Magdalene

The Obsessive Diary - July 16th

I prayed for my children, my lover, myself and the world in that order, concentric circles of care, may all lives be as blessed as mine. And she shimmered and pulsated, her body a fine mist of blurred vision, her face crystal clear. I don’t carry the weight of religious baggage in this life, though no doubt I have before, and doctrines don’t interest me but standing in that Basilica de Marie-Madelaine, the resting place of her skull, I felt the spirit. Guadalupe, Magdalene, if ever there was an emblem of misconstrued woman, it is she. Damned to whore and saint she was neither. Persecuted and hunted down, pregnant she fled from Palestine to France with two other Marys and Lazarus. Perhaps another daughter. She retreated to live out the last thirty years of her life in a cave in the mountains above St Maximin, her own prayers to a temple higher in the hills, occasionally she came down to town. She died in Aix. In the crypt of the Basilica her blackened skull is held in a head of gold, lit unrepentantly, guarded behind iron bars. On the 22nd July they will take her out and the streets will erupt in fiesta. But we were there yesterday, and it was quiet.

Of course there were Jesus’ on crosses looking pained - this iconography is never amis where devout Christians have anything to do with it; I can never look at it without thinking of a friend telling me the story of her lover in a coma being visited by a rainbow rasta man who said he was the Christ. When my friend’s lover said, But that’s not how you normally look this rainbow rasta Christ transformed temporarily into the the suffering version we’re used to, and said, People prefer me like this, I know and laughed as he changed back. So yes, the suffering version was there but not abounding. Mary held the stage and the light, Magdalene naked her arms crossed over her chest, Magdalene with her sacred oils and sexual wisdoms and fire power and love. We had planned to go from there to her cave.