotypes and microaggressions—like the time he told me I needed to be “a little softer, more like a woman and less like a man.” It was just one after the other, and eventually I had had enough. This scenario and experience is not unique to me. Many women and men, many of us diverse, have gone through experiences of discrimination, microaggressions, and prejudice in life. For those not engaged in conversations around such cultural flash points, microaggressions are brief verbal, behavioral, or environmental insults and invalidations toward people of marginalized identities.16 These experiences are painful, real, and can negatively impact the recipient’s emotional health.17 For me, the ongoing remarks from Robert and lack of support led me to eventually quit that job—though, shamefully, I did so without addressing the why. I had decided that I simply needed to cut all ties. I told Robert what I believed he wanted to hear: “You’re right, this is too much now that I have a son.” I’m embarrassed to share this with you, as the sentiment was the furthest thing from the truth at that time. I had imagined that quitting this way would be easier and less painful, but before I took the job, I had been warned by a senior psychologist in our department: “Whatever you do, don’t make Robert angry.” I didn’t know what this meant or how I would even make him angry, but it turns out, I did just that. Quitting was upsetting to him, and the weeks that followed were my own personal hell.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You look like a picture from a buggers’ compendium!’Diana laughed and said that I did. Then she reached and put her fingers to my chin and kissed me - so hard, I felt her teeth upon the soft flesh of my lips.And then the music started up in the room across the hall. Maria brought me a glass of the warm spiced wine and, to go with it, a cigarette from Diana’s special case. One of the Marie Antoinettes weaved her way through the crowd to take my hand and kiss it. ‘Enchantée.’ she said - this one really was French. ‘What a spectacle you have provided for us! One would never see such a thing in the salons of Paris ...’The entire evening sounds charming; it might, indeed, have been the very high point of my triumph as Diana’s boy. And yet, for all my planning, for all the success of my costume and my tableau, I got no pleasure from it. Diana herself - it was her birthday, after all — seemed distant from me, and preoccupied with other things. Only a minute or two after I had placed the garland of lotus flowers about her neck, she took it off, saying it did not match her costume; she hung it from a corner of the pedestal, where it soon fell off - later I saw a lady with one of the flowers from it, at her own lapel. I cannot say why - heaven knows, I had suffered graver abuses at Diana’s hand, and only smiled to suffer them! - but her carelessness over the garland made me peevish. Then again, the room was terribly hot and terribly perfumed; and my wig made me hotter than anyone, and itched - yet, I could not remove it, for fear of spoiling my costume. After Marie Antoinette, more ladies sought me out to tell me how much they admired me; but each proved drunker and more ribald than the last, and I began to find them wearisome. I drank glass after glass of spiced wine and champagne, in an effort to make myself as careless as they; but the wine - or, more likely, the hashish I had smoked - seemed to make me cynical rather than gay. When one lady reached to stroke my thigh as she stepped past me, I pushed her roughly away. ‘What a little brute!’ she cried, delighted. In the end I stood half-hidden in the shadows, looking on, rubbing my temples. Mrs Hooper was at the table with the hot wine on it, ladling it out; I saw her glance my way, and give a kind of smile. Zena had been sent to move amongst the ladies, bearing dainties on a tray; but when she seemed to want to catch my eye, I looked away.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Others had no time or opportunity for preparation, and passed, at the instance of the popular voice or of circumstances, immediately from the service of the state to that of the church, even to the episcopal office; though several councils prescribed a previous test of their capacity in the lower degrees of reader, deacon, and presbyter. Often, however, this irregularity turned to the advantage of the church, and gave her a highly gifted man, like Ambrose, whom the acclamation of the people called to the episcopal see of Milan even before he was baptized. Gregory Nazianzen laments that many priests and bishops came in fresh from the counting house, sunburnt from the plow, from the oar, from the army, or even from the theatre, so that the most holy order of all was in danger of becoming the most ridiculous. "Only he can be a physician," says he, "who knows the nature of diseases; he, a painter, who has gone through much practice in mixing colors and in drawing forms; but a clergyman may be found with perfect ease, not thoroughly wrought, of course, but fresh made, sown and full blown in a moment, as the legend says of the giants.410 We form the saints in a day, and enjoin them to be wise, though they possess no wisdom at all, and bring nothing to their spiritual office, except at best a good will."411 If such complaints were raised so