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 The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Both parents maintained adult responsibility for all their children at home. Martha matured as a result of her experience and was rewarded by both parents with appreciation and praise. In many immigrant families one of the older children often is responsible for helping the adults to understand the new language and strange culture. Here, too, the child performs vital functions that enable the family to keep going, but the adults maintain their responsibility at the head of the family. In contrast, in a postdivorce family, the child often takes responsibility for the one or both parents who are temporarily or lastingly overwhelmed by the crisis. This situation can be compounded by the adult’s subsequent disappointments in relationships. A formerly competent mother or father is unable to carry on as before. Recovery from a divorce is a lot harder than we have realized and it lasts a lot longer. As a result, the burden falls on the child who steps forward to take charge—out of compassion and often out of unrealistic guilt. This is one way that divorce profoundly changes not only the child’s experience but, as Karen illustrates, the whole personality of the child as she grows up and becomes an adult. Caregiving that involves sacrificing one’s own wishes for the needs of others is poor preparation for happy choices in adult relationships, as we’ll see in coming chapters. NINE Order Out of Chaos W hen I saw Larry five years later, he was twenty-two years old and showed signs of turning his life around; he was struggling to assume a new identity as a fair-minded, responsible adult. Had we stopped our conversations just a few years earlier, I would have pegged him as a lost boy who would become an angry young man likely to install violence in his relationships. But I was oh so wrong. On this visit, I got my first glimpse of his turnaround, which, like Karen’s conquest of the caretaker role, gave me a whole new perspective on the long-term consequences of divorce on children. Along with working at night and going to school during the day, Larry had begun to rework his relationships with his father and his mother, essentially coming to grips with their divorce. For me, this remains one of the most interesting interviews in the entire study. I still feel privileged to have seen this process unfold before my astonished eyes. We met in a sandwich shop down the street from the gym where Larry now worked out regularly. I hardly recognized this stocky, muscular, and blatantly handsome young man.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  What did he do to you that would justify what you did to me, or let others do?” She’s smiling, satisfied with my anger. “Oh no,” she says. “None of that, Regina. He was a lover—a very kind lover. I was in love with him, and I thought he was in love with me. I thought he’d be with me after he found out about you . . . but instead, he left.” She pauses a moment, then lights up another cigarette. “And I got stuck with you.” 11 The Happy House Summer 1988 to January 1998 WITHIN DAYS AFTER Cookie flies back to Idaho, my grandfather begins to notice that things around his house have gone missing. There are pots, pans, dishes, silverware, blankets, towels, photo albums, my grandmother’s jewelry, and even her nail polishes and makeup that he can’t seem to find. I presume he’s suffering some kind of grief-induced memory loss. “Regina, Cookie made multiple early morning trips to the post office to send packages to Rosie because she was home alone,” he said. “Gramps, Rosie moved in with one of her teachers more than a year ago. Cookie doesn’t even have guardianship of her anymore.” That’s when he and I put it together: Cookie pilfered his things while he was grieving. After Rosie’s teacher took over her guardianship, my baby sister was able to begin her healing . . . but Camille and I took quiet note as Rosie made choices to leave her past behind—and that included shutting us out. Rosie never said it, but we sensed she blamed us. No matter how we fought for her well-being, nothing we did could ever be enough when Cookie was the opponent. As much as it destroyed us to see Rosie cut off communication with us, we understood. We’d failed her. We’d grown up always one bad decision away from homelessness and poverty. We’d tried to raise each other when we were just kids ourselves, sharing everything we had . . . which was never very much. Rosie needed us to save her, and we tried, but we couldn’t, because when you live on the fringes of society with no resources, you have no voice and your complaints are easily ignored. So for now our relationship is wrought with an undercurrent of resentment and frustration. For Cherie, Camille, and me, adjusting to the world meant growing farther away from the pain we experienced as kids. For Rosie to do the same, she had to grow far away from us and closer to the people in her community who were finally able to protect her. ONE BY ONE , my friends begin to transition into work: Some take jobs at banks on Wall Street or at Manhattan advertising agencies or in federal law enforcement. Jeanine and her boyfriend, George, as well as Sheryl and her beau, Thomas, are hinting at their pending engagements. I take a job at Bruno’s, an Italian restaurant, working all shifts.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Michelle had her son and her work to keep her busy during the days, but as soon as her head hit the pillow at night, she began her guilty ruminations and went over her list of regrets. “Initially my belief was, I’m not married, and this woman’s marriage is broken, and she says she’s leaving her wife so this is fair game. In the beginning when I was blinded by love and lust, I had no capacity to think about the morality of my choices. Now that I’m more awake and not blinded by my choices, I feel bad about having an affair with a married person and hurting her family. I wasn’t the primary source of hurt, but I like her child and I know he suffered.” Michelle felt another, perhaps more abstract sense of guilt as well. “I’m a gay woman who wanted marriage equality because I respect the institution. I desire the right to be married as a gay person and then I carelessly invade another person’s marriage. I feel ashamed about that.” The love story was not over, though. After months of therapy with her wife, Delia told her that she wanted to date Michelle. Her wife agreed. Michelle was hesitant, but they all sat down and discussed it. “It was a little surreal. But her wife said she understood that there was a lot Delia was not getting out of the marriage and that she wanted her to be happy, that she was on board.” Still, after an initial period of euphoria about being back with Delia, Michelle began to feel increasingly anxious. A few months into their second attempt at a relationship, Delia’s wife “fell apart,” in Michelle’s words, and demanded that Delia stop seeing her. Delia seemed frozen and conflicted about what to do. Michelle, feeling agonized, decided to break things off herself. “It wasn’t good for anyone. But I miss her so much. I am just so in love with her.” She shook her head. It had been over a year since their breakup, and she didn’t feel any less adrift or broken about it. Part of her pain, she said, was that her relationship with Delia began illicitly.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Recovery from a divorce is a lot harder than we have realized and it lasts a lot longer. As a result, the burden falls on the child who steps forward to take charge—out of compassion and often out of unrealistic guilt. This is one way that divorce profoundly changes not only the child’s experience but, as Karen illustrates, the whole personality of the child as she grows up and becomes an adult. Caregiving that involves sacrificing one’s own wishes for the needs of others is poor preparation for happy choices in adult relationships, as we’ll see in coming chapters. T TWO Sunlit Memories he more I thought about Karen, the more I wondered what I would find in talking to young adults who were raised in unhappy intact marriages—whose parents were similar to Karen’s parents before their divorce. Would these children move into the breach as caregivers or would they somehow be protected by their parents’ decision to stay together? Would they be able to keep their distance from their parents’ unhappiness or, like so many children of divorce, be drawn into the vortex of ongoing conflict? Thus I was eager to meet the young people we recruited to serve as our comparison group for the adult children of divorce. When we began, I honestly didn’t know what we’d find. If we could lure them into participating, how candid would they be? As busy adults with families and jobs, would they be willing to talk with my colleagues and me for several hours at a time? Would we end up, as many researchers do, talking only to women, who tend to be more comfortable discussing relationships? At the outset, I was sure of only one thing: we needed men and women who would match our divorce sample. That is, they would have to be the same age, have similar backgrounds, and have grown up in the same neighborhoods as did the children in the divorce study. We found many people by asking those in the divorce study to put us in touch with their childhood friends who had grown up in intact families. These were adults who literally grew up alongside their friends who were part of our twenty-five-year study. They went to the same schools, played the same sports in high school, attended the same parties, and talked the same slang. Their parents were in the same socioeconomic group and had similar educational backgrounds. Eventually we settled on a group of forty-three people. I decided to keep the group small to begin with because frankly I had no idea what kinds of territory we’d get into.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Do you know who that could have been, and why they’re calling here?” “I think it’s my real father, Paul Accerbi.” I wish I could rewind my words . . . but already Addie’s taken them in, trying to calculate the facts. “Well then, how did he get our number, or know Pete’s name?” “I don’t know,” I lie. “Well, actually . . . I may know how.” I tell Addie about the letter, how I’d been watching my father’s name in the phone book for years, praying that he’ll be there for me when I turn eighteen. But Addie’s already lost in tears. “Why did you contact him?” she says. “Aren’t you happy here with us? Don’t we do enough for you? Do you want to leave us?” I stand motionless, watching her pour out emotions that I’ve never seen before—toward me or anyone she knows. “You mean you want me to stay here?” I ask her. And suddenly it’s all too much to bear. I begin shaking. “I didn’t know that I could hurt you,” I tell Addie. “But I need to know who my real father is. I have been curious for years, since I was eleven and he walked into the back of the deli I was working in. He examined me so closely, Addie, and now he actually took the time to find out my phone number and Pete’s name. I know it’s him calling. I just wanted to let him know that I’m okay. That I’m a good kid.” The next day I struggle to concentrate in school and skip my last two classes to come home early so I can sit by the phone and wait. But every time the phone rings, it’s never Paul, and I rush the person off the other end to keep the line open. When Addie arrives home, she says she spoke to social services. “They said that you’re not allowed to meet him alone, and you may not even speak to him on the phone if Pete or I, or Ms. Harvey, are not around. This is a strange man—it’s possible he isn’t your father at all, it could be someone who likes seeing you at Rickel’s or who remembers you from having dated your mother. So they want to avoid you putting yourself in a bad situation with this person without us here to protect you.” As she finishes expressing her concern for me, the ring of the phone busts through the tension. She looks at me. “Regina, let me answer that.” The exchange is curt. “Yes, I am Addie Peterman, the foster mother of Regina Marie. And you are . . . ? And you are . . . ? Mr. Accerbi—” My heart leaps. “—although you refuse to identify yourself, we know who you are.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I don’t know them and they don’t know me. I paid child support and their college tuition but I didn’t go to their weddings or to any other events in their lives. It would have been too stressful for everyone. I want them to be happy. But when I met my current wife there was just no way I was going to spend the rest of my life without her. I never thought you could love somebody that way. Out of that bond we had two children. They are the best thing that ever happened to me and I would give my life for them.” I think it’s reasonable to say that this father lives with the guilt of having deserted his children but he feels that maintaining ties to his past is more than he can tolerate. Although he is a man with a modest income, he paid child support and college tuition. But his feelings for his children are tied to his feelings toward his ex-wife, and that is a door he cannot stand to reopen. We need to come to terms with a great deal of variation in postdivorce parent-child relationships. The notion that these relationships are entirely separate from marriage and are self-sustained during the many changes in the postdivorce family is not supported in this work. There is no universal pattern. Some fathers are eager and able to continue parenting after the breakup and willing to shape their entire lives accordingly. Others cannot maintain loyalty to two families or have no wish to do so. Others find that continued frequent contact with the children of the failed marriage makes them unhappy. And still others continue to be driven or tormented by lifelong angers at their ex- wives. There is no dominant pattern that we can use to guide our policies and interventions for all or most families. Yet in part because of the demands of the legal system, our search is for a one-size policy that fits all. Effects of Witnessing Violence on Girls I HADN’T HEARD much about Larry’s sister during my previous interviews and now seemed like a good time to ask. I remembered her well from our first meeting at the breakup when she was a very pretty, shy, gentle four-year-old child who cried when I asked her to draw her family. I had thought about her on several occasions during my interviews with Larry and had long been distressed by her father’s statements to the child that she, like her mother, was inferior to men. I also remembered how the mother had wanted to cut back on the little girl’s visiting with her father because the child was brokenhearted after each visit but that the child had insisted on going despite her pain.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  She knew she was putting everyone off with her behavior, but she could not quell her anxiety. Shelley reacted by spending more and more time with Jane. Several months after settling at the villa, Mary had a miscarriage and nearly died. Her husband attended to her for several weeks, and she recovered. But just as quickly he seemed to become enamored with a new plan that terrified Mary. He and Edward had designed a boat, one that was beautiful to look at, sleek, and fast. In June of that year some old friends of the Shelleys had arrived in Italy—Leigh Hunt and his wife. Hunt was a publisher who championed young poets, and Shelley was his favorite. Shelley planned to sail up the coast with Edward to meet the Hunts. Mary was desperate for him not to go. Shelley tried to reassure her: Edward was an expert navigator, and the boat he had built was more than seaworthy. Mary did not believe this. The boat seemed flimsy for the rough waters of the area. Nevertheless Shelley and Edward left on July 1, with a third crewmember. On July 8, as they started on their homeward journey, they ran into one of the storms endemic to the region. Their boat had indeed been badly designed, and went under. A few days later the bodies of all three were found. Almost immediately Mary was seized with remorse and guilt. She played in her mind every angry word she had addressed to her husband, every critique of his work, every doubt she had instilled in him about her love. It was all too much, and she determined then and there that she would devote the rest of her life to making Shelley’s poetry famous. At first Jane seemed extremely broken up by the tragedy, but she recovered more quickly than Mary. She had to be practical. Mary might have a nice inheritance from Shelley’s family. Jane had nothing. She decided she would return to London and somehow find a way to support her two children. Mary empathized with her plight. She gave her a list of important contacts in England, including Shelley’s best friend from his youth, Thomas Hogg, a lawyer. Hogg had his own issues—he was always falling in love with the people closest to Shelley, first Shelley’s sister, then Shelley’s first wife, and finally Mary herself, whom he tried to seduce. But that had been years ago, they remained good friends, and as a lawyer Hogg could be of some help to Jane. Mary decided to stay in Italy. She had hardly any friends left, but the Hunts were still in Italy. Much to her dismay, however, Leigh Hunt had become surprisingly cold to her.