Why Religion? A Personal Story Quotes

“What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... 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.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; 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.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Times of mourning displace us from ordinary life.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later." Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story--a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we'd wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, "I can't imagine how you felt, what that was like." I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, "Like being burned alive.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“For those who find suffering inevitable--in other words, for any of us who can't dodge and pretend it's not there--acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“...although being "angry at God"--or at myself, or him, or anyone else--made no sense to me, I was often overwhelmed by sudden, intense bursts of anger that had no outlet, no appropriate target.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Meanwhile there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And though I'd flared with anger when the priest at Heinz's funeral had warned not to be "angry at God" because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Throughout those nameless days, my temper exploded at slight frustrations. Trembling, sitting in my stomach,m would spread until my whole body was shaking.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“the words of an ancient Jewish prayer: “Blessed art Thou, Lord God of the Universe, that you have brought us alive to see this day.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“Christmas lights, again, piercing like knives. The spirit of that season was never more remote than during those dark December days.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“My father scowled, warning that going to graduate school was a crazy idea for a woman. “If you’d been admitted,” he warned, “you’d never get married—you’ll turn into one of those lonely women who carry a briefcase and go to the movies alone! No, do something that really makes sense: take typing and become a secretary, or teach in an elementary school.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“Walking alone in the dark early the next morning, New Year's Day, the coming year stretched out like a bleak and endless highway, leading nowhere.... Having held on for months, thinking that that if only we can get through to the new year, now I felt plunged into black ice, in danger of drowning.... Suddenly I understood our friends' concern. Could this be what precedes some kind of breakdown--a sudden shift to feel oblivion as temptation, even as seduction?”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“I knew that I could not possibly teach; the energy and clarity that teaching requires, which I'd always taken for granted, were gone.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Am I religious?” 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.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“Religious fervor often veers so close to madness that some psychiatrists suspect that every religious emotion masks some kind of delusion.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“Christians who identify the snake in Paradise as Satan actually are projecting a far more recent invention into that ancient story, since the Genesis folktale pictures the serpent only as a cunning, talking snake, perhaps a stand-in for the humans’ inner voice.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“The ancient university breathed a spirit of having been designed by men and for men, as, of course, it was – not for anomalies like ourselves.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“What matters to me more than whether we participate in institutions or leave them is how we engage the imagination – dreams, art, poetry, music – since what each of us needs, and what we can engage, obviously differs and changes throughout out lifetime.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“From the first to the mid-fourth century, before various creed were increasingly formalized, many Christian monks were open to exploring other traditions along with their own, just as monastics today often include writings that range from the works of Moses Maimonides to the Buddhist sutras; apparently they were less concerned with what to believe than with the deepening their spiritual practice.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Mary Beth initiated the evening by playing the sound of ocean waves breaking on a beach, as we sat quietly, focusing on a large diorama. As the evening darkened into night, she lit candles and asked me to sit inside a large, hollow sculpture, as each participant, in turn, spoke about giving birth. In that enclosed space, shaped almost like a birth canal, I felt the ritual focus intensify. Suddenly a single question formed in my mind: “Are you willing to be a channel?” That jolted me into awareness of something that had never entered my consciousness: I was terrified of dying in childbirth. In the shock of that recognition, something changed, perhaps an involuntary release of muscles tensed with fear. Later, astonished by what had happened, I couldn’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about a woman dying in childbirth, often as it has happened in other times and places; instead, this felt like a genetic memory of countless women’s experiences, stored in the cells of our bodies. During the final, intensely focused moments of our gathering, another sentence formed itself, startling me, as if speaking to my intense desire to control what we can’t control: “You don’t have to do this; it does itself.” Three weeks later, for the first time in my life, I discovered that I was pregnant.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story