A learned and renewed spiritual view of traditional religion

Elaine Pagels knows from personal experience that spirituality defies logic.

Some spiritual patterns

She spoke to Mary Hynes on CBC Tapestry about her recent book “Why Religion?”

Elaine Pagels, an esteemed scholar of early Christianity and professor of religion at Princeton University, knew writing about her own spiritual experiences, particularly regarding the death of her young son and husband, might make her look like she was going "over the deep end."1

One of the founders of the Centering Prayer movement, Thomas Keating offers a reflection on contemplative prayer, the human search for happiness and our need to explore the inner world. Elaine Pagels writes in the forward of Keating’s book, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation.

Without discriminating in the ways that most Christians do between those we call Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, agnostic, Jew, Buddhist, or by other designations, Father Keating attempts to reintroduce into the lives of those he teaches insights and practices that Christian tradition sometimes has suppressed and often has left in obscurity. These two talks begin with a question of self-knowledge and end by recalling the unconditional love of God. In my own life, I cannot imagine having endured certain difficult times without his generous presence and without thepractice he teaches. Thomas Keating is both a “discerner of spirits,” gifted with a charism known from the early days of the Christian movement, and a “psychiatrist” in the original sense of the term—”physician of the soul.” Those of us who learn from him are grateful for—and blessed by—his gifts.2

Kathleen Hirsch of the Boston Globe adds some background on Elaine Pagels journey through suffering to spiritual insight.

https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_835w/Boston/2011-2020/2018/10/31/BostonGlobe.com/ReceivedContent/Images/Ch003_003_9780062368539.jpg

‘The wound is the place where the Light enters you,” wrote Rumi.
For religious scholar Elaine Pagels, arriving at something close to the equanimity of this insight has been the struggle of a lifetime, one marked by extraordinary intellectual achievement and extraordinary loss, movingly chronicled in “Why Religion,’’ her searing and wise new memoir.
While a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School in the late ’60s, Pagels stumbled onto the recently discovered early Christian gnostic texts, and it was life changing. Raised in a privileged secular-atheist family in Palo Alto, Calif., she flirted briefly with evangelical religion, but soon left all but an affection for the rituals of religious life behind. The manuscripts she began to read at Harvard offered a spiritual framework that transcended the dogmatic proscriptions of mainstream

Christianity, a path of liberation and self-knowledge that was deeply personal and, as she read these forgotten “gospels,’’ seemed to her to be worthy of a lifetime of study — in her word, “true.”3

The experience of Elaine Pagels that might be categorized as "over the deep end" actually resonates with the mystical experience of poets like Rumi and Trappist monks like Father Thomas Keating. Too often, we let negative experiences in religion or with “religious people” blind us to universal eternal spiritual truths that have been revealed in religious practice.

References

1 (2018, December 14). Scholar Elaine Pagels says spirituality defies logic. She knows from .... Retrieved December 17, 2018, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/why-religion-1.4934033/scholar-elaine-pagels-says-spirituality-defies-logic-she-knows-from-personal-experience-1.4940931


2 (n.d.). The Human Condition: Contemplation and ... - In Via Lumen, LLC. Retrieved December 17, 2018, from https://www.invialumen.org/uploads/3/7/5/4/37541063/the_human_condition_contemplation_and_transformation_by_father_thomas_keating.pdf


3 (2018, November 2). The suffering of Elaine Pagels - The Boston Globe. Retrieved December 17, 2018, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/11/01/the-suffering-elaine-pagels/izJwYDGewJqlfPmseynFML/story.html