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 Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He came at just the right time to see the old gentleman's last convulsive convulsions, and then he stood for a long time in the dying room with folded hands and looked at this short figure, which was outlined under the wrappings, at this dead face with the somewhat soft ones Trains and the white chops... "You haven't had it very well, Uncle Gotthold," he thought. “You learned too late to make concessions, to be considerate...But it is necessary... If I were like you, I would have married a shop a year ago... The dehors true!... Did you ever want it any other way than you had it? Although you were defiant, and well believed that defiance was something idealistic, your mind had little dynamism, little imagination, little of the idealism that enables one to have a quiet enthusiasm sweeter, more exhilarating, more gratifying than a secret love, any abstract good , to cherish, to cherish, to defend, to honor and to bring power and splendor to an old name, a company sign. You lacked the sense of poetry, though you were brave enough to love and marry in defiance of your father's command. You didn't have any ambition either, Uncle Gotthold. Admittedly, the old name is just a bourgeois name, and one takes care of it by helping a grain business to flourish, by honoring one's own person in a small piece of the world, Did you think: I'm going to marry the Stuewing, whom I love, and don't give a damn about any practical considerations, because they're small stuff and bourgeoisie?... Oh, we too have traveled and been educated enough to recognize quite well that the limits, the are attached to our ambitions, seen from the outside and above are only narrow and pathetic. But everything is just a parable on earth, Uncle Gotthold! Didn't you know that you can be a great man even in a small town? That one can be a Caesar in a moderate trading post on the Baltic Sea? Of course, that takes a bit of imagination, a bit of idealism... and you didn't have that, whatever you may have thought of yourself." And Thomas Buddenbrook turned away. He went to the window and, hands behind his back, a smile on his intelligent face, looked across at the dimly lit and rain-draped Gothic facade of City Hall. As was the nature of things, the office and title of Royal Dutch Consulate which Thomas might have claimed immediately after his father's death now passed to him, to Tony Grünlich's boundless pride, and the domed shield with lions , coat of arms and crown could now be seen again on the gable front in Mengstraße under the » Dominus providebit «. Immediately after this matter had been settled, in June of the same year, the young Consul set out on a business trip to Amsterdam, which he did not know how long it would take.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Virginia awakens. This might be another way to begin, certainly; with Clarissa going on an errand on a day in June, instead of soldiers marching off to lay the wreath in Whitehall. But is it the right beginning? Is it a little too ordinary? Virginia lies quietly in her bed, and sleep takes her again so quickly she is not conscious of falling back to sleep at all. It seems, suddenly, that she is not in her bed but in a park; a park impossibly verdant, green beyond green—a Platonic vision of a park, at once homely and the seat of mystery, implying as parks do that while the old woman in the shawl dozes on the slatted bench something alive and ancient, something neither kind nor unkind, exulting only in continuance, knits together the green world of farms and meadows, forests and parks. Virginia moves through the park without quite walking; she floats through it, a feather of perception, unbodied. The park reveals to her its banks of lilies and peonies, its graveled paths bordered by cream-colored roses. A stone maiden, smoothed by weather, stands at the edge of a clear pool and muses into the water. Virginia moves through the park as if impelled by a cushion of air; she is beginning to understand that another park lies beneath this one, a park of the underworld, more marvelous and terrible than this; it is the root from which these lawns and arbors grow. It is the true idea of the park, and it is nothing so simple as beautiful. She can see people now: a Chinese man stooping to pick something up off the grass, a little girl waiting. Up ahead, on a circle of newly turned earth, a woman sings. Virginia awakens again. She is here, in her bedroom at Hogarth House. Gray light fills the room; muted, steel-toned; it lies with a gray-white, liquid life on her coverlet. It silvers the green walls. She has dreamed of a park and she has dreamed of a line for her new book—what was it? Flowers; something to do with flowers. Or something to do with a park? Was someone singing? No, the line is gone, and it doesn’t matter, really, because she still has the feeling it left behind. She knows she can get up and write.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  – And with this question the night fell before his eyes again. He saw, he didn't know or understand anything anymore and let himself sink deeper into the pillows, completely blinded and exhausted by the bit of truth he had just been allowed to see. And he lay still and waited fervently, tempted to pray that it might come once more and enlighten him. And it came. With folded hands, not daring to move, he lay and was allowed to look... what was death The answer did not appear to him in poor and self-important words: he felt it, he possessed it inwardly. Death was a happiness so deep that it could only be fully appreciated in blessed moments like this one. It was the return of an unspeakably embarrassing mistake, the correction of one serious mistake, the liberation from the most adverse ties and barriers - a deplorable misfortune he made good again. end and resolution? Thrice merciful to anyone who felt these vain concepts to terrify! What would end and what would