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.

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

  The egg is warm as my insides, he thinks. It’s an old remedy. “The egg, it heals even the worst bruises,” says his grandma. She works on the violet lump shining, like a plum, on the boy’s face. As the egg circled, its smooth pressure on the bruise, the boy watched, under a puffed lid, his grandma’s lips crease with focus as she worked. Years later, as a young man, when all that remains of the grandma is a face etched in his mind, the boy will remember that crease between her lips while breaking open a hard-boiled egg on his desk on a winter night in New York. Short on rent, it would be eggs for dinner for the rest of the week. They would not be warm, but cold in his palm, having been boiled by the dozen earlier that morning. At his desk, drifting, he’ll roll the moist egg across his cheek. Without speaking, he will say Thank you. He’ll keep saying it until the egg grows warm with himself. “Thank you, Grandma,” says the boy, squinting. “You fine now, Little Dog.” She lifts the pearly orb, and places it gently to his lips. “Eat,” she says. “Swallow. Your bruises are inside it now. Swallow and it won’t hurt anymore.” And so he eats. He is eating still. — There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras. We stopped the truck one time on the side of a dirt road and sat against the driver door, facing a meadow. Soon our shadows on the red exterior shifted and bloomed, like purple graffiti. Two double-cheese Whoppers were warming on the hood, their parchment wrappers crackling. Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him? His tongue tracing my ear: the green pulled through a blade of grass. The burgers started to smoke. We let them. — I would work for the farm for two more summers after that first one—but my time with Trevor would stretch through all the seasons in between. And that day, it was October 16—a Thursday. Partly cloudy, the leaves crisp but still on their branches.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  HE HAD SEEN SNOW for the first time that winter, and he loved to be out in it, to stand with his arms outstretched as it fell, his mouth open to the sky. We went out that afternoon, the snow already tracked through but still lovely; the streets were quiet for the holiday, all the shops were closed. We were wearing the scarves I had found when I opened the presents under the tree, which were long and knit in the same pattern, one yellow and one blue; we wouldn’t ever be boyfriends who wore the same clothes, R. said, but one shared thing was acceptable, having one shared thing was nice. We didn’t go far, just halfway down the block, where I whistled, a short upward swoop I repeated three times, the usual signal. She might not be here, I had said, she isn’t always, she goes other places or maybe somebody takes her in, but she came quickly enough from her usual spot around the back of the building. She was beautiful in her way, tawny and medium-sized like most of Sofia’s street dogs, too skinny and with mange along one side. She was happy to see us, I thought, happy as she always was to get attention, though she lacked the confidence of some of the other dogs; she stayed near the wall, wagging her tail but not coming too close at first. Even when she let us pet her she tried to keep her distance, cringing in a sidling motion that brought her body within our reach but kept her head angled away, a mixture of eagerness and fear. Somebody had taught her that, I thought, somebody had beaten her, or many people had, but not in this neighborhood, here everyone was kind to her, she was a sort of communal pet. She lost some of her shyness when R. pulled the packet of treats out of his coat pocket, clumsy in his mittens, which he had to take off before he could tear open the packet and pull out one of the strips of leathery meat. She started whining when she saw it, prancing closer, and he crooned her name, Lilliyana, though that didn’t mean anything to her, it was just a name he had invented, it suited her, he thought. Ela tuka, he said, a phrase I had taught him, come here, and he held out the treat so she could take it, which she did by stretching her neck and pulling back her lips, taking hold of it with her front teeth, like a deer plucking a leaf. He had bought the treats the night before, when we were buying supplies; she should have Christmas dinner too, he said. She let us pet her more vigorously then, finally coming close, even pressing her side against his legs as she begged for a second piece, which he gave her, though that was all for today, he told her, there would be more tomorrow. She seemed to accept this, she didn’t keep begging once we turned away, as most dogs would have, I thought; she disappeared behind the building again to whatever shelter she had found.

