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

  As the story continues, the theme of illumination appears again. The light was so brilliant that it blinded Paul (Acts 9:9). Then, three days later, he was led to a Christian Jew in Damascus named Ananias. Ananias laid his hands on Paul and said, “The Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored” (Acts 9:17–18; all italics in biblical quotations have been added). Paul now saw differently—the light that was Jesus, and the Spirit with which he was now filled, had brought enlightenment: “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” The story in Acts 9 ends with Paul being baptized, the early Christian rite of incorporation. Paul had become “in Christ,” as he puts it in his letters. “In Christ” was for Paul a new identity that involved a new community and way of being. So decisive was this experience that it divided Paul’s life into two parts, the pre-Damascus Paul and the post-Damascus Paul. Commonly called his conversion experience, it is and it is not, depending upon what we mean by “conversion.” In a religious context, the word has three meanings, not all of which apply to Paul. The first is conversion from being nonreligious to being religious, the second is conversion from one religion to another, and the third is conversion within a religious tradition. Paul’s experience was neither of the first two. Clearly, he was deeply religious before his Damascus experience. In his own words, he was filled with religious passion: “zealous for the traditions of my ancestors”; “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Gal. 1:14; Phil. 3:5–6). Moreover, he did not convert from one religion to another. Not only was Christianity not yet a religion separate from Judaism, but Paul thought of himself as a Jew after his conversion and for the rest of his life. Paul’s was a conversion within a tradition: from one way of being Jewish to another way of being Jewish, from being a Pharisaic Jew to being a Christian Jew. Paul’s Damascus experience was his “call” to the rest of his life. It called him to his vocation, just as the “call stories” of the great Jewish prophets were calls to a vocation. All three accounts in Acts report that his Damascus experience was his commissioning to his vocation as an apostle to the Gentiles. Paul’s genuine letters confirm the picture created by Acts. Paul had experiences of Jesus as a living reality, and these experiences transformed him. We begin with Galatians 1:13–17, simply because it is one of only two places in Paul’s letters in which he mentions Damascus. He describes his earlier life as a zealous persecutor of the Jesus movement. Then he writes:

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

  Paul’s conviction that God had raised Jesus was grounded in his own experience of the risen Christ. It was not based upon stories such as those reported in the gospels. The pre-Damascus Paul had almost certainly heard the claim that God had raised Jesus. The claim had no persuasive power until his Damascus experience. Moreover, what he says about what a resurrected body is like does not fit well with a literal-factual reading of the gospel stories. Again, this does not mean that the gospel stories should be set aside, but it should affect how we hear those stories. The resurrection of Jesus as an imperative. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus not only was an experience; it also contained an imperative. The imperative is seen very clearly in the immediate meaning of his experience: “Jesus is Lord.” God had vindicated Jesus and thus said “no” to the authorities responsible for his execution. The conviction that “Jesus is Lord” is not an abstract theological claim, but an affirmation with an imperative: it calls for commitment, allegiance, loyalty. If Jesus is Lord, the imperative follows immediately that we should follow him, not the would-be lords of this world. There is a second reason for the imperative as well. As Paul writes about the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, he also writes about the general bodily resurrection—not just about the resurrection of Jesus by itself, but about his resurrection in the context of the Jewish hope for the resurrection of the dead. The hope for a general resurrection is not, however, an inference drawn from the resurrection of Jesus; rather, it is the premise for Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s resurrection. Twice he emphasizes this: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised…. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised” (15:13, 16). Understanding this requires introducing the word “eschatology.” Though used with a bewildering variety of meanings by scholars and theologians, its basic meaning is quite simple. “Eschatology” comes from the Greek word eschaton, which means “end.” It has often been understood to mean the “end of the world,” as if it referred to the end of the space-time universe and thus also the evacuation of the faithful to another world, namely, heaven. But, as we saw in Chapter 4, in Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, eschatology was not about the end of the physical world, but about the end of this age—the end of “this world,” a world of domination, injustice, and violence. Jewish eschatology, the premise of Paul’s claims about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, was about a transformed world. The hope for the general resurrection was a hope for what we call “God’s great cleanup of the world.