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 While You Were Out (2023)

  As Holmer and hundreds of other mourners filled the pews for a simple memorial service, the casket with the dead boy’s body idled in a hearse parked down the block. Holmer didn’t want poor Nancy’s battered body idling in the back of any hearse. Still, an accident? If we objected to Holmer’s command that we hide the truth, there was no time for debate about it or questions. And there certainly wasn’t time for a check-in to see how we were all feeling about Nancy and the gruesome way she had just died. Only more orders: Straighten up this house! Get all these damn shoes off the front porch. Do we have enough ice? Sure enough, within minutes of our arrival back home, the good people of St. Francis Xavier started to swarm. By 10 p.m., our house was buzzing with people, whispering at first and awkwardly hugging. Then out came the cigarettes and the bottles of booze. Jack Daniel’s. Tanqueray gin. Of course, Jameson. Pretty soon, the joint was jumpin’. Nothing captivates a bunch of Irish people more than a sad story and a stiff drink. We offered them plenty of both. The house was filling up fast. We would need to turn on our charm, put on our best party faces, and make these folks feel welcome. Holmer weaved through the crowd with his mug of coffee, hugging and wiping away his tears with his signature fashion statement: a big red bandanna that he always kept in his back pocket. My mother sat in one of the blue velvet living room chairs, looking dazed. She nodded between sips of her martini just as she had that Thanksgiving afternoon so many years earlier when she was home on a three-hour pass. More friends came pouring into the kitchen door. Neighbors. Relatives. Oh, you poor kid, one of my parents’ boozy dinner club pals said as she pulled me toward her ample bosom, calling me Nancy by mistake. Oh, God, I’m sorry, she said. I’m SO sorry. Still others arrived by the side door. We started in with stories about Nancy. It made us happy to talk about her, to keep her with us a while longer. The last five years had been such a mess. It was a relief to think about her before she got so sick. What a whiz she was at the keyboard, someone said. She loved those bluesy ballads, said another. And cute? Oh, she was so cute. That button nose. More people. More food. More booze. Remember the time she had two dates to the same dance without either guy knowing about the other? The living room was jammed, and the playroom was starting to get crowded, too. Here you go, Meg, someone said, handing me another beer. My turn now. This story may have been embellished over the years, I told them, but I’ll tell it anyway .

