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 Going Clear (2013)

  Bud Schotz slammed his gavel down as the slaughterhouse man took a pencil off his ear and made another mark on his tablet. It was painful to watch. Even Doris was respectfully silent as, one by one, the slaughterhouse man with his scarcely perceptible nod bought the entire lot. There was an air of stultifying indifference about him that wafted through the auditorium like anesthesia. Half an hour later, the first of Sonny’s heifers came up. They were all fine breeding stock, but that didn’t matter now, they were destined for hamburger. In an hour or so they would crowd into a semi and journey to a feedlot in the Panhandle, camp out there about five months, but more likely seven or eight months considering the shape these cows were in, until they reached their ideal weight, around 1,200 to 1,400 pounds. Eat and shit, it wasn’t much different from life on the ranch, except rudely concentrated, just a trough of water and bins of grain, no wandering around the pasture looking for Mom or nosing about with siblings. The smell is worse than anything you’ve ever encountered, which is why the feedlots are set as far as possible from human habitation, God help anyone within a mile of the place. Then it’s off to the packing plant, a polite term for the execution chamber. The cows arrive already washed, as if they’re going on a date, and unfed, to minimize contamination. They smell death ahead as they’re goaded into the chute, which curves to blind them from seeing what’s about to happen, but they know. They moan and weep. And then blackness as a bolt slams square in the middle of the forehead and interrupts their consciousness, a humane gesture that is also thought to enhance the flavor of the meat. A chain grabs hold of the left hind leg, and up they go onto the rail. Throat quickly cut, the bleeding begins, followed by skinning, splitting of the carcass, cooling, then the butcher gets to work. Today a cow; tomorrow, a T-bone. Civilization is built on such. Suddenly the atmosphere in the auction house quickened. “Sonny, is that Joaquin?” Doris asked when the bull charged into the arena as if it belonged to him. It was like seeing a heavyweight champ burst into a club gym. The crowd sat up, abuzz, studying Joaquin’s stats on a screen above the auctioneer’s podium. “All right, all right, very fine bull, two years old, got his papers right here,” Bud said, waving the registration certificate in the air. “This is a foundation animal. Put him in your front pasture and folks will take notice. Start the bidding at ten thousand. TEN-TEN-TEN GIMME TEN-TEN-ten-ten…”

• From Action (2014)

  In one such monogamous relationship, which included a lengthy and serious engagement, I vowed not to cheat, and I didn’t. But after two and a half years, I started backsliding into the realm of backdoor Facebook encounters. When I caught myself typing double entendres to people whose profile pictures I found achingly cute, I broke up with my then-fiancé rather than violate his trust, which I could tell I was about to do. Even though I was the one who chose to end that relationship, I was overwhelmed by despair and grief when it was over. I wondered if I would ever be able to love someone without emotionally fucking them over with my constant tail-chasing and tomcatting, and I decided the answer was no: I had tried my hardest with someone I was prepared to spend the rest of my life with, and I had failed. Clearly I was incapable of curbing my desire to freaq a sizable fraction of the world’s population, and that, I felt, made me worthy of contempt. Then I met Wes. We were introduced by a mutual friend on a beach trip two years ago, when I was twenty-one, right before I made the choice to leave my fiancé. A few months after we settled into our partnership, Wes told me that he knew he wanted to go out with me when, upon being picked up at my apartment, I burst into the car and greeted him by affectionately biting his arm. Suave, right? That sense of sexy intrigue intensified for both of us over the course of the afternoon as we discovered we had the same favorite animal (squid) and compared our imitations of the director Orson Welles. We separated from the rest of the group for a while, and I told him secrets that not even my best friends knew at the time, like why my engagement was ending (and that it was even ending at all). I felt closer to him than I had to anyone else in a long time.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Irene was a great cook, which was Rusty’s excuse for never having learned. Instead of encouraging her, Rusty said Irene shooed her out of the kitchen. Rusty was always harping that Miri should learn to cook, that Irene would have more patience with Miri than she’d had with her. Learning to cook from Irene would be a lot better than making lumpy and disgusting white sauce in the required cooking class at Hamilton Junior High. —THE LEG OF LAMB materialized as lamb stew that night. Tasty, with little potatoes, green beans, carrots and celery, seasoned with rosemary. Ben Sapphire joined Miri and Rusty at Irene’s table. He broke down several times, covering his eyes with his hand, blowing his nose with a handkerchief. “I can’t think of her inside that plane…my darling wife, my Estelle…” Irene patted his hand. “We took a place in Miami Beach for the season,” he told Rusty. “She was flying down early to get it ready. I was going to drive down with the luggage. She gets carsick—got carsick—never liked long drives.” He broke down again. “I’m so sorry,” Rusty said. “I spoke with her on the phone on Saturday. She ordered six Volupté compacts to take to Florida.” “The compacts,” he said, hitting his forehead with his hand. “I forgot about the compacts.” Again, Irene patted his hand. “Never mind about that.” “No, I want to pay.” “Please, Ben…” Irene shook her head. Miri stole a look at Rusty, who took her hand under the table and gave it a gentle squeeze. Rusty’s fingers were warm. Henry came home as they were finishing what was left of Rusty’s birthday cake. He was flushed with excitement, dropping a stack of papers on one end of the table, then handing each of them a copy of the Daily Post, with his story and byline on the front page. He had no idea who Ben Sapphire was but he passed a copy of the paper to him, too. Ben Sapphire took one look and turned gray. He excused himself from the table and Irene helped him to the bathroom. When she came back without Ben, she told Henry, “His wife, Estelle, was on that plane.” “How was I supposed to know?” Henry asked. “Sometimes you have to assume,” Irene said. Then she turned to Miri. “Darling, give me that paper.” But Miri held on to it. “She’s been through enough,” Irene said to Henry. “She doesn’t need the gruesome details.” “She was there, Mama,” Henry said. “She saw it happen.” “And that’s bad enough.” “You don’t think she’s going to read the paper tonight?” Henry said. “You don’t think she’ll want to read my story?” Miri wasn’t sure she wanted to read Henry’s story but she didn’t say so. She didn’t say anything. On the one hand, she wanted to forget it ever happened. On the other, she wanted to know who else was on the plane besides the dancer and Ben Sapphire’s wife, Estelle.