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 Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Judaism, from which Christianity emerged during the first century, has a simple affirmation of faith in God known as the ‘Shema’ – but not a detailed list of specific beliefs. 31 The main forms of Roman and Greek religion at this time do not appear to have felt the need for formal declarations of faith. Yet while Christianity is not typical in its use of public statements of faith, all religious traditions (and, of course, their secular counterparts) rest on certain beliefs, whether these are publicly affirmed or personally appropriated. The so-called Apostles’ Creed is thought to have emerged gradually within early Christian communities, particularly in Rome, apparently in response to the need for brief personal articulations of faith on the part of people who presented themselves for baptism. The Creeds set out the Christian vision of reality in dull, terse statements, each of which encapsulates an aspect of this greater vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true and made to be meaningful by a community of people, who have passed down in the Creeds their collective witness to what they discovered. Back in the 1980s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor introduced his idea of ‘articulation’. Every attempt to live a good life or develop a viable moral system depends on a set of background assumptions which need to be identified and put into words. ‘Articulation’ is about the ‘bringing to light of that which is unspoken but presupposed’. 32 Taylor’s point is that we need to put into words the grander vision of reality which shapes the way we think and live, despite the obvious inability of words to do justice or fully express this vision. A similar point is made by William James, who argued that religious doctrines are subsidiary to the way that religious people experienced the universe and felt about their place within it. 33 The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed; yet paradoxically that very act of expression both diminishes and restricts that vision, precisely because it is a rich imaginative reality that cannot be reduced to words. These statements – such as ‘I believe in God’ – are too easily misunderstood as purely (and uninterestingly) propositional , when they are really descriptions of something that is to be encountered and explored, a map of a new territory to be inhabited, both intellectually and socially. For Christians, faith is thus not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God, but a luminous vision of a God who brings meaning, coherence and joy. It is about ‘getting’ what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of seeing a oneness at the heart of things, allowing us to put everything together. Faith is about existential commitment. This is what I believe to be right and trustworthy. This is how I see the world.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  They took me into a room where there was a coin. I put my hand in the coffin & felt something so queer. It frightened me unpleasantly. I found something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so carefully. It must have been a body that had had vitality. ... I did not like to venture to examine the body for I was confounded.[398] I lately saw a boy of five (who had been told the story of Hector and Achilles) teaching his younger brother, aged three, how to play Hector, while he himself should play Achilles, and chase him round the walls of Troy. Having smiled themselves, Achilles advanced, shouting "Where's my Patroklos?" Whereupon the would-be Hector piped up, quite distracted from his rôle, "Where's my Patroklos? I want a Patroklos! I want a Patroklos! "—and broke up the game. Of what kind of a thing a Patroklos might be he had, of course, no notion—enough that his brother had one, for him to claim one too.[399] In 'The Nation' for September 3, 1886, President G. S. Hall has given some account of a statistical research on Boston school-boys, by Miss Wiltse, from which it appears that only nineteen out of two hundred and twenty-nine had made no collections.[400] Quoted in Lindsay, 'Mind in Lower animals,' vol. ii. p. 151.[401] Cf. Flint, Mind, vol. I. pp. 330-333; Sully, ibid. p. 567. Most people probably have the impulse to keep bits of useless finery, old tools, pieces of once useful apparatus, etc.; but it is normally either inhibited at the outset by reflection, or, if yielded to, the objects soon grow displeasing and are thrown away.[402] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 205.[403] Professor Lazarus (Die Reize des Spieles. Berlin, 1883, p. 44) denies that we have an instinct to play, and says the root of the matter is the aversion to remain unoccupied, which substitutes a sham occupation when no real one is ready. No doubt this is true; but why the particular forms of sham occupation? The elements of all bodily games and of ceremonial games are given by direct excite-motor stimulations—just as when puppies chase one another and swallows have a parliament.[404] Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 72.[405] Expression of the Emotions (New York, 1873), p. 330.[406] "The certainty that we are well dressed," a charming woman has said, "gives us a peace of heart compared to which that yielded by the consolations of religion is as nothing."[407] Thackeray, in his exquisite Roundabout Paper, 'On a Chalk-Mark On the Door,' says: "You get truth habitually from equals only; so, my good Mr. Holyshade, don't talk to me about the habitual candor of the young Etonian of high birth, or I have my own opinion of your candor or discernment when you do. No.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Let us now call the pleasure for the sake of which the act may be done the pursued pleasure. If follows that, even when no pleasure is pursued by an act, the act itself may be the pleasantest line of conduct when once the impulse has begun, on account of the incidental pleasure which then attends its successful achievement and the pain which would come of interruption. A pleasant act and an act pursuing a pleasure are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenomenon whenever a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot help thinking that it is the confusion of pursued pleasure with mere pleasure of achievement which makes the pleasure-theory of action so plausible to the ordinary mind. We feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed to act; if hindered, we feel displeasure; and if successful, relief. Action in the line of the present impulse is always for the time being the pleasant course; and the ordinary hedonist expresses this fact by saying that we act for the sake of the pleasantness involved. But who does not see that for this sort of pleasure to be possible, the impulse must be there already as an independent fact? The pleasure of successful performance is the result of the impulse, not its cause. You cannot have your pleasure of achievement unless you have managed to get your impulse under headway beforehand by some previous means. It is true that on special occasions (so complex is the human mind) the pleasure of achievement may itself become a pursued pleasure; and these cases form another point on which the pleasure-theory is apt to rally. Take a foot-ball game or a fox-hunt. Who in cold blood wants the fox for its own sake, or cares whether the ball be at this goal or that? We know, however, by experience, that if we can once rouse a certain impulsive excitement in ourselves, whether to overtake the fox, or to get the ball to one particular goal, the successful venting of it over the counteracting checks will fill us with exceeding joy. We therefore get ourselves deliberately and artificially into the hot impulsive state. It takes the presence of various instinct-arousing conditions to excite it; but little by little, once we are in the field, it reaches its paroxysm; and we reap the reward of our exertions in that pleasure of successful achievement which, far more than the dead fox or the goal-got ball, was the object we originally pursued. So it often is with duties. Lots of actions are done with heaviness all through, and not till they are completed does pleasure emerge, in the joy of being done with them. Like Hamlet we say of each such successive task, "O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Cana in Galilee (John 2.1–11): far from being a visit to the synagogue or the Temple in Jerusalem, the wedding at Cana was a big post-contract party in a convenient local house, where the main concern was the quality of the wine. After that, the similarities end: Judaism and Graeco-Roman society were at odds about the nature of marriage, and the Christian future lay not with Judaism, but with Hellenism. The positive feature of sexual teaching in Judaism, from the Abrahamic covenantal promises onwards, has been its exuberant celebration of marriage and children, not to mention the generous catering that sustains large families in celebratory mood. It is a consequent duty for every man to marry, and Judaism shows strikingly little cultural approval of celibacy, that option which was eventually to become almost overwhelming in Christianity (below, Part Two). What Christians find less easy to deal with in their inheritance from Judaism is the fact that the Jewish emphasis on marriage and the family long included the option of polygyny – as, indeed, is the case in the great majority of human societies in history. [36] Husbands can find multiple wives expensive, and so polygyny is generally a practice for elites (or for those who regularly travel long distances between their centres of operation, like traders). The stand-out case in the Hebrew Bible is King Solomon, with his collection of seven hundred wives, plus three hundred concubines. These ladies are not portrayed with approval in 1 Kings 11.3, not because of their polygynous character, but because many of them were foreign and led the ageing monarch into spiritual faithlessness. No such stigma attached to the earlier polygynous patriarchs such as Abraham, the most respected figures in Judaic history. This became a great difficulty in interpreting scripture for Christians, who inherited the patriarchs while deciding to reject polygyny (below, Chapter 4), but it was no problem for Jews, since polygyny continued to be a reality in the time of Jesus and for at least a millennium more. An exceptionally lucky archaeological find in Israel in the 1960s revealed, in a bag of papyri, the personal archive of a wealthy woman named Babatha, who lived about a century after Jesus, and may have died in the last Judaean stand against Rome in 135 CE. Included were legal papers relating to her remarriage after the death of her first husband to a man called Judah, who still had a living wife and daughter. Not all went smoothly thereafter, hence documents from lawsuits among Babatha’s papers. [37] A thousand years more passed before rabbis prohibited polygyny, a ban first recorded in the German city of Mainz, and hence no doubt a defensive reaction to the unsympathetically monogamous eleventh-century Christian society surrounding European Jewish communities. Jewish polygyny could linger later still in Muslim-ruled territories. [38] This is one of the starkest contrasts between Judaism and Graeco-Roman society. Jewish acceptance of polygyny needs little explaining, since it represents the norm in ancient west Asia.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  the opportunity arose in 1661–2 to revise Cranmer’s Prayer Book after Charles II’s restoration to the throne and the return of an episcopal Church of England, it is noticeable that one of the few wins that the triumphant bishops allowed Puritans in revising the Prayer Book was to make wedding Communion so optional as to become a dead letter; bishops were clearly not that concerned to defend it. The custom then more or less disappeared, but by then it had produced a cheering architectural consequence in the widespread preservation of medieval chancels in English parish churches, screened off as spaces for wedding Communions as well as Communions for the whole parish two or three times a year (see Plate 25). [54] Out of all this variety came the universal Protestant celebration of marriage and the family as nuanced by the progress of Reformation. Archbishop Cranmer did make one interesting innovation when he put into liturgical form a common sentiment in late medieval discussion of the family, taking it beyond Augustine’s bleak justifications of marriage as fides, proles, sacramentum (above, Chapter 9). From 1549 onwards, England’s wedding service affirmed that a major purpose of marriage was ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’ – the Scottish First Book of Discipline was clearly in the same frame of mind. Contemporary Catholic sources would not have disagreed, and indeed echoed the idea without giving it liturgical expression. What was different with Protestants was that theologians who overwhelmingly were married were saying this, and not only without a balancing exaltation of celibacy but with every evidence of personal delight. [55] One of the most charming examples comes from mid-seventeenth-century England: Jeremy Taylor, a bishop in the Church of Ireland in the latter years of his ministry. Taylor was one of the first English Protestant theologians whose work represented that distinctive Church of England evolution of a theology consciously negotiating between Protestantism and Catholicism, what would later be called ‘Anglicanism’. Repeatedly the twice-married Taylor revealed his delight in family life: no man can tell but he that loves children, how many delicious accents make a man’s heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society. On another occasion early in his career, Taylor preached a sermon that may have startled a dozing congregation by enthusiastically urging mothers to offer their own ‘exuberant fontinels’ to breastfeed their infants rather than relying on wet-nurses. This was not a sentiment to have enthused St Jerome. [56] THE PAPAL CHURCH: DEFENCE AND RECOVERY The hierarchy of the Western Latin Church took some time to react coherently to the explosion of protest in northern and central Europe following 1517.