Sadness

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 Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  The pledge, it will be remembered, had the same things for its object, and so we expressed ourselves satisfied with the orders. However, the end was far from making me feel happy, inasmuch as it lacked the grace with which the termination of every Satyagraha campaign ought to be accompanied. The Collector carried on as though he had done nothing by way of a settlement. The poor were to be granted suspension, but hardly any got the benefit of it. It was the people’s right to determine who was poor, but they could not exercise it. I was sad that they had not the strength to exercise the right. Although, therefore, the termination was celebrated as a triumph of Satyagraha, I could not enthuse over it, as it lacked the essentials of a complete triumph. The end of a Satyagraha campaign can be described as worthy, only when, it leaves the Satyagrahis stronger and more spirited than they are in the beginning. The campaign was not, however, without its indirect results which we can see today and the benefit of which we are reaping. The Kheda Satyagraha marks the beginning of an awakening among the peasants of Gujarat, the beginning of their true political education. Dr. Besant’s brilliant Home Rule agitation had certainly touched the peasants, but it was the Kheda campaign that compelled the educated public workers to establish contact with the actual life of the peasants. They learnt to identify themselves with the latter. They found their proper sphere of work, their capacity for sacrifice increased. That Vallabhbhai found himself during this campaign was by itself no small achievement. We could realize its measure during the flood relief operations last year and the Bardoli Satyagraha this year. Public life in Gujarat became instinct with a new energy and a new vigour. The Patidar peasant came to an unforgettable conciousness of his strength. The lesson was indelibly imprinted on the public mind that the salvation of the people depends upon themselves, upon their capacity for suffering and sacrifice. Through the Kheda campaign Satyagraha took firm root in the soil of Gujarat. Although, therefore, I found nothing to enthuse over in the termination of the Satyagraha, the Kheda peasants were jubilant, because they knew that what they had found the true and infallible method for a redress of their grievances. This knowledge was enough justification for their jubilation. Nevertheless the Kheda peasants had not fully understood the inner meaning of Satyagraha, and they saw it to their cost, as we shall see in the chapters to follow. 152PASSION FOR UNITYThe Kheda campaign was launched while the deadly war in Europe was still going on. Now a crisis had arrived, and the Viceroy had invited various leaders to a war conference in Delhi. I had also been urged to attend the conference. I have already referred to the cordial relations between Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, and myself. In response to the invitation I went to Delhi.

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

  “Eagle.” He laughed. “Christ, Toby, they’ll be eating out of your hand. Anything else? Chess? Music?” “I play in the school band.” “Terrific. What instrument?” “Snare drum.” “Yes, well, let’s stick with the grades and swimming and the Scouts.” Geoffrey told me he would send a list of schools to apply to, along with addresses and deadlines. I would have to be patient, this wasn’t going to happen overnight. “I don’t like the idea of that guy hitting you,” Geoffrey said. “Think you can hang on out there?” I said I could. “I’m going to call the old man about this. He might have some ideas. We’ll get you out of there, one way or the other.” He told me to give his love to our mother, and to keep writing. He said he really liked the wolf story. THIS WAS A low time for my mother. During the campaign she had traveled up and down the valley, and gone to conventions, and spent her time with people she admired. She had met John F. Kennedy. Now that the election was over she’d gone back to waiting tables at the cookhouse. She missed the excitement, but her sadness went beyond that, beyond boredom and fatigue. She had told a man who’d worked with her on the campaign that she wanted to get out of Chinook, and he offered to pull some strings to find her a job back East. Dwight somehow got wind of it. While they were driving up from Marblemount one night, he turned off on a logging road and took her to a lonely place. She asked him to go back but he refused to say anything. He just sat there, drinking from a bottle of whiskey. When it was empty he pulled his hunting knife out from under the seat and held it to her throat. He kept her there for hours like that, making her beg for her life, making her promise that she would never leave him. If she left him, he said, he would find her and kill her. It didn’t matter where she went or how long it took him, he would kill her. She believed him. I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what. My mother wouldn’t tell me. She was afraid I would make things worse if I knew, stir Dwight up all

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This central passage, in fact, is one possible expansion of the official formula to which we have often alluded: “The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible” (1 Cor. 15:3). As we have seen, the phrase “in accordance with the Bible” has little to do with isolated proof-texts and everything to do with the meaning of the long, dark, puzzling narrative of Israel ending with the question mark at the end of the books of Malachi and Chronicles. “Exile” was still in operation. The first Christians saw the message and accomplishment of Jesus as the long-awaited arrival of God’s kingdom, the final dealing-with-sin that would undo the powers of darkness and break through to the “age to come.” The whole point, as in Galatians 3, was that Israel’s long and sad story was not just a rambling muddle, an accumulation of irrelevant but damaging mistakes of generations that had more or less lost the plot. Paul never saw Israel’s past history like that, though many readers of Paul have assumed that he did. Rather, like so many other Second Temple Jews, Paul saw Israel’s history standing under the rubric of Deuteronomy 26–32. The covenant always envisaged blessings and curses, and the curses, the result of disobedience, ended in exile. One of the regular words for that “exile” or “captivity” when Israel’s scriptures were translated into Greek was the word that Paul uses in his dramatic summary of Israel’s plight under the law in Romans 7:23: aichmalōtizonta, “taking captive.” Only after that would there come the great divine act of liberation and transformation through which the covenant would be renewed. Only then would the divine plan for the whole creation—the covenant plan through Israel for the world—be put into effect. Paul, as we see at many points, has wrestled long and hard with this story, and here we see what is arguably the most important result of that struggle. For most of Christian history it has been quietly assumed that the long, complex prophetic sequence envisaged in Deuteronomy—so well known to Jews of Jesus’s day, so little known to the followers of Jesus after the first few generations—was basically irrelevant to the Christian story. One could leap straight from Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7 into the gospels and proceed as though all was well. But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel’s Messiah, is a step toward paganism. So it has proved in the long term, as the de-Judaized story had to find another narrative framework and eventually came up with the “works contract,” in which the history of Israel was merely an example of people getting things wrong, even though it also contained a few detached promises pointing into the long-distant future.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When Paul speaks of the Messiah being glorified and of his rule over the whole creation, he has several psalms in mind, notably Psalm 2, which speaks of the Messiah’s worldwide rule, and Psalm 8, which speaks of the “glory and honor” proper to human beings who are called to exercise delegated authority over God’s world. What we have here, as a result, is a dynamic fusion of messianic hope and human vocation, reshaped around the suffering of Jesus and refocused on the suffering of his followers. Paul has thus filled out the “inner dynamic” described in chapter 5 with a vision of the wider purpose of this suffering. This is how it works. The Messiah suffered and won the victory over the powers of evil. The church, the Messiah’s people, must suffer in the present, because they share the Messiah’s life, his raised-from-the-dead life, and this is the way to implement the Messiah’s victory. This is part of what it means to share in his “glory,” his splendid rule over the world, which at present is exercised through the Spirit-led work and suffering of his people. And through their prayer. Paul joins all these themes together in a unique passage, Romans 8:26–27, that brings the inner personal dynamic of suffering together with the larger world-redeeming purpose. This time he is alluding to Psalm 44, which speaks of God searching the hearts of his people (v. 21) and whose next verse, which Paul quotes a little later, refers to God’s people “being like sheep destined for slaughter.” The world-changing task of God’s people in the present, rooted in the Messiah’s victorious suffering, has its ultimate depth in prayer, particularly the prayer that comes from the indescribable depths of a sorrow-laden heart: In the same way, too, the spirit comes alongside and helps us in our weakness. We don’t know what to pray for as we ought to; but that same spirit pleads on our behalf, with groanings too deep for words. And the Searcher of Hearts knows what the spirit is thinking, because the spirit pleads for God’s people according to God’s will. (8:26–27) We should not forget, as we contemplate the depth of pain in this passage, that ten verses later Paul is declaring, in a shout of praise, that the Messiah’s people are “completely victorious.” As in the Psalms themselves, these things belong together. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Romans 8:26–27 is the passage that supplies a vital clue to the otherwise shocking question of how Jesus, the living embodiment of Israel’s God, could cry out, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” Here we have the Holy Spirit, who in Romans 8 is clearly the powerful presence of Israel’s God himself, groaning inarticulately from the heart of creation. And the Father—the Searcher of Hearts—is listening. This is the extraordinary “conversation” in which the suffering church is caught up.

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

  took on the color and glow of well-oiled baseball mitts. The smell grew deadly. The boys I went to school with were naturally obliged to shoot their mouths off, and finally—choosing the one I considered to be the weakest—I got into a fight. But by then the nuts were all husked anyway. AFTER SCHOOL I delivered newspapers. Dwight had bought the route for almost nothing from a boy who was sick of it and couldn’t find any other takers. I delivered the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer to most of the houses in Chinook and to the barracks where the single men lived. The route paid between fifty and sixty dollars a month, money that Dwight took from me as soon as I collected it. He said that I would thank him someday, when I really needed the money. I dawdled along the route, seizing any chance to delay going home. I sat in the bachelors’ quarters and read their magazines (GENT GOES UNDERCOVER AT VASSAR! MY TEN YEARS AS A SEX-SLAVE OF THE AMAZONS OF THE WHITE NILE!). I fooled around with kids from school, played with dogs, read both papers front to back. Sometimes I just sat on a railing somewhere and looked up at the mountains. They were always in shadow. The sun didn’t make it up over the peaks before classes started in the morning, and it was gone behind the western rim by the time school let out. I lived in perpetual dusk. The absence of light became oppressive to me. It took on the weight of other absences I could not admit to or even define but still felt sharply, on my own in this new place. My father and my brother. Friends. Most of all my mother, whose arrival seemed to grow more and more distant rather than closer. In the weeks since Christmas she had delayed giving Dwight a definite answer. She wanted to be sure, she told me. Marrying Dwight meant quitting her job, giving up the house, really burning her bridges. She couldn’t rush into this one. I understood, but understanding did not make me miss her less. She made the world seem friendly. And somehow, with her, it was. She would talk to anyone, anywhere, in grocery stores or ticket lines or restaurants, drawing them out and listening to their stories with intense concentration and partisan outbursts of sympathy. My mother did not expect to find people dull or mean; she assumed they would be likeable and interesting, and they felt this assurance, and mostly lived up to it. On the bus ride from Salt Lake to Portland she had everybody talking and laughing until it seemed like some kind of party. One of the

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

  us see it her way that we began to feel as if everything needful had already been done, and settled in without lifting a finger to save the house from its final decrepitude. Soon after we took the house, Kathy had a baby boy, Willy. Willy was a clown. Even when he was alone he cackled and squawked like a parrot. The sweet, almost cloying smell of milk filled the house. Kathy and my mother worked at their jobs downtown while Marian kept the house and did the meals and looked after Willy. She was supposed to take care of me, too, but I ran around with Taylor and Silver after school and didn’t come home until just before I knew my mother would arrive. When Marian asked me where I’d been I told her lies. She knew I was lying, but she couldn’t control me or even convince my mother that I needed controlling. My mother had faith in me. She didn’t have faith in discipline. Her father, Daddy, had given her plenty and she had yet to see the profit from it. Daddy was a great believer in the rod. When my mother was still in her cradle he slapped her for sucking her thumb. To correct her toddler’s habit of walking with her toes turned slightly inward he forced her to walk with her toes turned out, like a duck. Once she started school, Daddy spanked her almost every night on the theory that she must have done something wrong that day whether he knew about it or not. He told her that he was going to spank her well in advance, as the family sat down to dinner, so she could think about it while she ate and listened to him talk about the stock market and the fool in the White House. After dessert he spanked her. Then she had to kiss him and say, “Thank you, Daddy, for earning the delicious meal.” My grandmother was a gentle woman. She tried to defend her daughter, but her heart was bad and she couldn’t even defend herself. Whenever she was bedridden, Daddy would read to her from the works of Mary Baker Eddy to prove that her suffering was illusory, the result of improper thinking. On their Sunday drives he boosted her pulse by going through stop signs and racing trains to railroad crossings. Once he scooped a man onto his hood and carried him at speed for several blocks, screaming, “Get off my car!” My mother was on her own with Daddy. When she started high school he forced her to wear bloomers—pink silk bloomers with ruffled legs. He’d brought several pairs home with him from a cruise to China, where they were still in vogue among missionaries’ wives. He badgered her into smoking cigarettes so she wouldn’t eat much, and when they went to restaurants he made her fill up on

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Some Jews (not all) believed that deliverance would come through suffering, but such suffering would not be undergone by the Messiah himself. It would be hard for a Second Temple Jew to read key passages like Psalm 2 or Psalm 110 without envisaging the Messiah as a military conqueror. This is all the more striking in that the early Christians continued to invoke just those passages, shorn of their explicit violence, in their interpretation of Jesus and what he had accomplished. It is important, then, to detach the pre-Christian Jewish notion of a coming Messiah from the notion of suffering. Albert Schweitzer, as I mentioned a moment ago, popularized the idea that the long-awaited new age would come about through a period of intense suffering, which came to be termed the “messianic woes.” The phrase “messianic woes” by itself, however, is imprecise and potentially misleading. Schweitzer was referring to a visible reality: that from quite early on in the writing of the books that became Israel’s scriptures, some prophets and psalmists seemed to come back regularly to this idea of great suffering as the prelude to the coming deliverance. This suffering would, however, only be “messianic” in the loose sense that it might immediately precede the “messianic age.” Sometimes Israel’s scriptures refer to the suffering that results from Israel’s idolatry and sin. Sometimes, however, as in many of the psalms, it is suffering inflicted on God’s people, or perhaps on an individual, despite their innocence. The night gets darker, the pain still more intense, and then the new day will dawn. All this comes to a head in passages like Daniel 12:1: “There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered.” This is then seen in some of the classic “suffering” psalms, like Psalm 22, which begins with the experience of desolation, shame, and suffering: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. . . . But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads. . . . For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The victory over the powers would be won by Jesus dealing with the people’s sins. Recall how the narrative now worked. Israel had been in “continuing exile,” according to Daniel 9 and many later texts, ever since the Babylonian destruction. Renewal, reform, and even revolution had taken place, but the plight was still a reality, visibly underlined at Passover time in Jerusalem by the presence of Roman soldiers and the Roman governor himself, up from his normal residence in the port city of Caesarea to keep a personal eye on things during the notoriously dangerous freedom festival. But the analysis of that extended plight was that Israel was still “in its sins.” That had been the view of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—to say nothing of Ezra and Nehemiah, both of whom continued after the supposed “return from exile” to lament Israel’s sins and its consequent unredeemed, enslaved state. Thus, as long as Israel was still in bondage to hostile powers, what was needed was a new Exodus; but, because the cause of that bondage was Israel’s sins, what had to happen was for those sins to be dealt with. This combination of themes—the Passover victory, on the one hand, and the exile-ending “forgiveness of sins,” on the other—would then become characteristic of many strands in the New Testament. My argument in this book is that the combination goes right back to the Last Supper itself, the interpretative grid that Jesus himself chose and structured. And on this basis I will suggest that we can see at last how to rescue the central elements of early Christian “atonement” theology from their own pagan captivity. At the center of the whole picture we do not find a wrathful God bent on killing someone, demanding blood. Instead, we find the image—I use the word advisedly—of the covenant-keeping God who takes the full force of sin onto himself. This, I suggest, goes some way toward explaining the remarkable power that, as we saw at the start of this book, the story still retains. And it retains it as story more than as theory—especially when the various theories are detached from this story, not least from the ancient Jewish story in which it belongs, and relocated in different stories, images, illustrations, and the like, where their central themes can be subtly transformed to carry significantly different meanings. It retains its power particularly as acted story , as Jesus’s followers to this day “do this in memory of him.” But that brings us to the “words of institution.” This is where the theme of “end of exile” nests within and interprets the larger theme of the kingdom-bringing Passover. The words over the bread resonate out in several directions. “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19; Matt. 26:26 and Mark 14:22 lack “which is given for you”; 1 Cor. 11:24 reads “which is for you”).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Deuteronomy isn’t thinking simply of individuals who do bad things and so incur punishment. Nor is the book proposing a regular cycle that goes around and around from curse to forgiveness and blessing and back to curse again, though no doubt such cycles are visible in scripture, for instance in the book of Judges. Deuteronomy, on the contrary, envisages a single narrative, and the book was read in that way in the first century. Israel as a whole will rebel, will disobey, will worship idols; and Israel as a whole will therefore incur the ultimate curse—of exile from the land, the long-range biblical equivalent to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden. Then, eventually, there will be restoration. But how will it come about, and what will it look like? The problem this generates is not simply a problem for Israel itself. It was bad enough for the Israelites, as the psalmists complained: “How could we sing YHWH’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4). But Deuteronomy came of course at the close of the Pentateuch, the foundation charter for Israel; and the opening of Israel’s history, the call of Abraham, had always envisaged a glorious future not just for Israel, but for the whole world. What then would happen to the blessing held out for all the nations from Genesis onwards? It is as though the delivery van, commissioned to take an urgent message to a town far away, had become stuck in a snowdrift through the driver’s own culpable negligence. The point is not just that the van is stuck and the driver isolated and helpless; the problem is that the message is not getting through. This explains what Paul means when he says that the reason that the “curse” fell on Jesus and was therefore exhausted was “so that the blessing of Abraham could flow through to the nations in King Jesus.” He does not say, as many have said in expounding this passage, either that the law was wrong to pronounce the “curse” or that the purpose of Jesus’s bearing the “curse” was that people in general could now be forgiven their individual sin. That, he would have said, is of course important, but it is not the point being made in this argument, which is about the single family God promised to Abraham and the way in which that family has now been created. The passage, then, declares that the “exile” is over—because the “curse” has fallen on the Messiah himself, the single representative of Israel, and has thereby been exhausted. To use traditional language for a moment, this is undoubtedly “penal” (you can’t get more “penal” than the Deuteronomic curse), and it is undoubtedly “substitutionary” (the Messiah’s accursed death means that others are no longer under the curse). But this form of “penal substitution” has little or nothing to do with the narrative in which that theory is normally found.

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

  Here are the texts, with Ephesians probably based on Colossians: Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong has been done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven. (Col. 3:22–4:1) Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free. And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. (Eph. 6:5–9) You will notice, by the way, that the ratio of advice for slaves to advice for owners is four to one. With regard to the Christian community envisioned by the radical Paul, those texts are contradictory, conservative, and regressive. They are not just post-Pauline; they are anti-Pauline. With regard to the norms of Roman society, they might even be too liberal. First of all, they advocate reciprocal duties for slaves and owners—even granted that four-to-one ratio. Second, Paul directly addresses slaves as well as owners, and Roman slave owners would never accept that interference with their property. THE REACTIONARY PAUL ON SLAVERY Even the residual vestige of what Roman slave owners might find too liberal rather than appropriately conservative in Colossians and Ephesians is completely eliminated in the letter to Titus: Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior. (2:9) There is nothing there about any mutuality of obligations for slaves and masters. And there is nothing addressed directly to slaves. There is but a single verse, and it begins, “Tell slaves.” SLAVERY AND PATRIARCHY You can now see clearly—in the test case of slavery—how the radical Paul of the certainly Pauline letters is transmuted first into the conservative Paul of the probably not, or disputed, Pauline letters and finally into the reactionary Paul of the certainly not Pauline letters. How sad, how terribly, terribly sad. Here is our final question for this chapter.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Why did I put it off so long? I only told my parents of my departure the day before I left — to make things easier, or as a last expression of filial pity? My father did not insist much and my mother understood nothing and cried up to the last minute. Before leaving the house I destroyed my diary. There were already eight big notebooks, and I was taking only a bag on my back, like when I left home for the labor camp. Besides, books are my only possession and they weigh too much. We should have sailed at five o’clock, but the job of loading the ship seemed interminable and we weighed anchor only at sunset. As soon as we came out of the channel that leads into the harbor of Tunis, Henry was sick and went to lie down. I stayed on deck till we were out at sea, leaning on the rail. I lost sight of the coastline as night descended on the ship. It seemed to ooze from the holds, to fill the hatch, and to stain the blue sky with gray. First one star shone, then a second, then thousands. I grew uneasy gazing at the violet sea which attracted me like a sorceress while it heaved and settled, so I went down to the hold to sleep.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I paraded them now before me: my dying mother, from whom I wanted something—I don’t know what—even as she gasped her last breaths; the many loving black housekeepers, their names long vanished from memory, who held me as infant and child; my sister, herself badly loved, offering me scraps from her dish; the harried teachers who singled me out for praise; my old analyst, who sat loyally—and silently—with me for three years. Now I understood more clearly how all these feelings—let us call them “countertransference”—had made it almost impossible for me to offer unconflicted therapeutic help to Magnolia. If I had just let her be, just basked in her warmth as Rosa had done, just settled for small goals, then I would have condemned myself for using my patient for my own comfort. As it was, I had challenged her defensive structure and now condemned myself for grandiosity and for sacrificing her for the sake of a teaching demonstration. What I could not, or did not, do was bracket all my feelings and have a real encounter with Magnolia—Magnolia the flesh-and-blood person, not the image I had imposed upon her. The day following the group meeting, Magnolia was discharged from the hospital, and I chanced to see her waiting in the hospital corridor by the window of the outpatient pharmacy. Aside from her tiny, delicate lace cap and the blue embroidered blanket (Rosa’s gift) covering her legs in the wheelchair, she looked ordinary—weary, shabby, indistinguishable from the long gray line of supplicants stretching before and behind her. I nodded to her, but she didn’t see me, and I continued on my way. A few minutes later I reconsidered and turned back to find her. Still at the window, she was placing her discharge medications into a worn petit-point bag on her lap. I watched her wheel away toward the hospital exit, where she stopped, opened her purse, took out a small handkerchief, removed her thick gold-rimmed eyeglasses, and daintily wiped away the tears coursing down her cheeks. I went over to her. “Magnolia, hello. Remember me?” “Your voice sound real familiar,” she said, replacing her spectacles. “Now, you jes’ wait a minute while Ah get a look at you.” She stared at me, blinking two or three times, and then broke into a warm smile. “Doctah Yalom, Ah sure do remembah you. Nice of you to stop and visit. I bin wanting to talk to you, private-like.” She pointed to a chair at the end of the corridor. “Ah see a seat for you over there. Ah carry mah own around with me. Would you wheel me over?” When we had moved and I had sat down, Magnolia said, “You jes’ gonna have to oversight mah tears.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The other two, Owen and Peter, were foster like me. But even her natural children had been in foster care, when Starr was in rehab. How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean? I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine. We walked on. Davey pulled at a bush with bright yellow flowers. “Deerweed. Pea family.” The breeze came up the canyon, making the trees flicker green and gray. “Paloverde’s got the green bark. The other’s ironwood.” The quiet, the solidness of the mountain, the white butterflies. Green scent of laurel sumac, which Davey informed me the local Indians had used to sweeten the air in their wickiups. Clumps of giant ryegrass, still green, but already crackling like fire. Two hawks circled the seamless blue sky, screaming. THAT NIGHT , motifs of cowboys on broncos, lariats, and spurs decorated my sleeping bag bed, where I lay zipper open to the coolness watching Carolee, sixteen years old and tall as her mother, a sullen girl with pouty lips, zipping her top. “Thinks she’s going to ground me,” Carolee said to her reflection. “That’s what she thinks.” On the other side of our thin wall, the mother and her hippie boyfriend were making love, the headboard knocking against the partition. It was not the night magic, my mother and her young men, murmuring to strains of imperial koto in the scented dusk. “Lord almighty!” Starr wailed. Carolee’s mouth twisted into something not quite a smile, her boot on her bed, she was doing the laces. “Christians don’t say, ‘Fuck me baby.’ Actually they’re not supposed to do it at all, but she’s got the sin virus in her blood.” She posed in front of the mirror, lowered the zipper of her top an inch, so it showed the well between her breasts. She bared her teeth and wiped them with her finger. A dirt bike whined, and she pushed the screen out, climbed onto the dresser, narrowly missing her basket of makeup. “See you in the morning. Don’t close the window.” I got up and watched her on the dirt bike disappearing up the road. It was wide and white in the moonlight, the darkness of mountains darker than the sky, a perfect vanishing point of the road and the telephone poles. I imagined you could follow that road through the vanishing point, come out somewhere else entirely. “WITHOUT JESUS , I’d be dead today,” Starr was saying as she cut in front of a semi, which punished us with its air horn. “That’s the God’s honest truth. They’d taken my kids, I was ready for roadkill.” I sat in the passenger seat of Starr’s Ford Torino while Carolee slouched in the back, ankle bracelet glittering, a present from her boyfriend, Derrick.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When Paul speaks of the Messiah being glorified and of his rule over the whole creation, he has several psalms in mind, notably Psalm 2, which speaks of the Messiah’s worldwide rule, and Psalm 8, which speaks of the “glory and honor” proper to human beings who are called to exercise delegated authority over God’s world. What we have here, as a result, is a dynamic fusion of messianic hope and human vocation, reshaped around the suffering of Jesus and refocused on the suffering of his followers. Paul has thus filled out the “inner dynamic” described in chapter 5 with a vision of the wider purpose of this suffering. This is how it works. The Messiah suffered and won the victory over the powers of evil. The church, the Messiah’s people, must suffer in the present, because they share the Messiah’s life, his raised-from-the-dead life, and this is the way to implement the Messiah’s victory. This is part of what it means to share in his “glory,” his splendid rule over the world, which at present is exercised through the Spirit-led work and suffering of his people. And through their prayer. Paul joins all these themes together in a unique passage, Romans 8:26–27, that brings the inner personal dynamic of suffering together with the larger world-redeeming purpose. This time he is alluding to Psalm 44, which speaks of God searching the hearts of his people (v. 21) and whose next verse, which Paul quotes a little later, refers to God’s people “being like sheep destined for slaughter.” The world-changing task of God’s people in the present, rooted in the Messiah’s victorious suffering, has its ultimate depth in prayer, particularly the prayer that comes from the indescribable depths of a sorrow-laden heart: In the same way, too, the spirit comes alongside and helps us in our weakness. We don’t know what to pray for as we ought to; but that same spirit pleads on our behalf, with groanings too deep for words. And the Searcher of Hearts knows what the spirit is thinking, because the spirit pleads for God’s people according to God’s will. (8:26–27) We should not forget, as we contemplate the depth of pain in this passage, that ten verses later Paul is declaring, in a shout of praise, that the Messiah’s people are “completely victorious.” As in the Psalms themselves, these things belong together. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Romans 8:26–27 is the passage that supplies a vital clue to the otherwise shocking question of how Jesus, the living embodiment of Israel’s God, could cry out, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” Here we have the Holy Spirit, who in Romans 8 is clearly the powerful presence of Israel’s God himself, groaning inarticulately from the heart of creation. And the Father—the Searcher of Hearts—is listening. This is the extraordinary “conversation” in which the suffering church is caught up.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After I had been back for a week, I noticed that I was running a fever, low, but regular and persistent. It was a few tenths of a degree above normal in the mornings, and then rose enough in the evenings to give me a disagreeable impression of heat around my cheekbones. In the dangers and preoccupations of the camp, I had forgotten to worry about my health. Now that I could nurse my toe and my wounded feet, could sleep in a bed and feel all my pains, I realized how wrecked my whole body was. The failure of my naive adventure in search of others brought me back to myself. Besides, the curfew and my illegal position should have been enough. As the Germans came to feel that all was lost, they multiplied their raids. When the bombings were particularly violent, I ran to the trenches of the old cemetery. But the German military police, with their tagged dog collars, were sometimes already in the shelters. It was wiser not to go out at all, and so there was nothing to distract my attention from myself.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Yet you’re not right when you say I have no experience of tragedy. I do whatever I can to bring tragedy closer to me. I keep my death in focus. When I’m with you I often imagine how it would be if my wife were fatally ill, and each time I’m filled with indescribable sadness. I am aware, fully aware, that I’m on the march, that I’ve moved into another life stage. Taking early retirement from Stanford is an irreversible step. All the signs of aging—my torn knee cartilage, my fading vision, my backaches, my senile plaques, my graying beard and hair, my dreams of my own death—tell me I’m moving toward the end of my life. “For ten years, Irene, I chose to work with patients dying of cancer, hoping that they would draw me closer to the tragic core of life. That, indeed, happened, and I went back into three years of therapy, seeing Rollo May, whose book Existence had been so important to me in my psychiatric training. That therapy was unlike any other personal work I had done before, and I plunged deeply into the experience of my own death.” Irene nodded. I knew that gesture—that characteristic cluster of movements, one sharp chin jerk followed by two or three soft nods, her somatic Morse code signifying that I had made a reasonably satisfactory response. I had passed the test—for now. But I wasn’t finished with the dream. “Irene, I think there’s more to your dream.” I referred to my notes (almost the only notes I take during a session are of dreams because, owing to their evanescence, patients often repress or distort them immediately) and read aloud the first part of her dream: ‘“I am in this office, in this chair. But there is a strange wall in the middle of the room between us. I can’t see you.’ “What impresses me,” I continued, “is that last sentence. In the dream it is you who can’t see me. Yet this whole session we’ve been discussing it the other way around—that it is I who don’t see you. Let me ask you something: a few minutes ago when I talked about my aging, you know, my knee surgery, my eyes—” “Yes, yes, I heard all that,” Irene exclaimed, rushing me on. “You heard it—but as usual, whenever I mention something about my health, your eyes glazed over. Like those couple of weeks after my eye surgery, when I was obviously having a rough time and wore dark glasses, you never asked about the surgery or inquired about how I was doing.” “I don’t need to know about your health. I’m the patient here.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But Dr. Kingsley was my colleague, not my student, and I had known her for years. Not only was her husband a close friend but she and I had led many groups together: knowing her to be a superb therapist, I was certain that Paula’s account of her behavior was greatly distorted. Slowly, far too slowly, it dawned on me that Paula was jealous: jealous of the attention and affection I bestowed on Dr. Kingsley; jealous of my alliance with her and with all the members of the research staff. Naturally Paula had resisted the consultation workshop; naturally she had discouraged any collaboration with other researchers. She would resist any change. All she wanted was to revert to the time when she and I had been alone with our little flock. What could I do? Her insistence that I choose between her and Dr. Kingsley placed me in an impossible dilemma. “I care for both you and Dr. Kingsley, Paula. How can I maintain my own integrity and my collegiality and friendship with Dr. Kingsley without your feeling, once again, abandoned by me?” Though I reached out to her in every way possible, the distance between us grew greater. I could find no proper words; there seemed to be no safe topics. I no longer had the right to ask her personal questions, nor did she evince any interest in my life. All through lunch she told me stories about terrible mistreatment by her doctors: “They ignore my questions; their medications do more harm than good.” She also warned me about a psychologist who was talking to some of the cancer patients who had been in our group: “He’s stealing our findings to use in his own book. You’d better protect yourself, Irv.” Paula was obviously deeply troubled, and I was alarmed and saddened by her paranoia. I think my distress must have showed because as I moved to leave, she asked me to stay a few minutes more. “I have a story for you, Irv. Sit back and let me tell you about the coyote and the locust.” She knew I loved stories. Especially her stories. I listened expectantly. There was once a coyote who felt overwhelmed by the pressures in his life. All he could see were too many hungry cubs, too many hunters, too many traps. So one day he ran off to be alone. Suddenly he heard the notes of a sweet melody, a melody of well-being and great peacefulness. Following the song to a clearing in the forest, he came upon a large locust sunning himself on a hollow log and singing. “Teach me your song,” the coyote asked the locust. No response. Again he demanded to be taught the song. But the locust remained silent. Finally, when the coyote threatened to gobble him up, the locust acquiesced and sang the sweet song over and over until the coyote had memorized it. Humming his new song, the coyote started back to his family.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The Gallery’s director, Neil McGregor, moved from that role to become director of the British Museum, a job he did with great distinction and effect for the next decade. The final piece he acquired in the latter capacity, before moving to a similar position in Berlin, was a simple but haunting cross made from fragments of a small boat. The boat, which had been carrying refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, was wrecked off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on October 3, 2013. Of the 500 people on board, 349 drowned. A local craftsman, Francesco Tuccio, was deeply distressed that nothing more could have been done to save people, and he made several crosses out of fragments of the wrecked vessel. One was carried by Pope Francis at the memorial service for the survivors. The British Museum contacted Mr. Tuccio, and he made a cross especially for the museum, thanking the authorities there for drawing attention to the suffering that this small wooden object would symbolize. Why the cross rather than anything else? Another example struck me forcibly during the 2014 season of Promenade Concerts in the Albert Hall in London. (The “Proms,” as they are known, make up a major annual festival, offering world-class music cheaply to a wide audience.) On September 6, 2014, Sir Simon Rattle conducted an extraordinary performance of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Not only was the music wonderfully performed, the whole thing was acted out, choreographed by the American director Peter Sellars, a professor at University of California in Los Angeles, who is noted especially for his unique contemporary stagings of classical operas and plays. In a broadcast talk during the intermission, Sellars explained that this wasn’t theater; it was prayer. What he was doing, he said, related first to Bach’s musical portrayal of the story of Jesus’s death and then to our modern appropriation of both the story itself and Bach’s interpretation. At no point did Sellars make any specifically Christian confession of faith. But it was clear throughout that he saw the story of Jesus’s crucifixion as the story par excellence in which all human beings are confronted with the full darkness of human life and with the possibility, through inhabiting that story themselves, of finding a way through. Just as the world as a whole, whether Christian or not, dates itself by Jesus’s birth, so the reflective world, whether Christian or not, regularly finds that the story of his death, in art, music, or literature, provides a unique focal point for the dark dilemma of human existence and also a shining light to guide us through.

