Joy

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I feel well enough one afternoon to ring Walt and give him the lowdown. (His wife was ill with cancer at the time, so the call was brief.) You’re in the best place, he says. I wish I’d known you were having such a hard time. That’s the nature of it, though, I say—isolation. But you’re feeling better? You need me to fly out there and bring you a hot-fudge malted? Hold that thought, I say. That afternoon, when Warren and Dev show up, I feel a rush of delight just seeing them. Warren opens the stairwell door with one hand so Dev can slide past him, and the instant stays haloed in gold, for it’s my first conscious memory of something solidly good. Though their afternoon visit is always the day’s highlight, it routinely sends a volcano of guilt up my middle, since Dev always steps onto the ward with such hesitance, a posture almost soldierly in its wary vigilance. (Even now, from a distance of eighteen years, he remembers how scary the place was.) Dev was born into a bold certainty of feeling. About nearly everything, he held convictions. As a newborn, he had the appetite of a jackal. As a toddler, once faced with a tea service at my in-laws’, he’d stuck his fist in the sugar bowl and upended it, sugar spraying all over as Mrs. Whitbread hissed that no other child in that house had ever interfered with a tea. While other toddlers had winced at new food, he had a taste for sashimi, for steak tartare with raw onion and egg yolk. He approached stray dogs with his arms open, ran full speed into waves. Yet he was all sensibility. (In a few years, I’d see Dev stand once for a long time before two Cubist paintings—one Braque and one Picasso—announcing, I know I’m supposed to like the Picasso more, but this one’s stronger. And so it had been.) He was sturdily resolute in all his tastes. That day in the hospital, Dev comes in dressed in a Hawaiian print shirt, looking like a miniature Miami dope dealer, and wary that way, as if expecting to find machine guns in the hands of rival gang members as he slides under Warren’s arm.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  While this strikes me as too schematic, it is a huge gain to see that the crisis of sin and punishment and the hope of restoration all along the way concern both the covenant of Israel and the rise and fall of all creation; the life of Israel becomes a token and representation of the way of the whole world vis-à-vis the rule of God. Nogalski (Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve) has worked in a more refined method, exploring the ways in which these twelve books are stitched together into a unity by the careful use of recurring themes and vocabulary. In sum, the scroll of the twelve is arranged to express (1) the downward plunge into the abyss of historical exile and with that plunge to exhibit the God-abandonment and (2) the recovery from that abyss by the powerful return of YHWH to the life of the community. In canonical reading, each part of the twelve must be seen in context of the whole, so that the “personal perspective” of Hosea or Amos is not finally as important as is the larger sketch of life with God in the world. The work of the individual prophet, in this perspective, is made subordinate to the larger statement of the whole. THE PROPHETIC PLOTLINE This canonical perspective transposes the collection of twelve small pieces, in its final form, into a coherent whole not unlike the prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We may, however, reverse the equation and see that the three “big books” of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, are in fact much like the book of the Twelve. A close reading of the big books will make clear that each of them, notwithstanding the personal title of the book, is something other than the work of one person as author. Rather each of these books is a collage of many voices over time. Thus, for example, the book of Isaiah consists in quite distinct textual units, so that chapters 1–12 and 28–31 may be from the person named “Isaiah.” But chapters 13–23 as oracles against the nations are very different, and chapters 24–27 are very late and in a different idiom, so that after Second Isaiah (chapters 40–55) and Third Isaiah (chapters 56–66), we may speak of a fourth or a fifth Isaiah. Thus each of the three big books and all of them together exhibit an ongoing tradition that continues to speak about and mediate the interaction of YHWH with the world amid the deep crisis in the life of Israel. The various Isaiahs or the various Jeremiahs or the various Ezekiels are not unlike Hosea through Malachi in offering many voices with many perspectives over time. That ongoing relationship of Israel to God, so say these traditions, features a faithful partner, a harsh judgment, and a future possibility. That narrative sequence, variously expressed, is the plotline of all four big books: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve.

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

  Emmaus and Jerusalem A first example is in Luke 24:13–46. Note especially its integrated and rounded structure, as emphasized in the headings: (A ) SCRIPTURES (24:13–27) Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him…. Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (B ) BREAD (24:28–33a) As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem. (C ) SIMON PETER (24:33b-35) And they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. (B ’) FISH (24:36–43) While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.

