2015.07.26 St. Mary Magdalene, Alive and Well

The icon is painted by Robert Lentz. The inscription in Syriac reads: "Equal to the Apostles."

July 22 is the Feast of Mary Magdalene on church calendars. It rarely gets honored in parishes, except maybe in big Roman, Eastern, or Anglo Catholic ones where every feast and its subtitle makes the rota. Or in church communities named after the saint. Or where there is an uppity woman priest like me, nagging for its recognition, and incidentally, sleeping with the rector (married, don’t worry!)

Well, when the Feast of St. Mary Mag lands on a Sunday, it might get its due, but even then I wonder.

The reputation accrued to this gifted and faithful disciple of Jesus is worthy of vice-squad attention, despite the fact that it is not supported by biblical witness at all. It happened because of hierarchical resistance to lay preaching and patriarchal resistance to women leaders. Mary Magdalene, in a favorite story of mine in John 20,  stoops to peer into the empty tomb, weeping and looking for the body of Jesus, after the others had gone home. She turns away finally and has a direct mystical experience of Jesus the Christ. He tells her: noli me tangere (Latin for, don’t hold onto me.) This phrase was later interpreted to prove that Mary was a clingy and hysterical woman, and that therefore her testimony to the new vision a sham.

On a retreat, I prayed with the tomb scene, imagining myself as Mary and identifying with her grief. It sent me into fresh grief over the death of my father. He wasn't Jesus, of course, but in soul-talk such particularities don't matter.

It’s a miracle that Magdalene’s influence as a leader and teacher survived at all, and that the gospel she wrote has been translated and remains in print. There’s a great scene in it in which an angry (jealous?) Peter, incredulous that Jesus would have revealed so much to a woman, argues with her. (The Gospel of Mary, translated by Karen King is worthy of a read. The scriptural texts more kaleidoscopic and impressionistic, not news at 11. The more I read, the more I think, the more I want, the closer I feel to the Holy. All of it feeds my soul. King, btw, is a scriptural scholar at Harvard Divinity School and an Episcopalian.

Please note that Magdalene’s bad reputation did NOT follow her into the Eastern Orthodox tradition. So what’s with the West? Long story. Look it up. Think P for pope.

Consider this, should you doubt the veracity of ancient testimony: if women hadn’t already been functioning, historically, as leaders in the early church, their presence wouldn’t have been recorded in Scripture at all, now would it?  Mary Magdalene is alive and well. 

Every July 22nd for many years now, my feminist priest husband and I, have attended the Mary Magdalene Event at Boston College, School of Theology and Ministry.  The event is made possible by a woman of worth, both financial and spiritual, and the guest lecturers are always among the very best women scholars and theologians. This year we heard S. Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P. of Notre Dame. Next year’s speaker will be Amy-Jill Levine, Jewish theologian and professor of New Testament theology and history at Vanderbilt. Every voice counts.

                             

I got to shake hands with one of my favorite feminist theologians, Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, professor at Fordham. I felt like a groupie. Imagine! Who runs after women theologians? She gave me a vigorous handshake, grinned, and, upon hearing that I was an Episcopal priest who’d had ordination struggles with the patriarchal church, said: “Well, we are all still working together on this one.”  I wanted to hug her— but opted for boundaries.

The event began with a liturgy at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. The opening hymn, sung to the familiar tune, Old Hundredth (The Doxology) from the breviary of St. Helena's, an Episcopal Women’s Order, choked me up all the way through. I was expecting it. I knew it. I’d sung it. And yet I cried. 

 1. Out of the night where hope had died,
to tomb once sealed, now gaping wide,
the Magdalene made haste, to mourn
and bring her spices through the dawn.

2. She gazed in disbelief and pain
where Jesus in his death had lain,
until the radiant angel said,
Seek not the living with the dead.

3. Soon trusting love cast out her fears;
she rose and brushed away her tears.
As first apostle, Mary ran
to tell God's resurrection plan.

