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.

Page 38 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  But the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, described what would happen if the emperor (a boy of thirteen) restored the altar: “Try coming to the church and you will find either no priest there or one who refuses you entry” (L 17.15). This famous struggle took place in the summer of 384, just when Augustine was winning his appointment from Symmachus. It was no doubt the first occasion for Augustine to acquire any real knowledge about the notoriously intransigent Ambrose, who over time would break three different emperors to his will. It was also the time when Augustine, having read himself away from Manicheism with Cicero’s help, adopted Cicero’s own skepticism of the New Academy. What prior opinion, then, would Augustine now form about Ambrose, who was a menace to his influential friends, both pagan and Manichean? Milan might be a dangerous place for him. But Augustine was determined to escape Rome, because his students—though not as unruly as those in Carthage—were deft at eluding payments to their teacher. After three bad experiences as a teacher—in Thagaste, Carthage, and Rome—Augustine was at last moving up, out of the “dominie” class. In fact, he sped to Milan in style, his office as court orator entitling him to ride by the imperial post, a privilege Constantine had been criticized for letting bishops enjoy (Ammianus, History of Events 21.16.18). 2. Milan: 384–386 IN MILAN, Augustine moved onto a higher social plateau. He would shortly have an establishment of some size—Una and his son, his mother and brother, two cousins, a body of students—as well as the slaves, stenographers, and copyists necessary for one of his station. A government career was beginning, with the prospect of marriage into wealth. Since marriage was primarily a property arrangement, and Monnica was still managing her dead husband’s estate, she arranged the engagement to a Christian heiress not yet old enough to wed. (The legal marriage age for girls was twelve, so she was probably ten, since there was a delay of over a year.) What, then, of Una? She went back to Africa, vowed to live a life of consecrated continence. Augustine describes his reaction to a wedding for which he showed a lack of enthusiasm (O’Donnell 3.10–11): Since she [Una] was an obstacle to my marriage, the woman I lived with for so long was torn out of my side. My heart, to which she had been grafted, was lacerated [concisum], wounded, shedding blood (T 6.25). The language recalls what he had written on the death of Amicus (T 4.12): I held in my soul as it struggled against being held in, lacerated [concisum] as it was, and blood-smeared.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Conquest of the Incan Empire In the early 16th century, the Incan empire was riven by terrible epidemics and civil war. The Pizarro brothers, newly arrived merchants and opportunists, conquered the empire in a series of agreements, battles, betrayals, and executions in the 1530s. They made relatively few changes to the administration of the economy and government, granting Spanish encomenderos control over the forced labor of the native population and the wealth not siphoned off to the Spanish crown. Spanish encomenderos abused their privileges, and indigenous people died in great numbers under this harsh system. Although they technically had some rights under the law, in many cases, they were effectively enslaved. By the end of the 16th century, many had been forced into settlements intended to concentrate the labor force. These settlements were also designed to make it easier for missionaries to convert them, and to that end, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits in particular sent significant numbers of religious to the Americas. It was in this context that the Pizarros founded the city of Lima in 1535. It became the capital of the entire Viceroyalty of Peru, encompassing all Spanish-claimed territories south of Panama, stretching to the southern tip of the continent. The city grew rapidly; by Martín’s time, it held some 25,000 inhabitants, a population always in flux as farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and laborers came and went. Martín’s Early Life Martín was born in 1579 to Ana Velázquez. We know little about Ana, save that she was born in Panama, was of African descent, and had formerly been enslaved. She had a years-long relationship with Juan de Porres, a young Spanish merchant with respected social connections who did business in Lima. Martín had a younger sister named Juana. Juan never legally acknowledged or legitimized these two children, but he did acknowledge them socially, to friends and family. Years later, Juan married the daughter of a wealthy businessman, but this did not curtail his relationship with his older children. 96

