Dr. Elaine Pagels, Gnostic Scholar Handles Grief |507|

Dr. Elaine Pagels is a religious scholar, but that didn’t prepare her for personal grief.

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Alex: [00:03:00] That’s a clip from the series Dead to Me, bringing a little dark humor to the very real and very heavy topic of grief. It’s a topic that I cover in today’s interview with the extraordinary Dr. Elaine Pagels, who if you don’t know a couple years back won, what is essentially the Nobel Prize for the Humanities. And kind of went to the White House and had Barack Obama put the thing on her neck and that whole thing. In the field of religious studies, she’s kind of a superstar. Everything she writes is instant New York Times bestsellers. But the last book she wrote is more personal. And it touches on this topic of grief and her loss of both her young child and then her husband. And just because she studies religion as an academic doesn’t mean that those religious texts were able to comfort her. But then her story takes kind of even more interesting turn and one that I picked up on, and that’s that Dr. Pagels had some extraordinary experiences associated with those tragic losses. And that’s something we also cover in this interview. And of course, because this is kind of what I’m interested in, tied it back to what we really might be able to understand about those experiences and why we sometimes seem unwilling to, I guess, go there all the way.

Dr. Elaine Pagels: [00:04:21] I had had a couple of experiences. I don’t call them mystical, because I don’t know what they were. I just call them experiences I can’t explain.

Alex: [00:04:29] That’s not good enough. It’s not. I heard an interview with you, and your being totally honest, just like you are now. And first of all hats off for you for writing about those experiences. But you were explaining the process, [and] you’re explaining going through the book, and you were saying, “Gee, I was trying to decide how much I should write about that.” And you’ve made this [Crosstalk 04:49]. Of course, as a scholar of religion, you have to be careful about what you say. As you say that we all know exactly what you mean. But isn’t that the problem? Don’t we want more? Don’t we want more from academia? Don’t we want more from scholarship than to be running and hiding from things that we cannot say?

Dr. Elaine Pagels: [00:05:11] Exactly. And so people have unusual experiences. I was at a conference actually held in California by the founder of Esslyn Institute there, who I’ve known for a long time, and he had psychiatrists and poets, and all kinds of people coming together, 15 of us, talking about what we call the experiences, I cannot explain. Some kind of coincidences, some kind of people who say they saw someone who wasn’t there. They saw someone who had died, who was actually present or seemed present. What’s going on here? Is it a hallucination? Is it an actual message from another world? I mean, when I was in a situation like that, I thought, I can’t tell. I can’t tell whether I’m hearing the voice of somebody who’s died, or from another world, or whether I’m just making it up.

Alex: [00:06:08] And I’m not totally sure what...