Mary Magdalene

While searching for depictions of Mary Magdalene for this post, I came across this beautiful painting of Mary and Jesus. I don't know who the artist is because it was not credited, but it's from the website by the

Nasarean Religion of the Essene Way.

I've been interested in Mary Magdalene for a long time but you know, there's not a lot of facts out there about her. The Bible is not a good source. She's mentioned more in the Gnostic Gospels particularly, of course, in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene but also in The Gospel of Thomas, Pistis Sophia and The Gospel of the Egyptians (the latter of which I have not read).

I bought myself a small icon pendent of St. Mary Magdalene for my birthday along with one of Jesus. I've been thinking on them quite a lot. If you've read the Gnostic Gospels, you learn that Mary claimed to have been given certain spiritual knowledge by Jesus and, when she tried to share it with the other disciples, they started dissing on her, asking why Jesus would have told things to her-a woman!-he didn't tell them. Basically, they discounted her because she was a woman.

The more I think about this story, the more I know that the reason she, of all the people in Jesus' circle, was chosen is because-not in spite of-she was a woman. When a person is outside of what is the cultural norm, that person often has fewer "boxes" to break out of (boxes/illusion/assumptions/egotraps). Mary was a woman in a culture in which to be a women was to be less than to be a man. The male disciples came from several different backgrounds, some wealthier, some working class, some not-so-nice, but they all had the "benefit" of being men; they were insiders by nature of their gender. Mary was obviously intelligent, compassionate, curious, a good listener and a quick student and she had the gender perspective of being outside the norm so she could hear Jesus' lessons and truths with fresh ears ("those who have ears, let them hear"). She was open, literally, to his teachings.

Something I was listening to a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about Logos=Word and Sophia=Wisdom. I was thinking about how Jesus was the Word made incarnate, the Breath of Life. I am a word person; I always score incredibly high on tests of verbal ability. I know, though, that words, logic, are only half of it. Wisdom, intuitive right knowing, is the other half. I'm finding it interesting to think about Jesus and Mary balancing the two things. That whole male/female logic/intuition thing. In the Gospel of Philip, it is written, "As for the Wisdom...she is the mother of the angels. And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene".

I've got Joni Mitchell's song, "Passion Play (When All the Slaves Are Free)" in my head today:

Magdalene is trembling

Like a washing on a line

Trembling and gleaming

Never before was a man so kind

Never so redeeming

Enter the multitudes

In Exxon blue

In radiation rose

Ecstasy

Now you tell me

Who you gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

(Who're you gonna get)

I am up a sycamore

Looking through the leaves

A sinner of some position

Who in the world can this heart healer be

This magical physician

Enter the multitudes

In Exxon blue

In radiation rose

Misery

Now you tell me

Who you gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

(Who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes

The walking wounded

They come to this diver of the heart

Of the multitudes

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

Oh, climb down, climb down he says to me

From the middle of unrest

They think is light is squandered

But he sees a stray in the wilderness

And I see how far I've wandered

Enter the multitudes

In Exxon blue

In radiation rose

Apathy

Now you tell me

Who you gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

(Who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes

The walking wounded

They come to this diver of the heart

Of the multitudes

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

Oh, all around the marketplace

The buzzing of the flies

The buzzing and the stinging

Divinely barren

And wickedly wise

The killer nails are ringing

Enter the multitudes

In Exxon blue

In radiation rose

Tragedy

Now you tell me

Who you gonna get to do the dirty work

When all the slaves are free?

(Who're you gonna get)

Car Free In Tennessee: One Year

Yep. One full year of walking, busing and scooting. My kids are still hating it but, usually, at the least, I don't mind and frequently, I enjoy not owning a car.

My favorite teacher in high school was Mr. Linnemann. He taught English. People either 'got' him and loved him or they didn't and thought he was weird. It was like being in a small and very elite club to get him and appreciate him and contribute to his toe-jam collection. Besides the facts that he never married, always wore an awful green leisure suit, had a fairly long grey beard, carried a "purse" (actually a camera bad, but you know how teenagers can be) and literally barked at people when they were disrespectful toward him, the main reason for his being a town "character" was due to him not owning a car. Mr. Linnemann rode an old bike or walked everywhere. He always said that one does not own a car, one is owned by a car and would cite examples of how much one has to work in order to continue paying for the "privilege" of car-ownership. Of course, he said this year-after-year to young people who had just been initiated into one of the only consistent rites-of-passage available to teens in our culture-that of getting our driver's licenses-so I don't think many of us paid much attention to him at the time, but now his wisdom (and humor) come back to me.

A wonderful story about Mr. Linnemann: One of his pet peeves (he had many) was drivers pulling up over the cross-walks at intersections. One day, rather than walking around a car that's driver had done so, Mr. Linnemann opened the rear door of the car, climbed in and through the car and exited on the other side, leaving both doors standing open. My children were thrilled to hear that story and we always dare one another to enact that assertion of walker's rights when downtown and confronted by an SUV driven by an oblivious and selfish autocentric (a pun I'm sure Mr. Linnemann would have enjoyed).

Anyway, I've gone a year without a car. I've learned to navigate the Nashville MTA system and to write letters to create change in various aspects to benefit riders. I've walked a bajillion miles in every kind of weather and gotten to know my neighborhood and my city better. I've met lots of kind people whom I wouldn't have otherwise done. I've saved barrels of money and fossil fuels and emissions. I've bought a really cool scooter which is the best educational tool I could have come up with for encouraging people to think about gas mileage while they're getting around town. I've improved my life while "sacrificing" to make the world a better place. I really do not want to go back to car-ownership any time soon.

Hey! Why don't you join me?!

Muriel's Show

Muriel Anderson is a long time attender (or member, I don't really know because we don't differentiate) of Nashville Friends Meeting. She's a fingerpicking style guitar player and she totally rocks. She performed at a house party in a little studio on Music Row last night that I went to. When I got there, only 12 chairs were set up in the room she would be performing in. I knew that of 10 folks from Friends Meeting who were coming and had a good idea that the studio owners had underestimated. Sure enough, by show-time it was standing room only or, more accurately, sitting room only. The concert was to kick off her tour and I reckon she'll be gone for a while.

I've been attending NFM for going on 12 years. Muriel's been going longer than me but I've never really gotten to know her. She's a musician who lives out of suitcases. The handful of Sundays that she is in town, I've never had the opportunity to get to know her in more than the most superficial way. There are several people at meeting who are like that for me; I know them but don't really know them. I think I will make a concerted effort to spend time with a few people over the next year.

Anyway, back to the show: Muriel is a petite blond woman but she plays guitar like fire. The cool think is that she's not flashy just incredibly talented. She's a guitar god to a lot of people. There were as many young musicians there as Quakers and I'm thrilled that all these studly "guns" hang on her every note.

Muriel's percussionist last night was a woman named Kathy (didn't catch her last name). I spoke with her for a moment after the show. She's one of those underachieving types; she said she used to do environmental sciences down in Florida-mainly oil spills-and moved to Nashville to play music but didn't like the competitiveness and is now at divinity school at Vandy working toward being a hospice chaplain. Whew. Slacker. She seems nice. I hope I bump into her sometime soon.

Here's a link to one of the songs she performed last night (this was recorded at another performance).

God Is Love

I awoke with Marvin Gaye's song "God Is Love" running through my head (you can listen to it here):

Oh don't go and talk about my father
God is my friend
Jesus is my friend
He made this world for us to live in,
and gave us everything
And all he asks of us is we give each other love.
Oh ya
Don't go and talk about my father
Cause God is my friend
Jesus is my friend
He loves us whether or not we know it
Just loves us, oh ya
And He'll forgive all our sins
Forgive all our sins
And all He asks of us, is we give each other love.
Oh ya
Love your mother, she bore you
Love your father, he works for you
Love your sister, she's good to you
Love your brother,
your brother
Don't go and talk about my father, He's good to us,
God is my friend
Jesus is my friend
For when we call in Him for mercy, Mercy Father
He'll be merciful, my friend
Oh, yes He will
All he asks of us, I know, is we give each other love,
Oh ya

Beyond Our Beginnings

Yesterday, I went to hear a panel discussion which opened the "Beyond Our Beginnings: Women Writers from Lower and Working Class Backgrounds" at Vanderbilt. Joy Castro, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Heather Sellers, Dorothy Allison and Minton Sparks participated.

When I saw this listed in Sunday's paper, I was drawn to it. I thought about who I could take with me and emailed my friend Paige, who is a writer and community organizer for Mother's Acting Up. She has a toddler and couldn't make the timing work, so I went by myself.


I'm giving myself props for going. I feel so out of place at events at universities. First of all, most everyone knows most everyone else and I never know anyone and wind up standing around like a wallflower. (I do attempt to make conversation but people are tolerantly polite until the person they're meeting shows up and then I'm forgotten.) Secondly, I feel totally out of my element. I barely made it out of high school and never felt any inclination to pursue any higher formal education (and self-education doesn't count for much in that environment). I've been a stay-at-home mom for most of my adult life. Yeah, now I work for a university in an interesting job which allows me to "pass" for one of them, but I always get "caught" when asked "Oh how interesting. Did you study sociology?"


The funny thing is that this was a group of women who all, in one way or another, probably know very much how I was feeling about passing. They all came from families in which they were the first to "escape" or get beyond their raising, the first to go to college and work in some capacity that wasn't manual labor. If I had had the foundation to establish actual conversation (rather than small talk), I'm sure I could have found much in common with many of them. But an hour's worth of panel discussion does not allow for depth.


As I rode there on my scooter, I thought about how coming from the background I do has made me a much more creative and engaged person than I probably otherwise would have been. I'm an ideas person. Often, I'm not even aware that I'm supposed to be in a box that others struggle to think outside of. In many ways, I think I see culture from an outsider's perspective, noticing what works well and is good, what things are dysfunctional and which ones are neutral. There are many, many things about our culture, of course, which I've internalized and never considered that I should become aware of and examine, but I think I have more perspective than most folks in our society because of my upbringing and background. I feel grateful, now, for my parent's lifestyle choices during my childhood (most of them, anyway).

The thought that I left with which is still resonating with me is to speak up, tell our stories, speak our truths. All of the women are story-tellers whether via fiction, essay, memoir, spoken word or short story, each of the women on the panel (and most of the audience, I imagine) tells her own story. Someone asked what the repercussion were of writing about family and each panelist said that it was absolutely necessary although very frightening at first, but came to be healing for all those affected by the stories (characters and readers alike). Telling our stories is owning our lives and saying that our voices, our experiences, our lives are as important and valid as those who comprise the dominant culture--and oftentimes much, much more entertaining.

Coming from where I did, I have a unique perspective which enriches the lives of others. I have a loud voice and the strength and creativity to catalyze change for the better in my world. I feel strongly that inviting people from a broad spectrum of society to worship with us at NFM will enrich our spiritual community: They will each bring new ways of seeing the world, helping us move outside of our narrow culturally dictated paradigm (comfort zone). The changes they will bring will not always be easy or comfortable but, if we allow Spirit to open our hearts and guide us through the changes, they will make us a better community.