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The covenant purposes of God for Israel, and through Israel for the world, were at last established, with Jesus’s own blood as the blood of the new covenant. In other words, Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, is the place where and the means by which God’s covenant purposes and Israel’s covenant faithfulness meet, merge, and achieve their original object. And with that the true God was shockingly unveiled to the world as the true focus of worship, displacing the idolatries that had lain at the heart of sin. Israel’s past sins, the faithlessness that had apparently thrown the covenant into jeopardy, had been passed over, while the purpose of the covenant was gloriously fulfilled in the creation of a worldwide justified people. The “covenant of vocation”—Israel’s vocation to be the light of the world—was fulfilled. As a result, God and Israel “met” in Jesus. In Jesus, as Israel’s representative, God and Israel, God and the human race, God and the world met and were reconciled. “God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah” (2 Cor. 5:19). The Messiah is, in Paul’s mind, the unique place where Israel’s God really does meet with his people. He embodies Israel as the king who sums up his people in himself and whose faithfulness stands in for their faithlessness. He embodies Israel’s God himself come to rescue his people. The divine rescuing purposes and Israel’s vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event. That is what Paul is saying here. This passage does not, then, focus on the point that most of us, including myself in earlier writings, have assumed. Paul is not simply offering a roundabout way of saying, “We sinned; God punished Jesus; we are forgiven.” He is saying, “We all committed idolatry, and sinned; God promised Abraham to save the world through Israel; Israel was faithless to that commission; but God has put forth the faithful Messiah, his own self-revelation, whose death has been our Exodus from slavery.” That larger context is vital and nonnegotiable. If it seems suddenly complex for readers today, that is our problem; at least its complexities are biblical complexities rather than the endless ramifications of theory that seem to be required with every step that different traditions take away from that biblical home base. If we take what Paul says out of its Jewish context—and ultimately out of its Jewish eschatological context, replacing that with a Platonized vision of the “goal”—then we will end up with a moralized vision of the human vocation and a paganized view of the means of redemption. That has happened again and again.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I had one of those rare moments of clarity that don’t do you a damned bit of good when you can see the truth about anything you gaze upon. I saw that they were lovers, I saw that Roger separated us not to protect me, but because he could not bear to see his lover touch me, I saw that all of us were doomed. Still I could not weep as loudly as Roger, who had to be pulled off Professor Gregory by four campus cops. The administration shook us off like so many dead fleas. Professor Gregory was prosecuted for rape, on Roger’s testimony, and convicted. It took a lot of trouble for me to avoid finding out what his sentence was. I refused to testify because I did not want to describe, under oath, what happened when he grabbed me. I wasn’t sure, then, exactly what rape was, but I knew this was not it. An assailant and victim have nothing in common. But I had recognized him, and then made use of him. I was culpable. They expelled me when I was charged with being an accessory to violence against women, and I think I sort of deserved it, even though the woman in question was myself. A judge remanded me to the penal farm for re-education, where I stayed until Jackie set a big version of one of her rabbit traps for the bed-check matron and we high-tailed it to the bright lights, city sights, and torrid nights. The indefensible behavior of one of its leaders provided an excuse to investigate other leaders of Students for Solidarity. When dormitory rooms were raided, they found the usual assortment of contraband—proscribed reading material, illicit drugs, and an unsafe birth control device. It was enough to discredit the group. Nobody objected when it was banned. I’m out of the nice neighborhood now and walking through a sleazier part of town. There are more people on the street, but I feel safer because most of them are crooks and crazies. That says a lot for the flying buttresses of our Democratic Socialist Feminist Way of Life, don’t it? I give a wide berth to a circle of kids, music victims holding a sidewalk autism contest. I know they can’t hurt each other when they wear those helmets, but it creeps me out. Besides, they can’t see where they’re going, and I’m not wearing a crash-proof topper full of headbanging sounds. One of the helmets is defective, and I can hear snatches of music as I go by. Now I’m in trouble again. Worse, maybe. Pretty soon I’m going to be walking by the very alley where I got busted. To keep from gnawing on myself, I slip into a little reverie about the poor jane who got busted with me.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “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? This general theme—her being in danger and my failing to protect her—soon gathered steam. A few nights later she had two companion dreams, one following immediately upon the heels of the other. (Companion dreams may convey the same message. Our friend the dream-writing homunculus often amuses himself by composing several variations on a particularly arresting theme.) The first:

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Such as what’s happening right here, right now, Myrna. Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now, but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.” “You mean I’m not relating because of my whining?” “No, that’s not what I said. Now, Myrna, our time is up today, and we’ve got to stop, but when you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you a minute ago about how you’re relating to me. I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” After the session Myrna wasted no time putting in the cassette and following Ernest’s instructions. Starting with “I’d say you’d pass all my physical checkpoints,” she listened intently. “But some of the other things we’ve been discussing would give me pause. . . . Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information . . . but you’re not giving anything back! . . . I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals. . . . When you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you. . . . I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” Switching cassettes, Myrna listened to the countertransference dictation again. Certain phrases struck home: “She will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. . . . How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? . . . Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. . . . No tenderness . . . too self-focused . . . ungiving.” Perhaps Dr. Lash is right, she thought. I really never have thought about him, his life, his experience. But I can change that. Today. Right now as I drive home. But she couldn’t stay focused for more than a minute or two. To still her mind, she turned to a useful mind-quieting technique she had learned a few years before at a Big Sur meditation weekend (which in most other ways had been a rip-off). Keeping one part of her mind on the highway, with the rest she imagined a broom sweeping out every stray thought that popped in. That done, she concentrated only on her breathing, on the inhalation of cool air and on the exhalation of the air slightly heated in the nest of her lungs.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The particular concerns most salient to clinical work are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness—themes which form the spine of my text, Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). Since these sources of angst are universal—inherent in the human condition—psychotherapists cannot pretend that it is only “they,” the patients, who face these threats; instead it is “we,” all of us, who share a common destiny. Accordingly the metaphor of “fellow travelers” more aptly describes the therapist-patient relationship I strive for in my therapy work. I first met with Irene shortly after completing three years of research in which I and my colleagues studied the dynamics and clinical course of eighty bereaved spouses. * My research experience proved less relevant to the treatment course than I had expected; in fact there were many counter-productive instances—times when Irene felt, quite justifiably, that my reliance on the experience of other bereaved individuals impeded my appreciation of her unique experience. The effective therapist must be able to empty his/her mind of the expectations and stereotypes which obstruct vision in order to facilitate the patient’s unique narrative to unfold freshly in the relationship. And so, too, for therapy technique. Not only in “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” but in the other tales as well I urge the therapist to create a new therapy for each patient. Hyperbolic though that may sound, I sincerely mean that the therapeutic venture must be organic: the therapist and patient must together shape the form of therapy—indeed, the joint process of shaping the work is an integral part of the work. The contemporary managed care trend toward brief, ready-made, protocol-driven therapy is a wrong turn and is deeply threatening to the whole therapeutic enterprise; it is based on a profound misunderstanding of the process of personal growth, namely that therapy consists of imparting information or advice. Ernest Lash, the therapist in the last two stories “Double Exposure” and “The Hungarian Cat Curse” had an earlier life as the protagonist of my novel, Lying on the Couch. His encore appearance is meant to signify that these two last tales are heavily fictionalized. “Double Exposure” is a “what if” story. Years ago, I regularly audiotaped the sessions of a patient who had a two-hour commute to my office and handed her the cassette to listen to on the drive to the following session. (I routinely do this with patients who come to see me from great distances. It makes good use of the commute time by priming the patient for the next hour. Therapy is always more effective if the sessions are continuous rather than episodic—I much prefer sessions that explore ongoing themes at ever deeper levels to sessions that are focused outward, upon the external events of the preceding week). Well, one week I forgot to give my patient the tape.

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

  The chestnuts. Almost two years had passed since I’d shucked them and stored them away. In all that time no one had said a word about them. They’d been forgotten by everyone but me, and I’d kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to remind Dwight to give me the job again. We climbed up into the attic and worked our way down to where I’d put the boxes. It was cramped and musty. From below I could hear faint voices singing. Dwight led the way, probing the darkness with a flashlight. When he found the boxes he stopped and held the beam on them. Mold covered the cardboard sides and rose from the tops of the boxes like dough swelling out of a breadpan. Its surface, dark and solid-looking, gullied and creased like cauliflower, glistened in the light. Dwight played the beam over the boxes, then turned it on the basin where the beaver, also forgotten these two years past, had been left to cure. Only a pulp remained. This too was covered with mold, but a different kind than the one that had gotten the chestnuts. This mold was white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet or so above the basin. It was like cotton candy but more loosely spun. And as Dwight played the light over it I saw something strange. The mold had no features, of course, but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air. If Dwight noticed it he didn’t say anything. I followed him back downstairs and into the living room. My mother had gone to bed, but everyone else was still watching TV. Dwight picked up his saxaphone again and played silently along with the Champagne Orchestra. The tree blinked. Our faces darkened and flared, darkened and flared.