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  51 o The numbers of Christians killed over these centuries is particularly difficult to assess, although to be sure, the effect of persecution should not be measured only by numbers of fatalities. o It seems clear, moreover, that Christians enjoyed periods of peace that sometimes lasted for decades. • Overall, however, a consistent pattern appears to emerge: When Christians were persecuted by state authority, it was as a corollary of some larger political concern for the security of the imperial order. • The best known (or suspected) persecutions can be summarized according to century. o In the 1 st century, Nero killed Christians in 64 as a way of deflecting blame for the fire in Rome from himself. According to Tacitus, Nero “inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations... [and] hatred of mankind.” A persecution under Domitian (89–96) is postulated as the backdrop to the oppression and murder depicted in the book of Revelation. o In the 2 nd century, a regional repression under Trajan (109–111) in Asia Minor is known from the letter of Pliny, as well as from the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Under Marcus Aurelius (162–177), a persecution in Lyons can be documented and may have been more widespread. In the 1 st -century persecution under the emperor Nero, it was said that Christians were mocked, attacked by dogs, crucified, and burned. © Photos.com/Thinkstock. 52 Lecture 7: The Unpopular Cult—Persecution o The 3 rd century saw more violent outbursts of persecution under Septimius Severus (202–210), Maximinus (235), Decius (250–251), and Valerian (253–258). These were especially virulent in North Africa. In contrast to such spasms were lengthy periods of peace. o The most systematic and sustained persecution was the last, under Diocletian and Galerius (302–311), which led right up to the issuing of the Edict of Milan in 312, finally granting religious toleration to Christians. Effects of Persecution • Although the exact facts about the centuries of persecution are difficult to ascertain, the effect on Christianity is clear. • Under conditions of uncertainty and duress, Christianity continued to grow, partly by means of conversion and partly by means of childbirth—the refusal to practice abortion or infant exposure led to larger families. • Persecution generated two responses from within Christianity: the celebration of martyrdom as perfect discipleship and the writing of apologetic literature in defense of the movement. • The long-term effect on the Christian psyche was real: Like an abused child for whom early trauma continues to define later behavior, Christians tended through the ages to bear a sense of aggrievement and to become abusive toward others in turn when they came into power. We will see how imperial Christianity turned the state instruments of persecution on Jews, pagans, and those considered to be heretical in their Christian teaching. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom. Suggested Reading

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Poplavsky said to himself. ‘But surely there’s somebody in the management?’ ‘Me,’ the man responded in a weak voice. ‘You see,’ Poplavsky began to speak imposingly, ‘I am the sole heir of the late Berlioz, my nephew, who, as you know, died at the Patriarch’s Ponds, and I am obliged, in accordance with the law, to take over the inheritance contained in our apartment no. 50 . . .’ ‘I’m not informed, comrade . . .’ the man interrupted in anguish. ‘But, excuse me,’ Poplavsky said in a sonorous voice, ‘you are a member of the management and are obliged . . .’ And here some citizen entered the room. At the sight of the entering man, the man seated at the table turned pale. ‘Management member Pyatnazhko?’ the entering man asked the seated man. ‘Yes,’ the latter said, barely audibly. The entering one whispered something to the seated one, and he, thoroughly upset, rose from his chair, and a few seconds later Poplavsky found himself alone in the empty management room. ‘Eh, what a complication! As if on purpose, all of them at once . . .’ Poplavsky thought in vexation, crossing the asphalt courtyard and hurrying to apartment no. 50. As soon as the industrial economist rang, the door was opened, and Maximilian Andreevich entered the semi-dark front hall. It was a somewhat surprising circumstance that he could not figure out who had let him in: there was no one in the front hall except an enormous black cat sitting on a chair. Maximilian Andreevich coughed, stamped his feet, and then the door of the study opened and Koroviev came out to the front hall. Maximilian Andreevich bowed politely, but with dignity, and said: ‘My name is Poplavsky. I am the uncle . . .’ But before he could finish, Koroviev snatched a dirty handkerchief from his pocket, buried his nose in it, and began to weep. ‘. . . of the late Berlioz . . .’ ‘Of course, of course!’ Koroviev interrupted, taking his handkerchief away from his face. ‘Just one look and I knew it was you!’ Here he was shaken with tears and began to exclaim: ‘Such a calamity, eh? What’s going on here, eh?’ ‘Run over by a tram-car?’ Poplavsky asked in a whisper. ‘Clean!’ cried Koroviev, and tears flowed in streams from under his pince-nez. ‘Run clean over! I was a witness. Believe me—bang! and the head’s gone! Crunch—there goes the right leg! Crunch—there goes the left leg! That’s what these trams have brought us to!’ And, obviously unable to control himself, Koroviev pecked the wall beside the mirror with his nose and began to shake with sobs.

