The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

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.”

never saw these women without envy for how they came and went freely without the bondage of a chaperone. Surely peasantry was not all bad.

one of those small, nameless moments occurred that would loom large only later—a sweep of color at the edge of my eye. Turning toward it, I spotted a young man, a peasant, with uplifted hands and long strands of spun thread looped about his outspread fingers—red, green, lilac, yellow, blue. The threads streamed to his knees like bright falls of water. In time, they would remind me of rainbows, and I would wonder if God had sent them as a sign of hope as he’d done for Noah, something for me to cling to amid the drowned ruins that awaited, but right then the sight was nothing more than a lovely distraction. A girl not much older than I was attempting to coil the lengths of thread into neat whorls in order to sell them. I could tell they were tinted with cheap vegetable dyes. The young man laughed, a deep, booming laugh, and I noticed he was wiggling his fingers, making the threads flutter, rendering them impossible to capture. The girl laughed, too, though she was trying very hard not to. There was so much unexpectedness in the scene, so much gladness, that I fixed on it. I’d seen women offering their fingers as sorting pegs, never men. What manner of man assists a woman with the balling of her yarn? He appeared older than I by several years, as old as twenty. He had a short, dark beard and thick hair that fell to his chin, as was the custom. I watched him push a lock behind one ear, where it refused to stay, tumbling back onto his face. His nose was long, his cheekbones bro...

feeling the intensity of my stare, the man suddenly looked around, his gaze falling on me like a veil I could almost feel, the heat of it touching my shoulders, my neck, my cheeks.

God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.

What manner of person is this? Men would think him weak, yes. Women, too. But I knew the strength it took to forgo striking back.

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

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

the prophet lashed out at hypocrites and proclaimed it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to come into the kingdom of God. He blessed the poor, the meek, the outcast, and the merciful. He preached love, saying if a soldier forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two, and if you’re struck on one cheek, turn the other one.

“To avoid a fear emboldens it,”

She is difficult. You don’t have to feel love for her. Only try to act with love.”

“They speak of Jesus as having had no wife,” Lavi told me. That was a conundrum I puzzled over for months. Was it because I was absent when he traveled about Galilee during his ministry? Was it because women were so often invisible? Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.

“I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I am a voice.”

Christianity absorbed ideas of asceticism and Greek dualism, which devalued the body and the physicality of the world in favor of the spirit. Closely identified with the body, women were also devalued, silenced, and marginalized, losing roles of leadership they’d possessed within first-century Christianity. Celibacy became a path to holiness. Virginity became one of Christianity’s higher virtues. Certain that the end-time would come soon, believers in the second century hotly debated if Christians should marry. Considering the accretion of such views into the religion, it struck me as not particularly acceptable for Jesus to have been married.

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.

eschatological

Sophia, the feminine spirit of God.

Writing from a novelist’s perspective and not a religious one, I was primarily interested in his humanity. And what an extraordinary human being he was. I depicted him as a rabbi, social prophet, messiah, and nonviolent political resister, whose dominant message was love, compassion, inclusion, and the coming of God’s kingdom within the hearts and minds of people.

Judas as a child consumed with hatred for Rome, as a radical Zealot, and as an ardent disciple who believes Jesus is the Messiah destined to deliver them from Rome. His betrayal of Jesus is a piece of intricate and earnest political theater. It speaks, I think, to the danger of hyper-idealism, how a person overly possessed by a principle can begin to justify almost anything for his cause.

“Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders. She trespassed everywhere.”

as his audacity also reminds her of her own comparatively