Loneliness

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 Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In an organization, part of what we, as leaders, need to create is an environment where our differences are celebrated. That’s what makes work interesting, exciting—the different approaches, ideas, and backgrounds.” As we spoke with individuals in marginalized communities, a few things they wanted managers to understand about addressing bias included: 1) Don’t try to convince a person from a marginalized group of all the things that have gone wrong in your life to better relate to their issues (you were poor, your parents died, you have a learning disorder, etc.); this is not a competition. 2) Don’t ante up by saying that your daughter is gay or that you have lots of Black friends. 3) Be compassionate but don’t be “shocked” by racism or other forms of bias; if you are, you have been actively ignoring what’s been happening because it did not affect you directly. 4) Don’t preach about your “wokeness” to the issue; show it (we’ll get to how in a minute). Says Katie Burke, chief people officer for HubSpot, “Allyship is a verb, and it starts with a combination of self-awareness and empathy. You have to adopt a mindset where you’re constantly learning, growing, and improving how you stand up and show up for others. It’s a lifelong commitment to building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalized individuals or groups.” It’s our responsibility as leaders to ensure those who are in need of support aren’t left feeling like they’re alone, added Terry Jackson, PhD, an executive coach and CEO of the Jackson Consulting Group. “Every day, your employees deal with social issues. Those issues will impact productivity and the level of engagement within your organization. If you’re an emotionally intelligent leader, you understand what is going on in the community that’s impacting your vulnerable employees. If you are not embracing those issues, discussing them and trying to solve them, you’re going to end up on the wrong side of history because we are at the tipping point where everybody is willing to engage around what is right for humanity.” Fundamentally, to do what Jackson suggests, leaders must start by believing people when they say they are hurt by racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for instance, didn’t spring up out of nowhere. They exposed a nerve that has long been ignored in America, that we are a nation still divided by inequality. As leaders who care about our people—their lives and emotional experiences—we need to be there for each other. After all, being the “only” in any group can be lonely and isolating, especially when no one speaks up for you, when no one believes the challenges you face every day. “As more and more companies attempt to build more diverse and inclusive workforces, one of the dynamics that fundamentally needs to shift is who speaks up on matters of belonging,” said Burke of HubSpot. Who is that? The leader.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Another simple idea: Opening telecom lines ten minutes before a team conference call and leaving them open for ten minutes after so that team members can chat if they’d like. SUMMARYBuild Social BondsExclusion can be toxic to anxiety levels. Fear of missing out (FOMO) may harm mental well-being since humans have such a strong need to belong. Some 71 percent of professionals say they have experienced some degree of exclusion within their team.There is much team leaders can do to spot those who may seem to be left out—all the more important when some or all of a team works remotely: Which person is regularly cut off during group discussions? Who doesn’t seem to be interacting with anyone? Regular one-on-ones are the best way to understand what’s really going on.Leaders can encourage inclusion by ensuring that all team members can contribute in meetings and have their voices heard in a calm and organized manner, buddy new hires up with friendly seasoned employees, and spend time in every meeting recognizing contributions.Other methods for helping move a team from exclusion to connection include: 1) build camaraderie, 2) find a common core, 3) foster connections and friendships, 4) provide frequent validation, and 5) include remotes. 9Turn Doubts into AssuranceHow Gratitude Can Help Team Members Build ConfidenceThe way to develop what’s best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. —Charles Schwab One of the worst parts of anxiety is that it can make competent people feel insecure and start questioning their inner strengths. In our interviews, we found many high-performing people who suffer from anxiety say they constantly doubt themselves and their abilities. And yet a common problem we’ve found in years of executive coaching is that leaders don’t express gratitude to their people about work well done—at least not anywhere nearly as frequently or effectively as they should. In fact, many leaders spend most of their time addressing performance problems, often with a focus on the below-average work of one or two team members. They assume, usually incorrectly, that those who are doing okay in their duties don’t need much attention, and yet top performers can be gratitude sponges. In interviews with thousands of employees over the past twenty years, we can attest that many feel a considerable amount of anxiety about how they’re doing in their jobs. They want to know how their managers perceive the quality of their work. In fact, the highest-performing employees can often perceive lack of attention from a manager as a sign that things are not good at all. Silence can cause worry to creep up on even the best of workers. When we advise managers to offer more positive feedback, they can push back with a litany of concerns. They say it would be nice, but they don’t have the time to express more appreciation, or that their people are only interested in financial rewards.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Also bring remote people into the workplace on a regular basis. What follows are a few more methods used by leaders we’ve interviewed and worked with to enhance inclusion and strengthen bonds in their teams to great effect. Method 1: Build Camaraderie Ryan Westwood, CEO of Simplus, told us that he was affected when conducting a one-on-one with a remote employee via teleconference during the pandemic. “She said to me, in tears, ‘I haven’t had a hug in three months.’ Her grown boys live in different states. My heart was breaking. We have to be conscious of our coworkers and their situations, more than ever when people are working remotely.” As such, his company has created geographic regions for its six hundred employees. In areas with at least ten people, employees are given a budget to do “service projects, go bowling, do whatever you want to do.” Westwood added, “We don’t have a leader looming over the gatherings. It’s about people genuinely connecting in the way they want. We have found that our employee happiness and employee net promoter scores have gone way up from this small budget.” In another of our clients, a new team was formed during a reorganization. The group consisted of people who had not worked together before, who had various backgrounds and experiences. They were to provide support services to several divisions of the company, meaning they would be gone from the office most of their days. The leader knew this environment could be ripe for feelings of exclusion and anxiety, so she initiated a few simple activities that built esprit de corps and fostered inclusion. She brought the team together in the office first thing every Thursday morning without fail to see how the work was going, analyze loads and balance tasks, and brainstorm ways to help each other (these moved to teleconferences during the pandemic). She kept the meetings to an hour, and made sure no one voice dominated, yet no one was allowed to stay quiet either. To be respectful to those who may be anxious about speaking in public, and so no one would feel pushed onto a stage, she spent a few minutes the day before putting together an agenda, letting each team member know the specific updates she would ask them to share with the group. Not only did this make her more introverted workers feel more at ease with their part in the discussion—as they had time to prepare— the whole meeting ran more smoothly. During the sessions, she followed a round-robin format, in which everyone got a chance to share their thoughts in turn.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Microaggressions are biases that reveal themselves in often subtle ways and leave people feeling uncomfortable or insulted. They can take a psychological toll on the mental health of recipients and can lower work productivity and problem-solving abilities. Methods to help those who are marginalized feel valued and included in any team include: 1) listen up, 2) sponsor, 3) stand up, and 4) advocate. 8 Transform Exclusion into Connection Help Team Members Build Social Bonds The greatest kindness is acceptance. —Christina Baker Kline, novelist In some fascinating work done at Cornell University, researchers found that fire stations perform better—including saving more lives—when firefighters eat meals as a team. “Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together. That intimacy spills over into work,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Kevin Kniffin. In fact, the researchers noted that firefighters in stations where everyone dined alone often expressed embarrassment when asked why. “It was basically a signal that something deeper was wrong with the way the group worked,” Kniffin said. Eating together for firefighters is a big sign that everyone is accepted. We are not suggesting every team needs to run out to Chili’s at noon every day, but after twenty years of working with organizations around the world, we can attest that finding ways to include everyone can create boons to team performance. In contrast, exclusion can lead to job dissatisfaction and higher employee turnover. We’ve probably all been left out at some point in our lives; it evokes unpleasant memories from school playground days. While much has been written on bullying at work as a serious concern for employees’ mental health and team cohesion, research shows exclusion can be just as toxic to anxiety levels and hasn’t received anywhere near the attention. FOMO and being excluded at work can cast a dark shadow on one’s life, suggests Professor Sandra Robinson of the University of British Columbia. This is because we as humans have such a strong need to belong. Robinson’s research indicates that 71 percent of professionals say they have experienced some degree of exclusion from their team—even before the coronavirus pandemic isolated so many. And ostracism in the workplace can have long-term psychological implications, she adds. Exclusion can impact anyone and be a huge contributor to anxiety. As leaders, a step forward in inclusion awareness is to understand that when team members shun or snub other employees, it can make those people feel like they’re not fully accepted or respected by their colleagues. These actions are often insidious and subtle: phone calls that are not returned, meetings where some are not invited, lunch offers that never come. Ostracism like this not only affects morale; it can affect an individual’s productivity and a team’s ability to hit its goals.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For Luther, Christ’s merits did not constitute any kind of credit system. Rather his merits gave the church its “keys,” that is, the power to admit or reject individuals from the sacrament and the fellowship of Christians. Moreover, because every human action was tainted with sin, there could be no satisfactory payment for sin, no good deeds to be set in the balance, no way for the individual to make him- or herself acceptable to God by purchasing indulgences or any other means; the banking-system model of “merits” had to be rejected altogether. The flip side of the argument is that whereas the practice of indulgences permitted people to pray for one another, and fostered the creation of a whole series of cooperative prayers, sayings of Mass, chantries, and collective efforts toward salvation, for Luther the Christian stood alone before God, devoid of any assistance. On the face of it, this is a bleak and individualistic concept of salvation, where the emphasis is squarely placed on the believer’s encounter with the living God. It must also have accorded with Luther’s own experience—and perhaps his sense of isolation, as he stood alone to defend himself. The other topic of debate concerned the role of faith in the efficacy of the sacraments. Luther argued that the sacraments were ineffective without faith, while Cajetan insisted that they were valid in and of themselves; indeed, as the cardinal argued, since one could never be entirely sure of one’s faith, it was vitally important that the sacraments did not depend on it. Yet Cajetan eventually proved willing to compromise on this issue, insisting that Luther recant only on the other point, that the Pope had the power of the keys. The underlying intellectual issue at Augsburg concerned authority. When Luther presented his scriptural passages in support of his position on indulgences and repentance, it seems that Cajetan hardly bothered to read them. One person’s interpretation of the Bible, Cajetan believed, could not possibly be as weighty as papal decree. The proceedings thus exposed what Luther felt to be the authoritarianism of the Church and the Pope. At the end of the third and last meeting, on October 14, Cajetan finally lost patience. He sent Luther away, telling him not to return unless he was willing to recant. He then demanded that Staupitz intervene as Luther’s superior; Staupitz replied that he would do what he could but Luther’s knowledge of Scripture exceeded his own. In the meantime, Cajetan declared, he would report to Rome and await further instructions; but later that day, Staupitz heard rumors that Gabriele della Volta, the head of the Augustinian order, had requested that Cajetan seize Luther and send him to Rome. In response, Staupitz released him from his Augustinian vows—which included obedience toward those set over him in the order. Staupitz was effectively refusing to control or discipline his former protégé.39

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  They can take a psychological toll on the mental health of recipients and can lower work productivity and problem-solving abilities.Methods to help those who are marginalized feel valued and included in any team include: 1) listen up, 2) sponsor, 3) stand up, and 4) advocate. 8Transform Exclusion into ConnectionHelp Team Members Build Social BondsThe greatest kindness is acceptance. —Christina Baker Kline, novelist In some fascinating work done at Cornell University, researchers found that fire stations perform better—including saving more lives—when firefighters eat meals as a team. “Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together. That intimacy spills over into work,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Kevin Kniffin. In fact, the researchers noted that firefighters in stations where everyone dined alone often expressed embarrassment when asked why. “It was basically a signal that something deeper was wrong with the way the group worked,” Kniffin said. Eating together for firefighters is a big sign that everyone is accepted. We are not suggesting every team needs to run out to Chili’s at noon every day, but after twenty years of working with organizations around the world, we can attest that finding ways to include everyone can create boons to team performance. In contrast, exclusion can lead to job dissatisfaction and higher employee turnover. We’ve probably all been left out at some point in our lives; it evokes unpleasant memories from school playground days. While much has been written on bullying at work as a serious concern for employees’ mental health and team cohesion, research shows exclusion can be just as toxic to anxiety levels and hasn’t received anywhere near the attention. FOMO and being excluded at work can cast a dark shadow on one’s life, suggests Professor Sandra Robinson of the University of British Columbia. This is because we as humans have such a strong need to belong. Robinson’s research indicates that 71 percent of professionals say they have experienced some degree of exclusion from their team—even before the coronavirus pandemic isolated so many. And ostracism in the workplace can have long-term psychological implications, she adds. Exclusion can impact anyone and be a huge contributor to anxiety. As leaders, a step forward in inclusion awareness is to understand that when team members shun or snub other employees, it can make those people feel like they’re not fully accepted or respected by their colleagues. These actions are often insidious and subtle: phone calls that are not returned, meetings where some are not invited, lunch offers that never come. Ostracism like this not only affects morale; it can affect an individual’s productivity and a team’s ability to hit its goals. What’s Not Happening . . . and What IsIn some cases, exclusion is not intentional; and inadvertent actions can be tricky to spot. They are sins of omission: the result of help not offered, conversations not engaged in, camaraderie not shared. How are managers supposed to see what’s not happening?

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  For instance, one manager had employees share a song with their teammates that they had enjoyed listening to in the past week; another asked her people to share something off their bucket list. The spotlight moment became more about how awesome Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” is, or why Machu Picchu would be so cool to visit, than about the person; yet these quick sidelights gave tons of insights into the employee’s personality. Another simple idea: Opening telecom lines ten minutes before a team conference call and leaving them open for ten minutes after so that team members can chat if they’d like. SUMMARY Build Social Bonds Exclusion can be toxic to anxiety levels. Fear of missing out (FOMO) may harm mental well-being since humans have such a strong need to belong. Some 71 percent of professionals say they have experienced some degree of exclusion within their team. There is much team leaders can do to spot those who may seem to be left out—all the more important when some or all of a team works remotely: Which person is regularly cut off during group discussions? Who doesn’t seem to be interacting with anyone? Regular one-on-ones are the best way to understand what’s really going on. Leaders can encourage inclusion by ensuring that all team members can contribute in meetings and have their voices heard in a calm and organized manner, buddy new hires up with friendly seasoned employees, and spend time in every meeting recognizing contributions. Other methods for helping move a team from exclusion to connection include: 1) build camaraderie, 2) find a common core, 3) foster connections and friendships, 4) provide frequent validation, and 5) include remotes. 9 Turn Doubts into Assurance How Gratitude Can Help Team Members Build Confidence The way to develop what’s best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. —Charles Schwab One of the worst parts of anxiety is that it can make competent people feel insecure and start questioning their inner strengths. In our interviews, we found many high-performing people who suffer from anxiety say they constantly doubt themselves and their abilities. And yet a common problem we’ve found in years of executive coaching is that leaders don’t express gratitude to their people about work well done—at least not anywhere nearly as frequently or effectively as they should. In fact, many leaders spend most of their time addressing performance problems, often with a focus on the below-average work of one or two team members. They assume, usually incorrectly, that those who are doing okay in their duties don’t need much attention, and yet top performers can be gratitude sponges.