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

  They invite him . As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. (Luke 24:28–29) You will notice how that invitation is emphasized. The pair have presumably arrived at their village home and, but for the invitation, the stranger would have passed on and remained unrecognized. The pair are, in terms to be used later in this book, itinerants who become householders, but it is invitation that leads to meal that leads to recognition. “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight,” as 24:31 puts it. Resurrected life and risen vision appear as offered shelter and shared meal. Resurrection is not enough. You still need scripture and eucharist, tradition and table, community and justice; otherwise, divine presence remains unrecognized and human eyes remain unopened. That is exactly what this book is about. PROLOGUEThe Content of Your Vision “Gnosis” or “Gnosticism” is [a]… form of religion in late antiquity…. A clear-cut definition of this “religion of knowledge” or of “insight”, as the Greek word gnosis may be translated, is not easy, but should at least be briefly suggested at the very outset. We shall not go far wrong to see in it a dualistic religion, consisting of several schools and movements, which took up a definitely negative attitude towards the world and the society of the time, and proclaimed a deliverance (“redemption”) of man precisely from the constraints of earthly existence through “insight” into his essential relationship, whether as “soul” or “spirit”,—a relationship temporarily obscured—with a supramundane realm of freedom and of rest. [It] spread through time and space, from the beginning of our era onwards, from the western part of the Near East (Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor)…. One can almost say that Gnosis followed the Church like a shadow; the Church could never overcome it, its influence had gone too deep. By reason of their common history they remain two—hostile—sisters. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis , pp. 1–2, 368 It all began with the vision of a dead man, a dead man still bearing the wounds of an execution as horrible as hate could devise and contempt accomplish. And it happened outside the city walls, where dogs and crows waited for an unburied body. There was also a story. It told of a community, conceived in heaven but born on earth. It told of a kingdom standing in opposition to the other kingdoms of the world. It told of an individual, Peacemaker and Lord, Savior and Son of God, who proclaimed that kingdom’s advent as gospel, good news for all the earth. If you had heard that vision and that story in the early first century, would you have believed it?

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  This poetic performance in the midst of dislocated persons is an invitation to perceive historical circumstance differently. While they had succumbed to imperial ideology, they could not imagine homecoming because Babylon would never permit it. When they were able to imagine outside that ideology, however, they can see that the empire is not a given. The empire is an ideological construct that will be interrupted and trumped by the counter-news of the gospel that asserts an alternative reality. In the end the poet envisions and enacts, before the very eyes of the dislocated, a great procession of homecoming to Jerusalem. Jerusalem will indeed be marching to freedom in the light of God! It will be a grand public procession in broad daylight: For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song. and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 55:12; see 52:11–12 The faithful are always departing the grip of imperial ideology! ISRAEL TO BE A SERVANT TO ALL This grand and glorious vision, however, is interrupted by the counter-theme of servanthood. In several poetic units, Israel is reminded that its emancipation has a vocation larger than its own homecoming: I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those are in darkness. 42:6–7; see 49:6 The precise meaning of these lines is not clear. It is clear enough, however, to see that the future of Israel places Israel on the horizon of other peoples. Israel is to be a vehicle or an instrument through which YHWH is to relate in a covenantal way to other nations. That notion of servanthood, however, is greatly intensified in the difficult poem of 52:13–53:12, wherein Israel, as God’s servant, was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. 53:5

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

  This response is miracle once again, but of a much more lethal nature than that just seen in 2 Maccabees 3. The story records an attempted pogrom of Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy IV Philopator at the end of the third century B.C.E. The drink-crazed elephants that are to massacre the Jews “turned back on the armed forces that followed them and they began to trample them down and destroy them” (6:21). The king immediately repents, frees and feasts the Jews, and even allows them to punish their fellows who had defected from Judaism under the royal persecution. “In that day they put to death more than three hundred men; and they kept the day as a joyful festival, since they had destroyed the profaners” (7:15). In this response by miracle , imperial violence is stopped by divine violence and consummated with human violence. A fourth example is 4 Maccabees , written possibly around the same time as 3 Maccabees . The response illustrated here is martyrdom , so just as all three solutions—miracle, martyrdom, and revolt—were present in 2 Maccabees , we now have each given separate emphasis in a text to itself: miracle in 3 Maccabees , martyrdom in 4 Maccabees , and revolt in 1 Maccabees . We are, it would seem, dealing with basic human options of resistance. The author of 4 Maccabees sets out to prove that “devout reason is sovereign over the emotions” (1:1), that, for example, “as soon as one adopts a way of life in accordance with the law, even though a lover of money, one is forced to act contrary to natural ways and to lend without interest to the needy and to cancel the debt when the seventh year arrives. If one is greedy, one is ruled by the law through reason so that one neither gleans the harvest nor gathers the last grapes from the vineyard. In all other matters we can recognize that reason rules the emotions” (2:8–9). But, above all other arguments, there is an even more expansive description of those martyrs just seen in 2 Maccabees 6–7. Not only have those deaths conquered emotion by reason and pleasure by wisdom, they have conquered torture by suffering and tyranny by endurance. And they have done so in the public arena. Paradoxically, precisely, and publicly, as the tyrant wins, he loses; as the martyr loses, she wins. By martyrdom, tyranny is “conquered” (1:11), “nullified” (8:15), “defeated” (9:30) and “paralyzed” (11:24). In the words of Brent Shaw, the Maccabean martyrs defeated the power of violence by “the conscious production of a rather elaborate conception of passive resistance” or, better, by “active resistance through the patient body” (288, 300). All three responses to oppression illustrated above came out of the same Jewish tradition and were there by the first century. Revolt , from banditry to battlefield, presumes human violence, with or without assistance from divine violence.

