On Mary Magdalene and Women Priests
Hi friends,
I hope you're doing as well as can be expected under the current circumstances. My little family and I are chugging along, and mostly doing okay. My husband has a hard time working from home in our ~650 sq ft apartment, and I’m having to expend a lot of emotional energy managing my anxiety right now, but we’re all healthy and in a pretty lucky position right now, inasmuch as I have the time to teach the kids and my husband has job security and we can stay home. These emails I send out on the first of the month have been a nice anchor during this period when time seems to fluctuate. It’s nice to feel like I have a little control over something!
Easter was a few weeks ago, and we're in the Easter season now. (This has given me so much cognitive dissonance. I have a hard time feasting right now. But that's another conversation for another time.) In the days after Easter Sunday, the daily readings from the Book of Common Prayer focus largely on the story of Mary Magdalene at Jesus' tomb. Every year I read this story and it shocks me all over again. That Mary Magdalene was the first to know the Risen Christ, that Jesus appeared to her before he appeared to anyone else.
In Robert Place’s Tarot of the Saints, Mary Magdalene is depicted as the High Priestess. I don’t agree with all of Place’sassociations in this deck (they’re not bad, many of them are just surface-level), but I think this one is accurate. I think of the High Priestess as a wise keeper of secrets. She holds divine mystery, and who represents this better than Mary Magdalene? I will say it again: in the gospels, Mary Magdalene is the first to know the Risen Christ. He appears to her first. Which means that, for a short time, Mary MagdalenewastheChurch. For a short time, Mary Magdalene was the only person who held the mystery around which all of Christianity revolves. Knowing all this, it’s a thorn in my side that Mary Magdalene, who was given the first apostolic instruction to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection, isn’t considered an apostle.
If you’re reading this email, you probably know me well enough to know that I spent my teenage years an extremely devout Catholic. During my time as a Catholic, I had a particular devotion to the Eucharist. As a teenager, I spent more time at daily mass and adoration than I did going on dates. The Church was the bedrock of my life at the time, and so leaving it in my early twenties was a long, emotionally fraught process. And while I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided to leave the Catholic Church, I can pinpoint the exact moment it broke my heart. I was seventeen years old, and altar-serving at Sunday mass (a thing that was frowned upon already by certain members of the parish, which was in the process of becoming more traditional at the time, and I’m grateful that the parish priest stood up for the girls who wanted to be altar servers). I was kneeling at the side of the altar as the priest consecrated the host, and I realized, simultaneously, both I wish I could be a priest and this is as close as they’ll ever let me get. It was a gut punch. Because it isn’t like I didn’t know, intellectually, that I couldn’t be a priest in the Catholic Church. It isn’t like I didn’t know that I wasn’t allowed to be that close to the Eucharist. But I had never really allowed myself to think it, and the moment tumbled me into years of trying to understand why my faith was inferior and what about me wasn’t good enough for the priesthood. I still spent years as a devoted Catholic after that moment because I wanted so badly to believe that the Catholic Church was right. I read all the apologetics, I studied my catechism, I talked to priests, I considered becoming a nun even though I knew that wasn’t quite right. I really wanted to understand, even though in the end I couldn’t.
Mary Magdalene means a lot to me because women priests mean a lot to me. I don’t know how it’s possible to read the gospel stories of Mary Magdalene’s steady and unwavering witness to Christ resurrected and still believe that the priesthood is not an appropriate vocation for women. To know that a woman was the first witness to the event around which the entire religion of Christianity is built and still say that only men have the particular temperament required to be good priests. I mean, I do know. I do know how that’s possible. But it doesn’t make it less heartbreaking or infuriating. And now I’m Episcopalian, in part because of women priests. The short version is that I didn’t go to church for close to ten years, and when I did go to church again I went to a big beautiful Episcopal church and I watched a woman priest celebrate the Eucharist, and I spent weeks crying about it and now I call myself a Christian again. It’s not the only reason I’m back in some kind of faith, but it’s a big reason. And I still think about the priesthood all the time, though vocations are tricky things and most days I feel like my life is too full to give the idea of priesthood serious attention right now. But for now, at the very least, it feels good to be part of a kind of Christianity where Mary Magdalene would be welcomed and heard.