Invisible Realities

A Conversation with Elaine Pagels

In Good Faith host Steven Kapp Perry sat down with Elaine Pagels, an American historian of religion and the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism, including the Dead Sea Scrolls. She is the author of The Gnostic Gospels, Beyond Belief, and Revelations. Here, she discusses the kind of spiritual experiences you can’t explain.

I'd like to look back at what you talk about in your book - this spiritual awakening of your 15-year-old self that had been raised in Christianity. You had this experience going to a Billy Graham revival, and I wonder if you could just share what that moment was like for you.

I had come from a family that was Christian culturally. I'd been brought to a Methodist church much of my life. Most people I knew were Christians, one way or the other, but it wasn't very important.

And my father had given it all up as soon as he encountered Darwin, and he decided at that point that the fierce religion of his family was misguided. He just abandoned the whole thing. And I was always brought up to think that religion was for people who just were uneducated, didn't understand science.

So then, when I was a teenager, I happened to go with friends to a Billy Graham crusade, just because it was in San Francisco and it seemed like it would be interesting. And it was an extraordinary experience. It opened up the sense of a cosmic dimension in my life - a spiritual world - and it almost felt like I'd been living on a flat earth and suddenly it had a vertical dimension.

Had you had what you would call, looking back, spiritual experiences before that?

Well, perhaps glimmers of them, but I wouldn't have called them that. That wasn't part of the vocabulary or the world in which I lived. So, this was an unexpected discovery, and I realized how powerful that can be. And it opened many things up to me. Later, I left the evangelical church that I attended for that first year, but it had permanently changed the way I understand what religious traditions are about. They're not about ideas and beliefs as much as they are about experience.

I wonder if we could talk a minute about personal experiences. Sometimes they come to us unbidden and other times sought out, and I found the examples of both of these as you wrote. One is that circle of sisters before your son's surgery.

This was an experience in which I was in a hospital in New York, on a concrete floor next to the little crib with my one-year-old son, our only child, who was about to have open heart surgery in the morning. And of course, surgery on a baby is very dangerous, and I was terribly worried.

I was maybe half asleep or half in a kind of dream state, and I had the sense that suddenly there were people sitting with me. We were sitting in a circle and they were holding hands. It was a circle of women. And then, I realized I could add people to the circle. So, I sort of added my brother and my parents who were then in California and their presence was very comforting.

There were no words in this experience. It was just the sense of not being alone; there were people there. And after that, the fear decreased a great deal. And then this sense of their presence sort of vanished, but it left me with a sense of peace, and I felt the surgery would go well, as it did. And then the next day when my son was taken into surgery, I sat down and wrote a note to one of the women in this sort of dream.

And I said, you know, last night I was here in New York, and I was alone in the hospital, and I had the sense that you were sitting with me in a group of women, and it was very comforting to see you. And I sent the letter off, and then a couple days later, I got a letter from her saying that night she was sitting with what she called her sister's circle and they were praying for us.

I had no idea they were doing that. I still have that letter. It staggered me because whatever they were doing sitting in a room in California was available and present to me in that state of mind and that state of being. I don't know how to explain it, but I know that it happened.

With an experience like that you could say that it’s an amazing coincidence or you can decide that there is something beyond what we see. Did you feel like you had a choice there, or was it just clearly to you one thing or the other?

It was clearly one thing or the other because I didn't really know where this woman was. She had left New York and had gone to California. I didn't know she had a sister circle with whom she did prayer. I didn't know that they were actually aware that that was the night before my son's surgery. This could not have been a coincidence, and she knew it, too.

Because you've shared this in an interview or some other speaking situation, do you have people confide in you experiences like this that maybe they might not feel comfortable sharing with others?

Yes, of course they do. I've talked with ministers who say, oh we hear stories like this all the time or stories of someone seeing someone who has died. They could be considered coincidence, but not to me.

I have an anthropologist friend at Stanford University, and she was telling me some things like this. And I said, well, that's, that's remarkable. She said, yes, it's the difference between an anthropologist who's looking for God and one who thinks that the people who do that are crazy. So, you know, there are many people who, who negate any kind of experience they feel doesn't make rational sense.

What has made you open to that?

I think being in an extreme situation. I think it's a matter of partly being receptive. That night I was really in a very intensely emotional state; I think in certain states of mind you can experience things that are otherwise something you simply wouldn't pick up.

When I hear those, I have no reason to doubt people's experience. I've often actually wished I could have more of those experiences. And it wasn't until I was in my mid-forties that I actually had something similar happen to me - a son of mine was lost in a national park.

We didn't even know he was lost, and then I got lost. It was just totally unreasonable, but I got lost and ended up in the same place he was and found him clinging to the edge of a ledge.

Oh my gosh. And you were in a very alert state, right? This is not a normal state of being. I mean, it's highly intensified. There are situations when people have these experiences and they often don't talk about them. For me, I decided to talk about them because I was talking to a poet who's a good friend of mine. Her name is Marie Howe, and she wrote a beautiful poem called Annunciation.

It's a poem about the mother of Jesus, Mary, receiving the presence of an angel, and the presence of the angel is expressed as a kind of energy and divine love coming toward her from this invisible presence. And I said, Marie, how did you write that poem? It's such an amazing poem.

She said, oh, well, actually it happened to me, but of course I couldn't say that. And I said, why not? And she said, well, that's the last taboo. Which - she meant talking about having some experience like that. And I said, oh, okay, well, I'm going to write about that. If it's the last taboo, there's something powerful there.

Now, we talked about this being in an intense situation and this experience with the sister circle coming to you sort of unbidden. But when you and your husband were hoping to have a child, in a way, you sought out what was called a fertility ritual. Can you tell me about this one?

There is an artist in New York whose art consists of rituals. And we were talking and at one point she said to me, do you have children? And I said, no, my husband and I wanted to have children, but we haven't.

And she said, well, I'll do a ritual for you. And I thought, this is a little weird. She invited me and four other artists to her loft. And we focused on some meditation, there were candles, we sat together, and we went through some experiences in which each of these women spoke about having children, and each of these were artists and they had children.

I became aware of something that was completely unconscious: I was afraid of dying in childbirth. And it just staggered me. I don't remember ever hearing of anyone dying in childbirth. But it almost felt like a DNA kind of memory, which it could be.

When I realized that, it was like an opening. Another kind of revelation from inside. And then a week later, I got pregnant. Now, is that a coincidence? Is it psychosomatic? It could well be. But whatever it was, it was another one of those experiences I can't explain.

When you hear people say that 20th century people see religion failing or falling away, with people having experiences like this, do you think so? Or is that just part of our human experience that will always be with us?

It seems to me it's part of the human experience. Many people who might have experiences they can't explain would simply dismiss them. That's what happens in a secular world where people say, well, that can't happen. But I do sense that experience is much deeper than we realize, and that what I think of as a spiritual dimension is much more so - invisible realities that I can't imagine entirely. I mean, we use metaphors, you know, God as father or as mother, even in the traditions that I study. God as person. God is Jesus, God is divine light. All of these are metaphors for something quite beyond our language. So I guess I've become more aware of how limited our language is.

I like your use of the word metaphor there, as you've done your studies with the various Gnostic Gospels. It seems like a literal reading of those often precludes a lot of understanding that can be found by seeing the metaphorical parts of those.

When I read the Gospel of Mark, it reads like a simple story any 10-year-old could appreciate. But hidden in that story are many images and metaphors. For example, the prophecy of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible speaks about an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder and terror in the presence of a divine reality. He says, I saw a throne and there was something like a human being on the throne, but it wasn't a human being. I saw jewels and I saw lightning and fire and crystal and brilliance. So, he wants to say, I saw the divine.

If you tell a dream you can say, it's sort of like this and sort of like that. But what you might see in a dream is not quite equivalent to the words with which you can describe it. It doesn't mean that we're not talking about reality, it just means we're talking about a reality that's beyond our language.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full episode here or below.

The In Good Faith podcast aims to build bridges of understanding between religions. In talking with believers of different faiths, In Good Faith highlights personal experience and commonalities across spiritual traditions.

Art by Agnes Pelton.