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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict one another, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta, I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it. It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle. But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident.

• From Wild (2012)

  As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the “green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain. California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT again. It was sunny and clear but the air was cool, and it grew progressively cooler with each day as I passed into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, where the trail stayed above 6,000 feet. The views opened up again as I walked along a ridgeline of volcanic rocks and boulders, glimpsing lakes occasionally below the trail and the land that spread beyond. In spite of the sun, it felt like an early October morning instead of a mid-August afternoon. I had to keep moving to stay warm. If I stopped for more than five minutes the sweat that drenched the back of my T-shirt turned icy cold. I’d seen no one since I left Ashland, but now I encountered a few day hikers and overnight backpackers who’d climbed up to the PCT on one of the many trails that intersected it, which led to peaks above or lakes below. Mostly I was alone, which wasn’t unusual, but the cold made the trail seem even more vacant, the wind clattering the branches of the persevering trees. It felt colder too, even colder than it had been up in the snow above Sierra City, though I saw only small patches of snow here and there. I realized it was because back then the mountains had been moving toward summer, and now, only six weeks later, they were already moving away from it, reaching toward autumn, in a direction that pushed me out.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  l68 A THEOLOGY FORTHESOCIAL GOSPEL of God is brought toa people ignorant and accustomed to superstitious methods of winning the favour or help of higher beings, it will soon be coarsened and materialized. The changes inthe Hebrew conception ofGod were the resultof the historical experiences ofthe nationand its leaders. The Christian idea of God hasalso had its ups anddowns in the long and varied history of Chris- tian civilization. A fineand high conception of God is asocial achieve- mentand a social endowment. It becomes part of the spiritual inheritancecommon to all individuals inthat religious group. If every individual had towork outhis ideaofGodon thebasis ofhisown experiences and in- tuitions only, it would be a groping quest, and mostof us wouldsee only the occasional flitting of a distant light. By the end of our lifewe might havearrived atthe stage ofvoodooismor necromancy.Entering intoa high conception of God, suchas theChristian faith offers us, is like entering a public park or a public gallery of artand sharing the common wealth. Wheti we learn fromthe gospels, for instance, thatGod ison the side of the poor, andthat he proposes toview anything done or not done tothemas having been doneor not doneto him, such a revelation of solidarity and humanity comeswitha re- generating shock to our selfish minds. Any one studying life as it ison the basisof real estate and bank clearings, would come tothe conclusionthatGod isonthe sideof the rich.It takes a revelation tosee itthe other way. Whereverwe encounter sucha strain ofsocial feeling in our conceptions of God, itisalmostsure torun straight

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But the principal target of the Crusaders had been Islam, and now I had to come to terms with the third Abrahamic religion. Without knowing anything about it, I had always assumed that the Muslim faith was inherently violent and fanatical. It was a religion of the sword, and had established itself only by means of warfare. I had been instinctively moved by Islam when I had visited the Middle East, but I assumed that I would find the theology as repellent as the crusading ethos. But yet again—as with The First Christian— once I was confronted with the facts, I found the reality to be quite different. Islam might have become more intolerant during the last half century; this seemed to be due to the peculiar strains of our modernity. In general, however, it had been far more respectful of other faiths than Christianity. During the Crusades, Muslim generals, such as Nur ad-Din and Saladin, who led the Islamic riposte, had behaved with greater restraint and compassion than their Christian counterparts. Increasingly—just as I had done with Saint Paul—I had to dismantle my old position, which I could now see to be ignorant, prejudiced, and deeply conditioned by the culture into which I happened to have been born. Westerners had needed to hate Islam; in the fantasies they created, it became everything that they hoped that they were not, and was made to epitomize everything that they feared that they were. Islam had become the shadow self of the West, and even in the 1980s, I noticed, we seemed to find it difficult to regard Muslim faith and civilization with fairness and objectivity. The stereotypical view of Islam, first developed at the time of the Crusades, was in some profound sense essential to our Western identity.

• From Wild (2012)

  Perhaps Clarke’s most important contribution to the trail was making the acquaintance of Warren Rogers, who was twenty-four when the two met in 1932. Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and in some cases construct what would become the PCT. Though initially reluctant, Rogers soon became passionate about the trail’s creation, and he spent the rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal, financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way. Rogers lived to see Congress designate the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, but he died in 1992, a year before the trail was finished. I’d read the section in my guidebook about the trail’s history the winter before, but it wasn’t until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they’d been imagining me. It didn’t matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  When once theology concentrated on the story it was expanded by exegetical inferences, by allegorical embel- lishments, and by typology, until it conveyed far more than it actually contained. It comes as a shock to real- ize, for instance, that the story in Genesis itself does not indicate that the writer understood the serpent to be Satan, or Satan to be speaking through the serpent. Moreover, we find so few traces of any belief in Satan in Hebrew thought before the Exile that it seems doubt- ful if contemporary readers would have understood him to be meant unless further indications made the refer- ence clear. Here, then, we have two different methods of treat- ing the story of the fall. Theology has given it basic importance. It has built its entire scheme of thought on the doctrine of the fall. Jesus and the prophets paid little or no attention to it. They were able to see sin clearly and to fight it with the highest energy without depending on the doctrine of the fall for a footing. Only with Paul is the story clearly of religious import- ance, and even with him it is not as central as for in- stance the antagonism between spirit and flesh. It of- fered him a wide spiritual perspective and a means of glorifying Christ. Two things seem to follow. First, that the tradi- tional doctrine of the fall is the product of speculative interest mainly, and that the most energetic conscious- ness of sin can exist without drawing strength from this 42 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL doctrine. Second, that if -the substance of Scriptural thought, the constant and integral trend of biblical con- victions, is the authoritative element in the Bible, the doctrine of the fall does not seem to have as great an authority as it has long exercised. How does this affect the social gospel? What doc- trinal teaching on this point is able to give it the most effective backing? The social gospel is above all things practical. It needs religious ideas which will release energy for heroic opposition against organized evil and for the building of a righteous social life. It would find entire satisfac- tion in the attitude of Jesus and the prophets who dealt with sin as a present force and did not find it necessary to indoctrinate men on its first origin. It would have no motive to be interested in a doctrine which diverts at- tention from the active factors of sin which can be influ- enced, and concentrates attention on a past event which no effort of ours can influence. Theology has made the catastrophe of the fall so complete that any later addition to the inheritance of sin seems slight and negligible. What can be worse than a state of total depravity and active enmity against God and his will ? ^ Consequently theology has had little to say about the contributions which our more recent fore-

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  In this choice too I see something fortuitous, born of impulses which I am forced to regard as outside the range of my own nature. And yet, strangely enough, it is only here that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends; to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself — or so I hope. Here at least I am able to see their history and the city’s as one and the same phenomenon. But strangest of all: I owe this release to Pursewarden — the last person I should ever have considered a possible benefactor. That last meeting, for example, in the ugly and expensive hotel bedroom to which he always moved on Pombal’s return from leave … I did not recognize the heavy musty odour of the room as the odour of his impending suicide — how should I? I knew he was unhappy; even had he not been he would have felt obliged to simulate unhappiness. All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness. And being Anglo-Saxon there was a touch of maudlin self-pity and weakness which made him drink a bit. That evening he was savage, silly and witty by turns; and listening to him I remember thinking suddenly: ‘Here is someone who in farming his talent has neglected his sensibility, not by accident, but deliberately, for its self-expression might have brought him into conflict with the world, or his loneliness threatened his reason. He could not bear to be refused admittance, while he lived, to the halls of fame and recognition. Underneath it all he has been steadily putting up with an almost insupportable consciousness of his own mental poltroonery. And now his career has reached an interesting stage: I mean beautiful women, whom he always felt to be out of