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 Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  The patristic tradition often contrasts Cain with two other figures, Eve and David, who both recognized their fault. In the same second Homily on penance, Saint John Chrysostom evokes, after Cain’s silence, the confessions of David. In fact he draws up, around each of these two figures, two cycles of truth and the transgression that opposes it term by term. Cain knew his sin; David, claims Chrysostom, was not aware of his; and to establish this fact, which is not justified by anything in the Bible, he evokes a “philosophical” conception of passion: the soul must direct the body like the soul directs the chariot; if it is dazzled by some passion, or if it is inebriated, or even if it is just distracted, it no longer knows where it is going, and the chariot tips over in the mud. It was this way with David who, drunk with passion, did not know that he was in the process of sinning. Another difference: it is God who presents himself to Cain, the all-powerful God whom nothing escapes; it is only Nathan who presents himself to David. Nathan is a prophet like David, he has no preeminence over him. One imagines a physician who wants to treat another physician; and David might very well have rebuffed him, saying: “Who are you? Who sent you…? What audacity is pushing you…?” No authority in any case, no coercion, could force David to speak in spite of himself. Better: Cain had to reply to the question that already pointed to his crime: Where is Abel? David, for his part, hears himself being offered a fable: to spare his own flock, a rich man kills one of the sheep of a poor man who had only that one possession. The fable, as one understands it according to Chrysostom, had two functions: a test of the king’s judgment, an apologue to decipher to identify the guilty one. So tested, David replies by rendering the sentence himself: “The man who did that deserves death.” As for the enigma, it is Nathan who solves it: you are the man who did that; but David immediately accepts the designation and with the admission occupies the place that Nathan assigns him: “I have sinned against the Eternal One.” In his two responses, to the test and to the enigma, David stands in contrast to Cain. The latter had negated the law that joined him [to his brother] (I am not his keeper); and when he had ended up recognizing the magnitude of his crime and asked for the death sentence himself, it was not at the right moment—en kairô—it was after the fact, once the voice of the blood had denounced him. David, on the other hand, had begun by stating the law, delivering the sentence, and condemning himself without knowing it yet; then, once the truth was discovered, he had placed himself under the sentence that he had just pronounced. Made in this way, David’s avowal appears with its two faces—that of the formulated and accepted sentence and that of the admitted fault, and with all the more merit as it was not a matter of reducing the severity of a sentence one had oneself decided in advance. Thus analyzed through David’s adultery, or rather the carefully altered version that Saint John Chrysostom gives of it, the avowal appears as being not just the recognition that he’s committed a transgression, but the profound adherence to the sentence that condemns him.90 In accordance with a thematic essential to Christian penance, the sinner who confesses like David is both his own accuser and his own judge: “You have had the greatness of soul to admit your fault…You have formulated your own sentence.” If the pardon responds immediately to the avowal, this is because the latter is not simply an accurate statement of the facts, it’s also because it incorporates the constituent elements of a judicial procedure. Truth-telling, “veridiction,” involves its effects of remission in a relation to “juridiction”—a relation that shifts the agency that accuses and the one that judges onto the subject.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  1. The medical model is used quite frequently: sins are represented as injuries or wounds, penance as a remedy. A theme all the more common as it could take support from both the Hebraic tradition of sin-as-wound and the Greek notion of sicknesses of the soul. The idea of a penitential medicine is a commonplace feature in the Christian pastoral as early as the first centuries,76 and would remain so thereafter. A difference should be noted, however. When the penitential institution assumes the form of the sacrament by which it will be definitively recognized in the twelfth century, the priest, having the power to absolve, will occupy the place of the physician. The necessity of confession in the form of an individual, secret, and detailed avowal of sins will then be justified by the principle that every sick person has an obligation to reveal to his caregiver the infirmities he is hiding, the pains he feels, the illnesses he has suffered. From this viewpoint, the manifestation of what the sinner is in his truth and of the secrets of his soul constitutes a technical necessity.77 But in early Christianity it’s not the priest who treats wounds but Christ—that is, God himself: “But for their former sins, God who has the power of healing that will give a remedy; for he has the power of all things.”78 But is it necessary that the sinner show his wounds and his hidden ailments to such a physician? What needs to be made known to the one who knows everything? One can’t even conceal the faults that one may have committed in the secrecy of one’s heart.79 This is the paradox of that healing through penance: it demands that one manifest, through an explicit and rigorous exomologesis, sins that are already known by that one who is expected to heal them. One must spread out before him things that in any case can never be hidden from him. The truth is owed to him, not as a necessity in order for him to choose the appropriate remedies, but as an obligation on the part of the one he intends to heal. For the sick person it is not a matter of making the therapy possible by informing the physician of his ailment, but of deserving the healing, at the price of truth. —

