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.

Page 32 of 63 · 20 per page

• 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 Story of O (1954)

  It was about this same time that a change took place in Jacqueline: perhaps O had counted too heavily both on Jacqueline’s indifference and her sensuality, perhaps Jacqueline herself naively felt that surrendering herself to O was dangerous for her relations with René; but whatever the reason, she suddenly ceased coming to O. At the same time, she seemed to be keeping herself aloof from René, with whom, however, she was spending almost every day and every night. She had never acted as though she were in love with him. She studied him coldly, and when she smiled at him, her eyes remained cold. Even assuming that she was as completely abandoned with him as she was with O, which was quite likely, O could not help thinking that this surrender was superficial. Whereas René was head over heels in love with her, paralyzed by a love such as he had never known before, a worrisome, uncertain love, one he was far from sure was requited, a love that acts not, for fear of offending. He lived, he slept in the same house as Sir Stephen, the same house as O, he lunched, he dined, he went on walks with Sir Stephen, with O, he conversed with them both: he didn’t see them, he didn’t hear what they said. He saw, he heard, he talked through them, beyond them, and, as in a dream when one tries to catch a departing train or clings desperately to the parapet of a collapsing bridge, he was forever trying to understand the raison d’être, the truth which must have been lurking somewhere inside Jacqueline, under that golden skin, like the mechanism inside a crying doll. “Well,” thought O, “the day I was so afraid would arrive is here, the day when I’d merely be a shadow in René’s past. And I’m not even sad; the only thing I feel for him is pity, and even knowing he doesn’t desire me any longer, I can see him every day without any trace of bitterness, without the least regret, without even feeling hurt. And yet only a few weeks ago I dashed all the way across town to his office, to beg him to tell me he still loved me. Was that all my love was, all it meant? So light, so easily gone and forgotten? Is solace that simple? And solace is not even the right word: I’m happy. Do you mean to say it was enough for him to have given me to Sir Stephen for me to be detached from him, for me to find a new love so easily in the arms of another?”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Okay, the truth is that I had two very different feelings about the painting.” 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.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old. (63:5, 9) It would be impossible to scoop up all the passages we have looked at in this part of the book and turn them by some alchemy into the theology of the New Testament. Nothing in the Second Temple world encourages us to suppose that Jews before the time of Jesus were composing the kind of fresh construct we discover among the early Christians. But when we find those early Christians saying that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible” and telling the story of the Passover-time death of Jesus both to make that point and to sustain the freshly narrated world in which they themselves were living, we should be in no doubt that these were the themes they intended to evoke. These were the narratives they saw rushing together into a new, decisive, revolutionary dénouement. This is the context in which they glimpsed the nonplatonic goal of salvation and declared, in Jewish rather than pagan terms, that this goal had been won. By the evening of the first Good Friday, sins had been dealt with and the powers defeated in fulfillment of the ancient divine promise. The Messiah had died for sins in accordance with the Bible. We now turn, therefore, to the key early Christian texts in which this revolutionary message was spelled out. PART THREE The Revolutionary Rescue 8 New Goal, New Humanity THE TWO DISCIPLES who met the risen Jesus, without recognizing him, on the road to Emmaus said plaintively, “We were hoping that he was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). When Jesus, still incognito, began to explain to them what was going on, he was not saying, in effect, “You’ve got it wrong. Forget all that stuff about redeeming Israel. I’ve had a better idea.” No. In fact he said, “This is what had to happen: the Messiah had to suffer, and then come into his glory!” After that, “He began with Moses, and with all the prophets, and explained to them the things about himself throughout the whole Bible” (24:26–27). His answer was, to be sure, a radical redefinition of the “redemption of Israel.” It brought the entire expectation into a new focus, namely, his own unique role. The story of the Bible as a whole, he insisted, had been rushing forward toward the events of his own death and resurrection. The recent happenings were to be seen as fulfillment, not simply as a shocking turn of events. But to redefine is not to abandon. Many Jews of Jesus’s day had been praying and pondering what it might mean for God to fulfill his ancient promises at long last. There was no single template. Many groups, many teachers, many would-be prophets offered different interpretations.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Nor is this simply a metaphor or a type that would point forward, like a signpost, to something quite different. (A signpost may offer a symbol of a particular building, perhaps a hospital or a restaurant. The symbol doesn’t need to look at all like what you will see when you arrive at the destination. By itself, the signpost will give you neither medication nor food; but it will point you in the right direction. That is how many Christians have seen the biblical story of exile and the promise of restoration: a truthful signpost, but a signpost to something essentially different.) Western culture has been so wedded to the platonic idea that God’s purpose for humans is to leave this world and go to “heaven” to be with him—as opposed to the biblical idea that God’s purpose for humans is to reflect the praises of creation back to him and to reflect his image in the world, so that ultimately heaven and earth will be one—that many who hear and understand the point I have been making will still try to see it as an “illustration” rather than as part of the story in which Jesus and his followers were still living. Such people, perhaps the most frustrating of dialogue partners, will at once insist on “translating” the Israel-specific historical and biblical context into an abstract idea, as though Israel itself were simply an example of something else rather than the people through whom the divine project of restoration was to be taken forward. Such readers will then have to create a new context for Jesus and his death. It will only be “in accordance with the Bible” in a thin, twisted sense. The new context will distort what the Bible itself—both Old and New Testaments—actually says. This has happened time and again. But if we keep our nerve, we may perhaps be able to get things straight at last. If exile is the result of Israel’s sin, and if this exile is therefore to be understood as death, it is not simply that Israel happens to have done on a grand scale what the human race, symbolized in Adam and Eve, had done all along. Israel—the people called by God for the unique role in his purposes—could never be merely an example, even a large-scale example, of something else. Israel’s idolatry and exile, Israel’s sin and death are seen in Israel’s scriptures themselves not just as the quintessence, but also as the radical deepening of the human plight. It is as if the lifeboat sent to rescue drowning sailors from a stricken ship has itself been submerged under a giant wave before it has reached those in need of it.

