Mary Magdalene: A Woman Reclaimed, Reflection for her Feast Day

I had the great honor of sharing these reflections at Epiphany Catholic Church on July 23, 2023 for their Feast of Mary Magdalene celebration (her actual feast day is July 22).

Feast Day of Mary Magdalene; Epiphany Catholic Church, Joan Chittister excerpt, A Passion for Life; Luke 24:1-12

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Good evening. What a joy it is to be with you all celebrating the Feast of Mary Magdalene.

Yesterday the Resonant Peaceful Cities Project began for the 2nd of 3 years in Louisville. This study measures the effect of synchronized meditation on violence in a city or area of a city; this year the focus area is in Old Louisville. Last year with the participation of a few hundred ordinary folks like you and me, there was a 13% reduction in violent crime in Louisville during the time of the study. This year there are at least three times more people participating and it is expected that there will be a greater reduction in violence in Louisville, and particularly in the focus area, during the study period.

A few weeks ago I was telling a scientist about the project and last year’s results. The best way I can describe his response is that it was filled with contempt and derision. I won’t go into the particulars of his objections, but I will say that it was disappointing that a scientist, who I’d hope would exercise a healthy curiosity, was unwilling to even look at the data because it didn’t fit his preconceived ideas.

We just heard in Luke’s gospel that when Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary told the male apostles of Jesus’ resurrection, the men did not believe them. I wonder if the male apostles’ responses were also filled with contempt and derision. I hope not. If I put myself in their shoes, it’s easier to give them the benefit of the doubt because I can imagine being hesitant to believe. Maybe I’d be like Peter, wanting to check things out myself.  

I also imagine myself in Mary Magdalene’s shoes. I’m grieving my friend’s death, expecting to see and anoint his body, and he’s gone. I’m unsettled by that and even more so by the appearance of the two men in gleaming white who tell me Jesus is risen. Even though Jesus had told us it was going to happen, it’s pretty discombobulating to actually experience it. When I go to tell the others, I’m trying to process what’s just happened and I really need some care and understanding. Not only do I not get care and understanding, I’m met with disbelief. 

How was that for Mary? Was she expecting that reaction from her friends? Did the experience feel familiar? I wonder how many other times, even as a part of Jesus’ inner circle, Mary had spoken up among the men and been ignored, silenced, or told she was wrong. I am thankful that, whatever her previous experience, she chose to use her voice, to claim and proclaim what she had witnessed.

If you are a woman, I suspect speaking up and not being listened to is familiar. I suspect that speaking and not being taken into account until a man repeats what you’ve said is also familiar. Mary told the male apostles, but it was the men who spread the word wider.

Two thousand years later we women still have the experience of speaking truth and not being believed. We have the experience of stepping into leadership, whether in the church, the business world or in other contexts, and only being able to get so far.

In 2016 Pope Francis raised the celebration of Mary Magdalene from a memorial to a feast day. He recognized her as “the apostle to the apostles,” and noted that, “The decision is situated in the current ecclesial context, which calls upon us to reflect more deeply on the dignity of women, the new evangelisation and the greatness of the mystery of divine mercy.” 

We can celebrate this recognition, this reclamation of Mary Magdalene’s importance in our Catholic heritage. But, I, like Joan Chittister, am frustrated that “it is two thousand years later and little or nothing has changed.”

I am frustrated that there is a need to “reflect more deeply on the dignity of women.”  We are all made in the image and likeness of God; this alone endows us with inherent dignity. When I was teaching theology at Trinity, I remember talking about women’s experiences and women’s rights to my students. In their reflections, more than one of my students wrote, “I now realize that women are people, too.” I am frustrated that somehow the humanity of women is still in question.

As I was writing this, I considered whether I’ve heard men referred to as less than human. I have, in the context of men who do harm to others, and in the context of men who are part of the global majority – black, brown, indigenous – or part of some other marginalized group. But in a general sense, I don’t hear men’s humanity and dignity questioned.   

I am frustrated that women’s wisdom and leadership is nearly always absent from the pulpit. I am frustrated that we’re told that we are equal to men in the church, but that we cannot be deacons or priests. I also grieve this, since I know women who feel called to minister in this way and cannot follow that call in the Catholic Church. I am frustrated that someone like Roy Bourgeois, who supports women priests in this institution can be laicized and excommunicated for his solidarity and advocacy. I am frustrated that the many ways women weave our church communities together are often overlooked, taken for granted, or minimized.

Mary Magdalene was named twelve times in the gospels, second only to Jesus’ mother Mary. Mary Magdalene is one of the few followers who was explicitly named as witness to Jesus’ death and burial. She did not shy away from what must have been the gut-wrenching grief of watching her beloved friend die a horrible death. She was present at his burial and she was prepared to do the sacred work of anointing his lifeless, brutalized body.

Mary Magdalene, who was healed by Jesus and faithfully followed and supported him, was strong. She is, as Joan Chittister says, an icon for our century.

Chittister says, “She calls women to listen to the call of the Christ over the call of the church.” In a church that speaks of honoring women, but not does not, in fact, fully embrace us, we instead heed the call of the universal Christ, the spirit of all-embracing love. Dear women, this Christ of wholeness and interconnection lives in each of us. Mary Magdalene calls on us to trust ourselves.  

Chittister says, “She calls men to listen for the call of the Christ in the messages of women.” Patriarchy hurts us all. In the patriarchal paradigm, men are expected to have all the answers and lead with certainty, even when they are not certain and lack information, like the scientist who wouldn’t look at the data that challenged what he thought he knew. When men don’t listen to women, it is to the detriment of women and men. Dear men, we women are half of the global population. Our words, our experiences, our gifts, our truths do not diminish the value of your words, your experiences, your gifts, your truths. In fact, we enrich each other when we share them. When you, when we, bring curiosity and a sense of wonder to all people’s realities, when we honor both our commonalities and our uniqueness, we piece our fragmented world back into holy wholeness. Mary Magdalene calls on men to trust women.  

Chittister says, “Mary Magdalene is a shining light of hope, a disciple of Christ, a model of the wholeness of life, in a world whose name is despair and in a church whose vision is yet, still, even now, partial.”

We celebrate Mary Magdalene today in our world whose name is despair and our church whose vision is still partial. As we do so, we reflect upon her legacy and her lessons.

The theme of tonight’s celebration is “A Woman Reclaimed.” Reclaiming is often preceded by letting go of something to make space for what we choose to claim again. In that spirit, I offer these questions first for quiet reflection and then sharing.

Chittister says, “[Mary Magdalene] calls women to courage and men to humility.”

For women: When have you practiced courage? What would you like to release and reclaim to practice humble courage now? 

For men: When have you practiced humility? What would you like to release and reclaim to practice courageous humility now?

If those questions don’t resonate for you, I offer this simple question: How do this evening’s readings and reflection touch you?

What We Pay Attention To, an unfinished story

A few days ago 72 Catholics, as a part of the Catholic Action for Immigrant Children Campaign. were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. I am proud to call some of them friends. Two days before their action, over a thousand progressive Jewish activists and allies blocked the entrances of the ICE headquarters in D.C.; dozens of them were also arrested. If I knew them, I’d be proud to call them friends, too. Both of these actions are parts of larger campaigns to support our immigrant brothers and sisters.

Earlier in the week in Greenville, S.C, the same place where people attending a Trump rally chanted “Send her back,” a restaurant owner pledged to give 100% of the restaurant’s sales to the American Immigration Council.

Responding to that chant which was directed at her, Rep. Ilhan Omar quoted Maya Angelou:

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I rise.

Yesterday at the Big Four Bridge, my favorite place in my city of Louisville, KY, hundreds gathered in 90+ degree heat to “reclaim the space” after racist graffiti was sprayed on the bridge a few days before. They were responding to a Tweet by local poet, truth teller, and leader Hannah Drake.  

