Who was she?

She was our queen, our spiritual guide, our wise woman who knew our pain, our shame, our self betrayal, our abandonment.  She would be the perfect choice to carry his message to the world.

To restore her powerful, alchemical, world-changing message, we need to rediscover who she really was? Today, as an obviously masculine religion is explosively reacting in terrorism around the world, one can't help wondering why we are so silent about the other half of who we are as a human race?  All human beings contain within our individual psyche a masculine and feminine principle and yet the masculine has been endorsed, empowered and activated in almost every religion and world government, society and culture on the planet.  We all have both and now we all need to release the power of the authentic feminine - in men and women - to balance the insanity that threatens life on our planet. 

If she carries his message, to receive his message, we need to understand who she was and is.  This is just the beginning of that discussion.  We need to understand what it is in man's ancient hunt of the female that taunts, tempts, teases him still. How powerful is the magic of the fully integrated female? 

The male-dominated world of Rome, followed by the male-dominated world of the Roman Catholic Church, defined and dominated the western world by oppressing along the way the instinctual nature of women. Unchallenged and unbalanced, the masculine principle, in its effort to control, raged across western Europe. It became the beast of Revelation as it set out to homogenize humanity, molding it into an image of itself by killing the spirit of creativity and autonomy in all people, but especially in the female.

The campaign to eliminate the female power in Christ's message began by dismissing her, as mean men often dismiss women, by condemning her sexuality.  Instead, they set as the standard of the divine feminine, a soft, maleable, vulnerable, self sacrificing, submissive woman - a kind of pretty girl standard, a prepubescent female. To be very blunt, the out of control masculine principle has a thing for female pedophelia.  So, again, what kin dof power is there in the authentic feminine principle that frightens the male heirarchy so much.  Clearly, Jesus valued her full womanhood and by leaving her as his messenger, there is something about her he wanted us to realize.

So, who was she?

Ancient legends say she had been given in marriage to a wealthy man to satisfy her worldly father's personal status goals and her mother was equally blind to the beauty of the spirit in her young daughter. On the road to her betrothal, she and her female servant were robbed, beaten and raped and taken away into slavery.  Later, she was sold and was forced to work as a prostitute.  Her heart grew cold and closed.  She felt only loathing and found a way to kill the man who sold her.  She also grew strong and defiant and eventually became a wealthy woman.  Still in her 20's, something stirred in her.  Distant memories of her own deep spiritual self seemed to whisper to her, to call her away.

She packed up her belongings and traveled to a Galilean mountainside where she saw him speaking to a crowd gathered around him.  He was radiant and brilliant.  His voice and his words resonated deeply within her heart.  He looked at her and in that single glance, she knew somehow her life would never be the same.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," he seemed almost to chant.

She felt every word he spoke.

"Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted."

"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the peacemakers ... (Matthew 5)

His love of the humble, the poor, the disenfranshied, the marginalized, all those who have been oppressed, depressed, used and abused by a greedy political culture of power and control, that enslaved and used almost everyone, awakened her mind to a new freedom, a new hope for her life and for everyone else who sat there in the sun, listening to him.

"Are we not all whores to this world?" she thought, considering the falseness of those oppressive Roman leaders and her own parents and the others in the higher eschelons of social power.

And so it was remarkable that this itinerant preacher, filled to overflowing with the light of heaven and the holy spirit, would or could love her, a broken hearted, poor in spirit, oppressed, shame-filled woman.

But, he did. She was like those whom he wanted to elevate out of the prejudice and oppression.  She became an ambassador because she was poor and hungered for righteousness and love.  She understood every word he spoke.  She knew more clearly than most what it felt like to be hungry, poor, victimized and then to be restored and healed and filled with the same holy spirit that radiated from him.  It soon radiated from her also. Her selection alone would be his final and lasting message to the world.  He left his ministry in the hands of a woman.

