Why Religion? A Personal Story

Why Religion? A Personal Story

Elaine Pagels (2018, HarperCollins)

       When fifteen-year-old Elaine Hiesey went to hear Billy Graham preaching at San Francisco's Cow Palace, she was transported by his promises, to a degree that horrified her sedate suburban parents. Her father was at odds with religion, her mother a nominal Methodist, but she took up with a crowd of Bible-thumping Jesus enthusiasts near her home in Palo Alto. Fortunately, by my lights, she also had a crowd of arts-minded friends from the local community theater. When one of them, a gifted artist, was killed in a car accident, her Christian friends declared that he was going to hell, because he was Jewish. "That made no sense. Wasn't Jesus Jewish? When that didn't seem to matter, I realized that what they had said had nothing to do with what had drawn me to that church, and to the faith we'd claimed to share." 

 

        Though she left that church, she retained a sense that religion had answers to questions that she had never been encouraged to think about in her childhood home. She wasn't encouraged to think about them at Stanford, where she studied history; the study of religion wasn't even available there. But since the question wouldn't leave her alone, she pursued graduate study at Harvard's Divinity School. They put her off for a year, on the grounds that women take up space in graduate school better used by men; nevertheless, she persisted. 

 

       Harvard happened to be one of two places in the U.S. that had copies of the ancient books that had been discovered at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, twenty-five years earlier. With names like the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the 'gnostic' gospels purported to record the lost teachings of Jesus. The second-century bishop Irenaeus considered them heretical. By the fourth century, they had been translated from Greek into Coptic; they were hidden from the proscriptions of the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, and only returned to light in the 1940's. These discoveries have been the basis of Elaine Pagels's professional life, which has included teaching, and the writing of both scholarly and popular books.

      Why Religion also recalls her personal life: her marriage to the distinguished physicist Heinz Pagels; the illness and death of their six-year-old child, Mark, of pulmonary hypertension; their adoption of two more children; and her husband's shocking death in a hiking accident. "No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means 'emptied.' Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives." She describes the numbness of the ensuing months, as she figured out how to keep her family going, and tried to understand how rage might coexist with grief. It was a propitious time to study the book of Job, and the development of early Christian conceptions of Satan. 

 

     So, really, why religion? Heinz Pagels actually asked her this at the beginning of their courtship. "After an intense discussion, contentious and hilarious, we came to see that each of us was hoping to understand something fundamental." Today, she is not a believer, nor an unbeliever - her understanding comes from a time before creeds gave those words meaning. She sees religion both in a larger context, as part of the knotted net that binds all humans to each other and with the world; and as a personal, interior experience, all but incommunicable; in that sense, she is a gnostic. "Even now, writing about what's so deeply personal, I'm aware that anything I say can speak to you only as it resonates through what you have experienced yourself; yet even within those limits, we may experience mutual recognition."

     I hope that's not heresy, because it feels like salvation.

Email edition February 1 2019