Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  What’s so fascinating to me is that each of these mystics arrives, living in different countries and different centuries, at the same truth: that if we do the spiritual work to allow our soul to pass through the seven stages that exist within us as a part of the human condition, the soul merges with divine love. And the soul is free.

  The Gospel of Mary Magdalene was laid buried deep in the Egyptian desert, and hidden in an urn inside a cave, for both Marguerite’s and Teresa’s lifetimes. They would have never been exposed to the truth it also conveys; that there are seven powers or “climates” the soul must move through to unbind itself from the ego. “Collectively, they comprise the gravitational field of what the contemporary spiritual teacher Thomas Keating has termed “the false self system.”37 They came to it on their own.

  If we connect them, if we link them like a forgotten chain, from Mary Magdalene to Marguerite to Teresa, we see a legacy of love being left for us. A trilogy of love stories. And all of them are led by divine love through these seven stages. As if seven is a spiritual truth that exists intrinsically within, encoded in us, like a religion every body belongs to.

  Why I Am Proud to Be Part Impala

  The first form is darkness; the second is desire; the third is ignorance; the fourth is zeal for death; the fifth is the realm of the flesh; the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh; and the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person.

  These are the seven powers of wrath.

  — MARY 9:18–25

  The definition of a pilgrimage is simply a journey to a sacred place as a demonstration of devotion. What compels us to become so devoted that we’re willing to leave home for weeks, even months at a time, and travel halfway around the world, away from family, and loved ones, in order to reach this sacred place—that is a more complex mystery.

  All I can say is that I wish it wasn’t compulsory. But it is, or it has been for me. And this has posed immense challenges. Because I have the constitution of a cloistered nun. I don’t travel well. Okay, that’s a massive understatement. I am one of the world’s worst travelers. I am that anxious, sweaty, ugly-crying mess next to you when the plane hits turbulence. I am that backseat driver pointing out a sharp curve in the road up ahead to the bus driver. I can’t relax on anything that moves.

  I was asked to speak at an event in the South of France (which then meant I could finally visit Mary Magdalene’s cave) and I was asked to give a workshop based on my first book, REVEAL, in Devon, England (which then meant I could visit Glastonbury again and the Red and White Spring).

  So even though, as always, I just wanted to remain in my cozy apartment, take care of my sweet little man, and stay the hell still, I said yes. I said yes because I heard a yes, if you know what I mean. I didn’t think about it, or listen to the way my ego took off and started panicking; I felt the yes. It was sitting there inside me like the only grown-up in a room filled with toddlers.

  Moving “home” to Cleveland meant that I no longer had to keep moving. I didn’t have to be subject to the whims and greed of landlords raising rent beyond my means. I could own my apartment. I could make a new beginning as an indie mom, a life that looked a lot more like thriving rather than just surviving.

  But moving “home” to Cleveland also meant coming face-to-face with all the reasons why it never felt like home to me. The assault I experienced as a little girl at a friend’s house, and the inability to sleep for years after, or feel safe at night, or fly without sheer panic and dread.

  It was all still here, waiting for me, when I returned. And with those memories came a panic disorder, because the body never lies, and the body never forgets.

  I had already talked my way through years of therapy. And I was grateful for the clarity it gave me. But this return demonstrated to me that I had never healed all the way down and all the way through. I had managed. I had found ways to cope with the anxiety and fear that coursed through me most of the time, every day. I practiced the soul-voice meditation, I did yoga, or walked, or danced, or hula-hooped. I found a way every day to express the excess energy so that it wasn’t harnessed for a panic attack.

  And I chanted the prayer of the heart that Penny had taught me. Whenever the panic started to course through my veins in a way that made me certain I was about to leave my body altogether, I chanted from an intercom in my heart, “Lord Jesus Christ son of god have mercy on me.”

  Mary 9:18’s full list of the seven powers that exist within us for me is both the most humbling and the most helpful for being human. It reads like an ingredients label of the ego. It’s not suggesting that we all contain each of these elements in equal measure. But if we can understand it, it’s giving us an informative list of the powers of the ego that can potentially for hours, days, years at a time hold us captive.

  The first is darkness. I experience this as heaviness, depression, that feeling of being trapped, or constricted. That sensation that things suck, and they will always suck. That there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s just more tunnel. Helpless. Hopeless. And thinking I’m alone.

  The second is desire, or as Cynthia Bourgeault translates it, craving. For me, desire or craving is clinging. Wishing things could have been different. (I get seduced by this power frequently.) Attachment to what I think I want (which is usually light-years away from what I actually need). This is essentially wanting to be where I am not.

  The third is ignorance. This comes in the form of my lack of awareness. This is when I’m unconscious about something. And sometimes we need to be unconscious. It’s important to make clear that this “ignorance” isn’t an indication of a deficit of character or intelligence. It can actually be integral to healing. We can only see so much at once. We sometimes need to open our awareness about an aspect of ourselves, or an event that happened in our lives, in increments. And this is actually wise. The ignorance Mary is talking about is different; it’s about the unconscious states we can fall into, and then act from.