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

  Sophia, was turned into a mosque, and a cross, surmounted with a janissary’s cap, was carried through the streets, while the soldiers shouted, "This is the Christian’s God." This historic catastrophe would have been regarded in Western Europe as appalling, if it had not been expected. The steady advance of the Turks and their unspeakable atrocities had kept the Greek empire in alarm for centuries. Three hundred years before, Latin Christendom had been taught to expect defeats at the hands of the Mohammedans in the taking of Edessa, 1145, and the fatal battle of Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem, 1187. In answer to the appeals of the Greeks, Nicolas despatched Isidore as legate to Constantinople with a guard of 200 troops, but, as a condition of helping the Eastern emperor, he insisted that the Ferrara articles of union be ratified in Constantinople. In a long communication, dated Oct. 11, 1451, the Roman pontiff declared that schisms had always been punished more severely than other evils. Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who attempted to divide the people of God, received a more bitter punishment than those who introduced idolatry. There could not be two heads to an empire or the Church. There is no salvation outside of the one Church. He was lost in the flood who was not housed in Noah’s ark. Whatever opinion it may have entertained of these claims, the Byzantine court was in too imminent danger to reject the papal condition, and in December, 1452, Isidore, surrounded by 300 priests, announced, in the church of St. Sophia, the union of the Greek and Latin communions. But even now the Greek people violently resented the union, and the most powerful man of the empire, Lucas Notaras, announced his preference for the turban to the tiara. The aid offered by Nicolas was at best small. The last week of April, 1453, ten papal galleys set sail with some ships from Naples, Venice and Genoa, but they were too late to render any assistance.730 The termination of the venerable and once imposing fabric on the Bosphorus by the Asiatic invader was the only fate possible for an empire whose rulers, boasting themselves the successors of Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian, Christian in name and most Christian by the standard of orthodox professions, had heaped their palaces full of pagan luxury and excess. The government, planted in the most imperial spot on the earth, had forfeited the right to exist by an insipid and nerveless reliance upon the traditions of the past. No elements of revival manifested themselves from within. Religious formulas had been substituted for devotion. Much as the Christian student may regret the loss of this last bulwark of Christianity in the East, he will be inclined to find in the disaster the judgment realized with which the seven churches of the Apocalypse were threatened which were not worthy.

• From Trash (1988)

  Five, ten, twenty years—my mama has had cancer for twenty years. “That doctor, the one in Tampa in ’71, the one told me I was gonna die, that sucker choked himself on a turkey bone. People that said what a sad thing it was—me having cancer, and surely meant to die—hell, those people been run over by pickups and dropped down dead with one thing and another, while me, I just go on. It’s something, an’t it?” It’s something. Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me. After the hysterectomy, the first mastectomy, another five years later, her teeth that were easier to give up than to keep, the little toes that calcified from too many years working waitress in bad shoes, hair and fingernails that drop off after every bout of chemotherapy, my mama is less and less the mountain, more and more the cave—the empty place from which things have been removed. “With what they’ve taken off me, off Granny, and your Aunt Grace—shit, you could almost make another person.” A woman, a garbage creation, an assembly of parts. When I drink I see her rising like bats out of deep caverns, a gossamer woman—all black edges, with a chrome uterus and molded glass fingers, plastic wire rib cage and red unblinking eyes. My mama, my grandmother, my aunts, my sister, and me— every part of us that can be taken has been. “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,” my mama sang for me once, and laughing added, “But we don’t need as much of it as we used to, huh?” When Mama talked, I listened. I believed it was the truth she was telling me. I watched her face as much as I listened to her words. She had a way of dropping her head and covering her bad teeth with her palm. I’d say, “Don’t do that.” And she’d laugh at how serious I was. When she laughed with me, that shadow, so gray under her eyes, lightened, and I felt for a moment—powerful, important, never so important as when I could make her laugh. I wanted to grow up to do the poor-kid-done-good thing, the Elvis Presley/Ritchie Valens movie, to buy my mama her own house, put a key in her hand and say, “It’s yours—from here to there and everything in between, these walls, that door, that gate, these locks. You don’t ever have to let anyone in that you don’t want. You can lay in the sun if you want to or walk out naked in the moonlight if you take the mood. And if you want to go into town to mess around, we can go do it together.” I did not want to be my mother’s lover; I wanted more than that. I wanted to rescue her the way we had both wanted her to rescue me. Do not want what you cannot have, she told me. But I was not as good as she was.