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

  Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:28–32) That is parable, not history. The Christian liturgy involves both Scripture and Eucharist with the former as prelude and prologue to the latter. So also with the twin components of the Emmaus story. First comes the Scripture section, but even with Jesus as its interpreter the result is “burning hearts,” that is, hearts ready to do—but to do what? In the Eucharist section we get the answer to that question. It is to treat the stranger as oneself, to invite the stranger into one’s home, to have the stranger share one’s meal. And it is precisely in such a shared meal that Jesus is recognized as present—then, now, always. That is why the key verbs “took, blessed, broke, and gave” in the Emmaus story’s climax were also used in the Last Supper’s Passover meal before Jesus’s execution (Mark 14:22). That story is a parable about loving, that is, feeding, the stranger as yourself and finding Jesus still—or only?—fully present in that encounter. That was very clear to me decades ago, and I summed up the ancient Christian intention and modern Christian meaning of that parable by saying that, “Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens.” That is, by the way, an introductory definition of a parable: a story that never happened but always does—or at least should. All of that preceding section introduces the basic questions of this book. If there was at least one dark parable in the crucifixion details and one bright parable in the resurrection accounts, how many other parables were there as well? Are some, many, or most of the recorded events of Jesus’s last week—the Christian Holy Week—parable rather than history, or again, parabolic history or historical parable? You can see already that, although parables by Jesus invented both characters and stories about them—for example, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Unjust Steward—parables about Jesus presumed historical characters—for example, John and Jesus, Annas and Caiaphas, Antipas and Pilate—but invented stories about what they said and did. Where does factual history end and fictional parable begin? Does that interaction of fact interpreted by fiction, of history interpreted by parable, of human event interpreted by divine vision extend to the full content of a gospel? Could that be why we have only one gospel given in multiple versions, in four “according to”s as they are properly and correctly entitled: the Gospel according to Matthew or Mark or Luke or John? Those are the generative questions that inspire the sequence of this book, and I now provide a structural outline of the chapters to follow. The book has two main parts of equal size. Part I concerns parables by Jesus—involving fictional events about fictional characters.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  You said...You promised...You PROMISED I’d be numb from the WAIST DOWN!! I bang on a thigh. My LEG is like a rump roast!! Not much later, Warren’s face leans down through the haze, saying, I need a sandwich. WHAT! I say. A fucking SANDWICH? It won’t take long, he says. He’s gone for what seems a long stretch but can’t be even an hour. He comes back just as they start wheeling me spread-eagled and undraped down a public hall, with me saying, No man gets to see this who hasn’t bought me dinner—a joke the doctor doesn’t get, followed by, to Warren, Where the everloving fuck were you? Sleeping, it turns out, on the front lawn of the hospital after a turkey sandwich. He’s now loping alongside my gurney toward the delivery room, his face masked. An eternity later, I feel a cataclysmic movement, and—in one massive thunderclap of pain—all my innards seem to exit. I feel abruptly vacated. Warren shouts up at me, It’s a boy. I lie there throbbing while some space bar in the action gets hit, and there’s an interval of quiet, then the baby’s throaty cry. All the attending humans seem busily focused elsewhere till they hand Dev to me—short for Devereux—a family name of the Whitbread’s. This new Dev is squinty and crimson, and they’ve stretched a little white knit cap on his head. As he leans over me, Warren’s face is damp, too, and his ocean-lit eyes fixed on me with wondrous attention, and in that interval I first hold our bundled son, I feel us all stitched inside a glorious tapestry, breathing the same antiseptic air, cool as pine—a rare atmosphere conscribes us—the family I’ve pined for, an end to the perennial estrangement I’ve powered through the world running from. Warren and I both address Dev in coos and smooches and clicks. Dev squints up with dark blue eyes as if trying to make us out through smoke, and from the instant his gaze brushes by me, some inner high beams flip on. Never have I felt such blazing focus for another living creature. I can’t stop looking at him. Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self—delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. I feel such untrammeled love for these two beings. Back in my room, the nurse hands Dev to me again, and boy, is he hollering to blow the hair off your head. This one has a set of lungs, the nurse says, and a strong opinion. But soon as I open my seersucker gown to his velvety face, the crying snaps off. Dev nuzzles toward the only spot on my body soft enough to accommodate him, and blessed silence ensues. Look at him latch on, Warren says.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  My chiclet engagement ring’s still loose, only held on by the wedding ring I had fitted. Daddy wiggles the ring on my knuckle. He says, Murrr…murr. Married, I finally say. I’m married. Yes, to Warren. He’s my husband. I reach for Warren and draw him over. For a second there, I hold each of their hands, standing like a conduit between them. I’m still looking only at the good half of Daddy’s face. He gives Warren the up and down scrutiny he’d bring to a horse prior to auction, then he glances back at me and rolls his eyes as if to say, jokingly, This yahoo. Then he lets go my hand to shake Warren’s, and I take that in. And that’s it, that instant. My life as I’ve shaped it includes—for that instant only—the daddy I once loved more than beans and rice. The lady wheels back with a Dr Pepper. I help her flip the tab, and she slides a bent straw into it. We take turns buying, she tells me. Daddy takes a sip and winks at her. Then