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Well, it’s like coming to another world. It’s so different from devotional life at the temple.” “Are there any good feelings you feel when you come home?” “Yes,” he said warmly. “I love my parents and my sisters and brother very much.” Then he caught himself and added, “But they’re living in the material world.” “I see,” I said, a bit disheartened that he had caught himself and injected the cult perspective. “Would you mind telling me about your twin brother and what his death meant to you?” I was hoping to steer him back into his pre-cult identity. “Why?” he asked suspiciously. “Because, as a mental health professional, I believe that your whole family is still suffering from that tragedy,” I commented, hoping he would accept my sincerity. When I said that, Phil started to cry and choke up. I was struck by the power of his feelings. Then he stopped walking, put his hands together, and started rocking back and forth. He was chanting to shut himself down. Thought-stopping. After a few minutes he was recomposed. “Tom and I were very close,” he said, already beginning to lose control of himself again. “Tell me about him when he was alive. What was he like? What did he like to do?” Phil’s face started to shine as be reminisced about his brother. “Tom was bright, energetic, had a great sense of humor. He was the more aggressive of the two of us. He helped motivate me to do things, all of the time.” “Tell me, Phil, what do you think he would be doing today if he hadn’t had the car accident?” I was hoping to get Phil to think again about the kind of life Tom would have had “That’s a hard one,” Phil answered. “Do you think he would have joined the Krishnas?” I asked with a smile. “No, never,” Phil said definitively. “Tom was never into religion much at all, although he was very spiritual.” “So what do you think he would be doing?” I repeated. “He always said that he wanted to go into the media—to work in television. He wanted to be an anchorman for the six o’clock news.” “So he liked news. Did he like investigative journalism?” I knew that if he said yes, I would have another angle to work with later. “That was his favorite!” he said. Bingo. I decided to explore another angle first, though. I asked, “Back then, what did you see yourself doing?” “Back then? I wanted to become a musician,” he said with enthusiasm. “That’s right,” I said. “Your sister mentioned to me that you used to play electric guitar. You used to write songs, too.” “Yeah.” I felt that Phil was making some of the important connections I was hoping he would make. “So, did you want to have your own band and make records—the whole bit?” I wanted Phil to remember as much detail as he could.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Experiencing Bill’s flashback firsthand in my office helped me realize the agony that regularly visited the veterans I was trying to treat and helped me appreciate again how critical it was to find a solution. The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop. It took me years to learn how to effectively treat flashbacks, and in this process Bill turned out to be one of my most important mentors. When we gave the Rorschach test to twenty-one additional veterans, the response was consistent: Sixteen of them, on seeing the second card, reacted as if they were experiencing a wartime trauma. The second Rorschach card is the first card that contains color and often elicits so-called color shock in response. The veterans interpreted this card with descriptions like “These are the bowels of my friend Jim after a mortar shell ripped him open” and “This is the neck of my friend Danny after his head was blown off by a shell while we were eating lunch.” None of them mentioned dancing monks, fluttering butterflies, men on motorcycles, or any of the other ordinary, sometimes whimsical images that most people see. While the majority of the veterans were greatly upset by what they saw, the reactions of the remaining five were even more alarming: They simply went blank. “This is nothing,” one observed, “just a bunch of ink.” They were right, of course, but the normal human response to ambiguous stimuli is to use our imagination to read something into them. We learned from these Rorschach tests that traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between. We also learned that trauma affects the imagination. The five men who saw nothing in the blots had lost the capacity to let their minds play. But so, too, had the other sixteen men, for in viewing scenes from the past in those blots they were not displaying the mental flexibility that is the hallmark of imagination. They simply kept replaying an old reel.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  57Lecture 6—The Church Militant in the Spanish Empire the New World. So the colonial government forced the headman of each Indian village to send teams to work in the mines or the fields. Technically they might have been free, but in practice this was forced labor. Moreover, the workers typically fell into debt and ended up trapped at the bottom of the economic food chain. õ The friars and other missionaries were basically content with this system, even if they clashed with civil authorities over policies toward Indians. They were more concerned with the Indians’ souls than with their bodies. õ The way they saw things, Satan had been in control of Pueblo country since time immemorial, and now it was the missionaries’ job to root him out. This meant smashing and burning all the native religious objects they could find, especially Kachina dolls, the ceremonial dolls that some Pueblo used to represent deities in the spirit world. In 1630, one friar bragged that he had destroyed “more than a thousand idols” at one time, in a giant bonfire, while a Pueblo servant watched with a heartbroken look on his face. õ The missionaries used some less violent, more savvy techniques too. Sometimes they grouped young Indian men into teams, each with a captain who was in charge of making sure every member of his team went to church. õ By some estimates, by the end of the 16th century, seven million Indians in the Spanish empire had become Christians, at least in name. But for Westerners, conversion meant complete abandonment of any pre- Christian worldview,and the total embrace of Christianity’s worldview: salvation in Jesus Christ and only him. õ Most Indians did not approach religion this way. For the Pueblo, to “convert” might mean to embrace the outward demands of Catholicism to the extent that it made life under Spanish rule more bearable, or to incorporate Christian ideas and understandings of God into Pueblo spirituality alongside their traditional gods. 58 The History of Christianity II õ The Pueblos were a relatively peaceful people, but there came a point when Spanish aggression drove them to rise up. They had suffered years of a long drought, waves of nasty European diseases, and raids by nomadic tribes. Basically, they had a lot of reasons to wonder if the Christian God was all he was cracked up to be. õ In 1680, the Pueblo villages coordinated with each other to rebel. Part of the reason they could do this was that the colonists had forced them to learn Spanish, so that villages that once spoke only their own languages could now talk to each other. õ A leader named Popé rallied the Pueblo to rise up not only by making a political argument against Spanish rule. He drew on religious authority as well. He said the old gods were the right ones, and they demanded a return to traditional Pueblo worship.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  190 The History of Christianity II õ Yet Catholicism was the only officially permitted religion of Cuba. It was the white people’s religion, and if you were not white, adopting at least the outward practices of Catholicism was crucial to survival. õ In Havana, the church sponsored fraternal societies called cabildos that were based on ethnicity. These became refuges for black free people and enslaved people alike, where they could escape white racism and mix African worship traditions with devotion to their patron saint. They could do traditional African dances before an altar of the Virgin Mary, and parade on a feast day with African drums. õ To clarify: To white Spanish onlookers she might have looked like the Virgin Mary, but for these believers she was also Yemaya, the deity of maternity and the ocean. õ The cabildos were the birthplaces of the fusion of folk Catholicism and African polytheism known as Santeria. In this faith, worshippers venerate African gods called orishas or santos and reimagined as Catholic saints. 191Lecture 19—Slave Religion in the Americas õ Most of these gods come from the beliefs of the Yoruba people, a West African ethnic group that many Cuban slaves counted as their ancestors. The highest Yoruba God is the creator god Olorun, a supreme being who is a lot like God the Father or Jehovah in Christianity. õ For the Yoruba, he is the paragon of ashe, a spiritual energy that permeates the universe. A person can’t reach Olorun directly, but a person can seek help and manipulate this spiritual power by pleasing the lesser gods, the orishas, with sacrifices and offerings. õ Cuban worshippers kept sacred stones in a large soup tureen. These stones were meant to represent the deities; worshipers “fed” the deities’ stones with blood from sacrificed animals. This is one way they built a community and a spiritual world to replace the culture and communal structures that slavery had destroyed. SUGGESTED READING Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood . Raboteau, Slave Religion. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä Why did Christianity become both an ideology of oppression and a message of liberation on slave plantations? ä What accounts for the appeal of religious leaders like Nat Turner and Rebecca? ä What are the challenges in trying to recover the religious ideas and practices of enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries? 192

• From Jesus and His Jewish Influences (2015)

