Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  THE SEVENTH POWER: THE COMPULSION OF RAGE

  What We Have Remembered

  Where does the rage originate?

  First it was when your best friend left. The one who remembered you. The one you fell in love with. The one you trusted more than yourself. The one who made sure any pain and suffering you went through soon had meaning.

  Then it was your husband. Your partner. Your son’s father. The one who changed his mind, who hardened his heart after you had already handed yours to him. To hold, to harbor like a sparrow in his palm.

  First it was your best friend and then your husband.

  No, this isn’t where it began.

  First, it was the teenager who crept into his sister’s room while you slept, while you were in the last trusting sleep you would ever have, the one who confused you for an object, the one who had no idea that what he was doing severed you from your body.

  Then there was your best friend, and then there was your husband.

  No, this isn’t when it started.

  First, there was that moment in Sunday school, when you read how women were silenced, how they were only ever the supporting actresses in this variation of a story about god, and how the presence that you sensed before you went to church had been left out. What was within you was not outside of you, and this was the beginning.

  No, the first betrayal is every time you remain silent about what you hear in your heart. That is the most primal deception, this inability or unwillingness to trust what you hear inside you, in this voice that doesn’t have a voice without you.

  And this is understandable. This inability to be a bridge between what you hear in your heart and what you say out loud. Christ says in Mary 3:14, “Anyone with two ears capable of hearing should listen!” We’re not taught this form of “hearing” that I believe he’s referring to. This listening to the deep. Listening to what we hear from within us. We have never been taught to listen to the feminine, to turn inward, to trust that dulcet voice that knows itself completely.

  No one outside of you should ever be given the power to name you, or the burden of it. You carry the weight of knowing who you are. That is your responsibility and honor. When you know and name who you are, that is how time stops, how this moment right here goes back to the past and heals now what broke you back then.

  There is no time in love. There is only intention. There is only the promise of redemption. When we let this love reach to where it has never been before, to where we are broken. This is when we reclaim what was always ours.

  We are gifted this presence of the love inside us, and the first and last betrayal is the moment we stop listening. It’s the moment we lose our faith in this presence that proves we are more than just our mistakes, we are more than just human.

  This betrayal is ancient. Betrayal of the feminine is ingrained in the fabric of our belief. It’s here, present in scripture from the 1st century. It’s here at the start of Christianity. We question, we doubt, we disbelieve the feminine. We don’t trust it. We don’t feel it’s worthy of our trust. We abandon the feminine; we bury it. We demonize it. We portray it, her, as a prostitute.

  We forget that the feminine is a part of us. That the feminine is an essential half of what it means to be human and what it means to know god.

  We forget that something eternal lives within us for as long as we draw breath. We forget that we are both male and female, masculine and feminine, light and dark, conscious and unconscious, human and angel, divine and animal. We forget that we are all actually undivided.

  The Gospel of Thomas says, “Blessed are you in the midst of persecution who, when they hate and pursue you even to the core of your being, cannot find ‘you’ anywhere.”

  It’s only the ego that suffers betrayal. This is why you are beyond words, and beyond any need to ever defend this eternity you hold in you. There is no ‘you’ that can ever be threatened.

  What we have remembered is the other half of the story of Christ. We have remembered the love that can only come to life through us, from within. We have remembered her, the woman who knew Christ by heart.

  The Woman with the Alabaster Jar

  To be anointed with oil is higher than being immersed in water. It is when we are anointed, not when we are immersed in water, that we become Christians. Christ was called Messiah because of this: he is “the anointed one.”

  — THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP

  What she has done will also be told in memory of her.

  I was back from the pilgrimage and watching the first season of The Crown on Netflix. Binge watching, that is. I had spent most of that day for the time I had to write (while my son was at school) on compiling quotes about Mary Magdalene and her connection to anointing.

  The episode I happened to watch was the one about the controversial televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. The TV monitors are all switched off in the moment when the Archbishop approaches the Queen with the holy oil. This is the most sacred part of the ritual, we are told by the Duke of Windsor, the would-be king who abdicated the throne for his love of Wallis Simpson, an American socialite and divorcée.

  He narrates to an audience of guests in his mansion in France as they take in all the complexities of the coronation. When someone asks why the anointing is the holiest part of the ceremony, too holy even for it to be televised, the former king explains that the anointing is the moment when the divine is infused into Elizabeth’s human form. It’s when she is no longer just Elizabeth, but Queen Elizabeth II. The holy oil marks that transformation from only human to now also divine.

  The Archbishop hesitates before making the sign of the cross with the oil on her chest, and then her forehead. This is the part of the coronation that converts her from a woman into a queen.

  The first time I came across the biblical passage about Mary Magdalene anointing Christ was in Jean-Yves Leloup’s translation of her gospel. This is the translation with the painting by Giotto di Bondone of Mary Magdalene lifted up by angels above the mountain (which I can now say I climbed). This is the scene and legend that inspired my need to find her cave. An external depiction that for me is symbolic of what happened within her. The cave being her own heart.