he looks over at me, saying, Looooo. I love you, too, Daddy, I say. At the end of the visit, Warren calls him Mr. Karr and says he’s glad to meet him. And Daddy takes my hand in his and looks down at it and up at Warren. His eyes meet mine, and in a stiff nod, I get his last blessing, since within the year, we’ll come back to bury him. 14The Inconceivable Meets the ConceivableThere was earth inside them, and they dug. They dug and dug, and so their day went by, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. —Paul Celan, “There Was Earth Inside Them” (trans. Michael Hamburger) The call comes on the ancient black rotary phone in the middle of the night at the Whitbreads’ Rhode Island beach house. Daddy’s dead. Five years after we’d refused both breathing apparatus and feeding tube, he’d gone on blinking. He hadn’t wanted to die, which was contrary to all his stoic-sounding predictions about infirmity. On the back porch one night when I was home from college, he’d issued a long and drunken disquisition about how—if he became bedridden—I should never let some machine pump his lungs with air. He’d said, Don’t you let me linger. Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle. Your mama and sister won’t do this, but you do it. Get you a pillow and lay it over my face. I sipped at my Lone Star beer, which he’d doctored with salt so it was akin to sea water. Don’t you feel bad if I struggle. I probably agreed just to get him to shut up. But whatever death he’d expected to slump into, he’d fought off.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  About then Mother stumps in, hair every which way, a piece of cheese disappearing into her maw. She says, What’re y’all talking about so late? Our deep and abiding love for you, Lecia says. Mother slumps down on the facing chair, staring at the grassy shag carpet. When she lifts her head, there are tears in her eyes. I wish your daddy was here for this, she says, us all together this way. Look at both those boys, Lecia says, Pete Karr times two. He’s the only person who ever really loved me. What are we? I say. Mother shrugs. The only man, I mean. I miss him like crazy. He did adore you, I say. He felt sorry for me, she says, but he stood by, thick or thin. She runs a hand over her spiky hair, asking, Does this haircut look like feathers? In the library the next day, Mother’s bridge club marches in—a troop of ladies bearing into the small room trays of baked goods big as coffee tables. The day unfolds like that old TV show This Is Your Life, where producers conspire to drag before you the past’s every character. In aging form, they parade. There’s the doctor who examined me the night Mother went to the hospital; my first-grade teacher; the principal who told me I’d be no more than a common prostitute. John Cleary, the first boy I ever kissed, is there with his daughters. My friend Clarice from grade school, Meredith from high school (in lawyer’s garb and big as a linebacker), Doonie with his whole tribe. There’s the judge Mother charmed into freeing me from jail—nearly a hundred, he is, his liver-spotted hand still clutching Mother’s, and he still gazes at her like she’s a jam-stuffed biscuit. The druggist, the guy who ran the lumberyard, girls who snubbed me at the skating rink, girls who didn’t. I feel every school photo I ever took pass over my face to melt into the forty-year-old I am now. Seen by so many pairs of old eyes, I become my every self. Then above the crowd, a disembodied head comes gliding as if carried on a pole. From the corner of my eye, I catch the silhouette, and my head whips to track it. The profile vanishes behind a pillar. The room around me clicks off as the face eases back into view—black-haired with snow at the temples. I stand so fast, the chair I’m in tips over. The crowd parts, and the eras collapse into each other. All the notches on the time line are stripped off like thorns. It’s Daddy approaching me like a smiling phantom. Though it’s not Daddy, of course, but my cousin Thomas, unseen since our grandpa’s funeral in sixth grade, wearing the exact face Daddy had at fifty, and Lecia must think so, too, since she’s rushed to his side, hand over her mouth.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I finally ask, What do you think he’s thinking? You know the static channel on the TV? she says. It’s almost like he knows you, Warren says. The nurse says, I think they can smell their mothers. I smooch his little hand, cooing, You’re my crème brûlée, my chocolate shake, my bear claw. You’re my—in a flash, I think of my daddy snuggling the white cat he once so spoiled—boon companion. With Dev tucked under my arm, I set to staring at him as if to emboss my gaze on him, to seal him in the safe bubble of it, and so also to sear into my own head every iota of him. Warren comments that he does look an awful lot like Winston Churchill. Put a cigar in his mouth… Bite your tongue, I say. At some point the woman in the next bed comes over to show us her boy, and when she peels aside the blanket to reveal his face, I have to stop my own recoil, for that is one unfortunate-looking baby. He’s cute, Warren says. This kid has a face like a caved-in squash. His full head of hair lends him a werewolf aspect. My plump, pink-cheeked, bald-as-a-bubble infant sets the standard against which all others will come up short. I sit there with a smile welded on my face till the werewolf baby starts to sputter neurasthenically, Ehh…ehhh ehhh… The woman looks up at us, saying, Time to nurse. If Dev, who wails like a freight train when hungry, made no more noise than that, he’d starve. I’m tired, Warren says, though his handsome face holds nary a crease. Bone-weary, I let him peel my clingy hand off his biceps to extract himself. 16Postal PartumLet him be happy from time to time, and leap over abysses. —Wislawa Szymborska, “A Tale Begun” (trans. Stanislav Baranczak) You think having a baby is a big dang accomplishment, and the nurses smile, and the doctor seems distractedly glad, and you’re lying there not even minding overmuch how you’re torn from stem to stern because you’re so proud to have laid your egg, then the nurse comes in and hands you a round plastic pee catcher shaped like a matador’s hat—itself piss-yellow in color—to sit over the toilet seat, for really, all anybody in the hospital wants you to do is pee. Forget the baby, that’s all anybody’s waiting for: You pee, you go home.

