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 Boys of My Youth (1998)

  She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator — careful, almost went down — then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet, in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard. In the porchlight the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a chalkboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us is aware of it yet. The collie turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house, she drops like a shoe onto her blanket, a thud, an adjustment. I’ve climbed back under my covers already but her leg’s stuck underneath her, we can’t get comfortable. I fix the leg, she rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up again and she’s gazing at me in the darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs. Right on time: 3:40 A.M. There are squirrels living in the spare bedroom upstairs. Three dogs also live in this house, but they were invited. I keep the door of the spare bedroom shut at all times, because of the squirrels and because that’s where the vanished husband’s belongings are stored. Two of the dogs — the smart little brown mutt and the Labrador — spend hours sitting patiently outside the door, waiting for it to be opened so they can dismantle the squirrels. The collie can no longer make it up the stairs, so she lies at the bottom and snores or stares in an interested manner at the furniture around her. I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day. Or that the dog at the bottom of the stairs keeps having mild strokes which cause her to tilt her head inquisitively and also to fall over. She drinks prodigious amounts of water and pees great volumes onto the folded blankets where she sleeps.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  To pursue being naked, you have to believe that this person is worth getting to know for the rest of your lives. Being naked is peeling back the layers, conversation after conversation, experience after experience, year after year. It’s rooted in a belief that the soul has infinite depth and you’ll never get to the bottom of it.18 Our understanding of what it means to be naked reflects what we believe about the human soul. Is it infinite? Or can you get to the end of a person? The failure to understand the infinite depth of the human soul is often why people who are married have affairs. They stop exploring the person they married. They find somebody who appears more interesting. Another couple I’ve known for a while just told me that they have been taking dancing lessons. They’ve been married well over thirty-five years, and they’ve just taken up a hobby together that’s new to both of them. It’s so simple, taking up a hobby together, and yet it’s so profound. We need them to keep dancing, don’t we? Because we intuitively know that if they keep dancing, the world will be better for all of us. We see God in their echad. We desperately need more Johnny and Junes.19 CHAPTER NINE WHOOPEE FOREVER Sometimes when I hear someone talking about the “Christian ideal” for sex and marriage, I laugh. Jesus says in Matthew, “For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others have been made eunuchs; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”1 According to Jesus, some people are so devoted to God that they don’t need to be married. They have transcended the married state, moving past it to a place of union with God in which having a spouse is simply unnecessary. Now, obviously if everybody did this, we would have no future anybodies, but the point is, Jesus states this matter-of-factly. As if it’s the most normal thing imaginable. So according to Jesus, there’s being married, and then there’s something else. In the book of Luke, Jesus says, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels.”2 In the first text, Jesus claims that some have “renounced marriage” for a state of union with God. But in the second text, he says that this will be true for all sorts of people in “the age to come,” the implication being that this will be true for people who are married now. And in Matthew 19, Jesus affirms the one man, one woman marriage bond, the “one flesh” of Genesis, adding, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”3

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  When Lil got to this point in her story, she reached down and patted her daughter and said, “This is Crystal. She’s twenty-seven years old but will be about six months old developmentally for the rest of her life. She can’t talk or walk or move or feed herself or do anything on her own. She will be like this, totally dependent on us, until the day she dies. And I love her so much. My family and I, we can’t imagine life without her. She makes everything so much better.” What is Lil doing? She’s bringing heaven to earth. She gives us a glimpse into another realm. Into a better way. The way of God. She and her family have taken kids who were discarded because of their perceived lack of worth and said, “No, you are not to be rejected and turned away. We are going to love you as an equal, as a human, as one of us.” They show us how God loves us. They reflect the image. And when you see it lived out like this, you’re seeing heaven crash into earth. Instead of seeing labels like “handicapped,” “reject,” or “invalid,” Lil and her husband and her kids see only one label: “human.”22 And so they have only one response: love. And it makes all the difference in heaven and earth. Which takes us back to something that happened during Colonel Gonin’s stay at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity. Because sometimes, the difference between heaven and hell may be a bit of lipstick. CHAPTER TWO SEXY ON THE INSIDE Last year I was in Canada for a couple of days, staying in downtown Ottawa. When I got to my hotel, I noticed that there was a buzz about the lobby. Lots of people with cameras and lots of British accents.