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 Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  His lips quirk up, his eyes shining with incredulity. “Not exactly.” “You said fifteen.” My confusion is obvious. “I was referring to the number of women in my playroom. I thought that’s what you meant. You didn’t ask me how many women I’d had sex with.” “Oh.” Holy shit, there’s more… How many? I gape at him. “Vanilla?” “No. You are my one vanilla conquest.” He shakes his head, still grinning at me. Why does he find this funny? And why am I grinning back at him like an idiot? “I can’t give you a number. I didn’t put notches in the bedpost or anything.” “What are we talking—tens, hundreds…thousands?” My eyes grow wilder as the numbers get larger. “Tens. We’re in the tens, for pity’s sake.” “All submissives?” “Yes.” “Stop grinning at me,” I scold him mildly, trying and failing to keep a straight face. “I can’t. You’re funny.” “Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?” “A bit of both, I think.” His words mirror mine. “That’s damned cheeky, coming from you.” He leans across and kisses the tip of my nose. “This will shock you, Anastasia. Ready?” I nod, wide-eyed, still with the stupid grin on my face. “All submissives in training, when I was training. There are places in and around Seattle that one can go and practice. Learn to do what I do.” What? “Oh.” I blink at him. “Yep, I’ve paid for sex, Anastasia.” “That’s nothing to be proud of,” I mutter haughtily. “And you’re right, I am deeply shocked. And cross that I can’t shock you.” “You wore my underwear.” “Did that shock you?” “Yes.” My inner goddess pole-vaults over the fifteen-foot bar. “You didn’t wear your panties to meet my parents.” “Did that shock you?” “Yes.” The bar’s moved to sixteen feet. “It seems I can only shock you in the underwear department.” “You told me you were a virgin. That’s the biggest shock I’ve ever had.” “Yes, your face was a picture, a Kodak moment.” I giggle. “You let me work you over with a riding crop.” “Did that shock you?” “Yep.” I grin. “Well, I may let you do it again.” “Oh, I do hope so, Miss Steele. This weekend?” “Okay,” I agree shyly. “Okay?” “Yes. I’ll go to the Red Room of Pain again.” “You say my name.” “That shocks you?” “The fact that I like it shocks me.” “Christian.” He grins. “I want to do something tomorrow.” His eyes glow with excitement. “What?” “A surprise. For you.” His voice is low and soft. I raise an eyebrow and stifle a yawn at the same time. “Am I boring you, Miss Steele?” His tone is sardonic. “Never.” He leans across and kisses me gently on my lips. “Sleep,” he commands, then switches off the light.

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

  Among the most important followers were sisters from a village called Bethany, Mary and Martha, along with their brother Lazarus, clearly a particular favourite of Jesus, though Lazarus says nothing recorded in the Gospels. Then there is the stand-out figure of Mary Magdalen; all four Gospels name her as among the first witnesses of the Resurrection. Mary Magdalen’s role is particularly enhanced in John’s dramatic presentation. She meets the risen Jesus alone – first in deep distress mistaking him for a gardener, and then in deep joy, recognizing the reality (John 20.11–18). For this reason, she has often been called ‘Apostle to the Apostles’, for she passes the astonishing news on to the wider disciple-group. In the course of later history, she has undergone almost as many transformations as her familial opposite number, Mary the Mother of the Lord. John the Evangelist is responsible also for the theme that there was one special male disciple whom Jesus ‘loved’. It sits untidily beside the motif recorded in the Synoptics that Jesus sternly rebuked some of the Twelve for seeking a special place in Heaven (Mark 10.35–45; Matt. 20.20–28; Luke 22.24–27). The beloved disciple is never named in John’s Gospel, though it says that he provided its textual content (John 21.24); traditionally the character has been elided into the person of John the Evangelist himself. Other identifications have been suggested, such as Lazarus, but the indications are that the final editor wished the content of his Gospel to be seen as coming from John, son of Zebedee; John was one of the Twelve, and was actually one of those whom the Synoptic Jesus rebuked for seeking special treatment. This language of love and particular favour has inevitably aroused interest in those aware of Graeco-Roman institutions of same-sex relationships. Like the turbulence built into the picture of Mary Magdalen, the resonance passed down the centuries for those inclined to find it (see Plate 19). That irrepressibly witty monarch James VI of Scotland and I of England, for instance, astonished his Privy Councillors at Hampton Court in 1617 with a truculent defence of his undoubtedly erotic relationship with his favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: Christ had his John, he said, and James had his George.[28]

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

  Pilgrimages, Crusades, a Militant SocietyThe 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. 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]