dissolve? This body of his... This personality and individuality of his, this clumsy, stubborn, flawed and hateful obstacle to being something different and better ! Wasn't every human being a blunder and misstep? Did he not end up in a painful prison as soon as he was born? Prison! Prison! Barriers and ties everywhere! Through the lattice windows of his individuality man stares hopelessly at the curtain walls of external circumstances until death comes and calls him home and freedom... Individuality!... Ah, what one is, can and has seems poor, grey, inadequate and boring; but what one is not, cannot and does not have, that is precisely what one looks at with that longing envy that becomes love because it is afraid of becoming hate. I carry within me the seed, the seed, the potential for all the skills and activities in the world... Where could I be if I weren't here! Who, what, how could I be if I were not me, if this my personal appearance did not shut me off and separate my consciousness from that of all those who are not me! Organism! Blind, thoughtless, regrettable eruption of the urgent will! Better, truly, this will weaves freely in the spaceless and timeless night than languishes in a dungeon poorly lit by the quivering and swaying little flame of the intellect! In my son did I hope to live on? In an even more anxious, weaker, more vacillating personality? Childish, deluded folly! What's a son to me? I don't need a son!... Where will I be when I'm dead? But it's so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple! I will be in all those who have said, say and say I over and over again become: but especially in those who say it fuller, stronger, happier ...

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  The day after the consul's severe agony, the senator, at the table and, as it seemed, studiously in the presence of his son, condemned his wife with a few harsh words for the behavior of uncle Christian, who, when the patient was at its worst, slipped away and went to bed. "It's the nerves, Thomas," Gerda had answered; but with a look at Hanno, which the child had by no means escaped, he replied in an almost stern tone that no word of apology was appropriate here. The blessed mother suffered so much that one should have been ashamed cowardly to withdraw the little suffering that the sight of their struggles would have caused in one. From this Hanno had concluded that he dare not object to the visit to the open coffin. As at Christmas, the large room was alien to him when he entered it from the columned hall on the day before the funeral between father and mother. Straight ahead, glowing white against the dark green of large potted plants forming a semicircle, alternating with tall silver candelabra, on a black pedestal stood the copy of Thorwaldsen's Blessing Christ, which had been placed outside in the corridor. Everywhere on the walls a black pile moved in the breeze and hid the sky-blue of the wallpaper as well as the smiles of the white statues of gods who had looked on when people happily dined in this hall. And surrounded by his relatives dressed all in black, the broad crape around the sleeve of his sailor suit, his mind befogged by the scents, This wasn't grandma. It was her society cap with the white silk ribbons and her reddish-brown parting underneath. But that pointed nose, those drawn-in lips, that protruding chin, those yellow, transparent, clasped hands that looked cold and stiff, didn't belong to her. This was a strange wax doll, and there was something horrible about building and celebrating in this way. And he looked across at the landscape room as if the real grandmother was about to appear there in a moment... But she didn't come. She was dead. Death had exchanged her forever for this waxy figure, which kept its lids and lips shut so relentlessly, so unapproachably tight... He stood, resting on his left leg, his right knee bent so that his foot balanced lightly on the point, and one hand grasped the sailor's knot on his chest while the other hung limp. His head, with his light brown hair falling in curls at his temples, was tilted to one side, and his golden-brown eyes, surrounded by bluish shadows, squinted from under knitted brows, with a repelled and brooding expression into the face of the corpse. He breathed slowly and hesitantly, for with each breath he expected the scent, that strange and yet so strangely familiar scent that the clouds of floral scents could not always drown out.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  His face, with the light eyebrows, one of which was raised a little, seemed serious and attentive in these occupations; but his thoughts went far away in the dark, their own toilsome paths. Sometimes he would sit down on the small terrace in the pavilion, which was completely covered with vine leaves, and look without seeing anything across the garden to the red back wall of his house. The air was warm and sweet, and it was as if the peaceful sounds around him were soothing and trying to lull him. Tired of staring into emptiness, of loneliness and silence, he now and then closed his eyes, only to get up again and hastily shoo the peace away from him. I have to think, he said almost aloud... I have to put everything in order before it's too late... But here it was, in this pavilion, in the little yellow cane rocking chair, where one day he read for four full hours with increasing emotion a book that he had half looked for, half accidentally got hold of... After the second breakfast, with the cigarette in his mouth, he had found it in the smoking room, in a deep corner of the bookcase, hidden behind stately volumes, and remembered that a year ago he had bought it carelessly at a book dealer at a bargain price: a fairly large one, up A work poorly printed and stitched on thin yellowish paper, the second part of only a famous metaphysical system... He had taken it with him into the garden and now, in deep absorption, turned page after page... An unknown, great and grateful satisfaction filled him. He felt the incomparable satisfaction of seeing how a vastly superior brain took hold of life, this life so strong, cruel and scornful, in order to subdue and condemn it... the satisfaction of the sufferer, of the cold and harshness of life constantly kept his suffering hidden with shame and a bad conscience and suddenly received from the hands of a great and wise man the fundamental and solemn right to suffer in the world - this best of all imaginable worlds, which was proved with playful scorn to be the worst of all conceivable. He didn't understand everything; Principles and assumptions remained unclear to him, and his mind, untrained in such reading, was able not to follow certain trains of thought. But it was precisely the alternation of light and darkness, of dull incomprehension, vague foreboding and sudden clairvoyance, that kept him in suspense, and the hours passed without him looking up from his book or even changing his position in his chair. At first he had left many a page unread and, progressing rapidly, unconsciously and hastily, longing for the main thing, for what was really important, he only made this or that passage his own that fascinated him.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  [image "9780785263708_0195_002" file=Image00074.jpg] The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me. [image "9780785263708_0195_004" file=Image00075.jpg] God brought me to Graceland to rid me of this deception, to scrub it out of the gray matter of my mind. It was a frustrating and painful experience. I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug is so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction. [image "9780785263708_0195_007" file=Image00076.jpg] In the spring of my year at Graceland, when the ground was beginning to dry at Laurelhurst Park, a friend and I traveled to Salem to hear Brennan Manning speak. Manning is a former Catholic priest and a wonderful writer who has struggled with alcoholism and speaks frankly about matters of Christian spirituality. We sat so close I could see the blue in Brennan’s eyes and that quality of sincerity you find in people who have turned trial into service. Brennan grew up in New York and speaks with a slight East Coast bite that has been sanded down by years of smoking. An ear has to work a bit to keep his pace. He opened his talk with the story of Zacchaeus. Brennan talked about how an entire town, with their ridicule and hatred, could not keep the little man from oppressing them through the extravagant financial gains he made as a tax collector. Christ walked through town, Brennan said, and spotted the man. Christ told Zacchaeus that He would like to have a meal with him. In the single conversation Christ had with Zacchaeus, Brennan reminded us, Jesus spoke affirmation and love, and the tax collector sold his possessions and made amends to those he had robbed. It was the affection of Christ, not the brutality of a town, that healed Zacchaeus. Manning went on to speak of the great danger of a harsh word, the power of unlove to deteriorate a person’s heart and spirit, and how, as representatives of the grace and love of God, our communication should be seasoned with love and compassion. While Manning was speaking, I was being shown myself, and I felt like God was asking me to change. I was being asked to walk away from the lies I believed about the world being about me. I had been communicating unlove to my housemates because I thought they were not cooperating with the meaning of life, that meaning being my desire and will and choice and comfort. There was nothing fun about going home that night. I went with new eyes, seeing my housemates as people.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  They dealt with battle. He then proceeded to talk about cancer patients and how, because of war metaphor, many people who suffer with cancer feel more burdened than, in fact, they should. Most of them are frightened beyond their need to be frightened, and this affects their health. Some, feeling that they have been thrust into a deadly war, simply give up. If there were another metaphor, a metaphor more accurate, perhaps cancer would not prove so deadly. Science has shown that the way people think about cancer affects their ability to deal with the disease, thus affecting their overall health. Professor Spencer said that if he were to sit down with his family and tell them he had cancer they would be shocked, concerned, perhaps even in tears, and yet cancer is nothing near the most deadly of diseases. Because of war metaphor, the professor said, we are more likely to fear cancer when, actually, most people survive the disease. Mr. Spencer then asked us about another area in which he felt metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We value people, I shouted out. Yes, he said, and wrote it on his little white board. We invest in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listed an entire white board of economic metaphor. Relationships could be bankrupt , we said. People are priceless , we said. All economic metaphor. I was taken aback. And that’s when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dis-lodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. The next few days unfolded in a thick line of melancholy thought and introspection. I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself. It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God. And I wouldn’t receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn’t feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn’t make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had pre-supposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. And I mean that. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right. It wasn’t manly or healthy, and I cut it out. That was about a year ago, and since then I have been relatively happy. I am not kidding. I don’t sit around and talk bad about myself anymore. The girl and I got back together, and she could sense the difference in me, and she liked it, and I felt that I was operating a completely new machine. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was to receive love, to have the authority to love myself, to feel that it was right to love myself. When my girlfriend told me how she felt, I was able to receive it, and we had this normal relationship that in the end didn’t work because we realized we weren’t for each other. When we finally closed it out, it didn’t hurt because I trusted that God had something else for me, and if He didn’t, it didn’t mean He didn’t love me. From that point on, the point in the bathroom, I had confidence. Odd but true. [image "9780785263708_0245_002" file=Image00091.jpg] And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it. 20 Jesus The Lines on His Face A GUY I KNOW NAMED ALAN WENT AROUND THE country asking ministry leaders questions.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  We normally discussed literature or the day’s lecture, but one day Laura brought up an odd topic: racism in the history of the church. She had moved to Portland from Georgia where, though she is an atheist, she told me she witnessed, within a church, the sort of racial discrimination most of us thought ended fifty years ago. She asked me very seriously what I thought about the problem of racism in America and whether the church had been a harbor for that sort of hatred. It had been a long time since I’d thought about it, to be honest. Just out of high school I got hooked on Martin Luther King and read most of his books, but since then the issue had faded in my mind. I am sure there are exceptions, but for the most part I think evangelical churches failed pretty badly during the civil rights movement, as did nearly every other social institution. Laura looked down into her coffee and didn’t say anything. I knew, from previous conversations, she had dated a black student back in Atlanta who was now at Morehouse College where Dr. King himself earned a degree. Her question was not philosophical. It was personal. I told her how frustrating it is to be a Christian in America, and how frustrated I am with not only the church’s failures concerning *human rights, but also my personal failure to contribute to the solution. I wondered out loud, though, if there was a bigger issue, and I mistakenly made the callous comment that racism might be a minor problem compared to bigger trouble we have to deal with. “Racism, not an issue?!” she questioned very sternly. “Well, not that it’s not an issue, only that it is a minor issue.” “How can you say that?” She sat back restlessly in her chair. “Don, it is an enormous problem.” I was doing a lot of backpedaling at first, but then I began to explain what I meant. “Yeah, I understand it is a terrible and painful problem, but in light of the whole picture, racism is a signal of something greater. There is a larger problem here than tension between ethnic groups.” “Unpack that statement,” Laura said. “I’m talking about self-absorption. If you think about it, the human race is pretty self-absorbed. Racism might be the symptom of a greater disease. What I mean is, as a human, I am flawed in that it is difficult for me to consider others before myself. It feels like I have to fight against this force, this current within me that, more often than not, wants to avoid serious issues and please myself, buy things for myself, feed myself, entertain myself, and all of that.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Can you imagine a children’s book about Noah’s ark complete with paintings of people gasping in gallons of water, mothers grasping their children while their bodies go flying down white-rapid rivers, the children’s tiny heads being bashed against rocks or hung up in fallen trees? I don’t think a children’s book like that would sell many copies. I couldn’t give myself to Christianity because it was a religion for the intellectually naive. In order to believe Christianity, you either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children’s stories or ignore them. The entire thing seemed very difficult for my intellect to embrace. Now none of this was quite defined; it was mostly taking place in my subconscious. [image "9780785263708_0044_003" file=Image00009.jpg] Help came from the most unlikely of sources. I was taking a literature course in college in which we were studying the elements of story: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. The odd thought occurred to me while I was studying that we didn’t know where the elements of story come from. I mean, we might have a guy’s name who thought of them, but we don’t know why they exist. I started wondering why the heart and mind responded to this specific formula when it came to telling stories. So I broke it down. Setting: That was easy; every story has a setting. My setting is America, on earth. I understand setting because I experience setting. I am sitting in a room, in a house, I have other characters living in this house with me, that sort of thing. The reason my heart understood setting was because I experienced setting. But then there was conflict. Every good story has conflict in it. Some conflict is internal, some is external, but if you want to write a novel that sells, you have to have conflict. We understand conflict because we experience conflict, right? But where does conflict come from? Why do we experience conflict in our lives? This helped me a great deal in accepting the idea of original sin and the birth of conflict. The rebellion against God explained why humans experienced conflict in their lives, and nobody knows of any explanation other than this. This last point was crucial. I felt like I was having an epiphany. Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story about Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all. Now some people process the account of original sin in the book of Genesis as metaphor, as symbolism for something else that happened; but whether you take it metaphorically or literally, this serves as an adequate explanation of the human struggle that every person experiences: loneliness, crying yourself to sleep at night, addiction, pride, war, and self-addiction.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  [image "9780785263708_0169_003" file=Image00058.jpg] All the pretty girls at UMASS were running in their sweats that afternoon, the kids out smoking on the lawn, the trees behind them just sticks of things, just cobalt sky out for a walk. The place is lovely in the winter, very smart feeling, very bookish. The big houses are not close together. Red brick and ivy. Long lawns. Across town from UMASS is Amherst College. Emily’s grandfather started Amherst College because he wanted women to know the Bible as well as men. He was all vision and no hands, it seemed, and the place went bankrupt nearly immediately. The school was saved years later by the man’s son, Emily’s father, who was not like her grandfather in that he did not believe in the freedom or equality of women. Emily’s father kept women down. Austin, Emily’s brother, not Emily, was expected by the family to publish, to be a great writer. I was thinking about these things when I circled Amherst College and stopped at the Jones Library where some handwritten notes from Emily are kept, scribbles mostly, gentle pencil on a yellowed sheet within a glass case. It was like magic looking at them. I felt ashamed because I knew I had been reading her for only a year, and yet I felt as though I knew her, as though we were dear friends, what with her living in the apartment in Oregon with me and all. The man at Jones Library told me where to find the homestead, not much of a place, he said, and indeed I had passed it on the way into town without knowing it. I thought I would have felt it in my chest or sensed it to my right. I thought it would have been largely marked. I followed the man’s instructions and walked from the library down along the shops back toward Boston a mile. Her house is not very much like what you would think. Though it is big it is not grand, and there is a large tree in front that takes the view. A side door is greeted by concrete steps, the cheap sort, and the driveway has been paved. There is a historical marker, but it is small, and so the first thing a young man realizes when he visits the home of Emily Dickinson is that the world is, in fact, not as in love with her as he is. I wanted to gather the leaves, you know, clean up the place. And I was looking all about the house, before making my approach, when I saw this thing that was not her but only in my mind was her, swing open the side door and set a foot quickly on the step. She met my eyes and went white, whiter than she already was, anyway, and like a wind she fled back into the house. The door closed as if it were on a spring.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  But then there was conflict. Every good story has conflict in it. Some conflict is internal, some is external, but if you want to write a novel that sells, you have to have conflict. We understand conflict because we experience conflict, right? But where does conflict come from? Why do we experience conflict in our lives? This helped me a great deal in accepting the idea of original sin and the birth of conflict. The rebellion against God explained why humans experienced conflict in their lives, and nobody knows of any explanation other than this. This last point was crucial. I felt like I was having an epiphany. Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story about Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all. Now some people process the account of original sin in the book of Genesis as metaphor, as symbolism for something else that happened; but whether you take it metaphorically or literally, this serves as an adequate explanation of the human struggle that every person experiences: loneliness, crying yourself to sleep at night, addiction, pride, war, and self-addiction. The heart responds to conflict within story, I began to think, because there is some great conflict in the universe with which we are interacting, even if it is only in the subconscious. If we were not experiencing some sort of conflict in our lives, our hearts would have no response to conflict in books or film. The idea of conflict, of having tension, suspense, or an enemy, would make no sense to us. But these things do make sense. We understand these elements because we experience them. As much as I did not want to admit it, Christian spirituality explained why. And then the element of story known as climax. Every good story has a climax. Climax is where a point of decision determines the end of the story. Now this was starting to scare me a little bit. If the human heart uses the tools of reality to create elements of story, and the human heart responds to climax in the structure of story, this means that climax, or point of decision, could very well be something that exists in the universe. What I mean is that there is a decision the human heart needs to make. The elements of story began to parallel my understanding of Christian spirituality. Christianity offered a decision, a climax. It also offered a good and a bad resolution. In part, our decisions were instrumental to the way our story turned out.