Relief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 14 of 88 · 20 per page

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  I chose the epigraph to Part III carefully and deliberately. It was written over fifty years ago by someone who was a scholar, a novelist, and a playwright. Because it breathes common sense in every line, even suggesting an alternative interpretation seems to indicate the eccentricity of scholarship seeking to overthrow the normalcy of intelligence. Allow me, however, two more autobiographical details before proceeding. For most of my adult life, as I mentioned before, I taught primarily undergraduate, required, general-education classes at DePaul University in Chicago. Whenever we touched on the four gospels, which was usually at some speed and in passing, the students found biblical research on the source relationships between the gospels blissfully unbelievable. Why not take them more or less as Dorothy Sayers did in that epigraph? You have four versions of the same event, and all you have to do is integrate them into a synthetic whole. Or, conversely, you have different versions of the same event because the speaker said the same thing in different ways at different times. Why do I not take the gospels like that? What separates my presuppositions about the gospels from those of my students, or my conclusions about the gospels from those of a Dorothy Sayers? I spent the 1960s poring over the four gospels in parallel columns, word after word and unit after unit, day after day and year after year. I was studying the scholarly hypothesis that some of those gospels had used others as their sources—in other words, I was doing source-criticism— and in the end I found it absolutely convincing. I was also, presuming that first hypothesis, testing out a second one: you could get a very good glimpse into the heart and mind of an author by watching how a source was edited or redacted—that is, by doing redaction-criticism . (I know, by the way, that others had more interesting times in the sixties, but I spent them in a monastery, where alternative activities were somewhat curtailed.) In any case, those two processes—source-criticism and redaction-criticism—were the twin sides of the same coin. They stood or fell together; they confirmed or disconfirmed one another. Another term, tradition-criticism , could be used to describe the fuller process in which they fitted. If Unit A (the source ) was used by Unit B (the redaction ), a continuing tradition was developing. The basic validity of that double process is the major presupposition to be outlined in this section. If it is wrong, any historical reconstruction of Jesus and his followers built upon it is methodologically invalid. Ditto, of course, for any alternative hypothesis. It is the scholarly conclusions of tradition-criticism , hard won by gospel scholarship over the last two hundred years (but also confirmed by my own personal study), that separates me from the simplicity of common sense that here, as elsewhere, can become un common non sense.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The first two linked abnormalities stem from “a critical change in the manner of life of the pregnant woman in the first two or three weeks of pregnancy … an unexpected deterioration in the woman’s diet, in association with psychical stress … produced by some catastrophe in the life of a well-to-do woman” (54). The third abnormality stems from “disturbances in the final period of pregnancy or as a result of difficulties in the act of parturition” (54). Haas’s initial analysis of the crucified skeleton was hurried due to religious reburial priorities, and the skeleton had to be disinterred and restudied later by Zias and Sekeles. Here are the main points of that reappraisal. First, there was a bone from another adult in Ossuary 4 by a first-century ossuary-reburial mistake. Second, the crucified man’s arms were not nailed but tied to the crossbar and are pictorially depicted as bent over and behind it at the elbows (27). Third, his legs were not broken to hasten death. Fourth, his feet were affixed separately on either side of the upright by iron nails about four and a half inches long with olive-wood squares between their heads and his heel bones. Finally, there was “no evidence of the left heel bone” (25), but the right one still had the nail embedded in it, offering certain evidence of crucifixion in this case. “The nail was bent near its head and also at its pointed end”; after penetrating the olive wood and the right heel bone, it “may have accidentally struck a knot in the upright, thus bending the nail downwards. Once the body was removed from the cross, albeit with some difficulty in removing the right leg, the condemned man’s family would now find it impossible to remove the bent nail without completely destroying the heel bone. This reluctance to inflict further damage to the heel led to the eventual discovery of the crucifixion” (23, 27). That too is the first century in the Jewish homeland even before the horrors of total war in 66–73/74 C.E. That discovery emphasizes two points. First, however it was managed, be it through patronage or mercy, bribery or indifference, a crucified person could receive honorable burial in the family tomb in the early- or mid-first-century Jewish homeland. That agrees with what we know from Jewish texts of the same period. The Jewish philosopher Philo observed, in his Flaccus 83, that decent governors sometimes had crucified criminals “taken down and given up to their relations, in order to receive the honours of sepulture” at the time of the emperor’s birthday, since “the sacred character of the festival ought to be regarded” (Yonge 732). The Jewish historian Josephus recorded, in his Life 420–421, that he found three of his friends crucified after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and implored mercy from Titus.