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For Luther, Christ’s merits did not constitute any kind of credit system. Rather his merits gave the church its “keys,” that is, the power to admit or reject individuals from the sacrament and the fellowship of Christians. Moreover, because every human action was tainted with sin, there could be no satisfactory payment for sin, no good deeds to be set in the balance, no way for the individual to make him- or herself acceptable to God by purchasing indulgences or any other means; the banking-system model of “merits” had to be rejected altogether. The flip side of the argument is that whereas the practice of indulgences permitted people to pray for one another, and fostered the creation of a whole series of cooperative prayers, sayings of Mass, chantries, and collective efforts toward salvation, for Luther the Christian stood alone before God, devoid of any assistance. On the face of it, this is a bleak and individualistic concept of salvation, where the emphasis is squarely placed on the believer’s encounter with the living God. It must also have accorded with Luther’s own experience—and perhaps his sense of isolation, as he stood alone to defend himself. The other topic of debate concerned the role of faith in the efficacy of the sacraments. Luther argued that the sacraments were ineffective without faith, while Cajetan insisted that they were valid in and of themselves; indeed, as the cardinal argued, since one could never be entirely sure of one’s faith, it was vitally important that the sacraments did not depend on it. Yet Cajetan eventually proved willing to compromise on this issue, insisting that Luther recant only on the other point, that the Pope had the power of the keys. The underlying intellectual issue at Augsburg concerned authority. When Luther presented his scriptural passages in support of his position on indulgences and repentance, it seems that Cajetan hardly bothered to read them. One person’s interpretation of the Bible, Cajetan believed, could not possibly be as weighty as papal decree. The proceedings thus exposed what Luther felt to be the authoritarianism of the Church and the Pope. At the end of the third and last meeting, on October 14, Cajetan finally lost patience. He sent Luther away, telling him not to return unless he was willing to recant. He then demanded that Staupitz intervene as Luther’s superior; Staupitz replied that he would do what he could but Luther’s knowledge of Scripture exceeded his own. In the meantime, Cajetan declared, he would report to Rome and await further instructions; but later that day, Staupitz heard rumors that Gabriele della Volta, the head of the Augustinian order, had requested that Cajetan seize Luther and send him to Rome. In response, Staupitz released him from his Augustinian vows—which included obedience toward those set over him in the order. Staupitz was effectively refusing to control or discipline his former protégé. 39 The meeting at Augsburg thus ended with Luther losing Staupitz as his superior.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  I know of a pretty, beautiful, and cheerful garden where there are many children wearing little golden coats. They pick up fine apples, pears, cherries, and yellow and blue plums under the trees; they sing, jump, and are merry. They also have nice ponies with golden reins and saddles. I asked the owner of the garden whose children they were. He replied: “These are children who like to pray, study, and be good.” Then I said: “Dear sir, I also have a son, whose name is Hänschen Luther. Might he also be permitted to enter the garden, so that he too could eat such fine apples and pears, and ride on these pretty ponies, and play with these children?” Then the man answered: “If he likes to pray, study, and be good, he too may enter the garden along with Lippus and Jost.”19 Because Veit was with Luther during much of his time at the Coburg, his loneliness was not nearly as pronounced as it had been at the Wartburg nine years before. But Veit wrote to Kathie Luther, Dear and gracious Mrs. Luther: Rest assured that your lord and we are hale and hearty by God’s grace. You did well to send the doctor the portrait [of his daughter, Magdalena], for it diverts him from his worries. He has nailed it on the wall opposite the table where we eat in the elector’s apartment. At first he could not quite recognize her. “Dear me,” said he, “Lenchen is too dark.” But he likes the picture now, and more and more comes to see that it is Lenchen. She is strikingly like Hans in the mouth, eyes, and nose, and in fact in the whole face, and will come to look even more like him. I just had to write you this.20 Luther’s physical problems continued to plague him, and not a little. In May, he again suffered from headaches and ringing in his ears, which sometimes was so severe it seemed to him like roaring thunder. And there was more Anfechtungen. Luther knew that the devil was behind it and often said as much in his letters. “All right,” he wrote, “if [the devil] devours me he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet? One has to suffer if he wants to possess Christ.”21

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Once the band of Wittenbergers arrived in Augsburg, they initially wrote regularly to Luther, who was marooned in the castle at Coburg, some 200 kilometres to the north. Here, Luther joked, he had his own Diet, a parliament of birds: “You people, of course, go to Augsburg, [but] you are uncertain when you will see the beginning [of your Diet]; we came here right into the midst of a Diet . . . All are equally black, all have dark blue eyes, all make the same music in unison. | have not yet seen nor heard their emperor.’ He regularly signed his letters as from ‘the kingdom of the winged jackdaws’.* Nor was Luther the only one to talk about birds. Soon Agricola wrote from Augsburg, describing a dream of Melanchthon’s. An eagle had appeared, which was magically transformed into a cat. Immediately the cat had been stuffed into a sack. But then Luther arrived, and had called for the screaming cat to be let out; it was freed. The evangeli- cals were agog with possible interpretations. One of their number was called Caspar Aquila, or ‘eagle’, so perhaps the dream foretold disaster for his house. Others were convinced the eagle represented the emperor, and the practice of sorcery meant the evil machinations of the godless sophists and cardinals, who were preventing the emperor from understanding the truth. Only Luther ‘s arrival could ‘let the cat out of the bag’ and allow Charles V to hear the true gospel.” Luther used the enforced solitude to work on translating the Old Testament prophets and to write. First he penned his Exhortation to all Clergy, of which 500 copies were printed in Wittenberg and sent to Augsburg, where they sold out. This hard-hitting pamphlet began with Luther’s devastating false modesty — people would be asking, he pretended, “Who needs you? Who ever demanded your exhortation or writing?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  2 In 1519, when Martin was a famous but penniless monk, Hans inherited the family house in Mansfeld, and by 1522 he had become one of the wealthiest mine owners in the town. 3 Luther, meanwhile, had made his famous appearance at the Diet of Worms, and in 1522 he was hiding in the Wartburg Castle. Throughout the 1520s and 1530s, alone of all the mine owners of his generation, Hans Reinicke made a success of it, joining the capitalists of the Steinacher Saigerhandelsgesellschaft, dominating the silver production of Mansfeld, and acting as spokesperson for the mine owners; in the same decades, Luther became world famous. 4 Reinicke’s was the life that Luther could have led and had chosen not to. The two men remained friends and kept in contact, the friendship a powerful anchor in both their lives. Reinicke visited Luther during the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, while the reformer was suffering from loneliness in Coburg Castle. It was Reinicke who broke the news of Hans Luder’s death: When a letter arrived from his friend shortly afterward, Luther took one look and said, “Now I know that my father is dead.” As Melanchthon put it: “There was exceptional mutual kindness between these two, Luther and Reinicke, whether by some concord of nature or whether rising from that companionship of boyhood studies.” When Reinicke died in 1538, Luther lay ill, and the news of the loss of “my best friend” was kept from him for some months, because those around him knew how serious a blow it would be. 5 Their experiences together as boys had bound the two men throughout their lives. The bond may have had as much to do with shared misery as with shared boyhood pleasures, and Luther was scathing about the teaching his generation had received: “Everywhere we were obliged to put up with teachers and masters who knew nothing themselves, and were incapable of teaching anything good or worthwhile. In fact, they did not even know how to study or teach.” 6 He wrote this in 1524, and some of the bitterness that lay behind his words may be related to another reminiscence: that at school he “was once beaten fifteen times one after another in one morning.” One must beat and punish children, Luther conceded, “but at the same time one should love them.” 7 It was surprising that Mansfeld, a small mining town, should have had its own Latin school and it suggests the cultural aspirations nursed by its elite. Whatever its deficiencies, the school must have at least succeeded in imprinting Latin in the young boy’s consciousness, since his later ability to play with the language, to use Latin to express a whole gamut of emotions, and to form ideas with precision can only have developed through a very long familiarity with it.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Much of his early work was devoted to the defense of Socrates, who had forced men to clarify their ideas by his thought-provoking questions but had been sentenced to death in 399 on the charges of impiety and the corruption of youth. In a way that was not dissimilar to that of the people of India, he had become dissatisfied with the old festivals and myths of religion, which he found demeaning and inappropriate. Plato had also been influenced by the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras, who may have been influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt. He had believed that the soul was a fallen, polluted deity incarcerated in the body as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth. He had articulated the common human experience of feeling a stranger in a world that does not seem to be our true element. Pythagoras had taught that the soul could be liberated by means of ritual purifications, which would enable it to achieve harmony with the ordered universe. Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, out of its element, imprisoned in the body but capable of regaining its divine status by the purification of the reasoning powers of the mind. In the famous myth of the cave, Plato described the darkness and obscurity of man’s life on earth: he perceives only shadows of the eternal realities flickering on the wall of the cave. But gradually he can be drawn out and achieve enlightenment and liberation by accustoming his mind to the divine light. Later in his life, Plato may have retreated from his doctrine of the eternal forms or ideas, but they became crucial to many monotheists when they tried to express their conception of God. These ideas were stable, constant realities which could be apprehended by the reasoning powers of the mind. They are fuller, more permanent and effective realities than the shifting, flawed material phenomena we encounter with our senses. The things of this world only echo, “participate in” or “imitate” the eternal forms in the divine realm. There is an idea corresponding to every general conception we have, such as Love, Justice and Beauty. The highest of all the forms, however, is the idea of the Good. Plato had cast the ancient myth of the archetypes into a philosophical form. His eternal ideas can be seen as a rational version of the mythical divine world, of which mundane things are the merest shadow. He did not discuss the nature of God but confined himself to the divine world of the forms, though occasionally it seems that ideal Beauty or the Good does represent a supreme reality. Plato was convinced that the divine world was static and changeless. The Greeks saw movement and change as signs of inferior reality: something that had true identity remained always the same, characterized by permanence and immutability.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Why so late? The elevator door’s black rubber bumper stops midbounce against Warren’s hand. He says, Visiting hours are five to seven. Not for dads, I say. But the silver doors have shut him away. And I know Warren will come religiously from five till seven—never a minute longer. (To be fair to Warren, not yet thirty, he must’ve been shocked, as men often are—and the younger, the more shocked—by the dreamy looks their previously income-generating wives get when staring at some dumb hunks of baby.) With Dev, my every practical impulse has snapped off like a spigot turned tight. So what if I’m invisible to Warren or he to me? My rent’s paid. I have my boy. In six weeks, I’ll start to teach three days per week, three or four classes per day. No other fact sinks in. Sitting in my room the next night, after Warren’s brief, distracted visit, I feed the baby out of some gleaming core inside. It’s you and me, Dev, I say, which solitude is—in some ways—familiar. At least now I have a small sack of infant to cuddle with, a boy molded from silk and cream whose howling cares vanish soon as I take him in my arms. For seven days, I stay catheterized in the hospital. In seven days, the Bible tells us, God made the world, but I fail to release my pent-up urine. Eventually, the insurance company starts to squawk, and while the doctor doesn’t like sending me home with a bag strapped to my leg, they figure I can get up every morning after breastfeeding all night, load the baby into the car seat with diapers and changes of clothes and miscellaneous crap. I can drive to the clinic, get on the table, have the catheter taken out, then wait, breastfeeding in the hall, till four to see if I can relieve myself of urine before then getting re- catheterized—a length of flaming skewer slid into my body’s rawest corridor. Warren seems hardly to register any of this, sleeping every night unperturbed downstairs. Every hour and a half or two, Dev squawks, and I stagger to his crib, change his diaper, latch him to one breast then another, burp him, swaddle him. Then back in my solitary bed, steal an hour or two of sleep before Dev eats again. Born three weeks early it’s as if he’s trying to catch up, he just needs to be bigger than my scrawny body could tote. (He grew at twice the normal rate, and I’d have been smarter nursing him in the bed, but I’d been warned—ironically—that it’d ruin my marriage.) Maybe I don’t resent Warren more because he’s the only author of relief for me. He walks in the door like clockwork every day at six, the hour Dev inexplicably begins to holler as if being bullwhipped. And only Warren loves him enough to advance toward that flaming shriek. What’s wrong with him?

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jung’s continued faith suggests that a subjective God, mysteriously identified with the ground of being in the depths of the self, can survive psychoanalytic science in a way that a more personal, anthropomorphic deity who can indeed encourage perpetual immaturity may not. Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalized, subjective God. Nevertheless he made a valid and perceptive point when he insisted that it would be dangerous to attempt to abolish religion. People must outgrow God in their own good time: to force them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression. We have seen that iconoclasm can spring from a buried anxiety and projection of our own fears onto the “other.” Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish God certainly showed signs of strain. Thus, despite his advocacy of a compassionate ethic, Schopenhauer could not cope with human beings and became a recluse who communicated only with his poodle, Atman. Nietzsche was a tenderhearted, lonely man, plagued by ill health, who was very different from his Superman. Eventually he went mad. He did not abandon God joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine. In a poem delivered “after much trembling, quivering and self-contortion,” he makes Zarathustra plead with God to return: No! come back, With all your torments! Oh come back To the last of all solitaries! All the streams of my tears Run their course for you! And the last flame of my heart— It burns up to you ! Oh come back My unknown God! My pain! my last—happiness. 20 Like Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the policies of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of “God.” God had always been a struggle in the West. His demise was also attended by strain, desolation and dismay. Thus in In Memoriam , the great Victorian poem of doubt, Alfred Lord Tennyson recoiled in horror from the prospect of a purposeless, indifferent nature, red in tooth and claw.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The next seven sefiroth are said to correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis. During the biblical period, YHWH had eventually triumphed over the ancient goddesses of Canaan and their erotic cults. But as Kabbalists struggled to express the mystery of God, the old mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form. The Zohar describes Binah as the Supernal Mother, whose womb is penetrated by the “dark flame” to give birth to the seven lower sefiroth. Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah, inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as the channel through which the divine life pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation. It is in the Shekinah, the tenth sefirah, however, that the ancient sexual symbolism of creation and theogony appears most clearly. In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it had neither sex nor gender. In Kabbalah, however, the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God. The Bahir (ca. 1200), one of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, had identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered, lost and alienated from the Godhead, through the world. The Zohar links this “exile of the Shekinah” with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis. It says that Adam was shown the “middle sefiroth” in the Tree of Life and the Shekinah in the Tree of Knowledge. Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth together, he chose to venerate the Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth. The divine life could no longer flow uninterruptedly into the world, which was isolated from its divine Source. But by observing the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah and reunite the world to the Godhead. Not surprisingly, many strict Talmudists found this an abhorrent idea, but the exile of the Shekinah, which echoed the ancient myths of the goddess who wandered far from the divine world, became one of the most popular elements of Kabbalah. The female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God, which tended to be too heavily weighted toward the masculine, and it clearly fulfilled an important religious need.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Alone in his “Patmos”—as he called his study in the Wartburg, likening it to the island where John wrote the biblical book of Revelation—his intellectual development at the time paralleled in many ways that of Karlstadt. But whereas Karlstadt was dealing with new situations arising in Wittenberg and was forced to make policy in reaction to a host of different pressures—from the Elector, the populace, the university, the radical Augustinians—Luther was alone with the Devil. In To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther had argued that priests who lived with concubines ought to be allowed to marry, and in the spring of 1521 the Wittenberg graduate and university rector Bartholomäus Bernhardi had been the first to do just that, in public. 17 However, in 1520 Luther had not included monks like himself in his musings about marriage because they had made special vows of chastity of their own free will. Now, in Wittenberg, matters were moving apace as Karlstadt attacked monastic vows, first in a set of theses for debate, then in longer writings in both Latin and German. Luther not only read these tracts, but discussed them in letters to Melanchthon. 18 Then in early September 1521, he penned a first short set of theses for discussion within Wittenberg. He soon added others, which were published in early October, but Luther did not complete his own full tract on vows until November. 19 If earlier in the Reformation it had been Karlstadt learning from Luther, now Karlstadt was forcing the pace. For a work advocating marriage, Karlstadt’s tract is strangely anti-erotic, even antisexual. He does not mince his words in the Latin text, however: Monks only manage celibacy, he argues, by committing the sin of Moloch—that is, masturbation—shedding seed on the ground, or on their robes, and that is worse than fornication or adultery. Karlstadt’s pamphlet evokes the horror of frustrated lust, making the reader feel revolted by the sexual perversions to which it gives rise. He names some of these “beastly sins”—“I say that there are some young nuns and monks who commit sins (I lay them upon their conscience and into their hearts and shall keep silent on account of my shame) which are weightier than bestiality”—but in its German version the tract stops short there, leaving the reader to imagine the worst. 20 Karlstadt is fascinated by the flows that come out of the body, with women’s menses and with men’s—and women’s—“seed”: At the time, it was believed that both men and women had to release seed for conception to take place. Regarding marriage as a “medicine” for the ills of sexual lust, he concludes that the bishops should drive all priests to marry, because this is the remedy designed by God for concupiscence. The only thing stopping them from marrying, he claims, is avarice—one of the seven deadly sins, and one to which sixteenth-century society was particularly sensitive.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1516, when Luther heard that the Elector wanted to have Staupitz made bishop of Chiemsee, a plum posting, Luther had written to Spalatin refusing to have any part in the scheme. To be a bishop, he averred, means ‘to practise Greek ways, to sodomise and to live ina Roman manner’, and to amass personal property, ‘that is, the insatiable hell of avarice’. Although Luther was careful to point out that Staupitz was of course far removed from such vices, he asked Spalatin straight out: ‘do you want to be guarantor that when the opportunity is there . . . or when he is driven to it by necessity, this man will not be sucked into the maelstrom and raging storms of the courts of bishops?’* It seems that by this point Luther thought that Staupitz’s love of luxury — or perhaps his sexual inclinations (the verbs pergraecari, sodomari, romanari hint at homosexuality or pederasty) — outweighed his zeal for the Christian life. Now, in a letter of 3 October 1519 Luther castigated Staupitz for being too busy to write to him — usually it was the other way around, as Luther endlessly apologised to his correspondents for his failure to write. In one chatty letter sent to the older man in February of that year, packed with gossip about friends, he cheerfully said that the bishop of Brandenburg had taken to remarking, as he put logs on the fire, that he would not be able to have a good night’s sleep until Luther was thrown into the flames as well. Then in the October letter Luther lamented that his confessor was ‘deserting him too much’, making him feel, in the words of Psalm 131, ‘like a child weaned from its mother’. Luther continued: ‘I am empty of faith, full of other gifts, Christ knows how little I desire these, if I cannot serve him’ — an appeal to his confessor who like no one else understood his Anfech- tungen. Then in the letter’s final paragraph, he described a dream: ‘This night I had a dream about you, as if you wanted to retreat from me, but I wept bitterly and suffered; but you waved to me and said | should be calm, and that you would return to me. This certainly has come true this very day.’ Having not heard from Staupitz for some time, Luther was clearly suffering from what he felt to be his increasing coldness. Indeed, it would not be long before the rift between the two men became THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN 149 irreparable as Staupitz refused to follow Luther in rejecting the Pope and leaving the Church; he finally deserted his former protégé when Luther was excommunicated in early 1521. The instruction Staupitz gives Luther in his dream — to be calm — is exactly what he found difficult.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He sent Luther away, telling him not to return unless he was willing to recant. He then demanded that Staupitz intervene as Luther's superior; Staupitz replied that he would do what he could but Luther’s knowledge of Scripture exceeded his own. In the meantime, Cajetan declared, he would report to Rome and await further instructions; but later that day, Staupitz heard rumours that Gabriele della Volta, the head of the Augustinian order, had requested that Cajetan seize Luther and send him to Rome. In response, Staupitz JOURNEYS AND DISPUTATIONS 119 released him from his Augustinian vows — which included obedience towards those set over him in the order. Staupitz was effectively refusing to control or discipline his former protégé.” The meeting at Augsburg thus ended with Luther losing Staupitz as his superior. Not for the first or last time, Luther reached an intel- lectual breakthrough by attacking authority, but his victory unleashed enormous creativity as well as sadness and fear. The righteous anger and aggression he displayed seemed to give him the energy to develop his own identity — and may have helped smother the feelings of melancholy, ‘tristitia’, which so often plagued him and blocked his way. The rejection of the cardinal’s authority, however, was one thing; the separation from Staupitz quite another. His other close friend and fellow Augustinian, Wenzeslaus Linck, too, also left Augsburg. Years later, Luther recalled feeling very alone at this time. Staupitz ‘left me alone at Augsburg’, he recalled in 1531, and ‘when I departed from Augsburg, I was afraid because I was alone’.” Luther had been a monk for years, an institutional man who knew how to manage those in his care and to owe obedience to superiors. Now without authority and institutional support, he was left alone in his relationship with God — the singularity that he both craved and feared. Four days passed without any summons from Cajetan or reply to the written defence. On 18 October, Luther composed a formal letter to the Pope protesting against his treatment, and had it certified by two notaries.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth. 24 One of the “problems” that had to be overcome was Islam. A negative image of the Prophet Muhammad and his religion had developed in Christendom at the time of the Crusades and had persisted alongside the anti-Semitism of Europe. During the colonial period, Islam was viewed as a fatalistic religion that was chronically opposed to progress. Lord Cromer, for example, decried the efforts of the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh, arguing that it was impossible for “Islam” to reform itself. Muslims had little time or energy to develop their understanding of God in the traditional way. They were engaged in a struggle to catch up with the West. Some saw Western secularism as the answer, but what was positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and foreign in the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own tradition in its own time. In the West, “God” was seen as the voice of alienation; in the Muslim world it was the colonial process. Cut off from the roots of their culture, people felt disoriented and lost. Some Muslim reformers tried to hasten the cause of progress by forcibly relegating Islam to a minor role. The results were not at all as they had expected. In the new nation-state of Turkey, which had emerged after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1917, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), later known as Kemal Atatürk, tried to transform his country into a Western nation: he disestablished Islam, making religion a purely private affair. Sufi orders were abolished and went underground; the madrasahs were closed and the state training of the ulema ceased. This secularizing policy was symbolized by the banning of the fez, which reduced the visibility of the religious classes and was also a psychological attempt to force the people into a Western uniform: “to put on the hat” instead of the fez came to mean “to Europeanize.” Reza Khan, Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941, admired Atatürk and attempted a similar policy: the veil was banned; mullahs were forced to shave and wear the kepi instead of the traditional turban; the traditional celebrations in honor of the Shii Imam and martyr Husayn were forbidden. Freud had wisely seen that any enforced repression of religion could only be destructive. Like sexuality, religion is a human need that affects life at every level. If suppressed, the results are likely to be as explosive and destructive as any severe sexual repression.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  7 The Constant Lovers The myth they chose was the constant lovers. The theme was richness over time It is a difficult story, and the wise never choose it because it requires such long performance, and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts… —Robert Hass, “Against Botticelli” I t would’ve been a vintage personal ad. Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave . Were Warren laboring over this story, I’d no doubt appear drunkenly shrieking; spending every cent I could get my mitts on; alternately crowding his scholar’s home with revelers, then starting to vanish nights into a kind of recovery cult—none of this entirely untrue. I would’ve preferred that my ex vet this manuscript and correct the glaring flaws. Wisely, he balked—I’d have hated to see his version, too. How to write it without self deceit? I set out to forge a family, but it fell apart. Know any divorcée who ever stops weighing fault for a marriage’s implosion on some divine scales? There’s also a psychological phenomenon that messes with my ability to depict our nuptial collapse—the normally crisp film of my memory has, in this period, more mysterious blanks than the Nixon tapes. Maybe the agony of our demise was too harrowing for my head to hold on to, or my maternal psyche is shielding my son from the ugly bits. Or I was too shitfaced at the end. Whatever the case, those years only filter back through the self I had at the time, when I was most certainly—even by my yardstick then—a certain species of crazy. But inside that was a girl starving for stability and in love with a shy, brilliant man fleeing the aristocracy he was born to. Decades ago, I trained myself to mistrust that girl’s perceptions. No doubt she projected as many pixels onto the world’s screen as she took in. So while I trust the stories I recall in broad outline, their interpretation through my old self is suspect. Forget reporting the external events right, try judging them when you’re an alumna of custodial care. When I reach to grasp a solid truth from that time, smoke pours through my fingers. Yet driving east with all my belongings wedged into Warren’s small white car, I feel swept off my feet as any storybook maiden by her champion. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and the holiday burger taken at a roadside diner is a feast. We move into a bleached-out neo-ghetto apartment, which we pack with books and our two rickety desks laden with separate typewriters. December, a potted fern going brown gets hung with cardboard angels we cover in foil. On their heads I glue faces torn out of newspaper or off postcards—the Three Stooges, a poet or two, movie stars.