early as the end of the Nicene age, while the theological activity of the Greek church was in its bloom, there was far more reason for them after the middle of the fifth century and in the sixth, especially in the Latin church, where, even among the most eminent clergymen, a knowledge of the original languages of the Holy Scriptures was a rare exception. The opportunities which this period offered for literary and theological preparation for the ministry, were the following: 1. The East had four or five theological schools, which, however, were far from supplying its wants. The oldest and most celebrated was the catechetical school of Alexandria. Favored by the great literary treasures, the extensive commercial relations, and the ecclesiastical importance of the Egyptian metropolis, as well as by a succession of distinguished teachers, it flourished from the middle of the second century to the end of the fourth, when, amidst the Origenistic, Nestorian, and Monophysite confusion, it withered and died. Its last ornament was the blind, but learned and pious Didymus (340–395). From the Alexandrian school proceeded the smaller institution of Caesarea in Palestine, which was founded by Origen, after his banishment from Alexandria, and received a new but temporary impulse in the beginning of the fourth century from his admirer, the presbyter Pamphilus, and from his friend Eusebius. It possessed the theological library which Eusebius used in the preparation of his learned works. Far more important was the theological school of Antioch, founded about 290 by the presbyters Dorotheus and Lucian.

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

  That was the theory. But far from progressing to these more advanced states, I never left base camp. Of course, there were moments when I felt moved by the beauty of the music or uplifted by a rousing sermon, but in my view this did not count. It was simply an aesthetic response, something that even an atheist could experience at a concert or when she was exposed to skillful rhetoric. I never had what seemed to be an encounter with anything supernatural, with a being that existed outside myself. I never felt caught up in something greater, never felt personally transfigured by a presence that I encountered in the depths of my being. I never experienced Somebody Else. And how could I possibly hope to have such an encounter when my mind was unable to wait upon God? Prayer, we were always told, was simply a way of quieting the soul, enabling it to apprehend the divine. You had to gather up your dissipated faculties, bring them together, and present yourself, whole and entire, to God, so that every single part of your mind and heart could honestly say with the prophet Samuel: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” But my mind, heart, and faculties remained scattered. Try as I would, I could not re-collect, so there was no way that God could get through to me. I tried to discuss this with my superiors, of course. On several occasions I explained that I never had any consolation and could not keep my mind on my meditation. But they seemed frankly incredulous. “You’re always so extreme, Sister!” Mother Frances, the mistress of scholastics, had said with irritation. “You’re always exaggerating. Everybody has consolation at some time or another. Are you seriously telling me that in all the six years of your religious life you have never once experienced consolation?” I had nodded. She looked baffled. “Well, I really don’t know what to say to you,” she said, clearly at a loss. “That’s most unusual. I don’t know how anybody could go on without some consolation. “But I’m sure that things aren’t really as bad as you say,” she went on briskly. “You probably just feel a bit down at the moment, that’s all, and being you, you have to make a major drama out of the whole business.” This was not reassuring. I must be a particularly hard case, I thought miserably. As for my confession that I could never keep my mind on my prayers, this was also airily waved to one side. “Everybody has their off days, Sister!” Nobody would believe that I would love to have had some off days, because it would have meant that some of my days were “on.” So even in the convent, God had been conspicuous by his absence from my life. And that, I became convinced, must be my fault. My case seemed to be so peculiar that it could not be a mere failure of the system.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  2O4 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL In the first generation, and perhaps later, the Lord's Supper still had an outlook toward the coming of the Lord. We find this still in a significant phrase in Paul, who otherwise emphasized other lines of thought: " For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye proclaim theLord's death till he come" Now, to the larger part of the primitive Church the coming of the Lord signified the coming of the millennial reign of peace and righteousness on earth. The Lord's Supper was, therefore, connected with the realization of the social ideals and hopes of the Church. The prevalence of prophecy in the charismatic life of primitive Chris- tianity points inthe same direction. It acted as an in- terpretation of the Lord's Supper. The outlook toward the coming of the Lord became dim as timewent on. The eucharistic act was cut loose from the fraternal meal, and that was a great lessening ofits social value. The meal was still held occasionally in the evening, but turned into a charitable performance where the rich fedthe poor, and it finally ceased. The eucharistic act was connected with the church worship on Sunday morning. It developed sacramental quali- ties in two directions ; it was mystic food, inwhich the Lord was present and through which his grace and power and immortal lifenourished the soul; and it was a sacrifice offered to God. The fact that it was the central mystery of the esoteric ritual of the church made it very important as a bond of unity, but the fraternal feeling of the early days was lessened. It intensified the consciousness of God rather than the consciousness of man. The fraternal meal of Jesus became achief

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  Neither is it novel. The social gospel is, in fact, the oldest gospel of all. It is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.’’ Its substance is the Hebrew faith which Jesus himself held. If the prophets ever talked about the plan of redemption,” they meant the social redemption of the nation. So long as John the Baptist and Jesus were proclaiming the gospel, the King- dom of God was its central word, and the ethical teach- ing of both, which was their practical commentary and definition of the Kingdom idea, looked toward a higher social order in which new ethical standards would become practicable. To the first generation of disciples the hope of the Lord’s return meant the hope of a Christian social order on earth under the personal rule of Jesus Christ, NEITHER ALIEN NOR NOVEL 25 and they would have been amazed if they had learned that this hope was to be motioned out of theology and other ideas substituted. The social gospel is nothing alien or novel. When it. comes to a question of pedigree and birth-right, it may well turn on the dogmas on which the Catholic and Prot- estant theologies are based and inquire for their birth certificate. They are neither dominant in the New Tes- tament nor clearly defined in it. The more our historical investigations are laying bare the roots of Catholic dogma, the more do we see them running back into alien Greek thought, and not into the substance of Christ’s message nor into the Hebrew faith. We shall not get away again from the central proposition of Harnack’s History of Dogma, that the development of Catholic dogma was the process of the Hellenization of Christian- ity ; in other words, that alien influences streamed into the religion of Jesus Christ and created a theology which he never taught nor intended. What would Jesus have said to the symbol of Chalcedon or the Athanasian Creed if they had been read to him ? The doctrine of the Kingdom of God was left unde- veloped by individualistic theology and finally mislaid by it almost completely, because it did not support nor fit in with that scheme of doctrine. In the older handbooks of theology it is scarcely mentioned, except in the chapters on eschatology; in none of them does it dominate the table of contents. What a spectacle, that the original teaching of our Lord has become an incongruous element in so-called evangelical theology, like a stranger with whom the other doctrines would not associate, and who 26 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

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

  When The First Christian was screened in January 1984, it was a minor success. People liked the raw quality of the film, which, many felt, had freshness and originality. In secular Britain, my criticism of organized religion was also popular, and though, as expected, I received a lot of hate mail, a significant number of people wrote to tell me that after seeing the series, they felt that they could go back to church. I did not understand this. Had I not shown conclusively that the very foundations of Christian doctrine had been undermined by modern biblical scholarship? Why did people feel that their beliefs had been renewed by this onslaught? Again, I recalled Hyam Maccoby’s insistence that intellectual assent was not the same as faith, and that theology was not very important for Jews. I still could not see how this would work in practice, yet it appeared that some of my Christian audience had come to a similar conclusion. John had predicted that The First Christian would make me a television star. It did not. I was not sufficiently photogenic, and though the series got good ratings, religion could only be of minority interest in England. Even my friends rarely bothered to tune in. “How can you be interested in this stuff?” they would ask in bewilderment. “Who cares about it?” But I was finding it increasingly interesting—though strictly as a detached observer. After my return to London, I made two interview series. The first was called Varieties of Religious Experience. I talked to ten people from very different religious backgrounds about their faith. Tongues of Fire focused on poetry. Six poets—Craig Raine, D. M. Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, and Peter Levi—read their favorite religious poems and discussed them with me. These series were not very successful. Interviewing is an extremely difficult and underestimated skill, and I did not have it. I was too full of my own ideas, and was therefore unable to draw out my interviewee and make the best of him or her. Often I arrogantly thought that I could give more interesting answers to the questions myself, which was absolutely the wrong attitude. It was fun to meet the interviewees and a privilege to meet the poets, but the knowledge that I acquired while preparing for the programs, mastering the rudiments of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah, remained superficial. Television is a transient medium. One week I would interview a rabbi, the next a Buddhist monk, and as soon as he had left the studio, I started to prepare for the following week’s faith healer. It was not like The First Christian, when I had lived with Saint Paul for nearly eighteen months and had learned to hear the emotional resonance of his ideas. My brief from John Ranelagh was to quiz my interviewees as though I were a news reporter, exposing the holes in their logic, and to interlard their reflections with sharp, incisive comments of my own.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Now in his eighties, Ron has a philosophical approach toward the decision. He doesn’t bemoan the fact that he could be a billionaire. He knows why he made those choices in the moment, and he doesn’t want to waste energy on regret. 1 I can’t second-guess poor Ron, of course. Money doesn’t buy happiness anyway, as we all know. But you still have to wonder—what if he had found a way to stay in the game? If he had trusted the abilities of his partners rather than feeling intimidated by them? What if he hadn’t given up after twelve days? History is full of other almost-millionaires, almost-celebrities, almost-victors. Hindsight is always 20/20, so I’m not judging them, but that doesn’t make their decisions any less agonizing. At the same time, I wonder how many times I’ve given up too easily, too quickly, in my prayers. Have there been times when I’ve been unwilling to trust God, my senior partner, to carry me through? Have I stopped believing too soon? I’m sure I have. Maybe you have too. That’s why Jesus’ words are for us today. Always pray. Never give up. Call out day and night. Let Jesus find faith, not doubt, in your heart. ASK, WATCH, WAIT, REPEAT The Old Testament prophet Elijah has a lot to teach us about persistent prayer. James used his life to illustrate how powerful it is when humans pray: The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. 5:16–18 Elijah was a prophet sent to Israel when the nation was in a bad place. Evil, oppressive leadership had moved the nation away from God and from justice. As

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

  Even though she once told me that I had a voice like a broken knife grinder, I had to sing in the choir, and though I could never hit the higher notes and was ruefully aware of the tunelessness of my efforts, I was beginning to appreciate the spiritual quality of plainsong—the way the music circled meditatively around the words and drew attention to a phrase or obscure preposition that could easily have passed unnoticed, but which proved to have rich meaning. Now it looked as if the days of the chant were numbered, and though Mother Walter would have cut out her tongue rather than criticize the Vatican, she was convinced that this would be an irreparable loss. “Of course the council is inspired by the Holy Spirit,” she was saying, “but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Just think: Saint Bernard would have sung the same chant as we do. So would Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And now we have to listen to those silly children playing guitars.” For a moment, the measured calm of her voice faltered and her face darkened in a way we had learned to dread. “But Mother”—Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my guardian angel when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly—“surely the changes needn’t necessarily be a disaster? After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at Mass, is there?” Mother frowned. “I should have thought,” she replied coldly, “that this is a matter we need not discuss.” We all bent our heads obediently over our needlework, distancing ourselves. The topic had been portentously closed. No one would dream of taking it any further, against the expressed wish of our superior. “But some people,” Sister Mary Jonathan continued to my astonishment, “might go to church initially to enjoy the guitar because they like that kind of music. We’ve learned to love the chant, but lots of people can’t understand the Latin, and the music is so different from anything they are used to that they can’t make anything of it.” Mother Walter laughed shortly. It came out as an angry bark. “Anyone who needs a guitar to get them to Mass must have a pretty feeble faith!” Her eyes hardened and her lower lip protruded in a scowl. The tension in the room was almost palpable. Nobody ever answered back like that, and the rest of us were sewing as though our lives depended upon it. But I found myself looking hopefully at Sister Mary Jonathan, willing her to go on. I used to be able to do that, I thought wonderingly. I used to like exploring different points of view, building up an argument step by step, sharpening an idea against somebody else’s mind.

