Part 3 Elaine Pagels and Why Faith Matters Even in Life's Darkest

Extraordinary Persons of Faith: Part 3 Elaine Pagels and Why Faith Matters Even in Life’s Darkest Times Mothers Day Message – May 10/20 Rev. Del Stewart Introduction Elaine Pagels, (nee Hiesey) was born in California in 1943. She is an American Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her area of academic expertise and research is early Christianity and Gnosticism. *Gnosticism describes the thought and practise of various cults of the late pre-Christian and early Christian centuries distinguished by the conviction that material things are evil and, that the individual person’s liberation comes through gnosis, i.e. the [sometimes secret] knowledge of spiritual mysteries. Pagels’ best-selling book, “The Gnostic Gospels”, published in 1979, examines divisions in the early church and the way women have been viewed throughout both Jewish and Christian history. “The Gnostic Gospels” was named as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century. Pagels is 77 years old. Elaine Pagels with U.S. President Obama 1 Elaine Pagels’ Early Life and Education Born into a fiercely secular family, Elaine Pagels’ career and spiritual journey began with an act of teen rebellion. At age 13, along with some Christian friends, a curious Elaine Pagels went to a revival preached by Billy Graham, at the Cow Palace near San Francisco. When the world renowned evangelist invited the assembled crowd of some 23,000 to be “born again”, the teenage girl was unable to resist his invitation. With her eyes filled with tears, she went forward to be “saved”. Later in a personal memoir, Pagels wrote that the Billy Graham revival experience “changed my life, as the preacher promised it would – although not entirely as he intended”. After joining an evangelical church, the rebellious young Pagels quit when the church announced that a Jewish friend of hers who had been killed in a car crash was destined for eternity in hell because he had not be “born again”. Nevertheless, she remained fascinated with the New Testament, especially the Gospel of John, which she found to be the most spiritual of the four gospels. Pagels entered college to learn ancient Greek and was soon able to read the gospels in their original language, which proved to be a new and powerful experience. Elaine Pagels graduated in 1964 with a B.A. degree from California’s prestigious Stanford University, and earned an M.A. there in 1965. Still in her 20s, she studied modern dance with Choreographer Martha Graham of New York City, and then applied to five different graduate schools in five different academic disciplines; and today it’s common knowledge that Pagels, who is considered a genius, could have excelled in any one of these academic fields. Interestingly, Harvard University responded to her application by telling her that they already had too many women in their religion program but if she was still interested she could apply again the following year. She did and began studying for a Ph. D. degree under Helmut Koester where she 2 became part of a scholarly team examining the “top secret” ancient Egyptian documents, discovered in 1945 and known as the Nag Hammadi library manuscripts. These were heretical gospels long rumoured to exist but considered lost in the sands of Egyptian time. Pagels’ study of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts was the basis for her prize- winning but controversial, indeed furore-creating, 1979 book “The Gnostic Gospels” in which she argued that the Christian Church was founded in a society espousing contradicting viewpoints; and in an era much different from ours, producing scholarly evidence demonstrating that Gnosticism “attracted women because it allowed female participation in sacred rites”. Pagels went on to write other academic books: “Adam, Eve and the Serpent” which focuses on the creation narratives in Genesis and the way women have been viewed throughout Jewish and Christian history; and “The Origin of Satan” (1995) in which Pagels argues that the figure of Satan became a way for Jews and Christians to demonize their religious and cultural adversaries. Noteworthy too is her New York Times best-seller “Beyond Belief” which academically contrasts the canonical Gospel of John with the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas”. But there’s more to “Beyond Belief” than dry intellectuality. This volume is the beginning of Elaine Pagels personal exploration of spirituality and meaning during a terrible time of loss and tragedy. Elaine Pagels’ Terrible Time of Loss and Tragedy 1n 1969, Elaine married the brilliant theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels. With him she had a son and adopted two children. 3 In September 1982 she walked into the vestibule of the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan. Her infant son Mark had just been diagnosed with a fatal lung disease, and she needed ‘something’. The singing of the choir filled a void but when the congregation recited the creed it left her cold. In her own words, “it sounded strange to me, like barely intelligible signals from the surface, heard at the bottom of the sea.” In April, 1987 their son Mark, six years of age, died of that rare lung disease Then, about a year later, her husband Heinz fell to his death while mountain climbing near their summer home in Aspen, Colorado. After that horrible run of loss and tragedy nobody would have blamed or been upset with Elaine Pagels if she, like the biblical Job, had decided to “curse God and die”. But she didn’t do that. Instead, even though grief and rage and terror and despair threatened to overwhelm her, she held on, writing and publishing her personal story in a new book titled “Why Religion?” “Why Religion? In this amazing volume Pagels explores why religion has been around for thousands of years in spite of unspeakable human tragedy and suffering. She acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss” and explains at the very beginning, “I had to look into that darkness. I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.” About the death of her little boy, Mark, she writes, “I can tell only the husk of the story. It felt, she says, “like being burned alive.” Pagels goes on to freely share the intimate details of her life. She describes the terrors of raising a terminally ill child, she reflects on the futility of medical interventions, she challenges centuries of “calcified Christian belief”, and from the depths of her sorrow she testifies to the temptation of denial. And with considerable yet understandable disdain she points out “the facile comfort that churches often dole out like Kleenex.” 4 Although Elaine Pagels wasn’t a Christian believer in the traditional and orthodox sense, although she was critical and often disdainful of the religious establishment, and although she was confused and overwhelmed by the loss and tragedy in her life, she turned to history’s sacred writings – to the canonical gospels of the New Testament, the letters of the apostle Paul, the Gnostic gospels of the Nag Hammadi library and the insights of Buddhism and Trappist monks. It was there, in those ancient and holy manuscripts, that this Princeton historian of religion found solace. It was there she came to comprehend why no saint interceded to fill her son’s lungs with oxygen, why no angel caught her husband Heinz as he fell from the mountaintop. It was there in those texts and spiritual insights that she came to understand guilt and grief, and to know that suffering is common and essential to all human life. It was there in those sacred texts that Elaine Pagels found the answer to the question she posed in her book, “Why Religion?” Near the end of “Why Religion?” Pagels writes, “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”. Postscript In June, 1995, Elaine Pagels married Kent Greenawalt, a law professor at Columbia University. Each had been widowed six years earlier, and left with children. Elaine had a son and a daughter. Kent had three sons. And, now, about a kilometre down the street from Pagels’ Princeton office, stands the stone tower of Trinity Church where Elaine, along with her husband Kent, and their family worship on Sunday mornings. Elaine is frequently invited to preach at this Episcopal parish. When she does so, she is often autobiographical, always unabashedly honest about her own spiritual journey and very open about her doubts and certainties. And she has no qualms whatsoever about challenging even this progressive congregation on issues like religion’s repression of women. 5 Like that young teen at the Billy Graham San Francisco revival so many decades ago, Elaine Pagels is still a rebel-at-heart. Some of the Sources Used to Prepare Today’s Message Charles, Ron: “After her son and husband died, Elaine Pagels wondered why religion survives in “The Washington Post”, November 6, 2018 Pagels, Elaine: several of her books with emphases on “The Gnostic Gospels”, “Beyond Belief” and “Why Religion?’ Rogers, Diane: “The Gospel Truth” in STANFORD Magazine, January/February 2004 Wikipedia, “Elaine Pagels” END 6 7 .

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