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Many such foundations were scarcely less magnificent or wealthy than Cluny itself, but, in a radical innovation, from Spain to Scotland, they were only ‘priories’, all dependent on their mother house, which became a centre of what was for the first time called a monastic ‘Order’. The Cluniac Order was Christianity’s pioneering international corporation. That gave a particular usefulness to its elaboration of the monastic silent sign-system (above, Chapter 11), since often Cluniac monks recruited from across the continent would not have understood each other’s birth-language. [1] Cluny’s European-wide vision lay behind a variety of new initiatives in Western Christian life whose connections might otherwise seem puzzling. PILGRIMAGES, CRUSADES, A MILITANT SOCIETY The Compostela route was only part of a growing Western enterprise of mass pilgrimage, new not in character but in scale; it became one of the defining features of Western Latin devotion right up to the sixteenth-century Reformation. This search for holy places and the route to salvation that they might offer was enticingly open to anyone who chose to undertake it (that might include the growing proportion of Europeans who were serfs, or other unfree people, if they could seize or were granted the opportunity). Choice, it is true, was not always part of the package: we have already noted in Chapter 11 that, from the beginning of the new penitential discipline in Ireland or Wales, one penitential possibility was an order to go on pilgrimage to seek the forgiving power of a saint. That became standard in medieval Europe’s repertoire of penance, an early spiritual variant on the modern proposition that travel broadens the mind. [2] Pilgrimage afforded the same opportunities to women as to men, and, despite all the problems that medieval women might face in travel, they took full advantage of it; one estimate of Western pilgrim activity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries considers that women were almost as numerous as men among those known to have undertaken pilgrimages. Naturally all this activity created its own economy of service industries for support, entertainment and accommodation, besides very considerable financial benefit for the shrine churches themselves. [3] Unusually, the devotional activism of pilgrimage put laypeople on the same footing as clergy during a devotional revolution that in so many ways gave clergy a privileged position in society. Indeed, holy travelling gave laity the advantage over monks and nuns who observed their commitment to sacred enclosure. In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrim Prioress did exploit seniority to exempt herself from enclosure for her cheerful journey to Canterbury, but her sisters would have had to make do with journeys of the mind. Accordingly, some late medieval nunneries resourcefully equipped themselves with a series of pictures of goals of pilgrimage for pleasantly profitable contemplation amid their other spiritual amenities.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Fimm. Well, don’t think I’m letting you off the hook that easily,” she said with mock sternness. “You never know when Ill be wanting a repeat performance.” 172 { Kristina Wright “Sounds promising.” He retied his tie and adjusted the collar, using the vanity mirror to guide him. “Not that this wasn’t a nice surprise, but when can we spend a little more time together?” “T’ll give you a call later.” Though she was completely satiated, Charlotte couldn’t help but give him a teasing smile. “Tennis tomorrow, maybe? I’Il make you sweat to get me into bed.” “I love a challenge,” he said, leaning over to press a kiss to her forehead before he slipped out of the car. She laughed as she watched him sprint across the parking lot. At some point during their lovemaking, the sun had broken through the clouds and the squirrels had returned to their frolicking. She waited until he was gone from sight before she pulled out of the lot and headed back to the library. She was going to need an energy drink before the day was over. “T need you,” Ian growled. “That’s sweet, but ’m going out with the girls tonight,” Charlotte said as she drove through the heavy downtown traffic. “Remember?” “Ah, right, I forgot it was girls’ night,” Ian said. “I’m on call this weekend, but as long as there isn’t a five-alarm fire, maybe we can do something tomorrow.” Charlotte hesitated. “Well, I told Henry Pd play tennis with him tomorrow. I haven’t seen him in weeks.” “Fine, fine, far be it for me to come between you and your old professor. How is Grampa, anyway?” Charlotte found a parking spot on the street and maneuvered into it one-handed. “Don’t be mean. Henry is barely fifty and he’s in great shape.” “But I want my girl to myself,” Ian said. “I guess ’ll have you on Sunday.” : “Youre a darling,” Charlotte said, and meant it. “Why don’t you stay over tonight? I'll be in late, but I'll wake you when I get home and you can have me then.” “Oh, really,” Ian’s voice reflected his interest. “It’s that time, hmm?” Charlotte checked her lipstick in the vanity mirror and smiled at her reflection. She looked happy. She was happy — and hopeful. “Well, yes, but I'd still want you to stay over.” “Uh-huh,” Tan said, not sounding at all convinced. “Well, then, have a good time with the girls and hurry home.” Perfect Timing 173 Charlotte disconnected and smoothed her skirt before leaving the car. Henry wasn’t the only one who kept a change of clothes at work. She now wore a shimmery silver blouse with a red skirt. Red was ‘Terrence’s favorite color. Melissa and Wendy were already waiting at the bar for her inside the trendy bar Fringe. The décor was disco-chic and Charlotte’s silver blouse glinted in the light reflected by the mirrored tiles embedded in the walls.