  Christ says in Matthew 26:13, “By pouring this perfume on me, she has prepared my body for burial.” Leloup explains that Mary Magdalene walked the path of the sacred marriage. She demonstrates with her actions that she had become a bridge between the worlds. This act of anointing Christ’s body couldn’t have happened with just anyone. The fact that Mary was the one to have anointed Christ is a fact that marks her profound significance.

  What she has done will also be told in memory of her.

  That day we found the cave, after a teary good-bye with Alle Ooop, the Frenchman, and their beautiful teenaged kids, I called Veronique for a ride back from the café at the base of the mountain. Her husband answered and came to get me. As we made our way down the winding road that leads back into town, he told me that supposedly, on the day Mary Magdalene died, she came down from the cave in the mountains to the town of Saint-Maximin. He said she had given Saint Maximin a vision of her descent.

  So, Saint Maximin was waiting there for Mary at the entrance to the town. And as soon as she arrived, Saint Maximin rushed to her, and she fell into his arms. There’s a monument to mark where she died. It’s just there on the side of the road. He stopped the car so I could get out and look at it. It’s a large stone pillar with Mary Magdalene at the top of it being lifted up by four angels. I pressed my hand to it and closed my eyes. I thanked him and asked to go to her cathedral, Saint-Maximin. The icon I found of her then in the gift shop is the one of Mary Magdalene holding an alabaster jar.

  The alabaster jar Mary holds in so many of the paintings and icons of her is filled with the holy oil used to anoint the body before burial. This, Leloup believes, reveals that Mary Magdalene understands how to master the transition of death: “Her appearances with special oils to use in anointing Jesus Christ place h
er in the tradition of priests and priestesses of Isis, whose unguents were used to achieve the transition over the threshold of death while retaining consciousness.”45

  In John 12:1–8, Christ defends Mary’s use of the expensive spikenard to anoint him. When Judas is horrified that she wastes such an excessive amount of oil that could have been sold and the money given to the poor, Christ says, “It was intended that she should save this oil for the day of my burial.” It was intended. This was not an act Mary did on a whim. She didn’t just suddenly spill a year’s worth of wages in oil onto Christ’s feet for the hell of it. This was intentional. This was what had been intended all along.

  Anointing is still the most sacred aspect of ritual in the Christian tradition. But we have forgotten the memory of the woman who made it sacred.

  The Gospel of Philip explains the power of the holy oil to convert a human into the divine: “The name Christian is welcomed with anointing, in the fullness and energy of the cross, which the apostles call the union of opposites; then one is not just Christian, one is the Christ.”46 What’s the union of opposites? Think of every binary that comes to mind: male and female, light and dark, human and divine, life and death. The union of opposites comes when you’ve reached a state of consciousness that allows you to integrate them both.

  The ego seeks to divide and separate. Which is important, crucial even, if you want to arrive at work on time and fully dressed or write checks with your accurate name signed on them. The ego rocks in that department. And if you want to distinguish yourself as the one to blame or the one who is entirely blameless in the breakdown of a relationship, the ego reigns. Only the ego can identify the opposites. Only the soul knows the union of them both.

  To be an anointed Christian, in this context, means to live with the consciousness of this union.

  And if we see the resurrection narrative as a metaphor, the anointing ritual becomes the passage from the death of the ego, the limited self, “the egoic operating system,” as Cynthia Bourgeault refers to it, into the expansive realm of the soul. This is the transformation of consciousness at the heart of the Christian tradition, and Mary Magdalene is the one who has shown us the way.

  Anointing, then, in its original context, was the act of consciously acknowledging that the physical body passes away, but the soul within the body does not. Bourgeault believes that, “To reclaim anointing in its original context would make it the sacramental centerpiece of a whole new vision of Christianity based on spiritual transformation and the alchemy of love.”47

  After Mary anoints Christ with the spikenard and washes his feet with her hair, before his crucifixion, Christ says in Matthew 26:6–13: “Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached in all the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

  The Language of the Angels

  If the Savior considered her to be worthy, who are you to disregard her? For he knew her completely and loved her steadfastly.

  — MARY 10:9–10

  Like the mystic Marguerite Porete, we have so much of what Joan of Arc actually said, her real words, because of a lengthy trial leading up to her death. It’s because of these transcripts from the trial we know details about her life before she became a legend: for example, that Joan would have preferred to stay home spinning wool. She never intended to be anything more than what was expected of a peasant girl in rural France in the early 15th century when she was born.

  I often imagine the moment when Joan of Arc cut her hair. She was 13. And because of a vision she had of the archangel Michael, she cut her hair short, dressed in men’s armor, and led the army in several campaigns that shifted the Hundred Years’ War in France’s favor.

  “I die for speaking the language of the angels,” Joan said. She had succeeded in every battle she was a part of. She wasn’t on trial because of treason or war crimes charged against her. She wasn’t even (ultimately) on trial for the reason they gave her: repeat offenses of cross-dressing. She was on trial because she had listened to a voice inside her, a voice that transcended the sex and gender roles of rural France in 1430. She spoke the language of the angels, which has no ceiling and no limit to the possibilities of what we can be in this lifetime.

