Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  What It Means to Be Saved

  When Mary had said these things, she turned their hearts toward the Good.

  — MARY 5:9

  In 325 A.D., at the council of Nicaea, church fathers hammered out the creed of the Christian faith, a creed that’s repeated to this day in churches all over the world; I’ve mentioned it before, I know, but it makes sense to chant it again: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made; of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation . . .”

  To maintain this creed, the four gospels that were chosen for the canon of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, needed to have no rivals. So then, all of the gospels that had existed for almost three centuries as scripture sacred to the early Christ movement—like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, The Thunder, Perfect Mind—suddenly became a threat to the budding institution of the church. In the year 367, the Bishop of Athanasius of Alexandria ordered that the monks destroy all of the writings not specifically designated as canonical.14

  But, gratefully, there were many renegade monks (those Copts I could kiss), who disobeyed this edict. Holy rebels. These very wise and industrious monks wanted to preserve the gospels that related a very different Jesus from the one forming within the church hierarchy. Instead of burning and destroying the ancient texts, these mysterious monks buried them in urns in the desert and others deep in a cave. Thanks to the Bishop of Alexandria’s order, Egypt became a land of buried treasure.

  As you know, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene wasn’t among the Nag Hammadi findings or the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, those discoveries help contextualize Mary’s gospel and help us understand why all these scriptures were considered dangerous enough to want to destroy.

  The similarity between the gospels found in the Nag Hammadi library and the Gospel of Mary, or the common theological thread, is that they all emphasize the importance of remembering Christ within. The Gospel of Thomas, especially, focuses on the effort of transcending the opposites, to become one, single, or ihidaya: the unified one.

  The path of the ancient Christian was the practice of anamnesis, or living remembrance.15 Christ wasn’t understood as a being to follow and idolize, but rather as a master of this path, this transformational process. This path that Christ walked not because he was the only one who could walk it, but for us to see that it could be done. That we could become ihidaya as well.

  Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. In the original Aramaic of Jesus and his followers, there was no word for salvation. As Cynthia Bourgeault explains in The Wisdom Jesus, “Salvation was understood as a bestowal of life, and to be saved was ‘to be made alive.’”16

  I need to take a minute with this, because that’s a revolution in thought. Salvation not as something that’s one day given, or earned, by a force outside of me. Salvation as waking up, becoming even more alive. More present. It’s revolutionary for me because I see how easily it’s missed. If we are waiting for an external source of salvation, we’re focused outward. Instead, salvation comes from within. And we achieve this by going inward and participating in a process of remembering the love that’s all along just waiting for us to return to it.

  With the suppression and disappearance of these early Christian texts deemed “non-canonical,” Bourgeault explains that a fundamental shift was established in what theologians refer to as the eschatology, or the ultimate destiny, of humanity. With the creation of the Nicene Creed, there became a heaven to reach in the future, when we die, and a corresponding hell to descend into.

  There became a clear need to be redeemed, saved before this death, and this saving could only come through Christ. (And subsequently through the church, and the priests who received the apostolic authority to give blessings and the Eucharist.) This idea of saving became the promise of eternal life. This promise in turn became the soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation, the early church fathers instituted. Our sinful status as humans depended, then, on the church and god’s only son, Christ, to bestow mercy and redemption. The doors to heaven now had gatekeepers.

  The sacred texts found at Nag Hammadi, along with Mary’s gospel, reveal a sophiology rather than a soteriology. They focus not on a process of salvation, but on the wisdom of the divine, and on the internal transformation that Christ went through and that we all can go through as well. The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip also emphasize the unique and exceptional relationship between Mary Magdalene and Christ, as his koinonos, or companion.

  If the early church fathers were going to establish male authority, Mary’s true identity and relationship with Jesus according to these other “competing” and “conflicting” early sacred texts from the Christ movements in the 1st and 2nd centuries, then Mary Magdalene and her profound gospel would have to be buried, and her identity would have to be retold as someone far less significant to Christ than she was in all of this ancient scripture.

  Mary’s gospel reveals that she could turn the disciples back toward the good, toward god, which is an indication that she had followed this path that Christ walked to become ihidaya. It reveals that she was a leader among other leaders, an apostle to the apostles, and something far more radical and heretical than a prostitute.

  What It Means to Be Human

  Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know 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 6:1–2

  There was far less at stake for me. I could ask questions that they couldn’t simply because I was an outsider. An outsider not seeking to ever be let in. I was often asked what I was doing there at Union Theological Seminary, a non-Christian among Christians training to become ministers, reverends, priests. Why would I want to devote three years of my life to the academic and spiritual rigors of divinity school if I never intended on leading a congregation or even becoming a card-carrying member of a church?

  I don’t remember her name, if I ever knew it at all. Let’s call her Barb; that feels about right. What I have seared into memory is the look on her face when she whipped around in her seat in front of me to blast me with one of the hairiest eyeballs in the history of humankind. All because I stated what I thought was the obvious: “If Jesus was fully human, then he must have had sex.”

  We were studying the fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., which established that “Christ is at once perfect (totus) in his divinity and perfect (totus) in his humanity.” So, not half-divine and half-human, 50-50. But rather, fully divine, meaning 100 percent, and also fully human, another 100 percent. Doesn’t really make sense mathematically, but it held me rapt with attention. Because it released me from this idea that we were either human or divine. It let me grasp, or at least try to, that we could be both a saint and a screw-up, and that would be perfect; that would be the whole point rather than a contradiction.

  The logic for me, before I blurted out the obvious about Christ and sex to the whole class, went like this: if Christ was a “whole” man, as Pope Leo the Great said—Totus in suis, totus in nostris—then to depict him as celibate should amount to blasphemy. “How many times will it be necessary to repeat the adage of the early church Fathers,” Jean-Yves Leloup laments, “‘That which is not lived is not redeemed’?”17 Or said another way, if there’s an aspect of Christ’s humanity that wasn’t lived, for example, his sexuality, then it was also not transformed, redeemed. “Of course, Jesus Christ lived his sexuality,” Leloup exclaims simply, “otherwise he could not have been fully human.”18 And according to the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, attended by about 500 bishops from all over the world, and exactly no women
, Christ is both fully human and fully divine.

  Mary Magdalene clearly moves among the other disciples as one who has become a child of true humanity, and this is the ultimate goal of her gospel, to become an anthropos, a completed human being. The integration of the opposites within oneself. “A child of true humanity,” in the Gospel of Mary, according to Bourgeault, is someone who has achieved this state of inner oneness. “It designates the anthropos, the fully realized human being: the enlightened master of Eastern tradition, or the monad or ‘undivided one’ of hermeticism.”19

  The cost of taking Christ’s full humanity from him is that the importance, or even the sanctity, of being human has also been stripped from those of us who try to understand his teachings. And the cost of Mary Magdalene’s erasure as Christ’s partner, or companion, his spiritual equal even, has stripped us of a female model, of how the process of human love can unite us from within.

  Jean-Yves Leloup believes that, “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.”20

  There were teachings that Mary had “the ears to hear” and that the disciples did not. There were teachings given to her by Christ, in private, and/or from within her heart. Peter and the disciples trust her and ask her to reveal these teachings because they know that Christ loved her more than all other women. He loved her more than anyone else.

  But how can that be possible? I imagine Barb asking as she reads this chapter. How can Christ, if he’s god, play favorites? Wouldn’t he love everyone equally, as rays of light and all that jazz?

  Yes. And he loved her uniquely among all others. This is radiantly clear. Even if I only ever read the bible, I would have to wonder why or find it curious that Christ rose to her, Mary Magdalene. He let her witness him first. Or, he came back for her. Or, she was there, all along, with him through death, as if from within his heart, as if a red thread tied them together, as if they had prepared for it, and her love tethered him to her, led him through the darkness, to redeem it. And then, his first word was to call out her name, Mary.

  He loved everyone equally, yes, as he loved himself. But he also loved her more than all other women. Why? Because, Barb, he was (also) human.

  What I Learned as the Burning Bush

  Mary responded, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you.”

  — MARY 6:3

  The Greek “Philokalia” was compiled in the 18th century by Macarius of Cornith and Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. It’s a collection of sayings by the Hesychasts. Hesychasm is from the Greek for “stillness, rest, silence, quiet” and is a mystical tradition of meditation and prayer in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This rich, and wacky (I’ll explain), contemplative tradition within Christianity had been hidden from me. Up until that point, I had only associated meditation with Buddhism. But Hesychasm is an ancient form of meditation that’s native to Christianity, and that has been practiced since at least the 4th century. It just never crossed the divide between the monastic and secular worlds.

  The Hesychast would curl forward over his heart, drawing all of his attention and consciousness there, within. The quest for union with the divine was attained by bringing consciousness into the heart. The earliest mention of Hesychasm is in the 4th century with the Cappadocians in modern-day Turkey (or Constantinople), and especially with Evagrius in Egypt in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Then in the 6th century with Saint John of Sinai, the term is used systematically in his theological masterpiece The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

  Saint John of The Ladder describes a Hesychast as “he who, being without body, strives to retain his soul within the bounds of its bodily home. A rare and wonderful feat! A hesychast is he who says: ‘I sleep but my heart waketh.’”21 This is a reference to the passage in The Song of Songs 5:2, “I was asleep but my heart was awake.” The goal is theosis—which is an experience of being transformed by the presence of god, of pure love; it’s a constant exchange with the divine from within the heart. And this is what the Hesychast held as the ultimate state of being: union.

  To do this, the Hesychasts in Egypt would use the repetition of the Prayer of the Heart to descend (ascend) into the heart. The heart was understood to be far more than the body’s most critically functioning organ. The heart was experienced as “a treasure-house.” Saint Isaac of Syria explains the sacred aim of the Hesychast: “Try to enter your inner treasure-house and you will see the treasure-house of heaven. For both the one and the other are the same, and one and the same entrance reveals both. The ladder leading to the kingdom is concealed within you, that is, in your soul.”22

  The divine is experienced in the meditation as light, as a light within the heart that’s seen or perceived with the nous. The nous is said to have the faculty of direct knowing, or truth, according to the Hesychasts.23 And this only comes after clearing or cleansing the heart with the repetition of the Prayer of the Heart, Kyrie Eleison.

  Saint Symeon, the New Theologian from the 10th century, was among the last of what are referred to as the experiential theologians. He believed that spiritual authority comes from within, not from an apostolic appointment by the church. The emphasis of the Hesychasts and the experiential theologians was on this intimate, inner connection to the divine, from within the heart. That inner work had to take place or there couldn’t be an authentic transformation, a transformation that only comes from directly knowing or experiencing the soul.

  Similar to the Beatitude from Matthew 8: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god,” Saint Simeon explains, “Inasmuch as the heart is purified, so it receives divine grace, and again inasmuch as it receives grace, so it is purified. When this is completed through grace, a man becomes wholly a god.”24

  Professor McGuckin’s apartment was covered with the icons of saints his wife had painted; walking into it at Union while I was a divinity student always felt like entering into another world. I knew these saints were alive to them, that they were a part of their inner world as much as they were here depicted with embroidered robes and gold halos on the walls around them.

  I knew that as an Eastern Orthodox priest, Professor McGuckin could further my instruction in the Prayer of the Heart that Penny had initiated for me. What I wanted to know was how to pray like a Hesychast. He laughed when I first asked him. Then, when he realized I was serious, he warned me that this form of prayer is meant for the monastic life where you then don’t have to go out and cross a busy intersection or interact with the secular world. He explained that what happens by focusing all of our consciousness into the heart is a process that breaks down its walls, leaves it stripped bare and exposed.

  My raised eyebrows let him know how great that sounded to me. I was slowly moving through the Old Testament in a compulsory course for graduation, so Ezekiel 36:26 came flying into my mind: “I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

  He went on then to demonstrate the posture the Hesychasts would assume during the recitation of the Prayer of the Heart; they would curl forward, bending their necks and shoulders into an impressive-looking slouch so that they could gaze directly at their chests. And he explained that the breath was controlled during the prayer in the same way that Kundalini yoga focuses on breath with a mantra. Christ’s name was invoked with the inhale, and then the petition for mercy came with the exhale. And all along the intention is to drop further into the heart, to remember that the body can be a medium to access the soul, rather than an obstacle.

  I tried that posture for the rest of my time as a divinity student and it made me acutely aware of several things. The template for prayer and meditation here is based on a man’s body; specifically, on a breast-less chest. When you curl forward with breasts, especially larger ones, the back and neck of the budding Hesychast will scream bloody murder. And you can’t enter the heart in a body
of pain. Or, yes, you can. But torment of the body is not compulsory. There’s no entrance to the heart that reads, “If you’re not miserable, come back later.”

  So, I updated the Hesychast prayer as any Christian (with breasts) in Byzantium might have in the 4th century and instead just acknowledged the body before entering the heart. Whether I was seated or standing, alone or in a crowded room, I just took an intentional breath and recognized with sincere awe that I could not be here without this body.

  And instead of focusing on the breath during the prayer, I paid attention to what I sensed once I felt I was really there, in the heart. I took a second intentional breath to acknowledge that the presence of the soul, the nous, is right here, within me. That it takes all of two breaths to be connected again to what’s eternal. That I have direct access to divine love at the grocery store, while someone’s yelling at me, as I’m signing divorce papers, as my son cries for hours at three in the morning, as I pay bills on a credit card that’s nearly at its limit, as that dread comes over me to do more, to be more, to help more, to see the good in myself and others more frequently.

  Then I went into the silence, which is like going underwater, or entering dreams while wide awake. The silence is like flipping over in a kayak while whitewater rafting. Let me explain.

  I flipped once when I was rafting the Royal Gorge in Colorado as a daredevil teenager. I was in this yellow banana-like kayak with a red helmet on. I felt confident of the technique I had been taught to right myself if I capsized going over the waterfalls we were attempting to raft. I had practiced the technique on dry land and to the approval of the instructors. What I hadn’t anticipated was how deafening the roar of the water is beneath the surface. There’s a calming, rushing sound we’re all used to above ground. But then there’s the underside to that sound; there’s what the river sounds like from within it.