Mary

The New York Times panned the new opera “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene” by Mark Adamo that premiered in San Francisco last summer. I was there at one of only seven performances eager for a taste of great art that would take another punch at the age-old misogynistic misrepresentation of that famous Mary. I was hoping the opera would live up to the bold type in the sidebar of the program notes:

“The province of great art is not to make us comfortable, but to move us beyond ordinary and habitual modes of perception to apprehend a bigger, deeper, broader picture of more numinous possibilities.”

I have to disagree with the critics because from my theological perspective I think the opera succeeded in doing exactly that. The libretto portrays Mary as an intelligent and loving disciple, and as Jesus’ wife, and yes they go to bed together but you could hardly say they had sex.  Well, they had operatic sex fully clothed under a bed cover with a micro-torrid embrace, a few trills from the soprano and some lyrical subtly from the tenor. But I’m just sayin’….

OMG I’m saying Mark Adamo sure opened the audience to numinous possibilities better than any preacher has ever done it from a pulpit, and I’d be willing to bet three opera tickets on that. He forcefully made the point again that the Magdalene was not a prostitute but the core reason Jesus changed from an ascetic desert-father-type preacher to the teacher of love who changed the world. It was the love of a woman that brought Jesus to his sweet “Abba” connection with God that ultimately made Christianity such a personal and loving path. He loved his wife and their love opened heaven.

Cynthia Bourgeault in her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene adds to the husband-wife premise that it was Mary’s broken heart at Jesus’ tomb and her love for him that caused her to be the first person to understand the bridge to her dead lover and translate it into the teaching of resurrection for the disciples and ultimately the entire Church. Resurrection is pretty simple when you think about it that way and it makes a lot of sense.

I remember when I saw Ethel, a former parishioner; a year after her husband of 50 years had died. I took both her hands and told her how sorry I was that Charlie had died. Her eyes filled with tears and she smiled, “He’s dead Gayle but he’s not gone. I feel his presence when I have coffee every morning in our sun room and I still talk to him every day.”  Of course Mary could feel her beloved and it brought her a radical truth. I’m just sayin’ regular people experience this connection when they lose the ones they love.

Gratefully the apocryphal book discovered in 1896 and known as the Gospel of Mary is receiving attention recently and we are moving beyond our ordinary and habitual modes of perception. God willing through art and scholarship we will continue growing toward a bigger, deeper and broader picture of the possibilities held within the story that guides us

Numinous possibilities abound!

Copyright © 2013 Gayle Madison