Realization

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 Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  close call, but once I put it in terms of expected value, she realized it wasn’t close at all. Underscoring that point, Levitt concluded, “The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.” The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call. This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it’s not even in the vicinity. This book will go deep into the cognitive and motivational forces that gaff the scale in favor of persisting, as well as practical strategies for recalibrating the scale. For now, you can consider this simple heuristic as a rule of thumb: If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice. Jumping the Shark In 1985 or 1987 (accounts differ), a pair of University of Michigan students, Jon Hein and Sean Connolly, were talking about signals that their once favorite television shows had started an irreversible decline. That discussion spawned the famous phrase “jumping the shark.” The definitive instance they identified was from the classic, beloved TV series Happy Days, which first aired in January 1974. At the show’s peak, it had over thirty million viewers. Hein and Connolly decided Happy Days jumped the shark in episode 91 (season 5, in September 1977), when, famously, Fonzie, a character who was the leather-jacketed embodiment of cool, literally jumped over a shark. Just to set up such a story, the show had to get Fonzie from Milwaukee to California. They arranged this by having some Hollywood talent scouts pass through town. Their limo breaks down and they “discover” Fonzie and invite him out to Hollywood to audition. The rest of the show’s cast makes the trip with him.

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

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover design by Darren Haggar Cover photograph by Sam Contis Author photograph by Tom Hines Illustration by Daniel Lagin Version_1 For my mother Contents Also by Ocean Vuong Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Part I Part II Part III Acknowledgments About the Author But let me see if—using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone— I can build you a center. —Qiu Miaojin I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers. —Joan Didion I Let me begin again. Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. “I don’t understand why they would do that. Can’t they see it’s a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that.” I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you—but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves. I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. — Autumn. Somewhere over Michigan, a colony of monarch butterflies, numbering more than fifteen thousand, are beginning their yearly migration south. In the span of two months, from September to November, they will move, one wing beat at a time, from southern Canada and the United States to portions of central Mexico, where they will spend the winter. They perch among us, on windowsills and chain-link fences, clotheslines still blurred from the just-hung weight of clothes, the hood of a faded-blue Chevy, their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight. It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As the story goes, his voice returned spontaneously, only to elusively vanish again. Alexander took to observing himself in the mirror, hoping that he might notice something that correlated with his erratic vocal capacity. He did. He observed that the return of his voice was related to his posture. After numerous observations, he made the startling discovery that there were distinctly different postures—one associated with voice and another with no voice. To his surprise, he discovered that the posture associated with the strong and audible voice felt wrong, while the posture of the weak or absent voice felt right. Alexander pursued this observational approach for the good part of nine years. He came to the realization that the mute posture felt good merely because it was familiar, while the postural stance supporting voice felt bad only because it was unfamiliar. Alexander discovered that certain muscular tensions could cause a compression of the head-neck-spine axis, resulting in respiratory problems and consequently the loss of voice. Decreasing these tensions would relieve the pressure and allow the spine to return to its full, natural extension. Attending to this disparity allowed Alexander to cure himself of his affliction. Thus, through better mind-body communication, he was able to recover much of his natural ease of movement, leading to an economy of effort as well as improved performance. Realizing that he had the makings of a new career, Alexander gave up acting and began working with fellow actors and vocalists with similar performance problems. He also began working with musicians whose bodies were twisted and in pain from the strained postures they believed were required for playing their instruments. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin was one of his students. A number of famous pop stars and actors, including Paul McCartney, Sting and Paul Newman, had received treatments from Alexander method teachers and loudly sung their praises. However, even today, this method remains rather obscure, in part because it requires a demanding and refined focus.§ Alexander’s therapeutic work (described in his book The Use of the Self162) consists of very gentle manipulations, first exploratory and then corrective. It is essentially a reeducation of one’s entire muscular system. Treatment begins with the head and neck and subsequently includes other body areas. There is no such thing as a right position, he discovered, but there is such a thing as a right direction.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  After listening to her story, I asked her a simple question: “Imagine it’s a year from now and you stayed in the job that you’re currently at—what’s the probability you’re going to be unhappy at the end of that year?” She said, “I know I’m going to be unhappy, one hundred percent.” I followed up by asking, “If it’s a year from now and you switched to this new job you’re considering, what’s the probability you’re going to be unhappy?” She said, “Well, I’m not sure.” “Is it one hundred percent?” She said, “Definitely not.” At that moment, she realized, “Oh, wait a minute. I’m always going to be unhappy if I stay. If I switch, sometimes I’ll be unhappy, but sometimes I won’t. Sometimes, I’m going to find real fulfillment in the job that I’m switching to, and that has to be better.” All that I had done was to reframe her quitting decision as an expected-value problem. She was considering two options: staying in her job or quitting to take the new position at the insurance company. Which one carried the greater chance of increasing her happiness and making her feel better about her relationship with her children? She realized taking the new job had the higher expected value. Dr. Olstyn Martinez’s story reminds us that expected value is not just about money. It can be measured in health, well-being, happiness, time, self- fulfillment, satisfaction in relationships, or anything else that affects you. Time Travelers from the Past I often talk about thinking in expected value as a kind of mental time travel, propelling yourself into the future to glimpse the range of possible outcomes and take some reasonable guess at how likely each of them is. This time travel, as a means to becoming a better quitter, works in both directions. Sometimes, like Stewart Butterfield or Sarah Olstyn Martinez, you are looking into the future by using the clues that the present moment offers you. But other times, you can get the benefit of listening to a message from the past. Hundreds of people had climbed high on Everest before summit day in 1996. Those past climbers had figured out the appropriate turnaround times, whether

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  I also contrasted the leader of Call of God with the prophets, such as Moses. According to the Bible, in response to God Moses gave up his status and wealth to become a religious leader. Why was the leader of Call of God so preoccupied with accumulating real estate holdings? And why had he deliberately misled his followers to believe he wasn’t interested in money? Did this type of dishonesty reflect the pattern of leadership expressed in the Bible? At this point the group programming began to unravel. As Patrick once said, “When the person realizes he’s been lied to by the cult…it’s like turning on the light in a dark room.”779 As the lights came on and the cult programming crumbled during the final two days, the young woman increasingly began to ask critical questions. She saw how her group paralleled the examples I had given of other cults and also identified the pattern of coercive persuasion, which had been used to gain undue influence over her life. We went over each of Lifton’s eight criteria used to identify a thought-reform program.780 She could see these same criteria as the dynamics operating in the Call of God. For example, we discussed how the isolation the group encouraged and its dominant control of information and communication amounted to what Lifton labeled “Milieu Control” or control of the environment. She now could better understand why the leader had encouraged her to cut off her family; by consuming her time, the Call of God had further isolated her, thus negatively impacting both her marriage and parenting. We also discussed how the leader’s special letters from God could easily be seen as what Lifton calls “Mystical Manipulation” or planned spontaneity. That is, “initiated from above, it seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen spontaneously” but that “directed as it is by an ostensibly omniscient group, [it] must assume, for the manipulated, a near-mystical quality.”781 The supposed letters from God, rather than spontaneous pronouncements from a higher power, seemed to be calculated communications used to manipulate and control the group. This could be seen not only by the way the letters contributed to the authority and power of the leader but also through the way the letters were sometimes addressed to certain issues or people. Conclusion On the third day the young woman began to divulge previously unknown and critical inside information about the group. She talked about others in the Call of God who were struggling in their strained marriages and of other parents who were neglecting their children. The young woman also disclosed that one extremely devoted member had ultimately been forced to declare bankruptcy, which she suspected was due in part to the excessive demands of the leader.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  1:27–28) Paul understood that the gospel message was dismissed by the center of society. The rejected stone became the cornerstone of the gospel, becoming a stumbling block for the builders who rejected it. The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke clearly illustrates this point. The chapter contains three parables. The first parable is about the shepherd of a hundred sheep, who, losing one, leaves the other ninety-nine and searches for the one that is lost. The second parable tells of a woman with ten drachmas, who, upon losing one, lights a lamp and sweeps the house until she finds the lost coin. The last parable is the story of the prodigal son, who squanders his father's inheritance, only to return penniless and yet find acceptance in his father's house. When a party is thrown to rejoice in the prodigal son's return, the dutiful son who remained and stayed faithful to the father becomes angry that his disobedient brother is brought back into the fold. Traditionally, Euroamericans have interpreted these three parables by emphasizing those whom they consider lost. God's everlasting mercy for the lost (sheep, coin, or son) becomes the focal point in reading and understanding these passages, encouraging those in the center to go out and evangelize the lost. But this reading masks why Jesus told the parables in the first place and to whom they were directed. Usually, when reading these parables, the first three verses of the chapter are skipped or ignored. “All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to [Jesus] to hear him. But the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, ‘This one receives sinners and eats with them!’ He spoke to them these parables” (Luke 15:1–3). Luke begins the chapter by stating that those who resided on the margins, the tax collectors and sinners, were coming to hear Jesus. Worse yet, they were eating with him. Now, for those in the center, the Pharisees (who were upwardly mobile) and scribes (learned men of the Law), those in the margins of society were considered to be the am ha-ares , literally, “the people of the land.” With the exception of the tax collectors, who collaborated with the Roman imperialist powers in order to survive, the people of the land were composed of the vast majority of the poor, people devoid of any power or privilege. Along with the tax collectors they were looked down upon for not keeping the purity regulations, not because they did not want to but because they were too busy trying to survive. Like today's people of color, the dominant culture saw them as impure, ignorant, and responsible for their own marginalization, in short, sinners. These outcasts flocked to the liberating Good News Jesus proclaimed. As Jesus proclaimed his message, those with power and privilege found their space challenged. After all, according to Jesus, the tax collectors and prostitutes were making their way into the kingdom of God before the religious center (Matt. 21:31).

