#SANCTUS VII: MARY MAGDALENE

You can watch the video at this link.

How do we find holiness? That’s the question we asked ourselves in our first season of SANCTUS, a series of contemplative video essays we shared with you in Lent. In some ways, it was a natural question to ask in Lent, that inwardly-facing liturgical season of self-examination--most of the time, “holiness” is a word we use to describe “a state of perfection” that we aspire to, and Lent tends to be that time in the church year when we get serious about taking strides in that journey.

But as we learned over the course of six weeks together, holiness means wholeness, and so, “perfection” or “completeness” doesn’t make a lot of sense as an idea to work towards when we’re always only part of the way through--do we ever really arrive at holiness? When does a spiritual journey end, anyway?

In Lent, we asked these questions as an invitation into transformation, and now, in the depths of this fiery post-Pentecost summer, we are wondering: transformation into what?

To even begin to contemplate this vast and somewhat daunting question, let’s root ourselves in this time and place. SANCTUS comes to you today in what the Church calls “Ordinary Time.” This tends to be an ‘off-season,’ when church activities wind down and many of us move away to spend our days outside of more usual patterns and rhythms. For the Church, it almost feels like this isn’t even a season at all--every Sunday, we count how many days it’s been since Pentecost all the way through September when we finally seem to have something new to get excited about!

Of course, as students of the Kingdom of God, we know that’s not how it really works--there’s no “off” season or dead time for the Church--if anything, what we experience after Pentecost is the whole point! This is the time when we’re set loose! School’s out--so go forth into the world with gladness and singleness of heart and be the Church.

But just like it is for many students, without the structure of the school calendar, all of this free time might feel overwhelming. How are we to be the church, exactly?

Well, one suggestion we might take from the Church’s own calendar is to remember the very last special occasion we celebrated together: Trinity Sunday. On that day, everything we’ve been learning together from Advent to Christmas to Lent to Easter and Pentecost came together into one incredible numinous image: the Blessed Trinity, whirling, swirling, drawing us into its divine dance.

That’s the image we want to carry with us in the next six weeks. Holiness after Trinity Sunday takes on a different resonance: it means understanding wholeness as the whole of Creation taken up in that divine dance--or, as Saint Vida Scudder puts it, that Divine Society. Wholeness from a trinitarian perspective starts to take on cosmic proportions: all of Creating seeking union with God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

At this point, you may be wondering where Mary Magdalene fits in all of this. Or maybe you’re bristling at the gendered language we use when talking about the Trinity--should we really be talking about fathers and sons in a series that teased us with a tagline like “WOMAN/WISDOM”? Isn’t that kind of switcheroo what’s so fundamentally broken about Christianity? How can the Church meet the needs of at least half of the world when it seems so irredeemably patriarchal?

If you’ve had that reaction, we want to say “thank you”--because it’s in re-membering that fragmented Image of God that we’ve inherited as Christians that we begin to see the link between that Trinity Sunday dance and today’s feast of this most misunderstood woman called Mary of Magdala. As Cynthia Bourgeault puts it, Mary Magdalene helps us “repair the damage” --not just to her story and its place in church history, but also, the damage done to our image of ourselves and of God. Mary Magdalene, that “broken woman” healed by Jesus and who became a leader in his movement, is our guide for figuring out how to “repair the damage” done to our understanding of God “caused by heavy-handed patriarchal (and at times flat-out misogynist)...traditions.”

But before we make Mary’s acquaintance, let’s re-center ourselves again: provocations like these are what we’ll be exploring together over the next six weeks, through three video essays and three Zoom calls, every Thursday at 5:30 pm. Next week, we’ll be meeting on Zoom on the Feast of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. After that, we’ll be back on YouTube reflecting on The Transfiguration. Then we’re gathering on Zoom again for the Feast of Florence Nightingale before wrapping up our video essays the week after with a reflection on Mary the Virgin--Mary, the Mother of God. After that, there will be one more opportunity to gather on Zoom the Thursday after.

So we’ll be covering a lot of ground! And you will have plenty of opportunity to engage with the ideas we are presenting in these videos. Throughout, we invite you to keep the image of the Triune God in mind as we link arms with the saints along the way: just like the sense of endless possibility in each long summer day, the Trinity is a vast container that will help us make connections across many difficult and thorny topics. This is true for this season of SANCTUS and it will be true for other seasons to come.

Meeting Mary

In “A Re-Visioning of Love,” the Jungian therapist Dr. Ana Mozol shares an intriguing memory about Mary Magdalene that’s more of an aside than a central part of her story--she writes of finding a book in Thailand where she read “the story of when Jesus met Mary Magdalene, how she was possessed by seven demons, and that when he touched her, the demons rushed toward the sun and drowned themselves.” The author of this book she found “goes on to say that the word “demon” comes from a root that means division-- that Mary was divided into seven parts but with Jesus’ touch became unpossessed.” Dr. Mozol ends her recollection with this evocative line: “I have searched for this reference in numerous books of his and never found it again.”

There’s something very illustrative in here: a fragment of a memory of a lost book reflecting on a biblical narrative of a woman we all think we know. That’s Mary’s legacy--she has generated a whole industry of speculation about the truth of her life and ministry. Prostitute, lover, apostle, myth--her significance is pulled in so many directions as to become repossessed by the very demons of divisions that Jesus banished from her body, a kind of violence that is unfortunately not that unique to the story of one woman from one town on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Patriarchy will assign every woman a title or function: martyr, monster, or muse -- sometimes, all at once.

And so, “the meaning of Mary Magdalene” has morphed with the shifting tides of our cultural fascination with her person and its relationship to Jesus, leaving us with only images seen through a mirror darkly, each glimpse reflecting more of ourselves than of the woman herself.

What we know about history is that its books tend to be written by those who want to persuade you to share their vision of what happened and why. They preserve what they would like to be remembered, and with every layer of partial remembering, a patriarchal society ends up with a memory of itself where only mens’ stories are the stories that matter. We don’t have to look very far to find examples of this kind of split-remembering and the ripple effects it can have in cultures like ours: it’s right there in our Gospel accounts of Mary Magdalene. Here is how Dr. Barbara E. Reid, a Dominican Sister and biblical scholar, explains this scriptural enigma at length:

“It is clear that there are two strands of tradition in the New Testament regarding who was first to see the risen Christ and be commissioned by him to proclaim the good news. In the Gospels of Matthew and John, it is Mary Magdalene. In Luke and Paul, it is Peter. In Luke’s account of the empty tomb, Mary and her companions are commissioned by angelic messengers, not Jesus directly, and the proclamation of the women is regarded as ‘an idle tale’ by the others...Peter then runs to the tomb, sees the linen cloths, and goes home amazed...In the next episode, when Cleopas and his companion run back to Jerusalem to tell the others they have encountered the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, the other disciples greet them with the assertion, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon.’ There is, however, no account of an appearance of the risen Christ to Peter in Luke’s gospel. It is an ancient piece of the tradition that Peter was the first. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he lists all those to whom the risen Christ appeared. Heading the list is Cephas, the Arameic name for Peter, followed by the Twelve, then “more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time,” then James, then the apostles, and last of all, Paul himself...There is no mention of Mary Magdalene and her companions.” (Wisdom’s Feast, p. 97)

So what does this mean? Karen Jo Torjesen tells us that the same sort of remembering and forgetting of Mary’s role in the most foundational story of our faith happens in the Gospel of John. In Chapter 20, we read about the resurrected Jesus appearing to Mary, but later, in Chapter 21, “Peter was made the key witness of the resurrection.” This mismatch has puzzled New Testament scholars for a long time. Why is Mary Magdalene both in the middle and at the margins in our scriptures? In her book, When Women Were Priests, Torjesen argues that “the mixed messages about Mary Magdalene’s significance reflects the ambivalence about women’s leadership as the Gospels were taking their final canonical form” (p. 34-35).

In more recent years, the pendulum has swung in the other direction and a frenzy of speculation has once again redefined the meaning of Mary Magdalene--lost gospels and Vatican secrets steal the headlines in an understandable effort to repair some damage we all are beginning to recognize. And yet, we cannot help but feel that, try as we might, Mary of Magdala still remains just out of focus--a fractured image, a mirror of our own desires, a glass to see through but not really see.

The Dismembered Other

In many ways, this fragmentation is the fate of all saints, whose memories very quickly move from biographies to testaments of their holiness--the story of a saint, afterall, is called a hagiography, a text of a holy role. But this kind of subtle erasure seems especially true for women--martyrs, models, muses--victors, victims, virgins, voices--again and again, women are made to be symbols of something else, something somewhat other than who they are.

“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” writes Edwina Gately, in the poem that opens her book ‘Soul Sisters’--”How did you survive / so many years / bowed down by humiliation? / The meaning and purpose / of your womanhood / defined so absolutely / by your culture?” (p. 2-3)

“Ah, Martha! Martha! / The centuries have defined you / and dismissed you.” (p. 49)

“Ah, Mary of Magdala / they did not tell us / your story. / It was lost / buried deep / in layers / of fear and denial, / that such a one as you-- / Female, / fiercely loyal friend of Jesus-- / could walk so closely / with the Son of God, / never leaving his side / even as you stood / before the gates of hell.” (p. 117-118).

In a chapter called “Women of Metaphor, Metaphors of Women,” Tikva Freymer-Kensky writes:

“The women who appear in biblical stories are often striking characters, distinct personalities who have gone beyond the confines of the tales in which they appear to become important figures in our cultural memory. At the same time, these women are not fleshed-out individuals. Many of them appear in only one story, and that story tells us only those factors that serve the writer’s agenda. The Bible tells us nothing of their backgrounds, nothing of their future, nothing of their thoughts; solely their actions in a particular context. The striking incompleteness of these portraits has sometimes proved frustrating and infuriating. Many contemporary women feel that this fragmentary presentation exploits and abuses the characters; they want the narrators to care about the lives and thoughts of the women about whom they write. But these partial images have also been a spur to literary and poetic imagination. Readers of the Bible, millennia past and present, have brought these characters out of the confines of the narrative, adding personality traits and personal history in an ongoing process of midrash and story.” (Reading the Women of the Bible, p. 333)

There is so much we wish we could know for sure. Who was Mary the Magdalene for real? Was she a maiden in distress, or was she a crone--a benefactress who bankrolled the movement that Jesus was building? All we have are fragments of clues. What we do know for certain, however, is that we are called to be in this “ongoing process of midrash and story”--not just to re-member, but to put an end to our cultural dis-memberment more broadly. What happens to Saint Mary, Saint Agatha, Saint Maria Goretti--to every woman made to mean something other than who she is--that happens to every woman looking towards these soul sisters in faith for guidance as well.

And the meaning of this dismemberment has cosmic significance, touching the very core of Creation and--yes--the very heart of our Triune God. In “Earth in Crisis,” Dr. Jane Caputi writes:

“In a patriarchal culture like our own, women have become not only the “other” but simultaneously a symbolic sex. What is acted out on the female body parallels larger practices of domination, fragmentation, and conquest against the earth body, which is being polluted, strip-mined, deforested, and cut up into parcels of private property. Equally, this pattern points to the fragmentation of the psyche, which ultimately underlies and enables all this damage. The initial splitting of the psyche proceeds from a disavowal of interconnection and interdependency…split off from creation.” (p. 25)

Mary Magdalene knows something about fragmentation; she also knows something about reintegration. If we are to make our own meaning today of her life, let it be this: it is up to us to reconcile the fragments of her legacy--to repair the damage that theologies of domination and conquest have enacted on the lives of women like her, and to make connections between that subordination and the patterns of exploitation we see on a planetary scale.

That’s a very tall order, but that’s precisely the kind of process our Trinitarian faith invites us into--we’ll pick that part of the story back up again on August 5, when we contemplate the glory of God and the glory of “Man” through that mountain-top experience at the Feast of the Transfiguration. For now, let us end with these words from Edwina Gateley:

“Ah, Mary, / we your sisters / need to hear your running / and your story / resurrected and dusted from the tomb / of scriptural exegesis / into the bright sunlight. / We need to claim / your vision / breaking through / dead history / into our warm lives. / We, the women in prison, / women waiting / women silenced, / women battered, / women who weep alone by the grave / need to find you, / Mary of Magdala. / In the torn threads / of our own journeys, / we need to weave you, Mary, / sister and friend, / into our lives / that we might / stir and rise, / fluttering in the hope / of new beginnings, / no matter how long dead / we have lain / in the ground. / Ah, then, Mary, / brave woman of Magdala, / we too will run / from our tombs / singing our song / of resurrection / with you, soul sister, / into the bright, / bright sun.” (p. 130-131)