Elaine Pagels’s lifelong search for the sacred

A professor once said to me that religious scholars come in two varieties: those who openly admit the connections between their scholarship and their autobiography, and liars. By this standard, Elaine Pagels is no liar.

Pagel’s autobiographical reflections chronicle her search for the sacred throughout her life, from a fundamentalist Christian congregation in California to graduate studies in religion at Harvard, from a fertility ritual done on her behalf in New York City to a Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. Two tragic losses inform her search: the death of her son Mark from a congenital heart illness when he was six, and the death a year later of her husband, Heinz, during a hiking accident in the mountains.

Pagels’s account of grief is both unflinching and powerful. Surviving two losses of such magnitude while being a single parent and an award-winning Ivy League professor is an extraordinary testament to resilience and the power of carrying on. Pagels does not play down the rawness of grief, and her honesty makes her account ring with truth. “Christmas lights, again, piercing like knives. The spirit of that season was never more remote than during those dark December days.” Pagels details the ways her losses felt unbearable, and her descriptions will resonate with many who have faced grief.