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I had recently reinforced the secret military police, a distasteful institution, I admit, but one which the event proved useful. I knew all about those supposedly secret assemblies, wherein the aged Ursus was teaching the art of conspiracy to his grandson. The nomination of Lucius did not surprise the old man; he had long taken my incertitude on this subject for a well dissimulated decision; but he chose to act at the moment when the legal adoption was still a matter of controversy in Rome. His secretary, Crescens, weary of forty years of faithful service badly repaid, divulged the project, the date and place of attack, and the names of the accomplices. My enemies had not taxed their imagination; they simply copied outright the assault premeditated long before by Quietus and Nigrinus: I was to be struck down during a religious ceremony at the Capitol; my adopted son was to fall with me. I took my precautions that very night: our enemy had lived only too long; I would leave Lucius a heritage cleansed of dangers. Towards the twelfth hour, on a gray dawn of February, a tribune bearing a sentence of death for Servianus and his grandson presented himself to my brother-in-law; his instructions were to wait in the vestibule until the order which he brought had been executed. Servianus sent for his physician, and all was decently performed. Before dying he expressed the wish that I should expire in the slow torments of incurable illness, without having like him the privilege of brief agony. His prayer has already been granted. I had not ordered this double execution light-heartedly, but I felt no regret for it thereafter, and still less remorse. An old score had been paid at last; that was all. Age has never seemed to me an excuse for human malevolence; I should even be inclined to consider advanced years as the less excuse for such dangerous ill-will. The sentencing of Akiba and his acolytes had cost me longer hesitation; of the two old men I should still prefer the fanatic to the conspirator. As to Fuscus, however mediocre he might be and however completely his odious grandfather might have alienated him from me, he was the grandson of Paulina. But bonds of blood are truly slight (despite assertions to the contrary) when they are not reinforced by affection; this fact is evident in any family where the least matter of inheritance arises. The youth of Fuscus moved me somewhat more to pity, for he had barely reached eighteen. But interests of State required this conclusion, which the aged Ursus had seemed voluntarily to render inevitable. And from then on I was too near my own death to take time for meditation upon those two endings. For a few days Marcius Turbo doubled his vigilance; the friends of Servianus could have sought revenge.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e deep symbolism of these folk traditions is almost too perfect: just as the penitent prostitutes replaced the virgins of romance, the tomb of Pelagia has replaced the cave of Pan— and as a test of penance rather than purity.  Pelagia inhabited the vibrantly bilingual world of late antique Syria. Th e legends of the penitent prostitutes passed easily between the interconnected worlds of Greek and Syriac. At least one of the legends of a penitent prosti- tute, Mary the niece of Abraham, was originally composed in Syriac. Th e tale of her repentance belonged to a longer cycle of narratives about her uncle, the hermit Abraham of Qidun. Th e Life of Abraham is an early text, preserved in a manuscript as old as the fi fth century. Th us, the legend of Mary is almost exactly contemporary with the spread of the Sayings of the Fathers beyond Egypt and the elaboration of the story of Pelagia. Although her story was written in Syriac, the narrative betrays an intimate familiarity with Greek fi ction— indeed, the text depends as much on its inversions of romance as do the lives of Th ais and Pelagia. Unsurprisingly, the text was translated into Greek and Latin, and like the other legends of the penitent prostitutes, it was pop u lar across the Mediterranean.  Mary was an only child, orphaned by her parents and left in the charge of her uncle, Abraham, a monk in a village near Edessa. For the fi rst twenty years of her life she imitated her uncle and lived “like a chaste lamb, like a spotless dove.” Th en she became the target of a satanic plot: she was se- duced by a devious monk. Having lost her purity, Mary is distraught, but her distress is that of a romantic heroine subjected to the unthinkable. Un- chastity is a sort of death. “I am now as good as dead.” Darkened by guilt, she cannot so much as look on her uncle’s face, and she exiles herself, trading her ascetic habits for life in a tavern. Mary is the perfect opposite of the ro- mantic heroine. At the fi rst, slight assault on her virginity, she caves. Rather than being taken to a brothel by force, she deposits herself in a den of ill re- pute, a self- imposed sentence that represents a willful submission to the rules of romance: the girl without honor belongs in the house of shame.   FROM SHAME TO SIN Abraham failed to notice Mary’s absence. When he receives a “fearful vivid dream” of a huge snake devouring a dove, he still fails to understand this premonition of lost virginity (which reminds us of Leucippe’s mother’s dream). Two days later, he has another dream. Th is time the snake returns to Abraham’s house, and out of its belly fl ies the dove, unharmed. Finally the dreams become sensible to Abraham.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Why? If only we had known. According to primatologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, my girlfriends and I were facing some typical quandaries of the bipedal, semicontinuously sexually receptive, higher-order female primate living in the shadow of agriculture. Our age didn’t matter so much; our gender did. Contrary to everything we had learned and been told, many of us craved variety and novelty of sexual experience and had a hard time with monogamy precisely because we were female. On the one hand, we had evolved appetites and urges that were once highly adaptive. Under particular, not uncommon ecological circumstances, promiscuity was a smart reproductive strategy, a way for a female early hominin or human to increase the likelihood of getting high-quality sperm and becoming pregnant while maximizing the chance that numerous males might be willing to support her during pregnancy and help provision her and her offspring once she gave birth. On the other hand, these very same deeply evolved predilections now put us in conflict with a culture that continued to tell us, even post-second-wave feminism, that women were naturally choosy and coy and sexually passive. And monogamous. Men wanted sex; women wanted to put on the brakes. Right? It was a relief when, in my