Essay 1 of 5
There is something incredible happening in our world right now. It feels as though we are standing at a threshold, though I don't think we can yet see clearly what lies on the other side. Something is shifting in the way we understand power, gender, spirituality, and even what it means to know something to be true. The structures that have shaped our world for thousands of years are being questioned, and things that were once hidden are being brought into the Light.
We are seeing things we could not - or would not - see before.
A decade into the #MeToo movement, women continue to come forward with stories of sexual harassment, sexual violence, coercion, exploitation, and abuse of power. What was once dismissed as isolated incidents are increasingly being recognized as patterns. Women who were taught to stay quiet, protect the reputation of the family or institution, and question themselves before questioning the person who held the power are finding one another and discovering that what they experienced was not theirs alone to carry. Me too.
There is tremendous power in those two words. A private experience becomes collective. Shame begins to move out of the shadows. What was once endured in silence can finally be named. Perhaps this is one of the great shifts of our time: women are no longer as willing to accept the harms of an imbalanced system as simply the way things are.
For thousands of years, much of human culture has been organized through hierarchy and power-over. I don't believe the answer is to simply reverse the structure, placing women on top of the same hierarchy. That would simply create an imbalance of a different kind. Perhaps what is being asked of us is something more profound: to question the structure itself. What might become possible when power is no longer defined primarily through domination and control, but through relationship, reciprocity, responsibility, and community?
I wonder if this is part of what we mean when we speak about the return of the feminine. Not women replacing men, and not the feminine being elevated above the masculine, but a rebalancing of qualities that have been separated and unequally valued for a very long time: receptivity alongside action, intuition alongside reason, relationship alongside independence, feeling alongside thinking.
And perhaps, most importantly, a return to the body.
Our culture has become extraordinarily skilled at living in the realm of the mind. We think, analyze, consume, produce, communicate, and now increasingly ask machines to think alongside us. We have access to more information than any generation before us, yet many of us are profoundly disconnected from the most immediate source of information we have ever possessed: our own embodied experience. Why? Because we aren’t even present for our experience - we are dissociated and distracted.
Many spiritual traditions have also taught us, in one way or another, to move beyond the body. To transcend desire, emotion, sexuality, and the messiness of being human in hopes of reaching something more pure, more elevated, more Divine. There is a subtle danger here, one I have encountered in my own spiritual journey: the temptation to rise above what is difficult rather than becoming fully present with it. To forgive before we have grieved. To search for the lesson before we have allowed ourselves to feel the wound. To call something spiritual when what is actually being asked of us is to stay, to listen, and to meet what is here.
I wonder if we have sometimes confused transcendence with awakening.
What if our next movement is not away from the body, but more deeply into it? What if awakening isn't about escaping the human experience, but becoming more fully present for it?
And this brings us to another paradox of our time: the internet has given us an unprecedented ability to witness the lives and experiences of other human beings. Voices that were once isolated can now find one another. Stories that might once have remained hidden can reach millions. A woman in one part of the world can hear the story of another woman thousands of miles away and suddenly realize, I am not alone.
This is extraordinary. And it is also deeply destabilizing. Our nervous system has not adapted to the “open fire hydrant” influx of information, witnessing the suffering of our world en mass.
Everyone can speak now. Anyone can say anything about anyone. Something can be true and travel quickly. Something can be completely false and travel just as quickly. Images can be manipulated, stories distorted, and now, with artificial intelligence, entire realities can be generated. We are entering a world where we can no longer assume that something is true simply because it has been written, spoken, photographed, or presented with confidence.
We have more information than ever before. But remember, information is not wisdom.
As our capacity to create and distribute information expands, our capacity for discernment becomes increasingly important. How do we know what is true? How do we remain open without becoming gullible, discerning without becoming cynical?
Perhaps discernment is not the opposite of spirituality. Perhaps it is one of its highest expressions.
Perhaps this is why Magdalene feels so alive in this particular moment. We are questioning the structures of power that have shaped our world, listening again to voices that were silenced, and beginning to recognize the cost of separating ourselves from the body and from the fullness of our human experience. At the same time, we are entering a world where information is everywhere and truth is increasingly difficult to discern. We need a wisdom that can hold complexity without collapsing into either certainty or confusion; a wisdom that does not ask us to leave our humanity behind in order to find the Divine.
And this is where Magdalene meets us.
Here is a woman whose story has been interpreted, altered, rewritten, diminished, and carried forward for nearly two thousand years. A woman whose voice appears in the earliest Christian texts as a witness, and yet whose legacy became entangled with a story of sexual sin that the texts themselves do not actually tell.
At the very moment women are reclaiming their voices, we are beginning to look again at the women whose voices were lost. At the very moment we are questioning who has the authority to tell our stories, we are questioning who had the authority to tell hers. And at the very moment we are asking what it means to live a more embodied, integrated spirituality, we are encountering a woman whose story has been so deeply shaped by our ideas about women's bodies, sexuality, purity, and sin.
I don't believe Mary Magdalene is returning because we need another figure to worship. Nor do I think we need to turn her into something she wasn't in order to reclaim her. I wonder if she is returning because there is something we are ready to remember.
Something about the feminine. Something about embodiment. Something about wholeness. Something about witnessing what is actually here. Something about the discernment required to walk through a world where not everything that looks like truth is true.
And perhaps this is where the wisdom attributed to Magdalene becomes especially relevant to this moment. In the Gospel of Mary, we encounter a teaching that does not ask us to transcend what it means to be human, but rather to know ourselves fully within the human experience. The sacred is not somewhere other than here. We are not asked to escape the body, our desires, our emotions, our shadows, or the complexity of being human in order to become Divine. The invitation is toward wholeness.
This, to me, is the wisdom of embodiment. To become fully human and fully Divine. To allow the light and the dark to belong to the same whole. To recognize desire without being consumed by it, to listen to the wisdom beneath desire without making desire itself wrong. To feel deeply without becoming lost in feeling. To know the Divine without needing to leave the body to find Her.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons Magdalene feels so alive in this particular moment. We have spent so much of our spiritual history trying to rise above the human experience. Perhaps we are being invited now to descend more deeply into it - to bring consciousness into the places we have rejected, to meet our shadows with compassion, and to discover that nothing truly human needs to be exiled from the path of awakening.
Maybe the path was never about becoming less human. Maybe it was always about becoming fully alive.
I wonder if this is part of why Magdalene feels so alive in this moment. Perhaps before she can teach us anything, we are being asked to meet her again - not as the sinner she was made into, not as the saint we might wish her to be, but as the woman herself.
What if we could set aside, just for a moment, everything we think we know about Mary Magdalene and listen for the woman beneath the story?
Who was Mary Magdalene before we decided who she was?
Perhaps that is the place to begin.
