Tag: Women

On Mary Magdalene in Honor of Easter ~

“While {Mary Magdalene} has often been sentimentalized or sexualized, there has not until recently been the slightest threat of her being divinized, and her intact humanness is her saving grace.

Now that a new generation of bible scholarship has corrected the glaring inaccuracy of her earlier portrayal as prostitute and is steadily laying the groundwork by which we will sooner or later be able to fully reclaim her role as Jesus’s spiritual partner and lineage bearer, what presents itself to us is an accessible and entirely believable portrait of “one who got there”.

Applying the teachings that Jesus showed her, she did her inner work and emerged through the eye of the needle into singleness {wholeness or union with the Divine}. If Jesus shows us what the completed human being looks like in male form, she models it for us in its female version; together they become the Christosophia, the androgynous archetype of human wholeness.

And because her human heart and lover’s passion are so central to this transformation, she teaches us that we need not be afraid of these things in our own spiritual striving; the path to the fullness of being lies *through* human intimacy, not away from it. She binds the icon of the human heart to the angel of Holy Sophia.”

Cynthia Bourgeault

Art | Mary Magdalene by Dante Gabriel Rossetti