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  During the same era in which Tertullian wrote, a new institution was developing that had the role of organizing, regulating, and controlling this purification prior to baptism. Doubtless this did not involve a radical innovation so much as an institutionalization, according to a model that tends to give a general form to the practices of catechesis and preparation for baptism. Historians recognize several reasons for this establishment of a catechumenate, which, in the third century, came more and more to resemble an “order,” alongside that of the baptized believers. There was the influx of candidates, which threatened to weaken the intensity of religious life; the existence of persecutions, causing the insufficiently prepared to abandon their faith; and the struggle against heresies, implying a more rigorous instruction in the rules of living and in doctrinal content. To which the model of the mystery religions should perhaps be added, with the care that was taken in training their initiates.39 The catechumenate constitutes a very long period of preparation (it can last three years), in which the catechesis and the teaching of the truths and the rules are combined with a set of moral prescriptions, ritual and practical obligations, and duties. In addition—and this is what should be retained here—this preparation is punctuated with procedures designed to “test” the candidate: that is, to show what he is made of, attest to the “labor” he is engaged in, testify to his transformation and to the genuineness of his purification. These procedures correspond to the probatio, which for Tertullian was one of the meanings of the discipline of penitence that he considered indispensable to baptismal preparation. And they show that metanoia must not be understood only as the movement by which the soul turns toward the truth in detaching itself from the world, from errors and sins, but also as an exercise in which the soul must reveal itself, its qualities and its will. In short, it’s the institutional aspect of the principle that the soul’s access to truth cannot be gained without the soul manifesting its own truth. This is the “price,” in a sense—to take up Tertullian’s metaphor with its quite particular interpretation—that the soul must pay for entry into the light that will fill it.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  But it also has another meaning that we’ve already noted: it is the price one pays for redemption. “What folly it is, as insensible as it is unjust, to practice an imperfect penitence and then to expect a pardon for sin! This is to stretch forth one’s hand for merchandise and not pay the price. And the price which the Lord has set on the purchase of pardon is this: He offers impunity to be bought in exchange for penitence.”38 It may seem that in this passage Tertullian is reverting to the idea of an equal exchange, hence of a restrictive mechanism: man having paid the necessary price, God would then be obliged to grant him the pardon. This is not the meaning of the text, however. The coins that one gives in penitence will never be worth what God grants in return—eternal life. And so God’s generosity will never be constrained. The money of penance doesn’t measure the value of the remission obtained, it attests to the authenticity of that which is given in payment. It is not envisaged as a countable quantity, but as evidence, or rather proof. The rest of the passage shows this clearly: when one buys, the merchant “first examines the coin, which they have stipulated as their price, to see that it has not been clipped or plated or counterfeit; do we not believe that the Lord, also, preexamines our penitence?” In speaking of penitence-retribution, Tertullian doesn’t imagine a purchase that one would make from God, but an examination, before him, to which one submits. Probatio paenitentiae. It’s a matter of solid, tangible, genuine proofs of the change that takes place in the soul, of the work that one carries out upon oneself, of the commitment that one makes, of the faith that is formed. As it’s said a bit further on, in a compact formula, “the faith commences and is recommended by the faith in penance.” The word penitence thus designates two things: change of the soul, and manifestation of this change in the acts that allow it to be certified. It must be a proof of oneself. These analyses of Tertullian are neither isolated nor premonitory, even if they have a different tone than those of his contemporary, Clement of Alexandria, and are more elaborate than those of Justin.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  If I were to weave a basket from rushes or to plait palm leaves, so that I might eat my bread in the sweat of my brow and work to fill my belly with a troubled mind, no-one would criticize me, no-one would reproach me. But now, since according to the word of the Savior I wish to store up the food that does not perish, I who have made authenticity my cause, I, a corrector of vice, am called a forger.16 The long-term result can be seen in the curiously discrepant portrayals of Jerome in medieval art (Spain especially bristles with examples, thanks to the devotion of the powerful and wealthy Spanish monastic order later named after him, the Jeronimites). Either he is portrayed in a lavishly equipped study, as a scholar absorbed in his reading and writing, or he is a wild-eyed hermit in the desert – precisely the career at which he had failed. In either case he is very often accompanied by a lion, who has actually arrived in the picture by mistake, thanks to a pious confusion of names, probably by medieval Western pilgrims in the Middle East. They would have been told of a popular Palestinian hermit- saint called Gerasimos, who had actually lived a generation later than Jerome (Hieronymus). Gerasimos’s spectacular feats of ascetic self-denial attracted to himself the pre-Christian story of a good man who removed a thorn from a lion’s paw and won its long-term friendship – or maybe indeed a lion had grown fond of the wild holy man. Lions apart, if Jerome had not been so successful in his campaign for sainthood, and in persuading future writers that it was as much of a self-sacrifice for a scholar to sit reading a book as it was for St Simeon to sit on top of his pillar in a Syrian desert, it might have been far more difficult for countless monks to justify the hours that they spent reading and enjoying ancient texts, and copying them out for the benefit of posterity. Ultimately the beneficiary was Western civilization.17 Besides this, there was Jerome’s immediate and spectacular scholarly triumph: along with a fleet of biblical commentaries, he constructed a Latin biblical text so impressive in its scholarship and