reach as a timid provincial would, are now glad to be seen out with him. In his presence they wear the air of faintly distracted Muses suffering from constipation. In public they are flattered if he holds a gloved hand for an instant longer than form permits. At first all this must have been balm to a lonely man’s vanity; but finally it has only furthered his sense of insecurity. His freedom, gained through a modest financial success, has begun to bore him. He has begun to feel more and more wanting in true greatness while his name has been daily swelling in size like some disgusting poster. He has realized that people are walking the street with a Reputation now and not a man. They see him no longer — and all his work was done in order to draw attention to the lonely, suffering figure he felt himself to be. His name has covered him like a tombstone. And now comes the terrifying thought perhaps there is no one left to see? Who, after all, is he?’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her maid was an older woman in a plain brown dress; I saw her tugging at the frock, and thought nothing of it. But when she had the hooks fastened tight, she leaned and gently blew upon the singer’s throat, where the power had clogged; and then she whispered something to her, and they laughed together with their heads very close ... and I knew, as surely as if they had pasted the words upon the dressing-room wall, that they were lovers..The knowledge made me blush like a beacon. I looked at Kitty, and saw that she had caught the gesture, too; her eyes, however, were lowered, and her mouth was tight. When the comic singer passed us on her way to the stage, she gave me a wink: ‘Off to please the public,’ she said, and her dresser laughed again. When she came back and took her make-up off, she wandered over with a cigarette and asked for a light; then, as she drew on her fag, she looked me over. ‘Are you going,’ she said, ‘to Barbara’s party, after the show?’ I said I didn’t know who Barbara was. She waved her hand: ‘Oh, Barbara won’t mind. You come along with Ella and me: you and your friend.’ Here she nodded - very pleasantly, I thought - to Kitty. But Kitty, who had had her head bent all this time, working at the fastenings of her skirt, now looked up and gave a prim little smile.‘How nice of you to ask,’ she said; ‘but we are spoken for tonight. Our agent, Mr Bliss, is due to take us out to supper.’I stared: we had no arrangement that I knew of. But the singer only gave a shrug. ‘Too bad,’ she said. Then she looked at me. ‘You don’t want to leave your pal to her agent, and come on alone, with me and Ella?’‘Miss King will be busy with Mr Bliss,’ said Kitty, before I could answer; and she said it so tightly the singer gave a sniff, then turned and went over to where her dresser waited with their baskets. I watched them leave - they didn’t look back at me. When we returned to the theatre the next night, Kitty chose a hook that was far from theirs; and on the night after that, they had moved on to another hall ...At home, in bed, I said I thought it was a shame.‘Why did you tell them Walter was coming?’ I asked Kitty.She said: ‘I didn’t care for them.’‘Why not? They were nice. They were funny. They were - like us.’I had my arm about her, and felt her stiffen at my words. She pulled away from me and raised her head. We had left a candle burning and her face, I saw, was white and shocked.‘Nan!’ she said. ‘They’re not like us! They’re not like us, at all. They’re toms.’‘Toms?’ I remember this moment very distinctly, for I had never heard the word before.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “You know the story?” I shook my head. “Some pagans came to Hillel and told him that they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said: ‘Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’ ” “Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you,’ didn’t he?” I asked, stirring my large mug of milky coffee. Hyam shrugged. “Same difference.” He tended to talk very quickly and you had to listen hard to keep up. And these ideas were very strange and new. “I think Hillel’s version is better than Jesus’, though. It takes more discipline to refrain from doing harm to others. It’s easier to be a do-gooder and project your needs and desires onto other people.” “When they might need something quite different.” Hyam nodded. But something was still troubling me. “But how could Hillel say that his Golden Rule represented the whole of Jewish teaching? That everything else was just commentary?” I asked. “What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe?” “Easy to see that you were brought up Christian.” Hyam didn’t have a high opinion of Christianity, I noticed. “Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like.” I stared at him. I could not imagine a religion without belief. Ever since I had grown up and started to think, my Christian life had been a continuous struggle to accept the official doctrines. Without true belief you could not be a member of the church, you could not be saved. Faith was the starting point, the sine qua non, the indispensable requirement, and for me it had been a major stumbling block. “No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas—about God, salvation, and so on—as a basis?” “We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “ ‘Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don’t bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead.”