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When she left home for the first time, he drove her to college and, in typical fashion, ruined the trip by grousing the entire time about the ugly, garbage-littered stream by the side of the road. She, on the other hand, saw a beautiful rustic, unspoiled creek. Years later, after he died, she chanced to make the trip again and noted that there were two streams, one on each side of the road. “But this time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through the driver’s window was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” All the components of this lesson—my impasse with Irene, her insistence that I read Frost’s poem, my recollection of my patient’s story of the automobile ride—had been deeply instructive. With astonishing clarity, I understood now that it was time for me to listen, to set aside my personal worldview, to stop imposing my style and my views upon my patient. It was time to look out Irene’s window. Lesson 7: Letting Go Our final session was unremarkable except for two events. First, Irene had to phone to inquire about its time. Though our meeting time had often changed because of her surgical schedule, she had not once, in five years, forgotten it. Second, I developed a splitting headache just before the session. Since I rarely get headaches, I suspect that this one was in some way related to Jack’s brain tumor, which had first made its presence known via a severe headache. “I’ve been wondering about something all week,” Irene began. “Do you plan to write about any aspect of our work together?” I had not thought of writing about her, and at that time was immersed in planning a novel. I told her so, adding, “And anyway, I’ve never written about therapy as current as ours. In Love’s Executioner, I had usually waited years, sometimes a decade or more, after a particular patient’s therapy ended before writing about it. And let me reassure you, if I ever did consider writing about you, I’d seek your permission before beginning—” “No, no, Irv,” she broke in, “I’m not worried about your writing. I’m worried about your not writing. I want my story to be told. There’s too much that therapists don’t know about treating the bereaved. I want you to tell other therapists not only what I’ve learned but what you’ve learned.” In the weeks following termination, I not only missed Irene but, again and again, found myself musing about writing her story.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “The biggest takeaway, for me, was devaluing penetrative sex,” said Alex. “That was something that was really stressful for her, but it was a stress that she hadn’t been able to articulate because, like me, and like so many people in our culture, she saw sex as being first and foremost about PIV [penis-in-vagina] penetration.” During one session, their therapist suggested they take penetration off the table for a few months. “Because my ex didn’t feel worried about it anymore, we were able to enjoy ourselves more and the specter of physical pain and anxiety faded to the point where, when we started experimenting with PIV again several months later, it was a lot easier and more pleasant for us,” they said. “Shifting foreplay to the fore was such a necessary and monumental paradigm shift, I think. The realization for me, was that I didn’t want PIV—I wanted sexual pleasure and excitement, and I associated those with PIV, but that was a mistaken association that was hindering our ability to genuinely enjoy ourselves in the bedroom.” At the beginning of our third session, Weissfeld instructed me to put a pillow on my lap, rest my forearms on top of it, and caress it. I grabbed my waffle pillow, which coincidentally was crusted in another breakfast food (oatmeal), and did as she said. She asked me to lean back into the couch. She did the same. Today she was not in a van, but in a room decorated with artifacts meant to engineer relaxation: a yin-yang placard on the wall, intricate tapestries, a plush couch with pillows that did not appear to be crusted in oats. She wore a loose purple sweater and thick-rimmed glasses with a slight cat’s-eye. The pillow she chose for her lap looked fluffy. She began caressing it as I imagine she would a lover. I wanted to know everything about her. I opted to speculate about her life to avoid feeling what it was like to caress a pillow, which was the exercise. We were to alternate saying things we noticed, “popcorn style.” I said I noticed the pillow was soft. She said she noticed her feet on the floor. I said I noticed that the temperature in the room was fine. She noticed her hands were dry. I noticed my dog farted. As we continued, the observations got more specific, the language more precise. I noticed a sort of tingling heat building on my hands as I rubbed them across my pillow. She lifted her pillow to rub the edge in between her fingers. I tried that, too, and felt a soft coolness; I felt different temperatures as the pillow came into contact with different parts of my hand. Just five minutes earlier, my only note had been that the pillow was soft.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  No, I didn’t believe in God’s plan. Still, I liked listening to him talk. It had so little to do with the life I’d known. I kept thinking I’d go to one last meeting, then quit. I went again. He noticed I fidgeted, and he advised I exercise, as they did. It’ll be good for you, he said. He sounded playful, but when I laughed, he didn’t. Unechoed, I heard an idiot, laughing at nothing. I stopped. He asked which kind of exercise I liked best. I told him I used to swim; he drew up a schedule. Before the piano, I’d loved being in the pool. I used to frolic with half-nereid L.A. friends: I showed off high flip dives, and I played Marco Polo until I lost my voice, but this wasn’t fun. He set goals. I kept a log. One dull lap blurred into the next, tired leg muscles singing. Push through, he urged. Each night, I thrashed across the school’s Olympic-sized pool. I watched myself, the blurred Phoebe ghost, glide along striped