  The fourth is zeal for death. Or the craving for death. This sounds exceptionally odd. It later becomes, within Christianity’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” the sin of gluttony. Also a strange and rarely used word, but easier to understand. It’s about making choices in our lives that endanger our health or impair our longevity. Eating, drinking, and having sex in ways that neglect and harm the body. So, to be clear, it’s not that attending to the body or indulging in anything that gives us pleasure is a “sin” or a power of the ego. (“There is no such thing as sin.”) It’s when we do this to an extreme that actually harms the body. It’s that human tendency in us to be destructive toward the body. To take our pain out on the least-deserving possible thing, our own body. This is where the ego can take us, if we’re lost in this power and we’ve completely forgotten the soul.

  The fifth is the realm of the flesh. Or enslavement to the physical body. This to me is when we’re entirely identified with being a body, and only a body. It’s the power that’s later defined as lust, but I think it’s important to distinguish something. Lustful people are my favorite humans to encounter. I feel more alive around them. I had a boyfriend who could eat a meal in a way that made me jealous of everything on his plate. He lusted after his food. He lusted after my body in the same passionate way. And it was bliss. Lust, for me at least, isn’t the issue. It’s our relationship to it. Does it derail us almost entirely from our work, or does it fuel and inspire it? Does it harm the people we love, or does it light them up (like my boyfriend’s lust lit me up)? For me, as a woman, as a survivor, it’s a triumph to be lustful, to be present in my body during sex. It’s an uncelebrated victory. Where the fifth power can trip us up is when we forget that we are also a soul, not just this passionate body with its fiery needs. And it most explicitly applies to when that lust includes a sacrilegious transgression of forcing our physical needs on someone who does not consent to them.

  The sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh. Or the false peace of the flesh. This power later comes to b
e referred to as sloth. This one took me the longest to unpack. First of all, I’m insanely in love with sloths. Actual sloths. My son and I watch nonstop Animal Planet videos of baby sloths doing just about anything, and we melt. We’ve even perfected the baby-sloth cry. So, sloth does nothing for me in terms of understanding a power of the ego. And then second, this original description from Mary’s gospel as the foolish wisdom of the flesh, this trips me up as well.

  I think it has taken us a long time to understand that the body is wise. The body has been manipulated and vilified for millennia as the scapegoat for our own vices. It has taken the sexual revolution and the feminist movement to reclaim the body. To understand that we can trust the body to take us to realms of pleasure and joy that don’t have to be separate from our spirituality or religion. That we can trust the body when it comes to nutrition and craving foods that we need or that just bring us pleasure (when we are not in a cycle of addiction). That we can trust the body when it comes to alerting us to a dangerous situation or person. That we can trust the body to make us aware of needing to slow down, or decrease our stress levels. That we can trust the body to heal. That we can trust the body is more than just a machine to use, and misuse, at the ego’s whim. That we can trust the body has wisdom the intellect can never grasp, like the way a woman’s body forms another body within her even as she sleeps. That we can trust the body to tell us who we feel at home with. If we know how to listen, the body has wisdom, blood memory, that reaches back through the centuries and carries the echoes of our ancestors.

  What this sixth power has come to mean to me is that there is a reticence to change, a reluctance to do what we know is best for us, and we can feel this viscerally in the body. There’s a sluggishness, a tendency toward inertia. If we are headed to the couch the second we get home from work, that routine will be arduous to break. The body becomes easily habituated, meaning the routines we create can become engrained in us. The body is so loyal. And if we develop patterns of inaction, we will have to contend with a body that doesn’t really want to do anything.

  The seventh power is the power we all probably understand and know most intimately. The seventh power in the Gospel of Mary is the wisdom of the wrathful person. Or the compulsion of rage. It almost sounds like Christ, or Mary, since Christ is the one who originally gave this list to Mary, is being sardonic. Right? If this is a power of the ego, a power that keeps us from knowing our true self, then how could a wrathful person be wise?

  For me, similar to the power of lust, or the realm of the flesh, anger is healing. To feel and express my anger feels healthy. Anger creates appropriate boundaries with people who aren’t supporting us or who aren’t good for us to be around. Anger can flood the system with a sense of clarity and purpose. We sometimes know what we stand for and what we care most about from the presence of anger. Anger protects us and often protects others we love and those who can’t defend themselves. Anger, for anyone who has been silenced or made to feel insignificant, is a declaration that they actually matter. That their voice matters. That they are not to be silenced ever again. Anger in these situations is holy. Anger in the face of injustice is an act of love. It’s a statement of unifying ourselves with a stranger and saying, “I won’t let you be treated as I would not want to be treated myself.” Anger can be motivating and unifying. As the mystic William Blake relates, “The voice of honest indignation is the voice of god.”

  And also, anger can devour us from the inside out. Anger can divide. It is so compelling, it can derail and distract many of us for most of our lives. And this is how I think we can best understand the destructive side of anger; it’s simply when we get overcome by it. We can live in anger, or we can act on our anger in ways that we will regret then for the rest of our lives.

  As with all the powers, it isn’t the power itself that’s harmful. It’s the presence of the power and the absence of the soul. It’s forgetting entirely that we are not just the ego that is subject to the power. So, even as we are more enraged than we have ever been (even if we have every right to be, and it’s healthy and normal for us to be so angry), if we forget that there’s this equally significant part of us that is calm, still water beneath it all, then we will inflict our rage onto someone else. And whether that person is undeserving of that rage or in our eyes “deserving” of it, all it does is bind us to that person and to perpetuate a cycle of rage.

  As the brilliant comedian Hannah Gadsby relates about her sexual assault in Nanette, “I have a right to be angry, but not to spread it.” We know that hurt people hurt people. And this is a source of compassion we can access when we need relief from our anger. But ultimately, this seventh power is about the responsibility we need to take for the rage that can compel us to treat ourselves and others in ways we can hardly believe we’re capable of. I think it’s the seventh because it’s the hardest to come to terms with. How do we responsibly express our rage? How do we let anger motivate and mobilize us without burning us out or burning the house down?

  And anger is the seventh, I think, also because it’s often the reason we become more vulnerable to the other six powers of ego. We’re angry at the person who has harmed us and so we fall into a depression, or we cling obsessively to what could have been, or we harm ourselves physically by overeating or drinking or taking drugs in an effort to deal with that rage. And it’s just a tangled, gritty mess. And we feel trapped.

  So, on the one hand, it’s daunting to take in all seven powers at once. Holy crap, look at what we have to contend with, look at all the derailing powers that we contain. And yet, on the other hand, it feels like such a relief. Like, welcome to being human. This is normal, you binge watching Netflix to forget your pain, you drinking red wine like it’s a secret elixir for all fears, you sobbing over a divorce that happened seven years ago, you angry at what happened to you as a little girl and enraged anytime you ever hear of it happening to anyone else. You. Human being. You. Welcome. You’re not alone. You’re not odd, or strange, or actually different at all. You’re meant to feel all these things. And none of these feelings, these powers, make you less holy. They connect you. They make you, you. And this is part of the whole point of being here. To feel these horrible and hard derailing things, and to find your way back to love.

  So, this time when the anxiety disorder came back, I was armed with the road map of my own humanity that Mary’s gospel had given me. It gave me the perspective to notice these powers rear up and get louder, and to know that they’re nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of or to judge. I can be depressed. And angry. I can. I am human. And I can choose to use the presence of each of these powers as an opportunity to learn to strengthen my capacity to return to love.

  A close friend of mine suggested EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). She had recently remembered a childhood sexual assault and found that this form of therapy was powerful because it released the trauma that was still trapped there in the body. I found a therapist and began work three months before my pilgrimage to Mary Magdalene.

  Trauma lives in the body in present tense. And many, many illnesses stem from that truth. Because the body, as our most faithful warrior, will hold for us what we can’t face ourselves. Until we live into the strength to go all the way back, and experience it for the first time, long after it has actually happened.

  My body had waited for me, all these years, to return now that I’m filled with a fierce love that flows through me as much and as often as I can remember that it does. Now that I’m home in my body, my beloved body can give back to me what it has held for me for all these years.

  During a particularly powerful session, my therapist told me a story. (And his stories were always medicine, told with intention.) It went something like this:

  A cheetah is stalking a herd of impala. As if one unified and entirely connected mass, the herd senses the cheetah at the same moment and begins to flee at top speed. A young impala falters and gets delayed just for a split second. But that’s enough
time for the cheetah to pounce. At the moment of contact, the impala falls to the ground, as if instantly struck dead. But it isn’t. And it isn’t pretending to be dead either. It has fallen into an instinctive and involuntary altered state of consciousness shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.

  Physiologists call this state the immobility state or the freezing response. The other two responses to extreme situations of impending doom are fight and flight. These two states are very well known and researched. But this third state is less known, and little is understood about this altered state of immobility.

  But nature has developed it for two main reasons. First, it serves as a last-ditch effort to survive. The impala in its altered state is dragged back to a tree in the shade. In thinking the impala is dead, the cheetah is not on the alert. So, with its guard down, while turning its back, the impala can leap up, shake off the effects of the immobility response, and escape.

  The second reason is that while in this altered state the impala can’t feel any pain. It’s a prehistoric function developed so that in our last moments we die before we’re even killed.

  It is not under our conscious control. It’s about energy and the nervous system. Humans and animals share this same capacity to play possum. The difference is that the impala can simply shake off the experience to release the energy of the trauma without a story line or subsequent symptoms.

  Humans, though, especially with this third response to trauma, can develop PTSD and anxiety disorders from the energy of the “death” being trapped in the body.

  Trauma expert Peter Levine in Waking the Tiger explains that “this residual energy does not simply go away. It persists in the body, and often forces the formation of a wide variety of symptoms.”38