Mary Magdalene Part 5 Path of Conscious Love

I have another blog about this online course Mary Magdalene: Apostle for our Times by noted contemplative scholar Cynthia Bourgeault.  I am printing personal reflection questions about this week's lesson.  This week is entitled "The Path of Conscious Love".

Question 1

• Chastity is not, as we often assume, the absence of sexual relationship but fidelity and purity in what we do, a “singleness” of heart that leads us to live with wholeness and integrity. As Cynthia explains, “You can be chaste in relationships as much as you can be chaste in a celibate life. And you can be unchaste in relationships just as much as you can be unchaste in a celibate life.” What areas of your life feel coherently part of that singleness of heart? In what ways do you see the absence of singleness of heart? How are you pulled toward saying one thing and doing another? What does that pull feel like in your body and thoughts?  

I feel that this path of "singleness" of heart is so relevant to modern people. For me personally, I have to say that I feel split when I'm multi-tasking.  Since I started using a smart phone, my attention span shrank to the point where it is hard to read more than one sentence in a communication.  News, email, and texts instantaneously flash by.  The constant bad news overwhelms me.  Writing this, I feel strongly that are on information overload. We lack space and opportunity for communal connection. I'm very happy that I found a place and community to have regular connection. After our home church services on Sunday, we share a dinner meal together to talk and become friends. The dinner is such an important part of the worship each week. We share music and reflect on wisdom, and then the act of eating together lets us enjoy each other's company.  

I think this idea of singleness not only applies inward to my personal mind being undivided in intention, but it also applies externally to my cosmic relationship with reality. My egoic story does not exist separately from a meaningless cosmos.  My unique story is integral to a larger co-creative universe story of love and evolution. Integral singleness grounds me to a sacred dynamic universe evolving toward the more intimacy. 

Question 2

• What is it like to consider that Jesus may not have been celibate? Notice what reactions come up for you and journal to go deeper with these reflections.  

A non-celibate Jesus seems so much more real and human.  I reject the notion that Jesus was a deity.  I think sexuality is holy and beautiful and part of a healthy path toward becoming fully human. I feel that after 2000 years, a story of a human Jesus practising conscious love offers a much more relevant story for today.   The gnostic gospels point to Early Christian communities which taught this kind of message of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in relationship. I would celebrate abandoning a theology of redemption and original sin, and embrace a theology of embodied paths of wholeness and love modeled by Mary Magdalene. 

Question 3

• Psychologist John Welwood writes:   A conscious relationship is one that calls forth who you really are. . . . [Instead of looking to a relationship for shelter] we could welcome its power to wake us up in areas of life where we are asleep and where we avoid naked, direct contact with life. This approach puts us on a path. It commits us to movement and change, providing forward direction by showing us where we most need to grow. Embracing relationship as a path also gives us practice: learning to use each difficulty along the way as an opportunity to go further, to connect more deeply, not just with a partner, but with our own aliveness as well.  How does this teaching begin to shift or confirm for you the possibility of Jesus and Mary Magdalene walking a path of spiritual transformation in relationship? How does your experience of the Paschal mystery change, viewed through the lens of the sacrament of conscious love versus atonement to an angry God?  
  

  I think the recovery and celebration of the teachings of Mary Magdalene shifts Christianity in so many good ways.

  First, Mary Magdalene shifts the church to recognize female leadership. Patriarchy erased Mary Magdalene in the church. Bringing her back as one who embodies conscious love may be a step toward healing Western culture by embracing the divine feminine.  

  Second, Mary Magdalene points toward the embodied path of becoming human. Rather than striving for a heaven-oriented "mind over body" worldview, Mary Magdalene's embodied path strives for non-dual mind-body wholeness enriching life in this world. Christianity must go beyond the atonement theology in order to be healing presence for the planet.  The Angry retributive God demanding sacrifice for a sinful world separates mind and body.  This atonement teaching drives Christians to dominate and destroy the world so that they can "become perfect" in the next world.  I hope that a saner Christianity emerges that embraces the body and the world as sacred, like at Church for Our Common Home. 

  Third, Mary Magdalene puts relationship and the beloved as a path of conscious love. 2000 years of repressed sexuality, holding celibacy as the highest path to enlightenment diminishes human potential for creativity and wholeness.  I hope the next step for Christianity is to hold up a model of conscious love embodied by Mary Magdalene and Jesus co-leading a message of transformed conscious love.