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  When we go to God in prayer, He doesn’t usually put us on blast quite as intensely as He did Job and his friends. For one thing, we (hopefully) don’t spend so much time eloquently mouthing off about stuff we don’t really understand. What God does for us, and what prayer does for us, is provide perspective. At those lunchtime prayer meetings at my high school, I remember watching kids leave the room with a completely different posture than when they had come in. They would tell us later how those fifteen minutes changed their outlook on what they were going through. They gained perspective. I remember wandering the San Gabriel hills of LA, feeling both small and loved at the same time. That’s perspective. FROM DESPAIR TO DESTINY Life (and traffic) have a way of skewing our perspective. Difficult, overwhelming circumstances can cause our emotions and thoughts to spiral out of control. I’m not saying those feelings and thoughts are not real. They absolutely are. But they are not the whole picture. And they aren’t designed to make our decisions for us. Which of these things have you felt lately? Or maybe even right now? LonelyFrustratedBitter BetrayedDiscouragedAnxious OverwhelmedConfusedGuilty UselessRejectedIgnored HurtAbandonedUsed LostHopelessPowerless Those feelings, if left unchecked, will affect your actions and decisions. You might find yourself doing or saying things that you later regret—things that don’t align with who you are, what you value, what you believe, or how you want to live. Again, the feelings are valid. Don’t ignore them. But don’t define yourself by them either. Don’t let them tell you who you are. They are feelings, and feelings

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Is that spiritual bypassing? No. Well, not in and of itself. Prayer is not the problem. We should always pray. The problem is when we don’t take personal responsibility for what we need to do. The moment we use prayer, faith, Bible, church, tithing, God, heaven, or any other spiritual belief or practice to avoid personal responsibility, we’ve crossed the line into spiritual bypassing. On a practical level, what does spiritual bypassing look like? Usually, it means substituting internal growth or tangible action with a cheap appeal to: Prayer: “Just pray about it.” Faith: “If you just had more faith . . .” Heaven: “This earth is sinful and broken; all will be made right in heaven.” God’s sovereignty: “His ways are higher than ours, so don’t try to understand.” Spiritual disciplines: “If you would give/fast/volunteer, you would be blessed.” Forgiveness: “You have to forgive, forget, and move on.” Unity: “If you disagree or complain, you’re causing division.” Vision: “I know you’re suffering, but you are part of something bigger, so it’s worth it.” Love: “Love covers a multitude of sins; love keeps no record of wrongs.” The difficult thing with spiritual bypassing is that it sounds so, well, spiritual. It’s hard to object when the person doing the bypassing is quoting the Bible or appealing to your generous, compassionate nature. The bulleted list above consists of good things, after all. And most of the phrases in quotes come from the Bible or can be supported biblically. The difference, though, is how they are being used. Are we quoting the Bible and talking about spiritual things in order to serve others and to follow God wholeheartedly? Or are we using them to avoid change, escape accountability, or control people?

