The Book of Longings

The novel is at its heart a love story. In creating a love story for Jesus Christ, the novel dares to explore a possibility that the Christian Church rigorously denied and considered heretical for two millennia. It is difficult, even incendiary, for many in the contemporary Christian church to even imagine that Jesus could fall in love, marry, and have children. That idea seems strikingly out of character, tacky and human, out of line with the sacred perception of Jesus as the Son of God on a mission to redeem humanity from its sins. As a founding precept of the Church, Jesus’s love has long been defined as a broad love of humanity, an empathetic spirit that brought dignity and respect to all people, that found value and integrity in every heart.

The love that develops between Ana and Jesus, however, complements rather than contradicts Jesus as God. It is more than love at first sight, more than marriage and commitment, more than physical love. Kidd expresses Jesus’s humanity as a kind of supernal love. The love that defines and unites Ana and Jesus is hardly ordinary. The love celebrates the intimacy of sharing open and honest hearts, of finding in the physical act of love the expression of a far more compelling sense of spiritual oneness. When Ana first sorts through her attraction for the stonecutter she meets in the crowded marketplace of Sepphoris, Ana uses as her guide the Song of Solomon, the Old Testament canticle that celebrates the complex fusion of the sensual and sacred, the flesh and spirit.

Despite distances, Ana and Jesus are never apart. The tragedy of their stillborn daughter pulls them closer. The moment when Ana meets the eyes of the dying Jesus at the foot of the cross celebrates a love that is at once deeply secular and profoundly sacred. Much as in traditional parables, Kidd upholds the love between Jesus and Ana as an exemplum of an ideal sort of love. Surrounded as they are by couples whose marriages and whose love are far less than ideal, Ana and Jesus define love based on trust, honesty, communication, sympathy for the other person’s sorrows, and ultimately sustained by mutual respect. It is the very ideal love that Jesus tells Ana during their animated conversations about his mission he sees as God’s greatest gift to the world, a gift he cannot fathom why humanity rejects.

Ana’s story questions why Judeo-Christian theology has long denied women a place in scripture. Ana’s earliest writings center on her ambitious plan to gift each Old Testament woman a voice, to tell their story because the Biblical accounts neglect the women’s story. Women in Christian theology are stereotypes, caricatures. They are denied status other than dutiful wife, caring mother, or, as is most often the case, an occasion for temptation into sin, the threat of sexuality. Ana understands from an early age that women are far more complicated and far more invested in the Judeo-Christian theology than her culture acknowledges. For author Sue Monk Kidd, contemporary Christian theology has advanced little from those assumptions.

Women here play a pivotal role in the missions of their men, the prophets who become the defining, iconic figureheads in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To borrow from the metaphor of Ana’s own writing, their voices have been stifled, ignored, dismissed. Ana feels that anger when she steps into the vaulted halls of the great library at Alexandria. “I could feel a tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world” (245). Throughout Ana’s marriage, through the loss of her daughter and then the brutal execution of her husband, Ana clings to the power of her place, her assurance that her story has legitimacy and value. Years after her husband’s death, even as his message begins to define a mass social and religious movement, she finds her place in that story deleted. “Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased” (403).

With Jesus, Ana participates fully in the first steps toward his commitment to his ministry. He shares his vision; together they are baptized; together they tend the sick and wounded at Lazarus’s home; together they assess the risks of Judas’s political movement; she is there at the foot of the cross at the moment of his death. In Alexandria, in the women’s commune, Ana taps into the tonic energy of women committed to the spiritual life of reflection, devoted to scriptural study, and practiced in the arts of expressing that devotion in writing. In the end, Ana buries her greatest work that is itself a complicated examination of the paradox of women and their place within a cosmos designed by a God able to express itself as both a male and a female principle. Her voice is not silenced, unlike her mother’s or Tabitha’s; her voice simply awaits its audience, hers is a voice, she concedes, “begging to be born” (214). The burial marks her hope that in time women will emerge from the shadows.