• From Bold Move

  For example, in 2017, Psychiatry Research (a renowned academic journal) published a study showing that people who link their goals to their sense of self-worth and pursue their goals at all costs are more likely to experience symptoms of depression.5 Why? Well, I would imagine that the individuals in this study kept pushing through life toward the what while neglecting the why . Sure, getting to a goal is always satisfying, but how long does that satisfaction last if it is not aligned with what you care about? Have you ever gotten a promotion that you had been wanting for a long time, only to ask yourself, What’s next? instead of being able to treasure the moment? This empty feeling is the result of navigating through life using goals—or using a GPS that is focused more on the destination than the journey. You might be asking yourself, Why do I keep relentlessly pursuing my goals even when I know they are no longer what I really want? I’ve asked myself this same question many times. One reason we keep pursuing goals is to avoid any possible negative outcomes.6 The path we’re already on feels safer than the unknown. For me, climbing the academic ladder was familiar—difficult, yes, but a known challenge. Branching off on my own to pursue another career was risky because I hadn’t done it before. So I pushed aside my values and tried to focus on the next goal. The double-edged sword was that, in order to keep achieving my goals, I needed to deal with the discomfort that came from continuing to pursue goals that weren’t fulfilling. We might realize this only when it’s too late, such as I did only when my health started to waver. In those moments, I felt—and you likely have felt this at times too—that there wasn’t another way. East Meets WestThe third common guide we follow is other people’s values instead of our own, especially when we face real obstacles (e.g., moving to a new country, making a career change, marrying into a family). Often these obstacles are challenging because they lead to conflict between personal and group values, which inevitably leads to interpersonal challenges. To show you what I mean, let’s meet Stephanie. Stephanie was a young first-generation Chinese woman who I worked with a few years ago. Stephanie’s actual birth name was 梓涵 (Zĭhán), but outside her home she preferred to be called Stephanie, though this was actually a secret she kept from her parents, who did not approve of any “Americanization,” as Stephanie explained. Stephanie was born in mainland China, and her family moved to Boston when she was a baby.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  But the most decisive fact in transforming the sub- stance of primitive eschatology was the Church itself. Its future was now the future of Christianity. In Jew- ish eschatology there was no Church in the picture ; only the people. In primitive Christian thought the Church was real, but it was like a temporary house put up to shelter the believers till the Lord came and the real sal- vation began. But the Parousia did not come, and the temporary shelter grew and grew, and became the main thing. Even if the doctrines of eschatology had been kept unchanged, they w^ould no longer have been the same after the Catholic Church had come on the scene. ESCHATOLOGY 223 The considerations discussed above are necessary, it seems to me, for a proper understanding and valuation of the biblical material in traditional eschatology. A few constructive propositions can now be made about the future of the race. 1. The future development of the race should have a larger place in practical Christian teaching. The great ethical issues of the future lie in this field, and the mind of Christian men and women should be active there. If we can not be guided by moral and spiritual thought, we shall be guided by bitter experience. The Great War is in truth a grim discussion of the future of the race on this planet, but a discussion with both reason and religion left out. We have the amplest war- rant for directing the prophetic thought of religious men toward the social and political future of humanity, for all eschatology^ derived from Hebrew sources dealt with these interests. A stronger emphasis on the future of the race will simply restore the genuinely Christian em- phasis. But if Christian teachers are to teach truth about history, they must have truth to teach. If all ministers and Bible School teachers should now sud- denly begin to talk on these subjects, the angels above would probably be astonished to see a still thicker vapour of partisan fury and nationalistic egotism rising from all countries. 2. All Christian discussions of the past and the future must be religious, and filled with the consciousness of God in human affairs. God is in history. He has the initiative. Where others see blind forces working dumb agony, we must see moral will working toward re- 224 ^ THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL demption and education. A religious view of history involves a profound sense of the importance of moral issues in social life. Sin ruins; righteousness establishes, and love consolidates. In the last resort the issues of future history lie in the moral qualities and religious faith of nations. This is the substance of all Hebrew and Christian eschatology.