Fullness of the Magdalene

   

Fall into a deeper silence and you will hear the earth breathe flowers. A ray of the full moon descends into your fontanelle. You are the anointed one, the wounded one whose crown has never healed.

 

One drop of this nectar slips down your throat and pierces your chest. Hold it here, like a pulsing pearl. Your breastbone is an altar, where moonlight mingles with the warmth of the sun. Christ meets Mary here. Their encounter is a mysterious kiss. This is the bridal chamber of the heart.

The two become one. Yet the one becomes two for the sake of love. Their silence trembles with a song. Surely, this is the Song of Songs. "Your love is sweeter than wine, and your name is perfume poured out. Lead me into your chamber, O King. I am the garden and you are the Spring."

Miryam, in Hebrew, means a bitter sea, an ocean of tears. Magdala means a tower, or a columm. This tower is stored up with bittersweet myrrh, rising from your sacrum to your brow. This tower watches over your death as your grapes are crushed, you ferment, and effervesce into a new life.

 

Let the syllables of her name be your inhalation and exhalation. Ascend and descend on her spire of aloneness over the sea, each outbreath an offering of sacred loss, each inbreath a chrism of beauty. Sip from her murmuring spring of ineffable modesty.

 

Give up your pilgrimage to the past. This stillness needs no history. She will listen to the story of your silence, ringing with the ancient beauty of your longing. Bow down to a leaf, a moth wing, the cry of an ecstatic sparrow. Let your journey be a ragged saunter to the edge of any meadow, not far from home.

 

When you arrive at the feast of Presence, she will loosen and let fall her greenery, anointing your feet with dew, daubing them with moss and clover. Surely you must know, the Beloved takes the humble form of the place where you are.

 

Did you think you would find her in a ruined cloister, or a sojourner's shrine? Or tap the voiceless diamond gush of her song in the Torah, the Suras, the lips of Jesus?

 

Friend, the music you've been yearning for is the sound of one breath pouring into another, the spill of distant starlight from the rim of your own diaphragm, the name an infant whispers just falling asleep at the Mother's nipple. For thousands of years you've been falling asleep like that. Now is the time to fall awake.

 

Painting: Mary Magdalene by Danté Gabriel Rossetti