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 In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Legacy She 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. 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 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 Resignation In 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?

• 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 Cleanness (2020)

  The photos didn’t give any real sense of him, I was surprised by how beautiful he was when he pushed back the hood he had raised against the rain, which was just a light rain, a relief from the early summer warmth. He was short and dark-skinned, with close-cropped black hair, and as he looked up at me I realized it was his eyes that made him beautiful; they were large and almond-shaped, a shade of grayish green. I was sheltering beneath the awning of the café where he had told me to wait for him, in a part of Mladost where it was impossible to find your way, he said; you had to have lived there a long time to make sense of the jungle of buildings, the warren of unnamed streets. It wasn’t far from the apartment on campus where I lived, but it was on the other side of Malinov Boulevard, and there was little reason to explore beyond the supermarket where the whole neighborhood did its shopping. It was a Saturday, the café was full of couples and children. We acknowledged each other with a nod, and then I reached out to shake his hand as he looked away shyly, making me feel I had embarrassed him, that I had acted in some way I shouldn’t. We murmured a greeting but didn’t otherwise speak, he just turned and began to walk, leaving me to follow.

• 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 Cleanness (2020)

  We were trailing behind the others, we could hear them ahead of us in the dark, their occasional bursts of laughter. We were walking up Apolonia, the main thoroughfare, though it wasn’t until we reached the center of town that there were any real signs of life, some open shops, a restaurant, a man at a table outside, hunched over a slice of pizza. We caught up with the others in front of a convenience store, and waited until N. and the priest emerged with new bottles of wine and a stack of plastic cups. N. handed these out as the priest busied himself with one of the bottles, cutting the foil at the neck with a pocketknife attached to his keys, working at it slowly, with the deliberateness of drunkenness. He had arrived after the rest of us, driving in from Veliko Turnovo. We had all been curious to meet him, but there was nothing especially priestly about the man who appeared dressed all in black, not in a cassock but in jeans and a T-shirt he wore tucked in, tight on his thin frame. He had a young man’s beard, scraggly and unkempt, a sign of laziness more than devotion, I might have thought. Only his hands marked him out, the fingers long and thin, a scholar’s hands, with the weird sliding grace of someone accustomed to ritual. Or maybe I had this impression because of the way I had seen him raise his hand to a man’s lips earlier in the evening, when the distinguished Bulgarian writer, elderly and reclusive, asked for a blessing before he read. He had become priestly in that moment, he had stood solemnly while the writer pressed his lips to the third joint of the second finger of his right hand, and then he made the sign of the cross over the writer’s bowed head. It had surprised me, it was a gesture I hadn’t seen in years, not made in earnest, not since the year I had played at conversion in graduate school, when I had made it myself or had it made over me at the rail of a church in Boston, where I stood with my arms crossed over my chest, my mouth sealed by my disordered life, as I thought of it then.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  The prince gasped in astonishment just as the tavern doors were closing behind him. There, directly opposite his gaping eyes, was Cinderella, laughing and dancing as if she had not a care in the world. Her expression was happier than he had seen it in several years, and his outrage was temporarily distinguished by memories of the last time she looked just that way, a long time ago, on the dance floor where they first met. It had been that look that had stolen his heart, blinding him to everything but finding her again and making her his wife. But too soon after they married, that look had disappeared from her face, and frowns and pouts had taken its place. Until now, that is. And much as the prince had longed to see that look on Cinderella’s face once again, this was certainly not the setting he had imagined seeing it in. Why was she here? Who was she with? How could she have come here without the slightest regard for his feelings, or even a simple note to advise him of where she would be, which at least would have saved him the efforts of the last agonizing hours he’d spent trying to find her? He was shocked and confused by her astonishing behavior. But his confusion was quickly giving way to anger as he edged through the crowd toward his wife. At last Cinderella noticed the prince, just as he was approaching, and her face froze for a mere second in stunned surprise before she rushed into his arms. She was breathless and smiling again as she kissed him and whispered happily, “There you are, my darling!” The prince was completely disarmed by this greeting. “I was just wishing you were here, and here you are!” she continued, winding one arm around his neck and placing the other inside his warm hand for a dance, which he found himself engaged in even before he willed it. She examined his face with a queer little smile on her lips. She seemed to be searching for something. With effort he shook himself out of her spell long enough to ask, “Where have you been?” This seemed rather dull-witted, though, since she had obviously been here in this strange tavern, so he added, “Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” “Until just a few minutes ago I had forgotten all about you” was her forthright reply, spoken so guilelessly that it was impossible to detect offense. The prince was stunned yet again; becoming, in turns, confused, shocked, annoyed and angry.

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

  After the Huskies returned from break, when most coaches were trying to squeeze every single moment of practice out of players that the NCAA rules would let them get away with, Coach Neighbors shocked the program with the announcement of his plan to give the team an extra day off. Coach Neighbors was immediately criticized from every direction. He heard, from within the men’s basketball program, “They’re just giving up. They’re not even trying.” When he let his mentors know about this plan, they told him, “Man, you do that and you’re going to get fired.” His top recruit and best player, freshman Kelsey Plum, fought him on the decision: “We’re not practicing hard enough. This is weird. It’s not going to work.” Plum changed her opinion and her teammates fully bought in based on the changes they noticed, starting with a game the next month against number-three- ranked Stanford, who had beaten them by 35 points the year before. Now, in Neighbors’s first game on national TV, they broke Stanford’s sixty-two-game Pac-12 road winning streak, with a shocking upset victory, 87–82. It wasn’t a fluke. Washington finished the season strong, earned a bid to the WNIT, and won three games before losing in the quarterfinals. In his second season, the Huskies made a return to the NCAA tournament. A year after that, they made it to the Final Four. In the senior year of that recruiting class, they were one of the best teams in the country, finishing 29–6 and making the Sweet Sixteen. Each team won more games than the team the year before. When that class graduated, Neighbors’s alma mater, the University of Arkansas, asked him to turn around its women’s basketball program and he became head coach of the Razorbacks. In his first four seasons at Arkansas, the program had the best run of success in its history. Coach Neighbors’s teams didn’t become less competitive or start winning less because of the extra day off. They started winning more. And that extra day off didn’t just give them more wins on the court. That extra day gave those players time and space to explore other opportunities and interests that they wouldn’t have been able to explore if they had to be on the court for that extra day of practice. They used that day in ways that benefited them long after their college basketball careers. It’s amazing what you can accomplish in just one day.

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

  These indications present a fairly unified picture, though still beginning and partial, of one Judaean who consciously abandoned his ancestral custom. He did this not for the more common reasons of laxity, intermarriage, or attraction to the ways of another ethnos, however, but because he claimed an encounter with the resurrected figure of Jesus Christ, which in his view displaced the ethnos-polis-nomos foundations of ancient identity. This radical departure from the long-established, essential-seeming categories of life would require successive generations of Christ-followers in Paul’s trajectory—by no means the only Christian trajectory—to explain themselves, when Christ did not return to evacuate them. Their predicament remained awkward until perhaps already Tertullian and Origen in anticipation, but certainly Eusebius and his successors, managed to turn the tables and reform the social-political lexicon in light of Christianity’s ascendancy, so as to value this faith-based identity over ethnos- and polis-affiliation. 40 40 41 2 A Displaced Jew: The Specific Nature of Paul’s Earthly Identity Leif Vaage In his capacity as a missionary, Maurice Leenhardt once suggested to a New Caledonian elder that Christianity had introduced the notion of spirit ( esprit ) into Canaque thought. “Spirit? Bah!” the old man objected: “You didn’t bring us the spirit. We already knew the spirit existed. We have always acted in accord with the spirit. What you’ve brought us is the body. ” 1 Defining the specific nature of the enduring relationship between Paul’s apostolic adventures “in Christ” and their social origin within “Second Temple Judaism” has been a core conviction—or at least a chief concern—of Terence L. Donaldson for much of his scholarly career.2 The same cannot be said of me; at least not until quite recently. Perhaps late can still be better than never. In any case, in this essay I now join my long-time friend and colleague in his evermore popular scholarly effort to find Paul anew within what once was deemed to be of old. At issue is what I shall be calling Paul’s earthly identity. This essay summarizes the main argument of a larger monograph that still is under construction, whose working title also is: “Paul: A Displaced Jew.” The monograph explores the multiple ways in which the question of the early Christian apostle’s Jewish identity complicates not only many aspects of traditional Pauline scholarship but also some conventional habits of Jewish historiography. In addition, this question serves to expose how deeply imbricated both enterprises are in certain decidedly modern political projects. 3 1 See Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship Is—And Is Not (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013) 19; further, Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 164. 2 Cf. Terence L. Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997); also Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007).

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

  I got up at six in the morning five days a week and rode my bike the full hour it took to get to the farm, crossing the Connecticut River, past the suburbs with their suicidally pristine lawns, then into the sticks. As I approached the property, the fields unfolded all around me on both sides, the telephone wires slacked with the weight of crows dotted along the lines, the sporadic white almond trees in full bloom, irrigation ditches where more than a dozen rabbits would drown by summer’s end, their corpses stinking the hot air. Verdant swaths of tobacco, some high as my shoulders, stretched so far that the trees standing at the farm’s edge looked more like shrubs. In the middle of it all were three huge unpainted barns, all lined in a row. I rode up the dirt drive toward the first barn and walked my bike through the opened door. As I adjusted to the cool dark, I saw a row of men sitting along the wall, their dark faces moving over paper plates of runny eggs, talking amongst themselves in Spanish. One of them, seeing me, waved me over, saying something I couldn’t catch. When I told him I didn’t speak Spanish, he seemed surprised. Then a flare of recognition flicked over him and he lit up. “Ah!” He pointed at me and nodded. “Chinito. ¡Chinito!” I decided, it being my first day, not to correct him. I gave him a thumbs-up. “Sí,” I said, smiling, “Chinito.” His name was Manny, he said, and gestured toward a table where a large sheet pan of sunny-side-up eggs sat over a butane heater beside a glass pot of room-temperature coffee. I settled among the men, eating in silence. Not counting myself, there were twenty-two other workers, most of them undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America save for one, Nico, who was from the Dominican Republic. There was also Rick, a white guy in his twenties from Colchester, who, it was said, was on the sex offender list and tobacco was the only steady job he could get. Most were seasonal workers and followed various crops across the country as they ripened for harvest. At this farm, the men slept in an encampment comprising four trailers set a few yards beyond the tree line at the edge of the property, hidden from the road.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Straight as I could—no manipulation, no test, no ulterior motive.” Once again Irene nodded to let me know that I had made a reasonably intelligent response. Later in the session, just before we ended, Irene apologized for her remark. The following week she told me of describing the incident to a friend who was aghast at her cruelty toward me, and apologized once again. “No apology was needed,” I reassured her, and I meant it, really meant it. In fact, in a curious way I had welcomed her telling me I sure as hell could see her: it was enlivening; it was real; it brought me closer to her. It was the truth about how she felt toward me. Or part of the truth—and I hoped the time would come when I would hear the rest of it. Irene’s rage, which I first encountered in our second month of therapy, was deep and pervasive. Though it flared only occasionally into the open, it always rumbled just below the surface. At first I wasn’t much concerned about it. My research had reassured me that such anger was no more worrisome than persistent guilt or regret or denial and would soon dissipate. But in this instance, as often in my work with Irene, the research was misleading. Again and again I have found that “statistically significant” truth (often with the exceptions—the “outliers”—excluded from the calculation for statistical reasons) had little relevance to the truth of my unique encounter with the person of flesh and blood before me. In a session during our third year, I asked, “What feelings did you take home from our last session? Any thoughts about me during the week?” I pose this type of question often as part of my campaign to focus therapeutic attention on the here-and-now—on the encounter between me and the patient. She sat in silence for a while, then asked, “Do you think about me between sessions?” Although this question from a patient, which most therapists dread, is not uncommon, I somehow hadn’t expected it from Irene. Perhaps I hadn’t expected her to care, or at least to acknowledge she cared. “I—I—I often think about your situation,” I stuttered. Wrong answer! She sat for a moment, then stood. “I’m leaving,” she said and stomped out, not failing to slam the door behind her. I saw her through the window, pacing in the garden and smoking a cigarette. I sat and waited. How easy it is for noninteractive therapists, I thought, to deflect that question of hers by such ploys as: “Why do you ask?” or “Why now?” or “What are your fantasies or your wishes about that?”

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

  them was in charge of setting up chairs. He asked me to help him out, and when that job was done he posted me at the door with a couple of other boys to greet the guests as they arrived. The three of us sparked each other. By the time people began filing past our table we were laying down a steady line of scintillant repartee. Between gags I checked off names on the invitation list, the second boy wrote them down on adhesive nameplates, and the third escorted the guests to their tables. Then she was there, in line behind an old couple. I looked up and saw her watching me. The room bucked but I kept my balance. I didn’t even blink. I checked off the old couple’s name, and made a friendly joke they laughed at. And then I turned to her. I gave her a welcoming smile and said, “Name, ma’am?” She stepped up to the table and stood there thoughtfully, holding her pocketbook in front of her with both hands. She still had on the white sweater and plaid skirt she’d been wearing in the store. I felt no fear, nor any surprise after the first shock had passed. I knew she hadn’t followed me here. Of course she would have a boy in the Scouts, and of course he would belong to OA. She read my nameplate and looked me up and down, and I could see her face grow smooth and serene as she decided that she had been mistaken, that it couldn’t possibly be me. She returned my smile and gave me her name. I saw from the list that she had two boys in the Order. Already she was searching for them, glancing around her and peering into the noisy hall. She picked up her nameplate, gave her arm to the boy at the door, and passed into the banquet.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The photos didn’t give any real sense of him, I was surprised by how beautiful he was when he pushed back the hood he had raised against the rain, which was just a light rain, a relief from the early summer warmth. He was short and dark-skinned, with close-cropped black hair, and as he looked up at me I realized it was his eyes that made him beautiful; they were large and almond-shaped, a shade of grayish green. I was sheltering beneath the awning of the café where he had told me to wait for him, in a part of Mladost where it was impossible to find your way, he said; you had to have lived there a long time to make sense of the jungle of buildings, the warren of unnamed streets. It wasn’t far from the apartment on campus where I lived, but it was on the other side of Malinov Boulevard, and there was little reason to explore beyond the supermarket where the whole neighborhood did its shopping. It was a Saturday, the café was full of couples and children. We acknowledged each other with a nod, and then I reached out to shake his hand as he looked away shyly, making me feel I had embarrassed him, that I had acted in some way I shouldn’t. We murmured a greeting but didn’t otherwise speak, he just turned and began to walk, leaving me to follow.

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

  We remain interested in our partners; they delight us, and we’re drawn to them. But, for many of us, renouncing the illusion of safety, and accepting the reality of our fundamental insecurity, proves to be a difficult step . 4 Democracy Versus Hot Sex Desire and Egalitarianism Don’t Play by the Same Rules No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination. —Daphne Merkin S EVERAL YEARS AGO I ATTENDED a presentation at a national conference where the speaker discussed a couple who had come to therapy in part because of a sharp decline in their sexual activity. Previously, they had acted out fantasies of domination and submission; now, following the birth of their second child, the wife wanted more conventional sex. But the husband was attached to their old style of lovemaking, so they were stuck. The presenter took the approach that resolving this couple’s sexual difficulty was going to require working through the emotional dynamics of their marriage and their new status as parents. But in the discussion that followed, the audience proved far less interested in the couple’s overall relationship than in the disconcerting presence of domination and submission in their erotic life. What pathology, several participants asked, might underlie the man’s need to sexually objectify his wife, and her desire for bondage in the first place? Perhaps, some people speculated, motherhood had restored her sense of dignity, so that now she refused to be so demeaned. Some suggested that the impasse reflected long-standing gender differences: men tend to pursue separateness, power, and control, while women yearn for loving affiliation and connection. Still others were certain that couples like this needed more empathetic connection to counteract their tendency to engage in an implicitly abusive, power-driven relationship. What these remarks made clear was the unspoken subtext that such practices are inherently degrading to women, a rebuke to the very idea of gender equality, and antithetical to a good, healthy marriage. After two hours of talking about sex, the group had not once mentioned pleasure or eroticism, so I finally spoke up. I wondered, I said, if I was the only one surprised by this omission. After all, the sex had been entirely consensual. Maybe the woman no longer wanted to be tied up by her husband because now she had a baby continually attached to her breasts, binding her more effectively than ropes ever could. Didn’t people in the audience have their own sexual preferences, preferences they didn’t feel the need to interpret or justify? Why automatically assume that there had to be something degrading and pathological about this couple’s erotic play? More to the point, I wondered, was a woman’s ready participation in submission too great a challenge for the politically correct? Was it too threatening to conceive of a strong, secure woman enjoying acting out sexual fantasies of submission?

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

  After two hours of talking about sex, the group had not once mentioned pleasure or eroticism, so I finally spoke up. I wondered, I said, if I was the only one surprised by this omission. After all, the sex had been entirely consensual. Maybe the woman no longer wanted to be tied up by her husband because now she had a baby continually attached to her breasts, binding her more effectively than ropes ever could. Didn’t people in the audience have their own sexual preferences, preferences they didn’t feel the need to interpret or justify? Why automatically assume that there had to be something degrading and pathological about this couple’s erotic play? More to the point, I wondered, was a woman’s ready participation in submission too great a challenge for the politically correct? Was it too threatening to conceive of a strong, secure woman enjoying acting out sexual fantasies of submission? Would such recognition lessen women’s moral authority? Perhaps the participants in this conference were afraid that if women did reveal such desires, they’d somehow sanction male dominance everywhere—in business, professional life, politics, and economics. Maybe the very ideas of sexual dominance and submission, conquest and subjugation, aggression and surrender (regardless of which partner plays which part) can’t be squared with the ideals of fairness, compromise, and equality that undergird marriage today. As a relative outsider with regard to American society, I suspected that the attitudes I saw in this meeting reflected deeper cultural assumptions. Did the clinicians in the room believe that this couple’s sexual practices, even though consensual and completely nonviolent, were too wild and “kinky,” and therefore inappropriate and irresponsible for the ponderously serious business of maintaining a marriage and raising a family? It was as if sexual pleasure and eroticism that strayed onto slightly outré paths of fantasy and play, particularly games involving aggression and power, must be stricken from the repertoire of responsible adults in loving, committed relationships. After the conference, I engaged in many intense conversations with couples therapists from South America, the Middle East, and Europe. We realized that we all felt somewhat out of step with American sexual attitudes, but putting a finger on what was culturally different wasn’t easy. On a subject as laden with taboos as the expression of sexuality, making generalizations is a slippery slope. But if I could hazard one unpolished observation, I would say that egalitarianism, directness, and pragmatism are entrenched in American culture and inevitably influence the way we think about and experience love and sex. Latin Americans’ and Europeans’ attitudes toward love, on the other hand, tend to reflect other cultural values, and are more likely to embody the dynamics of seduction, the focus on sensuality, and the idea of complementarity (i.e., being different but equal) rather than absolute sameness. Bedroom Politics

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (non occ.) Further, He first healed by the remission of sins that which He had come to seek, that is, a soul, so that when they faithlessly doubted, then He might bring forward a work before them, and in this way His word might be confirmed by the work, and a hidden sign be proved by an open one, that is, the health of the soul by the healing of the body. BEDE. (ubi sup.) We are also informed, that many sicknesses of body arise from sins, and therefore perhaps sins are first remitted, that the causes of sickness being taken away, health may be restored. For men are afflicted by fleshly troubles for five causes, in order to increase their merits, as Job and the Martyrs; or to preserve their lowliness, as Paul by the messenger of Satan; or that they may perceive and correct their sins, as Miriam, the sister of Moses, and this paralytic; or for the glory of God, as the man born blind and Lazarus; or as the beginnings of the pains of damnation, as Herod and Antiochus. But wonderful is the virtue of the Divine power, where without the least interval of time, by the command of the Saviour, a speedy health accompanies His words. Wherefore there follows: Insomuch that they were all amazed. Leaving the greater thing, that is, the remission of sins, they only wonder at that which is apparent, that is, the health of the body. THEOPHYLACT. This is not however the paralytic, whose cure is related by John, (John 5) for he had no man with him, this one had four; he is cured in the pool of the sheep market, but this one in a house. It is the same man, however, whose cure is related by Matthew (Matt. 9) and Mark. But mystically, Christ is still in Capernaum, in the house of consolation. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Moreover, whilst the Lord is preaching in the house, there is not room for them, not even at the door, because whilst Christ is preaching in Judæa, the Gentiles are not yet able to enter to hear Him, to whom, however, though placed without, he directed the words of His doctrine by His preachers. PSEUDO-JEROME. Again, the palsy is a type of the torpor, in which man lies slothful in the softness of the flesh, though desiring health. THEOPHYLACT. If therefore I, having the powers of my mind unstrung, remain, whenever I attempt any thing good without strength, as a palsied man, and if I be raised on high by the four Evangelists, and be brought to Christ, and there hear myself called son, then also are my sins quitted by me; for a man is called the son of God because he works the commandments.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Then what? Had you eaten breakfast at home? Or in Mill Valley? Try to picture it. Let your mind wander freely back to that morning. Close your eyes, if it helps.” Halston closed his eyes. After three or four minutes of silence, Ernest wondered whether he had fallen asleep and in a soft voice prodded, “Halston? Halston? Don’t move, stay where you are, but try to think aloud. What are you seeing in your mind?” “Doctor”—Halston slowly opened his eyes—“did I ever tell you about Artemis?” “Artemis? The Greek goddess? No, not a word.” “Doctor,” said Halston, blinking his eyes and shaking his head as if to clear it, “I’m a little shaken. I’ve just now had the oddest experience. As though a rent suddenly appeared in my mind, letting all the uncanny events of that day pour through. I don’t want you to think I’ve been deliberately withholding this from you.” “Rest assured, Halston. I’m with you. You started to talk about Artemis.” “Well, I’m just sorting things out—I’d better start from the beginning of that accursed day—the day before I wound up in the emergency room. . . .” Ernest loved stories and sat back, full of anticipation. He had the strongest feeling that this man, with whom he had spent three puzzling hours, was now going to reveal the key to a mystery. “Well, Doctor, you know I’ve been single for almost three years and a little cautious—more than a little—about another—er—liaison. I informed you that I was greatly injured, emotionally and financially, by my ex-wife?” Ernest nodded. A glance at the clock. Damnit, only fifteen minutes left. He would have to move Halston along if he was to hear this story. “And this Artemis?” “Well, yes, back to the point, thank you. It’s funny, but it was your question about breakfast that morning that triggered something. It’s coming clearly now—stopping to breakfast at a café in the center of Mill Valley, sitting down at a large, empty table for four. Then the café got crowded, and a woman inquired if she could share my table. I looked up at her, and I confess I liked what I saw.” “How so?” “Extraordinary-looking woman. Beautiful. Perfect features, fetching smile. My age, I guess, around forty, but a lithe body, like a teenager. A body, as American films put it, to die for.” Ernest gazed at Halston, a different, animated Halston, and felt himself warming to him. “Tell me.” “A ‘ten.’ Like Bo Derek. Small waist and a most impressive bosom. Many of my Brit friends prefer androgynous women, but I hereby plead guilty to large-breast fetishism—and, no, Doctor, I don’t want to change that.” Ernest smiled reassuringly. Changing Halston’s—or his own—adoration of breasts was not on his agenda. “And?”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Exercise 3: Focusing on One Element of ExperienceThis 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.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  He was working in his garage and picked up a starter motor to put into his car. As he lifted it, he felt “a twinge of something” in his arm. The next day his shoulder felt tight and sore. Over time, the pain became more acute, and his range of motion progressively worsened, becoming chronic. Not surprisingly, Vince attributed his shoulder “strain” to working on his car. This is somewhat like the person who reaches down and picks up a piece of paper, only to have their back go into spasm. Common sense, and the clinical observation of most chiropractors and massage therapists dictates that this was already a back primed—“an accident waiting to happen. ” Vince is obviously confused about seeing a “mind doctor,” and he is reluctant to engage with me. Sensing this, I reassure him that I will not be asking him personal questions, but would just focus on helping him get rid of his symptoms. “Yeah,” he says, “my body sure is broke.” I ask him to show me how far he can move it before it starts to hurt. He moves it a few of inches and then looks up at me: “That’s about it.” “OK, now I want you to move it the same way, but much slower, like this.” I show him with my arm. “Huh,” he replies as he glances at his arm. He is clearly surprised that he could move it a few inches farther without the pain. “Even slower, this time, Vince … Let’s see what happens this time … I want you to really give it your full attention; focus your mind into your arm now.” Moving slowly allows awareness to be brought to the arm. Just moving it quickly, without mindfulness, is likely to re-create the protective holding pattern. His hand begins to tremble, and he looks to me for some reassurance. “Yes, Vince, just let that happen. It’s a good thing. It’s your muscles starting to let go. Try to keep your mind focused there, with your arm and with the trembling. Just let your arm move the way it wants to.” The trembling goes on for a while and then stops; Vince’s forehead breaks out in sweat. As Vince moves to the edge of the bracing pattern, some of the “energy” held in his muscular-defense pattern begins to release. This includes the involuntary autonomic nervous system reactions, such as shaking, trembling sweating and temperature changes. m Because these are subcortically based actions, the person does not have a feeling of control over their reactions. This may be quite unsettling. My function here is that of a coach and midwife, helping Vince to befriend these “ego alien” sensations, especially since he is wholly unaccustomed to involuntary reactions that he can’t control. “What is this, why is it happening?”

