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 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  According to this proverb, the people of Jerusalem were not punished for their own sins but for those of their fathers—notably those of Manasseh in the previous century. Ezekiel argues, to the contrary, that everyone is punished or rewarded for his or her own sins. He proceeds to give examples of righteous fathers and unrighteous sons, and the reverse. Neither the virtue nor the vice of the father is laid to the son’s account. Everyone stands or falls on his or her own merits. In the process, Ezekiel lays out more fully than anywhere else in the book what constitutes righteousness or wickedness. A sinner is one who engages in idolatry or in worship at the high places, defiles his neighbor’s wife, and does not observe purity laws, but also one who oppresses the poor, takes interest on loans, or performs unjustly in any way. Ezekiel’s concern for purity and related issues is evident on every page of the book. His concern for social justice is not so often spelled out, but receives due prominence here. In this regard, Ezekiel resembles the Holiness Code, where moral and ritual requirements are placed side by side (see Leviticus 19; the taking of interest is prohibited in Lev 25:36). The righteous do more than avoid these offenses. They also feed the hungry and cover the naked. The ideal of righteousness, then, is a well-rounded one, and not as narrowly focused on purity issues as we might have inferred from some passages in Ezekiel. Ezekiel insists that “the person that sins shall die.” We have seen that the vision of the destruction of Jerusalem in chapter 9 seemed to take this principle quite literally: only the righteous were spared. Nonetheless, it is clear that Ezekiel does not think that sinners are struck down automatically. He allows for the possibility that a wicked person may repent or that a righteous person may stray from virtue. Further, there is no suggestion of significant life after death, so even the righteous die eventually. “To live” here most probably means to be right with God, and “to die” means to be in disfavor. But in light of the vision in chapter 9, we must also reckon that those who lived unrighteously were liable to premature destruction. Ezekiel’s teaching on individual responsibility is often viewed as a watershed text in the Hebrew Bible. Prior to Ezekiel’s time, corporate responsibility was the norm. When Achan was convicted of violating the ban on booty in Joshua 8, not only was he executed, but also his entire family and even his animals. The case of Achan was admittedly exceptional. In the normal application of law in ancient Israel, only the wrongdoer was punished.

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

  The “sinful woman” abused the gifts of sexual love, ruining the “youth” of the city and violating their sanctified bodies. Her sins were heavy, but she was forgiven by the grace of Jesus. Like the debtor, she could never repay her debts, but God called only for repentance, which was merely an act “of free will.” 63 For most of the fourth century it was not Stoic fatalism, gnostic doctrine, or even vulgar pagan determinism that occasioned Christian preaching on free will. Rather, it was that irrepressible enemy: astrology. In the west, Ambrosiaster battled against the lively threat of astral determinism: “Nothing is so contrary to Christian doctrine.” It was in Syria, in the latter half of the fourth century, that the Clementine Recognitions repackaged Bardaisan’s voluntarism, but without so much allowance for the influence of the stars. Christian preachers of the age like Augustine and John Chrysostom regularly attack the lures of astrology. In Constantinople a sermon on the Magi led Chrysostom inexorably into a diatribe against astral determinism. “We are free and masters of our wills.… If human affairs were under the power of their sign, why do you lash your slave in anger? Why do you haul your adulterous wife before the courts?… If sins arise by necessity, why do you bear insult harshly?” Only someone who was possessed by a demon lost his “free will” and deserved pity rather than censure. Chrysostom’s sermon dates to around AD 400. He speaks of “free will” with complete innocence, in a fashion not far removed from Justin, Origen, or Methodius. It was still unproblematically a cosmological, antideterminist formulation. Sex, as ever, remained the reflexive paradigm of human freedom. In the middle of the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem could write, in his Catechetical Lectures, that the devil could suggest but not compel fornication, because the soul was self-governing. “If you wish, you will receive the suggestion, and if not, you won’t. For if you committed fornication by necessity, then for what reason has God prepared the hellfire?” Yet within just a few years, such untroubled absolutisms will come to seem hopelessly naive. 64 Vivifying the tensions between freedom and determinism in the fourth century was the spread of Manichean beliefs. The strongly dualist religion offered answers to the problem of evil that were seductive in their simplicity, proposing to solve through myth some of the most impossible theological conundrums of late antiquity.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] But while I was writing, Brandon taught himself about building codes and wood-fired ovens, restaurant licensing and leases, how to mix concrete and tile a wall. When I finally came to, when my book was at the printer, I saw that the lease was signed and our basement was impassable for all the scavenged pots and table bases, chairs, and professional kitchen equipment. I understood that I had been terribly wrong. He was going to open a restaurant. In the linoleum-floored kitchen of our duplex apartment, I sobbed and pleaded. I didn’t want a restaurant. I knew what that life looked like—debt, tight margins, long and irregular hours—and I didn’t want it. The friend with the successful Italian restaurant had recently filed for divorce. Our relationship stood on a foundation of long dinners and meandering conversations while cooking; now, when I finished my work each day, Brandon would be at the restaurant, beginning his. He would be a chef, working noon to midnight, seven days a week. Opening a restaurant is not a job for newlyweds. I didn’t want any of it. Brandon stared at me blank-faced. His mouth curled, a rictus of disbelief. The lease is already signed, he cried. I’ve been working on this for months! His voice had gone high and raspy. I did this for us, he said. I thought you would be happy. Now we can both do what we love to do. That’s what I meant this to be. The restaurant will bring together everything we love. But I don’t want it, I said, my pitch rising to match his. It can’t be that easy! That’s not what this industry is. I tried to slow down, catch my breath. I just never thought you’d get this far, I said. I thought you’d move on. I thought you’d give up. This would humiliate him, though that wasn’t what I wanted. I hadn’t believed in him, and now we both knew it. But I knew whose fault it was. I’d made the huge mistake. I’d been eyeballs-deep in my own work, distracted as I encouraged him in his. I hadn’t been clear about what I wanted, or didn’t want, because I didn’t think I had to be; the restaurant was never, not actually, going to open. Now it was. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] A friend of mine used to have a phrase taped to the wall of her office: Accept it as if you’d chosen it. The first time I read it, it seemed sad. I read it like an admission of defeat, the image of the toddler in the grocery store who, having wailed herself dry on the floor of the cereal aisle, stands and follows her mother in silence to the checkout line. When we opened Delancey, I saw that I’d missed the point. Accepting it, this thing I had not chosen—this was not defeat but evolution. This was what I’d heard called “resilience.” This was sanity.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  I also see the effects on Carter, a hardworking college student who initially came in for mild depression but quickly uncovered the underlying issue of “I always feel like I’m letting everyone down.” Carter was from a small town in central Massachusetts where, over the decades, textile mills had slowly given way to big-box stores and opioid busts. He was the smart kid, the golden boy, the big fish, bringing home straight As from his underfunded public high school. He was celebrated by the whole town when he got into his dream university, which, after he moved into his dorm, he realized was the biggest of ponds, filled with flashy and accomplished valedictorians. Carter tried mightily not to disappoint anyone—his parents, his friends, his girlfriend, his professors, his entire hometown. But the expectation that he become a big man on campus made him feel like shrinking into a shell. Carter felt like he should be able to do it all, despite the limitations set by a twenty- four-hour day and the fact that he isn’t a machine. He thought everyone expected him to be a brilliant, charismatic success story who could own the dance floor, but he felt chronically overwhelmed, self-conscious, and like he was faking everything. The discrepancy made him distant and unreliable, which put him in the very position he was trying to avoid: on the verge of making everyone upset. We’ll hear more from Carter in chapter 14, when we talk about feeling our authentic emotions. Finally, I see it in Jamila. A straight-shooting college senior, Jamila came to see me because she felt directionless, with no idea what she wanted to do after graduation. “I’m good at going to classes and taking exams,” she said, “but beyond that, I have no idea.” Jamila had ground her way through “should” her whole life, doing everything right to get to the next level, but now that she could pursue any path she wanted, she realized she didn’t know what she liked. “It’s as if I’ve been trying to do someone else’s generic idea of the Right Thing,” she said. One session, she welled up as she described the scene in the 2019 film Someone Great where Gina Rodriguez’s character, in a T-shirt and underwear, drunkenly unloads groceries with her best friend while they belt Lizzo lyrics and dance dorkily around the kitchen. “I don’t have any friends like that,” she reflected. “And you know what? Even if I did, it wouldn’t occur to me that I could let loose like that with them.” She sighed. She had a circle of friends, she said, but she felt peripheral, like the Dear Evan Hansen song: “On the outside, always looking in.” She yearned to be closer—to go deeper—but wasn’t sure how to make it happen. We’ll dive into Jamila’s story in chapter 15, where we cover building closer relationships. And, dear reader, let me tell you, I see perfectionism in myself.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If I have failed in that effort, it is my sin. If others in reading fail to respond in the same spirit, it is their sin. In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed. Let us do our thinking on these great questions, not with our eyes fixed on our bank account, but with a wise outlook on the fields of the future and with the consciousness that the spirit of the Eternal is seeking to distil from our lives some essence of righteousness before they pass away. I have written this book to discharge a debt. For eleven years I was pastor among the working people on the West Side of New York City. I shared their life as well as I then knew, and used up the early strength of my life in their service. In recent years my work has been turned into other channels, but I have never ceased to feel that I owe help to the plain people who were my friends. If this book in some far-off way helps to ease the pressure that bears them down and increases the forces that bear them up, I shall meet the Master of my life with better confidence. CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS ABOUT CROSSREACH PUBLICATIONS Thank you for choosing CrossReach Publications . Trust. Inspiration. Hope. These three words sum up the philosophy of why CrossReach Publications exist. You want solid Christian books from respected and acknowledged Christian writers from yesteryear. We want to provide them for you. Not only do you get the works of the most well-known men and women of Christendom, we have also brought back many lesser-known works from some of the giants from Church history, as well as hidden gems from less popular, and even almost forgotten authors that deserve to be heard again. Not only that, our editions are also high quality. We spend time editing and formatting and looking over our manuscripts before publishing. Some small publishers of classic works publish sloppy, almost illegible reproductions of these works. This will not do. We aspire to excellence and we believe it shows in our editions. We cannot guarantee perfection, but we’ll try. And we do this at a cost that is right for you. If you have any questions or suggestions please do not hesitate to contact us. ContactUs@CrossReach.net https://www.CrossReach.store Don’t forget you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter, (addresses are on the copyright page above) to keep up to date on our newest titles and deals. MORE FROM WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH Dare We Be Christians? Walter Rauschenbusch GOD’S world is great; too great for a little mind like mine to hold.

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

  The crowd stirred at the sight of the famous actress in tears. She has to leave when the mysteries begin, but two of her slaves find Nonnos and deliver a letter from their mistress in wax. She pours out her remorse and begs for an audience with Nonnos. Nonnos agrees to see her, in the relative safety of a small conclave of bishops. She groveled before them, grasping the feet of Nonnos, soaking them with her tears, like the sinner in the gospels. Her confession is a tsunami of self-loathing guilt: “I am a sea of sins. I am an abyss of wickedness.” Pelagia asks Nonnos himself to be her sponsor in baptism, as she exchanges her whorish garb for the robes of purification. The two will be united in her spiritual rebirth. 62 When she is baptized, she reveals that the name by which she was famous throughout Antioch, “Margarito,” “Pearl,” was merely a stage name. In fact her parents had named her Pelagia. Under her true name she is baptized and receives the holy mysteries. As the assembly rejoices, Satan himself appears, glowering at the baptismal party. He berates Nonnos and then Pelagia herself. He takes the guise of a jilted lover, humiliated by Pelagia’s betrayal. Pelagia, whose bridehood is now vouchsafed to Christ, crosses herself and turns away her old companion. He tempts her again, by night, but she resists and confesses her allegiance to her heavenly marriage chamber. The scenes do not generate much compelling spiritual drama, but as a transposition of romantic tropes they are at least clever. Pelagia bequeaths her estate to Nonnos, who instructs the church’s steward, following Mosaic law, not to allow the wages of the prostitute to cross the threshold of the church. Instead the money is distributed directly to orphans and widows. Pelagia manumits her slaves, urging them to free themselves from “slavery to the sin of this world.” The crowds marvel at her very public transformation, and many of her fellow prostitutes are inspired to follow her example. 63 Pelagia’s days of public fame are behind her. She takes a hair shirt and woolen robe from Nonnos, and by night, dressed as a man, she leaves the city. No one saw her depart. Three years later the author of the life, Jacob, went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Nonnos told him to find a monk named Pelagius, a eunuch. Jacob finds him living in a cell on the Mount of Olives, wasted by asceticism, with cavernous eyes. Jacob does not recognize the shell of skin and bones before him as the once-famous actress. Pelagius has achieved, through gruesome self-mortification, a state beyond biological sex, transcending male or female. When Pelagius dies, crowds gather for the burial of the recluse. Anointing the body, the clergy of Jerusalem realize that Pelagius was a woman.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Money’s tight. But you just can’t escape it. You probably don’t know what that’s like.” She wasn’t sneering, not really—she spoke like she was just stating the truth. Acknowledging reality with an affable shrug. That’s when the idea came to me, fully formed, as if I had thought of it myself. And that’s how it seemed, like the exact solution, a baubled ornament shining within reach. “I can get some money,” I said, later cringing at my eagerness. “My mom leaves her purse out all the time.” It was true. I was always coming across money: in drawers, on tables, forgotten by the bathroom sink. I had an allowance, but my mother often gave me more, by accident, or just gestured vaguely in the direction of her purse. “Take what you need,” she’d always said. And I’d never taken more than I should have and was always conscious of returning the change. “Oh no,” Suzanne said, flicking the last of her cigarette out the window. “You don’t have to do that. You’re a sweet kid, though,” she said. “Nice of you to offer.” “I want to.” She pursed her lips, affecting uncertainty, igniting a tilt in my gut. “I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to.” She laughed a little. “That’s not what I’m about.” “But I do want to,” I said. “I want to help.” Suzanne didn’t speak for a minute, then smiled without looking over. “Okay,” she said. I didn’t miss the test in her voice. “You want to help. You can help.” —My task made me a spy in my mother’s house, my mother the clueless quarry. I could even apologize for our fight when I ran into her that night across the stillness of the hallway. My mother gave a little shrug but accepted my apology, smiling in a brave way. It would bother me, normally, that wavery brave smile, but the new me bowed my head in abject regret. I was imitating a daughter, acting like a daughter would. Part of me thrilled at the knowledge I held out of her reach, how every time I looked at her or spoke to her, I was lying. The night with Russell, the ranch, the secret space I tended to the side. She could have the husk of my old life, all the dried-up leftovers. “You’re home so early,” she said. “I thought you might sleep at Connie’s again.” “I didn’t feel like it.” It was strange to be reminded of Connie, to jar back to the regular world. I’d been surprised, even, that I could feel the ordinary desire for food. I wanted the world to reorder itself visibly around the change, like a mend marking a tear. My mother softened. “I’m just glad because I wanted to spend some time with you. Just us. It’s been a while, huh? Maybe I’ll make Stroganoff,” she said. “Or meatballs.