mid-thirties, I found someone I lusted for and loved and could imagine settling down with, someone with whom I could have children and a life. Someone to whom I could stay true. It calmed the sexual static in my brain for a time. I was soon pregnant, and then exhausted by the demands of caring for an infant, who became a toddler, who became a preschooler, and then the whole thing began again with a second child. But when the heaviest lifting phase of motherhood subsided, when the nursing and the late nights were over and I came back to myself, a grown-up in command of her own mind and body again, I discovered that, although I wore a wedding ring on my left hand, not much had changed. My husband and I were thankfully back to having sex—sex I enjoyed, and plenty of it. So why, in my mind, was I faithless? I had fantasies I did not want to share, daydreams that were more graphic than soft focus and romantic. I liked sexually explicit novels and movies as much as I had before, maybe even more so. And I entertained crushes on wholly inappropriate objects—men who were married, or too young for me, or too old for me. I had crushes on women too, even though I was pretty sure I wasn’t gay or even bisexual. What kind of a wife and mother felt this way?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He looked lop-sided and comical, and intensely distressed. Tears ran freely down his face and over the waterproof pink of the Band-Aids. I dabbed at them with the sponge, and he shook his head, and winced, and winced again at the twisting of his wound that wincing caused. In my other hand, under the water, in spite of himself and his misery, his cock was hard. I wanked him slowly, the ripples slapping rhythmically against the side of the tub. ‘Will,’ he said, as if he must get it out before succumbing, ‘I killed my brother’s mate.’ 4 Charles Nantwich’s house was in a street off Huggin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was no longer marked in the London A-Z ; it was a cobbled cul-de-sac obstructed at its open end by two dented aluminum bollards padlocked to the ground. Halfway down on the left rose the tall façade of purplish London brick, the dormers behind its upper parapet looking out over the roofs of the surrounding semi-derelict buildings. It was an elegant post-Fire merchant’s house, prosperously plain, the only ostentation the door-case, with its delicately glazed fanlight and heavy projecting hood, the richly scrolled brackets of which were clogged with generations of white gloss paint. Much of the glass in the tall windows appeared to be original: warped, glinting and nearly opaque. I waited opposite for a minute, surprisingly taken back, by its air of secrecy and exclusion, to the invalidish world of Edwardian ghost stories, to a world where people never went out. Though close to Cannon Street, Upper Thames Street and the approach to Southwark Bridge, this little knot of side streets was very quiet. Drivers avoided the narrow gauge of its alleyways, and much of it seemed to have been given over to somnolent trades—a bespoke tailor, a watch repairer. One or two of the premises were warehouses; some had battened-up windows or displayed bleached and cracked signs for businesses long defunct. Though the buildings were eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, the streets were medieval, and, sloping quite steeply towards the Thames, gave the unsettling feeling that they could not long avoid being swept away. Skinner’s Lane, ending in a wall topped with spikes like spurs, half hidden amid tufts of brilliant yellow alyssum, had a mortal mood to it, and gave Charles’s residence the eccentric rectitude of a colonial staying on, unflaggingly keeping up appearances. I rang the bell twice before the door was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves and an apron, who let me in and then seemed to think better of it. ‘His Lordship expecting you, is he?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Yes, William Beckwith.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In the centuries after Christian triumph, the Christian literary imagination was transformed, as the church itself stood less as an alternative to society than an institution permeated by the world. Fiction still proved a vital medium for the expression of sexual morality and its relation to life. From Shame to Sin ends with the popular late antique tales of penitent prostitutes, stories of fallen women who repent of their sins and pursue spiritual rehabilitation. These lives are antiromances of some literary sophistication. The authors of the lives of the penitent prostitutes intentionally evoke the heroines of romance, all the more dramatically to violate the single, central rule of romance: the heroine’s corporal inviolability. The genius of this new archetype was that it allowed the authors to create allegories of sin, as a paradigm in which sexual morality has been freed from the requirements of society. These are tales of abundant moral autonomy, which dramatize the severance of sexual morality from its social moorings and place the individual eternally before the judgment of God. The stories of penitent prostitutes are the fictional analogue to the social and legal program of late antiquity, epitomized by the reforms of Justinian. The ideological correspondence between law and literature is telling of a deep transformation. Indeed, even as Christian authors perfected their new archetype, of the free sinner who repented, Justinian attacked coerced prostitution and built a monastery to serve as a refuge for reformed prostitutes. It was named, of course, Repentance.