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.

Page 189 of 267 · 20 per page

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

  “Sex is a lot better than masturbation and involves actual intimacy instead,” he said. “Masturbation has a role for me in an ideally sexually diversified lifestyle, but it’s a small part.” I asked him if he thought sex with others was more intimate than sex with himself. “I’ve never really considered intimacy something that can happen by oneself. There’s no interpersonal joy that comes from being with myself. I still enjoy it, but I don’t feel closer to myself for having wanked it, you know?” Regardless of how you internalized the message that masturbating is lesser than partnered sex, or even the idea, like Ryan, that it is a tedious exercise, this reluctance blocks us from pleasure. Masturbating is one of the healthiest things we can do for ourselves and our sex lives. And it’s free! Most of the materials we need come complimentary with birth. Self-pleasuring releases feel-good hormones like dopamine and oxytocin, and can help us rehabilitate our understandably fraught relationship with pleasure, reduce stress, and build affirming sexual fantasies.3 Our reluctance to explore self-pleasure robs us of a valuable tool for developing sexual autonomy. Ryan is masturbating, but he doesn’t care for himself the way he cares for sexual partners. Amy Weissfeld, the sex coach, recalls masturbating as a child—“babies are pleasure seekers,” she told me repeatedly—but then dropping it for years. Nothing dramatic happened, but she became busy with other things, and self-pleasure plummeted to the bottom of the to-do list. “I was in a good relationship and I just got busy doing other things. Like, life happened, and it didn’t seem important,” she said. “My partner would say to me, ‘What do you want? What do you like?’ And I’d be like, ‘I don’t know, whatever you’re doing is fine. It’s all good.’ I was dissociated from my body because of all this body shame.” It wasn’t until she expanded her own definition of masturbation into a broader practice of self-pleasure, one that wasn’t so orgasm-obsessed, that she stepped into her sexuality. She began touching herself like she was someone she loved. “What was key to my own sexuality was recognizing, number one, the importance of masturbation, but number two, that masturbation doesn’t have to be rubbing on the clit till I have an orgasm,” she said. “What I try to get people to do is not focus on trying to ejaculate or trying to have an orgasm or trying to perform in some way, but to just experience pleasure in the body. So sometimes, for me, I might just sit there with my hand on my heart for thirty minutes and I meditate. It’s like an erotic meditation. I’m redefining masturbation as self-love.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As for the middle-class boys who were now my classmates, they had become my equals and my everyday companions. In spite of myself, I respected their new suits that were so elegantly cut, their high-quality school equipment, and their healthy appearance. I even envied them their being able to refer without any hesitation to their parents and their social background. I, on the contrary, always had to be careful and watch my step when it came to admitting anything about myself or my family. If anyone asked me about it, I always said that my father was “in the leather business.” Yes, up to his elbows in leather, I would add mentally. In the same manner, I blew up to unnatural proportions my Uncle Aroun’s business and, in spite of my distaste for him, often boasted about it. About my mother, I avoided speaking as there was nothing much I could find to say about her. Without ever admitting it, I would have been ready to pay dearly for the privilege of being a middle-class boy, born and bred in the leather or grocery business. In spite of the friendships that I made in school, I never really managed to penetrate the social life of my schoolmates. They probably felt that I was too sarcastic and too severe in my judgments, perhaps even rather unpleasant. I was proud and easily hurt, so that I took no steps at all to suggest that they might invite me. I would have had to return any invitations, and it was impossible for me to entertain any guests at home. So it was Henry, who was not one of my classmates in high school, who brought me out socially. He introduced me to a group of scout leaders who were looking for an instructor for the Jewish part of their educational program. As I was still quite undiscriminating in my intellectual appetites and ready for anything, I happened also to attend some Hebrew night classes that had been organized by the Zionists. In an audience from the ghetto, I was thus one of the few high-school boys to have acquired both kinds of culture. The middle-class boys in secondary school were sarcastic about such an amateurish and hit-and-miss manner of teaching, being quite blind to its historical significance. Although their position made it clear that they would one day be the leaders of the community, they had lost all interest in the social problems of its daily life. Because their own future seemed to pose them no problems, they could only be flippant on every political issue, which shocked me deeply.