When he knew that his time would be ended by those power brokers of this world, he knew only this woman would be the one he would select to carry forward his message to the world, to the broken, pitifully devalued, precious people of God.  He knew the meaning of this choice, that he would leave the mission to her.  The male disciples couldn't quite understand his message about an inner kingdom.  Some did and most didn't.  But, she did.  She would have to be the one.  

What irony that the Christ would invite such a woman to carry on his ministry and yet how appropriate.  She would typify everything he taught, he believed in.  She, a marginalized woman in every way, would be the conduit of the Christ spirit.  And, so it was that she was chosen.

Her path was challenged by the disciples and then Paul and by the entire male dominated infrastructure of the world in which she lived.  She had to avoid Rome and carried her newborn child into the desert where she was cared for by the angels as her dearly beloved had been.

She knew the Christ spirit would be hunted by the control freaks who felt threatened by the free abandon, uncontrollable life-giving creative power and love of the Christ who filled her.  She longed to share this spirit with others.

Mercifully, she was supported by friends who took her to a safe place, a place where the ancient Goddess had been worshiped, a place that understood, albeit in a primitive way, her value.  She lived out the rest of her days passionately in love with her lord with whom she communed in the spirit.  She taught many the ways of the spirit, guided them into the deeper knowledge of the spirit, guided them into the kingdom within where they, as she, encountered the beloved, the realms of light and love.  She was faithful to her mission and lived to be very old.

Through her the ministry was fulfilled.  Despite her persecution throughout the centuries, now, her spirit has awakened among us, again, like a divine Sleeping Beauty. The time is now when the world needs her spirit.  And, soon, perhaps, her lord will return.  Perhaps.

Above: "Mary Magdalene" from St. Simon Catholic Church in Los Altos, California

Restoring the Divine Feminine

We all know the joke that men won't stop for directions.  In fact, I remember when I was still in college and my boyfriend and I were headed back to western New York and decided to take some country roads through New York State.  It was getting late and I knew that we'd taken a wrong turn several miles back.  I told him I thought we should turn around.  He insisted he knew the way and so being a good girlfriend, I didn't insist.  Finally, after an unbearably long time, I did the unthinkable.  I suggested we stop for directions.  "No. I know the way," he insisted tensely. 

At least an hour later, he said, he thought we'd made a wrong turn and would head north on a rough road headed up to Rochester.  It was getting very late and was snowing heavily.  I was getting scared.  Finally, after what should have been at the most a 2 hour trip, turned into 5 hours, we found our way from Rochester to Salamanca.  We arrived sometime in the early hours of the morning.  I never said anything about it to him and we put it behind us.  But, I've never forgotten.  

The life of Christianity is like that.  We made a wrong turn in the early years after the death of Jesus for many reasons.  Elaine Pagels does a fabulous job of discussing the wrong turn in her books.  Rather than get into a dissertation on the lost feminine Christos Sophia, I'll offer some broad brush strokes to frame the wrong turn.

First of all, there is and always has been a living tradition about the Bride of Christ, who is not "the Church," as too many Church fathers have asserted.  Everything in the Gospel is not metaphor and myth, although as in the story of Jesus, there is also in the story of Mary, a "living myth."  In short, that means it all really happened, but it also points to a deeper level of conscious reality, a kind of parabolic truth that is also lived and experienced in our 3-dimensional material reality.  They were real people who lived real lives, but their lives were mythic, archetypal that pointed to a deeper, more profound sacred reality and eternal truth.  

Some people mistakenly think the Catholic Church is a mirror of the earliest faith communities that popped up after the death of Jesus. Recent study and discovery, as well as rediscovery, suggests otherwise and since the Reformation was a turn off from the Roman Catholic Church's misguided path, the protestant churches have furthered the great wrong turn.  But, if we trace history back to before the Fall of Rome c. 404, we find there was a rich living Gnostic tradition which co-existed alongside the earliest threads of what would become Eastern Orthodoxy.  

