feasting with st. mary magdalene...

Today is the Feast Day of St. Mary Magdalene. There is a soft but insistent rain falling on our Berkshire hills. I can't help but smile thinking that for us Mary is "ringing out here handkerchief," as an old English legend puts it, "in preparation for joining the feast of St. James on July 25." Mary loves to feast. She is equally at home, however, with fasting, too as she embodies a spirituality that is fully grounded and at peace with mind, body, and spirit. As Cynthia Bourgeault teaches: in the gospel according to Mary Magdalene, she sees with her heart.

In the Near East, the heart is not the seat of one's personal emotional life, but an organ of spiritual perception... the heart is primarily an instrument of sight - or insight - "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." Its purpose is to navigate along the vertical axis and stay in alignment with the image of one's true nature. (The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, p. 51)

As best as anyone can interpret, the gospel according to Mary Magdalene takes place "in temporal history sometime between Jesus' resurrection and ascension - that is... it is a version of the 'upper room' appearances of Jesus in John and Luke... Jesus gathers his students around him once again to reflect on the meaning of his passage through death and to leave them final instructions and encouragement before his departure in physical form." (p. 47) After Jesus encourages his followers - men and women - not to lay down any rules for others beyond what he has already shared (the commandment to love one another as he loved them by washing their feet and to celebrate Eucharist in remembrance of him), Mary begins to teach the disciples saying: "Do not weep and grieve... Do not let your hearts remain in doubt... for he has promised us the grace" to encounter his presence wherever we go for "those who seek him in their hearts will find him." (p. 54) Bourgeault urges us to be clear about what this means:

(Mary's) actual words are, "He has prepared us so that we might become fully human." To become fully human is a modern translation of the words "to become an anthropos" - that is, a completed human being. (p.g 54) 

It is Bourgeault's thesis - and I embrace it - that Magdalene shows us what a mature and healthy disciple of Jesus looks like: she is at home with body and spirit, heaven and earth, fear and joy, celebration and solitude, life, death, resurrection and grace. Not so for the male disciples in the gospel stories: they are wracked by anxiety and guilt. They have betrayed Jesus and gone into hiding. Only Mary stays with Jesus through the passion, into the emptiness and then the resurrection. That the early Church was conflicted over her witness is clear - and we have all been the poorer for it. But to paraphrase Robert Bly when he said, "I was born a Norwegian Lutheran, raised a Norwegian Lutheran and will die a Norwegian Lutheran. But I don't have to be a stupid Norwegian Lutheran!" Same with each and all of us who seek to love Jesus and care for one another in embodied compassion: we were born into institutional traditions of Christianity - Reformed, Anabaptist, Catholic or Orthodox - but we don't have to remain stupid or inert in those traditions. Rather, we can learn from St. Mary to seek balance as we practice "seeing from our heart." In this, we can embrace the wisdom of divine feminine alongside the insights of the sacred masculine.

To that end let me invite you to read a beautiful essay by Lindsay McLaughlin at Friends of Silence (https://friendsof silence.net/blogs/lindsay/tender-things) I read "Love of Tender Things" the first thing this morning and found myself nourished for the whole day. McLaughlin's words speak of living in the balance of pure grace and beauty knowing full well that the world is filled with catastrophes
and perils, too.  

This is the unfair dilemma in which we find ourselves: how to hold the miraculous belonging, to accept the precious, joyous gift of kinship and community, while absorbing the telltale signs of a deeply unwell world and the unpreventable suffering of those we love. I have been thinking about this lately as the outer landscapes we love are more and more subject to the destructive forces of climate change and the inter-landscapes of human relationships have become increasingly disconnected and hurtful.

Here is what I have come to: we cannot and should not take this lying down, cannot and should not crumple into despondency and hopelessness. I recently came across this line from the poem "A Brief for the Defense" by the late American poet Jack Gilbert: "We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil." 

We are not alone in living into this balance: we have allies and friends to keep us connected to gratitude - poets, story-tellers, mentors and wise ones to guide us back on to the path when we inevitably stray - and we have prayer however we understand it. The reflection ends like this: "Call out to the whole divine night for what you love. What you stand for. Earn your name. Be kind, and wild, and disciplined, and absolutely generous. Amen." Indeed, last night a dear friend and colleague posted this prayer that I amplified and amended with a prayer another friend regularly uses (from Mychal Judge) to fit into my morning contemplation:

O God of Grace, God of tenderness, God of presence and awe:
As this day unfolds and opens
Take me where You want me to go;
Let me meet who You want me to meet;
Tell me what You want me to say;
And keep me out of Your way.

Keep my anger from becoming meanness;
Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity;
Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking;
Keep my anger turned toward justice not cruelty
Keep me fiercely kind and remind me that all of this – every bit of it –
is for love.

Grant me wisdom sufficient for this day in the Spirit of Jesus.

Glory be to the Creator + and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen.

With the rain - and my prayers, my friends and my icon - I sensed St. Mary Magdalene encouraging me as I took in McLaughlin's reflection this morning: do not weep and grieve only, but rejoice also as you keep moving towards that sacred balance on the road of becoming an anthropos. I believe, I believe, Lord help my disbelief.