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.

Page 126 of 189 · 20 per page

• 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.”

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

  But whatever the reason, my sudden fall from grace was a great blow. The possibility of a life in scholarship had been the one hopeful thing in my life. Now, yet again, it seemed that I was to be prized away from a familiar world. Jacob slept peacefully, turned on his side away from me. I took out my book and started to read by the small circle of pale light that came from Jenifer’s bedside lamp. I was on the late shift, sitting with Jacob until his mother, who was at a college dinner, returned home. Lying on Jenifer’s bed in the long attic room, I felt peacefully away from things. An owl hooted outside and I looked anxiously at Jacob, who was a light sleeper and, once woken, was likely to remain restless all night. But he slept on, while the alarm clock on the cluttered bedside table ticked loudly in the silence. Suddenly, Jacob reared up and gazed ahead, his eyes fixed and frightened and yet also, I sensed, unseeing. He began to make a strange keening sound in his throat and for a moment I felt pure panic. This was it: he was about to have an epileptic seizure. Snatching the rubber teething ring that Jenifer kept by her bed, I carefully inserted it into Jacob’s mouth, as instructed, and pushed him gently back on his side. Then we both waited. I was frightened: I had no idea what I would see or how I would cope. Jacob was a big child, taller and probably stronger than I. How could I prevent him from hurting himself? And what if he did not stop convulsing? If he had not regained consciousness within ten minutes, this would be a medical emergency. Status epilepticus, I had been told, could be fatal. But I was alone in the house and the nearest telephone was downstairs. Suddenly Jacob stopped breathing for what seemed like minutes but was probably only a few seconds. His face became distorted, and his eyes brutish and angry. The color drained from his skin, until it finally took on the mottled hue of a dirty stone. Then, after what seemed another long interval, his teeth locked on the teething ring and his body started to jerk convulsively. Please, let this stop, I prayed to nobody in particular, while it went on and on. Then, just as suddenly, the convulsions ceased and Jacob relaxed. The teething ring fell from his mouth, and he fell into a heavy, comatose sleep, his breathing rasping and ugly. The color gradually seeped back into his face. It was over. But I knew that there was always the danger of another seizure. If that happened, I must send for an ambulance immediately. Gradually, however, Jacob’s breathing returned to normal and he slid into a peaceful sleep.

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

  I wanted to blame somebody, and God was the obvious target, but somehow I could not get into this. Did I really believe that there was a Being up there somehow responsible for everything that happens on earth, including Jacob’s disabilities? No, I did not. Not only did it seem highly unlikely that there was an overseeing deity, supervising earthly events, apportioning trials and rewards according to some inscrutable program of his own, but the idea was also grotesque. If there was a loving providence, it bore no relation to any kind of love that I could conceive. I did not believe that this God existed, and as I sat that night beside Jacob in the semidarkness, I wondered if I ever really had. I heard movement below and realized that Jenifer was climbing cautiously up the wrought-iron staircase leading to the attic. Her lean, athletic frame appeared behind the frosted glass, and I watched her opening the door with the minimum of noise, stealing into the room with exaggerated care. She grimaced as one of the boards creaked in the course of her painful progress across the large, untidy room. “Everything all right?” she hissed. “Well, no: I’m afraid he had a fit. But he seems all right now. ” “Oh!” Dismayed, she sank onto the bed and looked across at her son. Her face, which had retained the stimulus of a lively evening, collapsed. She was wearing one of her strange evening dresses: this one was emerald green and decorated with little jewels of mirrored glass. With its matching green stockings, it was an optimistic, slightly frivolous outfit that suddenly looked incongruous. “Oh, my dear! I am so sorry,” she said. “I know how awful it is. I do hope it didn’t upset you too much.” “No, no. Don’t worry about it.” I smiled reassuringly at her as I gathered my books together. “Karen,” she said abruptly. We were still whispering, of course, but I could tell from the tentative tone of her voice that she was nervous about what she was going to say. “Karen—do you think you—please feel free to refuse, that goes without saying, of course. You do more than enough as it is and Jacob is so fond of you. I always feel confident when he is with you. But do you think—I mean . . .” “Whatever is it, Jenifer?” I asked, amused but slightly alarmed. “Well, I wonder if you would consider taking Jacob to Mass with you at Blackfriars.” In her embarrassment, the words tumbled out in a rush. “What!”