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  She must have noticed my blush for she gave me another gummy smile as she picked up the artistically filled bowl and instructed me to follow her into the living room. She carried the bowl high over her head like a temple priestess. “I want you all to meet my new friend, Tristine Rainer.” Anaïs set the bowl of leaves on a table inlaid with Moroccan tiles. “She has brought us poetry from the street!” The four people in the living room exclaimed and clapped. I felt as exalted as when I’d been applauded as the lead in my high school plays. A jowled, sixtyish woman with lacquered bouffant hair intoned in a deep voice, “Street poetry is my kind of poetry.” “This is Caresse Crosby.” Anaïs smiled at me. “She is the founder of Black Sun Press. Caresse, and her deceased husband Harry, published D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hemingway, and Henry Miller before anyone else would take a chance on them.” I had to keep myself from curtsying. “I’m so honored to meet you!” I followed Anaïs as she glided over to the older and taller of the two men in the room. “And this handsome man is my husband, Hugo Guiler.” She put her arm around his trim waist as he gave her shoulders a squeeze. I said, “But your last name is Nin.” Her laughter tinkled. “Nin is my professional name. My nom de plume.” “Of course.” I flushed over my naiveté. With the soulful mien and aristocratic bearing of a greyhound, Hugo lowered his narrow, angular head and asked if I’d like a martini, even though I was a teenager and looked like one. Then, with a kiss to Anaïs’s forehead, he strode into the kitchen. Anaïs took me by the hand and introduced me to Jean-Jacques, a short, wiry man in his thirties, expensively dressed. Though I later noticed that his French accent was heavier than hers, he used slang Americanisms with no accent at all. “How ya doin?” He reached for my hand as if to shake it but instead kissed the top, lingering so that I felt the air from his Gallic nose tickle my skin. He and Anaïs joked in French while he held onto my hand, and I cursed myself for having elected Spanish in high school. Hugo returned with Millie, who had put on a white, scalloped pinafore over her colorful dress. She carried a tray balancing a martini glass filled to the brim. Everyone watched as I lifted the glass it by its narrow stem, trying not to spill it. Successfully! Almost. Hugo rescued me from my embarrassment. “Caresse was telling us about her efforts to start a women’s world peace organization.” “Her greatest invention since the bra!” Anaïs exclaimed. “And both inventions are custom-fitted for women.” I didn’t know what she was talking about then but later learned that Caresse Crosby, as a socialite in her early twenties, had invented and patented the first brassiere.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  But in another moment she took the lead: “Some one might find us here,” she whispered, “I’ve let the maid go: come up to my bedroom” and she took me upstairs. I begged her to undress: I wanted to see her figure; but she only said, “I have no corsets on, I don’t often wear them in the house. Are you sure you love me, dear?” “You know I do!” was my answer. The next moment I lifted her on to the bed, drew up her clothes, opened her legs and was in her. There was no difficulty and in a moment or two I came; but went right on poking passionately; in a few minutes her breath went and came quickly and her eyes fluttered and she met my thrusts with sighs and nippings of her sex. My second orgasm took some time and all the while Lorna became more and more responsive, till suddenly she put her hands on my bottom and drew me to her forcibly while she moved her sex up and down awkwardly to meet my thrusts with a passion I had hardly imagined. Again and again I came and the longer the play lasted, the wilder was her excitement and delight. She kissed me hotly foraging and thrusting her tongue into my mouth. Finally she pulled up her chemise to get me further into her and at length with little sobs she suddenly got hysterical and panting wildly, burst into a storm of tears. That stopped me: I withdrew my sex and took her in my arms and kissed her; at first she clung to me with choking sighs and streaming eyes, but as soon as she had won a little control, I went to the toilette and brought her a sponge of cold water and bathed her face and gave her some water to drink—that quieted her. But she would not let me leave her even to arrange my clothes. “Oh, you great, strong dear,” she cried, with her arms clasping me, “oh, who would have believed such intense pleasure possible: I never felt anything like it before: how could you keep on so long! Oh, how I love you, you wonder and delight! “I am all yours,” she added gravely, “you shall do what you like with me: I am your mistress, your slave, your plaything and you are my God and my love! Oh, Darling! oh!” There was a pause while I smiled at her extravagant praise, then suddenly she sat up and got out of bed: “You wanted to see my figure”, she exclaimed, “here it is, I can deny you nothing; I only hope it may please you” and in a moment or two she showed herself nude from head to stocking.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  I hover between joy and terror. It has been so long, too long. What will he think of me, the strands of gray in my hair, the new wrinkles? What will he ask of me? Will I be able to give him what he needs? I remember other reunions, too few, too short. No time for more than a few kisses, a few playful swats on my bared butt. I remember lying on his lap in Golden Gate Park, my skirt flipped up around my waist. I can precisely recreate my shame and my excitement. I recall slouching down in the front seat of his car in a dark, sweltering parking garage, while he unbuttoned my blouse and dabbled his fingers in my cunt, naming me as his slut. A few hours every few years is all we manage, a country and my marriage separating us even as our history and our fantasies draw us together. Today will be different. I’ve booked us a hotel room, in this city where neither of us live. We have the entire day. My husband waits for me at home, while I wait here in the airport for my master. I don’t call him that to his face. He’d mock me, his voice bitter. “Tf I were your master, I’d simply order to you leave him and come to me, and you would.” He doesn’t give me that order, although I suspect that he’s tempted. He refrains, out of respect for me and my choices, or maybe in fear that his power over me is not as great as he Reunion 335 would like to imagine. He spares us both, and I’m grateful, though now, waiting, burning to see him again, I almost wish that he’d put me to that ultimate test and take away the awful yearning that I feel when we’re apart. Every one of my senses is on alert, yet he manages to surprise me. I’m looking toward the gates. He comes from the other direction and calls to me softly. “Sarah.” I start and then laugh nervously. When I stand up, my bag tumbles off my lap to the floor, toys clattering inside. “You’re here!” I feel clumsy, silly, stupid, but when he bends to kiss me, everything but the joy disappears. I’m flooded with it, gasping, overwhelmed. In his limbs I feel his pitiless strength. His lips, though, are gentle, questioning. Am I still his? I melt, open my mouth and my mind to him. Does he sense the answer? Sometimes I am certain that he reads my thoughts. He laughs ‘ironically and calls me suggestible. I don’t know what to believe, which suits him perfectly. He wants me a bit off-balance. I struggle to act normal, as if I were just meeting an old friend. “How was your flight? Did yow have trouble with your connections? What about your baggage? Is that the only jacket you have? October here can be kind of chilly ...”

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Soon I felt her legs quaking. I licked harder and faster. I felt her loving kicks of joy against my back urging me on; I let my pinky slide inside her snug spot as my tongue stroked her swollen clit so rapidly and so thoroughly my jaw started to ache, and then I heard muffled gasping, then louder shouts lilted by a brogue, “Oh Jesusfuck!” as she roared — and came — wet, violent, salty, her sex shivering warm spasms against my tongue, her voice ringing out so loudly in the room IJ could no longer hear Miles’ trumpet. I cooked her dinner the next week; she came up on the train. She brought vanilla and strawberry cupcakes from a boutique bakery in the city and after dinner we played strip poker and undressed. When we got bored with the card game, we smeared and squashed the cupcakes on to each other’s chin making fake beards that we licked off. “Cupcake tits,” I said, smearing strawberry icing on the soft underside of her breasts, slathering icing on to her nipples. “Cupcake tits topped by sugar kisses.” Then we smeared the melted icing on to our chests, our mouths shaping puckered lips as we lapped every last bit of sugary melt off each other’s nipples, even smearing icing up and down our backs, dripping into the clefts of our asses as our sweetened mouths moved lower on each other’s body, lapping up love. As her wet mouth closed over my cock, my tongue found her clit wet and swollen. “Sugar pleasures,” I said, loudly, and I’m sure, more than once. We attended to each other’s sex so thoroughly and so precisely that it seemed we were in a race to get each other off. I don’t remember who came first but I distinctly remember the glaze of her own cum Honeymoon with Shannon 43 coating her thigh. I remember too how deliberately and dramatically I kissed that glaze, lapping up every drop while she giggled and repeated, “Sugar pleasures, boy, sugar pleasures.” Around three in the morning, we both woke up restless. She said she wanted something but she didn’t know what. She crawled on to my stomach and pressed her knees into my chest. “It’s not food I want,” she said, “that’s all I know.” .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Yet in the manic pace of events over the next two or three years, Erasmus’s assertions about marriage proved as much of a hand-grenade lobbed into Europe’s controversies as his growing number of biblical commentaries. Josse Clichthove, a leading theologian in that bastion of traditional theological orthodoxy the University of Paris, went into print in 1522 to reproach him for undermining chastity by his praise of marriage. Erasmus’s reply to Clichthove was pugnacious, and he felt strongly enough to repeat what he had said about marriage and celibacy in a second work of 1526, the Institutio Christiani matrimonii. [13] This was the background conversation behind a swelling tide of clergy marriages, drawing reassuringly not merely on Erasmus’s weaponized arguments, but on the late medieval construction of loving and companionate marriage that tried to model itself on the Holy Family. There were also clerical voices to hear from a more distant past: it was while Luther was rapidly rethinking his former loyalty to Pope and Emperor in the crowded year of 1520 that he rediscovered and realized the importance of the animated little pamphlet of the late eleventh century, Epistola de continentia clericorum (above, Chapter 12). Almost from the moment that Luther’s Wittenberg protest became public in 1517, a handful of northern European priests began taking a momentous step into marriage. The first big name to cross this line in what was becoming the Reformation was a priest far to the south of Wittenberg, Huldrych Zwingli, leading a parallel reformation in the Swiss city of Zürich that was the first component of ‘Reformed’, non-Lutheran, Protestantism. Zwingli’s marriage in 1522 came as relief for his conscience, for he freely admitted that he had never succeeded in remaining celibate in his previous clerical appointments. His wife, Anna Reinhart, remained more in the background of Zwingli’s public ministry than Katharina von Bora, the spirited ex- nun who married Martin Luther three years later, but Anna still deserves honour for her pioneering role in overturning the special status and privilege of clergy upheld by the medieval Western rule on clerical celibacy. [14] It is also interesting that two of Zwingli’s reforming colleagues in Zürich, both important players in his variety of Reformation and also early entrants into marriage, were like Erasmus the illegitimate sons of priests: Leo Jud and Heinrich Bullinger. In the course of their wider work as Reformation leaders, they were righting personal injustices. [15] Clergy who had been more continent than Zwingli compounded their excitement at combating theological untruth in discovering the physical pleasure of marriage: in the case of the forty-two-year-old Martin Luther, with the glee of delayed adolescence, despite the fact that his marriage to the twenty-six- year-old Katharina had at first been a practical expedient to shelter her after her previous marriage arrangement had fallen through.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  The image of the ripped and bloodied pants was arousing to Marius, and his happiness was also aroused in imagining the gift of the fur pants. He was joyful when presented with this first symbol of manhood. The walk into the mountains was an initiation, a rite of passage. His pants were power objects on this “walkabout. ” In wanting to “jump for joy” early in the session, Marius activated resources in the form of motor patterns that were essential in eventually thawing his freezing response. Successful renegotiation of trauma occurs when the adaptive resources of the person increase simultaneously with the arousal. In moving from the periphery of the experience to the freezing “shock core”, his unresolved freezing patterns were neutralized by flexible and resolvable patterns as the activation increased. As I encouraged Marius to gradually track the initial, positive experience with his pants towards the traumatic, freezing, “shock core”, a joyful experience became linked to his earlier experience of defeat and rejection. This gave him new resource s— natural aggression and competence. Armed with this newly found confidence, when Marius saw the image of the rocks, his resources began to constellate. In jumping from rock to rock and finding and picking up the stick, Marius’ creative process developed these resources to propel his forward movement toward meeting the impending challenge. In being the aggressor, like the hunters, he tracked the imagined polar bear while I tracked his bodily responses. Marius had become resourced by the images and feelings of his empowered legs and the connection with the men from his village. It is with this sense of power that he sights his dangerous prey and makes the kill. Finally, approaching ecstasy, he eviscerates the imagined bear. It is of the utmost importance to understand that, even though this experience was imagined, because of the presence of the felt sense, the experience was in every way as real for Marius’ as the original one, that is, mentally, physiologically, and spiritually.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Still, she had been reluctant to try intercourse with Hugo again because he was too large and would hurt her when he pounded too hard. Fortunately, he was sympathetic, and with great tenderness they found a way to share affection that worked for both of them, returning to their pattern of the first two years of their marriage, when they were both virgins. When they went to bed, they caressed, kissed, and held each other, sometimes for an hour before Hugo would roll over and go to sleep. At twenty, this kissing and cuddling had frantically aroused her, but she had not known what for, whereas now the heartbreaking past sexual disappointments with Hugo had spoiled her appetite. Reading what she had allowed her hand to write freely, she admitted to herself that she wanted to experience lovemaking with Rupert one more time. She needed to know that despite the hysterectomy, she could still feel sexual fulfillment. Only Rupert could give her that reassurance. He would intuitively respond to her desire for him to be gentle. She needed Rupert’s lovemaking to restore her. One last time. When Rupert picked her up at LAX and brought her to the cabin, the fireplace was ready to be lit, a mattress positioned in front of it, a bottle of wine and glasses set on the hearth. She felt shy. She’d forgotten how beautiful Rupert was: his golden skin, his ardent, sensitive face lit by the now-blazing fireplace. He offered her a massage, and she placed herself in his hands. Under his touch, her skin became smooth and elastic; her body came alive as he explored its curves and muscles. Her tightly knotted nerve endings released like sea anemones unfolding. He turned her over and played his hands over her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs. As he was entering her, he called, “Anaïs, be my wife, my beautiful wife.” She tensed with guilt, but as he continued to caress her, as he moved inside her, she lost all thought. Their bodies spoke only pleasure, only desire mounting, rising, and ringing its great cathedral bell, high and low, proclaiming all the joy in the world. From the perspective of the body, this jubilee was everything, the only truth that mattered. All the rest was a lie. Rupert ran his fingers over her skin again, bringing her down. She watched the glowing embers in the fireplace. She listened to her slow, relaxed breathing and had no regrets. Rupert had given back to her the life of the body. Now she had to give back to him his whole life, to free him for what he wanted and deserved—a wife, a child. Her lies were standing in his way. Her best hope was that after she’d told him the truth, he would allow her to remain his friend, that the love between them would not be completely destroyed.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The Poor Clares of Villingen in south Germany outclassed most others by enriching their precinct with no fewer than 210 representations of places to visit in Rome and Jerusalem, and a generous papal grant gave them all benefits of indulgences just like a ‘real’ visit to these shrines (they all burst into tears with dutiful pleasure when this grant was read out to them). This was the ultimate tribute to the power of the pilgrimage. [4] Those travelling to the actual scenes of Christ’s life, death and resurrection in Jerusalem and the Holy Land had to face the reality of Muslim rule. From the beginning of the eleventh century, the growing numbers of Western pilgrims provoked rising tension, fuelled by the development of a new land-route through Hungary especially useful for northern Europeans. An unusual flashpoint occurred in 1009 when, in the course of steadily more deranged general behaviour, the Fatimid Caliph al-Hākim ordered the complete destruction of the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built long before in the time of the Emperor Constantine I. Even after Byzantine reconstruction in the 1030s and 1040s, the evidence of al-Hākim’s demolition was still obvious to travellers, and memories of it fed into an increasingly vocal call for revenge and for the Christian sites to be liberated from Muslim rule. [5] Loudest among those voices were monk-historians associated with Cluny’s rebranding of Benedictine life in its own image, Rodolph Glaber (‘the Bald’) and Adémar of Chabannes. They also banged the drum for the cosmic significance of the world turning its millennium of 1000 CE, a chronological detail that may not have excited those beyond Cluny’s influence quite so much. [6] The link of these themes to Cluny was no accident, given its management of pilgrimages to the westernmost extreme of Christendom at Compostela. The shrine of St James the Apostle, now safe from Muslim expansion as Christian armies successfully pushed back Muslim territory in Iberia, was itself a proof that God approved of warfare directed against the Church’s enemies. (In the Americas, where Spain and Portugal forcibly established new empires in the sixteenth century, a thousand years later James the Apostle still doubles as a symbol of the defeat of ‘Moors’ by Iberian Christians, as I have myself observed as a festal processional float passed me in rural Mexico: there was James

