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 Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Francis himself, the popularity of which has never dimmed in Western Christianity: the construction of a Christmas crib with a manger and live (though apocryphal) ox and ass. Later cribs, encouraged by reports of baby Jesus’s miraculous appearance to grace Francis’s manger, expanded to include the mother and paterfamilias in the now familiar fashion. At the other extreme of Jesus’s life, there was much to say about his sufferings for humanity on the cross, which Francis himself had approached by spontaneously exhibiting in his own body the bleeding wounds suffered by the crucified Saviour, his stigmata . Some over-enthusiastic admirers called Francis alter Christus , a second Christ. The new focus on the life and death of Jesus, and the consequent sufferings of his mother, had an unhappy side-effect, since it concentrated attention on those held responsible for his death: the Jews. The Gregorian ‘persecuting society’ had already launched a new active hatred of Jews in Western society, but the Franciscans only added to it, and they were not alone among preachers. It is particularly depressing that when some outrage against Jewish communities occurred, often involving massacre and vandalism, a destroyed synagogue might be replaced by a devotional chapel to Mary, whom the Jews were presumed to have blasphemed: Prague and Regensburg are two of the cities to have hosted these egregious buildings. That is the dark shadow of the enhanced devotion to the person of Christ that now structured the Western Church’s view of the family. [81] We noted in Chapter 12 how the binary pairing in the images flanking the crucified Christ on the beam at the chancel entrance were his mother and his beloved disciple. The creation of the Holy Family was another incentive for this Rood group to proliferate in churches across Europe. Alongside it, there flourished a new iconography of mother and child. In the first age of the friars, Mary commonly moved far from the serene Mother of God in Eastern icons or in the majestic figure of Romanesque sculpture, a Queen of Heaven to outdo any imperial or royal portrayal. Now she was commonly the bereaved mother, ‘Our Lady of Pity’ or Pietà , cradling her dead son in her arms after his body had been taken down from the cross. [82] In Mary’s grief, she was also prone to fainting away: an interestingly popular if unbiblical novelty in lay devotion and in ecclesiastical art, transforming ancient clichés about uncontrollable female emotion into a positive quality of piety. It was too popular for some male theologians, notably Thomas de Vio (‘Cajetan’ or ‘Gaetano’), Dominican champion of a revived interest in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who in 1506 successfully discouraged Pope Julius II from instituting a new feast of the Sufferings of Our Lady. He bleakly remarked that the idea of her swooning was the glorification of a ‘morbid state’, implying some bodily defect in Mary, when it was plain that at the Passion, the Queen of Heaven could suffer only mental anguish.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [34] Melania was married as a teenager to the slightly older teenager Pinian, who was sympathetic to her pleas on their wedding night to live as brother and sister, but felt a sense of duty to produce heirs for his consular family. After two successive children died in infancy, Pinian decided that he had done his best, and the relationship was free to develop as they wished, far away from family pressures back in Rome. Inherited wealth financed a life of suitably austere comfort in Jerusalem, and Pinian was buried in the grounds of the community of monks and nuns that Melania had devoted her energies to creating. [35] This tradition continued to fascinate couples in the eastern Mediterranean; at least three saints’ Lives variously dating between the sixth and the tenth centuries discuss outright celibate marriages with warm approval. The most complicated was that of Andronikos and Athanasia, where a sadly recognizable family tragedy expands into a miniature Greek romantic novel with echoes of the story of Melania and Pinian: the husband and wife, a golden couple from wealthy families in Antioch, separate in grief over the deaths of their two children. Later they are reunited in twelve years of monastic companionship, but without Andronikos recognizing his lost wife, for (in classic transvestite ascetic style) she is disguised as a man – as an Ethiopian, no less – and she does not enlighten him about her real identity before their edifying deaths. The other two stories are from Syria and Egypt, backdated to the time of pre- Constantinian persecution: from the outset of their marriages the couples portrayed pledge to live together without any sexual contact. [36] If it is argued that Lives of saints are just Lives of saints, literary constructions, one has to reckon with an extraordinary fifth-century tomb inscription to a couple at Aosta in Italy, which claims that, in the course of a long marriage, ‘the wife relinquished her husband and lived for more than twenty years in perpetual chastity.’ [37] Structurally chaste marriages lasted in the minds and conversation of Christians and were esteemed and practised for more than a millennium. At the end of the tenth century, the English Benedictine monk Ælfric was still lovingly retelling by then venerable tales of Julian/Basilissa, Cecilia/Valerian and Chrysanthus/Daria in his major cycle of Lives of the saints in Latin and Anglo-Saxon; the English were also very fond of the seventh-century local heroine Æthelthryth (Etheldreda), who had sabotaged the marital expectations of two successive royal husbands by her flinty choice of chastity (below, Chapter 11). [38] From the twelfth century, Western Christians began to have second thoughts, as we will discover, but Eastern Christians remained much more

