Permanent link for "Faith, Grief, Struggle and Renewal: A Personal Journey" by Douglas Kindschi, Sylvia and Richard Kaufman Founding Director, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, GVSU on November 14, 2024

“I grew up among people who regarded religion as obsolete as an outgrown bicycle stashed in a back closet.”  
So writes Elaine Pagels in the introduction to her latest book, Why Religion? A Personal Story.  It is indeed the personal story of a historian who asks, “Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?” She further explains how this question became “intensely personal” especially following the death of her young child, followed soon after by the “shocking” death of her husband. It left her a “crater that loomed as large as the Grand Canyon … like a black hole in space.”  Her personal journey leading up to becoming one of America’s premier scholars of religion is most fascinating and I’m excited that she will be in Grand Rapids this December for the Jewish, Christian, Muslim Dialogue on Dec. 5.

Pagels grew up with secular parents, her father a distinguished scientist, in Palo Alto, California. At age 15 she was drawn to a Billy Graham Crusade where she felt she was offered a new life by being “born again.”  She writes, “I could break out of my family and enter into the family of a heavenly father … who knew everything about me, even my secret thoughts — yet loved me unconditionally.”  Her parents were “horrified,” she writes, as she got involved with an evangelical church while at the same time her high school friends became “another kind of family — more raucous, playful, and daring.”

This latter group included the young musician Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead rock band, and a good friend, Paul, a high school dropout painter. She continued to be active weekly in the evangelical church but when her friend Paul died in a car crash, her Christian friends, at first sympathetic, asked “Was he born again?”  When Pagels said no, he was Jewish, their immediate response was, “Then he’s in hell.”  This response was not what had drawn her to the church nor was it what she understood from what Billy Graham said about “God’s love for everyone.”  She left that church, and never went back.

As a freshman at Stanford University, she was torn between interests in dance, art history, philosophy, and English literature. Her religious questions persisted, leading her to enter Harvard University’s doctoral program in religion studies. She asked why her “encounter with evangelical Christianity was so powerfully compelling? Was it Christianity, or could any religious tradition evoke such response?”

After an interview with New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl at Harvard, she knew it was the place where she could be challenged to rethink everything. She was introduced to a collection of early Christian documents that had been suppressed and mostly destroyed by the church establishment. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library of 13 ancient texts, in Egypt in 1945, opened a whole new understanding of the early developments in the Christian communities.  Like the Dead Sea Scrolls found two years later, these documents hidden for nearly 2,000 years revealed controversies as well as efforts to suppress these writings considered heretical. Documents such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip presented different claims and “secret teachings” of Jesus.

Pagels’ graduate study led her to conclude that the Christian tradition has been full of choice and different interpretations, from “the stark and simple Gospel of Mark to the prayers and hymns of Saint Francis, Saint Bernard, and Hildegard … all kinds of music, dozens of ‘rules’ for various Christian communities, poems of John of the Cross and many others. … In each generation, leaders from the apostle Paul to Martin Luther King Jr. … have selected elements from that vast collection, discarding some and reinterpreting others, focusing on those that deal with the specific challenges each one faces.  Far from destroying Christian traditions, this selection process enables them to survive, adapt, and spread, even today, in radically different cultures as new situations unimaginable in previous generations arise.” Pagels became part of the team translating and studying these texts, leading to many scholarly articles and her popular book, The Gnostic Gospels, a New York Times bestseller.

Pagels now asks herself the question, “Am I religious?” And responds, “Yes, incorrigibly, by temperament, if you mean susceptible to the music, the rituals, the daring leaps of imagination and metaphor so often found in music, poems, liturgies, rituals, and stories — not only those that are Christian, but also to the cantor’s singing at a bar mitzvah, to Hopi and Zuni dances on the mesas of the American Southwest, to the call to prayer in Indonesia.”

Given the variety of denominations and creedal statements, let alone practices, are we not all in the process of choosing? She finds helpful passages from the Gospel of Thomas opening us up to “more than a single path. Instead of telling us what to believe, they engage both head and heart … while deepening spiritual practice by discovering our own inner resources.”

Her “Personal Story” continues in the next chapters as she writes of her marriage to the prominent physicist, Heinz Pagels. She writes with great tenderness about their son Mark and the complications of his heart defect leading to his death at age 6. Such a terrible loss would strain many couples’ relationships, often leading to separation. But Pagels relates that she and Heinz grew even closer to each other and to the daughter they had adopted, leading them to seek another child to whom their love could be directed and to the adoption of a younger brother, David, for their daughter, Sarah.

Only a year later, when the family returned to their favorite spot in Colorado, Pagels describes in great detail, in the chapter titled “Unimaginable,” the event of the terrible death of her husband in a climbing accident. To face this second death in so short a period was devastating to Pagels and to her faith. She reflects, “Suddenly I was widowed. … It felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body.”  

She did was able to find comfort in a visit from a Trappist monk she had known in Colorado, who spent more than an hour with her in silent meditation. “I felt as though waves of energy were coming toward me from various directions,” she writes. When she shared that with him, he simply nodded and said, “Yes, that is what sometimes happens.”  She comments that his 50 years of contemplative practice gave him a state of being that made such experiences familiar.

She also found help in the words of Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote that when our lives turn out to be different from what we expected, we have to do “what life expects of us. … Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”    
This is Pagels’ very personal story, as well as insight into her scholarship reflected in her eight earlier books. We are honored that she will be joining us on December 5 to explore the theme “The Challenge of Power, Morality, and Religion.” Click here for more details and registration.

Other insights in the "The Challenge of Power, Morality, and Religion" series:

"How Can We Learn from Our Abrahamic Neighbors?" From Mustafa Aykol's The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims

"Does Conflict in the World Have a Religious Basis?" From Mustafa Aykol's The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World

"Can a Nation With Power Still Be Ethical?" From Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman's Putting God Second: How to Save Religion From Itself

"Learning From History and From Positive Religious Teachings" From Elaine Pagels, Ph.D.'s The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics

"Loving Country Has Limits Imposed by Biblical Covenants" From Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman's Who Are the Jews — And Who Can We Be?

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