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 140 of 145 · 20 per page

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  You were dead but have come to life; you were lost, but have found yourself; for you have done as Abraham did when by being ready to kill his own son he showed his faith. For herein is the whole life of man; to find and save that which is perishing in his soul. A sacrifice cannot be measured by its size. It happened once that Jesus was sitting with his pupils near a collecting box. People were placing contributions in the box for God's service. Rich men went up to the box and put in much, and a poor widow came and put in two farthings. And Jesus pointed to her and said: See, this poor widow, a beggar-woman, has given two farthings, and she has given more than all the others. For they gave what they did not need, while she has given all she had; she has put in her whole substance. It happened that Jesus was at the house of Simon the leper. And a woman came into the house and she had ajar of precious oil, worth thirty pounds. Jesus was saying to his pupils that his death was near, and the woman heard this and was sorry for him, and to show him her love poured oil on his head. And she forgot everything, and broke her jar, and anointed both his head and his feet, and poured out all the oil. And the pupils began to discuss it, and said she had acted badly. And Judas, who afterwards betrayed Jesus, said: See how much she has wasted. That oil might have been sold for thirty pounds, with which many poor people could have been clothed. And the pupils began blaming the woman, who was abashed and did not know whether she had done well or ill. Then Jesus said: You are wrong to trouble the woman; she has indeed done a good deed, and you are wrong to speak about the poor. If you want to do good to them, do so-they are always there. But why speak of them now? If you pity the poor, go with your pity and do them good. But this woman has pitied me and done good truly, for she has given away all that she had. Which of you can tell what is needful and what is not? How do you know that there was no need to anoint me with the oil? She has poured it on me to prepare my body for burial, and for that it was wanted. She has truly done the will of the Father by forgetting herself and pitying another. She forgot her worldly reckonings and gave away all that she had. And Jesus said: My teaching is to do the Father's will, and His will can only be fulfilled by deeds, and not by words only.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  During this time, the teenage Luther through some connections became acquainted with the prominent Schalbe family and lived with them for some years. Heinrich Schalbe was mayor of the town during this period, first in 1495 and again in 1499. So once again, far from being the son of a horn-handed miner, Luther was already at the very young age of fourteen ensconced in the life of a wealthy, well-connected young man with tremendously bright prospects. The Schalbe family were not only prominent and affluent but also deeply pious and as such were leading patrons of the local Franciscan monastery. It was Heinrich Schalbe’s wife who first planted in the young Luther’s mind the notion that marriage could be something out of the ordinary. She sometimes quoted a verse Luther recalled decades later: “To whom it can be given, there is no dearer thing on earth than a woman’s love.”10 During his nearly four years in Eisenach, Luther also came under the influence of Father Johannes Braun, at that time vicar of the foundation of St. Mary there. Braun had a relationship with St. George’s school and seems frequently to have entertained its students at his home, and it is there that Luther would have become acquainted with him. We gather from their later letters that Braun was a powerful spiritual influence on Luther and that the godly Braun early on saw in Luther a brilliant and sensitive soul upon whom God surely had particular designs, if only he would be open to them. The Schalbe family not only taught Luther that God must be at the center of life in a way that far surpassed anything he would have learned at home in Mansfeld but also exposed him to the idea that there could be a dark side to the church and that there might be some daylight between God’s idea of the church and the institution of the church itself. It was through the paterfamilias Heinrich Schalbe that Luther would first have heard of the elderly Franciscan monk Johannes Hilten, who was at that time imprisoned in the Eisenach monastery for his pronounced criticisms of the church.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  But can compassion heal the seemingly intractable problems of our time? Is this virtue even feasible in the technological age? And what does “compassion” actually mean? Our English word is often confused with “pity” and associated with an uncritical, sentimental benevolence: the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines “compassionate” as “piteous” or “pitiable.” This perception of compassion is not only widespread but ingrained. When I gave a lecture in the Netherlands recently, I emphatically made the point that compassion did not mean feeling sorry for people; nevertheless, the Dutch translation of my text in the newspaper De Volkskrant consistently rendered “compassion” as “pity.” But “compassion” derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo, or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. The first person to formulate the Golden Rule, as far as we know, was the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE),* who when asked which of his teachings his disciples could practice “all day and every day” replied: “Perhaps the saying about shu (‘consideration’). Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”2 This, he said, was the thread that ran right through the spiritual method he called the Way (dao) and pulled all its teachings together. “Our Master’s Way,” explained one of his pupils, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).”3 A better translation of shu is “likening to oneself”; people should not put themselves in a special, privileged category but relate their own experience to that of others “all day and every day.” Confucius called this ideal ren, a word that originally meant “noble” or “worthy” but that by his time simply meant “human.” Some scholars have argued that its root meaning was “softness,” “pliability.”4 But Confucius always refused to define ren, because, he said, it did not adequately correspond to any of the familiar categories of his day.5 It could be understood only by somebody who practiced it perfectly and was inconceivable to anybody who did not. A person who behaved with ren “all day and every day” would become a junzi, a “mature human being.”