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

  future where they fail, and that will hurt them much more. We all need someone who loves us but who also understands that it’s better for our long-term happiness to speak out loud the unpleasant truth when the path we are on is one we need to abandon. That’s the point of what Daniel Kahneman said. When you find that friend, ask them to be your quitting coach, to be that person who helps you figure out when to abandon course. If Daniel Kahneman, whose life’s work has been studying cognitive biases and decision errors, needs a quitting coach, then everybody needs one. Kahneman’s happens to be fellow Nobel laureate Richard Thaler. Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have somebody of that stature play that role for us, but we should all try to find someone to be that person in our life who tells us the truth, whether it’s a close friend, a mentor, a coworker, a sibling, or a parent. They just have to be someone who has our long-term best interests at heart and is willing to tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. Of course, almost all of us have experienced the opposite, where someone spared our feelings rather than helping us see the situation for what it was. You break up with someone and, all of a sudden, your close friends tell you, “I thought you should have ditched them months ago.” Or you quit your job and people in your family say, “I could tell you were miserable. It sure took you a long time to figure that out.” Of course, when they tell us those things, we all have the same reaction: “If you knew that all along, why didn’t you say so earlier?” And the answer is always the same: “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” You can get over hearing that you should quit something. But if you spend months or years in a job or a relationship that’s not contributing to your long- term happiness, that’s time you can never get back. Andrew Wilkinson experienced this himself after he had to fire the CEO of one of his businesses. Several of his friends told him they could see for a while that it was necessary. When he asked, “Then why didn’t you tell me?” they said, “We didn’t want to upset you.” That was aggravating to hear as Wilkinson immediately realized that if his friends had been honest about what they saw, he would have gotten to the

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

  That night, bellydown on the hardwood, your face resting on a pillow, you asked me to scrape your back. I knelt beside you, peeled your black T-shirt over your shoulders, unhooked your bra. Having done this hundreds of times by now, my hands moved on their own. As the bands fell away, you grabbed the bra, pulled it out from under you, and tossed it aside. Heavy with sweat from the day’s work, it landed on the floor with the thud of a knee brace. The chemicals from the nail salon rose from your skin. I fished a quarter from my pocket, dipped it into the jar of Vicks VapoRub. The bright eucalyptus scent filled the air and you started to relax. I dunked the coin, coating it with the greasy ointment, then dabbed a thumb’s worth across your back, down your spine. When your skin shone, I placed the coin at the base of your neck and pulled it outward, across your shoulder blades. I scraped and rescraped in firm, steady strokes, the way you taught me, until russet streaks rose from under the white flesh, the welts deepening into violet grains across your back like new, dark ribs, releasing the bad winds from your body. Through this careful bruising, you heal. I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it. How I want this to be true. And yet, even here, writing you, the physical fact of your body resists my moving it. Even in these sentences, I place my hands on your back and see how dark they are as they lie against the unchangeable white backdrop of your skin. Even now, I see the folds of your waist and hips as I knead out the tensions, the small bones along your spine, a row of ellipses no silence translates. Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me—the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once. You groaned into the pillow as I pressed along your shoulders, then worked down through the stubborn knots. “This is nice. . . . This is so nice.” After a while, your breathing deepened, evened out, your arms slack, and you were asleep. —

• From Cleanness (2020)

  She pressed against me more insistently, rubbing the top of her head against my jeans. She wanted a treat, and wanted more to be let inside. She had been a house dog once, I had heard, years ago she had belonged to a foreign teacher who left her behind when he went back to the States, she loved to sleep in our houses. But we had been told it wasn’t allowed; she was almost always dirty, and though she was treated for fleas and ticks you could never be sure, she was an outdoor dog now, we shouldn’t encourage her. But there was no one around to admonish me, and so Ela, I said to her, come on, and then I stood, successfully this time, maybe because Mama kept her side pressed against me, as if to prop me up as I kept one hand braced against the brick wall of the house. She whined at the door as I fumbled the key into the lock. Okay, Mama, I said soothingly again, okay. I would take the box of treats from the cabinet above the sink, I would put towels down on the kitchen floor so she would have a soft place to lie down. She was dirty but what was a little dirt, I thought as I turned the latch, I should have let you in a long time ago, I said, I’m sorry. I pushed the door open and she went ahead of me into the house, going just a few feet before she dropped onto the tile of the entranceway, a spot she claimed as if it had long been hers, and gave a quick deep sigh as she laid her head on her paws. She kept her eyes on me as I tossed my keys in the little dish by the door, her tail more subdued but still striking the wall beside her as I put my bag down, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Okay, Mama, I said again, you sleep there, we’ll sleep and in the morning we’ll feel better, though I feared I wouldn’t feel better, in body and spirit both I thought I would likely feel much worse. And then, because the dizziness didn’t pass or maybe because I wanted her warmth next to me, I lowered myself to the floor, I stretched myself out beside her and laid one hand on her flank. We’ll sleep, I said again, and she rolled onto her side, her stomach toward me, and placed one of her paws against my chest. It would leave a mark, I knew, I would have to scrub it out in the morning, but what did it matter, I thought as I closed my eyes, what does it matter, why not let it stay.

