Love

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 The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  The epiphany of the cock. I love his cock. Every millimeter, every centimeter, every movement at every moment. His was the first that spoke to me, that took me personally, that never failed me. A-Man remains calm in the face of his own erection—the ultimate test of male dignity. In my experience, most men, when hard, don’t act as if their penis is their own, but as if they have suddenly become subject to some kind of erectile radar device that forces them to relinquish all responsibility for its erratic behavior. A-Man, however, presents a complete paradox. Filled with the same juices, the same desires, the same hardness, he never loses his head. He uses his desire to create an event, to push boundaries, to do something not done before. He is the only man I’ve seen who can walk around a room with a killer erection and still look like a man with a mission—focused, alert, self- contained, and mischievous. He has the most noble erection I’ve ever met. Sometimes we discuss just where exactly is his cock going in my body. Somewhere into the center, behind my belly button. We have even measured with the tape measure. Hard to tell the exact angle. What is sure is that he stirs my guts from right to left, forward, upward, sideways, and back. It really gets your attention, having a large cock in your ass, concentrates the mind. Each time, rebirth. Nearly a hundred and fifty so far. That is a lot of starting your whole life over. You might think, after all that ass-fucking, why am I still counting? I’m anal! There you have it. Back to the terrible twos. The best way to feel, to know, a man’s cock is through one’s ass, where the walls cling to every inch all the way to the head. A pussy has less feeling, fewer nerves, less strength, less muscular power—and, often, less interest. A pussy, genetically, wants impregnation, the juice; an asshole wants the ride of its life. Both holes, I would postulate, reconcile the problem of mortality as caverns for creation: vaginas for babies, asses for art. Speaking of Michelangelo, there is the question of trimming the bush, the male bush. A-Man trims. In the beginning he didn’t, and then one day I suggested that a trimmed rim around the base of his cock would look superb, like a samurai warrior. “Depilation is the act of a fastidious lover,” states the Kamasutra. He thought about it for a minute and then promptly went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub. As I held the flashlight, he trimmed. And trimmed, and trimmed. He went far beyond the original idea and just cut down the whole bush—sides, top, balls, underballs, everything. Now there’s no going back to the bush.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  My orgasm arc with him is an act of giving, opening, giving. With others it is withholding, a battleground of control. In the past, I have achieved orgasm through the paradoxical experience of maintaining control of my pleasure all the while that my orgasm, with a life force of its own, desires its own fruition. The battle—and it is a battle—always ends with an orgasm more potent for its release than for any emotional pleasure. There are quite a few men out there who want nothing more than to please. For them I come in angry triumph: the greater my contempt for their wishing-to-please, the greater my resistance; the greater my resistance, the greater my orgasm. This is the pleasure, literally—and clitorally—of the war between the sexes. Afterwards, so sensitized, I shun all touch and, like Garbo, want to be alone. To take notes, eat dinner, and read The New Yorker. Is this any way to come? Well, it is one way. With him I have learned another. The way of no resistance. Of infinite contractions and many arrivals. And it was not a struggle to give up the struggle. It just happened with him, as if my body knew—I sure didn’t—that he was the one, the one man I could trust, the one man I could give to without his misinterpreting the gift, taking advantage of it, making it mean what it didn’t mean. Perhaps it was his beauty. DNA to DNA. He does have, objectively speaking, the most beautiful physique of them all. Maybe my clit knew he was my sexual mate long before I did. Just as it knew that resistance was necessary to all those men whose DNA was not a match for mine. With them I come from hostility, with him from love. #181 Last night—181. I tell him, after, “A hundred and eighty-one.” And I point out that that is just ass-fucks, that does not count pussy warm-ups. “What does that tell you?” I say. “That tells me three-hundred and sixty-two,” he said, “that’s what that tells me. Three sixty-two tells me it’s a good year.” SOUVENIRS As we approached two hundred, I found that my desire for continual repetition, for impossible guarantees, was intensifying. Managing my relentless need to be in that place with him became a full-time job. There was the disastrous day when the cleaning lady grabbed his well-worn shirt off my bed with the sheets and I came home and saw, to my horror, that she had washed, dried, and neatly folded my aromatic lifeline. I had slept every night with the shirt that smelled like him. Now it smelled like Bounce.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He stands by the bed naked, hard, and beautiful and says, “Show me your pussy.” He watches as I take off my thong, lie back on the bed, and bend my knees up and apart. Looking at my pussy, he says, “Spread it apart.” With a hand on each side I open my little pink pussy lips to him. He kneels before me and sucks on my clit, sings on my clit like a troubadour breaking all the rules. I flowed into his tongue and he murmured, “You like it when I eat your pussy, don’t you?” “I would die for it,” I admitted. I cannot imagine feeling greater love in all my life, nor do I expect to ever feel greater love, except for him. Nor would I ever ask or want greater love than I feel for him. With any others, after him, I will need to rest. THE UNWRITTEN RULES We are not domestic. We stay in the desire, in the bedroom—and out of the kitchen, the laundry, the office, and any other room that would threaten to bring in reality. We have, on a few occasions, when famished after sex, cooked dinner—well, actually he cooked it, but then we ate it in the bathtub with candles, floating a large metal bowl filled with tender rare meat between us. Both of us in the deep end, of course. We’ve never been to a movie and don’t plan on going to one, ever. Why would we? We are the movie: the porn that can never be—visually astounding, spontaneously inventive, genitally graphic, and viscerally soul-searing. It isn’t predictable with A-Man. The sex, the ass-fucking, that is the only constant. We never don’t fuck. We are not monogamous. Never have been and never will be. Neither of us has ever asked for it and neither of us has ever offered it. Offering it is the only way it could happen—neither of us would intrude on the other’s free choice. Free choice is at the core of what is hot between us. The subject has been discussed only to establish what is mutually understood. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is the basic policy. He says, “I don’t need to know.” He pays attention to what is, not what isn’t. Having never done this before, I thought about it plenty. If one has sex with someone other than the Beloved, what happens? Does one risk diminishing one’s affection for the Beloved? Does it contaminate the love? Or does it merely confirm the love in every way, the contrast illuminating the beauty of the Beloved yet again, in yet another way, from yet another angle. And this gift to each other—the freedom to allow for other experiences—only enhances the love. Love without chains is love.

