The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels

Author:Elaine Pagels [Pagels, Elaine]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

~ CHAPTER FIVE ~

CONSTANTINE AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

When I found that I no longer believed everything I thought Christians were supposed to believe, I asked myself, Why not just leave Christianity—and religion—behind, as so many others have done? Yet I sometimes encountered, in churches and elsewhere—in the presence of a venerable Buddhist monk, in the cantor's singing at a bar mitzvah, and on mountain hikes— something compelling, powerful, even terrifying that I could not ignore, and I had come to see that, besides belief, Christianity involves practice—and paths toward transformation.

Last Christmas Eve, I went to the midnight service with my sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, who, as an infant, when I carried her with me to the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, would raise her head to listen intently to the singing cascading down from the choir loft. When she was eight, she joined the choir at Trinity, a Protestant church in Princeton, because, she said, "the music helps my heart." Now, eight years later, after walking in the cold, we slowly pressed our way through the crowded church and found a place to sit close together on the stone stairs behind the lectern, where the choir was standing. This celebration was one that I loved as a child, and had come to love again as an adult, especially since the birth of our first child, Mark, and later of Sarah and David. Since Mark's death, however, I had found participation difficult.

But this year I found myself wholeheartedly singing the carols and listening to the stories of the child born in Bethlehem, angels breaking through darkness to announce the miraculous birth—stories that most New Testament scholars, knowing that we have little or no historical information about Jesus' birth, regard as a mixture of legend and midrash, that is, storytelling that draws upon Israel's stories of the miraculous birth of Isaac, of the prophet Samuel, and of the rescue of the infant Moses. On that night, my own associations with those stories seemed to be embraced in the joy and solemnity of the festival, laced, as it is, with intimations of Jesus' impending death as well as the promise of his continuing radiant presence. Attending to the sounds and the silence, the candlelight and darkness, I felt the celebration take us in and break over us like the sea. When it receded, it left me no longer clinging to particular moments in the past but borne upon waves of love and gratitude that moved me toward Sarah, toward the whole community gathered there, at home, or everywhere, the dead and the living. For a moment I was shocked by the thought: We could have made all this up out of what had happened in our own lives; but, of course, we did not have to do that, for, as I realized at once, countless other people have already done that, and have woven the stories of innumerable lives into the stories and music, the meanings and visions of Jesus' birth.

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