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

  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. 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.

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

  I had told the headmistress about the book, of course, and promised that I would confine my writing to the school holidays and weekends, so that it did not detract from my schoolwork. She had smiled and wished me luck. I see now that she probably expected the book to creep humbly into the back of the book-stores, gain a couple of kind notices in some obscure religious journals, and die an early death. That did not happen. June had sold the serial rights to a tabloid newspaper, which had also run a big interview with me, complete with photographs, in the Sunday edition. There were more profiles and photographs in some of the women’s magazines, and I had appeared on several radio and television programs. The children were agog, arriving in school each day brandishing copies of the Express and looking at me with new eyes. I was no longer just a boring teacher who nagged them about their punctuation, but had suddenly acquired celebrity status and had a kinky past. Of course, it was only a nine days’ wonder, and by the time I received my quietus from the school, the excitement had long subsided. The head had never remonstrated with me about the fuss, but she did not need to. A grim air of disapproval and reserve had made her position quite clear. This kind of notoriety was not what she expected from her staff. I myself had doubts about the wisdom of this publicity. Writing Through the Narrow Gate had been an act of restoration and self-discovery. It had redeemed the time I had spent in the religious life and set it in proper perspective. As I had unearthed more and more layers of the experience, I had felt that I was reclaiming my past. But now my inner journey had become a sensational story in the popular press. Any subtlety that the book might have had had been lost in the Express’s abridgement, especially when the newspaper text was punctuated with such subheadings as WHIP, TEARS, ANGUISH, and BLOOD. When I had written the last pages of Through the Narrow Gate, I had realized that those years had probably been the most significant of my life; they had changed me forever. I might have lost my faith, I could no longer believe in God or the doctrines of the church, but I still longed for the sense of heightened intensity and transcendence that the convent had promised to give me. Was I still a nun, living in the world and yearning for a deity that did not exist?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She hadn’t liked it. How very sad and disappointing. Had she listened to all of it and then decided she didn’t like it, or had she hated it so much that she had tossed it halfway through? I pushed up on my glasses and checked her car stereo: yes, Suzanne Vega was back in place. Nor were Adele’s nipples noticeably erect under her pink floral sweater. Was she made of stone? Imagine her chucking my cassette right out the window! Hours and hours of work, all custom joinery, all for her, dismissed. Of course I had said that she should feel free to do that, but still, I hadn’t expected her to do it. My pride was hurt. I paced around in the tall grass where I thought I had seen the tape land, but I couldn’t find it. And I didn’t want to spend much time out of the car, because the grass I walked in had the same disturbingly blurred quality that the road had—I felt I would inflict some rending injury to the network of cosmic wormholes if I walked on the median strip for too long. I started up time and drove slowly, until Adele was way ahead of me. At the next exit, I turned around and drove home. When I woke up the next morning, my Fold-powers were gone. [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 16THE WEEK FOLLOWING MY FAILED DRIVE, I WORKED FIFTEEN hours of overtime at a consulting firm. I was bothered by a persistent tingly feeling in the base of my right palm and increasing pain in my forearm. I needed at least a week off from typing, but because my Fermatal visitation-rights were now denied, I didn’t get one. What was clearly a carpal-tunnel problem got quite bad over the next several months. An over-the-counter wrist brace didn’t fit properly and made the pain worse. I was able to alleviate the symptoms a little by sleeping with my arm embracing a spare pillow. After a particularly trying stint typing an eighty-page price list, I went to Commonhealth and saw several nurse practitioners and doctors. Each of them tapped the inside of my wrist hard and asked what it felt like. Every diagnostic tap further injured the nerve, it seemed to me. I went up the chain of specialists until I reached the in-house repetitive-motion expert, Dr. Susan Orowitz-Rudman, a short cheerful woman of forty. I told her that I was a career temp and that I really had to be able to continue using the keyboard. She was full of ideas and theories. I found her hyphenated name powerfully attractive.