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The story reads like a dream in which we confront issues that we suppress in our waking lives. The wrestling match recalls the struggle Yaakov and Esau had in their mother’s womb when they had “almost crushed one another inside her.”13 When the twins finally came to birth, Yaakov (“Heel Holder”), the second born, was grasping his brother’s heel. In mythology, twins often represent two halves of a single whole: Esau is his alter ego, and yet Yaakov has been fighting with him all his life. Yaakov and Esau also represent two nations—Israel and Edom—who are locked in perpetual conflict.14 As he wrestles with the stranger, Yaakov is fighting with his brother, his God, and himself. Notice how the text makes it difficult to distinguish between Yaakov and the stranger, and how it repeatedly applies the word “face” to Yaakov, Esau, and God in a way that merges them in the reader’s mind. Enmity shapes our consciousness and identity. The people we hate haunt us; they inhabit our minds in a negative way as we brood in a deviant form of meditation on their bad qualities. The enemy thus becomes our twin, a shadow self whom we come to resemble. Like Yaakov, nations may also feel deep antagonism toward people they have wronged, and the enemy may become so central to national consciousness and identity that he becomes a second self. If we want to achieve reconciliation, not only do we have to struggle with the enemy, but we also have to wrestle with ourselves. And in the struggle, this myth tells us, we may find ourselves blessed and embraced by the presence of something greater. The next day when the brothers meet, Esau behaves with the magnanimity of a young prince, running toward his twin and embracing him. The two men weep together: like the Greeks, they feel that the sorrow of their shared past has created a bond between them. It is a moment of shalom, of “peace, wholeness, and completion.” Yaakov at once connects this ekstasis of reconciliation with the epiphany of Peniel, telling Esau, “For I have, after all, seen your face, as one sees the face of God, and you have been gracious to me.”15 We are nearing the end of our journey. As we prepare to take the final step, we should think of Yaakov after his bruising struggle with the stranger. Although wounded by the encounter, he has been blessed by his assailant and is walking toward his erstwhile enemy in the light of a new day.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  But Athens was equally guilty of pride and greed. Some Athenians were beginning to feel uneasy about their violation of the Delian League, which had originally been designed to bring the Greek city-states together against the Persian threat and to foster friendship and brotherhood between them. But after Salamis, Athens had started to invade other poleis and was using the spoils of battle to fund its expensive building projects.22 Aeschylus had made it clear to the audience that his city was in no position to pontificate self-righteously over the sins of the enemy. We need this spirit today. Centuries before Aeschylus, Homer had shown what could happen when you reached out to the enemy in time of war. The Iliad, his eighth-century epic, tells the story of a small incident in the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Achilles, the chief warrior on the Greek side, quarrels with King Agamemnon and, in a fit of egotistic pique, withdraws his men from the army and sulks in his tent. This had disastrous consequences for the Greeks, and in the ensuing confusion, Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus is killed by Hector, one of the Trojan princes. Achilles becomes almost mad with guilt, grief, and rage. He challenges Hector to a duel, kills him, and horribly mutilates his corpse by dragging it round and round Patroclus’s grave in full view of the Trojan royal family, who are watching from the city walls. He then refuses to give the body back to the family for burial, which means that Hector’s spirit will never know rest. But one night, King Priam of Troy enters the Greek camp incognito and makes his way to Achilles’ tent to beg for the body of his son. To the astonishment of Achilles’ companions, the old man throws off his disguise and falls at the feet of his son’s slayer, weeping and kissing the hands that “were dangerous and man-slaughtering and had killed so many of his sons.”23 His utter abasement awakens in Achilles a profound grief for his own dead father, and he begins to weep too, “now for his own father, now again for Patroclus.”24 The two men cling together, mourning their dead. Then Achilles rises, takes Priam’s hand, and raises him gently to his feet “in pity for the grey head and the grey beard.”25 Carefully, tenderly, he hands over Hector’s body, concerned that its weight might be too much for the frail old man. And then the two enemies look at each other in silent awe: Priam, son of Dardanos, gazed upon Achilles, wondering At his size and beauty, for he seemed like an outright vision Of gods. Achilles in turn gazed on Dardanian Priam And wondered, as he saw his brave looks, and listened to him talking.26 In the midst of a deadly war, the shared suffering and pity of it all had enabled each man to transcend his hatred and see the sacred mystery of his enemy.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The very first person I approached about the charter was Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, whose immediate and generous response gave the charter a credibility at an early stage that it might not otherwise have had. And my most sincere thanks to all the Councillors whose wisdom and insight were an inspiration: Salman Ahmed, musician and social activist; Ali Asani, Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture at Harvard University; Sadhvi Chaitanya, Spiritual Director of Arsha Vijan Mandiram; the Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C.; Sister Joan Chittister, Founder and Director of Benetvision; His Excellency Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of the Arab Republic of Egypt; Mohsen Kadivar, Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University; Chandra Muzaffar, President of the International Movement for a Just World; Baroness Julia Neuberger, Prime Minister’s Champion for Volunteering, U.K.; Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University; Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C.; Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, Rabbi of the Reform Jewish Community of The Hague; Reverend Peter Storey, former President of the Methodist Church of South Africa and the South African Council of Churches; Tho Ha Vinh, Head of Training, Learning, and Development in the International Committee of the Red Cross; Tu Wei Ming, Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University; and Jean Zaru, presiding Clerk of the Ramallah Friends Meeting. I shall never forget our conversation at Vevey, which was a model of Socratic and compassionate discourse. I look forward to working with you all in the future. And last—but for me far from least—thanks to everybody at My Ideal Dog: Eve, Gary, Stacey, and Amy Mott and Michelle Stevenson, who make it possible for me to promote the charter by giving Poppy such a wonderful second home and have taught me so much about compassion for animals. NOTES PREFACE Wish for a Better World 1. Information about the activities of the charter can be found on www.charterforcompassion.org. 2. Confucius, Analects 15.23. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the Analects are taken from Arthur Waley, trans. and ed., The Analects of Confucius (New York, 1992). 3. Analects 4.15, as translated by A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, Ill., 1989), p. 21. 4. Tu Wei-Ming, Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany, 1985), p. 84. 5. Analects 12.3. 6. The Buddha’s dates are now disputed. Western scholars used to think that he was born in about 563 BCE, but recent scholarship indicates that he could have lived a century later. Heinz Berchant, “The Date of the Buddha Reconsidered,” Indologia Taurinensen 10 (n.d.). 7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London and New York, 2006), p. 221. 8. E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 156. 9. Paul Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life’s Challenges (London, 2009). 10. August Comte, A General View of Positivism, trans.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Still, I was aware of the trust we had for each other, that somehow it was intact. The particulars of our split—that a discrete event had precipitated it, and that we had moved quickly toward divorce—had spared us some of the hurts that accumulate when a relationship breaks down and isn’t laid decisively to rest. It is grueling to work through difficult feelings, but I couldn’t stomach the exhaustion of letting them linger. We’d had the huge privilege of therapy, among a whole teetering pile of other privileges. Neither of us was interested in vengeance. We were bound together by June—for better or for worse, for real this time. I hoped the fact of her would motivate us to work hard on whatever we had left. I cried only when we talked through the parenting plan. Dividing up hours and holidays with our child seemed as vicious, as unthinkable, as severing a limb. With our custody arrangement, I would miss half of our daughter’s childhood. I attempted to cheer myself with a sobering fact: So do many (most?) parents who work full-time. I should feel lucky for my freedom, contingent as it is on my child’s father being a willing, reliable, and enthusiastic co-parent. I would rarely worry about June when she was not with me. I want her to love her father. She should. The attorney finished our paperwork and filed it the next day. This would start the clock on a ninety-day mandated waiting period, and then we could formally divorce. I mourned the idea of us. Like Orion’s Belt, like all the shapes we see fixed against the sky at night, our marriage was a perception dependent upon belief. I had stopped believing, but something solid remained. Brandon only lived on the other side of town. I had a key to his apartment, and he had a key to my house. We took June out together sometimes for soup dumplings and dry-fried green beans. He sent text transcripts of funny things she said. I sent photos of her crossing her eyes. You know, my therapist said, you can leave a relationship healthy. You don’t have to destroy it. I remember he paused, then added: And you don’t have to destroy yourself. [image file=image_rsrc2FT.jpg] 30I wrote a list in the notes function of my phone and titled it “2 things to not compromise on.” Item 1: Do not marry someone who will not go to therapy, both on their own and with you. Refusing to go to therapy with your partner is like looking the other way when they’re drowning. Item 2: Do not marry someone who does not take active steps to have an egalitarian domestic relationship. Daily tidying of the house, keeping track of grocery needs, buying dog food, etc. Maybe interesting, more than anything, that I even thought of marriage. Another list from that time: big happiness, big unknowns, big fatigue, big everything.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  His tragedy, however, gives him an entirely new vulnerability and, consequently, an ability to enter into the suffering of others. 6 His speech, hitherto reasoned and controlled, is now interspersed with wordless exclamations: “Ion ... ion! Aiai ... aiai!” When he meets his weeping daughters, he forgets his own distress in concern for their plight. The members of the chorus make their own journey to compassion. Initially appalled by Oedipus’s predicament, they cannot bear to look at him and shrink away in horror, but as they learn to appreciate the depth of his grief, this revulsion gives way to affection; they show the audience how to react to his tragedy as they reach out to Oedipus, calling him “dear one” and “darling.” 7 In Oedipus at Colonus, which Sophocles presented at the end of his life, Oedipus, a man shunned for his unspeakable but unintentional crimes, becomes a source of blessing to the citizens of Athens when they have the compassion to take him in and give him asylum. 8 Tragic drama reminds us of the role that art can play in expanding our sympathies. Plays, films, and novels all enable us to enter imaginatively into other lives and make an empathetic identification with people whose experiences are entirely different from our own. They can give us moments of compassionate ekstasis, and we should resolve, during this step, to allow art to unsettle us and make us question ingrained preconceptions. Films are especially emotive, because the big screen brings us even closer to the characters. We can find ourselves moved to tears, our mirror neurons firing as we witness the pain of characters in a movie, even though our rational minds tell us that their suffering is entirely fictional. When we have been affected in this way, we should not be too hasty to forget the experience as we leave the cinema or put the novel back on the shelf. We should let the pathos lodge permanently in our minds, in the same way as Athens made a home for both Oedipus and the Eumenides. Imagination is crucial to the compassionate life. A uniquely human quality, it enables the artist to create entirely new worlds and give a strong semblance of reality to events that never happened and people who never existed. Compassion and the abandonment of ego are both essential to art: it is easy to spot a poem, a novel, or a film that is self-indulgent or brittle with cruel cleverness. When a film makes us weep, it is often because it has touched a buried memory or unacknowledged yearning of our own. Art calls us to recognize our pain and aspirations and to open our minds to others. Art helps us—as it helped the Greeks—to realize that we are not alone; everybody else is suffering too.