Simply, there was an existing Christianity that included an understanding that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and she, like him, was a "chalice," a human vessel of the Christ spirit, the "Christos," which is also the conduit of the "Holy Spirit."  This understanding is traced throughout the Hebrew scriptures as Sophia and is (according to Marcus Borg) used within a feminine context.  The "Word" or logos is the structure into which the spirit is poured.  It is power and she is wisdom.  The Gnostics do a much better job describing this.  He is will, intentionality, she is the substance sought which brings it all to life.  This is when poetry and parable would describe this so much better because it is ineffable and it is spiritual and hard to rationalize.  It is felt and experienced in a deep, inner place within our hearts and souls.  

And, that was the problem - understanding, or rather surrendering into that state of pure abandon in which is experienced the ineffable, uncontrollable power of the spirit.  To a hard core rational world, like the Roman Empire, the idea that the spirit wills where it wills and is free from the limited understanding of the human brain, was a threat to its ability to control, oppress, manipulate and use.  That kind of masculine power is the dark stuff of history.  

When Rome fell, the Roman Catholic Church filled the void offering the western world some much needed order, structure. While that was urgent and necessary, just prior to that much needed emergency civilization saving act, it had suppressed an entire other half of the Christian story.  Forcing Gnostic scriptures and monastics underground, their scriptures and tradition either remained underground in the Coptic churches, from which it also ultimately disapeared over the centuries or it brutally killed anyone caught with those scriptures, condemning them as heretic.  Even recently, when in seminary, I asked some questions about the Nazarenes and the Gnostics, I was urged not to ask those questions because the Church still considers them heretic and "wrong."

Why?  What would be wrong with Jesus having a wife?  What would be wrong with a fully human Christ bearer?  Why couldn't a woman also be a Christ-bearer?  And, how is the Gnostic understanding of who the Christ is so very different from that of the mainline Church?  

Would it be fair to suggest that there is something inherent in what a woman is that may stir up or threaten a man's need to control?  And, along the same idea.  Is there something inherently threatening to the masculine power/control about the free will of the Holy Spirit, as per Jesus to Nicodemus. 

And, even further, what would a balance between masculine domination and feminine partnership look like? Rather than unmitigated domination and unfocused, unstructured substance, could there be something else? That is both the question and the opportunity that's knocking at the door of our new world today.  

If we look at the middle east as well as the last gasps of the dyning greed paradigm of the western world, we see what unrestrained, unbalanced, domination by the masculine principle's world system looks like. We also can see where it might lead us.  

Again, the question, which will be addressed in the subsequent Tiger Lilies posts, is what would it look like if we balanced these two extremes of divine beinghood for the human race as well as the rest of the Earth and its life? 

Through the exploration of Gnostic Christianity, anthropology and Eastern mysticism, we may stumble upon an open door to our future.

An open mind is the first step to receiving the wisdom of She who was the equal partner to He who came to free us from the darkness and oppression of our unblanced world.  We might want to step away from our old polarized thinking, our blaming, our stereotypical worldviews which address things in good / evil terms.

I also think some of these answers are in our sacred texts, oral traditions -  on cave walls and in sanskrit scrolls.  I'd like to explore some of them.  Feel free to share back what you think, how you are being challenged and what this means to you in your life as you, as we all are, by the powers to control, limit and dominate your own creative spirit, who you really are and how you choose to live out and express your own sense of being.



Jesus answered, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  (John 3:5)

Above "St. Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles" from thenazareneway.com

Emergence of Divine Feminine

(The following is borrowed from CNN. It is offered as the first in a series of the feminine principle and the emergence of the Divine Feminine today. As we stand on the edge of the New World, a new age, our only hope is to embrace the Holy Mother-Maiden-Bride who is the counterpart, the partner of the Divine masculine. If this does reveal that Jesus was married, it may suggest, what Gnostics have always believed, that His wife, may have been the Christos Sophia, as He was the Christos Logos. This is just the beginning and as you embrace even the tiniest bit what this means, your world - our world - will be rocked, but not with bombs, rather with love, healing, peace and joy. )

The Smithsonian Channel will air a special on King's findings on September 30.

Jesus says, 'my wife' in Coptic fragment
By Eric Marrapodi, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

(CNN) - A newly revealed, centuries-old papyrus fragment suggests that some early Christians might have believed Jesus was married. The fragment, written in Coptic, a language used by Egyptian Christians, says in part, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ..."

Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen King announced the findings of the 1 1/2- by 3-inch honey-colored fragment on Tuesday in Rome at the International Association for Coptic Studies.

King has been quick to add this discovered text "does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married," she wrote in a draft of her analysis of the fragment set to appear in the January edition of Harvard Theological Review. The divinity school has posted a draft of King's article to which AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University, contributed.

"This fragment, this new piece of papyrus evidence, does not prove that (Jesus) was married, nor does it prove that he was not married. The earliest reliable historical tradition is completely silent on that. So we're in the same position we were before it was found. We don't know if he was married or not," King said in a conference call with reporters.

"What I'm really quick to say is to cut off people who would say this is proof that Jesus was married because historically speaking, it's much too late to constitute historical evidence," she continued. "I'm not saying he was, I'm not saying he wasn't. I'm saying this doesn't help us with that question," she continued.

In the accounts of Jesus' life in the Bible, there is no mention of his marital status, while the accounts do mention Jesus' mother, father and siblings. The four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - tell the story of Jesus' birth and early childhood then skip to his short, three-year ministry before detailing his death and resurrection.

The idea that Jesus was married is not a new one.

In other writings about the life of Jesus from antiquity suggest Jesus may have been married to Mary Magdalene, a disciple who was close to Jesus. Author Dan Brown also used the idea of Jesus being married as a jumping off point for the fictional novel "The Da Vinci Code." King dismissed that notion in her call with reporters.

“There’s no indication we have that Jesus was married,” said Darrell Bock, a senior research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. “One could say the text is silent on Jesus’ marital status is because there was nothing to say.”

Initial dating for the honey-colored fragment by the team of scholars puts the papyrus piece coming out of the middle of the second century.

King is referring to the fragment as the "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife" or "GosJesWife" as a short hand for reference, and noting that the abbreviation does not mean this scrap has the same historical weight as the canonical Gospels.

Biblical scholars often use the term gospel to refer to a genre of ancient writings featuring dialogue between Jesus and his disciples, King notes in her paper. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas are just a few of the ancient accounts about the life of Jesus that Christians do not consider canonical.

At the conference, King said another professor suggested the fragment could have come from the text of a homily, or sermon, where the writer was using this phrase as a literary device. She told reporters that while she will consider that as a possibility, the fragment is “probably a gospel. Probably from the second century and most close to the Gospels of Mary, Thomas and Philip.”

Bock agreed with the notion that the text fragment shared similarities with those gospels, called the Gnostic Gospels, which were the writings of an early outlier sect of Christians. He said the text could be referring to a "gnostic rite of marriage that is a picture of the church and Jesus, not a real wife."

But he added, "it’s a small text with very little context. We don’t know what’s wrapped around it to know what it’s saying.”

Bock said it’s likely to be a gnostic text if it proves to be authentic. “The whole text needs vetting. She’s doing the right thing to release it and let scholars take a look at,” he said, adding “it’s a little bit like trying to analyze the game in the first quarter.”

“It’s a historical curiosity but doesn’t really tell us who Jesus was,” Bock said. “It’s one small speck of a text in a mountain of texts of about Jesus.”

The owner of the fragment has been identified by King as a private collector who has asked to stay anonymous. The owner brought the fragment to Harvard have King examine it in December 2011.

King then brought it to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Roger Bagnall, the institute's director and an expert on papyrus, examined it and determined it to be authentic, Bangall confirmed to CNN.

Ariel Shisha-Halevy, professor of linguistics at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who was asked to examine the authenticity, according to the draft of the article, told King via e-mail, “I believe - on the basis of language and grammar - the text is authentic. That is to say, all its grammatical ‘noteworthy’ features, separately or conjointly, do not warrant condemning it as forgery.”

Little is known about the origin of the text. Because both sides of the fragment have writing on them, King said it could have come out of a book rather than a scroll.

"Just like most of the earliest papyri of the New Testament and other literary and documentary papyri, a fragment this damaged could have come from an ancient garbage heap," the King says building on prior research by Luijendijk.

King writes "the importance of the 'Gospel of Jesus’ Wife' lies in supplying a new voice within the diverse chorus of early Christian traditions about Jesus that documents that some Christians depicted Jesus as married."

Eric Marrapodi - CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

السلام

Peace. People, be at peace. Please people, stop the insanity. Stop the hate. Put down your weapons and reach into the love and peace in the Qur'an and be at peace. America does not hate you. America has a heart as big as the entire world. In our cities and homes here in America we reach out to you who have come here from war torn, impoverished nations all around the world.  When you were hungry, we gave you food stamps.  When you needed shelter, we gave you shelter.  Try to see beyond the war and violence that is in your world.  We want to love you if only you will stop your violence.

Love each other, embrace each other and let your own hearts be filled with the light of our future which will only come if you will allow room for all of us.

If the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ and Master Buddha were to all come down here right now, wouldn't they be upset with us?  If we say we love our spiritual leaders, then why do we have to protest and fight and kill for them?  

Please everyone just put down your protest signs and go home to your wives and children.  For those of you out there who are hating America, take another look. Your people are here. America is the world.  America is not a handful of rich old white men (WASP) who are ruling the world.  The old empire is long gone. America is a country where all religions, all worldviews, all cultures, nationalities have the inalienable right to freedom of speech, of creative freedom to write, to design, to speak in however way one chooses to speak.  

Yes, there are ugly, rude and ignorant films out there, made by unenlightened people.  But, there are also pornographic films that display despicable acts in violation of children and women. Do you really think violence is the best response? Reactionary violence is not an enlightened response.  Here in America, when we are offended by ignorance such as that in this film the Muslim world is reacting to, we put our thoughts out there through letters to the editors in newspapers.  In America we have a national conversation  in the press, on the news. We pass laws. We hold town meetings. We may have a peaceful protest, but we don't blame a nation or a government for the poor creative choices of an individual.

Why do you pick up on - seek out even - a reason to feel offended by one insane person's rude portrayal of the Prophet?  Anyone who has even a modest education is well aware of the dignity and beauty of the Qur'an and yet this global overreaction to one person's stupidity makes fools of all of you.

If Americans are going to apologize for one stupid, ignorant and rude film, we better get to work because there are others that are far more violating and ignorant that exploit the minds, souls and bodies of our children and women. Who is apologizing for those?

Listen world! The crusades were fought centuries ago. The blood that was spilled then, is long gone. We have a global environment to clean up.  We have a world economy to put back on track.  We have starving children everywhere - in America's inner cities as well as in African nations.

We have got to stop this madness.  Whoever you are and wherever you are, put down your weapons, get over your religious pride, and live in peace with your neighbors - whether they are Christians or Jews.  We have more important things to do together as a world than to be fighting over something that isn't worth fighting over.  Stop spilling blood in reaction. America is you. As I look at the faces in our grocery stores, in our streets and schools, they are Muslim Arab Americans, they are Pakistani, they are South Korean, Philipino, Australian, African American, Irish American, Norwegian, Polish.  They are you - world.  They are you who came here to find peace and live and express your natural human rights of self expression.  When you decide that you are going to "hate" America, it is they who you are hating.  They are your people.  They are yourselves.

Your hate is your fear.  Face your fear and the phantoms that you lunge at or who lunge at the world through you, will go away.  They are not real.  But, your faith in your fear, your emotional and psychological investment in your fear is the most terrible fear.

Seek peace.  For God's sake, for your children's sake, for the world's sake, seek Peace.

                                                            السلام

Photo courtesy of CBS News.