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  When I first studied Hebrew, starting with Genesis, I was surprised to learn that the Bible includes not one, but two creation stories—not only the folktale of Adam and Eve, but another creation story, placed right before it, which begins “in the beginning,” and tells how God created the world in seven days. Like so many others, my father had mistaken this story for primitive science, having heard it from people who took it literally. Back in New York, I began to reflect on why people tell such stories. Reading the biblical creation story this time, I could see that it is not so much about how God created nature, but how such stories created a culture: how, for example, this story speaks of the world as originally “good,” intelligently planned by a beneficent creator, thus teaching its readers to celebrate the world’s beauty, and worship its creator. And by telling how God worked for six days, then rested, the story teaches its hearers that they, too, should work for six days and rest on the seventh, the holy day of Sabbath—a ritual that marks them as God’s people, set apart from “the nations.”

  I was excited to see that our creation stories are as practical as those of the Dinka. Whether we believe them or not, they are transmitted in our cultural DNA, powerfully shaping our attitudes toward work, gender, sexuality, and death. The first story, for example, tells how God first commands the original human couple to use their sexual energy: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth!” Reading this now, we can see that much in the Bible that sounds strange, or at least alien to contemporary values, makes much more sense when we understand the situation of the people who first told these stories. This first creation account, likely told and retold long before it was written down some three thousand years ago, transmits the cultural code of nomadic people, whose survival and well being depended on fertility, too precious a resource to waste—not only the fertility of their herds of goats and sheep, but also of themselves. The legal codes now bound with Genesis into the Hebrew Bible reinforce that primary command, treating any nonprocreative use of sexual energy—for example, sexual relations with someone of the same gender or with a prostitute, or spilling semen on the ground—as “abominations to the Lord,” some of which could get you killed.

  So while nothing feels more personal and private than our sexual responses, how we experience them may have a lot to do with what we inherited from ancient Israel. Even the laws that criminalize sexual activity between men name it “sodomy” from a story in Genesis 19, which says that God sent the volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient city of Sodom to punish and kill every man in that city, “down to the last man,” for having sex with other men. This story pictures Lot pleading in vain with a raucous crowd not to gang-rape two men he was sheltering as his guests. While begging them not to do it, he even forces his own two virgin daughters out of the house, so that the crowd of men could rape them instead! Although laws criminalizing “sodomy,” still in effect in seventy-two nations, were repealed in the United States in 2003, these strong prohibitions reverberate into the present, especially for people who read them as if God dictated them in person.

  Yet even those who have left these ancient traditions behind may experience the effects of such views, as I did. Even today, some traditionally minded Christians invoke teachings attributed to the apostle Paul, which picture Eve as gullible and sinful, and admonish women to be silent, subordinate, and to have babies:

  I do not allow any woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was made first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived, and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, provided they remain faithful in love and holiness, with modesty.

  Other Christians, like the African convert Tertullian, indicted their “sisters in Christ” as Eve’s coconspirators:

  You are the devil’s gateway . . . you are she who persuaded him who the devil did not dare attack. . . . Don’t you know that every one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the guilt, of necessity, lives on too.

  There’s nothing particularly Christian about misogyny, of course—some Jewish and Buddhist sources say such things, as do passages in the Koran. Yet as we noted, women in such cultures, religious or not, often internalize such attitudes early, as I did, until the women’s movement initiated a cultural exorcism, and the Nag Hammadi texts invited us to laugh, protest, or both.

  The Nag Hammadi sources show that even thousands of years ago, some people were asking, “Why take that story literally, when doing so makes no sense?” Are we to believe that Adam and Eve actually heard God’s footsteps crunching leaves, when, as Genesis says, “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day”? Was God lying when he warned Adam and Eve that they would die on the day they ate the forbidden fruit, since that didn’t happen? And wasn’t it the snake who actually told them the truth? Why would God deny humans knowledge that he admits could make them “like one of us”—that is, like divine beings?

  Not everyone who asked those questions dismissed the story as nonsense; some read it as myth or allegory, inviting the spiritually adventurous to plunge into its hidden depths. The anonymous author of another Nag Hammadi text, titled the Testimony of Truth, noting that the Lord acts like a vindictive tyrant, jealous of his human creatures, after asking “What kind of God is this?” dares claim that the serpent, who seeks to liberate them, “is Christ”! Others read the story symbolically, suggesting that the story of Eve’s emerging from Adam’s body is meant to show how our soul, or psyche, may come to recognize divine wisdom hidden deep within us. Discovering these long-suppressed sources invites us to uncover hidden continents of our own cultural landscape. And when we do, we gain perspective on reflexive attitudes that we may have unthinkingly inherited, just at a time when countless people are exploring a much wider range of gender identity, letting go of the assumption that gender difference, as our culture defines it, is built into our DNA.

  After evangelical Christianity shattered the ceiling of the constricted world I’d known before, the secret gospels opened up a far larger universe. Having lived for too long in a world that ignored or denigrated anything spiritual, I found that reading the story of Adam and Eve as showing how the human psyche, ignorant of spirit, may wake up, in pain and joy, to the presence of the spirit, spoke to my own experience—even before I knew that spiritual awakening was possible.

  Chapter 3

  A Lifetime

  Elaine with Mark in New York, when he was three weeks old.

  Do you have children?”

  “No; we very much hope to have children, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

  By the time my friend Mary Beth Edelson, an artist, asked me this question, Heinz and I had been married for seven years, hoping, then longing, for children. Finally we consulted a fertility specialist, although this field of medicine was in its early stages. Our Belgian physician prescribed intense doses of weekly hormone injections and blood tests, varying the medications and dosage for three years. Month after month, the treatments caused physical discomfort, along with repeated cycles of hope and disappointment, followed by another year and a half of daily injections and blood tests. When I told her this, Mary Beth said, “Let’s do a ritual for you. I only did it once before, but it worked.”

  Surprised and embarrassed, I was also intrigued. Mary Beth lived in a large loft in downtown New York filled with her husband’s sculptures, making art and creating rituals as performance art, in which she invited the audience to participate. Impressed by the “Ritual for an End to Bitterness,” which she performed in the SoHo loft called the Kitchen, I asked, “How did you choose to do that?”

  “I wanted to create a ritual to celebrate,” she answered, “but discovered that what prevents many people from celebrating is bitterness; so I started with this one.” Although I knew that fertility rituals have long been traditional in many cultures, the idea of participating in one felt strange, unless, perhaps, as art. But why not?
After reflecting on her offer, and discussing it with Heinz, who found it amusing, I realized I had nothing to lose.

  On a clear evening in February, feeling nervous, foolish, and excited, I arrived at Mary Beth’s loft, along with the few friends we’d invited: Sharon, Lizzie, and Lizzie’s partner, Emily, all of whom, like Mary Beth, had children; and Carolee Schneemann, an artist and filmmaker. Mary Beth initiated the evening by playing the sound of ocean waves breaking on a beach, as we sat quietly, focusing on a large diorama. As the evening darkened into night, she lit candles and asked me to sit inside a large, hollow sculpture, as each participant, in turn, spoke about giving birth. In that enclosed space, shaped almost like a birth canal, I felt the ritual focus intensify. Suddenly a single question formed in my mind: “Are you willing to be a channel?” That jolted me into awareness of something that had never entered my consciousness: I was terrified of dying in childbirth. In the shock of that recognition, something changed, perhaps an involuntary release of muscles tensed with fear. Later, astonished by what had happened, I couldn’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about a woman dying in childbirth, often as it has happened in other times and places; instead, this felt like a genetic memory of countless women’s experiences, stored in the cells of our bodies. During the final, intensely focused moments of our gathering, another sentence formed itself, startling me, as if speaking to my intense desire to control what we can’t control: “You don’t have to do this; it does itself.”

  Three weeks later, for the first time in my life, I discovered that I was pregnant. We were overjoyed, and the following October, on the clear and beautiful Sunday morning of the New York City Marathon, we drove to the hospital. Heinz stayed with me throughout the birth, encouraging Lamaze breathing; and although at moments the doctor was concerned about the baby, we were relieved, ecstatic, when our son Mark was born. Naive new parents, we marveled at him, finding him perfect. That afternoon, when a nurse took him to weigh him and do routine procedures, impatiently waiting for her to bring him back, I felt ferociously protective. Having previously experienced sexuality as the most powerful instinct, I now felt that this is what sexuality is for.

  The next day, though, physicians at Babies Hospital, concerned about Mark’s heartbeat, ordered an echocardiogram. I sat in the back of the room while they examined the images and engaged in intense discussion. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but caught the tone: something was wrong. When finally they called us into a conference room, they told us that Mark was born with a hole in one of the walls of his heart. Five years earlier, they said, a baby born with this condition invariably died. But since then, one of their pediatric cardiologists had invented an operation to make a repair, placing into the heart a plastic patch, over which tissue could grow. Since operating on a newborn is especially risky, they advised us to delay open-heart surgery until his first birthday.

  Released from the hospital, we were hugely relieved to take Mark home and resume a semblance of normal life, while he slept in a tiny carrying crib next to our bed, where I often woke to check on him, breastfeeding, holding him close. A few weeks later, we were grateful to have the support of Jean Da Silva, a wonderfully experienced woman from England, who told me when we met, “I’ve been a nanny since I was eighteen.” By this time, having married an American soldier, she had three children of her own. Her competence with babies hugely alleviated our concern for Mark’s health, and we could see that she, too, came to love him dearly. More than two months later, Heinz and I went out for dinner together for the first time since his birth, but rushed home to be with him.

  As that first anxiety eased, life with Mark seemed nearly normal; he smiled easily and was growing. After six months, he was sleeping in the baby’s bedroom under a mobile of stars. That year flew by, with visits to his adoring grandmother at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And although we usually spent summers in the mountains of Colorado, where physicists gathered from all over the world to do physics and hike on mountain trails, that summer, careful not to take Mark to high altitude, we flew instead to California, where I could keep him close to me, and where Heinz could meet with physicists at Berkeley, Stanford, and Santa Cruz.

  In Santa Cruz, we found a place we loved: a large one-room log cabin with a sleeping loft, nestled in a redwood forest that opened to a pasture where five Arabian horses grazed in a grassy meadow. That summer Mark often laughed with delight, especially when his father held him in his large hands, the two of them laughing together. On afternoon walks, I held our baby next to my breasts in a blue terry cloth carrier as we walked barefoot on the beach while the waves washed around our feet, stopping to pick up shells and disentangle seaweed from our ankles as we listened to the cry of the gulls and watched the pelicans. Mark was excited to learn to stand, first cruising around a low table, then holding on to my fingers with both hands, eager to walk to the meadow as the horses cantered to meet us at the fence, anticipating the carrots that we offered while stroking their long noses. Friends often stopped by at the cabin to sit and talk and drink iced tea during warm summer afternoons; indoors, with Mark next to me, or outside, holding him in the baby carrier, I loved to hear Heinz and his friend Nick, another physicist, talking and laughing.

  Below days that might have looked idyllic, though, ran dark currents of terror. Each day brought us closer to Mark’s October birthday—the day scheduled for open-heart surgery at Babies Hospital. Often, now, while preparing dinner in the evening, I began to drink more wine, welcome as an anesthetic to slightly mute the fear. I was careful never to drink more than one glass before dinner, another half glass during dinner, but I instinctively kept this secret, sensing that my capacity for alcohol was limited. Since I didn’t slur words or get drunk, no one could possibly notice, or so I hoped. But one day Heinz let me know that he’d noticed, saying quietly, but firmly, “I love you, but I’m not going to watch you destroy yourself.” Shocked and horrified that he’d noticed this secret, yet also relieved, I went to talk with a close friend.

  The next day, shaking with shame and fear, I drove to a small church in Boulder Creek, walked down the concrete steps to the basement, and slipped into a metal chair in the back of a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even when others nodded at me, acknowledging a newcomer, I didn’t speak; surely I didn’t belong there—or did I? What the speaker told of repeated drunk driving, lost jobs, fighting with his family, and time in jail reassured me that I had nothing in common with him. But others spoke simply of wanting alcohol as an anesthetic, as I did. Then I heard something that struck me powerfully, since it felt undeniably true: willpower alone could not quell the craving for alcohol; nothing less than a spiritual experience could do that. Now I knew that I had to stop drinking alcohol altogether, and did. Instead, what I needed was in the books that packed my bookshelf and were piled on the floor in the tack house behind the cabin—what already had engaged me for years: seeking a spiritual dimension. I’d published my book on the Gnostic Gospels the previous year, intuitively knowing what I needed; now I had to practice the insights I’d recognized in them. Without that anesthetic, the fear clarified, naked and inescapable. Often overcome, raw and feeling desperate, I could only try to meditate, breathe deeply, and ask for help—from my husband, from close friends, from the stars and redwood forests, from God.

  When we returned to New York in September, every day felt like a countdown to October 26. The day before, as we walked toward Babies Hospital holding Mark, to check in for surgery the next morning, I noted the motto over the door: “Healing Comes from the Most High.” After we’d signed a pile of papers for admission and surgery, Heinz went to work, and I stayed; he’d return in the late afternoon. After hours of blood tests, heart monitors, blood pressure tests, physicians with clusters of young residents walking into a blank room with neon lights to look at Mark, somberly discussing the case as I held him, they finally left us alone, and he fell asleep in a hospital crib with iron bars. Since I refused to leave him by himself, even for a moment, I
asked the nurses for a canvas sleeping cot. “Nothing available; besides, the hospital doesn’t allow parents to stay overnight.” When Heinz returned, he urged me to take a break from the hospital, while he walked the halls holding Mark, singing and talking.

  Pushing open the hospital’s heavy front door, relieved to step out of those arid halls, I hailed a taxi and headed downtown to the Lutheran church on Central Park West, where every Sunday afternoon during the church year the choir sings a Bach cantata. Sinking into a wooden pew in the back, I was grateful to hear the powerful, familiar words of the “Reformation” cantata: “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing . . .” Later, after stopping at the apartment to pick up a warmer coat and a blanket, I went back to join my family, carrying sandwiches wrapped in plastic and milk in paper cartons. That evening we shared them in Mark’s room, and stayed together until the head nurse sternly ordered us to leave: “Visiting hours are over.” Since Heinz had to be at work the next day, he finally left to get some sleep. Despite the nurses’ protests, I spread my coat and a blanket on the concrete floor, and prepared to spend the night next to Mark’s crib. After several more doctors’ rounds and nurses’ checkups, quiet descended around midnight.

  Anticipating surgery early the next morning, I could not sleep. Suddenly, after several hours stretched out on the cold floor while Mark slept, I sensed that I was not alone. Sitting up, I seemed to be sitting among women seated in a circle, holding hands. The only one I recognized was Nelle Morton, a revered and beloved older colleague, who’d retired from teaching at Drew University the year before and now lived in California. Surprised and comforted by the sense of their presence, I then realized, as in a lucid dream, that I could add people to the circle. I mentally added my parents and brother, also in California. During those moments, the ache of the hard floor drained away, along with anxiety and exhaustion, as a fresh rush of energy flowed into the room. How long it lasted I do not know, but it offered considerable reassurance; then they were gone, and I began to rest.