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

  But if man’s affection be one of passion, then it is moved also in regard to other animals: for since the passion of pity is caused by the afflictions of others; and since it happens that even irrational animals are sensible to pain, it is possible for the affection of pity to arise in a man with regard to the sufferings of animals. Now it is evident that if a man practice a pitiful affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to take pity on his fellow-men: wherefore it is written (Prov. 11:10): “The just regardeth the lives of his beasts: but the bowels of the wicked are cruel.” Consequently the Lord, in order to inculcate pity to the Jewish people, who were prone to cruelty, wished them to practice pity even with regard to dumb animals, and forbade them to do certain things savoring of cruelty to animals. Hence He prohibited them to “boil a kid in the milk of its dam”; and to “muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn”; and to slay “the dam with her young.” It may, nevertheless, be also said that these prohibitions were made in hatred of idolatry. For the Egyptians held it to be wicked to allow the ox to eat of the grain while threshing the corn. Moreover certain sorcerers were wont to ensnare the mother bird with her young during incubation, and to employ them for the purpose of securing fruitfulness and good luck in bringing up children: also because it was held to be a good omen to find the mother sitting on her young. As to the mingling of animals of divers species, the literal reason may have been threefold. The first was to show detestation for the idolatry of the Egyptians, who employed various mixtures in worshipping the planets, which produce various effects, and on various kinds of things according to their various conjunctions. The second reason was in condemnation of unnatural sins. The third reason was the entire removal of all occasions of concupiscence. Because animals of different species do not easily breed, unless this be brought about by man; and movements of lust are aroused by seeing such things. Wherefore in the Jewish traditions we find it prescribed as stated by Rabbi Moses that men shall turn away their eyes from such sights.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (2) Priests must be at one with others. They must have gone through the same experiences and must be in full sympathy with others. At this point, the writer to the Hebrews stops to point out – he will later show that this is one of the ways in which Jesus Christ is superior to any earthly priest – that earthly priests are so at one with other people that they have an obligation to offer sacrifice for their own sin before they offer sacrifice for the sins of others. Priests must be bound up with other men and women in all that life brings. In connection with this, the writer used a wonderful word – metriopathein. We have translated it as to feel gently; but it is really untranslatable. The Greeks defined a virtue as the mid-point between two extremes. On either hand, there was an extreme into which people might fall; in between, there was the right way. So, the Greeks defined metriopatheia (the corresponding noun) as the mid-point between extravagant grief and utter indifference. It was feeling about others in the right way. W. M. Macgregor, Principal of Trinity College, Glasgow, defined it as ‘the mid-course between explosions of anger and lazy indulgence’. The Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch spoke of that patience which was the child of metriopatheia. He spoke of it as that sympathetic feeling which enabled people to lift up and to save, to spare and to hear. Another Greek blames a man for having no metriopatheia and for therefore refusing to be reconciled with someone who had differed from him. It is a wonderful word. It means the ability to put up with people without getting irritated; it means the ability not to lose one’s temper with people when they are foolish and will not learn and do the same thing over and over again. It describes the attitude which does not get angry at the faults of others and which does not condone them, but which to the end of the day devotes itself to offering gentle yet powerful sympathy which by its very patience directs people back to the right way. We can never deal with others unless we have this strong and patient, God-given metriopatheia. (3) The third essential characteristic of a priest is this: people do not appoint themselves to the priesthood; their appointment is from God. The priesthood is not an office which is taken; it is a privilege and a glory to which people are called. The ministry of God is neither a job nor a career but a calling. Those who are called to the priesthood ought to be able to look back and say not: ‘I chose this work’ but rather: ‘God chose me and gave me this work to do.’ The writer to the Hebrews goes on to show how Jesus Christ fulfils the great conditions of the priesthood.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  All this was caused by a lack of inwardness in Israelite religion.18 The people followed other gods only because they did not truly know Yahweh. Their understanding of religion was superficial. Like the ritualists of India, Hosea was demanding greater awareness. Religious practices must no longer be taken for granted and performed by rote; people must become more conscious of what they were doing. Hosea was not talking about purely notional knowledge; the verb yada (“to know”) implied an emotional attachment to Yahweh, and an interior appropriation of the divine. It was not enough merely to attend a sacrifice or a festival. “I desire loyalty [hesed],” Yahweh complained, “and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God, not holocausts.”19 Hosea constantly tried to make the Israelites aware of the inner life of God. The exodus, for example, had not simply been an exercise of power on Yahweh’s part. When Yahweh had lived with the Israelites for forty years in the wilderness, he had felt like a parent teaching his children to walk, carrying them in his arms, and leading them like a toddler “with reins of kindness, with leading strings of love.” Yahweh had been like one “who lifts an infant against his cheek”; he had “stooped down” when he gave the people their food.20 Hosea was trying to make the people look beneath the surface of the ancient stories and appreciate the pathos of God. Amos and Hosea had both introduced an important new dimension to Israelite religion. Without good ethical behavior, they insisted, ritual alone was worthless. Religion should not be used to inflate communal pride and self-esteem, but to encourage the abandonment of egotism. And Hosea, in particular, was urging the Israelites to examine their inner lives, analyze their feelings, and develop a deeper vision based on introspection. Some of these qualities also appeared in the early portions of the Pentateuch, which were being produced in Israel and Judah at about this time.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Method 1: Build CamaraderieRyan Westwood, CEO of Simplus, told us that he was affected when conducting a one-on-one with a remote employee via teleconference during the pandemic. “She said to me, in tears, ‘I haven’t had a hug in three months.’ Her grown boys live in different states. My heart was breaking. We have to be conscious of our coworkers and their situations, more than ever when people are working remotely.” As such, his company has created geographic regions for its six hundred employees. In areas with at least ten people, employees are given a budget to do “service projects, go bowling, do whatever you want to do.” Westwood added, “We don’t have a leader looming over the gatherings. It’s about people genuinely connecting in the way they want. We have found that our employee happiness and employee net promoter scores have gone way up from this small budget.” In another of our clients, a new team was formed during a reorganization. The group consisted of people who had not worked together before, who had various backgrounds and experiences. They were to provide support services to several divisions of the company, meaning they would be gone from the office most of their days. The leader knew this environment could be ripe for feelings of exclusion and anxiety, so she initiated a few simple activities that built esprit de corps and fostered inclusion. She brought the team together in the office first thing every Thursday morning without fail to see how the work was going, analyze loads and balance tasks, and brainstorm ways to help each other (these moved to teleconferences during the pandemic). She kept the meetings to an hour, and made sure no one voice dominated, yet no one was allowed to stay quiet either. To be respectful to those who may be anxious about speaking in public, and so no one would feel pushed onto a stage, she spent a few minutes the day before putting together an agenda, letting each team member know the specific updates she would ask them to share with the group. Not only did this make her more introverted workers feel more at ease with their part in the discussion—as they had time to prepare—the whole meeting ran more smoothly. During the sessions, she followed a round-robin format, in which everyone got a chance to share their thoughts in turn. Her meetings may not have had the chaotic excitement of some brainstorming sessions, but her anxious people felt included and safe to speak up in this calm setting, leading to a tremendous amount of creative ideas flowing from the group. The team also started handing around a traveling trophy in those meetings, in this case a bowling loving cup the manager had bought at a Goodwill store.