Mary Magdalene

Sometimes you don’t know why. You only know that.

You know.

You know that what you are reading is true. Not because your mind has decided that it is. No, you know it in the depths of yourself. A resonance so strong that you can no longer deny it.

This is my story. Her story. And perhaps your story too.

It is the path I have always known and tried to walk, deep within me. I never knew it with my mind. Until now.

This story begins at the beginning. Childhood. I did not grow up in a Christian family. My parents did have to go to church when they were younger (especially at Christmas), but I believe they didn’t think much of it. As a result, I was never baptized and did not receive a Christian upbringing. I attended one church service in my childhood. And I never read the Bible, because we certainly didn’t have one at home. I did attend a Catholic primary school, where I occasionally picked up tiny bits and pieces of the stories. Later, during my student years, I joined a Catholic student association, but that was because that was where the fun people were for me.

This rather Christless (pretty nice word, right?) life never quite suited me. Not even as a child. Although my parents gave me exactly what they themselves had longed for as children: no Sunday obligations, no things you simply had to do, no church clothes, being sweet, and a whole lot more “yes and amen.” Precisely all of these things drew me enormously. I loved those kinds of obligations, I got energy from doing things right. I was always concerned with others and suffered just as much as my grandmother did from the fact that we had no Christmas tradition or traditions at all in our family. Where was the clarity, the connection, the devotion, the higher, the coming together in silence? I longed for this so deeply.

So when I was in fourth grade, I asked my parents if I could be baptized. I still remember my thoughts and feelings from that time very clearly. I knew they would find it strange and that it probably wouldn’t be allowed. I also knew that it was wrong for them to deny me this. Something inside me didn’t feel right. I wanted to be baptized because I felt that it wasn’t about me, but about something greater, something higher, something quieter… That connection was what I was seeking… So if it had been up to me back then, I would have been baptized and we would have gone to church every Sunday morning. We would have connected there, together, in silence, with something greater than ourselves.

But we didn’t. We didn’t build traditions either. Grandma stopped asking. I stopped hoping. But I kept searching, or actually: finding. I came across places where “that one thing” was there again for a moment. In me, outside me. Simply there. At the age of 16, I encountered the work of Etty Hillesum. I felt deeply religious and connected while reading it.

And there were so many more breadcrumbs on the path I call my life. Sometimes there were none for years. Sometimes suddenly there were a whole lot. A therapist, the work of C.G. Jung and depth psychology, the return to the body, women’s circles and womanhood, a romantic relationship, the medicine path, a journey to Mexico and now… Mary Magdalene.

What can I, as a Christian layperson — because I am still not baptized and I have only read one book about her — say about her… What am I allowed to say? Integrity is my greatest value.

So the only thing I want to say for now, at the beginning of this path, is: I am glad that my parents followed their own hearts. That they did not have me baptized. That they did not take me to church. That they left that whole story aside. Because I might otherwise have developed enormous resistance to the one-sided and incomplete story that comes with it…

“Everything happens at exactly its own time, and therefore everything is exactly as it should be. Whether we understand it or not.” I sometimes say this to clients, and now I say it to myself. Perhaps I would not have found what I felt back then. Now I do. So this timing is exactly right. Everything is exactly right.

Smiling, I look at the thin red bracelet around my wrist, with seven knots in it. My mother and younger sister brought it back from Barcelona, from a little spiritual shop. There was a Spanish text with it that none of us understood. I felt that they had no idea why they were giving this to me, at least not consciously… I didn’t know either, but I put the bracelet on. Until I read about the red thread in my book about Mary Magdalene. Worn around the left wrist. As a devotion to her. I looked up from my book at my wrists. I had indeed placed the bracelet on my left wrist. A shock went through me. And the seven knots? The seven Powers of the Ego that she writes about in her gospel. The ones we must overcome in order to reach our heart. Our soul.

That which I have always felt.

The Red Book. The Red Path. The Red Thread.

In my life. In her life. In your life.

I dedicate myself to this path of the Heart. Of the Rose. Of the Red. Which so unmistakably and clearly colors my life. Since the day I was born… with my red hair.

I dedicate myself to this path in which the writings of Mary Magdalene no longer remain absent — but are included. In which the feminine takes its place again. In which woman takes her place. In which polarity is slowly dissolved. And the story becomes whole again.

Where it all began.

With the love between a man and a woman.

Amen.