Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  Later that day, when Shai was with his dad, I went to a yoga class at the studio I love, called Inner Bliss. I love yoga. I do very little of it. I am adept at child’s pose. I spend half the class in it. And I often enter Shavasana, the corpse pose, about a half hour before everyone else does. I’ve never felt the need to actually go into whatever next pose the teacher leads us through. Everything feels like a suggestion. It feels like church for me, body church. It’s a place to be present, in my body, with a whole bunch of other bodies. A place to listen. And to rest my head on my stinky yoga mat and just let all my thoughts go. And do whatever helps me hear that voice that’s always here with me, within me, ceaselessly telling me the love I know.

  I stayed seated even after all the other budding yogis pushed back into their first of a billion downward dogs. I stayed rooted, sitting cross-legged on my mat, pretending my spine extended down, deep into the earth, reaching all the way to the underside of Australia, and that a ray of light shot up from the crown of my head, blinding the angels billions of light years away.

  I tried to see my body as the world tree.

  And of course, both places, all the way down and all the way up, are right here inside the heart. I took a deep breath, and I felt that descent, inward. And then I took a second breath to feel connected, and once I did, I whispered, “Where am I divided?” Instead of an answer, I felt compelled to open my eyes and start to move. So I met the class where they were—plank position. I planked, and asked again as I noticed the tension mounting in my neck, “Where am I divided?”

  There was a super-duper handsome yogi man on my left. He was so attractive it sounded as if a slight gong noise emanated from his chest. We were asked to do the cat-cow pose next. I went into the X-rated version. Craning my neck up far enough that my mouth opened ever so slightly and tilting my pelvis to an unnatural degree. On my third time through, I felt a sharp tweak of pain. I had overcocked my coccyx. I yelped. The pain was like a slap. Wake up! I was aware then that I was cat-cowing the hell out of my body for the sake of the handsome yogi man beside me. Who, of course, hadn’t even noticed. I started to laugh.

  How human of me. A wide Cheshire-cat smile took over my face. I whispered again, now with this levity and pulsating joy, “Where am I divided?”

  The song ended and a new song began right then. A voice I adore, Krishna Das. A voice that goes back to when I first fell in love with yoga, at divinity school, while studying the Divine Feminine, Tantra, Isis, and finding Mary’s gospel, all while beginning to understand that no matter how many sacred texts I read, I will never learn more than when I’m able to just be fully present in my body.

  It was a chant by Krishna Das I hadn’t heard before. And as we moved slowly into Warrior One pose, I heard Krishna Das sing the chorus Shai had just belted out to me earlier that day, from Foreigner, about wanting to know what love is. My smile got even wider.

  I know this state so well. This state of grace, where everything is so loud and clear and so entirely in my face. Where the message of what’s here to learn, to take in, presents itself in these curious sympathies, these “synchronicities,” as Carl Jung would call them. I sang quietly along with Krishna Das as he continued chanting his Kirtan to god, about wanting to feel what love is, and knowing “you” (god) can show me. I had prayed myself right into the experience of the answer.

  When things align like this, I remember what union might mean, as if in a dream I had recently. I can’t articulate the details with any precision; it’s more of a fleeting feeling that seems to slip in and out of my grasp like a spirited fish with slippery skin. It’s this feeling of integrity, where what’s within me is outside of me. Where who I am, all that I am, is right here, present.

  And what I think and feel comes through me, effortlessly, with no filtering and no holding back. Where the love within me expands out in widening circles; where I’m aware that I hold love within me, and that I am held in love from outside of me. Where I’m in love. And this lets me feel (even if just momentarily) the bliss of continuity, of being undivided from my heart to my words, and thoughts, to how my body moves and breathes. It’s all unified and undivided. I’m unified. I’m undivided.

  This is how I understand this passage from The Thunder, Perfect Mind, “What is your inside is your outside, and what you see on the outside, you see revealed on the inside.” The alchemist dictum, “as above, so below,” points to this same truth. If the world within us is bound to the ego, we will see a world outside of us through that lens. And if the world within us is freed to see with the eyes of the soul, then we see things as they truly are; we will see the heaven that’s already here. Nowhere else but in this humble, frequently humiliated, utterly shattered human heart.

  This is the singleness I believe Christ reached and Mary followed. And this to me is what made her the first apostle or, if you prefer, the apostle to the apostles. This capacity to become undivided. As Cynthia Bourgeault explains, “Apostleship does not lie in having been near Jesus, taught or studied with him, or attended the Last Supper. It lies in the inner integration (singleness) which allows that person to live in continuous communion with the Master in the imaginal meeting ground through the power of a pure heart, so that ‘Thy Kingdom come’ is in fact a living reality.”48

  This, to me, is the perfect human, the anthropos that Christ in Mary’s gospel calls us all to be. We are to clothe ourselves with this holy mix of being an ego, a self that struggles every single day to cope, and also equally, a soul that is eternal and knows it, a soul that is love and never needs to prove it. And this is the state I can keep choosing to be in, that I can practice returning to faster.

