Redefined is hosted by me, Zainab Salbi, and brought to you by FindCenter, a search engine for your soul. Part library, part temple, FindCenter presents a world of wisdom, organized. Check it out today at www.findcenter.com and please subscribe to Redefined for free on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

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What’s most important about life? What is the essence of life? Is it what we do? How much we earn? How many social media followers we have? Or is it, do we live our lives in kindness to ourselves and to others? Do we live our lives in love to ourselves and to others? In nearly losing my life, I was confronted with these questions, and it led me to the conversations that make up Redefined, about how we draw our inner maps and the pursuit of meaningful personal change.

Why we choose religion is a question I often wonder about. Who really makes the rules, and should we simply follow them without examining their origins and their purpose? My guest this time, Elaine Pagels, is a distinguished historian of religion, a professor at Princeton University, and the author of a number of important books, including her bestseller, The Gnostic Gospels. Her most recent book, Why Religion, spoke to me—and to many—in a profound way. It creates space for asking critical questions about ancient codes and beliefs while explaining why religion sustains and why it matters. It also tells the story of Elaine as she mourns the deaths of both her child and her husband within a year. And what religion does and does not do to address healing and suffering. Elaine is big-hearted and fiercely intellectual. She asks the big brave questions and reveals new stories and a hidden history of religion that is important for all to understand. Please join me.

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I want to start with the concept of suffering, because we are living in a moment where suffering is amplified. And I want to start with your particular suffering, because as I hear it . . . It’s funny because sometimes people hear my suffering and they’re like, “Oh my God, how did you deal with it?” And I read your suffering, and I was like, “Oh my God, how did you deal with it?” Can you tell us, in summary, the loss that you have experienced and what process you have come to learn about the meaning of suffering?

It’s a powerful question and you’re right that everyone is experiencing it. It reminds me of the Buddhist saying that all life is suffering. That there’s no life that doesn’t know that. And what amazed me in my own life is that when we are going through things we think we can’t survive, often we can. That seemed to me the surprise. That’s why I wrote that book. Not only about suffering, because everybody knows about that, but the surprise that sometimes we can live through those things that seem impossible to encounter.

For those who have not read the book yet, which everyone in my opinion should read it, can you tell us more about what happened? Just factually, what happened? And then where did that loss take you?

It was a time in my life when I had never been happier. Being fortunately married to someone I loved very much. And we had a child that we’d long wanted to have a child, a wonderful child. And then as you said, within a year, my son died of a very rare illness called pulmonary hypertension. And my husband who adored our son, as I did, and was a mountain climber all of his life, fell on one of his climbs and was killed. And before that time we had just adopted two children because we realized that if we had not had children, we could have made our life in different ways. But with that child and how we felt about him, we just felt we couldn’t live without children. And we wanted to find children who needed parents as much as we needed children. So I was left suddenly widowed with two babies and feeling completely unable to cope with it.

My heart is just all out here for you, Elaine. Such loss, which is tremendous. Some people feel guilty about . . . Some people say this is God’s punishing us. Some people say there must be a meaning in such loss. And in your book, you actually deconstruct all of them. You go into talking about the guilt. You do talk about those who feel that this is punishment. And you do talk about what the heck is the meaning from that loss. Can you tell us about how you handled . . . what’s your thought on deconstructing this concept and your conclusion of what is such loss for?

Yes, Zainab, because with any kind of deep loss, there’s great grief. There’s also anger, and then people talk about survivor’s guilt, but when the loss is the loss of your child, your primary responsibility as a parent is to keep the child alive. And if you can’t do that you feel like a failure, even if you’ve done everything you could. And I struggled with that. That was guilt on top of grief. But because I was exploring these emotional states and using some of the sources I read in the history of religion to do that, I was aware that the Bible, for example, teaches people that the death of a child has to do with a parent’s guilt. It’s even in the story of King David, when he took the wife of another man, had the husband killed on purpose so that he could take the wife and she was pregnant by King David.

