Books often come my way through Interlibrary Loan that I've either forgotten I requested or can't remember why I requested them in the first place. I assume this is caused by the delay between ordering and arrival, but I find I enjoy the element of surprise. "Oooh, I don't remember requesting this one!" I said to myself when Mary Magdalene Revealed by Meggan Watterson arrived. It sat on my shelf for a week or so, and the truth was that I wasn't entirely sure I would ever read it. I'm so very glad I did.
Watterson has earned two master's degrees, one from Harvard Divinity School and another from Union Theological Seminary. Her particular field of study is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. While this particular book educates, it is also a memoir detailing the transformational effect Mary's gospel has had on her life and spirituality. It also offers an historical context for understanding how the current version of the Bible came into being.
The early Church was no more unified than the one we have today. There were many Christianities at that time, with the Council of Nicea in the 4th Century charged with choosing which gospels would be included in the official canon. The writings that didn't make the cut were deemed heretical and banned, including the gospels of Thomas and Philip, The Apocryphon of John, The Sophia of Christ, The Pistis Sophia, The Acts of Paul and Thecla...and The Gospel of Mary.
Watterson tells us that three copies of this latter gospel have been found, one in an antiquities market in Cairo in 1896 written in Coptic, and two in Greek found separately in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt in the early 1900s. "Because it is unusual for several copies from such early dates to have survived," writes Harvard Divinity professor Dr. Karen King, "the attestation of the Gospel of Mary as an early Christian work is unusually strong."
Deemed a prostitute by Pope Gregory in his Homily 33 in 591, the Catholic Church finally corrected this error in 1969, admitting no Biblical justification for that depiction and officially endorsing Thomas of Aquinas's portrayal of Mary as "the apostle to the apostles." She was certainly one of Christ's most faithful followers.
Her gospel is considered an ascent narrative, though Watterson tells us the word ascent is problematic, since the path is not one of moving upward, but inward in order to perceive with "the eye of the heart." Mary shares Christ's teachings of the path to the soul's liberation, not in some other dimension or time, but while on Earth. Quite a different version of Christ's message than many of us have received.
In Mary 3:3, Christ says, "There is no such thing as sin; rather you yourselves are what produces sin." However, according to Watterson, this gospel offers a different definition of sin than we may be used to. "Sin is not a state of being that must be redeemed," writes Watterson." Sin is simply forgetting the truth and reality of the soul--and then acting from that forgetful state." And since sin comes from forgetting, it "is remedied by simply remembering."
I must say, though, that I don't find remembering very simple. Or perhaps it's remembering to remember that I find hard, as well as allowing that remembrance to drop down into my heart to be expressed in the world. The heart, with its capacity to love, is key to Christ's teachings. It is, as Watterson puts it, "our direct link to an experience of love." She tells us that to pray like Mary Magdalene is to "return to the love within us, within the heart, quietly."
After the crucifixion, Mary fled to France to escape persecution, and there preached Christ's message of what it means to be anthropos, a Greek word that, as Mary used it, means "a child of true humanity," both fully human and fully divine. In Mary's gospel, salvation comes in learning to so completely merge the human with the divine, the ego with the soul, the human with the eternal, that we are undivided. And Christ gave us an example of how to do that.
I realize this will sound foreign, even sacrilegious to some. To many of us, though, it is a breath of fresh air, one that awakens and strengthens something that lies deep within the heart. We are not sinful by nature and in need of being saved by some outside authority. We are human AND we are made in the image of God. Our lives are transitory AND a part of us is eternal. Our task is "simply" to remember. And to aim toward remembering always, and to live out of that remembrance.
The love is already there. It is our true nature. We need only return to it, again and again.
💖
Leia
