Hail Marys, the Feast of Mary Magdalene and the Silent Sister

The Feast of Mary Magdalene is the bright spot in that thing the Church calls Ordinary Time, and which I am calling the Extraordinary Time. Though there are some who would stop and say, why in the world talk about any church, the truth is the history of the Catholic Church is the history of the shaping of the Western world, so a few moments to talk about Saint Magdalene in that context are necessary.

These days, the kinder, gentler face of the Church is fond of calling Mary Magdalene the Apostle to the Apostles, which sounds nice, but the Mass and the services for her are still those celebrated for common days and commemorations. So far, among women, only the Virgin Mary ever ranks three readings and a Gloria, the full compliment of a high day in the Catholic Church. Looking up hymns and readings for Magdalene, I was greeted by several things, hymns for the Virgin Mary, esoteric videos by voodoo priestesses, Gnostic teachers and Catholic silence. If the Virgin Mary is the safe face of the feminine that the Church raises up, much as Athens raised up their own Virgin, then the Magdalene is something else entirely.

And this isn’t to disregard the power of the Virgin, for she herself has always been treated warily, and the Church has been careful about how she is reverenced. Movements to revere her come up from the ground rather than the church official, but the time for Mary Magdalene seems to be arriving, and her movement is coming up from the ground too.

There is another issue about Mary Magdalene. How many of her are there? In something that is not quite innocence, many women have been conflated to make her. The nameless Sinful Woman who wipes Jesus’s feet with her hair is conflated with Mary of Bethany, that most excellent saint and mystic, who wiped Jesus feet with spikenard and foretold his death,  and then, for reasons unknown, that Mary is conflated with Mary of Magdala who was at the foot of the Cross, the disciple of the Lord who was first to witness his rising. So we are confronted with at least two Marys, and two goes against the conventional urge of the Church toward mono everything. It would seem that from the very beginning, Mary Magdalene was the Lady off the Mysteries of the Church, she whose presence guarded the door to deeper and more personal truths. If the Virgin was the mother of the baby Jesus, Mary was the companion, and the mother of the Resurrection. But it is only natural that the easiest and most proselytizing form of the Church would be the successful one, the one which went with the order of the day, insisting on the supremacy of the male and the supremacy of what was already supreme. Such a church, which had no room for mysticism, could not readily accept such Marys, the midwives of the Resurrection and the arch disciples and beloveds of God. In a streamlining church of one God and one way, there was only room for one woman, and this comes to be the Blessed Virgin. Counter to all this, holding no baby, but a red egg, and not veiled in blue, but in red, the color of resurrection and sunrise, is Mary of Magdala. Equally brilliant, though nearly visible, stands beside her, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus who sat at Jesus’s feet. The most visible of Jesus’s many women disciples.

In the first century, the people who would be called Christians called themselves, among many things, the Way, and it appears that, unlike the streamlined version of Christian development offered in the Bible, there were many and generous versions of that Way, often quite startling to modern eyes. In that same sense, the two Marys still stand at the entrance of that Way, sphinx like, and await our coming.