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  These social realities which lay back of the theories gave them their influence and convincing power at the time they originated and for a long time thereafter, but when these social realities disappear, the theories of the atonement based on them become artificial and un- convincing, and sometimes repulsive. Analogies and il- lustrations taken from the priestly slaughtering of ani- mals or the ritual functions of the Jewish high-priest are remote from our imagination, and instead of clarifying the facts, they themselves need elaborate explanation. Forensic methods and the dealings of autocratic rulers arouse our moral antagonism and have brought the teach- ings about the atonement under suspicion. Our dominant ideas are personality and social soli- darity. The problems which burden us are the social problems. Has the death of Christ any relation to these? Have we not just as much right to connect this supreme religious event with our problems as Paul and Anselm and Calvin, and to use the terminology and methods of our day? In so far as the historical and social sciences have taught our generation to comprehend solidaristic facts, we are in a better situation to understand the atone- ment than any previous generation. As Christian men we believe that the death of our Lord concerns us all. Our sins caused it. He bore the sin of the world. In turn his death was somehow for our good. Our spiritual situation is fundamentally changed in consequence of it. But how? How did he bear our sins? How did his death affect God? How did it af- feefus? These three questions we shall discuss. THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND THE ATONEMENT 245 How did Jesus bear sins which he did not commit? The old theology replied, by imputation. But guilt and merit are personal. They can not be transferred from one person to another. We tamper with moral truth when we shuffle them about. Imputation is a legal device to enable the law to hold one man responsible for the crime committed by another. Imputation sees man- kind as a mass of individuals, and the debts of every individual are transferred to Christ. The solution does not lie in that way. Neither is it enough to say that Jesus bore our sins by sympathy. His contact with sin was a matter of expe- rience as well as .sympathy, and experience cuts deeper. Child-birth and travail reveal the realities of life to a woman more than sympathetic observation. How did Jesus bear our sins? The bar to a true un- derstanding of the atonement has been our individualism. The solution of the problem lies in the recognition of solidarity.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It turned out that his father was ambivalent about having a child; she felt this baby was hers alone. As I describe in Part II, there is a profound meaning in naming a baby after a person who died in tragic circumstances, for example, a child or a person who died by suicide or was murdered. Doing so is often an expression of a wish not only to revive what was lost but also to repair the past and heal trauma. In mid-April Rachel, Marc, and baby Ruth go to Israel—to look for their future, to search for the past, to find out who Ruth was. What they discover is unbelievable but in fact also quite believable. Suddenly everything makes sense. In Jerusalem, Rachel, Marc, and Ruth meet the family of her grandfather’s friend from Auschwitz. His friend had died years earlier, but the man’s daughter and granddaughter are happy to see them. They invite them to the daughter’s house in Jerusalem . “We met them on a Sunday morning,” Rachel tells me. “I had never felt such a breeze as on that day in Jerusalem. We walked into our hosts’ home, with Ruth sleeping in the sling, and were invited to sit on the porch. As we sat down, Ruth woke up, and I introduced her to the family. ‘This is Ruth,’ I said, and the daughter looked at me, startled. She didn’t say a word and went to the kitchen to bring tea and cookies. When she came back, she said, ‘How meaningful that you named her Ruth. My father used to talk about Ruth. He said that your grandfather never recovered from her death. That a part of him died with her.’ “I didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I had no idea who Ruth was. That I only knew from my mother that she was a relative who had died at Auschwitz and that her name was on the memorial candle my grandparents used to light every holiday. I couldn’t breathe and instead kept silent. Marc looked at me and knew what I needed. He turned to our host and asked if she could tell us everything she knew about Ruth. “And then we discovered my grandparents’ secret. She told us that when the war started, my grandfather was married and had a daughter named Ruth. She was still a baby when they arrived at Auschwitz. His wife and daughter were separated from him and taken to the women’s section. He never saw them again. Someone told him they were taken to the gas chambers and murdered just a few hours after they’d arrived.” Rachel tells me that while they were talking, a siren sounded. Their hostess apologized for not preparing them. “What a symbolic moment,” she said. “Today is Holocaust Day.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  As time passes, the traumatic experience is reprocessed. In every developmental phase the child will revisit the abuse from a different angle and with different understanding. When that abused child becomes a teenager and then an adult, when they have sex for the first time or have children, when their child reaches the age they were when the abuse happened—in each moment the abuse will be reprocessed from a slightly different perspective. The process of mourning keeps changing and accrues new layers of meaning. Time will not necessarily make the memory fade; instead, the memory will appear and reappear in different forms and will be experienced simultaneously as real and unreal. NINETEEN YEARS AFTER I first met Lara, it is a gloomy day in mid-September and I’m about to meet her again. It is also my birthday. In the intervening years, I’ve had three children. I have stopped working with children and am now only seeing adults. My office is in the same neighborhood as it was nineteen years ago, in downtown Manhattan. I open my door and look at the tall young woman who stands there. I do not recognize her. “I grew up quite a bit.” She smiles as if reading my mind. “Thank you for answering my email so quickly, and for agreeing to see me.” She sits on the couch and looks around. “I like your new office.” I recognize her smile and these first words. “Those were your exact words when I met you for the first time,” I say, trying to learn something about her from the way she looks: the black T-shirt, the black long silk skirt, her sneakers and blue nail polish, and her long straight hair, which I think used to be curly. I’m trying to read what has happened to her in the years since then. Where has she been? Is she happy? Did she find out what really happened? “I know it’s your birthday today,” she then says to my surprise. I nod and smile. Some things don’t change. She still knows more about me than I expect. “Don’t worry, I can’t read your mind,” she adds as if reading my mind. “When I tried to find you, I googled you, and one of the first things I found on your Wikipedia page was your birthday. I was happy you scheduled our session for today. I really wanted to give you a gift.” Traditionally, therapists do not accept gifts from patients. The contract with our patients is clear; there is no dual relationship, no exchanges other than our professional services for an hourly fee. Psychoanalyst and patient share a joint goal of trying to explore the unconscious; therefore, it’s interesting to understand when and why a patient brings a gift and what that gift represents. But in reality nothing can make a gift feel unappreciated and dismissed more than analyzing it.

• From The Lives of Great Christians (2007)

  A. Instead, we will explore Luther, the man of faith. 1. He was troubled and burdened by his own failings and recognized his dependence on God. 2. He was a man of great personal courage who took extraordinary risks in proclaiming the truth of Christianity as he understood it. B. We will focus on events in Luther’s life that tell us the most about what sort of Christian he was. C. Luther’s writings reveal a man who was at times humble and at other times quite arrogant; a man who recognized love as the way humans express their faith, yet a man who was capable of virulent hatred and intolerance. D. It is significant that Luther’s last written words were: “We are beggars: this is true.” IV. Luther’s university training for a career in law was interrupted when, in fear during a storm, he pledged that he would become a monk if he survived. A. Luther entered the order of Augustinian friars at Erfurt, where he was studying, and changed his study to theology. B. Despite “heroic” attempts at fasting and other ascetic practices as well as quite frequent confession, Luther was deeply troubled. C. After profession, ordination, and years of study, he went to a small and rather insignificant new university in Wittenberg to teach. V. While Luther was preparing lectures on Paul, he had what we refer to as the Reformation discovery. A. Luther had been scrupulous about discipline and confession but continued to fear God’s wrath. B. Someone famously said to Luther that God was not angry with him but, rather, Luther was angry with God. C. As Luther reflected deeply on Paul, especially Romans 1:17, it was as if the scales fell from his eyes; he realized that the just person lives by faith. D. This primacy of faith had extraordinary implications, but it took Luther a while to grasp them. ©2007 The Teaching Company. 76

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  One heroic diver would come over, eat me out, slowly, slowly, daring me not to come. Sometimes I’d last over an hour. How wonderful to be in the position of trying to hold back, of not praying to come. There was one thing he did want, to lick my ass. Okay, I said, go ahead. But he didn’t just lick my ass, he fucked my ass with his tongue, very impressive indeed, never had a tongue deeper to date. He never took his clothes off, and he had the good taste to never kiss me on the mouth. There is risk, however, with the Pussy Hounds. The final fading of my respect has sometimes happened when a man is so eager to suck my pussy that I know he indulges his need to please rather than an actual love of pussy. It’s distracting. Intention is all—I can feel it with my clit. It is more important to me that a man love pussy in general than mine in particular. After all, if he likes them as a whole, then mine is a slam dunk. But if a man likes only mine and not all the others, well, I just don’t trust him. With this type of man I have learned to guide my orgasm with fantasy, and, like him, play the using game. While he licks furiously, indulging his codependence, I file through my Rolodex of every man I’ve ever known, all in the audience, erections puncturing the air, watching this one lap at the altar they all still covet. Works every time. It is my altruism, not my narcissism, that fosters this fantasy. After all, a man can acquire such wisdom at the source of a woman’s orgasm: how to slow down, speed up, be consistent, be nonlinear, be persistent, be unpredictable, be patient, be outrageous, be generous, be witty. There is, in fact, nothing of value, philosophically and practically, that he can’t learn if he can turn the delta of Venus into the site of Vesuvius. Most men will lick and suck and drink a pussy—and I’m not complaining. But it is the rare man who does so with his whole consciousness poised on his tongue. It is this awareness that will move a woman; when her consciousness—on her clit—encounters his, orgasm marks their meeting. Ultimately, it is here—or rather, down there—that a man will learn how to be a winner or a loser, with women as in life. WHY THERE? Once gravity reasserted its hold on me, I immediately started examining my experience. It felt like my new job. I’d been given a gift and now I had to attempt some understanding. Why? Why me? Why him? Why there?