And then the story in the Bible says, “And the Lord smote the child because of the sin of the father and the mother.” The baby died, and the Bible clearly says it was a punishment from God on the parents. And that’s the way it often feels. Even if you know that you’re not guilty. I had to sort out the way my culture had taught me that. Even if you look at the beginning of Genesis. Right? The suggestion is that we wouldn’t die if somebody hadn’t sinned. Now, that’s just not true. Right? Because death is part of our natural state as human beings. But the story in Genesis says we die because someone did something wrong, somebody sinned, it’s somebody’s fault. And that way of looking at it increases the suffering in a very unnecessary way. I had to let go of it. And that was a real relief. The study of religion not only shows you what we can appreciate about those traditions, but also how damaging they can be in some ways. And I think we need to look at both.

What got you to studying religion? What was that history that got you to that journey?

Well, I started in a family that had turned secular. My father: brought up by ferocious Presbyterians, and they were talking a lot about hell and damnation. And he said they argued about it all the time, and he hated it growing up. As soon as he learned about science and Darwin, he just threw away Christianity for what I think are very good reasons, and said, “I’m done with that.” And I was brought up to think, well, religious traditions, those are for people who just don’t understand science, they’re just not rational.

But then, as happens to many of us, I discovered there was a deficit. What does it mean to live without the sense of a spiritual life? I felt it was like living on a flat earth. So when I was suddenly, unexpectedly, exposed to a huge evangelical Christian rally—I was fourteen years old and Billy Graham had 20,000 people in the sports stadium, and the choir is singing us a powerful song and everybody’s weeping—I was just overwhelmed with the emotional power of it. And I loved it. I just went down and was born again, and everybody’s rejoicing, because all these people were being saved that day in this huge Crusade for Christ in San Francisco. And later my parents were horrified by that.

I’m sure.

“How could that happen? That’s terrible.” But it was a discovery that one could live on a much bigger canvas than the individual self and the individual family, and who you and I think we are. It was the discovery of a region beyond this world that I think that I now call a spiritual dimension, and I didn’t stay there, because the world of evangelical Christianity proved too small. But I appreciate that first recognition.

It’s beautiful because one of my guests actually, previous guests in Redefined said that as children, or teenagers, almost all of us think about God in some way or form, or shape, and that eventually as we get older and as we sort of start cutting that away from us, like either because we are embarrassed or because we feel God is oppressive or we feel God is punishing or all of these things that we distance ourselves eventually from God. Some of us, not all, but that concept of God. And that curiosity is always with us when we are younger, basically. And until we cut it off for some and seems that this may be true in your case—this has definitely been true in my case where I grew up in a secular family, more spiritual than secular. But secular, like did not teach much about religion except my grandmother. Right?

And it was me who was curious about God, and it’s me who was like trying to discover what is God and what am I in front of God and all of that. And there was, in my opinion, for me, in my case, there was no outlet for it because I found religion, every time I try to go there, to be honest, I found it suffocating, restraining, even getting in my way or getting in the way of my love for God. You know? So I sort of always would get anxiety when I go to explore religion. And I sort of always drifted to what are the other routes that are available. Now, you explored through the study of the history of religion.

Well, what you just said, articulated a real difference between a sense of God, some kind of mysterious reality beyond our ordinary perception, right? That’s one thing. The traditions are often stifling. I found evangelical Christianity to be like a straightjacket after a while. First it seemed like a discovery, which it was, but then I discovered that it was massively confining and the group that I was in treated it like a special little club, which meant that they were superior to everybody else. And so I had to leave. Realizing that that sense of the mysterious reality beyond our ordinary experience is very different from the stories, the traditions, the forms of worship that Islam, Christianity, Judaism, that try to articulate it.

Let’s go back because what you have done is that you have these two stories and you integrated them. You have your own personal stories of grief, utter grief, and you have your intellectual curiosity and your intellectual path and academic career. And what I found so touching and important is that you did not cut them from each other, but you kept your intellectual curiosity as part of your own personal healing it seems. Can you tell us more about that?

Yes. I mean, I realized that what I was looking for in my work was a very personal question to start with. Why religion? Why am I looking for that? Why did I go for that? When, as you say, it has many limitations in the way that we ordinarily encounter it. When that grief hit, there wasn’t an avoidance. It was kind of like a black hole in space. I could hardly go into it because I went to the hospital shortly after my husband’s death, having boils all over my body. And I said to the doctor, “I got through my son’s death. I’m going to get through this.”

And he said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s much greater than that. You can’t just will yourself through it.” But there’s also a kind of anesthetic that happens naturally that sometimes you just cannot go back to those memories. But years later you have to go back because you can’t have a full life until you experience everything that’s going on. And the things you shut off maybe a while ago, because they were too painful. So I had to go back and experience the loss.

And in doing that, go through the entire process. So much of it nonverbal grief, anger, confusion, sorrow—and then discover that there are ways through it. But I was struck when you talk about meaning—the simple things people say. God wills it or whatever. That didn’t make sense at all. I mean, that struck me as insulting. When somebody said to me, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” And I thought, what are you saying to me? I couldn’t even speak to the person who said that to me. I was furious, devastated. He didn’t know that our son had recently died. And I thought, how does he know what I can handle? So it seemed overwhelming.

You talk about anger and you particularly say that our culture vilify anger, and there’s sort of no room for anger. And I think I find it particularly in perhaps Anglo culture, Anglosaxon culture, anger is sort of demonized or worried about, or people are like, afraid of it, and yet you actually say . . . You present another perspective of how biblical stories and see anger, especially righteous anger that motivates killing and others as a special prerogative of the Lord himself. Can you say more about how that works and what does it mean?

Yes. Well, it really struck me that I felt a lot of anger. And of course, anger is often an easier cover for grief, which we can also learn, but anger was deeply there, and I’d been brought up to be polite. You don’t lash out at people in violent rage, but I’d been invited by a group of psychiatrists in New York to talk about emotion.

And the topic they chose—which I hadn’t realized—was rage, power, and aggression. This is after my husband was killed. And I thought, “Oh! Well, I know something about that, from experience.” But I started to look at the biblical stories and realize that what they do is prohibit people in grief to be angry. That is, if you read the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, it says when someone dies, you tear your clothes. You grieve, you weep, you lament, but you don’t express anger. The only one who’s expressing anger without any limit in the Hebrew Bible is the Lord. When he’s angry at king David for something David did, he sends an angel to kill 70,000 people with a plague. So they interpret plague—I imagine taking this plague—as the anger of God for something we did. That’s what the Bible suggested, that God is allowed to have boundless anger and humans aren’t.

And that helped me too, because I was reading the work of a wonderful anthropologist, Rosaldo Rosario, who talked about how he recognized the power of anger and the necessity of it when you’re dealing with terrible loss or damage that’s done to you, which I know is part of your story. I mean, anger is an appropriate response to that, right? Is a necessary response. And so often it’s submerged, as the anthropologist said, in Western culture, he thought in Anglo culture, in the culture I was brought up in. So I realized that these religious traditions, not only in some times promoted guilt, but also prohibited anger. That’s why we can’t just swallow these religious traditions whole, because they’re indigestible. They have a lot of elements that aren’t helpful. We need to be aware of how they can lead us away from our own experience instead of opening it up. And so, the only path there is your experience, my experience, the first experience of each one of us, which is deeper than what we’re hearing from other people.

It’s so interesting because what I’m hearing from you is the religious experience almost cut us off from some of the very basic emotional experience of this being a human being. And this being a human being, it has all the emotions in, the sorrow and the joy, the anger and the kindness, and it sort of cuts us off from aspects of our human experience. And when we’re cut off from our human experience, the full human experience, then we’re not whole in ourselves, and eventually we’re not . . . How can we see God, as you’re arguing, or the Divine within us, if we’re not seeing the fully us and accepting the full us.

That’s so well said because these traditions claim to open us up, but often they do cut us off. For example, Jewish, Christian, Muslim tradition, as we all know, have strong prohibitions against women, and they cut women off from their sense of power, their sense of autonomy. And they teach that that’s the way women should act. This is as old as the story of Adam and Eve. When the Lord says to Eve, your desire shall be for your husband and he will rule over you, because she sinned and not the husband. And that’s what Christian tradition teaches traditionally too. Not always. But if we take it early, we can be in real trouble.

What I really appreciate, Elaine, is like in my darkest hours, let’s say in my darkest moments, I was angry at God. How could you do that to me? And I felt very guilty about being angry at God. Like, oops, I’m not supposed to be angry at God. And as I understand it from your book, you argue that that anger and vis-a-vis God is connected to the creation of Satan. But can you clarify that actually? And tell us more about that.

Yes. I mean, when I was totally devastated by loss, Zainab, some Christian minister said to me, not to be angry at God. And that made me angry because I wasn’t inclined to be. I mean, I didn’t believe in a God like that at the time. So I thought you’re not making any sense to me, but I am angry. And if I were angry, I’d be angry at Satan because in the ancient world, Satan was a person. The name Diablos, devil, means somebody who throws an obstruction in your path, somebody who blocks you, frustrates you, harms you, and wants to harm you. That’s Satan. So I thought, okay, look, I’m not angry at God. That just doesn’t make sense, but I’d like to be angry at someone. So I’ll just take out the anger I’m feeling by being angry at Satan. But it was kind of a joke because I didn’t believe in a real Satan either, but I started to look at the stories about Satan and think, Satan doesn’t really appear in the Hebrew Bible except very marginally in the book of Job. Otherwise—but there he’s a servant of God—but there are stories about how Satan becomes an evil angel. All the Jewish sources say that Satan was an angel originally, but he turned against the Lord.

And what I discovered is that the stories about Satan were about somebody who’s close to you, somebody who’s part of your group, part of your family, part of your tribe, who turns against you. The most dangerous enemy is not an outsider, but somebody close to you who betrays you and harms you, partly because they know you so well. That’s the most painful. So I was reading these stories about Satan and I thought, okay, I’ll just explore the stories about Satan. These are harmless, right? They’re just old folk tales.

Zainab, I was totally shocked. I actually started studying Muslim stories about Satan, Jewish stories, Christian stories about how a good angel went wrong. And I began to realize that the stories about Satan are actually written into the New Testament, in the story of the death of Jesus. And I thought, okay, wait a minute. People who imagine that the supernatural world is divided between God and an evil power, as many in the ancient world believed, would then divide the human world, right? Between God’s people and Satan’s people. The Jewish people could be God’s people and everybody else not, or the Muslim people or whatever. Or the right Christians against the wrong Christians. The Catholics against the Protestants who used to kill each other, as we know. So Satan would be used against other people. But what really shocked me was that I had never noticed, in the New Testament, how that works. So I thought, okay, I’ll just start reading the gospels again and see who’s associated with God and who’s associated with Satan. So the conflict up there will be read down here on Earth.

So you start to read the gospel of Mark. And it’s clear that Jesus and his followers are people associated with the holy spirit, the power of God. And the enemies who kill him, who frustrate him, who put him to death are associated with Satan. So I thought, okay, that’ll be some of the Jewish leaders and then the Romans who executed him. That’s not what I found. To my shock, the Romans were never associated with Satan. And we know historically they were the people who crucified Jesus. Instead, it was always the Jews who were associated with Satan. It was Judas, his own follower who betrayed him. It was the Jewish people in Matthew. Matthew says the whole nation cried out for the crucifixion of Jesus. Now that’s impossible, historically. That’s counter-historical. Jews don’t crucify people. Only the Romans did and they only crucified people they most hated, either slaves who rebelled against masters or provincial subordinate nations who revolted against the Roman Empire. And Jesus was regarded as a revolutionary against Rome. So I thought the way they tell the story of the death of Jesus turns the Jews into enemies. Why? And I realized later that the followers of Jesus who wrote it were terrified of the Romans. They’d killed Jesus. They were also being crucified. They were being tortured. They were being killed themselves. All of the prominent leaders—Paul, Peter, James—they were executed brutally by the Romans.

And so they were afraid to speak about Romans and they sort of blamed the crucifixion on other Jews so that people who were in the Roman Empire wouldn’t believe that Jesus was a revolutionary—which he probably wasn’t—but they blamed their own people. Now that’s one thing when Jews and Christians are persecuted minorities. But in the fourth century, the Christian movement became the dominant religion in Rome. And the whole legal code started to turn against the Jews and treat them like enemies. So if you were a rabbi converting people to Judaism, you could be burned alive.

And the hostility toward Jews that you can document throughout Christian Europe, where Jews are forcibly converted or tortured or kept in ghettos or prevented from inheriting property, hemmed in in so many ways, is a legacy of Christianity. So all I’m trying to say is that these little folk tales had real consequences because Christians began to demonize Jews. And so I was shocked. These old folk tales play a role in the real world. And so much of the stories in the Bible, some of which are folk tales, have real consequences. And it shocked me, but it made me aware of the power of religious traditions to harm people. And so I had to write a book trying to expose the way that happened.

It wasn’t primarily an offensive move at the time. It was a defensive move to protect themselves. But the consequences in the history of the Jews in all over the world has been overwhelming.

Fascinating for me, because it takes me to the concept of choice. Or as you say—as you write, rather, in the book—choice is also the Greek word for heresy, right? So you say Christian leaders calling themselves orthodox, “straight thinking” have defined choice as heresy. And yet it’s the choice that we have right now, each one of us, which history to read, which value to accept, which value to dismiss, or which story to dismiss is also seen as heresy by various religion and religious leaders. Can you talk more about that? It’s fascinating for me.

Even now, I have many students at Princeton who say, “Well, I’m afraid to ask those questions. I’m afraid to think about it that way,” because they’ve been told that they shouldn’t violate the boundaries of their tradition. But now we have the choice, the necessity, wouldn’t you say? To look at many traditions and say, wait a minute. All of these are created by human beings, these traditions, and we need to explore them and find out what’s authentic, what’s powerful, what we can affirm, and what we need to throw away. But again, that takes us back to our experience. And that’s where the choice is so important. And that’s where the only clue is to have the courage, to acknowledge our own, as you say, full experience, not just what the tradition allows.

Beautiful. And that’s why it makes the choice so threatening—heresy—right? If you look at it this way, then it becomes if we all choose, that is a threat to the religious institutions, because then we are questioning. No, this is not like this. This is like this.

Well, yes. And apparently somebody told me I have a reputation on certain evangelical websites, they call me Elaine Pagan. But the point is that we need to make those explorations. I mean, to see traditions like the poem called “Thunder.”

Oh, I was just going to ask you about that. Yeah.

This is an ancient poem that was found with the secret gospels. And we found the gospel of Mary Magdalene, which shows arguments among the earliest followers of Jesus about whether women have to be subordinate to men. Or whether they’re equal to men among the followers of Jesus. And that writing, which claims that they are equal, was totally suppressed. The only way it survived is in a fragment in Ethiopia, translated into Ethiopic. That fragment was found just at the end of the last century. Before that, it was totally obliterated by the leaders of the churches.

That’s fascinating.

But these other poems—

Well, that’s what I want to ask you about, “Thunder,” because the beginning of your book, you deconstruct all these concepts that we’ve been talking about, and more. And then for me, that turning point comes with this profound, profound poem that I tear up just thinking about it, which is . . . I want to just quote some lines of it. It’s a long poem that one can research it on the internet with attribution to you. But it says, “I am the thought that lives in the light. I live in everyone. And I delve into them all. I move in every creature. I am the invisible one in all beings. I am a voice speaking softly. I am the real voice, the voice from the invisible thoughts. It is a mystery. I cry out in everyone.” And this is just an excerpt that you mentioned in the book. What is this poem? It’s part of the discovery from Egypt and I’d love to go into it, because, for me, it goes into the feminine voice, from that masculine concept of God into a very feminine or more holistic notion of the Divine.

That poem, for me, as for you, speaks more deeply than anything else. It’s spoken in the voice of a feminine power, whose name is Thunder. And the Greek word for thunder, bronte, is a feminine word. And she speaks as a voice that comes forth from power. And as you say, a voice speaking in everyone, in everyone, and speaking about all experience. You know, Zainab, they translate thunder: “perfect mind.” But that’s not so good. It’s better to say thunder: complete consciousness, complete awareness. Because it’s not mind as a mental thing. It’s the consciousness. It’s the awareness. Nous is much more than the ordinary mind.

And it doesn’t mean perfect. It means complete. So you’re not talking about this divine feminine power simply as wisdom or spirit or holiness or beauty. She’s also speaking as foolishness, as power, as dominance. She’s speaking about the complete experience of humans, and she’s speaking as the complete experience of divine reality as well. And it’s a most astonishing poem because it speaks as if we all share in a way the same experience at a very deep level. And it certainly speaks to me that way like nothing else.

Let me ask you, I want to ask you about the Gospel of Truth, and what does it tell us about God? And I want to quote you, part of what you write. You say, “As this gospel tells us what separates us, what separates all beings including ourselves from God is not sin. Instead, what frustrates our longing to know our source is its transcendence and our own limited capacity for understanding.” You later on go and talk about how it all about relationships, how when we come to know ourselves simultaneously we come to know God. Can you take us there? Can you explore that more?

You speak it so beautifully. This Gospel of Truth claims to be the secret teaching of the Apostle Paul and it’s really a myth. It’s a myth about where we come from and where we go. And it suggests that it starts the beginning of time when all being comes forth from the Divine source and is thrown into the universe. And the beings that are there, we don’t know where we come from. We don’t know where we belong. We don’t know. We don’t know—we feel lost and frightened in the world. The way the existentialists speak about that: terror and isolation. And then it says, so the Divine source sent a messenger to us. It speaks that in this case the messenger is Jesus, and he comes into the world not to die for sins, because sin—that isn’t mentioned. The role of Jesus here is seen very differently. It’s seen as he comes to tell us who we are. Who we are is written on our heart, but we may not be able to read it.

So he comes to tell us, you belong to the father—which is the way the source is described—to the mother—because the source is simultaneously described as the spirit—you belong to the father and the mother and you all belong to each other. Not just humans, but all life. Every being that there is in the universe belongs from the same source and goes back. And Jesus came into the world to tell you what’s written on your heart and to show it. And in doing that, coming into the world, he had to die as we all do. But what we discover is that we all belong to that source, to the same family. We’re all part of the same family of that father and that mother, we call them. We call the source that, because that’s how we understand deep relationship, and we’re all part of each other’s family.

And it’s such a beautiful picture. The way it speaks about the, as you say, it is the connectedness with each other, with other human beings, with all beings, with spiritual beings, in which we find healing. I’ll never forget on the day of my son’s funeral when I thought I would rather die than be where I was in the back of that church with the little casket there. I just had this sense I wanted to get out of the world and not feel the pain because it was overwhelming. And yet there was something bigger that felt like a connectedness between all the people there and the dead and the living and all people. And if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the world, if it weren’t for the sense of somehow that deep connection that we share.

I have come to believe that the heart has a language and you are saying, you just used even almost the exact expression, but there’s a language of the heart and that we’re often, especially in this modern world, so disconnected from our heart because we are valued by our minds. Our success and our meaning and our worth is valued by our minds so we don’t spend time with the heart. And I come to realize that we have to learn the language of the heart, just like having to learn French and English and Spanish and whatever language. The heart has a language and it takes us slowing down and learning it and being patient and learning it.

And before we leave, I have some quick questions, fun questions, rapid questions. One is, what’s the piece of music that you always go to for joy or for solace?

There are many, there are many. One of them is a Mozart choral song called “Laudate”—it’s “Praise to the Lord.” It is the most exalted, but it can also be, I guess it’s often spiritual music. The song “Amazing Grace” can take you there.

And books that you always go to? Poems, books, prayers?

I go back to “Thunder” because, as I mentioned to you, I thought of calling my book Listening to Thunder because it spoke so deeply. But, Zainab, I use words a lot as a writer, as you do, but I always love the time we go beyond words into music, into dance, into embrace.

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That was Elaine Pagels. For full transcripts of this episode, please visit www.findcenter.com. Do remember to subscribe to this podcast. It is free and I truly appreciate your comments. You can also follow us on Instagram @Find_Center. Redefine is produced by me, Zainab Salbi, along with Rob Carso, Casey Kahn, and Howie Kahn at FreeTime Media. Our music is by John Palmer. Special thanks to Neal Goldman, Caroline Pincus and Sherra Johnston. See you next week when we’ll be joined by author, educator, and activist Tony Porter, cofounder of A Call To Men.