diction that it had an unchallenged place at the centre of Western culture for more than a thousand years. This Vulgate version (from the Latin vulgata, meaning ‘generally known’ or ‘common’), was as great an achievement as Origen’s work in producing a single Greek text a century and a half before (see pp. 150–52). Undeniably Jerome’s Vulgate was a work of Latin literature, but there was nothing much like it in Latin literature which predated the arrival of Christianity. That was the problem for Damasus and his new breed of establishment Christians. They wanted to annex the glories of ancient Rome, but they had no time for the gods who were central to it. All through the fourth century arguments simmered between traditionalist aristocrats and Christian emperors, bishops and government officials about the fate of the historic and ancient statue of Victory which stood with its altar in the Senate building in the Forum of Rome. The statue and altar were removed by imperial

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  “And it gave me much more awareness of things I need to change and bad patterns I perpetuate. But I feel weighed down by the amount of shit I need to fix. It just feels like I can’t even have a conversation with friends because there’s so much wrong. I think I always had a fear of being patently unlovable. But now I have all these scientifically validated reasons that prove I’m patently unlovable. So I think the main thing I would like to get out of this is being able to reframe it.” “Yeah,” Dr. Ham said, smiling, almost in awe. “That’s awesome. I want to say that I think the progress you made is really hope-inducing. Tell me about the changes you feel like you’ve made.” “Well, there was this time with my aunt about a month ago that I’m pretty proud of,” I started. A month ago, Joey and I had visited my family in Singapore and Malaysia for our pre-wedding honeymoon. One day, we drove past the post office and my aunt handed a package to Joey and told him to go inside and mail it for her. As soon as he left the car, she turned to me. “Ah girl, you must know no matter how nice your in-laws are to you, they are not your real family and you must not trust them. You must not act the same in front of them as you do me, and you must never fight with Joey in front of them. They will always side with Joey and not you.” This turned into a longer lecture about how I must forgive my father because we all have to forgive our real family for slighting us, because they’re the only actual family we’ll truly have. Joey was only gone for ten minutes, but by the time he got back to the car, I was sobbing angrily, crouched over with my face in my hands, shouting, “You don’t know what it’s like!” “What happened?” Joey gawked, swinging his gaze between the two of us. Nobody paid any attention to him. Instead, my aunt sucked her teeth and said, “Wah, you are still so upset about this stuff with your father, huh? After so long? You know, you should really take your pain and use it to be a better and stronger person.” “You know, I think Stephanie already does that. She works really hard to become a stronger person,” Joey pushed tentatively from the back seat, because I was crying too much to respond. “Oh, good, good,” my aunt said. “Aiyah, okay lah girl, sorry lah. Come, stop crying, let’s go eat chicken rice.”

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I took meager solace in knowing that William Carlos Williams and Richard Selzer had confessed to doing worse, and I swore to do better. Amid the tragedies and failures, I feared I was losing sight of the singular importance of human relationships, not between patients and their families but between doctor and patient. Technical excellence was not enough. As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives—everyone dies eventually—but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness. When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!”). When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool. For amid that unique suffering invoked by severe brain damage, the suffering often felt more by families than by patients, it is not merely the physicians who do not see the full significance. The families who gather around their beloved—their beloved whose sheared heads contained battered brains—do not usually recognize the full significance, either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them. I see the possible futures, the breathing machines connected through a surgical opening in the neck, the pasty liquid dripping in through a hole in the belly, the possible long, painful, and only partial recovery—or, sometimes more likely, no return at all of the person they remember. In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle. Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought. — With my renewed focus, informed consent—the ritual by which a patient signs a piece of paper, authorizing surgery—became not a juridical exercise in naming all the risks as quickly as possible, like the voiceover in an ad for a new pharmaceutical, but an opportunity to forge a covenant with a suffering compatriot: Here we are together, and here are the ways through—I promise to guide you, as best as I can, to the other side. By this point in my residency, I was more efficient and experienced. I could finally breathe a little, no longer trying to hang on for my own dear life. I was now accepting full responsibility for my patients’ well-being.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  Brad changed how he handled discussing his relapses with his wife when he realized that the way he had been approaching conversations with her was unproductive. “I used to get all emotional when I confessed to my wife that I’d relapsed,” he said. “It was like I ‘threw up’ on her, and used telling her as a way to lighten my burden. I felt better. I was being honest. But it absolutely destroyed Paula when I did it. All the drama made her feel just horrible. Now I talk about it with my counselor, my minister, and the men from my recovery group before I talk with her. It gives me a chance to examine what happened, be corrected, and ‘put in my place.’ They help me brainstorm ways to prevent relapse from happening again. Then I sit down with Paula and we have an intellectual conversation. I explain what I did and learned from the relapse. She still feels hurt, but at least the experience of my sharing doesn’t devastate her. She hates it when I slip up, but says she’s building respect for how I’m able to get help for myself, keep her informed, and improve over time.” Share the work. While rebuilding trust is up to the recovering porn user, the intimate partner needs to be involved in her own recovery process. Going to individual counseling and attending a twelve-step program, such as COSA or S-Anon, can be extremely helpful. As we discussed in chapter 5, many intimate partners respond to the discovery of a porn problem by trying to control and fix it themselves—monitoring behavior, violating privacy, and becoming a “porn cop.” This behavior, while understandable, can create serious obstacles to rebuilding trust.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  One form of therapy actually enlists other people to assume the role of your parent. There are group therapy retreats in which other patients take turns “parenting” one another. Your new stand-in parent makes the apologies your parent cannot give you, then provides you with the generous affirmations you deserved to hear as a child—that they are proud of you, that you are inherently good and beautiful. For many, this provides closure and allows them to foster new beliefs about themselves. And there are many other therapies built around teaching adults to reparent themselves. EMDR is one of them. In my first EMDR session, I embraced a child version of myself, “saved” her from her abuse, and told her she deserved love. But subsequent EMDR sessions were less effective, and I never was moved as starkly as in my first experience. Plus, Eleanor, her worksheets, and her constant coughing got on my nerves. After about three months, I stopped seeing her. — It was now seven months after my diagnosis, and summer had turned into fall. Even though I’d applied to a waitlist in the spring, it had taken this long to be paired with an affordable trauma-therapist-in-training through the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Mr. Sweater-Vest had a gentle smile, but it was offset by his eyes, which seemed terrified of me. Among other modalities, he practiced Internal Family Systems, or IFS, a form of therapy that asks patients to break up their mind into subpersonalities—a kind of internal family unit. Let’s say you’re an alcoholic. You might consider that drinking is not your entire identity. There is just one part of your personality that wants you to drink all the time. IFS practitioners call it your “firefighter,” because firefighters react to triggers and try to put out the fire by comforting you—often with unhealthy habits like drinking, binge eating, or doing drugs. This framework allows you to see your firefighter as part of your “family unit” and to subsequently forgive him for his tendency to throw beer on everything. He’s just trying to calm you, after all, and maybe you needed him for a time. But also, maybe you can retire him from service now and use another, healthier part of your “family” to care for yourself. I know many people who found IFS to be instrumental in their healing process, so I gave it a whirl. My new therapist, Mr. Sweater-Vest, asked me to draw caricatures of all of my subpersonalities. I doodled a jump-roping girl: my silly, fun side. A six-armed North Korean traffic controller: my obsessive manager. A Stepford wife with a meatloaf: my nurturer. A sword-wielding Arya Stark figure: my fighter. And a black puddle of sludge: my needy sad sack. He tried to get me to talk to these cartoons, to celebrate them and thank them for their service. But befriending them was a block I couldn’t get over. “What do you want to say to your puddle?” he asked me.

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

  Another question which was discussed with much warmth was which of the two sinned the more grievously, Adam or Eve, a question Hugo of St. Victor, Peter the Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventura, and other great Schoolmen united in attempting to solve—a question which arose quite naturally from Paul’s statement, 1 Tim. 2:14, that the woman was beguiled and not the man. The conclusion reached was that the preponderance of guilt was with Eve. The Lombard is inclined to be lenient with Adam and makes out that when he yielded to the persuasions of his wife, he was actuated by sympathy and was unwilling to give her pain by refusing her request. He was inexperienced in the divine severity and his sin was a venial, not a mortal fault. In fact this theologian distinctly gives it as his belief that Adam would not have given way to the temptation of the devil.1792 Eve sinned by pride, desiring to be equal with God. Adam was not seduced by the devil at all and had in mind the mercy of God and intended later to make confession of his sin, and secure absolution. Eve’s sin was the more grievous for she sinned against herself, against God, and against her neighbor. Adam sinned against himself and God, but not against his neighbor. Hugo of St. Victor said that the woman believed that God was moved by envy in forbidding them to eat the fruit of the tree. Adam knew this to be false. His sin was in consenting to his wife and not correcting her.1793 Albertus Magnus seems inclined to draw a more even balance. In that which pertained to the essence of sin, he said, Eve was the greater offender, but if we look at Adam’s endowment and at other circumstances, Adam was the greater offender.1794 Bonaventura laid down the proposition that the gravity of sin depends upon three things: ingratitude, lust, and the corruption which follows the sinful act.1795 Applying these rules to the Fall, he declared that, so far as ingratitude goes, Adam’s sin was the greater and, so far as lust goes, the woman’s sin was the greater. As for the evil consequences flowing from the sin, Adam sinned the more grievously as the cause of damnation to his posterity and Eve the more grievously as the occasion of such damnation. But as Eve was also the occasion of Adam’s sinning, her sin and guilt must be pronounced the greater.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 6 (1300 – 1800) (2009)