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

  I was pleased and relieved to be summoned to a viva. In the English Faculty, only those who were borderline cases between classes, or who were being considered for a first-class degree, had to undergo an oral examination. No viva, therefore no first. For the umpteenth time I mentally reviewed my papers. A viva, I knew, could last for hours. But when I looked again at the examiners, I felt my hopes plummet. I cannot do this, I thought bleakly. All my written answers had been carefully contrived. During the long weeks of revision, I had prepared essays that could be adapted to meet almost any contingency. They were my usual Gothic cathedral creations, intricate edifices of other people’s thoughts. But now I knew that there was no chance that I would be able to think on my feet in the way that would be expected of me. I still sat tongue-tied in class, marveling at the way the others could play confidently with ideas, get fresh insights in the course of a discussion, and produce arguments to support their case at a moment’s notice. I was especially impressed by the ease with which other people could say, “I think.” I had no notion what “I” thought. When I scoured my brain, I still encountered the old blank. There was no way that I could talk freely and impressively to the board. Miserably I listened for my name as the chairman of the examiners read out the list of our names, telling each of us (all of whose names began with the letter A) what time we should present ourselves. He didn’t mention me, and for a moment, compounded of both disappointment and wild relief, I thought it had all been a mistake. I had got a safe second and wouldn’t have to face the examiners after all. Then the chairman nodded at me with the same courteous little smile that he had given to the others. “And Miss Armstrong, would you stay here now, please?” I stood up slowly, adjusting my gown, while the others filed out of the room. “Come over here.” The chairman gestured toward the chair and I began the interminable journey across the carpet. It took a while before I recognized the sudden explosion of sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was clapping. I looked up to find that the examiners had risen to their feet and were applauding. The men had doffed their mortarboards. All were smiling broadly. And I remembered the old tradition. “Miss Armstrong,” the chairman said when the decorous clapping had petered out, “we wish to congratulate you on your papers, which were all quite excellent.”