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I had never felt anything like it before in my life. That thing, my penis, was getting hard, every time I watched the girls on “American Bandstand” or saw them walking down the streets. They’d even be in my dreams at night. I’d wake up in the mornings with the whole sheet soaked. I felt guilty at first. I actually thought I was committing a sin, dreaming it, thinking it, just watching them. But then one afternoon I crawled on top of a Rawlings basketball in my bedroom and did it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. And it felt good. It felt so good that I did it again after that, and again, and again. … I did it everywhere. And no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t stop. It got so bad after a while, I started saying Acts of Contrition after doing it. I asked God to forgive me for feeling this thing and then I couldn’t understand why I’d be asking God to forgive me for doing something that felt so good.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I’d wake up in the mornings with the whole sheet soaked. I felt guilty at first. I actually thought I was committing a sin, dreaming it, thinking it, just watching them. But then one afternoon I crawled on top of a Rawlings basketball in my bedroom and did it for the sheer pleasure of doing it. And it felt good. It felt so good that I did it again after that, and again, and again—with teddy bears in my bed making believe they were Marilyn Monroe, in the bathroom in the bathtub, in the basement laying the side pocket of the pool table seventeen times, in the back yard against trees. I did it everywhere. And no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t stop. It got so bad after a while, I started saying Acts of Contrition after doing it. I asked God to forgive me for feeling this thing and then I couldn’t understand why I’d be asking God to forgive me for doing something that felt so good. * * * For some reason Mom and I just didn’t get along back then. I was being sent to my room for punishment almost every night after dinner. “Take a bath,” “Clean your room,” “Take out the garbage.” . . . It was always something like that, and after battling it out with Mom in the kitchen and getting hit with the egg turner I’d be back in my room cursing her out under my breath as she’d be shouting, “God’s going to punish you, Ronnie! God’s going to punish you!” Later she’d come in and tell me she was sorry for yelling at me and I’d give her a big hug and tell her I was sorry too for making her so angry. Mom always wanted me to be the best at whatever I did, especially at school. “If you fail any subjects this year,” she’d tell me, “you’re not going out for any sports.” I kept telling her I was trying to do my best, but the only thing I could think of was baseball and instead of doing my homework every night I read every sports book I could get my hands on. For hours I’d swing the baseball bat in front of the mirror in my room. I still wanted to play for the New York Yankees more than anything else in the world. I joined the track team in the spring. I wanted to be the greatest pole-vaulter in the history of the school and so I worked out every day until dark on the parallel bars Dad had built the summer before in the back yard. I remember Mom in the kitchen cheering me on, turning on the porch lights so I could work out even more. I loved those bars and when my brother Tommy was home from school, we’d both get on them together.

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

  I answer that, The same is not to be said of their own goods which bishops may possess, and of ecclesiastical goods. For they have real dominion over their own goods; wherefore from the very nature of the case they are not bound to give these things to others, and may either keep them for themselves or bestow them on others at will. Nevertheless they may sin in this disposal by inordinate affection, which leads them either to accumulate more than they should, or not to assist others, in accordance with the demands of charity; yet they are not bound to restitution, because such things are entrusted to their ownership. On the other hand, they hold ecclesiastical goods as dispensers or trustees. For Augustine says (Ep. clxxxv ad Bonif.): “If we possess privately what is enough for us, other things belong not to us but to the poor, and we have the dispensing of them; but we can claim ownership of them only by wicked theft.” Now dispensing requires good faith, according to 1 Cor. 4:2, “Here now it is required among the dispensers that a man be found faithful.” Moreover ecclesiastical goods are to be applied not only to the good of the poor, but also to the divine worship and the needs of its ministers. Hence it is said (XII, qu. ii, can. de reditibus): “Of the Church’s revenues or the offerings of the faithful only one part is to be assigned to the bishop, two parts are to be used by the priest, under pain of suspension, for the ecclesiastical fabric, and for the benefit of the poor; the remaining part is to be divided among the clergy according to their respective merits.” Accordingly if the goods which are assigned to the use of the bishop are distinct from those which are appointed for the use of the poor, or the ministers, or for the ecclesiastical worship, and if the bishop keeps back for himself part of that which should be given to the poor, or to the ministers for their use, or expended on the divine worship, without doubt he is an unfaithful dispenser, sins mortally, and is bound to restitution. But as regards those goods which are deputed to his private use, the same apparently applies as to his own property, namely that he sins through immoderate attachment thereto or use thereof, if he exceeds moderation in what he keeps for himself, and fails to assist others according to the demands of charity.