Disappointment
Letdown when reality falls short of what was hoped for or promised.
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As far as the churches of Judea and Jerusalem are concerned, the traditions preserved in the Pauline Corpus are probably a better witness for their praxis than any sayings and narratives preserved in the Synoptic tradition. Helmut Koester, “Jesus’ Presence in the Early Church,” pp. 547–548, 550 Koester did not explain his choice of the word presence in that article’s title, but I take it as a deliberately wider and more inclusive term than, say, resurrection . The reason for my interpretation is found in the headings of the article’s first two sections. The first section is called “The Tradition of Jesus’ Sayings,” which refers to the fact that within the Q Gospel , for example, “the presence of Jesus was tangible in the words he had spoken” (1994a:541, 543). But in discussing the Q Gospel or the Gospel of Thomas , Koester could not have replaced presence with resurrection in that sentence, since resurrection is not basic to those texts’ understanding of Jesus. The second section is entitled “Jesus’ Presence in the Churches of Jerusalem and Antioch. The Pauline Evidence” (1994a:541, 546). In that case, to the contrary, presence could be replaced with resurrection . That second heading could be taken to mean: first, the churches of Jerusalem and Antioch; next, the churches of Paul. Koester, however, uses it to mean: the Pauline evidence for the churches of Jerusalem and Antioch. That represents a crucially important principle for me. I have not extended this book into Pauline theology or the Pauline churches, as I have noted, but I do include the Jerusalem community within its focus on the companions of Jesus and the birth of Christianity. I accept the use of what Koester calls “the Pauline evidence”—that is, the evidence of received tradition that Paul proclaims —as a window onto the earliest Jerusalem community. When, for example, Paul speaks against Corinthian meal practice, I read him not for Corinthian meal practice but for Jerusalem meal practice; not for the present Corinth customs he criticizes but for the past Jerusalem customs that he opposes to them. A Typology of Share-Meals The purely symbolic meal of modern Christianity, restricted to a bite of bread and a sip of wine or juice, is tacitly presupposed for the early church, an assumption so preposterous that it is never articulated or acknowledged. Robert Jewett, “Tenement Churches and Pauline Love Feasts,” p. 44 That epigraph adds another dimension to our distance from the Common Meal Tradition, be it in Jerusalem, Antioch, or anywhere else. It is another facet rendering understanding almost impossible. It is not just that some Christians get too much normal food; it is that all Christians get too little eucharistic food. The Christian Eucharist is today a morsel and a sip. It is not a real meal. You may reply, of course, that such is sufficient to symbolize the presence of Jesus and God in the community of faith. But why symbolize divinity through a medium of food that is non-food?
In fragments 3–4, column 1, lines 6–8, Alexander Jannaeus is called “the Angry Lion” who “hanged living men [hole in the manuscript ] in Israel since ancient times.” Because of that hole it is not certain whether the text would have read “which was not done” or “which was done.” But, in any case, it is live crucifixion that is in view, so it is clear that the Hasmoneans adopted Roman-style live crucifixion rather than traditional Jewish dead crucifixion. There is nothing said about removal of the bodies by sunset, and, in context, that issue does not seem a major concern of Alexander Jannaeus. The fourth stage is Essene crucifixion. This involves another one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 11Q19–20, the Temple Scroll from Cave 11, longest of all those found at Qumran (DSST 154–184). From within this text, which dates from around the year 100 B.C.E. , God legislates in first-person voice. In Lawrence Schiffman’s words. “The author/redactor called for a thoroughgoing revision of the existing Hasmonean order, desiring to replace it with a Temple, sacrificial system, and government which was the embodiment of the legislation of the Torah according to his view…. The text is a polemic against the existing order, calling for radical change in the order of the day, putting forward reforms in areas of cultic, religious and political life. So the true Sitz im Leben [life-setting] of the scroll is precisely one in which the circumstances of real life are the opposite of those called for by the author” (1994a:50, 51). It is a divine rereading of the Law prescribing how things will be when the Essenes take over Jerusalem and its Temple, the Jewish homeland and its government. It reflects, as Schiffman says, how things are not at the moment of its composition. Crucifixion is legislated for two crimes in 11Q19, column 64, lines 7–13. One criminal is a spy who betrays his people to a foreign nation; the other is a condemned person who escapes and curses his people among foreigners. In describing what is to happen to these criminals, there is an intercalation of these phrases in 64:8–11: “You shall hang him from a tree and he will die…. [H]e [shall] be executed and they shall hang him on the tree…. [H]e also you shall hang on the tree and he will die.” That describes Roman-Hasmonean live crucifixion twice as frames around biblical crucifixion as center. And then, in 64:11–13, there follows the command for sunset removal from Deuteronomy 21:22–23. In other words, whether one deals with dead or live crucifixion, removal and burial must take place before nightfall. That tells us, however, what was not happening under the Hasmoneans (and presumably under the Romans as well). At the time of Jesus, therefore, live crucifixion made obedience to Deuteronomy 21:22–23 almost impossible, and burial before nightfall was, at best, a hope for future implementation under post-Hasmonean and post-Roman Essene control.
