Honestly this book really got to me. As someone who grew up in the church, went to a Catholic school during my formative years, and continued to go to church all the way up through my junior year of college, I couldn’t help but relate this book to my own feelings about Jesus and religion. When I finally decided that I had too many questions about religion that were going unanswered I eventually stopped going to church. I had a bit of an identity crisis when I decided to stop going. Looking back on my journals now there is certainly a tinge of teenage angst, a bit of a drama-filled-poetic-attempt at articulating the difficulty of this decision.  It’s for sure cringeworthy to read, but at the same time I think that there’s some truth to that drama. As an adult I’ve come to find that many people have similar feelings about this severing of ones connection to faith. People leave the church for all types of reasons, & the church certainly has a way of alienating people. But the feeling of loss when you shift from being part of the church to not is real. 

I know this book is a fictionalized account of Jesus’s life, but I have to wonder how a book like this would’ve affected 17 year old me, struggling to come to terms with how I felt about all this. 

In her authors note Sue Monk Kidd notes, “From the first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imaging a married Jesus. Doing so provoked a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story? There are only speculative answers, but it seems plausible that Christianity and the Western world would have had a somewhat different religious and cultural inheritance. Perhaps women would have found more egalitarianism. Perhaps the relationship between sexuality and sacredness would have been less fractured. Celibacy among the priesthood might not exist. I wondered what, if any, effect imagining the possibility of a married Jesus could have on these traditions. How does imagining new possibilities affect realities in the present?” Something I really find value in thinking about. I’ll be thinking about this book for a while.

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