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  If the Bible is read as a book of regulations that clearly determine right and wrong, then passages like this one in Exodus become difficult to understand. If lying is always wrong, how then can God bless these two women for lying? Absolute truths derived from the Bible become somewhat problematic. Often, such absolutes become one of the privileges of those who are sheltered from the harshness of oppressive structures. Like the midwives, people who live under oppressive structures often find themselves in situations where decisions aren't easy or obvious and may even contradict supposed biblical principles. Many times the only choice available is the one in which a “lesser” evil is chosen. Yes, the midwives could have told the truth, but they would have been killed for disobeying the pharaoh, and someone else would have been found to carry out the pharaoh's wishes; or they could have lied and continued to save as many Hebrew boys as possible. Both killing and lying are vices to be avoided, but in this case, lying had the potential to save lives, and in the end Moses grew up to be used by God to liberate God's chosen people. Being caught between two sinful choices due to the overall structures of oppression can also be illustrated in the story of Doña Inez presented earlier. Doña Inez told the battered wife to leave her abusive husband. According to Malachi 2:16, God hates divorce. This oppressed woman—and her community of faith—was forced to make one of two choices, both of which were bad. Either she divorced her husband or she continued to live in submission to an abusive situation. Those who know what it means to live within a marginalized space, like Doña Inez, who suffered under both ethnic discrimination and sexism, can be effective guides for others who face oppression. At times, the only way to choose is to pick the action that most closely resembles the purpose of Jesus, who “came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” All biblical interpretations, to a greater or lesser degree, are subjective. None of us comes to the Bible objectively. Someone, usually someone we love and respect, like our parents, our pastor, or a teacher, has interpreted the text for us. Our love and affection for these persons are manifested by accepting their interpretations. Yet it is important to question interpretations that justify unjust social structures, specifically in the area of racism, classism, and sexism. Before exploring how the Bible is read from the margins so as to claim the liberative message of the gospel, it will be helpful to see how the center has historically read the Bible to justify race, class, and gender oppression. It is important to note that while these three forms of oppression are examined separately, in reality they are intertwined. Race, class, and gender oppressions are the three prongs of “Satan's” pitchfork.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  We read the words found in this story and impose upon those words the meaning our culture has assigned to them, a linkage that includes our twenty-first-century cultural biases. Because racism is so ingrained within U.S. society, we simply assume that Aaron and Miriam were upset because Moses married downward. If a present-day white family member was to marry a person of color, more than likely the family would be concerned about the relationship. Their biases are usually masked by the advice “Think about the children and how they will suffer.” We read these biases into the biblical story and conclude that Moses’ siblings were upset because a black woman had become part of the family. Yet a closer reading of the text reveals that it was not Moses who married downward. We first need to ask which people were politically superior in the region. The answer, Africans (specifically Egyptians). African blacks were the ones in positions of power during Moses’ lifetime. Hence, to marry a black person was to marry upward. The concern Aaron and Miriam expressed was that because Moses married upward, he might “put on airs.” This is why they ask if he thinks that God can only talk to him. This also explains why the text reassures the reader that “Moses was very meek, more than any man on the face of the earth” (v. 3). Yet race may not be the reason why Moses was marrying upward. Nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that Moses’ skin was white. Why then do we assume it was? At this time in world history, there were no major concentrations of Europeans in this area of the world. The Cushite woman may have been marrying down not because of race but because of the socioeconomic position of the Hebrews, a non-nation of people roaming through a desert. Yet, in spite of these sociohistorical facts, the dominant cultures read the texts from within their particular social location, imposing on the interpretation subconscious biases. How else have we “colored” the Scriptures? According to the Bible, what color were Adam and Eve? Saul, David, or Solomon? The prophets? Jesus? If the Bible does not tell us their color, why do we think of them and depict them on church walls and books as being white Europeans? One of my students once asked, “Where do blacks come from?” After all, if Adam and Eve were the first two humans, how can we explain the development of the black race? In her mind, Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, had to be white. Regardless of her assumptions, I asked her what God used to create Adam. She replied the soil, a reference to Genesis 2:7, where God forms man out of the ground's soil and then breathes life into him. I asked what color is the richest and most fertile soil. She answered black. I then asked if she had ever heard of white soil.

