Guilt

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 Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  The second step is to find ways to give up our racial power. This isn’t easy because this power is usually maintained through systems and institutions. But we need to make a conscious effort to give up power, to restore justice, to reactivate hospitality, to reinforce agency, to reconcile through repentance, and to recover life together. This will involve confronting institutionalized racism in church and society, and it will involve the kind of self-emptying and relinquishment modeled by Jesus Christ.9 Jim Wallis says, We can no longer plead that we are unaware of the systems around us and what their consequences are for our fellow citizens and brothers and sisters of color. The way things are must no longer be accepted—especially by the dominant racial group that most benefits from that unfairness. Things must change, and a new generation must take up that task. White privilege is a sin of which we must repent, and the best way to show that is by changing practices and policies—and by helping to create new communities that provide for another way.10 Relinquishing Other Forms of PowerRacial power isn’t the only form of power that we need to relinquish. We must choose to relinquish other forms of power that corrupt our faith and witness, disempower others, and keep us from the countercultural, revolutionary power of Jesus Christ. Here we mention just a few of these forms of power. We must relinquish political power. Too often Christians turn to political parties and personalities to achieve certain ends. We hold on to whatever political power we can muster in the hope to influence and shape society. But Stanley Hauerwas and Jonathan Tran remind us that this is a failure of Christian political imagination. It will serve Christians to remember that there are many ways to be political. Gathering with others around the given body of Christ, a polis through and through, is one such way, and is for Christians the original way. . . . To us the most troubling thing was not that Christians voted for Trump when they had plenty of reasons and ways not to do so. While regrettable, that mistake follows a more basic one. We are most troubled by the ongoing belief Christians hold that the nation-state, not the church, is the arbiter of Christian political action. This belief obligates Christians to modes of statecraft in order to fulfill their moral commitments. In order to play at statecraft—again, for one’s “vote to count”—Christians will have to prioritize those commitments that will survive the state’s political processes over those that will not.11 The church is political. But its politic is not of this world. We must also relinquish religious and theological power. Religion and theology have often been used to oppress, silence, and disempower. This is as true today as it was in Jesus’ time. There are few things quite as insidious and damaging as the abuse of spiritual and religious power.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Both Roman and Jewish authorities are actually at the tomb and witness the resurrection of Jesus. The Roman authorities confess Jesus, but the Jewish authorities conspire with Pilate to deceive their own people: Then all came to him, beseeching him [Pilate] and urgently calling upon him to command the centurion and the soldiers to tell no one what they had seen. “For it is better for us,” they said, “to make ourselves guilty of the greatest sin before God than to fall into the hands of the people of the Jews and be stoned.” Pilate therefore commanded the centurion and the soldiers to say nothing. (Gospel of Peter 11:47–49) A story must be read in its narrative entirety, from “the people” in 2:5b through “all the people” in 8:28 and into “the people of the Jews” in 11:48. The result of this consecutive account is, first, to make “the people” extremely guilty; next, to make them extremely repentant; and, last, to make them extremely dangerous to their own authorities. I reject categorically Schaeffer’s interpretation of that last cited unit. She claims that the Jewish authorities are afraid to acknowledge the resurrection lest their own people stone them for becoming, as it were, Christian apostates. That is profoundly wrong and reads the text against its own narrative logic. The Jewish authorities actually believe in the resurrection, because they witness it. But they decide to commit the terrible sin (which they admit is such) of not announcing that triumph lest the Jewish people stone their own authorities for leading them astray over Jesus’ crucifixion. My reading of the Gospel of Peter , therefore, is that it is more anti-Jewish with regard to the authorities than any of the canonical gospels but also more pro-Jewish with regard to the people than any of them. I do not, of course, take that as straightforward history. It is religious polemics and theological apologetics. Still, it confirms that anti-Jewishness is not an adequate explanation of the Gospel of Peter’s redactional purpose. Let me repeat the narrative core of that account, which sets Jewish people and Jewish authorities in opposition to one another. It is not simply a matter of onlookers repenting, as in my epigraph from Luke 23:47. It is a story about the Jewish authorities knowing the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and lying to protect themselves from their own people, who are dangerously ready to believe such an event . Narrative logic holds closely to that basic theme. The authorities lead the people into crucifying Jesus. All see the death miracles and recognize what they have done. The people repent and strike their breasts. Seeing that, the authorities obtain Roman soldiers and guard the tomb. Because of that, they are there to witness the resurrection-ascension of Jesus leading out from Hades those other holy Jews who died before him.