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 Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  I’m the founding director of the GlobalChurch Project. I’ve been in Christian ministry since 1987, including church planting, pastoring local churches, and teaching at theological colleges. I’m passionate about the local church and about seeing neighborhoods and lives transformed. I (Grace) am an associate professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion in Indiana, and I am an ordained Presbyterian Church (USA) minister. I have written several books on marginality, racism, sexism, and the need to embrace all people. As I grew up in Canada as a young immigrant child, it became very clear that my voice was often ignored. I experienced this firsthand in my elementary school. Because my first language isn’t English, kids made fun of my accent every time I opened my mouth. This made me feel self-conscious about speaking out loud in the classroom. So even though I wanted to speak up and answer questions that the teacher was asking, I felt that I couldn’t participate as I wanted, and as a result my voice became more and more silenced. In addition my voice was ignored in the Korean Presbyterian church that I grew up in. It was quite evident that male voices were welcomed, and women’s voices were considered unimportant and a nuisance. The blatant silencing of women’s voices was a painful reality for me and for other women in the church. I (Graham) first became passionate about the transforming practices covered in this book in the late 1990s, when I was speaking at a conference in Manila in the Philippines. I was staying in a backpacker’s hostel at night and speaking at conference sessions during the day. One morning I was woken by the sound of sobbing. I looked down from my bunk to see an elderly man weeping beside his bed. During the week I got to know this remarkable man. He was an elderly Vietnamese pastor who’d planted a church of a dozen people in his home thirty years earlier. That church had grown to tens of thousands of people. He told me stories from this Vietnamese church that sounded like something from the book of Acts. These were stories of miracles, lives transformed, persecution, and a growing, vibrant, underground church in communist Vietnam. But I noticed something. All the speakers at the conference in Manila looked like me: white men. So I started thinking about the injustice of this. Why weren’t people like my elderly Vietnamese friend asked to speak, or at least to tell their stories? And I started wondering about the thousands and thousands of stories that are never heard: Christians whose voices are ignored, silenced, or marginalized. How do we start to hear these voices? How do we hear their cries for (and stories of) justice, peace, hope, and reconciliation? How do we learn from them and embrace new practices that can transform the world?

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  (The idea of homes as refuge is truly terrifying for most people—myself included.) 2 . Planting gardens, caring for creation, and food sourcing . We must recover “our relationship to the earth in the creation-community.” 3 . Cultivating families and churches that provide “fertile ground for converted covenantal relations.” We form these relationships through intimacy, simplicity, hospitality, collaboration, and inclusion. 4 . Seeking the welfare of the city. This includes its ecology, built environment, socioeconomic elements, human connections, and marginalized persons.20 Hospitality is often richest in the context of shared history and generous inclusion . Such shared history with people, place, and land is not always possible. But when it is possible and valued, it can provide a remarkable environment for hospitality and inclusion. What does it mean to enrich shared history through inclusion? It means welcoming others into our lovingly nurtured homes, lands, cultures, and communities. It means recognizing the importance of shared history and the welcome of the outsider. We open up this shared history so that the outsider can become an insider. It is an intentional openness to others entering our lives. Our hospitality needs to be free, generous, and active. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople (in modern-day Turkey), charges the church to be given to hospitality.21 We welcome people into our homes in hopeful anticipation of our ultimate home. In welcoming them, we welcome Jesus Christ. Quakers refer to “that of God in everyone.” This reminds us that what we do to others, we do to Christ. When we welcome the least of them, we are welcoming Jesus. Hospitality will often disappoint us. People will wound us, use us, and let us down. They will betray our trust and refuse to reciprocate in kind. Hospitality will be a “now/not yet” experience. Sometimes it will be as unpleasant as foot washing. Some will offer us hospitality in return—enriching our lives more than we could have imagined. It was like that for Jesus. But hospitality makes us fuller, richer, more Christlike people. We welcome people into our homes and lives and lands in anticipation of the home and the age to come. In doing so we are a foretaste of our ultimate home and of the age to come in Christ Jesus.22 The Spirit of hospitality opens our hearts to others, enables us to relish diversity, and inspires us to embrace the other. Hospitality and Loving Our NeighborsGrowing up in a Korean immigrant family was not easy for me (Grace). Our family immigrated to Canada when I was five years old. We were all faced with many difficulties, encountering pains and obstacles from the day of our arrival. I had to learn a new language and assimilate into an alien culture. I always felt out of place as a foreigner at school and in the larger community. Some of my experiences were a result of an established system of racism and sexism that was rooted deep in the white American world I confronted.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Is there anything in there you didn’t know, that we hadn’t talked about? She says, I never knew you felt that way. What way? She shrugs and shakes her head, then asks, Didn’t we have some fun? Sure, later on some. We have fun now. But like you said, living through it... I mean in Colorado. Remember we went to that department store in Denver and I got y’all those little coats with fur on the hood? My head kecks to one side. I say, I got lost that day. But we found you. And y’all had your horses, and the house was so fancy. There was shuffleboard at the bar y’all liked to play. You loved the jukebox. “Ring of Fire,” my favorite song. But we were afraid you were gonna go to jail. Whatever for? Shooting Hector. Aw—she waves her hand in a pshaw motion—you knew I’d never shoot anybody. Dev comes to the doorway, one knuckle making a screwing motion in his eye socket, saying, Are y’all crying again? Then: Why does everybody from Texas cry and smoke? The next morning I come down about dawn, and she’s on the back porch in the saggy yellow seat of an old director’s chair, the final pages flipped over to the back. She’s staring at her bare feet. She glances up to say, I can’t believe I was such an asshole. You suffered the torments of the damned. But you saw that, didn’t you? All that time I thought I was so alone. I wasn’t alone at all, not with you and your sister. I must’ve done something right. You both turned out so magnificently. We’re a lot of fun to be with, I say. The shoulders I put my arms around are small as a schoolgirl’s. You did a lot of things right, I add. When Lecia’s turn comes, she meets me in Denver, renting a vast sofa of a car that I wheel through mountain passes while she turns pages. The child- abuse tour, she jokes it is, for my agenda is to double-check my words against the old landscape or school records or anybody we can drag up. But to say she’s skimmed over events I couldn’t forget is an understatement. She knows what happened enough to verify scenes, but it’s all been packed away. She didn’t have to go into therapy, she’s always claimed, because I told her the insights that my own therapy had routed out. Keeping the volume down made her the brave one, the unflinching one. In the mountains while Lecia reads, we revisit the town that held the summer cabin neither of us can find. We stand alongside the falling-down ring where our horses ran a gymkhana. We find the house where Mother left us with the stable owner’s family when she ran off to marry the bartender. There’s the phone booth alongside a trout pond where we once called Daddy sobbing because we’d forgotten Father’s Day.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  As a child with many shortcomings, it was nearly impenetrable. The institutionalized racism and sexism of the dominant culture seemed to oppose me from the outset. Thinking of my own childhood, of the flooding memories of utter toil, pain, and stereotyping that eventually led me to be marginalized by other children and the larger society, is saddening. Just as we as people have grown from our own small and naive stature into a more developed self, so has the issue of institutional racism and sexism. It has manifested into something big and so strongly integrated into our culture that it often goes unnoticed. Secular society ignores the destructive realities and therefore does little to dismantle them. But it is our Christian responsibility to work at eliminating the evils polluting and weakening our society, communities, and churches. This can be achieved by recognizing these evils, when and where they occur, and then eviscerating the oppression and dismantling the patriarchy that pervade our Judeo-Christian tradition. People of color have historically been ghettoized in the margins of society. They have been neglected, discriminated against, and stereotyped in North America, Australia, and other contexts. Pushed to the perimeters of their communities, people of color are sensitive to experiences of oppression. The wounds are raw and painful, not only from a brooding history but the present continuation of this mistreatment. The intersection of racism and sexism deepens the wounds and compounds the oppression that sidelined women of color experience. Paris was attacked by ISIS terrorists on November 14, 2015. It was devastating; ISIS claimed responsibility for the deaths of over 130 people. Since this event, there have been many forms of xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and ill feeling toward Muslim minorities. Many people are now afraid of Syrian refugees, who are fleeing for the safety of both their family’s and their own lives. Some Americans are now refusing to accept refugees into their states as they fear that they are terrorists. President Trump banned entry of refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 120 days. All this is a reminder of past actions. The United States enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first ban of any ethnic group into the United States. Chinese who were already in the United States had to carry identification at all times, making it difficult to travel. This ban was in place until 1943. Can we continue to live in fear of those who are different from “our crowd”? How can we ignore the plight of those who are being chased out of their country and seeking refuge in a foreign country? Are we following God in all this fear, blame, and neglect of others, or are we neglecting God’s commandment to love our neighbors? In this broken world of misgivings, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings among the diverse human family created by God, Jesus revealed our need to explore the margins and create a pathway toward healing and hope.

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

  Village/Town Level The Q Gospel curses (in Q 10:13–15) places such as Capernaum, with 1,700 people (Reed 1992:15). III. City Level Pre-Pauline situation involving Damascus (45,000), Jerusalem (80,000), and Antioch (150,000). IV. Metropolis Level Pauline situation involving Corinth (100,000), Ephesus (200,000), and Rome (650,000). The numbers for those first two levels are relatively secure. The population of Jerusalem at 180 hectares and 444 people per hectare (Broshi 14) makes it denser even than Ostia, and that figure is probably twice too large. The numbers in the last two levels are simply cited as given (Stark 131–132). My point is simply to emphasize that the “first urban Christians” were certainly not in the Pauline churches. Christians were in Damascus before Paul was converted; we know that because he persecuted them there. They were in Jerusalem even before that. And from Jerusalem some moved to Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria. It is one of the major strengths of Kyrtatas’s study, cited in the epigraph above, that he attempts to pay equal attention to countryside and city, to rural as well as urban Christianity, to the Little Tradition and to the Great Tradition. My move from Parts VII and VIII to Parts IX and X is a move from rural to urban situation, from the villages of Galilee to the city of Jerusalem. Without that move, a move outward to the great pagan cities would be inexplicable. It is on Jerusalem, therefore, that these final parts will concentrate. PART IXMeal and CommunityWe have [in the ancient Mediterranean] a society marked by two features. The first has been exhaustively studied and evoked with tones of understandable disapproval: there is a direct and unveiled link between wealth and the power to draw to oneself, with varying degrees of unabashed brutality, a share of the limited goods of others. In the eastern Mediterranean, the fight for the control of what little agrarian surplus there was was usually at its most remorseless within range of the great towns. The victims were almost inevitably the peasantry; and the result was a chronic condition of shortage and malnutrition, always ready to tip over into famine and epidemics. If abundance existed, it could only be found among the rich and their clients in the towns. The second aspect is less well-known: the pervasive linking of status and diet. Power was the power to eat. The divisions of society coincided transparently with gradations of access to foodstuffs: more food, more varied and better-prepared at the top; less food and less varied towards the bottom…. This is an age where thought about eating was, inevitably, a form of second thought about society and its blatant divisions. How to break the iron grip of shortage? Inevitably, the best and most stunning miracles refer, not to the millennial hope of restoring the lost generosity of the earth, but to the far more difficult feat of persuading the harder hearts of men to open up….

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

  PART IContinuation and ReconstructionA candid but rational inquiry into the progress and establishment of Christianity may be considered as a very essential part of the history of the Roman empire. While that great body was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capital…. But this inquiry, however useful or entertaining, is attended with two peculiar difficulties. The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. The great law of impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the imperfections of the uninspired teachers and believers of the Gospel; and, to a careless observer, their faults may seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. But the scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the Infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only by whom , but likewise to whom , the Divine Revelation was given. The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contacted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings. Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church?… In the course of this important, though perhaps tedious, inquiry, I have attempted to display the secondary causes which so efficaciously assisted the truth of the Christian religion…. It was by the aid of these causes—exclusive zeal, the immediate expectation of another world, the claim of miracles, the practice of rigid virtue, and the constitution of the primitive church—that Christianity spread itself with so much success in the Roman empire. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , vol. 1, pp. 382–383, 430 When the Jewish historian Josephus and the pagan historian Tacitus described Christianity, they noted four consecutive points: movement, execution, continuation , and expansion .

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

  Chrysa Kalliakati was an eighty-five-year-old woman whose lament for her mother had become famous. “Both mother and daughter were great poets and story-tellers; both were skilled midwives and medicine women, possessors of a miraculous recipe for a potion which had reputedly cured many women of infertility” (1980:132). Caraveli-Chaves, a woman participating in a woman’s network, recorded two versions of the lament. The first and “passionate” one was from Alexandra Pateraki, Chrysa Kalliakati’s fifty-nine-year old daughter, in Dzermiathes. The second and “halting” one was from Chrysa Kalliakati herself, at her other daughter’s home in Athens (1980:133–136). I code those versions as AP and CK, respectively. The twin versions are classic examples of an oral multiform even within the close constraints of family and female tradition about the same lament. Exactly the same line opens them both: “Oh slowly, oh mournfully, I will begin lamenting,” but AP has thirty-nine lines while CK has forty-four lines. Here are three instances of the similarities and differences that can be expected in such a situation. The first instance concerns the “history of the deceased” motif. Although very similar in both versions, it is six lines separated into lines 11–12 and lines 20–23 in AP, while it is eight lines joined together as lines 5–12 in CK: Lines 11–12 and 20–23 (Alexandra Pateraki) Lines 5–12 (Chrysa Kalliakati) because at the prime of your youth, you clothed yourself in black and then the darkness of your heart matched that of your dress; Fate had written that at the prime of youth because at the prime of your youth fate had written you should lose our father, you should become a widow…. that you should lose our father, you should become a widow. You used to come home each night, mother, I say each night; you walked home from deliveries and made darkness scatter. Ah how many times at midnight, after the roosters had crowed wouldn’t you be coming down the road— pale and tired out!… How many times wouldn’t you come back from work—pale and tired out—way past midnight, near dawn, after roosters had crowed! How many times at midnight, on nights steeped in darkness wouldn’t you come home from the road—lips saddened and embittered! Both versions agree on the mother’s biography as that of widow and midwife, but AP has missed those first lines that give “an insight into the mother’s ‘heart’” and especially into the peculiar plight of a widow in a patriarchal society (1980:138). Another instance concerns the “praise/invocation” motif. There are four stunningly powerful lines combining and rhyming Chrysa Kalliakati’s work as “embroidery” (xobliástra) of the “stars” (ástra) in the sky. AP puts that superb image at the start in lines 3–6; CK places it at the end in lines 41–44: Lines 3–6 (Alexandra Pateraki) Lines 41–44 (Chrysa Kalliakati) Ah, mother, keeper of the home and mistress of embroidery, Eh mother, woman from Kritsa, eh keeper of the home, you knew how to embroider the sky with all its stars.

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

  I have done that in previous scholarly books; here I wanted to look in fine focus at just one paradigmatic example. My best historical reconstruction of what actually happened is that Jesus was arrested during the Passover festival and those closest to him fled for their own safety. I do not presume at all any high-level consultations between Caiaphas or Pilate about or with Jesus. They would no doubt have agreed before such a festival that fast and immediate action was to be taken against any disturbance and that some examples by crucifixion might be especially useful at the start. I doubt very much if Jewish police and Roman soldiery needed to go too far up the chain of command in handling a Galilean peasant like Jesus. It is hard for us, I repeat, to bring our imagination down low enough to see the casual brutality with which he was probably taken and executed. The details in our gospels are, in any case, prophecy historicized and not history memorized . A Respected Member of the Council We know, from both literary and archaeological evidence, that a crucified body could be given back to its family for burial. Philo mentioned that as a possibility on certain festal occasions, and Yehochanan’s corpse was honorably buried in the family tomb. There were also found, by the way, in Ossuary 1 of Tomb 4 at Giv’at ha-Mivtar, the bones of a sixteen- to seventeen-year-old male who had been burned to death on the rack and his bones left there long enough to bear the marks forever. In a patronal society, of course, even such burial concessions would have taken at least some influence—at least the ability to approach, indirectly if not directly, the powers involved. During the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E ., for instance, Josephus, who was present as an aide, interpreter, and client to the Roman commanding general Titus, tells us this story in the autobiographical appendix to his Jewish Antiquities known as the Life . In this document, defending his operations as Jewish general and Roman prisoner during the First Roman-Jewish War of 66–73 C.E ., he writes in Life 75: When I…saw many prisoners who had been crucified, and recognized three of my acquaintances among them, I was cut to the heart and came and told Titus with tears what I had seen. He gave orders immediately that they should be taken down and receive the most careful treatment. Two of them died in the physicians’ hands; the third survived. In general, however, if one had influence, one was not crucified, and if one was crucified, one would not have influence enough to obtain burial. It would have been impossible, without influence or bribery, to obtain a crucified’s corpse. And it might also be very dangerous to request it, lest even familial association with a condemned criminal be judged as part of the problem and handled accordingly.

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

  Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture , p. 72 Scholars working in medical anthropology, comparative ethnomedicine, and the cross-cultural study of “indigenous” healing have proposed a distinction between curing disease and healing illness . Those preceding epigraphs are two classical descriptions of that dichotomy. To further distinguish the two components, we could say that the surgeon is better at curing disease while the shaman is better at healing illness. And that might be all right, of course, if those two processes were always totally separate. In explaining that distinction to undergraduate students at DePaul University as a background for discussion of Jesus as an indigenous healer, I was usually met with obedient disbelief—that is, take it down, give it back, forget it. Until the movie Philadelphia came along, and then the classroom silence was palpable. The protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, had AIDS , a disease caused by a virus that attacks the immune system. This disease may someday be curable, either by a vaccine that destroys the virus or by a drug that controls its effects. But the movie was not about the disease , which for Hanks could not be cured , but about the illness , for which healing was possible. The illness involved the man’s own reaction to his disease, as well as the reactions of his lover, his family, his employer, his lawyer, and of society at large through the justice system. He was fired by his employer not just because he had AIDS but because he had become infected as a homosexual, and he successfully sued his firm for that discrimination in court. In Philadelphia the distinction between curing disease and healing illness was devastatingly obvious. But so also was the interactive loop between the twin processes of disease and illness. The patient’s immune system was actually under attack on two fronts. The stress of being fired served, as it always does, to put one’s immune system in danger. On the other hand, strong support from lover and family, lawyer and jurors, strengthened that immune system and counteracted the stress. That story made sense of the distinction and showed how one could have successful healing where no successful curing was possible. It also showed how, in other places and times, where curing was not generally possible, healing might still be very important. That opened up serious classroom discussion about the necessity of having both processes equally available in an adequate health-care system. But, as Arthur Kleinman and Lilias H. Sung argue, although “ideally, clinical care should treat both disease and illness …modern professional health care tends to treat disease but not illness; whereas in general, indigenous systems of healing tend to treat illness, not disease” (1979:8). My contemporary undergraduates had one other major difficulty with this topic, even when the disease/illness distinction became clear and acceptable.

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

  Dress as I do, like a beggar, but do not beg. Bring a miracle and request a table. Those you heal must accept you into their homes. That ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots, but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just on the level of Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even on that of the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at the most basic level of civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations. It did not invite a political revolution but envisaged a social one at the imagination’s most dangerous depths. No importance was given to distinctions of Gentile and Jew, female and male, slave and free, poor and rich. Those distinctions were hardly even attacked in theory; in practice, they were simply ignored. What would happen to Jesus was probably as predictable as what had happened already to John. Some form of religiopolitical execution could surely have been expected. What he was saying and doing was as unacceptable in the first century as it would be in the twentieth—there, here, or anywhere. Still, the exact sequence of the events at the end of his life lacks multiple independent accounts, and the death is surer in its connection to the life than it is in its connection to the preceding few days. It seems clear that Jesus, confronted, possibly for the first and only time, with the Temple’s rich magnificence, symbolically destroyed its perfectly legitimate brokerage function in the name of the unbrokered Kingdom of God. Such an act, if performed in the volatile atmosphere of Passover, a feast that celebrated Jewish liberation from inaugural imperial oppression, would have been quite enough to entail crucifixion by religiopolitical agreement. And it is now impossible for us to imagine the offhanded brutality, anonymity, and indifference with which a peasant nobody like Jesus would have been disposed of. What could not have been predicted and might not have been expected was that the end was not the end. Those who had originally experienced divine power through his vision and his example continued to do so after his death. In fact, even more so, because now this power was no longer confined by time or place. A prudently neutral Jewish historian reported, at the end of the first century, that “when Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him….

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I could put in a skylight, and you could paint again. These old bones wouldn’t make it through a winter. We sit in a silence it’s hard not to scribble in with chat. Her long ash falls on the quilt, and she rubs it in, saying, It blends.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Getting the poems off my desk frees me to label a folder MEMOIR, which stays pristinely empty for months, till I stuff a few scrawled notes in. Next summer maybe I can set off down that row. That winter, snow falls without letup. From the eaves, the icicles grow jagged fangs big around as my thigh, past the windows. Living in the mouth of the winter witch, a friend calls this phenomenon. Also, we must’ve pissed off the snowplow driver, who has a nasty habit of dropping his shovel loads in our driveway. Hours on end, Warren and I, faces chapped, hack away at mountains of ice while Dev frolics in his blue snowsuit. The marriage has become nights on end of cordial agony. In the two years since I’ve gotten sober, Warren and I have alternately clung to or given room to each other till—over a tense series of months—we can no longer hold on. An old sociological or Darwinian theory holds that when we’re looking to gin out babies, we’re biologically propelled toward the partner who’ll color in dull spots in our own genetic code. So when opposites attract, they’re biologically combining to form the perfect offspring. Looking back, I can see how Warren’s very essence looked like a corrective to who I was and didn’t want to be, which is unfair to him. Nor does that theory account for the love we had and the long, pure, edifying conversation we shared. Still, it must be said that someone who doesn’t like herself very much (i.e., me: age twenty-five), someone who views a man as an antidote to her very being, will find—over time—that antidote becomes an irritant. I don’t want to rehash the times we wooed each other again and the times we withdrew, or the million fights we had. The truth is, as noted, we’re inclined to gloss over our failures. One spring morning my students come to help Warren lug his parents’ cherry antiques with all their heft and curlicued fittings from our small house. We unhitch our son’s bunk bed into halves for his dual households, since we’ll share custody. There’s a schedule magnetically stuck to the fridge with a red mom’s house and a blue dad’s house and an iconic Dev who slides from one to the other. At the kindergarten graduation, while every other kid heartily sings and claps and stomps, Dev rocks from side to side, staring from one to the other of us and barely moving his lips. Stabs of guilt like flaming arrows fire into me at his blue-eyed puzzlement. We’re poor, all of us. You can’t turn one home into two the same size. Since my salary comes closer to making the mortgage than Warren’s, he takes a town house in a ghetto complex near a graveyard. With the Whitbread furniture gone, Dev can skateboard in the living room.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And yes, being a sex educator is the best job ever, when people tell you stories like this. This chapter is about the obstacles that were standing in Laurie’s way, without her being fully aware of them, and how she and Johnny knocked them down. Let’s return to the garden metaphor: You’re born with a little plot of rich and fertile soil, unique to yourself. Your brain and body are the soil of this garden, and individual differences in your accelerator and brakes are important characteristics of your innate garden, which is made of the same parts as everyone else’s, but organized in a unique way. Your family and your culture plant the seeds and tend the garden, and they teach you how to tend it. They plant the seeds of language and attitudes and knowledge and habits about love and safety and bodies and sex. And gradually, as you move into adolescence, you take on responsibility for tending your own garden. As you begin to tend the garden yourself, you may find that your family and your culture have planted some beautiful, nourishing things. You may also find that your family and culture have planted some pretty toxic crap in your garden. And everyone—even those whose families planted pretty good stuff—will have to deal with the invasive weeds of a sex-negative culture full of body shaming and sex stigma. These travel not in the seeds planted by families but underground via their roots, like poison ivy, under fences and over walls, from garden to garden. No one chose that they be there, but there they are nonetheless. So if you want to have a healthy garden, a garden you choose, you have to go row by row and figure out what you want to keep and nurture… and what you want to dig out and replace with something healthier. It is not fair that you have to do all that extra work. After all, you didn’t choose what got planted by your family and your culture. No one asked for your permission before they started planting the toxic crap. They didn’t wait until you could give consent and then say, “Would it be okay with you if we planted the seeds of body self-criticism and sexual shame?” Chances are, they just planted the same things that were planted in their gardens, and it never even occurred to them to plant something different. I was chatting about this one October evening, over poutine and beer, with Canadian sex researcher Robin Milhausen, and she said this brilliant thing: “We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.” Exactly.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  So of course body self-criticism interferes with sexual wellbeing. We can’t understand women’s sexual satisfaction without thinking about body satisfaction, just as we can’t understand women’s sexual pleasure without thinking about attachment and stress. And women will not be fully, blissfully satisfied with their sex lives until they are fully, blissfully satisfied with their own bodies. So, to have more and better sex, love your body. Which is one of those things where you’re like, “Yeah!… But… how?” It’s hard, because you never chose not to love your body. You didn’t choose much that happened to you between the day you were born and the day you hit puberty, and that’s when most of the body self-criticism was taking root. You never even got a chance to say yes or no to the self-criticism being planted in your garden. What it comes down to is that a lot of women trust their bodies less than they trust what they’ve been taught, culturally, about their bodies. But culture has taught you stuff that is both incorrect and just wrong. Hurtful. I want to address two things you’ve been taught that are definitely wrong, and what’s right: first, that self-criticism is good for you and second, that fat is bad for you. These things are both false. Here’s why: criticizing yourself = stress = reduced sexual pleasureWomen have been trained to beat ourselves up when we fall short. We criticize ourselves—“I’m so stupid/fat/crazy,” “I suck,” “I’m a loser”—as a reflex when things don’t go the way we want them to. And our brains process self-criticism with brain areas linked to behavioral inhibition—brakes.8 So it’s not surprising that self-criticism is directly related to depression9—and does depression improve your sexual well-being? It does not. Here’s how that works: When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of stress.10 I described stress in chapter 4 as an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism to help us escape threats—“I am at risk.” When we think, “I am an inadequate person!” that’s like saying, “I am the lion!” Literally, our stress hormone levels increase.11 Your body reacts to negative self-evaluations as if you’re under attack. The solution is to practice replacing self-criticism with self-kindness. Women tend to have a two-layered response to this idea. First, they instinctively love the idea of being more accepting of themselves and not blaming themselves when life isn’t perfect. The research tells women what they already know intuitively: Self-criticism is associated with worse health outcomes, both mental and physical, and more loneliness.12 That’s right: Self-criticism is one of the best predictors of loneliness—so it’s not just “I am at risk,” it’s also “I am lost.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I know for a fact that Olivia was not born feeling uncomfortable with her genitals or her sexuality, and neither were you. When you were born, you were deeply, gloriously satisfied with (and curious about) each and every part of your body. But decades of sex-negative culture have let in weeds of dissatisfaction. Chapters 3 and 4 explain precisely how this can influence your sexual wellbeing, and chapter 5 describes how to undo that process and get back to living wholly inside your body, to return to that state you were born into, of deep, warm affection for and curiosity about your own body. But before we get there, let’s spend a chapter talking about the most important of all your sex organs and how it, too, is made of all the same parts as everyone else’s but organized in a unique way. I refer, of course, to your brain. tl;drEveryone’s genitals are made of the same parts, organized in different ways. No two alike. Are you experiencing pain? If so, talk to a medical provider. If not, then your genitals are normal and healthy and beautiful and perfect just as they are. The genitals you see in soft-core porn images may have been digitally altered to appear more “tucked in”; don’t let that fool you into believing that all vulvas look that way. Find a mirror (or use the self-portrait camera on your phone) and actually look at your clitoris. Knowing where the clitoris is is important, but knowing where your clitoris is is power. twothe dual control modelYOUR SEXUAL PERSONALITYLaurie hadn’t actually wanted sex with her husband, Johnny—I mean, really craved it—since before their son Trev was born. At first she figured it was the pregnancy. Then she figured it was a postpartum thing. Then she figured she was just tired. Or depressed. Or maybe she didn’t actually love her husband. Or maybe she was broken. Or maybe humans just aren’t meant to stay erotically connected after the months of cleaning baby puke off each other’s shirts. They’d had a great run. Right up until she got pregnant, their sex life was the kind of thing you find in romance novels—hot, hungry, passionate, sweet, loving, and just kinky enough to give them something wicked to think about as they locked eyes over his parents’ Thanksgiving dinner table. So maybe that was all they got. Maybe the rest of their lives would be sexless. Still, they’d been trying. They’d bought some toys and massage oil. They’d tried tying her up, tying him up, using flavored lube, videoing themselves, playing games… and sometimes it worked, all this exploration. But mostly it didn’t. Mostly Laurie wound up feeling sad and lonely because she loved Johnny, loved him so much it hurt, yet she couldn’t make herself want him, not even with all the novelty and adventure available to them in a twenty-first-century world of technology, fantasy, and permissiveness.

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

  As a maximal but still unscientific test, I once asked my undergraduates in a general-education class at DePaul University to write me their recollections of Jesus’ passion story, including the arrest, trial, execution, and burial. I told them that it was an experiment that I would explain more fully after they had completed it. They were promised five final-grade points no matter what they wrote but were asked to guarantee me in writing that they would not ask anyone for help or look up any biblical sources. They were simply to write me that story as they remembered it. I received about thirty-two summaries. There were some rather amusing details. Quite a few spoke about “Pontius Pilot,” and one mentioned “the trader Judas.” One student remembered “something about Jesus descending into hell to check it out,” and another said that, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked God “if there was any other way to go about his pretty morbid situation. The answer by Almighty God was, nope.” There were also a few understandable transpositions. One said that the dying Jesus “told Peter (?) to be a son to his mother (Mary),” and another said that “Mary cleaned the body and wrapped it in dean linens.” Here is one complete example, chosen both for brevity and some interesting details: Even though I have been educated at a Catholic Grammar School, High School, and now College, I can honestly say I do not remember much. I will though try to recall the Arrest, Trial, Execution, and Burial of Jesus in as much detail as possible. What I do remember about the Arrest of Jesus is that Judas betrayed Jesus. Judas was one of Jesus’ disciples and betrayed him anyway. He came to a town one day where Jesus was preaching and healing people and arrested him in front of the whole crowd. Judas and some men captured Jesus and took him away to what is known as the trial. The Trial of Jesus was quite short from what I remember. They took Jesus into a room and questioned him about his identity. Some priest asked Jesus if he really was the Son of God, and Jesus replied “yes” and that did it. The crowd was shouting “crucify him”, they thought he was an impostor. Their decision was to kill him which led to the Execution of Jesus. I remember the Execution of Jesus as being very sad. I was taught that Jesus was stripped of his clothes, and hung on a cross with nails pounded through his hands and his feet. Also, they placed a crown of thorns on his head and beat him. I do not remember who tortured him, but I do remember that he was horribly abused. They did this in order to see if God would rescue his Son. One of Jesus’ disciples had buried him in a tomb.

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

  His search for honesty and integrity—a search at once sexual and social, political and religious—led him first to revere and then speedily to revile Russian Communism in the 1930s. It also resulted in his receiving Sweden’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947 and the placing of his books on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books in 1952, just after his death. Gide wrote “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” his retelling of Luke’s version, as several years of darkness and despondency were coming to a climax in 1907. At one point, in fact, he intrudes himself into the story to pray like a latter-day prodigal son: “Lord, like a child I kneel before you today, my face wet with tears. If I recollect and tender here Your urgent parable, it is because I understand Your prodigal son, it is because in him I see myself.” In Luke, Jesus says, “There was a man who had two sons” (15:11), but Gide’s version expands that to a man who had three sons—and a wife. But it is no longer the prodigal’s older brother, but this invented youngest brother who will be the climax of the retold parable. We already get a warning of his importance early in the retelling when Gide intrudes with the comment, “In a room next to the prodigal’s, I know that a boy, his younger brother, will seek slumber in vain all night long.” Gide develops the story through four longish dialogues between the returned prodigal and first his father, next his older brother, then his mother, and finally his younger brother. The father tells the prodigal about the older brother: “It is he who makes the law here. It was he who urged me to say to you, ‘Outside of the house, there is no salvation for you.’” The older brother tells the prodigal about the father: “I am his sole interpreter, and whoever would understand the father must listen to me.” The mother tells the prodigal about the youngest brother: “He reads too much, and…often perches on the highest tree in the garden from which, you remember, the country can be seen above the walls.” The youngest brother tells the prodigal about himself: “Brother! I am what you were when you left.” He confesses, “I am leaving before the end of the night. Tonight. Tonight, before the sky pales.” But unlike the prodigal, who left with his share of the inheritance, the youngest son claims, “I have no share in the inheritance. I leave with nothing.” The prodigal bids his younger brother farewell. He admits to him, “You are taking with you all my hopes,” and tells him to forget his family and never return. The story concludes with some final words to the departing younger brother. “‘Be careful on the steps’…cautions the prodigal.” How would you classify Gide’s version of the parable in “The Return of the Prodigal Son”? It is, first and above all, an alternative version, a counterparable to that of Jesus.

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

  It is but a single boat, but it is also the only one from the first century CE ever discovered in Lake Kinneret. I take it as a symbol—not an argument, let alone a proof—of what life was like on the lake in the time of Jesus. “The Galilee at this time was economically depressed,” writes Shelley Wachsmann in his book The Sea of Galilee Boat . “The timbers used in the boat’s construction are perhaps a physical expression of this overall economic situation.”1 And the late J. Richard Steffy, one of the founding members of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, noting the combination of the boatwrights’ excellent craft with inadequate materials, told Wachsmann, “There is something pathetic about this hull.”2 One wonders, of course, for whom and by whom the lake was “economically depressed.” One wonders if all, or only some, of the first-century boats on that lake were in such a “pathetic” state. The Yigal Allon Centre’s display of “The Ancient Galilee Boat” is visually beautiful and pedagogically excellent. The wall is dominated by a banner headline in Hebrew and English: “The Mystery of the 2000-Year-Old Boat.” Underneath is a giant olive green question mark as big as the lines of questions in Hebrew to its right and in English to its left. Here is how those questions appear (my numbers): To whom did this boat belong? [1] To Jesus and his disciples [2] To the fighters of the Migdal battle [3] To a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee Almost the same heading, with “mystery” enlarged, and those same three questions are repeated again in an explanatory placard elsewhere in the room (my numbers): MYSTERY shrouds the 2000 Year Old Boat [1] Did this boat witness the events sweeping over the Sea of Galilee in Jesus’ time? Is this the boat that bore the Nazarene and his disciples to the surrounding villages to preach the gospel to the people? [2] Perhaps this was an ordinary fisherman’s craft, which was converted for use in battle in the great first-century Jewish rebellion against the Romans. [3] Or was it a simple fishing boat that plied the waters in quest of the daily catch until it was scuttled and abandoned on the shore? The simplest answers to those three questions are, respectively, possibly, probably, and certainly . But what is also certain is that its “crazy-quilt patchwork construction” illustrates the difficult life of at least one peasant fisherman’s family on that first-century Sea of Galilee. With that firmly in mind, here are my own three rather different questions. A First Question . Herod the Great, the Rome-appointed “King of the Jews,” died in 4 BCE . The emperor Augustus divided Herod’s kingdom among his three sons—Archelaus, Antipas, and Philip. Herod Antipas received Galilee and Perea, two unconnected territories with Galilee to the west and Perea to the east of the upper Jordan.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Or I sit alone in a donut shop drinking coffee with shaking hands till it’s time to get Dev from daycare. Still depressed, my shrink tells me, and she gives me pills that send color flushing back into the tips of leaves at least for a week or two, but I don’t know how to write about color. My only vocabulary belongs to feeling dark and dead. I go days without obsessing about a drink, then—pushing Dev’s stroller past the sour fumes of a beer joint’s door—have to restrain myself from running in and downing the first Bud I can get my mitts on. These powerful urges are close to complete madness, the old drunk self so fully occupying my body, it’s like being possessed. Joan praises my prayer regimen—however minimalist—the one or two sentences morning and night. But she wonders why don’t I apply prayer to my other woes: floundering marriage, the work, insomnia? Oh, please, I say on the phone. For me, god is a lowercase noun. God with skin on, as you said. You women keep me sober. You haven’t let go yet. People keep saying that. What’s it mean? It’s like there’s some hook in your head. You’re still fueling your fears by intellectualizing them, thinking this way and that. Everybody needs a hobby. Unless it’s gonna lead them back to the bottle. You’re not even kneeling yet. Sometimes I am. Yeah, like twice, she says. Why don’t I feel better? I say. I’ve doubled my Prozac. You do feel better, she says. The fuck you say, I shoot back. You were sobbing uncontrollably the first day we talked. You had to check in to the infirmary. Now look at you. The more I stall, the more Dev cranks up. In the park one day, he takes his best friend’s front tooth out with a stick. Another afternoon I’m collapsed on the sofa, and he pulls on my hands, trying to drag me upright. Get up, he says. The most cutting memory isn’t his fury as I recede from him, but his playing quietly, studying me with squiggles of worry around his mouth. I think our therapist has gone to France, or have we stopped seeing her after over a year of spinning our wheels? My focus is sobriety, not therapy. Maybe that time is so blurry to me—more even than my drinking time—because we remember through a filter of self, and of self I had little, having been flattened like a cartoon coyote by an inner anvil. With no self, experience streams past. Time lags until it’s sponged up. What I’ve forgotten from those sober months astonishes me. I can’t even dredge up how Warren and I decide to separate for the summer. I pushed for it, I think, or did I only find the sublet? The marriage is an airless box. Outside it, I’ll spring into being—or so I believe. I do recall confessing the decision to Joan.

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

  In Mark, the Twelve are accused not just of incomprehension, but of culpable incomprehension. That is the meaning of “hardened hearts” in 8:17. You will recall Pharaoh’s “hardened heart” from Chapter 1. That is a very, very serious indictment. But, of course, as already mentioned, since most of the Twelve were long dead—and many as martyrs—it was their ongoing theological tradition, leadership style, and named importance that were Mark’s ultimate target. But even to be so repeatedly criticized by Jesus means that they had to have been with Jesus all the time “on the way,” even if not “on the Way.” Severe criticisms are given in that extremely hard-hitting section just cited from Mark, but notice how they are presented: “Do you…? Are your hearts…? Do you…? Do you…? And do you not…? Do you not…?” (8:17b–21). They are offered as questions, and the Twelve even get to answer twice amid that drumbeat of interrogation. They could, to the contrary, have been uttered as condemning statements: “You do…! Your hearts are…! You do…! You do…! You do not…! You do not…!” Taking everything into account, I think Mark’s parable gospel of Jesus is still a challenge rather than attack. Indeed, if Mark were our only gospel version, that distinction might be picky and pedantic, might not be even worth raising. But I am already looking ahead to what will happen as we proceed through the next three gospel accounts, and what is sad there is how challenge escalates steadily into deeper and wider aspects of attack. As a first example of that unfortunate process, I turn next to the Parable Gospel according to Matthew. CHAPTER 8Rhetorical ViolenceTHE PARABLE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW IN 1959, I WAS SENT , as you will recall from the Prologue, to the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome for two years of postdoctoral specialization. The Biblicum—as it is known for short—is located just off the Corso, not far from the Trevi Fountain, somewhere in the heart of Rome. By that fall I had been a monk in the thirteenth-century Roman Catholic Order of Servants of Mary since 1950 and a priest since 1957, and I had just obtained a Doctor of Divinity from Maynooth College, the national seminary of Ireland. I rather liked that European doctoral title, because later I received an honorary American Doctor of Humanities, and that combination of divinity and humanity keeps me in touch, mutatis mutandis, with Jesus. I had to write a final thesis under the direction of Father Francis McCool S.J. to complete requirements for the Biblicum’s degree of Licentiate in Sacred Scripture. But what was to be my topic? As you will also recall from the Prologue, I saw Oberammergau’s Passion play in 1960, and it started me thinking about anti-Semitism and the New Testament. But that was much too broad a subject for the time available.