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

  The pseudo anonymity of their E-mails has allowed him to see her as a subject with her own desires, turning her into the object of his desire. “I’m saying things to her that I never thought I could. I expected she’d be turned off, but she’s not. She needs a lot less taking care of than I projected onto her,” Philip admits. “I realized I put a lot of stuff on her that doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to me, or at least to my family.” “I don’t get how your flings were supposed to be taking care of me, though I know in your mind it makes sense,” Jackie tells him. “It’s not OK, but I understand it. Still, I was always surprised at how easily you let yourself be caught. Like you were asking for it, so you could come to Mommy and get punished. I’m not interested in replaying your family drama. I’ll leave you first, and you know it.” To me she says, “Realizing I had the strength to leave helped me make the choice to stay. I have a lot more freedom. When I initiate sex now, I can feel almost brazen, and I like that. ‘You want this, Philip? Take it!’ It doesn’t have to be romantic or even particularly personal. I like a lot of different things. I prefer tender love, but sometimes greedy is good, too.” I’ve worked with Jackie and Philip on and off for years. Philip has stopped acting out, and over time he has searched for ways to undo the deeply ingrained belief that hot sex can’t happen at home. By finding ways to experience himself as a sexual man who is also a faithful man, he was able to undo family patterns that were at least three generations old. In the past, Philip’s fascination with porn was a haven for him, a fantasy of immediacy where the moment of desire and satisfaction merged. The women on the screen offered no resistance and required no effort on his part. Hence the tension between wanting and getting was nullified, and Philip never had to reconcile desire in the context of love. Gradually, he has allowed the dislocated parts of his sexuality to come home, and has been more able to remain present with his wife. The ongoing challenge for Jackie and Philip is to continue to bring the erotic home—to experience small transgressions, illicit striving, and passionate idealization in the midst of their intimate lives. The English analyst Adam Phillips underscores this point in his book Monogamy: If it is the forbidden that is exciting—if desire is fundamentally transgressive—then the monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough. In other words they have to work, if only to keep what is always too available sufficiently illicit to be interesting. Can You Want What You Have?

• From Cleanness (2020)

  They had been dancing at one of the clubs in Studentski grad, a part of the city named for the many schools and dormitories there, though it was the least studious quarter in Sofia, full of discotheques and casinos and bars; it was where my own students spent their weekends. R. told me this story at our second meeting, while we were lying in bed together, an intimacy I was surprised to find I wanted; usually after sex I was eager to be alone. I was drunk, he said, but that wasn’t why I went, I wanted to know if I liked it, I’ve only ever been with guys but I thought maybe I like girls too, I wanted to try. They had kissed and taken off their clothes and lain down together, he told me, and he didn’t respond at all; it was awful, he said, even when she gave me a blowjob I couldn’t get hard, it was like I was dead down there. She told me not to worry, I was just too drunk, but that’s not true, I can get hard when I’m drunk, I can always get hard. I guess this really is what I am, he said. We had been lying next to each other while he spoke, both on our backs, not touching, but after he said this he rolled toward me and put his hand on my chest, and then he laid his head on top of his hand. She had stopped by today to remind them of the plans they had made, a whole group was headed to dinner and then out to the clubs; she wanted to talk to me, R. went on, but I said M. was sleeping, I practically closed the door in her face. I don’t want to be mean, he said to me, but what does she want, she won’t leave me alone. She wants you, I said, trying to laugh, I sympathize; I had intended to be charming, but R. didn’t smile. He seemed uneasy, shifting in his seat, he pushed his food around but wasn’t eating now. Maybe it was the wind; each time it struck the glass he leaned away from it, and again I thought I had been wrong to sit there, a table in the middle of the room would have been better, we would have been less exposed.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  [Rick] That ordeal was, in a sense, the culmination of this long process of seduction, this long process of indoctrination that went on and on and on, and it ground out their ability to critically and independently think. Keith Raniere, he just kept going and going, pushing and pushing. He weaponized his women, his followers, very much like Charlie Manson. [Kelly] I think, at the end of the day, that he was trying to create an army of women through DOS to do his bidding. [Narrator] But Raniere's secret sect will soon be his undoing. The branding is the part of DOS and the part of NXIVM that ultimately brings Keith Raniere down. [woman screaming] [Narrator] Despite the pain and humiliation of the branding ritual, it's estimated that hundreds of women become members of NXIVM's secret sorority, DOS, led by Smallville actress Allison Mack. [Robin] The question is, why did they stay? Why not just say no? Why do we stay in bad relationships when we know it's a bad relationship, and we know we should be getting out, and we're still there? It's the same thing with cults. [Narrator] For Kelly Thiel, that realization comes in June 2017. I got a phone call from Canada. A woman called me, and she said, "Have you seen the Frank Report?" And I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "You have to read the Frank Report. You're not gonna believe what's going on." So she sent it to me. I clicked the link. The Frank Report came up. And it was an article talking about Keith Raniere and this thing called DOS. [Narrator] The Frank Report is an online blog created by the private investigator Frank Parlato. On June 5, 2017, Parlato publishes this article, entitled "Branded Slaves and Master Raniere," revealing NXIVM's branding rituals to the world. That was the beginning of me grappling with I was possibly in a cult. [Narrator] The exposé is based in part on the anonymous account of Stargate SG-1 actress Sarah Edmondson, a branded member of DOS. Eventually, Edmondson reconsiders her anonymity and goes to a bigger platform-- this time, on the record, when she appears on the front of The New York Times in October 2017. The New York Times breaks this story about DOS, and that Sarah Edmondson is interviewed talking about DOS and everything involved. [Armando] And the big bombshell is on the front page. You have Sarah Edmondson's branding for the world to see. This isn't just a group of weirdos trying to change their lives. This is something really dark and messed up. [Tabitha] When Sarah Edmondson happened, I was shattered. I could not, um, maintain a sense of reality. I had to go on medical leave from my job. I had to be on, like, four different medications to try to, like, maintain my sense of self again. I had been duped. I left. I couldn't-- I just couldn't spend one more minute in there.