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  14 The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable There was earth inside them, and they dug. They dug and dug, and so their day went by, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. —Paul Celan, “There Was Earth Inside Them” (trans. Michael Hamburger) The call comes on the ancient black rotary phone in the middle of the night at the Whitbreads’ Rhode Island beach house. Daddy’s dead. Five years after we’d refused both breathing apparatus and feeding tube, he’d gone on blinking. He hadn’t wanted to die, which was contrary to all his stoic-sounding predictions about infirmity. On the back porch one night when I was home from college, he’d issued a long and drunken disquisition about how—if he became bedridden—I should never let some machine pump his lungs with air. He’d said, Don’t you let me linger. Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle. Your mama and sister won’t do this, but you do it. Get you a pillow and lay it over my face. I sipped at my Lone Star beer, which he’d doctored with salt so it was akin to sea water. Don’t you feel bad if I struggle. I probably agreed just to get him to shut up. But whatever death he’d expected to slump into, he’d fought off. On the dawn plane flying to Texas, I feel furious relief that he’s finally gone curling over me like a cold green wave, and in the backwash of that, icy shame. Wave after wave, I’m drenched and shamed that way till touch down on the tarmac between palms and razor grass. Daddy’s dead. I no longer have to wander the corridors of corporate America feigning an expertise I in no way have, solely to pay for the bedpans and catheters and the slender white worms of gauze they pack into the bedsores on the backs of his heels as the bones try to cut their way free of flesh. He’s dead. They nailed him in a box, and a long conveyor belt rolled him into a flaming oven even before my plane scraped down. At the funeral home, I help up the steps my farm girl aunt, Daddy’s sister, who believes that in the final Rapture our graves will split and our bodies arise clothed in healthy flesh. She’s the only relative I felt kin to at a cellular level, and she holds out her shaking, bird-boned hand for me to steady herself, saying, Take me to him. Her milky blue eyes stare through gold-rimmed spectacles bought before Eisenhower. Holding the one hand, I explain about the cremation, and her free hand—clutching a thin hankie imprinted with violets—flies to her gaping mouth, and she cries with an agony worthy of Job, You burnt my brother!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  14 The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable There was earth inside them, and they dug . They dug and dug, and so their day went by, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. —Paul Celan, “There Was Earth Inside Them” (trans. Michael Hamburger) T he call comes on the ancient black rotary phone in the middle of the night at the Whitbreads’ Rhode Island beach house. Daddy’s dead. Five years after we’d refused both breathing apparatus and feeding tube, he’d gone on blinking. He hadn’t wanted to die, which was contrary to all his stoic-sounding predictions about infirmity. On the back porch one night when I was home from college, he’d issued a long and drunken disquisition about how—if he became bedridden—I should never let some machine pump his lungs with air. He’d said, Don’t you let me linger . Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle. Your mama and sister won’t do this, but you do it. Get you a pillow and lay it over my face. I sipped at my Lone Star beer, which he’d doctored with salt so it was akin to sea water. Don’t you feel bad if I struggle. I probably agreed just to get him to shut up. But whatever death he’d expected to slump into, he’d fought off. On the dawn plane flying to Texas, I feel furious relief that he’s finally gone curling over me like a cold green wave, and in the backwash of that, icy shame. Wave after wave, I’m drenched and shamed that way till touch down on the tarmac between palms and razor grass. Daddy’s dead. I no longer have to wander the corridors of corporate America feigning an expertise I in no way have, solely to pay for the bedpans and catheters and the slender white worms of gauze they pack into the bedsores on the backs of his heels as the bones try to cut their way free of flesh. He’s dead. They nailed him in a box, and a long conveyor belt rolled him into a flaming oven even before my plane scraped down. At the funeral home, I help up the steps my farm girl aunt, Daddy’s sister, who believes that in the final Rapture our graves will split and our bodies arise clothed in healthy flesh. She’s the only relative I felt kin to at a cellular level, and she holds out her shaking, bird-boned hand for me to steady herself, saying, Take me to him . Her milky blue eyes stare through gold-rimmed spectacles bought before Eisenhower. Holding the one hand, I explain about the cremation, and her free hand—clutching a thin hankie imprinted with violets—flies to her gaping mouth, and she cries with an agony worthy of Job, You burnt my brother!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Warren says, taking him from me, handling him like rare glass. He’s clearly unhappy here, I say. As Warren folds the boy to his body, I enter the only certain stretch of rest in my day. Hold his head, I say. It’s damp. Maybe tuck this blanket around him. Bring an umbrella in case it starts to mist. And when you change him, use the white cream. I’ve got him, Mare. Just let me do it. I plod back up the stairs and pitch forward, imploding in a black-brained sleep. Around eleven, the door swings wide, and Warren lays Dev in my arms before tiptoeing downstairs to his pallet in the living room, where the white-fog machine throws up each night a wall of noise beyond which we don’t exist. He’s working, going to grad school full-time. I have to breastfeed anyway, the argument goes.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I’ve been discussing this idea of sex that advances the plot with my women friends, and every time, their eyes widen and they say something like, “And after you’re married, the story’s over. Happy ending, no more plot. Oh.” Which… yeah. But it makes the solution obvious. Add more plot! So if you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, crap, that means that only in either brand-new or else dysfunctional relationships will the sex ever be exciting,” there’s good news—and also bad news, and then more good news. The first good news is that sex you crave often isn’t sex that feels good—remember, liking and wanting are not the same thing. This is “solace sex,” which is “soothing but unerotic,” in contrast to “sealed-off sex,” which is “erotic but empty.”23 Solace sex can feel like a relief, because you’re easing fear. But let’s not mistake relief for pleasure. Like imagine that you need to pee really, really badly, and you have to wait and wait, and then finally you pee, and it’s almost pleasurable because it’s such an intense relief. Sex to advance the plot in unstable relationships is like that. It doesn’t feel good when you experience fear and instability in your relationship, just as it doesn’t feel good to have to pee really badly. It only feels like a relief when you can finally do something about it. And don’t we want our relationships and our sex lives to be about more than just… relief? So the good news is that if you’re missing this kind of intense craving for sex in your relationship, it’s no loss. The bad news is that, yes, most of us will find it easier to crave sex, for what that’s worth, when our relationships are unstable—either new or threatened, whether in reality or imagination. But the second good news is that there’s a bunch of spectacular research on people who have great sex over multiple decades. The key is to be “just safe enough.” I’ll talk about that research in chapter 7, but first let’s come to grips with the individual differences that influence how you manage attachment in your relationship. When Laurie told me about her vacation fiasco and the ugly cry surprise, I asked, “What happened after the hot and dirty sex?” She said, “I fell asleep for three hours… which was almost as good as the sex. I just wish I hadn’t had to cry to make it happen.” “It sounds to me like crying let you discharge the accumulated stress that was hitting your brakes, which freed up your accelerator.” “Oh. Hm. So are you saying that to have more sex, I should cry even more than I already do?”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  This may be the most important consequence of understanding the way context influences how your brain processes sex-related stimuli: When sex doesn’t feel great, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Maybe there’s been a change in your external circumstances or your other motivational systems (like stress) that’s influencing your sexual response. Which means that you can create positive change without changing you. Another important consequence of understanding context is that it helps us understand why women are so different from each other. For many women, the most sex-positive contexts may not be the culturally sanctioned or readily available ones—such as hookups when you’re in college or the same old sex for the 1,287th time when you’ve been married for ten years. For some women, those are great contexts, but for other women a great, sex-positive context might be an anonymous one-night hookup against a wall of other people’s coats in a stranger’s closet at a party. For others it’s the warmly affectionate sex of a long-term, committed relationship. For some women, it’s a wide range of contexts, and for others, it’s a narrow window. As long as a woman is attending to her wellbeing and her partner’s, it doesn’t matter what the context is, as long as it brings her pleasure. But if we ignore context, then anyone who finds sex unfun or whose desire diminishes may be tempted to conclude they’re broken or they don’t like sex… when really all they need is a better context. In the right context, sexual behavior is arguably the most pleasurable experience a human can have. It can bond us with our partners, flood us with happy chemicals, satisfy deep biological urges, and transport us to spiritual heights. In the wrong context, though, it can literally feel like death. Depending on the context, sex can vary almost infinitely, from delicious to disgusting, from playful to painful—and because of the dual control mechanism, sometimes it’s two conflicting things at the same time. As she learned about the relationship between context and her insensitive accelerator, Camilla decided to think of her low-sensitivity accelerator in terms of the shower metaphor—the garden metaphor never really worked for her, but something about the shower metaphor felt like a good fit. She noticed that romantic, affectionate contexts, exciting and novel contexts, and low-stress contexts increased her brain’s sensitivity to sexual cues. Or, as she put it, “They heat up the water and build up the pressure.” And the very best context of all, she thought, was when she felt pursued. The extended courtship that characterized the earliest part of her relationship with Henry might have been specifically organized around the contextual factors that maximized her wanting for sex. She and Henry talked about it, and they decided to try an experiment: He would create entire evenings where he courted Camilla, wooed her, and—eventually—won her. And they learned something from this that surprised them both: It wasn’t the pursuing. It was the waiting that turned her on.