Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  THE FIRST POWER: DARKNESS

  What We Have Forgotten

  If I could start over, from the beginning, I would start with the most invisible, the threads in the web of our ecosystem that are rarely named, much less revered. I would start by listing the names of the trees, the flowers, the seeds that carry the light that give us life, because this is what we have forgotten. This is where our reverence has not yet reached.

  I would start with frankincense and myrrh, with the Boswellia and Commiphora trees that made them. I would start with the honeybee and the sweet essential nectar it feeds on. I would start first with what goes unnoticed, with what we haven’t realized is the most sacred among us.

  I would start with the names of everyone we’ve excluded, of the street children, of the millions slowly starving to death in plain daylight. I would start with the outsiders, the outcasts. I would start with every one of us who thinks we aren’t worthy of love just as we are. I would say each of their names, each of our names, who have been made into objects, who have been violated, who have had to survive by leaving the body altogether.

  I would list the names of all the mothers who have known the unspeakable joy of gradually knitting life within her, of bringing life from the dark into the light. The mothers who have no idea where their heart is anymore, now that it’s also outside of them. The mothers who remind us, no matter who we are, that our first country was a woman’s body, and our first element was water, and that our first reality was darkness.

  If I could write the beginning, it wouldn’t be in the light. It would be in the womb, in the dark, in a cave, in an egg. It would be to name all that has been left out of what’s holy. The blood, the body. Nothing real or imagined has ever happened without it.

  If I could start again, I would install an altar within me. I would place the most sacred object inside it: my own heart. If I could start again, I would know that the only cathedral I’ve ever needed to find, to enter, to return to again and again, is this humble red hermitage, this mystical space that holds all the answers. I would begin again inside my heart. And I would live this way. Speaking from it.

  If I could start all over, I would begin with her. I would list all of their names first as an introduction, a forgotten lineage: Inanna, Enheduanna, Isis, Quan Yin, Miao Shan, Mother Mary, Sarah-La-Kali, Thecla, Perpetua, Joan of Arc, Marguerite Porete.

  I would start with the other, hidden half of the story, the voices that were buried in deserts, and caves, the ones that were burned at the stake. The ones that were so threatening because hearing their voices would mean letting our love reach where it has never been before; to all of us, to all of creation, to the least among us, to the trees and the flowers, to the honeybee that feeds them, to the frankincense and myrrh, to the bark and the dirt, to the land itself where the word was first spoken.

  If I could begin again, it would be with her love, because this is what has been forgotten. This is what we need most to remember. That she could hear him, meet him, from within her own heart. That she had so much to teach us—that her love for him taught her. I would start with her love because this was the bridge. This is the bridge. This is how we move the story of what it means to be human forward. We hear from her, we hear from her about what her love made possible.

  If I could start again, it would be in the darkness. And in the darkness, all we would see is a hand suddenly extending out toward us. And the invitation would be terrifying. Seeing this hand would compel our heart to start beating, rapidly, audibly. The fear comes from feeling out of control. We want to leave and we want to stay in equal measure. We want to know what might happen next and for everything to remain exactly the same. Taking this hand is a choice to surrender. Surrendering it all. All of the fear. The hurt. The anger. And the ego that created it.

  If I could start again, I would start with Mary Magdalene, because she is the one who remembers him. The Christ I know by heart.

  The Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet

  Then Peter said to him, “You have been explaining every topic to us; tell us one other thing. What is the sin of the world?” The Savior replied, “There is no such thing as sin.”

  — MARY 3:1–3

  I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first went to church as a little girl. Yes, I do. I was expecting the outside to be like the inside. I wanted the great big, unsayable love I felt within me to be seen or witnessed outside of me. Back then before I felt separated from it, there was this wide expanse of love inside me, like my own private ocean.

  And so, I guess I was expecting for church to be this place where everyone walks around and greets each other, from one ocean to another, their innermost self, right there on the surface, their inner world rising up from the depths for a breath of fresh air. A place where we can hang our masks at the door, and just help each other be human. A place that reminded me how to be here in this world while not forgetting the part of me that is not of it.

  But that wasn’t what it was like.

  I’m not a Christian. Though I’ve baptized myself, many times. Like the fiery Turkish prophetess from the 1st century, Thecla, who was denied by Paul when she told him that she was ready to be baptized. She said to him, “Only give me the seal of Christ and no trial will touch me.” But he didn’t think she was ready. He told her to be patient. Thecla knew her own heart. (Which is why I love her.) And instead, she cut her hair short and baptized herself.

  I didn’t hear about Thecla until I was a young adult in seminary, where I learned that The Acts of Paul and Thecla date back to 70 A.D., which makes it as ancient as any of the gospels in the New Testament. This was the beginning of my education, or my re-education, that what I was searching for was within Christianity but not of it. Thecla wasn’t remembered as the first prophetess. Her story didn’t set the precedent for the voice of women in the church hierarchy. It was far too filled with a truth we weren’t ready for back then. Because for Thecla, salvation was something she found within her.

  But more about her later.