• From Cultish (2021)

  but according to basic math, guess how many people will be in your downline by the end of those twelve months? Over a trillion. That’s 142 times the world population, and a whole lot of diet pills. Study after study shows that 99 percent of MLM recruit s never make a dime, and the lucky 1 percent at the top only profits at everyone else’s expense. The calculations speak for themselves, but even if you’re totally in the red, with an empty bank account and a storage locker full of eye cream nobody wants, at least you get to stay a part of your team—your “family”—whose fellow recruits you might call your sisters and whose leaders you might even refer to as Mom and Dad. By this point, you’ve developed a deeply emotional, codependent bond with these people. You text with them all day. You’re in secret Facebook groups together. You have weekly meetings via video chat, where you all drink pink wine (“because you earned it!”) and spill your souls to each other. You save up all year to attend the company’s costly conferences so you can see your fellow boss babes in person. So, you’ll likely choose to ignore your damages, forget the math, and hold out, especially since you were emphatically promised a big payday at the end of all this. Plus, everyone above and beneath you is counting on you to make money. If you give up now, you’ll disappoint your Diamond Squad. You’ll disappoint your family and your “family.” You’ll disappoint God. You won’t be a #girlboss anymore. You’ll be nothing. Under that kind of pressure, things can get undeniably cultish. MLMs are scammy, but they aren’t just your average scams. They’re complex, life-consuming organizations with a language and culture all their own. MLMs have strong and pervasive ideologies that are missionary in character, and members revere their founding leaders, who share a desire not just to run a successful company but to rule the free world, on the level of religious worship. The famous University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils defined “cult charisma” as “whenever an individual is understood to be connected with crucial questions of human existence.” To this degree, MLM leaders are as influential as 3HO’s Yogi Bhajan and Shambhala’s Chögyam Trungpa. They convert you with compliments and exclamation points and fauxspiration. They condition and coerce you with loaded buzzwords (often invoking God), and they use thought-terminating clichés to silence dissent. They train you to employ these same techniques with everyone you know, at every turn. MLMs wield us-versus-them verbiage to tightly bond their followers and frame them as better than traditionally employed Americans. At Amway, the world’s biggest MLM, anyone who works for an “employer” as opposed to an upline mentor is said, with disdain, to have a J.O.B., a “jackass of a boss.” “When you work for someone else, you will never get paid what you’re worth,” Amway’s recruits are all taught to say.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  We had engaged a servant to look after the house. He lived with us as a member of the family, and the children used to help him in his work. The municipal sweeper removed the night-soil, but we personally attended to the cleaning of the closet instead of asking or expecting the servant to do it. This proved a good training for the children. The result was that none of my sons developed any aversion for scavenger’s work, and they naturally got a good grounding in general sanitation. There was hardly any illness in the home at Johannesburg, but whenever there was any, the nursing was willingly done by the children. I will not say that I was indifferent to their literary education, but I certainly did not hesitate to sacrifice it. My sons have therefore some reason for a grievance against me. Indeed they have occasionally given expression to it, and I must plead guilty to a certain extent. The desire to give them a literary education was there. I even endeavoured to give it to them myself, but every now and then there was some hitch or other. As I had made no other arrangement for their private tuition, I used to get them to walk with me daily to the office and back home a distance of about 5 miles in all. This gave them and me a fair amount of exercise. I tried to instruct them by conversation during these walks, if there was no one else claiming my attention. All my children, excepting the eldest, Harilal, who had stayed away in India, were brought up in Johannesburg in this manner. Had I been able to devote at least an hour to their literary education with strict regularity, I should have given them, in my opinion, an ideal deucation. But it was been their, as also my, regret that I failed to ensure them enough literary training. The eldest son has often given vent to his distress privately before me and publicly in the press; the other sons have generously forgiven the failure as unavoidable. I am not heart broken over it and the regret, if any, is that I did not prove an ideal father. But I hold that I sacrificed their literary training to what I genuinely, though may be wrongly, believed to be service to the community. I am quite clear that I have not been negligent in doing whatever was needful for building up their character. I believe it is the bounden duty of every parent to provide for this properly. Whenever, in spite of my endeavour, my sons have been found wanting, it is my certain conviction that they have reflected, not want of care on my part, but the defects of both their parents.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  All the more so for being unreal, gone in an instant, something to savor like perfume on the wind, piano played in a passing house in the afternoon. I hung on to it as Susan parked on the far side of the lake, where we could see the blue-green water, dotted with white, the picturesque hillside beyond. She turned the music down, but you could still hear Nelson’s trumpet. “I want you to ask yourself, what’s she guilty of?” Susan asked, turning toward me from the driver’s seat. “I mean, in your mind. Really. Murder, or being a lousy mother? Of not being there for you when you needed her.” I looked at the little woman, her black curls maybe one shade too black, her eyes a little mascara-smudged from the heat. The weariness was an act, but also the truth. Like so many things, the words hopelessly imprecise. I wished I had something to draw her with. She was in the process of becoming a caricature of herself. Not yet, now she was merely recognizable. But in five years, ten, she would only look like herself at a distance. Up close she would be drawn and frightened. “Honestly, aren’t you just trying to punish her for being a crappy parent, and not for the alleged murder?” She cracked her window with the electric button, snapped in the car’s lighter, and reached into her bag for her cigarettes. “What was Barry Kolker to you anyway, some boyfriend of your mother’s. She had a number of boyfriends. You couldn’t have been that attached.” “He’s dead,” I said. “You’re accusing me of being cynical?” She put a cigarette in her mouth and the lighter popped out. She lit it, filling the car with smoke. She exhaled up toward the slit in the window. “No, it’s not Kolker. You’re angry with her for abandoning you. Naturally. You’ve led six difficult years, and like a child, you point to the almighty mother. It’s her fault. The idea that she too is a victim would never occur to you.” Out the window, in the unairconditioned part of reality, a very red-faced jogger trotted by us, dragging a tired setter on a leash. “Is that what you’ll say if I tell the truth at her trial?” We watched her plodding down the sidewalk, the dog trying to sniff at the plants as they went by. “Something like that,” she said, the first honest thing I’d heard her say since I’d shaken her small hand. She sighed and flicked ash out the window. Some blew back in. She brushed it off her suit. “Astrid. She may not have been some TV mom, Barbara Billingsley with her apron and pearls, but she loves you. More than you can imagine. Right now she really needs your faith in her.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  I texted him that I was so sorry but very tired. He said please can I come in. I said I am tired but so sorry. He said, I came all this way. At this point I was wearing a bra and no bottoms. I slipped into sweats and ran out, grateful that I had done a bad job taking off my makeup because it still mattered to me to look pretty. He seemed nice, but I did not want to have sex with him. I’d reached a point in my life where I was considering not having sex with people when I didn’t feel like it. Feelingly horrible that he had traveled all this way—to be clear, fifteen minutes by taxi—I let him make out with me by my door. This was my way of apologizing for not having sex with him, my own mouth offered as consolation. He kept lobbying to come inside. I kept saying I was tired, and he kept saying he could come in just for a little, that he wouldn’t take very long. I kept offering more make-out to apologize. The cycle continued. After fifteen minutes or an hour, I worked up the resolve to pull away, bid a firm adieu, and stepped back inside, locking the door. If I had been one-eighth less tired, if one of the drinks Greek the Club bought me had been a vodka Red Bull and not a tequila soda, I would have had drunken intercourse with that stranger because he “had come all that way” and seemed disappointed, and from a young age I learned it is my job to manage people’s feelings. Not only did I have to fend off pressure from the firefighter, but my internal sense of “compulsory sexuality”—the social pressure to have sex and be sexual in situations you don’t want to have sex or be sexual—implored me to invite him in. It easily could have gone the other way. In the near decade since hurting that man’s feelings, I haven’t entirely shaken the impulse to emotionally caretake via sex, a sentiment that has been echoed to me by many people in relationships who feel burned out in their sex lives. It can feel like sex is something to be offered or withheld, rather than wholeheartedly enjoyed. But I want to give myself, and all of us, credit for the bad sex we have managed to avoid—those instances we listened to our gut and mustered up the energy to resist what felt like an inevitable sequence of events. If the sex recession has us scaling back on sex we don’t feel like having, we should celebrate it. 2 THE BAD SEX PROBLEM

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  We were all urged to give our babies to "Ma" (Joyce's spiritual name). We were told that these children would eventually be Ma's successors. All this was handled discreetly through "the girls," a group of women who took personal care of Joyce and handled her dirty work. When I was six months pregnant with our first child, I was targeted. The girls worked on Harryfirst and had him work on me. After two months of hell, I finally agreed to their plan. I remember the precise moment when the switch flipped: "There is nothing greater that I could do for my child than give her to the divine mother." Four of us gave our first child to this woman. She raised them as twins, like two matched sets of dolls. Joyce assured me that I would be significantly involved in my daughter's care. As it turned out, I got to watch all the children sleep a few hours a night, four nights a week. Near the end of the first year, I was thrown out of the nursery after an argument with Joyce's tyrannical teenage daughter. Shortly after that, I left Kashi Ranch and joined Harry, who had left five months earlier. I did not take my daughter with me, though I desperately wanted to. I had begun to see a rather dark side of Joyce, but I couldn't give her up: she was still my guru, my god. I had to truly believe this to leave my daughter with her. Harry and I moved back to Colorado and started a new life. Six months later, I got pregnant. When I gave birth to our first son, I learned how it felt to actually keep my own child. It was such a healing experience to love and nurture my son, yet it was so disturbing to think about my daughter. How could I have done this? Two years passed; trying desperately to replace my daughter, I became pregnant with our second son. For years I endured the deepest grief known to a woman: a longing for her child. Finally, I got up the courage to visit the Ranch to see my daughter. My little girl, Ganga, was six years old on my first trip back. She was so beautiful and full of life, and we connected right away, but I had to be careful because she thought Ma was her mother. Seeing her was both relief and torture. I wanted her back in my life, but I didn't want to move back to the Ranch and surrender to Ma again. For four months, Joyce and her cohorts worked on Harry and me to move back there. Finally, I hit my,limit; something snapped. I was breaking through the cult mind-set: I didn't have to accept Joyce's reality anymore. But what in hell was I going to do about Ganga? . I knew that I desperately needed good professional help.