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Destination You drive to Bloomington with her, because you love her and you want to deliver her safely. You don’t trust those airplanes to remind her how much she is loved. The Dream House looks just as you remember it. The pod full of her things has been delivered and sits in the yard like a shed. It occurs to you, when you open it, that someone could live in one of these, probably. A microapartment. Then you think about Narnia; the way Lucy enters the wardrobe and steps through those fur coats until she is in the snow, and there is the lamppost, and there is a whole new world frozen in a terrible winter by the White Witch. You unload it under the watchful eyes of her parents, who observe as you lift her tiny frame high to untie the mattress from the ceiling. She tells you later that they looked starry-eyed to see you picking her up like that—like you were some strapping lad showing off your strength. After you all go out to dinner, you fall into bed and cry and marvel, all at once. Dream House as Utopia Bloomington: even the name is a promise. (Living, unfurling, soft in your mouth.) Dream House as Doppelgänger When your cell phone rings in the late afternoon, you know what’s happening before you pick up. You do not believe in psychic powers, but still, you are certain. “I need to know this is real,” she says when you pick up. “I need to know that you’re in this for real.” “I am, I am.” “I just broke up with Val,” she says. “It’s just—it’s just clear from what’s been happening since she moved that this won’t work between us. We’re gonna stay friends, of course, and she adores you. But she’s going to go back to the East Coast.” You email Val, feeling strange. She writes back: “I hope eventually we can be really good friends. I want to be in your lives for a long time.” Afterward, you feel happy. Then you feel guilty for feeling happy, then happy again. You’ve won the game. You didn’t know you were playing, but you’ve won the game just the same. From now on, it will just be you and the woman in the Dream House. 15 Just the two of you, together. 16 15. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T92.4, Girl mistakenly elopes with the wrong lover. 16. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type P427.7.2.1.1, Poets and fools closely allied.

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

  Now, in the movements of the appetitive faculty, good has, as it were, a force of attraction, while evil has a force of repulsion. In the first place, therefore, good causes, in the appetitive power, a certain inclination, aptitude or connaturalness in respect of good: and this belongs to the passion of “love”: the corresponding contrary of which is “hatred” in respect of evil. Secondly, if the good be not yet possessed, it causes in the appetite a movement towards the attainment of the good beloved: and this belongs to the passion of “desire” or “concupiscence”: and contrary to it, in respect of evil, is the passion of “aversion” or “dislike.” Thirdly, when the good is obtained, it causes the appetite to rest, as it were, in the good obtained: and this belongs to the passion of “delight” or “joy”; the contrary of which, in respect of evil, is “sorrow” or “sadness.” On the other hand, in the irascible passions, the aptitude, or inclination to seek good, or to shun evil, is presupposed as arising from the concupiscible faculty, which regards good or evil absolutely. And in respect of good not yet obtained, we have “hope” and “despair.” In respect of evil not yet present we have “fear” and “daring.” But in respect of good obtained there is no irascible passion: because it is no longer considered in the light of something arduous, as stated above [1218](A[3]). But evil already present gives rise to the passion of “anger.” Accordingly it is clear that in the concupiscible faculty there are three couples of passions; viz. love and hatred, desire and aversion, joy and sadness. In like manner there are three groups in the irascible faculty; viz. hope and despair, fear and daring, and anger which has not contrary passion. Consequently there are altogether eleven passions differing specifically; six in the concupiscible faculty, and five in the irascible; and under these all the passions of the soul are contained. From this the replies to the objections are evident. OF GOOD AND EVIL IN THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL (FOUR ARTICLES)We must now consider good and evil in the passions of the soul: and under this head there are four points of inquiry: (1) Whether moral good and evil can be found in the passions of the soul? (2) Whether every passion of the soul is morally evil? (3) Whether every passion increases or decreases the goodness of malice of an act? (4) Whether any passion is good or evil specifically? Whether moral good and evil can be found in the passions of the soul?Objection 1: It would seem that no passion of the soul is morally good or evil. For moral good and evil are proper to man: since “morals are properly predicated of man,” as Ambrose says (Super Luc. Prolog.). But passions are not proper to man, for he has them in common with other animals. Therefore no passion of the soul is morally good or evil.