tiles. In time, I noticed more habits changing. I was drinking less, I realized. If I craved gin, I sipped tonic. I hadn’t known it, but I longed for discipline. It was part of the life I’d lost with the piano: a schedule, rigid expectations. With the six-plus hours I practiced each night, I’d had rules to bind me in place. They’d held me up. – I started playing the piano again, in Jejah, at John Leal’s request. I’d thought I couldn’t, but in a short while, as with the ongoing swims, I didn’t mind. Plinked single-octave hymns, simple chords that resolved, like finished stories, with each line: this wasn’t the music I’d failed. If I played well, or didn’t, I felt no pleasure. I didn’t have to be afraid. – So, I’d changed. It was possible. I often thought about what John Leal liked saying, that if we could believe all people existed in their minds as much as we did in our own, the rest followed. To love, he said, is but to imagine well. I pulled out this thought; I held it up, in private, turning it in the light as though I’d find in its prism gleam the Phoebe I could still become. –

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  These two polemical targets—purgatory and the Mass—thus ensured that when the Reformers were developing their own ways of explaining what the death of Jesus achieved, they were understandably eager to ward off what they saw as ecclesial abuse. I am not a specialist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it does seem to me that in general terms the Reformers and their successors were thus trying to give biblical answers to medieval questions . They were wrestling with the question of how the angry God of the late medieval period might be pacified, both here (through the Mass?) and hereafter (in purgatory?). To both questions, they replied: no, God’s wrath was already pacified through the death of Jesus. Not only does this not need to be done again; if we were to try to do it again, we would be implying that the death of Jesus was somehow after all inadequate. (Echoes of this controversy can still be seen when exegetes tiptoe around Col. 1:24, in which Paul seems to be saying that his own sufferings are somehow completing something that was “lacking” in the Messiah’s own sufferings.) They did not challenge the underlying idea that the gospel was all about pacifying divine wrath. It was simply assumed that this was the problem Paul was addressing in Romans 1:18–32 or indeed 1 Thessalonians 1:10 or 5:9. If, of course, you are faced with the medieval questions, it is better to give them biblical answers than nonbiblical ones. But the biblical texts themselves might suggest that there were better questions to be asking, which are actually screened out by concentrating on the wrong ones. As I have sometimes remarked in reading the gospels, it is possible to check all the correct boxes, but still end up with the wrong result, like a child doing a connect-the-dots puzzle who doesn’t realize the significance of the numbers and ends up with an elephant instead of a donkey; or perhaps, writing from Scotland, I should say a Saltire instead of a Union Jack. I should also add that these last two or three paragraphs, taken by themselves, could give a very lopsided view of the Reformers. Luther and his colleagues were energetic biblical expositors, excited about the New Testament message of the grace and love of God, which they had not heard taught in the days of their youth. In particular, they went back again and again to grace, love, faith, hope, freedom, and joy as the ultimate reasons for everything, and certainly the ultimate reasons for their own excitement and energy. That, for them, was what it was all about. However, in their insistence on certain particular ways of understanding the biblical teaching on Jesus’s death, the two factors I have highlighted—purgatory and the Mass—remained extremely influential.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The existential frame of reference described throughout this volume posits that many patients fall into despair because of an encounter with some of the ultimate concerns of existence. The particular concerns most salient to clinical work are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness—themes which form the spine of my text, Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). Since these sources of angst are universal—inherent in the human condition—psychotherapists cannot pretend that it is only “they,” the patients, who face these threats; instead it is “we,” all of us, who share a common destiny. Accordingly the metaphor of “fellow travelers” more aptly describes the therapist-patient relationship I strive for in my therapy work. I first met with Irene shortly after completing three years of research in which I and my colleagues studied the dynamics and clinical course of eighty bereaved spouses.* My research experience proved less relevant to the treatment course than I had expected; in fact there were many counter-productive instances—times when Irene felt, quite justifiably, that my reliance on the experience of other bereaved individuals impeded my appreciation of her unique experience. The effective therapist must be able to empty his/her mind of the expectations and stereotypes which obstruct vision in order to facilitate the patient’s unique narrative to unfold freshly in the relationship. And so, too, for therapy technique. Not only in “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” but in the other tales as well I urge the therapist to create a new therapy for each patient. Hyperbolic though that may sound, I sincerely mean that the therapeutic venture must be organic: the therapist and patient must together shape the form of therapy—indeed, the joint process of shaping the work is an integral part of the work. The contemporary managed care trend toward brief, ready-made, protocol-driven therapy is a wrong turn and is deeply threatening to the whole therapeutic enterprise; it is based on a profound misunderstanding of the process of personal growth, namely that therapy consists of imparting information or advice. Ernest Lash, the therapist in the last two stories “Double Exposure” and “The Hungarian Cat Curse” had an earlier life as the protagonist of my novel, Lying on the Couch. His encore appearance is meant to signify that these two last tales are heavily fictionalized.