Grief

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 Wild (2012)

  I was a horny old bastard too, I thought, while Stevie Ray the dog licked my knee methodically and the other Stevie Ray launched into a smoking rendition of “Pride and Joy.” The place on my leg where Spider had touched me seemed to pulse. I wished he’d do it again, though I knew that was ludicrous. A laminated card with a cross on it dangled from the stem of the rearview mirror, alongside a faded Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener, and when it spun around I saw that on the other side there was a photograph of a little boy. “Is that your son?” I asked Lou when the song ended, pointing to the mirror. “That’s my little Luke,” she said, reaching to tap it. “Is he going to be in the wedding?” I asked, but she made no reply. She only turned the music down low and I knew instantly that I’d said the wrong thing. “He died five years ago, when he was eight,” said Lou, a few moments later. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “He was riding his bike and he was hit by a truck,” she said plainly. “He wasn’t killed right away. He held on for a week in the hospital. None of the doctors could believe it, that he didn’t die instantly.” “He was a tough little motherfucker,” said Spider. “He sure was,” said Lou. “Just like his mom,” Dave said, grabbing Lou’s knee. “I’m so very sorry,” I said again. “I know you are,” said Lou before she turned the music up loud. We drove without talking, listening to Vaughan’s electric guitar wail its way through “Texas Flood,” my heart clenching at the sound of it. A few minutes later Lou shouted, “Here’s your junction.” She pulled over and shut the engine off and looked at Dave. “Why don’t you boys take Stevie Ray for a leak?” They all got out with me and stood around lighting up cigarettes while I pulled my pack out of the trunk. Dave and Spider led Stevie Ray into the trees by the side of the road and Lou and I stood in a patch of shade near the car while I buckled Monster on. She asked me if I had kids, how old I was, if I was married or ever had been. No, twenty-six, no, yes, I told her. She said, “You’re pretty, so you’ll be okay whatever you do. Me, people always just gotta go on the fact that I’m good-hearted. I never did have the looks.” “That’s not true,” I said. “I think you’re pretty.” “You do?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said, though pretty wasn’t precisely how I would have described her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was back before Kitty had even stirred; and when she woke I didn’t mention it.I didn’t tell her about Alice’s reply, either. This came a few days later - came while Kitty and I were at breakfast, and had to stay unopened in my pocket until I could make time to be alone and read it. It was, I saw at once, very neat; and knowing Alice to be no great penwoman, I guessed that this must be the last of several versions.It was also, unlike my letter, very short - so short that, to my great dismay and all unwillingly, I find that I remember it, even now, in its entirety.‘Dear Nancy,’ it began.‘Your letter was both a shock to me and no surprise at all, for I have been expecting to receive something very like it from you, since the day you left us. When I first read it I did not now whether to weep or throw the paper away from me in temper. In the end I burned the thing, and only hope you will have sense enough to burn this one, likewise.‘You ask me to be happy on your behalf. Nance, you must know that I have always only ever had your happiness at my heart, more nearly even than my own. But you must know too that I can never be happy while your friendship with that woman is so wrong and queer. I can never like what you have told me. You think you are happy, but you are only misled - and that woman, your friend “so-called”, is to blame for it.‘I only wish that you had never met her nor ever gone away, but only stayed in Whitstable where you belong, and with those who love you properly.‘Let me just say at the last what you must I hope know. Father, Mother and Davy know nothing of this, and won’t from my lips, since I would rather die of shame than tell them. You must never speak of it to them, unless you want to finish the job you started when you first left us, and break their hearts completely and for ever.‘Don’t burden me, I ask you, with no more shameful secrets. But look to yourself and the path that you are treading, and ask yourself if it is really Right.‘Alice.’She must have kept her word about not telling our parents, for their letters to me continued as before - still cautious, still rather fretful, but still kind. But now I got even less pleasure from them; only kept thinking, What would they write, if they knew? How kind would they be then? My replies, in consequence, grew shorter and rarer than ever.As for Alice: after that one brief, bitter epistle, she never wrote to me at all. Chapter 6 [image "008" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_008_r1.jpg] The months, that year, seemed to slide by very swiftly; for, of course, we were busier now than ever.