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  When the Dalai Lama called for a spiritual revolution on the eve of the third millennium, he explained that this did not mean embracing a particular religious creed. Rather, it would be based on a “radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self.” 9 This does not mean that we should recoil from ourselves with disgust, put ourselves down at every turn, and become hyperconscious of our faults. If we do this, there is a danger that we will simply become excessively self-conscious, mired in the insecure ego we are trying to transcend. The faith traditions agree that compassion is the most reliable way of putting the self in its proper place, because it requires us “all day and every day” to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there. As the Dalai Lama made plain, the reorientation away from self is essentially “a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.” 10 Compassion, he said, was impossible without self-restraint, because “we cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.” 11 Saint Paul made the same point: the practice of charity is incompatible with the hurtful stratagems we devise to undermine others and inflate the ego: Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s wrongdoing but delights in truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. 12 It takes courage to set the self aside. The Buddha knew that when somebody heard about anatta he was likely to panic, thinking: “I am going to be annihilated and destroyed; I will no longer exist.” 13 Yet when his disciples were introduced to this doctrine, the texts tell us that their hearts were filled with joy. 14 As soon as they started to live as though the self were nonexistent, they felt happier, freed of the dukkha that comes from excessive self- preoccupation. If we remain trapped in this greedy, needy selfishness, we will continue to be unhappy and frustrated. But as we acquire a more realistic assessment of ourselves, we learn that the envy, anger, fear, and hatred (which often spring from thwarted egotism) have little to do with us; rather, they are ancient emotions that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. “This is not what I really am,” said the Buddha; “this is not my self.” Gradually we will begin to feel more detached from these negative emotions and refuse to identify with them.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  A run of military victories for iconoclast emperors had abruptly and humiliatingly ended in the 830s: God’s favour seemed to have deserted the iconoclast cause. As regent for her son Michael III, toddler as well as Emperor, Theodora ordered a new Patriarch hand-picked for his iconophile sympathies to restore the icons to public worship. The occasion of their joyful formal reintroduction to the great church of Hagia Sophia, 11 March 843, was a decision never reversed, and it has always subsequently been celebrated in successor-Churches as the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’. It is possible to read this sequence of events simply as a matter of high politics and of the doctrinal statements produced by successive ecclesiastical councils and distinguished theologians (now much weighted to the iconophilic side, thanks to later censorship by the victors). Yet it is no accident that a succession of military men as emperors with strategic considerations in mind favoured the iconoclastic cause, and that two (admittedly ambitious and ruthless) women should successfully defy them and alter the future of Eastern Orthodoxy. It has been plausibly argued that the two sides represent contrasting ways of approaching the mystery of God at the heart of Christian faith, appealing to different constituencies in Byzantine society. Iconophilia became an alliance between women and monks, and the debate was about how to find holiness in this world. [35] It was a theme among iconoclasts that Christians met holiness in the particular situations where the clergy represented the Church to God, primarily in public performance of the Church’s liturgy. No one on either side was going to deny the place of the liturgy in the life of the Church, but it could perfectly well continue in its magnificence in churches without artistic representation of sacred figures. One reason for iconoclasts to reject the holiness of icons was that there was no official provision for a cleric to say a prayer of blessing over them (in the centuries since the Triumph of Orthodoxy, that has been remedied). [36] In terms of art, iconoclasts were content with rich depictions of a plain cross in their churches, some of which survive, and which might call to a soldier’s mind the humiliation brought to Christians by the Muslim seizure of Jerusalem, site of the crucifixion of Jesus and shrine to the miraculously preserved True Cross. Yet the churches and their liturgy were public space, and, by definition, they were therefore primarily male space, both for clergy and for laymen. Iconoclasts laying claim to that public space in their years of success had nothing else to offer those for whom the liturgy might have become impossibly splendid and too remote to satisfy every spiritual need, in churches that might be too crowded for quiet private devotion. That could include men: the traditional story of the Iconoclastic Controversy has been built around male iconophile theologians, of whom the most influential was the much-revered John of Damascus (c.675–c.745).

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It is a reminder that the reforming aspirations of a Gregorian persecuting society were complicated by the irrepressibly multiple voices of medieval Western Christendom. PLURAL VOICES IN A UNITED WEST The imaginative hold that the post-Gregorian Papacy and its focused authority enjoyed over Europe was based on its custodianship of the body of the Apostle Peter in Rome in the monumental basilica built by Constantine I, but also on the Church’s custodianship of the memory of Rome and its Empire. A genuinely Roman Emperor still ruled in the known world, but his throne was in the New Rome of Constantinople, and the language of his Church was Greek. The West was united by its use of the Latin language, all the more powerful and all-embracing because nowhere was it now anyone’s birth-tongue. It had to be taught, or absorbed through the Church’s conduct of worship, as much a common language overcoming cultural barriers as English is in modern India. Just because Latin was a language to be learned did not mean that it was not lively and creative, with a range of registers from liturgical to cheerfully scatological and lewd. It was hugely useful, but also hugely entertaining. Possession of it liberated the speaker into joining a wider world of shared experience and memory, which must be one reason why it was embraced with such enthusiasm by both Irish and Anglo-Saxons, whose own languages bore very little relation to its grammar and vocabulary. Fuelling this continent-wide conversation was the increasing circulation and range of ancient Latin texts and Latin translations of Greek texts, throwing European society open to the culture of a Mediterranean world centuries older than Christendom or Christianity itself. Like Carolingian society before it, twelfth-century Europe has been painted in colours borrowed from later centuries, as fostering a ‘Renaissance’ of Classical literature. There was no extensive equivalent in the Greek East, where, at precisely the same time, insecure imperial and ecclesiastical authorities reacted with hostility and repression towards scholars seeking to explore afresh the legacy of Aristotle and Plato in efforts to renew Byzantine society. The contrast between Western and Eastern Christianity thus deepened still further. [38] Western Latin culture was imparted through surprisingly risky teaching materials. Impressionable schoolchildren learned their Latin through that most erotic of Roman poets, Ovid: already in the tenth century the reforming Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury Dunstan relaxed from his ecclesiastical labours by annotating his ancient manuscript copy of Ovid’s verse in his own distinctive hand. From the early thirteenth century, one of the most popular school texts in Europe (to judge by surviving manuscripts and vernacular translations) was a brief, newly written, pseudo-Ovidian comedy effectively about rape, entitled Pamphilus, de Amore: were texts like this intended to teach boys how to be men, and girls to be aware of male charm turning into male violence?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In the very first year of his marriage, Luther wrote a letter to his old friend Georg ‘Spalatinus’ (Burkhardt), secretary to the Elector of Saxony, apologizing for not coming to his wedding to another Katharina, but assuring him that he and von Bora would have a private marital celebration: ‘On the night that I calculate you will receive this letter, I assure you that I’ll make love to my wife, in your honour, while you’re making love to yours – a joint effort!’ [16] In rather less toe-curling vein, in later years Luther’s former convent in Wittenberg blossomed into a large family home, six children in all, enjoying a stream of guests plus student lodgers taken in to balance the domestic budget. At dinner, the guests and lodgers eagerly absorbed and jotted down unbuttoned bons mots from the great man, trivial and profound alike, and within a few years of his death anthologies were being published as Luther’s ‘Table Talk’ (Tischreden). Historians have gratefully quarried that engaging heap of vivid details, though they have not always assessed them judiciously, taking too seriously the stereotyped misogyny of such laddish remarks as ‘Men have broad chests and narrow hips; hence they possess wisdom. Women have narrow chests and broad hips. A woman ought to look after the house: creation itself declares (with the broad bum and hips) they should sit still.’ Luther’s beloved Katie was presiding over the well-furnished table, and her responses to this admittedly annoying teasing have not been recorded. [17] Beyond this frivolity was Luther’s gradual recasting of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of sin, sex and marriage; the framework was still that of the fifth century, and his understanding of female biology was still unthinkingly that of Aristotle, but his own happy experience of the married state brought him a warmer picture of the family in Eden and through the Fall and expulsion from Paradise. Edenic marriage involved the conception of children in sexual pleasure that was chaste and without shame, just as was the hospitality of the Luther household. Child-rearing would then have been easy and joyful. Of course, none of this had time to happen in Eden, and the Fall had reduced it all to a shadow of its potential self, but there was no radical break in sexuality, or a hint that sex had taken on the Satanic character ascribed to it by Basil the Great. In the second generation of the Reformation, John Calvin is often seen as a more thoroughgoing Augustinian as well as a more joyless character than Luther, but he was more explicitly positive about sexual intercourse: it remained a gift of God despite the Fall, and husband and wife should enjoy it, observing of course due modesty and propriety. [18] Who were the women whom these clergy married in the course of their personal liberation? Hardly surprisingly, to begin with, the majority were the partners with whom they were already living, contemptuously termed ‘concubines’ by the old Church.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  That’s not what I’m saying, Ash sputtered. I just—just, you’ve told me what your pattern was with him. How you felt like you were always taking care, like no one else would do it if you didn’t. What I really want is for you to say nothing negative to me about Brandon, I said. Ever. I can’t stand it. When I arrived in Toronto, I saw that Ash had sent a long text: You are doing so much. You’ve been flying back and forth across the country over the last month and have managed to remain a steadfast, attentive mother. You’ve survived a case of hives. You’ve managed a restaurant from afar. You are curious and caring, committed to relationship and friendship. I want you to know that I admire you. Thank you for sharing yourself with me in all of it. I see you. I’m here. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] “When you look at yourself in the mirror,” writes author Ursula K. Le Guin, “I hope you see yourself. Not one of the myths.”39 I was trying. On a walk in our heavy coats, a friend commented: You seemed to disappear when you were dating Nora, and you haven’t with Ash. That seems like a good thing. I could feel it too. It’s weird, I said to my friend. I never fell in love with a man because he was a man, you know? I mean, I wasn’t falling in love with a penis. I loved his body because it was his. And I don’t think I was drawn to Nora because she was a woman, exactly. I don’t think I want a woman because she is a woman. Ash is not a woman in the same way I am, but they’re also not a man. And I like that so much. That they’re making their own form of person—like, this person who is themself. My friend nodded, said: I’m so happy for you. I couldn’t tell if she understood. But I was happy too. 28“I eliminated gender, to find out what was left.” This was how Le Guin explained her creation of an androgynous race of humans, the Gethenians, in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness. “Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human.”40 I liked that so much. Of course: under gender we find the bare thing, the person themself. Of course. But what about sexual orientation? I wanted to add. What do we find under that? What is left if we eliminate orientation—or if it changes willy-nilly? Is there anything solid to me at all, anything I can count on? I’d tried to interrogate myself—had parked myself under fluorescent lights in the cinderblock room of my history, went after myself like Vincent D’Onofrio on Law & Order. I wanted a voiceover, some deep baritone: What do we make of our unreliable narrator? She would have swapped anything, even her sanity, to make sense.