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
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