Shame

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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether the priest ought to deny the body of Christ to the sinner seeking it?Objection 1: It seems that the priest should deny the body of Christ to the sinner seeking it. For Christ’s precept is not to be set aside for the sake of avoiding scandal or on account of infamy to anyone. But (Mat. 7:6) our Lord gave this command: “Give not that which is holy to dogs.” Now it is especially casting holy things to dogs to give this sacrament to sinners. Therefore, neither on account of avoiding scandal or infamy should this sacrament be administered to the sinner who asks for it. Objection 2: Further, one must choose the lesser of two evils. But it seems to be the lesser evil if the sinner incur infamy; or if an unconsecrated host be given to him; than for him to sin mortally by receiving the body of Christ. Consequently, it seems that the course to be adopted is either that the sinner seeking the body of Christ be exposed to infamy, or that an unconsecrated host be given to him. Objection 3: Further, the body of Christ is sometimes given to those suspected of crime in order to put them to proof. Because we read in the Decretals: “It often happens that thefts are perpetrated in monasteries of monks; wherefore we command that when the brethren have to exonerate themselves of such acts, that the abbot shall celebrate Mass, or someone else deputed by him, in the presence of the community; and so, when the Mass is over, all shall communicate under these words: ‘May the body of Christ prove thee today.’” And further on: “If any evil deed be imputed to a bishop or priest, for each charge he must say Mass and communicate, and show that he is innocent of each act imputed.” But secret sinners must not be disclosed, for, once the blush of shame is set aside, they will indulge the more in sin, as Augustine says (De Verbis. Dom.; cf. Serm. lxxxii). Consequently, Christ’s body is not to be given to occult sinners, even if they ask for it. On the contrary, on Ps. 21:30: “All the fat ones of the earth have eaten and have adored,” Augustine says: “Let not the dispenser hinder the fat ones of the earth,” i.e. sinners, “from eating at the table of the Lord.”

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

  The competition was held outside, and it started to rain while we sat declaiming in The Great Circle. We wore Indian costumes made from burlap sacks that had once held onions. When the burlap got wet it started to stink. We were not the only ones to notice. Miss Houlihan wouldn’t let us quit. She walked around behind the circle, whispering, “Reach down, reach down.” In the end we were disqualified for keeping time on a tom-tom. Horseface Greeley taught shop. At the introductory class for each group of freshmen it was his custom to drop a fifty-pound block of iron on his foot. He did this as an attention-getter and to show off his Tuff-Top shoes, which had reinforced steel uppers. He thought we should all wear Tuff-Tops. We couldn’t buy them in the stores but we could order them through him. When I was in my second year at Concrete an impetuous freshman tried to catch the block of iron as it fell toward Horseface’s foot, and got his fingers crushed. I BROUGHT HOME good grades at first. They were a fraud—I copied other kids’ homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn’t bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C’s instead of A’s, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself. All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much. I had fallen in with some notorious older boys from Concrete who took me on as a curiosity when they discovered that I’d never been drunk and still had my cherry. I was grateful for their interest. I wanted distinction, and the respectable forms of it seemed to be eluding me. If I couldn’t have it as a citizen I would have it as an outlaw. We smoked cigarettes every morning in a shallow gully behind the school, and we often stayed there when the bell rang for class, then cut downhill through a field of ferns—ferns so tall we seemed to be swimming through them—to the side road where Chuck Bolger kept his car. Chuck’s father owned a big auto parts store near Van Horn and was also the minister of a Pentecostal church. Chuck himself talked dark religion when he was drinking. He was haunted and wild, but his manner was gentle; even, at least with me, brotherly. For that reason I felt easier with him than with the others. I believed that there were at least some things he would not do. I did not have that feeling about the rest. One of them had already spent time in jail, first for stealing a chain saw and then for kidnapping a cat. He was big and stupid and peculiar.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “Nothing happened, but something did change when I got that ring. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but now I see it pretty clearly. Entering a family shut me down fast. I didn’t tell her about it. In fact, I even tried to deny to myself that anything was different. But pretty soon, I couldn’t get turned on by her. Eventually, every time she left town, or even if she was just out for the night, I was logging on or trolling the bars.” Eight years of transgressions followed, some discovered, some disclosed, some mercifully kept secret. The sequence became repetitive, the resolution of one episode led to the next wave of transgression. Philip’s shame at cheating was always followed by remorse and repentance. He felt terrible about hurting Jackie, and vowed to change. He would make a big show of being an upstanding man and a good husband, and she would forgive him and take him back. Then he would become restless, and a lecherous escalation would always follow. During these years they also had two sons, Jackie finished her first novel, Philip got tenure at a university, and they moved to New York. All these developments helped them put off dealing with the problem. But the latest round was, for Jackie, one too many. To understand Philip’s sexuality, I followed the link to his parents, whose marriage strikingly represented the cultural division between “safe” domesticity and “dangerous” eroticism. While his mother raised five kids, his father engaged in a continuous series of affairs, none of which he made great efforts to hide. Philip’s grandfather, as it turns out, had done the same. “My father, who was actually a very likable man, went about it without much regard for how it made the rest of us feel—least of all my mom,” Philip told me. His mother, whose suffering was severe, was nonetheless a practical woman who never forgot that she had five kids to feed. “She never spoke about it, but we all knew she needed us as much as we needed her.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Maria moved away, went to college, became a casting agent, and today lives in a world vastly different from that of her childhood. But all this intellectual broadening has not succeeded in dismantling the prohibitions: carnal lust is sinful, and especially for women. Despite twenty years of brief encounters, seasonal relationships, and steady boyfriends, the vestigial messages cling obstinately to the sinews of her body with a subcutaneous tenacity. Acting liberated doesn’t necessarily mean being liberated. When she was still single, Maria could circumvent her latent sexual uneasiness. It was easier to be uninhibited when she had less invested emotionally. But once she chose to live within the geographic limitations of a family, the murmurs of her past began to echo. “Once every six months or so I’ll bring it up with Nico. I’ll say, ‘Nico, our sex life sucks. We need to do something about it. I want you to read this book.’ But he doesn’t want to read a book. He hates those books. He’ll say, ‘It’s not my thing. Let’s just make some time to be together. The more sex you have, the more sex you have, right?’ That’s his stock answer.” “I’ve recommended books to you before, but in this instance it sounds like you’re using them to hide behind. Why is it so hard for you to talk about yourself? To be your own advocate? What would happen if you said, ‘Nico, I want to tell you about myself—what I think and feel about sex, about myself sexually?’” “The whole subject is so emotionally overwhelming it makes me sleepy.” Maria was taught that nothing is free; everything must be earned. Privilege is for those who’ve never had to work hard, and it’s morally suspect. The credo was: you sacrifice for the good of the family. Her reluctance to put herself forward is particularly strong in the sexual realm. “It seems OK to ask for what you really need,” I explain, “but to ask for something just because you want it or like it is selfish. Pleasure itself, unless you’ve earned it, is dubious. It also raises the question of how much you feel you deserve and are worthy of receiving—just because you’re you. But eroticism is precisely that: it’s pleasure for pleasure’s sake, offered to you gratuitously by Nico.” Together, Maria and I work on cultivating a healthy sense of deserving that spans sitting down in the morning when she drinks her coffee, reading the paper while the kitchen is still dirty, and going out with her friends even if it means Nico has to spend two nights in a row taking care of the baby. She is to take a break from the idea that pleasure must be paid for, in advance, by the performance of duty. We chisel away at this complex system of fairness and merit, where everything has to be perfectly equitable in order to neutralize selfishness.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “Well, perhaps not,” you say soothingly. “Don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish you could meet my cat; I think you’d take a fancy to it if you could only see her. She is such a dear thing,” you go on, half to yourself, as you swim lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she’s such a capital one for catching mi—oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry again, for the Mouse is swimming away from you as hard as it can and is making quite a commotion. You call softly after it, “Mouse, dear! Do come back, and we won’t talk about cats!” When the Mouse hears this, it turns around and swims slowly back to you: its face is quite pale (with passion, you think), and it says in a low, trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why I am afraid of cats.” It is high time to go anyway, for the pool is getting crowded with the birds and animals that have fallen into it: there is a Duck and a Dodo (Amy Parker’s “trusting, extinguished bird”), a Lory and an Eaglet. And among them, every stranger who has ever seen you cry in public is doing the breaststroke. You turn from their pity and lead the way; the whole party swims to the shore. At the water’s edge, the creatures and the strangers disperse into the streets of Chicago. When you arrive home, there’s a message in your inbox: “I’ve made a mistake.” Dream House as SodomLike Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt,44 but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 44. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C961.1, Transformation to pillar of salt for breaking taboo.Dream House as Hotel Room in Iowa CityShe emails you to tell you that she is staying in a hotel room in Iowa City, and will you come see her? You say no, no, but then you go anyway.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Quit Thinking about Waste When we think about the friction that makes it hard for us to quit, we can see how goal-setting piles onto the katamari. We loathe closing mental accounts in the losses. But as soon as we set a goal, we start ourselves in the losses. This adds to the ruckus caused by all those other biases that gaff the scale against quitting. We are endowed to our goals, and they can easily become part of our identity. They become the status quo. Once we start toward a finish line, we accumulate the sunk costs of time and effort and money spent trying to get there. What makes it so hard to quit, if we were to sum up everything that we’ve talked about in this book, is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. We need to redefine what “failed” and “wasted” mean. When we worry that quitting means we’ve failed, what exactly are we failing at? If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success. The way we naturally think about failure is to have stopped something short of the goal, as in failing to make it to the finish line. But if you’re continuing to pursue something that’s no longer worth pursuing, isn’t that a failure? How do we start to redefine that and think about failure as failing to follow a good decision process? Success means following a good decision process, not just crossing a finish line, especially if it is the wrong one to cross. That means appropriately following kill criteria, listening to our quitting coaches, and recognizing that the progress we’ve made along the way counts for a lot. We also need to redefine what waste is. What does it mean to waste your time or money or effort? Our problem is that we tend to think about these things in a backward-looking way. We feel like if we walk away from something, that means we’ve wasted everything that we put into it. But those are resources that are already spent. You can’t get them back. We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste.

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

  And for Christ’s sake get these bottles out of here.” He sat next to my mother on the couch and smiled steadily at me while Judd stuck his fingers into the bottles and carried them clinking away. Judd returned with a dish of nuts and left with the rest of the bottles. “There you go, Jack. Dig in! Dig in!” He watched me eat a few handfuls, nodding to himself as if I were acting in accordance with some prediction he had made. “You’re an athlete,” he said. “It’s written all over you. The eyes, the build. What do you play, Jack, what’s your game?” “Baseball,” I said. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of truth. In Florida I’d played nearly every day, and gotten good at it. But I hadn’t played much since. I wasn’t an athlete and I didn’t look like one, but I was glad he thought so. “Baseball!” he cried. “Judd, what did I tell you?” Judd had taken a chair on the other side of the room, apart from the rest of us. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head at the other man’s perspicacity. My mother laughed and said something teasing. She called the man Gil. “Wait a minute!” he said. “You think I’m just shooting the bull? Judd, what did I say about Jack here? What did I say he played?” Judd crossed his dark legs. “Baseball,” he said. “All right,” Gil said. “All right, I hope we’ve got that straightened out. Jack. Back to you. What other activities do you enjoy?” “I like to ride bikes,” I said, “but I don’t have one.” I saw the good humor leave my mother’s face, just as I knew it would. She looked at me coldly and I looked coldly back at her. The subject of bicycles turned us into enemies. Our problem was that I wanted a bike and she didn’t have enough money to buy me one. She had no money at all. She had explained this to me many times. I understood perfectly, but not having a bike seemed too hard a thing to bear in silence. Gil mugged disbelief. He looked from me to my mother and back to me. “No bike? A boy with no bike?” “We’ll discuss this later,” my mother told me. “I just said—” “I know what you said.” She frowned and looked away. “Hold on!” Gil said. “Just hold on. Now what’s the story here, Mom? Are you seriously telling me that this boy does not have a bicycle?” My mother said, “He’s going to have to wait a little longer, that’s all.” “Boys can’t wait for bikes, Rosemary. Boys need bikes now!” My mother shrugged and smiled tightly, as she usually did when she was cornered. “I don’t have the money,” she said quietly. The word money left a heavy silence in its wake. Then Gil said, “Judd, let’s have another round.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Both men and women face these changes, but not in the same way and certainly not equally. The liberation that so bolstered women’s sexuality has yet to cross the threshold of motherhood, which has not lost the aura of morality and even sanctity that it always had. Desexualization of the mother is a mainstay of traditionally patriarchal cultures, which makes the sexual invisibility of modern western mothers seem particularly acute. Perhaps it’s our Puritan legacy that strips motherhood of its sexual components; perhaps we are convinced that lustfulness conflicts with maternal duty. Of course, there is more than one America, and cultural differences abound within this vast country. My friend June is quick to remind me that not all Americans came here on the Mayflower. “Black people are certainly not spared our share of sex problems, but we’re definitely a lot less hung up than you white folks,” she says. “Sex is a natural part of life, not some big dirty secret. My kids know I have sex; I knew my parents had sex. They’d put on Marvin Gaye, shut the bedroom door, and tell us we’d better not knock.” My Argentinean girlfriend jokes about how her husband calls her “mamita” in bed—what better way to co-opt the taboo? My Spanish colleague Susanna tells me that, in Madrid, her greatest sexual asset is her beautiful three-year-old son. “In New York it’s my accent, my hair, my legs, but definitely not my son.” My American patient Stacey, a white woman who lives in Brooklyn with her daughter, knows her demographics. “The only men who flirt with me are the West Indian pediatrician, the Russian dentist, the Italian baker, and the Puerto Rican grocer. The white guys? Forget it. If I’m with my kid, they look right past me.” A man with a baby in tow gets a very different response. It’s not just power that is an aphrodisiac. A guy walking down the street with a toddler on his shoulders projects stability, commitment, and nurturing. For most women (and some gay men), that’s sexy. In his book Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik contrasts America’s asexual model of reproduction with the more voluptuous French view, “All American What-to-Expect books begin with the Test, not the Act.” He goes on, “In Paris, [pregnancy] is something that has happened because of sex, which with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York, pregnancy is a ward in the house of Medicine. In Paris, it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Maria has taken hold of this idea. “I think my ‘low desire’ is, more than anything else, related to my lack of ownership around sex and my conflict with pleasure, especially pleasure with my husband. I can’t explain why I’m so uncomfortable opening myself up to Nico erotically. What I do know is that family is never where I’ve gone to get anything extra.” “Right. For you, family is about self-sacrifice, not enjoyment. But a healthy sense of entitlement is a prerequisite for erotic intimacy.” Only when Maria starts to look at what she brings to the erotic stalemate does Nico’s contribution become apparent. She asks him some of the same questions we have hashed out in our sessions. “What does sex mean for you?” “How was sex treated in your family?” “What are the important events that shaped your sexuality?” “What would you like to experience most with me sexually, and what are you most afraid of?” They spark conversations that are provocative and inspiring, that focus on possibilities rather than on problems. Maria learns that, for Nico, sex is both liberating and connecting, an eloquent mark of love. When she rebuffs him, he feels unloved. Nico is not a talker. Instead, he expresses caring by doing things: washing the dishes, shining her shoes, always keeping chocolate in the refrigerator. He makes sure that they get out of the house on the weekend, guilt-free (which Maria finds difficult), and don’t get bogged down with interminable housekeeping. He is generous with his affection, both with Maria and with their daughter. But the caresses stop when the sex starts. While he likes sex, he’s less in his element with seduction. “He’s so eager to get to the sex part of sex, where he knows what he’s doing, that he tends to gloss over the pursuit and the romance. The games, you know. I wind up feeling rushed. It takes Nico about two minutes to go from watching TV to being completely physically and emotionally ready to have intercourse. I need a slower buildup. And in my typical way of trying to take care of him, I don’t want him to feel bad, so I try to get turned on really fast. It’s a total fiasco.” For Nico, sex is a play in one act. For Maria it is a continuum of pleasures, a successive unfolding. The problem arises when they become trapped in a linear, goal-oriented focus on intercourse and orgasm that bypasses eroticism. In this setup she struggles with the idea that lingering is implicitly selfish and shamelessly greedy. Her lack of prerogative and lack of self-affirmation are met with Nico’s hurriedness, which further reinforces her notion that she is not worthy of attention. Of course she wouldn’t worry that she was taking too long if she thought he was into it. But for Nico slowness inspires a different kind of anxiety, a fear of inadequacy that he won’t perform well enough.

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

  “You want some cookies?” she asked. “That’s all right, Sister.” “Sure you do.” She put a package of Oreos on a plate and brought it to me. Then she sat down. With her arms crossed, hands hidden in her sleeves, she watched me eat and drink. Finally she said, “What happened, then? Cat get your tongue?” “Yes, Sister.” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “I know.” “Maybe you’re just thinking of it wrong,” she said. I stared at my hands on the tabletop. “I forgot to give you a napkin,” she said. “Go on and lick them. Don’t be shy.” She waited until I looked up, and when I did I saw that she was younger than I’d thought her to be. Not that I’d given much thought to her age. Except for the really old nuns with canes or facial hair they all seemed outside of time, without past or future. But now—forced to look at Sister James across the narrow space of this gleaming table—I saw her differently. I saw an anxious woman of about my mother’s age who wanted to help me without knowing what kind of help I needed. Her good will worked strongly on me. My eyes burned and my throat swelled up. I would have surrendered to her if only I’d known how. “It probably isn’t as bad as you think it is,” Sister James said. “Whatever it is, someday you’ll look back and you’ll see that it was natural. But you’ve got to bring it to the light. Keeping it in the dark is what makes it feel so bad.” She added, “I’m not asking you to tell me, understand. That’s not my place. I’m just saying that we all go through these things.” Sister James leaned forward over the table. “When I was your age,” she said, “maybe even a little older, I used to go through my father’s wallet while he was taking his bath at night. I didn’t take bills, just pennies and nickels, maybe a dime. Nothing he’d miss. My father would’ve given me the money if I’d asked for it. But I preferred to steal it. Stealing from him made me feel awful, but I did it all the same.” She looked down at the tabletop. “I was a backbiter, too. Whenever I was with one friend I would say terrible things about my other friends, and then turn around and do the same thing to the one I had just been with. I knew what I was doing, too. I hated myself for it, I really did, but that didn’t stop me. I used to wish that my mother and my brothers would die in a car crash so I could grow up with just my father and have everyone feel sorry for me.” Sister James shook her head. “I had all these bad thoughts I didn’t want to let go of.

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

  “You want some cookies?” she asked. “That’s all right, Sister.” “Sure you do.” She put a package of Oreos on a plate and brought it to me. Then she sat down. With her arms crossed, hands hidden in her sleeves, she watched me eat and drink. Finally she said, “What happened, then? Cat get your tongue?” “Yes, Sister.” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “I know.” “Maybe you’re just thinking of it wrong,” she said. I stared at my hands on the tabletop. “I forgot to give you a napkin,” she said. “Go on and lick them. Don’t be shy.” She waited until I looked up, and when I did I saw that she was younger than I’d thought her to be. Not that I’d given much thought to her age. Except for the really old nuns with canes or facial hair they all seemed outside of time, without past or future. But now—forced to look at Sister James across the narrow space of this gleaming table—I saw her differently. I saw an anxious woman of about my mother’s age who wanted to help me without knowing what kind of help I needed. Her good will worked strongly on me. My eyes burned and my throat swelled up. I would have surrendered to her if only I’d known how. “It probably isn’t as bad as you think it is,” Sister James said. “Whatever it is, someday you’ll look back and you’ll see that it was natural. But you’ve got to bring it to the light. Keeping it in the dark is what makes it feel so bad.” She added, “I’m not asking you to tell me, understand. That’s not my place. I’m just saying that we all go through these things.” Sister James leaned forward over the table. “When I was your age,” she said, “maybe even a little older, I used to go through my father’s wallet while he was taking his bath at night. I didn’t take bills, just pennies and nickels, maybe a dime. Nothing he’d miss. My father would’ve given me the money if I’d asked for it. But I preferred to steal it. Stealing from him made me feel awful, but I did it all the same.” She looked down at the tabletop. “I was a backbiter, too. Whenever I was with one friend I would say terrible things about my other friends, and then turn around and do the same thing to the one I had just been with. I knew what I was doing, too. I hated myself for it, I really did, but that didn’t stop me. I used to wish that my mother and my brothers would die in a car crash so I could grow up with just my father and have everyone feel sorry for me.” Sister James shook her head. “I had all these bad thoughts I didn’t want to let go of.

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

  I thought I’d left it back in Florida, together with my fear of fighting and my shyness with girls, but here it was, come to meet me. Sister James had nothing to do with it. She hated talking about sin, and was plainly bored by our obsessive questions about Hell and Purgatory and Limbo. The business with the arrow probably meant nothing to her. To her I was just another boy doing some dumb boyish thing. But I began to feel that she knew all about me, and that a good part of her life was now given over to considering how bad I was. I became furtive around her. I began skipping archery and even some of my catechism classes. There was no immediate way for my mother to find out. We didn’t have a telephone and she never went to church. She thought it was good for me but beside the point for herself, especially now that she was divorced and once again involved with Roy, the man she’d left Florida to get away from. When I could, I ran around with boys from school. But they all came from Mormon families. When they weren’t being instructed in their own faith, which was a lot of the time, their parents liked to have them close by. Most afternoons I wandered around in the trance that habitual solitude induces. I walked downtown and stared at merchandise. I imagined being adopted by different people I saw on the street. Sometimes, seeing a man in a suit come toward me from a distance that blurred his features, I would prepare myself to recognize my father and to be recognized by him. Then we would pass each other and a few minutes later I would pick someone else. I talked to anyone who would talk back. When the need came upon me, I knocked on the door of the nearest house and asked to use the bathroom. No one ever refused. I sat in other people’s yards and played with their dogs. The dogs got to know me—by the end of the year they’d be waiting for me. I also wrote long letters to my pen pal in Phoenix, Arizona. Her name was Alice. My class had been exchanging letters with her class since school began. We were supposed to write once a month but I wrote at least once a week, ten, twelve, fifteen pages at a time. I represented myself to her as the owner of a palomino horse named Smiley who shared my encounters with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and packs of coyotes on my father’s ranch, the Lazy B. When I wasn’t busy on the ranch I raised German shepherds and played for several athletic teams. Although Alice was a terse and irregular correspondent, I believed that she must be in awe of me, and imagined someday presenting myself at her door to claim her adoration. So I passed the hours after school.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: The same reason holds good of newly born children as of the insane who never have had the use of reason: consequently, the sacred mysteries are not to be given to them. Although certain Greeks do the contrary, because Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. ii) that Holy Communion is to be given to them who are baptized; not understanding that Dionysius is speaking there of the Baptism of adults. Nor do they suffer any loss of life from the fact of our Lord saying (Jn. 6:54), “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you”; because, as Augustine writes to Boniface (Pseudo-Beda, Comment. in 1 Cor. 10:17), “then every one of the faithful becomes a partaker,” i.e. spiritually, “of the body and blood of the Lord, when he is made a member of Christ’s body in Baptism.” But when children once begin to have some use of reason so as to be able to conceive some devotion for the sacrament, then it can be given to them. Whether it is lawful to receive this sacrament daily?Objection 1: It does not appear to be lawful to receive this sacrament daily, because, as Baptism shows forth our Lord’s Passion, so also does this sacrament. Now one may not be baptized several times, but only once, because “Christ died once” only “for our sins,” according to 1 Pet. 3:18. Therefore, it seems unlawful to receive this sacrament daily. Objection 2: Further, the reality ought to answer to the figure. But the Paschal Lamb, which was the chief figure of this sacrament, as was said above (Q[73], A[9]) was eaten only once in the year; while the Church once a year commemorates Christ’s Passion, of which this sacrament is the memorial. It seems, then, that it is lawful to receive this sacrament not daily, but only once in the year. Objection 3: Further, the greatest reverence is due to this sacrament as containing Christ. But it is a token of reverence to refrain from receiving this sacrament; hence the Centurion is praised for saying (Mat. 8:8), “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof”; also Peter, for saying (Lk. 5:8), “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Therefore, it is not praiseworthy for a man to receive this sacrament daily. Objection 4: Further, if it were a praiseworthy custom to receive this sacrament frequently, then the oftener it were taken the more praise-worthy it would be. But there would be greater frequency if one were to receive it several. times daily; and yet this is not the custom of the Church. Consequently, it does not seem praiseworthy to receive it daily.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In an early lesbian domestic abuse trial, a lawyer noted the odd and unsettling detail that most of the time the jury spent behind closed doors was—contrary to what she’d been worried about—the straight jurors attempting to convince the jury’s sole lesbian member of the defendant’s guilt. When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman. Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would. 45. Among the myths tackled by the Santa Cruz Women’s Self Defense Teaching Cooperative: “Myth: It’s only emotional/psychological, so that doesn’t count.” “Myth: I can handle it— unlike her last three lovers.” “Myth: Staying together and working it out is most important.” “Myth: We’re in therapy, so it’ll get fixed now.” 46. Actual questionnaire language by researcher Alice J. McKinzie: “Is your abuser present at this festival? If your abuser is at this festival, is she present while you are filling this out? If your abuser is not present while you are filling this out, is she aware that you are filling out this questionnaire? If you answered NO to the question above ... do you plan to tell her later?” 47. This No True Scotsman fallacy could bend these narratives in every direction conceivable; create a kind of moving goalpost that permitted an endless warping of accountability. In a firsthand account of her abuse in Gay Community News in 1988, a survivor wrote: “I had been around lesbians since I was a teenager, and although some of them had troubled relationships, I was unaware of any battering. I attached myself to the comforting myth that lesbians don’t batter. Much later, when I was ‘out’ enough to go to gay bars in a town that was liberal enough to tolerate them, I saw that some lesbians did indeed batter. However, I thought they were all of a type—drunks, sexist butches or apolitical lesbians—so I decided that feminist lesbians don’t batter.” Activist Ann Russo put it more succinctly in her book Taking Back Our Lives: “I had found it hard to name abuse in lesbian relationships as a political issue with structural roots.”

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  They can pretend they’re angels, but they’re not. They have to talk about what they’re experiencing and how they’re feeling and what it’s doing to them or they will begin the long slow drift apart. Or the person who was badly burned in an unhealthy sexual relationship and became cold and withdrawn from anybody of the opposite sex. And he’s been this way for years. He doesn’t let himself feel. And he has essentially turned his sexuality off. You can’t pretend you’re an angel. Angels and animals. There are these two extremes, denying our sexuality or being driven by it, and then there’s the vast space in between.4 More In the creation poem of Genesis 1, God creates animals before humans. And something significant happens in the creation of people that doesn’t happen in the creation of animals: people are created in God’s image. We have a spiritual dimension to us that animals don’t have. Some call this consciousness, others an awareness of “more,” others call it transcendence. However it’s described, the writer of Genesis wants us to see the distinction between what it means to be human and what it means to be an animal. Have you ever seen a dog concerned that its life just isn’t going anywhere? A cat reflecting? A horse not feeling centered? Animals have a physical body but no spirit.5 In the book of Job, it’s written that when God created the world, “all the angels shouted for joy.”6 And in the book of Psalms, it’s written that God made humans “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” which is a reference to angels.7 The book of Hebrews says that an angel is a spirit.8 A spirit is a being with no body, no physical essence. Marriage and sex and procreation simply aren’t parts of their existence. An angel is a being with a spirit but without a body. When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.9 The tension here cannot be resolved easily, if ever. In the first century in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus, there was a religious group that was aware of the powerful sexual forces that we carry within us.10 They observed that sex can get us into lots of trouble. Which we’d probably all agree with. Their conclusion was that because sex is so dangerous, it should just be avoided altogether. But to avoid sex, you need to avoid romance and affection and all that comes with them, and of course you’re going to need to eliminate marriage altogether. So this religious group forbade their followers from getting married.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  37Lecture 4—The Anabaptist Radicals õSimons renounced his Catholic ordination and became an Anabaptist. But he was horrified by the violence of the Münster episode. It did no good, and violence was no way to imitate Christ. õSimons joined the Anabaptist movement at a crucial moment, when Anabaptists were recovering from the shock of Münster and splitting apart into smaller sects. It didn’t take long for some people to realize that Simons was a natural leader who put the faith ahead of his own ego. A group of them approached him and asked him to become an elder, an Anabaptist church office almost equivalent to that of a bishop. õBy the 1540s, Simons was often representing the Anabaptists as their spokesman in debates with other Protestants, or as a theological diplomat who was sent to rein in radicals. He was always on the move, leading followers (soon called Mennonites) from city to city throughout Germany and the Netherlands, trying to both spread the Anabaptist message and find a safe haven that wouldn’t boot them out. õWhen it came to running a Christian community, the Mennonites were strict about church discipline. If someone went too far in challenging the leaders’ theology or broke any church rules, the entire community shunned them, cutting off all contact, even among family members. õMennonites would come to experience as many internal feuds and schisms as any other Protestant group. For example, take the Amish, the Anabaptists who live in tight-knit, isolated communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio. õTheir origins lie more than 300 years ago in a disagreement between their founder, Jakob Ammann, and some other Mennonites over the question of isolation from the outside world. Ammann excommunicated all the people who disagreed with him and led his followers—the Amish—to found their own church. õQuestions of how much to engage with people who don’t share your beliefs and how much can you change the traditions of your ancestors without deviating from true faith still preoccupy Anabaptists today. 38The History of Christianity II THE HUTTERITES õSome Anabaptists went even further than the Mennonites in withdrawing from mainstream society. By the early 1530s, a group of Anabaptists had f led persecution by heading to Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Things were a bit easier for them there because Moravia was rather isolated, and because the Holy Roman Emperor was more worried about fending off Turkish armies advancing from the east than he was about corralling a downtrodden bunch of heretics. õThe feudal lords who owned most of the land in Moravia were happy to have more people to farm it. The Anabaptists began to pool all their belongings and money in common ownership. In 1533, a man named Jakob Hutter showed up. He was deft at outmaneuvering the

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Many people in my field assume that the intensity that shapes the early stages of romance is a sort of temporary insanity, destined to be cured by the rigors of the long haul. Clinicians often interpret the lust for sexual adventure—ranging from simple flirting to infatuation, from maintaining contact with previous lovers to cross-dressing, threesomes, and fetishes—as an infantile fantasy or a fear of commitment. They favor a model of love as a companionate, intimate, collaborative partnership. What we are left with is a relationship that is strong on cooperation and communication but weak on complicity and playfulness. But dispassionate friendship is a problematic ecology for cultivating eroticism. The Day I Got That Ring… Jacqueline and Philip are trying to rekindle the spark they once had. Married for ten years, they are finally emerging from the haze of parenting young children. This fall their youngest son began kindergarten, and his new schedule put some order back into theirs. At the same time, in the past year their friends have gone through an epidemic of divorces. “All these couples we used to hang out with, who got married right around the same time as us, are throwing in the towel,” Philip tells me. “It makes you think about what you value, and it puts you face to face with the fatal flaws in your own relationship.” “And your fatal flaw?” I ask them. “Sex,” he answers. “Cheating,” she says. When they met, Jacqueline was the winning prize for Philip. “Jackie was smart, beautiful, and sexy. I couldn’t believe she was interested in me. I was really into her. I was all over her, too. We had great sex for a long time. Right up until I asked her to marry me,” he recalls. “What happened when she said yes?” I inquire. “Nothing happened, but something did change when I got that ring. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but now I see it pretty clearly. Entering a family shut me down fast. I didn’t tell her about it. In fact, I even tried to deny to myself that anything was different. But pretty soon, I couldn’t get turned on by her. Eventually, every time she left town, or even if she was just out for the night, I was logging on or trolling the bars.” Eight years of transgressions followed, some discovered, some disclosed, some mercifully kept secret. The sequence became repetitive, the resolution of one episode led to the next wave of transgression. Philip’s shame at cheating was always followed by remorse and repentance. He felt terrible about hurting Jackie, and vowed to change. He would make a big show of being an upstanding man and a good husband, and she would forgive him and take him back.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In my practice I aim to create a sex-friendly place, free of judgment and moralizing, where people can talk safely about their sexuality. Simply doing that—and often it is not so simple at all—can have a profound effect. Sex becomes both a way to illuminate conflicts over intimacy and desire, and a way to begin to heal these destructive splits. Together, Joni and I use the text of her fantasies to address critical issues between her and Ray. Dependency and passivity, aggression, and control were all feelings that she disavowed for years, they had been allowed only in the privacy of her mind. By reclaiming them in therapy she was one step closer to liberating them at home. Once Joni was no longer held captive by the shame of her fantasies, she became more relaxed and self-accepting. To her surprise, she was able to approach Ray with all sorts of requests and only a modest amount of trepidation. Conversations ensued in which formidable obstacles were revealed to be nothing more than awkward misunderstandings that, through neglect, had snowballed out of control. For years Ray had assumed that his gentle approach was what Joni wanted. In fact, he thought that was what all women wanted, and he couldn’t figure out why asking “What can I do for you?” warranted such an irritated reply: “Nothing!” He had no way of knowing that, for Joni, being taken care of sexually meant abdicating all responsibility and luxuriating in passive dependency, guilt-free. Their dynamics had become absurd, with her rejection triggering his solicitousness, which in turn triggered more rejection. When Joni invited Ray to be more assertive and self-directed, this was as liberating for him as for her. For the first time, he felt that there was room for a full range of feelings, not just tender ones. Joni was surprised at Ray’s positive response to her own new assertiveness. Even claiming her desire to be passive was an unprecedented act of agency on her part. Like many women, she had internalized the powerful message that bold expressions of female sexuality are whorish, unattractive, selfish, and certainly not part of intimate love. “I was afraid that if I told Ray, ‘Do this, don’t do that, slow down, stay longer, like this, and this, and this,’ it would feel emasculating to him.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “I submit. I’m passive, I’m without my own will. I do what I’m told, and I like being told what to do. What am I doing there, taking orders from men? I resent taking orders from anybody. I can’t stand authority, but I get off on submitting to a bunch of cowboys? It makes no fucking sense.” “Actually, it makes quite a lot of sense to me,” I tell her. “Well, would you mind enlightening the rest of us, Doctor?” I explain that sexual fantasy doesn’t work like other fantasies. If people tell me they daydream about a vacation in Tahiti, I believe they want a vacation in Tahiti. The connection between what they fantasize about and what they really want is refreshingly uncomplicated. But sexual fantasies don’t reflect reality in the same way. The point about sexual fantasy is that it involves pretending. It’s a simulation, a performance—not the real thing, and not necessarily a desire for the real thing. Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They’re complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn’t be translated into literal intent. “Think poetry, not prose,” I tell her. From everything Joni had told me about her relationship with Ray, I didn’t think she needed to worry about being a masochist, or even about being passive. The cowboys may be controlling her, but ultimately she is the one controlling the cowboys. She is the author, the producer, the casting agent, the director, and the star of the show. The whole thing is a production staged by her for the purpose of pleasure, not pain. These are worshippers, not sadists. If she were really being forced, she would not be having such a good time. Even though the means is control, her experience is one of care. The convoluted plots are just a safe pathway to pleasure. When I explain to Joni that her fantasy seems to be more about attention and vulnerability than masochism, her relief is palpable. She is a recovering alcoholic, and so the idea that she has dependency issues comes as no surprise to her. She has been denying her need for support her whole life, even while secretly longing for someone to take care of her. The only thing she’s ever felt safe enough to depend on was alcohol, a consistent and reliable friend. More to the point, alcohol never asked for anything in return.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  It is no surprise, then, that traumatized individuals constrict and brace against their rage as socialized animals. But let us look at the cumulative consequence of suppressing rage. Tremendous amounts of energy need to be exerted (on an already strained system) to keep rage and other primitive emotions at bay. This “turning in” of anger against the self, and the need to defend against its eruption, leads to debilitating shame, as well as to eventual exhaustion. This involution adds another layer to the complexity and seeming intransigence of the festering traumatic state. For these reasons, titration becomes even more crucial as a measure to interrupt this self-perpetuating “shame cycle.” In the case of molestation and other forms of previous abuse, a substratum of self-reproach has already been laid beneath a later trauma during adulthood. Indeed, because immobility is experienced as a passive response, many molestation and rape victims feel tremendous shame for not having successfully fought their attackers. This perception and the overwhelming sense of defeat can occur regardless of the reality of the situation: the relative size of the attacker doesn’t matter; nor does the fact that the immobility might have even protected the victim from further harm or possibly death.† And I haven’t even included here the additional blanket of confusion and shame that occurs within the complex dynamics of secrecy and betrayal in the incestuous family. As traumatized individuals begin to reown their sense of agency and power, they gradually come to a place of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. They achieve the compassionate realization that both their immobility and their rage are a biologically driven, instinctual imperative and not something to be ashamed of as if it were a character defect. They own their rage as undifferentiated power and agency, a vital life-preserving force to be harnessed and used to benefit oneself. Because of its profound importance in the resolution of trauma, I’ll repeat myself: the fear that fuels immobility can be categorized, broadly, as two separate fears: the fear of entering immobility, which is the fear of paralysis, entrapment, helplessness and death; and the fear of exiting immobility, of the intense energy of the “rage-based” sensations of counterattack. Caught in this two-sided clamp (of entering and exiting), immobility repels its antidote implacably so that it seems impossible to break through it. However, when the skillful therapist assists clients in uncoupling the fear from the immobility by restoring “self-paced termination of immobility,” the rich reward is the client’s capability to move forward in time. This “forward experiencing” dispels fear, entrapment and helplessness by breaking this endless feedback loop of terror and paralysis.