Mary Magdalene

A field guide to what was taken.

As a young Catholic schoolgirl in a pleated plaid skirt and green kneesocks, something in me always knew the story they were telling about Mary Magdalene was all wrong.

There aren’t many women in the Bible for a young girl (or women) to connect to. I had a devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, but she was divine and I was just a human. Mary Magdalene was different. She drew me in, and I think it was precisely because of the falsified sinful nature they had pinned on her. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t have told you why. I just knew.

Catholicism, for me, was tradition. It was the water I swam in. It didn’t interrupt my life. It taught me good morals, gave me a good education, and a fine group of friends. It was a way of being in and navigating the world.

When I was about ten, my parents took a wrong turn into evangelical Christianity, it rearranged my world and turned it upside down..

In that world, women are placed beneath men. A subservient wife is a virtuous wife. I watched my mother lose herself inside that world. She was instructed to obey my father, and she did. Through my teenage eyes, she was a doormat. I hated her for it, and I swore I would never be like her.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that she was entwined in a pattern of generational abuse. I thought she was weak. I didn’t understand that she and my grandmother were survivors. (My mother eventually broke that pattern. They just celebrated their 64th Anniversary.)

Patterns repeat if they aren’t broken.

I was so young and naive. I couldn’t see the programming, let alone begin to fathom how much of that programming had taken root in me, even though I rejected it.

In my late twenties I met the man I would marry. Immediately, he felt like home, because control had been modeled to me as love.

I stayed in the marriage longer than I should have out of fear, and because I had been taught to endure. There was no easy exit for me, it would take years. When my children and I finally escaped, we had to leave everything behind, including our identities. Just me and the wee ones, both under four.

In the midst of losing everything, I found freedom.

In that new found freedom I began to unpack the emotional and psychological abuse I had endured and survived. Not just from my marriage, but all of it.

That period of my life — the happy Catholic schoolgirl, the evangelical nightmare, the marriage, the slow unraveling — is what eventually made me cut and run from all religion as fast as I could. I left all of it.

But I didn’t leave her.

I held on to the Marys, and I began to heal. I made better choices. I started following the Celtic Wheel of the Year instead of the Roman calendar. I had been stripped bare by life. I knew that no matter what came next, I wasn’t going to be put in a cage again.

I was in my forties when I learned that there is a Gospel of Mary. Over forty years surrounded by Christians, and no one had ever told me her gospel existed. It was written in the second century by an unknown author, but Mary Magdalene is the central figure in it. She was the person to whom Yeshua (Jesus) gave special teachings regarding the soul’s journey and understanding of the self. Much to the chagrin of the male disciples. Imagine Yeshua revealing the secrets of the world to a woman, instead of them? There were other books written by early Christians, edited out of the Bible when religious elders in the 4th century chose what books to include.

I wasn’t just shocked. I was angry.

I was angry because I had been lied to. Lied to by the very institutions that were supposed to protect me. I was angry because I wasn’t given healthy role models to guide me. A girl without a role model is very easily manipulated. I had been manipulated, steamrolled, and under-educated about what really mattered. No lessons on boundaries, the autonomy of self, or individualism in spirit. My thoughts didn’t matter to the men running the show, that was my life.

I started reading. I wanted to understand all that had been kept from me. The teachings of a woman I had instinctively known, since I was small, had more to offer me than I had been allowed to receive. That was the beginning of a very slow walk to where I am now.

Catholicism gave me a solid tradition, but it was never personal. How could it be? There was no one in it for me to see myself in. Evangelical Christianity gave me something to run from, because it never fit. It was impersonal, performative, intrusive, and abusive. Neither of these led me to a higher spiritual understanding, just a leash to be led by. Mary Magdalene gave me something else. She gave me an embodied woman.

She was a flawed, human, first-century woman who understood Yeshua’s teachings in a way that felt lived, not performed. She understood that the kingdom he spoke of was not built out of stone or ceremony. It was not a Vatican. It was an internal world, alive and vibrant, free of the conquest and hunger for power that the men kept trying to drag the movement back toward. She vibrated on a different plane than they did. She understood him better than anyone else, and he loved her the most.

Yeshua came as a human and was also fully divine. A living example that we are capable of recognizing the divine within ourselves, even while fully tethered to this mortal coil. Mary Magdalene was the student who understood it. Not as theory, but as embodied knowing.

Yeshua’s teachings were never complicated. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Earthly wealth is not something to strive for. Protect the vulnerable. Feed the poor, and take care of the sick. Honor all children. Love one another, because it is the way. The only way.

That message has been distorted for a thousand years. There are no books in the New Testament explicitly identified as being written by women. The church wrote its own laws and chose its own book, a narrow selection of many, and left her gospel out of it.

She wasn’t just sidelined. She was degraded and silenced.

After everything I endured at the hands of religious men, it is hard for me to speak about my spirituality, or my faith at all. It is extremely personal, and I protect it. I do not want to be mistaken for the very thing I escaped from.

In spite of it all, Mary Magdalene is still here. She is the missing link for me. And as I look around, I am beginning to see that I am not the only woman that feels this way.

It took me time to understand that the woman who brought me back to Christ consciousness, was a woman who had been silenced by the same hands that had silenced me.

With all the horrid things happening in the world — genocide, pedophiles in the church, global elite child trafficking rings, online communities where men teach each other how to drug and sexually assault their wives, all the rot finally being named — I have been leaning on her harder than I ever have before. Because if a woman in the first century could endure watching her beloved executed by the Romans, and then walk into a room of frightened men and teach, then I can sit with what is unbearable now.

She is not abstract to me. She is a hand on my back.

She is leading me to new pastures. She is teaching me about myself at depths I didn’t know existed. She has led me to the Gospels of Philip and Thomas, to the Pistis Sophia, and to other writings I didn’t know existed.

She reminds me daily that there is so much more to comprehend than just the external that we are able to see with our eyes.

I don’t think the early Christian men who silenced her in the fourth century understood what they were doing. By burying her, they only made her more powerful. They did not realize that a thousand years later, women like me would find her anyway. Not through the church, but in spite of it.

Looking back, I can see that the Marys have been with me my whole life. They were there when I was a Catholic schoolgirl learning about Our Lady of Fatima. They were there when I was a young mother lighting candles in a grotto, praying for a safe and expedient exit. And they are here now, in my fifties, as I lean on them through what is unbearable. They never left. I just couldn’t see them clearly until now.

I do not belong to any religion. I never really have. I am part of a consciousness that began rising long before me, and is still rising now.

I am one of the women writing from inside that return. If you have felt her too, even quietly, in a way you don’t have words for yet, please know that you are not alone.

꩜ Ella