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

  Appreciating the deeply shared understanding and care that supports the micro-moments of love you feel with intimates can make you wonder whether newborns have the wherewithal to truly engage in love. While (most) parents love (most of) their newborns, are their newborns truly capable of loving them back? With their limited capacities, how can newborns muster up the selfless focus on others seemingly required by love? The trick is, they don’t need to muster at all. Under the right prenatal conditions, newborns arrive thirsty for connection with caring adults, trusting and open. From close range, they seek out your eye contact, body contact, and even synchronize their movements, to the extent they can, with yours. Ever the empiricist, I tested this claim out within minutes after my first son was born. As I held him skin to skin on my chest, we simply gazed at each other. Then I stuck my tongue out at him. It didn’t take but a moment for him to mirror me by sticking out his own tongue. I replicated my experiment some three years later when my second son was born and got the same result, a silly mother-son synchrony immortalized both times by my husband on film. Recasting love as positivity resonance makes it easy to identify micro-moment after micro-moment of love blossoming between infants and their responsive caretakers. Developmental science has shown that the attentive, infant-caregiver dance is absolutely vital to normal human development. As we’ll see in chapter 3, infant-caregiver synchrony runs deeper than visible behaviors; it coordinates biological synchrony as well. Babies live off this stuff. We all do. Like babies, we were all designed to thrive on love. Positivity resonance is a vital nutrient. This makes the fate of babies who, for whatever reasons, are deprived of positivity resonance all the more heart-wrenching. Sadly, not all children have the loving nourishment they need. Some, even as their other physical needs are met—for shelter, food, clothing, and such—have far too little experience sharing positive emotions with others. Love’s absence, research shows, can compromise nearly all aspects of children’s development—their cognitive and social abilities, their health. At one extreme, the stark and pervasive deprivation experienced by Romanian orphans reveals the painfully long shadow cast by early emotional neglect. Even among those orphans adopted and raised by loving Western families, developmental problems can persist for decades. More commonplace and poignant, however, is the unintentional emotional neglect that emerges within ordinary, even financially prosperous families.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  After ten years I left my husband. He couldn’t see me any longer; and he never even knew I had an asshole. I had retired from dancing some years earlier because of a hip injury that had first surfaced six months into my marriage. Funny, that: life’s wicked signposts. A friend says hips represent where you hold trust in your body. Hokum? Maybe. Either way, both my right hip joint and my trust were shot. I became intolerable both to myself and my husband. A wailing banshee, a celibate nymphomaniac with a suitcase of resentments and matching lingerie. I listed fifty-two of the former and left with the latter. Freedom. Fear. THE MASSEUR This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere. —JOHN DONNE My first affair began a week after the end of my marriage. Amazing what two phone calls can precipitate: one ended a ten-year relationship, and the other booked a one-hour massage that began the rest of my life. The adorable masseur. I had already had two massages from him for my wounded hip, and I’d held my breath to conceal my desire: I was still married. But by the next massage I wasn’t, and I took my first bold step. I could tell that he was too professional to make an overture, so I decided it was up to me. I planned beforehand that if (ha!) I was aroused again, I would say something by the end of the session—but what? I didn’t want to embarrass myself; the risk was high. At the end of that third massage, dripping with a decade of sublimated desire, I asked him in a general kind of way, “Do your clients ever get aroused?” “Yeah,” he ventured, and got up from a chair on the other side of the room to come back to the table where I was lying. “But I just let it be.” He was young and handsome, with big blue eyes and soft full lips, but this was not the source of my attraction. It was those magic hands. He placed one below my throat and I lost all decency and self-control. He did not retreat but slid his hand under the sheet. In the next few hours, I learned about how his mouth and tongue held the same magic current as his hands, and I thought I would die from the pleasure he gave me. It was a dream of pleasure, of love—yes, love, physical love. And no fucking, just sucking.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I lay beside her, and put my arms about her. My own desire I quite forgot, and she made no move to remind me of it. I forgot, too, Gully Sutherland - who three hours before had put a gun to his own heart, because a man had sat through his routine unsmiling. I only lay; and soon Kitty slept. And I studied her face, where it showed creamy pale in the darkness, and thought She loves me, She loves me — like a fool with a daisy-stalk, endlessly exclaiming over the same last browning petal. The next morning we were shy together, at first - and Kitty, I think, was the shyest of all. ‘How much we drank, last night!’ she said, not gazing at me; and for a terrible second I thought it might really have been only the champagne that made her cling to me, and say that she loved me, so very very much ... But as she spoke she blushed. I said, before I could stop myself: ‘If you unsay all those things you said last night, oh Kitty, I’ll die!’ and that made her raise her eyes to mine, and I saw that she had simply been anxious, that I might only have been drunk... And then we gazed and gazed at one another; and for all that I had gazed at her a thousand times before, I felt now that I was looking at her as if for the first time. We had lived and slept and laboured, side by side, for half a year; but there had been a kind of veil between us, that our cries and whispers of the night before had quite torn down. She looked flushed, washed - new-born; so that I could hardly press her skin, for fear of marking it - so that I feared, almost, to kiss her lips again in case they bruised. But I did kiss them; and then I lay, quite at my leisure, and watched as she splashed water on her face and arms, and fastened on her underclothes and frock, and buttoned her shoes. As she worked at her hair I lit a cigarette: I struck the match and let it burn almost to my fingers, gazing at the flame as it ate its way along the wood. I said, ‘When I first knew you, I used to think that, whenever I thought of you, I was all lit up, like a lamp. I was afraid that people would see...’ She smiled.

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

  One student raised his hand to confess that he’d been practicing LKM for some weeks and had come to the conclusion that he was incapable of directing love to himself. Sharon recounted how stunned and puzzled His Holiness was. “You’re wrong!” he told the student, albeit in his characteristic light and loving tone. “You have Buddha nature!” he proclaimed, referring to the possibility of awakening that is ever-present in all people. The ability to direct warmth and tenderness to the self was apparently a nonissue for him and to those he most frequently taught. Sharon also tells me that the reason that the traditional Buddhist practice of LKM begins with the self is because the self is presumed to be an easy target for love. Indeed, wishing oneself well was thought to be as natural as breathing, or as seeking out food when hungry or water when thirsty. Having practiced the skill of cultivating loving-kindness for the easy targets, like a cherished teacher or mentor, a dear friend, or oneself, students will then have developed key skills before they approach the harder targets, like unknown or difficult people. The logic is not to slam those new to the practice with the hardest parts first, but rather to build their skills gradually, starting with easy targets and working up to the more difficult ones. Accordingly, if you find that directing love toward yourself is especially problematic, you might consider whether to practice with easier people first. Perhaps start with a teacher or mentor to whom you feel especially grateful, or a friend who the mere thought of can melt your face into a smile. After you’ve spent considerable time—perhaps even weeks—practicing cultivating warm and tender feelings for these people, then you can begin experimenting with cultivating warm and tender feelings for yourself. You may in fact be your own most “difficult” person on which to focus in the next stage of your practice. If so, you’re in good company. That’s a common experience. Rest assured, the order of targets to which you direct your warm wishes matters far less than the time and energy you devote to developing this habit and skill. Your aim is simply to condition your heart to be more comfortable and familiar with warm and tender sentiments. Sidestep Obstacles to Self-Love As I introduced the practice of LKM in the previous chapter, I suggested that you lightly reflect on the good qualities of the person or people for whom you are extending your good wishes. Here I expand on the logic of this. As you visualize a particular person, gently name what’s good about him or her: “Generous.” “Kind.” “Accepting.” “Honest.” “Grounded.” “Inspiring.” You don’t need a long list, one or two traits will do. Let yourself begin to see these one or two traits not simply as labels, affixed to these people in superficial ways, but rather as deep expressions of who they are in this world, of who they’ve been to you.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter the kingdom. One day, I ventured down on the Pre-Raphaelite. First time. Terrified. Curious. I wanted to see her pleasure in order to know my own. She was a genuine redhead. Eating pussy when you are a heterosexual woman is overwhelming. To confront a pussy that close for the first time—you can’t ever get that close, at that angle, to your own—is like looking narcissism in the face with a resounding Yes! Profound. Wet. It can sometimes be so hard to be oneself in one’s own sex life. With another woman, a woman’s identity receives a brutal jolt: she is me, I am her, her pleasure is mine, mine is hers. The source, the center, the origin of the human race becomes your only view. I bonded with my own sex and learned to love myself. I also developed a new compassion for the male divers. A pussy is a wild and watery landscape of hills and valleys and ravines and mighty holes that suck one in like quicksand. Once in, you cannot escape. Diving is an act of bravery. The redhead, however, demonstrated less hesitancy, and ate me like a woman who knows how. Naughty, considerate, and relentless. Her fingers felt like tongues, her mouth like a baby’s, sucking. I resist men’s fingers. Too rough, too big, too fast. My shield goes up, my clit hides. My orgasms with her were long, open, and free. The next New Year’s we three reconvened and she had a surprise for us: her beautiful young Belgian friend who was mourning the loss of her rock-star lover. One-two-three-four, three of one and one of the other. She and me and him . . . and her. I did a striptease to Led Zeppelin, swinging around the luscious green velvet curtains at the door of her boudoir—a kind of Gone With the Wind–Vivien-Leigh-Gone-Wild moment.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  If I asked A-Man to be monogamous, then I would always know I had taken his freedom, and I loved him basking in his freedom. I did not want to control him. I remembered him saying once, “You go out with a chick, you sleep with her once, and she hands you an armful of ‘do nots,’ and you’re looking at her great tits and her hot pussy and you’re looking at the ‘do nots’ in your arms and you hand them back. ‘Hey, I think these are yours.’” I had admired that—that’s why he was A-Man and not Any Man. He was not going to compromise himself for pussy, like so many men do. And I didn’t want to compromise a man with my pussy, I wanted a man to be true to himself . . . while desperately wanting my pussy. But this was only idle speculation, for I knew that A-Man would not be monogamous, even if I asked. He had told me long ago that he had tried being a boyfriend several times and always failed miserably. Better not to even try. I agreed. Failure is the great anti-aphrodisiac. Besides, if I wanted him to be only with me then I would have to return the favor and be only with him. And I knew that I