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September 5 - October 20, 2011
But yes, right there in Matthew 27:61 it read: “And Mary Magdalene and the other Mary remained standing there in front of the tomb.”
All four gospels identify Mary Magdalene as having been the first witness to Jesus’s resurrection and they all single her out individually in this role.
all four gospels mention Mary Magdalene by name as the first witness to the resurrection.
In addition to her prominent role in the resurrection narrative, three of the four gospels also specify that Mary Magdalene was a witness to the burial of Jesus.
All four gospels either directly mention or allude to the fact that Mary Magdalene was present at the crucifixion.
Unlike Mary Magdalene’s role in the Passion and resurrection narratives, which is attested to in all four gospels, the report of her former demonic possession comes to us only through Luke
Second, all four gospels insist that when all the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene stands firm. She does not run; she does not betray or lie about her commitment; she witnesses. Hers is clearly a demonstration of either the deepest human love or the highest spiritual understanding of what Jesus was teaching, perhaps both.
why is the apostle to the apostles not herself an apostle?
Jesus’s core teaching is rooted in the ground of transformed eros and brings as its fruit not only forgiveness of sins but unswerving singleness of perception. Ultimately, it is not about “clean living” and purity, but the total immolation of one’s heart.
The problem arises when this generic meaning of the term gnosis gets confused with a later and much more specific strain in a very different cosmovision. Gnosticism as it was understood by the church fathers, and continues to be commonly understood today, is a specifically Greek heresy in that it depends upon a Platonic metaphysics of ideal forms and an inherent dualism between matter and spirit. In this complex metaphysical world of archons, emanations, and demiurges, salvation is a matter of freeing the immortal soul from its imprisonment in matter. As the fathers rightly noticed, this is at
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At the center of our being is a point or nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.5
Apostleship does not lie in having been near Jesus, taught or studied with him, or attended the Last Supper. It lies in the inner integration (“singleness”) which allows that person to live in continuous communion with the Master in the imaginal meeting ground through the power of a pure heart, so that “Thy kingdom come” is in fact a living reality.
modern Jesuit mystic Ladislaus Boros, whose 1973 book The Mystery of Death is an extraordinary reflection on the cosmological atonement effected during Jesus’s descent to “the heart of the earth.”
When, in the way we have just explained, Christ’s human reality was planted, in death, right at the heart of the world, within the deepest stratum of the universe, the stratum that unites at root bottom all that the world is, at that moment in his bodily humanity he became the real ontological ground of a new universal scheme of salvation embracing the whole human race.20
“Space-conqueror,” in fact, coincides precisely with the more familiar epithet (thanks to George Lucas) by which these conquerors were known in the Near Eastern shamanic traditions of the times: “sky walker.” The powers recognize him as a sky walker: one who has transcended the conditions of physical space and time and healed the sickness of humanity by going to its roots.
It gives one a bit of a start to realize that for the better part of two millennia, Christian theology has been written, shaped, formulated, and handed down almost exclusively by celibates talking to other celibates.
It was Plato who first came up with the idea of classifying love by types, and his delineation of agape (impartial, disinterested love) from eros (desiring love) has basically laid the foundation for all such discussions for two and a half millennia since. But Plato never made the error of equating agape exclusively with divine love (given the notoriously riotous passions of the Greek divinities, that thought would probably never have occurred to him), or eros exclusively with human desiring. That particular reductionism, which has had such a pervasive influence on contemporary Christian
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Kenosis is not the same as renunciation. Renunciation implies a subtle pushing away; kenosis is simply the willingness to let things come and go without grabbing on.
superb work of John Welwood, whose Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love (1990) is in my estimate the finest practical guidebook available to partnership as a pathway of spiritual awakening.
“Love is a transformative force because it brings the two different sides of ourselves—the expansive and the contracted, the asleep and the awake—into direct contact,”
Rainer Maria Rilke actually comes much closer to the truth when he writes in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are really princesses who are waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”17
“Love and death have a common root,” writes Ladislaus Boros, in The Mystery of Death. “The best love stories end in death, and this is no accident. Love is, of course, and remains the triumph over death, but that is not because it abolishes death but because it is itself death. Only in death is the total surrender that is love’s possible, for only in death can we be exposed completely and without reserve. That is why lovers go so simply and unconcernedly to their death, for they are not entering a strange country; they are going into the inner chamber of love.”2
When two people say “we” because love has made them we in reality, a new sphere of existence is created. The whole world takes on a new dimension, a new depth. This new sphere of existence is not simply “already there”; it comes into existence as a function of the free self-giving of one person to another.
Ward Bauman grasps this point precisely when he writes: “His death, rather than being a sacrificial offering to appease an angry God, as the church would later articulate it, was the result of his personal dying to self, as he himself taught it.”
In basilica after basilica throughout Christendom, wherever one passes beneath the tympanum of those great western doors or gazes up at the high altar to behold the image of the Christus Pantocrator clad in great priestly or kingly robes (the two become easily intertwined), exercising his solitary dominion over all things, one is actually looking straight into the face of the dysfunction pressed so close to the heart of Christianity.
Wisdom is about transformation and transformation is about creativity; the three form an unbroken circle.
For if the church struggles against its tendency toward a docetic Christ, before a docetic Mary it caves in instantly.
Fifth Way
Boris Mouravieff,
We talk of his “coming again” only in terms of a final judgment or a deathbed encounter. For the most part, our Christian path encourages us to “meet” him in the sacraments, to live ethically in this world, and to await a mystical reunion in the next. But that is not what Jesus himself proclaims, or what the earliest Christians experienced. They experienced Jesus as present: alive, palpable, vibrantly connected; their experience was that the walls between the realms are paper thin and that our embodiment is no obstacle to the full and intimate participation in relationship with him here and
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