Consider, for example, this admonition from Jesus: You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. (10:42–44) On the one hand, Mark’s leadership model flatly contradicts Roman imperial normalcy—and most of human normalcy as well. But, on the other, it is specifically directed to the Twelve disciples, who are angry at two of their members for asking Jesus: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (10:37). Mark’s gospel is much more directly and immediately about the use—and abuse—of power and authority by the twelve disciples rather than by the twelve Caesars. Its challenge is more internal than external. That is, by the way, the strangest aspect of this first gospel, and it will be my central focus for understanding Mark’s gospel as parable. IN THIS, MY THIRD point, I focus on that challenge to—and criticism of—the Twelve as leaders of the Christian community. I use that as my chosen focus to understand the entire parable gospel of Mark. But, before we begin, wonder for a moment why Mark is challenging leaders almost all of whom were dead by his time of writing in the early 70s—and many of whom had died as martyrs. Is he actually challenging something past, something present, or something permanent about Christianity? I will have two points in what follows, the first more negative, the second more positive. The negative aspect of Mark’s challenge to the Twelve appears most clearly in the long section 8:22–10:52. It is framed by twin stories about Jesus healing blindness, and both incidents open in similar fashion: “They came to Bethsaida,” and a blind person is healed (8:22–26); “They came to Jericho,” and a blind person is healed (10:46–52). Those healings are, of course, successful, and the second one concludes like this: “Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’ Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way” (10:52). For Mark, that does not simply mean “on the road” (of Galilee), but “on the Way” (of Jesus). So, then, how are the Twelve doing “on the Way”? Within those twin frames of healed blindness Mark inserts three cases of unhealed—or, better, unhealable —blindness. If Jesus successfully heals blind outsiders in 8:22–26 and 10:46–52, he fails disastrously to heal blind insiders—the Twelve—in 8:31–10:45. Notice this triple construction: First Test Second Test Third Test Prophecy by Jesus 8:31–32a 9:31 10:33–34 Reaction by the Twelve 8:32b 9:32–34 10:35–41 Response by Jesus 8:33–9:1 9:35–37 10:42–45 First, as they travel southward “on the way” to Jerusalem, Jesus prophesies his impending death and resurrection three times.
And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.” And an arrogant Roman historian reported, at the start of the second century, that “Christus, the founder of the name [of Christian], had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.” Some of Jesus’ own followers, who had initially fled from the danger and horror of the crucifixion, talked eventually not just of continued affection or spreading superstition but of resurrection. They tried to express what they meant by telling, for example, about the journey to Emmaus undertaken by two Jesus followers, one named and clearly male, one unnamed and probably female. The couple were leaving Jerusalem in disappointed and dejected sorrow. Jesus joined them on the road and, unknown and unrecognized, explained how the Hebrew Scriptures should have prepared them for his fate. Later that evening they invited him to join them for their evening meal, and finally they recognized him when once again he served the meal to them as of old beside the lake. And then, only then, they started back to Jerusalem in high spirits. The symbolism is obvious, as is the metaphoric condensation of the first years of Christian thought and practice into one parabolic afternoon. Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens. Jesus has been interpreted in this book against an earlier moment in Judaism’s encounter with Greco-Roman imperialism. It is not, however, the elite, literary, and sophisticated intellectual encounter of a Philo of Alexandria. It is, rather, the peasant, oral, and popular physical encounter of what might be termed, if adjective and noun are given equal weight, a Jewish Cynicism. Pagan Cynicism involved practice and not just theory, life-style and not just mind-set, in opposition to the cultural heart of Mediterranean civilization—a way of looking and dressing, of eating, living, and relating that announced its contempt for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage. Jesus and his first followers fit very well against that background; they were hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies. Greco-Roman Cynics, however, concentrated primarily on the marketplace rather than the farm, on the city dweller rather than the peasant. And they showed little sense, on the one hand, of collective discipline or, on the other, of communal action. Jesus and his followers do not fit well against that background. And both similarity and difference must be given equal respect. The historical Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic . His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely. But his work was among the houses and hamlets of Lower Galilee.
The preceding complex, Into the Desert , and the present one, Greater Than John , appear sequentially in the Q Gospel but appear separately in Gospel of Thomas 78 and 46. In this case, however, the Gospel of Thomas has no problem with naming John the Baptist. Q Gospel. The twin versions in Matthew 11:11 and Luke 7:28 have no substantive differences between them. Here is the wording in the Q Gospel: I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. (Q Gospel 7:28) It is, of course, one thing to declare John subordinate to Jesus as his divinely appointed precursor. It is quite another to say that the least in the kingdom is greater than John. Supremely high praise, as just seen in Q Gospel 7:24–27, is followed here by supremely high praise in 7:28a and then stern negation in 7:28b. Kloppenborg puts the contradiction like this. On the one hand, in Q Gospel 7:24–27, “John … belongs alongside Jesus as a precursor, not outside the kingdom as the representative of a bygone epoch”; but, on the other hand, Q Gospel 7:28 “emphasizes the greatness of the kingdom by asserting that even the greatest representative of the old order, John, paled in comparison with it…. It relativizes John by relegating his function to an era prior to the kingdom and indeed [possibly] to a realm outside the kingdom” (1987a:109–110). It must be emphasized that this unit is very, very unusual within the Q Gospel . It is not simply a matter of exalting Jesus above John within the kingdom, but of exalting the least one explicitly inside the kingdom over John implicitly outside it. But that negation is now framed in the following sequence of units: 1. Into the Desert: Matt. 11:7–10 Luke 7:24–27 2. Greater Than John: Matt. 11:11 Luke 7:28 3. Kingdom and Violence: Matt. 11:12–13 Luke 16:16 4. Wisdom Justified: Matt. 11:16–19 Luke 7:31–35 The exact location of Kingdom and Violence is somewhat uncertain, but I leave it there for the moment. What is most significant in that sequence of three or four units is its climax in Wisdom Justified . That unit places John and Jesus together, beyond any question of difference or superiority, as twin “children of Wisdom” rejected alike by “this generation.” That is an understanding of John in scant accord with Q Gospel 7:28, and it necessarily casts reflective light back on those preceding units. In summary, therefore, Q Gospel 7:28b within, first, Q Gospel 7:28, within, next, Q Gospel 7:24–35, and within, finally, the Q Gospel itself, could be tolerated because its stern negation was contextually muted. But the presence of Q Gospel 7:28 warns us that the Q Gospel knew a tradition asserting that the baptism movement of John was incompatible with the kingdom movement of Jesus. Gospel of Thomas.
