Elaine Pagels
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Elaine Pagels’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Exactly. It's a set of values and it's an ethical tradition.
Yes, a set of arguments, but it also has very deep emotional support in the practices that people do.
Well, it's a hard question. I mean, yes, I feel identified with Christian tradition from the way I grew up. And it speaks to me. It's sort of like English. You know, that's the language I grew up with. And I find it compelling in many ways. But it's not the only kind of tradition that compels me. I mean, I'm engaged with some friends in New York in a Buddhist meditation group, which we meet often.
Hmm. and other traditions as well. But yes, I would say Christian. I love that tradition in some ways. And Jesus seems like he was a historical person, but he's not just that. There are myths woven into the stories. There are elaborations. There are miracles. There are signs and symbols that play in the stories. It's not just a history at all.
These texts are called good news because they're publications of the message of Jesus, which is, God is going to come into the world and transform it. And your world can be transformed. Come and be part of that transformation. And the world, which now contains so much suffering and pain, will sort of explode into a glorious new reality.
I don't know. I don't know. It leads me to at least have an open question. I mean, I assumed until some time ago that after we die, you know, it's sort of what Steve Jobs was said to say, just lights out, right? But even stories I've heard about his death suggest that at some point he suggested there was something else.
And maybe that's just the thing people need when they go into death to allow them to do it. But there may be something else. So I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable. I think about this in the way that Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford wrote a brilliant book called How God Becomes Real. She's talking about Jewish tradition.
She's talking about Muslim tradition, about witchcraft, and about Christianity, various kinds. And she says... People don't just talk to invisible beings because they believe they're there. They actually engage in practices like prayer, meditation, opening themselves up to a larger sense of expectation of what's real.
And as they practice that, they become susceptible to envisioning more reality than the visible world. Or seeing the transcendent in the visible.
I do. I do. And Tanya does herself in the book. So it need not be spirits and gods. It could be the beauty of nature, the way it transforms people, or of art or music that seems to open up. a wider reality than the visible. So, yes, I'm now bizarrely open to that.
No, not too much, except... Except when I bring it up. As we get older, yes, it does come in. It does cross the mind from time to time. But I had some experiences with people I love who died that... I couldn't explain at all and totally didn't expect. I thought this was – I couldn't imagine it would happen. What were they?
Well, even after my husband's sudden death in a mountain climbing accident, it was just an utter total shock. I went to a Trappist monastery in Colorado where I happened to have gone with musicians who were playing music for the monks from the Juilliard Quartet, Robert Mann. And I got to know the monks, and I often went there and meditated in this very beautiful well of silence in the chapel.
I couldn't be a Catholic. It's just sort of against my Protestant resistance to that kind of authority. But there's something very deep and powerful about those experiences with those monks. And after my husband's death and after planning the funeral in a very spiritually deprived Protestant church in town, I went out there and meditated with one of the monks, who was an amazing man.
And I thought I heard a voice saying to me, I thought I could suddenly, after we meditated for an hour, I had the idea that I could ask my husband a question. I said, well, what do you think about this? And a voice came into my head, not auditory. This is fine with me. It's you I think about now. And I said, fine with you? What do you mean fine with you? You leave me with two tiny babies.
One is three months old. One is a year and a half. And you're gone. And what do you expect me to do with this? And I was irate at first. And then I thought, wait a minute. Who said that? I don't think it was my unconscious. It was not fine with me then.
It seemed like his voice. It seemed like my husband's voice. And I thought, how dare you ask? How dare you say it's fine with you? So you had a marital argument in his absence? Yes. At this late date, do you pray? Sometimes, yes. But not usually a lot of words. Meditate, maybe. So that wasn't the only experience with unexpected events like that.
Thank you very much, David.
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