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  It was okay by you as long as she didn’t take it seriously. When she started bringing home all this money it seemed even more okay. Once a week she said she was going to quit. She hated the photographers, the hustlers and the hype. She hated the models . She felt guilty making all this money on her looks, in which she didn’t believe anyway. You asked her if she thought being a secretary was fun. You told her to stick with it long enough to salt away some money, and then she could do whatever she wanted. You thought it was kind of kinky that she was doing this as long as she was slumming, as long as she wasn’t really a model. You both joked about the real models, the ones who developed ulcers over pimples and thought menopause set in at twenty-five. You both despised people who thought an invitation to X’s birthday bash at Magique was an accomplishment equal to swimming the English Channel. But you went to X’s birthday bash anyway, with your tongues in your cheeks, and while Amanda circulated you snorted some of X’s very good friend’s private stash of pink Peruvian flake in the upstairs lounge. Her agent used to lecture her, telling her that as a professional she had to take it more seriously, stop getting ten-dollar haircuts and start going to the right places. Amanda was amused. She did a fine imitation of this agent, a modeling star of the fifties who had the manner of a dorm mother and the heart of a pimp. Over the months, though, you started eating at better restaurants and Amanda started getting her hair cut on the Upper East Side. The first time she went to Italy for the fall showings, she cried at the airport. She reminded you that in a year and a half you had never spent a night apart. She said to hell with it, she would skip Italy, screw modeling. You convinced her to go. She called every night from Milan. Later on these separations did not seem so traumatic. You postponed your honeymoon indefinitely because she had to do the spring collections three days after the wedding. You were busy with your own work. There were nights you got home after she was asleep. You looked at her across the breakfast nook in the morning and it often seemed that she was looking through the walls of the apartment building halfway across the continent to the plains, as if she had forgotten something there and couldn’t quite remember what it was. Her eyes reflected the flat vastness of her native ground. She sat with her elbows on the butcher-block table, twisting a strand of hair in her fingers, head cocked to one side as if she were listening for voices on the wind. There was always something elusive about her, a quality you found mysterious and unsettling.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  “From that moment on,” Ryan proclaimed, “I knew I must restrain myself. Soon I also knew I was obsessed with my little prick, how good it felt, and how bad I was for wanting to touch it.” He went on to explain that, with plenty of twists and variations, he still felt essentially the same way as a middle-aged man. He craved love yet was driven by an insatiable appetite for nasty sex. In the past he had often hired prostitutes but not since meeting Janet. Thus far, though, he had been unable to resist even stronger urges to masturbate while talking on telephone sex lines. And he still sneaked out to X-rated bookstores in the black of night in search of pornographic videos and magazines. He was fascinated by graphic depictions of down-and-dirty sleaze. He was the first person I ever met who called himself a “sex addict,” at least ten years before the term became fashionable. The connotations of addiction accurately captured the out of control, compulsive quality of his behavior. But his insistence on casting himself as an addict who had to “kick the habit” only intensified the grueling struggle that fueled his obsession. Like most of today’s “sex addicts” Ryan was less hooked on sex than on fighting with it. He felt the helplessness of a drug addict because for him forbidden desires escalated in tandem with the need to resist them. His excitation was always ultra-hot, but there was little or no lasting enjoyment. For as long as he could remember, he had most assuredly been a prisoner of prohibition. No wonder Ryan was easily orgasmic while masturbating to porn or with anonymous phone partners. He considered his fantasy women sluts with whom he could freely express his depraved, lusty self. The fact that his fantasy partners weren’t actually present also made it easier for him to express his impulses in unedited form, although he worried that one day someone would recognize his voice and expose his secret. Because he admired and respected Janet, he felt self-conscious and inhibited—cut off from the roots of his eroticism. Although their shared affection and sensuality felt marvelous and usually produced an erection, he was unable to surrender to lust and generate sufficient erotic intensity to push himself “over the top” to orgasm. Once Ryan understood his conflict he asked Janet to join him in couple’s therapy. He wisely decided that telling Janet about his lusty exploits outside their relationship would only hurt her, so he kept those details to himself. But he was determined to tell Janet about the inner conflict that was preventing him from feeling sexy with the woman he loved.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and wrong in the universe. And it wasn’t only sexual sin that brought about feelings of guilt, it was lies and mean thoughts and throwing rocks at cars with Roy. My life had become something to hide; there were secrets in it. My thoughts were private thoughts, my lies were barriers that protected my thoughts, my sharp tongue a weapon to protect the ugly me. I would lock myself in my room, isolating myself from my sister and my mother, not often to do any sort of sinning, but simply because I had become a creature of odd secrecy. This is where my early ideas about religion came into play.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  For prisoners of prohibition every opportunity for enjoyment sets off a frantic inner conflict. When they feel aroused they’re awash with guilt. If their inhibitions are temporarily swept aside by desire, they pay later with remorse and shame. This conflict is so unpleasant that some people develop sexual aversions and go to great lengths to avoid becoming aroused. In the worst cases perfectly normal sexual stirrings actually trigger panic attacks. The opposite reaction takes place in those who become obsessed with sex, compulsively reenacting the very behaviors that were most forbidden. They keep their eroticism alive by sustaining a hidden sex life, cut off and thus protected from antisexual judgments. If these secret sex lives are eventually exposed, it is often to the amazement of shocked friends, family, constituents, or congregations. Many sex offenders are prisoners of prohibition who can only become aroused when they are actually violating laws, risking legal punishment and social censure. But most prisoners of prohibition are not sex offenders—and never will be. Instead the perpetual tension between antierotic training and persistent forbidden desires fuels an internal struggle as compelling as it is grueling. They harm no one except themselves and those who try to love them. In most cases their torturous secret comes fully to light only when they try to form an enduring sexual bond. Ryan and Janet: Too close for lust Ryan was distraught over his relationship with Janet, his new girlfriend. He told me how important she was to him, how doubtful he was about his ability to succeed at romance, and how determined he was to make a go of it. Ryan’s relationship with Janet was the most affectionate and tender he had ever known. “But,” he continued with a deep sigh, “I’m not handling it very well.” He was embarrassed to admit that even though he found her very attractive, he had never been able to ejaculate with Janet. As we discussed his predicament it soon became apparent that his inhibited ejaculations were a manifestation of a much more serious problem: a gaping chasm between his lusty urges and his desire for love and affection. I asked him to recall his earliest feeling or experience that seemed, in retrospect, to have been sexual. Most clients need to think about this question for a while, but Ryan knew his answer instantly. Around age four or five he had been casually playing with himself, enjoying the warm, tingling sensations between his legs. This simple memory became permanently etched in his mind when his father walked in on Ryan’s sensuous reverie, flew into a rage, ranted about hell and evil, and commanded him never ever to do that again, terrifying little Ryan half to death.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  It’s a sad reality that cultures and families often seem hell-bent on making the interplay of love and lust infinitely more difficult than it needs to be. The framework for adult love-lust interactions is sketched out during childhood and adolescence. Adult lust evolves out of simple experiences of sexual and sensual curiosity. The precursors to adult love are early emotional attachments, first to Mom, then to the larger family, and eventually to a community of friends and acquaintances. When kids play house, mimic favorite TV characters, simulate flirtatious poses or embraces, or initiate or reject nudity or sexy games with their peers, they’re engaging in the important work that Dr. John Money calls “sexual rehearsal play.”6 Through positive sex play kids learn about their own and others’ bodies. At the same time, the complex interactions and negotiations required by their games provide opportunities for practicing skills of social conduct. When adults try to protect children by forbidding sex play with age-mates, the message is powerfully communicated that their curiosities are bad, setting the stage for a later mistrust of lust. These “protected” children are frequently unprepared to handle the more demanding interpersonal challenges of adolescence. As adults they often end up confused or in conflict about matters of love and lust.7 For those who hold the twin beliefs that love is good and lust is bad, two basic strategies are available for dealing with this dichotomy. One approach seeks to tame or to purify lust by fusing it with love so that lusty urges are interpreted as love, an especially common response to sex-negative training among women. Rushes of sensation that many would call lust are interpreted as love or affection. A love-lust fusion can be visualized like this: [image file=image_rsrc3FE.jpg] When sex must always be joined with love, even casual sex can become infused with emotion and meaning. Unfortunately, this special intensity is typically followed by the realization that the partner isn’t feeling the same way. More often than not, the dream of lust redeemed by love quickly turns to loneliness. The inability to experience lust as separate from love clouds one’s judgment and is responsible for incalculable unnecessary suffering. Another response to love-lust conflicts, more common among men, is to protect the purity of love by creating an invisible barrier between it and lust so that a person becomes unable to feel both at the same time or with the same person. The splitting apart of love and lust can be visualized like this: [image file=image_rsrc3FF.jpg] When someone pursues lustful aims with complete detachment from tenderness and affection, erotic attention narrows to a laser like focus on maximum genital arousal. The result is often a level of excitation that is qualitatively different than any other kind—hotter, more insistent, a unique psychophysical high. Unfortunately, love-lust splits make it difficult or impossible to build and maintain sexual relationships because affection intrudes, reducing or obliterating the sought-after intensity.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Anyway, I don’t want to marry him.” “You should have thought of that sooner,” Irene told Rusty, one of the only unkind remarks he’d ever heard from his mother. Irene shipped Rusty off to Aunt Ida’s in Santa Monica, California, where Rusty supposedly met and married a boy who was going overseas. When Max had the second stroke Rusty took the next train back and Irene didn’t try to stop her. She needed all the help she could get. He remembered the murky stories Irene concocted to explain to anyone who had the guts to ask how Rusty happened to be pregnant, or later, how Rusty happened to have a baby, or even what happened to the boy. When Rusty balked, Irene told her, Too bad. He loved his sister, he admired her, he took her side, but he didn’t think this was fair to Miri. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00008.jpg] CONTROLLERS SAW SMOKE FROM ILL-FATED PLANEBy Henry AmmermanDEC. 18 — The Miami Airlines C-46 that crashed here on Sunday was a doomed flight. It had been turned over to maintenance personnel just one hour before its scheduled departure that morning. They worked furiously behind the scenes as passengers fretted in the departure lounge. The flight was delayed five hours. It was not long enough. As the aircraft climbed, air controllers saw smoke trailing from the right engine. They called the pilot and authorized him to return on any runway. He never answered that call, but witnesses saw the landing gear lowered. The pilot struggled to turn in the fatal moments before the flames and a collapsed wing deprived him of control. Parts of the plane rained down on residential neighbor hoods. Home owners on Verona Avenue, a mile from the crash, found pieces of aluminum and belting material in their yards. Joseph O. Fluet has been placed in charge of investigating the disaster for the Civil Aeronautics Board. He has put out a call for any found parts to be turned in to the police. 