Tenderness

Passages

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

Page 128 of 145 · 20 per page

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  A significant feature of this family history is that its considerable joint wealth ended up in the hands of the Church, because so many of the siblings embraced ecclesiastical careers or celibacy; that became a recurrent theme in later Christianity. [27] Gregory paid his own emotional debt to his sister by writing an affectionate though highly crafted biography of her. The story of Macrina lacked the lively incident of Antony’s, but the useful lesson of her life for many others was how to pursue lifelong Christian celibacy in a respectable if unexciting

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Martín’s Work at El Rosario After several years of medical apprenticeship, Martín entered the Dominican convent of Our Lady of the Rosary, known as El Rosario, as a lay servant and took vows there 9 years later. El Rosario was strictly segregated by rank and by ethnicity. Only those with “pure blood” (that is, European blood) were allowed to study to be ordained as priests and friars, and they occupied the main cloister. The convent could not have operated without the labor of many lay servants and enslaved men. Many worked on El Rosario’s hacienda, a farm outside the city overseen by lay brothers. The extent to which the Catholic Church not only accepted but participated in and enabled the slave trade and abuse of enslaved peoples is shocking to modern eyes, but nonetheless true. The Dominican order, like the rest of the church, purchased enslaved people to work on their lands and used terrible violence against them. Their preachers encouraged and spread racist caricatures and ideas that sought to justify the treatment of Africans and Afro-Peruvians as people of lesser intelligence and worth. As a lay servant, Martín performed only basic tasks: sweeping floors, cleaning bedpans, and counting linens. In recognition of his lifelong performance of these humble duties, he is often depicted with a broom. From the beginning, Martín found ways to make his warmth and kindness felt by those around him. Young novices, who later rose to eminent positions, recalled his kindness to heartsick boys. El Rosario was more than a monastery; it housed a school and an orphanage, provided sanctuary for the odd fugitive, and hosted local religious and social organizations called confraternities. It also operated what we today would call a food bank, soup kitchen, and free clinic. Patients told stories of how, when they were feeling down, Martín would produce an orange from his sleeves with a flourish to make them smile. 99

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Moreover, from the thirteenth century, more or less for the first time in the history of the Church, the clergy frequently told the laity what they should be thinking about marriage: that was part of the new work of preaching undertaken especially by the Franciscans and Dominicans. [78] The construction of the message was based on some theological innovations. One was a gradual shift of opinion among Western theologians, and then among clergy extracting advice from their writings to conduct confessions: Adam and Eve had found sex a pleasure. What was good enough for the first married couple surely provided guidelines for their successors. [79] Just as important, even though not such an exact fit for the circumstances of present-day lay households as Adam and Eve, was a new presentation of the Holy Family as a model for all Christian families. It was created in text and in art. Writers, preachers and many of the artists were celibate clergy, who had (in theory at least) left their last intimate contact with a real woman in childhood, before they left home for their institutional home in the Church. Such talented men, set aside for sacred ministry, felt safer with women who did not flaunt their sexuality but who rejoiced in their motherhood, or in a commitment to a celibacy which paralleled that of the male priesthood. That was the model of life in Nazareth around the Holy Mother Mary that was now pieced together for Catholic Europe. It was dependent on a devotional exploration of the human life of Christ, as part of the general humanist and personal turn of Western devotion (see Plate 21). Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, was one of the first to create this form of meditation, but a century later it became a theme of Cistercian piety with their Order’s particular dedication to Our Lady, universal patron of their monastic houses. That was paired with a new genre of writing about the person of Jesus. Aelred of Rievaulx was a pioneer in this, for instance writing a meditation on the passage in Luke’s Gospel (2.42) describing Jesus straying in the Temple ‘when he was twelve years old’. This was a literary present for Yvo, a Cistercian of Warden Abbey, remembered after his death in Aelred’s treatise on friendship as the ‘beloved’ monk whose ‘charming eyes’ had smiled on the writer. Burrowing into the various layers of meaning of Luke’s text in traditional fashion from ‘literal’ to ‘moral’, Aelred began by using his imagination to ponder on the boy lost in Jerusalem without a mother to feed him, make up his bed and tend his ‘boyish limbs with oil and baths’. One has to say that Jesus sounds a rather molly-coddled twelve-year-old. [80] The theme blossomed into the Christ-centred devotion preached by the Orders of friars. From the time of Francis onwards, that was a Franciscan speciality.