If it was, I term it radical itinerancy rather than simple functional itinerancy —the type associated, for example, with Paul or anyone else on the move for purely practical reasons of mission. At the end of the preceding chapter, I used the term radical egalitarianism to summarize what the Kingdom of God meant for Jesus. I now propose that radical itinerancy was its necessary concomitant, its geographical equivalent, and its symbolic demonstration. Two examples, each associated with one of those twin Mediterranean groups, the familial and the political, kin and associates, confirm that we are indeed dealing with programmatic rather than functional itinerancy in the case of Jesus. We are told in Mark 6:4 that Jesus’ own family did not believe in him, and yet according to Galatians 1:18–19, when Paul arrived in Jerusalem, say around 38 C.E ., he found James the brother of Jesus already there along with Peter. What happened in between? How did James get from disbelief to belief, and from Nazareth to Jerusalem? My proposal is that the family believed quite fully in Jesus’ power and importance, message and mission, but not at all in the way he was carrying it out . What Jesus should have done, as any Mediterranean family knew, was settle down at his home in Nazareth and establish there a healing cult. He would be its patron , the family would be its brokers , and as his reputation went out along the peasant grapevine, the sick would come as clients to be healed. That would have made sense to everyone, would have been good for everyone—for Jesus, for his family, and for little Nazareth itself. But instead Jesus kept to the road, brought healing to those who needed it, and had, as it were, to start off anew every day. That was no way to run a healing ministry and no way to treat your family, especially within the world of Mediterranean values. Of course his family believed in him, but rather in the way he should behave than in the way he was behaving. It is not surprising, therefore, once Jesus was gone, to find James firmly settled and precisely located in Jerusalem. And in charge, at least for those who accepted his authority. My second example is even more explicit and confirms for me the preceding explanation of the change within Jesus’ family from disbelief to belief. This is found in Mark 1:16–38, but it must be used with great care, for it is the only independent source for Jesus’ inaugural day in Capernaum. I doubt very much if this chronicles an actual day in the life of the historical Jesus. But it shows, like the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5:1–20 earlier, that in Jesus’ society people thought this way and that I am not simply retrojecting twentieth-century prejudices back upon them. Jesus calls Peter and others to become his disciples in 1:16–20.
I was really upset and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine and then I called my parents. That case, as the researchers explain, was not unusual: “[N]one of the enduring memories was entirely correct, and … many were at least as wide of the mark…. [T]hose questionnaires revealed a high incidence of substantial errors” (Neisser and Harsch 9, 12). One other student, for example, who later recalled hearing the news from a girl who ran screaming down her dorm corridor, had actually heard it in the cafeteria and been too sick to finish her lunch. Another student later thought she had been at home with her parents when it happened, although she had actually been on campus. When those second versions were compared with the first ones for accuracy and graded on a 0–7 scale for major (location, activity, informant) and minor (time, others) attributes of the event, “the mean was 2.95, out of a possible 7. Eleven subjects (25%) were wrong about everything and scored 0. Twenty-two of them (50%) scored 2 or less; this means that if they were right on one major attribute, they were wrong on both of the others. Only three subjects (7%) achieved the maximum possible score of 7; even in these cases there were minor discrepancies (e.g., about the time of the event) between the recall and the original report. What makes these low scores interesting is the high degree of confidence that accompanied many of them” (18). Confidence in the inaccuracy is surely much more disquieting than the inaccuracy itself, and the visual vividness with which the inaccuracy was recalled was even more disquieting. The mean for accuracy was 2.95 out of 7, as I noted; the mean for confidence was 4.17 out of 5, and the mean for “visual vividness” was 5.35 out of 7! In the instance given above, for example, the subject rated the confidence of her 1988 memory at a 5 (“absolutely certain”) for location, activity, informant, others and at a 4 for time (2:00 or 3:00 P.M. , rather than 11:39 A.M. EST ). Its actual rating was 0 on all counts. In the follow-up interviews after the twin questionnaires had been compared, the researchers made another significant discovery. The subjects’ memories for their second-version accounts remained “remarkably consistent” between October of 1988 and March of 1989, and when the researchers tried to help the subjects recover their first-version accounts, they found that “none of [their] procedures had any effect at all” (Neisser and Harsch 13). Even when subjects were shown their own original reports, they never “even pretended that they now recalled what was stated on the original record. On the contrary, they kept saying, ‘I mean, like I told you, I have no recollection of it at all’ or ‘I still think of it as the other way around.’ As far as we can tell, the original memories are just gone” (21).
