The Discipline Of Her Gaze

        

The feast day of Mary Magdalene is over, yet the daily discipline of her gaze continues.

Her darshan is a flame that consumes us, burns us up, and burns us down. Her alchemy turns our dross to gold, annihilating everything that is not ourselves. Nothing remains but our uniqueness.

The eyes of the Magdalene behold us, and we are held. She holds us in the gaze of a most severe and lethal demand: the demand to become who we are, each of us. 

This is true bhakti. Her gaze is not a call to merge with the One, annihilating our personhood in collective consciousness. It is a refiner's fire, shaping us in the ingot mold of our soul, destroying all but the grace of our own eccentricity.

"Bhakti" means devotion. But devotion to what? To whom? To the love of Jesus? To the Guru? To the path of enlightenment? No dear friend, Mary's eyes burn with an even more terrible and beautiful vocation. Her silence calls, "Be You!"

When the drop merges with the ocean, that is your spiritual work. But when the ocean merges with the drop, that is your spiritual play: your anointing, your Christhood, your delight.

Mary's olive-eyed glance pierces the heart, calling you to the alchemy that transmutes God into a human soul. She refuses to be an archetype or a symbol. She refuses to signify any truth other than her own jagged broken perfect singularity. Just so, Magdalene, like a mirror, calls you to the ineluctable suchness of Personhood.