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was hard to tell what was happening.” “Yes I know,” said the major. “Sometimes it gets very hard out there. I was out a couple of weeks ago and sometimes it’s very hard to tell what’s happening.” He stared down at the floor of the bunker until he could make himself say it again. He wasn’t quite sure the major had heard him the first time. “But I just want you to know, major, I think I was the one who killed him. I think it might have been me.” There, he had said it. And now he was walking away. For some reason he was feeling a lot better. He had told the major everything and the major hadn’t believed it. It was like going to confession when he was a kid and the priest saying everything was okay. He walked by the men outside the radio shack. They turned their faces away as he passed. Let them talk, he thought. He was only human, he had made a mistake. The corporal was dead now and no one could bring him back. * * * The chaplain held a memorial service that afternoon for the man he had killed and he sat in the tent with the rest of the men. There was a wife and a kid, someone said. He tried to listen to the words the chaplain was saying, the name he kept repeating over and over again. Who was this man he’d just killed? Who had he been? He wanted to scream right there in the church tent, right there during the ceremony. He kept hearing the name too many times, the name of the dead man, the man with the friends, the man with the wife, the one he didn’t know or care to know, the kid from Georgia who was now being carefully wrapped up in some plastic bag and sent back in a cheap wooden box to be buried in the earth at nineteen. He had panicked with the rest of them that night and murdered his first man, but it wasn’t the enemy, it wasn’t the one they had all been taught and trained to kill, it wasn’t the silhouette at the rifle range he had pumped holes in from five hundred yards, or the German soldiers with plastic machine guns in Sally’s Woods. He’d never figured it would ever happen this way. It never did in the movies. There were always the good guys and the bad guys, the cowboys and the Indians. There was always the enemy and the good guys and each of them killed the other. He went back to his tent after the ceremony was over and sat down. There was some mail but he couldn’t get interested in it. Someone had sent him a Sergeant Rock comicbook. But it wasn’t funny anymore. The good guys weren’t supposed to kill the good guys.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  I want to eat every two days.” Th en, again, she said, “I am a sinner. I want to eat every four days.” Finally, she asked the abbess to wall her in a cell with only a little opening to pass through bread. “Th us for the rest of her life she was pleasing to God.” Th e story begins in a cell (kellion) of dishonor and death, ends in a cell (kellion) of repentance and life. Th e living sepulture of the penitent pros- titute symbolized both the radical possibilities, and the suff ocating limits, of a purely spiritual redemption.  Th e Egyptian desert, in late antiquity, was to prove the birthplace of new archetypes of human spirituality. With its barren horizons, the simple ecol- ogy of life on the edges of civilization provided a rarefi ed backdrop. Here men— and some women— wrestled with sin, stared down the dev il, and sought internal transformation. In the desert tales of penitent prostitutes, the features of the moral landscape are simple. Th e women themselves are ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  sketched in little detail. Th e focus of the brief encounter is the father— his steadfastness, his grace. Th e tales are monastic from start to fi nish; even in the prostitute’s lair, the monk brings with him the whiff of the desert. Th e chief elements of the drama are sin and repentance. We are in a world where sin is inextricable from the machinations of the dev il and his de- mons. In this setting, the signifi cance of the girl’s prostitution is not that it places her outside of respectable society. It is, rather, that it arrays her with the forces of evil. Her repentance is not just the recovery of a most aban- doned sinner. A victory over fornication is a defeat over Satan’s legions. Th e monks who induce the conversion of the prostitute are like a modern sports team that courts away its rival’s most valuable player. Th e desert tales of penitent prostitutes are allegories of sin and salvation, played out against the grander cosmic battle between good and evil. Th e literary side is only one half of her story, for in the same period, in the late fourth and then more explosively in the fi fth century, the penitent prostitute, modeled on the “sinful woman” in the Gospel of Luke, becomes a pop u lar subject for Christian preachers. Her tearful repentance proved congenial to homilists in an age of mass conversion. Th e currency of these legends, already in the late fourth century, is also confi rmed in a most un- likely source: the rhetorical handbook of the pagan sophist of Antioch, Liba- nius. In one of his training exercises, Libanius creates a penitent pagan prostitute.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He walked on it like a man on a tightrope, it was so dark and so very hard to see. A couple of times he stumbled on the wooden boxes. It was quiet as he opened the tent flap, as quiet and dark as it had been outside the major’s bunker. He dragged in carrying his rifle in one hand and the map case in the other. They were all asleep, all curled up on their cots, inside their mosquito nets. He walked up to his rack and sat down, his head sinking down to the floor. Panic was still rushing through him like a wild train, his heart still raced through his chest as he saw over and over again the kid from Georgia running toward him and the crack of his rifle killing him dead. I killed him, he kept repeating over and over to himself. He’s dead, he thought. Gripping his rifle, holding the trigger, he went through the whole thing again and again, tapping, touching the trigger lightly each time he saw the corporal from Georgia running toward him just as he had out there in the sand when everything seemed so crazy and frightening. Each time he felt his heart racing as the three cracks went off and the dark figure slumped to the sand in front of him. “He’s dead—go get him!” someone was yelling to his right. “Go get him he’s hit!” Someone was running now, running to the body and they were pulling the guy in. They were bringing him back to the trench where they all lay scared and shivering. “Doc—Doc—where’s the corpsman!” somebody was yelling. “Hey Doc, hurry up!” Then somebody said it. Somebody shouted real loud, “It’s corporal. They got corporal . . .” “He’s dead,” somebody said. “He’s gone.” Slowly he turned the rifle around and pointed the barrel toward his head. Oh Jesus God almighty, he thought. Why ? Why? Why? He began to cry slowly at first. Why ? I’m going to kill myself, he thought. I’m going to pull this trigger. He was going mad. One minute he wanted to pull the trigger and the next he was feeling the strange power of a man who had just killed someone. He laid the weapon down by the side of his rack and crawled in with his clothing still on. I killed him, he kept thinking, and when I wake up tomorrow, he thought, when I wake up tomorrow it will still be the same. He wanted to run and hide. He felt like he was in boot camp again and there was no escape, no way off the island. He would wake up with the rest of them the next day. He would get up and wash outside the tent in his tin dish, he would shave and go to chow. But everything would not be all right, he thought, nothing would be all right at all.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * The next few weeks passed in a slow way, much slower than any time in his whole life. Each day dragged by until the night, the soft soothing night, when he could close himself off from the pain, when he could forget the terrible thing for a few hours. Each night before he slept he prayed to his god, begging for some understanding of why the thing had happened, why he had been made into a murderer with one shot. Why him? he thought over and over again. He first pleaded with God, then he became angry, demanding. Oh God, he thought, why did this happen, for what reason? What kind of god, he thought, would do this to him? What kind of god would give him these terrible feelings and nightmares for what seemed to be the rest of his life? The time passed in big gaps of deadness. Nights when he could sleep and forget and mornings when it all came back and the men stood by the tents looking at him in their peculiar way, whispering on the chow line. He found himself reading a small pocket Bible so he would not have to look at them and writing long letters to his mother and father. He wrote in his diary that he wanted to become a priest, and that was what he told his parents in the letter about the corporal that he finally wrote home. He told them the story he had told the major, the story about the firefight. And the whole thing in the letter took on a new and beautiful meaning. He had seen a man killed and something, something very deep and wonderful, had happened to him. In some wonderful way, he wrote to them, he had become something very different than he had ever been before. And now, he told them, he wanted to be a priest. He wanted to be like the guy up on the altar, the healer and the guy who gave communion. He finished the letter and he sent it. There, he thought, it’s through. And now deep down inside him he still felt the angry pain, but it became a little easier to live now, easier to live—even though the war was going on a little worse than before, artillery and rockets were hitting the camp almost every day, sending the men into the little bunkers they had built. The major was still sitting behind his desk in the big sandbagged battalion bunker, and whenever he walked past him the major would return his sharp salute with a very confident smile on his face. He thought of the major as his friend. He had understood the whole terrible thing. He had said that maybe it didn’t happen, things got confusing out there, and the major said he knew, that he had been out there himself under heavy fire and he knew.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “And then,” he said, “we took them up on top of a big sand dune that was a few hundred yards from the village.” “Didn’t anybody see you?” “Yeah,” he said. He could feel himself sort of relaxing now. “I think a couple of people in the village. They were going to get water or something. They saw us and one of them started running back to the village. The others just made believe they hadn’t seen us at all. I knew they had but they made believe and kept walking back to the village. We set up a perimeter on top of the hill. We set it up so we could watch all around us and see if anyone was coming out of the village after the woman.” “What time was this?” said the major. “Well—” he looked carefully at his watch. “I think it was about four. It was starting to get dark and I told all the men to eat their rations. Then it became very dark and there were a few small lights in the village and then the shooting started to the left. It was maybe a hundred meters from the big sand dune and I ran to the woman and the kid. I knew she was a woman now and pregnant. Then men started running toward the ocean, away from the dune. Some of them were very frightened. I kept yelling for them to stay, but everyone sort of scattered. Then they all seemed to be running in a line toward a long trench near the ocean. Most of them got back.” “Most of them?” said the major. “Yeah,” he said, “they all got back in the trench except one.” “Who was that?” “That was corporal, he was the last to come back. And that was when it happened,” he said. “What happened?” said the major. “That was when the corporal was killed.” The bald sergeant who worked for the major walked in just as he told the major the thing that had been rolling around in his head all night. “What happened?” said the major. The bald sergeant was putting some papers on the major’s desk. He did that and walked out. “There were a bunch of shots,” he said carefully. “Everybody was shooting, it was a bad firefight.” He paused. “It was pretty bad and then corporal was shot. He was shot and he fell down in front of us and a couple of the men ran out to get him. They pulled him back in. I think the others were still firing. The corpsman tried to help . . . the corporal was shot in the neck . . . The corpsman tried to help . . .” It was becoming very difficult for him to talk now. “Major,” he said, “I think I might have . . . I think I might have killed the corporal.” “I don’t think so,” said the major quickly. “It was very confusing.