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

  I always wanted to find out more, to see things clearly. And once an idea had been suggested to me, I got real pleasure from it—even if I could rarely come up with ideas of my own. But these three might as well have been studying quantum mechanics. “What do you want to do next week?” I had asked at the end of the hour. They gazed at me blankly. “Dunno,” one of the boys eventually volunteered. “You must have some idea,” I had said, a little testily. Silence. “What about Keats?” “Oh no,” the girl groaned. “Oh no—anything but Keats.” “What have you got against Keats?” I demanded. What could anyone have against Keats? Didn’t they admire those extraordinary odes, the sonnets— the letters, for heaven’s sake? The students continued to look at me expectantly, and for a wild moment I longed for one of them to get up and yell that he absolutely hated Keats, that he thought Keats was insufferably indulgent, pretentious, and overrated. I would have welcomed any sign of involvement or commitment. “Do you really not like Keats?” I asked again, hoping to coax them into a reaction. They shrugged and smiled sweetly. There was no hostility; they were perfectly . . . pleasant. I gave up. “Well, what about John Clare?” “Okay,” the girl replied equably, “I’ll do Clare.” I had given them a reading list and an essay title, which they had written down diligently, and we had parted cordially. But now, as I hurtled northward on the rattling train, I wondered what on earth was the point. Of course, not all the students were so passive. Only last week I had had a splendid session with two highly intelligent girls. But what had those three students actually learned this afternoon, and what would they learn about Clare? Certainly they would acquire a little information about him, but was their course teaching them to think? Was it enhancing their lives? Would the world be a better place because they had shared Clare’s insights? Or were they simply passing the time pleasantly? I shook myself irritably out of this reverie. I was glad to have this job. I couldn’t expect the moon. And yet I had thought, at some absurd level of my being, that if only I could get an academic post, everything would fall neatly into place. I had believed that I would find a new vocation. When I arrived home that evening, my flat did little to cheer me. I had been rather spoiled by life at the Harts’, where there was always something interesting going on. I had also been horrified by the exorbitant rents charged for the most meager of rooms in London and had been lucky to find this quite reasonable apartment near Highgate.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie holds the broomstick and I hold the radio. The copper wire wraps around both ends of the broomstick and the radio is taped to one end, the hair-clump of extra wire dragging on the ground like a tail. Jie switches the radio to AM and the morning news sounds like someone getting strangled, all static, a sound like the sea muffled inside our mouths. We discipline the dirt. Rake into rows and follow along. I warm the radio on my skin while it announces the weather: the sky cussing rain at us in the afternoon, more rain tomorrow morning. Jie skims the soil with the broomstick, sweeping its splintered end in half-circles, shushing me even though I’m not talking. When we’re near metal, the radio will whine with another voice, a song in gold’s frequency. I hear nothing until the static sours into something higher and raspier, almost Ma’s voice. Jie says, Dig here. We’re on a square of land where shadows don’t seem to survive. We dig with our bare hands, but we’re only a fist deep when we find an old lawnmower blade. The radio sings in three more spots, but the quicker we dig, the sooner we surrender to our suspicions: that the gold’s gone. In its place: five spent bullets, a dog whistle, a saw blade, some pennies, a bike chain, a whisk, a blank dog tag. The bullets glisten like dog eyes and my toes remember when they were shot, their ache outdated and residing in my spine. Jie finds and adds two more bullets to our metal shitpile. We’ve never seen the gold ourselves, and neither of us says it, but we know there is nothing here. The radio’s still tuned in to the soil’s soprano, the static louder where we’ve dug up nothing but the dark. Jie throws down the broomstick, stomps on it with both feet. It breaks easy as bone. I hope there’s really nothing to find, Jie says, though I disagree. I think it’s better to have something to lose, even if the gold’s now archived with the bones and the bullets. But Jie says the gold is better off buried, womb-safe, our lives spent waiting for its birth. Jie and I rebury everything we find. It feels like we’ve disturbed a cemetery, rifling through lives that aren’t ours to remember. I keep the blank dog tag and promise to carve it a name worth carrying home. _ We find Ba in the bedroom, bellydown on the mattress, his face so glossed with spit he looks candied. While he’s asleep, Jie says, we should detect for metals in his body. Maybe the gold is still buried inside him.

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

  I remember when I finally allowed this question to surface. It was toward the end of my first term and I was hurrying home to my flat in North London. The underground station at King’s Cross was packed with commuters and I tried to find a quiet place in my mind away from the crowds, the noise, and the bustle. Two free research days lay ahead. I could stay at home, finish the chapter that I was working on, and go to the British Library. Wonderful! Two whole days away from college! But then I stopped short: why was I so delighted? For the last couple of months I had been telling myself how lucky I was to have landed this job, but now, as I stood on the crowded platform, I asked myself: Is this it, then? Was this what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life? Of course, it was all very . . . pleasant. That was the word that continually came to mind when I tried to describe my new life. But it seemed wrong somehow. “Pleasant” sounded so insipid, so bland. They had been wrong at St. Anne’s, I thought. I can do this job, very easily indeed. Perhaps it was too easy? Had that entire struggle, all that striving led to something that was merely pleasant? Of course, I enjoyed it all. It was fun gossiping with Richard and Jackie. Moreover, I was hugely privileged to have a job that was pleasant, for heaven’s sake. And it wasn’t as though there was anything else that I wanted to do. There was no other profession for which I was remotely qualified. But somehow I had always thought that life should be more than merely pleasant. I tried to push the thought away. I am doing a useful job of work, I told myself firmly as I boarded the train and stood crammed against other bodies, swaying in unison with them through the dark subterranean tunnels. But was I? Only that afternoon, I had been giving a tutorial on the Romantic period to three students. They had been quiet, docile, and attentive, carefully noting down my every word—even the jokes—but had not seemed at all excited by Coleridge’s poetry. None of them had asked me anything, except how to spell a word or to repeat a date. But then, who was I to talk? I knew what it was like to feel tongue-tied in class, to have nothing to say. But these students had worried me. However empty and numb I may have felt, I had always been caught up intellectually in what I was studying. I always wanted to find out more, to see things clearly. And once an idea had been suggested to me, I got real pleasure from it—even if I could rarely come up with ideas of my own. But these three might as well have been studying quantum mechanics.

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

  “And it does,” I concluded. If I had found it impossible to beat the conditioning, why should the nuns find it any easier to adapt? Rebecca and I looked at each other bleakly. There was no need to spell out the implications for us. That, I thought, was the best thing about talking to Rebecca. She knew what it was like, and nobody else really had a clue. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Oh, my father has got me a job with The Tablet. Nothing much; nothing too onerous. But it will be interesting, I think.” “Is that a good idea?” I asked, startled. I didn’t want to be discouraging, but The Tablet seemed far too depressingly familiar. It is the chief intellectual Catholic journal in Britain. It was, no doubt, a very worthy and, in its own way, even an excellent paper, but frankly I had no desire ever to set eyes on it again, let alone help to produce it. “Isn’t it a little . . . er . . . Catholic?” Rebecca smiled. “Very Catholic indeed. Yes, I know what you mean. But I’m not sure that I could cope with anything more challenging. Not yet, at any rate. No, it will be nice. There’s a tiny office—just three or four of us. It will be quite a little community, in a way. Quite comforting, in fact.” I could see it all: a small enclosed world that viewed everything entirely from the church’s perspective, and whose radius of interest rarely extended beyond Catholic preoccupations. At an instinctive level, I could understand exactly why Rebecca wanted to work for The Tablet, even though I felt it to be a mistake. But it was then that I recalled my conversation with Charlotte. Was I really any better? So we’re leaving,” Jane told me grimly as we left the English Faculty Library and headed for her flat. “It’s definite. Keswick, here we come!” Jane and Mark had married the previous summer, and Mark, who was currently a lecturer in a teachers’ training college in London, had just accepted a promotion in a similar college in the Lake District. And as a good wife, Jane, of course, was going with him. “How do you feel about it?” I asked cautiously. This could mean the end of Jane’s career, or at least of a certain kind of career. Unlike me, Jane had been pegged for stardom. The powers that be wanted to keep her in Oxford. “Not great.” Jane grimaced, until her ebulliently positive nature asserted itself. “But hey—it’s beautiful up there. We’ve rented a lovely old eighteenth-century manor house—it’s even in Pevsner. It’s a mess at the moment. We’ll have to paint it from top to bottom. But when that’s over and Markie has started in college, it will be just the sheep and me. No distractions. It will force me to finish the damn thesis.”

• From Wild (2012)

  “That’s what the Australians told me. Did you ever meet them?” I shook my head. “They’re a married couple on their honeymoon. They decided to ditch the PCT too. They took off to go hike the AT instead.” It was only once I’d decided to hike the PCT that I learned about the AT—the Appalachian Trail, the far more popular and developed cousin of the PCT. Both were designated national scenic trails in 1968. The AT is 2,175 miles long, approximately 500 miles shorter than the PCT, and follows the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine. “Did Greg go to the AT too?” I squeaked. “Nah. He didn’t want to keep missing so much of the trail, doing all these bypasses and taking alternate routes, so he’s coming back to hike it next year instead. That’s what the Australians told me, anyway.” “Wow,” I said, feeling sick at the news. Greg had been a talisman for me since the day I met him in the very hour I’d decided to quit. He’d believed that if he could do this, I could too, and now he was gone. So were the Australians, a pair I’d never met, but a picture of them formed instantly in my mind anyway. I knew without knowing that they were buff and Amazonian, dazzlingly fit for the rugged outdoors by virtue of their Australian blood in ways I would never be. “Why aren’t you going to hike the AT instead?” I asked, worried he’d reveal that in fact he was. He thought about it for a while. “Too much traffic,” he said. He continued looking at me, at Bob Marley’s face so big on my chest, as if he had more to say. “That’s a seriously awesome shirt, by the way.”

• 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