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “I’m so glad you have chosen to be a part of this group. We will be together for most of this year, meeting weekly. I know it’s a big commitment, but healing takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t heal alone. You need relationships around you to heal. I want this to be a safe place for you to get the pain out and let healing begin. So, it’s vital that everything said here stays here. Confidentiality is of utmost importance and I would hate it if you heard through the grapevine of this small town something you shared in this group. I also want you to commit to being here. You are a part of this group and your presence matters. If you must miss more than three times, please say so now.” The women looked at each other, assessing one another’s commitment level to the group and if they could trust the women in this room. “I’ll share a little bit of my story first and then we can go around the room and introduce ourselves,” Olivia said, as she made eye contact with each member of the group before continuing. “My story is perhaps a little different than yours; I became interested in the effects of sexual addiction when I was in graduate school. We were required to do a research paper and for some unknown reason I picked the topic of sexual addiction. It wasn’t until I was reading the fourth book and the twentieth article on the topic that I realized my father was most likely a sex addict. “I remember sitting at my desk when the realization hit me. My father had porn stashed under the couch in the family room, like we kids wouldn’t notice it there, and I am pretty sure he had affairs on my mom. He stayed out late more nights than he came home, and he sexually abused me as well. “Before you freak out, I’m not saying men who struggle with sexual addiction sexually abuse their daughters, but we do know, when untreated, addictions can escalate. I’m sure my father never thought he would stoop to the level he did, but he did. When you add alcohol to the mix, people lose inhibitions and do things they wouldn’t do sober. “By the time I realized my dad most likely was a sex addict, I had spent several years in therapy working through my own trauma. I was part of a sexual abuse recovery group, and I healed enough I could actually feel some compassion for my dad. Not making excuses for him, but compassion in that he came from a family with tremendous amounts of dysfunction, he had personal trauma, and addiction was part of the culture he grew up in.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  He told me this over coffee because I was telling him how I thought, perhaps, man was broken; how for man, doing good and moral things was like swimming upstream. He wondered if God had mysteriously told me about his infidelity. He squirmed a bit and then spoke to me as if I were a priest. He confessed everything. I told him I was sorry, that it sounded terrible. And it did sound terrible. His body was convulsed in guilt and self-hatred. He said he would lie down next to his wife at night feeling walls of concrete between their hearts. He had secrets. She tries to love him, but he knows he doesn’t deserve it. He cannot accept her affection because she is loving a man who doesn’t exist. He plays a role. He says he is an actor in his own home. Designed for good, my friend was sputtering and throwing smoke. The soul was not designed for this, I thought. We were supposed to be good, all of us. We were supposed to be good. For a moment, sitting there above the city, I imagined life outside narcissism. I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered at how peaceful it might be not to be pestered by that childish voice that wants for pleasure and attention. I wondered what it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, everywhere I go being reminded of myself. It began to rain that night on Mount Tabor. I rode my motorcycle home in the weather, which I hate doing because the streets are so slick. I got home white-knuckled and wet. My room was warm and inviting, as it always is with its wood panels and dignified birch outside the window. I sat on my bed and looked out at my tree, which by this time was gathering rain in applause. I didn’t feel much like Napoleon that night. I didn’t like being reminded about how self-absorbed I was. I wanted to be over this, done with this. I didn’t want to live in a broken world or a broken me. I wasn’t trying to weasel out of anything, I just wasn’t in the mood to be on earth that night. I get like that sometimes when it rains, or when I see certain sad movies. I put on the new Wilco album, turned it up and went into the bathroom to wash my hands and face. I know now, from experience, that the path to joy winds through this dark valley. I think every well-adjusted human being has dealt squarely with his or her own depravity. I realize this sounds very Christian, very fundamentalist and browbeating, but I want to tell you this part of what the Christians are saying is true. I think Jesus feels strongly about communicating the idea of our brokenness, and I think it is worth reflection.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The heart responds to conflict within story, I began to think, because there is some great conflict in the universe with which we are interacting, even if it is only in the subconscious. If we were not experiencing some sort of conflict in our lives, our hearts would have no response to conflict in books or film. The idea of conflict, of having tension, suspense, or an enemy, would make no sense to us. But these things do make sense. We understand these elements because we experience them. As much as I did not want to admit it, Christian spirituality explained why. And then the element of story known as climax. Every good story has a climax. Climax is where a point of decision determines the end of the story. Now this was starting to scare me a little bit. If the human heart uses the tools of reality to create elements of story, and the human heart responds to climax in the structure of story, this means that climax, or point of decision, could very well be something that exists in the universe. What I mean is that there is a decision the human heart needs to make. The elements of story began to parallel my understanding of Christian spirituality. Christianity offered a decision, a climax. It also offered a good and a bad resolution. In part, our decisions were instrumental to the way our story turned out. Now this was spooky because for thousands of years big-haired preachers have talked about the idea that we need to make a decision, to follow or reject Christ. They would