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Deb shoots him a look. Joe pockets the change, then pulls it back out. He offers to buy Dev a soda. Can I, Mom? Dev says, for soda is contraband in our house, and I say sure, and later in his life, Dev will remember the chesty rumble of the soda machine in the basement of that place, the faded tattoos on the bulging biceps of Joe and Sam. He’ll also remember the claim of Philosophy David (who’s working a security job while trying to start a novel) that a doctor made him keep the bandana on his head else it might explode. Several afternoons a week we spend with this company. Let go, they urge me. Let go. I have no idea what this letting go means beyond surrounding myself with sober women—I mostly talk to women—and grouchily taking their suggestions. But each sober day seems to widen the chasm between Warren and me. The halfway house is another hiding place from our troubles. With our therapist, I sit across the room and rail. Rather than scrutinize my own absence—first via booze, now via recovery—I devote each session to old grievances. How Warren went running during Daddy’s funeral, took his paternity leave when Dev and I were still in the hospital, left every single late-night feeding for me to handle alone. Not that these complaints don’t have weight, but I nurse my grudges like foundlings. For his part, he succinctly itemizes the shrewish railings I’ve unleashed on him. Eventually, he says, I can’t undo the past, Mare. What about now? Surely you’re not gonna be one of those women, the doctor says, who gets her husband’s attention and then bails out just when there’s a chance to get a marriage she wants? But I am. I say, I just don’t trust that he cares for me the way I want. What you want, nobody can give you, he says. Intimacy exercises that involve backrubs and kissing, I flatly refuse to do. There’s a door slammed shut in me that I’ve barred. And Warren says—on the topic of our nonexistent sex life—One day you’re gonna reach for me, and I won’t be there. (From today’s vantage, my withdrawal and coldness seem so corrosive and mean, I want to shake my young self.) Prayer isn’t patching up the marriage yet, though applied to small problems from time to time, it sometimes yields up a feasible idea. Stranded without child care once, I figure out after a prayer—it comes to me—that I could slip Chris, an ex-hooker from the house, a few bucks to hang out in the quad with Dev for a spell, which seems safe enough for an hour or so.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But at twenty-three he was hit by a first-pitch fastball from Hamilton that crushed the left side of his face, fractured his cheekbone, dislocated his jaw, and so damaged his vision that it eventually terminated his career. It was a Friday-night game, the first of four in the Angels’ last visit to Boston for that season. Conigliaro was batting sixth in the Red Sox lineup and it was the fourth inning, no score, two out, nobody on. When Tony Conigliaro died of kidney failure in 1990 after round-the-clock nursing care since a heart attack in 1982, Dave Anderson of the New York Times interviewed Jack Hamilton about that fateful pitch (Tuesday, Feb. 27; p. B9). Hamilton remembered it as a day game because “I tried to go see him in the hospital late that afternoon or early that evening but they were just letting the family in.” He also remembered his manager leaving it up to him whether to accompany the team for its next series in Boston that same season. (He said he went.) And he remembered that “it was the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2–1, and he was the eighth hitter in their batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” There is, of course, no question about the fact of that accident. But, even though Hamilton admitted that “I’ve had to live with it; I think about it a lot,” he got five details wrong in his recollection of what happened. It was a night not a day game; it was the Angels’ last time in Boston that season; the batter was sixth not eighth in the lineup; the score was 0–0 not 2–1; and it was the fourth not the sixth inning. All of those are, of course, very minor and quite typical memory mistakes. But notice three features of that example. Even (or especially) in such a traumatic experience, the details are not protected by the indelible nature of the event itself. Further, there is no clear distinction in Hamilton’s memory between correct and false details, even though, in this case, we have the independent ability to check and make that distinction for ourselves. Finally, there may be a logic to those mistakes in memory. Hamilton denied motivation twice in the interview: “I know in my heart I wasn’t trying to hit him” and “I had no reason to throw at him.” In general, his memory mistakes tended to support those claims, exonerating him from any suspicion of malice rather than accident. Hamilton also remembered details that shifted blame elsewhere: “He’d been hit a lot of times,” Hamilton said. “He crowded the plate.” As Hamilton remembered and “had to live with it,” Conigliaro’s injury and his own innocence fused not just to recollect the event accurately but to reproduce the event appropriately.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  You still think it’s funny that she let you screen—at age eight—the über-violent Pulp Fiction because she found your interest in nonlinear film methods artistic. But I’d stood before her sputtering, What about the sodomy, Mother? From the corner of the room, you asked what exactly sodomy was. Mother said, When the man hurt the other man. You asked her if it was the guy with the bondage ball in his mouth. Jesus, Mother, I said. You see! Well, he was interested in the movie when his cousin talked about it, Mother said. It’s a testament to your desire to avoid further conflict that you waited till we were on the plane to tell me she’d also shown you—at the outset of our visit—a pearl-handled revolver in her pocketbook. Her rationale? She didn’t want you coming across it in her purse. I’d never go through Grandma Charlie’s purse, you said. Still, you considered the pistol incident something I’d want to know, while you reassured me you were disinclined to play with a loaded weapon. Mostly, Mother couldn’t hurt you. But I both could and did. The time I’m mostly thinking of, you were barely four, which—I would argue—is less like being a miniature person than like a dog or cat who can talk. Your father and I were coming to pieces, and not long after, you came to see me in the hospital. You remember the embossed smiley faces on my green slippers. You remember the red-haired woman so psychotic she once landed in four-point restraints just about the time you got there with your Ninja Turtle lunch box, and you could hear her howls. We had a picnic one summer afternoon when you visited, and the hospital grounds so evoked the playing fields where your father distinguished himself that you told your teachers at daycare that I was at a slumber party at Harvard. We both remember, albeit in varying tones of gray and black and shit brown, the misery I mired us in. That’s the story I want to tell: how I started getting drunk. How being drunk got increasingly hard, and being not drunk felt impossible. In Odyssean terms, I’d wanted to be a hero, but wound up—as Mother did—a monster. But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless, the Greek translators call it. That’s what Odysseus wished for his son, Telemachus: to live guilt free. As a teenager myself, reading how Odysseus boffed witches and fought monsters, I inked the word blameless on the bottom of my tennis shoe. And my favorite part was always when he came home after decades and no one knew him.