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  I then left my Latina/o neighborhood in Miami and moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where I eventually took a job teaching Spanish at a local college. I decided to test my students on their ability to pronounce colors in Spanish by pointing at an item and asking the students, ¿Qué color es esto? (“What color is this?”). After pointing to several items throughout the room and soliciting numerous different responses, I realized I had yet to ask a question where the answer would be Blanco (“White”). Not finding anything white in the room, I pointed to my skin and asked, “What color is this?” To my surprise, the class in unison responded, Moreno (“Brown”). At that moment I realized the dominant culture saw me as brown while I saw myself as white. Regardless of my skin pigmentation, the dominant culture classifies me as nonwhite because I speak Spanish. Without knowing it, I became a “cross-dresser” between two different constructions of race. While in Miami, exilic Cubans as a whole see themselves as being white, not realizing that to the dominant culture we are brown. THE FACTOR OF LANGUAGE The 1950s television star Desi Arnaz, best known as Ricky Ricardo in the sitcom I Love Lucy , had a sign posted on his dressing door: “English is broken here.” This spoken broken English became a unifying source among Hispanics, regardless of national origin. Yet, a presumption exists that all Latino/as are able to speak Spanish. In reality, some speak English, others Spanish, some are bilingual, while still others speak Spanglish. Now, if reading and interpreting the Bible in English becomes complicated because of meanings imposed upon the ancient text that reflect twenty-first-century biases, what happens when we read the text in another language? Those who read the Bible in Spanish discover a text that provides theological interpretations different from those who read the same passages in English. To read the Bible in Spanish is to find different ways of understanding the Scriptures, ways that expand and challenge the normative interpretations of the dominant culture. For example, the English word “love” usually characterizes how we feel toward diverse objects, persons, and experiences. I love my wife, I love ice cream, I love my children, or I love baseball—these are phrases any one of us would use to describe something or someone who gives us joy. In reality, I do not love baseball with the same intensity or passion as the love I express for my wife. Yet, because we use the same word to describe these different levels of affections, the word “love” loses its intimacy and significance. The Spanish language provides a distinction. Te amo (“I love you”) is reserved only for spouses or lovers. Te quiero (literally, “I want you”) is used to connote love toward family and friends. Me gusta (“I like it”) usually refers to baseball, ice cream, and other things or experiences we like.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  She had a sister named Mary who sat at the feet of Jesus to hear his words. But Martha was distracted with all the serving and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister left me alone to serve? Tell her then that she should help me.” Answering her, Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things when there is need of only one, and Mary chose the good part, which shall not be taken from her.” (10:38–42) Many sermons have been based on this text. For many, the main message is the need for believers not to worry about all the cares of this world (e.g., housework) as did Martha but, rather, to take the time to be with Jesus as did Mary. While such a message is uplifting, it falls short of uncovering the radical dismantling of a patriarchal system that was undertaken by Jesus. Through his actions, he denounced the assumption that women had no place in religious life. In fact, according to the wisdom of the time, if there was only one Torah left in the world and it fell into the hands of a woman to care for, it would have been better that the Torah be destroyed than have a woman touch it. This type of attitude led pious Jewish men to begin their morning prayers thanking God that God did not make them a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. Did this attitude toward women influence how women are remembered by the male writers of the Gospels? The text indicates that Martha was distracted by her serving duties. The Greek word Luke uses in the text for serving is diakonia. Nowhere in Luke's story does it tell us that Martha was serving in the kitchen doing “woman's work,” which is how this narrative is usually interpreted. Her duties in serving, more than likely, corresponded with the office of church deacon established in Acts 6:1–6. Luke (who also authored Acts) indicates that among the first deacons of the church (if not the first), upon which future ones would be modeled, is this woman. Martha's preoccupation with serving dealt with her duties and responsibilities toward the house-church that met at her home, leaving her little time to also “sit at Jesus’ feet.” Mary is also a disciple who serves and proclaims God's message, but on this day she chose “to sit at Jesus’ feet.” The Bible is not interested in telling us that there were no chairs available in the room, so Mary was left sitting on the floor. Rather, to study at the feet of a teacher was a euphemism indicating that the person who is sitting is the student or disciple of a master, a role reserved for men. For example, in Acts 22:3 the same phrase describes Paul's relation to his teacher Gamaliel. The text says Paul studied “at the feet of Gamaliel.” Hence, Mary not only touched Torah; she also read and studied it!

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I looked down at the page and then up again, confused; I don’t see it, I said, what did I miss? He leaned across the table, reaching his arms toward the page so that his upper body rested on the lacquered wood, a peculiarly teenage gesture, I thought, I remembered making it but hadn’t made it for years, and he pressed his finger to the margin of the page. Here, he said, pointing to a line where the single word She appeared, I made it here and it happens several times, the pronouns are all wrong, and even in his half-prone posture I could see that his whole body was tense. Ah, I said, looking up at him from the page, I see, and then he leaned quickly back, as if released by something, and as though after his revelation he wanted to reassert some space between us. I leaned back too, and pushed the pages across to him again; it was clear that they had served their purpose. Those poems we read in class, he said then, I had never seen anything like them, I didn’t know anything like them existed. He was talking about Frank O’Hara, I understood, whose poems had shocked most of my students, as I intended them to. I had never read anything before, he went on, I mean a story or a poem, that seemed like it was about me, that I could have written it. He didn’t look at me as he said this, looking instead at his hands, both of which were on the table in front of him and in one of which a cigarette had shrunk almost to its nub between two fingers. I felt two things as he spoke, first my usual dismay when talking to gay men here, who were more excluded than I had been, growing up in the American south, where at least I had found books that, even if they were always tragic, offered a certain beauty as compensation. But in addition to dismay I felt satisfaction or pride at having provided (as I thought of it) some degree of solace, and maybe this was the bigger part of what I felt. I had gathered him up, I thought, and this sparked a sense of warmth that started in the central pit of me and then radiated out.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Where had they come from? He looked at Myrna, who was bent over, holding her head in her hands. How to respond? His head swam; he had an impish impulse to say, “Your tits aren’t too big.” But thank God, he didn’t. Bantering was not called for. He knew that he needed to take Myrna’s words with the greatest possible seriousness and respect. He snatched at the life vest that in the stormiest of seas, therapists always have available: process commentary, that is, to comment on the process, the relationship implications, of the patient’s utterance rather than on its content. “Lot of emotion in your words, Myrna,” he said quietly. “Sounds like you’ve wanted to say them for a long time.” “I guess so.” Myrna took a couple of deep breaths. “The words had a life of their own. They wanted to come out.” “A bushel of anger there toward me—maybe toward both of us.” “Both? At you and at myself? Probably true. But getting less. Maybe that’s why I could say those things today.” “Feels good that you trust me more.” “I had really wanted to talk about other things today.” “Such as?” Ernest leaped at the idea—anything to change direction. As Myrna paused to catch her breath, he reflected on her uncanny intuition, her chilling burst of words. Amazing that she had grasped so much of him! How had she known? Only one possibility: unconscious empathy. Just as Dr. Werner had said. So Werner was right all the time, he thought. Why didn’t I allow myself to learn from him? What a jerk, a twerp, I’ve been. How did Werner put it? That I’m an iconoclastic Katzenjammer Kid? Well, maybe it’s time to let go of some of my juvenile questioning and debunking of elders—not everything they say is bullshit. Never again will I doubt the power of unconscious empathy. Perhaps it was this type of experience that prompted Freud to take seriously the idea of telepathic communication. “Where are your thoughts going, Myrna?” he finally said. “So much to say. Not sure where to start. Here’s a dream I had last night.” She held up a spiral tablet. “See, I wrote it down—that’s a first.” “You are taking our work more seriously.” “Gotta get my one-fifty’s worth. Oops!” She covered her mouth with her hands. “Didn’t mean that—sorry—please press delete key.” “Delete key pressed. You caught yourself—that’s great. Perhaps you were flustered by my paying you a compliment.” Myrna nodded but hurried on and read her dream from her notepad: I go to have my nose reconstructed. They remove the bandages. My nose is okay, but the skin has puckered or pulled up and my mouth is locked open and is a huge gaping hole taking half my face. My tonsils are visible—huge, swollen, inflamed. Crimson. Then a doctor with a nimbus comes by. I am suddenly able to close my mouth. He asks me questions, but I won’t answer.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Other aspects of Irene in Frost’s “Home Burial”? The mother’s clinging to grief and the father’s matter-of-factness and impatience with her for not letting it go: that too I had heard her describe in her own family. But these observations, however graphic and informative, did not sufficiently explain why Irene had placed such importance on my reading the article. “The key to what has gone wrong in therapy”: those were her words, her promise. I felt let down. Perhaps I’ve overestimated her, I thought; for once she has missed the mark. At our next session Irene entered the office and, as usual, marched past me to her chair without looking at me. She settled in, placed her purse on the floor next to her, then—instead of staring out the window in silence for a few moments as she usually did—she turned immediately to me and asked, “You read the article?” “Yes, I did, and it’s a marvelous piece. Thanks for giving it to me.” “And?” she prodded. “And it was gripping; I’ve heard you talk about your parents’ life after Allen’s death, but the poem brought it home to me with extraordinary intensity. I understand now so much more clearly why you could never return to live with them again and how closely you identified with your mother’s way and her struggle with her father and—” I couldn’t continue. The expression of growing disbelief on Irene’s face stopped me cold. Her astonished stare was that of a teacher facing some dunderhead of a pupil as she wondered how he could ever have been promoted to her class. Finally, through clenched teeth, Irene hissed, “The farmer and the wife in that poem are not my mother and my father. They’re us—you and me. ” She paused, caught herself, and a moment later added in a softer voice, “I mean, they may have characteristics of my parents, but essentially the farmer and his wife are you and me in this room. ” My head reeled. Of course! Of course! Instantaneously, every line of “Home Burial” took on new meaning. I scrambled furiously. Never before or since has my mind worked more quickly. “So it is I who brings the dirty shovel into the house?” Irene nodded briskly. “And I who enters the kitchen with muddy, grave-stained shoes? ” Irene nodded again. Not uncharitably this time. Perhaps my quick recovery would redeem me yet. “And I who chides you for clinging to grief? Who says you overdo it, who asks, ‘Why keep it up when his memory must be satisfied by now?’ I who digs the grave so briskly that the gravel leaps into the air? I whose words continually give offense?

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Her hands are nearly at right angles to her wrists, almost as though she were pushing something away. I make a similar movement with my arms so as to “mirror” her movements and help her to feel and trust her own (disowned) movements. * I bring Miriam’s attention to her extending her arms and bending her wrists and suggest that she repeat the movements slowly. I ask her to try to focus on how her arms feel when she makes the movement, so that she gets a sense of how the movement feels physically from the inside. At first, she seems puzzled. After a few times, she pauses, smiles and says, “It feels like I’m pushing something away … no, more like holding something away … I need more space, that’s what it’s really like.” She sweeps her arms from in front of herself and then off to both sides, creating a 180-degree range of free motion. She lets out a deep and spontaneous breath: “I don’t feel as suffocated, and my belly isn’t hurting like it was when we started.” She extends her arms, flexing her wrists again. This time she holds them out for several seconds, almost at arm’s length. “It’s the same problem … at work and with my husband, too.” She now places her hands gently on her thighs. “It’s so hard for me, I don’t know why but … I don’t feel like I have a right to do this … like I don’t have a right to my own space.” I ask her if it’s more of a feeling or a thought. She pauses, giggles and replies, “Hah, I guess it’s really a thought.” Now there’s a deeper laughter. By contacting her nonverbal bodily expression, Miriam is able to go beneath the veneer of her ruminative thoughts about Henry and her work, to explore freely the story her body is beginning to tell. With this emergent kinesthetic and proprioceptive awareness, she has begun to sense into the neuromuscular attitude that underlies her internal conflicts. After settling into her bodily experience, Miriam starts to get wound up again. I observe her carotid pulse and notice an increase in her heart rate, along with pressured, rapid, shallow breathing. I ask her to put her questionings aside for a moment and place her focus back on her body. Relieved by this suggestion, she closes her eyes. “I feel more solid now … like there’s more of me.” When I ask her to try and identify where in her body she feels the solidity, she says, “I don’t know; I just feel that way.” “Just take your time,” I suggest. “Don’t try too hard.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I had not read the assignment—I hadn’t read either text, but I especially hadn’t read the ancient one.” “The one that would have prepared you for the new text. Any hunches about the meaning of the two texts in your life?” “Hardly a hunch,” Irene replied. “I know exactly what they mean.” I waited for her to go on but she simply sat in silence, looking out the window. I hadn’t yet learned of Irene’s irritating trait of not volunteering a conclusion unless I explicitly requested it. Annoyed, I let the silence last a minute or two. Finally I obliged: “And the meaning of the two texts, Irene, is—” “My brother’s death, when I was twenty, was the ancient text. My husband’s death to come is the modern text.” “So the dream is telling us that you may not be able to deal with your husband’s death until you deal first with your brother’s. ” “You got it. Precisely.” The examination of this initial dream anticipated not only the content of therapy but also its process, that is, the nature of the therapist-patient relationship. For one thing, Irene was always forthcoming and thoughtful. I never asked a question without receiving an original and comprehensive response. Did she know the titles of the two texts? Indeed she did. Had she any hunches about why she needed to read the ancient text in order to understand the modern one? Of course; she knew precisely what it meant. Even routine questions—“What do you make of this?” or “Where do your thoughts go now, Irene?”—never failed, in five years of therapy, to reap a fertile harvest. Often Irene’s responses unnerved me: they were too quick, too precise. They brought to my mind Miss Fernald, my fifth grade teacher, who often said, “Come along, Irvin,” as she impatiently tapped her foot, marked time, and waited for me to stop daydreaming and keep up with some class exercise. I swept Miss Fernald out of my mind and continued, “And the meaning for you of The Death of Innocence ?” “Imagine what it meant to me as a twenty-year-old to have my brother, whom I expected to have as a life companion, snatched from me by a traffic accident. And then I found Jack. And imagine what it means now, at the age of forty-five, to lose him. Imagine what it is like to have my parents, in their seventies, living and my brother dead and my husband dying. Time out of joint. The young dying first.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Here I invoked a practice I always teach my students: when two opposing feelings put you in a dilemma, your best recourse is to express both feelings and the dilemma. “First, as I said, I admired it greatly. I have absolutely no artistic talent and am filled with respect for work of such quality.” I hesitated, and Irene nudged me: “But—” “But—well—uh—I’m so pleased with your finding pleasure in painting that I dread sounding even slightly critical, but I guess I was hoping that you might do something with your art that might be more—uh—how to put it?—resonant with our therapy.” “Resonant?” “One thing I like about our work together is that you invariably respond with substance whenever I ask about what’s passing through your mind. Sometimes it’s a thought, but even more commonly you describe some mental image. With your extraordinary visual sense, I was hoping you could combine your art and therapy in some synergistic manner. I don’t know—possibly I was hoping the painting might be more expressionistic, or cathartic, or illuminating. Maybe you could even work through some painful issues on canvas. But the still life, while technically wonderful, is so—so—serene, so far removed from conflict and pain.” Seeing Irene’s eyes rolling up, I added, “You asked for my feelings, and there they are. I’m not defending them. In fact, I suspect I’m making a mistake by being critical of any activity that provides you an interlude of peace.” “Irv, I don’t think you know much about painting. Do you know what the French call a still life?” I shook my head. “Nature morte.” “Dead nature.” “Right. To paint a still life is to meditate on death and decay. When I paint fruit, I can’t avoid observing how my still-life models are dying and decomposing day after day. When I paint I am very close to our therapy, pointedly aware of Jack’s passage from life into dust, very aware of the presence of death and the smell of decay in everything that lives.” “Everything?” I ventured. She nodded. “You? Me?” “Everything,” she replied. “Especially me.” At last! I had been scratching for Irene’s last statement, or something like it, since the very beginning of our work. It heralded a new phase in therapy, as I recognized from the strong dream she brought in a couple of weeks later. I am sitting at a table—like an executive board table. There are others there as well, and you are sitting at the head of the table. We are all working on something—perhaps reviewing grant proposals. You ask me to bring some papers to you. It is a small room, and to get to you I have to pass very close to a row of windows that are open and reach all the way to the floor. I could easily fall out the window, and I woke up with a powerful thought in my mind: How could you have exposed me to such great danger?

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 125 < Lecture 19  The Conversion of Constantine ` The next year, Constantius was dying. His junior colleague was named Severus, and he would ascend to the senior role. The new junior emperor to take Severus’s place was to be chosen based purely on merit and was not to be related to any of the other ruling three emperors. However, in a surprise move prior to his death, Constantius appointed his son Constantine for the position. ` The original senior emperor of the west, Maximian, had a son, Maxentius, who wanted the imperial rule for himself. Maxentius took imperial office by seizing power over the city of Rome itself. ` He called himself an emperor and claimed he was on equal status with the other four. Over some years, the two senior emperors of east (Galen) and west (Severus) both unsuccessfully tried to dislodge Maxentius from his fortified city. Severus eventually died in the effort. He was not replaced. Constantine ruled the west alone. ` Finally in 312 CE, Constantine marched his army across the Alps and made for Rome. In anticipation of the assault, Maxentius had all the bridges across the Tiber that provided access to the city destroyed. ` However, he then made a poor decision: He decided to come out in force to face Constantine’s army in the field. With the bridges out, there was no way to cross the Tiber north to favorable battlegrounds. ` Maxentius had a temporary pontoon bridge build next to the recently destroyed Milvian Bridge, marched his army across it, and engaged in battle. Constantine’s forces outmaneuvered him. His soldiers were backed up against the river. They desperately tried to cross the pontoons in a beeline for the city, but under the crushing weight, the bridge collapsed. ` Many of the soldiers, and Maxentius himself, drowned in the Tiber. Constantine entered Rome the next day as its ruler and as the emperor of the entire western half of the empire. ` As significant as the military event was in the political history of Rome, there was another outcome that was far more significant for the history of the West, down to today: Constantine believed that it was the Christian God who had assisted him and ensured his victory over Maxentius. He later claimed that it was on that day—October 28, 312—that he converted to become a Christian. The empire was never the same again.