  Yes, I’m here in a state with a slogan, “the heart of it all,” my home state that has asked me to heal all the way back and all the way through. Ultimately, I’m here, in my body, in this cathedral heart that’s all lit up with a love that has never left. I have died to the ego’s idea of me, which is something I keep doing, daily. I have replaced an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand, so that what I see blazes.

  This is why everything has changed and everything has stayed the same, because what has always been here in my heart is now met, fully. What I knew might exist, does. My inside is my outside. This is what the gospel of Mary Magdalene gave to me—the confirmation of what my body has always told me. There’s another way to see what it means to be human and god all at once. Like a yolk in an egg, like a soul in a body, like a world within a world, that begins and never ends.

  AFTERWORD

  I Believe Mary

  We should clothe ourselves with the perfect Human, acquire it for ourselves as he commanded us, and announce the Good news.

  — MARY 10:11–13

  Now that we’ve heard about what has been hidden from us, the last passage from the Gospel of Mary answers what we can each do to acquire “the perfect Human” for ourselves.

  Personally, the word perfect makes me cringe.

  I much prefer the word complete or true in its place. True as in whole. Authentic. Integral. So, we are to clothe ourselves with the true human. And this means that once we have stripped ourselves of the stories and ideas that feed the raging fires of the ego, or the power to judge (which ensnares us in a cycle of the ego’s seven powers), then the only thing we should put back on is this understanding or vision of being a true human being, the self and the soul united.

  This, of course, does not mean we remain that way. Perfect, whole, unified, complete. It does not mean we are infallible, and incorruptible, and that we float from now on several feet above the ground. It doesn’t mean we have to always wear white, never have sex, and abstain from anything that would actually make us happy. All of these ideas of perfect have confused us about what it means to be spiritual, to be a spiritually grown-up and true human being.

  As humans, we forget, as Mary revealed to us. The chains of forgetfulness bind us again to the ego. The work we’re being called to here, though, is to “clothe ourselves with the perfect Hu
man.” So we have to do the work that allows us to remember, again and again, and with greater ease and levity, this experience of the self as also a soul. This experience of not just being this pain, and grief, and terror of the ego, but also this soul of love that loves through us.

  This love that whispers from within us, when we are exhausted and alone, “Give to me what you cannot carry.”

  We are to “acquire it for ourselves as he commanded us,” which translates to me as seeing Christ as an example, a way-shower, a trail-blazer in what it means to be human.

  This doesn’t speak of idolizing or worshipping or distancing Christ from us or from what it means to be human. This says he commanded us to try, as we are each able, to experience the truth that he realized, which is that within the human heart sits a treasure. That treasure will be referred to as a diamond, as a light that pierces all other light, as heaven, as gold by the alchemists, as the soul, as the aspect of us that’s inseparable from god.

  If we can “acquire it,” since it’s already ours, and since it’s already here within us, then we will be able to see (thanks to the nous, the eye of the heart) that we are not separate from it. That we are no greater or less than a mustard seed, a tree, a flower, a wolf, a star, an angel, those streaks of red in a sunset that takes the breath away. We are aware, again, of what we had forgotten, that everything “exists in and with each other.” And this is humbling and empowering all at once.

  Because when I speak, if I speak from this place, from this treasure that has been hidden from us, then I use a voice that is more than my own. I become a voice in service of love. I become that one unified voice that demanded Thecla’s freedom. It’s a voice that’s more like fire, like an invisible flame that inconspicuously meets us in that silence inside us and asks us to be brave enough to tell the truth.

  This is how, for me at least, I can “announce the Good news,” as a voice in service of love.

  The good news that god is, simply, Good, that god is not male or female, or removed from us, high above and beyond our comprehension. God is simply the good, which exists within, and between, each one of us.

  The good news that there is no such thing as sin. We have nothing to be ashamed of in being human, in having a body, in feeling all that this body knows, which is lost to the intellect and beyond reason.

  We have nothing to be ashamed of or to ever have to hide when it comes to who we love. Who we love is not determined by our body or theirs, not their sex or their gender but the soul that expresses itself through it all.

  And the authority for speaking on behalf of this love comes from the depth of the transformation a person has undergone within themselves to remember who they really are.

  It is determined by their proximity to this experience of love, to this treasure Christ commands us to find. And that proximity to love lets them emanate humility, because they know in their bones the radical worth and equality of us all. It lets them radiate mercy, an almost freakish amount of giving all their love away. Giving their love to anyone and everyone, knowing as they do, that the more they give, the more they receive from within the heart. Lord Jesus Christ, son of god, have mercy on me. Mercy is this exchange, this law of the universe.

  Announcing is not converting; it’s not proselytizing. Cor ad cor loquitur. Heart speaks to heart directly. Those who have two ears will be able to hear and understand. It’s our work to do what we can to remember the soul, to remember the love that’s at the heart of how and why we heal.

  It’s our work to undo the systems of power that confuse us into forgetting our own power.

  The good news to me is that true power rests within us. That like Mary Magdalene, like Thecla, Perpetua, Joan of Arc, Marguerite Porete, and Theresa of Avila demonstrated, no one outside of us can keep us from finding this power. Because it’s not a power over us or outside of us. It’s a power that rests within us, and we can rest in it, be led by it, and be carried by it.

  It’s a power that takes us breath by breath, if we let it, to the places where our ego’s the loudest and most afraid, so we can become aware of the contrast; the stark contrast between the world the ego sees and the world love sees.

  It’s a power that’s the opposite of power. It’s love. And it’s this love that frees us from the ego so we can hear what’s in the heart, and then tell the truth.

  And that might sound too daunting. Telling the truth. Let me call on Hemingway here. When I get overwhelmed with what I’m going to write, or how in the hell I could ever say what feels like a symphony inside me, I freeze up, and cry, and spend most of the day cleaning the floor or the toilets so I don’t have to face my own ineptitude. To start writing again, I turn to Hemingway’s reminder; “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” We just have to tell each next truth we hear from within. And this is what frees us from the very unique cages our own egos have constructed for us.

  The perfect, or true human, is anchored into this love, and also, is equally, still and for as long as we have a body, this raging ego that will resist the “death” this love demands. So, it’s all part of the process. It’s part of what it means to be spiritual, and to be “perfect,” and to be an absolute mess at times. To fall flat on our egos and scream, for example, while sobbing in the shower. Or to storm out of a situation you couldn’t possibly handle calmly in the moment.

  The good news is that it’s just alpha, and then omega, ad infinitum. It’s just a constant return. A myriad of opportunities to come back to this voice of love inside us. And we can spend less and less time away from it, or feeling as though we’re separate from it, or aren’t worthy of it, if we choose to. Being human isn’t the failure. Being human is the soul’s chance to be here.

  The guru, the saint, the magi, the “perfected” ideal of yourself that can radiate beams of light like Princess Fiona after Shrek’s true love kiss, and remain that way, is an illusion. This is often used as a way for us to feel inadequate. To constantly compare ourselves. To constantly suggest to ourselves that we’re not there yet. We haven’t arrived.

  The good news is we never arrive. None of us. Not even the holiest person you can think of in this moment, like Oprah or the Dalai Lama. We never get there. That’s the whole point of being human. The point is to constantly arrive. For some of us with each breath. We constantly return to love. This is the good news; that we can. That it’s set up this way. That no matter who we are or how long we’ve been separated from feeling the presence of love, it’s actually right here.

  Within.

  I came across an article recently published in Harvard Magazine about Dr. Karen King and her translation of Mary’s gospel, titled, “The Bits the Bible Left Out.” Dr. King says it occurred to her that, “the central point of the gospel wasn’t the dispute between disciples, but the rise of the soul.”49 King explains, “The more I thought about it, the more the gospel seemed to be about a spiritual path in this life as much as what might happen in the afterlife.”50

  An ascent narrative, a story about the rise of the soul, this is at the heart of the Gospel of Mary. For me, what I’ve come to understand is that it’s the soul that rises, not me, not my ego, not anything “human” that I am. The soul rises up from within me. It’s the soul that rises. And I descend inward to meet it. Does that make sense? The soul rises up from within the heart and we have the chance, again and again, if we can get still and present enough to just listen.

  And we don’t have to wait until death to encounter the soul. The soul is right here. Like our own private heaven inside us. We can choose to die now and live as someone who has walked through death like Mary, and chose to resurrect as someone who cannot be separate from love.

  Your inside will be your outside.

  If you can listen to the silence inside you, hear what love wants you to say, to do, then no one outside of you can ever silence you again.

  And, for me, each time I do this, no matter how small or insignificant the truth I
hear, even if it’s just a quiet, unassuming “yes” to attend an event, or a “no” to something someone is asking of me, I feel like I’ve triumphed. Like somehow, taking that voice seriously has an impact that reaches all the way back and all the way through to the time I was silenced as a little girl. That if I remember the worth of that quiet (fierce) unassuming voice of love inside me, I save myself. Each time I simply use it.

  I guess it feels collective too. That it’s not just a personal battle over my own demons I win when I listen to that voice and believe it enough to take action on it and do what’s true for me, I also somehow move Mary’s story forward. I heal the disbelief. I heal the ancient misunderstanding that I was ever unworthy, that you could ever be unworthy, that she was unworthy. In consciously listening for what’s true for me and saying it, I practice the fact that I believe Mary.

  I don’t know what’s next for me and Mary Magdalene. What I see, or imagine, is simple. There’s this circle of us, this motley crew, and we’re all trying to understand her gospel. Maybe we’re a church, or a congregation of some sort that has included all the bits the bible left out. And we try, imperfectly together, to practice and know the kind of radical love her heart was capable of.

  Can you see it? Maybe we’ll sit in the same circle at some point. Or maybe you’ll start a circle wherever you are. Realizing, as you must by now, that you’re as much an authority on Mary Magdalene as I am. Because you’re an authority of the voice of your own soul. And because you remember that there is no hierarchy in the spiritual world.