The Book of Longings

“Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight.” 

The dream of being a writer defines Ana, a dream that places her in opposition to her own culture. The prayer that Ana inscribes in the incantation bowl that Yaltha gifts her expresses her determination to be her own woman, to accept what she terms the largeness in her, that is the part of her heart and her soul not defined by the narrow limits of her Jewish culture.

“There was a tiny fire in them, an expressiveness I could see even from where I stood. It was as if his thoughts floated in the wet, dark light of them, wanting to be read.”

As a love story involving Jesus Christ, the novel resists reducing the relationship between Ana and Jesus to a variation on a cliche Hollywood romance. In responding to Jesus’s eyes, even though Ana at this point has no idea who the man in the marketplace is, Ana notes a need in this man, a need for love and engagement as a man. This is richer, more complex than love at first sight. This is a convergence of two souls meant to complete each other.

“I thought of the young man in the market who’d lifted me to my feet. I thought of the scrolls and ink. In the darkness behind my eyes, I was free.” 

Here is the summary of the complex relationship between Ana and Jesus. In Jesus, Ana finds not her spiritual redemption (she never participates in his public ministry) but rather the opportunity at last to complete the self she knows she can be. Jesus represents not just love or physical satisfaction or domestic opportunity. Rather, he frees Ana.

“What crime did your daughter commit to cause her father to cut her tongue from her mouth? Is it a sin to stand on the street and cry out one’s anguish and beg for justice?” 

In Ana’s outrage over the treatment of her friend Tabitha when Tabitha refuses to be silent about her rape at the hands of a Roman soldier, Ana acknowledges the cultural suppression faced by women in her era. Ana’s dream of being a writer, of having her voice heard, is a risk. The treatment Tabitha receives from her own family provides stark, disturbing evidence of the reality Ana faces.

“I AM NO LAMB.” 

The bond that forms between Ana and Herod’s wife creates the opportunity for Ana to at last define herself as something more than a negotiable commodity, more than a beautiful face or a nester, the two roles to which her culture limits women. The capital letters indicate the strength and tenor of her defiance. Ana refuses to become Herod’s concubine, a position for which she would enjoy rewards. She refuses to sacrifice her soul, to negotiate for a secure place within a culture that imprisons the souls of women. Much like her husband, she will pay dearly for her defiance of convention.

“At night when I lay still in my bed, the knowledge of these things would break over me and I would laugh deep in my pillow. I assured myself the curse I’d written played no part in Nathaniel’s dying, but still, my jubilation often brought bouts of guilt. I rebuked myself for rejoicing in his death, I truly did, but I would not have wished him back.” 

As a widow at 15, Ana should follow the rituals of grieving when the man she is to marry dies suddenly from a fever raging through the city. Her refusal to pretend to mourn defies cultural convention and makes her an object of scorn from her own mother and eventually targets her for public vilification. She knows society’s expectations, but she cannot deny who she is.

“But even that did not fully explain him. I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness. […] But here was this poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.” 

The novel introduces here the theological concept that Ana’s husband will come to preach and for which he will in the end suffer the indignity of crucifixion. Ana here is part of Jesus’s early evolution, part of shaping his radical doctrine of God as an element of love in every person. She is his sounding board. She helps him understand the implications of his premise before he undertakes his public ministry. A mamzer is a Jewish term for a misfit, a social pariah, which describes both Jesus and Ana.

“Jesus, I would discover, was a peacemaker and a provocateur in equal measures, but one could never say which he would be at any given moment.”

To humanize Jesus is a radical concept. Here, Ana, in first arriving at the Nazareth household with her new husband, notes Jesus’s character which, contemporary readers recognize are elements that define Jesus Christ, the Christian savior. He is as much gentle and compassionate as he is angry and uncompromising. He is here showing in his humanity, settling disputes between his brothers, the very elements of his divinity. After all, Ana never sees that the man she has married is God.

“We had our togetherness—why should we not have our separateness?” 

This is a radical concept of marriage. In openly discussing Ana’s hesitation over having children, the couple define a contemporary sense of marriage. A man and a woman can maintain separate identities, separate pursuits, and not impact the holiness of their commitment to each other. Ana has her writings. Jesus has his emerging sense of mission.

“Everywhere I look, there’s suffering, Ana, and I spend my days making cabinets for a rich man.” 

Jesus here comes to terms with the implications of his mission to bring a message of hope. He asserts that every person has the element of godliness and thus deserves compassionate treatment. He begins to see the waste of his occupational calling as a carpenter and stonemason and begins to accept the enormity of his greater calling.

“‘Life will be life and death will be death,’ I whispered, and with those words, grief filled the empty place in me where the baby had lain. I would carry it there like a secret all the days of my life.” 

The stillborn death of Ana and Jesus’s daughter becomes a tipping point for both. Jesus as God now understands the depth of human suffering, the reality of loss, and the impact of grief—all elements that help give his divinity its human element. Ana spins into profound grief. She is inconsolable for weeks, unlike her pretend mourning after the death of Nathaniel. Only Yaltha’s insistence that Ana return to her writing will save her.

“Besides, I wish to hear what you think of John the Immerser.” 

The place of women in Christian history is defined by neglect. Women are relegated to the margins. Here, Jesus prepares to begin his public ministry by going to the River Jordan and seeing for himself the figure of John the Immerser. Ana expects to be left behind. But in a dramatic moment of inclusion, Jesus invites Ana to go with him. He wants her insights into John’s message.

“I reached up and felt the wetness on my lids. ‘John is a voice,’ I managed to say, ‘What it must be to say such a thing of oneself! I’m trying to imagine it.’” 

Ana never responds to her husband’s theological argument. She is not part of his public ministry. She never defines Jesus by his message. She understands the danger John poses to the Roman occupational government, but here she cries uncontrollably when she hears John and his message not because of the message itself but because here is a person, a man, given a chance to do what women can’t, the chance to have his unique and daring voice heard.

“Sophia, Breath of God, set my eyes on Egypt. Once the land of bondage, let it become the land of freedom. Deliver me to the place of papyri and ink.” 

In dedicating herself to the commune of the Therapeutae outside Alexandria, Ana dedicates herself to Sophia. It is the radical, and heretical, concept that God has a dual nature, a male and female principle, each of which directs humanity to different expressions. Yahweh demands sacrifice and rewards and punishes. Sophia encourages self-definition and rewards meditation. For Ana, exile to Egypt to avoid the arrest warrant Herod issues means the chance at last to be free to find her voice and to express that voice.

“I fell quiet, too. The wooden door onto the courtyard was flung wide onto the Egyptian night. I listened to the wind shake the palm fronds. The dark, tumbling world.”

The novel refuses to simplify the implications of either Jesus’s mission as a prophet or Ana’s evolution as a writer. The world does not encourage either of these pursuits and, indeed, punishes their expression. Here Ana learns of John the Immerser’s execution and that Judas is on the run in Jerusalem. The sanctuary of her retreat into the commune is upended by the real-time world and its hard realities, suggested by the wind that blows through the night. The same wind will cut through the streets of Jerusalem later when Ana accompanies her husband to Calvary.

“[B]ut I could feel the 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.” 

The great library at Alexandria initially impresses Ana, as an aspiring writer. She sees the rooms stacked with countless scrolls that captured the history of world cultures. Quickly, that awe diminishes when she realizes how little in the great library halls represents women, how men have created the concept of the world.

“I didn’t know whether Diodora was grieved or comforted. I didn’t know whether she was lost or found.” 

In a novel in which the central love story of Ana and Jesus is defined by certainty, the reunion story of Yaltha and her daughter, Diodora, represents a critical subplot that introduces the reality of uncertainty in relationships. Yaltha, exiled from her homeland, spends 20 years missing her daughter. In tracing through the archives of Alexandria evidence that Yaltha’s daughter is alive, Ana effects a reunion that positions the novel at a critical and very human moment. Ana cannot be sure that mother and daughter will find their way to forgiveness and a renewal of their lost love.

“I could smell the sea just over the limestone ridge. I felt the mix of fear and elation I used to get long ago waiting at the cave for Jesus to appear.”

Ana’s discovery of the commune of Therapeutae represents a tonic mix of fear and anticipation. Long defined as a daughter and then a wife, long defined by the limits of her culture, Ana understands at this point only vaguely the promise of life in the commune, a life devoted to prayer, study, and creativity. The novel parallels her first encounters with Jesus to the same complex mix of uncertainty and joy.

“I’ve come here with a love for the quiet life. I wish nothing more than to write and study and keep the memory of Sophia alive.” 

In her public declaration to the commune’s leader of her desire to embrace the demanding monastic life of the commune, Ana declares her commitment as well to the female principle of God, Sophia, and pledges her life to developing herself to express her love of that divinity.

“Why do you despise my fear and curse my pride? I am she who exists in all fears and in trembling boldness.”

These lines, taken from Ana’s magnum opus, The Thunder: Perfect Mind, encapsulate that work’s complex perception of a woman. The line is striking in its acceptance of the paradoxical nature of women in a culture that simplified women to be either whore or mother. Ana’s poem is a defiant assertion that women should be able to embrace that complexity.

“Your goodness will not be forgotten, […] Not a single act of your love will be squandered. You’ve brought God’s kingdom as you hoped—you’ve planted it in our hearts.” 

These are the last words Jesus and Ana exchange. Jesus is carrying his cross to his execution. Ana is among the throngs witnessing the gruesome spectacle. Here Ana confirms Jesus has succeeded in doing what he first proposed to her back in Nazareth long before he undertook his public mission.

“I wished for something beautiful to fill his mind. I wished for him to think of our daughter, Susanna. He would be with her soon. I wished for him to think of God. Of me. Of lilies.” 

This is Ana’s very real, very human response to the execution of Jesus. Jesus in Ana’s thoughts is not a savior redeeming humanity but a man, a husband facing capital punishment at the hands of the occupational government her family supports. It is a loving wife’s wish to ease the suffering of the man she loves. The idea that in his death Jesus would reunite with the daughter they lost is a radical redefinition of the traditional Good Friday narrative.

“I will always be with you.” 

In a novel that defines the human dimension of Jesus, handling the implications of the Easter event presents a formidable challenge. Ana is never a part of Christ’s divinity. In this quiet moment in Egypt, Ana is unsure whether the vision she has of her husband is a dream or a wish by her heart for simple closure. The moment hangs between explanation and mystery. Jesus’s message to his grieving widow extends as well to the nascent community of believers who see him as a resurrected God.