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  redemption of society when they are free from the acrid qualities of rebellion. Those who have derived their spiritual freedom and their social spirit from Jesus are most likely to have the combination of freedom with love and gentleness. This ought to be the distinctive mark of Christ within the social movement. Is it true that Jesus has been experienced as a Liberator more fre- quently apart from theology than within it? If so, why? To think out any one of these convictions, or to achieve any one of these harmonies, so that all life can become simple, whole-hearted, and divinely intelligible through its truth,’ is a great achievement for a life-time. Luther was one of the most dynamic personalities in his- tory, one of the epoch-making religious minds. Yet it took him years of morbid struggle to emerge from the gloom of religious fear into Christian assurance, and to cut across the labyrinth of church methods by the short- cut of simple faith. And after achieving this discovery, he imposed his emancipating faith on others as a sov- ereign formula, and would not let others advance be- yond the point he had reached. With Jesus these great inward convictions were not academic theory, but life and action. They were the reality on which he staked all. They were so much his own that he acted on them as a matter of course, with a self-possession which did not have to weigh and consider, but struck ahead, and struck right. In the case of biological mutations the question is not only whether the new type is valuable, but also whether 164 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL it will breed true and succeed in perpetuating itself against the competition of other types. Jesus not only achieved the kind of religious personality which we have tried to bring before our memory and imagination, but he succeeded in perpetuating his spirit. What was per- sonal with him became social within the group of the disciples. His life became a collective and assimilating force and a current of historic tradition. His disciples were human stuff, and all of them doubt- less were thin conductors for the powerful current they had to convey. His Jewish friends were full of older ideas, and most of them seem to have sagged back toward conservative Judaism. Luke’s narrative about Peter and Stephen, and Paul’s profound trouble of mind about the Judaizing brethren are evidence. As soon as the Church moved out into the Greek world, a process of assimilation began which left little of the real Jesus in sight. The historical research of the last forty years has written a new chapter about the sufferings of Jesus. Imagine him coming into a Gnostic conventicle in a. d. 150, or into the Church of Cyprian in a. d. 250, or into high mass at the Church of the Lateran in a. d. 1250, and trying to discover what it was all about.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  6. The most unattractive element in the orthodox outlook on the future life is the immediate fixity of the two states. When we die, our destiny is immediately and irrevocably settled for us. As the Westminster Larger Catechism (Question 86) has it: The communion in glory with Christ, which the members of the invisible church enjoy immediately after death, is in that their souls are then made perfect in holiness and received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory; waiting for the full redemption of their bodies, which even in death continue united to Christ, and rest in their graves as in beds, till at the last day they be again united to their souls. Whereas the souls of the wicked are at their death cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter dark- ness; and their bodies kept in their graves, as in their prisons, until the resurrection and judgment of the great day. This belief was novel at the time of the Reformation, and the precision and emphasis of this statement are directed against the idea of purgatory. The idea of a fixed condition is so unlike any life we know and so contradictory of our aspirations that our imagination stands still before a tedious sameness of bliss. The rich ESCHATOLOGY 233 diversification in Dante shows the possibility of the other view.^ We want the possibility of growth. We can not conceive of finite existence or of human happiness except in terms of growth. It would be more satis- factory for modern minds and for Christian minds to think of an unlimited scale of ascent toward God, reach- ing from the lowest to the highest, within which every spirit would hold the place for which it was fitted, and each could advance as it grew. This would satisfy our sense of justice. Believers in the social gospel will probably agree that some people have deserved hell and ought to get theirs. But no man, in any human sense of justice, has deserved an eternity of hell. On the other hand, it jars our sense of justice to see some individuals go to heaven totally exempt. They have given hell to others and ought to have a taste of it somewhere, even if they are regenerate and saved men.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Honey,” she said eventually, gazing at me, her hand reaching to stroke the top of my head. It was a word she used often throughout my childhood, delivered in a highly specific tone. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was. It was this very acceptance of suffering that annoyed me most about my mom, her unending optimism and cheer. “Let’s go,” I said after I’d wrestled her shoes on. Her movements were slow and thick as she put on her coat. She held on to the walls as she made her way through the house, her two beloved dogs following her as she went, pushing their noses into her hands and thighs. I watched the way she patted their heads. I didn’t have a prayer anymore. The words fuck them were two dry pills in my mouth. “Bye, darlings,” she said to the dogs. “Bye, house,” she said as she followed me out the door. It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I’d made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O’Keeffe I’d once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. On her first day in the hospital, a nurse offered my mother morphine, but she refused. “Morphine is what they give to dying people,” she said. “Morphine means there’s no hope.” But she held out against it for only one day. She slept and woke, talked and laughed. She cried from the pain. I camped out during the days with her and Eddie took the nights. Leif and Karen stayed away, making excuses that I found inexplicable and infuriating, though their absence didn’t seem to bother my mom. She was preoccupied with nothing but eradicating her pain, an impossible task in the spaces of time between the doses of morphine. We could never get the pillows right. One afternoon, a doctor I’d never seen came into the room and explained that my mother was actively dying. “But it’s only been a month,” I said indignantly. “The other doctor told us a year.”

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  Thus social causes contributed to the origin of escha- tological ideas. Other social causes led to their disap- pearance. Amid the doctrinal changes of the Protestant Reformation eschatology remained unchanged except that purgatory was cut out. It had no support in the canonical Scriptures. That was one motive. But, also, the belief in purgatory had become a prolific source of income for the Church. Hell was unalterable; no gifts or indulgences could unlock its gates. The penalties to be absolved in purgatory could be lightened by in- dulgence, and shortened by the prayers and pious works of friends. The indulgence system was built on this belief, and innumerable endowments were provided for masses to be read for the repose of the souls in purga- tory. Now, the income bearing property of the Church and the clergy living on it constituted the greatest social and economic problem of the age before the Reforma- tion. Wherever the Reformation received the support of government, church property was “ secularized ” or confiscated. When Protestant theology denied the 214 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL existence of purgatory, it denied that the Church could render any quid pro quo for its vested incomes, and this weakened the legal and moral hold of the Church on its endowments, and cut under some of the most offensive practices of the Church. Unless these practical consid- erations had made purgatory a social issue, it may be questioned whether the lack of biblical support for the doctrine would have sufficed to suppress it. The result- ing contest of Protestant theology against the doctrine of purgatory induced it, by its necessary reactions, to assert that the fate of the soul is fixed at death and the saved enter into glory. Perhaps the modern hesitancy about the doctrine of hell also has social causes. Despotic governments for- merly accustomed men to frequent, public, and very hor- rible executions, and to long and hopeless imprisonments. Since the spread of democracy has somewhat weakened the cruel grip of the governing classes, the criminal law has become more humane. Capital punishments have become less frequent, less public, and less cruel. The outfit of prisons has improved. There is an increasing feeling that punishment should not be merely vindictive and terrifying, but remedial and disciplinary, aiming at the salvation and social restoration of the offender. Our prisons are our human hells, where men are cut off from all that exercises a saving influence on our lives — the love of wife and child and home, work and play, contact with nature, hope, ambition, — only fear and co- ercion are in full force. If democracy should further weaken the hold of the governing classes on the penal system of the country; and if Christianity should im- ESCHATOLOGY 215

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  out, the understanding of its nature grew artificial, just as the understanding of Old Testament inspiration had become centuries earlier. It was not to the interest of church leaders to emphasize that the laity had once pos- sessed the gift of inspiration and the right of utterance. Consequently the realization of the charismatic life of the primitive Church was allowed to fade from the memory of Christians. The apostles alone stood out in the his- torical perspective as the possessors of inspiration. Their human frailties and fallibilities were forgotten or suppressed; they were conventionalized and fitted with haloes. Their utterances were infallible. Inspiration and infallibility were almost convertible terms. Being so high a gift, inspiration was strictly circumscribed, and was supposed to have ceased when the canon of the New Testament was completed. This, on the whole, has re- mained the popular orthodox view down to recent times. Now, so high a conception of inspiration discourages the stirring of the prophetic spirit in living men. A man might well claim that God had spoken to his soul and laid a message upon him. But who would want to claim that he is infallible? Psychical experiences are evoked by ex- pectancy. If men do not expect to be regenerated, few will have the experience. If they do not expect to be inspired, few will make their way single-handed to such an experience. The Church has reversed all the maxims of Paul except the last. It has quenched the spirit; it has discountenanced prophesying; it has forbidden intel- lectual scrutiny of inspiration so far as the biblical books were concerned. The only thing it encouraged was to cleave to that which is good. THE HOLY SPIRIT, REVELATION 193

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The orgasm itself, though it had unquestionably had a beginning, a middle, and an end, had lacked, despite its intensity, the lush greenery and winding roads and hot, fruit-filled bazaars that her hour of ridem mowing had led her to expect almost as her right. Perhaps she needed to do something to pep up her masturbational technique; perhaps her clitoris was simply tired of her own fingers after all these years. The vibration of the mower had felt so unexpectedly good. A year earlier, David’s car had developed a problem with wheel alignment, so that the steering wheel started wobbling dramatically at about sixty-three miles an hour, and she now remembered that before he had gotten it fixed she had been obliged once or twice to pull over to the shoulder and get her orgasm out of the way so that she wouldn’t be a hazard to others on the road. She simply needed more vibration, faster vibration, in her life—it was that simple. The idea of sexual devices had seemed faintly ludicrous in previous years, and when it stopped seeming ludicrous it began seeming too trendy—she couldn’t escape the suspicion that the majority of vibrators were still given as joke gifts at office good-bye parties. But why shouldn’t she at least try a toy of some kind? She had gotten rid of David, she was beginning her life afresh. She went back to her Cosmo , avoiding Patrick Swayze (who looked a little the worse for wear anyway), and found in the back pages an ad for a company in San Francisco, “women owned and operated.” They rushed her a catalog, sensing her breathlessness, and a week and a half later the good old UPS man was asking her to sign on line 34 for a large white box that Marian expected to contain four hand-held devices and a container of Astroglide. The UPS man, she noticed with relief, was, though handsome, not perfect—with a slight double chin and a pleasant asymmetrical smile and a hint of David’s incipiently stocky shape. When she opened the box, however, she discovered that she had gotten only three toys, not the full four she had ordered.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  10. Finally, theology has been deprived of the inspi- ration of great ideas contained in the idea of the King- dom and in labor for it. The Kingdom of God breeds prophets; the Church breeds priests and theologians. The Church runs to tradition and dogma; the Kingdom of God rejoices in forecasts and boundless horizons. The men who have contributed the most fruitful im- pulses to Christian thought have been men of prophetic vision, and their theology has proved most effective for future times where it has been most concerned with past history, with present social problems, and with the future of human society. The Kingdom of God is to theology what outdoor colour and light are to art. It is impossible to estimate what inspirational impulses have been lost to theology and to the Church, because it did not develop the doctrine of the Kingdom of God and see the world and its redemption from that point of view. 138 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL These are some of the historical effects which the loss of the doctrine of the Kingdom of God has inflicted on systematic theology. The chief contribution which the social gospel has made and will make to theology is to give new vitality and importance to that doctrine. In doing so it will be a reformatory force of the highest im- portance in the field of doctrinal theology, for any sys- tematic conception of Christianity must be not only defective but incorrect if the idea of the Kingdom of God does not govern it. The restoration of the doctrine of the Kingdom has already made progress. Some of the ablest and most voluminous works of the old theology in their thousands of pages gave the Kingdom of God but a scanty men- tion, usually in connection with eschatology, and saw no connection between it and the Calvinistic doctrines of personal redemption. The newer manuals not only make constant reference to it in connection with various doc- trines, but they arrange their entire subject matter so that the Kingdom of God becomes the governing idea. ^ 1 William Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, p. 192 : “ We are witnessing to-day a reaction against this exaggerated individualism (of Reformation theology). It has become an axiom of modern thought that the government of God has social as well as individual significance, and the conception of the Kingdom of God — obscured in the earlier Protestantism — is coming again into the forefront of theological thought.’' See the discussion on “ The View of the Kingdom in Modern Thought ” which follows.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  In fact, however, our traditional eschatology never was a purely Christian product, growing organically from Christian soil and expressing distinctively Chris- tian convictions. It is more in the nature of an histor- ical mosaic combining fragments of non-christian and pre-christian systems with genuine Christian ideas. It took shape under special historical conditions, and was broken up and shaped afresh to express other conditions, but in no case was it shaped to suit our modern needs. Like all eschatologies it expresses ideas about the uni- verse, but these cosmic conceptions are pre-scientific. The world protrayed in them is the world of the Ptole- maic system, a world three stories high, with heaven above and hell beneath. During the formative cen- turies the Oriental and Greek religious life, which deeply influenced Christianity, was dualistic, and whatever in- fluences have come from that source are not only his- torically but essentially unchristian. A Christian mind can get most satisfaction by contemplating how the genius of the Christian religion took this heterogeneous and often alien material and made something approxi- mately Christian of it after all. As a consequence eschatology is usually loved in in- verse proportion to the square of the mental diameter of those who do the loving. Calvin was the greatest exegete of his day and he wrote commentaries on nearly all the books of the Old and New Testaments, but he gave the Apocalypse a wide berth. No interpretation 210 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL of this main biblical source ever won general consent as long as it was interpreted doctrinally. The wise threw up their hands; those who devoted their minds to it, often suffered from mild obsession. Our generation is the first in eighteen hundred years to understand this book as its author, or authors, meant it to be understood, and now it is one of the most enlightening and interest- ing books of them all. In primitive Christianity es- chatology was in the centre of religious interest and thought. Today it is on the circumference, and with some Christians it lies outside the circumference. Theo- logians of liberal views are brief or apologetic when they reach eschatology. This situation is deeply regret- table. Perhaps no other section of theology is so much in need of a thorough rejuvenation.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  So in saying that she liked them, tall Joyce—who as I sit typing this towers above me now in a state of semi-nudity—was definitely saying the right thing if she was interested in getting to my heart, which she probably wasn’t. You have to be extremely careful about complimenting a thirty-five-year-old male temp who has achieved nothing in his life. “Hi, I’m the temp!” That’s usually what I say to receptionists on my first day of an assignment; that’s the word I use, because it’s the word everyone uses, though it was a long time before I stopped thinking that it was a horrible abbreviation, worse than “Frisco.” I have been a temp for over ten years, ever since I quit graduate school. The reason I have done nothing with my life is simply that my power to enter the Fold (or “hit the clutch” or “find the Cleft” or “take a personal day” or “instigate an Estoppel”) comes and goes. I value the ability, which I suspect is not widespread, but because I don’t have it consistently, because it fades without warning and doesn’t return until months or years later, I’ve gotten hooked into a sort of damaging boom-and-bust Kondratieff cycle. When I’ve lost the power, I simply exist, I do the minimum I have to do to make a living, because I know that in a sense everything I want to accomplish (and I am a person with ambitions) is infinitely postponable. As a rough estimate, I think I have probably spent only a total of two years of personal time in the Fold, if you lump the individual minutes or hours together, maybe even less; but they have been some of the best, most alive times I’ve had. My life reminds me of the capital-gains tax problem, as I once read about it in an op-ed piece: if legislators keep changing, or even promising to change, the capital-gains percentages, repealing and reinstating the tax, the rational investor will begin to base his investment decisions not on the existing tax laws, but on his certainty of change, which mischannels (the person who wrote the op-ed piece convincingly argued) in some destructive way the circulation of capital. So too with me during those periods when I wait for the return of my ability to stop time: I think, Why should I read Ernest Renan or learn matrix algebra now, since when I’m able to Drop again, I’ll be able to spend private hours, or even years, satisfying any fleeting intellectual curiosity while the whole world waits for me? I can always catch up. That’s the problem.