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The Reformers by and large rejected not only the abuses connected with purgatory (selling indulgences and the like), but the doctrine itself. In part this may have been because they saw this teaching being used as a weapon by the clerical elite to maintain social and dogmatic control. But their objections were set out in robustly theological and biblical terms. They insisted that the Christian soul went immediately to heaven after death. (Some tried to combine this with the New Testament’s sense of a time lag before the ultimate new creation, teaching that the soul might in some sense “sleep” in between bodily death and bodily resurrection; but the point, again, was “no purgatory.”) These issues remained unresolved and are not relevant to our present discussion, except as the context for the truly important thing. The rejection of purgatory precipitated a fresh emphasis from a new angle on an interpretation of the cross that echoed, but also differed from, that of Anselm. Catholic apologists for the doctrine of purgatory had insisted that at the point of death the still sinful soul needed two things: further purification and further punishment. (Allowance was made for a small number of saints who would go straight to heaven, but they were assumed to be very much the exception.) The Reformers replied that the purification in question was effected not after death, but by bodily death itself (as in Rom. 6:7, where death pays all debts) and by the Spirit’s present sanctifying work, putting to death the deeds of the body (as in Rom. 8:13). And they insisted, particularly, that postmortem punishment for the still sinful believer was unthinkable, because the punishment had already been inflicted on Jesus himself in the sinner’s place. “So, therefore, there is no condemnation . . . because . . . right there in the flesh, [God] condemned sin” (Rom. 8:1–4). That punishment had already been meted out and could not be repeated. Thus the doctrine known as “penal substitution” (Jesus bearing punishment in the place of his people), though in itself a much older, indeed biblical and patristic, conception, received a new boost and a new spin from the Reformers’ rejection of purgatory. One of the reasons it became such a hallmark of Reformation theology was that it was thus a key part of the polemic against a doctrine that lacked biblical support and had the visible propensity to generate corruption and abuse. (It is noteworthy that leading Roman theologians today, men of the stature of Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, have radically revised the doctrine, so that it bears almost no relation to what their forebears taught in the early sixteenth century.)

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

  The process of internalizing sexual norms begins in childhood, during small moments—of getting yelled at for grinding on a pillow, unknowingly masturbating; of watching movie couples orgasm in sync; of hearing gay slurs on the playground. Our understanding of what sexuality can and should be incubates in our soft kid brains long before we start having sex and even longer before we find ourselves wholeheartedly accepting that sex with our fiancé will never feel great but that he offers other things, like bringing home wine sometimes. The way “good sex” is modeled to us via digital media, like porn and movies— cis-heterosexual penis-vagina sex where the woman is awash in pleasure despite zero clitoral stimulation—is bad sex for most people with vulvas, who are unable to orgasm from penetration alone. And then there’s the extreme, outcome-centric emphasis on erection and penile orgasm—to signal the beginning and end of sex, respectively—that creates undue anxiety and pressure to perform. “Given that in most situations, at least in my experience, I’m running the show, if it’s bad, it’s probably my fault,” one thirty-year-old cis-het man told me. Unlearning reductive, patriarchal sexual norms requires education, exploration, and—because we are dealing with humans—communication. When we are failed by education, exploration and communication become more challenging. We don’t know how to communicate. We’re scared; we’re tired. Our vocabulary for communicating during sex is deeply limited, and when we believe our pleasure matters less, why speak up? Purity culture and cis-heteronormativity pervade popular culture so profoundly that it actually disrupts our sexual development. Messages about what sex is and isn’t live in our bodies long after we believe we’ve unlearned them—messages like “There’s something wrong with me if I can’t orgasm during penetrative sex,” “My job during sex is to make my partner orgasm,” and “I’m a bad, horrible slut for sleeping with so many people.” Even Emily Ratajkowski, a model and author who is arguably one of the hottest people on the planet, is not immune, admitting in a recent TikTok, “Women have internalized the male gaze so much, that when we’re having sex, we’re thinking about how hot or not we are.” These preoccupations aren’t always tethered to specific thoughts, but they can disrupt us before, during, and after sex with unpleasant body sensations, sensations that feel a lot like shame, anxiety, and numbness. Like trauma responses, these sensations bubble up when we least expect it, making it even harder for us to feel pleasure and enjoy sex. Bad sex becomes the norm.