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [82] Essential to the eventual success of these developments, which the Iconoclastic Controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries much encouraged (below, Chapter 10), was the ability of Mary to appeal to a wide range of Christians at all levels of society for a variety of reasons. In the fourth to sixth century, the concentration was on her virginity and the encouragement that it provided for ascetics: a mother and virgin whose sexual identity was removed from normal expectations, just like theirs. Yet even early on, there could be a simple (though not necessarily simple-minded) identification with her as Mother. The fourth-century pioneer of heresy-hunting, Bishop Epiphanios of Salamis, can often be suspected of making up heresies for the sake of completeness, but sometimes he denounces beliefs so delightfully banal that they could have been real: he was furious about the popular custom in such widely dispersed regions as Thrace and Arabia for women to bake loaves to tickle Mary’s palate on certain feast days. [83] What was a heretical perversion for Epiphanios might a millennium later be seen as a pleasing folk custom in honour of Our Lady. One important aspect of the new cult of the saints was the honouring of people who would once have been outcasts amid the pacifism of early Christianity – soldiers. We have already met some of them: Martin of Tours, Pachomios, Menas of Egypt. Now Roman martial virtues were celebrated, and the saints involved came to be lovingly portrayed in their imperial military costumes, even though the early examples of the genre had gained their sanctity by being killed by the military authorities. One of the first great Christian cults to range alongside that of Thecla was that of the saintly soldier-partnership of Sergius and Bacchus, victims of persecution under Galerius. On the eastern margins of fifth-century Byzantium lay the territory of an Arab people called the Ghassanids, who preserved their freedom of action by their formidable military skills, and they were early enthusiasts for this warrior pair, who had been martyred on that same eastern frontier. The sway of Sergius and Bacchus was thereafter far-reaching and prolonged, for instance winning devotion from eleventh-century Mongol nomad rulers who otherwise remained unimpressed by the overall Christian package. One element in the soldier-saints’ popularity must have been their intense same-sex bonding, a constant background theme in their joint portrayal in icons. Although obviously that was presented in the cult as a bond of asceticism, their martyr-legend included the interesting detail that they had been humiliated before their deaths by being paraded in women’s clothing. Their defiantly masculine holiness might appeal to soldiers such as the Ghassanids or a Mongol Khan of the Keraits, but it could be equally inspirational for a pair of monks who had expressed their special relationship in the form of adelphopoiēsis . And in all these cases, mothers anxious about their sons’ military adventures might have found equal comfort from the heavenly intercessions of Sergius and Bacchus.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  7. Saint Making in the Middle Ages Traditional Recognition of Saints For the first thousand years or so of church history, saints belonged to just a few types: biblical saints, martyrs, founders, theologians, and royalty. The process for recognizing saints then wasn’t terribly official. A person had to be recognized as holy by “popular acclaim,” meaning that people in general agreed they had lived a good and holy life. There had to be a local cult: people who venerated the saint, treated their burial site as a shrine, perhaps celebrated a local feast in their honor. And there should be commonly accepted miracles wrought through the saint’s intercession, which meant that after a person had prayed for a saint’s help in doing something, such as curing a sick child, that goal was accomplished through what people accepted to be divine, supernatural means. When all of these came together, the holy person would typically be recognized by a local ecclesiastical leader, often a bishop, in a ceremony that celebrated the “translation” or movement of their body, now considered relics, to a new and more prominent burial place, suitable for pilgrims to visit. The bishop might also proclaim an indulgence for pilgrims visiting the site to induce people to visit and spread the new saint’s cult as widely as possible. But it was a system without oversight and open to abuse. For one thing, bishops were commonly drawn from the same aristocratic families that produced saints in the early Middle Ages, and they were heavily involved in local politics. This made them susceptible to translating the relics of, shall we say, relatives of questionable holiness. The importance of saints’ recognition by local authorities meant that sanctity and devotion to saints’ cults were often fiercely local phenomena. Saints became inextricably linked with personal and civic identity as they were adopted as “patrons” of a place, a trade, or people with a specific illness or need. The veneration of saints was extraordinarily intimate for many people, bound up in ties of familial affection, civic pride, and personal identity. 48

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Her original concept for Prune? "It was a reaction to years of shitty catering," she admits. Prune was about "what it wasn't. New York, in '99, was still in long menu scrip mode." Hamilton says she wanted to open a place where everything wasn't stacked and drizzled. The menu was "everything I grew up eating. I wanted the food to have a close, familiar feel . . . like in a household. I'm not an inventor." The celeb chef thing "bums me out," she complains, before admitting that she doesn't even own a TV. It's easy, however, to read the above, or experience Hamilton's withering gaze of disapproval, and miss the heart of the matter. Chefs reveal their true natures with their menus, with their food, and with the nature of the environments that they choose to serve it in. Prune is a cozy, warm, inviting, and informal restaurant with a tiny, open kitchen, a few plainly appointed tables, and an ancient zinc bar. The menu is pure, unvarnished sentimentality, soulful comfort dishes pilfered, plucked, and remembered from the childhood she had—and from what is also, perhaps, the childhood she wished she'd had. Pasta kerchiefs with poached egg, French ham, and brown butter is straight from Hamilton's own past. Roasted marrow bones with parsley salad (my favorite dish in the world, by the way) is a lift from London chef Fergus Henderson's St. John (Hamilton was kind enough to call him and tell him she was appropriating his signature dish). Fried sweetbreads with bacon and capers, monkfish liver with warm buttered toast, and lamb sausages with escarole and romesco sauce join Italian wedding soup on the appetizer menu. The bar menu sports radishes with sweet butter and kosher salt and sardines with Triscuits and mustard—a dish that Hamilton loves because "it got me through every poor time in my life." For main courses, Prune offers roast suckling pig with pickled tomatoes and crackling, whole grilled fish, braised rabbit legs, rib eye with parsley shallot butter, ruby shrimp boiled with sausage, potatoes, and corn; as for the daily specials, even the most cynical professional would find them as inviting and comforting as slipping half-drunk into a warm bath. "I like no garnish, noncomposed plates," she says. She loves Asian food, particularly Thai, Burmese, and Sze-chuan, but refuses to incorporate any of its influence into her own cooking. "No. Won't allow it. Can't have cilantro on the menu. That's not what this place is about." So what, then, is Prune about? Like a lot of American chefs, Hamilton is conflicted on the subject of the French. "I hate the fucking French," she snarls unhesitatingly.