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Well, just as you can’t grit your teeth and make a garden grow, you can’t force a stress response cycle to complete. Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brakes on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brakes and allow ourselves to coast to a stop.6 To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing. So what’s the right context? Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do? You run. So when you’re stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do? You run… or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, “Exercise is good for stress,” that is for realsie real.7 Here are some other things that science says can genuinely help us not only “feel better” but actually facilitate the completion of the stress response cycle: sleep; affection (more on that later in the chapter); any form of meditation, including mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, body scans, etc.; and allowing yourself a good old cry or primal scream—though you have to be careful with this one. Sometimes people just wallow in their stress when they cry, rather than allowing the tears to wash away the stress. If you’ve ever locked yourself in your room and sobbed for ten minutes, and then at the end heaved a great big sigh and felt tremendously relieved, you’ve felt how it can move you from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.” Art, used in the same way, can help. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive self-care, they don’t mean that the construction of sentences or the task of drawing is inherently therapeutic; rather, they’re encouraging you to find positive contexts to discharge your stress, through the creative process. I’m inclined to add grooming and other body self-care to the list. Though I’m not familiar with any specific research on it, I’ve talked with lots of women for whom showering and the rituals, part social, part meditative, of painting their nails or doing their hair or putting on makeup—generally “getting ready” to go out (or stay in)—fully transition them from a stressed-out state of mind to a warm, social state of mind. These anecdotes aren’t data, but I’m inclined to call them evidence and say: yeah. Spend time treating yourself with affection.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I have a pet theory that these rituals and behaviors are related to “self-kindness,” which I’ll be talking about in chapter 5, but to my knowledge no one has ever specifically measured it.8 Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent. Everybody has something that works—and everyone’s strategy is different. Whatever strategy you use, take deliberate steps to complete the cycle. Allow yourself to coast to the end without hitting the brakes. Emotions are tunnels: You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. I say this so often my students sometimes roll their eyes: “Not the tunnel again.” Yes, the tunnel again. Because it’s true. While you’re figuring out what strategies help, pay attention to your patterns of self-inhibition, and identify places and people who create space for you to have Feels. Some of those patterns of self-inhibition are important and unchangeable—for example, carefully consider any plan that involves crying at work. But some of them will be self-defeating, and everyone needs at least one place in their life where they can just Have All the Feels without worrying about being judged or freaking people out. Find that place and those people. A final caution: Too often, we mistake dealing with the stressors for dealing with the stress. A couple years ago the leaders of the campus Peer Sex Educators sat in my office, reporting how well their Sextravaganza events had gone. They had worked for months and their efforts were rewarded with a spectacular success, but they looked exhausted and stunned and said, “Sextravaganza is over! Why do we still feel exactly as stressed out as we did the day it started?!” “Because you’ve dealt with the stressor,” I said, “but not the stress. Your bodies still think you’re being chased by the lion.” Solution: Do things that communicate to your body, “You have escaped and survived!” Physical activity Sharing affection Primal scream or a good cry Progressive muscle relaxation or other sensorimotor meditation Body self-care, like grooming, massage, or doing your nails The dance major chose physical activity, and the study of women and gender major organized a big group primal scream. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Title : Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Author: Nagoski Ph.D., Emily PRAISE FOR COME AS YOU AREGoodreads Choice Awards, Top 5 Science and Technology Books Buzzfeed’s 17 Things that Changed Our Sex Lives in 2015 Book Riot’s Best of 2015 Autostraddle’s Top 10 Queer and Feminist Books SSTAR’s 2017 Consumer Book Award “This is the best book I have ever read exploring the science of female sexuality. I am a total evangelist for Nagoski’s work…. You think you know how women’s sexuality works? I can guarantee that you do not. Not until you read this, anyway. The book is definitely great for college students and for bright high schoolers as well.” —Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls and Sex “This is the best book I have ever read about sexual desire and why some couples just stop having sex, and what they can do about it. Come As You Are is an absolutely necessary guide for all couples who want to understand the ups and downs in their own sex life. It is a must-read!” —John Gottman, Ph.D., author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work “Emily Nagoski has written one of the most important books about sex any woman (or anybody else) could ever pick up, full of insights that are both fascinating and deeply useful. Synthesizing new research and theory about sexuality with old-school sex-positive information of the sort you didn’t learn in sex ed (unless, perhaps, you are a Unitarian, or Scandinavian, or lucky enough to be in Dr. Nagoski’s class), I guarantee Come As You Are will open minds and change lives.” —Carol Queen, Ph.D., founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture “Emily Nagoski is worth her weight in TED Talks, and Come as You Are is a master class in the science of sex.” —Ian Kerner, sex therapist and bestselling author of She Comes First “It’s the science of sex, decoded and demystified. Want to be educated on the latest findings about female genitalia? Of course you do. Empowering and sex-positive at best, this informative read makes for an enticing bedfellow.” —Refinery29 “Lots of books—and articles and experts—claim to have the keys to transform your sex life. This one actually has it. It isn’t as fast as taking a pill, but it will last a whole lot longer. You will find no hot new bedroom moves—it’s that deeper-level soul stuff. You know, the stuff that actually works.” —Salon.com “Wonderful new language to help us articulate to women (and their lovers) what is going on.” —Huffington Post “Like a punch to the gut. When I read the passage that made me realize—after all these years—that I was not actually broken, I began to cry…. I wished [Nagoski] was someone who was actively in my life, someone I could reach out to for grounding every time I momentarily forgot the lessons in her book.” —Book Riot

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  bracelet I tried to hide under the sleeve of my gabardine jacket. Shortly after that, Warren ran into a friend of ours who was a shrink, and I called to ask if he could get me the fuck out of the bin, and he waved a wand that made Alice in Wonderland disappear like the ghost she was. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. Then I was stepping through the door of my own house. Then my son’s smooth arms were around my neck.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One thing, however, pleases me: namely, that this matter reached Rome and the Apostolic See rather than that permission of far-reaching consequence would be granted to these jealous people of Cologne to pass judgment. Since Rome has the most learned people among the cardinals, Reuchlin’s case will at least be considered more favorably there than those jealous people of Cologne—those beginners in grammar!—would ever allow.9 The Reuchlin affair affected how things proceeded when Luther stepped into his own controversy with Rome in 1517. As a result of it, many church officials in Rome were inclined to see Luther as yet one more troublemaking German with damnable Humanist sympathies. And many in Germany as a result of the Reuchlin controversy became deeply skeptical and even hostile to Rome. Reuchlin never left the church, but the attacks against him did not die down until the end of 1517, when Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg Castle Church door. That controversy would consume all the oxygen in European Christendom for decades, and Reuchlin would himself declare, “God be praised that now the monks have found someone else who will give them more to do than I.”10 ErasmusThe story of Erasmus and his criticisms and troubles with the church is a much larger story than that of Reuchlin, and because he had a relationship with Luther that had significant ups and downs, it’s worth introducing him here. Born in Holland in 1466, Desiderius Erasmus—or Erasmus of Rotterdam, as he came to be known—was a towering figure of his time. Known far and wide as the Prince of the Humanists and more recently as “the crowning glory of the Christian humanists,” he exemplified more than anyone else the Humanist cry of ad fontes!—meaning “back to the sources!”11 The Latin Vulgate was at that time the primary Bible text, but it was Erasmus who led the way in changing this, and in restoring the original Greek first-century texts of the New Testament. He also restored the Greek texts of the ancient Greek fathers of the church. His joy over the original Greek of all these writings was quite unbounded: For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology which deals chiefly with the divine mysteries unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.12

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In a letter to Spalatin that September, Luther circled back to the grim details of his most fundamental struggles: Today, on the sixth day, I had elimination with such difficulty that I almost passed out. Now I sit aching as if in labor confinement, wounded and sore, and shall have no—or little—rest this night. Thanks be to Christ who has not left me without any relic of the holy cross. I would have been healed from all soreness if the elimination had moved more easily. But whatever heals in four days is wounded again by elimination.24 But then, in early October, good news. Not only had his stubborn constipation problem been alleviated, but the subsequent recurring painful anal rupture had at last healed too. “At last my behind and my bowels have reconciled themselves to me,” he gushed. He exulted that he wouldn’t be needing any more