4 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriSome parents suggested it might be seen as inappropriate to hold a Christmas pageant this year. Others asked what could be more appropriate than celebrating the birth of Jesus and the spirit of the holiday season. The principal decided the show must go on. It would be performed twice—once in the afternoon for the kids at school and the parents who didn’t work, and again that night, for working parents and friends. That’s when Rusty would come. Miri marched in the choir. She loved the green choir robe with the white collar, and carrying the slim pencil flashlight that looked like a candle. The sound of their voices singing together gave her goose bumps it was so beautiful.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  The line at the funeral home snaked into the hall and out the door. Holmer, standing next to my mother, worked the room like Johnny Carson, kissing the ladies, hugging the men, and telling his funny stories just quickly enough to keep the people moving along. Technically, the mourners were there to comfort us, but we—or at least I—felt it should be the other way around. I felt guilty about putting our friends and relatives in such an awkward position, to have to come to us under these ugly circumstances, on Father’s Day no less. Let’s keep this breezy, I thought. The seven of us surviving siblings lined up beside our parents like a cheerleading squad waiting for the players to take the field. Soggy Lips Trio alert, I leaned over and whispered to Patty as our three wrinkled old aunts waddled through the door. The room seemed strangely festive on this sunny Sunday afternoon in June, the air smelling of peonies, the near-solstice sunlight streaming into the lobby, promising carefree days ahead, swinging on the hammock, splashing on the shore. With friends and relatives coming in from out of town, our gathering felt more like a wedding reception. I half expected to hear Bee Gees music being piped into the background. So, it was not entirely surprising when my friend Joan got a call a few days later from a guy saying, I don’t know if you remember me, but we met at the Nancy Kissinger wake, as if it were a Sigma Nu kegger. But as the night wore on and the guests began to peel away, it was clear that we would soon have to acknowledge that this indeed was not a frat party but a wake for our dead sister, a dead sister who had killed herself. Just as the gathering was about to end, a busload of nuns from our high school showed up to say the rosary. One old nun, who taught us math, pulled Mary Kay aside, pointed at Nancy’s casket, and whispered, She’s going to hell, you know. Nancy had sinned. She would burn for eternity. There would be no peace for her. What if the bishop found out that Nancy killed herself? Would he call off the Mass? Would her body have to idle in the back of the hearse after all? No one slept well that night. The next morning, we shuffled nervously into the vestibule of St. Francis, and as the doors to the church swung open, I could see my mother’s shoulders slump with relief. There, inside, was a standing-room-only crowd and not just one but three priests at the altar ready to say the funeral Mass. The pallbearers, uncles, cousins, and Nancy’s loyal science fair pal Ellen, rolled the casket down the aisle. One hurdle crossed. One more to go. Having her body consecrated for burial was one thing. Having it put into the ground would be another.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Several hands went up. None, alas, was Miss Parks’s. She was looking down. Shier than the professor, apparently. I was forced to call on Mr. Trujillo, and then Mr. Peterson. “Okay,” I said. “Now, Mr. Trujillo recorded his inventory on a FIFO basis and made a gross profit of four dollars. Mr. Peterson used LIFO and had a gross profit of two dollars. So... who has the better business?” A spirited discussion followed, involving nearly everybody but Miss Parks. I looked at her. And looked. She didn’t speak. She didn’t look up. Maybe she wasn’t shy, I thought. Maybe she just wasn’t very bright. How sad if she’d have to drop the class. Or if I’d have to flunk her. Early on, I drummed into my students the primary principle of all accounting: Assets equal liabilities plus equity. This foundational equation, I said, must always, always be in balance. Accounting is problem-solving, I said, and most problems boil down to some imbalance in this equation. To solve, therefore, get it balanced. I felt a little hypocritical saying this, since my company had an out-of-whack liabilities-to-equity ratio of ninety to ten. More than once I winced to think what Wallace would say if he could sit in on one of my classes. My students apparently weren’t any more capable than I of balancing this equation. Their homework papers were dreadful. That is, with the exception of Miss Parks! She aced the first assignment. With the next and the next she established herself as the top student in the class. And she didn’t just get every answer right. Her penmanship was exquisite. Like Japanese calligraphy. A girl that looked like that—and whip smart? She went on to record the highest grade in the class on the midterm. I don’t know who was happier, Miss Parks or Mr. Knight. Not long after I handed back the tests she lingered at my desk, asking if she could have a word. Of course, I said, reaching for my wrist rubber bands, giving them a series of vehement snaps. She asked if I might consider being her adviser. I was taken back. “Oh,” I said. “Oh. I’d be honored.” Then I blurted: “How would you... like... a job?” “A what?” “I’ve got this little shoe company... uh... on the side. And it needs some bookkeeping help.” She was holding her textbooks against her chest. She adjusted them and fluttered her eyelashes. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Well. Okay. That sounds... fun.” I offered to pay her two dollars an hour. She nodded. Deal. DAYS LATER SHE arrived at the office. Woodell and I gave her the third desk. She sat, placed her palms on the desktop, looked around the room. “What do you want me to do?” she asked. Woodell handed her a list of things—typing, bookkeeping, scheduling, stocking, filing invoices—and told her to pick one or two each day and have at it. But she didn’t pick. She did them all. Quickly, and with ease.