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 Cleanness (2020)

  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 Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Soon my interest in other writing projects waned and I began to sketch an outline, at first in a desultory manner, then with increasing commitment . Several weeks later, Irene and I met for a final check-in session. She had mourned the loss of our relationship. For example, she dreamed we were still meeting; she imagined conversations with me and mistakenly thought she saw my face in a crowd or heard my voice addressing her. But by the time we met, the grief about ending therapy had passed, and she was enjoying life and relating well to herself and to others. She was especially struck by her change in visual perception: everything had become fleshed out again, where for years her surroundings had appeared as a two-dimensional stage set. Moreover, a relationship with a man, Kevin, whom she had met in our last few months of therapy, had not only endured but was flourishing. When I mentioned that I had changed my mind and was now interested in writing about our therapy, she was pleased and agreed to read early drafts as I proceeded. Several weeks later I sent Irene a draft of the first thirty pages and suggested we meet to discuss them in a San Francisco café. I felt unaccountably tense as I entered and looked about for her. Spotting her before she saw me, I took my time about going up to her. I wanted to savor her from afar—her pastel sweater and slacks, her ease of posture as she sipped a cappuccino and browsed through a San Francisco newspaper. I approached. When she saw me, she stood, and we embraced and kissed on the cheeks much like old dear friends—as, indeed, we were. I ordered a cappuccino also. After my first sip, Irene smiled and reached over with her napkin to dab at the white froth on my mustache. I liked her taking care of me and leaned forward ever so slightly to feel the pressure of her napkin more fully. “Now,” she said, the dabbing done, “that’s better. No white mustache—I don’t want you aging prematurely.” Then, taking my manuscript out of her briefcase, she said, “I like this. It’s just what I hoped you’d write.” “And that’s what I hoped you’d say. But first, shouldn’t we back up and talk about the project as a whole?” I told her that in my revision I would make certain to conceal her identity so that none of her acquaintances might identify her. “How would you feel about being portrayed as a male art dealer?” She shook her head. “I want it just as I really am. I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I ask the female nurse to gently cradle and support Anna’s injured arm. This could help Anna contain the frozen “shock energy” locked in her arm, as well as heighten the child’s inner awareness. With this support, Anna would be able to slowly (i.e., gradually) thaw and access the feelings and responses that could help her come back to life. “How does it feel to be inside of your arm, Anna?” I ask her softly. “It hurts so much,” she answers faintly. Her eyes are downcast, and I say, “It hurts bad, huh?” “Yeah.” “Where does it hurt? Can you show me with your finger?” She points to a place on her upper arm and says, “Everywhere, too.” There’s a little shudder in her right shoulder followed by a slight sigh of breath. Momentarily, her drawn face takes on a rosier hue. “That’s good, sweetheart. Does that feel a little better?” she nods, then takes another breath. After this slight relaxation, she immediately stiffens, pulling her arm protectively toward her body. I seize the moment. “Where did your mommy get hurt?” She points to the same place on her arm and begins to tremble. I say nothing. The trembling intensifies, then moves down her arm and up into her neck. “Yes, Anna, just let that shaking happen, just like a bowl of Jell-O—would it be red, or green, or even bright yellow? Can you let it shake? Can you feel it tremble?” “It’s yellow,” she says, “like the sun in the sky.” She takes a full breath, then looks at me for the first time. I smile and nod. Her eyes grasp mine for a moment, then turn away. “How does your arm feel now?” “The pain is moving down to my fingers.” Her fingers are trembling gently. I speak to her quietly, softly, rhythmically. “You know, Anna, sweetheart … I don’t think there is anybody in this whole town that doesn’t feel that, in some way, it was their fault that Mary died.” She briefly glances at me. I continue, “Now, of course that’s not true … but that’s how everybody feels … and that’s because they all love her so much.” She turns now and looks at me. There is a sense of self-recognition in her demeanor. With her eyes now glued on me, I continue, “Sometimes, the more we love someone, the more we think it was our fault.” Two tears spill from the outside corners of each eye before she slowly turns her head away from me.