offer these ideas as a sort of magical solution to the dilemma of life. I had always hated hearing about it because it seemed so entirely unfashionable a thing to believe, but it did explain things. Maybe these unfashionable ideas were pointing at something mystical and true. And, perhaps, I was judging the idea, not by its merit, but by the fashionable or unfashionable delivery of the message. [image "9780785263708_0046_003" file=Image00010.jpg] A long time ago I went to a concert with my friend Rebecca. Rebecca can sing better than anybody I’ve ever heard sing. I heard this folksinger was coming to town, and I thought she might like to see him because she was a singer too. The tickets were twenty bucks, which is a lot to pay if you’re not on a date. Between songs, though, he told a story that helped me resolve some things about God. The story was about his friend who is a Navy SEAL. He told it like it was true, so I guess it was true, although it could have been a lie. The folksinger said his friend was performing a covert operation, freeing hostages from a building in some dark part of the world. His friend’s team flew in by helicopter, made their way to the compound and stormed into the room where the hostages had been imprisoned for months.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  For a split second, she recalled the brief conversation when Olivia asked her if her belief system played a part in the troubles she and James experienced. Olivia was clear that James’s behavior was James’s responsibility, but she also said we all have a powerful need to prove our belief system is true—even if it is destructive to love and life. At that moment, while speaking to these students, Kaycie had her own epiphany. She could feel it and it was real; deep down she believed trusting a man was emotional suicide. Momentarily stunned by this revelation, she knew she had to make things right with James. So much progress had been made between the two of them, but there was more work to be done if they were ever going to be truly naked and unashamed with each other. Wrapping up her talk, Kaycie asked the students if any of them experienced anything along the same lines as she did. She asked the student leaders and the Real Life team to come up to the front to be available to any of the students who needed support or prayer. It began slowly, but soon a throng of students flooded the front of the auditorium. Prayers, whispered truths, secrets were shared in this sacred space. Kaycie shook her head, always surprised by how many could relate to her story. It caused her to notice the heaviness in her heart, but just as quickly, the promise available for every student if they simply took hold of it. Jesus significantly healed her heart and was still doing so. And Jesus could heal their hearts too. It was quiet in the car on the drive home. Both were processing the time with the students and hearing some of their stories of sexual trauma and regrets. Both felt contented to have the opportunity to do as Scripture recommends—just put your ear to the lips of the victim and healing will begin. James interpreted her thoughts with, “You okay?” “Yes, I’m just processing what all happened tonight and a realization I had about myself. I know you are tired, but can we have some talk time when we get home, maybe after we have a shower and unwind?” “Sure, of course,” James responded. “Hey, let’s pray together before we get home so we can focus on each other.”

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Dismiss the thought and out go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of 'ideas' that have once served than you can make a new bubble out of old triangles. Each bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sui generis. [251] In his work, La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), especially chapters VI and VII. [252] Page 198. [253] Page 146. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that we often hear some one speak whilst our mind is preoccupied, but do not understand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly 'realize' what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in an unfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the idea is taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea. The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual field of intellectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M. Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class there is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea, when it is grasped—we hear the echo of the words as we catch their meaning. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there. [254] A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds that the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sentences are finished. [255] The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) to the doctrine set forth here is in O. Liebmann's Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, pp. 427-438. [256] See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze's Microcosmus, Eug. tr. vol.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Then she did it; she decided we didn’t need to be in touch anymore. She broke it off. She sent me a letter saying that I didn’t love myself and could not receive love from her. There was nothing she could do about it, and it was killing her. I wandered around the house for an hour just looking at the blank walls, making coffee or cleaning the bathroom, not sure when my body was going to explode in sobs and tears. I was scrubbing the toilet when the voices began. I’d listened to them so often before, but on this day they were shouting. They were telling me that I was as disgusting as the urine on the wall around the toilet. And then the sentiment occurred. I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany like a movement in a symphony or something. The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself. And I thought about that for a second and wondered why God would put that phrase so strongly in my mind. I thought about our neighbor Mark, who is tall and skinny and gay, and I wondered whether God was telling me I was gay, which was odd because I had never felt gay, but then it hit me that God was not telling me I was gay. He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself. It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God. And I wouldn’t receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn’t feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn’t make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had pre-supposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. And I mean that. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right. It wasn’t manly or healthy, and I cut it out. That was about a year ago, and since then I have been relatively happy. I am not kidding. I don’t sit around and talk bad about myself anymore.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “This term signifies an intimate, experiential, personal, face to face, eye to eye, I to I, type of a relationship. It isn’t casual and it isn’t quick. This type of relationship takes the willingness to study and observe and watch and listen and attune to and notice. Honestly, it takes work, but it is the kind of work that is more like an investment. The more you invest, the greater the reward. “How would lovemaking be different if you approached it with this term in mind? If this is what you were made for?” The room was still for a few moments while Olivia patiently waited. James motioned with his raised hand he wanted to say something. “Well, it gives sex a totally different meaning. If I initiate sex with Kaycie from a position of wanting to know her—I want to understand her. I want to experience her—I imagine I would be thinking less about having an orgasm with her and more about really being with her, being present with her. I would have to bring myself fully to bed. I couldn’t be hidden, or preoccupied. I would have her as my focus and my heart in the right place. “If I want to know her, I would be focused on discovering what pleases her sexually and how I could engage her whole person. I would see her not just as a body, but a person with a soul, spirit, and personality. I would care about her needs, her desires, her likes and dislikes. I would listen for what arouses her. I would notice when she goes quiet or when it feels like she has left the room mentally. I would ask her where she went. I would ask her what she feels and likes and wants. I would be way more sensitive to her.” With that, he sat back down with tears filling his eyes. Olivia asked him, “James, what might you be feeling?” James closed his eyes for a minute before he said, “I haven’t ever really made love to my wife. It just hit me; I haven’t known how to make love to her. I thought it was all about getting it on with her because I wanted her, but now I know it’s deeper than that. I want to know her.” He turned and looked at Kaycie, “Would you forgive me for not getting it? Would you forgive me for being selfish?” “I forgive you, James; I haven’t known how to make love to you any more than you have known how to make love to me. I totally forgive you. Will you forgive me for withholding and withdrawing from you?” Kaycie asked. “Of course, I will. Man, I don’t deserve you.” James smiled. They leaned into each other for a tender kiss. Olivia asked, “How is that for you two?”

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The slot-machine God provided a relief for the pinging guilt and a sense of hope that my life would get organized toward a purpose. I was too dumb to test the merit of the slot machine idea. I simply began to pray for forgiveness, thinking the cherries might line up and the light atop the machine would flash, spilling shiny tokens of good fate. What I was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality. But it worked. If something nice happened to me, I thought it was God, and if something nice didn’t, I went back to the slot machine, knelt down in prayer, and pulled the lever a few more times. I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. But the fun never lasts. My slot-machine God disintegrated on Christmas Eve when I was thirteen. I still think of that night as “the lifting of the haze,” and it remains one of the few times I can categorically claim an interaction with God. Though I am half certain these interactions are routine, they simply don’t feel as metaphysical as the happenings of that night. It was very simple, but it was one of those profound revelations that only God can induce. What happened was that I realized I was not alone in my own surroundings. I’m not talking about ghosts or angels or anything; I’m talking about other people. As silly as it sounds, I realized, late that night, that other people had feelings and fears and that my interactions with them actually meant something, that I could make them happy or sad in the way that I associated with them. Not only could I make them happy or sad, but I was responsible for the way I interacted with them. I suddenly felt responsible. I was supposed to make them happy. I was not supposed to make them sad. Like I said, it sounds simple, but when you really get it for the first time, it hits hard. I was shell-shocked. This is how the bomb fell: For my mother that year I had purchased a shabby Christmas gift—a book, the contents of which she would never be interested in. I had had a sum of money with which to buy presents, and the majority of it I used to buy fishing equipment, as Roy and I had started fishing in the creek behind Wal-Mart. My extended family opens gifts on Christmas Eve, leaving the immediate family to open gifts the next morning, and so in my room that night were wonderful presents—toys, games, candy, and clothes—and as I lay in bed I counted and categorized them in the moonlight, the battery-operated toys of greatest importance, the underwear of no consequence at all.