  to his friend Abbot Paul Volz, antiquary and future Lutheran preacher, written to preface the 1518 edition of the Enchiridion, Erasmus asked the rhetorical question, ‘What is the state [‘civitas’] but a great monastery?’73 This had important implications. First, it denied that there was anything distinctive or useful about monasteries: if the city-state or commonwealth (that is, the whole of society) was to become a monastery, then the monastic vocation which Erasmus himself loathed and had escaped was put firmly in its place, and perhaps his own personal guilt at his flight was exorcized. Second, in Erasmus’s ideal society everyone was to be an active citizen of a ‘civitas’ as in ancient Greek city-states, and everyone had a duty to behave as purely as monks were supposed to do under a monastic rule. Third, the person to make sure that they did so was the prince. This message much appealed to secular rulers, and fitted in with the existing late medieval trend towards princes and commonwealths taking power in matters of religion and morality out of the hands of churchmen. Catholic and Protestant alike developed this theme of Erasmian humanism, so that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became an age which historians have termed ‘the Reformation of Manners’, when governments began to regulate public morality and tried to organize every individual in society in an unprecedented fashion – on both sides of the Reformation chasm. That was one of the most long-lasting consequences of Erasmus’s writings and in that respect sixteenth- century Europe is his Europe. Yet his legacy was much wider. Beyond the appreciation of scholars, cultivated people showed their cultivation by enjoying his prose. The people of the Netherlands were proud of his birth there and they did not forget his pleas for tolerance. Significantly, the Roman Inquisition at one stage tried to ban all his writings, and religious radicals of whom mainstream Protestants disapproved found much varied inspiration in what he had written. One important matter to interest radicals was that Desiderius Erasmus did not share in Western theologians’ general stampede to praise Augustine of Hippo. He had too much respect for creativity and dignity in human beings to accept Augustine’s premise that the human mind had been utterly corrupted in the fall of Adam and Eve. Even before he turned towards theology as his main preoccupation, he began around 1489 drafting a work called the Antibarbari, eventually published in 1520. One of the aims of this was to defend humanist learning against scholastics, but it had a more general underlying purpose: Erasmus was protesting against the whole perspective on knowledge which sees the only real truth as what is revealed by divine grace, rather than what is available through the reasoning faculties of the human mind and through the acquisition of education. He was expressing his distrust of mysticism, such as that of the

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

  The sacrament of penance was placed in close connection with baptism by the Schoolmen, as it was later by the council of Trent, which called it a "sort of laborious baptism."1710 Baptism serves for the deletion of original sin; penance for the deletion of mortal sins committed after baptism. Using Tertullian’s illustration, the Schoolmen designated penance the second plank thrown out to the sinner after shipwreck as baptism is the first.1711 In daily religious life, penance became the chief concern of the people and also the chief instrumentality of the priesthood in securing and strengthening its authority. The treatment given to it by the Schoolmen is even more elaborate than the treatment they give to the eucharist.1712 One feature in which this sacrament differs from the others is the amount of positive activity it requires from those who seek the grace involved in it. Contrition, confession to the priest, and the performance of good works prescribed by the priest were the conditions of receiving this grace. Everything depends upon God, and yet everything depends upon the subjection of the penitent to the priest and his act of absolution. It is in connection with this sacrament that the doctrine of the keys comes to its full rights. Here a man is absolved from sin and reunited with the Church, and reconciled to Christ through the mediation of the sacerdotal key.1713 Two perversions of Scripture were the largest factors in developing the theory of meritorious penance. The first was the false interpretation of John 20:23, "Whosoever sins ye forgive they are forgiven, and whosoever sins ye retain they are retained." The passage was interpreted to mean that Christ conferred upon the Apostles and the Church judicial authority to forgive sins. The Protestant theory is that this authority is declarative. The second factor was the Vulgate’s translation of the New Testament for the word "repent," poenitentiam agite, "do penance," as if repentance were a meritorious external exercise, and not a change of disposition, which is the plain meaning of the Greek word metanoevw, "to change your mind."1714 The confusion of the New Testament idea and the Church’s doctrine is evident enough from the twofold meaning Peter the Lombard and Thomas Aquinas give to the thing called penance. Baptism, they said, is a sacrament, but penance is both a sacrament and a virtuous state of the mind. In the New Testament the latter is intended. The theologians added all the mechanism of penance.1715

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  When June makes mistakes, my therapist observed, you don’t stop loving her, do you? Even when she acts in a way you don’t like, you never assume she’s “bad.” You separate her actions from the essence of who she is. What if you could do that for yourself? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] But did I deserve it? One afternoon while June was in school, Brandon came over to pick up something, and when he walked into the living room, he burst into tears. He threw himself face-first onto the sofa and wailed. He was taller than the sofa was long, so his sneakered feet hung off one end, shaking with each sob. I didn’t know what to do, so I went into the kitchen and started to scrub at a smear of something on the counter. I wanted him to leave, to go do it somewhere else. Did I deserve love? Did I deserve pleasure? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I wanted to learn how to date. Compared to women I knew, I had dated little in the years before I married. Mostly I was in a relationship, or I was not. I just wanted practice. I needed practice at being whatever I was. I didn’t want to think about love. I wanted to be fucking someone. A friend pressed into my hands a copy of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and I covered it with Post-it flags. “I can remember, early on,” Nelson writes, “standing beside you . . . completely naked, . . . as you asked me to say aloud what I wanted you to do to me. My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it.”36 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I wanted to live on my own terms. My terms were this: I was a newly queer woman and also a mother. Separated with fifty-fifty custody, I was set loose for half of each week, my tether reeled out as far as it could go. I knew I shouldn’t tell my married friends with full-time children how great this was; that would be cruel. I had a feeling I shouldn’t tell anyone how much I liked being a childless mother. As a mother, I was supposed to grieve every hour I was without my child. I got half of my own life back, with the added perspective of parenthood to throw it into brilliant relief. I could see what I had and appreciate it. And I would have to hang on tight to that feeling when it shimmered over me, because each time June cried and clung to me as I buckled her into Brandon’s car, each time she asked why we had to have two houses, I knew I was the cause of her grief.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  CHAPTER 33 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] Ialways thought that estrangement was an on-off switch. But that’s not so, says Kristina Scharp, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She’s one of the very few academics who study estrangement. “I think that’s one of the myths of estrangement, that estrangement is a complete cutoff, or it’s final,” she said in an NPR interview. “Really, estrangement is more of a continuum, where you can either be more or less estranged, and actually people often go through multiple times of trying to create distance before they’re able to maintain a level of distance that’s right for them.”[1] I came to Scharp’s work by way of my friend Catherine Saint Louis. Catherine is a brilliant reporter and editor. She takes up space in a room, and not just because she is six feet tall. She is forceful—in her offerings of food, her own story, her opinions, and her kindness. We first connected on Twitter, and though we met up in a bright, bougie coffee shop in downtown Brooklyn to talk about freelancing, we quickly learned that our new friendship would center on our experiences with estrangement. Catherine has reported a lot on the topic, done tons of research on estranged families. Her work is inspired by her estrangement from her own father. And what she wanted to impress upon me was that even though there is a tremendous stigma around estrangement, it is fairly common. “Really?” I asked her at the time. “But I never hear about this from anyone except for a couple of close friends and you.” “I have spoken to four dozen people who say the exact same thing as you,” she said, smiling. “That’s why we need to talk about this in public.” Catherine told me about her own difficult relationship with her Haitian immigrant father—a man who wanted the best for her, who wanted her to do well in school and in her career, but also terrorized and demeaned her. Deciding to stop speaking to him, she told me, felt like deciding to stop touching a hot stove. Every time she got near him, she was burnt—and so at a certain point, she had to protect her skin. I told her that I was trying to decide what to do with my own father. I could not imagine continuing a relationship with him as I tried to climb out from the enormous pile of rubble that was my past. But at the same time, there was that guilt. What I owed him for those trips to the Tech Museum and the beach when I was a child, when he taught me about the Monkey King and tucked me in every night. What I owed him for the time when we both believed he loved me. The scales were also tipped by that weight of immigrant obligation.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Before that fall, I had never lived in our house alone, as its sole adult resident. Brandon and I had had big plans for the house, but we hadn’t had the money to see them through. He’d left without complaint. You know me, he said. I’ll have fun finding a new house someday. You know I like a project. I threw out his expired prescriptions and the ominous-looking earwax-removal kit he’d never used. I got tired of seeing the garden hose lolling next to the driveway like a diseased reptile, so I went to Fred Meyer and spent $29.99 on a plastic caddy on wheels. No one has so triumphantly coiled a hose. While I futzed, I listened to podcasts. In an episode of On Being, Krista Tippett mused with Franciscan friar Richard Rohr on the nature and necessity of suffering. It’s a simplistic metaphor, Father Rohr explains, but, “Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder. . . . If you read the great myths of the world and the great religions, that’s the normal path of transformation. What I always tell the folks is there’s no nonstop flight from order to reorder. . . . Yeah, that disorder is part of the deal.”35 This was around the time that the sewer backed up onto the old cherry-red carpet of the basement bathroom. The sewer pipes under the yard had eroded and split and would have to be replaced, at substantial cost. This work would not be covered by homeowners’ insurance. Because we still owned the house jointly, Brandon and I split the bill, both pillaging our savings. I cried a lot, made calls to a contractor acquaintance, and scoured Yelp reviews of sewer companies. Water mitigation, asbestos abatement, trenchless sewer replacement: I would learn to use these terms correctly in a sentence. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I sat in bed one night and wrote a list of people who had been kind to me in the previous year. I wondered why they had. I wondered if I deserved it. I wondered what I did deserve, after what I had done. I had developed a feverish obsession with someone who was not my spouse; had ended my marriage of a decade, thereby stripping my child of a home with both her parents in it; and had meanwhile spent five months riding the chaotic sea of a relationship that sent me pitching with lust, self-loathing, and confusion, in that order, only to end it. I felt bruised and embarrassed, and unsure of how else I could have done it. At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

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