• From Bold Move

  I stopped paying attention to the why (my value ) of what I was doing, and just focused on the what (aka the goals ) that I felt I needed to achieve. I was so focused on what people were telling me ought to be my next goal that I was almost entirely living up to their idea of success, not my own. I kept climbing their ladder, but I was no longer headed toward my dreams. In other words, I was off course—trying to navigate life without checking in on my values. The problem with ignoring our internal compass is that we usually end up moving in a direction that doesn’t reflect what we care about most. And journeying along a path that is not aligned with your values is usually uncomfortable. For example, if you care about honesty, and yet you find yourself telling a lie, you will feel uncomfortable. Similarly, if you care deeply about creativity, but you find yourself in a job that resorts to doing things the way they’ve always been done, you will be unsatisfied. If health is a core value of yours and yet you are overeating and not exercising, you will feel awful. When we feel the familiar pang of discomfort, we remain. We often just keep doing what we’ve always done, because it feels like the only thing we can do—and at times we just push ourselves even harder, as if more of the same would make it better (guilty!). We tell ourselves that it will get better, but it doesn’t seem to. This is the essence of remaining as a form of avoidance —we stay the course even if that means moving further and further from the life we want. We don’t run away or fight back; we just stay in our current patterns. Of course, staying the path feels better momentarily because remaining is avoidance and, as we’ve seen, avoidance works in the short term. If we end up blind to our true north, our emotional and physical health pays a price. This can happen to anyone, and as I continued chasing goals without considering what mattered most, it happened to me. Holy Shit: Am I Having a Stroke?I knew there was an emotional cost to what I was doing, and usually I was face-to-face with this cost in the wee hours of the night in those lonely, quiet moments where I would, for once, allow myself a little glimpse behind the curtain of this goal-driven treadmill of a career. Often, I found myself lying in bed, unable to sleep, anxious, staring at the ceiling as thoughts pounded on the shores of my brain: What am I doing? Will I always feel this anxious if I keep going? There is no other way; I must stay in this career! If I just write another grant, I will feel better. Why am I doing this? For whom am I doing this?

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  The social gospel could utilize the latter idea if it were commonly held. It would be an attractive idea to those who have fought for humanity, to come back to this earth and help on the Cause once more, beginning afresh on the basis of the experiences and character attained in the present life. The reward of a fine life, then, would be more life of the same kind. On the other hand there would be remarkable chances of retri- bution and purgation. A man who has prostituted women, might be re-incarnated as a prostitute and see how he likes it. A woman who has lived softly on the proceeds of child labour might be re-born as a little ESCHATOLOGY 231 Georgia girl working in a cotton mill. A man who has helped to lynch a negro, might be born in a black skin and be lynched by his own grandsons. Both theories, however, are somewhat aristocratic in their effect. When we consider the terrible inequality of opportunity for spiritual development in our present world, it does not convey a sense of Christian solidarity to think of a minority climbing into eternal life while the majority wilt away like unfertilized blossoms. The theory of re-incarnation seems to offer a fair chance for all, provided each soul is really started in the exact environment which it has earned by its past life and in which it can best develop for the future. The- osophists have devised a spiritual bureaucracy of “ Masters ’’ or higher spiritual beings who manage this very essential matter. In actual practice it is interesting to observe that those who profess to have a recollection of past existences, all seem to have been stately and famous personages. They do sometimes become savages or courtesans for one life-time to expiate dark deeds of vengeance, or as interesting slumming expeditions. The plain people who just raise hogs or sell cheese in one existence, seem to forget it in the next, which is very human. It is a more serious question whether this doctrine is not incompatible with social unrest and indignation. If the poor are in their present condition because they have deserved it in a previous life, why should we worry about them? The present child-labourers may be former stock-holders who have come back to get the other side, and we should be interfering with justice by trying to 232 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL uplift them. If people living in bad tenements are in the conditions best adapted to their future spiritual de- velopment in later incarnations, we may be tampering with things too high for us in condemning the tenements. This doctrine explains the present inequalities too well. It seems to cut the nerve of the social movement much more effectively than the hope of heaven ever did. Of course the Christian realm of grace would dis- appear, and a reign of Karma and exact retribution would supplant it.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  We are so accustomed to the churches that we hardly realize what a social force they exert over the minds they do influence. If we could observe a native Christian church in a pagan people, after the Christian organization is once in operation as a social organism, and is weaning families and village communities from pagan customs and assimilating them to the new ideas, we should realize better the power of conservation exerted in our own communities.^ The new religion of Christian Science provides another chance for such a realization. It ex- pounds a new religious book alongside of the Bible, and a new prophet alongside of Christ, and thus creates a novel religious consciousness among its own people. It has taken many nervous, unhappy, and burdened persons, and has given health to their bodies and calmness and ^ “ Social Christianity in the Orient,” by Emma Rauschenbusch Clough, Ph.D. ('Macmillan Company) is a striking narrative of the revolutionary effect of the introduction of Christianity in an Indian pariah tribe. 122 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL self-control to their minds by attacking and subduing their souls with a dogmatic faith, till they learn to con- tradict the rheumatic facts of life and to ignore even the presence of death by looking the other way. If we could see the old churches as clearly as we see this new church, we should realize their power. The men who stand for the social gospel have been among the most active critics of the churches because they have realized most clearly both the great needs of our social life and the potential capacities of the Church to meet them. Their criticism has been a form of com- pliment to the Church. I think they may yet turn out to be the apologists whom the Church most needs at present. They are best fitted to see that while the Church influ- ences society, society has always influenced the Church, and that the Church, when it has dropped to the level of its environment, has simply yielded to the law of social gravitation. This is true of the delinquencies of the Church in past ages, which lie heavily on our minds when we want to describe the Church as the great organism of salvation. Those whose expectations are created by the claims of the Church about itself may well be profoundly disappointed when they go through some of the bad chapters of Church History. If they have to judge it by its own absolute religious criteria as the body of Christ and the exponent of his spirit, the gap between the ideal and the reality is painful. The fact is that the Church has watered its own stock and can not pay divi- dends on all the paper it has issued. It has made claims for itself to which no organization composed of humans can live up. If we see it simply as an attempt to give

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  THE CHURCH AS THE SOCIAL FACTOR OF SALVATION I23 social expression to the life derived from Christ, we shall not feel too deeply disappointed when we see it fail. True social insight knows that its sins were always the sins of the age. If the Church was autocratic and op- pressive, so were all governments. There was graft in the Church, but the feudal aristocracy was founded on graft, and it never fought it as the Church fought simony. A fresh understanding for the indispensableness of the Church is gaining ground today in Protestant theology in spite of the increased knowledge of the past and present failures of the Church. This is an attempt to overcome the exaggerated individualism into which Protestantism was thrust by the violent reactions of the Reformation. When men were in the throes of a revolution against a Church which claimed everything, they naturally denied every claim by which the enemy could brace its authority. They denied the authority of the tradition and decrees of the Church and made the Bible the sole source of truth. They denied the doctrine of the eucharist because the mass was the chief monopoly right from which the Church drew material income and spiritual reverence. They em- phasized and elaborated the doctrine of election because it effectively eliminated the middle-man in salvation ; for it put man into direct contact with the source of salvation, and made the decree of salvation wholly independent of any human act or church mediation. But the result of this great polemical reaction against the Church was a system of religious individualism in which the social forces of salvation were slighted, and God and the indi- vidual were almost the only realities in sight. 124 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL Of course in actual practice the Protestant churches exercised very stout control over their members. Calvin, in a celebrated passage of the Institutes comes close to a social appreciation of the functions of the Church : “ But, as it is now our purpose to discourse of the visible Church, let us learn, from her single title of Mother, how use- ful, nay, how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government, until, divested of mortal flesh, we become like the angels. — Moreover, beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salva- tion, can be hoped for, as Isaiah and Joel testify. — The paternal favour of God and the special evidence of spiritual life are con- fined to his peculiar people, and hence the abandonment of the Church is always fatal.’^ i

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I heated six marbles on a baking sheet in a slow oven and then spooned them one by one into a glass of ice water which I held quite close to my eye. Into the glass I had first placed a fossil crinoid and a snip of my fingernail. (Now that I think of it, the sound of my ex-girlfriend Rhody using a fingernail trimmer in the morning in the bathroom, the extremely brief and high-pitched chirping sound of the smiling snipper blades meeting after they had snapped through her nail, which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong, is one of the most satisfying memories that I possess of that relationship.) I fully expected time to stop at the moment the interior of each hissing marble suddenly crazed itself with decorative cracks, but it didn’t. I used the butane torch my father had bought for a refinishing project to heat a notched stainless-steel serving spoon until it turned a deep orange. Though it looked soft and slightly swollen, its edges rounded like the edges of a stick of butter, I could not get the spoon to melt. Then I put a small oval pebble in the same spoon and played the torch flame over it, hoping for some lava. The pebble exploded with a snap, sending a stinging fragment of rock into my T-shirt. All of these experiments, and many others I performed during that period, were inconclusive and, frankly, disappointing. It wasn’t until the summer after fifth grade that I was once again able to Drop in, with the help of our basement washing machine and some thread. The Fermata 3 M ANY TEMPS DON’T LIKE DOING TAPES; I DO. NATURALLY I like transcribing some tapes better than others. In the early eighties I worked in the office of the head of a big company—well, why should I suppress the name?—in the office of Andrew Fleury, the head of Noptica. He had a three-person WP staff who did nothing but type his gigantic output of correspondence, speeches, interviews, Q-and-A sessions at stockholder meetings, and so on. I think he must have had political ambitions even then. I worked there several times. One long tape of his that I did included a letter ordering a case of some rare sort of Armagnac from a local liquor wholesaler. (It was a personal letter, let me say.) I didn’t know what Armagnac was, and, guessing, I typed Armaniac . Discovering this, Fleury flew into a rage. I heard him laying into one of the two co-office managers—“Paula, tell me what is wrong with this paragraph!” The letter was returned to me with the following marginal scholium: “An alcoholic beverage, not a crazy Armenian!!

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

  But this Easter, I did not attempt the trek to Mevagissey. If anybody at Lamledra noticed this, they all tactfully forbore to mention it. I was surprised, even slightly shocked, that such a final break with religion had affected me so little. From the Harts’ atheist stronghold, the events of that first Holy Week—the suffering and death of Jesus and his rising from the tomb—seemed an obvious fiction, a mere myth, an arbitrary sequence of improbable events that bore no relevance to life in the twentieth century. But in the convent, when we had lived that myth step by step, moment by moment, from Ash Wednesday through the long journey of Lent all the way to Golgotha, the myth had meant something entirely different. Holy Week, the culmination of Lent, had always been a special time. We had sung the whole of the divine office every day, instead of chanting an abridged version. Each novice had to sing a chapter from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The plaintive cadences of the Gregorian chant had penetrated our hearts; then there had been the drama of the Easter Vigil. I had never seriously questioned the myth itself because the liturgy, the fasting, and the strict silence of the convent during these days had re-created it, so that in some sense, whatever had happened in Jerusalem two thousand years before was not as important as the fact that the events had somehow been brought to life here and now. But without these rituals, the myth was dead. If you wanted to preserve your faith, the trick clearly was to keep practicing. If you stopped and looked at those rites and stories from the outside, they seemed absurd. Ludicrous, in fact. “Isn’t it Easter tomorrow?” one of the guests asked at supper. “Don’t talk about Easter and all that boring stuff!” Jacob commanded. Everybody laughed but broke off raggedly, looking rather warily at me. “Karen, do you insist on doing the washing up, so that Nanny can come upstairs with me?” “Yes, of course,” I said, grateful for the diversion. “As long as you don’t use the dishwasher,” Herbert muttered darkly. “I absolutely forbid anybody to use that dishwasher. It’s an absurd waste of—” “Karen, do you absolutely insist?” “Karen.” Jean Floud, the mistress of Newnham College, leaned across the table. “I’ve got to go back to Cambridge tomorrow. I’ll be leaving pretty early. If you’d like to come with me, I could drop you off at Mevagissey for Mass. ” My heart sank. I really didn’t feel like making a public announcement of my loss of faith. “Well, Jean, it’s very kind—” I began. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t take her to Mass,” Jenifer exclaimed, helping people to more lasagna. “She always comes home in such a bad temper!” She dropped a second helping on my plate. “Do I really, Jenifer?” I was astonished. “Yes, you do! I must say I don’t approve of a religion that makes people so gloomy.”

