Yearning

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 A Way of Being (1980)

  interviews, and prescriptive advice as to treatment. This cold approach was, however, suffused with warmth by the personality of Dr. Leta Hollingworth, who taught us more by her person than by her lectures. Later, when I interned at the then new and affluent Institute for Child Guidance, I was exposed to a very different atmosphere. Dominated as it was by psychoanalysts, I learned more about the individual. I learned that he cannot be understood without an exhaustive case history seventy-five pages or more in length, going into all the personality dynamics of the grandparents, the parents, the aunts and uncles, and finally the “patient” himself—possible birth trauma, manner of weaning, degree of dependency, sibling relationships, and on and on. Then there was the elaborate testing, including the newly imported Rorschach, and finally many interviews with the child before deciding what sort of treatment he should have. It nearly always came out the same: the child was treated psychoanalytically by the psychiatrist, the mother was dealt with in the same fashion by the social worker, and occasionally, the psychologist was asked to tutor the child. Yet I carried on my first therapy case there. It started with tutoring but developed into more and more personal interviews, and I discovered the thrill that comes from observing changes in a person’s behavior. Whether those were due to my enthusiasm or my methods I cannot say. As I look back, I realize that my interest in interviewing and in therapy certainly grew in part out of my early loneliness. Here was a socially approved way of getting really close to individuals and thus filling some of the hungers I had undoubtedly felt. The therapeutic interview also offered a chance of becoming close without having to go through what was to me a long and painful process of gradual and deepening acquaintance. By the time I had completed my work in New York, I knew—with all the assurance of the newly trained—how to deal with people professionally. In spite of the wide differences between Teachers College and the Institute, they both helped me arrive at somewhat the same formula, which could be stated as follows: “I will gather an enormous amount of data about this individual: his history, his intelligence, his special abilities, his personality. Out of all this I can form an elaborate diagnostic formulation as to the causes of his present behavior, his personal and social resources for dealing with his situation, and the prognosis for his future. I will endeavor to interpret all this in simple language to the responsible agencies, to the parents, and to the child if he is capable of understanding it. I will make sound suggestions which, if carried out, will change the behavior, and I will reinforce those suggestions by repeated contact. In all of this I remain thoroughly objective, professional, and personally aloof

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  In 1983, he had come across a newspaper article by Robert Bly. Influenced by Carl Jung, Bly was concerned that fathers no longer initiated sons into proper manhood; drawing on fairy tales and myths, he pointed to the role of a heroic quest in preparing young men to assume roles as productive members of society. Lacking this proper male development, society would be left with “soft males” unable to fulfill their roles. Dalbey also read Leanne Payne’s 1986 Crisis in Masculinity . Payne, a Christian psychologist, identified the roots of this “crisis” in men’s failure to separate themselves from their mothers’ femininity. Only a father could affirm a son’s masculinity and a daughter’s femininity, according to Payne, but with absent or overly authoritarian fathers (and overbearing mothers), a generation of men had become separated from their own masculinity. The results were devastating: “homosexual neurosis,” addiction to pornography, the proliferation of androgynous gender roles, widespread confusion and despair. Dalbey found inspiration in both Payne’s and Bly’s “explorations on the frontiers of masculinity,” but wondered why “a secular man and a Christian woman” should be paving the way. “Was there no Christian man to pioneer the journey?”18 Dalbey took up the challenge, but securing a publisher was no easy task. In 1987, when he was shopping his manuscript, “the unique needs of men had not yet appeared on the church’s radar screen.” Editors at Word Publishing were intrigued enough to bring him to Dallas so that he could explain in person why men would be interested in such a book, and Dalbey succeeded in convincing them to take a gamble on the project. Initially spreading through word of mouth, the book eventually ended up in the hands of Shirley Dobson, who brought it to her husband James, who then invited Dalbey on his Focus on the Family radio show. His 1991 appearance sparked a listener response that ranked in the top 10 percent of the program’s history, Dalbey later recalled. By then, evangelical men across the country were awakening to the problem of masculinity.19 In Healing the Masculine Soul , Dalbey introduced themes that would animate what soon became a cottage industry of books on Christian masculinity. First and foremost, Dalbey looked to the Vietnam War as the source of masculine identity. The son of a naval officer, Dalbey described how the image of the war hero served as his blueprint for manhood. He’d grown up playing “sandlot soldier” in his white suburban neighborhood, and he’d learned to march in military drills and fire a rifle in his Boy Scout “patrol.” Fascinated with John Wayne’s WWII movies, he imagined war “only as a glorious adventure in manhood.” As he got older, he “passed beyond simply admiring the war hero to desiring a war” in which to demonstrate his manhood.20 By the time he came of age, however, he’d become sidetracked.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  9. Anti-institutional. These individuals have an antipathy for any highly structured, inflexible, bureaucratic institution. They believe that institutions should exist for people, not the reverse. 10. The authority within. These persons have a trust in their own experience and a profound distrust of external authority. They make their own moral judgments, even openly disobeying laws that they consider unjust. 11. The unimportance of material things. These individuals are fundamentally indifferent to material comforts and rewards. Money and material status symbols are not their goal. They can live with affluence, but it is in no way necessary to them. 12. A yearning for the spiritual. These persons of tomorrow are seekers. They wish to find a meaning and purpose in life that is greater than the individual. Some are led into cults, but more are examining all the ways by which humankind has found values and forces that extend beyond the individual. They wish to live a life of inner peace. Their heroes are spiritual persons—Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Teilhard de Chardin. Sometimes, in altered states of consciousness, they experience the unity and harmony of the universe. These are some of the characteristics I see in the person of tomorrow. I am well aware that few individuals possess all of these characteristics, and I know that I am describing a small minority of the population as a whole. The striking thing is that persons with these characteristics will be at home in a world that consists only of vibrating energy, a world with no solid base, a world of process and change, a world in which the mind, in its larger sense, is both aware of, and creates, the new reality. They will be able to make the paradigm shift. CAN THE PERSON OF TOMORROW SURVIVE? I have described persons who are sharply at variance with our conventional world. Can they—will they be permitted to—survive? What opposition will they meet? How may they influence our future? Opposition

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The practice of absolute poverty had been emphasized by preachers and sects in the century before Francis and Dominic began their careers, and sects, such as the Humiliati, the Poor Men of Lombardy, and the Poor Men of Lyons, were advocating it in their time. Robert d’Abrissel, d. 1117, had for his ideal to follow "the bare Christ on the cross, without any goods of his own."769 One of the biographers of Bernard of Thiron, d. 1117, calls him "Christ’s poor man," pauper Christi, and says that this "man, poor in spirit, followed unto death the Poor Lord."770 Likewise the followers of Norbert, the founder of the Premonstrant order, were called the "poor men of Christ," pauperes Christi. Of another itinerant preacher, Vitalis of Savigny, who lived about the same time, his biographer said that he decided to bear Christ’s light yoke by walking in the steps of the Apostles.771 The minds of select men and classes of men were deeply moved in the thirteenth century to follow closely the example of the Apostles, and they regarded Christ as having taught and practised absolute poverty. Arnold of Brescia’s mind worked in the same direction, as did also the heretical sects of Southern France and Northern Italy. The imitation of Christ lay near to their hearts, and it remained for Francis of Assisi to realize most fully this pious ideal of the thirteenth century.772 The second feature was their devotion to practical activities in society. The monk had fled into solitude from the day when St. Anthony retired to the Thebaid desert. The Black and Gray Friars, as the Dominicans and Franciscans were called from the colors of their dress, threw themselves into the currents of the busy world. To lonely contemplation they joined itinerancy in the marts and on the thoroughfares.773 They were not satisfied with warring against their own flesh. They made open warfare upon the world. They preached to the common people. They relieved poverty. They listened to the complaints of the oppressed.774 A third characteristic of the orders was the lay brotherhoods which they developed, the third order, called Tertiaries, or the penitential brothers, fratres de poenitentia.775 Convents, like Hirschau, had before initiated laymen into monastic service. But the third order of the Franciscans and Dominicans were lay folk who, while continuing at their usual avocations, were bound by oath to practise the chief virtues of the Gospel. There was thus opened to laymen the opportunity of realizing some of that higher merit belonging theretofore only to the monastic profession. Religion was given back to common life.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, waiting on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job. ...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.... I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Illegal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least... Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.... Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. ...I am looking for a place to fix.... The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.... At this point the longing for junk concentrates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital attendant, a writing croaker.... A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent- nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of and the colors separated out like oil on water....) The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous magnifying mirror. He has a Latin handsomesmooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes. When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.... This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking off the mirror frame.... He has lost his voice.... He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Cold water makes your pores close up,” and maybe it was true: I felt my skin tighten, water dripping down my face and neck. How desperately Connie and I thought that if we performed these rituals—washed our faces with cold water, brushed our hair into a static frenzy with a boar-bristle brush before bed—some proof would solve itself and a new life would spread out before us. 2Cha ching, the slot machine in Connie’s garage went, like a cartoon, Peter’s features soaked in its rosy glow. He was eighteen, Connie’s older brother, and his forearms were the color of toast. His friend Henry hovered at his side. Connie decided she had a crush on Henry, so our Friday night would be devoted to perching on the weight-lifting bench, Henry’s orange motorcycle parked beside us like a prize pony. We’d watch the boys play the slot machine, drinking the off-brand beer Connie’s father kept in the garage fridge. Later they’d shoot the empty bottles with a BB gun, crowing at each glassy burst. I knew I’d see Peter that night, so I’d worn an embroidered shirt, my hair foul with hairspray. I’d dotted a pimple on my jaw with a beige putty of Merle Norman, but it collected along the rim and made it glow. As long as my hair stayed in place, I looked nice, or at least I thought so, and I tucked in my shirt to show the tops of my small breasts, the artificial press of cleavage from my bra. The feeling of exposure gave me an anxious pleasure that made me stand straighter, holding my head on my neck like an egg in a cup. Trying to be more like the black-haired girl in the park, that easy cast of her face. Connie narrowed her eyes when she saw me, a muscle by her mouth twitching, but she didn’t say anything. —Peter had really only spoken to me for the first time two weeks before. I’d been waiting for Connie downstairs. Her bedroom was much smaller than mine, her house meaner, but we spent most of our time there. The house done up in a maritime theme, her father’s misguided attempt to approximate female decoration. I felt bad for Connie’s father: his night job at a dairy plant, the arthritic hands he clenched and unclenched nervously. Connie’s mother lived somewhere in New Mexico, near a hot spring, had twin boys and another life no one ever spoke of. For Christmas, she had once sent Connie a compact of cracked blush and a Fair Isle sweater that was so small neither of us could squeeze our head through the hole. “The colors are nice,” I said hopefully. Connie just shrugged. “She’s a bitch.” Peter crashed through the front door, dumping a book on the kitchen table. He nodded at me in his mild way and started making a sandwich—pulling out slices of white bread, an acid-bright jar of mustard. “Where’s the princess?” he said.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  The impulse present in our seeking goes out beyond the seeker, and hovers as it were, unable to rest in any other goal until what is sought has been found and the seeker is united with it. This impulse, or search, does not seem to be love, which we have for known things, since it is an effort toward the unknown. Yet it has a quality cognate to love’s. It can be called an act of will, for the seeker wills to find, and if something knowable is being sought, then the seeker has a will to know. If that seeking is urgent and focused, it is called studious—our term for those wanting to master knowledge. So an impulse of some kind precedes the mind’s generative act, and through this will to seek and find knowledge, the knowledge itself comes to birth. (Trin 9.18) This restlessness outward is what Augustine called “the unstable heart” (cor inquietum), tumbling humans off balance toward what they want, without knowing what it is. “Our yearning anticipates landfall, throws hope as an anchor toward that shore” (P 64.3). His mind was always refashioning what it found inadequate. This dynamic character to his thought has been missed by those who break it off at any point and treat it as a system. The medieval period misunderstood The City of God as a fixed doctrine of church-state relations. Calvin tied down with an iron logic what is a dialectical process in Augustine’s thought on grace. The attitude of Augustine was one of joint endeavor after a truth that is always just beyond us: Let the reader, where we are equally confident, stride on with me; where we are equally puzzled, pause to investigate with me; where he finds himself in error, come to my side; where he finds me erring, call me to his side. So we may keep to the path, in love, as we fare on toward Him “whose face is ever to be sought.” (Trin 1.5) If others could advance beyond his capacities, he urged them to do so: Press on where you can. When we reach our final destination, you will not have to question me, nor I you. We are presently seeking in faith what we shall then share joyfully in vision. (S 261.3)

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  At the age of twenty, after two years of undergraduate studies, I took off a year from the turmoil that had become my life to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. My brother and cousin were studying at English universities at the time, and they suggested that I come over and join them. But I had been deeply affected by the Scottish music and poetry that my father loved, and there was something very appealing to me in the Celtic melancholy and fire that I associated with the Scottish side of my ancestry, even though I at the same time wanted to get away from my father’s black, unpredictable moods. Not entirely away, however; I think I had a vague notion that I might better understand my own chaotic feelings and thinking if I returned in some sense to the source. I applied for a federal grant, which enabled me for the first time to become a full-time student, and I left Los Angeles for a year of science by day, and music and poetry by night. St. Andrews, my tutor was saying, was the only place he knew where it snowed horizontally. An eminent neurophysiologist, he was a tall, lanky, and droll Yorkshireman who, like many of his fellow English, believed that rather superior weather, to say nothing of civilization, ended where the Scottish countryside began. He had a point about the weather. The ancient, gray-stoned town of St. Andrews sits right on the North Sea and takes blasts of late-autumn and winter winds that have to be experienced to be believed. I had been living in Scotland for several months by that time, and I had become a definite believer. The winds were especially harsh just off the town’s East Sands, where the university’s marine biology laboratory had been built. There were ten or so of us third-year zoology students, and we were sitting, shivering, wool layered, wool gloved, and teeth chattering, in the damp cold of the tank-filled laboratory. My tutor seemed even more puzzled by my being in these advanced zoology courses than I was. He was an authority on what one might have thought was a somewhat specialized portion of the animal kingdom, namely the auditory nerve of the locust, and just prior to his remarks about horizontal snowfalls in Scotland he had put my striking ignorance of zoological matters out into the public domain.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Dalmatia belongs to a certain hour of the night when those high gongs are snuffed out and the court of the Louvre seems so wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like weeping for no reason at all, just because it’s so beautifully silent, so empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs rolling the dice. With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on my throbbing nerves like a cold knife blade I could experience the most wonderful sensations of voyage. And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing at all. Now and then, it’s true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into a great cloudlike form that blotted out the past. I couldn’t allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It’s strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past. For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind —her. Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christs today. Day and night I thought of her, even when I was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all, suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a few trees and a bench, a deserted spot where we stood and had it out, where we drove each other crazy with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some deserted spot, like the Place de l’Estrapade, for example, or those dingy, mournful streets off the Mosque or along that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil which at ten o’clock in the evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes one think of murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of human drama.

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

  We may put it another way. The writer to the Hebrews shows us three things. (1) He shows us the ideal of what we should be – kin to God and rulers of the universe. (2) He shows us the actual human condition – the frustration instead of the control, the failure instead of the glory. (3) He shows us how the actual can be changed into the ideal through Christ. The writer to the Hebrews sees in Christ the one who by his sufferings and his glory can make us what we were meant to be and what, without him, we could never be. THE ESSENTIAL SUFFERINGHebrews 2:10–18 For, in his work of bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that he for whom everything exists and through whom everything exists should make the pioneer of salvation fully adequate for his destined work through suffering. For he who sanctifies and they who are sanctified must come of one stock. It is for this reason that he does not hesitate to call them brothers, as when he says: ‘I will tell your name to my brothers; I will sing hymns to you in the midst of the gathering of your people.’ And again: ‘I will put all my trust in him.’ And again: ‘Behold me and the children whom God gave to me.’ The children then have a common flesh and blood and he completely shared in them, so that, by that death of his, he might bring to nothing him who has the power of death, and might set free all those who, for fear of death, were all their lives liable to a slave’s existence. For I presume that it is not angels that he helps; but it is the seed of Abraham that he helps. So he had in all things to be made like his brothers, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the things which pertain to God, to win forgiveness for the sins of his people. For in that he himself was tried and suffered, he is able to help those who are undergoing trial. HERE, the writer to the Hebrews uses one of the great titles of Jesus. He calls him the pioneer (archēgos) of glory. The same word is used of Jesus in Acts 3:15, 5:31; Hebrews 12:2. At its simplest, it means head or chief. So, Zeus is the head of the gods and a general is the head of his army. It can mean a founder or originator. So, it is used of the founder of a city or of a family or of a philosophic school. It can be used in the sense of source or origin. So, a good governor is said to be the archēgos of peace and a bad governor the archēgos of confusion.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  There the distance between the chairs and the screen relieved my nausea, and the subject matter became more interesting for a twelve-year-old girl whose main endeavor was to learn as much as possible about the world beyond the Center. There were numerous episodes of television serials from the 1940s. Don Winslow of the Navy , a twelve-part adventure series about a U.S. Navy commander during World War II, and Kit Carson and the Mystery Riders were popular Friday night fare, as was Laurel and Hardy. But like the books in our library, the movies we watched were prescreened by a trusted Big Brother. Often in the middle of a movie, the screen would go dark, the lens being covered to prevent us from viewing what was considered “inappropriate material.” From the context of what we were viewing, I figured out what those “bad” parts were about. It was usually when a girl and a boy came into view together. Travelogues were among my favorite movies, adding visual stimulus to my years of fantasizing about the many cities and towns I had become familiar with from the lives of the saints. Far-fetched though it might have seemed, I allowed myself to revel in the belief that one day I’d find a way to see the whole world. I’d fly in an airplane. I’d visit all the cathedrals in Europe and eat in fancy restaurants and swim in the Mediterranean Sea. I’d see the cedars of Lebanon and go to the Isle of Lindisfarne. Someday, I will. I repeated to myself, over and over. Someday, I will. 34 The Unthinkable 1962 W here was Brother Martin? Brother Martin was one of the married Big Brothers, and five of the Little Brothers were his and Sister Laura’s children. He hadn’t been around for more than a week. I knew he wasn’t on a bookselling trip because I kept a mental account of each of the Big Brothers and Sisters who was traveling. I looked for clues to his whereabouts but could come up with nothing. If he were sick, we’d be praying for him. But there were no special prayers, no announcement. He’d just disappeared. Weeks went by with no mention of Brother Martin. Then one evening, Sister Catherine took her place in the doorway of our refectories and broke the news to us. “Little Brothers and Sisters, I have something to tell you,” she began, her voice serious. “Brother Martin is no longer with us,” she said. “He has betrayed the faith and Our Blessed Mother and already has one foot in hell. He is now Richard Cullinane [his name before coming to the Center], not Brother Martin.” I was thunderstruck and terrified. This could only mean one thing: Brother Martin had been kicked out of the Center. Why? I searched the faces of his five sons, trying to see if their expressions were sad. But I could detect nothing.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Every night, I promised myself that it would be the last night I drugged Dominic. But every night I had to do it, just in case. Should Theo return, I didn’t want there to be any impediments when he came swimming up. I would take him home and we would be entwined right away. I would do anything to stay with him. I would never think of leaving him again. Sometimes I would fall asleep on the rocks. As I drifted off I would imagine that he was watching me from somewhere, seeing if I was putting in my time, testing me. Perhaps it was the gods I didn’t think I believed in who were watching me. But this is how it is with the gods and other mythic creatures. You imagine them watching you. You almost feel it. And so I waited for him. Nothing meant anything without him, except the hope of his return. —One night I dreamt that Sappho came over to the rocks and sat with me. She looked like Chickenhorse, only it was Chickenhorse as a hot, butch lesbian: her thick thighs in ripped jeans, hair styled in a pompadour and dyed jet black. Sappho-Chickenhorse told me I was stupid to wait for Theo. She touched my sternum with her palm and said, “Look at yourself, all of this over an asshole fish-boy.” “But you were once the insane queen of unrequited love,” I said. “Shouldn’t you, of all people, understand?” “Just be careful you don’t drown,” she said. In my dream I closed my eyes. She kissed each of my eyelids. I felt turned on, like I wanted to rub against those thighs of hers in her jeans. When I opened my eyes again in my dream, Sappho had become Claire. “I’m sorry I can’t drown with you,” said Claire. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Lucy.” “Nobody is going to drown!” I said. “Go get your nails and toenails done instead. You can pretend you’re going on a date with David.” “Mani-pedi as the antidote to suicide,” she said. “It all makes so much sense now. But I just got them done. What do you do instead of kill yourself when your nails are already done?” “Maybe Le Pain Quotidien?” I said. “You should go get a Danish. But I need to stay by the water, just in case he surfaces.” “How long are you going to wait?” “It won’t be long now. I feel him watching.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It isn’t there because God simply wanted to found an institution in which his people could sit down and feel safe. It is a worldwide community that (as has been rightly said) exists by mission as fire exists by burning. And that, in turn, is why the “communion of saints” matters; read the book of Revelation and see. Those who have gone before us include, especially, those who have lived, suffered, and died to bear witness to Jesus as the world’s true Lord over against the other “lords” that try to claim our allegiance. To be “in communion” with them is far more than simply hoping that our departed loved ones will actually still, in some sense, be in touch with us, that there will be some kind of mystical contact beyond the grave. It is to share in fellowship and solidarity with all those who have been the “kingdom people” of their day and to gain strength and courage from them for our own witness. It was highly significant, in view of the vocation he already sensed, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose to write his doctoral dissertation, “Communion Sanctorum,” on this clause. Within this context, the “forgiveness of sins” gains an entirely new dimension. It includes, of course, just what it says to most of us: we are all overdrawn at the moral bank, and need to know again and again that God wipes out the debt and fills the account with his own freely given treasure. But when we step back from our own personal anxieties and awareness of guilt, we recognize that the world as a whole needs, longs for, aches and yearns and cries out for forgiveness —for that collective, global sigh of relief that means that nobody need seek vengeance ever again; that nobody will bear a grudge ever again; that the million wrongs with which the world has been so horribly defaced will be put right at last; that in God’s ultimate new world there will be no moral shadow, no lingering resentment, no character warped by another’s wrong. “Forgiveness of sins” is not a purely negative term, getting rid of the moral stain and guilt that we all incur, though it is that too. It is the positive presence of God and the Lamb, the Lamb whose shed blood has wiped the record clean. …the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. And so, finally, we come to the “resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Here we must “festoon” around the well-known words the great New Testament hope: “the life of the age to come,” the “coming age” in which the whole creation will be transformed to share the liberty of the glory of the children of God. And, within that new creation, the coming together of heaven and earth of which Paul spoke (Eph. 1:10), God’s people are promised new bodies. I have written about this elsewhere, but it is perhaps worth reiterating it.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Was it possible that she had started seeing more clearly than me? The way she looked at me now was the way I had looked at Diana and at her before: lovingly, but full of pity. I decided it was she who was to be pitied. She had given up on the thing that made her most alive, even if it made her the most crazy. I knew the old way still sounded beautiful to her. But in an act of self-preservation, she was walking the path back to safety and sanity now. Even for Claire, the pain had just gotten too great. Of course, this was today. Who was to say where she would be next week or next month or whenever she got out? For now she had convinced herself, or maybe done more than convinced herself. Maybe she had actually healed a little. But just because you had healed, it didn’t mean the men could no longer get you. Love and lust were latent in her, lurking. For now she was free of the insanity. The cocktail of meds had certainly helped. I wondered if what she felt on the cocktail was as good as romantic obsession, better than that sparkle. You had to feel something truly heavenly to get over the chase. The chase was everything, all the hope and possibility of life. Very little else would ever be enough. Love itself would probably never be enough. You had to have the moment of almost touching, almost fucking, the moment right before he enters you for the first time, all the time. I thought of a story I had read about Solon, an Athenian statesman, who one day heard his nephew singing one of Sappho’s poems. He immediately asked the boy to teach it to him so he could have it memorized. When asked why, he simply said, “So that I may learn it and then die.” I was not going to stop hunting for him. I was not even at the place where the addict throws away her drugs only to buy more. I wasn’t throwing anything away. Sappho had never given up on love, even when the longing was a dagger in her heart. When she fucked her lover Phaon, perhaps she thought she wouldn’t get attached. I’ll just fuck this young, hot creature and be done with it, she must have thought. Or maybe she thought she’d fuck him into loving her. But Phaon could not love her back: she was too old, or maybe too needy, and he was newly young and hot, having recently been rubbed with Aphrodite’s magic ointment, which transformed an old man into a sexy boy.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did. Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high—no longer be a drug—and that was why you grew tired of them. That was what had happened to me and Jamie. It was only when he was pushing me away—and then after he was gone—that he became a drug. It was so much easier for someone to be the drug before or after the relationship. When they were absent they were exciting. When they were right there it was a different story. But some human beings did want simple partnership: someone with whom to weather life, like Annika and Steve. How did they stay so into each other living side by side, everything out in the open? How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe. But whenever I felt I finally “had” Jamie, the nights in his bed seemed suffocating. I preferred the acquiring, the almost-getting, the moment before he was mine again. What was left to look forward to after you got a person? To “have” seemed nauseating. Then again, I was the sick one—the one in group therapy—not Annika. The women in group told themselves they were looking for symbiotic companionship, something like Annika and Steve. They thought they wanted a man to show up for them. But I didn’t believe them. They were choosing men who couldn’t be present, so it probably wasn’t really what they wanted. It certainly wasn’t what Claire or Diana wanted. It wasn’t what I wanted. 29. The next morning I awoke to find a long string of texts from Jamie. He must have been drunk and stayed up all night, because the texts were in varying stages of “I want you.” He could probably smell Theo from thousands of miles away, how absorbed I was becoming. Men could smell an opening and they could smell a closing. He said he wanted to see me when I got back to Phoenix. He asked what I thought about giving things another try. I figured you got a restraining order, I wrote. I miss you Lucy. I didn’t ask him about the scientist.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  “How often do you sleep with guests at this hotel?” I ask. “Never. You’re my first one,” he says, unconvincingly. I give him a skeptical look and he continues, “Sometimes three women in a month and then nothing for a few months.” I ask an improbably naïve question then, needing to know if these women have all been single. He laughs. “Married women proposition you?” I ask, unable to keep the shock out of my voice. “I guess they can’t stay away – you exude sex.” “So do you,” he says. He starts putting his clothes back on, reaching in the dark for a collection of money, keys, matches and joints which had fallen from his pockets. I pull my dress on, shoving the thong he produces from under the mattress into my purse, which I remember just now is holding its own condom. He asks if he can see me again since I still have two more nights here, but I hesitate. This tryst has been validating, fun, a fantasy come true, but I am keenly aware of how tired I am and think longingly of the cool white sheets in my room. I’m even more surprised when I feel a sudden yearning for #6, for the comfort of being intimate with someone who is so careful with and sensitive to what works for my body, whose sole purpose often seems to be to please me. I offer a noncommittal maybe, explaining that I’m not sure I can pull off sneaking away from my family two nights in a row, lean down to kiss him, then walk back off into the warm, star-filled night. CHAPTER 45Another ConfessionThe villa is silent when I slip in, so I walk on tiptoes into my bedroom. I am surprised to see that it’s only 11:30. The whole exchange took little more than an hour. Dropping my bag and sandals on the floor, I head to the bathroom to clean up. I laugh when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror: my hair a disorderly tangle, my skin a shiny, sandy mess. If anyone in my family had seen me come in, they would have wondered what experience I had just endured to come out looking like this, perhaps imagining a ceremonial purging process in which I shed the trauma of the last year. I hear my phone ringing inside my purse in the bedroom and run to answer it before it wakes anyone up. “Ah, Miss Laura, I’m surprised I got you on the phone. I figured you’d be too busy to answer,” #6 says in his deep voice from what feels like a million miles away. I tell him that I just got home, hoping he will connect the dots on his own, but he doesn’t so I explain that I was out with Blaze. He laughs, thinking I’m joking, but I remind him that I am efficient with my time.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Had Claire somehow helped me find a new direction, a new legitimacy to my thesis? At least I was admitting that my own idea had been bullshit—that you couldn’t read something as intentional if it had never been intentional, even through a perverted academic lens. Yet one crux of my thesis remained: there should be no attempt made to fill in the gaps with biography or bullshit narrative. So what to do with them then—the discomfort of not knowing? How to savor what was there without guessing at what wasn’t? I was drunk but the question seemed good. The writing seemed good. Around midnight, somehow, I found myself back out again on the rocks. It was chilly and I didn’t bring a sweater. I looked around, and then, feeling embarrassed, I stopped. It was obvious Theo wasn’t there, but I kept imagining that he was—or that he was deeper in the waves, farther out, watching me looking for him, laughing. I pretended to myself that I had come out to the rocks simply because I had wanted to be near the ocean. But I was disappointed. I turned to go home. “Lucy,” said a voice. It was Theo. Had he been hiding behind a rock? This kid was confusing. When I felt him watching me from far away, maybe was he watching me from much closer? He sort of bobbed a few feet away. “You’re back,” I said cheerfully, but casual. I did not ask where he had been. “I’m back,” he said. “How have the dates been treating you?” “Disgusting,” I said. “Ah, too bad.” “Each its own little death.” “Funny,” he said. “You’re like a little death.” “What?” I asked. “You are. You’re…gloomy yet charming. I like it.” “Well, no one has said that before.” “You’re gently death-ish. You know about death, you’re aware of it, and most people aren’t anymore. But you’re not a killer. You’re a soft darkness.” A soft darkness. “Yeah, I’m aware of death,” I said. I was thinking about the doughnut incident. “In high school I wore black lipstick and black nail polish.” “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It’s not manufactured. You have it in you.” “What about you? What’s your story?” I asked. “Oh God, I hate my story,” said Theo. “I bet you have a great story.” “What do you want to know, exactly?” he asked. He was treading water a little faster now. I caught a glint of his wet suit under the waves. “Where do you live?” I asked. “Around here,” he said. “So cryptic,” I said. “Are you aware of death?” Asking that, I felt kind of creepy in a good way. He had a lot of power in not revealing too much of himself.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated—something natural—holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured. What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right? I was almost ready to give up, when I saw him in the distance swimming toward me. I started laughing and some tears came to my eyes. “Hi!” he called. “Hello!” I giggled. “It’s good to see you. I was afraid you weren’t coming back.” I felt emboldened by how excited he seemed to see me. “Do you want to get out of the water and sit on the rock with me?” I asked. “No, you come closer to the water,” he said. “If I get out it will be too cold for me to get back in again.” “I can’t sit on the water,” I said. “No, just come closer to the edge. Put that blanket down on the rock. Lie down on it and just face me. Please? If you don’t mind.” I did what he said. I watched myself. Was this natural, what I should be doing? Or was I so sick that I would do anything that this strange boy asked? He couldn’t even bother to get out of the water to meet me. Was that a bad sign? But he was so kind in other ways, so attentive and present. “Now what? “Do you want to hug me?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I do want to hug you.” This seemed even weirder than him touching my foot. He was holding on to the rock and I leaned against him. I put my head over his shoulder, the way Dominic liked to support his neck on one of my limbs. He was cold and his skin was very soft. I felt like I was hugging a strange baby, but also like we had always known each other. We hugged and I felt like I dissolved into him, like I was diving into the ocean itself. I looked over his shoulder and saw the cresting waves, the whole ocean suddenly turning white, as though I were on the threshold of heaven.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  You’re joking,” she laughed. “That’s faff. Let me take you somewhere good.” I skipped group and met her in Brentwood at a place called La Boom Boom. Immediately I could tell it was way out of my price range: a hybrid of Mercedes-keyed tight-bodied moms in yoga pants and potential porn stars. You couldn’t tell who were the moms and who were the porn stars, but they all definitely had money. Who were these women buying lingerie in the middle of the day? I guess this was what everyone did in L.A. The place reminded me of being inside a black-and-pink birthday present. The walls were pink with black velvet stripes and there were little pink chocolates on a table. I ate some. “Come on,” said Claire. “Don’t be scared.” “How much do you think this stuff is?” “Just go in there,” said Claire, pointing to one of the little pink changing rooms. “I’ll bring you stuff. What size are you?” “I’m a 32 B on the top last time I checked,” I said. “But barely. I have no idea what I am on the bottom.” I tried on bra after bra, various panties with little slips of paper in each of them to keep them fresh for whoever bought them. I imagined other women’s vaginal juices on the paper. It nauseated me a little but also made me feel like I was part of some kind of ritual, a lineage, like Sappho’s all-female cult of Aphrodite. Claire and the saleswoman were the priestesses. They made it a party. The saleswoman was named Bridget and was a GMILF, a hot grandma type. They cooed over me, telling me I had a nice ass, cute little breasts, that I looked great in everything. Claire even slapped me on the ass. I liked the way they encouraged me, babied me even. With my mother dead, and Annika away at college, I’d never had that type of tactile feminine love as a teen. I’d pretended I didn’t need or want it. I told myself that I was lucky. As a single parent, my father wasn’t home much and I was free. I had zero curfew, no rules. But my longing leaked out in other places. It was in my love for Sappho, the divine feminine. I craved that nurturing, to be swallowed up in the arms of Aphrodite herself, rocked and held. But I was afraid to ask women for it, afraid they would die on me or reject me in some other way. So I looked for it in men who could not give it. But Claire and Bridget were heaping it on me voluntarily, without me even having to ask.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I could sleep under the stars, meeting Theo every night. Then I could go eat breakfast and shower in their multimillion-dollar home. The thought of moving to the water’s edge seemed romantic in that moment. Sappho had always lived by the ocean, imagining love as a luminous divinity rising from the waves. This would be my living thesis. Then I saw Theo’s head surface, his thick wet hair draped over his left eye. “Hey!” he said, spitting out water. “Can you see when you’re underwater?” “Yes,” he said. “I live there.” “Well, I’m here to kidnap you,” I said. “No, I’m willfully coming,” he said. “I’m coming up. Land ho.” He looked around to see if anyone was coming. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about a wagon. You are really committed to doing this, I see.” “Uh-huh,” I said. “I think we should at least try, anyway. I will protect you. I just want to be safe with you, no elements, just a soft place to land together, by ourselves.” “I really want to be with you,” he said. I shuddered. He climbed up onto the rocks belly first, then flipped himself over, grunting. “Need help?” I asked. “I’m okay.” I rolled the wagon over to the edge of the rocks and held it steady. As he dragged himself on board, he looked like a paraplegic pulling himself onto a seat. He rolled over just using his arms to rearrange himself and tucked where his knees would be up to his chest. I draped the blanket around his shoulders and let it collect in front of him, covering the bulk of his tail. We were good, it seemed. But hoisting the wagon off the rocks proved more difficult than I thought. I pulled left and right, and the tin axles ground. He tried to push off the rock with his arms, like a man in a wheelchair, face straining. With him pushing, I gave a final tug and the wagon fell onto the beach, toppling over and dumping Theo in the sand. “Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. But I noticed he was shaking. “Would you cover me up with the blanket quickly? Please?” The wagon and blanket were only a few feet from where he had fallen, but I realized how hard it would be for him to even crawl that far. I wondered if his tail was heavy, what was inside it. Was it human flesh or fish flesh? I covered up his bottom half and he just lay there for a second. “Maybe this is a bad idea,” he said. “Maybe this is a warning.” My stomach dropped. I wondered if he really felt this scared, or if he was embarrassed from the fall, looking for reassurance to show him how much I wanted him to come home with me.