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  4. DISCOURAGEMENT: IT DOESN’T WORK. Have you ever weighed yourself after a workout and been frustrated that you didn’t shed any pounds after such intense exercise? Maybe you even went up half a pound because you guzzled a bottle of water. Mentally, you know it doesn’t work that way. Exercise isn’t just about burning calories in the moment. It’s about increasing your metabolism and overall health so that your body burns calories all day long. Plus, losing weight isn’t the only goal. You want your body to be healthy, not fit into some stereotype that society has created. You want to build muscle, stay flexible, and have good circulation. In other words, exercise accomplishes more than what you see reflected on the scale or in your mirror. It keeps working for you all day long, not just in the moment. And its benefits go beyond just weight loss. In the same way, prayer works for you long after you’re done praying, and its benefits go beyond simply answered prayer. We looked at that in detail in section 1. And yet, many of us are so focused on getting quick, visible answers to prayer that we give up when they don’t happen. That’s like stopping your workouts because the scale didn’t change four minutes after you ran a 5K. Prayer is always working for you, day and night, in a hundred different ways. Give it time, and understand what results you’re looking for. Have a wholistic, long-term approach to prayer and you’ll be a lot more motivated. 5. SHAME: I’M EMBARRASSED. Remember the dentist example earlier? We avoid people who shame us. If we find ourselves avoiding God, sometimes it can be because we are ashamed of who we are or how we’ve failed. Maybe we think God is judging us, so we subconsciously stay away from Him. That sense of failure and condemnation is a greater enemy than you might realize. It will hold you back not just from prayer, but from faith, from serving, from taking risks.

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

  These series were not very successful. Interviewing is an extremely difficult and underestimated skill, and I did not have it. I was too full of my own ideas, and was therefore unable to draw out my interviewee and make the best of him or her. Often I arrogantly thought that I could give more interesting answers to the questions myself, which was absolutely the wrong attitude. It was fun to meet the interviewees and a privilege to meet the poets, but the knowledge that I acquired while preparing for the programs, mastering the rudiments of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah, remained superficial. Television is a transient medium. One week I would interview a rabbi, the next a Buddhist monk, and as soon as he had left the studio, I started to prepare for the following week’s faith healer. It was not like The First Christian, when I had lived with Saint Paul for nearly eighteen months and had learned to hear the emotional resonance of his ideas. My brief from John Ranelagh was to quiz my interviewees as though I were a news reporter, exposing the holes in their logic, and to interlard their reflections with sharp, incisive comments of my own. This skeptical approach was evident in the two books that I published at this time. The first of these was a poetry anthology, called Tongues of Fire, which came out with the series. I chose the poems and wrote short introductions to the various sections, exploring the similarity between religious experience and poetic creativity. This was potentially a fruitful line of inquiry, but I concluded, in my own mind, that religion was only an art form, a purely natural activity, and therefore could not be seen as divine in any way. The second book was far more critical. The Gospel According to Woman developed some of the ideas in the piece that I had done for Opinions. Like The Body of Christ, it was a polemic, and traced the misogyny that had been the Achilles heel of Christianity. It was clever but inherently hostile to faith. In the crazed excesses of such theologians as Tertullian, Saint Jerome, or Luther, and the lamentable neuroses of some of the women saints, Christianity appeared as unhealthy, unkind, and unnatural in its rejection of women and sexuality. As I finished the book, I felt profoundly relieved to have shaken off the toils of religion once and for all. In the spring of 1985, John asked me if I would like to do another series with Joel: this time on the Crusades. Channel 4 had been so pleased with The First Christian that they were going to give us a proper commission this time. “No more cutting corners, no more silly schedules, darling,” John promised. “Proper, serious filming!” I was thrilled. I remembered what wonderful fun it had been last time and could hardly wait for the project to begin. Joel was also delighted.