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  “Can’t I see her, too? You know, separately?” He thought it a fine idea—same mom, common ground, and similar information. She was less enthusiastic, but she finally agreed. Great—I finally had the shrink of my dreams, and she could now help me deal with the very annoying man who came with the deal. Here was a different kind of triangle—not sexual, per se—but more insidious. All my conversations with the Boyfriend were about our different, and occasionally mutual, therapy. In bed with Mom we certainly were—trouble was, I came to love Mom more than I loved him, while he remained convinced that he was her most cherished client. Just like when a man has bought three lap dances from a stripper, has a raging hard-on, and declares in all seriousness, “I think she really likes me!” When I initiated mistressing, our dear therapist announced that one of us had to go—or both. If we were potentially not monogamous and she knew it, the therapy would be poisoned. The Boyfriend announced that he’d had enough therapy and was ready to hit the road alone, comforted by the notion that when a man chooses his lover over his therapist it is a sign of his newly found independence and maturity. This was fortunate because I announced that I would definitely not give up the shrink no matter what. I chose my therapist over my lover, which was a sign of my own growing maturity: I had finally decided to choose a woman over a man. After four or five months of mistressing, I ended it completely and during the last phone call with the Boyfriend the elegant irony became apparent: he had now lost not only his lover but his shrink as well. I see it like this: you just never really can know what a particular connection is about—until later. The Last Boyfriend was about me finding a woman who would not only witness and analyze my misery but whose very presence in my life echoed my never-before-possible ability to endorse myself above, and beyond, any man. And when A-Man entered my world, she endorsed me from behind as well—while I learned to embrace my masochism sexually and leave it out of my life. DURING A-MAN You just don’t know when he’s going to show up. The one who is going to change everything forever, the one who’s going to rock your world. He might even be someone you already know. The Young Man had been gone for two years. In the meantime, I had acquired the Boyfriend, while the redhead Pre-Raphaelite had acquired a tall, skinny, rocker musician who wore more makeup than she did: they painted each other’s nails and were mad in monogamous love. So when the Young Man called, I knew it would have to be a two-way; the safety of a three-way sandwich was no longer an option.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I turned at last into an empty café where I drank coffee served by a Saidi whose grotesque squint seemed to double every object he gazed upon. In the far corner, curled up on a trunk and so still that she was invisible at first sat a very old lady smoking a narguileh which from time to time uttered a soft air-bubble of sound like the voice of a dove. Here I thought the whole story through from beginning to end, starting in the days before I ever knew Melissa and ending somewhere soon in an idle pragmatic death in a city to which I did not belong; I say that I thought it through, but strangely enough I thought of it not as a personal history with an individual accent so much as part of the historical fabric of the place. I described it to myself as part and parcel of the city’s behaviour, completely in keeping with everything that had gone before, and everything that would follow it. It was as if my imagination had become subtly drugged by the ambience of the place and could not respond to personal, individual assessments. I had lost the capacity to feel even the thrill of danger. My sharpest regret, characteristically enough, was for the jumble of manuscript notes which might be left behind. I had always hated the incomplete, the fragmentary. I decided that they at least must be destroyed before I went a step further. I rose to my feet — only to be struck by a sudden realization that the man I had seen in the little booth had been Mnemjian. How was it possible to mistake that misformed back? This thought occupied me as I recrossed the quarter, moving towards the larger thoroughfares in the direction of the sea. I walked across this mirage of narrow intersecting alleys as one might walk across a battlefield which had swallowed up all the friends of one’s youth; yet I could not help in delighting at every scent and sound — a survivor’s delight. Here at one corner stood a flame-swallower with his face turned up to the sky, spouting a column of flame from his mouth which turned black with flapping fumes at the edges and bit a hole in the sky. From time to time he took a swig at a bottle of petrol before throwing back his head once more and gushing flames six feet high. At every corner the violet shadows fell and foundered, striped with human experience — at once savage and tenderly lyrical. I took it as a measure of my maturity that I was filled no longer with despairing self-pity but with a desire to be claimed by the city, enrolled among its trivial or tragic memories — if it so wished.