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Paul has built into this narrative of Adam and the Messiah the darker theme of the Jewish law: “The law came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent” (5:20). What does that mean? Older theologies, including the “works contract” as often understood, saw the Jewish law as the equivalent of the original commands given to Adam and Eve. It was, so people thought, the moral standard Israel was expected to keep in order to be God’s people. It was the high moral bar that people in general, and Israel in particular, had to clear in order to be ruled “all right” in God’s sight. Then, in this same works-contract analysis, it became clear that Israel could not keep the law. The “law” was then seen as a negative, dangerous, perhaps even demonic power. According to some, God gave the law in order to terrify people with the prospect of judgment, so that they would run to the gospel for relief. That appears to make some sense, provided you approach the whole thing from the works-contract point of view. But this is not, however, the sense Paul has in mind. What Paul has in mind is a longer and more complex story, which he will unfold in chapter 7. This story is about the strange, unexpected divine purpose in giving the law, and this is what he has woven, as a foretaste, into the Adam-and-Messiah story of chapter 5. “The law,” he says, “came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent.” The phrase “so that,” italicized here, is vital. Paul is hinting that the often dark and sad history of Israel, the long descent into the “curse” of Deuteronomy, was not itself outside the divine purpose. That descent under the law was to be the means by which redemption would come. Even the exile itself, the long sojourn under the law’s curse, was part of the eventual saving purpose. The “so that” indicates that this was God’s intention. It was not an accident. Nor was it a demonic intrusion into the divine purpose. We note in particular at the end of Romans 5 that Paul in his distinctive way has done exactly what we saw in the four gospels. He has told the story of “how God became king” in such a way as to demonstrate that the death of Jesus was the clue to that result. At this point we seem to be very close to a central and more or less universal early Christian perception of what the gospel was all about and how its power was unleashed. If that is so, we should be less than surprised that Paul, like the gospels in describing Jesus’s last days, discerns the meaning of those days as the new Passover, the new Exodus. Romans 6–8: The New Exodus

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I believe this remoteness, and your discomfort about my challenging it, is the major factor motivating your wish to terminate. “Let me share a second observation: I’m struck by your lack of curiosity about yourself. I feel that I have to supply the curiosity for both of us—that I alone must carry the entire burden of our work.” “I’m not deliberately concealing anything from you, Doctor. Why would I do that intentionally? That is just the way I am,” Halston repeated in his wooden way . “Let’s try one last time, Halston. Humor me. I want you to review again the events of the day preceding the evening of the nightmare. Let’s go over it with a fine-tooth comb.” “As I told you, a normal day at the bank, and that night a horrible nightmare, which I’ve forgotten—the drive to the emergency room—” “No, no, we’ve done that. Let’s try another approach. Get your date book out. Let’s see,” Ernest checked his calendar, “our first meeting was May 9. Go over your appointments the day before. Start with the morning of May 8.” Halston took out his week-at-a-glance date book, turned to May 8, and squinted. “Mill Valley,” he said, “now why on earth was I in Mill Valley? Oh, right—my sister. I remember now. I wasn’t in the bank that morning after all. I was investigating Mill Valley.” “What do you mean, ‘investigating’?” “My sister lives in Miami, and her firm is transferring her to the Bay area. She’s considering a house in Mill Valley, and I offered to reconnoiter the town for her—you know, morning traffic patterns, parking, shopping, the best residential areas.” “Good. Excellent start. Now take me through the rest of the day.” “Everything is strangely hazy—it’s almost eerie. I can’t recall anything.” “You live in San Francisco—do you remember driving to Mill Valley across the Golden Gate Bridge? What time?” “Early, I think. Before the traffic. Maybe seven.” “Then what? Had you eaten breakfast at home? Or in Mill Valley? Try to picture it. Let your mind wander freely back to that morning. Close your eyes, if it helps.” Halston closed his eyes. After three or four minutes of silence, Ernest wondered whether he had fallen asleep and in a soft voice prodded, “Halston? Halston? Don’t move, stay where you are, but try to think aloud. What are you seeing in your mind?” “Doctor”—Halston slowly opened his eyes—“did I ever tell you about Artemis? ” “Artemis? The Greek goddess? No, not a word.” “Doctor,” said Halston, blinking his eyes and shaking his head as if to clear it, “I’m a little shaken. I’ve just now had the oddest experience. As though a rent suddenly appeared in my mind, letting all the uncanny events of that day pour through. I don’t want you to think I’ve been deliberately withholding this from you.” “Rest assured, Halston. I’m with you.