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

  For him, those twin stories imagine the Great Divine Cleanup of the World as here and now present. But it is present only by a divine-human participation and a divine-human collaboration. It is a treasure and a pearl demanding a transformation of the old and known past into a new and unknown future. Nobody has ever summarized Jesus’s challenge better than two African bishops who lived about five thousand miles and fifteen hundred years apart. “God made you without you,” said Augustine of Hippo in 416. “He doesn’t justify you without you.” That was magnificently misquoted by Desmond Tutu of Cape Town in 1999: “St. Augustine says, ‘God, without us, will not; as we, without God, cannot.’” That preceding section indicates the first correlation between challenge parables and a collaborative kingdom of God. This next one indicates that correlation with a nonviolent kingdom of God. It is quite possible to proclaim a paradigm shift with language—or even parables—that are ideologically and rhetorically violent and might even directly or indirectly, deliberately or accidentally, provoke physical violence. But it is the definition of challenge parables to be delicately provocative and gently subversive rather than violently angry and aggressively hostile. Challenge parables are not attack parables. Think again of Ruth or Jonah or Job from Chapter 4. Each story lured rather than forced its hearers to reconsider their cultural certainties and traditional absolutes. What could be more gentle, for instance, than that lovely pastoral idyll of Ruth with loyalty to both family and tradition ideally rewarded—happy ending!—with a firstborn son! There is no explicit attack on the laws of Deuteronomy or the decrees of Ezra and Nehemiah. All it asks is this: What does it mean that the great-grandmother of David, the once and future king of Israel, was a Moabite woman? In summary, therefore, Jesus’s challenge parables are not only profoundly appropriate, but even rhetorically necessary as a collaborative invitation for a collaborative eschaton and as a participatory pedagogy for a participatory kingdom of God. They are equally necessary as a nonviolent medium for a nonviolent message. They are short stories that delicately subvert the great story of the Bible. They do not deny it or even destroy it. But, as “word against the word,” their quiet voices remind us that the Bible is still our story about God rather than God’s story about us. IN PART I OF this book, I proposed a simple threefold typology of parables involving stories that point metaphorically beyond themselves to some external referent that has to be discovered by their recipients. That typology includes riddle parables or allegories, example parables or moral stories, and challenge parables or provocations. Focus, for a moment, on those cases already seen from the Christian Old Testament. Recall the riddle parable about the lion told by Samson to the Philistines, the example parables about the trees told by Jotham to the Shechemities and the lamb told by Nathan to David.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  These important details have been recounted innumerable times and are being confidently recounted this minute, told in tours of Luther sites around Germany in many languages, being written and read in otherwise excellent books about Luther, and posted in online articles and blogs. But not a single one of these seven things is true. They are each sloppy glosses on the actual facts and have over time congealed and finally ossified into the marmoreal narrative that has existed for half a millennium. Parson Weems’s pious legends of Washington chopping down cherry trees and casting silver dollars across the wide Potomac persisted for about 150 years, but these false details about Luther have persisted for more than three times as long. Their cultural roots are therefore that much deeper. It is my hope that what follows in this volume will do its humble part in uprooting them. The Madness of Martin LutherIt is not just Luther’s influence in history that is extraordinary. His demeanor and character and behavior—all of which led to these events that changed history—are themselves extraordinary. But these things were not so much innate attributes as ones that revealed themselves unannounced and by degrees at some point after 1517. So we must wonder what can account for the change in his personality in the years following the publishing of his theses. How can history reconcile the intense and dourly over-pious monk of his earlier years with the bold, courageous, and even sometimes raucous joke-and-insult-producing machine of later years? Whereas he had earlier been obsessively serious, he later became fun loving, sometimes rising to rarefied heights of gag-inducing scatology and buffoonery. Although the change in him did not have the speed of Paul’s on the Damascus Road, it nonetheless is obvious and important. And whatever it was that happened, he eventually seemed born anew and became a kind of giddy pied piper for that newness and freedom and joy, so much so that many thought he must be demon possessed—or at least simply mad.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  The bondaged nobodies are now situated in the covenantal story of unconditional promises, the assurance that they will be led to the land of well-being. The Hebrews have become Israelites, carriers of the promises of God. Thus God, in our verse, moves from absence to notice to recognition to promise. It is all triggered, however, not by YHWH’s faithful will but by the cry that breaks the totalism of Pharaoh. It is the cry, the daring assertion of unbearable suffering, that transposes Hebrews into Israelites. Pharaoh prefers silence that keeps Hebrews hopeless slaves who know nothing except hard labor. But the cry makes Pharaoh’s preference null and void. It is no wonder that the initial cry of the slaves ends in the exuberant singing and dancing of Miriam: “Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exod. 15:21) It is the silence-breaking cry that begins the process that turns pain into joy. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION The king of Egypt, like all kings, claimed to have perpetual control over the people. How do “kings” today claim to have control over people? On page 13, the author says, “When we consider permanent indebtedness of many people in our own predatory economic system, we can see how the drama of Egypt is endlessly reperformed.” What does he mean? The people cried out, and God heard and acted. Does God require groans in order to act? What can we learn from this story for our time?

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  In essence, that’s all the dual control model is: the brakes and the accelerator. And it’s not a metaphor, it’s a literal description of the excitatory and inhibitory activity of the central nervous system.4 The details are more complex, obviously, but the implications of even this basic idea are powerful, because you can immediately conceptualize all sexual functioning—and all sexual dysfunction—as a balance between brakes and accelerator. If you’re having trouble with any phase of sexual response, is it because there’s not enough stimulation to the accelerator? Or is there too much stimulation to the brakes? Indeed, a common mistake made by people who are struggling with orgasm or desire is assuming that the problem is a lack of accelerator; it’s more likely that the problem is too much brakes (more on that in chapters 7 and 8). And once you know whether it’s a problem with the accelerator or the brakes, you can figure out how to create change. When Olivia (the exuberant masturbator from chapter 1) answered my “excitors” questions [in the worksheets on pages 54–55] with, “I can feel turned on doing the dishes,” I had a pretty good idea what her sexual brain was like. She told me, “I love sex. I love my partner. I love trying new things, new places, new positions, new toys, new porn, new everything. I’m One Big Yes.” And I could see it in her face: the joy, the confidence of a woman living fully inside her body. I asked, “Have you sometimes done things and then thought, ‘Why did I do that?’ ” She winced and nodded. “That’s happened. Rarely, but… when I get super stressed, I’ll just go out and be like, ‘Whatever. Go.’ I’ve done some stupid shit.” “And are there times when you feel like you need to masturbate several times a day?” I asked, and she blinked at me like she wondered if I had a camera in her bedroom. “Usually I can ignore it,” she said. “But every once in a while it just makes me crazy. It’s like having an itch that no amount of scratching will help. I have this out-of-control feeling.” “Yeah,” I said. “A sensitive accelerator can make people more prone to risk-taking and compulsivity—that ‘out-of-control’ feeling.” “That’s why? A sensitive accelerator?” she said. “I’m not high testosterone, I’m high SE?” “It would explain both your ‘One Big Yes’ and the occasional out-of-control feeling.” It’s easy to assume that having a sensitive accelerator is fun—and it can be, in the right context. Olivia has a partner she delights in and a wide-open attitude that allows her to explore without worry or fear. She dives right in. And then sometimes, especially when she’s stressed or anxious, Olivia said, “It can feel like my sex drive is constantly demanding my attention and won’t leave me alone.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  That story is why the first chapter in this book is about anatomy. That story makes me want to print T-shirts with a drawing of a vulva and an arrow pointing to the clitoris, saying IT’S RIGHT HERE. It makes me want to hand out pamphlets on street corners with instructions for locating your own clitoris, both manually and visually. I want an animated GIF of a woman pointing to her clitoris to go viral on the internet. I want a billboard in Times Square. I want everyone to know. But even more, it makes me want every single person who reads this to stop right now and look directly at their clitoris. Knowing where the clitoris is is important, but knowing where your clitoris is… that’s power. Get a mirror and look at your clitoris, in honor of that student and her brave, amazing mom. When I first looked at my clitoris, during my earliest training as a sex educator, I cried. I was eighteen and in a bad relationship and looking for answers. And my instructor had said, “When you go home tonight, get a mirror and find your clitoris.” So I did. And I was stunned to tears to find that there was nothing gross or weird about it, it was just… part of my body. It belonged to me. That moment set the stage for a decade of discovering and rediscovering that my best source of knowledge about my sexuality was my own body. So go look at your clitoris. And as long as you’re in the neighborhood, check out the rest of your vulva, too. I love having nontraditional students in my class—those who aren’t in that eighteen-to-twenty-two age range—and Merritt was as nontraditional as they come: a perimenopausal lesbian author of gay erotica, with a teenage daughter whom she was raising with her partner of nearly twenty years. I was uninformed enough when I first met her to be surprised when she told me that her Korean parents were Fundamentalist Christians and that she grew up with quintessential socially conservative values. Which made her outness as a lesbian, her writing, and her presence in my classroom all the more remarkable. At forty-two, Merritt had never considered looking at her clitoris. It didn’t even cross her mind as a possibility until I suggested it during the first lecture, as I always do. She came up to me after class and said, “Is it really a good idea to suggest that kids this young look at their bodies? What if they just… shut down?” “That’s a really important question,” I said. “No one has ever told me of an experience like that, but it’s not a requirement, so maybe the folks most likely to have that experience don’t try it. Still, it’s something I recommend, especially for students who plan to continue on in public health or medicine, but it’s entirely up to each person whether or not they want to look.” Merritt didn’t do it.