couldn’t do that. I loved him too much. I was too vulnerable to give myself entirely to him. Without a commitment that might be broken, at least any pangs I might be feeling about the mousy brunette were not compounded by the self-righteous pain and anger of betrayal. So, I told myself, Do you know what you have to be if you’re not monogamous? Not jealous? No, jealousy is inevitable. Worth it. You’ve got to be worth it. He’s got to be worth it. The fucking has got to be worth it. Worth the occasional, gut-ripping insanity of jealousy. WAR As the days passed, however, I started feeling this overwhelming need to assert my authority over the mousy brunette. When I next saw A-Man I slyly suggested that we all get in bed together to assuage everyone’s pain with love and sperm. He smiled at me, loving that I was the kind of woman who would solve a problem with an orgy. Well, better than bayonets. He then said that he had actually suggested this to her during that first confrontation but that she had only cried harder in response, confessing that she would be too jealous. Damn. I knew if we could get her in bed, I could win. Suddenly winning became imperative. Winning what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but the stakes seemed very high indeed. It was not about having him exclusively, it never had been; it was about knowing I was the most beloved.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  6. €v yap Xpiot@ ‘Inoov ovbte Tepitouyn Te ioyvea ove axpoBvotia, adda wiotis bu ayamns evepyouneyn. “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love.” For the disclosure of the apostle’s fundamental idea of the nature of religion, there is no more important sentence in the whole epistle, if, indeed, in any of Paul’s epistles. Each term and construction of the sentence is significant. év Xpwot@ Inood (the bracketing of "Invotd by WH., because of its omission by B. Clem., seems scarcely justified) limits toyve.. It is not precisely equivalent to Tots éy Xpitt@ "Inoov, but means, rather, ‘‘on that basis which is created by Christ Jesus”; nearly equal, therefore, in modern phrase, to “in Christianity,” ‘on the Christian basis.” With toyver (from A’schylus down, “to have strength,” ‘to be able,” “to avail’’) is to be supplied, not duxaodv (“is able to justify”; cf. Acts 6'°), which would be to limit the thought more narrowly than the context would war- rant, but €is duxaroovyny, as suggested by the preceding sen- tence, and in the inclusive sense of the term as there used. By the omission of the article with teorTou7 and all the following nominatives, these nouns are given a qualitative force, with emphasis upon the quality and character of the acts. This might be expressed, though also exaggerated, by some such expression as, “by their very nature circumcision,” etc. The phrase 6 ayarns évepyoupern furnishes a most significant addition to the word méorts, which has filled so large a place in the epistle thus far. For not only has he not previously in 280 GALATIANS this epistle used the word a@ya7n, but, though often using each alone in other epistles (for méoTis, see Rom. 117 3”, etc.; and for ayamn, see esp. 1 Cor., chap. 13) he has nowhere else in any of his letters brought the two words into immediate connec- tion. The relation between the two terms, which is here ex- pressed but not perfectly defined by évepyoupevn did, “opera- tive, effective through,” “coming to effective expression in,” is made clearer by a consideration of the nature of the two re- spectively, as Paul has indicated that nature elsewhere. Faith is for Paul, in its distinctively Christian expression, a committal of one’s self to Christ, issuing in a vital fellowship with him, by which Christ becomes the controlling force in the moral life of the believer. See esp. 2° and cf. detached note on IIéo7ts and Ilicrevw, V B. 2. (e), p. 482. But the principle of Christ’s life is love (see 22°, TOU ayamnoarTos, etc.; Rom. 55-8 855-39), Faith in Christ, therefore, generates love, and through it becomes effective in conduct. See also v.”, where first among the ele- ments which life by the Spirit (which, as v.® indicates, is the life of faith) produces is love; and on the moral effect and ex- pression of love, see especially 1 Cor., chap.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  I. The verb éyaxéw is used in classical writers from Homer down, signify- ing with reference to persons, “‘to be fond of,” “to love,” “‘to desire”; with reference to things, “‘to be contented with,” “‘to take pleasure in.” If we seek a more definite statement of the content of the term, it appears that there are three elements which with more or less constancy and in varying degrees of emphasis enter into the thought expressed by the word: (a) “‘to admire,” “to approve,” ‘“‘to recognise the worth of,” “to take pleasure in,” (b) “‘to desire to possess” (c) ‘“‘to be well-disposed towards,” ‘to wish to benefit.” The first of these elements appears distinctly in Plato, Rep. 330B, C, yet blended with or shading into the second: todcou Evexa jodumny, hy & eye, bt wor B50Eas 08 apddea ayan&y te yonuata, toUto 3& noroUaw dc To TOAD of Ay wu) adtot xTHowWYTat: of S& xtHGkuUEvot StTAH Hol GAAot dondkLov- tat alta. oreo yxe ot nowntat tz abtHy mothuata xat ol matéoes todc Tatdac ayardot taltn te Sh xalt ot yonuattomuevor, meot te YoNUaTa omovddCoucty @s goyoyv EautHy, xa xat& thy yostav preo of &AAot. The third element is present, if at all in this example, only by suggestion in the words xa ot matéees tos matdacg d&yanot. There is, indeed, but slight trace of this element of meaning in the word as used by non-biblical writers of the pre- Christian period. Il. In the Lxx éyaxéw translates several Hebrew words, but in the great majority of cases (about 130 out of 160) the Kal of 27s, which is also rendered in a few cases (10) by gtAgw. 278 is used with much the same range of meaning as our English word love. Thus, e¢. g., it is used of the love of a parent for a child, Gen. 258; of a husband for a wife, Gen. 291® 85 of sexual love in which the element of passion and desire of possession is prominent, 2 Sam. 13} 4; of the love of friend for friend and of a people for a leader, 1 Sam. 181 3 18; of God’s love for Israel, Deut. 487 Hos. 113; of the love of men for God, Ex. 20° Deut. 6° 111; of the love of men for material things, Hos. 9!; and much more frequently for the love of immaterial things, good or evil, such as righteousness or peace, and their opposites, Ps. 45 (?) 117°) 335 Proy. 121. It is evident that into the thought of the Hebrew word enter all three of the elements named above, the emphasis upon the several elements varying in the various instances very greatly, even in some cases to the exclusion of one element or another. The element of admiration, approval, recognition of worth, is doubtless always present, whether one speak of the love of men for women, of men for men, of men for God, of men for righteousness, or even of God for men.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live in faith, faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not make of no effect the grace of God; for if righteousness is through law, Christ died needlessly. UDB ier try op Oe do) IIg 15. “Hyeis pices lovdaios cal ov && éOvav duaptorol, “We though Jews by nature and not sinners of Gentile origin.”” The clause is concessive in relation to Kat jueis . . . éructevoaper, etc., below: though possessing by virtue of birth all the advan- tages of knowledge of law (cf. Rom. 3! *), and hence of oppor- tunity of obeying it and achieving righteousness through it (cf. Phil. 3 *), and not men born outside the law, and hence in the natural course of events possessing none of the advantages of it. On the use of pdcet, cf. Rom. 227 1171-24. 2& 20vayv (note the omission of the article) is qualitative in force. The phrase is one of origin, exactly antithetical in thought, though not perfectly so in form to obcet ’Ioudaior. &uaeptwrot is evidently used not in its strict sense denoting persons guilty of sin, not perfectly righteous (see detached note on ‘Auaetia Pp. 436), but, as often in N. T., ‘‘persons (from the point of view of the speaker or from that which he for the moment adopts) pre-eminently sinful,” ‘‘sinners above others,” “habitual transgressors of law.” So of the publicans and other Jews, who at least from the Pharisaic point of view were guilty of specific violation of the law, Lk. 7% 37 151, 2, etc., and of the Gentiles, like our word “heathen,” Mk. 144 Lk. 247; cf. r Mac. 134: xat ZOnxav éxet 2Ov0c auaetwrdy, &vSeacg maoavéuouc. Tob. 138: detxvbw thy loydy xal thy weyarwobyyy attod Over ducotwArAGy. 16. ciddtes dé Ort od SuxaodTar dvOpwros e& epywv vopov “yet knowing that a man is not justified by works of law.” In antithesis to the preceding concessive phrase this is causal, giving the reason for the émucTevoapev of the principal clause. To be justified, Ssmavodc Oar, is to be accounted by God accept- able to him, to be approved of God, accepted as being such as God desires man to be.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  In the case of the love of men for God it becomes worship, adoration, or at least approaches this; in the case of friends, it involves mutual admiration; when it is goodness that is loved, it is the object of approval and delight. The desire to possess is likewise usually present; in a gross form in such a case aS 2 Sam. 13!-¢ Hos. 91; of an elevated type in the love of men for 520 GALATIANS righteousness. The desire to benefit can not, of course, be included when the object is impersonal; it may be said to be driven out by desire to possess in such a case as 2 Sam. 131-4; in the case of men’s love for God it becomes desire to serve the person loved (Deut. 11! '); in the case of God’s love for men and in such injunctions as Lev. 1918 #4 Deut. 10! the desire to benefit is the prominent element. Ill. In the N. T. usage of &yankw the same elements appear, the word being used of personal friendship where the element of admiration, usually accompanied with desire to benefit, is prominent (Mk. 10% Lk. 75 Jn. 115 13%); of God’s attitude towards Jesus, where approval is evidently the chief element of the thought and the word approximates the meaning of éxAéyo, “to choose”’ (Jn. 3° Eph. 1°); of the love of God for men of good character, where the meaning is much the same save in degree of emphasis (2 Cor. 97); of the love of God and of Christ for even sinful men (Jn. 3!* Gal. 22° Heb. 12° 1 Jn. 41°»), where benevolence, desire to benefit, is the chief ele- ment; of the love which men are bidden to have for God and for Christ, and of Christ’s love for God, in which admiration is raised to adoration, and in- cludes readiness to serve (Mt. 2237 Jn. 141 21, 31 Rom. 828 1 Cor. 83 1 Jn. 420); of the love which men are bidden to have for one another, even their enemies, in which the willingness and desire to benefit is prominent, and in the case of enemies admiration or approval falls into the background (Mt. 2249 Jn. 13%4¢ Rom. 13% 9 Eph. 5% 28 1 Jn. 21°); and finally of the love of things, when admiration and desire to possess are prominent, to the entire exclusion of desire to benefit (Lk. 114% Jn. 124? 1 Jn.