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is not the place for any detailed exposition of this much-discussed phrase. It echoes, often explicitly and sometimes implicitly, the scenario in Daniel 7, in which a sequence of four monsters culminates in the “little horn” that grows out of the fourth and final one; whereupon the scene changes to the divine throne room, in which judgment is pronounced and “one like a son of man” is brought to the Ancient One and seated beside him in judgment. To this figure is given “dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (7:14). The horn is silenced, the monsters are condemned, and the kingdom of God, exercised through the human figure, is inaugurated at last. Josephus tells us that, in the first century, an oracle in Israel’s scriptures propelled the Jews to war against the Romans: it seems clear that he has the book of Daniel in mind. Daniel 2 contains the messianic prophecy of the “stone” that will smash the idolatrous statue and become, in its turn, a great mountain. Daniel 9 contains the prophecy about the extended exile, at the end of which “an anointed one shall be cut off” (v. 26), though this will be the time “to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity” (v. 24). Put these together with Daniel 7, and the composite picture seems clearly to be the one that all four evangelists are offering. Jesus is the true Messiah, whose inaugurated rule will overthrow the rule of the powers of the world. It will, in other words, be the new Passover, though seen now in the lurid colors of mythological metaphor. But it will achieve this by putting an end to sin, which as we have frequently seen means the ending of exile and the return of YHWH. We have said enough to make it clear that for all four evangelists the meaning of Jesus’s death is found in the big picture of the narrative they are telling, moving as it does from Jesus’s kingdom-inaugurating work to his crucifixion, with “King of the Jews” written above his head. They are all, in their different ways, highlighting this combination of kingdom and cross. Luke says several times, in one way or another, that Jesus has been the one through whom God’s liberation of Israel has taken place, even if not in the form that people at the time were expecting or necessarily wanting.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Unfortunately, nothing in my psychiatric training had prepared me to deal with any of the challenges that Tom and his fellow veterans presented. I went down to the medical library to look for books on war neurosis, shell shock, battle fatigue, or any other term or diagnosis I could think of that might shed light on my patients. To my surprise the library at the VA didn’t have a single book about any of these conditions. Five years after the last American soldier left Vietnam, the issue of wartime trauma was still not on anybody’s agenda. Finally, in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, I discovered The Traumatic Neuroses of War, which had been published in 1941 by a psychiatrist named Abram Kardiner. It described Kardiner’s observations of World War I veterans and had been released in anticipation of the flood of shell-shocked soldiers expected to be casualties of World War II.[1] Kardiner reported the same phenomena I was seeing: After the war his patients were overtaken by a sense of futility; they became withdrawn and detached, even if they had functioned well before. What Kardiner called “traumatic neuroses,” today we call posttraumatic stress disorder—PTSD. Kardiner noted that sufferers from traumatic neuroses develop a chronic vigilance for and sensitivity to threat. His summation especially caught my eye: “The nucleus of the neurosis is a physioneurosis.”[2] In other words, posttraumatic stress isn’t “all in one’s head,” as some people supposed, but has a physiological basis. Kardiner understood even then that the symptoms have their origin in the entire body’s response to the original trauma. Kardiner’s description corroborated my own observations, which was reassuring, but it provided me with little guidance on how to help the veterans. The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them—and from our own experience. This sounds so simple, but even as Semrad pushed us to rely upon self-knowledge, he also warned us how difficult that process really is, since human beings are experts in wishful thinking and obscuring the truth. I remember him saying: “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.” Working at the VA I soon discovered how excruciating it can be to face reality. This was true both for my patients and for myself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  They knew Isaiah 59:2 (“Your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear”) as well as we do, but the early Christians did not explain the message of the gospel in those terms. They did not propose that God had set up, through Jesus, a kind of spiritual mechanism whereby anyone at any time could repent, be assured of God’s forgiveness, and experience the loving presence of God in a new way. Once again, I do not think any early Christians would have denied that this was true, but it is interesting that they didn’t put it like that. These are all meanings that belong in the much later world of modern Western piety. They are important, but they do not give us the original, and larger, biblical picture. No. If we are to be faithful to the biblical overtones of “forgiveness of sins,” we must insist that all such meanings are included within something much larger , something far more revolutionary. It is this larger reality that really matters. The smaller reality—that I, as a sinner, need to know the forgiving love of God in my own life—is vital for each person, one by one. But, as history shows, that reality can all too easily be understood within the Platonized version of the gospel in which the whole emphasis falls on a detached spirituality in the present and a detached future salvation in which the created order is abandoned altogether. Once again, that is how to domesticate the revolution. The larger reality is that something has happened within the actual world of space, time, and matter, as a result of which everything is different . By six o’clock on the Friday evening Jesus died, something had