• From 50 Shades Uncovered (2015)

  No. Nor can I. I personally don't find him attractive in any way. Hopkins: The fact his eyes are grey makes me suspicious as to the inner workings of his soul. He says at one point, it's one of my favorite lines, "'Cause I'm fifty shades of (bleep), Anastasia." - (laughs) - How ca-- How? How can you be attracted to a man who says that? He's interested in non-emotional sex, and that was the kind of condition right from the beginning. The strangest thing is he wants to control, but deep down what he wants is someone to tell him it's gonna be all right. He's scared of the love. He always wears a white linen shirt. I mean, who wants to go out with a guy that's continually wearing the same outfit? Not me. He's not gonna pick up his socks, his shoes are gonna be - in the middle of the floor. - Yeah. You know, that's sexy at first, but let's be honest, in the end we don't want it. - It's not what women want. - It's not what we want. I think it's interesting now, what do young women want? I don't think most of them want to be led to the red room of pain, but I think that there are a lot of young women now who actually want a man who can drive a car and navigate his way from home to the airport and be capable and make an omelet. Eclair: I very much like Christian's red room of pain insomuch that you know that it's a classy joint. He's got a purpose-built state-of-the-art penthouse dungeon. I think I'd prefer to have sex in a normal bedroom. He's gone to the extent of building a red room of pain - that has clearly been used. - Eww, used. There's nothing exciting about that. Am I wrong? - No, you're right. - It's used. That's just my sexual history right there. Do you want to have a go? The actual reality of most S&M is that, you know, nobody's got the funds for the beautifully upholstered leather, nicely veneered, proper wood job. Most people are going to be doing a DIY version from Argos. (clicks) Hodson: You just need a room, a bed, a yard of rope divided into two, and an imagination. Would I rather have sex in a normal dungeon? That's, uh-- As opposed to one of those weird ones. Narrator: The "Fifty Shades" character Anastasia Steele is asked to give up her independence and become Christian Grey's submissive. Kite: Christian is the dominating one the whole way through. He gives Anastasia a legal binding contract that outlines the sadomasochistic rules of their relationship and what she must and mustn't do. I had to sign a contract for, uh, "Playboy," but it's not nearly as demanding as Christian Grey's. He asks her to go see a gynecologist, which I thought was a bit strange.

• From Bold Move

  When will you complete the steps you outlined above? [Your Notes] Working and Reworking My Bold PlanI created two bold plans for myself: one related to well-being and one related to impact. For well-being, I set the goal of exercising twenty minutes a day, five days a week, in the morning before Diego woke up, for one month. Is this a workable step? Is it aligned with my value of well-being? I thought so, but I failed miserably in the first week, even though I really tried. I hadn’t exercised for two years and was carrying forty pounds more than my pre-COVID self, so it turned out not to be achievable. But failure is just good data for the next success, and so I didn’t get discouraged. This is something I often see my clients do: create a plan that might have been doable in the past but is perhaps too ambitious given a current reality (e.g., post-COVID Luana creating steps as if she were still pre-COVID Luana). So, if this is your first attempt at creating workable steps, I would suggest you take whatever you created and break it down in half. The point here is to set yourself up for success instead of sabotaging yourself into failure. This is an arbitrary exercise, so you may as well rig it in your favor! For instance, if I were advising someone on writing a book, I might say, “Make your first step one page per day. Literally one page. Take fifteen minutes, or take two hours, but when you hit the end of that page, you stop. Done for the day. No más. ” This might seem pathetically easy, but it’s also wildly sustainable. And this exercise is all about sustainability. After bombing in my own attempt, I went back to the drawing board and came up with an even more workable step: exercise ten minutes, three times a week, before lunch, for one week. This was definitely better and I was able to stick to it! It did take major work to open up that ten minutes before lunch three times a week, which is an important point: if your goals don’t make it onto your calendars, they will never happen! The trick here is to really look at your calendar, put your workable step in the place where you think you will be most likely to succeed, and then go for it. This technique really helps ensure that your goal is sufficiently scheduled . I know it might seem like overkill, but I promise you, if you don’t schedule these things, life will get in the way. Another trick I often use to help myself honor these steps is to imagine them as a doctor’s appointment.