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  She leans away and looks at you with the kind of slow, reverent consideration you’d give to a painting. She strokes the soft inside of your wrist. You feel your heart beating somewhere far away, as if it’s behind glass. “I can’t believe that you’ve chosen me,” she says. In the room, she takes off your new underwear and buries her face between your thighs. Savannah is warm and fragrant. The trees drip with Spanish moss, and the water in the fountains is dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. The Juliette Gordon Low house is a beautiful, rambling mansion crowded with antiques. Underneath the “Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace” sign that hangs over the entrance, she eggs you on into increasingly ridiculous poses; you are both giggling when you go inside. The ancient women staffing it, who are all wearing drag-queen lipstick and eye shadow, respond to your excited pronouncements about your love of Girl Scouting with silence. The tour is fascinating. Juliette, you think, sounds like a big dyke. The guide describes how she was constantly dissatisfied with her home—the furniture, the gate outside—so she just took on their design and modifications herself. She learned to smith metal. Why is it that badass women who don’t follow the rules always sound like lesbians to you? A psychiatrist would have a field day with that realization. (Though, in your defense, there is a portrait of her in a button-down top and with a hat like a park ranger’s and looking butch as hell hanging on the wall.) Afterward, the two of you walk through an old cemetery. She kisses you behind a mausoleum. She tries to get you to fuck her there, and you don’t want to out of respect for the dead, but she is so beautiful. Then an employee shows up and you rearrange yourselves quickly and leave, laughing. You drive to Tybee Island and order a platter of seafood—twisting open crayfish and swallowing scallops, eating nothing but the fruit of the sea. It is just mouthfuls of butter and water and salt and muscle. After the meal, you go to the beach and wade into the water. You see dolphins. Every so often, her phone rings, and she smiles and walks some distance away to tell Val about the trip. Even as she shrinks with distance, she waves at you. On your last day in town, a drunk man accosts you on the street. You are holding her hand when he comes up and grabs you. She shouts, “Let her go!” and does a martial arts move on his arm. He backs off in surprise, telling you to both go fuck yourselves, and staggers away. You tremble for the better part of the next hour. As you walk back to the car, she keeps apologizing for not intervening sooner. “Sooner than immediately?” you ask. “I saw him coming from a mile off. I saw what he was going to do,” she says.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Then one day, several months after being abandoned, he wandered through the streets of Taganrog and suddenly felt welling up from within a tremendous and overwhelming sense of empathy and love for his parents. Where did this come from? He had never felt this before. In the days leading up to this moment he had been thinking long and hard about his father. Was he really to blame for all their problems? Pavel’s father, Yegor Mikhailovich, had been born a serf, serfdom being a form of indentured slavery. The Chekhovs had been serfs for several generations. Yegor had finally been able to buy the family’s freedom, and he set his three sons up in different fields, Pavel designated as the family merchant. But Pavel could not cope. He had an artistic temperament, could have been a talented painter or musician. He felt bitter at his fate—a grocery store and six children. His father had beaten him, and so he beat his children. Although no longer a serf, Pavel still bowed and kissed the hand of every local official and landowner. He remained a serf at heart. Anton could see that he and his siblings were falling into the same pattern—bitter, secretly feeling worthless, and wanting to take their anger out on others. Now that he was alone and taking care of himself, Anton yearned to be free in the truest sense of the word. He wanted to be free of the past, free of his father. And here, as he walked the streets of Taganrog, the answer came to him from these new and sudden emotions. Understanding his father, he could accept and even love him. He was not some imposing tyrant but a rather helpless old man. With a bit of distance, he could feel compassion and forgive the beatings. He would not become enmeshed in all of the negative feelings his father inspired. And he could finally value as well his kind mother, and not blame her for being so weak. With his mind emptied of rancor and obsessive thoughts of his lost childhood, it was as if a great weight had been suddenly lifted off him. He made a vow to himself: no more bowing and apologizing to people; no more complaining and blaming; no more disorderly living and wasting time. The answer to everything was work and love, work and love. He had to spread this message to his family and save them. He had to share it with mankind through his stories and plays. Finally in 1879 Anton moved to Moscow to be with his family and to attend medical school, and what he saw there made him despondent. The Chekhovs and a few boarders were all crammed in a single room in the basement of a tenement, in the middle of the red-light district. The room had little ventilation and almost no light. Worst of all was the morale of the group. His mother was beaten

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  It dries in one second from the hot breath coming through the window. We roll along in silence for awhile, sweating and thinking, working on our Fireranchers. Mine is so thin I try just resting my teeth on it to see how it feels. I bite it in half. We are taking the low road from Tucson to a national monument on the border of Mexico. The map says we are now passing through the Comobabi Mountains, but outside the windows of our car the desert is as flat as a sheet of parchment. The saguaros have given way to brush and patches of gravelly dirt; along the highway from time to time are homemade altars. We keep passing them, eighty miles an hour. The next one we’ll stop at so I can see who it’s an altar to. There aren’t even any jet trails out here, the sky is a long, blue yawn. Neil Young comes on the radio. We see a hawk up ahead, standing on the hood of a broken-down car. We slow down to gaze and it stares at us. Its black-trousered legs are sturdy and long, its beak is curved. We peel off, back up to warp speed, and the landscape turns into a melting blur out the windshield. “Look, sweetie,” Eric says, turned toward me in the driver’s seat. On the very tip of his tongue is his Firerancher. Thin as tissue paper, it looks like the moon in the daytime sky. Suddenly love is looming over the car, as big and invisible as the ghost mountains of the Comobabi range. I smile at him and turn up the radio with my toes. He snaps peevishly at his haunch, bending stiffly backward to chew the peppery trail of a flea. The walls of the den are pungent with the smell of safety and his own fur. He gives up and flops back over, closes his eyes in the dimness and begins panting. No good, he’s awake now, it’s time to step back out into the day. In the sunlight he blinks and stretches, fore and aft, like a collie. He shakes so hard he almost knocks himself off his feet. The sky is as blue as blue and the coyote is in a good mood. He lifts his muzzle and takes in a long snort of air, pulling with it the invisible happenings in the vicinity. There’s something big and dead looming just over the rise. The coyote yawns and his tail swings down between his back legs in its traveling position. He puts his nose to the ground and begins his afternoon expedition. Somewhere, right on the edge of what his nose is capable of, a rabbity perfume is lingering. He breaks into a lope just for the fun of it but drops back down to a trot after a hundred yards or so. The sun is pressing burning fingers into his spine.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I half turned and grinned: ‘I’d like that.’ He didn’t grin back; in fact he looked very serious—and there had been something about the way he said ‘you ought to come over some time,’ casual and comradely and yet pondered, or even rehearsed, that convinced me that this was the same uptight, hungry boy I had blown in the Brutus, and that he needed my help, had passively picked on me as the one to show him what it was all about. I held his gaze a little longer, thinking of saying, ‘Well, how about tonight?’ Arthur-less, I was moronically ready for it, but somehow I deferred. I sensed he was relieved when I said, ‘Next week some time?’ ‘OK.’ He lifted his right hand a few inches off the bench in a strangely touching, almost secret wave. Two other hearty figures pushed past me, coming in red and sweaty from the gym. ‘How’re ya doin’, Phil boy,’ said one of them in the routine American disguise of some British queens. I went on into the gym, believing that some kind of agreement had been made, that it filled his thoughts now as it did mine. Then for a few minutes I made myself think about something else, concentrated on my exercises on the mat, stretching and limbering up. Because I was so easily moved by people, I had learned to distance myself, just in those moments when I felt them taking hold: I made myself regard them, and even more myself, with a careless, almost cynical detachment. But as I gathered, spread and folded up my body now, endeavouring to feel alive all over, ready and independent, I saw Phil again, in one of those odd coups d’oeil, typical not only of his hesitant mobile manner but of so much of gay life, where happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned. Aptly enough, I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, wide apart. Between them I saw him pass the open gym door, his bag in his hand, his shirt-sleeves rolled up in tight bands around his biceps. He went by, but a second or two later stepped back again, and peeped into the gym. Our eyes met, I raised my head, he looked for a moment longer, and then, moved perhaps by the secrecy which characterised his doings, without smiling, turned and went off. As I sat up it was as if a fist squeezed my heart and cracked a tiny flask at its centre, saturating it with love. An hour or so later I found James in the shower. He held out his hands to me in a pathetic gesture; the fingertips were white and puckered. ‘A long time, eh?’ I commiserated. ‘There’s just been nothing, darling. I don’t know why I bother.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was happy to ponder his treasured artifacts and the secret metamorphoses that they enshrined. ‘A last leg, and a question,’ he proposed. ‘Both rather special.’ I took his arm again and we went out into the hall. ‘Are you interested in boxing? That’s not the question, by the way.’ ‘I suppose I am,’ I said. ‘I boxed a bit at school.’ ‘Oho! You be careful. You don’t want to get that pretty nose broken.’ ‘I don’t do it any more. Don’t worry.’ ‘It’s been a great interest of mine. You’ll have to find out about all that side if you go into this.’ I looked at him humorously. ‘Go into what?’ He was unlocking a door under the shadow of the cantilevered stairs and groping for the light switch. ‘Come down here. Whoopsy! That’s it.’ In front of us a narrow staircase ran steeply down between unplastered rubble walls. It was a squeeze for us side by side, and I tended to be half a step behind, as he, one hand on the rope banister, committed himself with a heavy, lurching tread to each new stair. ‘This is the most remarkable thing,’ he said in a tone of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, he’ll like this, won’t he. There’s no other house in the world that has anything like this. Come along in, come along in.’ He took on for a moment the air of a horror-film villain, muttering gleeful asides while leading his victim into the trap. The stairs turned a corner, and we went down two or three more steps and under a rough wooden lintel into a cool, mildewy darkness. Various fleeting ideas, tinged with alarm, went through my mind as I stood and brushed at my upper arm where it had rubbed against the chalky staircase wall. Then Charles found the second light switch and the darkness fled, revealing a squarish quite lofty cellar room. Though it contained nothing at all there were two remarkable things about it. The walls, which were plastered and painted cream, had a continuous frieze running round, which, being above head height, looked tastefully classical at a glance but, like the library over-door, were homosexual parodies when inspected close to. And the floor, uneven, pitted in places, was a mosaic. We made our way along the walls on old drugget, through which the roughness of the floor obtruded, so that I was afraid of Charles stubbing his toe or even twisting his ankle. On the further side of the room he stopped. ‘You see it best from here,’ he explained.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  She speaks a paradox. Two things are going on here. She’s giving. Giving herself away. Letting go. Losing herself in her lover. And yet she’s also getting something in return: the other person. Her lover, at the same time, has let go and fallen into her. There is something about losing yourself to another and their losing themselves in you at the same time that defies our ability to categorize. Healthy marriages all have this sense of mutual abandon to each other. They’ve both jumped, in essence, into the arms of the other. There is a sense of mutual abandon between them. If one holds back, if one refrains, it doesn’t work. We see this again in First Corinthians, where it’s written, “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife.”5 So which is it? Is his body hers, or her body his? Who has the authority in this passage? The only proper answer is yes. Which is it? Yes. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” But this paradox of mutual submission is only one of the profound things going on in this passage. The command to the husband is to love your wife “just as Christ loved the church.” On the first pass, it seems quite straightforward. But as we’ve seen before, words in the Bible are often loaded. In this case, the word love in the Greek language is a specific kind of love. The word for love here is the word agape (ah-GAH-pay).6 We find the word all over the New Testament, and it’s generally used in the context of God’s love for people, as in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world.” So the man is to love the woman, to “agape” her, like God “agapes” the world. Agape is a particular kind of love. Love is often seen as a need, something we get from others. Agape is the opposite. Agape gives.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  WHEN MY MOTHER TALKED ABOUT relationships, she didn’t have much to say about intimacy. “You need two things in a marriage,” she told me. “You need the will to make it work and you need to be able to make compromises. It’s not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.” My father, who was always less pragmatic than my mother, more than filled the quota for expressiveness and demonstrativeness. He openly adored and adorned her with kisses, gifts, and attention. But if I had asked him whether or not they had intimacy, he would have looked at me perplexed, not knowing what I was talking about. He knew love, and he knew partnership, and they implicitly included the vastness of intimacy. For my parents and others of their generation, the modern discourse on intimacy would have eluded them altogether. Their relationship was far from perfect—they might have come to therapy for any number of reasons—but the notion of “working on their intimacy” would have been alien to them. When Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, tells his wife, Golde, that he will allow his daughter to marry the man she loves (instead of the man he has chosen for her), he frames his decision with the understanding that “this is a new world.” It’s a world where people marry for love, far distant from the world in which he met Golde on their wedding day and was told by his father that he would learn to love her in time. Now, twenty-five years later, as he witnesses the burgeoning love of his daughter, he asks his wife if she does love him, after all these years. Golde answers with an amazing list of experiences they’ve shared in their life together, and she gives a beautiful and lyrical description of how the “old world” used to think of love and marriage. She washed his clothes, milked his cow, shared his bed, starved with him, fought with him, raised his children, cleaned his house, and cooked his meals. “If that’s not love, what is?” she asks. Knowing that Golde loves him doesn’t change anything, but Tevye ends the song by acknowledging that “after twenty-five years, it’s nice to know.”

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  But the Ten Commandments are about something else. In a Jewish wedding ceremony, a legal document called the ketubah must be agreed upon and signed by both parties. Essentially it’s a list of what they are entering into. Both the bride and groom must be clear with each other on what they are committing to, what they both affirm it will take for this relationship to work. The Ten Commandments are the ketubah. They’re the agreement between the people and God about how they’re going to live together, which is why the first one deals with having other gods. It’s essentially an agreement that this relationship won’t work if they have other lovers. And for the rest of the Hebrew scriptures, we find God referring back to these original vows. In the book of Hosea, God says to his people, “You cheated on me!”9 The whole book is a picture of how God’s people have been unfaithful to him. In one text God laments, “You were the bride of my youth.”10 This was supposed to be a beautiful thing, but the people haven’t been faithful. They’ve broken God’s heart. From the perspective of the scriptures, then, a man and a woman coming together is a picture of God and his people coming together—the God of Exodus, the God who travels with his people in a cloud of smoke and fire. The God who is with his people. The God of the Shekinah. To symbolically represent this coming together, for thousands of years Jews have taken a prayer shawl, which in the book of Numbers God commanded the people to wear, and fastened the four corners to four poles, and then the wedding attendants hold the four poles so that the couple can exchange their vows under the canopy, the chuppah.11 A marriage takes place under the chuppah just like Israel exchanged vows with God under the Shekinah. This same God, the one who hovers over his people, hovers over a married couple, protecting them and journeying with them and blessing their union. A marriage is a sacred, holy thing. And the Shekinah glory of God rests upon it. In the ancient world, after the ketubah had been signed and the vows had been exchanged, the couple still wasn’t officially married. There was one important act that made them married. Their physical union. So the wedding party would lead them to their bridal chamber, attach the chuppah above their bed, leave them, and the couple would consummate their relationship. With all of the guests waiting outside. When the woman says in the Song of Songs, “Let the king bring me into his chambers,” this is wedding language. There’s a celebration about to start.12

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  It wouldn’t have been fair to send you over there without telling them that.” “Thanks a lot. I guess that’s it for Paris.” “Not necessarily.” “Oh, great. All I have to do is let them adopt me.” She told me to think about it. They were being very generous, she said. They were offering to share everything they had with me—even their name. “Their name? I’d have to change my name?” “It’s a good name. It used to be mine.” When I asked my mother what she wanted, she wouldn’t tell me. She said it was my decision. Though she didn’t often make use of it, she had a way of going blank, impervious to scrutiny. She gave nothing away. I couldn’t stare her down, or wheedle my way in, or flush her from cover by haughtily pretending that I already knew what she wasn’t telling me. But Dwight had plenty to say. The prospect of losing me not only for a year but, practically speaking, for good, brought him to a frenzy of coaxing and bullying and opinion-dispensing. He said I would never forgive myself if I passed up a chance like this. So what if they wanted me to call them Mom and Dad. He’d call them Jesus and Mary if it meant a chance to live in Paris. Was I afraid to leave my mother? Okay, he’d fly her to Paris every summer, I had his guarantee on it, word of honor. So what was the problem? I’d better think fast, he told me, and I’d better come up with the right answer. WHENEVER I WAS told to think about something, my mind became a desert. But this time I had no need of thought, because the answer was already there. I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s. When I was younger and having trouble learning to write, she sat me down at the kitchen table and covered my hand with hers and moved it through the alphabet for several nights running, and then through words and sentences until the motions assumed their own life, partly hers and partly mine. I could not, cannot, put pen to paper without having her with me. Nor swim, nor sing. I could imagine leaving her. I knew I would, someday. But to call someone else my mother was impossible. I didn’t reason any of this out. It was there as instinct. I felt lesser instincts at work on me too, such as alarm at my uncle’s description of his family as “well-regulated.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. And even if my mother wouldn’t tell me what she wanted, or give any hints, I was sure that she wanted me to stay with her. I took her inscrutability as a concealment of this wish. Later she agreed that this was so, but maybe it wasn’t all that simple at the time.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Plot Twist You spend the rest of your time in San Diego writing, drinking scotch, taking long walks down to the beach with your classmates, and pulling massive bullwhips of kelp out of the ocean. You and Val talk every other day. One day, she asks if she can accompany you on your way back to Iowa, when you’re done. You pick her up in LA. She is windswept and beautiful, and the two of you bundle into the car and drive. You blast Beyoncé’s “Best Thing I Never Had” as you drive toward the Grand Canyon. You get there near sunset, and you lead her to the edge and you talk about the depth and ancientness of it all. The photo you take there is one of your favorites: Val staring out at the vast expanse of space, carved inch by inch by water and wind and time. Her mouth is hanging open, her dark curls blowing around her face. A few days later, on a friend’s foldout couch in New Mexico, you reach out for each other in the dark. Val asks if she can kiss you, and you say yes. Every day, you drive and talk about the woman in the Dream House. At night, you curl into each other. You visit every tourist trap in Roswell, New Mexico. You sleep at a shady motel in southern Colorado, where an elderly couple next door smokes weed that pours through the flimsy shared wall, and signs warn about bears. You drive up a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, your tiny car winding up narrow paths and sharp switchbacks until you reach the peak. You visit your cousins and their new baby in Nebraska; the baby’s head is stained purple from gentian violet. You talk about her, the woman in the Dream House, but you also talk about who you were before her, and who you are hoping to be after. Eventually, you and Val will come to love each other outside this context. You will move in together, get engaged, get married. But in the beginning, this is what holds you together: the knowledge that the two of you are not alone. V Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love. —Dorothy Allison

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

  I answer that, As stated above ([1229]Q[26], A[1]), Love belongs to the appetitive power which is a passive faculty. Wherefore its object stands in relation to it as the cause of its movement or act. Therefore the cause of love must needs be love’s object. Now the proper object of love is the good; because, as stated above ([1230]Q[26], AA[1],2), love implies a certain connaturalness or complacency of the lover for the thing beloved, and to everything, that thing is a good, which is akin and proportionate to it. It follows, therefore, that good is the proper cause of love. Reply to Objection 1: Evil is never loved except under the aspect of good, that is to say, in so far as it is good in some respect, and is considered as being good simply. And thus a certain love is evil, in so far as it tends to that which is not simply a true good. It is in this way that man “loves iniquity,” inasmuch as, by means of iniquity, some good is gained; pleasure, for instance, or money, or such like. Reply to Objection 2: Those who acknowledge their evils, are beloved, not for their evils, but because they acknowledge them, for it is a good thing to acknowledge one’s faults, in so far as it excludes insincerity or hypocrisy. Reply to Objection 3: The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known. Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, viz. sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the other senses, we do not use the expression “beautiful,” for we do not speak of beautiful tastes, and beautiful odors. Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that “good” means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the “beautiful” is something pleasant to apprehend. Whether knowledge is a cause of love?Objection 1: It would seem that knowledge is not a cause of love. For it is due to love that a thing is sought. But some things are sought without being known, for instance, the sciences; for since “to have them is the same as to know them,” as Augustine says (QQ[83], qu. 35), if we knew them we should have them, and should not seek them. Therefore knowledge is not the cause of love. Objection 2: Further, to love what we know not seems like loving something more than we know it. But some things are loved more than they are known: thus in this life God can be loved in Himself, but cannot be known in Himself. Therefore knowledge is not the cause of love.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  It wouldn’t have been fair to send you over there without telling them that.” “Thanks a lot. I guess that’s it for Paris.” “Not necessarily.” “Oh, great. All I have to do is let them adopt me.” She told me to think about it. They were being very generous, she said. They were offering to share everything they had with me—even their name. “Their name? I’d have to change my name?” “It’s a good name. It used to be mine.” When I asked my mother what she wanted, she wouldn’t tell me. She said it was my decision. Though she didn’t often make use of it, she had a way of going blank, impervious to scrutiny. She gave nothing away. I couldn’t stare her down, or wheedle my way in, or flush her from cover by haughtily pretending that I already knew what she wasn’t telling me. But Dwight had plenty to say. The prospect of losing me not only for a year but, practically speaking, for good, brought him to a frenzy of coaxing and bullying and opinion-dispensing. He said I would never forgive myself if I passed up a chance like this. So what if they wanted me to call them Mom and Dad. He’d call them Jesus and Mary if it meant a chance to live in Paris. Was I afraid to leave my mother? Okay, he’d fly her to Paris every summer, I had his guarantee on it, word of honor. So what was the problem? I’d better think fast, he told me, and I’d better come up with the right answer. WHENEVER I WAS told to think about something, my mind became a desert. But this time I had no need of thought, because the answer was already there. I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s. When I was younger and having trouble learning to write, she sat me down at the kitchen table and covered my hand with hers and moved it through the alphabet for several nights running, and then through words and sentences until the motions assumed their own life, partly hers and partly mine. I could not, cannot, put pen to paper without having her with me. Nor swim, nor sing. I could imagine leaving her. I knew I would, someday. But to call someone else my mother was impossible. I didn’t reason any of this out. It was there as instinct. I felt lesser instincts at work on me too, such as alarm at my uncle’s description of his family as “well-regulated.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. And even if my mother wouldn’t tell me what she wanted, or give any hints, I was sure that she wanted me to stay with her. I took her inscrutability as a concealment of this wish. Later she agreed that this was so, but maybe it wasn’t all that simple at the time.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  You could just tell him, I said, cutting into R.’s monologue, and though I had said versions of this before he looked up at me blankly. About us, I mean, you could tell him about us, and then you wouldn’t have to lie. He made an exasperated sound at this, a dismissive sound that made me angry, or not angry, quite, but annoyed. Listen, I said, wouldn’t it be better, isn’t it what you want? I knew I should probably stop but I went on, I want you to be happy, I said, really happy, and you can’t be happy when you have to lie so much. I fell silent then, as did everyone else in the restaurant, an instant of shock at a gust of wind that smacked angrily at the building, an even stronger gust than the others. It was like being besieged, I thought, as conversations picked up and the room filled again with noise, a little tentative now, as if we were all embarrassed at having been frightened. R. began to speak but I had more I wanted to say, I spoke over him, Wait, I said, let me just, and then I paused again, at a loss. You’re happy when you’re with me, right, I said, and he made his noise of exasperation again, a glottal exhalation. You know I am, he said, and it was true, it was something we had already begun to say to each other, that we made each other happy. This was true for me from the very first evening, after I had drawn him to me and kissed him and we fell into bed together, when I looked up at him in the dark and saw his smile. Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did. He had given me so much, I thought, for all that he couldn’t give, and I was ashamed of the tone I had taken. I do know, I said, speaking more gently now, and you know I’m happy too, and maybe the best thing this could do, I meant our friendship, relationship, I didn’t know what word to use, is show you what it would be like if you were open, if you let yourself live in a fuller way. I could see that my speech wasn’t having the effect I wanted, that R.’s mood was turning darker; he wasn’t looking at me anymore but at the window, at his reflection or the world beyond it. I should have stopped talking but I couldn’t stop, I want you to be able to live, I said, really live, I don’t want you to just wait for things to happen to you, I want you to be happy. And what are you afraid of, I asked, do you really think your friends won’t accept you, your parents? His family wasn’t religious, I knew, he was from a small place but not a particularly conservative one. I think you should trust them more, I said, I think you should trust that they love you.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  But he was bright-faced when he turned back to me and I shifted my gaze from his reflection to the real image. He asked me about my day, and I told him something funny, I don’t remember what, something at my own expense; he liked stories in which I was a little ridiculous, in which students got the best of me. It had the effect I wanted, which was his laugh, or less his laugh than the transformation his face underwent when he smiled. It isn’t true, what I said earlier, really I think I was caught from our first meeting, or even before our meeting, from the first photographs he sent me that showed his face. We had been chatting for several days by then, emailing back and forth on a dating site, though it wasn’t for dating so much as for sex, which at first was all we thought we wanted. And anyway he was twenty-one, too young to take seriously; it might be a bit of fun, I thought when I looked at his profile, a bit of fun but nothing more. His pictures didn’t show very much, mostly his torso, which was thick and unsculpted, a little heavy in a way I liked. In his second email he sent a link to a video that showed what most men must have wanted to see: he was naked, exposing himself, turning to give a full view before he jerked himself off. There was something dispiriting about it, the faceless body too starkly displayed, turning as if on a dais; it shamed me a little to enjoy it. He waited several days before he showed me more, and only after I had promised to be discreet; he wasn’t out, he told me, not even to his closest friends, and so it was a pledge of trust to send the photo in which finally I saw his face. He was at a club, there were other people behind him in the dark, but he was the only one looking at the camera. The glare of the flash was bright on his skin, and he seemed gripped by joy, there’s no other way to say it, his eyes were shut and his mouth stretched impossibly wide, revealing teeth that were large and imperfect, an upper one in front just slightly skewed. When I saw it I knew I wanted to be smiled at like that. I would never get tired of it, I thought in the restaurant, each time he smiled it filled me with a happiness I had never felt before, a happiness that was particularly his to give.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  But I was wrong. “I said What can we eat?” She sat up, her shoulder-length hair splayed out behind her like a cartoon character just blasted with TNT. She crawled over, squatted before the toy army men, picked one up from the pile, pinched it between her fingers, and studied it. Her nails, perfectly painted and manicured by you, with your usual precision, were the only unblemished thing about her. Decorous and ruby-glossed, they stood out from her callused and chapped knuckles as she held the soldier, a radio operator, and examined it as though a newly unearthed artifact. A radio mounted to his back, the soldier crouches on one knee, shouting forever into the receiver. His attire suggests he’s fighting in WWII. “Who yoo arrgh, messeur?” she asked the plastic man in broken English and French. In one jerking motion, she pressed his radio to her ear and listened intently, her eyes on me. “You know what they telling me, Little Dog?” she whispered in Vietnamese. “They say—” She dipped her head to one side, leaned in to me, her breath a mix of Ricola cough drops and the meaty scent of sleep, the little green man’s head swallowed by her ear. “They say good soldiers only win when their grandmas feed them.” She let out a single, clipped cackle—then stopped, her expression suddenly blank, and placed the radio man in my hand, closed it into a fist. Like that she rose and shuffled off to the kitchen, her sandals clapping behind her. I clutched the message, the plastic antennae stabbing my palm as the sound of reggae, muffled through a neighbor’s wall, seeped into the room. — I have and have had many names. Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield. —