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  2 But when the old brain is co-opted by the new, the result can be disastrous. Reason was an ambiguous tool, because, as we have seen throughout history, it can be used to find a logically sound rationale for actions that violate our humanity. In his tragedy Medea , Euripides (c. 484–406 BCE) told the story of the eponymous woman from Colchis who married Jason, hero of the Argonauts, and helped him find the Golden Fleece. When Jason callously casts her off, in revenge Medea kills not only Jason and his new wife, but the children she and Jason conceived together. Very few animals would slaughter their young, yet Medea is driven to this act by her uniquely human reasoning powers. Arguing with the consummate logic that Athenians were developing in their democratic assemblies, she raises one objection to her hideous plan after another, only to reach a terrifying conclusion: she cannot punish Jason as he deserves unless she also murders their boys. She is too intelligent not to find the most effective means of revenge and too tough not to carry it out. 3 If it is not tempered by compassion and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. But it was also true, as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) would claim later, that the exercise of our rational powers was essential to the empathetic experience of tragic drama. Without the detached critical rigor that enabled you to stand back from the reptilian me-first mentality, you would be unable to escape from your self-preoccupation and appreciate the plight of another person. Tragedy, Aristotle believed, educated the emotions and taught people to experience them appropriately. As he watched the drama unfold, a small-minded person would see his own troubles in perspective and an arrogant person would learn to feel compassion for the unfortunate. Purified, drained of their dangerous potential, the emotions could thus become beneficial to the community. 4 We are a tragic species, divided against ourselves, our two brains locked in conflict. As they learned to identify with the suffering hero, the Greek audience found themselves weeping for people they might otherwise shun—for Medea or for Heracles, who in a fit of divinely inspired madness killed his wife and children. At the end of Euripides’ Heracles , Theseus, legendary king of Athens, embraces the broken man and leads him gently offstage, the two bound together “in a yoke of friendship.” As they bid him farewell, the chorus laments Heracles’ fate “with mourning and with many tears … For we today have lost our noblest friend.” 5 The art of the dramatist enabled the audience to achieve an expansion of sympathy, so that they had a taste of the “immeasurable” power of compassion. An audience that could befriend a man who had committed an act like that of Heracles had achieved a Dionysian ekstasis , a “stepping out” of ingrained preconceptions in an empathy that, before seeing the play, they would probably have deemed impossible.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Around the same time, I noticed a new book in the den of our house. The book was on the shelf where my parents kept art books, and it read ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE in bold gray letters down its white spine. Inside were male nudes with ball gags and leather and elegant, velvety portraits of what I would later recognize as uncircumcised penises. There was a photo of a smirking old lady, the artist Louise Bourgeois, with a giant, ropy-veined statue of a cock tucked under her arm like a clutch. I remember the afternoon that I found it, how I turned the glossy pages with fascination and fear and the strange, slippery sense that adults call arousal. I never told my parents I’d found it. It wasn’t that they would have been angry; they’d put it on the shelf, so it was fair game. Making a big thing of it would have only made us all uncomfortable. Still I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want anyone to know how much it confused me. The year was 1986 or 1987, and by then AIDS was on every front page. I was learning that some people, a lot of people, thought people like my uncle were an abomination. Apparently this was sanctioned by the Bible. Some people thought people like my uncle deserved this new disease, this “gay plague.” I began to understand that the way my family understood gayness, and sex, even art, was not how everyone did. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I don’t remember how my parents told me that Jerry was sick. The last Christmas that Jerry was alive, the Christmas of 1987, my dad made a video of our holiday. He’d just gotten his first camcorder. We were at my aunt Tina’s house in California, and you can hear Mannheim Steamroller’s synth-classical Christmas album plinking in the background. The morning after Christmas we drove up to Santa Rosa, to Jerry’s house. In the final frames, the camera follows Jerry as he walks up the driveway to the barn. The way his legs work, the sun in his hair like tarnished brass: it really does look like me. Jerry died of pneumocystis pneumonia on March 6, 1988, in a hospital bed at Johns Hopkins. He was forty-two years old. He’d flown to Baltimore to join up with my grandmother, and they’d planned to travel together to New York, where Jerry would start an experimental drug regimen. But he was sick when he got off the plane in Baltimore, and they never made it. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My mother was forty-one when Jerry died. Her family—Joe, Elaine, the six surviving siblings—tipped from its axis. But in Oklahoma, it was hard to talk about. This is how it was almost everywhere, except San Francisco, maybe New York, and maybe LA. In many towns, this is how it still is.