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
So it was Adams—fierce, narrow, unbending, ungenerous, intolerant—who had been right. Who then had been wrong? Like Trevelyan, Lecky blamed an insensitive and blundering ministry; but otherwise the breadth of his sympathy seemed limitless. There had been as many heroes and villains on one side of the water, he made clear, as on the other; and if he labored to convince his readers that the victorious Adams contained within his fierce personality the elemental virtues of strength, courage, and an unending devotion to a righteous cause, he declared with equal insistence that the defeated loyalists had had the same virtues, together with perhaps greater vision, and in addition had paid for their convictions with suffering that the triumphant patriots never knew.12 This is a remarkably well-balanced judgment; it marks a great advance in interpretation, and it approaches, within the limitations of the knowledge of the time, a rounded perception of the whole. But its great impact on the developing lines of historical understanding in the United States had less to do with the comprehensiveness of Lecky’s sympathy than with the pessimistic message that could be derived from his stirring account of the loyalists’ superior virtue and vision and their defeat by the likes of Adams. Before the 1880S were out Lecky was being cited again and again by a new group of American writers developing a dark view of the American past that spoke directly to overwhelming problems of their own time and place. For them, Lecky, and through Lecky the loyalists, took on a new and unique importance. The first of these problems was the question of the ethnic character of American society, a question that obsessed American thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. Who were the American people? In the course of the 1880S and 1890s nine million immigrants entered the United States. Of the total population of seventy-six million in 1900, over ten million had been born abroad, and almost half of them had come from central, eastern, and southern Europe—peasants in large part, almost totally ignorant of Anglo-American culture. Were all of these people in more than a technical sense equally American? Some—Jeffersonian humanists—never doubted that they were, since they shared the passion for freedom that had motivated the Founding Fathers. Others, anticipating the positive results of a still-emerging process of ethnic mixing, were equally optimistic. But for yet others, of British ancestry and inherited status if not wealth, the immigrant hordes, the frightful slums they seemed to create, the crudeness, violence, and corruption of a new boss-run political system that seemed to violate every principle of a proper democracy—all of this was a threat and a challenge. It evoked elaborate responses and seemed to demand a rethinking of the past.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Yet in the end Gipson, though a devoted Anglophile, could hardly say that they had been right and the Revolution wrong, nor was he able to formulate the issue in any other terms. It was not possible for him, given his basically institutional explanation of historical development, to penetrate into the mental, psychological, or ideological world of either side. He wrote of events but not of motivations, of what happened but not of why things happened or of what people understood was happening. Despite all the concrete detail of his huge study, the basic forces at work prove to be impersonal and abstract. The cause of the Revolution as it emerges from his volumes has little to do with anyone’s specific decisions or actions. The basic pressure toward what became a revolutionary change came from the development of institutions. The Revolution, as Gipson saw it, was the result chiefly of the desire of the colonies’ lower Houses of Assembly, which in England were still thought of as provincial councils possessed of limited and inferior powers, to gain the autonomy and powers of full legislative bodies. This difference in viewpoint, he believed, was irreconcilable, and when the issue was squarely posed in the 1760s a fundamental conflict was inescapable. Gipson expressed this often in the metaphorical terms of children nourished and fostered by an indulgent and somewhat neglectful parent; they grew to political maturity, and in the vigor of early manhood cast off their dependent state. The interpretation in Gipson’s immense work is woven lightly into a detailed narrative fabric. But though it attains a degree of apparent impartiality by relieving both the loyalists and the ministry of much of the blame that had been heaped on them, it does not explain why some people opposed the Revolution; it does not make clear why any sensible person could have failed to associate himself with the unstoppable march forward of the American public institutions that he described. Gipson’s apparent modernity is deceptive. Born in Colorado and educated in Idaho, he had developed his Anglophilia in the three years he spent in Oxford, 1904–7. By the time of his first publication, 1920, doctoral dissertations on technical aspects of the loyalists’ lives based on fresh archival research were being written. By 1970, when his fifteenth and final volume in the British Empire series was published, the first modern history of the loyalists written by a professional, academic historian had appeared, free of the Anglian sentiment that had inspired Gipson’s labors.29 It would be followed by many other such works, heavily documented, impartial, personally disengaged, associated with large historical themes, but drained of the passions that had once given the subject such profound and controversial relevance. PART TWO Peripheries of the Early British Empire 6 Thomas Hutchinson in Context The Ordeal Revisited
From Come As You Are (2015)
Like this putative correlation between pirates and global temperature, there’s also a correlation between nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction. The correlation makes it easy to think that the nonconcordance is causing the sexual dysfunction, or that the dysfunction is causing the nonconcordance. But just as pirates and global temperature can be linked together by the Industrial Revolution, nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction are linked together by a third variable: context. How does context link sexual functioning and concordance? Sexually functional women have brakes that are sensitive to context, turning off the offs when they’re in the right context—which, remember, means both external circumstances and internal mental state. Sexually dysfunctional women’s brakes stay on, even in contexts where you would expect them to turn off. I’ll illustrate this with an extraordinarily clever study published in 2010. Dutch researchers built an “ambulatory laboratory”—a take-home kit of plethysmograph, laptop computer, and handheld control unit.25 Participants completed tests in the lab similar to other nonconcordance research—viewing erotic stimuli and measuring various automatic and conscious responses—and they took the ambulatory lab home with them and tested themselves there, too. This way researchers could measure how being in the lab influenced the results, compared to being at home. In other words, they measured the effect of context. They studied two groups: eight women with healthy sexual functioning (the control group) and eight women who met the diagnostic criteria for “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (the “low-desire” group). Result: The control group’s genital response and subjective arousal more than doubled when tested at home, compared to in the lab. Plus they reported feeling “less inhibited” and “more at ease” at home. The low-desire group’s genital response also doubled at home… but their subjective arousal did not, nor did they report feeling less inhibited or more at ease. Which is to say, they were less concordant because their brakes didn’t turn off. Just being at home wasn’t enough to turn off the low-desire women’s brakes. The sexually satisfied women were more sensitive than women with low desire to the change in context from the lab to home. To be more specific, recent research has found that sexually healthy women experience more concordance if they have lower sensitivity brakes.26 Whether it’s the external circumstances or internal experience hitting the brakes, context is fundamental to most women’s sexual wellbeing. Context is the crux and the key. Context is the cause. Here’s a thing that happens to me sometimes: A wife drags her husband over to me and says, “Tell him what you told me.” Laurie did that with Johnny at a lunch buffet. “Tell him what you told me. The arousal thing. Tell him, please.” “He didn’t believe you?” “He thinks I ‘must have misunderstood.’ ” So I told him: “Okay, Johnny. I know this is the opposite of everything you’ve ever learned about sex, but it’s true: The state of Laurie’s vagina doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about her state of mind.”
From Come As You Are (2015)
Your brain also has sexual “brakes” that respond to “potential threats”—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain interprets as a good reason not to be turned on right now. These can be anything from STIs and unwanted pregnancy to relationship issues or social reputation. There’s virtually no “innate” sex-related stimulus or threat; our accelerators and brakes learn when to respond through experience. People vary in how sensitive their brakes and accelerator are. Take the little quiz on page 54 to find out how sensitive yours are—and remember that most people score in the medium range, and all scores are normal. threecontextAND THE “ONE RING” (TO RULE THEM ALL) IN YOUR EMOTIONAL BRAINYou’d like Henry if you met him—he’s polite, with a sweet smile and a soft voice, handsome, a little old-fashioned. He stands up when a lady enters the room. Henry is almost as geeky as Camilla, his wife. Their ideal Friday night involves Settlers of Catan, anything by Joss Whedon, or Cards Against Humanity—or possibly all three. And they have a nice sex life, he and Camilla. Henry is pretty much always the initiator, and though he’d certainly enjoy being the object of his wife’s sexual pursuit, he’s an easygoing guy who feels lucky to have a life partner who shares both his sense of humor and his need to have the bathroom kept organized at all times. They’re careful, thoughtful, introverted sweethearts. When they first met—I mean, when they first met in person, which doesn’t include the weeks of online flirting—their eyes met and both of them experienced an instantaneous, “Yes. This is it. You’re it.” But they’re careful, thoughtful people, and they took it slow. They told each other, “I’m not really ready for a relationship. We should just be friends.” And they nodded solemnly at each other. And they became friends. For a year. Gradually, Henry began to court her. He brought flowers… made of Legos. He commissioned her favorite webcomic artist to draw a portrait of her. He wrote RPG scenarios for her. He wore ties. He held her hand. By the time they kissed, they were both in love—though neither had said so. And by the time they first made love, they had committed their lives to each other, and they told each other so over and over, urgent whispers in the dark. Camilla, you’ll remember, is a low SE woman—she represents about 4–8 percent of women whose sensitivity to sex-related stimuli is fairly low.1 And yet on the day she got married, oh, she was sensitive. Five years later… not so much. She told me, “It used to be, I’d be in the kitchen and he’d come up behind me and start kissing my neck and I’d just melt instantly. But now he’ll do the same thing and I’ll just be like, ‘I’m trying make dinner.’ I don’t understand what’s wrong with me now.” “Nothing’s wrong, the context is just different,” I said.
That understanding is called vicarious satisfaction or substitutionary atonement, because the sinless Jesus was punished instead of or in the place of sinful humanity. I first saw The Passion of the Christ during a convention of the Global Pastors Network (GPN) at Calvary Assembly of God Church in downtown Orlando on January 21, 2004, about a month before its public opening. That understanding of the suffering and death of Jesus as vicarious atonement for human sin was already evident in the film’s promotional advertising, especially posters with the line: “Dying Was His Reason for Living.” That was also why the film explicitly focused on the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus and why the resurrection became irrelevant. That theology of Jesus as replacement victim was all about dying and not about either living beforehand or rising afterward. After the screening, Mel Gibson was interviewed onstage by Dr. James O. Davis, one of the founders of the GPN. Mr. Gibson said that Jesus had to bear the punishment for all human sin since the dawn of creation and that, even though Jesus could have atoned for that with one drop of blood from his pricked finger, he chose to accept the fullest measure of suffering due for such cosmic evil. In that theology, God’s “will” certainly included and indeed demanded the execution of Jesus. But when did that theology begin? It is certainly not present in the New Testament itself. Jesus spoke of collaboration, not substitution. When he warned his companions about his fateful journey to Jerusalem, he did not say that he went instead of them. He said: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). That is collaboration, not substitution. Paul, likewise, spoke of participation, not substitution. “In Christ” is his favorite expression, never “by Christ.” Or think of this rhapsodic acclamation: “All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). That, once again, is about our participation with Jesus and not our replacement by Jesus. I repeat my question. When, why, how, and where did that theology of substitution arise? The answer to the “when” part is: not until a thousand years after the time of Jesus. It arose only at the very end of Christianity’s first millennium. But why, how, and where? In April 1098, Otho de Lagery and Anselmo d’Aosta, two of Western Christianity’s most important clerics, met at the Vatican in Rome. They were in their sixties and deeply involved in opposing projects. Both projects would be profoundly important for politics and religion right down to our present day. And both projects would be—each in its own way—profoundly disastrous. Otho de Lagery is better known as Pope Urban II.
From Come As You Are (2015)
And for Gottman and the couples in the research he cites, “desire” has more to do with liking. Holding. Savoring. Allowing. Exploring this moment together, noticing what it is like, and liking it. The Mating in Captivity style of desire is higher adrenaline; it’s inherently exciting. We relish this kind of perpetual itch-scratch-relief-itch cycle. We like to want, so much that we can’t always separate the experience of wanting from the experience of liking. It’s a good fit for the existing narrative that says spontaneous desire is the right way to experience desire. The Science of Trust style of desire is lower adrenaline, more a celebration of sensation in context, a celebration of togetherness. Perel’s style is about hunger as the secret sauce that makes a meal delicious. Gottman’s is about arriving home from work and cooking dinner with your partner, having a glass of wine while you cook, feeding each other all the strawberries you meant to keep for dessert, then sitting down together and savoring every mouthful. In the Perel style, you come to your partner with your fire already stoked. In the Gottman style, you stoke each other’s fire. My personal inclination is more toward Gottman’s style, while my twin sister said, “Why would closeness ever make anyone want more closeness? Space!” I know people who swear by one or the other. I know people who are too exhausted to try either. I know people who are convinced that one is the True Way to desire, even though I think they’d benefit from trying the other. It’s a matter of fit. And I think that in the end, both are strategies for accomplishing the same overall goal: increasing activation of the accelerator and decreasing the brakes. The two approaches are more alike than they sound on the surface, and their similarities are where we find the deepest truth: Both are clear that passion doesn’t happen automatically in a long-term, monogamous relationship. But they’re also both clear that passion does happen—as long as the couple takes deliberate control of the context. For some couples that context feels like creating closeness. For others, it feels like creating space. Following Johnny’s revelation about the dials and switches and what Laurie is sensitive to, they decided to try one of those box subscriptions. Every few months, a box would come in the mail—like a Fruit of the Month thing, only instead of fruit they got kits with a sort of prefabricated sexy fantasy. They both feared it would be kind of cheesy, but they also figured it was worth a try. They were paying attention to context, and even though Johnny’s context was, “Give me two minutes to brush my teeth,” Laurie’s was, “Get me the heck out of mommy mode or I’ll never get to hey-sexy-lady mode.” So the box arrived and they opened it together. Their first impression was… well, disappointment. “That was a lot of money for some arts-and-crafts supplies,” was how Laurie put it.
From Come As You Are (2015)
maximizing yum… with science! part 3: media nutritionExposure to media that reinforces body self-criticism increases body dissatisfaction, negative mood, low self-esteem, and even disordered eating.28 This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by a multiyear study of the impact of Western media—especially television—on young women in Fiji.29 In a culture where there had been “a clear preference for a robust form,”30 after three years of exposure to late 1990s American television (think Melrose Place and Beverly Hills, 90210), rates of disordered eating among teenage girls rose from 13 percent to 29 percent, with 74 percent reporting that they “feel too big or too fat,” in sharp contrast to pre-TV culture. And this wasn’t just a blip—ten years later, rates of disordered eating still hovered around 25–30 percent.31 If there were a food that consistently made you sick, you’d stop eating it. So if there’s media that makes you feel more self-critical, stop looking at it. As you’re looking at movies or television or porn or magazines or social media, ask yourself, “After I see this, am I going to feel better about my body as it is today, or worse?” If the answer is “Better!” then do more of that! Increase your exposure to the media that helps you celebrate your body! But if the answer is “worse,” stop it. You don’t have to get mad and write a letter to the editor or anything (though if you want to, feel free!), just pay attention to how magazines and TV shows and music videos make you feel, and stop buying anything that makes you feel worse. You don’t need to be trained in media literacy and all the ways that you’re being manipulated with digital alteration of images in order to know when something is making you feel better or worse about yourself. And if it makes you feel worse, evidence suggests that it’s interfering with your sexual wellbeing—even if you’ve been taught to believe that feeling worse about your body “motivates” you to “improve” your body. That’s a psychological trap you never need to be caught in again. Stop watering the weeds. By limiting your exposure to media that makes you feel worse about yourself, you’re not just improving your own sex life, you’re also voting with your eyeballs, your ears, and your cash. You’re joining an audience that will pay attention only to things that make women feel better about themselves. Wouldn’t it be amazing to live in a world where performers and artists and media outlets were competing to make the largest number of women feel fantastic about their bodies right now? On behalf of women everywhere, thank you for anything you do to make that real!
The twelve named males and the three named females fail. But the unnamed female and the unnamed male succeed. The issue is not gender, but name. Mark’s parabolic challenge to and within Christianity is an exaltation of leaders who liberate over leaders who dominate, a transcendence of charismatic over institutional leadership, and a hymn for the nameless over the named. That reversed positive and negative are, of course, characteristic of challenge parables. Think, for example, of the “good” priest and Levite who do “wrong,” and the “bad” Samaritan who does “right.” So also in Mark’s challenge gospel. The “good” named ones are counterpointed with the “bad” nameless ones. The challenge is to consider, ponder, meditate on the possibility of reversed status between the named and nameless Christians—before God and with Jesus. WHAT, THEN, MY FOURTH question asks, is the location and situation of Mark’s somewhat startling vision of Christian community. I imagine his gospel written among “the villages of Caesarea Philippi” (8:27) for refugees from the terrible destruction of Judea, Jerusalem, and its Temple in the great war of 66–74 CE . They had lost everything—their lands and possessions, their homes and their loves, their hope and maybe even their faith. In his Jewish War, the historian Josephus claims that false prophecy led Jerusalem’s Jews astray by promising them that the (first) coming of the Messiah would save them from the Roman onslaught (6.312–313). In his gospel, Mark claims that false prophecy led Jerusalem’s Christian Jews astray by promising them that the (second) coming of the Messiah would save them from that same Roman destruction. And, says Mark—with parabolic hindsight and fictional creativity—Jesus had warned against that very delusion: Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come…. And if anyone says to you at that time, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘Look! There he is!’—do not believe it. False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect.” (13:5–7, 21–22) Furthermore, Mark lays full responsibility for that mistaken conflation of the coming of Christ with the coming of Rome on the shoulders of the Twelve, that is, on their misunderstanding of Jesus and on the forty-year tradition that had derived from their incomprehension. He is not, in other words, talking about the Twelve in the 30s with Jesus, but the tradition of the Twelve after Jesus—the tradition that was operative from the late 30s to the 70s, when Mark was writing. You should have understood, says Mark, that Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes for both Jews on the western side of the lake (6:35–43) and for Gentiles on the eastern side (8:1–9).
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Then Mother flies up to help, a sober mother who sees frying chicken and assembling lasagna as a way to mend all the chaos she’d brought in the thirty years prior. All my life, she lived in a state of irritation predicated on either drinking too much or not having drunk enough. Never (is this true?) did I lie in bed and have her cook for me. As a child, when I got measles and chickenpox, she’d announce, I just don’t like sick people, leaving me feverishly staring at the TV’s flickering grown-ups. On this trip, Mother is transformed. She goes with me to the clinic every day, helping me load the baby in the car. Most evenings she brings my dinner steaming from a tray—doughy dumplings in oniony broth, chicken collapsed off its bones, turnip greens with fatback. Afternoons, she lies in bed with me, the baby between us kicking his covers off as I gaze at him. Mary, I believe you’re gonna stare the skin off him, she says. Sober she might be, but she’s still capricious as a cat. After about a week, when I’ve gotten used to counting on her, she disappears one day. I’d run out of diapers, and she’d rushed heroically off to the store. Her first hour away, I figure she got lost. An hour later, I decide she’s had a car wreck. An hour after that, I know she’s dead or stopped at a bar somewhere, so I wrap Dev’s bare ass in a towel held together by duct tape and lug him to the market in a stroller, finding no sign of our car in the lot. Late that afternoon Mother prances in with brochures for tours of Russia and China. She is—miraculously enough—cold sober. But she met a man at a travel agency next to the grocery store, and he took her to lunch and to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum. By then she’s built up enough goodwill during the visit that I let it slide. My therapist later reminds me that, however sober, Mother will forever be a haphazard fetcher of necessary items. Treat her more like a five-year-old, the therapist says, which method starts shaping expectations to the right size. Meanwhile, the catheter that’s been in place for weeks has chafed till there’s blood in the piss bag, fire running through my ripped-up undercarriage. After a full month of daily drives to the clinic, I insist they teach me how to catheterize myself—it’s not rocket science, after all. They send me home with a bottle of betadyne and sterile gauze and a bag of glass catheters. Within a day or two—maybe after a respite from the nonstop irritation of the catheter—I start relieving myself like all the other girls. Which is Mother’s cue to leave. Why? She’s sick of it, no more complicated than that. Right before she takes off, she walks in on me sobbing.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Almost as worrisome is Lecia’s grim focus on a brisket Mother promised to fix. Whenever we drive home, Mother tempts Lecia with some childhood dish—chicken and dumplings, fudge, red beans and rice—but never, not once, follows through. Lecia’s ongoing capacity to hope for these dishes just stumps me. On the road before her, there’s a shimmering mirage of meat shredded in lush gravy with a side of buttery potato hunks. Does she bounce up and down a little in anticipation like a kid on a carousel? I believe she does, though the next instant, her face clouds. It won’t be there, will it? she says, shooting me a look. There’s a newspaper cartoon of a bucket-headed boy repeatedly talked into running at the football held by a wicked pigtailed girl who yanks it away so the boy falls on his ass every time. How many times, Lecia says, am I going to run at that football? Many, it turns out. With scads of costly professional help, I gave up pining for maternal behavior long ago. But Lecia had once hired Mother to pick up her son Case at kindergarten until—a few weeks in—Mother forgot the boy in the parking lot. Given fat sums to answer Lecia’s insurance office phones, Mother tended to snipe into the receiver What? The way Stalin trusted Hitler not to invade Russia, Lecia trusts Mother. In a way, I admire the simple persistence of both parties—Lecia’s overfunctioning, Mother’s under. On any given holiday, Mother sits on her spreading white ass on either porch glider or couch. Which idleness—in some perverse way—I also envy. It takes fortitude to station yourself immobile before the classic-movie channel for days at a pop while hordes of individuals bake and whip, sauté and sear; serve and clear; and eventually scrub cheese crusts off casseroles and pan drippings from a blackened oven. For weeks I’ve hounded Mother daily about brisket, and she’s sworn to ante up. But yesterday her corns hurt, and as late as dawn this morning, the meat hadn’t been bought. She was having palpitations, but I swore if the stove was cold when we walked in, I’d head back to the airport. It could kill me to go to the store with my heart fluttering this way, she said. If you drop dead making this brisket, I said, you’ll go straight up to live with Baby Jesus. I’m thinking of going back to being a Buddhist, she said. Then you’ll escape the wheel of rebirth, I said. Minutes after we pull in, my sister’s face floats cherublike above an electric skillet holding a mess of peppery brisket. She uses her hand to wave toward her nose the white ribbons of steam swiveling up. Mother breathes frost on her big square glasses, then wipes them. She looks stunned we’re making such a big deal. Oh, she says with a distracted look, I forgot to get the blow-up mattress.
From Come As You Are (2015)
A couple years ago, I talked to a young woman who had learned most of what she knew—or rather, what she thought she knew—about sex by watching porn. She was genuinely surprised when nothing in her first sexual encounters happened the way she expected. She thought orgasms would come easily and often. She thought direct clitoral stimulation would always make her see stars. She thought wrong. But she kept trying to make her experience match the map. She kept behaving the way people in the videos behave, assuring herself that because she was doing what she was supposed to be doing, the feeling she was having must be pleasure. It was months before the dissonance between what she expected to experience and what she was actually experiencing became clear to her. That’s when she came to me, convinced that she must be broken. When I told her that women are more likely to have orgasms later in a relationship than the first time they have sex with a new partner, she truly didn’t believe me, so convinced was she that the map was right and the terrain—her body—was wrong. I also told her that pleasure is context dependent, so that even clitoral stimulation doesn’t feel good unless it’s in the right context. “Like tickling,” I said. “If it doesn’t feel good, that just means you haven’t got the right context yet. When clitoral stimulation doesn’t feel good it’s not because your clitoris doesn’t work, it’s usually because you’re not turned on enough yet.” The first step toward joy is recognizing a mismatch between the map and the terrain, with the knowledge that the terrain is always right. Olivia is One Big Yes when it comes to sex, which has the potential to create profound ecstasy… or profound self-doubt and anxiety, not to mention the chasing dynamic. And it all depends on how she feels about her capacity for Yes. Way back at the beginning of the first chapter, Olivia found out that her “map” wasn’t true—the story she told herself about wanting sex because of her hormones was a metaphorization that shielded her against the cultural messages that would tell her she’s a bully. But she drew a new map—grounded in the science and in nonjudgmental attention to her own internal experience. She realized that her sensitive accelerator could team up with her little monitor to create that out-of-control feeling, and they could also team up to create joyful pleasure. She got the out-of-control feeling when she allowed the spiral of stress/self-criticism/stress to escalate. She got the joyful pleasure when she learned to deescalate by allowing the stress to run its course, without hitting either the brakes or the accelerator. “Slow down. Stay still.” That’s Olivia’s advice for all higher-desire partners. “Don’t chase, don’t push or pull. Be like the person with the broom on a curling team. Clear the path to sex.”
From Come As You Are (2015)
We’ll start with the idea that your experience or perception of all kinds of sensations varies, depending on a number of factors, including external circumstances, mood, trust, and life history. Then we’ll get deep into the nitty-gritty of why this is true and unchangeable: When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat. And then I’ll show you the specific brain mechanism that governs this whole process. Understanding this mechanism—I call it your emotional “One Ring”—is central to figuring out how context affects your sexual responsiveness. I want to warn you ahead of time: This is the nerdiest, scienciest chapter in the book. Dust off your thinking cap. It’s worth it. The payoff is that anytime you hear someone complain, “Women are so complicated— yesterday she liked one thing, today she wants something completely different,” or wonder, “Why don’t I respond the way I used to?” you’ll be able to say, “Context! What you want and like changes based on your external circumstances and your internal state.” This chapter tells you how to crack the code and make sense of it all. Laurie’s dissatisfaction with her sex life wasn’t a result of a challenging accelerator and brakes; it was a result of a challenging context. But she didn’t like my suggestion that she just let herself not want sex for a while. To her, that felt like giving up. She wanted to want sex, and, darn it all, she was going to try. So she thought about times in the past when she had pleasurable sex and remembered a particularly excellent pre-baby anniversary vacation at a fancy hotel in the mountains. “Aha! Context!” she thought, and she and Johnny made a reservation and planned a trip to recapture the passion. The plan failed utterly. The drive was long and exhausting, they argued on the way there, and by the time they finished dinner, the pressure of expectation was totally overwhelming. Laurie felt herself shut down, and she just said no, no to everything. She took a hot bath, had a glass of wine, and went to sleep. Johnny watched a movie. And then in the morning, she felt too guilty about the previous night to try again. So one afternoon soon after that, Laurie and Johnny sat down and tried to figure out what had worked on that first trip that was missing the second time. Well, their whole lives were different now: They were parents, she had a frustrating job, she was a student… They had replicated the external circumstances but not the context. “Great, so all you have to do is quit your job, quit school, and sell Trevor to the circus. Problem solved,” Johnny teased. More constructively, he said, “Maybe we’re thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe it’s about what it feels like, rather than where we are or what we’re doing. When you think about the great sex we had on that anniversary, what did it feel like?”
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
What’s your dream for your life? The very concept makes me sag. I tap a smoke on the hard pack and light it. Why’s that such a foreign question? she wants to know. Poets are dreamers, right? I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been about survival, just getting through, standing it. Don’t you see how savage that sounds? Like, that’s the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature. Composition mostly, I say (Lord, was I dead then to my blessings, a self-pitying wretch if ever one was). We’re the poorest in the neighborhood.... From what you tell me about how you grew up, the husband, baby, book, job were your dreams. Staying sober, I say. I’d really like to patch things up with Warren, make a good home for my son. If I could write again, whether anybody liked it or not, I’d feel like I was reentering a conversation with the gods I worshipped all my life. She looks at me and says, Nothing else? That’s it? My innards are roiling. The smoke in my mouth tastes like creosote, so I flick its small sparks away. Money, I say. I’d like some more money. It sounds shallow, but hell. I kind of have an idea about a book I’d like to write, about when I was a kid and my mom went crazy and my family came apart.