  The baptisms in my life, which are more accurately just ecstatic skinny-dips, have come as markers when I felt like I was expressing more faithfully what’s within me; when I’m no longer denying or silencing this quiet, unassuming voice inside me.

  I’m not a Christian. But I find myself having to make that distinction often. Or that I need to make certain no one mistakes me as one. I wasn’t raised religious, I was raised feminist.

  My great-grandmother, Big Margie (who was tiny but had a presence so large it seemed to enter the room before she did), was a suffragette. She would whisper crazy comments to me when I sat on her lap, like, “It’s fine if you want to become a wife and a mother, just make sure you get paid for it.”

  My mom, Margie, marched for the Civil Rights Act, and for the Equal Rights Amendment, and taught me to protest for women’s rights when Roe vs. Wade was in danger of being overturned. I was 13 and my little sister was just a towheaded three-year-old. Her Planned Parenthood t-shirt came down to her knees.

  I was holding her hand when an elderly woman approached me, clutching a pro-life poster with an iron grip. She came right up to me, until we were awkwardly chest-to-chest. She hated me. I felt it. It was visceral. I mean, she hated who she thought I was. She was so angry as she spoke that small beads of spit landed on my face.

  She said, “How many will be enough for you?” I had no idea what she was asking me. I wasn’t there because I thought I would ever have an abortion myself. I was there because I knew that if anything was holy, it was the relationship between myself and my own body. It was too intimate for anyone outside of me to ever shame or control.

  I’ve always felt I would have to rewrite the history of Christianity to officially become a part of it. No, I would have to turn back the globe like Superman when Lois Lane dies, and make certain they get the message straight from the start. Or the message as I have come to believe in it; that we are not inherently sinful, or unworthy in any way, and that w
e shouldn’t feel shame for how human we are, or how often we break, lose faith, and make wildly misguided mistakes.

  When I went to church for the first time as a little girl and read the bible, I broke out in hives. I couldn’t reconcile the feminism I had been raised in with the idea that god was a Father, and that salvation only came through his son, Jesus, and therefore men held this exclusive right (being the same sex as the Father) to speak on behalf of him.

  The body never lies. And I got a blaringly clear message written in red rashes across my skin that this was a system of belief that doesn’t match what exists within me. So, I left the church. Physically. I marched out of the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland. But the turmoil, the anger, as well as the fierce love, and longing—it went right along with me.

  I spent my years at seminary searching through the church’s history for when women were silenced, for how the Pope happened, and all those male cardinals in red, and why a Popess could not even be imagined.

  I searched for the stories and the voices that had been edited out or, in the case of Mary Magdalene’s gospel, torn apart and buried.

  I remember the first time I led a retreat about the Gospel of Mary and started with this passage, “There is no such thing as sin.” We were sitting in a circle, so I could see the immediate response—every face lit up with equal amounts of shock and excitement.

  There is nothing inherently sinful about being human, I explained. There’s nothing sinful about the body, or sex, or sexuality. Being human isn’t a punishment, or something we need to endure, or transcend. Being human is the whole point.

  We just also don’t want to forget, or miss the mark, which is how the word for sin translates from the Greek, by mistaking ourselves (and others) as only this body. We are this body, yes, and all the raging humanity it demands. And also, we are this soul. Both.

  One of the women in the circle, Ger, was in tears. I knew from what she had shared during the retreat that she was from Ireland, raised religious, and that she had been sexually abused as a child. The warmth radiating from her made me fall madly in love. I’ll never forget that joy beaming out of her eyes, through her tears, like headlights switched to high beams.

  And I can’t remember if she said this at that retreat or later, when she joined my spiritual community, the REDLADIES, but it struck me because it wasn’t what I had intended when I began to talk about Mary’s gospel. I just wanted to share and discuss Mary Magdalene’s teachings. But she said, “You’ve reminded me of the Christ I knew before I went to church.”

  For me, finding Mary Magdalene’s voice, her gospel, was like finally attending that church I had imagined church would be like as a little girl, a place where we’re not trying to be better than anyone else, or to be better than who we are in that moment. Everyone, no matter who we are, and everything, is included, especially the body.

  I’m not a Christian. But I recently came across a quote from the English philosopher and lay theologian G. K. Chesterton that sums up what I have come to believe: “Christianity isn’t a failure; it just hasn’t been tried yet.”

  So, I’m not a Christian, or if I am, it’s a Christianity that we haven’t tried yet, one that includes Mary Magdalene. It’s the Christianity that existed before the church. It’s the church whose doors are ripped off at the hinges. It’s the Christianity that includes all that has been left out.

  How a Feminist Sees an Angel

  The Savior replied, “There is no such thing as sin; rather you yourselves are what produces sin when you act in accordance with the nature of adultery, which is called ‘sin.’

  For this reason, the Good came among you, pursuing (the good) which belongs to every nature.”

  — MARY 3:3–5

  There’s a legend that Mary Magdalene was lifted up seven times a day by the angels. She lived in a cave in the South of France, where she had escaped persecution after her brother Lazarus was beheaded farther south in Marseilles. Supposedly, she had been preaching, ministering there in France in the years following Christ’s crucifixion. And in the last 30 years of her life, she remained in this cave, known as La Sainte Baume, where angels gathered her up and transported her to the peaks of the mountain range, to the rarefied air where their messages could be heard more clearly.

  In the artistic depictions of this legend, Mary Magdalene is held literally, physically, by a bevy of angels. Wings surround her body, and her hands are pressed to her heart with her gaze directed even farther upward. For example, in Italian Renaissance artist Giotto di Bondone’s painting of this legend, Mary Magdalene’s body is covered only by her long red hair and lifted up by four angels, her hands pressed together in prayer.

  I think Mary was lifted seven times a day by the angels. But I also think we’ve deeply misunderstood what this scene represents. If we can find our way back to this legend in Mary Magdalene’s story, seeing with a new sense, perceiving with the eye of heart, we’ll remember a truth so many of us have forgotten.

  We’ll remember that this scene isn’t unique to Mary Magdalene. It’s the vision of a path that’s possible for all of us. We’ll remember that this artistic rendering of Mary Magdalene is actually a depiction of an inner transformation, of the very real and formidable terrain we can cross in order to know who we really are. And we’ll remember that an angel is simply a thought that lifts us up from out of ourselves, from out of those cages the ego would prefer for us to remain within.

  If this is all you read, if you put down this book at the end of this sentence, know that this is the most important message of Mary’s gospel: we are inherently good.

  Now, if you’re still with me, that goodness can never be lost. We can feel lost to it. But it is woven into the fabric of who we are; it’s our nature. Goodness. And the word that for me describes this experience, of knowing this inherent goodness, is soul.

  The word soul to me describes that eternal aspect of our being; an aspect that allows us to feel loved, and to experience that we are love. And that our humanity is not intrinsically sinful, or shameful. This human body is the soul’s chance to be here.

  When I see a painting of winged beings decked in Greek togas or naked with golden halos above their heads lifting up Mary Magdalene, I see this as a symbolic depiction of an inner transformation. I see it as an artistic expression of a very intimate moment when Mary chooses love from within her.

  These angels lifting her up in so many of these paintings to me are actually meeting her in her heart, taking her from out of the despair, or lack of forgiveness, or the envy that’s oppressing her, and bringing her back again to the good, to god. Angels are the thoughts, the memory, the sensation of love. They are whatever comes and shifts us from being lost within ourselves, to seeing again, not with the ego, but with the eye of the heart.

  Sin in Mary’s gospel is not about a long list of moral or religious laws; it’s not about wrong action. Sin is simply forgetting the truth and reality of the soul—and then acting from that forgetful state. The body then, the human body, isn’t innately sinful. “Sin” is when we believe we are only this body, these insatiable needs, these desires and fears the ego conjures. “Sin” is an “adultery,” or an illegitimate mixing, a mistaking of the ego for the true self, rather than remembering that the true self is the soul.

  The soul lives in the silence, the stillness we have to meet with inside us. (Which can make it hard to hear, and to find.) Words are the ego’s favorite outfits. Words are how the ego breathes and fuels the flames of thoughts that start replaying inside us from the second we wake up. Our capacity to see the truth that we are sinless, that we are good, has nothing to do with the eyes.

  So, why four angels, and why seven times a day?

  I think perceiving the good takes practice. And I think we need help getting to that place above the mountains, deep within the heart, that reminds us of what’s good. Especially in a world, or within a heart, that has been shattered and has long since fallen apart.

  Luke 8:1–3 i
s the first passage in the New Testament when we hear Mary Magdalene’s name. This is the passage I’ve mentioned that claims she was healed of seven demons. (But that, for me, confirms her mastery of the seven powers she describes in her gospel.)

  Pope Gregory’s homily 33 with its interpretation of Mary as the prostitute took off like the hottest possible gossip, as we can imagine, and still reigns as truth today. According to Harvard scholar Dr. Karen King, the reason for the popularity of the Pope’s view of Mary (and why it has held the collective imagination for nearly two millennia) is because it served the early church fathers: “this fiction solved two problems at once by undermining both the teachings associated with Mary and women’s capacity to take on leadership roles.”5

  And this is what’s still at stake with the vision of Mary; from the 1st century to the 21st century, women’s spiritual authority within the church has been hard won, opposed, or flat-out rejected.

  The last time Mary is mentioned in the New Testament is in John 20, when Christ rises from the empty tomb to her, to say her name. She is the one with the eyes that can perceive him.

  Hermeneutics. This is a word that changed everything for me in divinity school and seminary. It means, in theology, the lens you use in order to “read” or interpret scripture. The theological term for interpreting scripture is exegesis. You use a certain hermeneutical or interpretive lens then every time you translate a piece of scripture. We all do. Pope Gregory did.

  When I read scripture, I interpret it with feminist hermeneutics. I am reading the text from the perspective that we are all equally divine, and human.

  What do I mean by feminist?

  There’s this quote I came across as a budding teen feminist by poet and self-professed “warrior” Audre Lorde that made this holy fire race through me as I read it: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even if her shackles are very different from my own.” Feminism here isn’t real, or without a divisive agenda, unless it refers to all women.