Surprise
Rupture of expectation—events reorder faster than the narrative can catch up.
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From The Tides of Lust (1973)
Behold the foolish temerity of the man; what madness is necessary to call oneself the fountain of necromancy? —Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim to the mathematician and court astrologer, Johan Virdung, August 20, 1507 THREE FAUST IN ITALY Today, Wednesday after St. Vitus, 1528, one who calls himself Dr. Jorg Faustus of Heidelberg has been told to spend his penny elsewhere, and has promised not to resent or mock such summons of the authorities. —Record of expulsion from the minutes of the Town Council of Ingelstadt FOUR HOMUNCULI Oh, this is admirable! Here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and i’ faith I mean to search some circles for my own use. Now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure, stark naked before me; and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw before. —Marlowe, Doctor Faustus FIVE THE STONES OF ST. MARK I leave you free to choose whatever lie you think worthiest to be the truth. —My Faust, Paul Valéry SIX ALCHEMICA I knew a man named Faustus of Kundling, a little town near my home. When he studied at Cracow, he had learned magic, which was formerly keenly studied there and where public lectures were delivered about this art. Later he wandered about in many places and spoke about secret things. When he wanted to create a sensation in Venice, he announced that he was going to fly into the heavens. The Devil then lifted him up in the air, but let him fall to earth again, so that he nearly gave up the ghost again. —Johannas Manlius, 1565, Locorum Communium Colectunea SEVEN HARBOR OF THE SCORPION But Doctor Faustus within short time after he had obtained his degree fell into such fantasies and deep cogitations that he was marked of many, and of the most part of the students was called the Speculator. — The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faust (1592) THE SCORPION’s log: Perhaps this is a bad book. If there are bad things in this book then I should throw it in the water because I was afraid of what was on his face and because I was surprised and scared—I wasn’t surprised at Bull in fact I guess I’m glad—because I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. I didn’t feel sorry for him. And it would be too much trouble to have write this down then to tear it up. Or hire him. It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.
And he said: “Peace be to you! My peace I give to you!” And they all marveled and were afraid. The Savior laughed and said…. Philip said…. The Savior said…. [etc.] (The Sophia of Jesus Christ 90.14–92.6) If biography gospels give us twenty chapters before the resurrection, discourse gospels give us twenty chapters afterward. Biography-Discourse Gospels . The title given to the fourth and final type, biography-discourse gospels , emphasizes its polemically hybrid aspect. Once again two examples will suffice. But the content of those two examples is very different. The first example is the Epistula Apostolorum (or Epistle of the Apostles ). The discourse part of this document is far longer than its biography part, but the epistle tries, as it were, to subsume discourse within biography. The second example is John’s Preaching of the Gospel . The biography part of this document is slightly longer than its discourse part, but it tries, as it were, to subsume biography within discourse. The mid- to late-second-century Greek Epistula Apostolorum , extant now only in fairly early Coptic and very late Ethiopic translations (NTA 1.252–278), devotes nine of its fifty-one present units to biography: Epistula Apostolorum 3–12a summarize in swift outline the canonical gospel accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds, life and death, burial and resurrection. This outline is actually a catalogue of miracles. It begins with the virginal conception and Bethlehem birth, mentions Jesus studying letters but knowing them already, and then goes on to recount the stories of the wedding at Cana, the woman with a hemorrhage, the exorcism of Legion into the swine, the walking on the waters, and the multiplication of loaves and fishes. It concludes with the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and Archelaus (Antipas?), the burial, the women at the tomb (and Jesus’ appearances to them), the disbelief of the disciples, and, finally, Jesus’ appearance to them, despite the doubts of Peter, Thomas, and Andrew. In these few sections, the life and death of Jesus is swiftly summarized. But all the rest—Epistula Apostolorum 13–51—is a postresurrectional dialogue with repeated interchanges between the risen Jesus (“he said”) and the apostles (“we said”). Here, in 12a, is the point where biography gospel converts smoothly into discourse gospel (NTA 1.256): But we [touched] him that we might truly know whether he [had risen] in the flesh, and we fell on our [faces] confessing our sin, that we had been [un]believing. Then the Lord our redeemer said, “Rise up, and I will reveal to you what is above heaven and what is in heaven, and your rest that is in the kingdom of heaven. For my [Father] has given me the power to take up you and those who believe in me…. We answered…. Then he answered…. We said…. [etc.] (Epistula Apostolorum 12) Jesus even foretells, in Epistula Apostolorum 31–33, that Paul would persecute the church and be converted to become apostle to the pagans.
Of a truth it was he who then said that he was the Son of God.” (3) But how is he like the goat? For this reason: “The goats shall be alike, beautiful, and a pair,” in order that when they see him come at that time they may be astonished at the likeness of the goat. See then the type of Jesus destined to suffer. (4) But why is it that they put the wool in the middle of the thorns? It is a type of Jesus placed in the Church, because whoever wishes to take away the scarlet wool must suffer much because the thorns are terrible and he can gain it only through pain. Thus he says, “Those who will see me, and attain to my kingdom must lay hold of me through pain and suffering.” If, by the way, our eyes or heads are now spinning, that is part of the process. We are persuaded of the validity of the argument by the sheer difficulty in taking it apart. It is almost easier just to listen and nod or read and agree than to analyze, explore, and disentangle. Exegetical laminations such as the above were what certain learned followers of Jesus were creating in the years immediately after his death, and notice that it was passion and parousia rather than passion and resurrection on which they were concentrating. They were interested in linking the departure of Jesus on the cross to his return at the end of the world. That Day of Atonement symbolism, and other similar examples, are what the prophetic passion looked like for years and continued to look like for skilled exegetes long after the next stage, the narrative passion , developed and separated from it. How did that next stage develop? The intertextual dexterity of the Epistle of Barnabas 7 is quite brilliant, and it is also supportive or probative, from the Hebrew Scriptures, for the passion-parousia destiny of Jesus. But it can hardly be called a good story or even a narrative sequence, let alone a historical memoir. Something more is absolutely necessary to change exegesis into story; some model is required to change argument into narrative. Compare, for example and in contrast, the following historical anecdote. Philo of Alexandria, in Against Flaccus 32–39, recounts how the Alexandrian mob mocked the Jewish Agrippa I when, having been made king of the Jewish homeland by the emperor Caligula, he sailed home via Alexandria in August of 38 C.E . There was a certain lunatic Carabas, whose madness was not of the fierce and savage kind, which is dangerous both to the madmen themselves and those who approach them, but of the easy-going, gentler style. He spent day and night in the streets naked, shunning neither heat nor cold, made game of by the children and the lads who were idling about.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
It was an extraordinary development, this late-nineteenth-century revisionism. It is a revealing example of the intricate way in which American self-identity was shaped by an awareness of England. It involves some of the most celebrated historians of the time and some of the most obscure and strange. It starts with the magisterial figure of W. E. H. Lecky. Why Lecky, in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century,11 should have broken out of the existing orthodoxies to reach a breadth of view and a balance of judgment on the leaders of the American Revolution unknown before is not apparent from his published letters or from the History itself. It was not simply that he was a thorough and judicious scholar and responded open-mindedly to the wealth of documentation that had become available. The structure of the story was essentially clear in his mind before he saw the hundreds of volumes that are cited in his footnotes. Perhaps his being Irish—in his youth a fervent Irish patriot yet against home rule—helped broaden his view of colonial questions. But for whatever reason, his third and fourth volumes (1882), which cover the Revolution, presented the most carefully balanced assessment of its causes that had yet been seen, and flatly challenged the prevailing pieties. For Lecky agreed with the Tory view that “the American Revolution, like most others, was the work of an energetic minority, who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctuating majority to courses for which they had little love, and leading them step by step to a position from which it was impossible to recede.” The American people did not want independence; they wanted a redress of grievances, and “it was only very slowly and reluctantly that they became familiarized with the idea of a complete separation from England.” And then he wrote, in a passage on the loyalists that is central to his view of the Revolution and that would evoke the most fervent responses in America:
A reed shaking in the wind? [The implied answer is no.] Then tell me what you went out to see? A man in soft clothes? Look, those who wear soft clothes live in palaces. So what did you expect? A prophet? Yes, of course, and much more than a prophet.” In terms of format the saying is set up as an implicit dialogue; it is addressed to those presumably sympathetic to John. In terms of content the saying sets up a contrast between desert and palace and between their appropriate and expected inhabitants. But, while a prophet is clearly named as the one you expect to find in the desert, the palace dweller is not defined as king or courtier, ruler or minister. He is simply described, metaphorically, as one who bends to the prevailing wind and, literally, is dressed in soft or luxurious garments. But, even if that is a correct reading, why is the saying set up like that? Why compare and contrast the desert-dwelling prophet with, precisely, the palace-dwelling “man”? The only answer I can imagine is that the saying intends a comparison between John and Antipas and that it arose, directly and immediately, from the crisis engendered among his followers by John’s incarceration and execution. It reads like an attempt to maintain faith in John’s apocalyptic vision despite John’s own execution. What do you prefer: a dead Baptist or a living Antipas? Maybe Jesus was still with John when Antipas struck and that saying correctly summarized his initial defense of John despite the shock of his arrest. The second set is also found both in the Gospel of Thomas 46 and in the Q Gospel in Matthew 11:11 or Luke 7:28. Once again I give both versions, in that order. (1) Jesus said, “From Adam to John the Baptist, among those born of women, no one is so much greater than John the Baptist that the person’s eyes should not be averted [before him out of respect]. But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will know the kingdom and will become greater than John.” (2) “I am telling you, no one born of a woman is greater than John; yet the least in God’s realm is greater than he.” But that set seems to contradict the preceding one. The first set exalts John above Antipas, but the second set concludes by exalting anyone in the Kingdom of God above even John. That expression—the Kingdom of God—will require much more discussion in the next chapter, but for now I accept the second set of sayings as a startlingly paradoxical juxtaposition of greatest and least. Not John in the desert but the child in the Kingdom is the beginning of the future. Both those sets of sayings about John derive from the historical Jesus, and that leaves only one conclusion—namely, that between those twin assertions Jesus changed his view of John’s mission and message.
That is what challenges the given normalcy of audience expectations, hierarchical prejudices, and ethnic presuppositions. In summary, therefore, Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan in 10:30–35 must be read apart from those Lukan frames added before it (10:25–29) and after it (10:36–37). That is my first step. Then, having removed it from its literary context in the gospel of Luke, the second and equally important step is to replace it in its social context in the world of Jesus. First, in the Jewish homeland, the priest and the Levite—think of them as first-level and second-level clergy—represent the culturally given “good guys.” Priest and Levite versus Samaritan represent the positive and negative cultural polarities of first-century Jewish tradition. Similarly, gentry inside the coach and carriage workers outside the coach represent the social and cultural polarities of Fielding’s world. But the stories are turned on their head when the “good guys” act badly and the “bad guys” act well. Second, had Jesus intended an example parable about helping somebody in distress, he could easily have done so by telling his story with unspecified characters, such as: “A man was going down,…a first traveler,…a second traveler,…a third traveler.” Had he wanted to insist that such help applied even to enemies in distress, he could have done it: “A Samaritan was going down,…a first traveler,…a second traveler,…a third traveler.” Those would have been classic example parables, but as soon as Jesus specified the reputable clergy as nonhelpers and the disreputable Samaritan as helper, we have—as he intended—a classic challenge parable. Finally, one wonders why this was not clearly obvious throughout almost two millennia of Christian tradition—or even for Luke himself. It is because “good Samaritan” is—for us by now—a redundant cliché. It is simply a standard term for somebody who helps another in distress. It has long ago lost any hint of oxymoron—like, say, a square circle. We do not hear it as so many first-century Jewish ears would have—as a cultural paradox, a social contradiction in terms. For centuries before the time of Jesus, there had been tension between Jews and Samaritans, and a “good Samaritan” was more paradox than cliché. That tension started when Israel split into separate northern and southern kingdoms in the late 900s BCE . It intensified when the Assyrian Empire captured the northern kingdom in the late 700s BCE and the Babylonian Empire captured the southern kingdom in the early 500s BCE . It was an estrangement between descendants of the same ancestors, but by the first century it had hardened into ethnic, political, and religious animosity within the land of Israel. Think, for example, of this story: Jesus sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.
Compare, then, the following two endings of the Two Ways traditions as given in the Didache and the Teaching of the Apostles (which is as close as we can get to the former’s unredacted source): Teaching of the Apostles 5:2–6:1, 4 Didache 5:1–6:2 [A] Abstain, my son, from all these things. [A] May you be delivered, my children, from all these things. [B] And see that no one leads you astray from this Teaching; otherwise, you will be taught outside the true instruction. [B] Watch, lest anyone turn you away from this way of teaching, since such a person teaches you without regard for God; [C2 ] for, on the one hand, if you are able to carry the [entire] yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but, on the other, if you are not able, undertake that which you are able [to bear]. [C1 ] If you do these things daily with reflection, you will be near the Living God but if you do not do them, you will be far from the truth. Notice in passing (but recalling Rose-Gaier’s earlier point about the gendered equality of the Didach [image "image" file=Image00033.jpg] ), that difference in address between “my children” and “my son.” My main point, however, concerns a comparison of those twin conclusions. First, both agree in [A] on concluding the Way of Death with a general injunction against “all these things.” Next, both agree in [B] on a warning against anyone teaching apart from the Two Ways discipline just detailed. Finally, however, comes a very striking difference. The Teaching of the Apostles ends in good, disjunctive Two Ways style in C1 . It is an either/or with God and the truth on only one side of that choice. There are no in-betweens, no other options, no alternative selections. But, in C2 , Didache 6:2 omits any mention of that dichotomy and ends, instead, with a choice not between absolute Life and Death but between relative “being perfect” and “doing what you can.” Those latter options must certainly not refer to such deeds as magic or sorcery, abortion or infanticide, fornication or adultery, theft or murder. Those, surely, are not “Do what you can” situations. That distinction between “being perfect” and “doing what you can” refers. I suggest, to that earlier insertion at the start of the Didache’s Two Ways teaching. That initial redactional insertion in 1:3b–2:1 corresponds to this final redactional insertion in 6:2, and the opening “You will be perfect” in 1:4 corresponds with the closing “You will be perfect” in 6:2. It is those radical commands from the itinerant prophets that are accepted but contained, cited but controlled by that serene distinction between perfection and adequacy . When compared with an earlier Christian version of the Two Ways tradition, such as the Teaching of the Apostles , the Didache’s somewhat permissive conclusion is extremely surprising.
And that surprise is confirmed by a later Christian version of the Two Ways given in a document that uses the Didache as a source. The Apostolic Constitutions is a church-order document from the late fourth century that quotes the Didache as the basis for Book 7:1–32 (Funk 1:386–423). It cites, paraphrases, omits, and expands on its Didache source, but here is all it gives from Didache 6:2 (Funk 1:404): See that no one leads you astray from piety. Do not turn, it says, to the right or to the left from it, that in all things you may know what to do. Where you turn from the way of piety, you will be impious. (Apostolic Constitutions 7:19) That paraphrased version picks up only seven Greek words from Didache 6:2 (italicized above) and omits any mention of perfection versus adequacy. We are back again with a proper Two Ways disjunction between piety and impiety. Here, however, a cautionary note is necessary. The Didache is willing to be gentle and delicate in demanding full perfection of everyone. It is willing to take a “Do what you can” stance on these most difficult challenges. But it is not willing to create two classes of Christians, the “perfect” ones and the “ordinary” ones. All alike are called to perfection and should get as close to it as possible. One must take very seriously, therefore, this final warning in the apocalyptic section that concludes the Didache (Milavec 1989:100): The whole time of your faith will not be of any use to you if, in that last moment, you are not perfected. (Didache 6:2) Because that “you” is plural, the saying presses a little harder on the community as a whole than on isolated individuals. Still the Didache , even while containing those radical sayings within its own protective teaching, does not consider “perfection” something only for charismatic elites. It is something for all to strive after by doing “what you can.” Let us return for a moment to the subject of redemptive almsgiving, to address one final and very difficult question that this section has raised. Recall that recent phrase from Didache 4:5 about almsgiving as “atonement for one’s sins,” which I italicized above. The very idea of almsgiving comes not from Greco-Roman paganism but from Judaism. And so does the idea that almsgiving can be atonement for one’s sins, can gain remission from sins before God. It is from Judaism that early Christianity obtained both those ideas. But belief in redemptive almsgiving fits there in some tension with belief in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus. The retention and emphasis on redemptive almsgiving in early Christianity requires explanation beyond the obvious one of Jewish tradition. There were also all those hard sayings about poverty and possessions in the gospels. They could not be exactly ignored, but neither could they be exactly followed.
Ruth and Boaz are married, and their firstborn child is a son. That is, of course, the expected happy ending to this beautiful tale of fidelity to family and loyalty to tradition. This story, told so fully from a female viewpoint, ends with these lines: The women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.” Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse. The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David. (4:14–17) But that last line—indeed, that last word—is a very surprising conclusion to this pastoral idyll. We are suddenly and unexpectedly hurtled from private peasant story to public royal dynasty. Finally, that story has two striking aspects. One is that the audience is never allowed to forget that Ruth is a Moabite and not an Israelite woman. The word “Moab” is emphasized heavily at the start and finish of the story (1:1, 2, 6, 7, 22; 4:3, 5, 10). Ruth herself is identified as “a Moabite wife” (1:4), as “the Moabite who came back with Naomi from the country of Moab” (2:6), or more simply and regularly as “Ruth the Moabite” (1:22; 2:2, 21; 4:5, 10). Another is that there is a double emphasis on the descent of David, the once and future king of Israel, from Ruth and Boaz. Here is how the book concludes: The women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed; he became the father of Jesse, the father of David. Now these are the descendants of Perez: Perez became the father of Hezron, Hezron of Ram, Ram of Amminadab, Amminadab of Nahshon, Nahshon of Salmon, Salmon of Boaz, Boaz of Obed, Obed of Jesse, and Jesse of David. (4:17–22) We are told twice about that lineage of Obed to Jesse to David. We are told twice, therefore, that the Moabite woman Ruth was the great-grandmother of Israel’s ideal king. What has happened is that what we thought was an example parable —what happens if one is faithful to family and tradition?—has turned into a challenge parable —what happens if a Moabite woman is the ancestor of David? I turn now to see how short story becomes challenge parable. Imagine hearing that story within the historical matrix of the Persian restoration in the 500s and 400s BCE . The Persian Empire had placed the Jewish leaders Ezra and Nehemiah in charge, with an imperial mandate to restore their ancestral laws—as part of its program for all its newly acquired ex-Babylonian territories.
“The general principle,” as Daniel Schacter wrote recently, “that memories are not simply activated pictures in the mind but complex constructions built from multiple contributions … also applies to emotionally traumatic memories” (209). Case 2 . People, we are told, can recall with great accuracy where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, or the space shuttle Challenger ’s explosion on January 28, 1986. Those cases enlarge that individual memory of a traumatic pitching accident to a general remembrance of a traumatic national disaster. In 1977 two experimental psychologists, Roger Brown and James Kulik of Harvard University, coined the term “flashbulb memories” for recollections of “the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event” (73). A flashbulb memory is “very like a photograph that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each of us found himself when the flashbulb was fired” (74) and is “fixed for a very long time, and conceivably permanently, varying in complexity with consequentiality but, once created, always there, and in need of no further strengthening” (85). They even claimed a special biological mechanism for the specially vivid and detailed clarity of such specially imprinted memories. Thus, for example, thirteen years after President Kennedy’s assassination, only 1 percent of their respondents had forgotten the circumstances in which they first heard about it. Unfortunately, however, there was no way to test the detailed accuracy (as distinct from the detailed imagery) of those memories. No baseline of memory had been immediately established against which later memories could be tested for inconsistency. The morning after the Challenger explosion, the 106 students in Psychology 101 (“Personality Development”) at Emory University filled out questionnaires on how they had first heard of the disaster. That established a baseline for their memories within twenty-four hours of the event itself in January of 1986. Then, in October of 1988, the forty-four of 106 students still at Emory were requestioned (only 25 percent remembered the original questionnaire!) and their two answers compared. Finally, in March of 1989, follow-up interviews were given to the forty students willing to participate in the final phase of the experiment. Here is one example of two questionnaire answers from the same subject: Report of Memory After 24 hours (Jan. 1986) Report of Memory After 2½ years (Oct. 1988) I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that. When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked.
In fact, later tradition, in an attempt to solve this inequality, takes the term in the Latin translation of the New Testament, dives, which simply means “rich man,” and turns it into a proper noun, “Dives.” But here is what the parable actually says: There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. (Luke 16:19–21) I pause for a moment at that point in the parable. Notice that neither the rich man nor the poor man has done anything particularly moral or immoral. They are simply described economically rather than appraised morally . The parable continues: The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.” (Luke 16:22–25) The parable then continues with a request from the rich man that Lazarus be sent to warn his five brothers, but he is told: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (16:31). I bracket all of 16:27–31 as a Lukan addition based on postresurrection Christian experience in which it took both the interpretation of “Moses and the prophets” (24:27) and the recognized presence of Jesus himself (24:28–30) for “eyes to be opened” (24:31–32). Its presence does not, in any case, change my reading of the parable as a challenge. That story is actually an extremely surprising reversal of audience expectations. As I mentioned above, we are not told that the rich man did anything wrong or the poor man did anything right. Yet their roles in this world are reversed in the next world. Does that not challenge any world’s standard presumptions about the fortunate rich and the unfortunate poor? Is heaven and hell about rewards merited and punishments deserved or about simple reversals of earthly status? What if, in the next life, this life’s nonsuffering haves will become suffering have-nots and this life’s suffering have-nots will become nonsuffering haves . A simple reversal of fortune? Think about that for a moment! THINK, IN FACT, MORE widely about all the reversals of cultural normalcy and audience expectations in the parables of Jesus seen so far.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Whitbread says, I fail to see why you couldn’t greet them when they arrived, for God’s sake. Once the front door has opened and shut, Tiger slinks back in and slumps at my feet. After a while I smell coffee and bacon, and a while later, I see a wizened, disheveled old woman balding under her black hairnet. Slippers slide her up the hall across from me to the wet bar. (I’d later find out she’s the cook.) She opens the fridge and draws out a carton of eggnog, pouring herself a small punch cup full. How sweet, I think, they keep eggnog in the summer. Then she unscrews the top of a bottle of dark rum and upends it with both hands. She takes two long draws, then shuffles off.
From Come As You Are (2015)
the true story of sexAfter all the books that have been written about sex, all the podcasts and TV shows and magazine articles and radio Q&As, how can it be that we all still have so many questions? Well. The frustrating reality is we’ve been lied to—not deliberately, it’s no one’s fault, but still. We were told the wrong story. For a long, long time in Western science and medicine, women’s sexuality was viewed as Men’s Sexuality Lite—basically the same but not quite as good. For instance, it was just sort of assumed that since men have orgasms during penis-in-vagina sex (intercourse), women should have orgasms with intercourse, too, and if they don’t, it’s because they’re broken. In reality, about a quarter of women orgasm reliably with intercourse. The other 75 percent sometimes, rarely, or never orgasm with intercourse, and they’re all healthy and normal. A woman might orgasm lots of other ways—manual sex, oral sex, vibrators, breast stimulation, toe sucking, pretty much any way you can imagine—and still not orgasm during intercourse. That’s normal. It was just assumed, too, that because men’s genitals typically behave the way their minds are behaving—if a penis is erect, the person attached to it is feeling turned on—a woman’s genitals should also match her emotional experience. And again, some women’s do, many don’t. A woman can be perfectly normal and healthy and experience “arousal nonconcordance,” where the behavior of her genitals (being wet or dry) may not match her mental experience (feeling turned on or not). And it was also assumed that because men experience spontaneous, out-of-the-blue desire for sex, women should also want sex spontaneously. Again it turns out that’s true sometimes, but not necessarily. A woman can be perfectly normal and healthy and never experience spontaneous sexual desire. Instead, she may experience “responsive” desire, in which her desire emerges only in a highly erotic context. In reality, women and men are different. But wait. Women and men both experience orgasm, desire, and arousal, and men, too, can experience responsive desire, arousal nonconcordance, and lack of orgasm with penetration. Women and men both can fall in love, fantasize, masturbate, feel puzzled about sex, and experience ecstatic pleasure. They both can ooze fluids, travel forbidden paths of sexual imagination, encounter the unexpected and startling ways that sex shows up in every domain of life—and confront the unexpected and startling ways that sex sometimes declines, politely or otherwise, to show up. So… are women and men really that different?
Second, does that conjunction of the kingdom and challenge, of the kingdom as challenge, speak only to its earliest and most ancient Jewish hearers or also—and maybe even more so—to those of us who are today its latest and most modern Christian readers? CHAPTER 5Challenge Parables: Part IIILET ANYONE WITH EARS TO HEAR LISTEN ! IN 1973 I WAS AN associate professor at DePaul University in Chicago and had just published In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, the first in a series of books that would culminate with The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant in 1991. An editor from Argus Press asked me to write a more popular version of In Parables to be published in 1975. When finished, I called it The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, having borrowed part of that title from The Book of Hours, written by the Prague-born German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke from 1899 to 1903. For Rilke, the “dark interval” was the musical interval between the notes of life and death, which are so hard to reconcile, because “death’s note tends to dominate.” I did not, however, use Rilke’s phrase the same way in my title. I used it for the pause between hearing and understanding or reading and interpreting. I intended it as the holding moment between parable and interpretation or challenge and response. That title, The Dark Interval, referred more to those who heard the original oral version of the parables and had to interpret for themselves than to those who read them in later written versions, where they were already interpreted for them—and us—by evangelists and tradition. Reread, for example, that written version of the Good Samaritan in the last chapter. Time your reading. It will probably take you less than one minute. But that is a written plot summary, not an oral performance. Had Jesus told it like that, a cough from the audience could have ruined the key word, “Samaritan.” And, besides, an oral audience would have interrupted him with questions and objections, comments and disagreements. Give Jesus an hour, not just a minute, for that story. I also remember another but later request from my editor at Argus. Among the parables I discussed in the book was that of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. It opens like this: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector” (Luke 18:10). Before Jesus’s original audience even heard the rest of the parable, that opening juxtaposition would have made them immediately uneasy. I wanted my readers to sense that initial surprise. So I asked them to imagine a modern equivalent in which a Roman Catholic priest opens his Sunday sermon like this: “A pope and a pimp went into St. Peter’s to pray.” I asked them to think of representative “good” and “bad” characters in their own story world.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
My friend Clarice from grade school, Meredith from high school (in lawyer’s garb and big as a linebacker), Doonie with his whole tribe. There’s the judge Mother charmed into freeing me from jail—nearly a hundred, he is, his liver-spotted hand still clutching Mother’s, and he still gazes at her like she’s a jam-stuffed biscuit. The druggist, the guy who ran the lumberyard, girls who snubbed me at the skating rink, girls who didn’t . I feel every school photo I ever took pass over my face to melt into the forty-year-old I am now. Seen by so many pairs of old eyes, I become my every self. Then above the crowd, a disembodied head comes gliding as if carried on a pole. From the corner of my eye, I catch the silhouette, and my head whips to track it. The profile vanishes behind a pillar. The room around me clicks off as the face eases back into view—black-haired with snow at the temples. I stand so fast, the chair I’m in tips over. The crowd parts, and the eras collapse into each other. All the notches on the time line are stripped off like thorns. It’s Daddy approaching me like a smiling phantom. Though it’s not Daddy, of course, but my cousin Thomas, unseen since our grandpa’s funeral in sixth grade, wearing the exact face Daddy had at fifty, and Lecia must think so, too, since she’s rushed to his side, hand over her mouth. Maybe that day’s bounty bumped my sales up, plus Lecia’s inflicting copies on virtually everybody she knew—clients, friends, cleaning people. Out of the trunk of her car, she hawks them like a hot dog vendor (I swear), and being as she could sell snow to an Eskimo, she reorders often. In any bookstore, she remerchandises so that my book’s in front. So the book was a sleeper hit, which floored me. Before it came out, I’d actually warned the publisher not to print so many, since the thought of them growing cobwebs in warehouses flooded me with dread. Having spent my fifteen-year career reading to a few loyal pals, I was shocked to find that now bookstore crowds wrapped around the block as I signed till my hand cramped. Mail flooded in. Magazines would pay me astonishing sums to write a few thousand words. Lecia and Mother were wild with glee, my sister joking that I’d never have to call collect again. But in another way, nothing much changed. A single mom can’t hit the road and stay gone. Mostly I lived like before. I taught. I stood around a Little League field with a clipboard and a whistle around my neck. Maybe once a week, some mom might say she’d seen me in People magazine. Then once or twice a month I’d make a surreal overnight trip where I felt—as writer Ian McEwan once said—like an employee of my former self. The big win? Money. My bills were paid.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
There’s no map in my head either, just my torso leaning one direction or another. I follow a path straight as a spear to the pale brick schoolhouse, which now houses town offices. The heavy door closes behind us, and we’re sealed in with the odor of floor wax. As we look up the short stairway leading to a wall of coat hooks, it so exactly matches my recall that I feel a shock. It happened. Lecia seems enervated all of a sudden. She wants to go back to the motel, see if we can find something halfway decent to eat. I knew this would be hard for you, I say. She stares at me with cool brown eyes, saying, Then why the fuck did you bring me here? Back on the main drag, tourists are gleefully buying fool’s gold and Indian arrowheads and turquoise earrings. The house we lived in burnt to the ground, we find out. A neighbor lady doesn’t recall us, but she names the principal who lived across the road. Maneuvering back to the hotel, I walk us smack against the bar Mother once owned—a gift shop now. Or I claim it’s the same bar. Lecia says it isn’t. Hell no. (I remember one day at the bar: A horse had thrown Lecia, and she showed up with a broken collarbone, the sharp edge poking the thin flesh. Her blond hair was tugged back in a smooth ponytail, and her round eyes were dry of tears. Mother told her, Go stand under the wall dryer till it feels better. Does anybody have an aspirin? Nobody did, so I stood alongside her, the hand dryer blowing its hot wind on her clavicle.) On Lecia’s big black sunglasses, the bar’s doorway floats as if projected across a blindfold. She says, This isn’t it. Let’s go. She’s rooted before the door as if a force field holds her back. I point to the pink stucco hotel where we first stayed before Mother bought the house. We walked there with snow on our hooded fur coats. Back and forth we quibble. Still she refuses to go in. She’ll wait on the curb while I check with the shop owner. Yes, it used to be a bar, the lady says from her rice-powdered face with crinkles around her smiling eyes. Her capped teeth are big as chiclets. I step inside, thinking, How much smaller the large places are once we’re grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards. This was a harmless little gin mill once. The clerk confirms the layout in my head, that the bathroom is over there, and I push into the small gumball-blue room. There’s the spot where a wall dryer once hung. The raw hardware of its back plate faces across from a modern paper-towel holder.
From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done
To achieve the kind of transparency we have witnessed in the best teams, workers have to have avenues that allow them to communicate upward—not only with their team leader but with senior leadership—and know they are being heard. We’ve all seen fly-by attempts at connection from bosses. “Hihowareyouohgood” isn’t giving anyone a warm fuzzy feeling. Without real listening, employees who might want to offer up solutions about issues the company is facing will be discouraged to even try. A leader who was effective at this kind of upward communication was James Rogers, then president and CEO of Duke Energy. Rogers had a reputation for tackling hard topics, and he instituted “listening sessions” with groups of up to one hundred managers in three-hour meetings. You may have seen these kinds of gatherings with mixed results. Rogers’s sessions worked, perhaps because he began by asking everyone to grade him anonymously on electronic voting devices on a scale of A to F. The results immediately appeared on a screen for all to see. The grades were generally good, but less than half of employees were willing to give him an A. He took the feedback to heart and conducted this opening exercise each time they met. He would then ask open-ended questions about what they were seeing in the trenches and what he could do to help. Somewhat ironically, he found that “internal communication” was the area in which most of his managers thought he could improve upon. As Rogers found, upward feedback involves absorbing criticism even when it is direct and personal—and when those delivering it work for you. As he showed, that usually means applying the suggestions to improve your leadership style. And the only response that’s appropriate or necessary at the time is “Thanks for the feedback.” Ryan Westwood holds such open feedback sessions and says they can be eye-opening. “We once created a program to give out cash incentives to employees based on them getting further certifications. Our leadership team was really excited about it, and I shared the plan with a group of employees. They said, ‘Ryan, this is crap. None of us will respond to this.’ I was shocked.” Westwood asked the group what they would do instead, and with the advice he went back and the team redesigned the program. He said, “Those employees became champions because it was now their program. It was a huge success and we saw quadruple the number of employees getting certifications.” If there’s one positive aspect of uncertainty, it’s that it provides a logical rationale for why every voice is needed. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School told us, “If we had a perfect blueprint or a crystal ball as leaders, we wouldn’t need to hear from our people. It’s the existence of uncertainty that gives people permission to speak up, despite doubt. Uncertainty all but requires input from everyone. So as long as you acknowledge the uncertainty that lies ahead, it can be your friend in creating psychological safety.”
From Martin Luther (2016)
LUTHER DESCENDED FROM his island in the sky on March 1, 1522. About two days into the trip, he came to the town of Jena, where he stayed at the Black Bear Inn. Johannes Kessler, a nineteen-year-old student from St. Gall, Switzerland, was also staying there. Kessler was headed to Wittenberg too, traveling with a fellow student, Wolfgang Spengler. Kessler wrote a firsthand account of his time at the inn, saying that he and Spengler observed a knight at a table, dressed in a scarlet-red doublet with woolen breeches and wearing a red hat. One hand touched the pommel of his sword, the other held a book, which they observed to be a Hebrew Psalter. How curious for a knight to be reading such a book! But the mysterious knight bade them join him and asked whether they knew anything about the nascent Reformation. They certainly did. As it happened, they were themselves headed to Wittenberg. At some point in their conversation, they inquired after the famous Martin Luther, asking whether he was then at Wittenberg. The knight volunteered that he could with certainty say that Luther was not at Wittenberg but would soon be. And he told them that when they reached that fair city, they must send greetings to Schurff from “the one who is to come.”1 At some point, the innkeeper took the young men aside and told them the man with whom they were eating was none other than Luther himself, but they mustn’t let on that they knew, because he was traveling incognito, no thanks to this blabbering innkeeper. But the students didn’t believe this preposterous claim, assuming the ill-informed innkeeper had mistaken the name of Ulrich von Hutten—who they knew was a real knight and a friend of the Reformation—for Luther’s and that this knight, conversant in the things of the budding Reformation, therefore must be he. But when they arrived at Wittenberg on March 8, they gave their letters of introduction to Hieronymus Schurff and soon afterward were introduced to Melanchthon, Nicholas von Amsdorf, and Justus Jonas. And then they met Luther too. Here he was in his natural habitat—sans beard and doublet. They were taken aback to understand that this smooth-shaven monk was indeed the same figure with whom they had spoken at the Black Bear Inn. Eventually, Kessler would return home to become a noted reformer in his native Switzerland. Before his arrival in Wittenberg, on March 5, Luther came to the town of Borna, near Leipzig. There he stayed at the nobleman von der Strassen’s home, where he wrote the following letter to Frederick. It has become one of his most famous. “I wrote for your sake,” he began, “not for mine.”
From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done
We’ve all seen fly-by attempts at connection from bosses. “Hihowareyouohgood” isn’t giving anyone a warm fuzzy feeling. Without real listening, employees who might want to offer up solutions about issues the company is facing will be discouraged to even try. A leader who was effective at this kind of upward communication was James Rogers, then president and CEO of Duke Energy. Rogers had a reputation for tackling hard topics, and he instituted “listening sessions” with groups of up to one hundred managers in three-hour meetings. You may have seen these kinds of gatherings with mixed results. Rogers’s sessions worked, perhaps because he began by asking everyone to grade him anonymously on electronic voting devices on a scale of A to F. The results immediately appeared on a screen for all to see. The grades were generally good, but less than half of employees were willing to give him an A. He took the feedback to heart and conducted this opening exercise each time they met. He would then ask open-ended questions about what they were seeing in the trenches and what he could do to help. Somewhat ironically, he found that “internal communication” was the area in which most of his managers thought he could improve upon. As Rogers found, upward feedback involves absorbing criticism even when it is direct and personal—and when those delivering it work for you. As he showed, that usually means applying the suggestions to improve your leadership style. And the only response that’s appropriate or necessary at the time is “Thanks for the feedback.” Ryan Westwood holds such open feedback sessions and says they can be eye-opening. “We once created a program to give out cash incentives to employees based on them getting further certifications. Our leadership team was really excited about it, and I shared the plan with a group of employees. They said, ‘Ryan, this is crap. None of us will respond to this.’ I was shocked.” Westwood asked the group what they would do instead, and with the advice he went back and the team redesigned the program. He said, “Those employees became champions because it was now their program. It was a huge success and we saw quadruple the number of employees getting certifications.” If there’s one positive aspect of uncertainty, it’s that it provides a logical rationale for why every voice is needed. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School told us, “If we had a perfect blueprint or a crystal ball as leaders, we wouldn’t need to hear from our people. It’s the existence of uncertainty that gives people permission to speak up, despite doubt. Uncertainty all but requires input from everyone. So as long as you acknowledge the uncertainty that lies ahead, it can be your friend in creating psychological safety.” Communication is key in the process, Camaraza said to us. “In our team we listen and we explain.
From Martin Luther (2016)
Because he knew that it might be some time until he heard back from Albrecht, Luther also sent the theses to his friend Johannes Lang in Erfurt and some others. These were academic allies and friends he respected, and Luther doubtless thought sending the theses to them would help stir a debate and would lead toward dealing with the issues at hand more generally. The Nuremberg Humanist and printer Christopher Scheurl was impressed with what he read and thought that the theses should be reprinted, and without the fussy legality of needing to obtain copyright permissions, he simply printed them himself, right there in his own town of Nuremberg, instantly ensuring that they would have a dramatically wider reading. In this way, the horse snuck out of the barn, because once the theses were circulating, the whole controversy would take on a life of its own. But Luther did not realize this at the time, having never lived through anything like this before—and who had? After Scheurl had the theses reprinted in Nuremberg, other editions were soon printed in Basel and Leipzig too. In fact, the Basel edition was produced in an elegant pamphlet form, which promptly catapulted it into the intellectual jet stream and guaranteed it a far speedier and wider circulation. Where the theses went after that, no one can say. They were like milkweed seeds borne aloft by the wind, and they floated far beyond the borders of Saxony and Germany and settled everywhere. In January, they were translated into German, which infinitely multiplied their reach and started even non-academics jabbering with conviction and fire. By March 1518, even Erasmus himself had gotten his hands on a copy. And he sent it along to his friend Thomas More in England, which is how it fell under the wandering eyes of King Henry VIII, who would have something to say about it in due time, and nothing very nice. The speed with which Luther’s theses spread was simply unprecedented in the history of the world. The advent of printing had changed everything, but no one understood that yet, so what happened now stunned everyone, and it certainly concerned Luther. That March, he wrote to Scheurl: