Cerberus | Chapter 8: The Glades
I easily identified Pastor Hughes’ elegantly simple formula for creating feel-good emotions in us. He had stoked and then quelled our anxiety in the name of God.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 7: Cerberus at Church
Had I trained my students to cut out feelings until the heart went numb? Were my faculty colleagues doing the same thing to their students? Were we manufacturing ministers who created corpse cold Sunday services?
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 6: The Door
I had spent most of my life learning how to avoid feelings of empathy, compassion, and caring because they were neglected or attacked. Then I cried for six months.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 5: Loveable?
“I was born in New Jersey,” I said. “I am American, and so are my parents. But I have always known that `Sue’ is not my real name. See that tree over there? We could refer to that tree as `Sue’ if we wanted to. But that’s not its real name.”
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 4: Mom’s Cerberus
I seemed to have found a door, opened it, and entered into a part of herself never before disclosed to me. I had entered the place where she spent most of her life: the room guarded by the sculptured, mourning bodies she carved to block the dark entranceway to her heart.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 3: Mr. C
Within a very short time, I was booking hundreds of Hollywood celebrities and celebrity intelligentsia for my show because of the way I set it up: as a glimpse into their emotional heart.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 2: The High Priest of Anxiety
I spent most of my free time holed up in Dad’s booklined study. This dense space is where I first met the pagan beast. I felt free as a monk in his cell after the day’s duties were completed. The dark matter of the universe was now as close to the monk as his thoughts.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 1
Cerberus is the “hound of Hades,” the multi-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the gates of the Underworld and prevents the shades of deadened feelings, like compassion, caring, and empathy, from taking permanent leave, lest they get slaughtered again.
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