The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd
Raised in a Lutheran congregation with a pessimistic view of humanity and abiding faith in God’s disappointment therein, I struggled with Christianity into adulthood. As a child, I simultaneously longed to be enfolded by my Lutheran faith and lived with gnawing certainty that I—a kid whose brain positively suppurated with damnable thoughts—was destined for eternity in the pit. I flirted with Pentecostalism over the years, then liberal Christianity and Judaism and, finally, Nicheren Buddhism. In time, unbelief came to seem an option—even a deliverance—I might honestly embrace. When I did at last don the robe of the unbeliever, it felt like a kind of salvation.
Still...
I remember a Good Friday procession upon which I happened at the University of New Mexico in the Eighties. I was working on a doctorate, consumed by my studies, and going home each night to a marriage wheezing out its final death rattle. A young man portraying Jesus Christ led the procession, a wooden cross hoisted over his shoulder, its base rasping the pavement behind him. In that moment, invited to share Jesus’ penultimate misery, I felt shattered by his isolation—hobbling to his death, an object of ridicule, abandoned by friends and supporters, to mount Golgotha alone. I wept then on that New Mexico afternoon and, really, in thinking about it, I feel teary even now.
But the tears I shed were for the suffering of a man, not the death of a god. In truth, I cried as well for myself, for in his harrowing friendlessness, I saw my own, much more trivial aloneness. Jesus, who shares my humanity, is a figure whose lonely end can move me. Jesus the supernatural being—well, I’m not sure what to make of him.
It is to this human heart of the gospel story that Sue Monk Kidd applies her pen in The Book of Longings. Ana, the rebellious daughter of Herod Antipas’ chief scribe and a fledgling (if unofficial) scribe herself, yearns to release her own “largeness,” to be remembered as a “voice.” Ultimately, these yearnings—and the behavior they provoke—consign her to the status of a mamzer, or outcast, among the Jews of Sepphoris, both an embarrassment and a burden to her Hellenized father and forbidding, status-conscious mother.
Jesus, an itinerant laborer and a mamzer himself thanks to the questionable circumstances of his birth, recognizes Ana’s largeness of spirit and embraces it, addressing her affectionately as “Little Thunder.” Jesus feels his god as everywhere present—too large, too loving to to confine Himself to Jerusalem and the precincts of the Great Temple. Together, the young couple resolves to set Him free.
Life, of course, intervenes. Newly married, Ana and Jesus bend themselves to the grind of subsistence living in ancient Nazareth, Ana setting aside her quills and inks; Jesus, his conviction that God intends him to serve a special end. When his ministry does at last begin, after an encounter with John the Immerser (Baptist) in the waters of the Jordan, Ana must flee to Alexandria to escape the wrath of Antipas, who’s incensed at her role in a palace intrigue. In Alexandria, she finds refuge among the Therapeutae, an ascetic sect of Jews devoted to the search for wisdom. With the Therapeutae, Ana finds room for her own heterodox Judaism and devotion to Sophia, the feminine aspect of the divine. Among these seekers, she will indeed come into her own as a “voice.”
So much is at play in this tale—the suffocating effects of religious orthodoxy and doctrinal devaluation of women, the psychology of collaboration and the politics of resistance, the ever-contingent acceptance of minds—particularly female minds—that incandesce. And finally, the vulnerability of even the most adoring relationship to the demands of the divine.
Ron Charles, writing for The Washington Post, adopts a patronizing tone with respect to The Book of Longings, faulting in particular Ana’s feminism as “immaculately conceived, wholly uncontaminated by the trappings of her culture,” and, one detects, lamenting both the book’s focus on a character ancillary to that of Jesus and Kidd’s eschewing of the supernatural. The first critique is frivolous—if we posit Jesus as a remarkable historical figure, why would we rebel at the notion that he’d choose a remarkable mate? And for those of us who find small value in accounts of the miraculous, the human Jesus of Kidd’s telling becomes a character whose sufferings matter—one who dares greatly, who loves indiscriminately, yet is broken, as we will all be broken, creatures of blood and bone, not the stuff of gods.
Jesus, whose heart swells with his Lord, exhorts all who’d listen to trust their God for care and sustenance. Yet at his end, it is women, those absent power, who provide him his last measure of care. It is Ana who tenders his last experience of love as he collapses on the road to Golgotha. God is not banished from this tale, but this is a human story, as stories that move me tend to be.
The Book of Longings is the best book I’m going to read this year, unless I’m mistaken. It’s likely the best book you’ll read this year, too—get it at your local bookstore or through bookshop.org, an online seller that uses part of its proceeds to benefit independent bookshops. But buy it.
Do.
