The Book of Longings

Fiction Books in the Magdalene Canon, pt. 2

I'll never forget the morning that I finished reading The Book of Longings. It was the depths of the covid-19 pandemic, when time had little meaning. I had an unusually free weekday morning, and upon waking, I could do nothing but absorb myself in the last half of Sue Monk Kidd’s sweeping narrative. I couldn’t rise to fix breakfast or start my day in any way until I knew where main character Ana spent the rest of her days.

I was possessed with a holy compulsion to hear her voice and know how her story ended.

Whether or not Ana ever actually lived was irrelevant to my hyperfixation. Kidd herself acknowledges that her protagonist isn’t based on any known historical figure. But rather, my zeal was based on what she represented.

A woman about whom so many have speculated.

The woman who knew Jesus completely.

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In The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd takes up the simple but eternally compelling question, “What if Jesus had a wife?” She takes this question a step further by allowing that woman, in all her divine humanness, speak for herself. Rather than speculate about her, Kidd allows her to tell us her own story.

In the opening pages of Kidd’s beautifully crafted book, we meet Ana, the teenage daughter of a privileged Jewish family in Roman-occupied Galilee. She is betrothed to a wealthy widower whom she finds repulsive. Rather than focus on womanly arts, she uses her gift of writing to record the stories of Biblical women. She is close to her aunt, also educated and literate, an exiled woman from Alexandria who encourages and supports Ana’s passions. Also in the home is Ana’s adoptive brother Judas. (Yes, that Judas.)

Prior to her marriage to Jesus, Ana experiences the gamut of patriarchal oppression of young women in Roman society. She witnesses her best friend’s punishment for naming her rapist. She is forced to sit for a mosaic portrait of her face by a despotic ruler who becomes enamoured with her beauty. Her parents threaten to burn her beloved scrolls of women’s stories because they don’t see the value in her writing, prompting her to bury them for safe-keeping. And after her repulsive fiance dies, her father offers her back to the despot as a concubine. Ana is on the verge of being publicly stoned for adultery when Jesus offers his marriage proposal, which Ana’s father reluctantly accepts.

After leaving her family home and returning to Nazareth with Jesus, along with her aunt, Ana’s life changes significantly. She lives in poverty with Jesus for years until events separate them, and she flees to Alexandria with her aunt as Jesus begins his ministry. As he preaches and builds a movement in Galilee, she enters temples of Isis and becomes immersed in the legendary Therapeutae community, where she takes up her passion for writing again, with Kidd crediting her with authorship of one of the most famous poetic works of the area. As much as her youth was influenced by patriarchal oppression, her later years are about reconnecting to feminine power.

Ana and Jesus are reunited only briefly, under the most tragic of circumstances. And later, as his legend and the early Christian church grows, she witnesses herself being completely erased from the story. And yet, ultimately, she ends up in exactly the place she is meant to be, supported in her gifts, and certain of her positive impact on the Christ movement.

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Every time I pick up Kidd’s Book of Longings, I’m floored by the author’s attention to detail and intense historical research. She believably situates her main character in a time and place that are as culturally rich as they are consequential to our current times and theologies. We see the birth of one of history’s most influential religions and the accompanying gender-based tensions through Ana’s eyes.

Ana represents everything women weren’t supposed to be in a patriarchal society. She’s an auto-didactic intellectual, constantly on the search for new knowledge. She never fits neatly into any context she’s forced into. And yet, her love and respect for Jesus is pure. And his for her is equally so. Again we see, believably, how Jesus could have included the voices of women in his budding ministry. Jesus’ beloved Ana influences him as much as anyone else around him as he sets out preaching radical love and resistance against the Roman Empire. She is nearly as much a part of it all as he is.

This book would have impacted me greatly no matter what, but it wasn't until I read the afterward that I understood its full meaning. In it, Sue Monk Kidd discusses why she felt moved to write such a book. She says she was captivated by the idea of Jesus having a wife.

And that if he was married, she would be the most silenced woman in history.

This line crashed into my soul like a thousand bricks. As I read it, I felt the generational sorrow of so many women who have been erased.

How many most silenced women’s voices have we lost to history?

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This, like the other books in this series, does not directly tell the story of Mary Magdalene. (In fact, she appears for only a few pages near the end of the narrative.) And yet, it tells the truth of a woman who most likely existed, a woman who knew Jesus the Christ intimately, and stood back supportively while his ministry gained fame. Holding the holy secret that she was, in fact, his equal.

And grieving him as the Roman Empire viciously sacrificed him for political control.

In order to know Christ’s love, we must know her, however indirectly. His story is not complete without her. And our collective salvation is not complete without remembering her.

Whether her name was Ana, Mary, or something else entirely, her story may have been silenced, but it is not forgotten. And may we keep telling it, over and over again, until all have heard.

Thank you for reading! Next week, we’ll continue our Fiction Books series with another speculative work, this time about the story of Adam’s first wife. Join us then!