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I remember the night of the day that he moved out. By the light of my bedside lamp, I dug out an old T-shirt of my father’s from the bottom drawer of my dresser. It was from a diner in Oklahoma City whose corned beef hash my mother once loved, royal blue cotton jersey with the restaurant’s logo on the back. I’d taken it from my father’s closet the year after he died, and it still smelled like him, a high-pitched musk. In thirteen years, I’d never worn it. I didn’t want the smell to go away. But the day that Brandon moved out, I unfolded it and pulled it on, held the fabric to my nose until I was sobbing. I wanted company, and grief was it. I was free from the labor of our marriage: the tidying up after him, the keeping-track, the constant doing. After he moved out, I made a mess of the place. I left dirty dishes in the sink, threw my clothes on the rug. It was a relief to stop trying to set a shining example, to stop hoping he would follow suit. You’ve been begging the wrong person to see you, my therapist says. You don’t have to do that anymore. I nod, not entirely sure. Alone in our house—my house—I was defiant and furious. How had I put up with it, with how not-right we were, for so long? And then, picking up June at his apartment, I’d look around the room and nearly choke, guilt filling my mouth like a wad of gauze. June’s toys were strewn everywhere, and the laundry too, and here was all this furniture that used to be ours, in this alien, half-finished place. I was the one who’d landed him here, us here, June here. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Why can’t you stay married and just date girls on the side? a friend asks. It’s not like that, I say. I’m not who I was before. I couldn’t be who I am and stay where I was. We tried. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I drove around a lot that summer, to Brandon’s and back, to Nora’s and back, to camp drop-off and back, to the restaurant and back. In the car I played the same song on repeat, “The Swimming Song,” by Loudon Wainwright III. I wondered if June would remember it years later, how much I played it that summer. That summer I was always swimming, even when I wasn’t. I could have drowned at any time, and often I thought I might. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] If I spend enough time feeling guilty, I decided, things will be okay. If I feel guilty enough, he will stop being angry with me.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] A friend sent word from amid the trials of her winter: her new baby hadn’t been sleeping, and she’d gotten a horrible cold. Her husband took a day off to be with her, and they snuggled in bed. “Marriage is hard,” she wrote, “but marriage is also transcendent.” I touched my hand to the hole where my marriage used to be. I peered down the fissure. We were married for ten years. Does it count for anything? Is the counter zeroed now? Who decides if it is? I want us to be the ones to make the call. We don’t always look at each other when we talk, as though our words were for the room and not the other. We’ve learned to be kind rather than exacting. Sometimes I think he might hate me. On better days, I’m glad for the plasticity of his heart. Our marriage transcended us, and it lives on in this weird, complicated family we make. I’m reaching now, but I try it: “Divorce is hard, but divorce is also transcendent.” If marriage defines a certain set of limitations, is there something transcendent about its end? Is there something out here I couldn’t have imagined, past the breach in the perimeter? Out where we are now, beyond the old checkpoints, in the space at the margin? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I am optimistic. But there is freedom too in a degree of pessimism. Brandon and I will do things differently, like we always have. We will disagree in ways that drive each other batshit—and not funny-batshit, just regular. I used to want him to change; I always expected him to change. He might never, but I might not either. I teeter sometimes on the edge of disliking him, let myself sway there a while. It passes, because now I can get up and leave. I can’t fix or control everything, but I can also stop trying to. There’s freedom in giving up some hope. I can commit to being a “good-enough” co-parent. I don’t know what Winnicott would say, but I like it. I can commit to trying to weather the hiccups and disappointments. Aiming to be good-enough might actually give us a shot at being decent. I can try to loosen my grip on all of us—not just on Brandon, but on Ash and June. Let each of us slip into our places, be what we are. Not because I’m so generous, but because I want them to do the same for me. Brandon, Ash, and I have gone to family counseling, to keep working at it. Ash and I work at it too. There are days when I wish I could have a brand-new life with Ash, shiny and unblemished—our own family, uninformed by exes and the gymnastics of co-parenting. I don’t like that Ash is haunted by my ghosts. It wasn’t what they imagined for themself. But this wasn’t what I imagined for myself either.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Austerlitz, Vera told me how in autumn we would often stand by the upper enclosure wall of the Schénborn Garden to watch the squirrels burying their treasures. Whenever we came home afterwards, I had to read aloud from your favorite book about the changing seasons, said Vera, even though you knew it by heart from the first line to the last, and she added that I never tired of the winter pictures in particular, scenes showing hares, deer, and partridges transfixed with astonishment as they stared at the ground covered with newly fallen snow, and Vera said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? Ale kdyz vSechno zakryje snih, jak veverky najdou to misto, kde si schovaly zasoby? Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end? It was six years after their farewell outside the gates of the Trade Fair in HoleSovice, so Vera continued, that she learned how Agata was sent east in September 1944 with one and a half thousand others who had been interned in Terezin. For a long time after that, said Vera, she herself had been almost incapable of thinking of Agata, of what must have become of her, and of her own life continuing into a pointless future. For weeks she was hardly in her right mind, she had felt a kind of dragging outside her body, she had tried to pick up broken threads and could not believe that everything had really happened as it did. None of her endless attempts later to find out my whereabouts in England or my father’s in France had produced any results. Whatever she tried, it was as if all traces were lost in the sand, for at the time, with an army of censors causing havoc in the postal services, it often took months to get an answer from abroad. Perhaps, Vera surmised, said Austerlitz, it would have been different if she could have turned in person to the appropriate authorities, but she lacked both the opportunity and the means to do so. And in this way the years had raced by, seeming in retrospect like a single leaden day. She had indeed gone into the teaching profession and did what was necessary to maintain herself, but almost all her feelings had been extinguished, and she had not truly breathed since that time. Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive. Such remarks of Vera’s were often followed by a long silence, said Austerlitz, as if neither of us knew what to say, and the hours passed by almost imperceptibly in the darkened flat in the Sporkova. Towards evening, when I said goodbye to Vera, holding her weightless hands in mine, she suddenly remembered how, on the day of my departure from the Wilsonova Station, Agata had turned to her when the train

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  All speak of the piercing sorrow of bereavement, which has stripped away the veneer of security to reveal the terror that lies at the heart of human life. In the spirit of the Daodejing, there is no triumphalism and no gloating. The Persians are presented as a people in mourning. Greece and Persia are described as “sisters of one race ... flawless in beauty and grace.” 20 But Aeschylus hints that Greece and Persia are also bound together by a shared lust for power. Darius warns against the dangers of hubris (“overweening pride”), admitting that when he invaded Greece he brought disaster on his people by failing to observe the divinely sanctioned boundaries of his empire. ... Let no man, Scorning the fortune that he has, in greed for more Pour out his wealth in utter waste. Zeus throned on high Sternly chastises arrogant, boastful men. 21 But Athens was equally guilty of pride and greed. Some Athenians were beginning to feel uneasy about their violation of the Delian League, which had originally been designed to bring the Greek city-states together against the Persian threat and to foster friendship and brotherhood between them. But after Salamis, Athens had started to invade other poleis and was using the spoils of battle to fund its expensive building projects. 22 Aeschylus had made it clear to the audience that his city was in no position to pontificate self-righteously over the sins of the enemy. We need this spirit today. Centuries before Aeschylus, Homer had shown what could happen when you reached out to the enemy in time of war. The Iliad, his eighth-century epic, tells the story of a small incident in the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Achilles, the chief warrior on the Greek side, quarrels with King Agamemnon and, in a fit of egotistic pique, withdraws his men from the army and sulks in his tent. This had disastrous consequences for the Greeks, and in the ensuing confusion, Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus is killed by Hector, one of the Trojan princes. Achilles becomes almost mad with guilt, grief, and rage. He challenges Hector to a duel, kills him, and horribly mutilates his corpse by dragging it round and round Patroclus’s grave in full view of the Trojan royal family, who are watching from the city walls. He then refuses to give the body back to the family for burial, which means that Hector’s spirit will never know rest.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Christina’s life changed for the better when she left Mario and with the help of her new partner started a successful catering company. But she never wavered in her belief that she was destined to work with children in Vietnam. In 1989 she felt that the time had come and made her first visit to the country. One day, while she was watching two destitute little girls playing in the dirt of the street, one of them smiled at her and tried to hold her hand. Christina was immediately overcome with memories so painful that she tried to walk away; she wanted no more grief, no more involvement. Yet all the time she was saying to herself: “There’s no difference between an Irish gutter and a Vietnamese gutter. At the end of the day they are the same.” Suddenly past and present came together, and Christina realized that the Vietnamese girl was the child she had seen so long ago in her dream. Sobbing, she sank down in the dirt and pulled the children into her lap, promising to take care of them. This was a major turning point: “Here the pain, sorrow and anger of my childhood in Ireland would be resolved. I would work with the street children of Ho Chi Minh City. Here I would stay. Here I would find happiness.” 4 Christina became a crusader for the street children of Vietnam. She founded an orphanage with the help of wealthy businessmen, and later established the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation in London, which raised thousands of dollars. This enabled her to open the Children’s Medical and Social Centre in Ho Chi Minh City in 1991, just two years after her first visit to the country. There are now foundations in France, the United States, and Australia. When she began her work, friends told her that she was attempting the impossible. “You are only one person,” they insisted. But Christina never forgot that “when I was a child, I needed only one person to understand my suffering and pain.... One is very important.” 5 Her life has been a demonstration of this truth. Let us consider the moment of recognition. When Christina looked into the child’s face, she saw herself; she realized that there was no “us” and “them”; “at the end of the day they are the same.” From a purely rational perspective, this statement makes little sense.