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this explains Cicero’s statement that everything to do with crucifixion, including the word crux itself, should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things, or the endurance of them, but liability to them, the expectation, indeed the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man. (In Verrem 16) The horrible personal and physical aspects of crucifixion were matched by the social, communal, and political meaning. This is important not just as the “context” for our understanding of the Jesus’s execution (as though the barbaric practice were just a dark backdrop to a theology produced from somewhere else), but as part of the very stuff of the theology itself. We might already have figured this out from the careful placing of Philippians 2.8b, thanatou de staurou, “even the death of the cross,” at the dead center of the poem that some think antedates Paul himself. As we shall see later, the first half of that poem is a downward journey, down to the lowest place to which a human being could sink with regard to pain or shame, personal fate or public perception. This was precisely the point. Those who crucified people did so because it was the sharpest and nastiest way of asserting their own absolute power and guaranteeing their victim’s absolute degradation. The early Christians did not suppose that Jesus might in principle have died in one of a number of ways (being stoned, killed in battle, assassinated with a dagger in a crowd, or whatever). Reading backward in the light of the subsequent events, they interpreted the crucifixion as part of the strange, dark divine plan in which the shame and horror were part of the intended meaning. Jesus, they believed, had gone to the lowest point possible for a human being, never mind a Jew, never mind one whose followers had hoped he was the coming king. So how had crucifixion come to be used in this way? The early history of the practice is lost in the mists of the pre-Roman world. The first historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, mention the execution of people on poles and trees, though it isn’t always clear whether this was simply hanging or impaling, both of which would have resulted in a much quicker death. Recent scholarly work has surveyed the evidence from the entire ancient world and has stressed that part of the point of crucifixion itself, as opposed to impaling or hanging, was that the victim was often able to see, to speak, to cry out in pain or protest for hours or even days. In some cases it was even possible for a victim to be rescued, to be brought down from the cross in time to recover.

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

  When I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer. That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off. I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it. MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother. I said I didn’t remember, exactly. “It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?” I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said. “Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She stared at me, surprised by the madam, by the thanks, so unusual in that part of town, and by the muffled emotion in my voice. I saw her hesitation and decided to surprise her even more, to overcome her indifference, to discover even the smallest spark of communion so that this meeting would really put an end to my loneliness. “You know... you’re the first woman...” For the first time, she smiled faintly. Then, as she had to open the door, she turned her back on me and let in the violent daylight Bissor was waiting for me with his back to the wall as he eyed a little blonde in pink rayon panties. She was smiling broadly at him, and all her teeth that were mounted on a metal setting turned her mouth into an inhuman machine. “Well, how was it?” asked Bissor. “O.K.,” I answered sadly. It was getting late, and the first wave of customers, all white-collar workers, was closed behind the doors of the more presentable girls. Those that we saw now seemed to be the ugliest. As the narrow alleys had been heated by the sun all through the afternoon, I now began to discover the smell that dominated the reserved quarter. The water streamed from under the closed doors in little spurts and wet our shoes, flowing into a gutter in the middle of the street and forming there a kind of blackish mud which smelled penetratingly of sperm, piss, and sweat. I had noticed none of this when we had arrived. To keep up an artificial enthusiasm, I kept repeating to myself: “It’s the first time I’ve seen a woman naked; it’s a historic moment.” I wanted to feel enriched and more manly. But, I was ashamed; I felt dirty and cheap, as though I had been an accomplice in all this wretchedness and collective scorn. I was disappointed, unsatisfied, and disgusted; all this stuck in my throat and made me want to cry. Fortunately, Bissor was silent. The poor girls without customers sat on their doorsteps and invited us in, with forced smiles and languid looks. I was not even afraid any more. The last ones we saw, the women I had not even dared look at earlier, were hideous and fat, with withered skin and flabby jowls, with oily hair and thick makeup, like eczema scabs. Most of them were collapsed on the stone steps of their doorways to rest their thick, varicose legs. “They’re for the old guys,” Bissor explained. Before we left the district, he made me piss in a corner against a leaning buttressed wall, all damp and sticky with a yellow pool that stank of ammonia at its base. It was necessary, he said, to avoid catching clap.