The Three Marys

As long as I was in the Church, Easter and to some extent Christmas, was troublesome. Both holidays promised so much and delivered basically nothing. Holy Week was easy to understand, and all through that week, as a church, we usually moved together becoming kinder, better people, people who behaved as if they actually believed not only in the Gospel, but in the power of the Gospel, what in some terms might be called the magic, the sacredness of things. Holy Thursday was a day when it seemed we really were devoted, really did love one another, and Good Friday was a day we were all in the mystery of the death of God. And then came Easter, with its blinding white and gold, with the word ‘alleluia’ sung for the first time in forty days, with the flowers on the altar and with, yes, business as usual. For a brief window we had behaved as if there was something else, something brilliant awaiting us and now, shrinking from the light, we were back to the middling place Christians generally inhabit.

            The writer Ali Smith, talking about her new book Spring says spring is a hard time, and everyone has always known this. It is the hinge time when we are coming out of the dark into the light and the truth is we really don’t want that light as much as we say we do. It is too much, too stark, come to quickly. This is the peculiar burden of Easter, and the failure of Easter. Christmas, for all of its peculiarities is, in the end, about the birth of a baby. Good Friday about a death. These are things we can wrap our heads around, but resurrection is a thing from the otherworld. It is a mystery all the way around. It is a deeper looking in at things, and I’m not sure as an entire people, barely initiated and only half awake, a church could honestly perceive it. Resurrection would require your whole life to change. It would require a deep devotion, a love that, frankly, en masse, Christians (or any other people) do not possess. Because of this, Easter, like the other Christian events, becomes a spectator event rather than an initiation and awakening. It becomes the story of one very particular and special man coming out of a tomb and the vague promise that one day, in the far off future, after you are long dead, you will rise too. It becomes the promise of a heaven which, wherever it is, definitely is not here.

The mystery of Easter is not a brightly lit church. It is a cold an empty tomb, and inside of it there is no baby and certainly no virgin. There is nothing, and there are the three Marys. In a text which knows no Goddess and no priestess, the only name for both is Mary, and the revolving number of women who swirl about Jesus, his mother, his fostermothers, his disciples, his spiritual lovers, are called the Three Marys. Two of them, Salome and Joanna, are not even actually called Mary. To learn about these women is to learn about a mystery long ignored.

These Marys who were at the foot of the Cross, who were at the burial of the Lord when the male disciples had left, are also first to visit the tomb on Easter morning. But there is no one to visit. There is only the emptiness of nothing. Looking in, not knowing how they feel, plunged from one terror to a deeper one, they are finally going to tell the men, but the men don’t hear them, and the men still aren’t hearing them twenty centuries later. The Marys have left now, except for Mary Magdalene, who sits there in a blasted garden by a grave with a robbed body all on her own. And it is on her own, in this strange space, that she receives the holy revelation because, though we always ache for others, it on our own that revelation and initiation always comes.