  This is why she was burned at the stake, not because she dressed like a man, which she did, but because she listened to the voice of love inside her, and she believed it enough to let it guide her.

  The church declared Joan of Arc guilty of cross-dressing in 1431 and burned her at the stake. Supposedly, her last words were, “Hold the cross so high that I may see it through the flames.”

  Twenty-five years later, her mother demanded a retrial. Joan of Arc was declared innocent in 1456. And Pope Benedict canonized her a saint in 1920.

  I don’t know what the language of the angels sounded like exactly, for Joan. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s about hearing what’s already in the heart and then declaring, even if you’re terrified, “I am not afraid. I was born to do this,” like Saint Joan did.

  Joan of Arc is the girl who had the courage and the steel-like faith to follow the voice of an angel only she could hear, from within her. That voice cut her free from any expectations projected onto her in the world that she was born into. That voice connected her to her own inner world.

  She was burned at the stake for speaking the language of the angels, which meant following that voice within her, that no one else could control or contain. That voice that only she could validate and act on. “Act, and God acts,” she said.

  This is where worth comes in.

  What can block that voice, that language of the heart, the vision of love that’s within us, is an ancient misunderstanding that we’re not worthy of such proximity to an angel. It’s that ancient divide, the idea that there is humanity and then there is divinity. That the two are separate, and what’s more, that one is higher, more crucial, or more holy than the other.

  The powers of the ego, the seven powers that we have moved through in Mary’s gospel, are about a power over. But this language, this vision, is about a power with. It’s about a love that comes from understanding the worth inherent in being human. A love that comes from experiencing that “every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.” Act and god acts; this is a living exchange. A constant dialogue. A mercy.

  Who are we to disregard that voice of love?

  Levi, in Mary 10:10, reminds Peter that Christ considered her worthy. “For he knew her completely and loved her steadfastly.” So how could Peter disregard her? And how could we?

  Now, let’s imagine for a moment that nothing in any gospel has ever been literal. Let’s imagine that it’s meant to be poetic and suggestive. That all scripture is meant to point us through parable after parable to an awakening that can only come from within.

  Then the cross can represent the interstice, the meeting point of all opposites. The place that’s out beyond life and death, male and female, light and dark, human and divine, heaven and hell. The cross can be the holy instant when we can finally see who we truly are. “Hold the cross so high that I may see it through the flames.”

  We are not this struggle, this heartbreak. We are not this triumph, this drive to win. We are not the impulse to cause pain, or the compulsion to save lives. We are the moment when we think we are forsaken, forgotten. The moment when we think we are alone. And from out of the darkness a voice calls our name. And we remember.

  Love is stronger than death.

  In disregarding Mary, in forgetting who she was to Christ, “For he knew her completely and loved her steadfastly,” we disregard the aspect within us that’s fluent with the angels.

  We forget that actually Christ did not die alone on the cross; there was one who never left, who was with him from within her heart. There was a woman who could perceive his soul.

  Remember. She wept at seeing the tomb empty. She needed to be with his body. She was there when no one else was. She was the love that remained.
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br />   She wept, and also there at the tomb she spoke to two angels. In place of where Christ’s body had been, Mary saw, like Joan, two angels cloaked in white. (Remember, they appeared within her.) They asked her, “Why are you weeping?” Then Mary turns, and Christ asks her the same question as the angels, “Why are you weeping?” (Because love is stronger than death.)

  This is what has been hidden from us. A love that is a power we have always been worthy of. A love that is a power with us, from within us. A love that brings us back to life, again and again.

  The Prayer of the Heart

  What is your inside is your outside,

  And what you see on the outside,

  You see revealed on the inside.

  — THE THUNDER, PERFECT MIND 4:30–31

  I was in full-on mom-mode. It’s a mode that feels like a possession, like I’ve morphed into a cyclone. Cleaning up as if I had seven arms and calling out directives at my son as if we were suddenly under some sort of deadline to get everything organized in his room, as if we were about to get judged by some galactic panel that comes down hard on the messy and disheveled.

  Then, suddenly, Shai belted out from across the room, with as much angst as Foreigner themselves, that classic ’80s chorus of wanting to know what love is.

  This, of course, cracked me up. He was communicating, with such levity and with that little twinkle in his eye, that he was feeling ordered around right now, not loved. So, I replied by singing the next line to the chorus, with matching angst and strain in my face, begging to know what love is, and wanting someone to show me.

  He has skillful means at such a young age. With one lyric, he snaps me out of the trance of who I don’t have to be.

  I tackled him onto the bed and started kissing his cheeks like a crazy puppy until those peals of laughter I love so much came from him, dismantling the energy in the room the same way rays of light breaking through thick cloud cover shift the landscape. I returned to myself again. Not a mom primarily. Not a form-fitting, knowable thing. Not a revered or a hallowed thing. Just a human woman who loves with all her being this miraculous human who came from her own body.