The Book of Longings

This section charts Ana’s emotional recovery from the death of her daughter and her stunning emergence through the reclamation of her voice. The section marks Ana’s recovery from the stillborn death of her child, the recovery of her interest in writing, and ultimately her critical place in her husband’s decision to undertake the difficult and dangerous work of his public ministry. Ana begins the section symbolically mute but closes the section with her voice recovered.

Ana begins this section unable to find her voice, uninterested really in anything but the implications of the tragedy of her lost child. Death has become a reality, pressing and undeniable. Through the agency of her aunt’s confession of her own lost daughter abandoned back in Egypt more than 20 years earlier, Ana finds s sense of purpose in grief. She returns to her writing. “My breasts were dry now, but the ink Yaltha and I had made from red ocher and oven soot flowed each day from my reed pen” (188). After destroying her store of papyrus after the death of her child, Ana gratefully receives from her aunt the bits of shattered jars, the clay surfaces more than adequate for her to write upon.

In turn, Ana undertakes to fix the tragedy of her aunt. She will restore Yaltha to her daughter. It is a daring act of individual empowerment. Ana will restore what men, acting from ignorance and anger, have done. Within a culture that defined Ana now as a grieving and helpless mother and Yaltha as an outcast and an unfit mother, Ana sets as her goal the redefinition of both. The ambition is itself a manifestation of one woman’s initiative and strength. Jesus understands the implications of Ana’s reemergence. Within a culture that sees the loss of a child as a permanent emotional definition and the need for that woman to return as soon as possible to the task of childbearing, Jesus demands Ana restore herself first. “Write all you wish” (190), he says. Thus begins Ana’s recovery of herself.

Key to this section is the weird dream Ana has as she ends the mourning period. It is a graphic dream of giving birth, Ana squatting over a hole in the corner of a darkened room. The newborn slips out of Ana and into the waiting hands of Yaltha. Ana is surprised because the child is alive. The newborn cries out, “her tiny fists waving in the air” (197). Yet when Yaltha places the newborn in Ana’s arms, Ana sees the newborn is her. She is mother and baby. The dream functions to suggest the beginnings of Ana’s new life compelled by her own urgency, her own initiative. She is newborn. As Jesus assures her, “It seems you will be born again” (198).

The movement toward Ana’s rebirth parallels Jesus’s own movement into the dangerous work of his public ministry. Promoted to major commission to build Herod’s new synagogue, a commission that marks Jesus’s emergence as a respected stonemason in the employ of the hated Romans, Jesus sees only the inequalities among the Jews. He sees divisions, fierce and ugly, between rich and poor, old and young, men and women. Judas tells Ana that Jesus, during breaks in the construction of the synagogue, talks with prostitutes and tax collectors and even lepers in the city. Jesus believes a vision that unifies rather than divides people. He sees the implications of the schism between the Jewish people and the Romans. For him, the paramilitary solution posed by Judas cannot remedy these sharp inequities. “God’s kingdom won’t come by the sword” (207), he tells Ana after talking with Judas. Repairing the people of Judea cannot happen by simply removing the Roman presence: It begins with changing their very hearts, their very souls.

The meeting between Jesus and Judas, arranged by Ana, suggests the depth of their disagreement. Judas is hot with anger and frustration. He is impatient for the elimination of the Romans. He and his guerrilla warfare comrades in the underground see their moment as the restoration of God’s kingdom, a plan echoed in the angry and impatient rhetoric of John the Immerser, rhetoric that predicts the fast-approaching apocalypse: “God would establish his kingdom on earth. Governments would crumble. Rome would be overthrown” (213). The time, for them, is now. The world would then be perfect. Jesus confides in Ana his vision of a far more difficult inner revolution, a grand-scale change of perception possible only when each person sees in each other person the stuff of God. God, he tells Ana, is love not power. The much-beleaguered Jews and the much-hated Romans share more than what they dispute.

Even as Jesus turns toward his public ministry, Ana emerges as a power in her own right. After returning to her writing, she acts on her own initiative to help her friend Phasaelis. The letter Ana sends by courier is itself a singular act of courage and defiance, one that ends up costing her dearly. She feels she must act to save her friend. Then when Jesus departs to experience first-hand the baptismal rituals of John, Jesus insists Ana come with him, share the experience. Jesus recognizes in her the importance of her perception and her role in what is fast becoming his broad sense of a mission.

News of John’s execution and that Herod has discovered Ana’s role in warning his now-deposed wife determines Ana’s own mission. Her return to Sepphoris to settle her family’s estate endows her mission with unexpected resources, the money she claims as part of the estate settlement. Ana is now coming into her own. Even as Jesus accepts that life as a stonemason no longer fulfills his sense of urgency, Ana finds herself now in a similar position. As Jesus departs Nazareth for the uncertainties and dangers of a public mission that inevitably will draw the ire of the Roman authorities and even the anger of the Jewish people themselves, so also does Ana accept the reality of her own mission: her immanent and necessary departure from Nazareth. It is time, she acknowledges, to find herself, a mission less dramatic than her husband’s but every bit as important and every bit as dangerous. Her initial goal of returning Yaltha to her daughter now becomes a mission to return Ana to Ana, to complete the rebirth she pre-visioned in her dream. In Sepphoris, Ana lies, schemes, and plots to secure passage for Yaltha back to Egypt. When news of Herod’s arrest warrant reaches her, that scheming becomes the instrument of Ana’s own release. As loving as her marriage is, as supportive as her gentle husband is, Ana must now engage the difficult work of her own mission. Incantation bowl in tow, with its lofty aspiration to find the power of words, she must now depart Jesus. She must be about the business of her own reclamation, her own recovery, indeed her de facto resurrection from the catastrophic experience of the death of her child.

Before she departs with Yaltha, however, Ana secretly gives Judas a considerable chunk of the money from her estate settlement only if he promises never to reveal where the money came from. It is a moment, of course, no canonical gospel acknowledges, that a woman used her own money secured through her own agency to fund what will become Christianity itself. Christ’s mission would not have succeeded without Ana’s financial support.

The goodbye between Jesus and Ana marks the end of this section. Both face uncertainty. Both face danger. Both risk everything, including the security and stability of their marriage and their family, to face a future that promises only challenge and travails. As Ana departs, leaving her husband ironically in the company of Judas, Jesus says exactly what Ana, heading toward an entirely new culture, needs to hear, “I bless the largeness in you” (252).