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

  one’s own popularity was baffling to me. These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else. I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn’t gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work. I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  His life’s work eventually led to a new denomination, now the second largest Protestant denomination in America. Thus hundreds of millions of Protestants around the world, whether they know it or not, have Paul as their primary theological ancestor. To say the obvious, Paul matters. But how he matters and how much he matters vary greatly among Christians. There are very diverse understandings of Paul’s importance, message, and character. To some extent, the same could be said of Jesus, for he is diversely interpreted as well. But all Christians agree that Jesus was admirable, attractive, and appealing. Not so with Paul. THE CATHOLIC PAUL AND THE PROTESTANT PAUL Catholics and Protestants see Paul’s importance quite differently. For Protestants (at least historically—we’re not sure about the present), an interpretation of Paul’s theology and language is foundational for understanding Christianity. Not so for Catholics. Though they see Paul as a saint and his letters as sacred scripture, they have not made Paul central in the way that Protestants have. This difference can easily be seen in the history of Protestant and Catholic theology since the Reformation. But we illustrate it by speaking autobiographically. Borg: In the Lutheran form of Christianity in which I grew up, Paul was more important than Jesus. Of course, none of my pastors or Sunday school teachers ever said this. Indeed, they would be puzzled by the statement. But as I look back on my experience of growing up Lutheran, it is clear that I was taught to see Jesus, God, and the Christian gospel through a Pauline lens as mediated by Luther. I was blissfully unaware of this, of course. I took it for granted that our way of seeing Jesus, God, and Christianity was not a way of seeing them, but the way. For me as a Lutheran, the foundational Christian message was “justification by grace through faith,” a Pauline and Lutheran phrase often shortened to “justification by faith.” What this meant to me was that I would be accepted by God “by faith”—and faith meant believing in Jesus and God as understood by Paul and Luther. Not until I went to seminary in my early twenties did I realize how Lutheran my way of seeing Paul and the gospel was. Not that the Lutheran view is simply wrong—it’s much better than some. But I learned that there are other vantage points for seeing Paul, some that add greatly to his richness and fullness. In another seminary decades later, I encountered the difference between Catholic and Protestant perceptions of Paul firsthand. While I was a visiting professor of New Testament in a theological consortium that included three Catholic seminaries, a number of Catholic students attended my courses. As I was lecturing about Paul’s understanding of justification by grace, I noticed that several of the Catholic students looked puzzled, and then one asked, “What’s all this about ‘justification by grace’? Why is this important?” I realized that the phrase was largely foreign to them.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Justification: transformation, not imputation. If you misread the justice of Paul’s God as retributive, the only good news might be that God would pretend, as it were, that we were just, that God would impute to us a justice we did not have. Such an “as if” treatment would have horrified Paul. There is nothing, for example, about fictional imputation of justice, but everything about factual transformation by justice in these claims from 2 Corinthians: All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (3:18) We do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. (4:16) If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (5:17). That is transformation, not imputation. Sacrifice: participation, not substitution. We saw in Chapter 5 that Paul’s understanding of sacrificial atonement must be emphatically distinguished from Anselm’s