medication. He then told Spalatin to watch out for Melanchthon, because he was always concerned for him and feared that if the plague broke out in Wittenberg, his more frail friend must be spirited away to someplace safe. “That head,” he says, “must be preserved so that the Word, which the Lord has entrusted to him for the salvation of souls, may not perish.” And finally he reported on a priest at the Wartburg “who daily celebrates mass with great idolatry.”25 We can only imagine how that priest would have shuddered had he known that the taciturn bearded fellow observing him was none other than Martin Luther of Wittenberg. The MassJust as Luther’s views on marriage were suddenly being put into action in Wittenberg, what he had written about the Mass was being acted upon too. Luther had argued that the Catholic Mass, by being a reenactment of the sacrificial death of Christ, put forth an idea that was unscriptural, so the Mass as it had been practiced was theologically wrong. This was, of course, a monumental idea: to dismiss the single thing most central to medieval ecclesiology. Luther, of course, had also made it clear that separating priests into a special caste apart from laypeople was unbiblical, and therefore the idea that only they and not the laypeople should take the bread and the wine both during Communion was wrong. But suddenly in Wittenberg, Gabriel Zwilling—who was one of Luther’s Augustinian brethren—Melanchthon, and Karlstadt were putting these things into practice. They were celebrating the Lord’s Supper and giving both the bread and the wine to all who came. Laypeople had never drunk the Communion wine before—or at least not for many centuries. And the Wittenbergers were even going a step further by allowing the laypeople to handle the Communion chalice.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One thing we see is that in 1520 Luther had accepted the idea of an irreparable breach with Rome. There was only the very slimmest of possibilities that Rome would do the right thing, but Luther was sure that he had done the right thing and would not gainsay it now in the slightest. Everything had changed since Leipzig. He more than ever felt confidence that God was with him, that the truth was unassailable, and that not to defend it would be genuine heresy, of a kind the pope and his minions could not fathom. It would be to sin against God. So Luther had become increasingly bold. “Unless I am unable to get hold of a fire,” he declared, “I will publicly burn the whole canon law.”35 The events of the past year had drawn him out into lonelier and more dangerous theological territory, but there was a newfound freedom and a faith that bloomed in this situation. He knew that God was with him in a way he couldn’t have known before, so his fear of Rome, if ever any had existed, had vanished. In all he wrote and did this year, he would not just pull up the drawbridge with Rome; he would set it aflame. Unless a gaggle of papal nuncios could be persuaded to swim the alligator-filled moat with olive branches in their teeth, the back-and-forth had ended forever. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was in his second treatise, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he parsed the theological errors of the whole sacerdotal system in which a caste of priests perform seven sacraments. Luther first shot down the hoary idea of the seven sacraments as utterly subjective and without biblical basis. Whether with prophetic authority or sheer mad hubris, he excised five of the seven, saying that only two stood the true test of whether something was indeed a genuine sacrament. The only ones instituted by Christ himself, he said, were Communion and baptism. Thus the other five—confirmation, marriage, ordination, penance, and extreme unction—were man-made and must be tossed outside the camp to rot. For Erasmus, this marked the end of any hope about holding Luther within the church.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Dev hollers, kicking his feet to motorboat the raft around. That night after he’s tucked in, I do try to stretch out my standard two-sentence prayer habit a little longer by dredging up a list of stuff to be grateful for, though not on my knees—no way am I gonna grovel like a reptile. Sitting in a red leather chair, I notice the cherry furniture Warren’s parents gave us. I close my eyes a second, saying, Thanks for the furniture. And the rent. Thanks Warren hasn’t left me and taken our boy. The exercise seems so self-helpy and puerile, but a few more things come to mind inadvertently. Thanks Dev doesn’t have a fever. Mother’s sober. Lecia’s business is going great, and her new boyfriend’s a prince. Thanks for Joan the Bone and Lux. Also the infirmary this weekend... Enumerating these small things actually pierces me with a sliver of feeling fortunate. Then from that one moonlit meeting, the young doctor’s face rises up in me, and I think of what she’d said about asking for my dream, so I add, While we’re at it, I’d like some money. Not a handout. I’m willing to work for it. It takes me a full five minutes to shut up begging, and it sounds crazy to say it, but for the first time in about a week, I don’t want a drink at all. It’s an odd sensation, since the craving’s shadowed my every waking instant for the past few years. But I abruptly stop feeling my skin like a too-tight sausage casing.