• From Wild (2012)

  [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] By the time the young women pulled their van over to the side of the narrow highway, the tall trees that lined the road almost entirely blotted out the setting sun. I thanked them for the ride and looked around as they drove away. I was standing next to a forest service sign that said WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND. The PCT was just beyond it, the women had told me as I’d climbed out of their van. I hadn’t bothered to look at my map as we drove. After days of constant vigilance, I was tired of checking the guidebook and checking again. I’d simply enjoyed the ride, lulled by the women’s confidence that they knew where they were going. From the campground they said I could hike a short trail that would take me up to the PCT. I read the fresh pages that I’d ripped from my guidebook as I walked the paved loops of the campground, straining to see the words in the dying light. My heart leapt with relief when I came across the words WHITEHORSE CAMPGROUND, then it fell when I read on and realized I was nearly two miles away from the PCT. The words “just beyond it” had meant something different to the women in the van than they did to me. I looked around at the water spigots, the sets of brown outhouses, and the big sign that explained how one should go about paying for a spot for the night by leaving money in an envelope that should then be deposited through a slot in a wooden box. Aside from a few RVs and a smattering of tents, the campground was eerily empty. I walked another paved loop, wondering what to do. I didn’t have money to pay to camp, but it was too dark to walk into the woods. I came to a campsite on the very edge of the campground, the one that was farthest away from the sign detailing how to pay. Who would even see me? I set up my tent and cooked and ate my dinner in luxury on the picnic table with only my headlamp to light my way and peed in perfect comfort in the pit toilet, and then got into my tent and opened up The Novel. I’d read perhaps three pages when my tent was flooded with light. I unzipped my door and stepped out to greet the elderly couple who stood in the blinding headlights of a pickup truck. “Hi,” I said tentatively. “You need to pay for this spot,” the woman barked in response. “I need to pay?” I said, with false innocence and surprise. “I thought only people who had cars had to pay the fee. I’m on foot. I just have my backpack.” The couple listened in silence, their wrinkled faces indignant. “I’ll be leaving first thing in the morning. By six at the latest.” “If you’re going to stay here, you need to pay,” the woman repeated.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  The quintessentially practical apostle James had this to say about prayer: What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. 4:1–3 James is not criticizing what they are asking for, but rather why they are asking for it: to spend what they get on their pleasures. He’s calling them selfish, essentially. And he wants them to know that God doesn’t respond to selfish prayers. James first points out how much fighting there was among them. Then he connects their unanswered prayers to their quarrels by emphasizing the root cause of both: they only cared about getting, taking, grabbing, hoarding. It was textbook narcissism. He’s talking to us too, of course. If our approach to either community or prayer is primarily self-focused, we miss the point. And eventually we’ll mess them both up. We don’t exist in a bubble, and we don’t pray in a bubble. We’re not islands unto ourselves. We’re in this together, as we saw when we talked about forgiveness, so our prayers can’t be motivated by a narcissistic focus on self. We are of infinite importance, but that doesn’t mean the universe revolves around us. Yes, God wants to bless us. But He doesn’t want to us to be isolated. Our prayers, therefore, should be within a context of community. That means not just praying for yourself, but praying for others. It means understanding that the blessings God gives you should be shared with others. It means praying with humility and love and understanding, as someone who looks out not only for their own interests, but also for the interests of others (Philippians 2:4). It means praying for God’s will to be done first and foremost, not ours.