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Ultimately, the “you” that is consciously aware of being a “self,” an individual distinct from other individuals, is a composite self, a hologram built of these multiple motivational and cognitive processes all engaging with the environment and with each other, in a noisy, messy, multidirectional tug-of-war. As a person capable of desiring multiple things at once—food, sleep, sex, warmth, to be left alone, etc.—you are a collective of motivations. A flock. Complex things can happen in a flock because there’s no leader. If one bird notices a predator, it will fly away (following the “avoid predators” rule), and then all the birds around it will follow, pulled as if by a magnetic force, not because of the predator but because they’re following the “stay by your neighbors” rule. And if your brain is a flock, then orgasm is a destination the flock can fly toward—a magnetic pole—and sexual pleasure is the flock itself. Sexual pleasure emerges, like flocking behavior, from the interaction of all these different birds. The more birds you have flying toward orgasm, the greater the pleasure you experience. If some of the birds are flying toward orgasm but others are trying to accomplish some other goal—as in, you’re trying to masturbate to orgasm, but your feet are cold—the “flock” that is your brain will not move simultaneously in the same direction. Some of the birds may arrive at orgasm, but the experience won’t be the same as if all the birds got there. “Subtractive integration” happens when the birds flying toward foot warmth actively tug at the birds who would otherwise fly toward orgasm. Put on socks, and those birds are freed up and can move toward orgasm. “Additive integration” happens when the birds flying toward an attachment object (your sex partner) tug their neighbors to fly faster and more enthusiastically. Fall wildly in love, and your flock may rush to orgasm at the littlest prompting. The technical language for what I’m describing here is that sexual pleasure is an emergent property of a complex dynamical system. But all you need to remember is that peak sexual pleasure happens when the whole collective works together, when all the birds are flying in the same direction, when all of your motivation systems are coordinated and attuned to the environment in a way that gives rise to every system moving collectively toward orgasm. Turn on all the ons and turn off all the offs. Get rid of all the predators and pile on different kinds of incentives at the magnetic pole: attachment, curiosity, expansive pleasure—all the motivations orgasm can fulfill. The more the whole system is moving in the same direction, the more the orgasm takes over your whole awareness, with every cell of your body focused on the same thing: pleasure. Peak sexual pleasure requires all of you. The most pleasurable orgasms happen when every part of you is present and collaborating in pursuit of one shared goal: ecstasy.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  So yeah, love feels good—“I am whole.” Except when it hurts like you’re dying—“I am broken.” Because: attachment. the science of falling in loveIn practice, humans build important social connections with multiple people, and our sense of wholeness emerges both from our own inner sense of wholeness and from our connection with our friends and family, as well as with our primary partner. But there is the particular experience of “falling in love” or “bonding” with one specific person that typifies what our culture has come to consider “love.” If you’ve ever had a kid or fallen in love, you’ll recognize the narrative of attachment, the series of behavioral markers that characterize the attachment process. Proximity Seeking. You feel connected to the other person, so that it feels good to be around them (liking) and you desire (wanting) to be as close to them as possible. Most parents have experienced proximity seeking in the form of little toddler fingers under the bathroom door, while you try to have thirty seconds in a row of alone-time as you pee. In romantic relationships, proximity can take the form of social media, text ing, phone calls, and email, as well as walking past their locker six times every day to see if they’re there, or leaving work early to get home sooner. Safe Haven. When things go wrong in your life, you want to tell your attachment object all about it; you seek them out for support. In adult relationships, it’s the phone call to your partner after a long, hard day at work. When your stress response is activated, your attachment mechanism says, “Soothe your stress by connecting with your attachment object.” This is the “tend and befriend” dynamic, which I’ll talk about more later. Separation Distress. When the person goes away, you feel pain—you miss them. For adults, it’s the aching loneliness while your partner is away at a conference. It’s okay for a while… and then it’s too much, too long, too far. Secure Base. Wherever that person is, that’s your emotional home. Any adult who has come home from a business trip and fallen onto the couch next to their partner, to hold hands and make eye contact while they talk about what happened while they were away, has experienced this. A real-life example: My sister Amelia’s husband was a high school music teacher, and every other year he accompanied his choir to Europe for a week or two. And every year during that time, she sat around feeling an emotion she called “homesick,” even though she was the one at home. Because he is her emotional home, her secure base. So she experienced separation distress. Amelia’s favorite book is Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester, the hero of that story, expresses attachment and separation distress when he says to Jane:

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And I went home and thought about it for a week. I read a lot of science. I reread a lot of my own blog posts. I watched my dogs romp in the yard. And when I got to class the following week, this is what I told my students: Confidence is knowing what is true about your body, mind, sexuality, and life. Knowing that your genitals are made of the same parts as every one else’s, organized in a unique way. Knowing about the brakes and accelerator. Knowing about context and about the difference between liking, wanting, and learning. Knowing about arousal nonconcordance and responsive desire. Knowing what’s really true, even when it’s not what you were taught “should” be true. Knowing what’s true, even when it’s not what you wish were true. Joy is loving what is true about your body, mind, sexuality, and life. Loving your genitals, your brakes and accelerator, and the way your brain responds to context. Loving the context itself. Loving arousal nonconcordance and responsive desire. Loving what’s true, even when it’s not what you were taught “should” be true. Loving what’s true, even when it’s not what you wish were true. I said all this to my class, and the student who had originally asked me to define my terms raised her hand again. She said, “Joy is the hard part.” In the years since, students and workshop attendees have agreed: Joy is the hard part. Fortunately, the research shows us a practice that can teach us, well… how to joy. This chapter is about that practice. We’ll begin with why confidence alone is not enough, then describe the process of “reality checking,” to bridge from confidence to joy. We’ll conclude with an exploration of “nonjudging,” the key skill that bridges from joy… to long-lasting, sustainable access to ecstasy. why confidence is not enoughConsider “Ms. B.,” whose story opens a New York Times article about women’s sexual medicine. The article begins: Since Ms. B. entered her mid-40s, she says, sex has been more about smoke and mirrors than thunder and lightning. She is rarely if ever interested enough to initiate it with her partner of 10 years, and she does not reach climax during the act. She wishes it were otherwise.1 Having gotten this far in the book, you’ll recognize that Ms. B.’s desire style may be responsive rather than spontaneous, and it sounds like she’s not reliably orgasmic with intercourse. Both of these put her squarely in the majority. And she wishes it were otherwise. Which is perfectly understandable. I imagine she learned (as most of us do) that spontaneous desire and orgasms with penetration are normal, and since that’s not what she’s experiencing, she believes she’s abnormal. Broken. If I believed I were broken, I would wish it were otherwise, too.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I reminded her of the conversations we had had about nonjudging as a way to cope with her depression. “That skill applies to pleasure, too. Don’t judge it. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just what’s happening in your body right now. You don’t have to be ashamed of it, you don’t have to worry that when it passes it will never come back, you don’t have to do anything but say hi to it and let it be what it is.” She looked at me skeptically, and when we talked again a few weeks later, she said, “So I tried that nonjudging pleasure and joy thing and, uh…” She bit her lip and tears filled her eyes. I waited. After a long silence, she sniffed and said, “If you don’t judge it, it grows.” This is a strange truth about nonjudgment. When you turn toward suffering with nonjudgment, the suffering diminishes as wounds heal. When you turn toward pleasure with nonjudgment, it expands to fill the space judgment once filled. I don’t know why this is true, but it’s an essential fact about nonjudgment. “You didn’t warn me about that,” she accused. “If I had warned you, would you have tried it?” “Oh, hell no,” she agreed. “But… I also like it.” “And how do you feel about the fact that you like pleasure?” I prompted. She rolled her eyes—at herself or at me, I still don’t know—and she said, “Well when you put it that way, it seems pretty normal.” It is normal. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy or simple. Many of us have been taught that pleasure is selfish, sinful, a waste of time, or something to be ashamed of. How dare we attend to what feels good, when we ought to be attending to other people’s needs or our partner or making sure we meet other people’s expectations? But here is the truth: Pleasure is a gateway to accessing your fullest, truest personhood. Pleasure is where you find a no-holds-barred connection with yourself and with those you love most. Why? Because pleasure only happens in a context where your brain feels safe enough to be completely and entirely you, without shame or social performance or “shoulds.” Ecstasy comes to us when we leave behind everything that doesn’t delight us or spark our curiosity. Ecstasy comes when we surrender to pleasure without reservation. You are allowed to like pleasure. And the first step toward that is simply to notice it with nonjudgment. Merritt is the queen of not doing it the way you expect her to. She began to trust herself not when she could give herself pleasure, but when she could give her partner pleasure. She embraced herself as a sexual woman… when she allowed herself not to be sexual. She sank down in the light of intense pleasure… when she let go of trying to experience pleasure.