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The irritation that once drove me like a cato’-nine-tails can start flailing in an instant. But now the car door I slam or the snipe I let fly at Warren trails an apology. I blurt out sorry nonstop, since I never again want to nurse such bitterness as I’d stored up before. Once, I’m laden with parcels and carrying Dev up slick stairs on my hip after he’s hurt his ankle, and he calls me poopy head so many times that I’m ready to fling him down and swear. But a quick prayer— Please let me be a loving mom —leads me to bust out laughing instead . When a guy honks and cuts me off and shrieks at me, calling me the c-word, my hand does not automatically flip him the bird—a small change, maybe, but for me profound. That spring-loaded trigger has eased off. The guy’s comment just flows past as if I’ve been lacquered over. Every so often I find myself praying for citizens like him, though in the past I might have petitioned for a machine gun. One morning at my desk, an essay I’ve had an idea about starts to unreel itself like a satin ribbon. Six hours later, I look up and realize I’ve been writing with ease. Some days, premenstrual self-loathing can transform me into a ring-tailed, horn-honking, door-slamming bitch. But those incidents now strike me as 100 percent my problem, regardless of provocation. And they bring me to my knees, for it’s on their back end that I sometimes fantasize about a slender glass of innocent champagne with some berry-colored crème de cassis making a little sunset in the flute’s bottom. Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past. But the spiritual lens—even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day’s actions—is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Karlstadt even asked if Luther would appeal to the new elector, Duke John, so that he might be able to return to Saxony. It must have been humiliating for Karlstadt, but he even went to the length of revoking the last books he had written against Luther and promised not to write, preach, or teach again. Luther did intercede with the elector, asking that Karlstadt be given a hearing to let him prove he was not a “rebellious spirit” in the mold of Müntzer. Given the climate of those days, this might well have saved Karlstadt’s life. During the eight weeks that Karlstadt was quietly hiding under Luther’s aegis, he wrote a full apology—titled Apology—in which he explained himself and told of his wanderings among the violent peasants. Luther himself wrote a foreword to it, making clear his sharp doctrinal differences with Karlstadt but nonetheless using his influence to make sure Karlstadt was given a fair hearing. Karlstadt even published a pamphlet in which he explained that his views on the Sacrament—which had differed from Luther’s “Real Presence” views—never had been meant as a doctrinal statement but had been only his personal views, previously set forth in the manner of theses to be disputed. Even for Luther, it was not easy to convince the elector John that Karlstadt should be allowed to return to Saxony. The fear that he would again cause trouble was something he took very seriously. Karlstadt had asked whether he might live in Kemberg, but because this lay on the main road to Leipzig, the elector feared it would be too easy for people to visit him there and subsequently spread his radical ideas. But that September, he was officially given permission to live in Seegrehna, a small hamlet five miles southeast of Wittenberg, where his wife’s family lived. Spalatin had likely been the chief strategist in this, knowing that Karlstadt was best kept close to Wittenberg, where they could keep an eye on him. But early in 1526, Karlstadt’s son was to be baptized, and Karlstadt invited Justus Jonas, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Kathie Luther to be the godparents. Luther and a number of others from Wittenberg made the short journey to Seegrehna for the celebration. Karlstadt’s son—who was named Andreas, after his father—was two, which was very old for an “infant” baptism, but he had been born around the same time that Karlstadt was banished from Saxony, and it is also possible that at that time Karlstadt was still opposed to infant baptism. But now was a time for reconciliation, such as was possible, and Luther himself was stunned at the development. In a letter to Amsdorf, he wrote, “Who would have thought a year ago that those who called baptism a ‘dog’s bath’ would ask for baptism from their enemies?”*18

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Luther now expected that he would at long last get the fair hearing he had been seeking, and he reckoned that the archbishop of Salzburg would probably be the judge. But what happened in the meantime would affect that too. And then, on January 12, the news came that the emperor had died. Years later, Luther recalled that with the earthshaking news of Maximilian’s death “the storm ceased to rage a bit.”17 CHAPTER EIGHTThe Leipzig DebateA simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it. —Martin Luther A plague on it! —Duke George the Bearded AS PROGRESS ON Luther’s case had slowed down in Rome and the Vatican, things again heated up in Germany. Luther had written his response to Eck’s Obelisks, titled Asterisks, but he had intended this to be rather private, along with their larger disagreement. And it had been, until Luther’s somewhat bumbling Wittenberg colleague Andreas Karlstadt had on his own accord—and without telling Luther—replied to Eck publicly, with his own 406 (sic) Theses. Karlstadt sometimes seems to have been angling to upstage Luther, but whatever his reasons for doing this, it was now unhelpful in the extreme, and the banked fires of the disagreement with Eck once more flared up. This was because Eck now felt compelled to respond publicly. Eck’s response to Karlstadt—titled Response—appeared in mid-August 1518. But Eck now escalated things dramatically. For some reason, he no longer was interested in a quiet academic dispute in writing between the universities of Wittenberg and