Something begins to unravel for her. Or something that had always existed within her suddenly races to the surface, and in those three days her life is transformed. Her fiancé begs her to come away from the window. He tells her that she should be ashamed for directing her love away from him. He reminds her of her duty, of the law. And he enlists her mother, who begs for her to return to them as well. But Thecla remains. And even more, she begins to want to meet Paul and to leave the life that had been expected of her for a life she now feels is authentically her own.
Her fiancé reports Paul to the governor, calling him a magician, attributing him with the powers to persuade young women not to marry. The governor has Paul arrested and sent to jail. Thecla leaves her house in the middle of the night to go see him. She gives her bracelets to the prison gatekeeper as admission, and he lets her in. She gives an ornate mirror to the guard at the cell door, easily discarding the remnants of her old life. He lets her in as well. Then she goes to Paul and sits at his feet.
The next day, word gets out that Thecla had been to the prison to see Paul. Her fiancé is beyond outrage. Thecla is his! She is his possession. Thecla’s mother agrees and screams for her punishment. Her own mother suggests that she is burned at the stake for breaking the law of her betrothal, for going her own way, for following her fiery, young heart.
The governor has Paul whipped and thrown out of town. But to teach a lesson, he has Thecla stripped and binds her body to the stake.
The pyre is lit. And I’ve always imagined that she was visibly trembling. But that her resolve comes from a place within her, and it gives her this courage that reminds her of who she is, of what she’s capable of. Just as the flames are beginning to reach her, Thecla makes the sign of the cross and a sudden thundercloud covers her and all the spectators. Rain pours down onto the fire that was meant to take her life. And she is saved. She has saved herself.
Thecla finds a robe to wear, a robe that was more commonly worn by men, and sets off in Paul’s footsteps to catch up with him. A child finds her in the market of a nearby town, a child who knows where Paul can be found.
Thecla is led back to where he had been waiting for her, in deep prayer, not knowing if she had lived or died. She greets him and informs him that she will cut her hair and follow him wherever he is led. He’s flattered, I’m sure, but also concerned. Thecla, it seems, was extraordinarily beautiful. So, he voices his fears that Thecla will only run into more trials as an unmarried young woman in this forbidden religion called Christianity.
She reassures him, “Only give me the seal of Christ and no trial will touch me.” She wanted baptism, she wanted confirmation from him, her elder, that she was ready and even maybe worthy of being baptized. Paul responds, “Be patient.” So she listens, as patiently as love does. And she remains with him at his side.
Their ministry leads them to Antioch (an area that the Romans referred to as Asia Minor, which was an epic portion of the entire Mediterranean). They are walking down the crowded streets in the center of town when the president of Syria, Alexander, notices Thecla and decides he must have her. Right there, as his own. First, he pleads with Paul and offers him bribes of money and power, hoping to appeal to Paul’s greed. Paul pretends that he doesn’t know Thecla. He essentially disowns Thecla right there for everyone to see. She yells out, wise and empowered teen that she is, and insists that Alexander not violate her.
Alexander, being a president rife with power, goes for it anyway, and tries to take her right there in the street. Thecla won’t have it. She rips his crown from his head and tears his garments, drawing attention to his actions and, subsequently, shame from onlookers. Again, Thecla is saved. She has saved herself.
She’s brought before a court to judge her actions and is sentenced to death in the stadium. Thecla, again, is stripped and her hands are bound. She’s led out into the stadium to face her fate. She is forced to wear one word, which is the word that encapsulates how she has been charged: sacrilege. She is wearing the word sacrilege, standing naked in the center of a packed stadium as the crowd cheers on the arrival of the wild beasts that are meant to take her down.
A ferocious lion approaches her. I’ve often imagined the look of love she must have given it. Courage coming face-to-face with courage; the depth of recognition that must have been there. Supposedly, the lioness stopped charging at Thecla and instead lay down at her feet.
Frustrated, the officials send out more wild animals to attack her, but the lioness has now become Thecla’s protectress. And she mauls each next beast that tries to harm her. Eventually, the lioness is killed. But the crowd has begun to turn.
The women in the crowd begin to scream, “Unholy judgment.” They start to proclaim Thecla’s innocence and to voice the true sacrilege, which is to put such love to death.
In the stadium with Thecla is a pit of water filled with wild sea lions. As more beasts enter the stadium and charge at her, Thecla declares, “In the name of Jesus Christ I baptize myself.” As she enters the water, a cloud of fire suddenly surrounds her so that she can’t be touched. And for a third and final time, Thecla saves herself.
The women in the crowd now recognize who she is, or maybe they recognize themselves in her. This is the part in her story that I love the most. It’s the part that gives me the most hope—when the women in the crowd no longer see her as separate from them. And so, they refuse to let her be harmed.
Together they throw rose petals, nard, cinnamon, and cardamom into the arena below where she is standing. And the intoxicating perfume that the roses and spices create lulls the beasts into a stupor, and they all lie down and fall asleep.
Then the scripture reads, “All the women cried out in a loud voice, as if from one mouth,” praising Thecla’s courage. In saving herself, Thecla has unified the force of love in all the women around her. In freeing herself, she has freed them.