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  This whole establishment, remember, was being subsidized by Romanian. When Augustine, at his patron’s behest, returns to Thagaste as a teacher in 375, we are first informed that Romanian is a Manichean. It has often been assumed that Augustine converted him to his new faith. But this influence could have worked the other way. Romanian, who had made business contacts in the Western Empire, no doubt knew influential people in Carthage, to whom he would have recommended his young protégé. Some of these may have been the well-placed Manicheans who would become Augustine’s patrons, in their turn, when he goes on to Rome. Manicheism had the glamour of fashion with an edge of danger (as a heresy, it was formally banned in the Christian Empire). Peter Brown (B and S 108–9) compares its appeal to that of “Bolshevism” in British universities of the 1920s. Romanian, with his cosmopolitan aspirations, may well have been a Manichean “fellow traveler” before Augustine came back to Thagaste, bubbling with a twenty-two-year-old’s enthusiasm for his new faith. Romanian was not simply an intellectual reflection of his young protégé—as he would prove later on. 5. Thagaste: 374–376 WHEN, his own studies completed, Augustine began teaching in his hometown, he strove energetically to convert a Christian catechumen to Manicheism—and he succeeded. “I wrenched him from his faith” (a fide deflexeram, T 4.7). Now Amicus (as I shall call him, to avoid periphrases) became his closest friend, a replacement for the magic circle of young intellectuals he had left behind in Carthage. But when Amicus fell seriously ill, his Christian parents, fearing he might die, had him baptized while he was unconscious. When Amicus recovered consciousness, Augustine thought he could joke him out of what had been foisted on him—and felt aggrieved when Amicus dared to defy him, holding on to the faith that Augustine was ridiculing. When Amicus did, in fact, die shortly after, Augustine plunged into a hysteria of grief. Half his own soul was gone—he would force himself to live only because half of Amicus’ soul was in him. His sorrow was like a great external force alienating him from himself: “I was made a riddle to myself, and I asked my heart why, in its anguish, it was whirling me about” (T 4.9). The last part of that sentence is a quotation from a Psalm (41.6) that echoes God’s rebuke to Cain for being angry when Abel’s sacrifice was accepted: “Why, in your anguish, is your face contorted?” ( Genesis 4.6). The echo is clear in the Latin of Augustine’s Bible: Quare tristis esset et quare conturbat me? Quare tristis factus est et quare concidet facies tuus?

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  one morning when scarcely anyone was out and about, they were marched under guard to nearby HoleSovice railway station, where it took almost another three hours to load them on the trucks. Later, said Vera, I often walked out to HoleSovice, to Stromovka Park and the Trade Fair precinct. On these occasions I usually visited the lapidarium installed there in the sixties and spent hours looking at the mineral samples in the glass cases—pyrite crystals, deep green Siberian malachites, specimens of Bohemian mica, granite, quartz, and limestone of an isabelline yellow hue—wondering at the nature of the foundations on which our world is built. On the very day when Agata had been forced to leave her flat, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, a man from the Trusteeship Center for Requisitioned Goods came to the Sporkova and put a paper seal on the doors. Then, between Christmas and the New Year, a troop of very shady characters arrived to clear away everything that had been left behind, the furniture, the lamps and candelabra, the carpets and curtains, the books and musical scores, the clothes from the wardrobes and drawers, the bed linen, pillows, eiderdowns, blankets, china and kitchen utensils, the pot plants and umbrellas, even the bottled pears and cherries which had been standing forgotten in the cellar for years, and the remaining potatoes. They took everything, down to the very last spoon, off to one of the over fifty depots, where these abandoned objects were itemized separately with that thoroughness peculiar to the Germans, were valued, then washed, cleaned or mended as necessary, and finally stored, row upon row, on specially made shelves. Last of all, said Vera, a pest control officer turned up in the Sporkova. He struck me as a particularly sinister figure, with an unpleasant look in his eye which went right through me. To this day he sometimes haunts my dreams, in which I see him surrounded by clouds of poisonous white smoke as he goes about fumigating the rooms.—When Vera had come to the end of her story, so Austerlitz continued that morning in Alderney Street, she handed me, after a long pause in which the silence in the Sporkova flat seemed to grow deeper with every breath we two small photographs measuring about three by four inches from the little occasional table beside her chair. She had found them by chance the previous evening inside one of the fifty-five carmine-red volumes of Balzac which she had happened to pick up, she did not know why. Vera said she could not remember unfastening the glass doors and taking the book off the shelf where it stood with its companions, she merely saw herself sitting here in this armchair and—for the first time since her late twenties, a point on which she laid special emphasis—turning the pages which tell the story of the great injustice suffered by Colonel Chabert. How the two pictures had slipped between the leaves was a mystery to her, said Vera. Perhaps Agata had borrowed the small volume while she was still living here in

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  had died on being deported in 1944. Since that time, which, as I told myself while attempting to decipher, through the sparse stems of the asparagus fern, the letters forming the words morts en déportation, was now half a century ago, since that time, said Austerlitz, not much more than a dozen years had passed before I moved into Amélie Cerf’s apartment in the rue Emile Zola with my few belongings. What, I wondered, are twelve or thirteen such years, if not a single moment of unalterable pain? Was Amélie Cerf, whom I remember as physically almost nonexistent, perhaps the last surviving member of her tribe? Was there no one left to put up a memorial to her in the family mausoleum? Did she ever come to lie in that tomb at all, or did she dissolve into the empty air like Hugo and Lucie?