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  Jesus Christ: the Son of God, 51, 138 f., 216, 221; born of woman, born under law, 216 ff.; died, 139, 140 (cf. I1), on the cross, 143, 145 (cf. 168-175); raised from the dead by the Father, 6 f.; source and agent of Paul’s apostleship, 5; source of grace, 18, 20, 361; jointly with God the Father source of grace and peace, 11; gave himself for our SINS) Liye (Cees O) ecallingy: not ascribed to, 19; the gospe! of, 24; Paul a servant of, 32; is the content of the revelation by INDEXES which Paul received his gospel, 41-43, 50, 51; sent forth from God, 216, to deliver them that are under law, 219, that they might receive the adoption, 220; the sons of God receive his Spirit, 221; he is the basis and cause of Christian liberty, 83, 270; object of faith, 120 f., 123, 138 f., 196 f.; cf. 202; basis of justification, 124; his crucifixion participated in by Paul, 135; he lives in the believer, 136 f.; cf. 248; not distinguishable in ex- perience from the Spirit, 137; manifested his love in his gift of himself for men, 139 (cf. 11); his death evidence that righteous- ness is not through law, 140; set forth to the Galatians, crucified, 143; delivered men from the curse of the law, 168-171; be- came a curse for us, 171 ff., in order that we might receive the blessing of the Spirit, 176; the law a means of bringing men to him, 200; by baptism into him they acquire his standing, 203; in him all distinctions are abol- ished, 206 ff.; those who are his are heirs of the promise to Abra- ham, 208; they who have the Spirit of the Son recognise God as Father, 223; relation of Gen- tile believers to Christ de- stroyed by receiving circumci- sion, seeking to be justified in law, 272, 275; in him neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but faith work- ing through love, 279 f.; they who are his have crucified the flesh, 319; the Galatians ex- horted to fulfil the law of the 527 Christ, 329; his cross an occa- sion of persecution, 349, and the ground of glorying, 354; the apostle received as Jesus Christ by the Galatians, 242; bears in his body the marks of Jesus, 359 f. Jew, Jews, 108, III, 119, 206. Jewish Christians, 108 f.; eating with Gentiles, lix f., 116. Jews: religion of, 46; attitude towards Gentiles, lix, 104. John, 94. JosepHuS: use of geographical terms, xxxili; use of d:a0hxn, 499. Joy, 312, 314. Jubilees, doctrines of the book of, 158. Judaisers, see ‘‘Opponents of Paul.”’ Judea, 62 f., 435 f.; churches otf, 62s Justify, 119, 123 f., 159, 165, 201, 275, 460 ff. Kindness, 312, 315. Kingdom of God, 310 ff.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  In 1 Jn., asin the Gospel of John, 6 cate absolut> frequently occurs in antithesis with 6 vids, suggesting that the ref- erence is to God as Father of Christ. N. T. usage in general evidently has a twofold basis, on the one side in the conviction attested by the synoptic gospels that as Jesus could speak to other men of God as “your Father,” so he could also think and speak of him as ‘‘my Father,” and on the other, in that the ascription to him of messiahship carried with it the designation of God as his Father in the sense in which God was the Father of the Messiah (cf. esp. Heb. 15). These two conceptions have, indeed, a common root in the conception of God’s love and watch-care over those whom he approves, but the differentiation of the two ideas would probably be more present to early Christian thought than their common root. A comparison of the several books of N. T., with remembrance of the order of their development and of that of their sources, especially of the synoptists and the fourth gospel, indicates that the two conceptions developed in the order named, the conception of the fatherhood of God as pertaining to Jesus in a unique sense or degree grad- ually gaining ascendancy over the earlier idea that God is Father of all whom he approves, but even in its latest forms never wholly losing sight of the basal idea of fatherhood as consisting essentially in love. That “the Father loveth the Son and showeth him all things that he himself doeth,”’ is still in the fourth gospel the fundamental element of fatherhood. In respect to the thought of Paul in particular, it is to be noted (a) that he used the same form of expression in reference to Jesus as in respect to Christians, viz., ““God and Father of us,” “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”’; (b) that he expressly associated together the sonship of men by virtue of which they call God their Father and the sonship of Jesus, making the possession of the Spirit of the Son the ground or the conse- quence of the possession of the spirit of sonship (Rom. 8-16 Gal. 44-7); but (c) that he did not apparently join the two together in the expression, ‘“‘the God and Father of us and of the Lord Jesus Christ”’ ; (d) that though employ- ing the expression “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and once (2 Cor.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I always found cocks rather ugly—better not to look too closely. Wrinkled, asymmetrical, disparate shades of color. Dangling and silly when down, curved, veiny, and just plain weird when up. Was this foreign protuberance supposed to get me wet? Visually, it dried me up. Visually, it was humorous. And scary. And they all want you to lick it, suck it, and rub it. Ugh. The only thing I liked about it was the metaphor, a monument of vertical desire. And that unruly hair all over the place. It’s insulting. When I deigned to go down on a man, hairs always caught on my tongue—and it can take ages to find that one curly culprit. In short, a cock was not a thing of beauty to me. Now, women, they are beautiful. Breasts, hips, curves, asses, faces, eyes, lips, smell, pussy—everything about a beautiful woman is, well, beautiful. Would my eyes ever see a cock as an object of beauty? I tolerated them at worst and felt a mild, passing affection at best. And since they rarely did much for me during intercourse, I really had no proper place for them. Then he came along and it all changed—in those first three hours. The epiphany of the cock. I love his cock. Every millimeter, every centimeter, every movement at every moment. His was the first that spoke to me, that took me personally, that never failed me. A-Man remains calm in the face of his own erection—the ultimate test of male dignity. In my experience, most men, when hard, don’t act as if their penis is their own, but as if they have suddenly become subject to some kind of erectile radar device that forces them to relinquish all responsibility for its erratic behavior. A-Man, however, presents a complete paradox. Filled with the same juices, the same desires, the same hardness, he never loses his head. He uses his desire to create an event, to push boundaries, to do something not done before. He is the only man I’ve seen who can walk around a room with a killer erection and still look like a man with a mission—focused, alert, self-contained, and mischievous. He has the most noble erection I’ve ever met. Sometimes we discuss just where exactly is his cock going in my body. Somewhere into the center, behind my belly button. We have even measured with the tape measure. Hard to tell the exact angle. What is sure is that he stirs my guts from right to left, forward, upward, sideways, and back. It really gets your attention, having a large cock in your ass, concentrates the mind. Each time, rebirth. Nearly a hundred and fifty so far. That is a lot of starting your whole life over. You might think, after all that ass-fucking, why am I still counting? I’m anal! There you have it. Back to the terrible twos.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  She showed us a futon that rolled out over the Persian carpet, kissed us both on the forehead, placed two condoms and a bottle of water beside the futon, and disappeared to her own bedroom. She was our fairy godmother, she had felt it between us, she had seen it, and she sanctioned it, even engineered it—despite the fact that she had wanted him. I’d never had a woman do that for me before. I loved the redhead and her house of Freudian mirrors. And then the blessings really began. Thus far, there had been no fucking that night. Now love poured out of this guy’s body like oil. When he entered me, I knew. I just knew. He fucked in love, not frenzy; in tenderness, not anger; in ease, not desperation. What his cock could do for me seemed to be the question he was answering. It did plenty for both of us. Finally, a fuck I liked. A new year, a new world. I saw him once more, alone, before he went to Europe for two weeks, but I simply didn’t have the courage to love him, so I got myself one of those temporary boyfriends—monogamy, weekends away, dinner parties, friends, plans. When the Young Man returned, he called, and I told him I had a boyfriend, I couldn’t see him. He was too good to be real, I told myself, so I chose instead a small, jealous man who didn’t even like to eat pussy. Why? Self-hatred, lack of faith, and a fear of what is beautiful: divorce can make you nuts. But after the boyfriend snooped in my diary one morning six weeks later and confronted me with questionable evidence—I had kissed the Young Man at the gym and had written it down—I fired him on the spot, my outrage being greater than his. I never saw him again. So I continued to date some men (dinner) while fucking others (no dinner). I was learning a lot—well, two things anyway. I preferred sex on an empty stomach, and to eat alone with a good book. MEN Despite all this emerging knowledge, convention dies hard and I still kept trying out boyfriends—whom I always bitterly resented afterwards for allowing me to entrap myself. But between these misguided debacles there were several amusing forays. The impossibly handsome actor who modeled Jansen bathing suits but whose riveting blue eyes seemed to look into mine only to see their own reflection. It was the first time I witnessed a man’s narcissism that was undoubtedly greater than mine—how unbecoming, I thought. His cock was huge and, I suppose, impressive, but it smelled antiseptic and I kept away. The big neighbor who looked like Nicolas Cage was a bit of a jerk, but he fucked so slow that I cried at the beauty, at the sadness. Then there was the other neighbor, the biker. I’d never had a Harley man; never done it before on a Harley, over a Harley.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  The sentence dcYa7nrjaet<; . . . aeaui:6v is quoted from Lev, 19", following the Lxx. dyaTCiQcjett; clearly refers specially to the love of benevolence (see detached note on 'Ayarcdw and 'Aydcic^). In the original passage, :pD3 rijn1? Fanxi, n, though in itself capable of being used colourlessly to denote another person without indication of the precise relationship, doubtless derives from the context ("Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself") a specific reference to fellow Israelites. This limitation of the command, as, of course, also those passages which enjoin or express a hostile attitude to non-Israelites or to per- sonal enemies (Deut 23SM1 25"-" Ps." 41" 6922-28 io9«-»), the apostle* disregards, as he does the specific statutes of the law, such, e. #., as those requiring circumcision and the observance of days, which he conceived to be no longer valuable and valid. His affirmation is to be taken not as a verdict of mere exegesis, summing up with mathematical exactness the whole teaching of 0. T., and giving its precise weight to each phase of it, but as a judgment of insight and broad valuation, which, discriminating what is central, pervasive, controlling, from what is exceptional, affirms the former, not introducing the latter even as a qualification but simply ignoring it. It is improbable that he drew a sharp distinction between portions of the law, and regarded those which were contrary to the spirit of love or not demanded by it as alien elements intruded into what was otherwise good; at least he never in- timates such a discrimination between good and bad parts of the law. Rather, it would seem, he looked at the law as a whole, as one might view a building many parts of which taken alone are without v, 14-16 297 form or comeliness, yet which as a whole is wholly beautiful. Its total meaning was to him love; and this was the law of God; the parts as such had for him no authority. 15. el 5e a\\rj\ovs Mwert ical KartcrOkTe, /JXerrcre JUT? far* aXX^Xoou apaXco07?r€. "But if ye are biting and devouring one another, take heed lest ye be consumed by one another." The form of the conditional clause and the tense of the verbs imply that the apostle has in mind a condition which he knows to be, or thinks may be, even now existing. It would but slightly exaggerate this suggestion to translate, "If ye continue your biting and devouring of one another." What the condition was to which he referred neither the passage nor the context discloses; most probably it was strife over the matters on which the judaisers were disturbing them.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  as the sphere of his new life, the apostle now hastens to identify that faith by the addition of the article rfj and a genitive express- ing the object of the faith. For other instances of a qualitative noun made definite by a subjoined article and limiting phrase, see W. XX 4 (WM. p. 174); Rad. p. 93; Gild. Syn. p. 283; Rob. p. 777; EMT 424; and cf. chap, i7 321. On the objective genitive after TrCcm?, see on 5i& Tr^rreco? Xpwrrou 'Iqo-ov, v.16. On the meaning of TOV vlov TOV 0eov, see detached note on The Titles and Predicates of Jesus, V, p. 404, What par- ticular phase of the meaning of this title as applied to Jesus is here in mind, or why it is chosen instead of X^O-TO'? or Xpio-rfa 'I^crov?, which have been used in this passage thus far, there is nothing in the context clearly to indicate. No theory is more probable than that here, as in i16, it is the Son of God as the revelation of God that he has in mind, and that this expression comes naturally to his lips in thinking of the love of Christ. See Rom. 83* 32; but notice also Rom. 58 836' 39, and observe in the context of these passages the alternation of titles of Jesus while speaking of his love or the love of God, without apparent reason for the change. •roO uloO TOO 0eoO: so tf ACDb a* «KLP, all the cursives, f Vg. Syr, (psh. hard.), Boh. Sah. Arm. Eth. Goth. Clem., and other fathers. Ln. adopted the reading TOO 0sou xal XptatoO attested by BD* FG d g. Despite its attestation by B, this is probably a Western corruption. The apostle never speaks of God expressly as the object of a Christian's faith. TOI) &*ya*jrtfcravr<k f*& teal frrapa&6vrQ<s eavrov im& "who loved me and gave himself up for me." Cf, the note on roS &fonw $avri*v vw^p r&v a/yuzpri&v ^/i<5i/? chap. i4. Here as there, and even more clearly because of the use of the verb irapaSCBwtu (cf. Rom. 425 8* i Cor. nw Eph. 52> 25, esp. Eph. 5*) in, place of the simple S/Scp/u, the reference is to Christ's volun- tary surrender of himself to death. The use of /^ and lf*ov rather than f)^m and fm&v indicates the deep personal feeling with which the apostle writes. The whole egression, while suggesting the ground of faith and the aspect of Christ's work with, which faith has specially to do, is rather a spontaneous 140 GALATIANS and grateful utterance of the apostle's feeling called forth by the mention of the Son of God as the object of his faith than a phrase introduced with argumentative intent. On the mean- ing of ayaTrdu, see on 514.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  the Greek is very expressive even when reproduced in Eng- lish: "and live no longer I, but liveth in me Christ/' The first Se is not adversative but continuative, the sentence ex- pressing another aspect of the same fact set forth in the preced- ing sentence. The translation of AV. and RV., "Yet I live, yet no longer I," is wholly unwarranted; this meaning would have required a\\d before ovic£nt Cf. RV. mg. The second 8e is sub-adversative (Ell.), equivalent to the German "son- dern," introducing the positive correlative to a preceding nega- tive, statement. In this sentence Paul is clearly speaking of spiritual fellowship with Christ (cf. on v.19). Yet this is not a departure from the central thought of the whole passage. He has already said in v.19 that the purpose of the dying to law was that he might devote himself directly to the service of God instead of to the keeping of commandments. He now adds that in so doing he gains a new power for the achievement of that purpose, thus further justifying his course. Saying that it is no longer "I" that live, he implies that under law it was the "I" that lived, and the emphatic fy<*> is the same as in Rom. 715-20. There, indeed, it stands in w.17- 20 in direct antithesis to the apaprfa which is inherited from the past (cf. Rom. s12), here over against the Christ who is the power for good in the life of one who, leaving law, turns to him in faith. But the ^y<w is the same, the natural man having good impulses and willing the good which the law commands, but opposed by the inherited evil impulse and under law unable to do the good. On the significance of the expression &> ^/W, see Rom, 8*- u i Cor, 2*6 Col i27-29 Eph. 316"19. It is, of course, the heavenly Christ of whom he speaks, who in religious experience is not distinguishable from the Spirit of God (cf. chap, s16- ia- *8). With this spiritual being Paul feels himself to be living in such intimate fellowship, by him his whole life is so controlled, that he conceives him to be resident in him, imparting to him im- pulse and power, transforming ham morally and working through him for and upon other men. Cf. 4™. Substantially the same fact of fellowship with Christ by which he becomes the con- trolling factor of the life is expressed, with a difference of form 138 GALATIANS of thought rather than of essential conception of the nature of the relation, by the phrase eV X/MCTT$, which is more frequent in Paul than eV ejjiot. Cf. i22 326- 28 S4, and Frame on i Thes. i1, and references there given to modern literature.