This story comes from one of the earliest Christian scriptures that has ever been found. It’s titled The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Scholars know that it was widely read because so many copies have been recovered. But in the late 2nd century, an early Christian leader and theologian named Tertullian condemned this scripture because it implied that women had the spiritual authority to lead communities and to baptize.
The scripture ends by relating that Thecla healed many, that her ministry lasted until she died at the ripe old age of 90, and that she’s buried supposedly right near Paul.
I think the most threatening aspect of Thecla’s story is that she frees herself from any illusions that power resides outside of her.
The Thecla who was to be married off, the Thecla from a prominent family with the weight of her mother’s expectations, the girl who was bound by the law to become a wife and held no earthly rights to follow the dictates, the call of something inside her, she died during those three days and nights when she refused to leave her window and the sound of Paul’s voice. She began to move of her own volition. She began to go against expectations of a girl, considered the inferior sex in her time. She began to do what her heart was telling her to do. And this was the sacrilege to those in power. That she refused to obey or validate any authority outside of her. Even, and ultimately, Paul’s.
She baptized herself because she realized she could. She realized that all along within her she contained the power to save herself.
And so she did.
The Passion of Saint Perpetua
Matter gave birth to a passion which has no Image because it derives from what is contrary to nature. A disturbing confusion then occurred in the whole body.
That is why I told you,
“Become content at heart, while also remaining discontent and disobedient; indeed, become contented and agreeable only in the presence of that other Image of nature.”
Anyone with two ears capable of hearing should listen!
— MARY 3:10–14
Vibia Perpetua had just recently given birth. Her prison guards allowed her to nurse her son whil
e she awaited sentencing. And perhaps because she was a noblewoman from the uppermost class in Roman society, they also allowed her some amenities: a pen, ink, and papyrus. This is how we know so much about her. Her prison diary from 203, later referred to as The Passion of Saint Perpetua, is considered one of the earliest Christian writings we have. Its emotion, its beauty, and its bravery articulate the vision of a form of faith more radical than what Christianity would become even a century later.
She was 22 years old. She was a daughter to her father, a wife to her husband, and a mother to her newborn son. But none of these positions as a woman mattered more to her than the truth that she was a Christian, and this is why Perpetua was in prison.
Felicitas, a slave who was eight months pregnant, was imprisoned with her. I’ve always imagined that they comforted and supported each other, since now, they were no longer separate. They were no longer defined by Roman’s strict hierarchical structures as a free woman and a slave. They were sisters, equals. And this is what made them so dangerous.
At this time in ancient Carthage, in Roman-occupied North Africa, at the start of the 3rd century, converting to Christianity was a crime punishable by death. And this was primarily because Christian beliefs turned the Roman structure of power and authority on its head.
Christianity’s premise, that we are all equal in the eyes of god, or the Good, in Mary’s gospel, leveled the fervently held beliefs in society that were based on sex, race, property, wealth, and citizenship. Women were defined by their social status as daughters, wives, and mothers. And women, no matter their social standing, were considered property with as little rights as a slave.
The emperor could have no other rival, not even god. So, to honor and celebrate Emperor Septimus Severus’s birthday, several young catechumens, Christian converts under instruction in their faith before baptism, were rounded up and held captive. The Christians-in-training had two choices: renounce their faith or be thrown into the arena for public execution.
Perpetua’s father visited her several times before her sentencing to plead with her to remember her fidelity to him as his daughter, to remember her place in the order of things.
“My father,” she explains in her diary, “because of his love for me, wanted to change my mind and shake my resolve.”
During one of these visits, she asks him, “Father, do you see this vase here? Could it be called by any other name than what it is?”
“No,” he replied.
“Well, neither can I be called by anything other than what I am, a Christian.”
When Christ says at the end of this passage, from Mary 3:14, “Anyone with two ears capable of hearing should listen!” he isn’t, of course, referring to our actual ears or the capacity to hear sounds. He’s referring to an ability to “hear” or understand the message within the words.
This is what I “hear” when I read this passage.
“Matter gave birth to a passion,” which for me means the ego. The ego (this passion that matter, our body, gives birth to) has no real image, or identity. Image, here, is what’s lasting and eternal. The ego will die when matter dies, so it is contrary to this more unconditional aspect of our self, or soul: our image.
This image, as we’ll go deeper into further on in Mary’s gospel, resides in the heart. The command, “Become content at heart,” is to say, merge with the image, become more identified with the image of the true self rather than the ego, which will pass away when the body does. Remain discontent, and disobedient with the ego, not only our own, but also others. Don’t let the rules, projections, and expectations of a society that doesn’t see your true image define you. Only become content and agreeable with the image of yourself that’s free from the limits of the ego. Only the soul will satisfy you and be able to define the nature of who you really are.
Perpetua never wavered. She had become content at heart. She knew she would never renounce her faith. She prayed, though, for a dream on how to face the fast-approaching date of her sentencing. She writes in her journal of a golden ladder she climbed in a dream that extended up into heaven. The dream had come to her as an answered prayer. At the base of it was a ferocious dragon. And on either side of the ladder, just an inch to the left and right of each rung, there were all kinds of deadly weapons.
She stepped on the dragon’s head to climb the ladder and then she ascended carefully to avoid the man-made instruments of combat and war. She made it to heaven in the dream, and this emboldened her as she stood trial and confessed that she was a Christian.
She also had a dream of fighting an Egyptian solider in the arena. She watched as her body morphed from being female to suddenly being male, naked, and oiled up for battle. She succeeded in this dream as well.
And so, when she was led out into the arena, stripped naked, and standing beside her sister Christian, Felicitas, it is said that she screamed out confidently to the crowd, again and again, “Love one another.” Discontent and disobedient until her last breath, to remain content at heart.
Grandma Betty’s Lightbulb Eyes
When the Blessed One had said these things, he greeted them all. “Peace be with you!” He said. “Acquire my peace within yourselves!”
— MARY 4:1–2
My grandmother, Elizabeth, who believed in beer and angels in equal measure, was one of the first Christians I ever met. What I mean is, knowing her, hearing what Jesus meant to her, what she heard when she read scripture, helped me understand that it wasn’t the bible that terrified me, it was the way it has been interpreted.
She was a presence of love to everyone she encountered, not just to other Christians. She exuded this profound acceptance, this beautiful refusal to ever judge. There was no hidden agenda, no guilt, or coercion when she mentioned a certain passage from scripture, or quoted a psalm.
I woke up early one morning when I was home from college, when I was wracked with insomnia, when the early tremors of a full-blown anxiety disorder were just starting to bloom. I was so profoundly lost. No, that isn’t it. I mean, that’s the phrase we use for that stage of life, that confusing not-a-kid-and-not-quite-an-adult mess. But it’s not what I was really feeling.
I knew exactly who I was. And I knew exactly what I had lost. There was a piece of me that felt missing. An elusive, ephemeral, and yet essential piece of me. Without it, I felt like I was watching my life happen. I was witnessing it, but I wasn’t really present in it. I was perpetually caught up in my own thoughts. I was locked in the past or feeling dread about the future.
That morning, Grandma Betty was standing by the kitchen window holding a cup of coffee. Her hand shook as she lifted the cup slowly to her lips. She saw me and smiled her quiet, relaxed smile. It was a smile that wasn’t forced. It didn’t ask me to smile back. It seemed to start from somewhere inside her. As if what I saw on her face was just the tip of the iceberg. She was so serene. So content. And in comparison, I felt like this very tired and very tiny hurricane.
She wasn’t alone, not ever. That’s what it felt like to me, when I was around her. I felt like I was in the company of way more than just her. As if I was walking in on something, a meeting, a dialogue, a love affair. Even as she stood there by herself in her little flannel nightgown that went clear up to her neck, smiling out at a bleak, depressing, gray December that only Cleveland can muster. She was present to a presence that resided within her, a presence that seemed to never leave her. A presence that filled her with a love that lit up her face, and made her eyes beam as if two candles were blazing behind them.
We’d become pen pals when I left for college, and we continued corresponding years later when I began my first of ultimately three pilgrimages in search of that light she seemed to innately possess. I studied with theologians, Old and New Testament scholars. But somehow for me, Grandma Betty was always the ultimate authority when it came to scripture. I guess because she was living proof that she had read between the lines, or digested the words in a way that had set her free. And many, many of th
e most acclaimed theologians didn’t have Grandma Betty’s lightbulb eyes. They didn’t possess the peace that inhaled and exhaled through her.
When Christ says, “Acquire my peace within yourselves!” in the Gospel of Mary, I hear this as a directive to focus not on worshipping him but on becoming like him. To not distance him and distinguish him as other than us, but rather see him as an example of who we all have the potential to become. We can acquire his peace within ourselves. Or, at least, Betty proved to me it was possible.
After Grandma Betty passed, my mom gave me one of the many letters she had kept from our correspondences over the years. It was worn at the edges and smelled like her. My handwriting is a close cousin to hieroglyphs. She had read the letter so carefully that she marked all the words she had worked hard to figure out in pencil above my red ink. I sobbed when I saw this. I could feel her soft gaze in the slow, careful attention she gave to my every sentiment. She had been my witness. My secret, extraordinary minister, to help me sort out why I seemed to love Christ and yet cringe so often in church.
What I learned at divinity school, and later, seminary, is that there was a story about Jesus that won out. There was a version of Christ that was created in the 4th century. Emperor Constantine in 313, by a single edict, converted Christianity from this struggling, persecuted, and forbidden religion—the one Perpetua died for—to a state religion redefined by men.
The process of compiling the current version of the bible, the one you would find, say, in the bedside table of a hotel room, was guided by the need for a unified version of Christianity. In the wake of Christ, there were many “Christianities,” there were many communities with varying ideas about what or who had just walked the earth. And beyond the metaphysics of what Christ’s existence might subsequently mean, there was also the more practical issue of authority. Who would have the authority to tell the story?
Mary Magdalene Revealed Page 5