The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Knock upon yourself as on a door, and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on that road, you cannot get lost, and what you open for yourself will open. THE TEACHINGS OF SILVANUS

All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night.

That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all. I swore an oath to set down their accomplishments and praise their flourishings, no matter how small. I would be a chronicler of lost stories. It was exactly the kind of boldness Mother despised.

A child as awkward as I required an explanation. My father suggested that while God was busy knitting me together in my mother’s womb, he’d become distracted and mistakenly endowed me with gifts destined for some poor baby boy. I don’t know if he realized how affronting this must have been to God, at whose feet he laid the blunder.

My mouth parted. Surely she knew no devout Jew would look upon figures in human and animal form, much less create them. The second commandment forbade it. Thou shalt not make a graven image of anything living in heaven, or on the earth, or in the sea.

When I looked up, Yaltha’s eyes were settled on me. She said, “A man’s holy of holies contains God’s laws, but inside a woman’s there are only longings.” Then she tapped the flat bone over my heart and spoke the charge that caused something to flame up in my chest: “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies.”

Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it . . .

A betrothal to Nathaniel ben Hananiah was a form of death. It was life in a sepulchre.

When the longing of one’s heart is inked into words and offered as a prayer, that’s when it springs to life in God’s mind.” Does it? “Earlier tonight, I sent my bowl across the room with my foot,” I said. She smiled. Her face looked ancient and somehow beautiful. “Ana, your betrothal has stolen your hope. Return to your longing. It will teach you everything.”

Under the apple tree I awakened you . . . My beloved put his hand to the latch, and my heart was thrilled within me . . . Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it . . .

The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.

“Because, Ana, you are female. This is the Court of Women. We can go no further.” In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.

Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.

“When your betrothed repeats the blessings, do not look at him. Do not look at your father. Look to yourself.”

When I was nine, I discovered God’s secret name: I Am Who I Am. I thought it was the truest,

In the curve of my ear I heard the rush of wings. I saw the ibis lift away.

I went to sit on a rock in the sun, thinking of the endless debates I’d held in my head about God. I’d been taught God was a figure similar to humans, only vastly more powerful, which failed to comfort me because people could be so utterly disappointing. It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.

It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

son a wife.” A

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

“God is like a mother hen, Ana. She will gather us beneath her wing”? But I never felt gathered into that place where he seemed to dwell so effortlessly.

I would call her Littlest Thunder.” This brought me a deep and sudden consolation, as if I’d been gathered, if only for a moment, into that most inscrutable place beneath Sophia’s wing.

sepulchre!”

movement spread like floodwaters,” he

“Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”

I was sent out from power . . . Be careful. Do not ignore me. I am the first and the last I am she who is honored and she who is mocked I am the whore and the holy woman I am the wife and the virgin I am the mother and the daughter I stopped and looked at their faces, glimpsing both wonder and bewilderment. Diodora was watching me intensely, her hands tucked under her chin. A smile moved on Yaltha’s lips. I felt all the women who lived inside me. Do not stare at me in the shit pile, leaving me discarded You will find me in the kingdoms . . .

Do not be afraid of my power Why do you despise my fear and curse my pride? I am she who exists in all fears and in trembling boldness

I, I am without God And I am she whose God is magnificent . . . I am being I am she who is nothing . . . I am the coming together and the falling apart I am the enduring and the disintegration . . . I am what everyone can hear and no one can say

It was true I no longer believed in the God of rescue, only the God of presence, but I believed in Sophia, who whispered bravery and wisdom in my ear day and night, if I would only listen, and I tried now to do that, to listen.

I felt the moment come, the severing. It was gentle, like a touch on the shoulder.

“It is finished,” Jesus said. There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.

“All shall be well,” Yaltha had told me, and when I’d recoiled at how trite and superficial that sounded, she’d said, “I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There’s a place in you that is inviolate. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”

“Go in peace, Ana, for you were born for this.” Those ten words were her greatest gift to me.

“Listen to me, Ana. You’ve dared much with your words. So much that a time will come when men will try to silence them. The hillside will keep your work safe.”

“You’re not listening,” she said. “Think what you’ve written!” I scrolled through them in my head: stories of the matriarchs; the rape and maiming of Tabitha; the terrors men inflicted on women; the cruelties of Antipas; the braveries of Phasaelis; my marriage to Jesus; the death of Susanna; the exile of Yaltha; the enslavement of Diodora; the power of Sophia; the story of Isis; Thunder: Perfect Mind; and a plethora of other ideas about women that turned traditionally held beliefs upside down. And these were only a portion. “I don’t understand—” I broke off, because I did understand. I just didn’t want to.

Reaching into my pouch, I remove the mummy portrait I commissioned all those years ago as a gift for Jesus, meant to preserve my memory. The three of us stare at it a moment—my face painted on a piece of limewood board. I carried it all the way to Galilee to give him, but I was too late. I will always regret that lateness. I fold the last remnant of Jesus’s cloak around the portrait and slip it into the jar, thinking with wonder how his memory is being preserved three decades after his death.

“They speak of Jesus as having had no wife,” Lavi told me. That was a conundrum I puzzled over for months.

Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.

And it comes to me that the echoes of my own life will likely die away in that way thunder does. But this life, what a shining thing—it is enough.

The sun slips from the sky and the dark gold light rises up. I gaze into the far distance and sing, “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I am a voice.”

Claims that Jesus was not married first began in the second century.

Celibacy became a path to holiness. Virginity became one of Christianity’s higher virtues.

Early Christianity debated whether Jesus was human or divine, a matter it settled in the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea and again at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, when doctrines were adopted stating Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Nevertheless, his humanity diminished as he became more and more glorified.

The Therapeutae was not a figment of my imagination, but a real monastic-like community, near Lake Mareotis in Egypt, where Jewish philosophers devoted themselves to prayer and study and a sophisticated allegorical interpretation of Scripture.

and a devotion to Sophia, the feminine spirit of God.

The Thunder: Perfect Mind is an actual document written by an unknown author believed to be female and dated within the novel’s time frame. Its nine pages of papyrus were among the famous Nag Hammadi texts discovered in 1945 in a jar buried in the hills above the Nile in Egypt. In the novel, Thunder: Perfect Mind is authored by Ana, who composes it as a hymn to Sophia. The passages of it that are included in the novel are from the real poem. I’ve read and reread this poem for two decades, awed by its provocative, ambiguous, commanding, gender-bending voice. Imagining Ana creating it as her great opus simply made me happy.

The day Ana appeared, I knew one thing about her besides her name. I knew that what she wanted most was a voice. If Jesus actually did have a wife, and history unfolded exactly the way it has, then she would be the most silenced woman in history and the woman most in need of a voice. I’ve tried to give her one.

While researching the novel, I happened upon a photo of an ancient incantation bowl. What captivated me about it was that over two thousand years ago a prayer had been inscribed in a spiraling fashion inside the bowl.