  23Lecture 4—The Destruction of Solomon’s TempleJesus and His Jewish Influences marched northwards.” As the Egyptian army was crossing the mountain pass at the foot of Megiddo (a large biblical tell), Josiah confronted them, and Necho captured and killed him. ●● Because of Josiah’s reforms, the biblical writers viewed him as a second David: “Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign. He reigned 31 years in Jerusalem. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David. He did not turn aside to the right or to the left.” Because the biblical writers directly compared Josiah to King David, Josiah’s death was a disaster that also put an end to the hopes of a revived kingdom of Judah. ●● Interestingly, Josiah’s death occurred at the site of Megiddo. Megiddo guards the outlet of a crucial mountain pass in the center of Israel. In antiquity, many significant battles were fought there. Eventually, Josiah’s death at Megiddo became identified as the site of the ultimate battle at the end of days, as expressed in the Revelation of John 16:14–16: “They are demon spirits that perform wonders, and they go out to the kings all over the world to muster them for battle on the great day of God Almighty. So they mustered the kings at the place called, in Hebrew, Armageddon.” ●● The Greek word Armageddon actually comes from the Hebrew words Har Megiddo , meaning “Mount Megiddo.” In Greek, Har Megiddo became Har-Magedon. In English, it became Armageddon. The Babylonian Exile ●● After Josiah’s death, the Babylonians began to conduct a series of military campaigns against the kingdom of Judah, exiling the inhabitants of Judah to Babylonia. All of this culminated in the year 586 B.C., when the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem for 18 months. That siege ended with the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  “Those were the fears that I dealt with, no matter how ridiculous they may be to somebody else,” she said. Commenting about her son’s suffering and death, she told the press, “It is difficult, because I don’t think it’s settled, fully, the weight of what was lost.”331 2010—Mohan Singh, Sexual Predator and Rapist Michael Lyons used the name Mohan Singh and claimed to be a spiritual man focused on helping people. He said he was a trained “naturopathic” healer, whom celebrities often sought out. He said he was “chiropractor to the Queen” and an osteopath who treated the Dalai Lama of Tibet. But authorities described Lyons as a sexual predator who mesmerized and exploited women, creating an international cult composed of female followers who treated him “like a god.” Lyons may have attacked hundreds of women before British police finally arrested him.332 In 2010 a London court sentenced Michael Lyons to seven years in prison for raping one woman and three more years of confinement, to run consecutively, for assaulting another. The court also heard the testimonies of five women, whom Lyons had raped in the United States.333 Prosecutor Philip Katz described Lyons as a “sexual predator masquerading as a guru and a healer,” someone who seemed “charismatic, charming and reassuring” but was in fact “controlling, aggressive and sinister.”334 The counterfeit guru convinced his followers that he could cure cancer, and the women who followed Lyons lavished gifts and cash on him. He lived in a luxurious penthouse apartment in North London, liked to wear expensive, flowing robes, and was driven around in vehicles made by Bentley, Mercedes, and Roll-Royce. Lyons jetted around the world, visiting Miami, Paris, and India, methodically creating a network of women who would do his bidding. His female followers, called “The Friends of Mohan,” would recruit or lure other women, whom the guru would then abuse. “It is about psychological and emotional control, brainwashing and isolation from families,” investigating officer Detective Sergeant Nick Giles explained.335 Lyons’s exaggerated persona was a cover for humble beginnings. He was born in Jamaica, and his parents moved to England in the 1960s. Lyons grew up in a poor neighborhood in Manchester. He began his group, The Friends of Mohan, while visiting India during the 1980s. The self-styled guru started frequenting gyms and yoga studios, promoting himself as a practitioner of “alternative therapies.” “His victims [tended] to be highly intelligent with an interest in spirituality, but at a point in their life where they are searching for answers,” Detective Giles said.336 The guru also reportedly used such methods as sleep deprivation as well as psychological and peer pressure to persuade women to obey him.337 The women Lyons raped were alternately told that he would somehow enlighten them with his “organic penis” or that he was “feeling” their “energy pulse” and that this behavior was “unblocking” their “chakras.”338 Some of the women suspected they were drugged.339 Women who followed Lyons were deeply devoted.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Sure. I loved music so much. I remember singing my songs with Tom. He would help me with the lyrics sometimes, too,” he said with considerable pride. “So you could imagine being a successful musician, living a happy and spiritually fulfilled life?” I asked, nodding my head. I wanted him to create as powerful a mental image as he could. “You bet!” Phil said, his eyes defocused. He was obviously enjoying what he was imagining. “Can you imagine how good it feels to be up on stage, singing your songs, touching people with your creativity, making them happy?” I asked. I wanted Phil to get in touch with how good he would feel as a musician. “Yes! It’s a wonderful feeling,” he said. “Great. Just imagine enjoying your music, and perhaps see your friends there, too. They must admire and respect your talent a great deal. Perhaps you are even happily married, maybe have kids.” I knew that I was taking a risk, but he seemed to enjoy adding the wife and kids to his fantasy. I waited a few minutes in silence until Phil returned from his pleasant imaginary voyage. “Now I have another question.” I paused for a deep breath. “What do you think Tom would say now if he saw you in the Hare Krishnas?” I have to admit I was caught off guard, when Phil burst into intense sobbing, which continued for a full five minutes. By this time we were sitting together in a quiet park. Phil clutched his chest and rocked back and forth. The loud crying seemed to echo from deep within. I debated with myself whether or not to put my arm around Phil and console him; I decided not to interrupt. Eventually, he stopped and collected himself once more. I looked compassionately at Phil and decided to try the question again. “Really, what would you tell Tom?” I asked. Phil wiped his eyes and stated quite categorically. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?” I nodded and remained silent for a while. I decided to let him think about the question some more, hoping he would answer it within himself. I suggested we get up and walk some more. I wanted him to shift his frame of mind. “There are a few more things I would like to discuss with you before we go back to the house.” I started up again. “If you could put yourself in your parents’ shoes, how would you feel to lose a son?” “What?” he asked looking up at me. “Imagine being your mother,” I said. “She carried Tom and you, gave birth to both of you, nursed, diapered, washed both of you. Cared for you when you were sick. Played with you, taught you, watched you grow to adulthood. Can you feel what it must have been like for her to lose Tom?” “Yes. It was horrible,” he said. He was, indeed, talking as though he was his mother.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Unfortunately, however, those are not always the professionals to whom ex-members turn. Often they spend many frustrating years working with therapists who know little or nothing about mind control. It is unethical for a therapist who is not trained in addictions to be in charge of treating someone with an addiction. Similarly, an otherwise-talented therapist, who is largely clueless about undue influence, should not counsel ex-cult members. Therapists need to understand that it is essential to first make an accurate diagnosis by doing a thorough interview. Then the client should be referred to a professional with the proper training and experience. After all, it is the therapist’s obligation to get proper help for a client. Psychological Problems Of Ex-Cult Members Former cult members report a variety of psychological difficulties after they leave. The most common is depression, particularly during the first few months after leaving. It is difficult to describe the pain of realizing that you have been lied to and mentally enslaved—that your dream was really a nightmare. Many people who leave after decades of involvement have to face the lost years of missed opportunities. Some have no spouse or partner, no children, no education, no relationships with relatives, and no friends. Many ex-cult members describe their experience with a cult as if they had fallen deeply in love, and given every ounce of their love, trust and commitment to someone, only to find out that the person was a false lover and was just using them. The pain and the sense of betrayal is enormous. Others describe the realization in more graphic terms: feeling as though they had been spiritually and psychologically raped. The sense of personal violation is indescribable. I myself came to realize that all of the love and devotion I felt towards Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han as my “True Parents” was totally one-sided. I realized after I left that they didn’t care about me personally at all. Instead, I was automatically labeled “Satanic” and a traitor, and shunned.182 When people are depressed, they tend to only see the bad side of things. Their pain can be so great that it blots out any hope of a positive future. It is essential that former members acknowledge and work through their pain, and go through the necessary grieving period. Two realizations seem to help ex-cult members most: first, that some positive things came out of their involvement, and, second, that they now are (or can be) much stronger because of their experiences. It can also help to encourage them to put their experience in a manageable and hopeful perspective. There are almost always examples of people whose experience was much worse than their own, and who were able to thrive after exiting.

• From The City of God

  Books That Matter: The City of God excessive affections or wrongly attuned attachments to things of this world. We are too proud, too attached to something, and our suffering teaches us to hold it more lightly, as not truly part of who we essentially are. As he puts it in Book 2, Chapter 9, “In this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement.” As to the sufferings of pagans in the sack of Rome, he can see no way in which the similar thing can be affirmed. In seeing it this way, we attempt to recover and reaffirm the agency lost in suffering. It is thus essentially an empowering strategy. By resisting the temptation towards a static victimhood, we attempt to find in suffering God’s presence, to which we are called to respond. At times, the empowering purpose of this therapy has been pushed beyond asceticism to self-destructiveness. But there’s a difference between humility and humiliation, selflessness and self-abnegation, and this practice should remain available to us. Because of this, we must emphasize that not every person can manage this in the same way, and none of us should assume that we can. It should be undertaken with the utmost pastoral tact, and not out of apologetic interests but practical healing ones. Remember, he says we are talking here more as consolation than as apologetic. None of this aims to exonerate God—God’s righteousness is presumed here—but rather to figure out what humans can do, how to respond to such absurd suffering without appealing to the arid calculus of merit. Nor should this encourage us to seek out more suffering. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. We don’t need to go out looking for more suffering; but what suffering we encounter we should seek to use to our own advantage. Is this attitude fully inhabitable, however? Is it possible? Is it wise? It seems to set us up for a life of complicated and transitory happiness, at best. Can you imagine telling a friend who has suffered the death of a spouse, or worse still a child, to try to find some use in this death? To learn from it that they may have cherished their now departed 108 Lecture 5 Transcript—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1) loved one wrongly? Augustine does not pretend to have answered or solved the problem of evil, just sketched the outlines of how someone with his philosophical and theological convictions might answer it, and he will return to this topic repeatedly in later books, climaxing in the last three on the resurrection of the dead. 109

• From Christian Saints

  9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic Margaret’s Early Life Margaret’s extraordinary journey began in Laviano, a small Tuscan village. She was born there to a comfortable peasant family in 1247. They lived enmeshed in what Judith Bennett has called the “economy of makeshifts,” in which residents of small communities bartered necessities with each other and developed what today we’d call side gigs to supplement the harvest. Around the age of 8 or 10, Margaret would have begun training with her mother in preparation to run her own household. But her mother died when Margaret was about 7. We don’t know what caused her mother’s death, but we do know her death would have disrupted Margaret’s life and education at a critical point. Her father soon remarried, as was common in the Middle Ages. This made stepparents and blended families fairly common in Margaret’s world, but it wouldn’t have made growing up any easier. Not surprisingly, Margaret rebelled. We know few of the details, but in her late teens, Margaret fled her father’s house, traveled some 9 miles westward to Montepulciano, and took up residence with a nobleman there. Custom has named him Arsenio, though we have no evidence of his actual name or family. We do know that Margaret lived with him in a fortified family holding, often termed a castle. Fra Giunta went to some effort to portray her way of life during that time as sinful and full of material comforts. She and Arsenio seem to have enjoyed a stable, loving relationship. They had one son and raised him together for nearly a decade. Their story may seem romantic, but they were ultimately unable to overcome the class barrier to marry. Arsenio’s family would have forbidden marriage with a penniless peasant (now of bad reputation, as she was living with him unwed). This left Margaret without any financial stability and labeled her son illegitimate. So, when Arsenio died suddenly from injuries sustained while hunting (or possibly from a roadside attack, not unusual between feuding noble families), Margaret and her son were left with nothing. Soon after Arsenio’s death, his family expelled them from their home. She was then, by Thomas Renna’s accounting, 25 years old. 65

• From Banned Books

  8. Holden Caulfield’s Subversive Voice J. D. SALINGER’S EARLIER LIFE Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City in 1919 . His parents had a so-called mixed marriage, which was rather unusual for the time . His Jewish father worked as a food importer, and his Gentile mother, Miriam, was of Scottish descent . They lived, with Salinger’s older sister, in a large apartment in Manhattan . Salinger was such an erratic student that his parents eventually dispatched him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania . His college career was also erratic: He attended NYU for a year, then Ursinus College, and, finally, Columbia at night . There, he had the good fortune of finding a mentor in his English professor, Whit Burnett, who was also the editor of Story magazine . That’s the magazine that would publish Salinger’s first short stories . Salinger’s studies were disrupted by World War II . He was drafted into the army after Pearl Harbor and served in a counterintelligence unit because of his proficiency in French and German . Sergeant Salinger saw combat in some of the European theater’s bloodiest battles . Traumatized by all he had done and seen, Salinger suffered a nervous breakdown and had to recover at a US Army hospital in Nuremberg . Shortly after his discharge, Salinger wrote and published in Collier’s magazine a short story narrated by “Holden Caulfield .” It’s called, significantly, “I’m Crazy .” An earlier story from 1941 called “A Slight Rebellion off Madison” also featured a character called Holden Caulfield . Holden, then, had been incubating in Salinger’s imagination for a long time . In a real sense, Holden accompanied Salinger through those horrific wartime battles in the form of six chapters of the manuscript of Catcher that Salinger kept with him . As critic Louis Menand says in a brilliant essay he wrote for The New Yorker for the 50th anniversary of the publication of Catcher, Salinger’s novel is, at bottom, a 1940s novel—a war novel . Holden is reeling from death—the death of his older brother Allie, whose name, Menand and other critics point out, sounds an awful lot like the word ally . Two of his other short stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” are also post-traumatic war stories . 61

• From The Mystical Tradition

  Lecture Twenty-Eight The Mystical Sect—Shi’a Scope: Historical divisions within Islam are connected to disputes concerning authority. In the Sunni tradition, four schools of interpretation (the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) place an emphasis on different sources and procedures for determining the Sunna but are mutually accepting. The sect or party called Shi’a, by contrast, locates the heart of Islam in connection to the Prophet and the Prophet’s family; regards authority to reside not in the umma but in a prophetic imam descended from the fourth caliph, ‘Ali, who was assassinated in 661 C.E.; and understands the principle of dissimulation (taquiya) to apply both to history and to the Qur’an. This lecture traces the origin of the Shi’a, its principles, and its internal divisions. Outline I. Islam emphasizes the unity of God and the unity of the umma (Muslim community), but like other historical religions, it has experienced internal divisions. A. The Sunni tradition, to which 85(cid:16)90 percent of Muslims worldwide adhere, has several distinct schools of Shari’ah to make appropriate legal determinations related to striving in the way of Allah. 1. The Maliki (8th century), centered in Medina, emphasizes the Hadith for the establishment of the Sunna. 2. The Hanafi (8th century) centered in Kufa, Iran, emphasizes qiyas, that is, reasoning from analogy. 3. The Shafi’i (9th century), centered in Mecca, Baghdad, and Cairo and accepted by the majority of the Sunni tradition, is the most complex legal system, encompassing the Qur’an, Hadith, qiyas, and ijma’ (the principle of consensus). 4. The Hanbali (9th century) is a conservative reaction that restricts the Sunna to Qur’an and Hadith; its contemporary importance stems from its adoption by the Wahhabi reform movement of the 19th century. B. The most fundamental and important conflict is that between the Sunni tradition and the Shi’a (meaning “party” or “sect”). The 112 ©2008 The Teaching Company.

• From The Mystical Tradition

  Shi’a accounts for approximately 10(cid:16)15 percent of Muslims worldwide but a majority in Iran (95 percent) and a substantial minority in other Middle Eastern countries. II. The origin of the division is found in the institution of the caliphate, more precisely, the nature and legitimacy of authority over the umma after the death of the Prophet. A. The Sunnis accept succession through the caliphate, a non-mystical and even secular authority over the umma exercised through (often-disputed) dynasties. 1. The first of these dynasties was the Orthodox Caliphate (632(cid:16)661 C.E.) in Medina; the first four caliphs under this dynasty were Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and ‘Ali. 2. The second dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate (661(cid:16)751), was centered in Damascus. 3. The ‘Abbasid Caliphate of Islam’s golden cultural age (751(cid:16)1258) was centered in Baghdad. This was the most stable dynasty, with 37 caliphs. 4. The Ottoman Caliphate (1258(cid:16)1924), in Istanbul, was a weak and often corrupt regime ended by the Turkish ruler Mustafa Kemal. B. The Shi’a protests the entire sequence of caliphs after ‘Ali: There are no legitimate heads of the umma within the caliphates, and authority is located only in the imams (“leaders”) descended from the family of the Prophet (Ahl al-Bayt, meaning “people of the Prophet’s house”). 1. ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad (husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima Zahra), was the true successor from the start, even if “hidden.” 2. The pivotal event in the history of the Shi’a is the martyrdom of ‘Ali’s son Hussein, who led a revolt against the illegitimate caliphate in 680 C.E. C. The dispute over succession has led to dramatically different ways of viewing religious authority. 1. For the Sunni tradition, authority resides in the Shari’ah, interpreted by the experts (ulama) and involving exoteric observance (fiqh). 2. For the Shi’a, authority is connection to the Prophet, teaching is vested in the imam, and the most profound teaching is the esoteric understanding of the Qur’an and Hadith. ©2008 The Teaching Company. 113

• From The Mystical Tradition

  III. The Shi’a has developed its own distinctive set of convictions and practices within the broad framework of Islam. A. Certain convictions, such as ideas relating to God’s oneness (Tawhid), justice (adalah), and final judgment (Qiyama), are also found in the Sunni tradition but given particular emphasis by the Shi’a. Other ideas are more distinctive. 1. The imam’s authority is absolute; he is the Mahdi (“enlightened one”), sinless and infallible; in extreme positions, he is a radiance of divine light or even an incarnation of God. 2. The Shi’a embodies a strong element of loss and restoration: The origin of the sect was tragic, and martyrdom is deeply imprinted in the tradition. The return of the 12th imam, Muhhamad, who died or disappeared in 873 C.E., will restore the fortunes of the oppressed devout. 3. The principle of taquiya (“dissimulation”) is extended to an esoteric understanding of authority (‘Ali is the hidden imam) and the Qur’an (which reveals truths esoterically). 4. The Shi’a has a powerful sense of having suffered persecution from the Sunni throughout history. B. Beyond the five pillars shared with all Muslims, which tend to be placed in a secondary position, are practices distinctive to the Shi’a. 1. An additional tax (khums) of one-fifth of income is gathered and contributed to the imam. 2. Striving in the way of Allah (jihad) means resistance externally to Islam’s enemies and internally to the lure of vices. 3. An engaged and active style of piety is found in the practices of “commanding what is good” and “forbidding what is evil.” 4. Similar sectarian reinforcement is found in loving the Ahl al- Bayt and dissociating from the enemies of the Ahl al-Bayt. 5. The Shi’ites also have special holidays: the Prophet’s birthday, the 12th imam’s birthday, a commemoration of Hussein’s memory, the festival honoring Hussein’s household, and the date of Muhammad’s proclamation of ‘Ali as the imam. IV. As inevitably happens with religious splinter groups, the sectarian principle embedded in the Shi’a led to still further divisions. 114 ©2008 The Teaching Company. A. The majority of the Shi’ites are the Twelvers found predominately in Iran. 1. This group recognizes 12 imams. 2. The 12th imam, Muhhamad, is believed simply to have removed himself and will return as the Mahdi. B. The Seveners (Ismailites) recognize only seven of the imams as authentic. C. At least four other divisions can be identified, illustrating the truth that the more central a symbol, the more likely it is to be the cause of religious division. Recommended Reading: Nasr, S. H. Ideals and Realities of Islam. Questions to Consider: 1. Compare the central place of religious law in Judaism and Islam and its disputed place in Christianity. 2. What aspects of the Shi’a justify calling it a “mystical sect”? ©2008 The Teaching Company. 115

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  With no mother around to fetch us, Mary Kay, Nancy, Jake, and I walked the ten blocks home. The midafternoon temperature was in the sixties, unusually warm for a late November day in Chicago, and storm clouds were gathering in the southwest. I darted from one tree to the next, trying my best not to pee in my pants. They think the Russians did it, Nancy said. She looked around, like they might be hiding behind the next tree and she was letting us in on a top-secret intelligence briefing. Even at ten years old, Nancy was something of a conspiracy theorist. When we arrived at the back door, Grandma was parked at the breakfast room table, per usual, listening to the radio and scanning the afternoon newspaper with her magnifying glass in one hand and shiny brown rosary beads in the other. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the old woman cried out as we paraded into the house. She took off her cat-eye glasses and buried her head in her hands, sobbing, Irish! Catholic! As far as Grandma was concerned, the only thing better than being a Catholic was being an Irish Catholic, and, to her great pride, President Kennedy was both. Are ya Irish? she’d ask any friend who walked through our back door, in her ersatz brogue. Luckily for us, the answer was almost always yes. Our parish directory read like the manifest on the ship that Grandma’s father took from Cork to Ellis Island. We had two families of Sullivans, three of Kellys, Callaghans, O’Connors, O’Connells, O’Hallorans, McHughs, McDonnells, Sheehans, Pritchard, Carews, Burn, Burns, and three families of Byrnes. Classes were canceled every March 17, so we could all celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in sacred style. While my parents guzzled screwdrivers and Bloody Marys at our uncle Joe’s annual bash, we’d ride our bikes past the public school shouting, “SCHOOL SUCKERS!!!” Oh, indeed you kids are lucky to be Irish, Grandma told us, giving no heed to our German last name or that of our mother. We Irish have our faith, Grandma said, and when you have that, you have all you’ll ever need. She mesmerized us with tales of Irish martyrs who’d sooner be burned at the stake than renounce their devotion to Christ. I beamed with pride hearing about my fearless forebears who were willing to have their fingernails ripped off, be split in two by horses, or made to poke out their own eyeballs before they’d turn their backs on the Lord Jesus or his holy church. I hoped someday I’d get my turn to be put to the test like that. Surely, this new dead president was now a martyr, too. I could start praying to him for strength while my mother was gone. We squeezed together on the living room couch in front of the TV a few days later to watch the president’s funeral.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Another survivor, Charlotte Delbo, describes her dual existence after Auschwitz: “[T]he ‘self’ who was in the camp isn’t me, isn’t the person who is here, opposite you. No, it’s too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other ‘self,’ the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch me now, me, doesn’t concern me, so distinct are deep memory and common memory.…Without this split, I wouldn’t have been able to come back to life.”[29] She comments that even words have a dual meaning: “Otherwise, someone [in the camps] who has been tormented by thirst for weeks would never again be able to say: ‘I’m thirsty. Let’s make a cup of tea.’ Thirst [after the war] has once more become a currently used term. On the other hand, if I dream of the thirst I felt in Birkenau [the extermination facilities in Auschwitz], I see myself as I was then, haggard, bereft of reason, tottering.”[30] Langer hauntingly concludes, “Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.”[31] The essence of trauma is that it is overwhelming, unbelievable, and unbearable. Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past. Nancy’s StoryFew patients have put that duality into words as vividly as Nancy, the director of nursing in a Midwestern hospital who came to Boston several times to consult with me. Shortly after the birth of her third child, Nancy underwent what is usually routine outpatient surgery, a laparoscopic tubal ligation in which the fallopian tubes are cauterized to prevent future pregnancies. However, because she was given insufficient anesthesia, she awakened after the operation began and remained aware nearly to the end, at times falling into what she called “a light sleep” or “dream,” at times experiencing the full horror of her situation. She was unable to alert the OR team by moving or crying out because she had been given a standard muscle relaxant to prevent muscle contractions during surgery. Some degree of “anesthesia awareness” is now estimated to occur in approximately thirty thousand surgical patients in the United States every year,[32] and I had previously testified on behalf of several people who were traumatized by the experience. Nancy, however, did not want to sue her surgeon or anesthetist. Her entire focus was on bringing the reality of her trauma to consciousness so that she could free herself from its intrusions into her everyday life. I’d like to end this chapter by sharing several passages from a remarkable series of e-mails in which she described her grueling journey to recovery.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it. I’ve long known the drill: Boobs, too small. Butt, too big. Face, bird-like. Upper arms, old. But it’s not just age—she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures. I don’t know why she has never seen herself as beautiful. I think I’ve been waiting all these years for her to do so, as if that kind of self-love would somehow offer her body to me. But now I realize—she already gave it to me. At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it. I have always hated Hamlet—the character—for his misogynistic moping around after his mother’s remarriage. And yet I know I carry a kernel of Hamlet within me. In fact, I have proof: a childhood diary, in which I swore to one day exact revenge on my mother and stepfather for their affair, which broke up my parents’ marriage. (My father’s untimely death unfortunately occurred shortly thereafter.) I swore in my diary that my sister and I would stand forever with the ghost of our dead father, who now looked down upon us, betrayed and heartbroken, from heaven. Also like Hamlet, I was angrier at my mother than at my stepfather, who was essentially a stranger. He had been the young housepainter in white pants who would sometimes stay late into the evening when my father was out of town on a business trip. On such nights, my sister and I would put on skits or dances for him and my mother: jesters for the queen and ersatz king. Not long after, he and my mother were walking down the aisle. When the reverend asked us to bend our heads in prayer, I kept my chin up, a sentinel. For the duration of her marriage to my stepfather, my mother’s maternal body seemed to me supplanted by her desiring body. For I knew that my stepfather wasn’t just the object of her desire. I knew she believed him to be her desire, incarnate. Such thinking set her up for a bitter fall when he left her, twenty-odd years later, confessing all kinds of infidelities on his way out the door. I hated him for crushing her. I hated her for being crushed. When I was a teenager, my mother tried to explain her reasons for leaving my father in more adult terms. But even at thirteen I didn’t know what to do with the notion that she needed to leave him “to have a chance at joy.” My father seemed to me the vessel of all earthly joy; his death had but deepened this impression.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Another important perspective I wanted Phil to have was that of his parents. He needed to connect with their grief and sense of loss. Phil had been so wrapped up in his own pain that he hadn’t realized how deeply everyone else had been affected. Indeed, his parents had kept themselves together in order to help their children. As a result, they had never been able to go through all the stages of mourning properly. Helping Phil remember and process the experience of being recruited into the cult was also important. When I asked him to verbalize what he thought and felt when he first met the devotee, Phil’s long-suppressed guilt feelings about asking Tom to buy him the guitar string came to the surface, for the first time in years. Furthermore, by recalling his recruitment, Phil was able to remember some of the questions and doubts he had at the time. He also remembered that when he first started chanting, it made the pain go away. He remembered thinking at the time, This is a whole lot better than feeling suicidal. In all rescue efforts, it is important to introduce different perspectives. Each time a cult member takes a different perspective, the cult’s hold on them is weakened. In addition to asking a person to remember who they were before joining the group, it can also be quite valuable to ask them to imagine the future. What will they be like in a year, two years, five years, or even ten years? What do they realistically see themselves doing then? Selling flowers on street corners? If not, how would they feel if they were unable to do anything but sell flowers on the street in ten years? Another valuable perspective can also be that of the cult’s leader. In one rescue effort, I asked a Moonie, “If you were the Messiah, would you live the way Sun Myung Moon is living—in a palatial mansion, with two $250,000 personal yachts, limousines and an array of high-end luxuries?” She answered, “Definitely not. I would give all my money to help the poor. I would live very simply.” I was then able to ask her why she thought Moon lived as he did. She told me, “It troubles me. It has always troubled me!” Most cult leaders lead opulent lives, while their followers live relatively poorly. When I told Phil what it felt like to be in the Moonies, I especially tried to convey what it felt like to be around Moon—the excitement, the honor, the awe. I could have asked him to imagine what it feels like to be a Moonie who believes that Moon is ten times greater than Jesus Christ, to feel the incredible honor of living on earth and meeting the Messiah in person. When Phil stepped into the shoes of a Moonie, his experience as a Krishna devotee was altered forever.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Mothers and fathers (and any other adults in a guy’s life) need to challenge the unwritten rules of male socialization, the forging of masculinity through unexamined entitlement, emotional suppression, aggression, and hostility toward the feminine. Boys wouldn’t stay in that “man box” if they did not reap some reward, but it is ultimately a trap: sabotaging authenticity, increasing isolation, encouraging depression, stoking rage, and promoting violence (against both others and themselves). Close relationships, whether platonic or romantic, have been found to be the number one key to personal well-being, and emotional literacy—the ability to understand and express feelings—is the key to those close relationships. Yet male conditioning renders boys numb. By adulthood, the majority of men have difficulty not only expressing but identifying their emotions (the formal term for that is “alexithymia”). Recall that mothers use richer emotional language with infant daughters than with their sons (and fathers an impoverished vocabulary regardless of a child’s gender): that’s something that isn’t so hard to change. Identifying boys’ emotions for them when they are small (“You seem scared.” “You seem sad.” “What are you feeling?” “What’s going on right now?”) is a start. Fathers, by the way, are chiefs of the gender police. Boys as young as four are keenly aware of Dad’s judgment, rejecting “girl” toys, even something as innocuous as miniature dishes, for fear he would think playing with them was “bad.” If they are willing to stretch beyond—way beyond—the way they themselves were fathered, then dads (or other adult male mentors) can make a tremendous difference in sons’ approach to masculinity, sex, and love. Obviously, they can lead by example (and will, whether they intend to or not), modeling the importance of affection, emotional expression, and healthy connection. But dads also play a vital role in validating boys’ feelings, listening with empathy, praising a son who is himself being compassionate or caretaking. Rather than thinking about how to “toughen up” a boy (a phrase, along with “man up” and the like, that should be immediately expunged from your vocabulary), ask yourself what it might mean to raise a man who is resilient: who can express his feelings in a way that is respectful to himself and others as well as listen in return. To that end, among other things, fathers need to advise boys in ways beyond aggression or anger to handle conflict.