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

  It’s about something I’ve lost that I’m afraid I’ll never get back.” When Ryan married Christine, he slammed the door on cruising. He left his struggling acting career, turned his paralegal moonlighting into a full-time job, and applied for law school. Now he works for environmental organizations as a legal consultant. As I listen to him sounding bewildered by his crush, I see an awakening of his dormant senses. I don’t discourage Ryan’s “immature” wishes, and I don’t lecture him. Nor do I try to talk reason into him or explore the emotional dynamics beneath this presumably “adolescent” crush. I simply value his experience. He is looking at something beautiful; fantasizing about Barbara is a way of living the life he hasn’t chosen. I marvel with him at the allure of the enchantment, while also calling it by its true name: a fantasy. The question I pose to him is how he can relish this experience without allowing the momentary exhilaration to endanger his marriage. “How beautiful and how pathetic,” I say. “It’s great to know you can still come to life like that. And you know that you can never compare this state of intoxication with life at home, because home is about something else. Home is safe. Here, you’re trembling; you’re on shaky ground. You like it, but you’re also afraid that it can take you too far away. I think that you probably don’t let your wife evoke such tremors in you. There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you. At our next session, Ryan knows exactly where he wants to start. Earlier that week, Christine and Barbara had made plans to go out to dinner. Feeling guilty, as she usually does, about going out without him, Christine invited Ryan to come along. Then she proceeded to ignore him for the rest of the evening. For once, he didn’t mind taking a backseat as he watched the women reminisce. After college they had both spent a year in Togo with the Peace Corps. Christine came home; Barbara never did. As was often the case in their conversations, each reported her envy of and admiration for the life of the other. “We’d just finished a great bottle of Australian Shiraz,” said Ryan, “and we were all pretty tipsy, when Christine totally shocked me by blurting out to Barbara, ‘I look at you and I wonder if it’s worth it. Frankly, I don’t think I’m made for this—the kids, the house, the job. Sometimes I wonder if I did it just to prove I could.’ Then she says, ‘I find it all so oppressive.’ She wondered if it was all worth it—she finds it oppressive? I was stunned.”