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  (Leviticus 25:35–37) It was, of course, very easy, even in the absence of interest, to get more and more deeply in debt. Hence the next step was at least some control over creditors and what they could do with pledges given as collateral. The second step, then, was the controlling of collateral to avoid oppressive or vengeful actions. The Covenant Code is, as usual, quite succinct. Its formulation is expanded in Deuteronomy (but again not in the Deuteronomic Code itself). If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate. (Exodus 22:26–27) No one shall take a mill or an upper millstone in pledge, for that would be taking a life in pledge…. When you make your neighbor a loan of any kind, you shall not go into the house to take the pledge. You shall wait outside, while the person to whom you are making the loan brings the pledge out to you. If the person is poor, you shall not sleep in the garment given you as the pledge. You shall give the pledge back by sunset, so that your neighbor may sleep in the cloak and bless you; and it will be to your credit before the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 24:6, l0–11) The third step, finally, was the remission of debts. The Deuteronomic Code took the idea of the seventh-year rest and, in a somewhat extraordinary move, applied it to debt. Remitting debt followed the same pattern as forbidding interest. It did not apply to the foreign merchant from whom, since he demanded interest of you, you could demand interest in return. It was not present in the Covenant Code but was invented by the Deuteronomic Code as part of the sabbath year liberation. Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed…. If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  He had worried —a subtle look in which the twin trajectories of his royal-blue eyes dragged themselves inward. He had guilty , which was sad with the inwardness of worried . I have a monkey face, I said, adding, Your nose honks when I pinch it. I pinched his nose and made the squeaky clown-nose noise— ee-oo, ee-oo . The note I would leave for Warren told him how, within weeks of scattering my ashes, he’d find some cheerful, barrette-wearing Elizabeth of a girl, a blonde from Smith or Barnard or Wellesley. Her Fair Isle sweater would fit better into her in-laws’ Christmas photo than my black schmattas. She would give Dev blond siblings. I’d get scissored from his memory like some grubby nanny from a distant past. He needed to be rid of me if he was to thrive. Looking into Dev’s face, I could almost feel the darkness leave me, but something in me held on to it. ( Where is God in this scene? my current spiritual advisor would ask. Now I’d say, He’s right there. In full power in the body of the boy, whose light I had to defend my misery from.) Dev said, No more work. I said, No more work, just play. Which in some lackluster fashion, I did until his father came to keep him for the weekend, while I disappeared into my sublet. Before Warren got there, Dev was Superman, and I was a distinctly unwondrous Wonder Woman. Check . In the hospital dark, lying there, crying for my son, I realize that one of the last big suggestions I’d failed to take regularly was praying on my knees. Janice’s voice comes back: You don’t do it for God . In the hospital, I have this urge to kneel, yet to do so in public—in front of my sighing, unsettled roommate—seems, well, obscene somehow. I tiptoe to the bathroom and bend onto the cold tiles. Thanks, whoever the fuck you are , I say, for keeping me sober . I feel small, kneeling there. Small and needy and inadequate. Pathetic, even. Like somebody who can’t handle things. Which is fairly accurate, after all, for the average inmate. If you’re God, I say, you know I feel small and needy and inadequate. And tonight I want a drink. The silence fails to say anything back. I glare at it. It feels like judgment, the silence. And at that silence I give off rage; I start a ranting prayer in my head that goes something like this: Fuck you for making me an alcoholic. For making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny. You’re a fucking amateur, torturing a baby like that, you fuck. And my daddy withering into that form. What pleasure do you get from…from smiting people? I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is—strangely—the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She suggests I doctor bathwater with lavender salts, set votive candles all over, kill the lights, then step into my own baptismal fount. Maybe there I can rethink events on the train. Follow that, she says, with a list of how your life has changed since you quit drinking. Lying back in the fragrant water, I let a washcloth obliterate my features, rewinding to the days and hours before I got on the train. It’s the old story. Underslept and underfed, I’d been running with my shoulder bag thumping against my butt, doing quarterback dodges and rolls on crowded holiday streets, while behind me, pedestrians dove for cover. I was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I’d loped. Take the subway, the sane voice had said. Take the subway, you can buy a sandwich. Then counterattack claimed I needed cardio for the blubber on my ass. A sandwich isn’t the solution. You need to refinance. You need five hundred dollars this week or Dev’s Christmas is Tiny Tim’s. You might as well call it the voice of the Adversary, for once I tune in to it, I’ve lost my real self—the God-made one, akin to others. The Adversary’s voice can suck me into the maelstrom of my tornado-force will, which’ll chew up anybody in its path, me included. The washcloth steams my features soft, and once the water’s cold, I oil myself up like a bodybuilder, slip on sweats, then towel-wrap my hair like a Turkish pasha. Heating up meatballs for Dev and his pals loudly playing air hockey in the basement, I do Patti’s list of what’s changed in ten years. The boys clattering downstairs are a nightly antidote to the shipwrecked household I grew up in, and we no longer have to roll coins from the sofa cushions in order to afford meatballs. Last month at Mother’s surprise birthday, I floated in the pool alongside her and Lecia while brother-in-law Tom worked the grill and Dev and his cousin did cannonballs. The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises—a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. Asked my concept of God, I mouth all the fashionable stuff—all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain—forlorn childhood, this failed relationship—I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned. How’s that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing God? Margaret says, We often strap on to God the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you’ve been neglected, God seems cold; if you’ve been bullied, He’s a tyrant. If you’re filled with self-hatred, then God is a monster making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now? I don’t know, like some slutty Catholic schoolgirl. She laughs at this and says, I see you—she peers through those lenses—what I can see of you, as my sister, God’s beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we’ve been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while. So you don’t judge me? I want to know. For what? she said. I don’t even know you. Well, I say, I’m not married, and I aspire to be sexually active again some day. She says, I’m not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that God’s dream for you? God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie. I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God’s will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it. I like the Disney version. I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she’s a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify. Let’s eat a cookie and pray for each other’s disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies. Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men. Together we bow our heads.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Some afternoons at the house, I inflict the agonizing shots, the big needle stiff in her muscle, while in the next room, a house resident may have popped out a second or third addicted or HIV-positive baby. Deb’s calm baffles me. I’ve let go, she says. If you’ve surrendered, I say (I get maniacal in these arguments), wouldn’t you stop using the hormones and harvesting the ova? Deb says, It may not be right for me to conceive. But to pursue them and not get them will somehow turn out in my favor in some way I can’t foresee now. (Years later, Deb will divorce, and her ex will kill himself, and she’ll tell me, Now I see maybe why we could never get pregnant.) I tell the other women that Deb doesn’t even mark on her calendar when her period’s due. Her doctor does that. She needs to relinquish all control. Joan wonders if the rest of us could manage such faith, and we strike a deal that we’ll all let go our own wills as openhandedly. In fact, until each of us has given up care of her life to some greater force for good, the group won’t go on. But I quibble so much about arcane definitions of will and care that the women wind up voting that I’ve surrendered already and am just being a bitch about it. And to their will, I yield, which is a start. With the group, I finally succumb to Joan’s long-running nag that I list stuff I feel most crappy about—every single grudge and humiliation—a private exercise we all talk about over a month or so. I break mine into columns with the crappy thing on the left, the particular way it hurt me in the middle, my part in it on the right. In some cases—being sexually assaulted, say—my part has been burying or ignoring the awful event in a way that restabs the wound. Almost eighty pages, mine gets to be. Theirs are way shorter, since they’ve done this before. Sitting in my posh office in low lamplight one Sunday, we unscrew Oreos and sip muddy coffee while privately rolling down our individual columns— we cherrypick what to share—and it floors me to see laid out how fear has governed pretty much my every moronic choice. I’ve never regarded myself as a fearful individual. I’ve hitchhiked in Mexico and blustered drunk into biker bars all mouthy. Those acts now strike me as more pitiful than brave—the sad bravado of a girl with little to lose. We’re supposed to go over the full grudge lists with another person, and Joan gives me a list of sober preachers and rabbis and priests who’ll listen. In my shame, I half expect a religious guy to hurl lightning bolts down on my head. A man with a thick Irish lilt answers one call. Come on over, he says. But would you mind bringing me a Coca-Cola?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Before we head to the park, I tuck two more beer bottles in my coat pocket, plus one in my purse alongside a juice box. Coming home at dusk, I find smoke billowing from the stove door’s edges, the alarm screaming. I yank out the forgotten roast, black and unidentifiable as any roadkill. Mary’s pot-roast recipe? Drink a six-pack then ring the fire department. And rather than call for pizza while congratulating myself that Dev was king of the monkey bars in an arctic gale, I pile a hungry boy into the car for a rush-hour lope through the store for another pot roast, since I’d idly mentioned to my husband a pot roast was forthcoming. Thus ignoring the fact that Warren would forgo roast to find a cheerful spouse and a slice or two of pepperoni. In the store, I trot through the aisles behind a veering cart, thinking, Isn’t Warren a demanding dick to insist on pot roast? My blood-alcohol level is waning, and as my near-starved toddler holds out his arms toward a sugary cereal, his whine revs up till he’s baying like a sick calf to be liberated from the cart. I look at his quite prominent—is that his pulse throbbing?—blue horn as the strangers fix me in their sights. (What a mean, awful mother!) Dev is hoisted out while he thrashes and arches his back like he’s being abducted. We abandon our sundries. Outside, I strap him into his car seat while he flails, and I shout at him—Goddammit, Dev, you’re gonna make me nuts—and tears fill his blue eyes. He covers his face with his hands. While grocery carts veer alongside us, I catch in the rearview Dev’s face all quiet and big eyed. So I heft him out of the car seat and smother his face in kisses, gushing regret. Back home, still there is no pot roast. I scramble eggs while uncorking a new wine, the sweet squeak of the cork releasing the aroma of ferment, and I tell myself, Who wouldn’t drink? This is the last bottle. I’ll finish it, then start fresh tomorrow. In a sneaky, insidious process, it’s all I really look forward to, and I’d bare my teeth at anybody approaching the glass in my hand with a mind toward taking it. That night Warren comes in at ten-thirty, failing to thank me for the noodley casserole glop I slap in a bowl. Ditzy with wine and holding a boulder of guilt, I confess to Warren about snapping at Dev in the store. He blinks. You can’t do that. Easy for you to say, you’re not here all day. But Warren faces me with the piety of a natural parent. Trained to rein in a thoroughbred or wrest a slipper from a teething pooch, he’s disinclined to lose his cool.