  • • • It would take the Tennessean James Agee to probe the meaning of “poor white” on a truly meaningful level. In his powerfully drawn, enduringly evocative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Agee attempted to toss the source of the white trash fetish back onto the middle class. The unusual book included the chaste still life–style photographs of Walker Evans, and addressed what Odum’s slow-to-change cohort refused to do: interrogate how an interpreter imposed his values on the subject. There could be no such thing as objective journalism. Agee opened the book by wondering out loud how a Harvard-educated, middle-class man like himself could write about poor whites without turning them into objects of pity or disgust. He did not want to be a mere gawker. How could he “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’”? Was it possible to convey the “cruel radiance of what is”? Probably not. 57 So Agee experimented with different strategies, offering detailed descriptions of material objects: shoes, overalls, the sparse arrangement of furnishings in the tenant's home. With a meticulous attention to detail, he tried in words to imitate the camera’s “ice-cold” vision. In another of his departures from conventional reporting, he interspersed what he imagined were the unspoken thoughts of the poor tenant with the uncensored insults he had heard from the landlord. Inside the mind of the tenant, he voiced disbelief: how did he get “trapped,” how did he become “beyond help, beyond hope”? He gave his subjects real feelings, descriptive laments. The landlord’s cruelty comes through his laughter over Agee’s enjoyment of the tenants’ “home cooking.” The landlord curses a poor cropper as a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” who had bragged that he hadn’t bought his family a bar of soap in five years. A woman in one of the tenant families was, in the landlord’s words, the “worst whore” in this part of this country—second only to her mother. The whole bunch were, to the owner, “the lowest trash you can find.” 58 There was a method to Agee’s madness. In this strangely introspective, deeply disturbing narrative, the author tries to force readers to look beyond conventional ways of seeing the poor. Instead of blaming them, he asks his audience to acknowledge their own complicity. The poor are not dull or slow-

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  In my family, porn and anything sexual, was regarded as dirty and wrong. I didn’t dare ask my parents about sex. The community we lived in was so conservative that any type of reality-based sex education was banned in the schools. I grew up shy, sexually ignorant, and extremely guilty about masturbating. Like other boys, I saw porn on occasion, mostly pictures of naked women in magazines that were passed around by my friends. It really turned me on. Still, I didn’t usually look at porn when I was young. It was there and I wanted to do it, but I worried there must be something weird about me for wanting it. I did use images from porn when I masturbated though. During college, I occasionally rented porn videos and bought magazines, but still I was too ashamed and afraid to use porn regularly. After college I began dating Alice, a cute woman I didn’t know very well. I figured if a girl shows interest in me, seems to like me, and I find her attractive, then I should marry her. She said yes, but we agreed to abstain from sex for religious reasons until we got married. Alice and I were engaged for four years. We didn’t even kiss. As you can imagine, being in my early twenties, it was incredibly sexually frustrating. About this same time I went to work at a computer firm. I was paid to research and catalog Usenet groups. These are virtual communities where anyone can post anything anonymously. A large percentage of the Usenet groups are devoted to porn. If you are into an unusual type of sex, you can find porn about it easily. In the Usenet group you know that the other people posting to the newsgroup are also into it. I became fascinated with these anonymous porn worlds and the sexual content they contained. For example, I had a little bit of a foot fetish. One of my favorite groups featured the barefoot category. I’d go there and look. I also became interested in sexual photos of underage girls and visited a lot of those sites. I didn’t hide from my fiancée the fact that I used Internet porn. Alice seemed jealous and hurt, but tolerated it. I felt a lot of guilt about the porn and the masturbation, but my bad feelings only seemed to intensify my orgasms. And I justified it by thinking, It’s better than being sexually frustrated all the time, or sexual with someone else. As time went on, though, I turned my sexual attention more to the pornography and less to the relationship with my fiancée. I developed a pattern of masturbating to porn whenever I was feeling lonely, frustrated, or bored. Our decision to hold off on sex, coupled with how easy it was to access Internet porn at my job, turned my porn use into an addiction.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Fixated on efficiency, he combined salt and pepper into one shaker and would sometimes eat breakfast late at night in case he didn’t have time to do so the next morning. Jake left notes he scribbled to my mother in the refrigerator to remind her, “Sliced cheese costs the same, tastes just as good, and is easier to use when making sandwiches.” He filled plastic bags with ice and wore them around his neck on sultry summer days as he pedaled his bike toward Lake Michigan invoking his motto: Under 75 degrees or underwater! Jake brought a backpack full of maps, almanacs, and little notebooks with him wherever we went and made pronouncements about modern culture that were impossible to prove. He’d say things like, No one eats in their cars anymore or Catholics don’t buy full-length mirrors . He sounded authoritative enough, but if you asked for his sources, you’d find that they were anecdotal or based on very small sample sizes. When Jake was in seventh grade, kids beat him up on the St. Francis playground so viciously that my parents transferred him to the public school. Not only had I done nothing to stop the harassment, I pretended not to notice. Once, I even laughed nervously. Like Peter in the garden at Gethsemane, I knew instantly that I had just betrayed the one person in my life who most consistently modeled love and compassion, and I was bitterly disappointed in myself for being so weak. 1957, Me: The bedrooms were full by the time I arrived. So, for the first several months, I slept in a bassinet by the front door like a human burglar alarm. From the few baby pictures taken of me, I can see why there weren’t more. The left side of my face was swollen where the forceps had grabbed me, making it look like I was winking, the creepy way a prizefighter does after getting clobbered in the tenth round. My feet turned in toward each other, so I had to wear plaster casts on both legs and baby shoes affixed to a metal bar to keep them straight. My mother worried about why I didn’t walk or talk or reach for things as early as her other kids. The pediatrician examined me thoroughly and considered all the evidence. You’re right, Jean, he told her. This one is slow. But she’ll probably be okay socially. 