Weekly in cities and villages throughout Palestine, Palestinians, sometimes with Israelis and internationals, gather to speak out against the Israeli military occupation, speak to reclaim their space, reclaim, exclaim their dignity and right to be.

In Puerto Rico, in Hong Kong, in other places around the world, people are remembering their power and using it to speak out, to call for, to create change. Are we paying attention?

Empowering, creating change happens in public protests. It happens in quieter ways, too. It can happen as parents and grandparents listen and talk to their children and grandchildren about the world, relationships, ways we do and can relate to each other. It can happen as people choose to honor each other in the fullness and complexity of their divine humanness, not for what they produce, but simply because they are.

I’ve been reading adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. Throughout the book, she offers this reminder: What we pay attention to grows.*

Knowing the stories above, the sense of courage and inspiration grows. I was going to say my sense. And then I remembered, I am a part of Creation, of All-That-Is. And if I am part of Creation and my sense of courage and inspiration grows, then the sense of courage and inspiration grows.

This evening on Facebook, a friend posed the question: If you could build anything, what would it be? There were many beautiful answers to this question from a large music school to cheap inexhaustible energy sources to a better world to a plan to fix our mental health care system to more affordable housing and on and on. Most of the answers fill me with hope and engage my imagination. We can only build these things if we can dream them first.

What we pay attention to grows.

I love this idea.

I believe it.

I don’t always know how to practice it well.

How do I or we bring to light devastating realities in a way that grows the healing and not the hurt?

Truth-telling is important. Empowering. And yet so often, in seeking to lift up the dignity-humanity-divinity of a person or group facing dehumanizing forces, we truth tell in a way that demonizes and dehumanizes the perpetrators of harm, thus perpetuating harm, though directed differently.

I get it. I’ve done it many times and since that way of thinking and speaking is all around me, I imagine I’ll do it again, even as I try to break the habit of shaming and blaming, a practice I turn both outward and inward.

My nonviolence and nonviolent communication training compels me then to ask this question:

How do I or we address these issues, these patterns of systemic harm in a way that honors the humanity of both perpetrator and victim, actor and receiver of harm?

Those actively doing harm, while perhaps not suffering in the way they are hurting others, are also suffering. They are not well, even if they are well-resourced.

Because when we are well, well at that deepest place within us,

well so that our divine-stardust-interconnected nature shines,

we don’t hurt other people. Not intentionally.

Or if we do,

in humility,

from that place of knowing that we can be both divine and imperfect all at once,

we find ways to try to make amends, to bring healing to the places of fracture.

When I lead Nonviolent Communication training, I often quote Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

Where even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense, I know that I cannot be fully healed until we all are fully healed. Until we’re all in that field.

The healing field.

The healed field.

If I wish harm to someone who’s hurt me or my friends or family or someone I don’t even know, I also suffer. I’m not in the healed field. Because that someone is a part of the Interconnected. And I am part of the Interconnected.

What we pay attention to grows. I do not want to pay attention to and grow the harm in the Interconnected.

I want to lie down in that field.

I want to pay attention to the potential for healing, to the ways of imagination that know and acknowledge the harm, that reveal it, but don’t get stuck in it.  

Yesterday at a retreat for a board I’m on, someone reminded us several times that we can’t do everything, but we can do something.

When we do something, we get unstuck.

Tonight my something is to write, first for myself, to process input in an attempt to create comprehensible output.

Then I share this with you, because maybe you didn’t know the stories I started with, or maybe you don’t know the work of adrienne maree brown, or maybe you’d forgotten that even though you can’t do everything, you can do something.

You can do something that grows your vision of what you want the world to look like. Even one small thing makes a difference.

And then maybe when you remember you can do something, that one small thing, you’ll do it.

And maybe someone else will notice.

And maybe they’ll remember their power, too, and they’ll do something.

And maybe someone else will notice and do something

and someone else and do

and someone

and

*She also writes a zillion other beautiful, simple, challenging things. If you haven’t read her work, check it out!