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  So I don’t think you need a lot of help with learning to listen. How else can we help you in this group?” “Ah don’ know how dis group can help me.” “I heard a lot of good things said about you today. How does that feel?” “Well, natchally, dat feels good.” “But Magnolia, I have a hunch you’ve heard that before—that people have always loved you for how much you give. Why, the nurses were saying that very thing before the group met today—that you’ve raised a son and fifteen foster children and never stop giving.” “Not now. Ah can’t give nuthin’ now. Ah can’t move mah legs, and those bugs—” She shuddered suddenly, but her soft smile remained. “Ah don’t want to go back home no more.” “What I mean, Magnolia, is that it probably isn’t too helpful for others to tell you things about yourself that you already know. If we’re going to help you here, we need to give you something else. Maybe we’ve got to help you learn new things about yourself, give you some feedback about your blind spots, things you may not have known.” “Ah done tol’ you, Ah gets help by helpin’ other folks.” “I know that, and that’s one of the things I really like about you. But you know, it feels good to everyone to be helpful to others. Like Martin—look what it meant to him to help Rosa by being understanding;” “Dat Martin is sometin’. He don’ move too good, but he’s got a fine head on his shoulders, a real fine head.” “You do help others and you’re good at it. You’re a marvel, and I agree with Rosa, the hospital should hire you. But Magnolia,” I hesitated in order to give my words greater impact, “it would be good for others to be able to help you too. By being so totally giving, you don’t let others get help from helping you. When Rosa said she’d like to go home with you, I was thinking too how great it would be to be comforted by you all the time. I’d like that too. I’d love it. But then, when I thought more about it, I realized I’d never be able to repay your help, to help you, because you never complain; you never ask for anything. In fact,” I hesitated again, “I’d never get to have the pleasure of offering you something.” “Ah nevah thought about it jes’ like that.” Magnolia nodded thoughtfully. Her smile had vanished. “But it’s true, isn’t it? Maybe what we ought to do here in this group is help you learn to complain. Maybe you need the experience of being listened to.” “Mah momma always said I put myself last.” “I don’t always agree with mothers. In fact, I don’t usually agree with them, but in this case I think your mother was right.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I take her arm, maybe for the first time. The fleshy part just above the elbow. It feels soft and warm, something like her warm kichel dough just before baking. “I remember your telling Jean and me about Uncle Simon’s 7 Up. That must have been hard.” “Hard? You’re telling me. Sometimes she’d drink his 7 Up with a piece of my kichel—you know what a job making kichel is—and all she’d talk about was the 7 Up.” “It’s good to talk, Momma. It’s the first time. Maybe I’ve always wanted it, and that’s why you stay in my mind and my dreams. Maybe now it will be different.” “Different how?” “Well, I’ll be able to be more myself—to live for the purposes and causes that I choose to cherish.” “You want to get rid of me?” “No—well, not in that way, not in a bad way. I want the same for you too. I want you to be able to rest.” “Rest? Did you ever see me rest? Daddy napped every day. Ever see me nap?” “What I mean is you should have your own purpose in life—not this,” I say, poking her shopping bag. “Not my books! And I should have my own purpose.” “But I just explained,” she replies, moving her shopping bag to her other hand, away from me. “These aren’t only your books. These are my books too!” Her arm, which I’m still clutching, is suddenly cold, and I release it. “What do you mean,” she goes on, “I should have my purpose? These books are my purpose. I worked for you—and for them. All my life I worked for those books—my books.” She reaches into her shopping bag and pulls out two more. I cringe, afraid she is going to hold them up and show them to the small crowd of bystanders who have now gathered around us. “But you don’t get it, Momma. We’ve got to be separate—not fettered by one another. That’s what it is to become a person. That’s exactly what I write about in those books. That’s how I want my children—all children—to be. Unfettered.” “Vos meinen—unfeathered?” “No, no, unfettered—a word that means free or liberated. I’m not getting through to you, Momma. Let me put it this way: every single person in the world is fundamentally alone. It’s hard, but that’s the way it is, and we have to face it. So I want to have my own thoughts and my own dreams. You should have yours too. Momma, I want you out of my dreams.” Her face tightens sternly, and she steps back away from me. I rush to add, “Not because I don’t like you but because I want what’s good for all of us— for me and for you too. You should have your own dreams in life.

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

  Eddie, a longtime friend of mine, had a history of getting dumped by women who were dismayed because he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—“open up.” The consensus among these women was that Eddie had a fear of commitment. “Whatever that means,” he said. They never knew how he felt about them. He would respond defensively. “What do you mean? I see you every day, don’t I? How can you not know how I feel?” When he met his wife, Noriko, she spoke almost no English, and he spoke no Japanese at all. Their courtship was literally speechless. Twelve years later, with two children in tow, he reflects on the early days. “I really think that not being able to talk made this whole thing possible. For once, there was no pressure on me to share. And so Noriko and I had to show how much we liked each other in other ways. We cooked for each other a lot, gave each other baths. I washed her hair. We looked at art. I remember one day I had just seen some amazing sculpture this homeless guy Curtis had made on Lafayette Street—he was crazy but brilliant. Try explaining that in pantomime. Whatever we couldn’t say, we showed, so I put her coat on her and led her by the hand all the way across town. Her face lit up when she saw it. It’s not like we didn’t communicate; we just didn’t talk.” When Too Much Is Still Not Enough I am not convinced that unrestrained disclosure—the ability to speak the truth and not hide anything—necessarily fosters a harmonious and robust intimacy. Any practice can be taken to a ridiculous extreme. Eddie and Noriko remind us that we can be very close without much talk. And the reverse is also true—too much self-revealing talk can still land us on the outskirts of intimacy. In the wonderful movie Bliss, a scene of passionate lovemaking—dim lights, vague body parts, and the roaring groans accompanying orgasm—is immediately followed by a couples therapy session. The therapist, played by Spalding Gray, adheres to an ideology of openness which the husband finds more than a little difficult to take. Therapist:How’s the sex?Joseph:You go first.Mary:OK. I have a confession to make. I fake my orgasms. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you.Joseph:You’ve never had an orgasm?Mary:Not with you.Therapist:Joseph, it’s important that Mary can tell you how she feels, and for you to be able to hear it.Obviously, knowing everything about the other, and having him know everything about us, does not always promote the kind of closeness we want. If words serve as venues of connection, they can also stage insuperable obstacles. Needless to say, I don’t advocate this kind of therapeutic intervention.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  They jes’ keep comin’ back.” Apparently, Magnolia was talking about her insect hallucinations. “You guys should hire Magnolia,” Rosa said, turning to me. “She’s the one who really helps me. And not just me. Everybody. Even the nurses come to Magnolia with their troubles.” “Chile, you makin’ a lot out of nuthin’. You ain’t got much. You so skinny you easy to give to. And you got a big heart. Makes folks want to give to you. Feels good to help out. Thas mah bes’ medicine. “Thas mah bes’ medicine, Doctah,” Magnolia repeated, looking over at me. “You jes’ let me help out folks.” For a few moments I couldn’t say a word. I felt entranced by Magnolia—by those wise eyes, that inviting smile, that bounteous lap. And those arms—just like my mother’s arms, with those generous folds of flesh cascading down to obscure her elbows. What would it be like to be held, to be cradled, in those pillowy chocolate arms? I thought of all the pressures in my life—writing, teaching, consulting, patients, wife, four children, financial commitments, investments, and now my mother’s death. I need comfort, I thought. Magnolia-comfort—that’s what I need, some of Magnolia’s big-armed comfort. A refrain from an old Judy Collins song drifted into my mind: “Too many sad times . . . Too many bad times . . . But if somehow . . . you could . . . pack up your sorrows and give them all to me . . . You would lose them . . . I know how to use them . . . Give them all to me.” I hadn’t thought of that song for ever so long. Years before, when I first heard Judy Collins’s dulcet voice sing out, “Pack up your sorrows and give them all to me,” desire stirred deep within me. I wanted to climb right into the radio to find that woman and pour my sorrows into her lap. Rosa jolted me out of my reverie: “Dr. Yalom, you asked earlier why I thought others here were better than me. Well, you can see now what I mean. You see how special Magnolia is. And Martin too. They both care about others. People—my folks, my sisters—used to tell me I was selfish. They were right. I don’t reach out to do anything for anyone. I don’t have anything to offer. All I really want is for people to leave me alone.” Magnolia leaned toward me. “That child is so artful,” she said. “Artful”—a strange word. I waited to see what she meant. “You should see the blanket she’s embroidering for me in occupational therapy. Two roses in the center, and around them she’s stitching teeny violets, mus’ be twenty of ’em, all along the edges. And she did the edges in a delicate red design. Honey,” Magnolia turned to Rosa, “will you bring that blanket into group tomorrow? And the picture you was drawin’ too?”

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

  Man’s mind is well disposed as regards what is near him, viz. his neighbor, first, as to the will to do good; and to this belongs “goodness.” Secondly, as to the execution of well-doing; and to this belongs “benignity,” for the benign are those in whom the salutary flame [bonus ignis] of love has enkindled the desire to be kind to their neighbor. Thirdly, as to his suffering with equanimity the evils his neighbor inflicts on him. To this belongs “meekness,” which curbs anger. Fourthly, in the point of our refraining from doing harm to our neighbor not only through anger, but also through fraud or deceit. To this pertains “faith,” if we take it as denoting fidelity. But if we take it for the faith whereby we believe in God, then man is directed thereby to that which is above him, so that he subject his intellect and, consequently, all that is his, to God. Man is well disposed in respect of that which is below him, as regards external action, by “modesty,” whereby we observe the “mode” in all our words and deeds: as regards internal desires, by “contingency” and “chastity”: whether these two differ because chastity withdraws man from unlawful desires, contingency also from lawful desires: or because the continent man is subject to concupiscence, but is not led away; whereas the chaste man is neither subject to, nor led away from them. Reply to Objection 1: Sanctification is effected by all the virtues, by which also sins are taken away. Consequently fruit is mentioned there in the singular, on account of its being generically one, though divided into many species which are spoken of as so many fruits. Reply to Objection 2: The hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold fruits do not differ as various species of virtuous acts, but as various degrees of perfection, even in the same virtue. Thus contingency of the married state is said to be signified by the thirtyfold fruit; the contingency of widowhood, by the sixtyfold; and virginal contingency, by the hundredfold fruit. There are, moreover, other ways in which holy men distinguish three evangelical fruits according to the three degrees of virtue: and they speak of three degrees, because the perfection of anything is considered with respect to its beginning, its middle, and its end. Reply to Objection 3: The fact of not being disturbed by painful things is something to delight in. And as to faith, if we consider it as the foundation, it has the aspect of being ultimate and delightful, in as much as it contains certainty: hence a gloss expounds thus: “Faith, which is certainly about the unseen.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Her air of supreme self-sufficiency told the other group members she needed nothing from them. Only her husband had cut through her formidable demeanor; only he had challenged her and demanded a deep, intimate encounter. And it was only with him that she could weep and give voice to the young lost girl within her. And with Jack’s death she lost that touchstone of intimacy. I knew it was presumptuous, but I wanted to become that touchstone for her. Was I attempting to replace her husband? That’s a crass, shocking question. No, I never thought to do that. But I did aspire to reestablish, for one or two hours a week, an island of intimacy, a place where she could doff her fix-it, supersurgeon state of mind and be openly vulnerable and challenged. Gradually, very gradually, she was able to acknowledge feelings of helplessness and to turn to me for comfort. When her father died not long after her husband, she felt overwhelmed at the thought of flying home for the funeral. She could not bear the idea of facing her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother and seeing her father’s open grave next to her brother’s tombstone. I agreed and strongly advised her not to go. Instead, I scheduled a session at the exact time of the funeral and asked her to bring pictures of her father, and we spent the hour recalling her memories of him. It was a rich, powerful experience, and later Irene thanked me for it. Where was the line between intimacy and seduction? Would she become too dependent on me? Would she ever be able to break away? Would the powerful husband-transference prove irresolvable? That thought nagged at me. But I decided to worry about it later. The here-and-now focus was never difficult to sustain in my work with Irene. She was extraordinarily hardworking and dedicated. Never, not once in all my work with her, did I hear resistant, and expected, comments such as, “This doesn’t make sense. . . . It’s irrelevant. . . . You are not the issue. . . . You’re not my life—I see you only two hours a week; my husband died only two weeks ago—why do you press me about my feelings toward you?—This is crazy. . . . All these questions about the way I look at you, or the way I walk into this office—they’re too trivial to talk about. Too many big things are going on in my life.” On the contrary, Irene immediately grasped what I was trying to do and throughout therapy seemed grateful for all my attempts to engage her. Irene’s remarks about my “improvising” therapy were of great interest to me. Lately I have found myself proclaiming, “The good therapist must create a new therapy for each patient.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Always liked to eat. When my folks took me for a ride in the car, they always had peanuts and potato chips. In fact, that was my nickname.” “What was?” asked Rosa, who had turned her chair slightly toward Martin. “Mr. Crisp. My mom and dad came from England and called potato chips ‘crisps.’ That’s what they called me, Mr. Crisp. They liked to go down to the harbor to watch the big ships come in. ‘Come along, Mr. Crisp,’ they’d say, ‘let’s all go for a ride.’ And I’d run out to our car—we had the only car on the block. Of course I had good legs then. Just like you, Rosa.” Martin leaned forward in his wheelchair and peered down. “You look like you got good legs— a little skinny, though, no meat on ’em. I used to love to run—” Martin’s voice trailed off. Puzzlement furrowed his face as he pulled the sheet around him. ‘“Don’t like to eat,’” he repeated as if to himself. “I always liked food. I think you missed a lot of fun.” At this point Magnolia, who, true to her agenda, had been listening intently to Martin, spoke up: “Rosa, chile, Ah just reminded me of when mah Darnell was small. Sometimes he wouldn’t eat either. And you know what Ah used to do? Change the scenery! We’d get in the car and drive into Georgia —we lived right near the border. And he’d eat in Georgia. Lawd, how he ate in Georgia! We used to josh him about his Georgia appetite. Honey”—here Magnolia leaned toward Rosa and dropped her voice to a loud whisper—”maybe you ought to leave California to eat.” Trying to mine something therapeutic from this discussion, I stopped the action (in the jargon, I called for a “process check”) and asked the members to reflect upon their own interaction. “Rosa, how are you feeling about what’s happening now in the group, about Martin’s and Magnolia’s questions?” “Questions are okay—I don’t mind them. And I like Martin—” “Could you speak directly to him?” I asked. Rosa turned to Martin. “I like you. I don’t know why.” She turned back to face me: “He’s been here for a week, but today, in this group, is the first time I’ve spoken to him. It’s like we have a lot in common, but I know we don’t.” “Do you feel understood?” “Understood? I don’t know. Well, yeah, in a funny sort of way I do. Maybe that’s it.” “That’s what I saw. I saw Martin trying his best to understand you. And he wasn’t trying to do anything else—I didn’t hear him try to manage you or tell you what to do, or even tell you that you ought to eat.” “It’s a good thing he didn’t try. It wouldn’t have done any good.” Here Rosa turned to Carol, and they exchanged bony grins of complicity. I hated their grisly conspiracy.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When I mentioned that I had changed my mind and was now interested in writing about our therapy, she was pleased and agreed to read early drafts as I proceeded. Several weeks later I sent Irene a draft of the first thirty pages and suggested we meet to discuss them in a San Francisco café. I felt unaccountably tense as I entered and looked about for her. Spotting her before she saw me, I took my time about going up to her. I wanted to savor her from afar—her pastel sweater and slacks, her ease of posture as she sipped a cappuccino and browsed through a San Francisco newspaper. I approached. When she saw me, she stood, and we embraced and kissed on the cheeks much like old dear friends—as, indeed, we were. I ordered a cappuccino also. After my first sip, Irene smiled and reached over with her napkin to dab at the white froth on my mustache. I liked her taking care of me and leaned forward ever so slightly to feel the pressure of her napkin more fully. “Now,” she said, the dabbing done, “that’s better. No white mustache—I don’t want you aging prematurely.” Then, taking my manuscript out of her briefcase, she said, “I like this. It’s just what I hoped you’d write.” “And that’s what I hoped you’d say. But first, shouldn’t we back up and talk about the project as a whole?” I told her that in my revision I would make certain to conceal her identity so that none of her acquaintances might identify her. “How would you feel about being portrayed as a male art dealer?” She shook her head. “I want it just as I really am. I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. We both know I wasn’t mentally disturbed: I was a sufferer.” Something had been worrying me about this project, and I decided to get it off my chest. “Irene, let me tell you a story.” I then told her about Mary, a good friend of mine, a psychiatrist of great integrity and compassion, and the patient, Howard, she had treated for ten years. Howard had been horribly abused as a child, and Mary had made a Herculean attempt to reparent him. In the first years of therapy he had been hospitalized at least a dozen times for suicide attempts, substance abuse, and severe anorexia. She had stood by him, done marvelous work, and somehow gotten him through everything, including helping him to graduate from high school, college, and journalism school. “Her dedication was extraordinary,” I said. “Sometimes she met with him seven times a week—and for greatly reduced fees. In fact, I often warned her that she was overly invested and needed to protect her private life more.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The covenant renewal itself is explained by the principle of the representative substitute, namely, that the “servant,” the quintessential Israelite, takes upon himself the fate of the nation, of the world, of “the many.” And this principle itself is not something other than the faithful love that, as a human being, Jesus showed again and again when he touched the leper, or the unclean woman, or the corpse on the pallet. When, again in John, Jesus says, “No one has greater love than this, than to lay down your life for your friends” (15:13), this does not seem like a new point. It merely sums up the way he had been all along. Theories of atonement do not need to be superimposed on an abstract narrative about Jesus, as has so often been attempted. They grow out of the real-life Jesus stories we already have. It is astonishing that the four gospels have been so underused in “atonement theology.” It was only with hindsight that Jesus’s first followers realized what had been going on in that last dramatic week, in the Last Supper and on the cross. In particular, it was only with hindsight that they came to recognize that the central element in Passover, the central fact of the kingdom announcement in Isaiah 52:7 (“Your God reigns!”), was the personal and glorious presence of Israel’s God and that they had all unknowingly been witnessing this very thing. John says this quite explicitly (the divine Glory is unveiled throughout Jesus’s career, but especially on the cross), but the other three gospel writers say it too in their own ways, as of course does Paul. And it is this element, finally, that ties the ends together and gives to the whole event the only sense it can ultimately have. Take this away, and we are left once more with a paganized doctrine in which one man decides to throw himself on the wheel so that it may turn at last in the opposite direction.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In particular, all four gospels tell the story of Jesus as one of Israel’s God returning at last. This theme, so often ignored in the past, has come to the fore in recent scholarly analysis. When Mark opens his gospel by lining up John the Baptist with the prophetic messengers of Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40, the point is that those messengers are preparing the way not simply for a coming Messiah, but for YHWH himself. When John opens his gospel with multiple echoes of Genesis and Exodus, bringing the prologue to its climax in v. 14 with the Word becoming flesh and revealing the divine Glory and in v. 18 with the unveiling of the otherwise unseen Father through the divine Son, he is setting the stage for his readers to understand that Jesus is not simply “son of God” in the sense of the Davidic king of Psalm 2, 2 Samuel 7, and so on. John’s Jesus is the living embodiment of the one creator God, Israel’s covenant God. The messianic language of the divine “Son” is discerned as the perfect vehicle (going back, we may suppose, to Jesus himself) to express this. When Matthew has the angel tell Joseph that the child to be born will be “Emmanuel,” “God with us,” and then finishes his gospel with Jesus himself telling his followers that he will be “with them always,” alert readers know that the entire story ought to be read with this in mind. Luke’s birth narratives are still more explicit, designating the child in Mary’s womb as the “Holy One” who will be “God’s son” (Luke 1:35). When Luke’s gospel nears its climax, the coming of Jesus to Jerusalem is clearly to be seen as the moment when, at last, Israel’s God is “visiting his people,” that is, coming back in person to judge and to rescue (19:44). There is much more that could be said to fill in this picture. But this will suffice for our present purposes. We should not then be surprised when all four gospels tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to draw out, repeatedly, his sense of compassion and love, which we have already noted as a striking feature. This was by no means necessarily the case for prophetic or would-be messianic figures in the Second Temple Jewish world. We do not know as much as we would like to about the leaders, including the would-be Messiahs, whom we meet briefly in the pages of Josephus or indeed about Simon bar-Kochba, who led the final failed revolt almost exactly a hundred years after Jesus’s public career. But we do not get the impression from them of a character such as we find in the stories about Jesus. Nor, for that matter, does John the Baptist come over as the sort of person who might claim to have a heart that was “gentle, not arrogant” or to offer his followers “the rest they deeply need” (Matt. 11:29).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  As we tell the story again, as we listen to the musical settings, as we contemplate some of the great works of art that help us to glimpse the way in which the horror and pain of the world and the powerful love of the creator God came rushing together on to one place; as we find ourselves battling an intransigent magistrate on behalf of someone suffering injustice or praying at a deathbed and feeling a soft hand squeeze at the name of Jesus; as we find ourselves singing “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”; as we find ourselves stopped in our tracks once more by the forgiving love that won’t let us go sneaking back to the place of slavery—on these occasions and on thousands more we know that we are in the presence of the Lover himself. Christian devotion today has everything to gain and nothing to lose by exploring what the early Christians meant when they said that the Messiah died for their sins “in accordance with the Bible,” by understanding better how the great story fits together and how it all makes sense. Christian theology, undergirding that devotion, has everything to gain and nothing to lose by abandoning its Platonized eschatology, its moralized anthropology, and its paganized soteriology and embracing instead the vision of new heavens and new earth with renewed humans rescued from the power of sin and death to take their proper and responsible place, here and now and in the age to come, within that new world. Yes, it will mean taking up our own cross. Jesus warned us of exactly that (Mark 8:34–38). It will mean denying ourselves—a phrase we used to hear in hymns and sermons, but for some reason don’t hear quite so much today. How remarkable it is that the Western church so easily embraces self- discovery, self-fulfillment, and self-realization as though they were the heart of the “gospel”—as though Mark 8 didn’t exist! Yes, following Jesus will mean disappointment, failure, frustration, muddle, misunderstanding, pain, and sorrow—and those are just the “first-world problems.” As I have already said, some Christians, even while I have been working on this book, have been beheaded for their faith; others have seen their homes bombed, their livelihoods taken away, their health ruined. Their witness is extraordinary, and we in the comfortable West can only ponder the ways in which our own unseen compromises—perhaps because of our platonic eschatology—have shielded us from the worst things that are happening to our true family only a short plane ride away. But the first generations of Christians, with the New Testament writers at their head, would remind us that these are not simply horrible things that may happen to us despite our belief in the victory of Jesus. They are things that may come, in different ways and at different times, because this is how the kingdom comes.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Paul’s remarkable description of prayer in Romans 8:26–27 indicates that there are times when “we don’t know what to pray for as we ought to; but that same spirit pleads on our behalf, with groanings too deep for words.” At that point, as we noted a moment ago, Paul declares that God, the “Searcher of Hearts,” knows what the Spirit is thinking. The Spirit, as we just saw, is taking the role in this passage that in the Exodus narrative belongs to the glorious divine Presence. There is, in other words, no question that for Paul the Spirit is (in later language) fully divine. We thus have here a conversation going on between the Spirit, groaning with sighs too deep for words, and the Heart Searcher himself; the two are deeply in tune with one another, but the Spirit is groaning like a woman in labor. Does this mean a split within the Trinity? Certainly not. And if Paul can say that about the Father and the Spirit, through whose dialogue the church is conformed to the image of the Son (8:29), why should Matthew and Mark not say something very similar about the Father and the Son? I suspect, in fact, that we have been misled by the easy assumption that while the Son and perhaps the Spirit are out and about on their various tasks, the Father is, as it were, waiting back at the office, calmly in charge of the world. In a sense that may be true. But if the Christology of the New Testament means anything, it means that we only learn the deepest truths about God himself by looking at Jesus. In Philippians 2 we discover that the life of self-abandonment and humility to which the Son devoted himself was not undertaken despite the fact that he was “in the form of God,” but precisely because he was in the form of God. In Colossians 1:15 the Messiah is the “image of the invisible God”; in John 1:18 he is the one who makes known the God who cannot otherwise be seen. In Mark 10 Jesus insists that the power that overcomes the powers is the power of self-giving love. All these, it seems, converge in the actual events.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  I do not suppose that the author of Revelation was consciously alluding to the Hasmonean priest-kings. Nor do I imagine that 1 Peter 2:9, which also invokes Exodus 19:6, had in mind the claims of that dynasty, which by the middle of the first century AD had passed into ignominious history, having failed to prevent the Roman invasion, the rise of Herod, and many other ills. But the parallel does indicate the ways in which the larger implicit story of Israel, anchored in the ancient scriptures, could be brought back to life not just in theory but also in concrete practice. The hundred-year reign of the Maccabean priest-kings may be seen as a distant cousin of the thousand-year reign of the Messiah’s people, the “reigning priesthood,” in Revelation 20:6. The theoretical basis for the claims made by 2 Maccabees about the effect of the martyrs’ sufferings is explained in a revealing passage that has some additional similarities to early Christian reflection. The terrible sufferings that the Jews endured during the period of Syrian domination, says the writer, had a particular purpose. They were designed in order to allow the Jewish people to experience their necessary punishment in advance, in the present time, rather than having to wait, along with the other nations, for the final day of judgment: I urge those who read this book not to be depressed by such calamities, but to recognize that these punishments were designed not to destroy but to discipline our people. In fact, it is a sign of great kindness not to let the impious alone for long, but to punish them immediately. For in the case of the other nations the Lord waits patiently to punish them until they have reached the full measure of their sins; but he does not deal in this way with us, in order that he may not take vengeance on us afterward when our sins have reached their height. Therefore he never withdraws his mercy from us. Although he disciplines us with calamities, he does not forsake his own people. (6:12–16) The writer does not quite put it the way one might have expected, granted what the seventh brother says later on. We might, looking back from the latter’s speech in chapter 7, have expected the writer to say in chapter 6 that the sins of the Jewish people had reached their height and that the martyrs were somehow exhausting the vengeance that had resulted. He draws back from that idea, but the thought is not far away. As we shall see, this is close to what Paul says in Romans 5–8.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  (29) That, by the way, gives us a glimpse of what jail would have been like for Paul, were he not significant enough to be chained to a soldier in the barracks and supported by the presence of at least seven friends. When Demetrius returned, he went straight to the prison, found Antiphilus, and at first was allowed to minister to his needs. He went to work as a porter in the harbor and gave half of his wages to bribe the guard and half to help his friend. But then the jailer forbade any more such visits for anyone, and Demetrius had to make a dangerous decision: Demetrius…could think of no other means of obtaining access to his friend than by going to the Prefect and professing complicity in the temple robbery. As the result of this declaration, he was immediately led off to prison, and with great difficulty prevailed upon the jailer after many entreaties to place him next to Antiphilus, and under the same collar. It was now that his devotion to his friend appeared in the strongest light. Ill though he was himself, he thought nothing of his own sufferings: his only care was to lighten the affliction of his friend, and to procure him as much rest as possible; and the companionship in misery certainly lightened his load. (32) That is no doubt the hyperbole of parable rather than the precision of history, but we have to imagine something similar—if less extreme—with Epaphras and Paul. Epaphras chose to live inside the prison alongside Paul as if he were his personal slave—not as a fellow criminal prisoner (sundesmios ), but as a fellow prison inmate (sunaichmalōtos ), accepting freely all the dangers to health and even life entailed in that decision. When you read the letter to Philemon, therefore, do not think only about Onesimus; think also of Epaphras (Epaphroditus). THE CONSERVATIVE PAUL ON SLAVERY Imagine, for a moment, the domestic situation when Onesimus arrived home with that letter for Philemon and announced that there was good news and bad news or, better, that the good news for him was bad news for his owner. (We do not, by the way, presume that their city was Colossae, despite the pseudo-Pauline letter to the Colossians, 4:9). Onesimus’s liberation could not have been kept a secret. What if Philemon had other slaves—would there have been an immediate mass conversion to Christianity? What rumors would have spread throughout the slave infrastructure of their village or city about Christians? Critics could easily have accused Christians—unfairly, but maybe inevitably—of advising slaves to flee their owners or even murder them in their beds. Still, even granted all of that, it is surely sad that the radical Paul of the letter to Philemon was so swiftly and thoroughly sanitized into the conservative Paul of Colossians and Ephesians. In both those books, pseudo-Paul addresses Christian slaves and Christian slave owners and thereby depicts those relationships as perfectly normal.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  In a single chapter in Romans, he writes, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus ” (8:1). In the very next verse, he refers to “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus ” (8:2). A few verses later: “You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (8:9). After a few more verses, he speaks of “the Spirit of God ” (8:14). Paul’s communities “in Christ” were communities “in the Spirit,” grounded in the Spirit of God as known in Jesus. Paul speaks not only of the “Spirit of Christ,” but also the “body of Christ.” This metaphor dominates most of 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul combines Spirit language with body language: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body —Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit ” (12:13). Near the end of the chapter, Paul puts it in a sentence: “You are the body of Christ” (12:27). Christian communities were the “body of Christ” animated by the “Spirit of Christ.” Their identity and their life together “in the body” were grounded in Christ, in the Spirit, in the Spirit of God as known in Christ, and not in “this world.” We add one more image—implicit this time in a single word, not a phrase. Paul regularly addressed his communities as “brothers” (“brothers and sisters,” in the inclusive language of recent translations of the New Testament). The term appears more than fifty times in his genuine letters. To address people as brothers (and sisters) was not just social convention. Nor was it just about affection, though affection was of course involved. It was more—it was “new family” language, describing what social historians sometimes call a “fictive family” to distinguish it from a biological family. The use of new family language implies that members of the community have the same obligations to each other as biological brothers and sisters do. In the urban world of Paul, where extended biological families had been broken apart, diminished, and sometimes lost completely because of migration to the cities and high death rates, these communities were “new families” in which members had the same responsibility to care for each other that biological families did. These were to be communities of caring and sharing. All of these images had their home in Paul’s conviction that the “new age” had begun. The term “new age” in our time is sometimes associated with “New Age” movements that are negatively regarded by many Christians. But the language is biblical and eschatological. Paul was convinced that the eschaton, God’s dream for the world, had begun in Christ and that it was a process already under way. God’s great cleanup of the world had begun, and his communities were part of the “new creation,” of the way the world is meant to be.

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

  Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmis takable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs. All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification. The Cult Status of Children The sensuous pleasure of caring for small children is natural and universal. It is also wise from an evolutionary standpoint—the mother’s bond to her child is a powerful physiological response that ensures the infant’s survival. However, I’d like to make a distinction between the parent-child bond, on the one hand, and a recent culture of child rearing that has inflated this bond to astonishing levels, on the other. Stephanie’s intense focus on her kids is not a mere idiosyncrasy—not simply her own personal style.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Life, death, spirituality, peace, transcendence: those were the topics we discussed; those were Paula’s only concerns. Mostly we talked about death. Each week four of us, not two, met in my office—Paula and I, her death and my own. She became my courtesan of death: she introduced me to it, taught me how to think about it, even to befriend it. I came to understand that death has had a bad press. Though there is little joy to be found in it, still death is not a monstrous evil that drags us off to some unimaginably terrible place. I learned to demythologize death, to see it for what it is—an event, a part of life, the end of further possibilities. “It’s a neutral event,” Paula said, “which we’ve learned to color with fear.” Every week Paula entered my office, flashed the broad smile I adored, reached into her large straw bag, lifted her journal to her lap, and shared her reflections and dreams of the past week. I listened hard and tried to respond appropriately. Whenever I voiced doubts about whether I was being helpful, she seemed puzzled; then, after a moment’s pause, she smiled as if to reassure me and turned again to her journal. Together we relived her entire encounter with cancer: the initial shock and disbelief, the mutilation of her body, her gradual acceptance, her getting used to saying, “I have cancer.” She described her husband’s loving care and that of close friends. I could easily understand that: it was hard not to love Paula. (Of course I never declared my love until much later, at a time when she was not to believe me.) Then she described the horrible days of her cancer’s recurrence. That phase was her Calvary, she said, and the stations of the cross were the trials experienced by all patients with recurrence: radiotherapy rooms with doomsday metallic eyeballs suspended aloft, impersonal harried technicians, uncomfortable friends, aloof doctors, and, most of all, the deafening hush of secrecy everywhere. She cried when she told me about calling her surgeon, a friend of twenty years, only to be informed by his nurse that there were to be no further appointments because the doctor had nothing more to offer. “What is wrong with doctors? Why don’t they understand the importance of sheer presence?” she asked me. “Why can’t they realize that the very moment they have nothing else to offer is the moment they are most needed?” The horror in learning of one’s sickness unto death, I learned from Paula, is intensified many times over by the withdrawal of others. The isolation of the dying patient is exacerbated by the foolish charade of those who attempt to conceal the approach of death. But death cannot be concealed; the clues are ubiquitous: the nurses speak in hushed tones, the rounding doctors often pay attention to the wrong parts of the body, the medical students tiptoe into the hospital room, the family smiles bravely, visitors attempt cheeriness.