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  She had, she thought, comfortably reconciled herself to this, careful at all times to have low expectations. But looking down at Rob's unconscious face, his eyes closed and without expression or care, blissfully snoring as "Jingle Bells" played on and on, the snowflakes beginning to collect on his lashes, she found herself thinking how sweet he looked, how strangely innocent he'd once been. She remembered the first time she'd met him. Just a quick hello between orders at Red House, where she'd had to poke her head into the kitchen to greet the people who'd prepared what had been a spectacular meal He'd been distracted. His eyes had swept right across her face without registering. He'd managed a "Nice to meet you" before hurrying back behind the single six-burner range to rescue an order of skate grenobloise. It had been all about the food then. She'd recognized that look. They could leave him like this. It might serve him right. Could be a much- deserved wake-up call, coming to in a doorway in a puke-stained Santa suit. But he looked so abjectly helpless, didn't he, so fucking adorable lying there in that ridiculous outfit, snow collecting on his chest and legs like something out of Dickens. She could take him home. Drop him in a hot tub. Feed him hot cocoa with marshmallows. Or she could draw the word asshole on his forehead with red lipstick and leave him to possible hypothermia and a "Page Six" item. She looked at Paul, saw the fatigue, the worry, the disgust in his face—the look she'd seen in so many good cooks' faces over the years when faith and hope had begun to ebb. And then she had an idea. "I know what to do," she said. "Hail a cab and help me pick his sorry ass up. America's sexiest chef is gonna work the line tonight." When they arrived at Saint Germain, Michelle and Paul hauled Rob down the service stairs and hosed him off. Michelle then helped peel off the sodden Santa suit and they managed to dress him in a snap-front dishwasher shirt and some ill- fitting checks borrowed from Manuel. After several large mugs of coffee and threats and numerous stomach-emptying trips to the bathroom, Paul announced to the crew that Rob would be working the saute station for the rest of the shift. "I can't do it," Rob had protested, as he was half carried, half pushed onto the line. Kevin, eyes gaping, stepped aside after a final wipe of his cutting board, and Michelle moved in to take over at grill. Paul took his place at the expediting station. "You can do it, chef," he said. "Remember? Out all night snorting blow and doing Jager shots, puking on the line into the trash bins? Cold sweats and shakes? We cooked, man. We got three fucking stars working like that, bro. You can do it. Think of the good old days." "Oh God . . .

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Bitter tenderness rose up in the master’s heart, and, without knowing why, he began to weep, burying his face in Margarita’s hair. Weeping herself, she whispered to him, and her fingers trembled on the master’s temples. ‘Yes, threads, threads . . . before my eyes your head is getting covered with snow . . . ah, my much-suffering head! Look what eyes you’ve got! There’s a desert in them . . . and the shoulders, the shoulders with their burden . . . crippled, crippled . . .’ Margarita’s speech was becoming incoherent, Margarita was shaking with tears. Then the master wiped his eyes, raised Margarita from her knees, got up himself and said firmly: ‘Enough. You’ve shamed me. Never again will I yield to faint-heartedness, or come back to this question, be reassured. I know that we’re both the victims of our mental illness, which you perhaps got from me . . . Well, so we’ll bear it together.’ Margarita put her lips close to the master’s ear and whispered: ‘I swear to you by your life, I swear by the astrologer’s son whom you guessed, that all will be well!’ ‘Fine, fine,’ responded the master, and he added, laughing: ‘Of course, when people have been robbed of everything, like you and me, they seek salvation from other-worldly powers! Well, so, I agree to seek there.’ ‘Well, there, there, now you’re your old self, you’re laughing,’ replied Margarita, ‘and devil take you with your learned words. Other-worldly or not other-worldly, isn’t it all the same? I want to eat!’ And she dragged the master to the table by the hand. ‘I’m not sure this food isn’t about to fall through the floor or fly out the window,’ he said, now completely calm. ‘It won’t fly out.’ And just then a nasal voice came through the window: ‘Peace be unto you.’ 1 The master gave a start, but Margarita, already accustomed to the extraordinary, exclaimed: ‘Why, it’s Azazello! Ah, how nice, how good!’ and, whispering to the master: ‘You see, you see, we’re not abandoned!’—she rushed to open the door. ‘Cover yourself at least,’ the master called after her. ‘Spit on it,’ answered Margarita, already in the corridor. And there was Azazello bowing, greeting the master, and flashing his blind eye, while Margarita exclaimed: ‘Ah, how glad I am! I’ve never been so glad in my life! But forgive me, Azazello, for being naked!’ Azazello begged her not to worry, assuring her that he had seen not only naked women, but even women with their skin flayed clean off, and willingly sat down at the table, having first placed some package wrapped in dark brocade in the corner by the stove. Margarita poured Azazello some cognac, and he willingly drank it. The master, not taking his eyes off him, quietly pinched his own left hand under the table.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic Fra Giunta Bevegnati’s Hagiography Margaret lived during the 13th century, a time when a surge of popular religious interest in following the vita apostolica, in imitation of Christ and the apostles, had inspired many new monastic orders and small, informal communities. Many ordinary people like Margaret donned makeshift religious clothes, in imitation of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Known as penitents, they struggled to live a religious life amid the bustle and noise of towns and cities rather than behind quiet monastery walls. Margaret was positioned at the forefront of the papal effort to provide structure to unofficial adherents in what came to be known as the Third Order of the Franciscans. These “lay penitents” addressed some of the most pressing social needs of the booming medieval city: poverty, disease, safe lodging, and basic medical care. Margaret’s life in Cortona was likewise intertwined with the city’s problems and squabbles. Most of these details were skimmed over in the official record of her life and miracles, a document known as the Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona, or the Legenda. It was compiled after her death by her sometime spiritual counselor and friend Giunta Bevegnati, a Franciscan friar, whose Italian title was Fra. Like many hagiographies, the Legenda was intended more to make the case for Margaret’s sainthood than to record a factually accurate biography. We know little of her home life or her professional life in Cortona. Brief references show us Margaret as a midwife, charity organizer, hospital administrator, fundraiser, and symbol of her city’s civic pride. Fra Giunta glossed over these details to formulate her as a new kind of lay saint. His account emphasized her direct experience of Christ through visions, her penitence and asceticism, and her attachment to the Franciscan order. In his telling, Margaret became the “new Magdalene,” a repentant prostitute (heavy emphasis on the repentance) inspired by Francis of Assisi and his followers. 64

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Margarita’s glance picked out among those coming up the woman at whom Koroviev was pointing. She was young, about twenty, of remarkably beautiful figure, but with somehow restless and importunate eyes. ‘What handkerchief?’ asked Margarita. ‘She has a chambermaid assigned to her,’ explained Koroviev, ‘who for thirty years has been putting a handkerchief on her night table during the night. She wakes up and the handkerchief is there. She’s tried burning it in the stove and drowning it in the river, but nothing helps.’ ‘What handkerchief?’ whispered Margarita, raising and lowering her arm. ‘A blue-bordered one. The thing is that when she worked in a café, the owner once invited her to the pantry, and nine months later she gave birth to a boy, took him to the forest, stuffed the handkerchief into his mouth, and then buried the boy in the ground. At the trial she said she had no way of feeding the child.’ ‘And where is the owner of the café?’ asked Margarita. ‘Queen,’ the cat suddenly creaked from below, ‘what, may I ask, does the owner have to do with it? It wasn’t he who smothered the infant in the forest!’ Margarita, without ceasing to smile and proffer her right hand, dug the sharp nails of the left into Behemoth’s ear and whispered to him: ‘If you, scum, allow yourself to interfere in the conversation again . . .’ Behemoth squeaked in a not very ball-like fashion and rasped: ‘Queen . . . the ear will get swollen . . . why spoil the ball with a swollen ear? . . . I was speaking legally, from the legal point of view . . . I say no more, I say no more. Consider me not a cat but a post, only let go of my ear!’ Margarita released his ear, and the importunate, gloomy eyes were before her. ‘I am happy, Queen-hostess, to be invited to the great ball of the full moon!’ ‘And I am glad to see you,’ Margarita answered her, ‘very glad. Do you like champagne?’ ‘What are you doing, Queen?!’ Koroviev cried desperately but soundlessly in Margarita’s ear. ‘There’ll be a traffic jam!’ ‘Yes, I do,’ the woman said imploringly, and suddenly began repeating mechanically: ‘Frieda, 7 Frieda, Frieda! My name is Frieda, Queen!’ ‘Get drunk tonight, Frieda, and don’t think about anything,’ said Margarita. Frieda reached out both arms to Margarita, but Koroviev and Behemoth very adroitly took her under the arms and she blended into the crowd. Now people were coming in a solid wall from below, as if storming the landing where Margarita stood. Naked women’s bodies came up between tailcoated men. Their swarthy, white, coffee-bean-coloured, and altogether black bodies floated towards Margarita.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [11] In writing his autobiographical Confessions over the five years or so prior to his treatise on marriage, Augustine of Hippo has provided us with the most rounded picture we have of any individual in the ancient world. No autobiography is entirely trustworthy, and his is couched as a giant prayer to God, with the connected underlying purpose of winning the reader to the life of Christian continence that Augustine had embraced for himself, after many emotional and sexual adventures. Nevertheless, Confessions is extraordinarily revealing about one of the most fascinating leaders in the history of Christianity. It retails the youthful affairs of a brilliant student and teacher in higher education; successive monogamous relationships with two women, the first of whom bore him his son; his psychological fencing with his strong-minded mother Monica about his marital future – but also his intense bond with a teenage male friend who died young, and his deep feelings for his long-term friend Alypius. Inevitably the same-sex friendships have in modern times attracted both excessive excitement and contrary, embarrassed efforts to deny physicality in them. They should simply be regarded as an unusually well-documented example of emotions that were commonplace in late antiquity, and any physical component to them (perfectly plausible) is of secondary importance. [12] Overall, Augustine’s account of himself suggests an interesting complexity of experience, reflected in his treatises on marriage and virginity. By the time he wrote in 401, his son was dead: a promising and much-loved young man called Adeodatus (‘Given by God’), a name that suggests that the pregnancy had not been planned. Also part of Augustine’s past history was his flirtation with Manicheism. Manichee views were now among his chief objects of attack, but he remained vulnerable to unsympathetic accusations that his theology was still not totally distanced from their dismissal of the flesh. Around him was the North African diocesan flock whose care he had dutifully, though initially unenthusiastically, taken up; his sermons (of which an extraordinary and recently augmented number remain) reveal his frequent impatience not just with their inattention in church but their general sexual laxity, especially the men. Additionally, Augustine brought to his task a deep admiration for Bishop Ambrose of Milan, a great influence on him at an important moment of change, so he embraced Ambrose’s view of Mary as pure virgin as well as perfect mother. All this created a difficult balance to maintain in his paired treatises on marriage and virginity – it is noticeable that around half of Augustine’s treatment of consecrated virginity consists of a pointed commendation of humility, which is not an automatic virtue among ascetics. [13] Augustine’s exploration of marriage is a conscientious attempt to do justice to the often-contradictory elements of biblical pronouncements on the subject and to create from them a distinct pattern of ‘Christian marriage’, against the background of all marriages since the Garden of Eden.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In 1961, Tammy Faye married a fellow Pentecostalist, Jim Bakker, and started on a public career in a classic conservative Christian mode. Their evangelism was structured on a variation of Pentecostalism often styled the ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which proclaims that prayer is the route to success and wealth, citing Christ’s promise in Mark 11.23–24 that ‘whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours’. Tammy Faye predictably emphasized how traditional, stable nuclear heterosexual families were now under threat from the New Morality, although in a pattern remarkably frequent among her fellow women campaigners on the Christian Right, her own family background had in fact been disrupted and unhappy. Likewise, her husband later claimed that he had suffered sexual abuse in his youth behind a conventional Pentecostal facade. [49] From 1965 the Bakkers built up a phenomenally successful TV evangelistic show, PTL ( Praise the Lord , or People That Love ), in step with the growth of American religious and political conservatism. In the echo chamber of the Religious Right, though carefully avoiding endorsing a particular political party unlike some of their competitors, they enjoyed regular viewing figures of 12 million by 1986. By then behind the scenes all was unravelling: both Bakkers were suffering addictions seeking to counter severe stress, and their lives were becoming chaotic. Sexual abuse accusations against Jim Bakker in 1987 were followed by revelations that he had embezzled vast sums from the contributions of the devout, funding the pair’s lavish lifestyle. This is a not unfamiliar progression in popular evangelism, but there was a twist. While Jim went to prison, Tammy Faye persevered in developing an unexpected and individual strand in their TV show that she herself had pioneered. In 1985, to widespread Evangelical astonishment and disapproval, Tammy Faye staged an interview on PTL with Steve Pieters, a minister of the Metropolitan Community Church – by satellite, since he was by then in an advanced stage of AIDS and too sick to come to the PTL studio. It was an emotional and ideologically chaotic occasion, but out of it emerged Tammy Faye’s tearful acceptance of Pieters on screen as a fellow Christian, at a time when AIDS sufferers were often seen as alien threats to American society. After the Bakkers’ final disgrace and divorce, she persisted, co-hosting a TV talk show with a gay actor and becoming a regular and welcome fixture at public gay events (Plate 37). ‘When we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that,’ she told Larry King Live in 2006 . A year later she was dead of cancer, mourned by the leading US gay magazine The Advocate as ‘one of the few Christian conservatives to openly support us’. [50] Tammy Faye Bakker’s version of a conversion narrative represents one possible outcome of seventy years of bitterness and confrontation on sexual matters: a story of judgement suspended and transformed by personal experience.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And I’ve been abducted from the hospital . . . also very nice! I’ve been brought here, let’s grant that, too. Let’s even suppose that we won’t be missed . . . But tell me, by all that’s holy, how and on what are we going to live? My concern is for you when I say that, believe me!’ At that moment round-toed shoes and the lower part of a pair of pinstriped trousers appeared in the window. Then the trousers bent at the knee and somebody’s hefty backside blocked the daylight. ‘Aloisy, are you home?’ asked a voice somewhere up above the trousers, outside the window. ‘There, it’s beginning,’ said the master. ‘Aloisy?’ asked Margarita, going closer to the window. ‘He was arrested yesterday. Who’s asking for him? What’s your name?’ That instant the knees and backside vanished, there came the bang of the gate, after which everything returned to normal. Margarita collapsed on the sofa and laughed so that tears poured from her eyes. But when she calmed down, her countenance changed greatly, she began speaking seriously, and as she spoke she slipped down from the couch, crept over to the master’s knees, and, looking into his eyes, began to caress his head. ‘How you’ve suffered, how you’ve suffered, my poor one! I’m the only one who knows it. Look, you’ve got white threads in your hair, and an eternal crease by your lips! My only one, my dearest, don’t think about anything! You’ve had to think too much, and now I’ll think for you. And I promise you, I promise, that everything will be dazzlingly well!’ ‘I’m not afraid of anything, Margot,’ the master suddenly answered her and raised his head, and he seemed to her the same as he had been when he was inventing that which he had never seen, but of which he knew for certain that it had been, ‘not afraid, because I’ve already experienced it all. They tried too hard to frighten me, and cannot frighten me with anything any more. But I pity you, Margot, that’s the trick, that’s why I keep saying it over and over. Come to your senses! Why do you have to ruin your life with a sick man and a beggar? Go back! I pity you, that’s why I say it.’ ‘Oh, you, you . . .’ Margarita whispered, shaking her dishevelled head, ‘oh, you faithless, unfortunate man! . . . Because of you I spent the whole night yesterday shivering and naked. I lost my nature and replaced it with a new one, I spent several months sitting in a dark closet thinking about one thing, about the storm over Yershalaim, I cried my eyes out, and now, when happiness has befallen us, you drive me away! Well, then I’ll go, I’ll go, but you should know that you are a cruel man! They’ve devastated your soul!’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She seemed to be striving to obliterate, not only herself, but the whole hostile world through some strange and agonized merging with Mary. It was terrible indeed, very like unto death, and it left them both completely exhausted. The world had achieved its first real victory. CHAPTER 47 1 T heir Christmas was naturally overshadowed, and so, as it were by a common impulse, they turned to such people as Barbara and Jamie, people who would neither despise nor insult them. It was Mary who suggested that Barbara and Jamie should be asked to share their Christmas dinner, while Stephen who must suddenly pity Wanda for a misjudged and very unfortunate genius, invited her also—after all why not? Wanda was more sinned against than sinning. She drank, oh, yes, Wanda drowned her sorrows; everybody knew that, and like Valérie Seymour, Stephen hated drink like the plague—but all the same she invited Wanda. An ill wind it is that blows no one any good. Barbara and Jamie accepted with rapture; but for Mary’s most timely invitation, their funds being low at the end of the year, they two must have gone without Christmas dinner. Wanda also seemed glad enough to come, to leave her enormous, turbulent canvas for the orderly peace of the well-warmed house with its comfortable rooms and its friendly servants. All three of them arrived a good hour before dinner, which on this occasion would be in the evening. Wanda had been up to Midnight Mass at the Sacré Cœur, she informed them gravely; and Stephen, reminded of Mademoiselle Duphot, regretted that she had not offered her the motor. No doubt she too had gone up to Montmartre for Midnight Mass—how queer, she and Wanda. Wanda was quiet, depressed and quite sober; she was wearing a straight-cut, simple black dress that somehow suggested a species of cassock. And as often happened when Wanda was sober, she repeated herself more than when she was drunk. ‘I have been to the Sacré Cœur,’ she repeated, ‘for the Messe de Minuit; it was very lovely.’ But she did not reveal the tragic fact that her fear had suddenly laid hold upon her at the moment of approaching the altar rails, so that she had scuttled back to her seat, terrified of receiving the Christmas Communion.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  This was no random thought, but a purposeful reference to Ovid (predictably), and the poet’s treatment of the legend of Hermaphroditus, the beautiful son of the god Hermes and goddess Aphrodite, forced by the gods into bodily and spiritual androgyny with an amorous water-nymph. To another monk Peter (whose comb Baldric always carried as a keepsake), he cheerfully wrote: ‘If you can, keep your deeds above reproach, but if you cannot, at least keep your confidences to yourself.’ [44] Behind this literary efflorescence among clerical authors was a practical consideration: how to make emotional sense of the twelfth-century transformation in monastic formation. Rejecting the Carolingian Benedictine oblation of children, these were communities built up from adults who had made a free, informed choice to enter monastic life, and brought with them adult emotional and sexual experience. [45] They needed to explore how they might shape a new emotional life among other men for the rest of their lives. In literature that would mean moving on from the unequal-age, life-cycle model which was the accepted convention of ancient same-sex activity. Among the texts that they would draw on would be another biblical text about love between equals, even though the participants were male and female, the Song of Songs. From the glory-days of Cluny onwards, this book of the Bible was the most frequently read and written about of all biblical books in commentaries produced in male monasteries, while there are very few texts discussing it surviving from any medieval woman: it was a literary text in a man’s literary world. For a monk, the Song of Songs was a meditation on divine love, but its vocabulary remained that of undisguised and mostly fulfilled adult sexual desire. [46] The monastery was a safe space for even extravagant outpourings of same-sex expression, as long as one observed very careful delimits and a carapace of literary and biblical allusion. When those limits were understood, it could lead to remarkable emotional frankness – for instance in a series of treatises on friendship created in a major specimen of the new monasticism, the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire. The author was one of its monks and later celebrated Abbot, Aelred, prolific in writing on spirituality and how it should be practised. In writing these texts on friendship, he was directly and successfully challenging his Order’s original prohibition on particular personal friendships in a monastic community. Once more a celibate looked back to a pre-Christian Classical model, in this case Cicero’s text De Amicitia (‘On Friendship’), to illuminate urgent personal questions: how permeable was the boundary between friendship and love, the physical and the spiritual? [47] Aelred was not prepared to define that frontier when writing of his grief for a dead friend, and neither can we: ‘some may judge by my tears that my love was too carnal.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  That’s what this weekend was all about: a last chance to renew our connection. Or maybe this was good-bye. I could no longer read from her expression what went on inside her head. I wiped my hands along the sides of my thighs and pushed open the glass door that opened onto steps to the path that wound to the narrow beach. Kari didn’t look my way as I approached. Her arms wrapped around her middle as she stared at the water. “No problem getting away?” “No. I had the days.” “Good. Have you unpacked?” At last, she glanced my way. Something in her eyes gave me hope. For the first time in a long time, she met my gaze and really looked at me. I smiled. “Not yet. But would you like a glass of wine before we get settled?” “That and a fire. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She stepped closer. Her arm settled at my waist and she leaned in to hug me from the side. Kari was the kind to kiss friends on the lips or offer a tight hug, so I couldn’t rely on the gesture to mean anything. I draped an arm around her waist, and we walked slowly back to the cabin. Inside, the fire took me only minutes. I placed several logs and kindling in the grate and as soon as the crackling fire was built, the air inside the cabin lost its crisp edge. I pulled my sweater over my head, and, dressed only in a tank and my jeans, I sat cross-legged on the hearth rug. A glass dangled in front of me. “Thanks,” I murmured. “I was supposed to get that. Sorry.” She sat beside me. “This was a good idea. This weekend.” “Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say, hoping she’d let me know what had been on her mind. We’d been so busy working, too tired and stretched to hook up, that we’d drifted apart. I didn’t like feeling like I was in this alone—the only one worried that our relationship was on its last legs. Friends had introduced us, knowing that both Kari and I had dated women before and knowing my preference for waiflike blondes. We shared a lot of the same interests, were close to the same age. I’d ended a long relationship and hadn’t really wanted to fall directly into another, but I did want companionship. We’d landed in bed together that same night, the attraction so hot and fast that it took my breath away. She was like that. A bolt of lightning not easily captured. Even from the start, I began preparing myself for it to end. I must have stared at the fire too long. A kiss landed on my shoulder. A hand slipped beneath the hem of my tank and glided upward to cup a breast. Kari moved closer and her body snuggled against my back.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  2. Philip Neri: Playful Pragmatist At some point, he also began to evangelize, using his wit and interest in human foibles to approach those he met through the city’s vibrant street life. But he was no street-corner preacher. Philip’s evangelizing was deeply personal, more conversational than instructional. Slowly, a group of laymen began to gather around him informally, working in the hospital wards as they could and praying with him in their free time. In 1548, the city was preparing for the upcoming jubilee year of 1550. People of all classes flocked there from faraway lands, crowding the city and straining its capacity. Many arrived sick or injured, and the existing hospices, hospitals, and monasteries couldn’t provide enough shelter, food, and care for them all. Philip and his confessor founded the Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity to provide for them. By the time the jubilee year came around, they were hosting some 500 pilgrims every day. Philip’s Ministry and the Early Oratory It may also have been around this time that Philip experienced something of a spiritual crisis. He felt a calling but was not sure in which direction. He knew the life of a monk wasn’t for him, nor the new religious orders, such as the Jesuits. In fact, throughout his career, Philip ardently resisted any attempts at curbing his individual freedoms. At the encouragement of his spiritual director, Philip entered the priesthood. He was ordained in 1551, when he was about 36, unusually old to embark on the career at that time. He moved into the community attached to San Girolamo della Carità and became a chaplain there, where he lived until pried out by papal order in his old age. Confessions and the spiritual direction he could impart with them became the backbone of Philip’s ministry. But his ministry was intensely personal, flexible, and pragmatic. He continued to meet individuals where they were: on the street, in a tavern or square, and, increasingly, in his own humble rooms. 11

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  We had a good laugh about his dad dick-whuppin’ his mom into acceptin’ me as her daughter-in-law. We talked until we fell asleep in each other’s arms. We woke up to the sound of the ocean crashin’ on the shore. That last day we spent together, we got up before sunrise and walked out to the end of the pier. It was empty. We stood behind the little bait house and food stand and watched the seagulls fight over scraps. Dushawn was behind me with his big arms wrapped around me. I wondered if we could beat the odds. Most people ain’t up to forever. Suddenly he pulled up my jacket and my mini skirt, and moved the crotch of my panties to the side. He slid up inside me and started workin’ me slow while we watched the tide crash against the pier. I thought, Maybe it won’t last forever, but as long as he fucks me like this, it will. Shit. I pushed back on that big dick and stopped worryin’ ’bout whether or not it would last. As my man squeezed my ass and made my juices run down my leg, I squeezed my pussy muscles and started worryin’ ’bout how to finish my business in Compton and get back to Dushawn as soon as possible. 2 CAN PLAY K’wan “Whassup,” I said, standing in the doorway of her midtown apartment. She was a little on the plump side, but had a cute face. From the moment I saw her I knew her type. One of society’s misfits. They’re all one type or another. I know, it’s a chauvinistic statement, but what do you expect from a nigga in my line of work? “Hi,” she said, sheepishly. “You must be Chocolate?” “True,” I said, stepping into her apartment, not waiting for an invite. Her place was plush to say the least. Fifty-eight-inch television, plush carpet, and original paintings lining the walls. Shorty was obviously sitting on a few dollars, which suited me just fine. I mighta been a tramp, but I was no ho. To get a taste of this chocolate, you had to pay like you weighed. In Ms. Thang’s case, she’d be breaking the bank. “I’m Chandra,” she said, extending her hand. I didn’t take it, I just stared at her. Chandra was a big-boned sister, but she wasn’t fat. Give it a few years or a baby or two, and she would be. She had smooth caramel skin and a round face. Her hair was rich and black, just tickling her shoulders. I could tell that she had the potential to be a very attractive chick, but lacked the self-confidence to step it up. “Can I use your bathroom?” I asked, giving her my most innocent smile. “No problem. It’s down the hall to the right.”

• From The Girls (2016)

  Squinting up at the sun while Country Joe sounded from the house. Clouds drifting across the blue, outlined in neon. “Check out Orphan Annie,” Suzanne said, rolling her eyes at Caroline. Caroline was overdoing it at first, her stumbling, dopey affect, but soon the drug actually caught up to her and she got wild-eyed and a little scared. She was thin enough that I could see the glandular throb at her throat. Suzanne was watching her, too, and I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. Helen, Caroline’s supposed cousin, didn’t say anything, either. She was sunstruck, catatonic, stretched out on a piece of old carpet and listing a hand over her eyes. Giggling to no one. I went over to Caroline finally, touching her tiny shoulder. “How’s it going?” I said. She didn’t look up until I said her name. I asked her where she was from; she screwed her eyes tight. It was the wrong thing to say—of course it was, bringing up all that bad shit from the outside, whatever rotten memories were probably doubling right then. I didn’t know how to pull her back from the bog. “You want this?” I said, holding up the bracelet. She peeked at it. “Just have to finish it,” I said, “but it’s for you.” Caroline smiled. “It’s gonna look real nice on you,” I went on. “It’ll go good with your shirt.” The electricity in her eyes calmed. She held her own shirt away from her body to study it, softening. “I made it,” she said, fingering the embroidered outline of a peace sign on the shirt, and I saw the hours she’d spent on it, maybe borrowing her mother’s sewing box. It seemed easy: to be kind to her, to put the finished bracelet around her wrist, burning the knot with a match so she’d have to cut it off. I didn’t notice Suzanne eyeing us, her own bracelet ignored in her lap. “Beautiful,” I said, lifting Caroline’s wrist. “Nothing but beauty.” As if I were an occupant of that world, someone who could show the way to others. Such grandiosity mixed up in my feelings of kindness; I was starting to fill in all the blank spaces in myself with the certainties of the ranch. The cool glut of Russell’s words—no more ego, turn off the mind. Pick up the cosmic wind instead. Our beliefs as mild and digestible as the sweet rolls and cakes we hustled from a bakery in Sausalito, stuffing our faces with the easy starch. —In the days after, Caroline followed me like a stray dog. Hovering, in the doorway of Suzanne’s room, asking if I wanted one of the cigarettes she’d cadged from the bikers. Suzanne stood up and clasped her elbows behind her back, stretching. “They just gave you them?” Suzanne said archly. “For free?” Caroline glanced at me. “The cigarettes?” Suzanne laughed without saying anything else.

• From The Girls (2016)

  To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere. When a pool player sauntered over, I was prepared to scare him away. But Sasha smiled big, showing her pointed teeth. “Hi,” she said, and then he was buying us each another beer. Sasha drank steadily. Alternating between distracted boredom and manic interest, feigned or not, in what the man was saying. “You two from out of town?” he asked. His hair graying and long, a turquoise ring on his thumb—another sixties ghost. Maybe we’d even crossed paths back then, haunting the same well-worn trail. He hitched up his pants. “Sisters?” His voice barely tried to include me in the purview of his effort, and I almost laughed. Still, even sitting next to Sasha, I was aware of some of the attention washing onto me. It was shocking to remember the voltage, even secondhand. How it felt to be a desired thing. Maybe Sasha was so used to it that she didn’t even notice. Caught up in the rush of her own life, in her certainty of the meliorative trajectory. “She’s my mother,” Sasha said. Her eyes were taut, wanting me to keep the joke going. And I did. I huddled my arm around her. “We’re on a mother-daughter trip,” I said. “Driving the 1. All the way up to Eureka.” “Adventurers!” the man exclaimed, pounding the table. His name was Victor, we learned, and the background wallpaper on Victor’s cellphone was an Aztec image, he told us, so imbued with powers that just the contemplation of said image made you smarter. He was convinced that world events were orchestrated by complicated and persistent conspiracies. He took out a dollar bill to show us how the Illuminati communicated with one another. “Why would a secret society lay out their plans on common currency?” I asked. He nodded like he’d anticipated the question. “To display the reach of their power.” I envied Victor’s certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief—that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols—as if evil were a code that could be cracked. He kept talking. His teeth wet from drink, the gray blush of a dead molar. He had plenty of conspiracies to explain to us in detail, plenty of inside information he could clue us into. He spoke of “getting on the level.” Of “hidden frequencies” and “shadow governments.” “Wow,” Sasha said, deadpan. “Did you know that, Mom?” She kept calling me Mom, her voice exaggerated and comical, though it took me a while to see how drunk she was. To realize how drunk I was, too. The night had sailed into foreign waters. The fritzing of the neon signs, the bartender smoking in the doorway. I watched the bartender stamp the butt out, her flip-flops sliding around her feet. Victor said it was nice to see how well Sasha and I got along.