Why Religion? summary

Roughly a year and a half after Elaine accepted Jesus into her heart, she received some terrible news. Her close friend Paul was dead, killed in a car accident the night before.

In the year leading up to this tragedy, Elaine had begun spending time with a group of artistic individuals. Paul was one of them. Together, they encouraged each other’s artistic pursuits and interests. All of them were actors at the local community theater, and while driving around together at night, they would sing songs and recite poetry.

In 1942, near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi, an Arab farmer dug up a man-sized jar that contained an ancient collection of books. These books eventually found their way to Cairo, where a French scholar, Jean Doresse, stumbled upon them. He was astonished when he deciphered the first words: “These are the secret words of the living Jesus, and the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote them down.”

The Nag Hammadi library, as it came to be known, would end up shaping Elaine’s entire life, both as a scholar and as a person.

Elaine was surprised, and not a little embarrassed, when her friend, the artist Mary Beth Edelson, proposed a ritual. Edelson reassured the doubtful Elaine that, though she’d only done it once, it had worked.

A ritual for what?

On the night before Mark’s operation, Elaine refused to leave his room. With the surgery scheduled for early the next morning, Mark had already been admitted to the hospital, and Elaine defied a nurse’s orders by spending the night on the floor, next to his bed. But she got little rest.

After a few anxious, sleepless hours, Elaine suddenly sensed that she wasn’t alone. It seemed to her that a group of women, holding hands and seated in a circle, was there with her. In particular, she recognized a cherished colleague who’d retired from Duke University the year before. The group soon vanished, but Elaine felt comforted.

No cure. No treatment. Fatal in all cases.

Less than a year had passed since Mark’s open-heart surgery, and Elaine had taken him to the hospital for one of his regular checkups. Now she listened in disbelief as the doctors told her what they themselves could hardly believe: tests had revealed that Mark had pulmonary hypertension, a rare and terminal lung disease.

After Mark’s death, Elaine wasn’t only cast into the deepest despair; she was also racked by guilt. It had been her job, as a mother, to protect his life, to keep him out of harm’s way – and she’d been unable to do those things. Had she therefore failed as a parent?

Such questions weighed on her unbearably. Grasping for answers and hoping for relief, she recalled stories from the Bible, noting that grief is often entangled with guilt in such tales.

Elaine had heard that parents who lose a child often separate. But this didn’t happen to her and Heinz. In fact, they grew even closer, welded together by the strength of their love and the strain of their loss.

What’s more, they were still parents. About a year before Mark’s death, after a miscarriage, Elaine and Heinz decided to adopt a baby girl, Sarah. And about a year after his death, they adopted a baby boy, David. Though still grieving Mark’s death – for Elaine, that grief would never really fade – it began to feel possible to move forward with life.

Shortly after Heinz’s death, Elaine sat silently in a chapel. In that deep quiet, she felt that she could talk to Heinz. And so she asked him how he felt about what had happened. Though she hadn’t expected a reply, an inner voice immediately responded.

Unexpectedly, the answer she heard was, “This is fine with me.” “How,” Elaine asked, internally, “could it be fine?” Heinz had abandoned her and their two babies. Was that fine?

Nearly 25 years after Heinz’s death, Elaine received an honorary degree from Harvard. At first, she didn’t want to attend the ceremony. Heinz had been at her first Harvard graduation; how could she bear to go to the second one without him? In the end, however, accompanied by Sarah and David, now both in their mid-twenties, she did go.

And sitting in that crowd of graduates, she realized that she’d graduated in a deeper sense. She’d passed life’s true test: surviving despite unbearable loss.