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Don’t you worry I’ll raise a row; that I’ll tell the papers - the police - your secret?’ ‘And with it, your own? Oh no, Miss King. I have no fear of sensation: on the contrary, I court it! I seek out sensation! And so do you.’ She leaned closer, and fingered a lock of my hair. ‘You say I know nothing about you; but I have watched you upon the streets, remember. How coolly you pose and wander and flirt! Did you think you could play at Ganymede, for ever? Did you think, if you wore a silken cock, it meant you never had a cunt at the seam of your drawers?’ Her face was very close to my own; she would not let me turn my eyes from hers. She said: ‘You’re like me: you have shown it, you are showing it now! It is your own sex for which you really hunger! You thought, perhaps, to stifle your own appetites: but you have only made them swell the more! And that is why you won’t raise a row - why you still stay, and be my tart, as I desire.’ She gave my hair a cruel twist. ‘Admit that it is as I say!’ ‘It is!’ For it was, it was! What she said was the truth: she had found out all my secrets; she had shown me to myself. Not just with the fierce words of that moment, but with all - the kisses, the caresses, the fuck on the chair - that had made her say them; and I was glad! I had loved Kitty - I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. Now, this lady had torn it from me - had laid me bare, as surely as if she had ripped the shrieking flesh from my white bones. She pressed against me still; and even as her breath came warm against my cheek, I felt my lusts rise up to meet her own, and knew myself in thrall. After all, there are moments in our lives that change us, that discontent us with our pasts and offer us new futures.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice’s voice becomes tender as she continues. “It was also the first time I thought that maybe my father was sad. That maybe he had lost something too. I know it sounds strange, but honestly, I never thought about how he felt when I didn’t want to see him anymore. I never imagined how he felt when he walked into his office that Monday morning. It didn’t occur to me that maybe my mother did this to hurt him and not only to heal herself. Even when I say it now, it feels wrong. I don’t think she had bad intentions.” I hear how through Art’s eyes, Alice’s view of her father became more nuanced. She could start seeing him and her mother as complex humans who struggled to survive. “After about a month of nightly conversations with Art, when we talked about absolutely everything, I agreed to meet him outside of the office. And that was it.” Alice pauses. “We spent that night together and knew that we would spend every night of the rest of our lives together. A month later we tried to get pregnant.” “And you felt like you were betraying your mother,” I say. “Oh yeah,” she replies. “I obviously told my mother right away and she was happy for me, but I knew that I had crossed some secret line. I was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t legally divorced yet. I was afraid she would see that as a move toward my father and would worry that I might forgive him and leave her. So I told her gradually. “At first she just listened, as she always did. She was always a good listener. And then she asked, ‘Is he a good man, Alice?’ And that made me so uncomfortable because I knew what she really wanted to ask. I knew she was thinking about my father. But she didn’t want to ruin it for me. She just kept asking if he was a good man. “‘Why do you keep asking that, Mom? Of course he is,’ I answered, and she noticed that I was irritated. “‘I love you more than anything,’ she said. ‘I want you to be with a good man. I want you to be happy. One day you will have a daughter and you will understand that.’” Alice looks at me. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “it did ruin it for me. It made me worried. I felt her doubt and I thought that maybe she could see something about Art that I couldn’t. When I was with him, I felt completely safe, but when I was with her, I felt her suspicion of him, and it made me doubt my own judgment.” I wonder out loud if it was her fear of losing Alice that made her mother so worried.