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  When my big book on the resurrection came out, he read it, all 700 pages, in three days, commenting that he had really started to enjoy it after about page 600. Presumably, with the end in sight, he was starting to experience hope as well as reading about it. Particularly with my popular writings, I now realize that he was always part of the “target audience” of which I was subconsciously aware. Writing a book like this feels different now that he’s not there to read it. In any case, though I hope he learned a few things from me, this book—particularly its concluding chapter—hints at some of the many things I learned from him. As I grieve his passing, I dedicate this book to his memory with gratitude, love, and, yes, hope. N. T. Wright St. Mary’s College St. Andrews Ascensiontide 2011 1 Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); The Challenge of Jesus (London: SPCK; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000). 2 The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). Chapter 2 The Three Puzzles J ESUS OF NAZARETH, then, stands out in the middle of history. Tens of millions call him “Lord” and do their best to follow him. Countless others, including some who try to ignore him, find that he pops up all over the place—a line in a song, an image in a movie, a cross on a distant skyline. Most of the world has adopted a dating system based, supposedly, on his birth (it’s a few years off, but near enough). Jesus is unavoidable. But Jesus is also deeply mysterious. This isn’t just because, like any figure of ancient history, we don’t know as much about him as we might like. (In fact, we know more about him than we do about most other people from the ancient world; but even some who wrote about him at the time admitted that they were only scratching the surface.) Jesus is mysterious because what we do know—what our evidence encourages us to see as the core of who he was and what he did—is so unlike what we know about anybody else that we are forced to ask, as people evidently did at the time: who, then, is this? Who does he think he is, and who is he in fact? Again, people who listened to him at the time said things like, “We’ve never heard anyone talking like this,” and they didn’t just mean his tone of voice or his skillful public speaking. Jesus puzzled people then, and he puzzles us still. There are three reasons for this. The first reason for our being puzzled is that, for most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I don’t mean just the Middle East, a major international trouble spot then as now. I mean that people in his day and in his country thought differently. They looked at the world differently.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He never finished a show without calling into a public-house on his way home; and on the night of our party he had been drinking at Fulham. Here, all hidden in a corner stall, he had overheard a fellow at the bar say that Gully Sutherland was past his best, and should make way for funnier artistes; that he had sat through Gully’s latest routine, and all the gags were flat ones. The bar-man said that when Gully heard this he went to the man and shook him by the hand, and bought him a beer, then he bought beer for everyone. Then he went home and took a gun, and fired it at his own heart ...We didn’t know all of this that night at Marylebone, we knew only that Gully had had a kind of fit, and taken his life; but the news put an end to our party and left us all, like Esther, nervous and grave. Kitty and I, on hearing the news, went up to the stage - she seizing my hand as we stumbled up the steps, but in grief now, I thought, rather than anything warmer. The manager had had all the house-lights lit, and the band had lain their instruments aside; some people were weeping, the cornet-player who had tickled me had his arm about a trembling girl. Esther cried, ‘Oh isn’t it awful, isn’t it horrible?’ - I suppose the wine made everybody feel the shock of it the more.I, however, did not know what to make of it. I couldn’t think of Gully at all: my thoughts were still with Kitty, and with that moment in the change-room, when I had felt her hand on me and seemed to feel a kind of understanding leap between us. She hadn’t looked at me since then, and now she had gone to talk to one of the boys who had brought the news of Gully’s suicide. After a moment, however, I saw her shake her head and step away, and seem to search for me; and when she saw me - waiting for her, in the shadows of the wing - she came and sighed. ‘Poor Gully. They say his heart was shot right through...’‘And to think,’ I said, ‘it was for Gully’s sake that I first went to Canterbury and saw you ...’She looked at me, then, and trembled; and put a hand to her cheek, as if made weak with sorrow. But I dared not move to comfort her - only stood, miserable and unsure.When I said that we should go - since other people were now leaving - she nodded.

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

  One of the most difficult things about returning to the family home was that at every turn I kept meeting my former self—the undamaged, seventeen-year-old Karen, who had been vital and full of hope. In my bedroom, I remembered how I had sat in this very chair and lain on that very bed, full of excitement about the great adventure I was about to begin. When I took down a book from my shelves, I remembered my wonder and delight when I had first read this novel or come across that poem. There were boxes of letters and postcards from friends, full of affection and an easy intimacy that I could no longer imagine. That person had gone; she had indeed died under the funeral pall. I felt bereaved—full of grief as though for a dead friend. This, I knew, was entirely my own fault. My superiors had not intended this to happen to me; they had not meant to push me into this limbo. I had not responded properly to the training. I had been too feeble to go all the way, to let myself truly die. I had kept on hankering for love and affection, and wept because I was too weak to endure these robust austerities. I had attempted something that was beyond my capacities, and been injured by my presumption—like a little girl who, in her impatience to become a ballerina, insists on going en pointe too early, before her feet are properly mature, and hobbles herself forever. Love was beyond me; even friendship was difficult. But at least I had my work. I knew that I was good at academic study. Despite the upheaval of leaving the religious life, I had done very well at Oxford so far and was expected to get a first-class degree. With that under my belt, I could become an academic, engaged in full-time study and teaching the subject I loved. So I returned to Oxford for the summer full of renewed determination to do even better and make this prospect a reality. If I had lost one cloister, I could immure myself in my studies and find another.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Back online, computer games of all sorts continued to break new technological ground. Fifteen years after MUD1 went live, there were hundreds of such games, with many variant technologies, populated by thousands of users. These worlds were still difficult to use and virtually unknown outside of hard-core computing circles, but that was starting to change. In 1993, Julian Dibbell, a journalist at New York’s Village Voice, published an essay about an incident that happened in one of these worlds, a popular online hangout known as LambdaMOO. (A MOO is a MUD variant. The acronym stands for “MUD, Object Oriented,” which describes in computer terms the way in-game elements are handled by the central server.) LambdaMOO was a rich and active community of experienced MUDders—a mature and sophisticated virtual society. It was the kind of MUD that did not involve battling monsters; it was a “What do you do here?” kind of place. As such, LambdaMOO’s society tended to be dominated by players who were au fait both with the technology and with netsex. It was a vibrant place, though it was virtually unknown beyond its own community. It was only when something terrible happened there that the outside world took notice. Dibbell’s essay, “A Rape In Cyberspace,” was, for many people, the introduction both to virtual worlds and virtual sex. It was not a pleasant introduction. Dibbell chronicles the story of a LambdaMOO resident who worked out how to hack the game’s code in a way that allowed him to attribute actions to other characters within the game. He then proceeded to act out rape fantasies using members of this online community as pawns. He caused lines of text to appear on people’s screens like “Moondreamer jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy.” It’s unpleasant enough out of context, but probably just enough to classify the writer as a jackass rather than a psychopath. But for the Pennsylvania woman whose online persona was Moondreamer, and for the many other highly developed player/avatar pairs who were victims and witnesses of such attacks, the effect was profound. Dibbell recounts how one victim had “posttraumatic tears” streaming down her face. He describes a violation far different from merely accidentally reading an offensive passage of text, or even from experiencing a game like Custer’s Revenge. Novelists sometimes talk about how their characters become so real that they weep when their creations face death, hardship or tragedy. MUDders spent years developing and crafting their online personas, giving them such complexity, nuance and humanity that they became as close to real as any fiction could possibly get. The bond between player and avatar goes beyond that of novelist and character. Whatever similarities or differences there are between creator and creation, the avatar on some level is the player, or at least is an extension thereof. It’s what makes netsex so different from other forms of erotica, and it’s what makes virtual sexual violence unlike any other depiction or description.

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

  The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. We have seen too much religious certainty recently. Maybe this is a time for honest, searching doubt, repentance, and a yearning for holiness in a world that has lost its bearings. The best theologians and teachers have never been afraid to admit that in the last resort, there may be Nothing out there. That is why they spoke of a God who in some sense did not exist. It is why the Buddha refused to comment on the metaphysical status of a Buddha after death, and why Confucius would not speak of the Tao. What is vital to all of the traditions, however, is that we have a duty to make the best of the only thing that remains to us— ourselves. Our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies. September 11 changed my life once again. Suddenly my subject had acquired a terrible new relevance. I wish with all my heart that it had not happened in this way. I have spent most of the months since that fearful day in the United States trying to share my understanding of Islam and fundamentalism. I have spoken to senators and congressmen, to members of the State Department, and at the United Nations. I see this as a form of ministry. The September apocalypse was a revelation—an “unveiling” of a reality that had been there all the time but which we had not seen clearly enough before: we live in one world. What happens in Gaza or Afghanistan today will have repercussions in New York or London tomorrow. We in the First World cannot continue to isolate ourselves in our wealth and good fortune. If we do that, those who feel dispossessed or excluded will come to us, in a terrible form.

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

  But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings. Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen. I felt as though I had been plugged in, like an electrical appliance, and suddenly come to life. To paraphrase my friend Saint Paul, instead of experiencing reality as through a glass darkly, I could now see it face-to-face. This meant that nothing now interposed itself between the material I was studying and my emotional and intellectual reflexes. It was also true that, working as I was in Israel, I was out of my usual environment, and could no longer operate on automatic pilot. Removed from the reflexive skepticism of Channel 4, I could not simply dismiss the Crusaders as “bonkers.”

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

  Instead of reaching out to the Jews in their midst, instead of trying to learn from Islam (a far more advanced civilization than their own), the Crusaders had been unable to govern their fears and resentment. They had killed, maimed, burned, desecrated, and destroyed what they were psychologically incapable of understanding. And in doing so, they had vitiated their own integrity and their own moral vision. Auschwitz showed where such calculated hatred could lead, but I realized that as long as Western people continued to accept the old distorted portrait of Islam, they would simply compound the original error. Perhaps this series could show the viewers that Islam was not the demon that haunted their imaginations, and that Muslims could be as flawed, imperfect, courageous, and idealistic as their own heroes. If we could achieve this, we would do something important. But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings.

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

  His sojourn there was embittered by the ravages of the pestilence in Strassburg, which carried away his beloved deacon, Claude Féray (Feraeus), his friends Bedrotus and Capito, one of his boarders, Louis de Richebourg (Claude’s pupil), and the sons of Oecolampadius, Zwingli, and Hedio. He was thrown into a state of extreme anxiety and depression, which he revealed to Farel in a melancholy letter of March 29, 1541.544 "My dear friend Claude, whom I singularly esteemed," he writes, "has been carried off by the plague. Louis (de Richebourg) followed three days afterwards. My house was in a state of sad desolation. My brother (Antoine) had gone with Charles (de Richebourg) to a neighboring village; my wife had betaken herself to my brother’s; and the youngest of Claude’s scholars [probably Malherbe of Normandy] is lying sick in bed. To the bitterness of grief there was added a very anxious concern for those who survived. Day and night my wife is constantly present to my thoughts, in need of advice, seeing that she is deprived of her husband.545 ... These events have produced in me so much sadness that it seems as if they would utterly upset the mind and depress the spirit. You cannot believe the grief which consumes me on account of the death of my dear friend Claude." Then he pays a touching tribute to Féray, who had lived in his house and stuck closer to him than a brother. But the most precious fruit of this sore affliction is his letter of comfort to the distressed father of Louis de Richebourg, which we shall quote in another connection.546 § 90. Calvin and Melanchthon. The correspondence between Calvin (14 letters) and Melanchthon (8 letters), and several letters of Calvin to Farel from Strassburg and Regensburg. Henry, Vol. I. chs. XII. and XVII,—Stähelin, I. 237–254.—Merle D’Aubigné, bk. XI. ch. XIX. (vol. VII. 18–22, in Cates’ translation). One of the important advantages which his sojourn at Strassburg brought to Calvin and to the evangelical Church was his friendship with Melanchthon. It has a typical significance for the relationship of the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions, and therefore deserves special consideration. They became first acquainted by correspondence through Bucer in October, 1538. Melanchthon brought Calvin at once into a friendly contact with Luther, who read with great pleasure Calvin’s answer to Sadolet (perhaps also his Institutes), and sent his salutations to him at Strassburg.547

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

  By severe oppression under Trajan and Hadrian, the prohibition of circumcision, and the desecration of Jerusalem by the idolatry of the pagans, the Jews were provoked to a new and powerful insurrection (A.D. 132–135). A pseudo-Messiah, Bar-Cochba (son of the stars, Num. 24:17), afterwards called Bar-Cosiba (son of falsehood), put himself at the head of the rebels, and caused all the Christians who would not join him to be most cruelly murdered. But the false prophet was defeated by Hadrian’s general in 135, more than half a million of Jews were slaughtered after a desperate resistance, immense numbers sold into slavery, 985 villages and 50 fortresses levelled to the ground, nearly all Palestine laid waste, Jerusalem again destroyed, and a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, erected on its ruins, with an image of Jupiter and a temple of Venus. The coins of Aelia Capitolina bear the images of Jupiter Capitolinus, Bacchus, Serapis, Astarte. Thus the native soil of the venerable religion of the Old Testament was ploughed up, and idolatry planted on it. The Jews were forbidden to visit the holy spot of their former metropolis upon pain of death.18 Only on the anniversary of the destruction were they allowed to behold and bewail it from a distance. The prohibition was continued under Christian emperors to their disgrace. Julian the Apostate, from hatred of the Christians, allowed and encouraged them to rebuild the temple, but in vain. Jerome, who spent the rest of his life in monastic retirement at Bethlehem (d. 419), informs us in pathetic words that in his day old Jewish men and women, "in corporibus et in habitu suo iram a Domini demonstrantes," had to buy from the Roman watch the privilege of weeping and lamenting over the ruins from mount Olivet in sight of the cross, "ut qui quondam emerant sanguinem Christi, emant lacrymas suas, et ne fletus quidem i eis gratuitus sit."19 The same sad privilege the Jews now enjoy under Turkish rule, not only once a year, but every Friday beneath the very walls of the Temple, now replaced by the Mosque of Omar.20 The Talmud.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They walked together, and the world smiled to see it! They embraced on the street, and strangers were glad! While all the time I lived pale as a worm, cast out from pleasure, from comfort and ease.I rose from the bath, all heedless of the spilling water, and took up the photograph again; but this time I crushed it. I gave a cry, I paced the floor: but it was not with wretchedness that I paced, it was as if to try out new limbs, to feel my whole self shift and snap and tingle with life. I hauled open the window of my room, and leaned out into the dark - into the never-quite-dark of the London night, with its sounds and its scents that, for so long, I had been shut from. I thought, I will go out into the world again; I will go back into the city - they have kept me from it long enough!But oh! how terrible it was, making my way into the streets next morning - how busy I found them, how dirty and crowded and dazzling and loud! I had lived for a year and a half in London, and called it my own. But when I walked in it before, it was with Kitty or Walter; often, indeed, we had not walked at all, but taken carriages and cabs. Now, for all that I had borrowed a hat and a jacket of Mary’s to make me seemly, I felt as though I might as well be stumbling through Clerkenwell in no clothes at all. Part of it was my nervous fear that I would turn a corner and see a face I knew, a face to remind me of my old life, or - worst of all - Kitty’s face, tilted and smiling as she walked on Walter’s arm. This fear made me falter and flinch, and so I was jostled worse than ever, and had curses thrown at me. The curses seemed as sharp as nettle-stings, and set me trembling.Then again, I was stared at and called after - and twice or thrice seized and stroked and pinched - by men. This, too, had not happened in my old life; perhaps, indeed, if I had had a baby or a bundle on me now, and was walking purposefully or with my gaze fixed low, they might have let me pass untroubled. But, as I have said, I walked fitfully, blinking at the traffic about me; and such a girl, I suppose, is a kind of invitation to sport and dalliance ...The stares and the strokings affected me like the curses: they made me shake. I returned to Mrs Best’s and turned the key in my door; then I lay upon my rancid mattress and shivered and wept. I had thought myself brilliant with new life and promise, but the streets that I thought would welcome me had only cast me back into my former misery.

• From Bold Move

  So, I taught this trick to Filomena and Ted, and they were able to implement it successfully. Unfortunately, by the time we started to implement the opposite action plan for Filomena, her relationship with Ted was already fraying and, before long, Ted broke up with her. Filomena mentioned to me that she felt as if the damage to the relationship had been done and no matter how much she tried, Ted still felt wary around her. Filomena was devastated at first, often crying in my office and saying things like, “If I had just known this stuff earlier, I could have saved the relationship.” We talked a lot about the fact that our brains always want to make sense of things and come up with one conclusion or another to minimize dissonance, so it made sense that she wanted to blame herself. And she wasn’t wrong: I agreed with her that not knowing her avoidance pattern certainly made the relationship challenging. Yet I often remind my clients who find themselves in the midst of romantic turmoil that it really takes two to tango, and in this case, Ted inevitably had a role in the breakup as well. Filomena continued to work on opposite action when her fear of abandonment would arrive, including with her parents. And so it was with some delight that I recently received an email from Filomena, in which she wrote that she is now happily married with a newborn. From what she shared with me, her dating life was challenging for a while, but she was finally able to break her own avoidance pattern and came out the other side truly happy and (finally) comfortable in a romantic relationship. Oliver’s Opposite Action PlanAs for fiery Oliver, most of his reactions were triggered by feelings of anger, and he would go from zero to sixty in seconds before exploding. When it comes to anger, DBT teaches a clear plan of opposite action involving a few different methods. One method is the simplest: you can just avoid the person you are angry with until the anger passes. In other words, as soon as Oliver felt anger toward Martha for making a mistake at work, his opposite action would be to stay away from her—instead of engaging in a pointless and hurtful verbal attack—until he was no longer in amygdala hijack. Sometimes this is too hard for the client, and instead they could take a time-out, where they substitute “go shriek at so-and-so” with “take a walk around the block.” Whatever it is, I would recommend that you have a plan in place before you find yourself on the brink of exploding into anger.

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

  Pain: complaint, suffering, sorrow David starts by expressing his pain and feelings of abandonment: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. verses 1–2 You might recognize that first line. Jesus quoted it on the cross. Actually, much of this psalm parallels Jesus’ suffering on the cross, and all four gospels refer back to it when describing His crucifixion. Both David and Jesus expressed their pain honestly. They didn’t try to put on some spiritual mask, pretending things were okay. They cried out. They expressed their emotions. The best prayers are real prayers. They aren’t eloquent, but they are heartfelt. They aren’t polished, but they are transparent. They aren’t theological masterpieces, but they touch the heart of God. Dear God, like, really? Dear God, are you serious? Dear God, where in the world are you? Dear God, I’m done. I’m at the end of my rope. God isn’t scandalized by that level of honesty. He won’t get His feelings hurt over it. That is exactly how the psalmist prayed, time after time. God already knows our hearts, so why not be transparent with Him? We can tell Him that we feel alone, betrayed, abandoned, afraid, angry, disappointed, confused, or hurt. Maybe you’ve been told that is disrespectful, but God calls it honest. 2. Processing: struggling with the contradictions David doesn’t stay in that dark place, though. He processes his feelings by turning to God. He starts by saying this: Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises. In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. verses 3–5 What is David doing? He is remembering God’s works in the past. He is reminding himself that God has always been faithful, and He won’t stop now. Part of processing our pain is to ground our present circumstances in the bigger picture. Pain has a way of shouting so urgently that we think the entire sky is falling. But maybe it’s just a small piece of it. Or an acorn. The only way to know is to spend some time reflecting on who God is, what He has done for us, how great He is, and where we fit in His plan. After that moment of light, though, things grow dark again. David poetically laments how powerless he feels. It’s like the clouds of doubt cleared for a moment, then closed in on him again.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  THE CONCEPTION OF GOD l8l tion that all who aresaved at all will enjoy an equal bliss. Purgatory was a great balancer and equalizer.) Finally, Christianity has taught that God allots suffering with wise and loving intent, tempering it according to our strength, relieving it in response to our prayer, and using it to chasten our pride, towin us from earthliness to himself, and to prepare us for heaven. This interpretation does notassert the justice of every suffering, taken by itself, but doesmaintainits loving intention. All these are powerful and comforting considerations. But they areshaken by the bulk of the unjust suffering in sight of the modern mind. These Christian ideas are largely true as long as welook at a normal village com- munity and its individuals and families. But they are jarred by mass disasters. The optimism of the age of rationalism wasshaken by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, when 30,000 people were killed together, just and unjust. TheWar has deeply affected the religious assurance of our own time, and will lessen itstill more when the ex- citement is over and theaftermath of innocent suffering becomes clear. But that impression of undeserved mass misery which the war has brought home tothe thought- less, has long been weighing on allwho understood the socialconditions ofour civilization. The sufferings of a single righteous mancould deeply move the psalmists or the poet of Job. To-day entire social classes sit inthe ashes and challenge the justice of the God who has af- flictedthem by fathering the present social system. The moral and religious problem of suffering has entered on a new stage with the awakening of the social conscious- ness and the spread of social knowledge.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I said all the things I had to say, we both fell onto the floor and sobbed. The next day, Paul moved out. Slowly we told our friends that we were splitting up. We hoped we could work it out, we said. We were not necessarily going to get divorced. First, they were in disbelief—we’d seemed so happy, they all said. Next, they were mad—not at us, but at me. One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me. Another made out with Paul. When I was hurt and jealous about this, I was told by another friend that this was exactly what I deserved: a taste of my own medicine. I couldn’t rightfully disagree, but still my heart was broken. I lay alone on our futon feeling myself almost levitate from pain. Three months into our separation, we were still in a torturous limbo. I wanted neither to get back together with Paul nor to get divorced. I wanted to be two people so I could do both. Paul was dating a smattering of women, but I was suddenly celibate. Now that I’d smashed up my marriage over sex, sex was the furthest thing from my mind. “You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one of our late-night heartbreak conversations. “Come visit me in Portland,” she said. Within the week, I quit my waitressing job, loaded up my truck, and drove west, traveling the same route I’d take exactly one year later on my way to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. By the time I reached Montana, I knew I’d done the right thing—the wide green land visible for miles outside my windshield, the sky going on even farther. The city of Portland flickered beyond, out of sight. It would be my luscious escape, if only for a brief time. There, I’d leave my troubles behind, I thought. Instead, I only found more.

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

  never give the whole picture. They come and go, they rise and fall, they make a lot of noise and then fade into the background. There is a reason the book of Psalms is so emotionally charged. It’s an ancient record of the heartfelt cries of people just like us. They turned their pain and anxiety into prayers, poetry, and songs. Their words resonate with us today, across the barriers of language, culture, and time, because their experiences are intensely human. They are our experiences too. Many of the psalms were written by David, a famous warrior, king, and musician in the Bible. One time, before David was king, he was living with a band of several hundred followers in the wilderness. While he and his men were away from the camp, marauders swooped in, kidnapped their families, and stole their livestock and goods. When David and his men returned, they were shattered. The Bible says, “David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep” (1 Samuel 30:4). It gets worse. David’s men were so upset that, in their grief, they turned on David. Verse 6 says, “David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him; each one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters.” Then we immediately read this amazing phrase: “But David found strength in the LORD his God.” David turned to prayer. Along with a priest named Abiathar, David asked God if he should go after the enemy army. God replied: “Pursue them. . . . You will certainly overtake them and succeed in the rescue” (verse 8). That was all David needed. He returned to the crowd of devastated, angry men and told them the plan: They were going to get their families back. And they did. They recovered every last family member and all the livestock and goods that had been stolen. How did David go from being “greatly distressed” to leading a daring rescue operation? Prayer.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Can I ride my horse?” my mother asked the real doctor. She sat with her hands folded tightly together and her ankles hooked one to the other. Shackled to herself. In reply, he took a pencil, stood it upright on the edge of the sink, and tapped it hard on the surface. “This is your spine after radiation,” he said. “One jolt and your bones could crumble like a dry cracker.” We went to the women’s restroom. Each of us locked in separate stalls, weeping. We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two. I could feel my mother’s weight leaning against the door, her hands slapping slowly against it, causing the entire frame of the bathroom stalls to shake. Later we came out to wash our hands and faces, watching each other in the bright mirror. We were sent to the pharmacy to wait. I sat between my mother and Eddie in my green pantsuit, the green bow miraculously still in my hair. There was a big bald boy in an old man’s lap. There was a woman who had an arm that swung wildly from the elbow. She held it stiffly with the other hand, trying to calm it. She waited. We waited. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman who sat in a wheelchair. She wore a purple hat and a handful of diamond rings. We could not take our eyes off her. She spoke in Spanish to the people gathered around her, her family and perhaps her husband. “Do you think she has cancer?” my mother whispered loudly to me. Eddie sat on my other side, but I could not look at him. If I looked at him we would both crumble like dry crackers. I thought about my older sister, Karen, and my younger brother, Leif. About my husband, Paul, and about my mother’s parents and sister, who lived a thousand miles away. What they would say when they knew. How they would cry. My prayer was different now: A year, a year, a year. Those two words beat like a heart in my chest. That’s how long my mother would live. “What are you thinking about?” I asked her. There was a song coming over the waiting room speakers. A song without words, but my mother knew the words anyway and instead of answering my question she sang them softly to me. “Paper roses, paper roses, oh how real those roses seemed to be,” she sang. She put her hand on mine and said, “I used to listen to that song when I was young. It’s funny to think of that. To think about listening to the same song now. I would’ve never known.” My mother’s name was called then: her prescriptions were ready. “Go get them for me,” she said. “Tell them who you are. Tell them you’re my daughter.”

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

  That had hit home, and I returned to my script and started again. This time, I made myself remember some of the more positive things about the convent years. I recalled the excitement of those first days in the postulantship, when I had been convinced that I had embarked on the road to holiness; the beauty of the liturgy; the kindness of some of my superiors; and the grief that I had felt when it had become clear that I must leave. I realized that the order had itself been undergoing a painful period of transition. For the first time in years, I allowed myself to feel the attraction of the ideal that had propelled me into the convent and kept me there. June had been far more satisfied with this second attempt. A final draft, with some fine-tuning and additions, took only a few weeks, and the manuscript was ready for the publishers. It had been sold at auction just a year after Sally had sat me down at her father’s desk and forced me to make a start. 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.

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

  But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings. Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen. I felt as though I had been plugged in, like an electrical appliance, and suddenly come to life. To paraphrase my friend Saint Paul, instead of experiencing reality as through a glass darkly, I could now see it face-to-face. This meant that nothing now interposed itself between the material I was studying and my emotional and intellectual reflexes. It was also true that, working as I was in Israel, I was out of my usual environment, and could no longer operate on automatic pilot. Removed from the reflexive skepticism of Channel 4, I could not simply dismiss the Crusaders as “bonkers.”