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  There seems to be a rival group of teachers there now, and they have poured scorn on Paul and his ministry, his style, his methods, and particularly his suffering. If only he were a real apostle, as they are, none of this would have happened to him! We only see this, of course, through Paul’s response, but it seems from what he says and from how he says it that they were undermining him in particular because he was bringing shame on the church. How could they look up to someone who had been ill-treated in the way he had been? Paul’s answer is to explain to them the way in which his own ministry is shaped by the message of the Messiah and his cross. The letter has many twists and turns—there are jerky passages that look as if Paul was dictating it in bits, perhaps while on the road around northern Greece—but at its heart we find this message: that the true signs of apostolic ministry are to be found in the things that show that the apostle is formed by the Messiah himself, the Messiah whose death overturned all cultural expectations as well as all forms of power. Here we see, as it were, the large-scale exposition of Galatians 2:19–20. Paul has been crucified with the Messiah, and the life he now lives is the Messiah’s own crucified and risen, suffering and glorious life. It is one thing to say, “We don’t proclaim ourselves, but Jesus the Messiah as Lord, and ourselves as your servants because of Jesus” (4:5). Anyone might assent to that in theory, but it is quite another thing to find the meaning of that claim etched painfully into real life: We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the extraordinary quality of the power may belong to God, not to us. We are under all kinds of pressure, but we are not crushed completely; we are at a loss, but not at our wits’ end; we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are cast down, but not destroyed. We always carry the deadness of Jesus about in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our body.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Minutes earlier the orderlies had removed his body. The first time she met Dr. Lash, she was startled by the antique rolltop desk in his office. It was like her father’s, and often during her long silences she caught herself gazing at it. She never told Dr. Lash about the desk and its secrets, or about her poems, or about the long silence between herself and her father. Ernest also slept poorly that night. Again and again he reviewed his presentation of Myrna to the countertransference study group, which had met a couple of days earlier in a member’s group therapy room on Couch Row, as upper Sacramento Street was often called. Though the seminar had started out leaderless, the discussions had grown so intense and so personally threatening that a few months ago they had hired a consultant, Dr. Fritz Werner, an elderly psychoanalyst who had contributed many astute papers to the psychoanalytic literature on countertransference. Ernest’s account of Myrna had provoked a particularly animated discussion. Though praising him for his willingness to expose himself so candidly to the group, Dr. Werner had also been sharply critical of the therapy, especially the T-shirt comment. “Why so impatient?” Dr. Werner asked as he scraped the bowl of his pipe, filled it with acrid-smelling Balkan Sobranie, tamped it down, and lit it. When first invited he had stipulated that his pipe be part of the deal. “So she repeats herself?” he continued. “So she whines? So she makes impossible requests of you? So she’s critical of you and doesn’t behave like a good, grateful patient? My God, young man, you’ve only seen her for four months! What’s that—a total of fifteen or sixteen sessions? Why, I’m currently seeing a patient who for the entire first year —that’s four times a week, two hundred hours —simply repeated herself. Over and over, the same lament, the same yearning for different parents, different friends, a different face, different body—the same endless pining for what could never be. Eventually she got fed up with listening to herself, fed up with her own repetitive cycle. She herself realized she was squandering not only her analytic hours but her entire life. You can’t fling the truth in your patient’s face: the only real truth is the truth we discover for ourselves. “ Evenly suspended attention, young man,” he said firmly. “That’s what you need to give the patient. Evenly suspended attention; words as true now as when Freud first uttered them. That’s what is required of us—to attend to the patient’s words without preformulations, without bias, without personal reactions limiting our vision. It’s the heart and soul of the entire analytic enterprise.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it was mostly Mrs. Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one with a great deal more, that these women left out. Once started, Mrs. Bolton was better than any book, about the lives of the people. She knew them all so intimately, and had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their affairs, it was wonderful, if just a _trifle_ humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to "talk Tevershall," as she called it, to Clifford. But once started, it went. Clifford was listening for "material," and he found it in plenty. Connie realised that his so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for personal gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs. Bolton, of course, was very warm when she "talked Tevershall." Carried away, in fact. And it was marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have run to dozens of volumes. Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the _passional_ secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are _conventionally_ "pure." Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs. Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. "And he was such a _bad_ fellow, and she was such a _nice_ woman." Whereas, as Connie could see even from Mrs. Bolton's gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a "bad man" of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a "nice woman" of her, in the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy by Mrs. Bolton.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  With many Christians bent on escaping the present world, leaving it to its own devices and desires, the world channeled the optimistic energy of the earlier Christian mission into “secularism,” the development of the world and society as though God was either remote or nonexistent. Having banished God to a distant “heaven,” earth was free to move under its own steam and in its own chosen direction. This split-level world, a modern version of the ancient philosophy called Epicureanism, is still widely assumed as the norm. The Enlightenment was, in effect, trying to get the fruits of the older Christian culture while ignoring the roots. Most modern Western countries emphasize education, medicine, and the care of the poor; these were all concerns of the church from the earliest times. It is an open question whether such concerns can be sustained in a just and peaceful society in a world from which God has been banished. Of course, part of the Enlightenment rhetoric is to point out that many wars and injustices had been committed by the churches themselves or by people claiming to act in God’s name. This cannot be denied. The charge must be faced with penitence and shame. But it remains the case that social concern beyond one’s own family, faith, or nation, more or less unknown in the ancient world, was part of the church’s life from its earliest days. The second mood I have been describing has often been as quick to disown that tradition as the secular world has been to dismiss it. Dividing history into “periods” or “movements” is always tricky, but these two stand out. In part, the second was a reaction against the overoptimism of the first. It too bred a reaction, as new “social gospel” movements arose in the early twentieth century, insisting that the emphasis on “going to heaven” wasn’t the point and that following the Jesus of the gospels meant working to help the poor and the sick here and now. Many churches today are shaped through traditions that go back to one or another of these movements, and many debates in church councils, synods, and the like reflect the unresolved issues in question. Many Christians grew up reading the Bible in the light of this or that version, often without realizing that these traditions of reading scripture were themselves shaped by cultural forces that distorted some elements of biblical teaching and screened out others altogether.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When we moved from our alley, we left our proper social and economic level. Even if people were poor in our new street, they dressed better and patronized more expensive stores. We now had to live above our means and to sacrifice necessities to appearances. As she had in the past, my mother continued to buy remnants and pieces of defective cloth in the covered bazaars; but now, in making our clothes, she had to sew the pieces together into something “stylish.” She also started taking cheap permanent waves which reddened her lovely black hair and, for some months, made her head resemble a hideous brown sheep’s head. I retained, consequently, a fixed horror of permanents. For the first time in his life, my father now bought a suit of overalls. We had gas and electricity; for her long-term Sabbath cooking, however, my mother reverted to charcoal which was cheaper. Our gas and electricity bills were indeed occasions for collective remorse: “Put out that light! Is it so hard to press a button? It cost us two hundred francs last month!” I heard those words thousands of times. My father groaned continuously and made plans to reduce our budget. But he didn’t have the severity needed to carry out these plans; besides, we could hardly live on less than we did. In order to pay our higher rent, to buy more conventional clothes and to meet the other indispensable expenses of our new status, we could no longer eat our fill. Besides, our family was always increasing. My father and his friends discussed their common problems at the café, and each passed his own unworkable suggestions on to the next. One evening, my father came home with this scheme: “There are so many of us that each meal is very expensive. If we cut out only one meal a week we could make a real monthly saving. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we go to bed on an empty stomach. That evening, there’ll be boiled chick-peas and as much bread as you want.” In a firmer tone, he then concluded: “I’ve decided we’re going to follow my plan.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The narrow alleys of the red-light district bordered immediately on the open ghetto and nothing particular distinguished them from other streets. Impatient men waited at the little doors of the cells only ten yards away from the ragged children playing marbles in the cracks in the uneven pavement. The first shops on these streets were still occupied by second-hand dealers. The topography of the place suited me perfectly, for I could wander around as though I were passing there by accident or looking for something. But I could not prevent myself from walking too fast and too stiffly, with a false air of preoccupation. My quick searching glances into the main street, vaulted like a covered bazaar, never went beyond the dealers, and I avoided their eyes and those of passers-by as though I would find in them some sort of ironical accusation; so I hurried past. But even if I were to cross into the zone of public shame, how could I ever accost the women I saw there, sitting on their doorsteps? That seemed an insurmountable trial. And there was another frightening obstacle. I knew, from having often heard our school supervisors say so, that one should never go there without a condom. I had already seen comrades of mine, pale and proud, with rings around their eyes and an awkward gait, announce with affected nonchalance that they had caught gonorrhea, as though that were a proof of their virility. The others, who knew most of the prostitutes by name, would nod knowingly. “Never go to Lola without a condom. Fontana caught this from her.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In short, I brought my bag over to the scouts, and thus began a retreat which was to have important consequences. The distinction between the middle class and the ghetto population continued within the camp. Of course, the soldiers made no distinctions and manhandled and degraded all the workers alike. But the men grinned when they saw a middle-class son arrive, caught in a raid or requested by name by the Germans, for they were sure he would not stay long. Nor were they wrong: as soon as he had been forgotten by the Germans, the middle-class boy went home in the convoys of the sick and the fathers of large families, or became a driver or nurse who, one day, on a trip to town, just disappeared. I found that the scouts, who slept apart, were also left outside all the little intrigues of the camp. Besides, the rejection was mutual. When they started confiding in me, they admitted they had invited me so as to avoid a disaster: the head of the camp had asked them to take one or two more men in their tent, but they had feared they would not be able to command the same cleanliness and discipline in the others. It was certainly too late now for me to indulge in remorse. All through the long monotonous days in the camp, I still tried to force the confidence of the men. Today, the spring that drove me is broken and I’m amazed at my decision to go to camp and at my naiveté, as though they were foreign to me. What innocence, what fervor, but also what self-sufficiency I must have had to believe I would be welcomed by the others merely because I had gone to them, full of faith and goodwill! In spite of the difficulties, I thought I was succeeding. The men, covered with lice, no longer fought disease. I discovered a barber among the workers. He had brought his tools with him, but he was called upon only on the eve of a day of leave. Together, we organized a little plot which would also be profitable for him. The following Sunday, rather ostentatiously, in the middle of the camp, I had my whole head shaved. After a few ironic comments, a few men followed my example when I explained that this would help protect me from lice. After that, the barber held his sessions every Sunday.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But just as we must (I believe) restore the biblical vision of God’s ultimate future and reconceive atonement in relation to that—the task of Part Three of the present book—so we must restore the biblical analysis of evil and see the cross as addressing it all, not just part of it. Scandalous—For the Wrong Reasons? If a quick tour of two thousand years of church history leaves us somewhat confused about the meaning of the cross, we will not be surprised that there is plenty of confusion in our own day as well. When, as I mentioned earlier, the National Gallery opened its 2000 exhibition “Seeing Salvation” and the skeptics sneered, the standard Christian response might have been, “Well, he died for our sins.” But that, for many today, just makes it worse. Skeptics come back with more scorn. “Sin” itself is out of date, they say. It’s just a projection of anxieties or childhood phobias. To land our “sins” onto a dead first-century Jew is not just ridiculous; it’s disgusting. To suggest that some god projected our “sins” onto that man is even worse: it’s a sort of cosmic child abuse, a nightmare fantasy that grows out of—or might actually lead to!