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The Soul: How can I express your flame of power without sounding like a Medieval theologian gone mad with the wine of solitude?
The Magdalene: "I am the same Shakti that yogis and yoginis praise as the fire of breathing."
The Soul: You enter my flesh as this very inhalation, veiled only in silence, and search the Bridal Chamber of my heart for your lover, Jesus; and then you are not only the Shakti, the Holy Spirit, the energy of God, you are the Lady Magdalene, and your gaze calls me deeper into Being me.
The Magdalene: "The Magdalene am I. My name means The Tower. I am the tower inside your body, uniting the earth to the sky, rising from your sacrum to your crown. Am I not filled with honey and myrrh?"
The Soul: But I sound like a fool when I try to express your presence, muttering about a miracle that all my brothers and sisters carry inside us. How can I find words to tell them about the consort of the Almighty, She who helped Him spin the galaxies and fill our night with stars, yet who enters our bodies as a gentle and most intimate breath?
The Magdalene: "I am that one who has been known in all generations. I am the fire of poetry in Mira Bai, Lala Dev, Rumi and Rabia, I am the Bride awaiting the royal Groom in the garden of the Song of Songs, I am Hokmah-Sophia, the Shekinah of Israel. I am Ruuh, the Holy Spirit of Alláh. The troubadours found names for me in every land and language, you must do the same."
The Soul: Though the Truth is formless, through your grace I gaze into the face of the Beloved. There is nothing to remember, because there is no past, and nothing to fear, because there is no future. A tender glow in my rib cage overwhelms me. It is the light that is born from the womb of darkness, and the silent motherhood of the Uncreated.
The Magdalene: "I will guide you to the marriage of I and Am, the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber, where Christ and Sophia, Word and Wisdom kiss, for this is the union of the solar and lunar nerves coiled around the tree of your spine in the vineyard of your sacred body."
The Soul: I am the garden, You are the Spring. First there is Winter, a season of loss. Yet loss is an illuminated door.
The Magdalene: "I am the sensuality of emptiness."
The Soul: Then where inside my body may I find this Bridal Chamber, to behold this nuptial feast of Miryam and Jesus?
The Magdalene: "Just beneath your sternum, and just above the horizon of your belly's rise and fall, in the fructifying hollow where your pilgrim exhalation comes home, to plant a seed in the valley of longing."
The Soul: I am a thirsty furrow. I am a fallow vineyard for your roots. I am the Father of the drunken Child, who teaches me a wayless ineffable joy.
The Magdalene: "When your tongue has been loosened by my grapes, already fermented on the vine, you will be ready to pray. I am the Paramour, who dallied with God when we created the world out of our love-play. You are my nearest Friend, and my dearest Child, and my secret Lover too. You are the garden where all of me blossoms in each flower. This is a Mystery."
The Soul: Then let me offer these seven flowers of ecstasy. Let my heart be a prism for your radiance, my body a rainbow of your diamond light.
The Magdalene: "Not seven flowers, dear, but seven times seventy trillion fragrant motes of human pollen. Let each cell of your body be a chalice, overflowing with my musky essence. Let every atom of bone sparkle with the vintage of yearning. For as you yearn for Union, so I yearn for You, and we breathe one another."
The Soul: I will pray this prayer each morning and evening, even in the Vigil at 3 a.m. I will wake with this prayer on my lips, impure as they may be.
The Magdalene: "Remember, dear one, when you pray: God does not listen to the words. It is not the words of prayer that heal, or bless, or enlighten you. It is the nectar that flows through them, the nectar of Silence. God hears the Silence in your words."
The Soul: Then listen to these waves of trembling stillness. How shall I address you? As cosmic Shakti? As universal Force? As the ever-virgin Energy of creation?
The Magdalene: "Address me as a Person whom you may touch, whose tears you may feel on your own cheek, whose name you might whisper into your pillow, falling asleep, or awaking."
The Prayer of the Soul:
O Miryam Magdalene, hear my prayer!
For the sake of love’s play you visit
the bridal chamber in my chest,
appearing, disappearing, dancing
in mist and moonlight
at the meadow edges of my body,
for I am a wilderness and You are my breath.
Descend through the soft ancient portal in my crown.
Pour the Milky Way down my spine,
over spilling the chambers of my heart
with distant starlight, intimate wine.
Inebriate me with your clarity,
consume me with your flame of compassion,
overpower my mind with your ineffable beauty,
that I may fall ever deeper
into groundless gratitude,
until we are both lost in love,
dissolved in one blue sky.
And yet, and yet...
be ever my threefold Goddess:
Prophetess, Mother and Paramour,
engendering the light of Christ in me,
giving birth to the joy of Christ in me,
gazing on the face of Christ,
the Lord of Astonishment,
in me.
Image: Mary Magdalene by Gabriel Dante Rossetti, Delaware Art Museum.
This museum is near my homeland in Pennsylvania, and I visit this painting
every time I go home.
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