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  In Esquire, Tom Junod wrote about Rogers, “There was an energy to him … a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy,” and, tellingly: Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.” * * * Disney and Rogers are both titans of childhood; their creations are both beloved and immortal. As personalities, they are both studies in high standards, intensity, work ethic, and focusing on the details, from the size of Grumpy’s finger to the velocity of popcorn. But despite being cut from the same cloth, they each created very different garments over the course of their lives. One man was rigid; the other was flexible. One had something to prove; the other had something to share. One avoided any possibility of error; the other made room for inevitable mistakes and hardship through a belief in service and a mission greater than himself. One disengaged from those around him; one engaged fully and with authenticity. One craved approval yet was desperately isolated; the other craved intimacy and created a life based not on control but connection. Despite such different lives, Disney and Rogers shared a core worldview, perfectionism, or the tendency to demand from ourselves a level of performance higher than what is required for the situation. Perfectionism can be healthy, with high yet reasonable and flexible standards, but it quickly becomes unhealthy when standards become unrealistic and rigid. Most importantly, unhealthy perfectionism demands we perform superbly simply to be sufficient as a person. It’s not a diagnosis, though it can range from mildly inconvenient to downright paralyzing. Perfectionism comes both from within as a personality style and from all around us as a reaction to a demanding environment. If you’ve been nodding in quiet recognition, this book is for you, whether or not the term perfectionism snaps into place like that final, satisfying puzzle piece. In fact, most of us with unhelpful, Disneyesque perfectionism don’t see it as the overlapping center of the Venn diagram of our struggles. I, for one, didn’t resonate with the concept until I started researching it for my last book, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, and I’m a clinical psychologist who supposedly has a certain degree of self-awareness about things like this.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Despite his flexibility with others, Rogers could be hard on himself. In 1979, after more than a decade on the air, Rogers rolled a piece of paper into his typewriter and tapped out his thoughts in a clickety-clack stream of consciousness: “Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? … Why don’t I trust myself? … AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned trying to create? GET TO IT, FRED!” But what truly pushed Fred Rogers was something much deeper than self-castigation. The reporter Tom Junod profiled Rogers for a 1998 cover story in Esquire. In the process, he watched Rogers in action on set and commented, “Fred, of course, was an amazing perfectionist who didn’t—I wouldn’t say he drove those people, that’s the wrong word—but absolutely knew what he wanted when he wanted [it] and would not leave that day until he saw it.” His staff could sense the intensity, too. “There wasn’t a spontaneous bone in that man’s body,” observed Seamans. “He hated to go into anything unprepared.” But both Junod and the Neighborhood staff also understood innately that Rogers’s intensity was in service of something greater than a good show. He was driven by his high but flexible standards, commitment to guided drift, his unshakable service to children, but most of all, his energy was funneled into one thing: human connection. He forged connections quickly and deeply, with everyone. Ten-year-old Jeff Erlanger came on the show to explain how his electric wheelchair worked and why he used it. Nearly twenty years later, Jeff rolled onstage in a tuxedo at the Television Hall of Fame induction ceremony to introduce Rogers. Rogers, who had kept in touch but not seen his old friend since the original taping, leaped to his feet and clambered straight onstage, a huge smile on his face. Rogers connected with François Clemmons, the Black, gay actor who for twenty-five years played Officer Clemmons on the show; together, they quietly broke the color barrier by cooling their feet in a shared plastic wading pool—a revolutionary act in 1969. In his memoir, Clemmons remembers, “There was something serious yet comforting and disarming about him. His eyes hugged me without touching me.” Rogers once connected with an empty-eyed boy fiercely wielding a toy sword in Penn Station, who was forced into saying hello by his starstruck mother. Rogers leaned in and whispered, “Do you know you’re strong on the inside, too?” The boy, caught off guard at being given something he did not know he needed, nodded nearly imperceptibly. Rogers even connected with Koko, the gorilla who had been taught American Sign Language. It turned out she was a fan of the show. Upon meeting, she hugged him and wouldn’t let go. Then, in tribute to the opening sequence of the show she adored, she lovingly removed his shoes.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Jews and Christians treat their scriptures with ceremonial reverence. The Torah scroll is the most sacred object in the synagogue; encased in a precious covering, housed in an ‘ark’, it is revealed at the climax of the liturgy when the scroll is conveyed formally around the congregation, who touch it with the tassels of their prayer shawls. Some Jews even dance with the scroll, embracing it like a beloved object. Catholics also carry the Bible in procession, douse it with incense, and stand up when it is recited, making the sign of the cross on forehead, lips and heart. In Protestant communities, the Bible reading is the high point of the service. But even more important were the spiritual disciplines that involved diet, posture and exercises in concentration, which, from a very early date, helped Jews and Christians to peruse the Bible in a different frame of mind. They were thus able to read between the lines and find something new, because the Bible always meant more than it said. From the very beginning, the Bible had no single message. When the editors fixed the canons of both the Jewish and Christian testaments, they included competing visions and placed them, without comment, side by side. From the first, biblical authors felt free to revise the texts they had inherited and give them entirely different meaning. Later exegetes held up the Bible as a template for the problems of their time. Sometimes they allowed it to shape their world-view but they also felt free to change it and make it speak to contemporary conditions. They were not usually interested in discovering the original meaning of a biblical passage. The Bible ‘proved’ that it was holy because people continually discovered fresh ways to interpret it and found that this difficult, ancient set of documents cast light on situations that their authors could never have imagined. Revelation was an ongoing process; it had not been confined to a distant theophany on Mount Sinai; exegetes continued to make the Word of God audible in each generation. Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis: any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate. All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao. But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest. The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies.