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Even after I urge my sister to ask Mother point-blank if she’s lying about her ailments to yank Lecia’s chain, and even after my Mother baldly confesses that she makes up about 95 percent of her maladies, my sister can’t stop herself from galloping toward the town of our birth, since forty years of training can’t be shaken off, and codependence is a terrible thing. While we sisters agree it’s time to sell the sagging house and move Mother closer to one of us, each time we sound serious about this, Mother gets weepy and suffers shortness of breath and unprecedented rises in blood pressure that twist my sister’s innards. A few times I fly Mother to New York City, the mecca of her youth, and roll her through museums in a wheelchair until she says, I feel like a fool; why don’t I push you awhile? We horrify many citizens of that great city as she limps behind me and I recline, swigging water. At night, though she swears to stay out of the minibar, she forces me nearly to bankruptcy by devouring as many fifteen-dollar Cokes and twenty-dollar PayDay bars as she can in her brief stay. At one breakfast, I find her hands smeared with chocolate. But I’m the prodigal, the long-gone daughter, and I can’t send home enough checks to pay down that guilt. And when one night she tells me her mother hasn’t come back with the car, and I have to remind her that her mother is forty years dead, I can hear the hoofbeats of the apocalypse galloping unwilled toward her. So I fly home, crossing the patio whose bricks are being split by grass. I walk in, drop my bulging bag, holler, Honey, I’m home , and I find the dining room ceiling caved half in, the central air conditioner dangling down through plaster on a slanted slab of plywood, hanging in midair as if by magician’s wires. Mother, I say, rushing into the room and feeling under my sandals the squish of water in the green shag carpet, which exudes moldy odors of a color I don’t want to picture. I say, Mother, what happened here? I stare up into the hole while standing off to the side, fearing the rest of the ceiling is on the verge of collapse. Finally, I ask, Why didn’t you call somebody? I didn’t know who to call, she says. She’s distractedly studying a crossword in one hand, her brass glasses on the tip of her narrow nose till she says, What’s an eleven-letter word for coinage of Alexander the Great? I squish my feet, saying, The rug’s ruined. Can’t you smell that? No worse than outside, she says. This didn’t happen just today? She looks up saying, Of course not. This week. Maybe last week. I still don’t understand why you didn’t call somebody before the whole floor soaked through. She perches on the side of an easy chair and studies her puzzle.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  She told us she’d never been big on conflict. “I expect my employees to do their jobs without hand-holding,” she said in our first session. In 360s with her team, we heard several complaints that her new employees didn’t know where they really stood with her. Everything was hinted at. “Become a better coach” and “become more assertive” were the two leadership skills we worked with her on over the coming months. Executive coach Peter Bregman had a similar experience with two of his clients. One of them was seen as the apparent successor to the CEO, but he had a problem. “Several of his direct reports were close friends, and he didn’t hold them accountable in the same way he held his other direct reports,” said Bregman. “They didn’t do what he asked and weren’t delivering the results expected. It was hurting his business and his reputation.” Bregman said the other members of this team saw the problem clearly enough and they admitted it was affecting their own motivation because of the unfairness. The leader, on the other hand, had blinders on. He didn’t see it. Bregman’s other client was CEO of a fast-growing billion-dollar enterprise. “He’s warm, gregarious, and authentic,” said the coach. “He’s learned, the hard way, that having friends when you’re the boss can be complicated.” He used to have work friends come to his house for dinner and get to know his family. “But then I had to make hard calls for the good of the business, including firing one of them, and it became too painful. I became hesitant to make decisions because of it. So no, I’m not looking for friends at work.” Bregman explained that this second leader doesn’t avoid friendships with employees because he is a bad guy. He avoids them because he is a good guy. Indeed, it can be hard for leaders to have close friends in the employee ranks, either because they can’t separate friendships from business decisions, or because they have to make tough calls that may destroy those relationships. “There’s plenty of research supporting the idea that having friends at work makes you happier and more engaged,” Bregman adds. “But the research doesn’t address that friendships at work are tricky, especially when you’re the boss.” This means for those who are promoted from individual contributor to manager, or from manager to a manager-of-managers, they can choose to be proactive. Says Professor Art Markman of the University of Texas at Austin, “Make an effort to take some of your [work] friends out and talk to them about some of the stresses and responsibilities of the new position. Help them understand some of the tensions you’re feeling. You may assume that your friends will implicitly understand the tensions you have, but they are much more likely to be sympathetic if you have an open conversation.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Other Sabbatarians did not go to these lengths but remained loyal to their Messiah and to the synagogue. There seem to have been more of these crypto-Sabbatarians than was once believed. During the nineteenth century, many Jews who had assimilated or adopted a more liberal form of Judaism considered it shameful to have had Sabbatarian ancestors, but it appears that many outstanding Rabbis of the eighteenth century believed that Shabbetai had been the Messiah. Scholem argues that even though this Messianism never became a mass movement in Judaism, its numbers should not be underestimated. It had a special appeal to the Marranos, who had been forced by the Spanish to convert to Christianity but eventually reverted to Judaism. The notion of apostasy as a mystery assuaged their guilt and sorrow. Sabbatarianism flourished in Sephardic communities in Morocco, the Balkans, Italy and Lithuania. Some, like Benjamin Kohn of Reggio and Abraham Rorigo of Modena, were eminent Kabbalists who kept their link with the movement secret. From the Balkans, the Messianic sect spread to the Ashkenazic Jews in Poland, who were demoralized and exhausted by the escalating anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. In 1759 the disciples of the strange and sinister prophet Jacob Frank followed the example of their Messiah and converted en masse to Christianity, adhering to Judaism in secret. Scholem suggests an illuminating comparison to Christianity. Some sixteen hundred years earlier, another group of Jews had been unable to abandon their hope in a scandalous Messiah, who had died the death of a common criminal in Jerusalem. What St. Paul had called the scandal of the cross was every bit as shocking as the scandal of an apostate Messiah. In both cases, the disciples proclaimed the birth of a new form of Judaism which had replaced the old; they embraced a paradoxical creed. Christian belief that there was new life in the defeat of the Cross was similar to the Sabbatarians’ conviction that apostasy was a sacred mystery. Both groups believed that the grain of wheat had to rot in the earth in order to bear fruit; they believed that the old Torah was dead and had been replaced by the new law of the Spirit. Both developed Trinitarian and Incarnational conceptions of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like mystics in other religions, the Sufis had experienced a unity and felt one with the whole of existence. Sirhindi, however, dismissed this perception as purely subjective. While the mystic was concentrating on God alone, everything else tended to fade from his consciousness, but this did not correspond to an objective reality. Indeed, to speak of any unity or identity between God and the world was an awful misconception. In fact, there was no possibility of a direct experience of God, who was entirely beyond the reach of mankind: “He is the Holy One, beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond.” 4 There could be no relation between God and the world, except indirectly through the contemplation of the “signs” of nature. Sirhindi claimed that he himself had passed beyond the ecstatic condition of mystics like Ibn al-Arabi to a higher and more sober state of consciousness. He used mysticism and religious experience to reaffirm belief in the distant God of the philosophers, who was an objective but inaccessible reality. His views were ardently embraced by his disciples but not by the majority of Muslims, who remained true to the immanent, subjective God of the mystics. While Muslims like Findiriski and Akbar were seeking understanding with people of other faiths, the Christian West had demonstrated in 1492 that it could not even tolerate proximity with the two other religions of Abraham. During the fifteenth century, anti-Semitism had increased throughout Europe and Jews were expelled from one city after another: from Linz and Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and Moravia in 1454. They were driven out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Lucca and Milan in 1489 and Tuscany in 1494. The expulsion of the Sephardic Jews of Spain must be seen in the context of this larger European trend. The Spanish Jews who had settled in the Ottoman empire continued to suffer from a sense of dislocation coupled with the irrational but indelible guilt of the survivor. It is, perhaps, not dissimilar to the guilt experienced by those who managed to survive the Nazi Holocaust and it is significant, therefore, that today some Jews feel drawn to the spirituality that the Sephardic Jews evolved during the sixteenth century to help them to come to terms with their exile. This new form of Kabbalism probably originated in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire, where many of the Sephardim had established communities. The tragedy of 1492 seems to have caused a widespread yearning for the redemption of Israel foretold by the prophets. Some Jews led by Joseph Karo and Solomon Alkabaz migrated from Greece to Palestine, the homeland of Israel. Their spirituality sought to heal the humiliation that the expulsion had inflicted upon the Jews and their God. They wanted, they said, “to raise the Shekinah from the dust.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  As we have seen, later generations of Muslims have shared his concern to incarnate the divine will in human history by establishing a just and decent society. From the very beginning, God was experienced as an imperative to action. From the moment when—as either El or Yahweh—God called Abraham away from his family in Haran, the cult entailed concrete action in this world and often a painful abandonment of the old sanctities. This dislocation also involved great strain. The Holy God, who was wholly other, was experienced as a profound shock by the prophets. He demanded a similar holiness and separation on the part of his people. When he spoke to Moses on Sinai, the Israelites were not allowed to approach the foot of the mountain. An entirely new gulf suddenly yawned between humanity and the divine, rupturing the holistic vision of paganism. There was, therefore, a potential for alienation from the world, which reflected a dawning consciousness of the inalienable autonomy of the individual. It is no accident that monotheism finally took root during the exile to Babylon, when the Israelites also developed the ideal of personal responsibility, which has been crucial in both Judaism and Islam. 14 We have seen that the Rabbis used the idea of an immanent God to help Jews to cultivate a sense of the sacred rights of the human personality. Yet alienation has continued to be a danger in all three faiths: in the West the experience of God was continually accompanied by guilt and by a pessimistic anthropology. In Judaism and Islam there is no doubt that the observance of Torah and Shariah has sometimes been seen as a heteronymous compliance with an external law, even though we have seen that nothing could have been further from the intention of the men who compiled these legal codes. Those atheists who preached emancipation from a God who demands such servile obedience were protesting against an inadequate but unfortunately familiar image of God. Again, this was based on a conception of the divine that was too personalistic. It interpreted the scriptural image of God’s judgment too literally and assumed that God was a sort of Big Brother in the sky. This image of the divine Tyrant imposing an alien law on his unwilling human servants has to go. Terrorizing the populace into civic obedience with threats is no longer acceptable or even practicable, as the downfall of communist regimes demonstrated so dramatically in the autumn of 1989. The anthropomorphic idea of God as Lawgiver and Ruler is not adequate to the temper of post-modernity. Yet the atheists who complained that the idea of God was unnatural were not entirely correct.