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Irene had baked for the shiva at the Sapphires’ house in Bayonne, and now Ben Sapphire’s sons were headed back to Chicago and Los Angeles with their wives and children. Once they’d left, Ben offered to drive Miri and her friends to the Y, or wherever they wanted to go, in his fancy new car, but Miri wasn’t about to let him drive her anywhere. He was too old, too hairy and sometimes—you never knew when—he’d break down and cry. It was dangerous to drive that way, wasn’t it? She understood he was sad. She understood why. But she wasn’t ready to accept a ride from him. “Thank you,” she said to his offer, “but my friend’s father is driving us tonight.” He nodded. “Maybe another time.” “Yes, another time.” Ben SapphireHe’d open the door to the house in Bayonne, the house where he and Estelle had raised their family, calling out, Stellie, honey, I’m home —but no one ran into his arms, no one slept curled around him, telling him every night before they went to sleep how much she loved him. Estelle was gone, gone forever. He wanted to believe he’d catch up with her on the other side but he didn’t believe in the afterlife. It was all shit. Dead is dead. Dead and buried. All he had left was his memories and their children and grandchildren. He and Estelle had vowed long ago they would never become a burden to their children. The children had their own lives. And he wanted it that way. He didn’t know what his future held. Only that he had to get out of that house. He’d already made the decision to put it on the market. His daughters-in-law had disposed of Estelle’s things. They’d taken the good jewelry and furs for themselves, with his blessing. The new leather gloves, gloves Estelle hadn’t yet worn, they gave to Irene for the compassion she’d shown Ben since the crash. He could see Irene didn’t want the gloves. But what could she do? She was a mensch. She thanked them for thinking of her. Now Ben would move to the Elizabeth Carteret hotel until he found an apartment that suited him. In the meantime, there was always Irene’s couch. After the funeral, he wanted to talk to the rabbi about something so personal, so shameful, it was eating away at him. But he couldn’t admit it to this rabbi, who had bar mitzvahed his sons, who had married one of them, this rabbi who thought of Ben Sapphire as a loving husband and father, a pillar of the community. Instead, he went to a Catholic church in Elizabeth, where no one would know him, and sat for a long time before he told the priest he had something to confess. He had not been faithful to Estelle. Men are different, he’d explained early on, men have needs. And she’d understood.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  Of the writings of Aristotle it seems that only his Categories and On Interpretation had been translated into Latin by the close of our period; not even the rest of the treatises belonging to the Organon, much less the ethical and metaphysical writings, were put into a form that would have made them accessible to Western theologians. Boethius, the translator of these treatises, had intended to render all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, and thereby "to bring them into harmony and to demonstrate that they do not disagree on everything, as many maintain, but are in the greatest possible agreement on many things that pertain to philosophy." But the two logical treatises were all that he completed, or at any rate all that was preserved, and apparently were all of Aristotle that was known to the Christian West until the early part of the twelfth century. Only then did Western thinkers turn once more to a concerted study of classical philosophical systems, and that primarily as a result of external provocation as well as internal theological neces sity. It was as theologians that they studied Aristotle. It seems as though philosophy and matters philosophical disappeared from the attention of Christian thinkers for half a millennium or more. Yet this same Boethius, whose translation of Aristotle delineates the end of classical thought as much as does the nearly contemporary closing of the school at Athens, The Triumph of Theology 43 was also the author of a book which seriously qualifies any such interpretation of the triumph of theology. His Consolation of Philosophy, "the noblest literary work of Norden (1898) 2:585 the final period of antiquity," played a unique role in the history of medieval literature and devotion. Manuscripts of the work are widely distributed among the libraries of Europe; it was translated by King Alfred, by Chaucer, and perhaps by Queen Elizabeth I; and it provided com fort to Dante Alighieri in his bereavement over the death of Beatrice. Languishing in prison for treason and pre sumably for his fidelity to trinitarian orthodoxy in defiance of an Arian emperor, Boethius turned his hand to an old genre of classical literature, the consolatory discourse or "consolatio," which had been adapted from Greek models by Cicero. Boethius seems to have been the first Christian theologian to employ the "consolatio," but the result was a form of consolation which pictured the operation of the divine in the affairs of men without any unmistakable reference to the Christian doctrine of God, either Arian or Nicene. The basic theme of the book was a defense of free will and of the goodness of divine providence, under whose sovereignty fate was permitted to function.