• From Between Us

  In cultures where individuals are part of given and durable interdependent relationships, love may be less central. One way of understanding this is that individuals in these cultures are close to others already, and love as an emotion that discriminates between those who are worthy of your caring and those who are not is not as useful. You have to take care of the people with whom you are interdependent. Emotions of closeness or caring in those cultures, such as amae and fago, focus on meeting the needs of others, rather than seeking out contact with those who are worthy. Amae and fago are less about having fun with someone who makes you feel good, and more about helping others, and making sure that they do not suffer too much. Other Emotions in Close and Dependent Relationships Contrary to the intuition of many a student (and colleague), it is also not the case that individuals from so-called collectivist cultures seek more intimacy in relationships. To the contrary, individuals in tightly connected, interdependent relationship networks are more concerned about limiting the burdens of such interdependence than about seeking more intimacy and love. Take an example from Ghana, where cultural psychologist Glenn Adams was struck by the caution about friends found in slogans, poems, and stories. A Ghanaian poem sounded: Beware of friends. Some are snakes under grass; Some are lions in sheep’s clothing; Some are jealousies behind their façades of praises; Some are just no good; Beware of friends. Bumper stickers would carry such slogans as “Beware of bad friends.” And when random Ghanaian and U.S. American participants in public places (markets, parks) were asked by interviewers about their friendships, Ghanaian participants considered it normal to be cautious, or even suspicious about friends. In sharp contrast with American respondents, Ghanaians also declared the person having many friends to be foolish or naïve. Why would Ghanaians not seek as many good friends as they could? The majority of Ghanaians (versus a small minority of Americans) understand friendships to mean that you offer material and practical support. This expectation from friends may be a liability against the background of resource poverty. Moreover, in a Ghanaian context, you need not seek friends to keep you company—company is always assured. And finally, there is always the possibility that friends take advantage of you or are not to be trusted.