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

  306The History of Christianity II õBut fundamentalist and evangelical missions exploded, and Catholics and Mormons did quite well too. During the Cold War, many of these conservative missionaries saw themselves as evangelists not only for the gospel, but also on behalf of American civil religion. In other words, they were spiritual foot soldiers in the global battle against communism. õOne example: the evangelist Bob Pierce, a Baptist minister. As a traveling preacher, he spent a lot of time in Korea. He was overwhelmed by the suffering he saw, especially the suffering of children who had lost their parents in war. In 1950, he founded a Christian charity called World Vision to help care for those orphans, although World Vision’s mission soon expanded to include a lot of different kinds of relief work— everything from disaster relief to help for victims of sex trafficking. õPierce was convinced that the charity and preaching shouldn’t go in only one direction: Korean Christians had a lot to teach Americans, too. He published a book called The Untold Korea Story in which he raved about Korean Christians’ religious zeal. õIn the decades since then, World Vision has grown into a huge international organization that works in more than 90 countries, and its theology has become more ecumenical. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians all work there. 307Lecture 31—Culture Wars and the Christian Right THE 1960s AND 1970s õNext, this lecture will turn to the origins of the movement that has come to be known as the Christian right. That term refers to the organizations and activists that grew up in the late 1970s with the aim of mobilizing voters to restore the authority of the Bible in the public sphere and to roll back many of the social changes of the 1960s. õThe Christian right is not synonymous with conservative Christians or evangelicals. Many Christians who call themselves evangelical or conservative have dissented from some of the ideas and tactics of the activists about to be covered. õThe worldview that motivated these activists grew from the early Cold War cultural and geopolitical situation. Below are five of their primary principles. 1. America is a Christian nation. A traditional reading of the Bible should rule over every sphere of culture. 2. White, native-born Protestants—and a few others who agree with them—should be in charge of that culture, at least in America. The racial component is a complicated one, often not explicit; it has troubled many conservative Christians. But most scholars (including most Christian scholars) agree that it is very important to understanding this movement. 3. The ideal family is the heterosexual nuclear family, where sex is bound within marriage and the wife submits to her husband’s authority. 4. The free market is the only Christian way to do business. 5. It’s America’s duty to defend these values around the world.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  This fact is not lost on the poor of the earth, who recognize God's solidarity with them, as articulated in the songs slaves sung: Poor little Jesus boy Made him to be born in a manger World treated him so mean Treats me mean too.3 To understand Jesus from the social location of the poor is to create a sacred space where the marginalized can grapple with their spiritual need to reconcile their God with their struggle for justice and dignity. For many who read the Bible from the margins, Jesus’ poverty is attested by the sacrifice offered by his parents at his birth. According to Luke, “And when the days of [Mary] cleansing were fulfilled according to the Law of Moses…[they] offered a sacrifice according to the Law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (2:22–24). The law as stated in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus required her to offer a lamb for her child, but if she could not afford one, then the sacrifice would be two turtledoves or two young pigeons. Mary made use of the offering of the poor. Jesus’ poverty was not limited to his birth. Jesus lived the life of an itinerant preacher, a life marked by privation. Referring to himself in Luke, Jesus would say, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (9:58). He wandered throughout Judea without money in his purse. Several incidents indicating Jesus’ lack of funds are recorded in the biblical text. For example, when questioned if he paid the didrachma (Temple tax), Jesus instructed Peter to find the necessary funds to pay the tax in the mouth of the first fish Peter hooked (Matt. 17:22–27). When asked if one should pay tribute to Caesar, Jesus asked to be shown a tribute coin rather than producing one himself (Luke 20:20–26). In order to survive financially, Jesus relied on the charity of others. “He traveled through every city and village…and the twelve were with him, also certain women…who were ministering to him of their possessions” (Luke 8:1–3). Jesus also stressed his solidarity with the ultradisenfranchised by referring to himself as the good shepherd, as recorded in John 10:11. Today, when we think of a shepherd, we envision a wise, humble pastor who lovingly cares for his flock. Unfortunately, that was not how people saw shepherds during Jesus’ time. No social status was so limited and tenuous, so close to no status at all, as that of the shepherd. The shepherd lived apart from what was considered civilization, among the company of the most miserable outcasts of society. From the margins, the shepherd occupied a slavelike space, usually guarding someone else's flock with his or her life.4 Then, too, Jesus came from the uncelebrated region of Galilee. Nazareth was so insignificant to the religious life of Judaism that the Hebrew Bible never mentions it.

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

  I touch your shoulder with the gentleness Trevor showed me back in the river. Trevor who, wild as he was, wouldn’t eat veal, wouldn’t eat the children of cows. I think now about those children, taken from their mothers and placed in boxes the size of their lives, to be fed and fattened into soft meat. I am thinking of freedom again, how the calf is most free when the cage opens and it’s led to the truck for slaughter. All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough. For a few delirious moments in the barn, as Trevor and I fucked, the cage around me became invisible, even if I knew it was never gone. How my elation became a trap when I lost control of my inner self. How waste, shit, excess, is what binds the living, yet is always present and perennial in death. When the calves are finally butchered, surrendering their insides is often their final act, their bowels shocked from the sudden velocity of endings. I squeeze your wrist and say your name. I look at you and see, through the pitch dark, Trevor’s eyes—Trevor whose face has, by now, already begun to blur in my mind—how they burned under the barn lamp as we dressed, shuddering quietly from the water. I see Lan’s eyes in her last hours, like needful drops of water, how they were all she could move. Like the calf’s wide pupils as the latch is opened, and it charges from its prison toward the man with a harness ready to loop around its neck. “Where am I, Little Dog?” You’re Rose. You’re Lan. You’re Trevor. As if a name can be more than one thing, deep and wide as a night with a truck idling at its edge, and you can step right out of your cage, where I wait for you. Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things—and call it good.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I wouldn’t touch it, it was part of my role almost to pretend it wasn’t there; I want to be a hole, he had typed in our chat, I want to be nothing but a hole. It was important to seem like I didn’t care about his pleasure but I did care about it, very much, I wanted him to be hard. I took a step toward him, claiming ground and coming too close; I could feel his heat through the fabric of my shirt. We looked at each other, and before he dropped his eyes I felt an upwelling of tenderness for him. I wanted to kiss him, to be in a different kind of scene with him, but of course I couldn’t change the scene, it would have been a breach of our contract. If it had been my usual role to dominate, to be cruel, to be cruel in that way, my role or my nature, I would have simply acted on my inclination, I think; at least that’s what I imagine it must be to act as the men I long for act, to want something and not question it. But I didn’t kiss him, instead I ran my hands across his torso, the back of my hands, stopping when I reached his nipples, which I brushed across lightly several times, feeling them tighten further. Then I took them between my thumb and forefinger, gently at first, rubbing the tip in little circles, like a bullet, not twisting but massaging, so that he hummed slightly to show me that he liked it, and slowly I began to grip him harder, listening as his humming became more glottal and higher in pitch, became a whine. And then I grabbed him very hard, pinching and twisting in a way meant to hurt. He opened his mouth, not whining but gasping a single syllable, Ah, his eyes clenched shut. But he didn’t move his hands, which was the test, he didn’t lift them to shield himself or loosen my grip, when I looked they were pressed against his thighs, fingers extended, the tips digging into his flesh. Good boy, I thought, though I didn’t say it out loud. It became a kind of contest then, I wanted to make him ask me to stop. But he took what I gave him, when I pulled on them hard he even leaned back to stay upright, though that could only have increased his pain. I wouldn’t find his limit, then, or not that way, and I acknowledged this by changing the direction of my pulling, tugging him by his nipples not toward me but down. He resisted this at first, too, straining against me to maintain his position, not realizing until I yanked harder what I wanted him to do.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  To read, see, and define Christ from the margins is to make the message of the gospel relevant to those who are disenfranchised and trying to survive just one more day. As during the days of his earthly ministry, Jesus is not to be found among the religious elite who occupy the center of society, comfortable in their ornate cathedrals; rather he is found among the publicans, tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, in short, those who are considered outcasts by society. It is to the margins of society that we must go in order to find Jesus. The margins of society, in the here and now, in this time and place, are understood as encompassing the poor, Hispanics, Amerindians, Asian Americans, blacks, members of other disenfranchised groups, women, and gays. THE ECONOMICALLY MARGINALIZED CHRIST Who is this Jesus who was called Lord and Savior by those who suffered economically at the margins of society? Who is the Christ of the poor? The biblical text tells us that, although divine, he became human, assuming the condition of a slave, according to Paul's letter to the Philippians: [Jesus Christ], who subsisting in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, in the likeness of humans, and being found in the fashion of a human, he humbled himself, becoming obedient until death, even the death of the cross. (2:6–8) The radicalness of the incarnation is not so much that the Creator of the universe became a frail human but rather that God chose to become poor, to take the form of a slave. Jesus willingly assumed the role of the ultradisenfranchised. He was born into, lived, and died in poverty. Under our Christmas trees, among the multitude of conspicuous gifts, we usually have a nativity scene. The baby Jesus rests comfortably in a crib made of wood while angelic cows gaze upon the miracle. The proud parents (Mary and Joseph) survey the sanitary scene as kings and peasants come to worship. Yet, if we accept the reliability of the Gospels (particularly Matthew and Luke), then Jesus was born in a barn, full of the manure of those “angelic cows” and the flies attracted to most stables. A manger was either a wooden box or a hole on the cave wall from where horses and cattle ate. Like a barn animal, Mary was forced to give birth amidst such unsanitary conditions. Jesus physically entered this world as if he were homeless.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. So do thou not wait for Christ till He Himself call you, but outrun Him, and come before Him. There follows, And Jesus when he came out saw much people, and was moved with compassion towards them, because they were as sheep having no shepherd. The Pharisees being ravening wolves did not feed the sheep, but devoured them; for which reason they gather themselves to Christ, the true Shepherd, who gave them spiritual food, that is, the word of God. Wherefore it goes on, And he began to teach them many things. For seeing that those who followed Him on account of His miracles were tired from the length of the way, He pitied them, and wished to satisfy their wish by teaching them. BEDE. (in Marc. 2, 26) Matthew says that He healed their sick, for the real way of pitying the poor is to open to them the way of truth by teaching them, and to take away their bodily pains. PSEUDO-JEROME. Mystically, however, the Lord took apart those whom He chose, that though living amongst evil men, they might not apply their minds to evil things, as Lot in Sodom, Job in the land of Uz, and Obadiah in the house of Ahab. BEDE. (in Marc. 2, 25) Leaving also Judæa, the holy preachers, in the desert of the Church, overwhelmed by the burden of their tribulations amongst the Jews, obtained rest by the imparting of the grace of faith to the Gentiles. PSEUDO-JEROME. Little indeed is the rest of the saints here on earth, long is their labour, but afterwards, they are bidden to rest from their labours. But as in the ark of Noah, the animals that were within were sent forth, and they that were without rushed in, so is it in the Church, Judas went, the thief came to Christ. But as long as men go back from the faith, the Church can have no refuge from grief; for Rachel weeping for her children would not be comforted. Moreover, this world is not the banquet, in which the new wine is drank, when the new song will be sung by men made anew, when this mortal shall have put on immortality. BEDE. (in Marc. 2, 26) But when Christ goes to the deserts of the Gentiles, many bauds of the faithful leaving the walls of their cities, that is their old manner of living, follow Him. 6:35–4435. And when the day was now far spent, his disciples came unto him, and said, This is a desert place, and now the time is far passed: 36. Send them away, that they may go into the country round about, and into the villages, and buy themselves bread: for they have nothing to eat. 37. He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat?

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I almost passed over it, kissing his upper thigh on the right and then the left, but I didn’t skip it, I kissed it, too, as I had kissed the rest of him, and said again the words that somehow became more real with repetition. Usually words wear out the more you use them, they become featureless, rote, and more than any others this is true of the words I repeated to R.; even in our relationship that was still so new they had lost most of their flavor. I remembered the fear I had felt the first time I spoke them to him, weeks before, when they had had all their force; I had been terrified, really, not so much that they wouldn’t be answered (they weren’t, it would be days before he repeated them) as that they would scare him away, that he would startle like the wild thing I sometimes felt he was. But now we said them often, when we left each other and were reunited (even if it was only a room we left, only minutes we were separated). But repeating the words now didn’t dull them, it called them to attention somehow, to service, it restored them, and they became difficult to say again; I found myself almost unable to speak as I whispered into R.’s silence, kissing the soft flesh of his stomach, the firmer flesh over his ribs, his nipples and the patch of hair at the center of his chest, his collarbone, the taut skin at his windpipe. His arms were still raised but he had folded them at the elbow, crossing his forearms over his face. I kissed his armpits again, the exposed undersides of his arms, and then (I was kneeling now, my knees on either side of him) I took his arms in my hands and moved them away from his face. He hadn’t uttered a sound in all that time, the fifteen or twenty minutes it had taken me to make my way up his body, not since the interrogative of my name, the admonition I ignored; there hadn’t been any change in his breath, or none I had noticed, and so I was surprised to see the tears on his face, two lines that fell toward his ears, he hadn’t wiped them away. He didn’t try to hide them when I moved his arm, or tried only by turning his face slightly, as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze (though his eyes were shut, there was no gaze to meet). I paused, wanting to speak, to ask him what they were for, his tears, but I knew what they were for, and so I hung over him a moment before I continued kissing him, the line of his jaw, his chin, his cheek and lips, which didn’t answer mine, which suffered themselves to be kissed, his ears, the tracks of his tears, his eyes.

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

  I encourage Mitch and Laura to listen to each other with greater empathy. Mitch begins to understand that Laura’s alienation from her body has nothing to do with him. This eases his sense of rejection and his anguish about being unable to please her. While it is clear to Mitch that his desire is rooted in love, he needs to help Laura trust the sincerity of his interest in her. Far from seeking a selfish discharge, he longs for union. For her part, Laura learns something equally crucial about Mitch—that when the language of words fails him, as it invariably does in the realm of emotion, he communicates with his body. She’d always felt that Mitch’s “itch for the horizontal” had little to do with her; it was just raw physical release. As she hears him, she sees that Mitch needs physicality to voice his tenderness, his yearning to connect. Only in sex does he feel emotionally safe. By limiting him to her own nonphysical language, to the exclusion of his sensual language, Laura has stifled his ability to “speak” to her. She blinds herself to her husband as he really is, and at the same time reinforces the very behaviors she rails against. When Mitch is reduced to using a truncated language of words, the romantic lover disappears and the bully emerges. Mitch and Laura exemplify two extremes on the mind-body continuum. Couples are often configured on opposite sides of this divide. There are those for whom the body is like a prison in which they feel confined, self-conscious, and self-critical. The body is an inhibited site, awkward and tense. Play and inventiveness have no place there. Words feel safer than gesture and movements, and these people take refuge in speech. When reaching out to others, they prefer the verbal route. Then there are those for whom the body is like a playground, a place where they feel free and unrestricted. They retain the child’s capacity to fully inhabit their bodies. In the physical realm, they can let go; they don’t have to be responsible. They are often the partner in the relationship who wants more physical intimacy. It is especially during lovemaking that they are able to escape their inner rumblings. For them, sex is a relief that puts a halt to their anxiety; for their more verbal partners, sex turns out to be a source of anxiety.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  The Samaritan lived a life of han. Although the wounded man was a member of the dominant culture responsible for the Samaritan's oppression, the Samaritan was able to take pity because he had han inside himself. The ability to recognize han initiates a healing where the wounded are able to heal the wounds of others. One who suffers unbearable pain is able to understand and pour refreshing “oil and wine” on the others’ wounds. Hence the importance of support groups, where people struggling with the same pain come together to help each other in the healing process. By picking the Samaritan outcast to be the catalyst for healing and salvation, instead of other members of the dominant culture, Jesus calls the han -ridden communities located on the margins of society to be the agents of healing for a han -ridden world.8 Those who are suffering han should not look to the priest and ministers for help unless they too have experienced han. MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS If a biblical text can be read and interpreted in several different ways, which interpretation is correct? The challenge faced by those who read the Bible from the margins is that the dominant culture has the power to shape and legitimize the religious discourse. The interpretations of the disenfranchised can easily be dismissed as interesting perspectives that may add some “color” to understanding the Bible, but in the minds of the dominant culture, these interpretations are deemed lacking in scholastic rigor and without any universal relevance. Yet, violence is done to the biblical text when we reduce the interpretations that come from the margins into interesting perspectives among the multitude of possible perspectives, each equal in value and importance. Reading the Bible from the social location of oppression does not call for the treatment of all biblical interpretations as equals, where the interpretation from the margins is but one competing perspective. Rather, an affirmation and an option are made for the interpretations of the disenfranchised, taking priority over the interpretations of those who still benefit from societal structures of oppression. At first glance, it may appear somewhat arrogant to claim the superiority of one interpretation over another. Why should the interpretations that are formed in the margins of society take precedence over the interpretations voiced by the dominant culture? Is it because the disenfranchised are holier? Smarter? Closer to God? No, of course not. The reason an interpretational privilege exists for the disenfranchised is that such an interpretation is based on a concept known as the hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed. This term basically means that those who are disenfranchised are in a position to understand the biblical text better because they know what it means to be a marginalized person attempting to survive within a social context designed to benefit others at their expense. In W. E. B.

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

  PSEUDO-JEROME. Further, he who obtains healing is always drawn aside from turbulent thoughts, disorderly actions, and incoherent speeches. And the fingers which are put into the ears are the words and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, of whom it is said, This is the finger of God. (Exod. 8:19) The spittle is heavenly wisdom, which loosens the sealed lips of the human race, so that it can say, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and the rest of the Creed. And looking up to heaven, he groaned, (Cf. Mat. 12:20. Luke 11:20) that is, He taught us to groan, and to raise up the treasures of our hearts to the heavens; because by the groaning of hearty compunction, the silly joy of the flesh is purged away. But the ears are opened to hymns, and songs, and psalms; and He looses the tongue, that it may pour forth the good word, which neither threats nor stripes can restrain. CHAPTER 8 8:1–91. In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples unto him, and saith unto them, 2. I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat: 3. And if I send them away fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way: for divers of them came from far. 4. And his disciples answered him, From whence can a man satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness. 5. And he asked them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven. 6. And he commanded the people to sit down on the ground: and he took the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to his disciples to set before them; and they did set them before the people. 7. And they had a few small fishes: and he blessed, and commanded to set them also before them. 8. So they did eat, and were filled: and they took up of the broken meat that was left seven baskets. 9. And they that had eaten were about four thousand: and he sent them away.

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

  BEDE. To convey therefore the truth of His resurrection, He condescends not only to be touched by His disciples, but to eat with them, that they might not suspect that His appearance was not actual, but only imaginary. Hence it follows, And when he had eaten before them, he took the remnant, and gave to them. He ate indeed by His power, not from necessity. The thirsty earth absorbs water in one way, the burning sun in another way, the one from want, the other from power. GREEK EXPOSITOR. But some one will say, If we allow that our Lord ate after His resurrection, let us also grant that all men will after the resurrection take the nourishment of food. But these things which for a certain purpose are done by our Saviour, are not the rule and measure of nature, since in other things He has purposed differently. For He will raise our bodies, not defective but perfect and incorrupt, who yet left on His own body the prints which the nails had made, and the wound in His side, in order to shew that the nature of His body remained the same after the resurrection, and that He was not changed into another substance. BEDE. He ate therefore after the resurrection, not as needing food, nor as signifying that the resurrection which we are expecting will need food; but that He might thereby build up the nature of a rising body. But mystically, the broiled fish of which Christ ate signifies the sufferings of Christ. For He having condescended to lie in the waters of the human race, was willing to be taken by the hook of our death, and was as it were burnt up by anguish at the time of His Passion. But the honeycomb was present to us at the resurrection. By the honeycomb He wished to represent to us the two natures of His person. For the honeycomb is of wax, but the honey in the wax is the Divine nature in the human. THEOPHYLACT. The things eaten seem also to contain another mystery. For in that He ate part of a broiled fish, He signifies that having burnt by the fire of His own divinity our nature swimming in the sea of this life, and dried up the moisture which it had contracted from the waves, He made it divine food; and that which was before abominable He prepared to be a sweet offering to God, which the honeycomb signifies. Or by the broiled fish He signifies the active life, drying up the moisture with the coals of labour, but by the honeycomb, the contemplative life on account of the sweetness of the oracles of God.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  She seemed to accept this, she didn’t keep begging once we turned away, as most dogs would have, I thought; she disappeared behind the building again to whatever shelter she had found. WE FOUND THE TREE by chance one late afternoon. We were in a part of town I’d never seen before, on the other side of the city center, looking for a German supermarket, a chain that was popular in Western Europe but that had only the single store in Sofia. It was less a store than a warehouse, really, there weren’t shelves but huge bins people pawed through, everything mixed together, a dozen kinds of chocolate bars in one bin, toothpaste and shaving cream in another. The chain had its own brand of food, and R. was craving something from his life in Lisbon, a frozen lasagna, and when we found it in an oversized freezer case he clutched it to his chest with happiness. It was a long walk from the store to the metro, longer because the sidewalks were caked with ice. R. scolded me as we walked, telling me to take my hands out of my pockets, to keep them free in case I slipped, as for whatever reason I did often enough; if it had been night he would have passed his arm through mine to keep me upright. R. saw the trees first, in the window of a little shop that was full of Christmas decorations. Even from outside you could see how cheap they were, all metal wire and plastic bristles, but R. insisted that we needed one, and ornaments, a box of lights; I want to have a real Christmas, he said. It was maybe three feet tall, it hardly weighed anything but it was cumbersome, I held it in both arms like a child as we walked. I felt a little ridiculous sitting with it on the train but R. seemed proud, he kept one arm around it to hold it steady on the seat between us. When we got home, he wanted to trim the tree right away, and he opened the box of tinsel to find that it was far too large, we hadn’t been paying attention, it was meant for a much bigger tree. He laughed as he wrapped it again and again around the branches; she was swaddled now, he said, it would keep her warm. Her, I repeated back to him, inquisitive, mocking him a little, and this gave him an idea: she needed a name, he said, and he decided to call her Madeleine, I don’t have any idea where it came from but he loved to say it. He liked to give things names, I think it was a way of laying claim to them, and he called out to her every time he passed, almost singing it, Madeleine, Madeleine. He saved the box of ornaments for Christmas Eve, little glass balls we hung from hooks on the branches, tucked among the tinsel.

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

  Halfway down her shinbone, a brownish stub protrudes, smooth and round as the end of a baguette—or what it is, an amputated leg. I glance at you, hoping for an answer. Without skipping a beat, you take out your file and start to scrub her one foot, the puckered nub beside it shaking from the work. The woman places the prosthesis at her side, her arm resting protectively around its calf, then sits back, exhaling. “Thank you,” she says again, louder, to the crown of your head. I sit on the carpet and wait for you to call for the hot towel from the warming case. Throughout the pedicure, the woman sways her head from side to side, eyes half-closed. She moans with relief when you massage her one calf. When you finish, turning to me for the towel, she leans over, gestures toward her right leg, the nub hovering above the water, dry this whole time. She says, “Would you mind,” and coughs into her arm. “This one also. If it’s not too much.” She pauses, stares out the window, then down at her lap. Again, you say nothing—but turn, almost imperceptibly, to her right leg, run a measured caress along the nub’s length, before cradling a handful of warm water over the tip, the thin streams crisscrossing the leathered skin. Water droplets. When you’re almost done rinsing the soap off, she asks you, gently, almost pleading, to go lower. “If it’s the same price anyway,” she says. “I can still feel it down there. It’s silly, but I can. I can.” You pause—a flicker across your face. Then, the crow’s-feet on your eyes only slightly starker, you wrap your fingers around the air where her calf should be, knead it as if it were fully there. You continue down her invisible foot, rub its bony upper side before cupping the heel with your other hand, pinching along the Achilles’ tendon, then stretching the stiff cords along the ankle’s underside. When you turn to me once more, I run to fetch a towel from the case. Without a word, you slide the towel under the phantom limb, pad down the air, the muscle memory in your arms firing the familiar efficient motions, revealing what’s not there, the way a conductor’s movements make the music somehow more real. Her foot dry, the woman straps on her prosthesis, rolls down her pant leg, and climbs off. I grab her coat and help her into it. You start walking over to the register when she stops you, places a folded hundred-dollar bill in your palm. “The lord keep you,” she says, eyes lowered—and hobbles out, the bell chime over the door clanging twice as it closes. You stand there, staring at nothing. Ben Franklin’s face darkening in your still wet fingers, you slip the bill under your bra, not the register, then retie your hair. —

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He ate his all at once, tossing them in his mouth and putting his mitten back on before he leaned down for his bottle and turned to watch the fire. But I didn’t watch the fire, I kept my eyes on him, though it was cold and I wanted to be back in the hotel with him, in the warmth of our bed. I took my time, I put the raisins in my mouth one by one, thinking a wish for each, though all my wishes were the same wish. THE LITTLE SAINT His name meant light, or that was the root of it, the root too of the word for holy, for any number of words associated with sanctity and the church; and this was why later, when I grew fond of him, I called him Svetcheto , the little saint. It made him laugh, both because it was bad Bulgarian, he told me, no one who actually spoke the language would say it, and also because he liked it, I thought, not the name but that I had made it up for him. I liked it too, not least because it was so at odds with the things we did together, with how I used him or how we used each other. And maybe there actually was something saintly about him, his slightness and quiet in the hoodie that framed his face like a monk’s cowl when I saw him that first time, or in the bathrobe he wrapped around himself later, when I came to his door; and maybe there was something saintly in his endurance, too, I guess I think there was, in his desire for pain. But that first day I didn’t know his name, I thought probably I would never see him again. We had chatted online for the first time just an hour or so earlier, though I had looked at his profile often; he was always online, for months I had been fascinated by him. It was a kind of profile common enough in the States or Western Europe but I had never seen one like it here; it claimed that anyone who wanted to could fuck him, that he wanted it rough, that his only demand was to be fucked bare, he wanted as many loads as he could get. No limits whore, it said, in good pornographic English, with a Bulgarian translation beneath. I was curious to know what that meant here, no limits, and where he had learned it.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He had meant every word of it, what he had said about himself online, I wasn’t sure I had ever met anyone who embodied so fully his fantasy of himself. I thought of all the men who had fucked him, adding a third finger to the two already inside, feeling again that strange tenderness for him, even as I twisted my hand to give him the pain he wanted, as I thrust my hips up to gag him. Why should I care who fucks me, he would say to me later, why should I say no to anybody, I don’t want to say no. Why shouldn’t I give it away, his body, he meant, what could I do with it that would be better? I like for guys to fuck me, who cares if they’re ugly or old, I hate all that, people who think they’re so special nobody deserves to fuck them. Why should you have to deserve it, he would say, his head on my chest, who doesn’t deserve a little fucking? I think we should all give it away, wouldn’t it be wonderful, everyone fucking all the time, everywhere, I would love it, and I laughed, I said I would too, it would be my version of heaven. And when I asked him if he worried about disease he said Fuck worrying, I hate it, I don’t want to worry. I don’t want to live forever, I’d rather live ten years the way I want than live forever and be miserable, I want to be happy. I don’t care about being safe, he said, I don’t care if I get sick, why should I be special, and I wondered what feeling he was speaking from, whether it was joy or defiance or despair, I wanted to know where one ended and the others began. I wanted to argue with him, but I didn’t argue, what would have been the use, and anyway to argue with him would have been to lay claim to him somehow, to violate his ethics of claimlessness. Because it was an ethics, I thought as I lay with him, it was more coherent than my own life, with its alternating precaution and risk; I tried to imagine his life of wholeheartedness but I knew it would never be mine.