The Book of Longings

When the Roman police push Jesus to the ground, assuming Jesus was assaulting Ana when he was really helping her, a single tuft of red thread falls to the ground from his robe. Ana picks up the thread. Later, when she cannot get Jesus out of her mind, she twines the thread in a bracelet she will ultimately wear for more than 30 years. Red represents both the love and the suffering she will endure. It represents her heart, certainly, but also the blood of her husband spilled at Calvary. When she decides to bury the thread along with her writings and her incantation bowl outside Alexandria, the red thread represents the eternal bond she feels for the husband she lost. Ana is never part of Christ’s ministry. She went into exile in Alexandria during the three years of Jesus’s public mission, so she never witnesses the miracles, never hears him preach, and never embraces his message as being divine. For Ana, Jesus is her friend, her husband, and her lover. The red thread thus helps humanize Jesus.

The Book of Longings is a historical novel that speculates on the authorship of an actual document titled The Thunder: Perfect Mind, discovered among a wealth of gnostic scrolls preserved in sealed jars. The manuscripts were unearthed during a massive 1945 archaeological dig along the West Bank in Upper Egypt near the city of Nag Hammadi. Gnosticism is an umbrella name given to various radical sects that sprang up in the Middle East during the first century C.E. devoted to the development of a person’s individual spirituality rather than demanding allegiance to an organized, institutional church.

No one is sure who wrote the poem. Biblical scholars have long speculated that the voice heard in the long poem (more than nine papyrus pages) is most likely a woman whose language skills and sense of symbology reflect that she was familiar with both the Jewish and Aramaic traditions. The poem reflects a keen interest in spiritual matters. The poet argues that beyond the evident and obvious differences that divide people, humanity is essentially one, a single grand spiritual entity defined by rich paradox rather than any certainty. The voice heard in the poem speaks as a divine messenger bringing a difficult message of hope. Humanity is shaped as much by its passions as by its intellect, by its pursuit of pleasure as by its pursuit of knowledge. Imbalance is the key to humanity’s plight. Thus, the voice is at once profoundly human and grandly divine. In the poem, insight is anything but clear sight. The voice embraces all humanity and speaks in turn for the rich and the poor, men and women, the strong and the weak, the divine and the profane, the old and the young, the infirm and the vigorous. The parts of the poem quoted in the novel suggest the breadth of that vision. For instance, the epigraph quotes the middle section, “I am she who is honored and she who is mocked / I am the wife and the virgin / I am the mother and the daughter / I am she / Do not be afraid of my power / I am the knowledge of my name.” Thus, the poem attempts to inspire and encourage people, men and women, to see that the sufferings and fears of their mean and often desperate lives come from those without such wisdom, those without such sweeping perception. The character of Ana, schooled in both Jewish and Aramaic traditions, in touch with the spiritual as well as the physical dimensions of human experience, and a committed feminist devoted to the liberation of the disenfranchised, provides a probable profile as the author.

A young Yaltha, fleeing accusations of murdering her abusive husband, and then Ana, dodging an arrest warrant issued by Herod, find their way to a small settlement outside Alexandria, a colony run by women, where both find refuge and sanctuary among women devoted to an intense life of spiritual study and reflection. Although they are Jewish, the women in the settlement believe that God has in fact a dual nature: one male, one female. They devote themselves to the female principle, which they call Sophia. Sophia directs humanity into a life of coexistence, harmony, and quiet discipline, unlike the male principle, Yahweh, which demands obedience, sanctions war, and doles out harsh punishments for sinners. The evolution of Ana as a woman, a mystic, a philosopher, and ultimately a writer centers on her lifelong exploration and interrogation of the harsh implications of a Jewish culture in which, for more than a millennium, people assumed that God was male. From that assumption, the Jewish world Ana knows gave women a secondary status.

Through the powerful agency of her aunt, herself seen by her family as an impudent and dangerous loose cannon, Ana learns about the colony devoted to “study, reading, writing, composing songs, prayers” (322). The idea appeals to her. Ana finds her intellectual freedom among the Therapeutae, a Greek word that means “healing.” When she must leave Nazareth for Egypt, Ana and her aunt live for a time in the colony of the Therapeutae along the vast shores of Lake Mareotis just to the north of Alexandria. The life she finds there is “small and simple” (321), and it is exactly what she needs. “I wish nothing more than to write and study and keep the memory of Sophia alive” (323), she tells the commune’s spiritual leader. What Ana finds is indeed a forerunner of the Christian monastic lifestyle. Women, robed in simple garments, spend hours in quiet reflection, poring over both Jewish Scripture and the literature of different cultures, reflecting Alexandria’s diverse cultural makeup as a major Mediterranean port. Given the settlement’s endorsement of creativity—another entirely new idea for Ana who spent her adult life concealing her writings and protecting them from destruction—Ana thrives. It is during her time at the commune that Ana produces what becomes her defining work, The Thunder: Perfect Mind.