Easter
“Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached in all the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”
The Magdalen Anointing Christ’s Feet by Sebastian Ricci
Suddenly the whole picture changed for me. I’d thought I knew the tradition well. As an Episcopal priest I’d presided over many Good Friday liturgies, and as a choral musician, I’d sung my share of Bach Passions. I’d thought I knew the plot backward and forward.
How could this key point have escaped my attention? No wonder Mary Magdalene came so unerringly to the tomb on Easter morning; she’d stood by in silent, unflinching vigil the whole time Jesus was being laid to rest there. Maybe she never left.
Since that moment I have literally not heard the Passion story in the same way. It inspired me to go back to the gospels and actually read the story in a new way.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
“Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” John 12:3
I do indeed intend to open the emotionally charged question of a possible love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and my conclusion is that such a relationship most likely did exist and is in fact at the heart of the Christian transformational path — one might even say, its long-missing key.
But the kind of relationship I have in mind is not the sentimentalized melodrama our culture commonly holds up as love, but a spiritual love so refined and luminous as to be virtually unknown in the West today.
And I am entering these shark-infested waters precisely for the sake of this love: because its healing and generative energy is desperately needed right now to heal the deep psychic wounds of Christianity.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
July 22nd, 2021
It was the Wednesday of Holy Week.
I’d just woken up from a vivid dream. The kind I had to write down immediately. The kind I knew would linger.
I was with a man named John, whose last name means “repairer of a vessel.” We walked outside to a meeting where he became visibly upset, shouting things like, “It’s misogynistic!” He said we needed to tell everyone. I agreed and felt glad he understood. Then we sat down in front of a news crew, lights shining on our faces, while he was interviewed. I tousled my hair. After it was over, I realized I never got to talk. I told him good luck spreading the word, but the whole thing left me still feeling, sort of, inferior. Then I looked in a mirror and noticed my skin was a deep tan color. I remember thinking I looked beautiful.
That same morning, my friend Emily sent me a “Holy Week at Home” guide, inviting us to reflect on the love and courage of women. All the women who came before us, who raised us, who have walked with us. And the women who stayed at the foot of the cross when the Twelve betrayed, denied, and abandoned Jesus.
I got where this was going. And I sat with it for months, while the meaning kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding some more.
Until late September, during a Center for Action and Contemplation Mary Magdalene course taught by Cynthia Bourgeault with Brie Stoner, when we dug into the Gospel of John. Though it was the last to be written, I learned there’s strong scholarly evidence it was originally semi-finished around AD 80 but went under construction until the early 2nd century in order to fit the “Master Story.” During this extensive revision, Mary Magdalene got written out, and John stole the show.
Then Cynthia said the words out loud that I already knew inside:
“Everyone thinks it's Maundy Thursday at the Last Supper, but Holy Week as a liturgical celebration actually begins on Wednesday with the anointing ceremony. Perfectly bookending the Resurrection, in which Mary comes with the same sacred anointing oil. If you cut Mary Magdalene out, you cut out the essence of the Christian transformational message.”
I flashed back to the Wednesday evening I had my dream, celebrating the start of Passover with some close friends. Pouring out prayers and oils, washing each other’s feet.
Later on in class, Cynthia shared her own woken-from-a-deep-sleep moment that told her to go to the Song of Songs to find Mary’s voice.
I looked it up myself and began reading the first chapter:
“I am dark, but lovely,
O daughters of Jerusalem,
Like the tents of Kedar,
Like the curtains of Solomon.
Do not look upon me, because I am dark,
Because the sun has tanned me.”
And everything came together. Ah, of course — the Gospel of John, the vessel, the women, the misogyny, the voiceless Mary, the tan skin, the anointing.
The bigger picture became clear.
I saw a woman who prepared her Beloved for burial and stuck around as his witness, trusting a vision only she could see from within, until he rose again.
I saw her love as an image of The Love that never leaves us even when we feel doomed.
I saw why Meggan Watterson says Jesus needed it in order to resurrect. That his purpose was fulfilled because she was there to meet him.
I saw this alternative model for partnership. One that shows us how to let go and still love — through every journey a person must take. Every ego death, every soul rising. Holding them in your heart while giving them the space to save themselves.
I saw the importance of tending to your own soul work, remaining the pillar of your own life, standing in your own magnetic power.
I saw goodness in our longing, our feeling, our grieving, our weeping. Desire like the spark of creation. Darkness like fertile soil. Tears like rainwater. The tomb more like a womb.
I saw the Apostle to the Apostles. The one human who could relay the full message of the risen Christ — silenced.
I saw how different Christianity would be if it included the whole story. The hidden part. The woman's side. The Feminine. Mary Magdalene. So with my own voice, I speak up for hers — hoping someday, maybe it will.
Why did the Christian community fail to acknowledge Mary Magdalene
as the intimate spiritual companion — probably closest disciple,
maybe even spiritual equal — to Rabbi Jesus?
And how has the mischaracterization of Mary Magdalene excluded
women from full participation in Christ’s lineage?
Mary’s way was the way of the heart. She exemplified devotion.
The institutionalized church is the way of the analytical mind.
Mary’s teachings are rooted in the body and grounded in direct experience with the sacred.
The dogma of the church demanded unquestioned adherence
to established doctrines and prescribed rituals.
Given her personal relationship to Christ — a connection
that did not require the intercession of a male authority figure —
it isn’t difficult to see why
Mary Magdalene would be perceived as a threat.
Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy
As with all lovers who have lived to the full the wager that love is stronger than death, the faithfulness of their two hearts resonating across time and space form a particular kind of energy channel through which divine compassion pours itself forth as wisdom and creativity. This is the real post that Mary Magdalene has always had — unacknowledged but irrepressible — and why her presence on the contemporary scene, at this critical juncture in the life of Christianity, is so important — and in fact, so predictable. When a new infusion of love is needed, Mary Magdalene shows up. Our only real choice is whether or not to cooperate.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.”
The Crucifixion by Vladimir Borovikovsky
What is the meaning of the passion? First of all, God wasn’t angry. Again: God wasn’t angry! Particularly in fundamentalist theology, you’ll often hear it said that God got so fed up with the sins and transgressions of Israel that he demanded a human sacrifice in atonement. But of course, this interpretation would turn God into a monster. How can Jesus, who is love, radiate and reflect a God who is primarily a monster? And how can Christians theoretically progressing on a path of love consent to live under such a reign of terror? No, we need to bury once and for all those fear-and-punishment scenarios that got programmed into so many of us during our childhood. There is no monster out there; only love waiting to set us free.
Cynthia Bourgeault
What happened to the women on the first Easter Day
Breaks open a daring horizon,
Inviting all hearts to discern.
Mid the grieving and trauma of loss,
The horror to stand at the foot of a Cross.
A body we think was buried in haste,
And a tomb that was empty but restless in taste.
Empowering a strange group of women.
What happened to those on the first Day of Easter,
The faithful disciples by Magdalene led?
A subverted truth the patriarchs dread.
Beyond all the theories that time has construed,
Beyond the oppression we have too long endured.
The first ones commissioned for Easter proclaim
A woman-led mission we’ve brutally maimed.
But we can’t keep subverting empowerment.
Resurrection still flourishes and always it will,
Imbued with a truth that time will fulfill.
What women empowered at the dawning breakthrough
will bear fruit in season
despite all the treason.
’Cos justice will render what deserves to endure.
Diarmuid Ó Murchú, “Risen Empowerment,” Inclusivity: A Gospel Mandate
What if, instead of emphasizing that Jesus died alone and rejected, we reinforced that one stood by him and did not leave?
Ten years later, I still remember clear as day the sense of startlement that went through me in a small Catholic church in Seldovia, Alaska, when I suddenly found myself standing before a bas relief carving of the fourth station of the cross — Jesus bidding farewell to his mother — and suddenly realized with every fiber of my being that it was not his mother he was bidding farewell to, but his beloved. What told me this I can’t tell, or whether the sculptor even intended it. But something in the body language between them, the quality of the yearning one could still feel arcing through the restrained gestures, made the picture absolutely clear. Since then, I have never experienced the Paschal Mystery in the same way. Suddenly, in addition to all those other crosscurrents running through that great Holy Week drama — messianic pretensions, political intrigue, betrayal, abandonment, sacrifice, cosmic redemption — there is also a wrenchingly personal dimension: “Lovers, going unconcernedly to their death… the inner sanctum of love.”
And so it is love standing at the foot of the cross, love following the small entourage that takes his body from the cross and places it in the tomb; love holding vigil when everyone else has gone home. Not just a pious disciple or distraught camp-follower but Jesus’s koinonos, his uniquely beloved partner; with their hearts now stretched taut to accommodate the vast distance that has suddenly opened up between them.
And it is love that remains there for those entire three days (for where else is there to go?), holding his tether like falcon and falconer as he descends into the underworld. The sheer tenacity of her presence is not the result of ordinary human courage or even the detached equanimity of one who has attained to his level of mastery. It is an act of substituted love, as instant by instant she gives herself that he might be well. For those three days she holds in her own heart all that death has left unresolved in him — the swirling events of that final week, the anguish of betrayal and abandonment, the wrenching final “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” She takes his anguish into her own heart, so that he might travel freely to accomplish the cosmic task he has been given to do.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
“When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body.” Mark 16:1
…new life starts in the dark.
Whether it is a seed in the ground,
a baby in the womb,
or Jesus in the tomb,
it starts in the dark.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark
August 13th, 2021
Friday the 13th.
Before patriarchal religious times, it was a day to celebrate the Divine Feminine, the Wild Woman, the Goddess. The day of Venus and Freya.
On the last Friday the 13th, I was at coffee with my friend Kana and it didn't take long for us to start chatting away about all of this. About how the true stories of many women have been so terribly twisted to undermine our worth. How the first man came from the womb of Mother Earth. And the "Son of man" came from the womb of Mother Mary. It got me thinking about Christ and Mary Magdalene during his passage through death to rebirth. And then suddenly, something happened in my heart. A dropping down sensation, a shift, a clicking into place.
That night I dreamt I was with a man. We tumbled through a doorway. He kissed me. His face brushed up against my nose, a symbol for intuition and wisdom. We lied there together, his head resting on my womb. I could feel an intense energy moving from me to him and back to me again. He told me there was so much he could see now. And then he got up, to answer a call, to keep integrating his shadow and light, to stay connected to Source.
And the next morning, before I had a chance to tell her any of this, Emily — another dear friend of mine — said she also had a dream. We were on a beach in Seattle, I was teaching a group of people about Mary Magdalene. I ran along the shore, waving around a white flag with a green lighthouse on it. Green, the color of Spring, renewal, eternal life. A lighthouse, as in Magdala, which means tower.
The Feminine is a powerful force. It always has been, since the very beginning of time. One that comes from this mysterious, miraculous place within. I long for a society that values this kind of power. For a world that stops fearing it in women and begins embracing it in every human.
I look up at this Christ, this embodiment of enduring love set in gold, with arms that take in the whole mass of us, sitting there in the pews, silently praying, silently saying everything we need to say into our hearts.
We think our hearts are separate and our own. But really, the heart is like a walkie-talkie. If we know how to use it. And when we have the courage to get still enough to go inward, it’s like we’re pressing down on that little red plastic bit on the side and speaking directly into a receiver.
Then when we release our grip on that little red plastic bit that lets us speak to the soul, to god, to spirit — however you experience it or whoever you think is holding the matching walkie-talkie — suddenly, there’s a crackling noise and then a stream of light from a voice within you.
Mary and Christ had walkie-talkie hearts.
And what I could feel in that moment beneath his wide embrace is that I do too. We all do.
If we know how to use them.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.”
Mary Magdalene is most associated with Easter, with the resurrection, because she was the one there at the tomb, the one who waited in the dark, past his death and absence. She was the one he resurrected to. She was the first to see him, and she only recognized it was him when he called her by name.
But let’s back up.
I think it’s significant to realize that she didn’t just happen to be there, in the right place at the right time. There’s a prominence inherent in the fact that she was the one to be there, to see him first. There’s a love we’ve overlooked for so long. The human love between two people, as a love that never ends. And I think it’s time we recognize it.
I have always wondered how the story of the resurrection would shift fundamentally if we realized it was also a story about a love we all possess. That when we can let love reach where it has never been before, out past the ego’s idea of the self, then we quite literally come back to life. We die, and resurrect. Hopefully several times at least before we pass away, into whatever’s next for us.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
When Mary Magdalene is returned to her traditional role as the anointer of Jesus, a very important symmetry is also restored. We see that Jesus’s passage through death is framed on either side by her parallel acts of anointing. At Bethany, she sends him forth to the cross wearing the unction of her love. And on Easter morning he awakens to that same fragrance of love as she arrives at the tomb with her spices and perfumes, expecting to anoint his body for death. He has been held in love throughout his entire passage.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
Invitation to Love by Janet McKenzie
There’s a more ancient legend, though, that associates the egg with Easter.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene traveled to Rome, where she was admitted to the court of Tiberius Caesar because of her high social standing. She told the court the story of her love for Christ, and how poorly justice was served under Pontius Pilate during Christ’s trial. She told Caesar that he had risen. And to help explain his resurrection, supposedly, she took an egg from off of the feast laid out before them…
…An egg, like a seed, contains the end at the beginning. The seed already has the bloom held within it. The egg holds safely inside whatever new life its precariously fragile shell is meant to protect. And is that new life is going to emerge, it has to come from within. You can’t break a shell and still expect a little beak to one day peck its way out and into the world. You have to let that tiny creature with wings within the shell arrive at the day of its own birth. You have to remain in this trusting, quiet unknown, as every mother or artist knows, and let that life declare its existence not when your ego says it’s time, but when that new life is ready.
A body, like an egg, contains a soul.
In the beginning there’s the dark, there’s the womb, and the only light is in the soul, this new life that waits to emerge from within. The soul is the beginning, and also the end. Birth is meant to happen before we die. Ideally, many times. But we have to die to the ego to let it. The more the soul rises, resurrects in this life, the more love is present here inside us. Meaning, the soul is all we are when we come into this life and it’s all that we’ll be when we leave it. If you can stand there at the beginning, then you’ll know the end, which is a love that only ever expands.
Then according to the legend, Caesar was like, “Hah, yeah, right. A person can no more resurrect than that egg in your hand turn red.”
(The egg immediately turns red.)
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
I am the first and the last.
I am she who is honored and she who is scorned.
I am the whore and the holy woman.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the bride and the bridegroom.
I am she, the Lord.
The Thunder, Perfect Mind 1:5-19
March 31st, 2021
There came a point in my time with Mother Mary when I got pushed out of the nest. I’ll be honest — it was a rocky transition, as terrifying as it was illuminating.
I started hearing less from the mother who gave birth to baby Jesus and more from the one who walked with Jesus Christ through rebirth.
This other Mary who, as Cynthia Bourgeault stunningly puts it, “Holds his broken heart in her own, as she holds vigil at the tomb.”
History painted a picture of an eternal virgin and a penitent whore. It's really caused quite the confusion.
But when I look at these Marys, I see two sides of the same golden coin. Two fully human women with boundless courage. They both knew Love, they both knew gut-wrenching loss. They knew the treasure was worth the cost.
Only the Mary Magdalene I’ve met was just like you and me.
Learning to embrace her eros and honor her longing, to trust her Knowing and speak her truth in a world that wants so badly to repress it.
Navigating all her messy wounding, her false narratives, her ego. Her bullshit.
Her spiritual purity came from doing the work. It came from amazing Grace upon Grace. She found the kind of Light that even death couldn’t put out, within. So she stayed with it, through the dark, until new life had risen. Showing us — this is how we can transform ourselves, too.
Over and over again, that's what I keep finding: Mary Magdalene, offering new life. As partners, co-creators, beloveds of the Divine.
And Mother Mary watching over with holy assurance, saying, “Your turn.”
A person who has had the demons cast from them is a person who’s done the work.
Cynthia Bourgeault
Mary Magdalene with Jesus, the Christ by Janet McKenzie
It’s a re-education to see Mary Magdalene as an apostle, as a beloved disciple Christ considered worthy enough to want to return to first. Worthy enough to want to have her as his witness. To come to her, in the dark, beyond death, because he knew she was the one who could see him with her heart.
It’s a re-education to think that Christ needed Mary’s love in order to resurrect, in order to be witnessed. Just as the angels need us to know how worthy we are to perceive them.
I love imagining that his ministry and hers are still inextricably linked. That his purpose was fulfilled because she was there to meet him. That he was only able to bridge heaven and earth because of the human love between them. I love to imagine that we might still have a love story to unearth. A love that has been age after age, making its way to the surface of our consciousness. A love that we are finally ready for.
A love that is as human as it is divine.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
“Place me as a seal upon your heart, for love is as strong as death.”
Sweet was the love between our Lord and Mary. She had much love for Him. He had more for her. Whoever would know thoroughly all that took place between Him and her, not as a gossiper would tell it but as the story of the gospel bears witness — which cannot possibly be false — he would find that she was so completely desirous of loving Him that nothing less than He could comfort her… And if a man should desire to see written in the gospel the wonderful and special love that our Lord bore to her… he will find that our Lord would not permit any man or woman — yes, not even her own sister — to speak a word against her without answering for her Himself. Yes, and what more? He blamed Simon Leprous in his own house for what he thought about her. This was great love. This was surpassing love.
Unknown fourteenth century monk
Mary is the only person there at the tomb,
maybe because she had more to do with his ability to come back to life
than we’ve ever recognized.
Maybe because Mary Magdalene is meant to move the story
of what it means to be human forward.
Or put another way, her story is meant to move a more ancient story
of the power of the goddess forward into the modern world.
A story of a human woman, a woman in love,
who works miracles by bringing love itself back to life.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
Please do not misinterpret what I am up to here. I am not proposing that the whole sacred drama of Christ’s Passion and resurrection, the epicenter of the Christian mystery, is only a love song, Only a tryst between two lovers. It would be absurd and demeaning to make that claim. I am only saying that it is also, among other things, a love song, and that romantic love is an essential element in its unfolding.
It becomes an even more essential element as we try to fathom the true sacramental meaning of Jesus’s self-offering.
What do I mean by this? Well, for many contemporary Christians, the hardest part of accepting and entering into the Paschal Mystery is the atonement theology it is usually based on. Atonement theology presents Christ as the spotless and unsinning “great high priest,” whose death on a cross would take away the sin of the world. This theology is laid out chapter and verse in the New Testament book of Hebrews; it pictures Jesus's sacrifice as an expatiation for human sinfulness, an idea deeply rooted in the Old Testament cultic traditions. And what I am describing here is only atonement theology in its most bland and affirmative version; in the darker version that dominates so much of fundamentalist theology, we hear it said that God was “angry” and demanded the sacrifice of his son to appease his anger. This primitive, monstrous interpretation does no justice to the depths of love in either Old or New Testament. But for many Christians, it’s what they’ve grown up with.
Conversely, whenever Mary Magdalene enters the picture — which she does rarely enough, sad to say — it is fascinating how the energy changes. Atonement theology softens, and with the same breath as she enters, a new warmth seems to blow. With her come the cadences of gentleness and forgiveness, the sounding of that core vibration of love.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.
John 20: 15-18
In her desire to cling to Jesus
and his refusal to allow it,
we see ourselves reflected as in a mirror.
We are shown that eventually even
the greatest things in our lives
— even our loves —
must be released
and allowed to become something new.
Otherwise we are trapped.
Love has not yet made us free.
Cynthia Bourgeault
I’ve always been a little suspicious of what Christ said to Mary in John 20:17. Because after all, Mary not only was the first to witness the resurrection, but was also the only one there. No one was there to witness the witness. No one actually heard Christ say to Mary, “Noli me tangere.”
I love the translation of this moment in A New, New Testament.
Christ says to Mary, “Do not hold on to me.” (The idea that this is in response to Mary trying to touch Christ or reach for him is actually an interpretation; it’s not stated within scripture that she did.) “Do not hold on to me” feels like a comment to reinforce this path of self-emptying love.
Noli me tangere is Christ’s reminder to Mary that there’s no need to reach for his physical form. He’s not outside her, appearing before her in the gardens by the empty tomb. He’s still where he has always been, and will never leave. Inside the walls of her mystical heart.
Noli me tangere, beloved. There is no need to touch me, to cling to me, to hold on to my physical form. I am with you, from within you.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven. Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us. There is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom of Jesus
Saint Paul explains this principle by way of his beautiful hymn in Philippians 2:6-11, prefacing his comments by saying, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”:
Though his state was that of God,
yet he did not deem equality with God
something he should cling to.
Rather he emptied himself,
and assuming the state of a slave,
he was born in human likeness….
The phrase “emptied himself” in line 4 is the English translation of the Greek verb kenosein, which is where the word kenosis comes from. In context, you’ll see exactly what it means: it’s the opposite of the word “cling” in line 3. Jesus is practicing gentle release. And he continues to practice it in every moment of his life, as the next verse of the hymn makes clear:
He being known as one of us
humbled himself obedient unto death,
even death on a cross.
How beautifully simple — the path of Jesus hidden right there in plain sight! While some Christians are still reluctant to think of Jesus as teaching a path (isn’t it enough simply to be the Son of God?), in fact, the Gospels themselves make clear that he is specifically inviting us to this journey and modeling how to do it. Once you see this, it’s the touchstone throughout all his teaching: Let go! Don’t cling! Don’t hoard! Don’t assert your importance! Don’t fret. “Do not be afraid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” (Luke 12:32).
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer
Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection by Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov
As the Gospel of Mary Magdalene makes clear, whether this encounter takes the form of a vision, an intuition, or a physical reunion, the real meeting ground is in the imaginal.
Imaginal does not mean “imaginary” — that is, fictitious or subjective. It means the realm in which the images — the eternal prototypes — reveal themselves in their full authenticity.
The fine points of this cosmology may seem complicated. But the important thing to keep in mind, from the point of view of this teaching, is that Mary meets him in an actual place — in “a reality that is neither the fruit of her projections nor some need to be filled with what remains of Yeshua in her memory.” It is both physically and spiritually “objective” — valid and truthful. Or so it would be perceived, at least, by “those with ears to hear.”
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
We talk of his “coming again” only in terms of a final judgment or a deathbed encounter. For the most part, our Christian path encourages us to “meet” him in the sacraments, to live ethically in this world, and to await a mystical reunion in the next.
But that is not what Jesus himself proclaims, or what the earliest Christians experienced. They experienced Jesus as present: alive, palpable, vibrantly connected; their experience was that the walls between the realms are paper thin and that our embodiment is no obstacle to the full and intimate participation in relationship with him here and now.
The kingdom of heaven is not later, it is lighter:
it exists right here, right beneath our noses, in a more subtle but expansive presence that is ours the moment we move beyond our egoically generated space-time continuum (what Jesus calls “the world”) and directly encounter the Source. From this imaginal plane of reality, reality floods back into our own world and fills us with grace, presence, and creativity. Here we discover that God is not only for us, but with us.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
“What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside this body.
You must awaken while in this body, for everything exists in it:
Resurrect in this life.”
Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women.
Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.
Mary responded, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you.”
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
What has been hidden from us
has been hidden within us.
What Mary reveals to the other disciples
that had been hidden from them
is this direct connection
to the spiritual world
we all contain.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
The reason Mary Magdalene became Jesus’s lineage bearer
was not because she was his girlfriend or wife,
but because she walked the talk. She mastered the teaching.
Cynthia Bourgeault
Magdalena by Mateo Cerezo
“A person does not see with the soul or with the spirit. Rather the nous, which exists between these two, sees the vision…”
Nous in Greek means the eye of the heart. It’s the vision, or perception of the soul.
If how we see, truly see, is not with eyesight, but with a vision, a form of spiritual perception that allows us to know what’s real, what’s lasting, what’s actually true, if this comes from within us; then no one has power over us.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Caravaggio
The nous is a property of the heart, not the mind. It is sometimes called “the eye of the heart” — a kind of mystical intertidal zone in which divine spirit and human spirit are completely interpenetrating.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
According to Mary’s gospel, seven is the number of stages we need to go through, or powers we need to confront within ourselves, to reach a clarity or singularity of heart that lets us see past the ego of our own little lives to what’s more real, and lasting, and infinite, and already here, within us.
Darkness. Craving. Ignorance. Craving for Death. Enslavement to the Physical Body. The False Peace of the Flesh. The Compulsion of Rage.
For me, these seven powers in Mary’s gospel serve as the template of what it means to be human.
It’s like being handed a road map for the inner terrain. Here are the seven routes the ego can (and most likely will) take while you’re embodied. Here are the places as human beings we get stuck. These are the climates, the states of mind that can compel us to act in ways that are not indicative of who we really are. These are the powers that can silence us from within.
The point of Mary’s gospel is not to suggest that we need to become someone else, someone “better.” There isn’t this om-vibrating version of yourself that you figure out how to be. It’s about acquiring a vision that allows us to see what has always been here, within us.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
The restitution of the true character of Miriam of Magdala as a companion of Yeshua of Nazareth can help men and women today realize their potential of anthropos, their full humanity, which is both flesh and spirit, both human and divine.
Jean-Yves Leloup
“When you are able
to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the higher like the lower,
so that a man is no longer male
and a woman, female
but male and female
become a single whole;
when you are able to fashion
an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand,
or foot for a foot,
making one image supercede another
— then you will enter the kingdom.”
The Gospel of Thomas
The imperative in Mary’s gospel is to become “the child of true humanity,” which means fully human and fully divine. It means becoming fully conscious of the eternal, unbounded soul while here in this tethered, limited human form. And this translates to me as trying (and faltering) and trying again to cultivate this love inside us. It means doing all we can to be the presence of love.
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
“Aquire my peace within yourselves. Be on guard so that no one deceives you by saying, ‘Look over here!’ or ‘Look over there!’ For the child of true Humanity exists within you. Follow it! Those who search for it will find it. ”
The Risen Lord is indeed risen. Present, intimate, creative, “closer than your own heartbeat,” accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy. The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from any one or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you live and move and have your being. This is the message that Mary Magdalene has perennially to bring. This is the message we most need to hear.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene