Wisdom teaching

"Set me as a seal on your heart, a seal on your arm, 

for love is as strong as death."  Song of Songs 8:6-7

Awakening to the Magdalene's teachings, what they are and why they're important, has been a jouney for me. For years I'd had a sense of something lacking from the Church's teachings. As a child, I asked my religion teacher what was the "Holy Ghost."  He didn't know and stammered something like, "it's the third part of the Trinity." So, that was useless. I wanted to really get this and that didn't make sense.

The teaching of the Gnostics informs that question.

Today, if a child asked me that question, I would respond with inviting the child to bring some of his friends into the music room where I would play some powerful praise music and show some videos of how passionate praise can lead to a powerful infilling of the Holy Spirit.  That's ground zero.  I would explain, as Jesus does in the Gospel of John, that God is Spirit and we worship God in Spirit. Yet, even that, I would tell him, is only the beginning.  That power releases something inside you - a kind of power which will guide you, make you free and confident, teach you and make you smart, strong, courageous and full of joy.

It will set you free from anyone's control.  You will control yourself and release your own power which comes from God's Holy Spirit. And, when you are self empowered by the Holy Spirit, you will not need to attempt to control (oppress, use, abuse) others or fall victim to any kind of addiction. You will experience life, real life, and that life is your real self which is eternal. 

So, what if you experienced a taste of that gorgeous power, that love beyond description and with it the knowledge that you would live forever - and not just an intellectual knowledge, but a felt experiential relational knowing, would you let anyone take that away from you?  They can't really, but they tried.  You can kill the body, but not the soul.

Understanding this rationally is only like opening the book to a great story.  It's not the full experience, but it's a kind of map of the new country. It's the experience itself that teaches.  Some things can be read and studied and some have to be experienced because you learn on a different level than simply intellectual.  That too is part of the difference between Orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. I believe we need some kind of an integration of the two, which sadly took 2,000 years for us to achieve. Only now are we finding both in the newly emerging Church, yet still not so much in the Roman Catholic, which still bars women from the sacrament of ordination. In the Catholic Chutch, for women there are only six sacraments, for men, all seven!

For me it would be years and several churches later before I would finally understand who the Holy Spirit was, and she's no ghost, for sure. Rather, she's a beautiful, fragrant power of joy, absolutely pure unconditional love, hope and healing, wisdom that can knit a room full of strangers into an intimate web of friends.  Her spirit is sheer awesomeness. That spirit radiates from within and yet for some it is visible externally.  Whenever Moses came out of the tent to meet with the people, he radiated a light so bright that it hurt their eyes, so he began wearing a veil over his face. That brightness is called "Shekinah," which is what the halos around the saints are really.

The terrible difference between the Gnostic and Orthodox, a difference worth dying for, is the Church then withheld Mary's teaching (which was Jesus' original teaching) that people could access that power of God, that Holy Spirit, personally and that it was already existent within them as part of their initial creation, their own inner programming.

It is their birthright, as it is every one's birthright, and with its access, individuals became free, sovereign, incredibly powerful, radiant, brilliant creatively. The potential for human spiritual development, growth, evolution and awesome ascension has always been available to us. 

Only a fearful, weak, spiritually impoverished, vacant, dark patriarchal institution would attempt to block the people from receiving this gift, this birthright. It forced them into submission to their priestly authority witholding from them the realization that they were always meant to be priests of their own lives. The Catholic priesthood wanted to withhold that from the people and thereby control the masses. They were like the pharisees Jesus condemned in the gospel, whom he calls "white washed tombs" because they were focused externally to the exclusion of the inner reality, where the real knowledge (gnosis), the real power, which is light and life eternal, is. They set themselves as guardians of the well of knowledge, yet didn't drink and didn't allow anyone else to drink from it either. 

Jesus says, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness." Matthew 23:27 (NKJV)

Then, as if he were speaking to the church in the Middle Ages and Inquisition, he says to the spiritually dead Jewish power brokers of his time, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." Matthew 23:13 KJV

There are hints and pointers to His real message in the Gospels and yet the focus of the incomplete canon (since it doesn't include Gnostic scripture) seems to return to how we can "control" God through good works or good behavior, obedience to authority, submission to an externally set law, rules; giving to the poor or "doing" without "being."  If just doing was the whole picture, why would they have to present God as judgmental, fearful and punitive, casting people into a fiery pit for eternity? Talk about control through fear! We understand today that control through fear is basically a personality disorder, a kind of psychopathology.  Would the creator of the universe be such a being?  Or, is that more likely a picture of ourselves at that time? 

They held onto their one-sided version of the message with a firm grip over the people.  And, if anyone dared to challenge their stance, he or she was tortured, burned to death. What kind of courage would someone need to have, what kind of faith, knowledge, absolute certainty of their rightness, to stand up to that kind of beast?  The answer whispers from the graves of the many hundreds of thousands of her persecuted spiritual army, Gnostics, Sethians, Cathars, Templars and numerous others.

This was just one of the points the reformers addressed when they called for faith over works. While they were rightly and instinctively resisting the Church's control, at the time they didn't have the whole story and weren't able to go all the way. That full awareness would take a few more centuries and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Gnostics understood the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, as did the early Jews, who called her the Hokhmah. She is the feminine side of God and is God as much as the power to will and to act is the masculine side of God and is God.

These two reciprocal attitudes - that of being (faith, contemplative prayer) and that of doing (social justice, giving to the poor, systemic change for the better, education/teaching) offer a glimpse into the duality of God, the real masculine and feminine postures of life. Both are necessary for a more complete understanding of God and ourselves. Without both, working together, held in balance by each half, the heinous results are what we've seen happen in the opppressive power of control, in our history and today in the Middle East. The darkside of power set the world ablaze.  The gentle washing of the Holy Spirit would have kept that power in check.  What happened (and is happening) without it, is all over our history books and still in today's news.

The "doing" aspect was always meant to be a reflective response to the "being" aspect. Inspiration leads to wise action. In a sense, our actions need to be informed and guided by our wisdom from God's Holy Spirit. So, it's spirit first then action, or feminine first then male.  And, it's not a heirarchal paradigm, rather it's a reciprocal, relational model. A dance of light.

This duality was seen in Judaism since Moses and is reflected in the ancient symbol of the Star of David - the two tetrahedrons posed over each other in reciprocal position - one is female, the other male.

So, was it something to die for?  Is it still?  The Cathars and Templars were the first freedom fighters of what would begin a wave to the future reformers. Yet they would only bring some of the picture into perspective.  Today the need for a full understanding and experience of God remains as vital and imperative as ever.  Our collective apathy isn't helping to accomplish that which may be our biggest failure today as a global family.
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Above: "Mary Magdalene" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882)