4.  Jesus is risen! Mary cries,
Lift up your hearts and dry your eyes,
Jesus is risen—come and see—
and goes before to Galilee.

5.  All glory be to God above,
for Mary's apostolic love,
all praise to God whom we adore
for ever and for evermore. Amen.
    
   

2015.07.19 Improbable but Perfect Fields for Zeal

This day marks the 167the anniversary of the first women's rights conference in history. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author of The Women's Bible, and Lucretia Mott, the conference took place in 1848 in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Stanton, one of my "sheroes," was dissatisfied with traditional biblical translations, authorized and executed by well-meaning men, who apparently forgot the verse in Genesis in which God created men and women equally in the divine image. But Stanton and other women knew their bible, and they knew, too,  about the dismal status of women in society.
They brought religion and politics together with zeal.

Stanton still inspires me, though much of her bible commentary sails over my head, and I bet I'd be cowed by her formidable presence.

 

Seneca Falls, a small hamlet (2010 population, 6,681) borders New York's Finger Lakes. It was an improbable setting for feminist zeal and the birth of the impossible demand for a woman's right to vote.

 

First-Century Palestine after the crucifixion of Jesus was no more probable a setting for reformist zeal, or resurrection cheer, either. The sweetly naive, Christian song, “They will know we are Christian by our love,” written in 1968 by then-Catholic priest Peter Scholtes, has been recorded and popularized so much that many Christians today consider this an identifying refrain, a musical mantra— despite the fact that its spirituality, “We are one in the spirit,” doesn’t ring true in the face of contemporary Christian rancor and divisiveness.

Well, it didn’t ring true in the first century land some now call “holy” either. What is astounding is that Christianity, the little love-faith, didn’t miscarry completely and wash out to sea like so many other movements of zealous beginnings.

Why? Well, for one thing there wasn’t an ounce of naiveté in the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, any more than there was in Stanton and her women. No cotton candy. The early Christians had love all right, as did the women, and they also had zeal for their God of grace.

I wonder if zeal is what we softened Christians need more of today?

As Jewish insurgents in First-Century Palestine warred for power and position, they were terrified of extinction. Where was their God? Who would be Messiah/King/ Head Honcho? Who would be the King of the Jews? (The inscription the Romans put on Jesus’ s cross, King of the Jews, was not a faith statement; it was mockery because they had crucified another of the Jewish rebels, another zealot, another political annoyance.)

Something new had to happen fast—and zealously. Zeal means great energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or an objective. It’s close to jihad. The early Jesus followers had to save their people, and they had to save their sense of divine favor. Some of them followed the zeal of one man, Jesus of Nazareth, and they kept that zeal going like a brushfire. 

Do we need more zeal today? Do I, as I write and advocate for the fullness of the image of God, have enough zeal?

Reza Aslan, author of Zealot. The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, gives a stunningly vivid picture of the context of Jesus’s times. I’d studied some of this but never had it explicated in such powerful and complete ways. Both the political and historical context came alive. Context, they say, is everything. Well no, content also counts; in fact, context and content must be inseparable—held together in tension. This book succeeds.

Aslan (just love that leonine name!) is an Iranian American, professor of creative writing at the University of California, a scholar of religions and historian—not a theologian. He was born into  a luke warm Muslim home (Sound familiar, Christians?) Aslan met Jesus at fifteen at an evangelical youth camp in Northern California. He writes: “It was there that I heard a remarkable story that would change my life forever.” 

Many of us Christians hear bits and pieces of this story every Sunday in parish churches. Does it change our lives?  

Aslan’s experience sounds like, but was not, a religious conversion experience. He is married to a Christian woman and remains Muslim. His teenage zeal, however, had a life of its own —enough to fuel his pursuit of the Jesus of history and write about it. His book is not meant to be theology, any more than the Bible is meant to be history, yet the complementarity of the two shapes my spirituality and my religious practice. 

But do I have enough zeal? Can you be zealous about the whole enchilada of history, politics and religion? Zeal sounds extremist. It’s scary. My Godde, I’m an Anglican! I’m not one of the conservative evangelical Christians in the south, or wherever they are supposed to be, possessed by certain social political issues that can get confused with religious ones. They do have zeal, though. Still, the spirituality of zealotry must rise above particularity, even go beyond and deeper than social justice activism. It’s a soul-fire. It's what the women at Seneca Falls had.

The frenzied hotbox of Jesus’s day, held intact only by Roman oppression, made zeal near-inevitable. Something had to explode. This ancient empire has been compared to our American empire—too much wealth and status concentrated in too few people who hold the reins of power. Will there be a revolution, as some young people say, maybe advocate? Revolutions demand change. Collective zeal is their fuel. By 70CE the Romans had burned Jerusalem and the Temple to the ground. Messianic pretenders felt abandoned by God. All was lost.

Aslan writes: “Meanwhile, in triumphant Rome, a short while after the Temple of the Lord had been desecrated, the Jewish nation scattered to the winds, and the religion made a pariah, tradition says a Jew named John Mark took up his quill and composed the first words to the first gospel written about the messiah [sic, one of many] known as Jesus of Nazareth—not in Hebrew, the worship language of Jesus, but Greek, the language of the heathens. The language of the impure. The language of the victors.

This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus the Christ.” (p. 68-69)

This one sentence stunned me. One. One Jewish man remembered and wrote—this in the midst of violence, terror, chaos and grief. Thus began the written biblical memoir known as the New Testament. One.

Was that simple, single act of remembering and writing the real miracle? Was it zealous?
                                                         
                                     *  *  *  *

Zeal makes change, for better or worse. It is not to be mocked, and not to be exaggerated. When you force or fake zeal, you desecrate it.  Zeal is born, focused, and expressed in diverse ways: silence, creating art, music, movement, shouting and jumping, praying, preaching, storming, talking and listening into the night. Often zeal comes in childhood, and often it gets eclipsed as we grow. But something mysterious touches you to the core, and you never forget. Never. Forever. What you do with it depends on your context.

I'm haunted on and off by something a wondrous seminary professor of mine referred to more than once: "the routinization of charism."  We, dumbly rapt and determinatively zealous, middler seminarians laughed and clapped, as if we actually knew we were hearing the call to zealotry.

Zealotry was the right spiritual gift to awaken First-Century Palestine to divine grace for all. Zealotry awakened 19th century America to basic rights for all, including women. Is zeal what’s needed for 21st-century America? For 21st-century Christianity?

2015.07.12 Peacemaking Made Simple/Papal

Pope Francis right now is traveling for peace—just saying hello, shaking hands, listening and meeting folks and their leaders.




Here are his four elements of peacemaking:

1. Time is bigger than space: if you protect your own space or area you get war, but if you allow time enough to explore the space of others, you have a chance at peace

2. Unity prevails over conflict: eventually we tire of feuding.

3. Reality is more important than ideas: we can argue ideas forever, which allows the fighting to continue. A STORY transforms. Fighting must stop so we can listen deeply to the stories of ourselves, each other, and our scriptures.

4. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts: Each part fits into the whole but each one has a different shape and place. There must be a place for every part in the whole.

I find these to be true. These basics could go on the fridge. Maybe if we keep peace in our faces, and keep it simple..............     It gets difficult when we think too big. 

My formula: War = fighting about what we love the most
                      Peace = praying, or talking, about what we love the most

We’re not the Pope or, for the most part, anyone special, but we do have the capacity for peace if we pay attention to it in our daily lives. Peacemaking isn’t always some big fat political deal, or ordeal. Maybe it’s friendship, being friends.

Ponder this simple question: How do you make friends?  How did you as a kid? Multiple ways I’m sure, but for me it was, and usually still is, “Hi.”

Just look at that photo again. Amazing how the gesture of a blessing and a friendly wave "hello" are nearly indistinguishable.

Hi.