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me not to have children simply because I had manic-depressive illness. Even in my blackest depressions, I never regretted having been born. It is true that I had wanted to die, but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn’t imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else. All things considered, I had had a marvelous—albeit turbulent and occasionally awful—existence. Of course, I had had serious concerns: How could one not? Would I, for example, be able to take care of my children properly? What would happen to them if I got severely depressed? Much more frightening still, what would happen to them if I got manic, if my judgment became impaired, if I became violent or uncontrollable? How would it be to have to watch my own children struggle with depression, hopelessness, despair, or insanity if they themselves became ill? Would I watch them too hawkishly for symptoms or mistake their normal reactions to life as signs of illness? All of these were things I had thought about a thousand times, but never, not once, had I questioned having children. And despite the cold-bloodedness of the doctor who examined me and who told me I shouldn’t, I would have delighted in having a houseful of children, as David and I once had planned. But it just didn’t work out that way: David died, and Richard—the only man since David’s death that I wanted to have children with—already had three from a previous marriage. Not having children of my own is the single most intolerable regret of my life. I do, however, and very fortunately, have two nephews and a niece—each wonderful and quite remarkable in his or her own way—and I enjoy, beyond description, my relationships with them. Being an aunt is an extraordinarily pleasurable sort of thing, especially if your nephews and niece are reflective, independent, thoughtful, droll, smart, and imaginative people. It is impossible not to find their company delightful. My nephews, whose interests, like those of their father, have leaned toward the study of mathematics and economics, are quiet, witty, freethinking, gentle souled, and charming young men. My niece, considerably younger, is now eleven and, having already won a national writing award, is very determined to become a writer. One often finds her curled up in a chair, scribbling away, asking about words or people, tending to her many and various animals, or leaping mouth first into a family discussion to defend her point of view. She is fiery, sensitive, original, and disconcertingly able to hold her own against a very vociferously articulate pack of older brothers, parents, and sundry other adults. I cannot imagine the awful gap that would exist in my life without these three children.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Some of my reluctance, no doubt, stemmed from a fundamental denial that what I had was a real disease. This is a common reaction that follows, rather counter-intuitively, in the wake of early episodes of manic-depressive illness. Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one’s notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt. In my case, I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been. It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life. My family and friends expected that I would welcome being “normal,” be appreciative of lithium, and take in stride having normal energy and sleep. But if you have had stars at your feet and the rings of planets through your hands, are used to sleeping only four or five hours a night and now sleep eight, are used to staying up all night for days and weeks in a row and now cannot, it is a very real adjustment to blend into a three-piece-suit schedule, which, while comfortable to many, is new, restrictive, seemingly less productive, and maddeningly less intoxicating. People say, when I complain of being less lively, less energetic, less high-spirited, “Well, now you’re just like the rest of us,” meaning, among other things, to be reassuring. But I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been mildly manic. When I am my present “normal” self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. And I miss Saturn very much.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  More specifically, and not surprisingly, I became particularly interested in manic-depressive illness. I was absolutely and single-mindedly determined to make a difference in how the illness was seen and treated. Two of my colleagues, both of whom had a great deal of clinical and research experience with mood disorders, and I decided to set up an outpatient clinic at UCLA that would specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of depression and manic-depressive illness. We received enough initial funding from the hospital to allow us to hire a nurse and buy some file cabinets. The medical director and I spent weeks developing diagnostic and research forms and then put together a teaching program that would qualify as a clinical rotation, or training experience, for third-year psychiatric residents and predoctoral psychology interns. Although there was some opposition to the fact that I, as a nonphysician, was the director of a medical clinic, most of the medical staff—especially the medical director of the clinic, the chairman of the psychiatry department, and the chief of staff of the Neuropsychiatric Institute—backed me up. Within a few years, the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic had become a large teaching and research facility. We evaluated and treated thousands of patients with mood disorders, carried out a large number of both medical and psychological research studies, and taught psychiatric residents and clinical psychology interns how to diagnose and take care of patients with mood disorders. The clinic became a popular choice for training. It was a scurrying, busy, emergency- and crisis-filled rotation due to the nature and severity of the illnesses being treated, but it also was generally a warm and laughter-filled place. The medical director and I encouraged not only hard work and long hours, but after-hour partying as well. The stress of treating suicidal, psychotic, and potentially violent patients was considerable for all of us, but we tried to back up the clinical responsibility carried by the interns and residents with as much supervision as possible. When the relatively rare catastrophe did occur—an extremely bright young lawyer, for example, refused all efforts to be hospitalized and then committed suicide by shooting himself through the head—the faculty, residents, and interns would meet, in small and larger groups, in order to figure out what had happened and to support not only the devastated family members, but the individuals who had borne the primary clinical responsibility. In the particular instance of the lawyer, the resident had done everything that anyone could possibly have been expected to do; not surprisingly, she was terribly shaken by his death. Ironically, it is usually those doctors who are the most competent and conscientious who feel the most sense of failure and pain.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  In fact, that was something with which Jews were familiar. After AD 70, the sacrifices of the Temple came to an end when the Temple was destroyed. The Rabbis taught that, with the Temple ritual gone, theology, prayer, penitence, the study of the law and charity were sacrifices equivalent to the ancient ritual. Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai comforted himself in those sorrowful days by believing that ‘in the practice of charity he still possessed a valid sacrifice for sin’. An ancient Christian writer says: ‘I expected that your heart would bear fruit and that you would worship God, the Creator of all, and unto him continually offer your prayers by means of compassion; for compassion shown to men by men is a bloodless sacrifice and holy unto God.’ After all, Jesus himself said: ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:40). The best of all sacrifices to bring to God is the gift of help to one of his children in need. OBEDIENCE AND PRAYER Hebrews 13:17–19 Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they sleeplessly watch over your souls, conscious that they will have to give account of their trust. This do that they may carry out this task with joy and not with grief, for, if you grieve them, there would be no profit to you either in that. Keep on praying for us, for we believe that we have a clear conscience, for we wish in all things to live in such a way that our conduct will be fair. I urge you to do this all the more that I may the more quickly be enabled to return to you. THE writer to the Hebrews lays down the duty of the congregation to its present leaders and its absent leader. To the present leaders, the duty of the congregation is obedience. A church is a democracy but not a democracy taken to extremes; it must give obedience to those whom it has chosen as its guides. That obedience is not to be given in order to gratify the leaders’ sense of power or to increase their prestige. It is to be given so that at the end of the day the leaders may be seen to have lost none of the souls committed to their care. The greatest joy of the leaders of any Christian fellowship is to see those whom they lead established in the Christian way. As John wrote: ‘I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in the truth’ (3 John 4). The greatest sorrow of the leaders of any Christian fellowship is to see those whom they lead growing further away from God. To the absent leader, the duty of the congregation is that of prayer.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me desperately and then something happened, something which is not even clear to me now, and of her own volition she boarded the train and she was looking at me again with that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural, which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reach out for her, who cling to her desperately and there is that same inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is an ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face. It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets; it is that which stares out from the walls and terrifies us when suddenly we respond to a nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a sickening panic. It is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists, which makes them beckon to us and lure us to their strangling grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear like the guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty sockets of eyes that have seen too much. It is that sort of thing, written into the human physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead I suddenly see inscribed “Impasse Satan.” That which makes me shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: “Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis .” In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with “Défendez-vous contre la syphilis!” Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon. I think it was the Fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass again. Not a word of warning.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing at all. Now and then, it’s true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into a great cloudlike form that blotted out the past. I couldn’t allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It’s strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past. For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind—her . Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christs today. Day and night I thought of her, even when I was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all, suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a few trees and a bench, a deserted spot where we stood and had it out, where we drove each other crazy with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some deserted spot, like the Place de l’Estrapade, for example, or those dingy, mournful streets off the Mosque or along that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil which at ten o’clock in the evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes one think of murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of human drama. When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand. How many thousand times, in walking through the streets at night, have I wondered if the day would ever come again when she would be at my side: all those yearning looks I bestowed on the buildings and statues, I had looked at them so hungrily, so desperately, that by now my thoughts must have become a part of the very buildings and statues, they must be saturated with my anguish.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  And he puts the live wire right between the legs; he hits below the belt, scorches the very gizzards. It is no use putting on rubber gloves; all that can be coolly and intellectually handled belongs to the carapace and a man who is intent on creation always dives beneath, to the open wound, to the festering obscene horror. He hitches his dynamo to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus gush forth, it is something. The dry, fucked-out crater is obscene. More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis. If there is only a gaping wound left then it must gush forth though it produce nothing but toads and bats and homunculi. Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster. She used to say to me, Mona, in her fits of exaltation, “you’re a great human being,” and though she left me here to perish, though she put beneath my feet a great howling pit of emptiness, the words that lie at the bottom of my soul leap forth and they light the shadows below me. I am one who was lost in the crowd, whom the fizzing lights made dizzy, a zero who saw everything about him reduced to mockery. Passed me men and women ignited with sulfur, porters in calcium livery opening the jaws of hell, fame walking on crutches, dwindled by the skyscrapers, chewed to a frazzle by the spiked mouth of the machines. I walked between the tall buildings toward the cool of the river and I saw the lights shoot up between the ribs of the skeletons like rockets.

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

  I had no idea that something that looks so much like a church could be so cultlike.”365 Charles Meade died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three.366 Meade Ministries subsequently changed its name to Mountaintop Ministries Worldwide Inc. Rhode Island pediatrician Dr. Seth Asser published a study of the deaths of 172 children due to what he called “religion-based medical neglect.” According to that study, 140 of the children had a 90 percent chance of survival, while 18 others had a 50 percent chance of survival if they had received proper medical care. “Most were ordinary illnesses that no one dies from—appendicitis, pneumonia…And many of them died slow, horrible deaths, without the benefit of [pain-relief] medicine,” Asser said.367 Child advocate Rita Swan worked with Asser on the study project. Swan left Christian Science, a church known for its faith healing beliefs, after her youngest son died without medical attention while a Christian Science practitioner prayed over him. Swan explained, “We’re not against prayer…Parents have a right to pray for divine healing. But when parents see the situation is critical, they have a responsibility to seek medical help in addition to prayer.” CHAPTER 3 FAMILY CULTS Some small cults can largely comprise the members of a single family or blended family led by an all-powerful—usually patriarchal—figure. In the book Captive Hearts, Captive Minds , Madeleine Tobias and Janja Lalich explain, “In addition to the larger, more publicized cults, there are…’family cults,’ where the head of the family uses deceptive and coercive persuasion and control techniques.”368 The bonds within this particular type of cult are quite strong, strengthened by loyalty that is expected through family ties. Children raised within such an environment may know of no other life, and for this reason they accept without question what the outside world would regard as bizarre behavior. The following historical examples of family cults illustrate these points. Within such closely tied family groups, the so-called DDD syndrome may develop, which summarizes a cultic situation that includes “debility, dependency and dread.” A publication of the American Sociological Association first described this syndrome.369 Psychologist Michael Langone later adapted DDD for the American Family Foundation (AFF), now known as the International Cultic Studies Association ( ICSA). Langone witnessed the additional factor of deception in the recruitment practices of some cults as well, so he included deception in his adapted version of DDD.370 In family cults a combination of deception, control of the environment, and socialization may debilitate those victimized. This is enforced through stringent rules and relative isolation. That is, those held within a family cult environment are expected to express dutiful submission and commitment to parental authority. Langone described people in destructive cults as “vulnerable” and influenced by authority figures who deceptively appeared to be both “benevolent” and beneficial. This role of authority, when assumed by a parent, can be particularly deceptive and debilitating to children.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Hands by your side,” she said sternly and I stiffened to attention. As she patrolled the long line of children standing in military formation, I turned to watch my parents walking out of the far side of the yard carrying my two youngest sisters, Margaret Mary (who was just two) and five-month-old Veronica, and heading to their new home in St. John’s House. “Eyes straight ahead,” Sister Matilda barked at me. Then she led us up the stairs to the third floor—to the apartment that had, until a few hours earlier, been my family home. I stared in astonishment at the change that had taken place since I left that morning. There were now two twin beds in each of the four rooms. With no explanation, Sister Matilda assigned us to our bedrooms and I was distraught to discover that I would no longer share a room with Mary Catherine. Following orders, we prepared for bed in silence, taking turns washing at the sink, brushing our teeth, and donning the white cotton nightgowns assigned to each of us. “Everyone, line up with your hands folded.” It was time for night prayers. In single file, our hands folded as instructed, we descended to the second floor, where the front room had been converted into a chapel. Kneeling on the wooden floor in assigned places, we said, in unison, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Act of Contrition, and the prayer to our Guardian Angel. Then Sister Matilda rose, and we followed her in silence, returning to the third floor and our assigned beds. There was no bedtime story. Surrounded by darkness in my new bedroom, I tried to absorb the crushing realization that in a flash, my family had been split up. As I lay alone in my bed without a goodnight kiss from my parents, without the bedtime story of one of my favorite saints, without tucking my baby sister Veronica into her crib, without the whispered, “Good night, my little princess,” from my father, I let the tears flow down my cheeks. It was safe to cry silently—no one could hear me. I couldn’t fathom why my family had been taken away. I fell into an unsettled sleep. When I woke the next morning to the harsh clang of a bell that was our wakeup call, I realized I wasn’t in a dream. This was my new life. 10 From Carefree to Caged 1954 F ather and Sister Catherine had assigned Sister Matilda as the Angel in charge of the children. “Dear Sister in the Immaculate Heart of Mary, sometimes you have a bad temper.” Those words were addressed to me as I knelt on the linoleum floor of the kitchen in what used to by my family’s apartment. With my eyes focused on the floor and my hands folded as if in prayer, I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard, forcing back the words I wanted to yell—“I do not have a bad temper.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  It was a crushing moment in the life of the Center—as though the four children had been killed in an accident. In one day, thirty-nine children had become thirty-five. The empty chair where Maud had sat at my table was a daily reminder of the loss. We counted down the days to the first visit, then the next and the next. They were joyous occasions, those Saturday mornings when Brother Theodore brought the children up for a few hours. But the happiness was always followed by weeping as the car drove off in the afternoon. Not more than a few months after the four children had left, Sister Catherine stood in our refectory. Her green eyes were cold, her lips a thin line that displayed anger. She came to the matter with direct force. “Those four children have been corrupted by the evil ways of the world. After all they were given, after all the prayers that have been said on their behalf, they have betrayed Our Blessed Mother.” What could they have done? I held my breath as she continued. “They were seen window-shopping on the street in Brighton,” she said. As Sister Catherine continued her verbal barrage, I lost track of her words. At the age of fifteen, I hadn’t the slightest notion what window-shopping was. How do you shop a window? But a new image was forming in my mind. I saw the four of them now dressed in worldly clothes doing worldly things. I was jealous. 39 A New Crush 1963 I had a new obsession. My crush on Brother Dominic had subsided after that summer of horseback riding lessons, but by the time I was fifteen, I succumbed to another one: Brother Basil. Brother Basil ran the dairy farm, and it was he who presented me with my first cow, the ninety-pound, timid little creature on that Christmas morning when I was twelve years old. Despite the fact that we were not allowed to speak to the Big Brothers at any time, Brother Basil had permission to give me instructions on how to feed and care for my new prized possession. Perhaps it was spawned in those moments of conversation, but my crush erupted seemingly out of nowhere. Brother Basil was good looking for sure—with blue eyes, an easy smile, and handsome, rugged features. Although he was twenty years older than I was, he was a decade younger than my father and so different. My father, gregarious and intellectual, seemed to me to be getting older, most likely because his once full head of black hair had now thinned around his temples and was laced with streaks of gray. Brother Basil, on the other hand, was the picture of youth and vitality. His sturdy build and his strong hands gave him a sense of invincibility. His full head of hair was without a strand of gray.

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

  Our response to God must be based on obedience, not on outcome.”413 Robidoux incorporated Balizet’s views into his own teachings. Roland Robidoux’s children then began to have their own “revelations.” His son, Jacques, who became an elder in the group, heard orders from God telling him to give up a business, so he shut it down. His daughter Michelle said God had forbidden eyeglasses. Later God supposedly forbade shorts, cosmetics, and photo albums. In November 1998, Jacques said God had commanded them to throw away their books. Members of the group eventually told relatives there would be no further communication. Roland Robidoux even ended contact with his eighty-four-year-old mother, who lived next door, after she dropped out of his group. Finally in March 1999, after her marriage to Dennis Mingo had fallen apart, Michelle Mingo received the ominous revelation concerning her nephew, Samuel. Karen Robidoux was told God was testing her. In 2004 a jury cleared Karen Robidoux of murder charges, but she was convicted of assault and battery for starving her son. The young woman was then sentenced to a prison term of two and a half years but was set free at the time of the verdict due to the time she had already spent in custody, primarily in a psychiatric hospital. After her release Karen Robidoux said, “I don’t think I could ever have true peace, because there is a hole in my heart that’s very big.”414 Karen Robidoux’s husband, Jacques, was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the death of their son, Samuel. He later appealed that conviction on the grounds that he too had been “brainwashed” and therefore “was not competent a at the time of his trial.”415 However, his appeal was denied.416 In 2004 Michelle Mingo pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact of assault and battery on a child. She was released after spending four years in jail.417 After a lengthy illness Roland Robidoux died in 2006. He was never charged with any crime. Paul Walsh Jr., Bristol County district attorney, said state law in Massachusetts limited the responsibility of care concerning a child only to parents.418 2009—Jaycee Lee Dugard Kidnapping What might Elizabeth Smart’s life had been like if she had never been found? That question may be answered in part by the story of Jaycee Lee Dugard, which emerged during 2009. In June of 1991 eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped while walking home from school on a neighborhood street in South Lake Tahoe, California. Her kidnapper was Phillip Garrido, a man already on parole for a rape and kidnapping conviction.419 His previous victim, whom Garrido abducted in Las Vegas in 1976, described him as “a monster.”420 But unlike either Garrido’s last victim, who was soon rescued, or Elizabeth Smart, who was found after nine months, Jaycee Dugard was under her kidnapper’s control for eighteen years.