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Is his mightiest accomplishment going to be merely the invention of a memorable formula that urges others to accomplish something? And was the world any better for his having written what he had written? The world has recognized its inspirational value and fully metabolized it; individual lives have perhaps been in some cases improved as a result of its existence—high school homework may have been done that wouldn’t have been done, new leaves may have been turned over, difficult phone calls may have been made—but now its own big moment of efficacy is finished, it can no longer surprise us into sudden effort, and yet the person who thought it up is almost certainly still with us, living out, not Day 1, but Day 1,234, or Day 3,677, of the sadly anticlimactic rest of his life—repeatedly experiencing, as we all do, those brief calendrical regrets when it is no longer the toddlingly innocent fifth or sixth of a given month but somewhere early in the teens, midway down, and then suddenly it’s the twenty-sixth and the month is going forever, the one and only October you will be given that year, and the false optimism of a new young month is about to begin, like a stock split that without changing any fundamentals makes the price per share look alluringly cheap all over again; and then the “3” of the new month’s date again slides into the “5,” and the “5” mutates into the “12,” each of the thirty or thirty-one successive numerical dates carrying with it, regardless of what actually happens on that day, a default mixture of emotions that results simply from its location on the scaffolding of the calendar—a specific ratio between the residual determination to get whatever difficult or distasteful things there are outstanding done in the days of the month that remain and the growing despair at the many difficult or distasteful things that simply cannot get done in the days that remain and must be carried forward to the next month. The calendar was my enemy because I had no control over it anymore, no option of postponement, no eject button, and I had not been in control of it for over eight months. On the other hand, my coordinator, Jenny, had not had any work for me that day, so I was free. I had been assigned to work at an architectural firm in Cambridge, but then they called and canceled and nothing else had turned up. I lay in bed for a while, took a shower, and wandered out to the back yard (my landlord’s yard, really) with a large heavy dry beach towel. I don’t know now what the date was, but I do know that it was early in the month, when I still felt full of hope (or perhaps it was so late in the month that I felt the undisturbed and imminent hope of the next month in full force), and it was sometime in the late spring.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Boys know such sentiments are wrong—they are not completely blank slates for the culture to inscribe. Still, they are barraged by these images and ideas, usually without challenge or context. About half of boys ages ten to nineteen say that at least several times a week on TV, in movies, in music videos, or on YouTube they see unrealistic images of women’s bodies or women whose bodies and looks are portrayed as more important than their brains or abilities (and, frankly, a mere half of boys seems low). Nearly half also see female video game characters portrayed as “hot” and a quarter see such characters every day. “I’ve been watching the show Californication lately,” said Mason, the guy with the flip phone. “I think in some ways it’s more damaging than things that are incredibly unrealistic. Because it’s just slightly unrealistic. It’s still kind of believable. Like, the main character has sex with everyone wherever he goes. His character has such a good build, it’s believable. But every girl in the show is a topless, sex-crazed fiend, and every dude is sex-crazed as well. And, I don’t know. They make it seem so convincing. Whereas if you were to watch a porn video where a dude comes in with his dick in a pizza box, it’s like, ‘All right, obviously that isn’t going to happen in real life.’ Also Californication—it’s on regular TV; it’s not porn. So you believe that more.” Even a show like Modern Family, Mason added, which was one of his favorites in high school, includes Gloria, the dumbed-down, hypersexualized (though secretly smart!) bombshell who is essentially a latter-day Charo. “Whatever media you turn to,” he said, “however family friendly it is, it’s always sexualizing women. It’s inescapable.”