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

  A sacrament being an outward and visible sign of an inward or spiritual reality, this new reality encouraged a formal ecclesiastical ritual in church for all, for the first time in the Western Church. Western clergy had previously only been involved in negotiating or presiding over royal or noble marriages, but from the eleventh century a long campaign sought to make this requirement universal.[55] This was a marked shift even from the new devotional activism of the Carolingian Church. Carolingian monarchs or high nobility might have considered a church ceremony as bonus legitimation for dynastic turning points, but it had still been optional. In an analogous liturgical situation, the Emperor Charlemagne did not consider giving an active role to the senior clergy present in his chapel in Aachen when he granted his imperial title to his son Louis in 813; the younger man simply took his crown from the altar while everyone present looked on as witnesses.[56] An institution of marriage carefully constructed on the basis of family negotiations had not felt itself needing much confirmation in Christian liturgy. As late as the end of the eleventh century, the German romantic poem Ruodlieb included a prolonged description of decorously cheerful wedding ceremonial in a knightly family. It was still entirely domestic and did not involve a priest at all – all the more remarkable since the poet-author was a monk of the stately Benedictine house of Tegernsee in Bavaria.[57] A significant liturgical symbol of the anomaly in the marriage sacrament now constructed by liturgists was that at first it remained slightly distanced from the interior of the church building. The most prominent liturgical pattern-book in medieval England was the ‘Use’ of Sarum, designed to specify the elaborate round of services in a brand-new cathedral, under construction from 1220 on a virgin site at Salisbury (Sarum). Its wedding rite placed the bulk of the ceremony ‘ante ostium ecclesiae’, in front of the entrance to the church. At Salisbury, what that meant was that the actual marriage took place in the new Cathedral’s extremely large north porch. Only after the couple had taken their vows, exchanged rings and been blessed by the priest, did they get the chance to process into the church itself for a nuptial Mass. On the one hand, the Church wanted to take charge of the event, which after all had been declared to be one of the seven sacraments, but, on the other, it could not bring itself to do so inside the church building.

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

  The issue remained in play for another half-century, before the later Empress Theodora was freed by the death of her iconoclast husband Theophilos in 842 to emerge as a second female champion of icons. 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.

• From Between Us

  32 ​For Japanese, emotions were OURS; for Americans, they were MINE: Japanese and American research participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (1) a Japanese athlete by themselves, (2) a Japanese athlete with three others, (3) an American athlete by themselves, and (4) an American athlete with three others. The described differences were found in the within-culture conditions, where American participants projected the emotions for American athletes, and Japanese participants projected emotions onto the Japanese athletes. Differences were not found for the conditions in which participants reported emotions for athletes from the other culture (Uchida et al., “Emotions as within or between People? Cultural Variation in Lay Theories of Emotion Expression and Inference”). 34 ​our study examined which emotions: Takahiko Masuda et al., “Placing the Face in Context: Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 3 (2008): 365–81. Copyright © 2008, American Psychological Association. 34 ​looked at the expressions of the other figures: Note that the traditional paradigm for “face recognition” would have been just fine for our North American participants: they did not use the information from the surrounding people’s faces. Yet, this paradigm failed to capture an important aspect of “emotion” perception in the Japanese. This is one example where Western researchers, by modeling their very paradigm according to a MINE model of emotions, would never have picked up on important cultural differences in the way emotional episodes evolve (Batja Mesquita et al., “A Cultural Lens on Facial Expression in Emotions,” Observer 17, no. 4 [2004]: 50–51). 34 ​using pictures of real faces: Takahiko Masuda et al., “Do Surrounding Figures’ Emotions Affect Judgment of the Target Figure’s Emotion? Comparing the Eye-Movement Patterns of European Canadians, Asian Canadians, Asian International Students, and Japanese,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 6, no. 72 (2012): 1–9. 35 ​Historically, this seems to be the common way: Many of the examples in this and the next paragraph are taken from Paul Heelas, “Emotion Talk across Cultures,” 1986. In ordinary language, the English “emotion” (introduced from French) is said to have become associated with the mind no earlier than the eighteenth century; before that it was located in the body (as in physical disturbance or bodily movement) (Thomas Dixon, “Emotion: One Word, Many Concepts,” Emotion Review 4, no. 4 [2012]: 387–88). 35 ​the Homeric Greeks: Bennett Simon and Herbert Weiner, “Models of Mind and Mental Illness in Ancient Greece: I. The Homeric Model of Mind,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 2, no. 4 (October 1, 1966): 306. 35 ​early modern people in the United States: John R. Gillis, “From Ritual to Romance,” in Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 90–91. 35 ​the Kaluli, living in Papua New Guinea: Edward L. Schieffelin, “Anger and Shame in the Tropical Forest: On Affect as a Cultural System in Papua New Guinea,” Ethos 11, no. 3 (1983): 183–84.

• From Between Us

  Praising is embedded in a child-focused culture, where a child’s perspective is taken quite seriously from very early on. Mothers of white U.S. and European babies have face-to-face interactions with infants, and talk to them, as opposed to mothers from many other cultures who keep their babies on their bodies, instead of facing them. How much middle-class American families invite even their babies to be full conversation partners is well illustrated by a story of my own family. One of my undergraduate students at Wake Forest—let us call him John—was exceedingly smart, but less than exceedingly organized. Once in graduate school, he asked me for a last-minute favor: he needed a recording of a family dinner conversation, a family with small children. I agreed to help him, but right before the start of our dinner, I realized that the data would be worthless to him. I spoke Dutch to the children, their dad spoke English, so John (not being bilingual) would not be able to make any sense of our conversation. John’s deadline was imminent, so I had no choice but to tape our dinner conversation anyway. To my surprise the recording turned out to be very useful to John: he was interested in speaking turns. My daughter Zoë, who was less than one year old, and not speaking yet, was still allowed speaking time. We asked her questions (in either language), and we allowed her time to answer, even if she was not yet able. We prepared her for the role of an individual who was valued in her own right. There are many practices to let middle-class American children know that they are valued individuals, but praising is a practice that is particularly emotionally arousing. With praise for children’s small early successes—such as holding a book right side up and early talking (“me happy”)—American middle-class parents not only teach their children the importance of those particular achievements, “but also hope to instill in them a generalized self-reliance that, it is thought, will stand them in good stead in their future pursuit of success and happiness.” As one of the moms in Miller’s research said: “[It is important to give] them enough love and praise so that they feel good about themselves, and then they can go and master the world.” The marking of small achievements by parents and other socializing agents paves the road for the child to feel good about themselves generally; it predisposes children to feel happy, proud, or full of self-esteem.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  What I’ve found is that even though you experience positive emotions as exquisitely subtle and brief, such moments can ignite powerful forces of growth in your life. They do this first by opening you up: Your outlook quite literally expands as you come under the influence of any of several positive emotions. Put simply, you see more as your vision widens; you see the bigger picture. With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mind-set, you become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time, you also become more resourceful. This is because, little by little, these mind-expanding moments of positive emotions add up to reshape your life for the better, making you more knowledgeable, more resilient, more socially integrated, and healthier. In fact, science documents that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself. These two core facts about positive emotions—that they open you up and transform you for the better—form the two anchor points for my broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which I wrote about in my first book, Positivity, to show how you can put positive emotions to work as you navigate your days to overcome negativity and thrive. The word positivity is purposefully broad. I chose it to cover the full range of positive emotions and then some. It also spans the psychological conditions that seed your positive emotions as well as their myriad effects—the slowing rhythm of your heart, the opening of your mind, and the relaxed, inviting look on your face. It even encompasses the fruits of positive emotions that ripen for you only a season later—their mounting effects on your relationships, your character, your health and spiritual growth. Here, you could protest and say that I’ve roped too much into this one term. Yet I see real value in using an encompassing word like positivity. It lassos the fuller dynamic system in which love and other positive emotions operate. Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive this intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. Yet when I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity. Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love, which I provide in chapter 2. Love—like all the other positive emotions—follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build: Those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life.

• From Between Us

  30 ​associated autonomic arousal: Robert W. Levenson, Paul Ekman, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity,” Psychophysiology 27, no. 4 (July 1, 1990): 363–84. The meaning of the physiological data for this particular task has been contested: Boiten provides evidence that the autonomic activity associated with voluntarily adopted facial expression may be merely explained by effort-related changes in respiration (Frans A. Boiten, “Autonomic Response Patterns during Voluntary Facial Action,” Psychophysiology 33 [1996]: 123–31). See also Quigley and Barrett, “Is There Consistency and Specificity of Autonomic Changes during Emotional Episodes?,” 2014; Robert B. Zajonc and Daniel N. McIntosh, “Emotions Research: Some Promising Questions and Some Questionable Promises,” Psychological Science 3, no. 1 (1992): 70–74, for empirical reviews that challenge the existence of specific ANS patterns that, across studies, consistently distinguish between emotions. 31 ​“focusing on . . . interpersonal interactions and relationships”: Levenson et al., “Emotion and Autonomic Nervous System,” 974. Copyright © 1992, American Psychological Association. 31 ​failed to cue emotional experience in the Minangkabau: This is my conclusion. The Levenson team provides different explanations for this finding, rather suggesting that the Minangkabau had been less successful in making the various expressions, and that this could have been a reason that they did not feel the associated emotional state. (Levenson et al., “Emotion and Autonomic Nervous System,” 1992). 31 ​only if socially contextualized or shared: Cultural psychologists Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama were the first to suggest “Americans and Minangkabau define emotions differently, and that they have different expectations about when and why an emotion will be experienced . . . one could argue that the subjectivity of the Minangkabau was keyed or tuned to the presence of others . . . the activity of the autonomic nervous system stemming from the configuration of the facial musculature did not [for them] constitute an emotion” (Hazel R. Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “The Cultural Construction of Self and Emotion: Implications for Social Behavior,” in Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence [Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994, 89–130]). To my knowledge, this hypothesis has never been directly tested. 31 ​Uchida decided to study the phenomenon more systematically: Yukiko Uchida et al., “Emotions as within or between People? Cultural Variation in Lay Theories of Emotion Expression and Inference,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35, no. 11 (November 10, 2009): 1427–39; the quote of the Japanese athlete further down comes on p. 1432.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  When I reached out to the abbot and let him know of my wish, his response, not surprisingly, was one of elation. He promised a very quiet affair, as I requested—nothing that would get the attention of the rest of the large crowd that would be arriving for the picnic, and he reassured me that we would go off premises to the small Catholic church in the center of town. My dearest friend, Alexandra Trower, agreed to be my witness, and the only other attendants were my parents. [image file=Image00041.jpg] What I had not anticipated was the abbot’s decision to turn a requested “Catholic blessing” into a full Catholic wedding, concelebrated by one of the other priests from the abbey. I was on the verge of giggles when, during the ceremony, the abbot asked the question that is part of the Catholic wedding ceremony, “Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God?” I was about to be fifty and my husband was fifty-nine. I answered in the affirmative; I’m not sure my husband did. My Catholic wedding was indeed the best fiftieth birthday present. * * * As I entered my fifties, I reminisced on the uniqueness of my childhood experience and felt an urge to record my personal recollections as a legacy for my children and theirs. The Center of my childhood was now extinct, and within a generation or two, there would be no one left who had a firsthand memory of the life we had lived. In one small way, my story was the same as that of thirty-eight other children. But in reality, there were thirty-nine stories that could be told, and I could tell only mine. I was struck by how differently the thirty-nine of us approached life, religion, and relationships after the similarity of our upbringing, defined by the deprivation of parental affection and a regime of rules and punishments. Only two of the thirty-nine remain in religious life. Several others made a commitment to that life but eventually left in their twenties, thirties, and even sixties. Some of the thirty-nine remained resolutely Catholic, while others took a more laissez-faire attitude toward religion and more than a few abandoned religion entirely. There were marriages and divorces, as well as couples who chose to live together unwed. There were Ivy League graduates and those who did not attend college at all; straight and gay; financially successful professionals, with careers in medicine, psychiatry, engineering, and finance; and a few who struggled to face life’s daily challenges.

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

  Alongside a revival of Catholicism in the parishes, the regime allowed a minimal restoration of male monastic life, but it considered that it had much less to fear from female religious Orders, particularly those that could take up the educational and charitable functions so prominent up to the Revolution. In fact, a remarkable number of new Orders were now founded for the same purposes, and Napoleon’s regime had too much else to think about to do much to stop them. These Orders took advantage of a relaxation in the Church’s rules on female religious from before the Revolution. In 1749, Pope Benedict XIV had arbitrated in a local row in Bavaria between the Bishop of Augsburg and a group of religious women in the diocese: as the ‘Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, they were still obstinately carrying on the work of Mary Ward, the would-be founder of a female equivalent of the Society of Jesus a century before (above, Chapter 14). Rather surprisingly, the Pope ruled against the Bishop and allowed his opponents a continuing existence as an ‘Institute’: effectively he recognized them as more than just a group of pious laywomen. In the post-Revolutionary era, women gleefully seized on this breach in the Council of Trent’s decree of female enclosure for their own purposes.[13] The Concordat was not designed to give women a greater active share in the life of the Church, but the vacuum was there to be filled – and not merely by nuns. The nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable re-enchantment of the world that the Enlightenment had sought to govern by reason; this reflected priorities among devout laywomen. The French Revolution was not the first time that women had guarded Christian practice through difficult times through observances they cherished (above, Chapters 10 and 14). Women kept the Church going through the worst phases of Revolutionary de-Christianization; they sustained their faith through their loyalty to Catholic customs that pre-Revolutionary clergy had often despised but did not now have the power to discourage – the cult of saints and pilgrimages, for instance. Such practices had a rich future at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In Catholic Europe after 1815, where secular political authority took its cue from the Code Napoléon and emphasized the superiority and agency of a man as paterfamilias, it proved to be the Church that gave more space for women to seize initiatives for themselves. In that frequent paradox of Western Christianity since the Reformation, as for instance in British Methodism, French Catholicism became an organization run by (clerical) men for the benefit of women. The institutional component of female Catholic life was led by a quite astonishing proliferation of convents and female Orders, a process heralded in pre-Revolutionary France but now spreading elsewhere, as both Enlightenment and Revolution cut a swathe through comfortably funded male monasteries.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  It was Jay who had witnessed that scene and said to himself, “That’s me,” and so it was. And in this moment, right in this place, you suddenly realize there is no friction, no antagonists or doubters. They cannot be found inside the Barn. There is only the state of Iowa and its abiding love of the sport—and its true champions. The one thing Jay probably never counted on was the idea that these people might appreciate the moment as much as he would. Go figure. And later, after the ceremonies and the love, after Dan Gable stops by for photographs, and the TV cameras and reporters’ notebooks go away, the Borschels’ extended family, twenty or so in all, heads out to a Bennigan’s near the Linn-Mar team hotel to celebrate. Jay is presented with a poster signed by Cael Sanderson congratulating him on the four titles. Food and drinks are ordered all around. And then Jay, the center of all of this, stands up and says, “Thank you,” and very quietly excuses himself, and hugs all the folks at the table; and he takes his ravaged body back to the hotel and passes out, leaving Jim and Carol and the coaches and their wives and girlfriends to carry on the party by themselves. They sit in the hotel hallway drinking Curt Hynek’s homemade Swisher moonshine; and inside, Jay sleeps, just as happy not to be part of it. Nobody has to tell him it’s a great thing he did, after all. Nobody has to tell him anything, unless perhaps they want to say that they wonder how he’ll do at the next level, with the next challenge. If they want to say that, Jay will listen. CHAPTER 15Making Things GrowThe day always starts at the same location. “We’ll meet at the gas station in Walker,” Brad Bridgewater had said the night before, by way of imparting the complete and total set of directions. Sure enough, all that is needed is to spot the sign that says WALKER while heading north on Troy Mills Road, and then to take that left turn. After a few miles of gently undulating corn fields and cattle pastures, there begin to pop up a few homes and then a few more; and finally, over there on the left-hand side of the road, there appears a little station with a couple of gas pumps and plenty of parking and hanging-around room. There’s a place inside where you can buy chips and soda, fast food, mostly. It is called Hocken’s, after Shannon Hocken’s grandfather, who has owned the place for a long while—decades, really. In one of those signs of the times out in the country, the Hockens have run out of people who want to keep the family business going, and they’re selling. The store and station will be called something else pretty soon, for the first time in most of these kids’ lives.

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

  I answer that, As stated above ([2581]FS, Q[25], AA[1],2,3), when we were treating of the passions, joy and sorrow proceed from love, but in contrary ways. For joy is caused by love, either through the presence of the thing loved, or because the proper good of the thing loved exists and endures in it; and the latter is the case chiefly in the love of benevolence, whereby a man rejoices in the well-being of his friend, though he be absent. On the other hand sorrow arises from love, either through the absence of the thing loved, or because the loved object to which we wish well, is deprived of its good or afflicted with some evil. Now charity is love of God, Whose good is unchangeable, since He is His goodness, and from the very fact that He is loved, He is in those who love Him by His most excellent effect, according to 1 Jn. 4:16: “He that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him.” Therefore spiritual joy, which is about God, is caused by charity. Reply to Objection 1: So long as we are in the body, we are said to be “absent from the Lord,” in comparison with that presence whereby He is present to some by the vision of “sight”; wherefore the Apostle goes on to say (2 Cor. 5:6): “For we walk by faith and not by sight.” Nevertheless, even in this life, He is present to those who love Him, by the indwelling of His grace. Reply to Objection 2: The mourning that merits happiness, is about those things that are contrary to happiness. Wherefore it amounts to the same that charity causes this mourning, and this spiritual joy about God, since to rejoice in a certain good amounts to the same as to grieve for things that are contrary to it. Reply to Objection 3: There can be spiritual joy about God in two ways. First, when we rejoice in the Divine good considered in itself; secondly, when we rejoice in the Divine good as participated by us. The former joy is the better, and proceeds from charity chiefly: while the latter joy proceeds from hope also, whereby we look forward to enjoy the Divine good, although this enjoyment itself, whether perfect or imperfect, is obtained according to the measure of one’s charity. Whether the spiritual joy, which results from charity, is compatible with an admixture of sorrow?Objection 1: It would seem that the spiritual joy that results from charity is compatible with an admixture of sorrow. For it belongs to charity to rejoice in our neighbor’s good, according to 1 Cor. 13:4, 6: “Charity . . . rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth.” But this joy is compatible with an admixture of sorrow, according to Rom. 12:15: “Rejoice with them that rejoice, weep with them that weep.” Therefore the spiritual joy of charity is compatible with an admixture of sorrow.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The back door slams. Jim is heading off in the truck to his workshop. I don’t want to leave. I sulk. I fret. I scowl at the fire, hot with self-pity. Then I hear the door open and Erin’s tousled head appears round the frame. It wears a vastly conspiratorial expression. I sense a plan is brewing. And a minute later I’m helping him drag their huge Christmas tree out of the room and onto the snowy lawn, tip snaking through the rough trail it makes, branches skittering over and cutting through the crust that glitters in the sparse light. We prop it up in the deep snow as if it had grown there. I have no idea what is going on. ‘OK, Macca, let’s burn this!’ he says. Puzzlement. ‘It’s traditional. It’s what we do here. In America.’ I don’t believe him for a second. ‘In England we dump them on the street, traditionally,’ I say. ‘Absolutely let’s burn it.’ ‘I’ll get the firelighter!” he yells. I can feel the madness to this, its contagious pagan glee. He runs back from the house with a squeezy plastic bottle of firelighting gel and in the snowy hush, fog collecting around us as the thaw turns ice to water that hangs in the warming air, he decorates the tree with gloopy green strings that drip and stick like glutinous tinsel. ‘Stand back!’ he commands. He strikes a match. A branch catches with a tearing scratch of flame. For a few moments this is pretty: a soft yellow light in the monochromatic gloom. But then there is an explosive, tearing waterfall of rearing flame that bursts into appalling brightness. Erin’s eyebrows go up. He steps back a good few paces. And now I am laughing so much I can hardly stand. ‘Jesus, Erin,’ I shout. It’s as if he’s set light to the whole of the world: a twenty-foot pyramid of flame lighting the lawn, the house, the river, the far side of the river, sending black shadows out from trees that a moment ago were lost in darkness, and our faces are gilded with fierce, orange fire. What the hell have we done? The smoke mixes with the fog so that everything, everywhere is on fire. The incandescent tree, black twigs sintering, clicking, crumbling, and smoke, and Erin and I now wearing the faces of people who are going to be in serious trouble. ‘I think we might be seeing the fire truck any moment now,’ Erin shouts, and we’re both of us children again, delighted at what we have made and fearful of disaster. And then the fire is out. The skeleton stands in the snow, all its complexity gone. Just a thin trunk with a few charcoal branches, already damp in the steaming air. And I stare at the remains of the tree and breathe the smoke and fog from the air and Erin makes a face at me and I make one back. ‘That,’ he says, ‘was excellent.’

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  What it takes the ordinary man a number of incarnations—supposing there are such things—to live out, I live out in a lifetime. I have the accelerated rhythm which goes with genius. I make no bones about it—it’s a fact. I am gay inside all the time, even when I am depressed. I never doubt for a minute. Never. I am dead certain of everything. I do not even sign contracts with my publisher any more. What for? What have I to fear, what have I to lose? I am inexhaustible. And to date nobody has ever yet done me a dirty turn. Nobody has ever cheated me, that I can say. Now and then I may do a little cheating myself—but as for the others, no, not one ever does me a dirty turn. The longer I live the less protection I demand. As I explained it to Reichel one night, if you are an artist, that means that you are denuding yourself more and more, that by the time you die you are stark naked and your bowels turned inside out. If you are an artist it is quite legitimate to talk about “the man of the record,” because there is no other man and there is nothing but the record. Everything is gravy to you and everything turns back into gravy—it slops over and runs right out into the backyard. And that is why, my dear Fraenkel, after having digested Oswald Spengler, D. H. Lawrence, Elie Faure, Friedrich Nietzsche and all the others, I feel very happy about the bad times we are living through and always have lived through. I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world. I feast on death. The more death there is the stronger I become. Bigger, fatter corpses, is what I say! I am on my way to Godhood, a little angle worm now, but eating my way through and leaving no dirt behind. I am helping the world along with my fine digestive apparatus. Sometimes I begin to munch before the corpse is cold. A friend is talking to me, for example, and not realizing that he has not yet turned cold, I begin to bite into him. You should try that some time. It’s like eating cold turkey with a hot sauce. Anyway, this is the point. Somewhere you talk about words, words, words. I say fine! Words are never just words, even when they seem just words. For the hand that writes there is the mind that reads, the soul that deciphers. Some write syllabically, some cabalistically, some esoterically, some epigrammatically, some just ooze out like fat cabbages or weeds. I write without thought or let. I take down the dictation, as it were. If there are flaws and contradictions they iron themselves out eventually.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  convictions has created prayers and hymns of social aspiration, for which the newer hymn books are making room. Conservative denominations have formally committed themselves to the fundamental ideas of the social gospel and their practical application. The plans of great interdenominational organizations are inspired by it. It has become a constructive force in American politics. This new orientation, which is observable in all parts of our religious life, is not simply a prudent adjustment of church methods to changed conditions. There is religious compulsion behind it. Those who are in touch with the student population know what the impulse to social service means to college men and women. It is the most religious element in the life of many of them. Among ministerial students there is an almost impatient demand for a proper social outlet. Some hesitate to enter the regular ministry at all because they doubt whether it will offer them sufficient opportunity and freedom to utter and apply their social convictions. For many ministers who have come under the influence of the social gospel in mature years, it has signified a religious crisis, and where it has been met successfully, it has brought fresh joy and power, and a distinct enlargement of mind. It has taken the place of conventional religion in the lives of many outside the Church. It constitutes the moral power in the propaganda of Socialism. All those social groups which distinctly face toward the future, clearly show their need and craving for a social interpretation and application of Christianity. Whoever wants to hold audiences of working people must establish some connection between religion and their social feelings and experiences. The religious organizations dealing with college men and women know that any appeal which leaves out the social note is likely to meet a listless audience. The most effective evangelists for these two groups are men who have thoroughly embodied the social gospel in their religious life and thought. When the great evangelistic effort of the “Men and Religion Forward Movement” was first planned, its organizers made room for “Social Service” very hesitatingly. But as soon as the movement was tried out before the public, it became clear that only the meetings which offered the people the social application of religion were striking fire and drawing crowds. The Great War has dwarfed and submerged all other issues, including our social problems. But in fact the war is the most acute and tremendous social problem of all. All whose Christianity has not been ditched by the catastrophe are demanding a christianizing of international relations. The demand for disarmament and permanent peace, for the rights of the small nations against the imperialistic and colonizing powers, for freedom of the seas and of trade routes, for orderly settlement of grievances,—these are demands for social

• From Between Us

  It is possible that the emotion profiles differed because immigrants encountered different types of interpersonal situations in public spaces versus at home. If they were more happy in public spaces, perhaps the reason was they encountered more (or fewer) situations that elicited happiness. For example, I might have been more “happy” after I immigrated to the U.S., because people in the U.S. create so many opportunities for happiness by celebrating you and giving you compliments. Alternatively, if the kinds of situations were no different, immigrants might have switched to a different frame of doing emotions (much like I started to do less “opinionated indignation” in North Carolina, just because the relational goals there were different than they had been in my native Holland). Both explanations may hold, but my colleague Jozefien De Leersnyder and I wanted to see if we could detect frame-switching in emotions, even if biculturals encountered the same kinds of interpersonal situations. So we designed a study to test this. We asked bicultural Turkish Belgians to collaborate with a “neighbor” on designing their ideal neighborhood. Their task was to jointly come up with a plan, helped by a map of the neighborhood, pictures of such things that they might want to have in their neighborhood (such as playgrounds and trees), pens, glue, etc. We created two cultural contexts. Half of the biculturals were invited to the social room of the Turkish neighborhood mosque, where they interacted with a Turkish “neighbor” and a Turkish experimenter, and spoke Turkish throughout the interaction. The other half of the biculturals were invited to the community center in the neighborhood that was funded by the local (Belgian) government, they interacted with a Belgian majority neighbor and a Belgian experimenter, and they spoke Dutch (the language spoken in this part of Belgium) throughout the experiment. Our main question was whether the emotional responses of the Turkish Belgian biculturals in the Turkish condition would be more “Turkish,” and in the majority Belgian condition more “Belgian”? Would the dance be different, depending on dance partners and music playing in the background?

