Misunderstanding Mr. Mister
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.”
—THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
I didn’t know what I was receiving, the import of it. How it had set something in motion, like a silent, slow-moving river inside me, that would lead to carving out my own personal Grand Canyon, or illuminating my own private Taj Mahal.
I first heard the prayer of the heart on a silent Buddhist meditation retreat, of all places. This was not long after my clumsy attempt at confronting angry-billboard-man. And it was given to me by a Christian contemplative, the oldest member of our group, who was in her 70s, and who was so shiny and excited about every step of our retreat, even our silent work assignments, like washing the dishes and sweeping the meditation floor.
She was a tiny waif of a thing and yet somehow exuded more energy than the rest of us. I can’t remember her name, but let’s call her Penny. She was always, even in those ridiculously early morning meditation sessions, radiating light. She shined. I had never really seen someone glow before, but she looked like she had just recently fallen madly, deeply in love.
Penny taught me one afternoon about the prayer of the heart. She said she repeats it inside her all the time to the point that she rarely has to think about it. She said it’s like a song that’s constantly playing inside her. She can be thinking about other things all throughout the day, but if she drops into her heart, even for just a moment—there it is—still sounding, still circling back from the end to the start again like a lighthouse in the fog.
Penny had this infectious enthusiasm for what’s next in life. For inviting it in. For being in the awe and wonder of what new experiences might yet be possible. She had lived in a cave with nuns in Tibet, she had traveled on a barge with her husband along the canals of France, and now she was learning about Vipassana meditation practice at a Buddhist center in Barre, Massachusetts. She wasn’t afraid of what’s next; she had her arms wide open to it.
And this is why I loved her. This is why I gravitated toward her during breaks, or tiny windows of time when we were permitted to talk.
Penny first said the prayer in Greek, Kyrie Eleison. Instantly, I heard the lyrics of the chorus to the Mr. Mister song playing as if on a loudspeaker in my mind, the lyrics about the road that must be traveled, through the dark, in the night, to reach a highway in the light.
She explained that these two words in Greek translate as “Lord, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.” I started laughing, which was a bizarre response, but let me explain.
For all these years, I had thought Mr. Mister was singing about his girlfriend Kyrie. Kyrie Eleison. It was a song I freaked out over if I heard it come on the radio as a little girl. I would scream from the back of my mom’s red Volvo station wagon and beg her to turn it up. Then I’d belt out the words to what I thought was a love story about Mr. Mister and Kyrie Eleison, a mysterious and somewhat elusive woman, I imagined, who he hoped would follow him wherever he went.
I explained to Penny how the Greek had been lost on me for all these years. And then I asked her, out of curiosity, why she prayed to Christ. Because I knew for me, at least, I couldn’t imagine begging Christ for mercy. To me it felt like this internalized oppressive idea that a man had to save me, or that I had to be more submissive to be more holy, or that I had to admit some intrinsic aspect of me was lowly, and nearly unforgiveable, so that I had to beg constantly for mercy (to be worthy of it). It felt shitty. And I couldn’t understand how this tiny human glow stick of a woman would choose to set this prayer on automatic replay within her.
Penny said that it isn’t the words she focuses on, it’s how she feels when she repeats them. She said it’s like hitting the reset button on her whole idea of herself. She’s a woman, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a Christian, and all these identities can at times tie her into a solid knot. The prayer of the heart, she said, brings her back to the truth that she’s none of these identities. These are all ideas. Words. Concepts. Expectations. Projections. The prayer of the heart takes her back to the beginning, or to the current of light that weaves through all these changing identities as the one constant among them.
The Three Marys
Love refuses nothing, and takes nothing; it is the highest and vastest freedom. All exists through love.
— THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP
I think that what makes a place sacred is simply the fact that we’ve been called to it. Lisbeth, the artist I collaborated with for The Divine Feminine Oracle, told me the story of a woman named Emma Crawford who moved to the small town of Manitou, Colorado, for a tuberculosis cure in the early 20th century. While there, Emma felt compelled to climb the nearby Red Mountain. Against all medical advice, she climbed the mountain and tied a red handkerchief at the top. She eventually died of TB, but the spirit of her need to climb the mountain became local legend. The mountain was made sacred simply because she had answered its call to climb it.
I remember the considerable strain it seemed to take my roommate in college not to communicate with her facial expressions just how freakish she thought I was as she explained that I had shot up in bed in the middle of the previous night and shouted about a woman with a red cape on the edge of the sea. We weren’t friends before my dead-of-the-night declaration anyway, but it just confirmed for her why this had been the case.
I had no idea what my nocturnal self was talking about. In my courses at college, I was merging my women’s studies with my passion for world religions. My senior thesis was on the Hindu goddess Kali. And though red is her signature color, she wasn’t a cape wearer. So, I wrote it off as the inevitable outbursts of a vivid dreamer, and as solid proof of why I’m meant to live like a hermit in a single dorm room.
A year after graduation, I was standing on the edge of the sea in the South of France in the small fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. I was on a pilgrimage to sacred sites of the divine feminine, and Saintes-Maries had a church with a crypt for a saint named Sarah. Saint Sarah is known to the Romani people as the Queen of the Outsiders, and is celebrated each May 24 in a festival where four horsemen carry her icon from her shrine in the crypt down to the sea.
There are three main legends that surround Saint Sarah and who she might have been. The first is that she was a generous, and kindhearted noblewoman who lived in the South of France collecting alms for the poor. She had a vision that the female saints present at Christ’s crucifixion would arrive on their shores. In approximately the year 42, when the three Marys—Mary Magdalene, Mother Mary, and Mary of Solome—arrived on a “ship without sails,” to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, supposedly Saint Sarah was the first to welcome them with open, and apparently prophetic, arms.
The second legend, referred to as “the golden legend,” because of the book The Golden Legend by Dominican Jacobus Voragine, written in the 13th century, relates that when the three Marys arrived in the 1st century, Sarah had previously been a slave. She was known as “Sarah the Egyptian,” and supposedly possessed healing powers connected to the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis.
The third legend is that Sarah is the child of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. She’s the reason the three Marys were being persecuted and needed to escape to France. The Marys wanted to protect Sarah from the Romans. Sarah then is understood and considered in this legend as the living holy grail, or as the Sang Royale, the bloodline of the union of Mary and Jesus.
All three legends claim that Mary Magdalene came to the South of France escaping persecution after testifying before the court of Tiberius Caesar as a witness to Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. And that she preached as a minister about what it
means to be “a true human being,” anthropos, in Greek, which translates as someone who is fully human and fully divine.
“Fully divine” might sound strangely unattainable or just flat-out not relatable. But here’s how I have come to understand it.
In that region of France, known as the Camargue, there’s a cross that’s associated with Mary Magdalene. It’s called “La Croix de Camargue,” the Cross of the Camargue. It’s also known as the Guardians Cross.
The cross at the top represents faith, the anchor of the local fishermen at the bottom represents hope, and the heart in the middle represents the love of the three Marys who arrived in the Camargue in the wake of Christ.
This love is the love that changes everything.
It’s the love that’s described in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul writes that even if he could speak the language of the angels, but didn’t have this love, he would have nothing. Even if he could know every hidden truth, but didn’t have this love, he would know nothing.
It’s the love that’s kind, never envious or conceited. It’s the love that expands when truth triumphs. The love that holds all things, can handle and face all things. The love that is ever hopeful and ever patient. It is the love that never fails.
And this is what makes it divine.
1 Cor 13:13 reads, “Faith, hope, and love endure—these three, but the greatest of these is love.” What moved me about seeing this cross was the presence of the heart in the center. Because somehow, through the centuries, the focus on love has been obscured and replaced with fear. Just like the story of Mary Magdalene, and her role in the earliest form of Christianity.
She’s there as a love that never failed.
I had no idea before arriving that first time in Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer that it was associated with the legacy of Mary Magdalene. Or at least I didn’t know in a conscious way. But as I was listening to the legends of the three Marys the town was named after, staring at the bright, silky red capes of every hue that are placed around Sarah’s icon, that dream from college came barreling back to me.
And it wasn’t like déjà vu, or a moment of feeling prophetic like Sarah. It was more a feeling like being led to something that gave my life more meaning; or even more, that this was the meaning to my life, to find this life that existed for Mary Magdalene after Christ.
When the tour guide told us about the cave north of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer called La Sainte Baume, the Holy Cave, where Mary supposedly lived out the last 30 years of her life, my heart started leaping around like an erratic monkey in a cage. The only other time it had behaved so insanely was when I was madly in love.
I knew my monkey-heart was telling me something. As if my body was dog-earing this moment for me. As if it was making sure I didn’t miss this glimpse of what’s to come. Her cave, I could hear my body applaud and scream, her cave!
I had always thought of Mary Magdalene’s story ending after witnessing the resurrection. But there was a life for her that began again, right there, where I was standing, in the South of France. A place that had called me to it. And there was a love her story contains, that I was there to find. A love that is “the highest and vastest freedom.” A love I was prepared to dedicate my life to remember.
The Red Thread
Jesus said, “I am the one who comes from what is undivided.”
— THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
I still don’t know exactly what it means, or better said, I don’t know why it means so much. The red thread. I’m wearing it on my left wrist now. I’m not sure if I’ll ever take it off. When I look at it there’s this echo, like a radio frequency, or like those little bars that light up as my laptop searches for an Internet connection. It radiates. It transmits. And deep down, in this place that exists before words or thoughts, I just know what the red thread ties me to.
In Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, the red thread is worn on the left wrist because the left side of the body is considered “feminine.” It’s the receiving side, the side where our anatomical heart beats, and it’s worn there both for protection and to honor the feminine, since this is the aspect of our psychic being that allows us to “receive” spirit, or to know and feel that connection.
In Greek mythology, Ariadne, considered both human and divine, and the consort to the Greek god Dionysus, assisted Theseus when he entered the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur by giving him a red thread. He was able to find his way out of the dark maze because of it.
I’ve also come across a Japanese legend that relates that the red thread has to do with our fate. That we are tied by this red thread to all the people we are destined to meet in order for the soul to evolve. Every encounter, even the most random, was actually already woven for us in a scarlet tapestry before we were born.
The first time I saw the red thread was the last time I met with the shaman. I was doing work with her to recover that piece of myself that felt missing. Though a “piece” doesn’t quite cover it; a missing half better describes it. I knew this other half because of a palpable absence I felt. It was more than loneliness. It felt physical. The absence of this other half was like a phantom limb, like an absence so powerful it becomes a presence. It’s a presence that’s always there, because of the great tall shadow cast by the fact that it isn’t.
The shaman taught me how to have a vision. Or, she taught me how to become aware of the fact that the majority of us have them all throughout the day, whether we’re aware of it or not. She taught me how to begin to see with a different form of perception by going deeply inward, or farther up and further in, as C. S. Lewis describes it in The Chronicles of Narnia.
I’m not sure how others travel in visions, and I get it—if you’ve never had a vision, you’re probably already hovering outside your body just from reading this. It seems like a strange concept. But it’s actually not strange at all. It’s the most natural thing we humans do. We vision. We use our imaginations. What we don’t realize, or what we don’t really get sometimes, is that what we imagine can actually affect and change us. What we envision with our imagination isn’t just our “imagination.”
Between 1913 and 1916, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed a form of meditation that he referred to as “Active Imagination.” This meditation technique served as a bridge between the conscious ego and what Jung described as the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, which includes wisdom and information that the ego may not even understand.
What’s powerful about Active Imagination is that it helps create pathways between what we are consciously aware of and what remains hidden in the unconscious. Jung linked Active Imagination with the process of alchemy, that ancient effort of oneness, or becoming gold. And by gold, I mean, merging with these fragmented or divided parts of the self. Merging the ego and the soul. Alchemy as a process of unifying our sense of self, into a whole. This is what Jung’s The Red Book is all about.
The shaman taught me how to find the world tree, a spiritual motif in almost all religions. I remember the first time I saw it. (I mean inwardly, with my eyes closed.) I was walking through a field, within my heart (stay with me) when I saw it in the distance. It took my breath away. It felt so ancient. It felt like the holiest thing in existence. It felt like seeing a part of me, as if these limbs that were reaching up into heaven were a part of my body and the roots that reached down into the underworld were also coursing through my veins. The psyche, of course, can’t be seen, but this tree felt like the nearest thing to an image of it.
There’s an alchemical dictum that says, “as above, so below.” This was the metaphysical truth I felt that I was encountering in seeing this world tree within me. Everything that happened below in the dark was inherently connected to what happened above, in the light.
The shaman had taught me how to set a strong intention each time I had a vision. I had to ask for the help I needed. “This is how spirit works,” she had said to me with a smile. “Spirit is ethical. You have to ask in order to receive.” She would have me s
tate my intention out loud, which always made me feel self-conscious, because I looked crazy. But I would do it anyway. I trusted her more than I cared about appearing sane.
And once I stopped questioning everything that happened in the vision, once I trusted that what I heard and felt and experienced was real in the sense that it was really the wisdom I needed, then it all came effortlessly to me. My greatest obstacle was believing it could all be this simple; ask for what I need, and receive it from within. Which is also to say, my greatest obstacle was believing that I could ever be that powerful.
The tree was so familiar to me, like a religion that existed before religion; like the original template that all religions are based on. I knew how it worked. Nothing felt foreign to me.
During this last vision that I had with the shaman there supporting me, I pressed my hands to the weathered bark and sensed that I was meant to descend. I followed the roots until it felt as though the air had shifted, like the cabin pressure in a plane changing altitude. I was submerged into what felt like a different realm or consciousness from the one I was in just a moment ago.
I was standing inside a cave. It was cold, that bone cold that creeps under the skin. The walls of the cave were glistening, wet. I heard a dripping noise in the distance. It echoed somewhere deeper down than where I was standing. It made me feel like the cave was endless. As if the cave never stopped descending downward. Farther up and further in.
In this vision, I knew that I had reached the underworld. And I had set the intention to meet with the medicine or message that was most aligned for me in that moment. It had to do with my heart. And that piece of me, or that presence, I felt destined and determined to find.
Mary Magdalene Revealed Page 7