• From Between Us

  They and the rest of Tamalekar’s family spent the evening in quiet talk, with the [ . . . ] man speaking with respect and politeness. The visitor had distinguished himself by bringing a gift of a carton of cigarettes. The evening wore on past the point at which the family usually retired, and when the young man stepped out for a moment [ . . . ], Tamalekar said to his family, “We fago this one because he is calm. Even though we are sleepy, we’ll stay up and talk with him.” Later Tamalekar gave the man one of his valued possessions. The meaning of fago as taking care of someone does not change, but this time the nurturing is prompted by a man, who through his calm and kind behavior (not through his needs), demonstrates having compassion himself. Compassion meets compassion and nurturing; in this case, the act of fago is more reciprocal. Whereas love seeks joyful closeness between autonomous individuals who find each other special, fago is nurturing a person with whom a connection already exists, or else has come to be felt. Typically, fago is an unavoidable response to another person’s needs, whereas love is seeking closeness to another person of your choice, one who has special qualities and who is particularly appreciative of you. To be sure, loving partners will take care of each other in case of need, and fago-ing individuals may find joy in each other (as when the young man from the other island came to visit Tamalekar’s family). Yet the central acts of these two emotions differ, with love achieving mutual admiration, attraction, or longing, and fago achieving the nurturing of connected others in need. Each emotion is “right” because it achieves the most valued relationship goals in the culture. Remember that the Chinese word for love was categorized as a negative emotion, a form of sadness by Chinese participants? One reason may be that Chinese love simply runs a different course—one including the awareness of another person’s suffering, the sadness when life is hard on them, and the effort that goes into need satisfaction, rather than merely describing the bliss of connecting with a special individual. The bad always comes with the good.

• From Between Us

  When I teach about cultural differences in emotions, my students often think that love should be more pronounced in collectivist contexts. If the ties between people are strong in collectivist contexts, then wouldn’t this be because individuals feel lots of love for each other? Wouldn’t interdependence between people be achieved by individuals consistently seeking intimacy? The answer to both questions is a resounding “no”; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In truly collective cultures, relationships are either a given or chosen in close consultation with the group (the latter being the case in arranged marriages). In these cultures, relationships are not so much organized around admiration or attraction (love), but rather around the needs of others (empathy/compassion). The “right” emotions in many cultures are not about idealization and choice, but rather about need and the unavoidable connection between people. Take the Japanese emotion of amae. Like love, this is an emotion that centers on caring and dependence, but it is very different from love. The prototype of an amae relationship is that between mother and child. As we have seen in chapter 3, Japanese mothers accept and indulge the childish behavior of their toddlers and kindergartners. They do not curtail this behavior, and show empathy and understanding. In the case of the preschoolers Nao and Maki (also introduced in chapter 3), Nao clung to her mother’s leg, and in so doing, she was acting younger than her age. She did not take control in the situation, and waited till someone else did. Maki became the nurturing partner, and in so doing accepted an amae relationship. She approached Nao and convinced her to play with her. Maki thus accepted Nao’s inappropriate demeanor and offered what Nao needed. Amae not only presupposes, but also—importantly—created an interdependent relationship between the girls. Therefore, amae, a central emotion in Japanese close relationships, achieves interdependence, rather than mutual admiration, attraction, and longing. Amae is certainly not restricted to childhood. You grant your close friends or your romantic partners what they need even, or especially, if it is unreasonable. Amae is based on need and indulgence, rather than idealization or elevation of the partner. In her book Unnatural Emotions, anthropologist Catherine Lutz describes a central Ifaluk emotion of closeness and dependence: fago. One of the translations of fago is “love.” However, unlike U.S. American love, which shares features with joy, fago shares features with sadness and compassion. Fago is “right” in Ifaluk society. It is a mature person’s response to the suffering of others: the readiness to take care of other people in need. Fago is typically felt for someone who is sick, dying, or without family, but it also occurs in a more pleasant context, as is apparent from an example involving Tamalekar. A young man from another island came to visit him by ship. The visit was appropriate, because the young man shared a clan affiliation with Tamalekar.

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

  It happens sometimes that for very friendship one denies his friend’s petition, knowing it to be hurtful to him, or the contrary to be better for him, as a physician refuses what his patient asks for. No wonder then if God, who fulfils the desires put before Him by His rational creature for the love that He bears to that creature, fails sometimes to fulfil the petition of those whom He singularly loves, that He may fulfil it otherwise with something more helpful to the salvation of the petitioner, as we read in 2 Cor. xii, 7-9; and the Lord says to some: Ye know not what ye ask (Matt. xx, 22). Therefore Augustine says (Ep. ad Paulin. et Theras.): “The Lord is good in often not giving what we will, to give instead what we should prefer.” CHAPTER XCVII HOW THE ARRANGEMENTS OF PROVIDENCE FOLLOW A PLANGOD by His providence directs all things to the end of the divine goodness, not that anything accrues as an addition to His goodness by the things that He makes, but His aim is the impression of the likeness of His goodness so far as possible on creation. But inasmuch as every created substance must fall short of the perfection of the divine goodness, it was needful to have diversity in things for the more perfect communication of the divine goodness, that what cannot perfectly be represented by one created exemplar, might be represented by divers such exemplars in divers ways in a more perfect manner. Thus man multiplies his words to express by divers expressions the conception of his mind, which cannot all be put in one word. And herein we may consider the excellence of the divine perfection shown in this, that the perfect goodness which is in God united and simple, cannot be in creatures except according to diversity of modes and in many subjects. Things are different by having different forms, whence they take their species. Thus then the end of creation furnishes a reason for the diversity of forms in things. From the diversity of forms follows a difference of activities, and further a diversity of agents and patients, properties and accidents. Evidently then it is not without reason that divine providence distributes to creatures different accidents and actions and impressions and allocations. Hence it is said: The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, hath established the heavens in prudence. By his wisdom the depths have broken out, and the clouds grow thick with dew (Prov. iii, 19, 20).

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Sex is a beautiful way to bridge an attachment breach when you have missed an attachment cue from your spouse. The comfort and warmth of your partner’s skin on your skin can soothe the pain of separation. Many times, if sex is about connection and expressing love, bodies can repair and make up faster than our brains can. Powerful feel-good hormones are released when a man and a woman go chest to chest, belly to belly, skin on skin. Caressing, kissing, and touching sensitive erogenous zones helps you get out of your head and into your body. Sometimes, a couple just needs to put their annoyances or frustrations on the shelf and make love to each other. I’m not talking about putting a bandage on abuse; abuse is wrong—always. There is no excuse for emotional, physical, or verbal abuse. If abuse is going on in your relationship, stop everything, don’t pass go, get help. Now! What I am talking about is the average marriage, where there is connection and disconnection, we hear each other and we misunderstand each other, we have moments of sensitivity and moments of insensitivity, we have days of attunement and times where we are un-attuned. Even great mothers miss attuning to their children’s needs up to 70 percent of the time. When she realizes she missed her baby’s cue, she responds and repairs. We are going to miss each other as husband and wife on occasion, but it doesn’t mean we should find excuses to neglect our sexual relationship. This part of a marital union is important. It has more value than we have assigned it. We can treat it casually and think it is supposed to happen like in the movies: automatic desire, instant arousal, spontaneous orgasm. That is silly. We have to work at anything worth having. Don’t neglect this part of your relationship, even if it hasn’t been great. I think God thinks it is great when we make an effort to make love to our partner even if fireworks don’t happen; there is still goodness happening. Just being together is good. Caressing, kissing, holding, cuddling, playing, and fondling are all good. We need to take the focus off of having intercourse and an orgasm and put the value on giving each other pleasure. Pleasure is underrated. Pleasure for your body and giving your spouse pleasure is worthy of our time and effort. God wants you to have the feel-good hormones released in your body to make marriage easier. It’s like a free mini-vacation—why wouldn’t you go? So, what if my spouse doesn’t like making love? Great question. There is a reason someone doesn’t like sex. Instead of personalizing it and making it about yourself, why not explore with your spouse what they don’t like. Be empathic, listen, ask good questions. Maybe she or he feels pressured. Maybe she feels misunderstood or taken for granted. Maybe he feels like he is supposed to be a sexual machine.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Men, especially after your wife has a baby, you have to tune into her more, not less. I know it’s hard. Husbands can feel like they have been replaced with this little person who is having a love affair with your woman, or maybe your wife is having postpartum depression. It’s not easy; be patient and sensitive. God has provided a beautiful opportunity to mature you into a sensitive partner to the woman He has given you. Be present with her; ask her what she needs and how you can support her. Tell her you miss being sexually close with her and what that means to you, but reassure her you will wait until she is ready. Connect with her emotionally. It’s really tempting after children come for the husband to just work more hours because he feels neglected. Move in toward her, not away. Sexy takes on new meaning for a woman once she has children. Helping her with the kids is the sexiest thing you can do. I remember watching Ron playing with the boys and thinking, Wow, that man is the sexiest thing on the earth and I can’t wait to get him alone after those kids of ours go to bed! I am telling you, woo her by helping her. Women, I want to caution you, it’s so easy to judge a man and think all he wants is sex; or the other extreme, he never wants me anymore. Get into your own solid self and pursue him sexually. Men want to be wanted as much as a woman wants to be wanted. No one wants to be judged for his or her sexual desires or lack of desire. If you don’t want him pawing at you then give him reassurance that he is desirable by pursuing him. In the Song of Solomon it is the woman who opens the book by saying, “Kiss me—full on the mouth! Yes! For your love is better than wine, headier than your aromatic oils” (Song of Sol. 1:2). If you carefully read this book about marital sexual love and desire, you will find she frequently pursues him. She openly desires him. She asks for his affection. She regards him. She freely loves him pleasuring her body. She allows herself to soak in and receive sexual pleasure. They say men love to make their women happy. Let him make you happy! This Song of Solomon woman says, “When my King-Lover lay down beside me, my fragrance filled the room, His head resting between my breasts the head of my lover was a sachet of sweet myrrh, my beloved is a bouquet of wildflowers picked just for me from the fields of Engedi” (Song of Sol. 1:12–14). Maybe part of the problem we women have with finding, maintaining, and expressing sexual desire is because of the way we think and what we say to ourselves about our man. She calls him my King-Lover.

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

  The brutal and horrifying death of Jesus on the cross ordered by the Romans marks a reconciling end to such narrative ambiguities around family. Alone among the four Evangelists, John brings Mary to the foot of the cross to watch her son die – she is absent from the witnesses named by the Synoptics. The Evangelist builds still more on her presence (John 19.25–27): hanging half-alive on the cross, with Mary standing beside the disciple whom Jesus loves, he commands them to regard themselves as mother and son. ‘From that hour, the disciple took her to his own home’ (Plate 4). Thus were biological family and Jesus’s chosen and beloved associates melded into one as he died.[32] Interestingly, John never gives Mary her name either, consistently calling her simply the mother of Jesus; she and the unnamed disciple have both become symbols, but paired and crucial symbols. If one reads back to the beginning of the story of Jesus in John’s Gospel, the wedding at Cana, Jesus leaves for Capernaum straight afterwards ‘with his mother and brothers and his disciples’ (John 2.12; my italics). The motif seems to be that at both polarities of Jesus’s public career, his first miracle and his crucifixion, the two relational polarities are united. John must be aware of the familial tensions in other narrative traditions. * The disruptive constructions of family and relationships in the Gospels are paired with some strong opinions from Jesus on marriage: crucial and individual statements on divorce and monogamy. Jesus condemns divorce, which under existing Jewish custom was easy to obtain. To justify his condemnation (Mark 10.10; Matt. 19.9; Luke 16.18), he quotes the Creation narratives in the book of Genesis (Gen. 2.24): ‘a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.’[33] He uses this proof-text not simply to forbid divorce, but, by implication, polygyny as well. He thus significantly decouples this central Jewish text on marriage from Judaism’s previous history and practice of marriage. As we have seen, Genesis’s ‘one-flesh’ theology did not deter the Jews from honouring patriarchally based polygyny, as much in Jesus’s time as before or later. But in rejecting polygyny, Jesus injects the idea of a restrictive twoness into his version of the Genesis quotation, where it had not been before: ‘the two shall become one flesh’, he says, a modification of the original that is already present in the version quoted in the Gospel of Mark and repeated in Matthew’s Gospel. In many modern Christian translations of Genesis, that ‘two’ word has leaked back from the Gospels into the Hebrew Scripture, where actually it makes no such appearance – rather as some modern Christian Bibles retrofit the word ‘virgin’ into Isaiah 7.14.

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

  At the time, some of Epiphanes’s Christian contemporaries reached for their standard marginalizing ploy by writing him off simply as one more gnostic. Kathy Gaca, a refreshingly original genealogist of Hellenistic Jewish and then Christian rhetoric on fornication, sees him rather as a serious Christian, reading Plato and early Stoic philosophers alongside what he knew of New Testament texts, and doing so without the filter provided by Philo of Alexandria. Other commentators have pointed out that his reading must have included Cynic admirers of the outrageous ascetic Diogenes.[30] Epiphanes saw conventional marriage as a confidence trick designed to protect property rights: it should be replaced by arrangements for communal sexual activity alongside a general communalism. His blueprint for a just society, ‘sharing in common on the basis of equity’, might be seen as a logical, if unusual, deduction from the picture of community sharing in the Jerusalem Church in the Acts of the Apostles, as much as an expression of Platonism or Cynicism. Epiphanes does explicitly echo Paul’s cry in Galatians 3.28, urging Christians to end the division between ‘female and male, slaves and free persons’. His extension of that into a ban on marriage and the conventional household nevertheless makes a rather radical leap beyond Paul – not to mention his ridicule of the tenth of the Ten Commandments that forbids coveting one’s neighbour’s wife. Nothing in the history of the second-century Church suggests that Epiphanes’s line of argument was ever going to rally Christians against celibacy in favour of uninhibited sexual enjoyment. He forms a contrasting pair with his young near-contemporary in Alexandria whom Justin Martyr had praised for seeking castration. Was there a middle way between these two teenage extremes? It might have been the warm defence of marital sexuality written around 180 by Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch. In his one surviving treatise, justifying Christianity to a well-read non-Christian friend, Autolycus, Theophilus could speak of the exclusive passion of married love in terms more reminiscent of Graeco-Roman romanticism than of contemporary Christian writings, but he still related it squarely to the first biblical marriage: God made woman by taking her from his side so that man’s love for her might be greater…what man who marries lawfully does not disregard his mother and father and his whole family and all his relatives, while he cleaves to his own wife and unites with her, loving her more than them?[31]

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

  Yet not everyone listened even to Chrysostom. From his own time, and so two generations after Macrina, comes the vivid literary life-story of the Roman aristocrat Melania the Younger; the work of a fifth-century ascetic, it has been described as ‘the most vivid and animated biography of a woman to have survived from antiquity’.[34] Melania was married as a teenager to the slightly older teenager Pinian, who was sympathetic to her pleas on their wedding night to live as brother and sister, but felt a sense of duty to produce heirs for his consular family. After two successive children died in infancy, Pinian decided that he had done his best, and the relationship was free to develop as they wished, far away from family pressures back in Rome. Inherited wealth financed a life of suitably austere comfort in Jerusalem, and Pinian was buried in the grounds of the community of monks and nuns that Melania had devoted her energies to creating.[35] This tradition continued to fascinate couples in the eastern Mediterranean; at least three saints’ Lives variously dating between the sixth and the tenth centuries discuss outright celibate marriages with warm approval. The most complicated was that of Andronikos and Athanasia, where a sadly recognizable family tragedy expands into a miniature Greek romantic novel with echoes of the story of Melania and Pinian: the husband and wife, a golden couple from wealthy families in Antioch, separate in grief over the deaths of their two children. Later they are reunited in twelve years of monastic companionship, but without Andronikos recognizing his lost wife, for (in classic transvestite ascetic style) she is disguised as a man – as an Ethiopian, no less – and she does not enlighten him about her real identity before their edifying deaths. The other two stories are from Syria and Egypt, backdated to the time of pre-Constantinian persecution: from the outset of their marriages the couples portrayed pledge to live together without any sexual contact.[36] If it is argued that Lives of saints are just Lives of saints, literary constructions, one has to reckon with an extraordinary fifth-century tomb inscription to a couple at Aosta in Italy, which claims that, in the course of a long marriage, ‘the wife relinquished her husband and lived for more than twenty years in perpetual chastity.’[37]

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  She knew, to my amazement, that I had a career in the financial world. That pleased me—that she had made an effort to keep me in her sights. For her part, she said she had taken up oil painting and followed it with, “And I’d love to paint your portrait, and Davey’s, too,” referring to my brother’s name as a baby. “That would be wonderful,” I replied, intrigued by what she might produce. Sadly, time ran out before her dream became reality. She was ill with breast cancer at the time and succumbed before she had a session with either of us. In an act of Catholic kindness, the prioress of one of the splinter groups of Big Sisters admitted Betty into their convent on her deathbed, fulfilling a request she had been making for years—that she be allowed to rejoin the Center. She was buried in the Center’s cemetery, and the stone on her grave is inscribed: Sister Mary Elizabeth. After I had been living for several years in New York City, I reconnected with Charles Forgeron (formerly Brother Sebastian). He was single and often in need of an escort in his active social life and for several years in a row, we attended an annual ball at the Pierre Hotel. Sadly, he, too, died young, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. Over the next couple of decades, the bond with the “uncles” and “aunts” of my youth remained as warm as when I was a child. They rejoiced in my marriage and shared in the joy of the two children that followed. A year before my children were born, my husband’s ex-wife died. I pondered the fact that my husband was now a widower, and in the eyes of the Catholic Church I was free to be married as a Catholic. But I let the idea percolate without acting upon it until I was closing in on my fiftieth birthday. My sister Peggy had organized the annual “Center Children” reunion. It was to be held on August 15, the day before my birthday. I told my husband that I would like to have our marriage receive a Catholic blessing by Abbot Gabriel, and he was all in favor of that. The abbot had been one of the Big Brothers who became ordained as a priest after the Center reconciled with the Catholic Church and subsequently was elected abbot when the community joined the Benedictine order. To me he remained one of my favorite “uncles.”