interpretation of it as substitutionary sacrificial atonement. Indeed, Paul’s own interpretation of Christ’s execution was as a participatory sacrificial atonement. That is why, in Romans, having mentioned “Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” in just one verse (3:25), Paul does not develop that further, yet spends a whole chapter on our participation in Christ (6:1–23). Humanity’s universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization’s drug of choice, and our addiction now threatens creation itself. Christ’s life was the incarnate revelation of a nonviolent God, and it was consummated by his death from the violent injustice he had opposed justly and nonviolently. His death was a sacrifice, was something “made sacred,” as we saw above, because it was the ultimate witness to the character of his God and the ultimate invitation for us to participate with him. And we participate by dying—metaphorically and really—to civilization’s violent normalcy or by dying—literally and really (unfortunately often still necessary)—from the same dominational evil we oppose. JUSTIFIED BY GOD’S GRACE AS A GIFT Grace as free gift. We are now “justified by God’s grace as a gift” (3.24). What does that mean? In Romans, Paul’s Greek word charis is usually translated “grace” and understood to mean a free gift. He speaks about being “justified by his grace as a gift” (3:24), about “the free gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ” (5:15), and, like a drumbeat, about “the free gift…the grace of God and the free gift…the free gift…the free gift…the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness” (5:15–17). But be very careful here. There is no such thing as a free gift.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  SO HOW DID the first Christians interpret the death of Jesus? What did they say about it, what did they mean, and how did they arrive at that view? This brings us at last to the heart of our investigation. I have insisted that we cannot jump straight in with the normal Western assumptions about what “dying for our sins” or even “in accordance with the Bible” might actually mean. We need to go back, as we have now done, and investigate, first, the set of first-century Jewish assumptions within which those phrases meant what they meant and, second, how the very first Christians went about putting this new vision into practice. But, having done all that, we must return to the underlying question. Already by the time of Paul, the early Christians believed that something had happened on the cross itself, something of earth-shattering meaning and implication, something as a result of which the world was now a different place. A revolution had been launched. We must remind ourselves that for a full account of “atonement”—as we have seen, more of a complex word than we often recall—we need to speak of resurrection, ascension, the Spirit, the life of faith, the ultimate resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of all things. But we must still insist that it is proper, necessary, and vital to ask: By six o’clock on the first Good Friday evening, what had changed and how had that happened? That is the task to which we must now give attention. Right away we meet something very peculiar. You might suppose that if Christian theologians were going to trace the meaning of Jesus’s death, they would begin with Jesus himself. Mostly, they do not. I possess many books on the “atonement.” Few give much attention to the gospels. None, as far as I recall, starts with Jesus himself. They may sooner or later highlight one famous saying, Mark 10:45 (“The son of man . . . came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’”), but they do not normally go much beyond that. They seldom if ever link the meaning of Jesus’s death with Jesus’s announcement of God’s kingdom coming “on earth as in heaven.” They seldom highlight the fact that Jesus chose to go to Jerusalem and (so it seems) force some kind of a showdown with the authorities not on the Day of Atonement, not at the Festival of Tabernacles, the Festival of Dedication, or any other special day on the sacred calendar, laden with meaning as they were, but at Passover.