—real human abuses in today’s world. We can do without that nonsense. The angry scorn of the skeptics gets extra traction from the fact that some have found the sign of the cross to be a symbol of fear. The horrible dark history of “Christian” persecution of people of other faiths, particularly Jewish people, has left a stain on what should be a symbol of hope and welcome. I remember being shocked, as a young man, to read about Jews who had escaped from persecution in supposedly “Christian” cultures in eastern Europe and who then, upon arriving in America, saw on street corners the sign of the cross, which they had come to fear and loathe. Those of us who grew up with crosses in our churches and all around us and with no anti-Jewish ideas in our heads have to face the fact that our central symbol has often been horribly abused. It has been used as a sign of a military might or of a dominant culture determined to stamp out all rivals. The emperor Constantine, facing a crucial battle, saw a vision of the cross in the sky and was told, “In this sign you will conquer.” The Ku Klux Klan burns crosses, claiming to bring the light of the Christian gospel into dark places. The fact that such nonsense is a scandalous denial of the early Christian meaning of the cross doesn’t make it any better. It isn’t just those outside the Christian faith who have found the cross a symbol of fear. Many inside the church too have shrunk back from one particular interpretation that, in some form or other, has dominated much Western Christianity over the last half millennium.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Because, of course, we have all failed in this vocation. When humans turn from worshipping the one God to worshipping anything else instead, anything within the created order, the problem is not just that they “do wrong things,” distorting their human minds, bodies, hearts, and everything else, though of course that is true as well. In addition—and this is vital for grasping the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion—they give to whatever idol they are worshipping the power and authority that they, the humans, were supposed to be exercising in the first place. Worshipping things other than the one true God and distorting our human behavior in consequence is the very essence of “sin”: the Greek word for “sin” in the New Testament means, as we saw, not just “doing wrong things,” but “missing the target.” The target is a wise, full human life of worship and stewardship. Idolatry and sin are, in the last analysis, a failure of responsibility. They are a way of declining the divine summons to reflect God’s image. They constitute an insult, an affront, to the loving, wise Creator himself. The Great Playwright has composed a drama and written a wonderful part especially for us to play; and, like a spoiled and silly child, we have torn up the script and smirked our way through a self-serving but ultimately self-destructive plot of our own. As we know in other walks of life, when people duck out of their assigned responsibilities, someone else will take them over instead, and no good will come of it. When humans sin, they hand to nondivine forces a power and authority that those forces were never supposed to have. And that is why, if God’s plan is to rescue and restore his whole creation, with humans as the active agents in the middle of it, “sins” have to be dealt with. That is the only way by which the nondivine forces that usurp the human role in the world will lose their power. They will be starved of the oxygen that keeps them alive, that turns them from ordinary parts of God’s creation into distorted and dangerous monsters.

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

  72. And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man. 73. And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee. 74. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew. 75. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. iii. 6.) Among the other insults offered to our Lord was the threefold denial of Peter, which the several Evangelists relate in different order. Luke puts Peter’s trial first, and the ill usage of the Lord after that; Matthew and Mark reverse the order. JEROME. Peter sat without, that he might see the event, and not excite suspicion by any approach to Jesus. CHRYSOSTOM. And he, who, when he saw his Master laid hands on, drew his sword and cut off the ear, now when he sees Him enduring such insults becomes a denier, and cannot withstand the taunts of a mean servant girl. A damsel came unto him, saying, Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee. RABANUS. What means this, that a handmaid is the first to tax him, when men would be more likely to recognise him, except that this sex might seem to sin somewhat in the Lord’s death, that they might be redeemed by His passion? He denied before them all, because he was afraid to reveal himself; that he said, I know not, shews that he was not yet willing to die for the Saviour. LEO. (Serm. 60, 4.) For this reason it should seem he was permitted to waver, that the remedy of penitence might be exhibited in the head of the Church, and that none should dare to trust in his own strength, when even the blessed Peter could not escape the danger of frailty. CHRYSOSTOM. But not once, but twice and thrice did he deny within a short time. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) We understand that having gone out after his first denial, the cock crowed the first time as Mark relates. CHRYSOSTOM. To shew that the sound did not keep him from denial, nor bring his promise to mind.