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

  My bar was low. My bar was “ideally not murdered but not so bad if murdered.” Eventually, I returned to New York City to rebuild the life I’d blown up when I moved to Naples. I continued to label my Croatian sexploits, just as I always had, as either horrible or fantastic—an impulse that in many ways reflects the black-and-white thinking around sex that haunts our society. The men marked two ends of the casual sex spectrum that fit neatly into storytelling, which for a time was the most useful part of my sexual encounters. Writing about sex helped convince me my dalliances were worth something, even if they meant nothing to me. I’d long passed the point where such kooky adventures could be considered character-building, so at least I could get a paycheck and publicly scold the men who’d ejaculated on my eyeballs. For many people, this is part of growing up—not dabbing cum off their lashes, but having bad sex until they figure out what good sex is. It takes some longer than others to distinguish between the two. Without any real success in the long-term relationship department, I missed some of the opportunities that allow you to figure out what good sex means to you personally, which often happens in a relationship with someone you trust. I thought sex with the cruise ship worker was good because I thought he was hot, and that it was hot that he thought I was hot, and it felt important to me that, having fled two countries in the night that year, I have hot sex with Croatian strangers who could affirm the deranged coming-of-age bender I was on. But sex is never just sex, just like fleeing is never just fleeing. We use sex—bad sex—to solve personal problems, and it usually doesn’t work. However personal it may feel—and, fuck, it feels personal—bad sex is one of the oldest customs in human history. Much like stone tools and shells as currency, bad sex is mundane, utilitarian. Our tools have grown more sophisticated, and shells have found their way onto the necklaces your dad buys on vacation, but bad sex endures, quietly. While I can’t personally speak to the quality of sex several millennia ago, it is safe to assume it was bleak, given what we know now about what people knew then about sex. I’ll start with the Greeks: Aristotle believed that sperm was excrement. Archilochus, a lyric poet from the seventh century BC who was famous for his erotic verses, also paints a somewhat unfortunate picture. In one of his steamier bars, he likens sex to a quotidian farm transaction: “His penis is swollen / like a donkey from Priene / taking his fill of barley.”1 (In another poem, his depiction of arousal has been translated both as “boil in the crotch” and “feeble now are the muscles in my mushroom.”)

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The women of our house had already been living a good week in joyous anticipation of a mystery that made them forget all their dissensions. They tried to remain solemn about it, but were too excited to be able to conceal their wild childish happiness. Actually, they were busy organizing a dance, with Negro musicians and the sacrifice of a live white cock, for the purpose of exorcizing and saving Aunt Maissa. The poor woman really needed saving. Her brothers had married her off to an old man of sixty who had the reputation of being very rich. The marriage brokers had affirmed that he owned several houses. When they had been questioned, the ignorant tenants of these houses had confirmed the ownership. But the clever old rascal, in spite of his curled up mustache, his upright posture, and the great care he devoted to his dress, was only the rent-collector for an estate-management corporation. His twenty-year-old bride didn’t even obtain the standard of living that might have compensated her, by flattering her feminine vanity, for the essential element of marriage that was lacking, and helped her forget its absence. Still, her brothers had managed to marry off a girl who had no dowry, though this is the nightmare of families like ours. It turned out, nevertheless, to be a bad deal: she became hysterical and, having soon exhausted her husband, bounced back on her brothers, a pauper with two sick children. A sharp word, a mere question as to her right to hang her laundry across the roof terrace, were enough to make Aunt Maissa swoon away, collapsing on the ground and foaming at the mouth while her arms and legs beat the air like those of a sick mare. When she came to, she uttered frightful screams that made all the children weep with fear. Her attacks were becoming more and more frequent, and Maissa was now falling in the stairway too, rolling down whole flights of stairs. It was often whispered that she needed a husband, and a young man this time. But this cure required such a huge financial sacrifice that her brothers felt it would not be appropriate: a widowed mother of two children should devote herself to their upbringing. Besides, no man would be ready to assume such responsibilities. During the shameless family discussions held around the table in the first-floor flat, the poor woman tried to conceal her embarrassment and her hopes beneath an appearance of modest indifference that was eloquently betrayed by her feverish glances and her uneasy hands. Men were always right when it came to money matters. The women, however, fell back on a more mysterious and less expensive explanation of her predicament: Aunt Maissa was possessed of spirits.