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The great rabbi Akiva, executed by the Romans in 135 CE, taught that the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was the greatest principle of the Torah.49 Only his pupil Ben Azzai disagreed, preferring the simple biblical statement “This is the roll of the descendents of Adam” because it emphasized the unity of the human race.50 In order to reveal the presence of compassion at the core of all the legislation and narratives of the Torah, the rabbis would sometimes twist the original sense and even change the words of scripture. They were not interested in merely elucidating the original intention of the biblical author. Midrash (“exegesis”) was an essentially inventive discipline, deriving from the verb darash, “to search,” “to investigate,” or “to go in pursuit of” something that was not immediately self-evident. A rabbi would be expected to find fresh meaning in scripture, which, as the word of God, was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Another famous story shows that from the very beginning, the rabbis realized that compassion was the key to religion now that the temple had been destroyed. It happened that R. Johanan ben Zakkai went out from Jerusalem and R. Joshua followed him and saw the burnt ruins of the Temple and he said: “Woe is it that the place, where the sins of Israel find atonement, is laid waste.” Then said R. Johanan, “Grieve not, we have an atonement equal to the Temple, the doing of loving deeds [gemilut hasadim], as it is said, ‘I desire love [hesed] and not sacrifice.’ ”51 Practically expressed compassion was now a priestly act that would atone for sins more effectively than the temple sacrifices. It is a good example of the new midrash. Rabbi Johanan is quoting the prophet Hosea, who would probably have been surprised by his interpretation.52 In its original context, hesed had meant not “love” but “loyalty”; for Hosea, God had not been speaking of the loving deeds that Jews would perform for one another but of the cultic fealty that Israelites owed to him.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The problem is that philosophical theories that aim to make sense of suffering are often presented in immensely dull and technical ways, that treat suffering as a rational problem demanding an intellectual solution, often involving arcane definitions and distinctions that baffle their readers, leaving them drowning in a glutinous alphabet soup. The success of The Shack made it clear that what people were looking for was a meaningful and accessible engagement with the problem of suffering which they did not find in self-help manuals, traditional spiritual comfort food, and least of all in an abstract rational analysis based on generic notions of divinity which failed to engage the emotional aspects of suffering and pain. This is a real problem. The American philosopher of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff found himself unable to read academic works on theodicy following the death of his son in a climbing accident in 1983. They just didn’t connect with his situation. ‘I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. I have read the theodicies produced to justify the ways of God to man. I find them unconvincing. To the most agonised question I have ever asked I do not know the answer.’ 50 When it enters our lives, we are overwhelmed by the immensity of the question of suffering. As Johann Baptist Metz remarks, this is ‘a question that can neither be answered nor forgotten, a question for which we, from our side, have no answer; it is the question of “too much.”’ 51 Wolterstorff is one of many Christian writers to explore the question of whether the painful presence of suffering in the world negates Christian belief. C. S. Lewis, now a canonical Christian writer, found the devastation of World War One so troubling that he doubled down on his teenage atheism. Shortly after the end of the war, Lewis published a collection of poems entitled Spirits in Bondage in March 1919 under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. 52 Lewis’s ‘Ode for New Year’s Day’, written when under fire from German artillery near the French town of Arras in January 1918, protests against a silent uncaring heaven, a disinterested spectator of the carnage of the war. The existence of evil and suffering in the world was a moral outrage that would lead any intelligent person to reject belief in God. This is an influential argument, and many have experienced its force. David Hume, for example, argued that the world we know and experience is so clearly inadequate that it could only have been made by an ‘infant deity’, or some elderly deity in his dotage, who urgently needed to be retired from duty. Yet there is a problem with this argument.

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

  "We would have you know that Henry, the false king, has stolen the seal of the Lord Pope Gregory. Wherefore, if ye are told anything contrary to the words of our envoys, hold it false, and believe not Henry’s lies. Further, he has carried away with him the Bishop of Porto, because that man was once familiar with the Lord Pope. If by his help he should attempt anything with you or against you, be sure this bishop is a false witness, and give no credit to those who shall tell you to the contrary. Know that the Lord Pope has already conquered Sutri and Nepi; Barabbas the robber, that is to say, Henry’s pope, has fled like himself. Farewell. Beware of the snares of Henry." § 18. Death of Gregory VII. Gregory was again in possession of the Lateran, but he left the scene of melancholy desolation, accompanied by Guiscard and a few cardinals and Roman nobles. He went first to Monte Cassino and then to Salerno. The descent from Canossa to Salerno was truly a via dolorosa. But the old pope, broken in body, was unbroken in spirit. He renewed the ban against Henry and the anti-pope at the close of 1084, and sent a letter to the faithful in Germany, stating that the words of the Psalmist, Quare fremuerunt gentes (Ps. 2:1, 2), were fulfilled, that the kings of the earth have rebelled against Christ and his apostle Peter to destroy the Christian religion, but could not seduce those who trusted in God. He called upon them to come to the rescue of the Church if they wished to gain the remission of sins and eternal salvation. This is his last written document. His mind remained clear and firm to the end. He recommended Cardinal Desiderius of Monte Cassino (Victor III.) as his successor, and next to him Otto, bishop of Ostia (Urban II.). He absolved all his enemies, except Henry and Wibert. "the usurper of the apostolic see."84 He died, May 25, 1085, with the words which best express the meaning of his public life and character: "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."85 "Nay," said one of the bishops, "in exile thou canst not die, who, as the vicar of Christ and his Apostles, hast received all the nations for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession" (Ps. 2:8). Robert Guiscard, his protector, died a few weeks afterwards (July 17, 1085).

