Elaine Pagels: Why Religion?

I’ve been long familiar with and deeply impressed by the ground-breaking research and writing of Dr. Elaine Pagels in the realm of traditional and apocryphal biblical translation and interpretation. Her approach to religion and spirituality infused my own writing, which include the role of the so-called Gnostic gospels in the formation of the Christian era. Most of her scholarly works were written before or shortly after the turn of the millennium.

So, I was delighted to discover that Dr. Pagels had authored a new book published in 2018 called Why Religion? A Personal Story. The title struck me as curious for her: what personal connection would an author, who spent her life working with texts that Christianity disdained as heretical, have formed with the typical “religion” (she does not use “spirituality” in her title. As a fan of the underdog, in this case the almost-obliterated Gnostics, I bought the book and started to read with the ample caution I’ve formed against anyone who attempts to sell me something packaged as religion.

I should have known that Pagels would not disappoint. In fact, she surpassed my expectations. This book is more about Elaine the wife, mother, and vulnerable human being that I did not get a chance to meet in her earlier works. I should also have known that it was going to be a tear-jerker. When the core of the story has the author telling blow by blow how she pushed herself through the tragic loss of her five-year- old son compounded a year later by the shocking death of her husband in a hiking accident, no eye can remain dry. Elaine does not spare herself or the reader the pain of so much suffering, but neither does she turn aside from the hard questions such tragedies, which happen in some form to all human beings, slam us with: Why do bad things happen to good people?

She does not run away from self-questioning and, while listening to other, insists on arriving at her own answer. Speaking of her young son, she writes: “During those dark, interminable days of Mark’s illness, I couldn’t help imagining that somehow I’d caused it. If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”

In another place, she flies into the face of those who would try to console the inconsolable with an appeal to the goodness of the Almighty: “For if we believe that an all-powerful God created a ‘very good’ world, what happened to it? While the Buddha declared as his first noble truth that ‘all life is suffering,’ Jewish and Christian theologians, on the contrary, speak of ‘the problem of suffering,’ as if suffering and death were not intrinsic elements of nature but alien intruders on an originally perfect creation.” That hurts to have to work your way through.

These are just a couple of examples of the poignant way Dr. Pagels relates the process of facing suffering as it is and arriving to the wisdom that allows us to understand and endure the unimaginable. She informs us of other familiar attempts to escape that she tried, only to return to the deep contemplation she wrote about as a scholar. Speaking of a document, The Gospel of Truth, she once rescued from oblivion and translated into English, she applies it to her tragedy as a balm to help her heal herself:

“I’ve come to love this poetic and moving story for the way it reframes the gospel narrative. Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, or somehow as ‘good for you,’ this author sees it rather as Buddhists do, as an essential element of human existence, yet one that may have the potential to break us open out of who we are. My own experience of the ‘nightmare’—the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified—has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores equanimity, even joy.”

No synopsis or review can replace the experience of a book like Why Religion? A Personal Story. It must be read, cried with, pondered over, and perhaps reread. If you suffer from an event that seemed undeserved, unfair, beyond the ability to bear, beyond the possibility to heal, please read this book.