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Despite Jamestown’s intractable problems, a group of English investors and religious separatists secured a patent from the Virginia Company and set their sights on land near the mouth of the Hudson River. Whether by accident or, as some have speculated, by secret design, their first ship, the Mayflower, landed on Cape Cod, beyond the purview of the Virginia Company, in 1620. The small, struggling band lost half their number to starvation and disease during the first year. The wife of one of the leaders, William Bradford, mysteriously disappeared over the side of the Mayflower . It would be a full decade before the English settlers in Massachusetts made significant inroads in attracting new settlers to the region. 39 When the mass migration of 1630 did take place, it was the well-organized John Winthrop who led a fleet of eleven ships, loaded with seven hundred passengers and livestock, and bearing a clear objective to plant a permanent community. Far more intact families migrated to the colony than had to Virginia, and a core of the settlers were Puritans who did not need the threat of a death sentence to attend church services on the Sabbath—one of the many examples of heavy-handedness practiced in the early days of Jamestown. Land ownership was New England’s most tempting lure. During its first decade, the Bay Colony received some twenty-one thousand settlers, only about 40 percent of whom came from East Anglia and the coastal towns where a high percentage of Puritan converts lived. For every religious dissenter in the exodus of the 1630s, there was one commercially driven emigrant from London or other areas of England. The majority in these years came as extended families accompanied by their servants. And almost 60 percent of the arrivals were under the age of twenty-four—one-third of them unattached males. 40 When Winthrop defended the colony, he wanted to create a religious community that would be saved from the “corrupted” bastions of learning, Oxford and Cambridge. Beyond fighting corruption and the Catholic antichrist, however, the new governor proved himself a pragmatic man. To attract settlers, he boasted that the amount of money required for purchasing a few measly acres in England translated into hundreds of acres in Massachusetts. In overpopulated Britain, he said, the land “groaneth under her inhabitants.” Nevertheless, Winthrop had no plan for redeeming all the poor, whom he referred to as the “scum of the land.” His vision of vile waste people differed little from that of the Anglican cleric Richard Hakluyt’s. 41 Inequality was a given in the “Citty upon a Hill,” submission was regarded as a natural condition of humankind. In “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  As the room darkened into night, a low wall lamp glowing warmly, Paul’s breaths became faltering and irregular. His body continued to appear restful, his limbs relaxed. Just before nine o’clock, his lips apart and eyes closed, Paul inhaled and then released one last, deep, final breath. — When Breath Becomes Air is, in a sense, unfinished, derailed by Paul’s rapid decline, but that is an essential component of its truth, of the reality Paul faced. During the last year of his life, Paul wrote relentlessly, fueled by purpose, motivated by a ticking clock. He started with midnight bursts when he was still a neurosurgery chief resident, softly tapping away on his laptop as he lay next to me in bed; later he spent afternoons in his recliner, drafted paragraphs in his oncologist’s waiting room, took phone calls from his editor while chemotherapy dripped into his veins, carried his silver laptop everywhere he went. When his fingertips developed painful fissures because of his chemotherapy, we found seamless, silver-lined gloves that allowed use of a trackpad and keyboard. Strategies for retaining the mental focus needed to write, despite the punishing fatigue of progressive cancer, were the focus of his palliative-care appointments. He was determined to keep writing. This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say. Paul confronted death—examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it—as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality. Dying in one’s fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not. “The thing about lung cancer is that it’s not exotic,” Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. “It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough. [The reader] can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, ‘So that’s what it looks like from here…sooner or later I’ll be back here in my own shoes.’ That’s what I’m aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying, and not exhortations to gather rosebuds, but: Here’s what lies up ahead on the road.” Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely. Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture. His strength was defined by ambition and effort, but also by softness, the opposite of bitterness. He spent much of his life wrestling with the question of how to live a meaningful life, and his book explores that essential territory. “Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote. “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.” Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The beautiful baby girl who would die in the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion at New York Cornell. You notice we’re doing hand compression. Because the patient can no longer get enough oxygen through the vent. For at least an hour now. Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it. 30Six weeks after she died we had a service for her, at the Dominican Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue. Gregorian chant was sung. A movement from Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat was played. Her cousin Griffin read a few paragraphs John had written about her in Quintana & Friends: “Quintana will be eleven this week. She approaches adolescence with what I can only describe as panache, but then watching her journey from infancy has always been like watching Sandy Koufax pitch or Bill Russell play basketball.” Her cousin Kelley read a poem she had written as a child in Malibu about the Santa Ana winds: Gardens are dead Animals not fed Flowers don’t smell Dry is the well People’s careers slide right down Brain in the pan turns around People mumble as leaves crumble Fire ashes tumble. Susan Traylor, her best friend since they met at nursery school in Malibu, read a letter from her. Calvin Trillin spoke about her. Gerry read a Galway Kinnell poem that she had liked, Patti Smith sang her a lullaby that she had written for her own son. I read the poems by Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, “Domination of Black” and “New Hampshire,” with which I had put her to sleep when she was a baby. “Do the peacocks,” she would say once she could talk. “Do the peacocks,” or “do the apple trees.” “Domination of Black” had peacocks in it. “New Hampshire” had apple trees in it. I think of “Domination of Black” every time I see the peacocks at St. John the Divine. I did the peacocks that day at St. Vincent Ferrer. I did the apple trees. The following day her husband and my brother and his family and Griffin and his father and I went up to St. John the Divine and placed her ashes in a marble wall in St. Ansgar’s Chapel along with those of my mother and John. My mother’s name was already on the marble wall at St. John the Divine. EDUENE JERRETT DIDION MAY 30 1910—MAY 15 2001 John’s name was already on it. JOHN GREGORY DUNNE MAY 25 1932—DECEMBER 30 2003 There had been two spaces remaining, the names not yet engraved. Now there was one. During the month or so after placing first my mother’s and then John’s ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine I had the same dream, repeated again and again. In the dream it was always six in the afternoon, the hour at which the evensong bells are rung and the cathedral doors are closed and locked. In the dream I hear the six o’clock bells.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxiii. 1) He went slowly, that He might not seem to catch at an occasion of working a miracle, but to have it forced upon Him by others asking. Mary, it is said, arose quickly, and thus anticipated His coming. The Jews accompanied her: The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted her, when they saw Mary that she arose up hastily and went out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix. 16) The Evangelist mentions this to shew how it was that so many were present at Lazarus’ resurrection, and witness of that great miracle. Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at His feet. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxiii. 1) She is more fervent than her sister. Forgetful of the crowd around her, and of the Jews, some of whom were enemies to Christ, she threw herself at her Master’s feet. In His presence all earthly things were nought to her; she thought of nothing but giving Him honour. THEOPHYLACT. But her faith seems as yet imperfect: Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. ALCUIN. As if to say, Lord, while Thou wert with us, no disease, no sickness dared to shew itself, amongst those with whom the Life deigned to take up His abode. AUGUSTINE. (de Verb. Dom. s. lii) O faithless assembly! Whilst Thou art yet in the world, Lazarus Thy friend dieth! If the friend dies, what will the enemy suppose? Is it a small thing that they will not serve Thee upon earth? lo, hell hath taken Thy beloved. BEDE. Mary did not say so much as Martha, she could not bring out what she wanted for weeping, as is usual with persons overwhelmed with sorrow. 11:33–4133. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, 34. And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. 35. Jesus wept. 36. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him! 37. And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? 38. Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. 39. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. 40. Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? 41. Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  The samurai, whose name was Sakon Horikoshi, said: 'Thank you, dear child, for your kindness; but tell me, do you not need the umbrella yourself? 'The boy's only answer was to Start weeping. Sakon asked him the reason of his grief, and, drying his tears, the other replied: 'I am the son of Sluyuzen Magasaka, and my name is Korin. My father left his Lord of the Province of Kai, and we came to the Province of Buzen; but he died suddenly on the boat, and my mother and I buried him in this village. Since then we have lived here in a little house which we built with the help of the obliging villagers, and we make umbrellas for a living. But I cannot use this poor umbrella to protect myself from the rain without sorrowfully thinking that my mother made it with her unfortunate, delicate hands.' Sakon was greatly touched by this sad Story, and went to the village and learned from the mother that the boy's tale was true. When he gave his message to the Governor of the Province, he spoke to him also of Korin. The Lord was moved and commanded Sakon to bring the lad before him; so Sakon very joyfully presented the boy and his mother to that Lord. Korin was very beautiful: his young, untroubled face was like a serene moon in the autumn sky: his black hair was a lotus, and his voice had the love-murmuring of the nightingale amid young peach blossom. The Lord made Korin his page and loved him greatly. Time passed and, one evening when Korin was on guard, the Lord tenderly caressed him and whispered: 'Dear sweet Korin, I would even give you my life if you desired it.'But Korin answered: 'Your flatteries give me little pleasure, my Lord, since it is no true love for a samurai to have an affair with a Lord who is all-powerful. It is even a dishonour for one who esteems a selfless and sincere male love. I would rather have a man of some class for my lover, it is true, but he would have to be devoted and utterly true; a man whom I could love all my life. That would be my greatest pleasure.' The Lord said to him: 'Come, you are not serious! 'But Korin insisted: 'My Lord, I mean what I say, and it is the vow of my heart. I swear it on my love as a samurai and before all the gods of Japan.' The Lord was astonished at the bold frankness of this boy.