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  The heavy weight of him moving so feverishly between her thighs renewed the ache within her. Wanting to experience the pleasure again, Olivia writhed beneath him, clawing at his back, as her body rushed for the precipice. She sobbed when the rapture hit her, and then Phoenix tensed, rock hard, against her. Burning dampness flooded across her stomach in pulsing jets. He cried out her name as he shuddered in her arms. [image file=image_rsrc3ZG.jpg] Sebastian buried his face in the fragrant curve of Olivia’s neck and damned himself for being a heartless cad. His control was a source of pride to him, but he’d had none of it today. From the moment he’d seen her on the deck of the Seawitch with her chin tilted defiantly and a far too heavy sword in her hand, he’d been captivated. As the day had progressed, he’d become more and more enamored with her. Her beauty alone was impossible to resist, but the fire, the passion . . . He could no more have resisted touching her than he could have chosen to stop breathing. She’d been trying to assist him, to tend to his wounds, as no one ever had. And he’d repaid her by staring lustily at her exposed breasts and stripping her of his shirt when she’d wished to cover herself. Olivia had been willing, eager, but he should have walked away for her own good. He could never be the husband she deserved. Despite this, he’d spread her out, a feast for a starving man, and debased her with his ravenous touch. And damned if he didn’t want to do it again. Immediately. Sebastian rose onto his elbows and gazed down at Olivia’s beautiful face, flushed with his passion. He almost inquired if she was well, but the dazed look in her eyes answered the unspoken question. His expression most likely mirrored hers. Placing a swift, hard kiss against her parted lips, he untangled his limbs from hers. Olivia was all heat and desire, a fiercely passionate woman who, even in her innocence, had pleasured him almost beyond bearing. Untried and unschooled, she hadn’t the guile to hide her response or to play any games. He’d felt wanted, needed, in a way no one had ever made him feel before. Staring at her taut belly, shiny with his seed, Sebastian was swept with an overwhelming wave of possessiveness. He wanted to mark her like this everywhere, brand her completely, so that no other man would ever touch her. Her drowsy eyes followed him with such warmth it took his breath away. The way she looked at him, her palpable panic when he’d slipped on the rigging—how long had it been since anyone had cared for his welfare? So long ago he could scarcely remember it. Only his gratefulness for her tender regard had prevented her complete ruination.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Only a few minutes ago Myrna left my office, and I was aware of feeling surprised that the hour had passed so quickly. And sorry to see her go. Amazing. She used to bore me. Now she’s a vivacious and engaging person. Haven’t heard a whine in weeks. We banter a lot—she’s so sharp that it’s hard for me to keep up with her. She’s open, introspective, produces interesting dreams, even dabbles in interesting words. No more monologues: she is very conscious of me in the room, and our process has become harmoniously interactive. I look forward to seeing her as much as any other patient—perhaps more. “The sixty-four-dollar question is: How did the T-shirt comment launch this transformation? How to reconstruct and interpret the events of the last fourteen weeks? “Dr. Werner was certain that the T-shirt comment was an egregious error, that it would result in a rupture of the therapeutic alliance. He was dead wrong about that. My thoughtless, insensitive crack turned out to be the pivotal incident of therapy! “But he was right—oh, so right—about the patient’s ability to tune in to the therapist’s countertransference. She intuited virtually every single countertransferential feeling I described at the last presentation. And with uncanny accuracy. It’s enough to make a Kleinian out of me. She missed nothing. She nailed me on everything. There is not one comment I shared with the group the last time I presented her that I haven’t had to acknowledge explicitly to her. Perhaps there is some validity to parapsychology after all. So what if the research has failed to replicate positive findings? A remarkable incident like this simply demonstrates the irrelevance of empirical research. “Why is she better? What else could it be but the wake-up call of the T-shirt comment? This case has demonstrated to me that there is a place for cruel honesty, for what Synanon used to call ‘hard love.’ But the therapist has to back it up, has to stay present, stay honest with the patient. It requires a relationship that has to be well established, that will enable therapist and patient to weather the ensuing storm. And in these litigious days it requires courage. The last time I presented Myrna, someone—I think Barbara—labeled the T-shirt comment ‘shock therapy.’ I agree: that’s exactly what it was. It changed Myrna radically, and in the post-shock period I grew to like her better. I admired the way she hung in there and kept insisting on straight feedback. She has a lot of guts. She must have sensed my growing admiration for her. People love themselves if they see a loving image of themselves reflected in the eyes of someone they really care about.”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Whether or not the feeling of love ensues, studies of couples show, hinges a lot on how you respond to your partner’s positive expressions. Do you lean in toward them? Or do you shy away? Do you meet them in kind, expressing your own genuine positive emotions in turn? Or do you shrug them off as irrelevant or point out the potential downsides? Researchers who have carefully coded couples’ responsiveness to each other in situations like these find that those who capitalize on each other’s good fortunes, by responding to their partner’s good news with their own enthusiasm and outward encouragement, have higher-quality relationships. They enjoy more intimacy, commitment, and passion with each other, and find their relationship to be more satisfying overall. In other words, when one partner’s good news and enthusiasm ignites to become the other partner’s good news and enthusiasm as well, a micro-moment of positivity resonance is born. Studies show that these moments of back-and-forth positivity resonance are not only satisfying in and of themselves, providing boosts to each partner’s own mood, but they also further fortify the relationship, making it more intimate, committed, and passionate next season than it is today. Another person’s expression of positivity, from this perspective, can be seen as a bid for connection and love. If you answer that bid, the ensuing positivity resonance will nourish you both. Two ways to fortify your intimate relationships, then, are to bring your own good news home to share, and to celebrate your partner’s good news. Regardless of who initiates, the key is to connect to create a shared experience, one that allows positivity to resonate between you for a spell, momentarily synchronizing your gestures and your biorhythms and creating the warm glow of mutual care. Sharing or celebrating the joy of some personal good fortune is certainly not the only way to foster the micro-moments of love that strengthen relationships. Any positive emotion, if shared, can do the same.