1959, Patty: My wingman, a Goody Two-shoes who worked so hard to please me and everyone else that my friend Mary Claire nicknamed her Yygor (pronounced EE-gor), an eccentric spelling of Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. She baked pretzels for Holmer in her Easy-Bake oven and made a papier-mâché likeness of him one Father’s Day, using one of his many empty beer bottles as the body. With my stick-straight hair, I admit to being jealous when old ladies in the grocery store would coo at Patty’s adorable ringlets.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  If a man was formerly told that if he did not submit to the power of the state he would be subjected to the attacks of evil men, of external and internal enemies; that he would be compelled himself to struggle with them and to subject himself to being killed; that therefore it would be advantageous for him to bear certain privations, in order to free himself from these calamities,—he was able to believe it all, because the sacrifices which he made for the state were only private sacrifices and gave him the hope for a peaceful life in an imperishable state, in the name of which he made these sacrifices. But now, when these sacrifices have not only increased tenfold, but the advantages promised to him are absent, it is natural for any one to imagine that his submission to power is quite useless. But not in this alone lies the fatal significance of the universal military service, as a manifestation of that contradiction which is contained in the social concept of life. The main manifestation of this contradiction consists in the fact that with the universal military service every citizen, upon becoming a soldier, becomes a supporter of the state structure, and a participant in everything which the government does and the legality of which he does not recognize. The governments assert that the armies are needed mainly for the purpose of external defence; but that is not true. They are needed first of all against their subjects, and every man who does military service involuntarily becomes a participant in all the violence which the state exerts over its own subjects. To convince himself that every man who does his military service becomes a participant in such deeds of the government as he does not acknowledge and cannot acknowledge, let a man only remember what is being done in every state in the name of order and of the good of the nation, things which the army appears as the executor of. All the struggles of dynasties and of the various parties, all the executions, which are connected with these disturbances, all the suppressions of revolts, all the employment of military force for the dispersion of popular crowds, the suppression of strikes, all the extortions of taxes, all the injustice of the distribution of the ownership of land, all the oppressions of labour,—all this is produced, if not directly by the armies, at least by the police, which is supported by the armies. He who does military service becomes a participant in all these matters, which in some cases are doubtful to him and in many cases are directly opposed to his conscience.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Now he hates you. It’s clear. You brought him here, out of his cozy home with the three children and the wife who will follow him into sepulchers. You brought him out into the demon slush of January, into this dingy room, and you are forcing him to spend all his earnings and all his parents’ savings on this slick and joyless attorney, and you are fixing to ruin his life. All that he has built. Every Fisher-Price learning desk he has switched to On in the airless expanse of seven A.M. He sold one home and bought another because of you. In North Dakota right now, Aaron Knodel is Teacher of the Year; across the whole state he is deemed the absolute best in the business. And here you are, you vagabond freak, you spawn of alcoholics, you child of suicide, you girl who has been with older men before and gotten them into trouble, army men, upright men of America, and here you are again, you destructive tart, trying to take down the Teacher of the Year. He exhales at you pungently. Breath of eggs. The other thing that is abundantly clear—you must stop caring. Immediately. If you don’t, you might never get out of this room. You search for the end of your heart and, unbelievably, you find it. Your gratitude to yourself and to God is dizzying. How many days have you felt you were doing the right thing? Today is one. Maybe the only one. You thought you’d still want to fuck him. You’d stalked him online. It’s not even stalking these days. You open your computer and ghouls pile up. You can’t avoid obsequious write-ups in local papers. Or Facebook will advertise a link to the store where your former lover’s gloves are from. The recent pictures you saw made you still tingle, and you smarted from bygone lust. But as you sit here now, there’s nothing. His tight, petite mouth. His imperfect skin. His lips aren’t sensual but dry and distracting. He looks sickly, as if he’s been eating muffins and drinking AA coffee and Coca-Cola and sitting in a drafty basement scowling at the wall. Good morning, says his lawyer, Hoy, who is a terror, with his mustachio of wiry, wizard hairs. He has made sure to announce to the press that his client had taken and passed a polygraph test, even though the prosecutor said it was unlikely to be admissible in court. You can see the judgment in Hoy’s whiskers. He’s the type that makes you feel like a poorly educated piece of shit with a car that won’t start on winter mornings like this one. He says, Would you please state your full name for the record. The court reporter taps the keys, your brother David breathes with you in unity, you say your full name out loud. You say, Maggie May Wilken. You swish your long, thought-out hair.