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  But then, I knew that already. Finishing the last jellylike hunk of turtle, I got a text message on my phone from New York. Dee Dee Ramone is dead. I nibbled distractedly at another scorpion toast, feeling myself sink into a deep, dark depression. Before returning to the hotel, I waddle around Singapore, a kooky, unbelievably clean, very crowded expanse of lush vegetation, stately colonial- era houses, and magnificent trees poking through and between vast, multileveled modern shopping malls and new office buildings. It's the world's largest food court, with major chains like Mickey D's, Starbucks, and KFC sandwiched between vendors selling fish balls and curries. There seem to be a Prada, a Ferragamo, an Hermes, and a Burberry on every corner and millions of people shopping shopping shopping. No cops in sight. Not a one. I am surprised by the seeming total invisibility of police presence. I guess the famously severe penalties really do discourage potential violators. I do not, by the way, necessarily see the widely publicized policy of caning as a bad thing. The rotten American kid who received a few desultory whacks for vandalism a few years back should have gotten another ten, just for stupidity and bad manners. After Clinton appealed to the government, his number of smacks was reduced— unfairly, I think, as his alleged coconspirators from Hong Kong had to bend over and take the full freight. While I'm in town, Singaporeans keep warily inquiring what I think of this, expecting, no doubt, for me to be appalled. But I can think of no punishment more appropriate for, say, the Enron bunch, than a public caning (after being stripped of all their assets and sentenced to a little prison time, of course). All those investors and employees who lost their life savings while their bosses cashed out should at least have the pleasure of seeing Lay, Fastow, Skilling, et al. publicly bent over a sawhorse and flogged with a rattan pole. Even the pillory would seem appropriate—as these weasels will still, inevitably, remain rich. It would be a feel-good event for everybody. In fact, while we're at it, a few whacks for people who order egg-white omelettes, no butter, no oil, might be enlightened policy . . . The next morning, I'm up early to go to the Tekka wet market to shop, then to the Butterbean Bistro, to cook for another journalist. There is no part of me that doesn't hurt, and it's been quite a while since I've stood behind a stove. I dread having to prepare food from unfamiliar ingredients, in an unfamiliar kitchen, with unfamiliar tools—but the bistro is remarkably well equipped with mise en place, and I manage to soldier through a workmanlike meal of steamed razor clams and pasta, followed by a roast lemon and herb chicken with vegetables and citrus beurre blanc. Foolishly, I eat my own food, using up valuable storage space I should be reserving for professional purposes.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Rather, this refocusing on a person (rather than an idea) allows a believer to find a way of envisaging life in a suffering world, and make it meaningful by living it out. This point is brought out by the novelist Francis Spufford in his Unapologetic , one of the finest recent explorations of the capacity of a Christian worldview to make emotional sense of things. Spufford suggests that a fixation on over-intellectualised accounts of suffering is ‘a phase in the early history of our belief’ that tries to ‘abolish the mystery’ of suffering. Instead, we need to face up to something that nobody can explain, and learn the wisdom of coping with it. We take the cruelties of the world as a given, as the known and familiar data of experience, and instead of anguishing about why the world is as it is, we look for comfort in coping with it as it is. We don’t ask for a creator who can explain Himself. We ask for a friend in a time of grief … We don’t say that God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world; not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. 62 Coping with Trauma and Suffering: Viktor Frankl and Jordan Peterson This leads us into the move from the intellectualisation of suffering to living meaningfully in a world of suffering. Meaning-making is not a purely cognitive matter; it is also about enactment , living in certain ways. In their different ways, both Judaism and Christianity offer ‘present suffering as part of a broader story of redemption. In complicated ways, each tradition depicts catastrophe as a path forward.’ 63 Both experienced trauma – Judaism through the Babylonian deportation and exile, and Christianity through the crucifixion of Christ – and both developed the strength and flexibility to endure in the face of present and future disaster. The question of finding meaning through suffering surged in significance during the traumas of the First and Second World Wars. Yet it has been given a new importance with the increase in human lifespan in western culture, which often involves living with suffering over extended periods. As early as 1958, the psychologist Edith Weisskopf-Joelson noticed that American culture seemed intolerant of suffering, and reluctant to help people to find belief systems to cope with this. ‘The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading.’

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

  Ashoka’s dilemma may lie behind the story of the Mahabharata, India’s great epic. This massive work—eight times the length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined—is an anthology of many strands of tradition transmitted orally from about 300 BCE but not committed to writing until the early Common Era. The Mahabharata is more than a narrative poem, however. It remains the Indian national saga and is the most popular of all India’s sacred texts, familiar in every home. It contains the Bhagavad-Gita, which has been called India’s “national gospel.” 103 In the twentieth century, during the buildup to independence, the Gita would play a central role in the discussions about the legitimacy of waging war against Britain. 104 Its influence in forming attitudes toward violence and its relation to religion has therefore been unparalleled in India. Long after Ashoka was forgotten, it compelled people of all ranks to grapple with his dilemma, which thus became central to the collective memory of India . Even though the text was finally redacted by Brahmins, at its heart the epic depicts the pathos of the Kshatriya who could not achieve enlightenment because he was obliged by the dharma of his class to be a man of war. The story is set in the Kuru- Panchala region before the rise of the large sixth-century kingdoms. Yudishthira, eldest son of King Pandu, has lost his kingdom to his cousins, the Kauravas, who rigged the ritual game of dice during his consecration, so that he, his four brothers, and Draupadi, their common wife, had to go into exile. Twelve years later the Pandavas regain the throne in a catastrophic war in which nearly everyone on both sides is killed. The final battle brings the Heroic Age of history to an end and ushers in what the epic calls the Kali Yuga—our own deeply flawed era. It should have been a simple war of good versus evil. The Pandava brothers were all fathered by gods: Yudishthira by Dharma, guardian of cosmic order; Bhīma by Vayu, god of physical force; Arjuna by Indra; and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva by the Ashvins, patrons of fertility and productivity. The Kauravas, however, are incarnations of the asuras, and their struggle therefore replicates on earth the war between devas and asuras in heaven. But even though the Pandavas, with the help of their cousin Krishna, chieftain of the Yadava clan, finally defeat the Kauravas, they have to resort to dubious tactics, and when they contemplate the devastated world at the end of the war, their victory seems tainted. The Kauravas, on the other hand, although they are fighting on the “wrong” side, often act in an exemplary manner. When their leader, Duryodhana, is killed, devas sing his praises and cover his body with a shower of petals. The Mahabharata is not an antiwar epic: innumerable passages glorify warfare and describe battles enthusiastically and in gory detail.