changed, and changed radically. Heaven and earth were brought together, creating the cosmic “new temple”: “God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah” (2 Cor. 5:19). This was totally unexpected. No Jews prior to Jesus were walking around with this kind of messianic narrative in their heads. But when the resurrection compelled the disciples to rethink their original and natural reaction to the death of Jesus—a reaction we see graphically portrayed in Luke’s picture of the two on the road to Emmaus—we find them grappling with the fresh belief that these events were seen as the dramatic, unexpected, but nevertheless appropriate fulfillment of the ancient prophecies and therefore as the events through which the long-awaited new age was being ushered in at last . This was not about inventing a new kind of religion. It had nothing to do with getting rid of the earthbound hopes of the ancient Jews and embracing a “spiritual” reality instead.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  145 This counterintuitive (bottom-up) view challenged the Cartesian/cognitive (top-down) paradigm where the conscious mind first recognizes the source of threat and then commands the body to respond: to flee, to fight or to fold. James’s bottom-up perception—that we feel fear because we are running away from the threat—while only partially correct, does make a crucial point about the illusory nature of perception. We commonly believe, for example, that when we touch a hot object, we draw our hand away because of the pain. However, the reality is that if we were to wait until we experienced pain in order to withdraw our hand, we might damage it beyond repair. Every student of elementary physiology learns that there is first a reflex withdrawal of the hand, which is only then followed by the sensation of pain. The pain might well serve the function of reminding us not to pick up a potentially hot stone from the fire pit a second time, but it has little to do with our hand withdrawing when it is first burned. Similarly, every student of basic chemistry learns, hopefully after the first encounter, that hot test tubes look just like cold ones. However, what we falsely perceive , and believe as fact, is that the pain causes us to withdraw our hand. James was able to perceive that fear was not a primarily cognitive affair, that there was a muscular and visceral reaction in his body first , and that it was the perception of this body reaction that then generated the emotion of fear. What James observed was that, yes, when the brain calculates that there is danger, it makes this assessment so quickly that there isn’t enough time for the person to become consciously aware of it. What happens instead, according to James, is that the brain canvases the body to see how it is reacting in the moment. In what was a revelatory revision, James relocated the consciousness of feeling from mind to body. In doing this he demonstrated a rare prescience about what neuroscience was only to begin to discover a hundred years later. Ben Libet, 146 neurosurgeon and neurophysiologist at the University of California–San Francisco’s Medical School, conducted a revealing, but little known, series of studies over thirty years ago. He essentially confirmed James’s observational chain. Here’s a little experiment that you can do right now. Hold one of your arms out in front of you with your hand facing upward. Then, whenever you feel like it (of your own “free will”), flex your wrist. Do this several times and watch what happens in your mind. You probably felt as though you first consciously decided to move and then, following your intention, you moved it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He is Jewish (with a Berber mother, which does not simplify things) and a Tunisian subject, that is to say a subject of the Bey of Tunis. But, as a pogrom during which Arabs massacre Jews shows him, he is not really Tunisian. His culture is French and he is the only one in his class who understands Racine properly. However, Vichy France delivers him to the Germans and Free France, when he wants to fight for her, asks him to change his Jewish-sounding name. There would be no question of being a Jew if, to be so, he didn’t need to accept a faith he does not share and traditions he views as ridiculous. What will he become in the end? One is tempted to say a writer as Mr. Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt proves that he is one, and also because a writer defines himself by his inability, nostalgic in fact, to blend into the anonymity of a class or race. In any case, there is no doubt that writing was the road to Damascus for this non-believing Paul. In terms of language at least, he wanted to be French. After reading about the father’s coughing fit, the mother’s dance, the son’s sexual initiation, the reader will surely conclude that Mr. Memmi is a novelist. But that’s not all he is. The mere fact of having described so precisely and sensitively the rending condition of a young Jew becoming aware through sheer intelligence and will of who he is, and is not, demonstrates a deeper choice. By writing about the difficulty of being a Jew, the author finally chooses to be one (and that’s good), replacing the traditional religious sensibility of his forebears with a sensibility that is more modern, dramatic, intelligent, loyal without illusions. This allows him to remain what he is while paying attention to the contradictions of others, French or Arab. Somehow, he will no longer deny anything in himself or others. The book, indeed, ends with the hero’s flight to South America. But that is novelistic artifice. This kind of hero never leaves or, if he does, leaves unchanged. All of us, French and born in North Africa, also remain who we are, faced with contradictions that today bloody our cities, and which we will not overcome by fleeing them, but by living them out. That is why I so much value Mr. Memmi’s beautiful book. Albert Camus PROLOGUE This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang.