The Great Big Unsayable Love

For those who are new to my work, I am a writer and a feminist theologian. Feminist to me means we are all radically equal as human beings. Theologian simply means a person who engages in the study of god. Or in my case, a person who engages in the study of all that has been left out of our ideas of god.

The beginning of my story, of what led me to this moment, all started when I walked out of church as a little girl covered in hives after reading the Bible for the first time. I knew this wasn't the whole story. I knew in a way where no one outside of me could tell me otherwise.

I wasn’t raised religious; I was raised feminist. So, reading that god is referred to as the father, and a father only, terrified me.

There was this great big unsayable love inside me. And I thought Church would mean I could begin to figure out how to share it. Because didn’t we all have this inner-ocean? Didn’t we all just want a place where we can hang our egos at the door and help each other be human?

Wasn’t Christ about a love this vast and inclusive?

The body never lies. I stormed out of my Sunday school class, terrified, and angrier than I had ever been. Where were women’s voices? The women leaders. I knew they must have existed. And I knew that for some reason within Christianity their presence had been erased.

I spent many years then studying anything other than Christianity. I studied the stories of female saints, mystics, and gurus from the world religions and throughout history. Their stories inspired me because all of these women also felt this great big unsayable love inside them. And with that love, challenged the cultural expectations enforced on women and girls within their lifetimes.

When I saw comedian Hannah Gadsby in her show Douglas, everything lit up in me when she said, “If women had been a part of the naming of the things, we would have a completely different language.” This is what I realized about religion. If women had been a part of the naming of god, we would have a completely different idea of the sacred, of what it means to be spiritual, and even, what it means to be human.

Before and after completing my Master of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School in comparative religion, I went on a pilgrimage to the south of France. A pilgrimage is simply an act of devotion. It’s a way to demonstrate how devoted you are to what you believe in.

In my case, I wasn’t aware when I first arrived in the south of France that Mary Magdalene’s legend continued on here after she witnessed the resurrection. Or not consciously. I was with a group visiting various sites of the Black Madonna in France. And our pilgrimage led me to the small seaside village of Saintes Maries de la Mer. This is when I learned that Mary Magdalene had come ashore here on a ship without sails according to legend. And that she had ministered in the south of France until she escaped further prosecution from the Roman Empire by living in the caves at Sainte Baume, the sacred mountain.

The body never lies. As I listened to this legend in my early twenties about to go to divinity school, I knew many things that I couldn’t uncoil with words. I knew because of the way my heart had gone berserk, like some feral monkey suddenly noticing its cage. I knew I would have to return, on my own. I knew that I had been called here to the south of France because the rest of my life was meant to be about the life that began here for Mary after Christ’s death.

With my fiery, feral monkey-heart set on understanding more about Mary Magdalene, I went back to study Christianity in depth at Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. While there I happened to study with, or was destined to study with, an expert on the Gospel of Mary, and other early Christian scripture not originally included in the formation of the bible in the 4th century. Dr. Hal Taussig is the editor of A New, New Testament, which adds back into the Bible the early Christian scripture deemed too heretical, and radical, to originally include. Scripture like The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, and this powerful 1st century scripture titled The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

Encountering this early Christian scripture changed my life. It changed my ideas of Christianity, of what it means to be human, of what it means to be saved, of what it means to reach heaven and resurrect. It changed my idea of who Mary Magdalene might have been.

Because Mary’s gospel is ultimately about vision. It’s about learning to see not through our own little egos and the myriad of powers that can derail us from what we are meant to do in this lifetime. It’s about finally seeing the power we all contain. The power to know the truth of who we are, and then take action on it.

Each year, I hold these Sunday meetings so that we can piece back together all that has been left out of what is considered holy. This year, we’re going to focus on The Gospel of Mary, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Thomas, The Passion of Saint Perpetua, and The Thunder: Perfect Mind. The scripture that has been hidden from us.

So that we can see clearly with a vision every one of us is capable of, the vision Christ refers to in Mary’s gospel as the spiritual eye of the heart.

With only more love,
​M.

Talking with Angels

“Then Mary stood up and greeted them; she tenderly kissed them all and said, “Brothers and sisters, do not weep, do not be distressed nor be in doubt. For his grace will be with you sheltering you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has united us and made us true Human beings.” ​
​—The Gospel of Mary

In Jean-Yves Leloup’s translation of Mary Magdalene’s gospel, he mentions an unforgettable and true story transcribed by Gitta Mallasz titled Talking with Angels. It’s about a powerful group of friends in World War II Hungary who began to meet once a week as the climate of hatred built in the world around them. During one of those meetings, Hannah, closed her eyes and began to recite the words that she was suddenly hearing loudly and clearly from within her. These words, as the group soon finds out, are messages from each of their corresponding angels.

The words that came through Hannah, and that Gitta transcribed, are so beautiful, and so powerful, my copy of Talking with Angels has duct-tape all down it’s spine; I’ve read it at least once a year over the past 20 years.

At one point, Gitta asks her angel through Hannah, “What is the heart?”And Hannah answers, “The sanctuary of sanctuaries, The place where the divine dwells, The place of grace, the chalice.” So, similar to the gospel of Mary, the heart is considered sacred and central.

And reminiscent of Mary 2:2, “Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.” The angels reveal to Gitta and her friends, “The circle is the key. There is no hierarchy: the circle is completed.”

And echoing so much of the emphasis of union, and of transcending the opposites in the gospels of Thomas and Philip, the angels explain, “There is no high and no low, there is nothing brought low, nothing base, if you achieve union with the divine. Away from the divine, there is above and below. United, all is One.”

Then the number seven comes up as well. Just as there are seven powers of the ego that Christ reveals to Mary in her gospel, the angels reveal that there are seven forms of creation, and that the human is the fourth.

The first, number one is the mineral, so the earth itself, all the rocks, soil, water, which turns into clouds and returns to earth as rain. Two is the plant, so the trees, the greens and food we eat, the seeds that provide life for us all, and then three is the animal, so every gorgeous creature here on earth from the majestic whale to the stunning and wise timber wolf. These first three forms of creation make up what the angels refer to as “the created world.”

Then, there’s what the angels refer to as “the creating world.” This starts with number five, the angel. These are the metaphysical beings, meaning without material form, that the group of friends in Talking with Angels united with in order to receive “heavenly” support throughout their terrifying human circumstances. This angel that we each have is how I understand the theological concept of soul. I don’t think the angel is separate from the soul. I think we can perceive the angel through the heart. And merge with it while embodied. I think in a sense, or to say this all another way, I think the angel is the brightest and wisest aspect of who we are.

The sixth form of creation is the seraph, and this is an angelic being that is separate from us. Separate meaning an intensity that we can’t perceive while we’re in human, material form. And finally, there’s the seventh. The angels refer to the seventh with a symbol rather than a name. It’s an O or a zero. A circle really. Or they simply refer to the seventh as the divine.

The angel, the seraph, and the divine comprise “the creating world.” And like “the created world,” “the creating world” cannot speak for itself.

This is where number four, the human, comes in. The human sits between “the created world,” mineral, plant, and animal, and “the creating world,”the angel, the seraph, and the divine.

The task or purpose of the human is to be a bridge between the worlds.

We, the human being, are the bridge between the two worlds that cannot speak except through us, from within us.

When we consider every form of creation as significant, as sacred, we are uniting the seven. Only the human has the capacity to become aware of the soul and speak on behalf of love. This is why the angels tell Gitta and her friends, “Rejoice at being human,” even as they face their deaths, because of the ignorance of the Nazis' antisemitism, racism, and homophobia.

The angels explain, “ONLY THE HUMAN HAS THE WORD. YOU SPEAK IN THE NAME OF THE DIVINE.”

Gitta writes after the angels reveal this understanding of what it means to be a true human being, or the Anthropos according to Mary’s gospel: “I discover my own dignity: the dignity of the individual human who is called to unite spirit and matter. Never have I so intensely felt that creation cannot be fulfilled without the participation of the human. It is only through me, the human being, the fourth in the middle, that my angel can act on earth. With this discovery, my life takes on a wholly new meaning.

I have the possibility and the task of uniting matter and spirit, in my body as in my soul.”

These words, “uniting,” “union,” “to be united,” are foundational and represent a theme throughout the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. When the disciples are panicked in Mary chapter 5 and feel despair about how they could possibly go out and announce the good news of, “the realm of the child of true humanity.” Because, “if they,” meaning the Roman Empire, “did not spare him,” Christ, then, “how will they spare us.”

Mary Magdalene stands up, the scripture reads. She greets them all as her brothers and sisters, and she comforts them. In one version of the Gospel of Mary, it says she tenderly kissed them all, and says, “Brothers and sisters, do not weep, do not be distressed nor be in doubt. For his grace will be with you sheltering you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has united us and made us true Human beings.”

The true Human being is the Anthropos, the being that has united body and soul and heaven and earth inside them.

Gitta was the only one among the small group of beloved friends to survive. And when she was finally safe in France, and emotionally ready or able to go back over the transcription of the powerful words the angels spoke through Hannah 33 years after the end of the war, she published the first edition of Talking with Angels in French. It became an immediate international bestseller and is translated now into many languages.

Here are several messages from the angels that have red pen underlined in my copy, and that resonate the most with the truths also revealed in the Gospel of Mary.

“The goal is not above; the goal is not below; for the divine dwells neither above nor below. Above and below are but parts: the divine dwells in the WHOLE. To unite: that is the goal.”

“My beloved ones, is it so difficult to reach the mountain peak? It is beneath the depths of the seas, and it is far beyond the seas. It is above, high above: in the depths of the human heart.”

And finally, and this is printed in all caps because as Gitta explained, sometimes the angels shouted, or expressed an exuberant joy that had an intensity Hannah said felt like rivulets of light streaming through her:

“THE BODY IS LOVE WHICH HAS BECOME MATTER.”

This is what it means to “call the human into being,” as the angels direct. It is to unite all those aspects within us that we have understood or misunderstood to be separate, or greater or less than the other. We are to experience the worth, the dignity of being human and our truest purpose by existing as the bridge between them.

With only more love,
​M.

The Good News

“We should clothe ourselves with the perfect Human, acquire it for ourselves as he commanded us, and announce the Good news.”
​—The Gospel of Mary

Now that we’ve heard about what has been hidden from us, the last passage from the Gospel of Mary answers what we can each do to acquire “the perfect Human” for ourselves.

Personally, the word perfect makes me cringe.

I much prefer the word complete or true in its place. True as in whole. Authentic. Integral. So, we are to clothe ourselves with the true human. And this means that once we have stripped ourselves of the stories and ideas that feed the raging fires of the ego, or the power to judge (which ensnares us in a cycle of the ego’s seven powers), then the only thing we should put back on is this understanding or vision of being a true human being, the self and the soul united.

This, of course, does not mean we remain that way. Perfect, whole, unified, complete. It does not mean we are infallible, and incorruptible, and that we float from now on several feet above the ground. It doesn’t mean we have to always wear white, never have sex, and abstain from anything that would actually make us happy. All of these ideas of perfect have confused us about what it means to be spiritual, to be a spiritually grown-up and true human being.

As humans, we forget, as Mary revealed to us. The chains of forgetfulness bind us again to the ego. The work we’re being called to here, though, is to “clothe ourselves with the perfect Human.” So, we have to do the work that allows us to remember, again and again, and with greater ease and levity, this experience of the self as also a soul. This experience of not just being this pain, and grief, and terror of the ego, but also this soul of love that loves through us.

This love that whispers from within us, when we are exhausted and alone, “Give to me what you cannot carry.”

We are to “acquire it for ourselves as he commanded us,” which translates to me as seeing Christ as an example, a way-shower, a trail-blazer in what it means to be human.

This doesn’t speak of idolizing or worshipping or distancing Christ from us or from what it means to be human. This says he commanded us to try, as we are each able, to experience the truth that he realized, which is that within the human heart sits a treasure. That treasure will be referred to as a diamond, as a light that pierces all other light, as heaven, as gold by the alchemists, as the soul, as the aspect of us that’s inseparable from god.

If we can “acquire it,” since it’s already ours, and since it’s already here within us, then we will be able to see (thanks to the nous, the eye of the heart) that we are not separate from it. That we are no greater or less than a mustard seed, a tree, a flower, a wolf, a star, an angel, those streaks of red in a sunset that takes the breath away. We are aware, again, of what we had forgotten, that everything “exists in and with each other.” And this is humbling and empowering all at once.

Because when I speak, if I speak from this place, from this treasure that has been hidden from us, then I use a voice that is more than my own. I become a voice in service of love. I become that one unified voice that demanded Thecla’s freedom: “And the women all cried out in a loud voice, as if from one mouth.”

This is how, for me at least, I can “announce the Good news,” as a voice in service of love.

We have nothing to be ashamed of in being human, in having a body, in feeling all that this body knows, which is lost to the intellect and beyond reason.

We have nothing to be ashamed of or to ever have to hide when it comes to who we love. Who we love is not determined by our body or theirs, not their sex or their gender but the soul that expresses itself through it all.

Announcing is not converting; it’s not proselytizing. Cor ad cor loquitur. Heart speaks to heart directly. It’s our work to do what we can to remember the soul, to remember the love that’s at the heart of how and why we heal.

It’s our work to undo the systems of power that confuse us into forgetting our own power.

The good news to me is that true power rests within us.

That like Mary Magdalene, like Thecla and Perpetua demonstrated, no one outside of us can keep us from finding this power. Because it’s not a power over us or outside of us. It’s a power that rests within us, and we can rest in it, be led by it, and be carried by it.

It’s a power that takes us breath by breath, if we let it, to the places where the ego is the loudest and most afraid, so we can become aware of the contrast: the stark contrast between the world the ego sees and the world love sees.

The perfect, or true human, is anchored into this love, and also, is equally, still and for as long as we have a body, this raging ego that will resist the “death” this love demands. So, it’s all part of the process. It’s part of what it means to be spiritual, and to be “perfect,” and to be an absolute mess at times. To fall flat on our egos and scream, for example, while sobbing in the shower. Or to storm out of a situation you couldn’t possibly handle calmly in the moment.

The good news is that it’s just alpha, and then omega, ad infinitum. It’s just a constant return. A myriad of opportunities to come back to this voice of love inside us. And we can spend less and less time away from it, or feeling as though we’re separate from it, or aren’t worthy of it, if we choose to. Being human isn’t the failure. Being human is the soul’s chance to be here.

The guru, the saint, the magi, the “perfected” ideal of yourself that can radiate beams of light like Princess Fiona after Shrek’s true love kiss, and remain that way, is an illusion. This is often used as a way for us to feel inadequate. To constantly compare ourselves. To constantly suggest to ourselves that we’re not there yet. We haven’t arrived.

The good news is we never arrive. None of us. Not even the holiest person you can think of in this moment. We never get there. That’s the whole point of being human. The point is to constantly arrive. For some of us with each breath. We constantly return to love. This is the good news; that we can. That it’s set up this way.

That no matter who we are or how long we’ve been separated from feeling the presence of love, it’s actually right here.

Within.

With only more love,
​M.

The Body Never Lies

“Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.” –The Gospel of Mary

The majority of people I have met while leading workshops or retreats about Mary’s gospel over the past decade were not aware that she had one. And most have learned either through popular culture or more formal Christian or Catholic services that Mary Magdalene was known as the “penitent prostitute.”

So much of what we could have known about Mary Magdalene has been lost, destroyed, or remains buried. This is where the importance of the body comes in. Because the body never lies.

The external proof of who Mary Magdalene might have been is in fragments. The first six pages of Mary’s gospel is missing. What we have of her gospel starts on page seven.

There are also four missing pages in the middle of her gospel at a very critical point when Christ is about to reveal to Mary how we can receive a vision, or experience directly, or know from the Greek word gnosis, what is true and real and right for us from within.

The first passage then that we do have of Mary’s gospel is this jaw-dropping, heart-stopping passage about how we are all inextricably inter-connected: “Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.” (Mary 2:2)

Here’s why this first passage is so radical – it turns our entire idea of power on its head.

Let’s imagine that for the majority of us our ideas of the divine and what it means to be human exist along a vertical line starting up here with god (I’m pointing to my finger tips) and then angels (if you believe in them) are maybe here (I’m pointing to my palm) saints and people in exceptional positions of authority and power are somewhere below them (I’m pointing to just below the wrist) and then the rest of humanity would be here (I’m pointing to my mid-arm) and then the animals and creatures on this earth and the earth itself, food, rocks, minerals all exist below that on this vertical line of existence (I’ve reached the elbow.)

This piece of scripture means that we are all inter-connected, from the animals to the angels, from the gold that gives currency its worth to the earth itself that nourishes seeds into food that sustains us.

Existence cannot be ranked according to a hierarchy, a vertical line that suggests what is above is more significant and that what is below is less worthy.

This is the form of power structure the ego sees and assigns to the world. Mary’s gospel, from this first passage, is suggesting a very different way of seeing the world and every living being it contains. Mary’s gospel says we exist in and with each other. Inter-connected. Inter-dependent.

There is no hierarchy then to the spiritual world. Love renders us all equal. (My arm is slowly falling down until it’s straight, until my finger's tips are at level with my elbow.)

Our worth does not come from any status we can reach, or material wealth we can acquire, or any external power the ego has identified with that’s external to us.

Mary’s gospel names for us seven powers that the ego will be compelled by, which is a part of what it means to be human. These seven powers blind us from the ultimate power that rests within us. And we each have to do the hard, discerning work of learning to know, as in from direct experience, when we are neck-deep in the ego. So that we can become increasingly aware of the choice we’re presented with in every moment: move from the ego, or move from love. See with the limiting egoic-sight, or see with the spiritual eye of the heart.

The practice revealed in Mary’s gospel is one that demands embodiment. We have to be fully present in the body to experience directly what we already know, what we truly believe in, and what we want most for ourselves and each other. We have to return fully to the body to know the ultimate power that renders us all equal, the power that teaches us every nature, every modeled form, every creature exists in and with each other.

With only more love,
​M.

What I Need to Tell You

Ultimately what I need to tell you can’t be told. Not with words anyway. Words are the ego’s favorite outfits.

Ultimately, what I need to tell you already lives inside you. It’s a diamond, a well. It’s a vat of honey that has no better name except home. And it calls to you when you are lonely, when you feel lost, when the sound of your name doesn’t comfort you. When you feel confused about why you’re here, or why you keep making the same choices again and again.

It’s there waiting, this knowing, this love that is love that is love. It’s the most radical existence because it’s not dependent on anything external to you.

It’s what gleams and glimmers in your eyes even when you feel defeated, betrayed, filled to the gills with the word failure. It’s there even when you feel like you’re drowning in the overwhelm, the regret, the shame your ego is flooding you with – you catch this light in your eyes, and you know in that place that’s beyond them, that place where words no longer have meaning, you know that everything is going to be all right. Not because it is, but because there’s nothing that exists outside of you that this love within you cannot meet.

This is where I am. It’s a world within a world. It’s a universe that’s merciful. It’s a heaven that has always been right here. It’s a love that never ends. It’s a divinity that’s realized. No longer distant and incomplete. But here in the tiny, discrete moments of the most courageous acts of being present, of finally entering the story of our own lives so fully, we move it forward; we experience what’s next, what’s new, what’s truer for us than what’s past.

My son and I have this prayer we recite before he gets out of the car and goes to school. It’s actually half prayer, half handshake. It’s a spiritual version of the pinkie swear. We loop our pinkies and say a quick prayer about love being with him. I made it up one morning in elementary school years ago when he was more anxious than usual. Over the years, we’ve kept up the practice, though now that he’s a teenager, we have to recite it at least a red-light or two away from his high school so no one sees.

Ultimately what I need to tell you is told like that – with our pinkies looped. Because life is hard. Change is difficult and inevitable. And because we forget so often that we’ve never been alone, even when we’re by ourselves. And this practice of “being with” – this is how everything changes. This is how I understand what Bells Hooks might have meant when she gave us this diamond – “healing is an act of communion.”

With only more love,
​M.

We Must Be Unreasonable About Love

We must be unreasonable about mercy. We must give mercy away, hurl it towards each other, even when we can’t have mercy on ourselves.

We must want a witness, a witness that locks eyes and just speaks and hears directly from the heart, the very bones of each other, as if our hearts are walkie-talkies, and we can speak freely, the freest, silently, from within us, just by staring, even from across a crowded room, or in the midst of crisis, or when words have lost their meaning.

We must crave touch like a food source; we must speak touch like a second language.

We must understand that we will never happen again.

We must touch with this knowing; every day our bodies shift, every day our bodies only happen once, every day will be the last day we look exactly like this. We must touch like our bodies are rivers; where we dive in will never be where we surface.

We must be otherworldly brave. We must be the kind of courageous that legends are made of, must be willing to be the most naked possible, the most de-shelled and exposed, the most un-armed and bare, the most open and real – what taking off our clothes can only mildly point to.

We must want to be happy more than right, whatever “right” means. We must understand that “right” is too expensive, is too high a price to pay; “right” is never worth joy’s sacrifice.

We must know, as in grasp, as in experience directly in the body, from our very bones, that life is short, so returning to love isn’t an ideal, or a new year’s resolution, or what happens on Sunday, or once we’ve been wrung out by arguing, exhausted by stress and pain. The return to love can’t be via exhaustion; the surrender to love can’t come second hand.

We must desire returning to love as an everyday priority like drinking water or breathing.

We must want to laugh, to bring levity when levity is least expected but most needed. We must want to get to that point when the laughing clears out the lungs, leaves us coughing, our eyes all watery, and those odd and too infrequently used stomach muscles aching.

We must want to walk each other through where we are most afraid, not judging or fixing or trying to heal or change. Just walking with each other, side by side through the fear as we face it.

We must love each other, the very bones of us, and not ask for proof, or evidence, or reasons why we’re worthy of that love.

We must be inspired by a vision, a clarity of contribution, a way of serving this world with soul.

We must be living in the body in a way that comes from the truth that the body is the soul’s chance to be here.

We must be embodied, fully, wanting to exist intensely, to feel deeply, to be present to all that’s possible. We must be at the stage in life of what’s next. What’s after the search for self, the self-harm, the dissociation, the constant leaving and disembodying, the constant disappearing acts.

We must be at the stage of life that is focused on what happens after the soul is found. We must want to answer – what do we do with our freed self? What do we do with our freed selves together? How do we each support each other’s own union? What do we do with all this gold? With all this honey? How do we now serve the world? What will be our shared legacy of love?

We must be unreasonable about love.

We must give and give and give love recklessly, irrationally, knowing it’s the only inexhaustible resource, knowing the well can never run dry, because the source of love comes from within us but is always more than us.

We must know that the source of love is like an old-school pirate’s treasure-chest, that sits hidden in the heart and that is constantly replenished if we only just close our eyes and let it.

We must want more for each other than we’ve ever managed to want for ourselves.

With only more love,
​M.

What I Want For You

What it takes some days to arrive at this page… to believe in the voice these words contain. It sometimes takes half the day of staying present to the anxiety. Of doing what I have to in order to move through it. Long walks, hot showers, enough sage burning to make my neighbors suspicious.

And then sometimes, I can settle enough to sit still. To start to listen. To not judge what I hear, and just type. And it always arrives once I’ve sat with the anxiety long enough for it to show its true face: anger. Gorgeous, red and gold anger.

Anger that I still struggle so much to believe enough in my voice to simply use it. Anger that so many women writers, theologians, artists, voices from the queer community I know are struggling with me and have throughout time. Anger knowing that this lack of belief is a symptom of patriarchal dominance.

This is why I call it gorgeous, the anger. Because it’s galvanizing.

The anger reminds me that I’m alive, and that everything is still possible. It compels me to choose something other than the paralysis of anxiety. It reminds me of all the voices that have been silenced, the voices with not enough of the gorgeous rage to fuel them into words. And, it reminds me of all the voices, like Thecla’s and Mary Magdalene’s, that were buried. Burned. Destroyed. And of all the voices that still silence themselves. This is what always ends the pacing, the anxiety, and the disbelief in myself: the memory of so many who were not able to use their voice.

When here we are, me and you reading this, still able to use our voices in service of love. What makes anger sacred for me is that it connects us. It’s easier for me to believe in your voice than it is to believe in my own. And there’s something sacred about that configuration. It means it’s easier for me to hold you up than it is sometimes to hold myself up. And if we’re all doing that for each other, there’s a sacred exchange, a divine symmetry. Where I want for you more than I know how to want for myself, and you in turn, do the same.

I want you to feel the joy that sometimes finds me when I can get still and quiet enough inside to simply become a scribe to the love that pours through me. I want you to feel a bravery, collective and true, well up from within you each time you’re in a space of disempowering doubt and anxiety that lets you say or write what’s held within you like a firefly in a mason jar. Maybe every time feels apocalyptic. In each next generation. Maybe every time is ultimately an uncovering, a revealing. I don’t know.

I just know that this time, now, is all we have. And that using our voices in service of love has always been the calling.

To just say what sets the firefly free.

With only more love,
​M.

How I Found My Purpose

When I first graduated from college, I wanted to be a childcare worker. I wanted to take care of the most vulnerable youth, referred to as S.E.D. children or “severely emotionally disturbed.” So my career started off at a residential treatment center in San Francisco. This population of children needed more psychiatric care than the foster system could provide. Their short lives had been dominated by trauma. And the treatment center provided an education, a stable environment, and psychiatric care for them. I was hired as a part of the educational team in the middle school on campus.

There was a small chapel across the street from the entrance of the treatment center. I would go to meditate during breaks and to let the stillness cloak my frayed nerves. The heavy smell of incense would crowd out the small terrors I might have witnessed that day. A cloak of silence would settle over me. And this is when I would always hear it. Not hear as in an actual voice, but hear as in become aware of something that I could sense: a knowing. I would know that I’m not doing what I am meant to do. And I can’t articulate the precision of that knowing; it was more of an absence. I knew that something critical was missing, but I didn’t know what.

The emotional toll of the work for me was significant. I didn’t separate myself from the children. I counted myself among them. I had known what it was to be held down against my will. And this formed an indelible bond between us. So much so that the most difficult aspect of the job for me was one I hadn’t anticipated. As childcare counselors, we had to learn how to physically retrain the children if they had a psychotic break and needed to be kept safe from harming themselves or someone else in the classroom.

Typically, another physically stronger counselor would assist me in a restraint if one was ever needed in the course of a day. But one day, after about a year of being a counselor, I was forced to try to restrain a 13-year-old boy on my own. Let’s call him Titanic, because he was obsessed with it. He was beloved to me. And I can’t remember if I ever knew what it was that triggered him that day. I just remember him suddenly climbing up on his desk and screaming a scream that I can still hear today. It was the kind of scream that told his whole story. Hiding under the house from his father, then one abusive foster home after another. It was the kind of scream that comes from a human being who has never felt safe and has never known home.

I was standing by the doorway. I remember bracing myself against the wall at first as he came charging at me. When we were out in the hallway, I forgot all of my training. The head teacher and assistant counselor, consumed with tending to the rest of the classroom, trusted me to keep Titanic safe. But I couldn’t seem to snap out of that miasma of pain his scream had plunged me into. I was frozen. I fumbled through some self-defense. Shielded my face. And then I attempted to begin a restraint by getting hold of his arms behind his back and lowering him to the ground. This only served to enrage him further. And this is the last thing I remember before the searing pain, he said, in nearly a snarl, “This isn’t who you are.” Then he slammed me with all his strength against the wall, right where there happened to be a fixture that hit by spine in just such a way that my L4 disk has never been the same.

For a long while, I had to stay flat on my back. Any movement created electric rivulets of pain that lit up channels in my back like the tiny green veins on the underside of a leaf. And so I read. I read everything I could find about female saints and mystics. From India to France, Norway, and Sweden and then on to Spain. I read about the connection between physical suffering and mystical states of being. And I cried. A lot. I cried at all this wisdom that had been lived and then lost to history. Because the wisdom was lived and written by a female.

And I cried because I felt called out. I felt this deep sense that Titanic identified that lurking restlessness that would meet me when I meditated; I wasn’t being true to who I really am.

Workers' Compensation covered my physical therapy. And in the weeks to come, I began to move without the searing pain. I found yoga. I found acupuncture. I found that my new back demanded I put my body first before all things.

I wasn’t ready to give up on what I saw as a life of service. This is when I found a position as a childcare counselor with pregnant teens. And if Titanic called me out, the teenage girls at St. E’s led me to my calling, to the way I’m meant to live out my purpose of being fully human.

My purpose is who I am not what I do.

Who I am is a fragile human ego and an eternal soul. My purpose is to live out the full expression of them both. What I do is write. What I do is write about god. But if one day, the pain gets too intense for me to sit like this, to write, my purpose remains. I am called to be a true Human being: to be fully human and fully divine. This never changes even as my ability to write inevitably does.

Writing is what I’m meant to do with my purpose. What I mean is if our purpose is to be both fully human and fully divine, I can practice that cocktail of extremes the most exquisitely for myself in writing. Because writing asks me to bring love to where I am most human. I am the most vulnerable, the hardest on myself, the most critical, and the most insecure in my writing. So, the depths of the love that I might be also is called on for me to write.

What is the one thing that demands you love yourself fiercely in order to do it?

With only more love,
​M.

How Meditation is About Direct Knowing

Meditation for me has never been about becoming more spiritual. For me, it’s about being able to just be present. In a world of incessant distractions, enticing us into a future we imagine will somehow be “better,” or a past we’re convinced we’d be happier to return to, it’s an act of love for ourselves to harness our attention in the one place where change can actually happen: now.

We often know the answers to the questions we’re seeking. Fear creates this static, white noise and this jittery, frenetic energy that makes us think we can: (a) find the answer outside of us, and (b) find the answer with the mind. The answer, however, in my experience, doesn’t come from a thought; it comes from a direct knowing. And we have access to that knowing, from the Greek gnosis, if we can get still and quiet enough to listen.

Start by taking a deep breath, and with this breath set the intention to go inward. Imagine this space within however you want to—a cathedral with light-drenched, stained-glass windows, a disco ball hanging above a dance floor casting light diamonds everywhere as it spins, a little red raft on a warm, calm ocean that feels like the most dependable thing that has ever existed.

Then, when you’re there (and by there I mean you’re fully present within you), take a second breath. And with this second breath set the intention of meeting with your soul, and if the word soul doesn’t resonate with you – your true self, or just love itself. And if you’re afraid to meet with love (who isn’t), then just intend to meet with your voice. The most authentic one.

The one you had at some point in your life, like when you wore a cape at age seven, or when you stood up to that bully on the playground in middle school, or when you told that first crush how you actually felt, or when you said that first no to someone you had wanted to impress, or when you said that first yes even though you feared others would judge you. That voice. Take your second intentional breath and imagine inhaling that voice like it’s your long-lost beloved. Because it is.

Now, together, when you and this soul-voice are walking arm in arm in your imagination, or floating together on a little red raft on the calmest seas that have never existed, then ask. Ask anything and everything. And here’s the most important thing ever: believe it.

Believe this voice you hear inside you so much that you are willing to act on it. Believe in this voice. Believe in you.

And then, before taking the third breath, start to give gratitude. Say thank-yous like throwing confetti at a wedding. Thank everything and anything that might have come to you. Because what we ask inwardly, we find. Because as daunting as it is to experience, we contain our own answers. And as powerful as it is to practice, it’s also a responsibility.

After the third breath, open your eyes. There’s nothing more radical or revolutionary than doing this every day. Because there’s nothing more empowering than to dare to be fully embodied.

With only more love,
​M.

How I Found Love

There were moments when I was a teenager and felt more emotions than I could handle, like I was being crowded out of my own skin from the amount of anxiety whirling around, like accidentally lit fireworks in a shed. So I would climb out of my bedroom window onto the roof of the house when I couldn’t sleep and sit against the red brick chimney at the peak of it. I could pour out all the fireworks going off inside me into the sky, into the stars. And the presence was always there sitting beside me.

Or on pilgrimages as a young adult when my ardent intention was to know love, as in to experience it directly. Like with the Black Madonna of Vassiviere, I went down on my knees before her, in a small medieval Cathedral in Besse, France, and the presence was there as this ineffable weight inside me seeing out through my eyes – to help me realize that all this love I’m pouring out to the Black Madonna, and to anyone in my life that would let me – that this love is actually a part of me. And when I stood up hours later, the presence of love stood up and walked out of the cathedral with me.

Or when I began to meditate, in my own monk-like way, in my convent dorm room in seminary. Its windows were eye-level to the stain-glassed scenes of Christ’s life on Riverside Church. So, when the light hit just so, every possible color streamed into my apartment. I had been studying the Hesychasts from ancient Byzantium, and I learned that the desert ascetics practiced a form of meditation called the prayer of the heart.

I started trying it out myself. First on my own, and then later under the guidance of a Greek Orthodox priest. The Hesychasts focused all of their attention into the heart. Hesychast comes from the Greek hesychia, which means stillness. So, the Hesychasts went into the stillness of the heart, and curled their torso forward into a “c” in order to do so. I tried the navel-gazing yogic pose of theirs for a while, but my neck was screaming with pain. And for me, listening to the body is a form of devotion. So instead, I began using three intentional breaths to anchor me into the meditation. One to enter the heart, one to connect to the presence I met there, and one to surface again at the end of it.

What I found in this form of meditation was that same presence of love that would somedays, sometimes, silently make my eyes water from the exquisite proximity of it.

Now, after almost two decades of meditating like the Hesychasts, of turning inward daily, the heart is not a concept or a romantic ideal. It’s not a fixed location. And love is not something ultimately we find and meet with because of someone else.

The heart is a time machine, an alchemist, a sanctuary. The heart is an entire world. It’s a world within this one, a world that’s merciful. And love is the presence that waits for us there to return it to when we can find the self-worth to remember it’s always meant for us, or when we exhaust ourselves enough and surrender inward as our last straw, our last shred of hope, and meet with it.

After all our searching, after all our efforts to try and impress, or prove, or earn love from someone else, we return to the presence that exists within the heart, which is where the search ends.

There’s a profound reminder Christ gives us in the gospel of Mary, “Be on your guard so that no one deceives you by saying, ‘Look over here!’ or ‘Look over there!’ For the child of true Humanity exists within you.” (Mary 4:3-5)

We keep thinking, forgetting, misunderstanding that something external to us, a position in the world, a status we want to attain, or a person we’ll one day meet, will fill that unspeakable void, that missing piece, that sense that there’s something fundamentally absent. Mary’s gospel reminds us not to be confused by those deceptive whispers that the answer is found somewhere else or in someone else. The answer “exists within you.”

The word that’s translated into English as “the child of true Humanity,” comes from the Greek Anthropos, which means more directly, fully human and fully divine. One within the other, both. What this word is pointing us to is a different definition or understanding of what it means to be human. Here, in the gospel of Mary, to be human is to be a self and a soul; it’s to contain almost impossibly in one being both what’s otherworldly and infinite and what’s individual and finite.

And what I found by becoming adept at returning to the heart, even in the most painful moments, or especially then, is that this presence of love is what remains.

This presence of love is what endures. And rather than spending time finding it, our lives can be about living from it.

With only more love,
​M.

How I Found the Most Elusive Power

The Acts of Paul and Thecla is scriptural evidence of the precedence of women’s spiritual authority in the earliest form of Christianity. And it contains Paul’s commission to Thecla, after she baptizes herself, which places Thecla in the same apostolic line as him. This, I know from my experience of writing about Mary’s gospel, will most likely piss a lot of people off. But then, we know that the truth always does.

I’m less concerned or motivated by the idea of Pope Francis one day taking Thecla’s scripture, or Mary’s gospel, seriously. I just care that the template of transformation in Thecla’s story of reclaiming a power that exists within us gets to as many as possible.

I just care that the girl who baptized herself finally gets her place in the sun.

As a feminist theologian, I want to bring Thecla’s story back from erasure. And to make clear that The Acts of Paul and Thecla was ordered to be destroyed in the 4th century not because it lacked authenticity, but precisely because it legitimized women’s spiritual authority.

Personally, Thecla’s story helped me recover a discrete power I’d lost touch with as a little girl. A power that contains the elusive capacity to choose for myself rather than to do what I think will make others feel happy, or not even necessarily happy, just more comfortable. I used to exert considerable effort and spend considerable amounts of time in the business of placating other people’s egos, as if I would be compensated somehow for it. As if it somehow made me safer. As if silencing and distancing myself from what I actually wanted, from what was actually true for me, this daily sacrifice accrued a form of sacred worth, like celestial Bitcoin, that then earned me this place among the coveted “good.”

As if good meant doing what we’re told, as if good meant submissive; as if good was something we need to perform and prove or earn. Rather than good being defined as the actual essence of what we are as human beings, which is one of the many empowering clarifications on the nature of humanity that the gospel of Mary gave back to me.

From a very young age, through the form of trauma that unfortunately statistics tell us one in four endure, as a survivor, and as the child of an alcoholic, I learned on a life-or-death scale to stop listening to that still quiet voice inside me. That voice that knows what I want, in each next moment, and with each next person I meet. There’s a voice that just knows who I am and what I need. But what’s so impactful about trauma is that it creates a distance from the body, from that voice within. So, I became adept at listening instead to what will please and placate. Thinking this will provide safety, putting others before that voice. And so, little by little through the years, I siphoned the power that voice contains over to others, until eventually, I forgot where the source of that power originated.

Thecla’s voice brought me back to my own. When I picked up her scripture again as the world stood still in 2020, I began to heal in a way I had never been able to before. I began to use that elusive power to make new choices in my life, to finally break old patterns, and to ultimately reclaim a fundamental sense of self-worth that has nothing to do with what I can produce or provide for anyone else. It’s an innate worth that lets me shut out the expectations of those around me and live with radical integrity. And this is why I think, “the women all cried out in a loud voice, as if from one mouth,” when Thecla baptized herself at the end of her story. Because, Thecla demonstrated, embodied a truth they already knew – the truth that when the powerless unite, anything becomes possible.

When we stop relying on systems of power outside of us, and return instead to the source of power within us in that calm still voice of love, we regain the capacity that should always remain ours, the capacity to choose what comes next for us.

And I think this is what invites the miraculous into our lives. Listening to what we desire most and having the courage, the heart, to act on it. The miracle of the roses, the cardamon, and nard, the miracle of the women in the crowd collectively remembering they have always had the power to save themselves and each other, only came after witnessing Thecla become the answer to her own prayer.

With only more love,
​M.