Ingolstadt but rather in something more like a colossal public spectacle. On the title page of his Response, he called for a debate that should be decided by no less a person than the pope himself, which should be held at the university of Paris or Cologne—or Rome! He thought early April of the following year, 1519, would be about right for the date but said he would allow Karlstadt to decide the venue. The Wittenbergers thought that something closer to home would be far less expensive, not to mention theologically friendlier, so they suggested either of the universities at Erfurt or Leipzig. Eck chose Leipzig and immediately asked Duke George of Saxony for permission. [image file=image_rsrc6KW.jpg] A portrait of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther Translates the New TestamentLuther was no longer restless at the Wartburg, as he had been in his first days there. His constipation had passed, and upon returning from his quick trip to Wittenberg in December, he had dived headlong into translating the New Testament into German. He reckoned that with a few months’ hard work, he really could finish it. The plan was to do so and then return to Wittenberg around Easter, this time for good. He had first mentioned the idea of translating all twenty-seven books of the New Testament in December, to his friend Johannes Lang, who was himself then translating the book of Matthew. That Luther managed to pull off the entirety of this project in eleven weeks has boggled the mind of scholars for half a millennium. This is because such an undertaking requires an extremely rare set of skills, and history has judged that Luther performed it exceedingly well, so well that his is still today the principal German translation that is used or upon which subsequent translations have been based. Perhaps most important in translating an ancient language into a modern language is maintaining the innate poetry of the language, even and perhaps especially when that “poetry” takes the form of prose. The language should be supple and vivid and powerful, but the theological ideas behind the words must not suffer along the way. On the contrary, Luther wanted to clarify the theological meaning of many previously poorly translated and therefore misunderstood passages. These bad translations and ideas had contributed not only to the misunderstanding of individual verses and theological ideas but also to the wider problem of general unfamiliarity with the Bible. Who wished to read something that was swollen and opaque? And if people did not read it for themselves, they would be reliant on a priestly caste to interpret it for them, which had of course been the case for many centuries, with results that Luther hardly considered positive.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Another key member of the meeting is the Promise Tracker, someone who makes a list of who agrees to what and the timelines. We found a good example of team load-balancing when we worked with a biotech firm. A leader of a quality team had called such a meeting during a crisis in the factory: A contaminant had been found in one of their sterile products. During the meeting, a senior staff member mentioned they could postpone their deviation reports for up to thirty days and still meet FDA requirements. The reports document exceptions found to normal operating procedures, and the team normally prided themselves on completing them within days. Decision made, the team was then able to prioritize the next few weeks’ efforts on finding the point of contamination. The quality team got through the crisis and found it helpful to continue to meet weekly thereafter to balance loads, which resulted in the streamlining of several of their key processes. They discovered some work they’d been doing for years could be safely omitted entirely—for instance, one batch report was no longer required at all by regulators, and an internal audit that had been conducted monthly could be done quarterly. Left to work individually, the team members would most likely never have come up with these solutions. Tensions would have mounted, and goals might have been missed. Instead, conditions improved for everyone. Method 3: Rotate PeopleIf it’s possible given the nature of their business, leaders should consider moving people out of high-load and high-stress jobs into lower-stress ones in a rotating schedule to avoid anxiety overload. “Changes of pace, changes of demands, and shifts into situations that may not be so draining enable people to replenish their energies and get new and more accurate perspectives on themselves and their roles,” counseled Harvard’s Harry Levinson. Change also helps people be able to look forward to a time when they can get out of tough assignments. A study among nurses in the United States found job rotation helped reduce burnout. It also inspired staff members to achieve higher performance and allowed them to gain new knowledge and skills. Best of all for their hospitals, it increased the quality of care given to patients. A practitioner of job rotating is Matthew Ross, co-owner of The Slumber Yard, an online mattress review firm. His goal with moving people between jobs has been to enhance employee satisfaction, reduce turnover, and have his team members gain valuable new skills. Employees transfer to other lateral jobs as often as quarterly, and he finds that training employees to be competent in multiple disciplines helps reduce stress when one of them has to fill in for a colleague who’s out for a day or if an employee moves on. When done thoughtfully and with proper training, rotating jobs can also be an opportunity to help people move out of their comfort zones and work in areas where they may not normally be assigned.