• From A History of God (1993)

  God can also be used as an unworthy panacea, as an alternative to mundane life and as the object of indulgent fantasy. The idea of God has frequently been used as the opium of the people. This is a particular danger when he is conceived as an-other Being—just like us, only bigger and better—in his own heaven, which is itself conceived as a paradise of earthly delights. Yet originally, “God” was used to help people to concentrate on this world and to face up to unpleasant reality. Even the pagan cult of Yahweh, for all its manifest faults, stressed his involvement in current events in profane time, as opposed to the sacred time of rite and myth. The prophets of Israel forced their people to confront their own social culpability and impending political catastrophe in the name of the God who revealed himself in these historical occurrences. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation stressed the divine immanence in the world of flesh and blood. Concern for the here and now was especially marked in Islam: nobody could have been more of a realist than Muhammad, who was a political as well as a spiritual genius. As we have seen, later generations of Muslims have shared his concern to incarnate the divine will in human history by establishing a just and decent society. From the very beginning, God was experienced as an imperative to action. From the moment when—as either El or Yahweh—God called Abraham away from his family in Haran, the cult entailed concrete action in this world and often a painful abandonment of the old sanctities. This dislocation also involved great strain. The Holy God, who was wholly other, was experienced as a profound shock by the prophets. He demanded a similar holiness and separation on the part of his people. When he spoke to Moses on Sinai, the Israelites were not allowed to approach the foot of the mountain. An entirely new gulf suddenly yawned between humanity and the divine, rupturing the holistic vision of paganism. There was, therefore, a potential for alienation from the world, which reflected a dawning consciousness of the inalienable autonomy of the individual. It is no accident that monotheism finally took root during the exile to Babylon, when the Israelites also developed the ideal of personal responsibility, which has been crucial in both Judaism and Islam.14 We have seen that the Rabbis used the idea of an immanent God to help Jews to cultivate a sense of the sacred rights of the human personality. Yet alienation has continued to be a danger in all three faiths: in the West the experience of God was continually accompanied by guilt and by a pessimistic anthropology. In Judaism and Islam there is no doubt that the observance of Torah and Shariah has sometimes been seen as a heteronymous compliance with an external law, even though we have seen that nothing could have been further from the intention of the men who compiled these legal codes.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  If someone deviated from what he regarded as the correct theological position, they were at once called to account—Luther demanded complete intellectual and spiritual submission. As a result, he was surrounded by yes-men. Indeed, the man who had done so much to fight for conscience and freedom and against spiritual tyranny was in danger of creating a church that was in some respects less tolerant than the one he had attacked. Other matters also troubled him. At the height of his collapse, and ready to die, Luther had prayed repeatedly to “Christ who shed his blood for us,” addressing God: “You know that there are many, whom you have allowed now to shed their blood for the gospel, and I believed that I would be one who would shed my blood for your name, but I am not worthy of it. Let your will be done.” 37 These remarks reveal that Luther was again preoccupied with martyrdoms, recent and ongoing. 38 Just a few months before, on April 23, Georg Winkler of Halle—an evangelical who had formerly been a close advisor of Albrecht of Mainz—was murdered on his way back from an interrogation by the archbishop’s officials. 39 Luther had heard of his death the week before his collapse, and suspected that Albrecht might have had Winkler assassinated. And another case was worrying him as well. Leonhard Kaiser, a former Catholic cleric who had started to preach Lutheran doctrine in Bavaria, had been arrested, and on his release in 1525 he had gone to study in Wittenberg, where he became well known to Luther and Melanchthon. But then, after eighteen months in Wittenberg, his father fell seriously ill and he had returned home to Bavaria, only to see his father die just a few hours after he arrived. Unwise enough to preach again, Kaiser was soon arrested by the Bavarian duke’s officials as a recidivist heretic, and on March 7, 1527, he was imprisoned once more. Luther and Melanchthon both wrote him letters of spiritual comfort, as did the Saxon Elector. The news of Kaiser’s imprisonment and impending martyrdom weighed heavily on Luther. In December 1524, “Brother Henry”—a Dutch Lutheran who had also been a student at Wittenberg and a follower of Karlstadt—had been murdered by hostile peasants. Luther had written a pamphlet about his martyrdom, one of the first of many martyrologies of the Reformation. 40 His reaction to the Kaiser case, however, was much more emotional and was pervaded by a strong sense of foreboding. On May 20, a month and a half before his breakdown, he wrote to Kaiser, and was in no doubt about what fate awaited him. 41 In October, still under the impact of his collapse, Luther continued to write about how he felt “unequal” to Kaiser; he was nothing but a “wordy preacher,” whereas “Leo” was a powerful man of action, a “lion” and “emperor” true to his name.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  As he’s gathering up household garbage for the dawn pickup, I brillo the blackened pot-roast pan, slamming it against the sink’s perimeter, blue suds foaming around nails chewed to the quick. At one point he holds up a garbage sack of empty cans, asking, Did you finish a whole case of beer? Of course not, I tell him. (How trippingly off the tongue that lie goes. It weighs less than a mustard seed.) I just bought that beer last weekend, he says. Well, maybe you’re drinking more than you know, I say. Which is laughable, as Warren is a fount of discipline, a completer of sit-ups, a runner of many miles. We have a rowing machine set up in his study, and at night he pulls against oars for an hour at a pop. He barely uses a whole pat of butter on a potato. He slices turkey thin enough to read through. If you lie to your husband—even about something so banal as how much you drink—each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it’s deflected away. On the porch again, I scan the snowy landscape with an irritation almost predatory. The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. Daddy …I say, staring off the dark porch into my snowy yard. Before he died, the wordlessness he floated inside during my teen years had become permanent. If he roused at all, his head craned around bewildered, and he handled his dead hand like a parcel he’d been asked to hold for a stranger. Yet through alcohol’s alchemy, I’d swear some nights his shadowy form stands in the yard behind an old push-type lawn mower. Why’d you keep drinking? And Daddy, who was a shrugger, a starer into distances, shrugs and stares. You know …Then he dissolves into the falling snow. I upend the smooth bourbon, trying to achieve the same blunt, anesthetized state that once snuffed him out. It can’t have been sleeting or snowing every second of those years, but that’s my memory of it—the hood was always up on my parka, with some weather going tick tick tick tick against the waterproofing. There’s snow in my head, too. Wide blizzards of bad news blowing sideways. My few hopes are desperate ones. One key fantasy on the porch—no kidding—is winning the magazine sweepstakes I’ve never entered. I habitually filch sweepstakes forms from doctor’s-office magazines or shopping circulars. Sitting outside by flashlight— have to change that overhead porch bulb —I meticulously fill them out, imagining the limo pulling up with balloons and champagne. Such a good story we’ll be: two poets win a jackpot….

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  At the poetry readings Warren hosts for his job every few weeks, I swill plastic cups of vinegary white wine and yammer like somebody pulled a string on my neck till the library lights get turned off. After one such event, Warren drives home with his jawline flexing. What? What’s the matter? I ask. Do you have to stay till the last drop is drunk? he says. His sole mention of my drinking, as I recall. Which pierces me. How hard I’ve tried not to drink. I call him the fun police and unleash the litany of chores that tip me out of bed every day at five A.M. That this was a dead echo of Mother’s speechifying on Warren’s not being enough of a party boy eludes me. The more I drink, the more weekends I split off, leaving Warren to care for Dev solo while I take naps. Also, evenings Warren comes home early enough, I hide in my study drinking as he and Dev play at making the bed, which involves Dev bouncing as Warren floats the sheet over his head, occasionally wrestling the little ghost form down. Through the wall, I can’t make out words, only Dev’s staccato whoops and giggles, followed by Warren’s deep-throated purr, which sounds like hubbidee hubadub hubbadee...hum sally bum bum. The timbre’s barely tolerable, for when Warren speaks to me, the airspace is sandpapered and abraded, spiked as a bondage collar. I can’t look at him without hearing some muffled verdict pounded out by my own heartbeat—guilty guilty guilty. Across the months, I start to find myself first one place, then another, arriving in situations as if tipped out of a bucket. I find myself in a restaurant before noon ordering a pricey Bloody Mary, telling myself the tomato juice makes it a vegetable serving. I find myself cornered by a drunk writer of substantial reputation at a party. His expectant leer scares me out the door. At the car, I have keys in my hand but no purse. Where’s my purse? I find myself squatting in the bedroom closet with two incongruent bottles, whiskey and Listerine—the latter with accompanying spit bowl. Despite the dark, it feels safe in here, leaning against the back wall with clothes before my face. On one of Warren’s school nights, friends I once taught with ring my doorbell holding a twelve-pack, the ambush making me giddy as a prom queen. They pore over my shoe box of Dev’s baby pictures while regaling me with their new projects—a play at Yale, a book of short stories. But even as I giggle and suck down beers, I know Warren’s headlights are gonna swipe the house silent again. Sure enough, he comes in the back door and stops in the living room to shake hands before excusing himself. About eleven, he calls from upstairs, and I find him on the landing, shirtless in boxers. He whispers, I can’t sleep from the noise.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like mystics in other religions, the Sufis had experienced a unity and felt one with the whole of existence. Sirhindi, however, dismissed this perception as purely subjective. While the mystic was concentrating on God alone, everything else tended to fade from his consciousness, but this did not correspond to an objective reality. Indeed, to speak of any unity or identity between God and the world was an awful misconception. In fact, there was no possibility of a direct experience of God, who was entirely beyond the reach of mankind: “He is the Holy One, beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond.” 4 There could be no relation between God and the world, except indirectly through the contemplation of the “signs” of nature. Sirhindi claimed that he himself had passed beyond the ecstatic condition of mystics like Ibn al-Arabi to a higher and more sober state of consciousness. He used mysticism and religious experience to reaffirm belief in the distant God of the philosophers, who was an objective but inaccessible reality. His views were ardently embraced by his disciples but not by the majority of Muslims, who remained true to the immanent, subjective God of the mystics. While Muslims like Findiriski and Akbar were seeking understanding with people of other faiths, the Christian West had demonstrated in 1492 that it could not even tolerate proximity with the two other religions of Abraham. During the fifteenth century, anti-Semitism had increased throughout Europe and Jews were expelled from one city after another: from Linz and Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and Moravia in 1454. They were driven out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Lucca and Milan in 1489 and Tuscany in 1494. The expulsion of the Sephardic Jews of Spain must be seen in the context of this larger European trend. The Spanish Jews who had settled in the Ottoman empire continued to suffer from a sense of dislocation coupled with the irrational but indelible guilt of the survivor. It is, perhaps, not dissimilar to the guilt experienced by those who managed to survive the Nazi Holocaust and it is significant, therefore, that today some Jews feel drawn to the spirituality that the Sephardic Jews evolved during the sixteenth century to help them to come to terms with their exile. This new form of Kabbalism probably originated in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire, where many of the Sephardim had established communities. The tragedy of 1492 seems to have caused a widespread yearning for the redemption of Israel foretold by the prophets. Some Jews led by Joseph Karo and Solomon Alkabaz migrated from Greece to Palestine, the homeland of Israel. Their spirituality sought to heal the humiliation that the expulsion had inflicted upon the Jews and their God. They wanted, they said, “to raise the Shekinah from the dust.”