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  I turned around. “No, I didn’t!” She nodded. “They found him in a lobby behind the stairs in a building on Forty-eighth—frozen to death. They think he had a heart attack or something. Oh, that boy was just the sweetest! I used to let him stay with me all the time. On my couch. He was always so nice.” Now she leaned over and put her hand on my wrist. “I have never known anyone who could get into sex more than he could. I mean, that boy loved to come!” “Yes, I know.” “I mean—” a bit loaded, she was just on the other side of discretion—“I have a few little kinks, myself, and he was always the world’s most obliging lay. You see, I like to get fucked in unusual places. Once, when he came by looking for a place to stay, I threw him into the shower, dried him off, stuck him in an old suit jacket of mine from the last time I had a straight job—it just about fit him—and took him to the Rainbow Room. You ever been to the Rainbow Room, honey?” “On the top of Rockefeller Center? Yes . . .” “And I made him fuck me in the stall in the ladies’ room.” She sat back now. “And that boy was not quiet when he came. Another time—” she turned and pointed toward the door—“right across the street there in Beefsteak Charlie’s. You ever been in there? They got the back room, which is three steps down from the front, and off around the side. They close that at nine-thirty, before they kick everybody out at ten. Well, honey, we went right in there—and he did me out on one of the tables. I mean, half the waiters was in there, eggin’ us on. I don’t know what the manager thought—if he knew. And don’t tell me about the Staten Island Ferry at midnight—” She shook her head. “That boy was so talented. I don’t think he’d had his twenty-ninth birthday yet.” She shook her head once more. “Frozen to death in a hallway—with a heart attack. I think the drugs must have weakened his system.”

• From Escape (2007)

  When I had all four children together, we walked to the park near our house. I sat on a bench and wept as I watched my children swing and play. I wanted to be their mother. I wanted to watch them grow up. I was angry thinking how much of their lives I would miss by dying. Leaving them alone and motherless stabbed me with sorrow. But I ached in sorrow for myself. My unborn baby and I were dying and no one really cared. My husband wouldn’t miss me. My sister wives would be glad I was gone. My death would be seen as God’s will and there would be no questioning, no mourning. The only tears that would be shed for me were those I was shedding for myself. My children were exuberant and it felt as unbearable to watch them as it was to turn away. Shirley learned of my deteriorating condition from Tammy. Tammy and Shirley had been sister wives of Uncle Roy. Tammy was having coffee with her and condemning me to Shirley. Shirley knew how grave my condition was and went through the roof. For Shirley, this was a medical issue, not a religious one. She immediately called Merril and insisted he take me to the hospital. He made light of it and Shirley could tell he wasn’t going to act. The next day when she saw Merril at a community function she spoke to him in front of people she knew he was trying to impress. She told him I needed to go to the hospital immediately and if I didn’t he’d have a dead wife and a dead baby. I could not go to the hospital on my own. My husband had to authorize it. The volunteer ambulance drivers in Colorado City and Hildale were all members of the FLDS. Because of this they were under enormous pressure not to interfere with another man’s family. And so they would not take a woman (or her child) to the hospital unless her husband had given his approval. Shirley shamed Merril into sending me to the hospital, and I was en route an hour later. The doctor didn’t want to deliver me because the baby was still small and his lungs undeveloped. By now I was thirty-three weeks pregnant. I stabilized in the hospital quickly with adequate food and hydration. I stayed there for four weeks and then Andrew, my fifth child and third son, was born by Cesarean section. Andrew was small, but he nursed heartily and gained weight quickly. His survival was a miracle. Shirley said she’d never thought I’d carry Andrew as long as I did. Thankfully, only Merril was allowed to be present in the delivery room.

• From The City of God

  After a long interval, Hermes again comes back to the subject of the gods which men have made, saying as follows: "But enough on this subject. Let us return to man and to reason, that divine gift on account of which man has been called a rational animal. For the things which have been said concerning man, wonderful though they are, are less wonderful than those which have been said concerning reason. For man to discover the divine nature, and to make it, surpasses the wonder of all other wonderful things. Because, therefore, our forefathers erred very far with respect to the knowledge of the gods, through incredulity and through want of attention to their worship and service, they invented this art of making gods; and this art once invented, they associated with it a suitable virtue borrowed from universal nature, and, being incapable of making souls, they evoked those of demons or of angels, and united them with these holy images and divine mysteries, in order that through these souls the images might have power to do good or harm to men." I know not whether the demons themselves could have been made, even by adjuration, to confess as he has confessed in these words: "Because our forefathers erred very far with respect to the knowledge of the gods, through incredulity and through want of attention to their worship and service, they invented the art of making gods." Does he say that it was a moderate degree of error which resulted in their discovery of the art of making gods, or was he content to say "they erred?" No; he must needs add "very far," and say, "_They erred very far._" It was this great error and incredulity, then, of their forefathers who did not attend to the worship and service of the gods, which was the origin of the art of making gods. And yet this wise man grieves over the ruin of this art at some future time, as if it were a divine religion. Is he not verily compelled by divine influence, on the one hand, to reveal the past error of his forefathers, and by a diabolical influence, on the other hand, to bewail the future punishment of demons? For if their forefathers, by erring very far with respect to the knowledge of the gods, through incredulity and aversion of mind from their worship and service, invented the art of making gods, what wonder is it that all that is done by this detestable art, which is opposed to the divine religion, should be taken away by that religion, when truth corrects error, faith refutes incredulity, and conversion rectifies aversion?

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  This hijrah (“migration”) from Mecca was an extraordinary step. In Arabia, where the tribe was the most sacred value, to abandon one’s kinsfolk and accept the permanent protection of strangers was tantamount to blasphemy. The very word hijrah suggests painful severance: HJR has been translated as “he cut himself off from friendly or loving communication … he ceased … to associate with them.”14 Henceforth Meccan Muslims would be called the Muhajirun (“Emigrants”), this traumatic dislocation becoming central to their identity. In taking in these foreigners, with whom they had no blood relationship, the Arabs of Medina who had converted to Islam, the Ansar (“Helpers”), had also embarked on an audacious experiment. Medina was not a unified city but a series of fortified hamlets, each occupied by a different tribal group. There were two large Arab tribes—the Aws and the Khasraj—and twenty Jewish tribes, and they all fought one another constantly.15 Muhammad, as a neutral outsider, became an arbitrator and crafted an agreement that united Helpers and Emigrants in a supertribe—“one community to the exclusion of all men”—that would fight all enemies as one.16 This is how Medina became a primitive “state” and how it found, almost immediately, that despite the ideology of hilm, it had no option but to engage in warfare. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The Emigrants were a drain on the community’s resources. They were merchants and bankers, but there was little opportunity for trade in Medina; they had no experience of farming, and in any case there was no available land. It was essential to find an independent source of income, and the ghazu, the accepted way of making ends meet in times of scarcity, was the obvious solution. In 624, therefore, Muhammad began to dispatch raiding parties to attack the Meccan caravans, a step that was controversial only in that the Muslims attacked their own tribe. But because the Quraysh had abjured warfare long ago, the Emigrants were inexperienced ghazis, and their first raids failed. When they finally got the hang of it, the raiders broke two Arabian cardinal rules by accidentally killing a Meccan merchant and fighting during one of the Sacred Months, when violence was prohibited throughout the peninsula.17 Muslims could now expect reprisals from Mecca. Three months later Muhammad himself led a ghazu to attack the most important Meccan caravan of the year. When they heard about it, the Quraysh immediately sent their army to defend it, but in a pitched battle at the well of Badr, the Muslims achieved a stunning victory. The Quraysh responded the following year by attacking Medina and defeating the Muslims at the Battle of Uhud, but in 627, when they attacked Medina again, the Muslims trounced the Quraysh at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad dug a defensive ditch around the settlement.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Why have I written these particular tales? In this work, as in all my writing endeavors, I have been both pushed and pulled: pushed by unconscious forces—by primitive self-serving motives and by buried events from my past which strain for expression; and pulled by the future—by the ideals I have constructed and to which I aspire and by the goals of edifying and entertaining my audience. In this discussion of the six tales I shall focus more on pull than on push—my reasons are not only more accessible to me but in better taste. The title story, “Momma and the Meaning of Life,” had its inception in a dream, which I accurately reproduced in the opening paragraphs. Upon awakening from that dream, I was haunted the rest of the day by the dream phrase “Momma, how’d I do?” The image made me shudder, it seemed ripe with possibility and stirred up many thoughts about meaning in life. I turned on my computer to jot down my ruminations but something else entirely happened. I had the eerie writerly experience of being only a midwife or a scribe to a rapidly emerging story that insisted upon writing itself. The “push” in writing this story is unambiguous: my conversation with my mother’s ghost, a conversation that, alas, I never had in life, was an attempt to resolve some unfinished and tormented business from the past. The same theme reverberates with somewhat less clamor, in the next two tales as well—“Travels with Paula” and “Southern Comfort.” In this, I join a long line of writers who have unabashedly used their medium to work through personal conflicts. Even Hemingway, who was no aficionado of the search within and who always denigrated psychotherapy and its “effete wet-thinking” practitioners, acknowledged that his Corona (i.e. his typewriter) was his psychiatrist. I meant the second tale, “Travels with Paula,” to be an encomium to a remarkable woman, a memoir of my apprenticeship in working with the dying, and a guide to practitioners who consult with cancer patients. It is also a historical account of the first therapy group for cancer patients. Though such groups are exceedingly common today*, they were entirely unknown when Paula and I first embarked on the venture. The professional reader may obtain more information about such groups from my book Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). I recommend this text to readers interested in pursuing all the existential themes discussed in Momma and the Meaning of Life as well as in my other books: Love’s Executioner, When Nietzsche Wept, and Lying on the Couch. It is the mother book for all my literary writing. Despite its ponderous title it is easily read by nonprofessionals since I have made every effort to avoid jargon and to write lucidly. Many therapists have recommended this book to patients struggling with urgent life issues.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  Yet Chrysostom remains uncomfortably aware that the actual churches he knows in Antioch and Constantinople fall far short of such celestial harmony. Having inherited his vision of the church from such heroic predecessors as Justin, Athenagoras, Clement, and Origen, Chrysostom, measuring the church of his own day against theirs, alternatively grieves and lashes out in anger: Plagues, teeming with untold mischiefs, have come upon the churches. The primary offices have become marketable. Hence innumerable evils are arising, and there is no one to redress, no one to reprove them. Indeed, the disorder has taken on a kind of method and consistency of its own.24 Excessive wealth, enormous power, and luxury, Chrysostom charges, are destroying the integrity of the churches. Clerics, infected by the disease of “lust for authority,” are fighting for candidates on the basis of family prominence, wealth, or partisanship. Others support the candidacy of their friends, relatives, or flatterers, “but no one will look to the man who is really qualified.” They ignore, Chrysostom says, the only valid qualification, “excellence of character.”25 Pagans rightly ridicule the whole business: “ ‘Do you see,’ they say, ‘how all matters among the Christians are full of vainglory? And there is ambition among them, and hypocrisy. Strip them,’ they say, ‘of their numbers, and they are nothing.’ ”26 Could the vision forged by the embattled Christians of earlier times, who saw the church as an island of purity in an ocean of corruption, fit the circumstances of a state religion, a church that had come into imperial favor, wealth, and power? Chrysostom saw his church as still contending against powerful rivals.27 He did not consider the possibility that his vision of the church, sanctioned by nearly four centuries of tradition, might no longer fit the situation of his fellow Christians at the beginning of the fifth century. Now that the world had invaded the church and the church the world, new questions had arisen: How, for example, were Christians to envision the new role of a Christian emperor and the legitimacy of his rule, not only over unruly pagans, but over Christians themselves (notably including the increasing flood of nominal converts)? And how were Christians to account for the unsettling new prominence of the churches, in which becoming a bishop now guaranteed a man tax exemptions, vastly increased income, social power, and possibly even influence at court? The traditional Christian answers to the question of power no longer applied by the later fourth century, when not only Constantine but several others, including Theodosius the Great, had ruled as Christian emperors. Augustine’s opposite interpretation of the politics of Paradise—and, in particular, his insistence that the whole human race, including the redeemed, remains wholly incapable of self-government—offered Christians radically new ways to interpret this unprecedented situation.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  When I got home at night, I generally went straight to my computer, where I wrote story after story, mostly about women and their hurt because it was the only way I could think of to bleed out all the hurt I was feeling. I frequented newsgroups and chat rooms for survivors of sexual assault. Though I couldn’t tell anyone in my real life what had happened, I unburdened myself to strangers on the Internet. I blogged, mostly about the minutiae of my life, hoping, I think, to be seen and heard. I loved and craved the freedom of being online and being free from my life and my body. I ate and ate and ate but rarely was any of the food I ate memorable for any reason but the quantity. I ate mindlessly, just to fill the gaping wound of me or to try to fill the gaping wound of me. No matter how much I ate, I still hurt and I was still terrified of other people and the memories I couldn’t escape. I managed to put together a collection of short stories for my thesis, entitled How Small the World, and successfully defended my thesis and then I was done with school and I had no idea what to do so I got a job working at the university as a writer for the College of Engineering. I tried to do what was expected of me. Some days, I tried really hard. 28As I spent more time working at the College of Engineering, I realized that when I had dreamed of making a living as a writer, I probably should have been more specific about what, exactly, I meant by that. And still, every day I got to write. I had my own office and a computer on which I could play solitaire and work on my own writing. I mostly wrote articles about faculty research—things that I knew nothing about and that the faculty were more than eager to explain to me—on robotic construction equipment, aerogels that could be used in space, defenses against bioterrorism, innovative uses for RFID chips. The job was fine, by far the best job I had ever had, making the most money I had ever made even though I was not making much money at all. I had a great, encouraging supervisor named Constance, who made me a much better writer. I learned how to use the Adobe Creative Suite. I worked with undergraduate engineering students as the adviser of their magazine.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxviii) The question asked for the third time disturbed him: Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time, Lovest thou Me? He was afraid perhaps of receiving a reproof again for professing to love more than he did. So he appeals to Christ Himself: And he said unto Him, Lord, Thou knowest all things, i. e. the secrets of the heart, present and to come. AUGUSTINE. (de Verb. Dom. serm. 50) He was grieved because he was asked so often by Him Who knew what He asked, and gave the answer. He replies therefore from his inmost heart; Thou knowest that I love Thee. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. cxxiv) He says no more, He only replies what he knew himself; he knew he loved Him; whether any else loved Him he could not tell, as he could not see into another’s heart: (non occ.). Jesus saith unto him, Feed My sheep; as if to say, Be it the office of love to feed the Lord’s flock, as it was the resolution of fear to deny the Shepherd. THEOPHYLACT. There is a difference perhaps between lambs and sheep. The lambs are those just initiated, the sheep are the perfected. ALCUIN. To feed the sheep is to support the believers in Christ from falling from the faith, to provide earthly sustenance for those under us, to preach and exemplify withal our preaching by our lives, to resist adversaries, to correct wanderers. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. cxxiii) They who feed Christ’s sheep, as if they were their own, not Christ’s, shew plainly that they love themselves, not Christ; that they are moved by lust of glory, power, gain, not by the love of obeying, ministering, pleasing God. Let us love therefore, not ourselves, but Him, and in feeding His sheep, seek not our own, but the things which are His. For whoso loveth himself, not God, loveth not himself: man that cannot live of himself, must die by loving himself; and he cannot love himself, who loves himself to his own destruction. Whereas when He by Whom we live is loved, we love ourselves the more, because we do not love ourselves; because we do not love ourselves in order that we may love Him by Whom we live. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. Pass.) But unfaithful servants arose, who divided Christ’s flock, and handed down the division to their successors: and you hear them say, Those sheep are mine, what seekest thou with my sheep, I will not let thee come to my sheep. If we call our sheep ours, as they call them theirs, Christ hath lost His sheep. 21:18–1918. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. 19. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God.

• From The City of God

  For these vain, deceitful, pernicious, sacrilegious things did the Egyptian Hermes sorrow, because he knew that the time was coming when they should be removed. But his sorrow was as impudently expressed as his knowledge was imprudently obtained; for it was not the Holy Spirit who revealed these things to him, as He had done to the holy prophets, who, foreseeing these things, said with exultation, "If a man shall make gods, lo, they are no gods;"[317] and in another place, "And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered."[318] But the holy Isaiah prophesies expressly concerning Egypt in reference to this matter, saying, "And the idols of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, and their heart shall be overcome in them,"[319] and other things to the same effect. And with the prophet are to be classed those who rejoiced that that which they knew was to come had actually come,--as Simeon, or Anna, who immediately recognised Jesus when He was born, or Elisabeth, who in the Spirit recognised Him when He was conceived, or Peter, who said by the revelation of the Father, "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God."[320] But to this Egyptian those spirits indicated the time of their own destruction, who also, when the Lord was present in the flesh, said with trembling, "Art Thou come hither to destroy us before the time?"[321] meaning by destruction before the time, either that very destruction which they expected to come, but which they did not think would come so suddenly as it appeared to have done, or only that destruction which consisted in their being brought into contempt by being made known. And, indeed, this was a destruction before the time, that is, before the time of judgment, when they are to be punished with eternal damnation, together with all men who are implicated in their wickedness, as the true religion declares, which neither errs nor leads into error; for it is not like him who, blown hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, and mixing true things with things which are false, bewails as about to perish a religion which he afterwards confesses to be error. 24. _How Hermes openly confessed the error of his forefathers, the coming destruction of which he nevertheless bewailed._

• From Escape (2007)

  Jolene said that not eating wouldn’t get them anywhere. Moments later, her husband came in and put on the movie Shrek. It was the first movie my younger children had seen since Warren Jeffs banned them in the community. They were enchanted. I took Bryson back upstairs to bed. Arthur followed me into the bedroom. “Mother, I know you have been living in hell,” he said quietly. “But I can’t back you in this. I don’t want to live in Salt Lake. I want to be in Colorado City with my brothers and sisters.” I just listened. I knew he needed to feel he could tell me everything. “I have never lived in a big city before and I don’t want to. I want to be in a small town.” “Arthur,” I began cautiously, “you’re fifteen. In a few years you can live wherever you want. But until you’re eighteen, you’ll be with me.” Arthur was not a boy who showed his emotions. But suddenly he began to quiver, then shake. “Mother, this has been the worst day of my life. I watched the road going to Dan’s house. Once we were there, I got the address and ran to call Father. When Father answered his cell phone I could barely speak, I was so out of breath. I told him where you were. I was going to run back and meet him there but Sarah showed up and stopped me.” By this point, Arthur was sobbing. “Mother, I gave Father my word. I told him I would meet him at the address that I gave him, but I didn’t do it! I always keep my word to Father.” It was awful to see my son in such agony. “Arthur, I don’t expect you to understand what I am doing. But there’s no way your father ever would have let me leave peacefully. Escape was our only option.” “I don’t want to be pulled into this fight between you and my father. I don’t want to have to take sides. What you did this morning seems crazy. But I will do whatever is necessary to protect my brothers and sisters. You can’t ask me not to.” I was proud of Arthur because he was such a responsible son. He had been completely indoctrinated by the FLDS and I didn’t expect this to be easy for him. We’d always been very close. He never saw much of Merril. But he had been taught to fear and respect him. Now he was in an impossible situation. He didn’t want to turn against me, but he also wanted to keep his word to Merril. I knew this was tearing him apart, but at the moment there was nothing I could do. When we finished talking and I’d helped Bryson get back to sleep, I went to check on the rest of my children.