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Mary Magdalene Revealed

Page 18

by Meggan Watterson


  I helped one of the teenage girls down the slippery slope that led into the cave. There were chilling and bizarre egg-shaped indentations in the side of the cave wall that I wouldn’t have been able to see without the light that they brought down into the dark. I was mesmerized.

  The teen I had helped down started to get claustrophobic. Alle Ooop took off her headlamp (without saying a word) and handed it to me so I could stay in the cave alone while she led the kids back up.

  I could hear the echo of water trickling even deeper down into the cave. There was an endless sound to it and a timeless feel to the place where I was standing. It was cold enough to see my breath. The walls of the cave were glistening wet. I tried to take in what I was seeing.

  This was the place I had wanted to find for most of my life. A place where the memory of Mary Magdalene isn’t once removed. A place where my life could overlap with hers. A place where I felt as though I was encountering not her words, or her legend, not her teachings, or the stories that have been told about her, but the actual human woman.

  I felt elated to sense her humanity, to have stood where I felt certain she had been.

  I thought of salvation then. The definition of it as something that comes from within, salvation as simply “to be made more alive.” Because this is what happened to me in the Cave of Eggs. I was made more alive. What was within me was here, met from the outside. It wasn’t happiness. That’s too fleeting. I stared at the eggs, at the gorgeous, miraculous-looking ovals in the cave wall, and I felt radiant. Luminous. Nothing, and no one, ever, can take from me what I encountered right then. This is the thing itself, and not a prayer, or a song, or a story. This is the love that sits hidden within us. This is the love that never ends.

  I felt that other side of myself, the side I met with that last time I saw the shaman, and when I first saw the red thread. The side I thought I would always find in someone else. In romantic love. And for all these years, for all my broken hearts, I have resented and resisted this truth: that this love I’ve always known and desired is right here within me. It’s the other half of who I am.

  And this is what it means to rest in silence. Because this is when all those voices, those ideas and stories we wrestle with inside us, the ones that keep us up at night, and lead us to believe we aren’t worthy of love, or of anything good, this is when the whole clamorous riot goes mute.

  This is when we understand what freedom is. The silence that returns us to love.

  When we all were gathered around a large table at the café at the base of the mountain, drinking ice cold Schweppes, the man in our little band of pilgrims turned to speak to me for the first time and asked in his thick French accent, “What does Mary Magdalene mean for you?”

  I took a while to answer. And then I asked him the same question. He just lifted his hand and placed it on his chest and said, “Isis and Mary Magdalene are the same here in my heart.” I stared at him, a frank look of pure shock on my face. It’s always the quiet ones.

  When I checked out of Le Couvent Royale, the total was 520 euros for the week I was there. I had a moment of anticipation that it would total 513, the number that had been harassing me since I arrived in France. As the receptionist went over the bill, I Googled Druids and saw that they were Celtic priests and priestesses from a tradition that existed long before Christianity.

  Then just because I wanted the haunting of 5:13 to end, I made good on my vow from early that morning and Googled what scripture it refers to. When I read Galatians 5:13, I got chills. And I knew it was the message meant for me: “Brothers and sisters, you are called here to be free.”

  This is when the receptionist let me know she had accidentally charged me for a room tax with two occupants rather than just me alone. She reconfigured the total. Yep, 513.

  She Who Confirms the Truth

  After Mary had said these things, she was silent. Since it was up to this point that the Savior had spoken to her.

  — MARY 9:30–31

  Le Sacré-Coeur, the Sacred Heart cathedral, is high on a hill in Montmartre, in Paris. Walking up the winding path, even when it’s packed with tourists, is magical to me. My favorite Christ is up there. He’s made of a gold mosaic in a dome that arches over the main altar. His arms are outstretched and he’s radiating this form of embrace that blows my composure every time.

  Donna, author of Sex and the Soul and the friend I had in common with the man seated at my table on the Queen Mary, met me in Paris for several days. She’s a walker, like me. Our little hotel was near the Eiffel Tower, so we decided to walk all the way from the 7th arrondissement of Paris across the Seine to the 18th arrondissement, where the Sacred Heart cathedral is located.

  When we finally arrived, Donna groaned at the crowds. There was a line wrapping around the cathedral with a security checkpoint stationed in front of the gate. Everyone was frisked to get inside. I talked Donna into waiting. I built up the anticipation. And like a child in line at an amusement park, I fluttered with sheer excitement.

  We were ushered around to the left, partitioned off from the main pews in the center of the cathedral for those who came to pray, not just snap photos and beeline it for the gift shop. The outer circle for tourists moved slowly past small altars dedicated to various saints.

  When we got to the enclave for Mother Mary, Donna wanted to stop. She paid for a small votive, lit it, and let this soft light suddenly shine from her face. I knew she was saying a prayer for her mother who had passed of cancer years ago. Her mother had loved Mary. Devoted. That’s the word Donna used, her mother was devoted to Mary.

  This particular statue of Mother Mary is exceptionally beautiful. She’s in a glass-enclosed altar. Her arms are outstretched with her open palms facing upward. She has a golden sacred heart in the center of her chest. There’s a little gate at the entrance to her separate little enclave within the cathedral. I opened it so I could get a closer look at her. A little girl, no more than three, was holding the gate shut when I turned around to leave. Her mother was laughing and repeating to her in French, “Rose, open the door.”

  I kneeled down to Rose’s height, so we could be eye to eye, and I smiled into her cherub face. “I get it, little one. You want me to stay here and pray to Mary.”

  The polarity of Mother Mary the virgin and Mary Magdalene the prostitute has always seemed a bit too familiar, too contrived to be true. Jean-Yves Leloup, in The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary, explains, “We have forgotten to represent the other side of Christ, his feminine side, in a way beyond the reductionist stereotypes of mother and whore.”41

  Like Mary Magdalene, Mary of Nazareth, Christ’s mother, was said to have always walked with him. And she was there throughout his ministry and there with Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross at his crucifixion. She was also there, according to some legends, with Mary Magdalene on the ship without sails that arrived in the South of France in the 1st century. There’s a legend that relates she returned to or never left Jerusalem, where she was assumed by the angels into heaven at the moment of her death.

  Mary, Christ’s mother, has been represented as the virgin, just as Mary Magdalene has been represented as the whore, based on ideas of the church that didn’t form until centuries after Christ’s crucifixion. In 431 A.D., at the council of Ephesus, Mary was declared Theotokos, god-bearer, or more simply put, the Mother of God. She was, therefore, subsequently declared as immaculate, the Ever-Virgin. Some other titles she has been given over the years include the Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of the Angels, Our Lady of Good Council, Our Lady Undoer of Knots, and She Who Confirms the Truth.

  She was born without the “sin” that the church fathers had established by the 4th century that sex and procreation entailed. This idea of sin did not exist before then. (And it does not exist in the Gospel of Mary.) This is important to not forget; women weren’t present during the council of Ephesus, so women did not get to help create the story that would shape the birth of institutionalized Christianity.
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  I’m ready for a Mary that is a third option, a middle between these extremes that touches to the truth more faithfully. A Mary who isn’t a whore or a virgin. Or, a Mary that is both, like the voice in The Thunder, Perfect Mind: “I am the whore, and the holy woman. I am the wife and the virgin.” I turned back to Mary’s statue, to her outstretched arms and her open palms.

  I stared at her golden heart. And I imagined that moment in Christian belief when the angel Gabriel announced to her that she would give birth to god.

  What’s so profound about Mary is that the “yes” she said to that surge of light that came in the form of an angel within her, a yes that she never uttered outside of her, became one of the greatest expansions of love in the history of religions.

  I nodded in humility to Mary. To her courageousness that’s still left so unacknowledged, and uncelebrated. She should be riding a tiger like the Hindu goddess Durga. We don’t get yet how powerful it is to be that wide open to the voice of love, to be that present to the light inside the heart. And then to make our life about that union.

  Donna ushered me on. We made our way past the rest of the semicircle of altars that line the inside of the cathedral, then entered the tourist-free, roped-off area for the real prayers. She led us to a pew that was virtually empty and right beneath the golden Christ I had returned to the Sacred Heart cathedral to see. The second we sat down, this thick, sweet, honey-like silence spilled over me. I couldn’t move. And I couldn’t hear anything except that tumultuous, expectant silence inside me.

  I looked up and took Christ in from this proximity. I noticed that there’s a little Joan of Arc kneeling at his feet. She’s suited up in full armor, down on one knee. Her sword is gold and off to one side. How could I have missed her? Joan of Arc, and her hauntingly brave mantra before entering the Hundred Years’ War in France as a teenaged soldier, “I am not afraid, I was born to do this.” She, like Mary, had said yes to the angel she heard within her.

  I asked a question then, in my heart. I had been feeling, sensing, half-believing I wouldn’t come back from this pilgrimage. Or, said another way, I knew I would not come back the same.

  I asked if I would see my son again.

  I thought about Mary as I asked this. The love of her son. Being with a soul from the moment of conception, to first breath, to first steps, and first words, and first love. And then last steps, and last words, and last breath. It’s such an uncelebrated vocation, to love a boy to manhood, to completion. To raise a man who has been initiated by the feminine.

  Marion Woodman in Conscious Femininity relates that when we as a culture can raise the divine masculine from infancy to manhood, we will have moved the Christian story forward. We will have witnessed the rise of the divine masculine, a masculinity that can only come through a merging of the masculine with the feminine.

  Christ in this form, at the Sacred Heart, fully clothed in robes of gold and light, crowned with a halo that reaches in the four directions, and with arms as wide as the ceiling of the cathedral, is the masculine I love. Integrated. Whole. Feeling. Embracing. And most importantly, enduring.

  Then, I heard and felt the sweet exhale of the answer, yes.

  I know I will see my son again. I trust this. Even as everything is uncertain. I will see him again.

  And then something more happened. I feel the awareness of what love really does. I feel the way love functions as a bridge. That in loving we can’t ever be separate from those we love. Cor ad cor loquitur, which is Latin for “heart speaks to heart directly.” I am only ever as far away from him as I allow myself to believe I am. I am only as far from him as I am from my own heart.

  I miss him. And instead of thinking this, I tell this to him directly. I remember that I am with him always, from within. I tell him how much I miss him and just how much I love him.

  I look up at this Christ, this embodiment of enduring love set in gold, with arms that take in the whole mass of us, sitting there in the pews, silently praying, silently saying everything we need to say into our hearts. We think our hearts are separate and our own. But really, the heart is like a walkie-talkie, if we know how to use it. And when we have the courage to get still enough to go inward, it’s like we’re pressing down on that little red plastic bit on the side and speaking directly into a receiver.

  Then when we release our grip on that little red plastic bit that lets us speak to the soul, to god, to spirit—however you experience it or whoever you think is holding the matching walkie-talkie—you lift up on the button and wait, expectantly, in silence. Until suddenly, there’s a crackling noise and then a stream of light from a voice within you.

  Mary 9:30–31, “After Mary had said these things, she was silent. Since it was up to this point that the Savior had spoken to her,” reminds us that everything we’ve been hearing since Mary 6, when Peter asks Mary to teach them about what has been hidden from them, is a conversation that took place within Mary. It makes certain to remind us that these secret teachings came to her, that Christ revealed to her alone, because she could hear him, from within her.

  Mary and Christ had walkie-talkie hearts.

  And what I could feel in that moment beneath his wide embrace is that I do too. We all do.

  If we know how to use them.

  The next day at breakfast, Donna and I were planning our visit to the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal on Rue du Bac. As I waited for my omelet to arrive, I checked my email and saw that Lisbeth, the artist for The Divine Feminine Oracle, had uploaded her first draft of the card for Saint Catherine Labouré. My jaw dropped at the timing. She’s the saint who had the vision of the Virgin Mary at the exact chapel I was about to see for the first time that morning.

  Catherine saw a vision of Mary, similar to the stance Mary’s statue is in at the Sacred Heart cathedral, with her arms outstretched and her palms open. Except in Catherine’s vision, rays of light were streaming out of Mary’s palms. She said that the light was the healing, the answered prayers rushing from her to everyone who calls out to her.

  Catherine also asked Mary a question in her vision. She noticed that there were rays that weren’t reaching our world. They were sort of ricocheting off the world’s surface and going into space. Catherine asked Mary what that was all about. And Mary said, “Those are the graces for which people forget to ask.”

  Spirit is so mindful, so ethical, that we have to ask on behalf of ourselves and others to be blessed with healing. We have to love ourselves enough to ask for assistance.

  Donna did the same face-morphing thing that she’d done at Sacred Heart when she lit a candle for her mom. Her features just sort of transformed from normal-looking human skin to glowing particles of light. She’s so unassumingly Catholic. So unceremoniously spiritual. No rosary. No mention really ever of Christ or Mary. But get her in a cathedral and she’ll transubstantiate right in front of you.

  Donna then made her way to a seat in the pews, but I wanted to do some close-up praying right beneath the statue of Mary that’s lit with a golden halo at the center of the altar in the cathedral. A woman beside me, from Senegal I later learned, had tears streaming down both cheeks. I heard her pray in a language I didn’t comprehend but my heart understood. Cor ad cor loquitur. I went to pray for myself, but when I heard her suffering, I started immediately praying for her. And I instantly felt lighter. And this is what is so paradoxical. (As the truth, apparently, inherently is.) When I empty myself, when I forget myself for the sake of someone else, I’m instantly filled beyond what I could have ever asked for myself.

  Maybe this is what grace needs; the moment when the sudden love we have for a perfect stranger eclipses what we think we know, what we think we need, and just takes over. Maybe this is what Mary did in that moment when Gabriel asked her if she would give birth to god. Would she eclipse herself, and her own little life, the story she was living with Joseph, the future they were beginning to script for themselves? Would she let spirit write her story instead? Could she sa
y yes to this light inside her?

  THE SIXTH POWER: THE FALSE PEACE OF THE FLESH

  The Whole Point Is That It Never Ends

  Even if it only comes and goes. Even if you hide it from others. Especially if you hide it from yourself. Even if it scares you. Especially if it scares you.

  Even if you wonder some days if it was ever real. Even if you think deep down that it’s someone else’s. Even if you think its beauty has nothing to do with you.

  Even if you haven’t seen it in so long it feels lost to you. Especially if it feels lost to you. Even if it’s buried so deep you have to mine past the hardest parts of you.

  Even if it’s only your secret. Especially if it’s only your secret. Even if it’s just a grain of sand. A mustard seed. I want you to know that your love is enough.

  You can always begin again.

  I have this deeply held belief that there’s this place I’ll reach, this state of mind—meaning heart—where I become too aware, too conscious, to be hurt again or too enlightened to fall down neck deep in the mess of my ego. I keep thinking there will be this “X marks the spot,” this plateau where I arrive, this place where I free myself once and for all from myself.

  But there is no there.

  The whole point is that it never ends.

  It isn’t a failure to feel human, to be broken by heartbreak. It’s the whole point. The choice we have, the opportunity that’s presented to us in those moments of exquisite pain, is to also remember the soul. We can bring in the other half of what it means to be human. Not right away, or at least not at first. We can just let it sit on our shoulder or in our back pocket. And even that little presence of light might help us move through the pain differently than we had before.

 

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