Surprise

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I had two middlemen working for me in my CD business, Bongani and Tom. They sold the CDs that I copied in exchange for a cut. I met Tom at the arcade at the Balfour Park mall. Like Teddy, he lived nearby because his mom was a domestic worker. Tom was in my grade but went to a government school, Northview, a proper ghetto school. Tom handled my CD sales over there. Tom was a chatterbox, hyperactive and go-go-go. He was a real hustler, too, always trying to cut a deal, work an angle. He could get people to do anything. A great guy, but fucking crazy and a complete liar as well. I went with him once to Hammanskraal, a settlement that was like a homeland, but not really. Hammanskraal, as its Afrikaans name suggests, was the kraal of Hamman, what used to be a white man’s farm. The proper homelands, Venda and Gazankulu and Transkei, were places where black people actually lived, and the government drew a border around them and said, “Stay there.” Hammanskraal and settlements like it were empty places on the map where deported black people had been relocated. That’s what the government did. They would find some patch of arid, dusty, useless land, and dig row after row of holes in the ground—a thousand latrines to serve four thousand families. Then they’d forcibly remove people from illegally occupying some white area and drop them off in the middle of nowhere with some pallets of plywood and corrugated iron. “Here. This is your new home. Build some houses. Good luck.” We’d watch it on the news. It was like some heartless, survival-based reality TV show, only nobody won any money. One afternoon in Hammanskraal, Tom told me we were going to see a talent show. At the time, I had a pair of Timberland boots I’d bought. They were the only decent piece of clothing I owned. Back then, almost no one in South Africa had Timberlands. They were impossible to get, but everyone wanted them because American rappers wore them. I’d scrimped and saved my tuck-shop money and my CD money to buy them. As we were leaving, Tom told me, “Be sure to wear your Timberlands.” The talent show was in this little community hall attached to nothing in the middle of nowhere. When we got there, Tom was going around, shaking hands, chatting with everybody. There was singing, dancing, some poetry. Then the host got up onstage and said, “Re na le modiragatsi yo o kgethegileng. Ka kopo amogelang...Spliff Star!” “We’ve got a special performer, a rapper all the way from America. Please welcome...Spliff Star!” Spliff Star was Busta Rhymes’s hype man at the time. I sat there, confused. What? Spliff Star? In Hammanskraal?

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Her family had laughed, entertained by their friend’s outrageousness. One of his parlor tricks over the years had been to read aloud the love letters women had written him. They remembered the young wife, asked about her, but this was all he knew, this random encounter. I watch Emily’s face. She said he drank too much, that he’d spent time in federal prison, had fallen off a ladder onto his head, that his memory was gone. He claimed to have written a novel but no one had ever seen it. She says the name of the novel— The Button Man. The party moves to other stories, its white noise washes over me. I sit back in my armchair, look at each face, try to piece it together. Emily and I had gotten together over a year before, had stayed together for a while, were still close. And now my father, who I don’t think about much at all, aside from the infrequent letter, turns out to be a close friend of Emily’s family. Her parents, I will later learn, are Ray and Clare, whose names I’ve never heard before, though they remember me. After a few minutes I tap Emily’s shoulder. That guy you were talking about, I say, that’s my father . I’m known to not always speak the truth, but still she stares at me in horror. I’m serious , I say.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  37 applauds everything in Sanders’ book except its view of Paul. This view Dunn considers retrograde, inferior even to the old Lutheran Paul. 64 An even bigger surprise is Dunn’s reason: “The Lutheran Paul has been replaced by an idiosyncratic Paul who in arbitrary and irrational manner turns his face against the glory and greatness of Judaism’s covenant theology and abandons Judaism simply because it is not Christianity.” 65 Dunn imagines Paul as only one of a class of Jews who became Christ-followers, who must all have had similar reasons for doing so. 66 This assumption leads him to reject Sanders’ “arbitrary and abrupt discontinuity between Paul’s gospel and Jewish past.” Dunn prefers to see Paul as reasoning himself into following Christ from scripture, as a Jew concerned only about the too-narrow “nationalist and racial” character of contemporary Judaism. Being committed to ancestral tradition, Dunn proposes, Paul saw Christ as a means of dropping the “badges” of Jewish exclusivity. “Logic,” “argument,” and “corollaries” appear more than half a dozen times each in the famous lecture’s latter part. But the ancient recipients of Paul’s letters, who were perhaps more willing than modern professors to believe that God spoke to people, might not have found Paul’s move (according to Sanders) so strange. Is it arbitrary or irrational to do what God tells you? The author of Acts actually thematizes necessary obedience to divine instruction, irrespective of human preference, to explain Christian origins—and uses Paul as Exhibit A (9:3–19; 26:19). Should Paul have remonstrated with the divine presence: “Well I’m flattered, but could you offer a seminar for me and my Jewish friends? If you can convince us that this is all grounded in scripture, and if we can all be apostles (I wouldn’t wish to be idiosyncratic), I’ll consider your offer”? Dunn’s assumption that Paul was one of a class, the members of which must have followed Christ from similar reasoning, seems to me controverted by nearly every line from Phil 3:2 through Gal 6, with Romans in the bargain. Paul’s claims of personal selection, revelation, and unique authority leap out everywhere: “When the one who had set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me ... was pleased to reveal his son in me, that I might proclaim him among the nations, I did not consult with flesh and blood” (Gal 1:15–16). “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus ...? Are you not my work in the lord? ... You are the seal of my apostleship!” (1 Cor 9:1). “Last of all ... he appeared to me. ... I am what I am ... I struggled far more than all of them [apostles] put together’ (15:8, 10). “I reckon myself in no way behind the oh-so-grand apostles” (2 Cor 11:5). No less, Paul speaks pervasively of abrupt change, novelty, and disjunction: “If one is in Christ, it’s a new creation. The old things went away. Look: new things have come to be!” (Gal 6:15). He formerly pursued the ancestral traditions with zeal, but now regards those who read scripture without Christ as veiled and blinded by “the god of this age” (2 Cor 3:17–4:4). If Paul’s Announcement had been more in the vein of “I’m OK, you’re OK,” or “You know, I’ve discovered a new reading of Isaiah,” it would surely not have generated such urgency—or intense controversy.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward. In the next yard, a neighbor starts up his leaf blower. The leaves flutter and land in the street with a series of little clicks. When Paul bends to tug at a braid of ragweed, the photo in his pocket falls out, landing faceup on the grass. A black-and-white Polaroid, slightly larger than a box of matches, it shows a group of young people with faces smeared by laughter. Despite Paul’s quickness—sticking it back in his pocket soon as it lands—I make out the two faces I know too well: Paul and Lan, their arms around each other, eyes burning with an exuberance so rare it looks fake. In the kitchen, Paul pours me a bowl of Raisin Bran with water—just how I like it. He plops down at the table, takes off his cap, and reaches for one of the already rolled joints lined, like thin sticks of packaged sugar, inside a porcelain teacup. Three years ago, Paul was diagnosed with cancer, something he believed was brought on by his contact with Agent Orange during his tour. The tumor was on the nape of his neck, right above the spinal cord. Luckily, the doctors caught it before it invaded his brain. After a year of failed chemotherapy, they decided to operate. The whole process, from diagnosis to remission, took nearly two years. Leaning back now in his chair, Paul cups a flame in his palm and pulls it through the joint’s length. He sucks, the tip intensifying as I watch. He smokes the way one smokes after a funeral. On the kitchen wall behind him are colored-pencil drawings of Civil War generals I had made for a school project. You had sent them to Paul months earlier. The smoke blows across the primary-colored profile of Stonewall Jackson, then fades. Before bringing me to Paul’s, you sat me down on your bed back in Hartford, took a long drag on your cigarette, and just said it. “Listen. No, look at me right here, I’m serious. Listen.” You put both hands on my shoulder, the smoke thickening around us. “He’s not your grandfather. Okay?” The words entered me as if through a vein. “Which means he’s not my father either. Got it? Look at me.” When you’re nine, you know when to shut your mouth, so I did, thinking you were only upset, that all daughters must say this, at some point, of their fathers. But you kept going, your voice calm and cool, like stones being laid, one by one, upon a long wall. You said that when Lan met Paul that night in the bar in Saigon, Lan was already four months pregnant. The father, the real one, was just another American john—faceless, nameless, less. Except for you. All that remains of him is you, is me. “Your grandfather is nobody.” You sat back, the cigarette returned to your lips.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Kathleen Enstice, a forensic pathologist who worked for the state, was summoned to exhume the infant’s body. Marsha was shocked that law enforcement would do something so upsetting without justification. As soon as the baby was exhumed but before she had an opportunity to formally examine the body, Enstice told an investigator that she believed that the baby had been born alive. She later conceded that she had no basis for such an opinion and that without an autopsy and tests there was no way she could know if a baby had been born alive. As it turned out, Enstice had a history of prematurely and incorrectly declaring deaths to be homicides without adequate supporting evidence. The pathologist subsequently performed an autopsy at the Department of Forensic Sciences laboratory in Mobile. She not only concluded that Marsha Colbey’s baby was born alive but also asserted that the child would have survived with medical attention. Even though most experts agree that forensic pathologists—who primarily deal with dead people—are not qualified to estimate survival chances, the State allowed prosecutors to pursue criminal charges. Unbelievably, Marsha Colbey—a few short weeks after delivering her stillborn son—found herself arrested and charged with capital murder. Alabama is among the growing list of states that make the murder of a person under the age of fourteen a capital offense punishable by the death penalty. The child-victim category resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of young mothers and juveniles who were sent to death row. All five women on Alabama’s death row were condemned for the unexplained deaths of their young children or the deaths of abusive spouses or boyfriends—all of them. In fact, nationwide, most women on death row are awaiting execution for a family crime involving an allegation of child abuse or domestic violence involving a male partner. At trial, Kathleen Enstice testified that Timothy was born alive and had died by drowning. She testified that her conclusion of a live birth was a “diagnosis of exclusion”—that is, she could not find evidence that the baby was stillborn and did not have another explanation for his death. Her testimony was exposed as unreliable by the State’s own expert witness, Dr. Dennis McNally, an obstetrician/gynecologist who examined Mrs. Colbey two weeks after the stillbirth. Dr. McNally testified that Mrs. Colbey’s pregnancy was at high risk for “unexplained fetal death” because of her age and lack of prenatal care. Enstice’s conclusion was further discredited by Dr. Werner Spitz, who had authored the medical treatise Enstice had relied on in her forensic pathology training. Dr.

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

  õ Government officials saw churches and older universities as relics of the Middle Ages that needed serious reform if they were to contribute to “modern” German civilization. The officials wanted a somewhat scientific inquiry system that did not follow rules set by theology, but relied instead on assumptions and methods independent from religious authorities to investigate subjects. õ The aim of this systematic inquiry, or Wissenschaft, was to push the boundaries of human knowledge, to question everything, and to get down to the foundations of how and why humans live and think as they do. õ The state encouraged an approach to theology that Prussian bureaucrats considered “scientific.” That meant dropping the intramural debates about, for example, infant baptism and focusing on big questions that bring modern historical discoveries to bear on religious subjects, even if it sometimes meant upsetting church authorities. The approach used by biblical scholars like Strauss is called higher biblical criticism. BRITISH DEBATES õ Strauss’s The Life of Jesus hit British intellectual culture like a lightning bolt in 1846, when it was first translated into English. The translator was Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pseudonym George Eliot. õ But by the time that Strauss’s book reached English-speaking readers, calls for reform in higher education were getting louder. Some wanted to import the German model wholesale. Others, like John Henry Newman, an Anglican theologian who converted to Catholicism, believed that the German model was disastrous. He said that the university had no place doing original research; that was the job of academic societies like the Royal Society. Newman thought that university professors should focus on teaching and passing down Christian values to the next generation. 204 The History of Christianity II õ In 1860, a book with the innocuous title Essays and Reviews stirred up a huge debate over whether and how religion should be taught at British universities, especially Oxford. The seven contributors to the volume were all Christians who exhorted the reader to study scripture. But the big takeaway was that in the modern, 19th-century British university, religion belonged as an object of study like anything else. Faculty should not approach it as a set of doctrines to inculcate into students. DARWIN AND EVOLUTION õ In 1859, Charles Darwin published the bombshell work On the Origin of Species. The book grew from his voyage as a young man on the HMS Beagle, which sailed from the coasts of Latin America and the Galapagos Islands west to the waters around Australia, to Cape Town, and all the way back to the port of Plymouth. The trip took almost five years. Lecture 21—The Church’s Encounter with Modern Learning 205

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  another way to think of fire In making the documentary I find one of my mother’s ex-boyfriends in a retirement community in Florida—acre upon acre of identical attached houses, seemingly held together by golf. Vernon had been the carpenter she’d been with when our house burned down, married with a couple kids. He left his family for my mother, and all he will say about it when I meet him is that it had been wrong. A Roman Catholic led astray by a disbeliever. Vernon is the only one who won’t allow me to videotape him, or even record his voice. I got his address from his second wife. He’d become a recluse, she said, refusing to see even his own children. I remember he and my mother being together for five years, though he claims it was only two. I remember hanging off his neck, I remember watching him shave. He turned on the window washer in his car once and told me ours was the only car it rained on, and I believed him. Surprised to see me after thirty years, but he invites me in and we talk for three hours without a break. He digs out a photograph he took of me sitting beside my mother in 1965, the first photograph I’ve ever seen of the two of us together from when I was that young. She looks calm. I look like there’s a coiled spring inside me and I’m about to shoot off into outerspace. I tell him I remember how he rebuilt our house after the raccoons burned it down, and he laughs. Raccoons, Vernon guffaws, raccoons? Outside the white Florida sky bears down on hapless golfers. Raccoons didn’t burn down your house , he clucks, your mother did . He describes the house, before the fire, as even worse a ruin than I remember. All it needed was a match , he says. My mother had developed a flirtatious relationship with an insurance agent, Vernon claims, got the house covered for more than it was worth. The night of the fire my mother was wide awake in bed beside him at two in the morning. She smelled smoke before there was any smoke, he insists. Half an hour later smoke filled the downstairs. They ran into the room my brother and I slept in and carried us outside, the house now thick with it.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  applauds everything in Sanders’ book except its view of Paul. This view Dunn considers retrograde, inferior even to the old Lutheran Paul. 64 An even bigger surprise is Dunn’s reason: “The Lutheran Paul has been replaced by an idiosyncratic Paul who in arbitrary and irrational manner turns his face against the glory and greatness of Judaism’s covenant theology and abandons Judaism simply because it is not Christianity. ”65 Dunn imagines Paul as only one of a class of Jews who became Christ-followers, who must all have had similar reasons for doing so. 66 This assumption leads him to reject Sanders’ “arbitrary and abrupt discontinuity between Paul’s gospel and Jewish past.” Dunn prefers to see Paul as reasoning himself into following Christ from scripture, as a Jew concerned only about the too-narrow “nationalist and racial” character of contemporary Judaism. Being committed to ancestral tradition, Dunn proposes, Paul saw Christ as a means of dropping the “badges” of Jewish exclusivity. “Logic,” “argument,” and “corol aries” appear more than half a dozen times each in the famous lecture’s latter part. But the ancient recipients of Paul’s letters, who were perhaps more willing than modern professors to believe that God spoke to people, might not have found Paul’s move (according to Sanders) so strange. Is it arbitrary or irrational to do what God tel s you? The author of Acts actual y thematizes necessary obedience to divine instruction, irrespective of human preference, to explain Christian origins—and uses Paul as Exhibit A (9:3–19; 26:19). Should Paul have remonstrated with the divine presence: “Well I’m flattered, but could you offer a seminar for me and my Jewish friends? If you can convince us that this is all grounded in scripture, and if we can all be apostles (I wouldn’t wish to be idiosyncratic), I’ll consider your offer”? Dunn’s assumption that Paul was one of a class, the members of which must have followed Christ from similar reasoning, seems to me controverted by nearly every line from Phil 3:2 through Gal 6, with Romans in the bargain. Paul’s claims of personal selection, revelation, and unique authority leap out everywhere: “When the one who had set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me … was pleased to reveal his son in me, that I might proclaim him among the nations, I did not consult with flesh and blood” (Gal 1:15–16). “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus …? Are you not my work in the lord? … You are the seal of my apostleship!” (1 Cor 9:1). “Last of all … he appeared to me. … I am what I am

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  At first you may find it difficult to differentiate between sensations, emotions and thoughts. Give yourself time as you accept the perplexity of this challenge. With practice you will become much more clear and adept at untangling the various aspects of body/mind. Trust that over time your steadfastness will bring with it, potentially, rich opportunities for extending your experiential edge. Exercise 3: Focusing on One Element of Experience This time as you explore your experience, notice and label your sensations, images and thoughts as they come into your awareness. When you peek inside, notice which of these three elements appears to be most salient. Then, one by one, shift your attention by focusing exclusively on images, then on physical sensations, next on feelings, and finally on thoughts. It is possible that certain experiences will just pop up into awareness from seemingly out of nowhere. This may surprise or even startle you and cause your “thinking mind” to jump in and try to understand what is going on. Resist this habit. It will take you away from the developing focal experience. Such seduction by the mind is to be expected. Each time this happens, simply and gently remind yourself, “This is what I am experiencing now,” and then bring yourself back to the picture, sensation or feeling that you were experiencing before you were lured into thought. As you continue focusing, your images, sensations or feelings may expand, deepen or change. Softly say to yourself, “Now I am aware that ...” You are likely to try to figure out what is going on or try to remember what you think may be a memory from the past. The idea is not to try to “remember” anything (repressed or otherwise); though it is entirely possible that some sort of “revivification” may occur spontaneously. The key is to bring yourself back to the present with the gentle words, “Now I am aware that ...” as you continue to follow your internal experience in the here and now. The tendency is to be drawn to the revivification, especially when traumatic material is involved. It turns out, however, that a key to processing traumatic material successfully (as well as avoiding the pitfalls of so-called false memories) is in cultivating the ability to hold a dual consciousness with an emphasis on the sensations, feelings, images and thoughts that are unfolding in the here and now. When this is done, fragmented sensory elements, which make up the core of trauma, become gradually integrated into a coherent experience. It is this transformation that healing trauma is all about; it is not about “remembering” per se, but gradually moving out of fixity and fragmentation into flow and wholeness. Discussion You may (unless you are extremely obsessive) have found it maddeningly difficult to stay focused on a sensation (or image) without drifting off into thought. For these exercises to take hold, you will need to regularly set some time to practice (generally from five or ten minutes to an hour).

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Needless to say, Freud’s theory was not well received by the professional community, many of them doctors, bankers and lawyers. Most of them were fathers as well. From what is now known about the prevalence of sexual abuse, some of them almost certainly had been guilty of incest themselves. For this and other reasons, Freud backed away both from the seduction theory (as it was ironically labeled) as well as from his therapeutic method of uncovering repressed memories in order to relive them through strong emotional catharsis. In what must have been a profound betrayal to many of his patients, Freud began to interpret their symptoms not as deriving from sexual violation, but as being rooted instead in their childhood “oedipal” wishes, fantasies to have sex with the parent of the opposite gender. Freud may have also been unnerved when, during the intense cathartic reliving, patients would frequently transfer those (alleged) oedipal lusts onto him. Freud, with a discomfort in his own sexuality, appears to have shrunk from staying present with his patients’ confused, volatile sexuality and, thusly, betrayed them in yet another way. For these and other reasons, it appears that Freud abandoned the “hypno-abreactive” techniques in favor of free association to “help” the patient become conscious of their oedipal wishes and then to (somehow) sublimate these infantile “lusts.” In this way, Freud believed that by recognizing their fantasies, his patients’ neuroses could be transformed to “ordinary suffering.” A contemporary (Pierre Janet140) and a student (Wilhelm Reich) of Freud saw things differently. The Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich was convinced that his teacher had made a terrible mistake on two accounts. First, Reich believed that neurosis arose both from real events as well as from deep conflicts. Secondly, he was adamant that cure could only be realized when there was a powerful emotional release at the same time as the patient remembered a traumatic event. However, Reich went further than Freud in his treatment. He clearly recognized that the painful emotions evoked in reliving traumas had to be replaced (in the course of treatment) with deeply pleasurable sensations in order for health to be restored and maintained. Reich also believed that repression, of both the negative emotions as well as the pleasurable ones, was a physical reality, manifest in chronically tight and spastic muscles. These bodily restrictions caused constrained breathing and awkward, uncoordinated or robotic movements. He named this muscular rigidity character armor and perceived it as a mechanism having two unitary functions. While enabling the emotional component of the memory to be repressed, it also stifled the capacity to feel pleasurable sensations.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  7 This paper, which I discuss in Chapter 4, gave me the key that allowed me to weave observations of my body-mind clients (like Nancy) with an appreciation for how certain fear-based survival instincts both shape trauma and inform its healing. I was fortunate to have the freedom to speculate in this manner since trauma had not yet been formally defined as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and would not be for over a decade. For this reason, I am happy to say, I never pigeonholed trauma as a reified and incurable disease, as it became known in the early PTSD literature. A synchronous and full-cycle return occurred several years ago. I was presenting my work at a conference titled “Frontiers in Psychotherapy,” put on by the Psychiatry Department at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. At the end of my talk, a lively, impish man jumped up to introduce himself: “Hi, I’m Jack Maser!” I shook my head, dubious at first; not quite believing my ears, I burst into spontaneous laughter. After exchanging a few words, we arranged to lunch together. At this time he shared with me his delight in discovering that his animal work had found a clinical application in real-life therapy. I was sort of a clinical godchild to his experimental godfather. In 2008, Jack Maser forwarded to me an article that he and a colleague, Stephen Bracha, had just published. In this article they proposed a fundamental change to the “Bible” of psychiatric diagnosis. They wanted to include the concept of tonic immobility in explaining trauma. 8 My jaw dropped so far that a bird might have flown in and nested there. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, is the encyclopedic book that psychologists and psychiatrists use to diagnose “mental disorders,” including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. (The DSM is now in its “IV-R” edition, the “R” denoting a partial revision of the fourth edition.) The next edition—the DSM- V—will (ideally) be a significant step forward. The previous versions of the PTSD diagnosis have been careful not to suggest a mechanism (or even a theory) to explain what happens in the brain and body when people become traumatized. This absence is important for more than academic reasons: a theory suggests rationales for treatment and prevention. This avoidance, and sole reliance on taxonomy, is an understandable overreaction to the Freudian theory’s previous stranglehold on psychology. I believe that it is only with intimate collaboration that science and praxis will co-evolve into a lively, vibrant partnership capable of generating truly innovative therapies.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Beginning meditators are often painfully surprised at the tumultuous activity of their minds. Thoughts, sensations, feelings, fears and desires chaotically pursue each other like dogs obsessively chasing their tails. However, as they gain some steadiness in awareness, practiced meditators start taming their restless minds. They begin having extended periods when they are not sucked into the endless swirling vortex of their frenzied thoughts and emotions. In place of this turbulent state a sublime inquisitiveness about moment-to-moment experience begins to develop. They start to investigate the “how” of each arising moment, as well as their reactivity to various thoughts, sensations, feelings and situations. They settle into the mysterium tremendum of “no-self.” In the words of the meditator, “One must be present, and it is not always useful to begin the past all over in order to live in the present.” One of the greatest barriers to being fully present is the habit of accepting what one does deliberately (i.e., “on purpose”) “as the last word” instead of only one mode, rather than including what occurs spontaneously. For growth and development, any live organism and its supporting environment must be in intimate contact. However, because of our cultural conditioning, as well as frightening and aversive events from the past, we have learned to block this organic flow. Perhaps the most concrete reason to pay attention to your body is that it is a ready tool to resolve various physical, emotional and psychological symptoms. However, such a “cure” is not a treatment in the traditional sense. It is not a mere alleviation of symptoms. Rather, it is a descent into the parts of our being that are alien, that we might prefer not to deal with—the parts of ourselves that we have split off from and, at one point, “chosen” to deposit out of sight and touch. They are concealed in the world of “non-experience.” Absent Body, Present BodyYou walk into the kitchen. There, sitting in a bowl on the kitchen table, is the “perfect” apple. Its color, shape and size make you want to reach out and hold it in your hands. You do just that, and then notice its solid weight, fragrant smell and smooth texture. Already saliva begins to form in your mouth, and your viscera gently gurgle. You bring the apple to your mouth, open your jaws and take a powerful bite. As you start to chew, saliva flows copiously from your glands. The sweet and tangy taste is almost orgasmic. You continue to chew. The apple liquefies, and you acquiesce to the reflex to swallow. When the fruit moves through the throat, and begins its slide down the esophagus, perhaps you have the physical sensations of food in free fall, followed by a gentle dropping sensation in your stomach. Then nothing—that is, nothing until much later when you feel the urge in your bowels for evacuation.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Interestingly, Matthew’s text also describes a radical change of mind on the ethnic issue, but in this story, it is Jesus himself who undergoes a transformation as he receives his resurrection body and the power that comes with it. The pre-resurrection Jesus is staunchly committed to a closed-ethnic approach to Gentiles. We see this in several passages, 26 but perhaps most clearly in Matt 10:5–6,27 as Jesus instructs his disciples to programmatical y avoid not only Gentiles, but even Samaritans. While the blessings of the kingdom, such as healing and exorcism, are not restricted to Israel exclusively (we shall return to this later when dealing with salvation), the kingdom is clearly not for the nations. Yet. No Gentile ever becomes a disciple in this gospel, even though some rare individual examples affirm their loyalty to Jesus, as conquered subjects would their sovereign. 28 Indeed, in Matthew’s list of rules for the future ekklēsia, Gentiles typify the archetypal outsider: the unrepentant sinner (Matt 18:17). In a somewhat unexpected narrative turn, however, the post-resurrection Jesus, invested with all power not only on earth but also in heaven (Matt 28:18), opens up the ethnical y defined gate of discipleship to allow non-Jews to enter (28:19–20). There has been much debate as to what exactly the resurrected Jesus’ sudden interest in Gentiles 24 Cf. Acts 15:8–10. As seen here and elsewhere, the basic understanding of the production of theology and the rulings that often follow with it in Acts (and in Paul) is that these are human activities trying to make sense of what the divine (which is ultimately unknowable and uncontrol able; cf. Rom 11:33– 36) has already accomplished. In this post-factum sense-making activity—theology—searching biblical texts that il uminate what is presented as God’s acting based on certain experiences in the here-and-now plays an important, but not isolated part (Acts 15:14–15). Theology, in these texts, is thus not primarily constructed based on analysis of biblical texts (“biblical theology” represents a phenomenon quite foreign to the authors of the biblical texts), but builds on an understanding of God as a present reality capable of new, surprising, and history-changing interventions in the world. 25 For further discussion, see Anders Runesson, “Paul’s Rule in All the Ekklēsiai (1 Cor 7:17–24),” in Introduction to Messianic Judaism: Its Ecclesial Context and Biblical Foundations (ed. David Rudolph and Joel Willits; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 214–23. 26 E.g., Matt 15:24: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 27 Matt 10:5–8: “These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.’ ”

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  24 Cf. Acts 15:8–10. As seen here and elsewhere, the basic understanding of the production of theology and the rulings that often follow with it in Acts (and in Paul) is that these are human activities trying to make sense of what the divine (which is ultimately unknowable and uncontrollable; cf. Rom 11:33– 36) has already accomplished. In this post-factum sense-making activity—theology—searching biblical texts that illuminate what is presented as God’s acting based on certain experiences in the here-and-now plays an important, but not isolated part (Acts 15:14–15). Theology, in these texts, is thus not primarily constructed based on analysis of biblical texts (“biblical theology” represents a phenomenon quite foreign to the authors of the biblical texts), but builds on an understanding of God as a present reality capable of new, surprising, and history-changing interventions in the world. 25 For further discussion, see Anders Runesson, “Paul’s Rule in All the Ekklēsiai (1 Cor 7:17–24),” in Introduction to Messianic Judaism: Its Ecclesial Context and Biblical Foundations (ed. David Rudolph and Joel Willits; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 214–23. 26 E.g., Matt 15:24: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 27 Matt 10:5–8: “These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.’ ” 28 So, e.g., the magi from the East (2:1–12), the centurion from the West (8:5–13), and the Canaanite from the North (or past, as Matthew’s change of Mark’s “Syrophoenician” [Mark 7:26] to “Canaanite” is likely meant to signal, as a generalized description of Israel’s enemies; 15:21–28). They all confirm their allegiance to Jesus as if to an emperor, but only as members of “the provinces,” or as resident aliens, not as Jews, or “citizens” of “the land of Israel,” gē Israel, Matt 2:20, 21. For a detailed discussion, see Runesson, D iv in e Wrath, Part II (343–433). Beyond Universalism and Particularism105

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

  You might be skeptical that people would go to a website to flip a coin to help them make a life-changing quitting decision. But twenty thousand people over the course of a year actually did this. Obviously, these people must have felt that the choice of whether to quit or to persevere was so close, so 50-50, that flipping a coin to help them decide seemed like a reasonable option. It stands to reason that if these decisions were, in reality, as close as the coin flippers felt they were, they would be equally likely to be happier if the coin landed heads or if it landed tails, whether they ended up sticking or quitting. That is, after all, the definition of a close call. But this isn’t what Levitt found. When he followed up with the coin flippers two and six months later, he discovered that for the big life decisions, people who quit were happier on average than people who stuck, whether they quit on their own or after the coin flipped in favor of quitting. While the decisions may have felt close to the people making them, they were not actually close at all. As judged by the participants’ happiness, quitting was the clear winner. Because people were much happier when they quit what they considered a close decision, that shows that people are generally quitting too late. That’s exactly what was happening with Sarah Olstyn Martinez. She thought it was a close call, but once I put it in terms of expected value, she realized it wasn’t close at all. Underscoring that point, Levitt concluded, “The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.” The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call. This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it’s not even in the vicinity. This book will go deep into the cognitive and motivational forces that gaff the scale in favor of persisting, as well as practical strategies for recalibrating the scale. For now, you can consider this simple heuristic as a rule of thumb: If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice. Jumping the SharkIn 1985 or 1987 (accounts differ), a pair of University of Michigan students, Jon Hein and Sean Connolly, were talking about signals that their once favorite television shows had started an irreversible decline. That discussion spawned the famous phrase “jumping the shark.” The definitive instance they identified was from the classic, beloved TV series Happy Days , which first aired in January 1974.

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

  The results showed that female sexual partners in committed relationships with men who were treated with an impotence drug (in this case Levitra, made by Bayer, which also sponsored the study) had better sex. That’s the “duh” part. But get this: the women’s bodies reacted as if they were receiving the drug, as if they were the ones being treated. So a drug they didn’t even take affected their bodies. “Her physiology is linked to him,” Goldstein says. “Men share problems with women, and the solutions. . . . I can change someone’s physiology without treating them. It’s the wildest thing!” There’s a concept in the world of physics called “entanglement.” It refers to the weird fact that subatomic particles have “partners”—other subatomic particles—with which they can be entangled, sometimes over great distances. If a physicist tinkers with one particle, the change affects the other particle. Strange but true. I find Goldstein’s study a strong indicator that humans can be entangled, that the romantic ideal extolled by poets and Dr. Phil exists in real life. We really change when we fall in love. We become a unit, at least sexually. “There are no other physiologic abilities of men and women that are shared, and that is what is so fascinating about these data,” Goldstein says. 18 Have you observed people who have to have a radio on, the television on, or their iPod nearby? Are you one of those people? One of the reasons some have to always have noise and external stimulus is because they are terrified of the silence. The stillness. The present. If you stop and rest in the quiet, you will have to listen to what is going on inside of you. And this can be frightening.Imagine a person who never listens to their own soul, who never sits in the silence with themselves, who is never naked with themselves. Imagine this person trying to become echad with another. How can a person mingle with another soul when they are out of touch with their own? Ask yourself the following questions and write down whatever comes to mind. Get rid of your edit button. No one’s going to read this. You’ll throw it away afterward. Maybe. But seriously, try this. Write out your answers to these questions: What is frustrating me right now? What am I angry about? No, don’t go to the next one, go back. Listen. Reflect. Be honest. Give yourself time. The book will be here when you get back. What am I scared of? What am I dreading? What am I anxious about? What concerns me? What is stressing me right now, the smallest thing that I don’t want to write down because it seems so dumb but it actually is stressing me? What am I looking forward to? Today, tomorrow, this year?

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

  In any case, no matter the reason that you might be quitting, you need to always remember that what you think is a backup plan will often turn into your Plan A. The Great ResignationIn March and April of 2020, when COVID first hit the United States hard, the pandemic created a massive forced-quitting event. In just those two months, twenty million people lost their jobs, at one point at a rate of one million per day. For the approximately twenty-eight million people in the United States employed in the retail, accommodation, and food service industries, work just stopped. There were no customers. Huge numbers of these businesses closed, temporarily or permanently. So many of the others had to lay off, furlough, or drastically cut the hours of their remaining employees. The level of uncertainty for these workers and businesses remained especially high through the end of 2020. When people started feeling more comfortable returning to stores, hotels, and restaurants, you would assume that after all that uncertainty, those who had been laid off from those jobs would be eager to get back to work. But something surprising happened. Beginning in April 2021, there was a second wave of mass quitting, only this time it was voluntary. The Great Resignation had begun. In April, nearly 4 million people voluntarily quit their jobs, the highest number since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started counting in 2001. The highest rate of quitting was by workers employed in service jobs, the very same people who were forced to quit at the beginning of the pandemic. More than 1.3 million of those workers quit in April. In other words, during that month alone, about one in twenty people working in service jobs quit. Almost the same number of employees in those industries voluntarily quit in May. A new quitting record was set in June, which was broken again in July. And again in August. Why did so many people who had lost their jobs during the pandemic decide to quit when those jobs came back? Based on what we’ve learned in this book about quitting decisions, we can take some educated guesses. First, the people who lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic were forced to explore other options that might be available to them to earn a living, something that they wouldn’t generally have done under other circumstances. That gave them a better sense of the landscape and allowed them to see opportunities they might have been neglecting. Second, it also allowed them to reexamine their own preferences. In the same way that Maya Shankar figured out that she didn’t like solo work, being forced to quit gets you to ask yourself what the features are that you like and don’t like of the work you have been doing. Do you want to be physically present in a workplace or do you prefer to work remotely? Do you want something with more flexible hours? Do you love your job?

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other. Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand? Dream House as EpiphanyMost types of domestic abuse are completely legal. Dream House as LegacyShe goes on a ski trip to Colorado with her parents, and you are not invited. She calls you from the lodge while you are at home, writing. “I’m taking a hot bath,” she says. “Drinking a gin and tonic. Thinking about you. I’m going to get myself off. I miss you.” “I miss you too,” you say. “Do you want to get off with me?” she asks. The idea is tempting—your cunt clenches and relaxes, a reflex—but your roommates are in the kitchen, feet from your door, and you don’t trust yourself to be quiet. “I don’t know if I can, right now.” “You know,” she says, her voice leaking through the receiver like gas, “if you’re not turned on by me, you can say so.” “I’m not—what?” “If you don’t find me attractive, maybe we shouldn’t be together at all.” You are sitting up straight now. “Are you breaking up with me?” “I’m saying that it’s really hard to be with someone who isn’t into you, and I don’t think I should be.” “You are breaking up with me.” You feel a sudden ballooning in your chest, somewhere between panic and elation. You hang up the phone. She calls back immediately, and you reject the call. Again, and again. You start sobbing, and John comes in. He asks you what’s going on. “I think she just broke up with me,” you say. The phone keeps chirping. John gently pries it out of your hand. “Why don’t we turn this off?” he says. You try to turn it off but you are having trouble remembering how, so you open up the back and remove the battery. The whole thing goes black, mercifully silent. You are sobbing in disbelief, your body aching from the whiplash turn of the conversation. He hugs you tightly, and you sit there together. [image file=image_rsrc2K1.jpg] After an hour, you put the battery back in the phone. Almost immediately, it rings. You pick up. She is weeping. “Why weren’t you answering my calls?” she sobs. “You just broke up with me,” you say. “I didn’t break up with you!” she howls, and then from the background you hear her father’s voice, enraged. “Is that that fucking bitch? Get off the goddamned phone—” And then she starts screaming at him to go away, and the phone goes dead. John stares at you but doesn’t say anything. You will eventually lose track of the number of times she breaks up with you like this.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Stopgap MeasureShe gets into your MFA program and will leave the Dream House to come to Iowa City. She talks about moving in with you. You coo with excitement over the phone, but when you hang up you feel like you did when you were a kid and your brother launched a baseball into your nose: warm blood down the back of your throat; milk, and metal. Dream House as the ApocalypseAccording to some students of eschatology, 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world. And it was, in a way. But the end did not come as fire or flood. No glittering comet struck our planet. No virus leapt from continent to continent until bodies lay strewn in the streets. The flora of the world did not grow to overtake our buildings. We did not run out of oxygen. We did not vanish or burst into dust. We did not all wake up with blood soaked into our pillows. We did not watch a beam from an alien ship carving trenches into the earth’s crust. We did not turn into animals. We did not starve or use up all of our potable water. We did not trigger a new ice age and freeze to death. We did not choke to death in a self-induced smog. We didn’t get sucked through a wormhole. The sun did not overtake us. At the end of the world, the park was beautiful, hot. The grass was a little long. The trees were punctuated with birds. Dream House as Surprise Ending“I’m in love with someone else,” she says. The two of you are sitting in an Iowa City park next to a baseball diamond after a friend’s baby shower, and you don’t understand how the conversation even arrived at this point. The grass is crowded with dandelions, and you remember, suddenly, that game you played as a kid, yellow-chinned, in love. “What?” you say. “With Amber,” she says. You think of Amber—a classmate of hers at Indiana, willow-thin and redheaded, with a soft, mousy voice. “We kissed once, drunkenly, and I realized that I loved her.” You stare at her, fast-forwarding through a mental film of every time she’d accused you of merely looking at other people the wrong way. She meets your gaze for a moment and then looks away. She slings her arm over the back of the bench, like she’s going to bring you in close. She doesn’t.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Surprise Ending “I’m in love with someone else,” she says. The two of you are sitting in an Iowa City park next to a baseball diamond after a friend’s baby shower, and you don’t understand how the conversation even arrived at this point. The grass is crowded with dandelions, and you remember, suddenly, that game you played as a kid, yellow-chinned, in love. “What?” you say. “With Amber,” she says. You think of Amber—a classmate of hers at Indiana, willow-thin and redheaded, with a soft, mousy voice. “We kissed once, drunkenly, and I realized that I loved her.” You stare at her, fast-forwarding through a mental film of every time she’d accused you of merely looking at other people the wrong way. She meets your gaze for a moment and then looks away. She slings her arm over the back of the bench, like she’s going to bring you in close. She doesn’t. You get in your car, drive to a distant street, and pull over. You don’t have the space in your brain to cry. You pick up your phone and see that, on Freecycle, someone is giving away catalog cards from a defunct library. You drive to a local Panera, take a stack of cards from a very nice woman who is probably wondering why you look like you’ve been forced to eat dog shit at gunpoint. Back at your house you calmly add the pile of cards to your scrap collection because you think you’d like to make a collage. Very late, your girlfriend—or is she?—appears at your house and says she has to get back to Bloomington. Where has she been this whole time? She doesn’t say, but she kisses you. “I think we’re meant to get through this,” she says. “Don’t worry. Promise me you won’t worry.”