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

  songs he’d learned at Choate. We still sing them. After I went East to school my mother took a job in Washington, D.C. During the Christmas holidays Dwight trailed her there and tried to strangle her in the lobby of our apartment building. Just before she blacked out she kneed him in the balls. He hollered and let her go; then he grabbed her purse and ran. While all this went on I was sitting in our room, reading Hawaii and languidly pretending to believe that the strange noises I heard came from cats. The neighborhood was rough, and I had formed the habit of assigning all such sounds to inhuman origin. When my mother stumbled upstairs and told me what had happened, I tore off blindly down the street and was immediately collared by a plainclothesman who suspected me of another crime. By the time I got home Dwight had been arrested. He was standing outside with my mother and two cops, staring at the ground, the lights of the cruiser flashing across his face. “Bastard,” I said, but I said it almost gently, conscious of the falseness of my position. I had known someone was in trouble and had done nothing. Dwight raised his head. He seemed confused, as if he didn’t recognize me. He lowered his head again. His curly hair glistened with melting snowflakes. This was my last sight of him. My mother got a cease-and-desist order, and the police put him on a bus for Seattle the next morning. I DID NOT do well at Hill. How could I? I knew nothing. My ignorance was so profound that entire class periods would pass without my understanding anything that was said. The masters thought I was lazy, except for my English master, who saw that I loved books but had no way of talking about them beyond what I’d begun to learn from my brother. This man befriended me. He tutored me, cast me in some of the plays he directed, and tolerated the presumption his kindness sometimes gave rise to. But most of my teachers were clearly disappointed. It scared me to do so poorly when so much was expected, and to cover my fear I became one of the school wildmen—a drinker, a smoker, a make-out artist at the mixers we had with Baldwin and Shipley and Miss Fine’s. But that’s another story. If I worked hard I could just stay afloat; as soon as I relaxed I went under. When I felt myself going under I panicked and did wildman things that got me in trouble. My demerit count was almost always the highest in the class. While the boys around me nodded off during Chapel I prayed like a Moslem, prayed that I

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

  “Must’ve been good to get out.” “It was. Real good.” “Terrific,” Roy said. “Have a nice walk home?” She nodded. Roy smiled at me, and I gave in. I smiled back. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” Roy said to her. “Even your own kid knows what you’re up to.” He turned and walked back into the living room. My mother closed her eyes, then opened them again and went on stirring. It was one of those dinners where we didn’t talk. Afterward my mother got out her typewriter. She had lied about her typing speed in order to get work, and now her boss expected more from her than she could really do. That meant having to finish at night the reports she couldn’t get through at the office. While she typed, Roy glowered at her over the the rifles he was cleaning and I wrote a letter to Alice. I put the letter in an envelope and gave it to my mother to mail. Then I went to bed. Late that night I woke up and heard Roy’s special nagging murmur, the different words blurring into one continuous sound through the wall that separated us. It seemed to go on and on. Then I heard my mother say, Shopping! I was shopping! Can’t I go shopping? Roy resumed his murmur. I lay there, hugging the stuffed bear I was too old for and had promised to give up when I officially got my new name. Moonlight filled my room, an unheated addition at the rear of the apartment. On bright cold nights like this one I could see the cloud of my breath and pretend that I was smoking, as I did now until I fell asleep again. I WAS BAPTIZED during Easter along with several others from my catechism class. To prepare ourselves for communion we were supposed to make a confession, and Sister James appointed a time that week for each of us to come to the rectory and be escorted by her to the confessional. She would wait outside until we were finished and then guide us through our penance. I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems