Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  I’ll never forget how disoriented I was, and I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t expecting it, or if it was simply because the sound itself was so new. I had never heard the clamoring clash of currents under the surface before. I couldn’t move at first. I wasn’t sure which end was up. My helmet banged against a series of rocks as I scrambled to find the rip cord on the edge of the skirt that sealed me into my kayak. I let go of my paddle so I could search with both hands. And as soon as I found it, I yanked on it with all my upside-down strength could muster.

  Going into the heart, for me, is loud like that; it’s like hearing the sound of a river from within it. It isn’t a silence that we understand as silence. It’s not a silence devoid of sound. This silence is the sound of the presence of love within us; and that can be excruciatingly loud. Disorienting even. It’s a new voice, meaning, one we’re not familiar with, even though it’s the most important we could ever hear. It’s also new in the sense that it has been hidden from us. Meaning, it’s the last place we’re taught to look for the voice of god, right here in our own heart.

  While I was experimenting as a modern-day Hesychast at Union, I was also in a theatrical course in exegetics. We were divided into pairs of two to act out for the rest of the class a single line from the Old Testament without using words. My partner was a kind, quiet (which worked well here), older bearded man with a limp. We were given Exodus 3, which is about Moses and the burning bush. I had to be the burning bush. I knew how happy it would make me from that day forward to get to say that I performed as the burning bush. (It still cracks me up.) You should have seen the way I pantomimed the hell out of it; my arms flailed up like flames and my face took on a holier-than-though look when “the angel of god” speaks to Moses as a bush on fire.

  Our interpretation of this moment was that everything that happened actually took place in the heart. Meaning, a bush engulfed with flames never actually started speaking to Moses. It wasn’t like the sound of a voice coming over the intercom when you order drive-thru fast food.

  Moses doesn’t hear a voice outside him say from this fiery bush, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” This is what he hears from within him when he stops herding his sheep for long enough to recognize this miraculous sight; not the vision of the burning bush, but the spirit that moves him to acknowledge the presence of love that has a message for him. From within his own heart.

  The burning bush, then, is symbolic of anything in our lives that disrupts us from the habituated routine, the monotony of our everyday, and allows us to return to the presence of love.

  Quiet-bearded-man and I demonstrated this by starting and ending our performance with our hands over our hearts. We tried to convey that nothing we were about to do ever really happened. Literally. What we were acting out was the effort of what it takes to remember that no matter what we are doing, or who we are with, or where we are in the world, a mosque, a temple, a yoga studio, a department store, the ground is made instantly holy the moment we’re present enough inside our own bodies to hear the presence of love.

  The lesson I never forgot, maybe because I acted it out with my body, or maybe because of all the humility it required, and all the humor, was that angels don’t speak outside of us. The most sacred voice we can ever hear doesn’t have a voice at all. An angel, the voice of god, the presence of love, the voice of the soul, this is the sound of silence. And this truth has been hidden from us, that we contain this chorus. Every one of us.

  What has been hidden from us has been hidden within us. What Mary reveals to the other disciples that had been hidden from them is this direct connection to the spiritual world we all contain.

  Quiet-Bearded-Man didn’t think it was as significant as I did, so we left it out. But I thought it was cool that Moses introduces himself to the bush. (I’m laughing.) After the bush gets his attention, and he lifts his head from herding sheep, he says, “I am Moses.” So, in response to this incendiary voice that was actually sounding from inside him, Moses knows who he is. He says his own name.

  I thought this was significant because this is what has stayed with me all these years. That this voice of love within us is the truth of who we are. This is how we can move in the world; we can identify with this miraculous, unexpected, uncontrollable, mysterious, and angelic voice of love within us. We can identify with the burning bush. Engulfed by flames but never consumed by them. And in this way, we can live out what has been hidden from us.

  How to Meditate Like Mary Magdalene

  She said, “I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to him, ‘Lord, I saw you today in a vision.’ He answered me, ‘How wonderful you are for not wavering at seeing me! For where the mind is, there is the treasure.’”

  — MARY 7:1–4

  Dr. Hal Taussig introduced me more formally to the Gospel of Mary as a professor of biblical literature and early Christianity at Union. He taught a course titled “Loosening Canon” that I took at the same time as McGuckin’s course about Hesychasts. Taussig’s course let me fall deeper in love with Mary’s gospel alongside the texts that help contextualize the discourse that takes place within it; the Gospels of Thomas and Philip in particular.

  Years later, at a Barnes & Noble, I stopped suddenly, shocked to see his name in gold lettering across a book titled, A New, New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century. I grabbed it like a psycho and began riffling through the contents. IT BLEW MY MIND. I morphed into a geek theologian right there in the aisle. My mouth was open and everything.

  It combines the scripture that was originally included in the formation of the New Testament with the scripture that was excluded, like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas, The Thunder, Perfect Mind, and The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

  In the introduction, Taussig explains that with the traditional New Testament, “to know what is inside it, you must know what is outside it.” And he gives an example of Paul and Thecla: that you cannot understand Paul (whose conversion story was included in the traditional bible) without also knowing Thecla (whose conversion story was excluded). He describes a fresco dated from approximately 500 A.D. that’s painted on the walls of a cave in Turkey. It’s of Paul and Thecla, and it depicts them teaching together side by side.

  Thecla, as you know, is the fiery Turkish teenager who baptizes herself in the name of Christ, wears men’s clothing, and defies patriarchal structures of the 1st century that insisted she marry and have children. Taussig explains that what’s included in the New Testament about Paul is incomplete without knowing his relationship to Thecla.

  Scholars agree, based not externally on political correctness but internally on linguistic differences, that three of the letters attributed to Paul, 1–2 Timothy and Titus, were written well over a half century after Paul’s death. They were created in his name but were in fact reactions to his original views on radical equality for everyone in the Christian community—whether they were Jews or Gentiles, females or males, slaves or free born—which is clearly expressed in Galatians 3:27–28: “For all of you who were baptized into union with Christ clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Judean nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female; for in Christ Jesus you are all one.”

  How then did we arrive at the blatant patriarchal dominance of 1 Timothy 2:11–12? “A woman must learn, listening in silence with all deference. I do not consent to them becoming teachers, or exercising authority over men; they ought not speak.” By the 4th century, when the New Testament was being compiled, the radical equality of Christianity was tamed as sexist norms were instituted within the church hierarchy. To really understand 1 Timothy 2:11–12, Taussig suggests you have to look both inside and outside the traditional New Testament. You can’t really see what was included and why without also seeing what was excluded.25

  Taussig organized a committee to very carefully scrutinize which sacred texts should be included in A New, New Testament. Men and women, ordained and secular, scholars and mona
stics, were asked to reach a consensus on which early Christian scripture should represent the various strands of Christianity that existed in the first several centuries before the formation of what became the master story, the singular narrative of Christ captured in the four canonical gospels.

  It’s hard to explain what seeing all these “conflicting” early Christian texts bound together in one bible did to me. It let me accept the kind of Christian I have always been. Everything else had felt like a compromise, an omission. This wholeness of binding together what “he” said and what “she” said, of what has been seen and unseen, accepted and outcast, including it all, and calling it all Christianity, this to me is what made it sacred, this is what made it scripture.

  There’s the external and the internal experience of Christ. The metaphysics of what happens when we pray or meditate, this is what Mary’s gospel reveals to us. This is what we have been missing. The validation of what we can only meet with and find from within the heart.

  Without Mary’s gospel, we miss out on the ancient dialogue she had with Christ about this precise practice. Where do we go when we “go within”? What’s there waiting for us?

  Christ says in the Gospel of Thomas that the kingdom is already spread out upon the earth, if we only have the spiritual capacity to see it. There’s a vision we have to acquire, or return to, that allows us to perceive what’s here. This is the nous.

  Jesuit priest Jean-Yves Leloup describes the nous as a dimension that’s often forgotten. In the ancient world, the nous was seen as “the finest point of the soul,” or as some might say today, “the angel of the soul.”26 This is the dimension that Mary’s gospel alone directly addresses. When Christ says, “For where the mind is, there is the treasure,” the word for mind is nous. And this is the treasure because this is our direct link to an experience of love, of god, or of the Good, right here in this body. And that return to love is what frees us from the seven powers that bind us to the ego’s reality.

  The concept of mind in Greek includes the heart; it was never separated from it. This is pre-Descartes, this is before there was an idea that such a division could occur in the body. That we could be a mind devoid of heart. Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault in her masterpiece, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, explains that the nous is a property of the heart, not the mind as we understand mind in the Western world. The heart according to the Near Eastern wisdom traditions is an organ of spiritual perception.27 Merging with the nous, becoming conscious of it within the heart, and seeing with its vision, this is the goal of the process of inner transformation that the Gospel of Mary relates Christ underwent and that we can all undergo as well.

  Bourgeault believes that the Gospel of Mary could potentially be proof that Mary Magdalene was a witness not only to Christ’s resurrection but to the entire transformation he went through. If she had merged with the nous, if she could see with the spiritual eye of the heart, which is a vision that allows us to see through death, to be a love that exists beyond it, then she never left him, not physically or psychically. She witnessed the way he freed himself from the bonds of death, how he remembered the nous, and created a spiritual blueprint for us all to follow.

  The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, then, according to Bourgeault, has preserved in visionary form through the pure, unflinching nous of Mary Magdalene, the moment “when universal salvation gushed forth from Jesus’s cosmological act of atonement.”28

  I think this is how we pray, how we meditate, like Mary Magdalene. We return to love within us, within the heart, quietly, discreetly, and we don’t ask for any reward or external affirmation in exchange for doing the work. The return to love is the treasure itself.

  This is why she was so wonderful, according to Christ. He calls her wonderful, I think, because of the unique bravery it takes to return to the love within you. She returned to the nous, which is the aspect of the soul that we can be conscious of while living, while here in this human body.

  And I don’t think union was a constant state for her. I think it’s something she became adept at remembering. Union is hard won. Merging with the nous, the angel of the soul, becoming one, this is as gritty as it gets when it comes to spiritual work.

  I think it’s a state we can all work at cultivating. It happens where no one else can see or validate for us that we’re doing the work. It’s feminine, it’s internal. It’s direct experience. It happens quietly, within, when instead of reacting from the ego, we take a moment and respond differently.

  For example, as I moved through the years, out of Union, into and out of a marriage, raising a son, I found that the desire to love was enough. A desire to see with this spiritual eye of the heart was enough to allow for these tiny transformations all throughout the day. I couldn’t curl forward over my heart all day like the Hesychasts, so I just took three intentional breaths whenever I felt one of those seven powers of the ego arise. A breath to descend into the heart, a second breath to connect to the soul, the nous, and then a third breath, to surface and know I’m being led by love.

  I called this the soul-voice meditation, and eventually, I would hang out in my heart for hours on end. Just listening. Asking questions and receiving answers.

  My beloved, crazy, navel-gazing Hesychasts experienced the nous as containing a faculty of direct knowing, or unmediated truth.29 This isn’t something we need outside sources to confirm, or people we love and trust to validate for us. This is something that’s in the bones. Or that’s how it feels to me. It feels like blood memory. Like something I couldn’t possibly learn, from anyone or anywhere. It’s the other side of education. It’s what we can only become aware of from within.

  The Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton describes the nous as “a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.” The invisible light of heaven. This is what I think Christ means when he says in the Gospel of Thomas that the kingdom is already here, spread out all over the earth, if we only had the eyes to see it.

  The Red Egg

  Have you already found the beginning, then, that you seek for the end? For where the beginning is the end will be. Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.

  — THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

  I shot up in bed with one of those gasps, a sharp intake of air, like I’d been held underwater for too long. It felt like three in the morning. Everything was silent in that interstice type way, suspended between night and day. I can’t even imagine how hysterical my face must have looked. Shock had my eyebrows clear up to my hairline. My face was buckling under the strain of trying to comprehend what I was feeling. I probably looked like an astronaut undergoing high G-force centrifuge training.

  I sat there in the dark wide-awake, beside my sleeping fiancé, trying to figure out what I had felt and why I was terrified by it. It was the holiest moment I had ever experienced.

  I knew several things all at once. I was pregnant, I was having a boy, and he would be solid, big-boned. He would be a real concrete presence.

  He felt like something that just a second before had been ephemeral and otherworldly and was now a fixed being tethered to me for all of eternity.

  And I use the word eternity intentionally here because I felt like I knew it. I understood it. And this is what scared the hell out of me. I think the idea of it has always comforted me. Ah, how nice, we live on forever. But the actual breath of it, the glimpse I felt during my son’s conception, just utterly freaked me out. We never end. And this is what I was repeating as I started crying, trying to digest, and comprehend, everything I knew then.

  We don’t have an ending.

  What I knew about eternity didn’t come from my mind. My body was telling me. We never end. And I sat there, like that, crying because I was so terrified and so insanely happy.

  I had never heard of conscious conception, that it was a thing, like conversion stories, or near-death experiences. I didn’t know this genre existed. That other women also were aware
of the moment when they conceived. I sat there feeling alone and like a freak, which is like home base for every woman I’ve ever known. New experience = I’m a freak. It’s the go-to conclusion.

  This was also before the expression “zero fucks given” came into common usage. But this is what began to descend on me. I began to give absolutely zero fucks about how I would ever explain this to anyone. I felt this righteous need to just validate it myself. THIS HAPPENED. And this scared the shit out of me and this was the holiest moment I’ve ever known. Yes, utter paradox. And yes, no apologies.

  It made me think of how our concept of god would be so different if all along, from the time of the Venus von Willendorf period of prehistory, roughly 30,000 B.C.E., to right now, we’d never swung around and done a 180 from worshipping the goddess to just worshipping a god. Think of the sermons! The rituals! The ceremonies! Think of how much they would change if we were equally hearing from both sexes about what it’s like to find god in the body.

  The liturgy and the laws would shift dramatically, I think. Because for me, the experience was like the universe huffed on me. I felt like for one instant, or maybe an eternity, I really got how massively beyond my comprehension this being human is. That’s it. I was humbled senseless.

  I have zero clue about anything ultimate, or how it works, or why I got to be the mother of this particular son. This one that I recognized the second I saw him. As if his face had always been missed, as if I always knew the shape of it. As if he existed in me all along.