So, I am still thinking about Elizabeth Shrader's article, and her thesis on alteration of the texts of the Gospel of John, especially in the case of the story of Mary and Martha and the raising of Lazarus. As many people have suspected and fantasized, the early orthodox hierarchy of the Churches cut out or limited the influence of Mary Magdalene which means we have an entirely different orthodox Christianity than we might have. Did those first Christians know that the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus would fill the vacuum left by Mary being cut up into several Marys and hidden away? Was it something that they decided they could live with? But it does create something a little strange, especially when we get to the Middle Ages and we enter the cult of the Virgin at the same time we have the cult of courtly love.
Our Christianity, and to an extent, out fantastic view of things crystallized in the Middle Ages. I would even go so far as to say we have three ways of looking at things: the legendary and fantastic way: Arthur with his lovely Queen Guinevere, lady of Camelot. Then the actual terrestrial way, some king on his throne, let's say Henry the Second,and his wife, Queen Eleanor. And then the heavenly way, the court of heaven C.S. Lewis loved so much, wrote about and in some ways modeled Narnia on. There is a hiccup here, for Jesus is king, but he is an infant king, and his lady is.... his mother.
The absence of Mary Magdalene and or her exile means the absence of a complete picture of a heavenly Queen with a beloved. It means a sharp difference in the quality of devotion. There is no Radha to Jesus's Krishna. It means a different look at sex. We may say Mary Magdalene was a devoted disciple of Jesus and nothing more. We may say she was Jesus's lover, but even the most modern minds have a difficulty with her being both. Our views of sex and of holiness prize distance so much that we cannot imagine a divine disciple going to bed with her Master. We cannot imagine Jesus teaching his most personal things while lying in bed with Mary, or John for that matter. And it is not that this is the way things went down. Who knows how things went down? But it is that this vision was taken from us. In losing Mary Magdalene, in letting her be turned into a reformed harlot of a friend of Jesus who is prominently named but disappears from the face of the formal church, we lose a Queen of Heaven and a lady of the church who has nothing to do with virginity.
It is hard to say what we lost when we lost Magdalene. How many sights called Our Lady might have been hers? What would a church have been like that reverenced her as much it reverenced Mary of Nazareth, or reverenced her more? How would we think of ourselves and our relationship to Christ if the chiefest relationship to Christ was not of a penitent Peter who had betrayed him, but of a lover who had never abandoned him, not even at the Cross? What if in place of the shame that characterizes most Christian interactions with the divine, what if rather than Paul, the reformed and sexually repressed sinner (and killer) being the model of Christianity, we had the Magdalene? We don't exactly know what we lost in losing her, how can we, but around her we see, much like Saint John the Baptist, the signs of some powerful reverence lost to the mainstream church which must be recaptured, and this is why it is Saint Magdalene who is lady of the invisible church which lies in secret, and Mistress of all lost things.
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