“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.”
Read MoreUltimately 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.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreMeditation 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.
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreThe scripture that contains Thecla’s story, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, reads like a gospel written explicitly for women. Because no one comes to save Thecla. (Well, not until the very end – and that’s only after she baptizes herself. And spoiler alert, it’s only the women in the crowd who join her in her efforts of saving herself.) Again and again throughout her story, Thecla has to draw from a strength within her she never knew existed.
Read More“He said, ‘Thecla, my betrothed, why do you sit like this? What is the emotion that binds you in passion? Turn toward your Thamyris and be ashamed.’ And her mother also said the same things to her, ‘Child, why do you look down and sit like this, answering nothing but acting like a mad person?'” (The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Chapter 10)
In 1986, a year before his death, at a lecture in Amherst on the responsibility and role of the writer in society, James Baldwin said, “The reason that Plato wanted no poets in his republic is because a writer is, by definition, a disturber of the peace.”
Read MoreOne of the most significant names used to identify Christ by the earliest group of people to document his teachings was the Greek word Christos, which means “someone anointed with oil,” or simply, “The Anointed.”
Read MoreThe Mary Magdalene Oracle is about a vision of radical love that formed long before Christianity became a formal religion, long before Mary’s gospel was excluded, destroyed, and buried. Unearthing that vision changed everything for me.
Read MoreIn her gospel, Mary Magdalene tells the other disciples about a vision she had of Christ. She says: “I saw the Lord in a vision, and I said to him, ‘Lord, I saw you today in a vision.’ He answered me, ‘How wonderful you are for not wavering at seeing me! For where the mind is, there is the treasure.’” (Mary 7:1–4)
Read MoreI can’t name or point to one particular event or moment when I sensed it, or remembered it. Remembering is the closest word to try to describe it. It’s like remembering a memory of something I once knew completely, experienced directly, and yet somehow also completely forgot about, completely forgot not just that I experienced it but that it ever existed.
Read MoreThere’s a legacy of love, a red thread, that hasn’t been written about before now. Or it has, it’s just scattered, with pages missing and with parts buried. It isn’t codified in any one singular sacred text; it isn’t institutionalized within any one religion or sect. It isn’t handed to every little one born to this world as a secret personal bible, as a promise sealed already inside the heart, that love is where we have all come from, no matter who we are.
Read MoreThe Divine Feminine Oracle contains 53 saints, mystics, poets, priestesses, gender rebels, cross-dressers, trailblazers, and holy troublemakers who represent both divine beings and the human beings who sought to embody them.
Read MoreWords are like sutures. They can close up ancient wounds. They’re magic, we know this. Words heal not just from the meaning they convey but also the energy they contain. Words can hold, as if tiny little vessels, the energy that transmits from the writer to the reader. Or from the speaker to the listener. Words have the power to transport us and transform us just from taking them in.
Read MoreI remember walking into my first tarot reading as if that moment remains in present tense. A close friend had booked the appointment because she had heard that this particular card reader was really powerful.
Read MoreSometimes I set it aside, the magic. Not on purpose, not consciously. I set it aside out of pain, or doubt. I set it aside to drink in the mundane for a bit. Because, and few tell us this much less prepare us for it, magic is exhausting. Because magic is a direct reflection of our own power. And that’s always one part exhilarating and one part terrifying. So, I set it aside sometimes. I place it in a box in the garage, all taped up and labeled, “Magic,” with a red cautionary skull and crossbones so someone doesn’t open it unaware of the dangers it contains.
Read MoreThe Gospel of Mary doesn’t refer to god as god at all. God of course is the masculine form of the creator, or ultimate divine being in the English language. The feminine form is goddess. The Gospel of Mary refers to god or goddess, or the ultimate creator, as simply, The Good.
Read MoreChrist’s parable of the vineyard workers describes a man who arrives in a vineyard late in the day, and yet he’s given the same amount of pay for his brief labor as those who have been hard at work since dawn. Christ explains that in the world to come (or in the world that already exists invisibly within this one), “those who are last shall be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:16) This doesn’t seem fair though, or just. And that’s precisely what the parable is meant to do; it’s meant to get us all caught up in our ego so that we can recognize it and release it.
Read MoreIt’s hard to remember what we have never been taught. It takes trusting our own intuition, our own heart. It takes learning how to listen to what the soul whispers to us when we can get still enough, free enough from the distracting chaos of our everyday life.
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