Feast Day of Saint Mary Magdalene

“Magdalene
her name means tower
not whore, not sinner, not infidel of the seven devils
they labeled her less-than
because they feared what her tower held:
not sin but scripture
not shame but sacredness
not filth but flame
a tower of truth
but towers fall, don’t they?
when men build stories from stone
and forget the word was born in woman’s body
at the edge of things
cracked open with knowing
she was never the footnote
not the soft epilogue to his ministry
she was his equal, mirror to messiah, goddess to god:
his counter-spell, his mirror myth, his ritual in red;
not whore, not slave, but beloved;
a woman undone by the very thing that made her divine: her desire.
But listen, love— she didn’t break the jar because she was desperate
she broke it because she was called
called to speak when silence was safer
called to stay when the others fled
called to embody the towering truth:
that strength and softness are not separate
that holiness can wear hips
that god grew inside a womb but also walked beside one
loved and worshipped one
when the world bloomed in bruises and blessings
this kind of power will not do
if we let a woman be beloved, be equal, be tower
what’s next? a tabernacle? a sanctuary?
a truth that eclipses all the lies of smallness and inferiority?
so they silenced her with ink and pulpit
turned her hips into heresy, her hair into sin
her hands into something not fit to beckon or bless
they scraped the sacred from her body and called it repentance
scrubbed her clean of her wildness
tried to bleach her into silence
folded her into a cautionary tale
the scarlet stain on holy scrolls
but history is porous and so is the grave
after centuries of redacted gospel
after pulpits built on her silence
she is waking from shadow in boots of fervor
incense clinging to the brazier of her spine
this is not a tale of repentance
this is a story of theft
and now it is a tale of return
another kind of resurrection
the tower stands again, friends
not in lace and halos but barefoot
with red clay on her soles
and a voice like an earthquake
wrapped in linen
she does not walk back into scripture
she bursts through the margins
mud-footed and mythic
pulling the divine back into the body
she has risen again
not with trumpets but with soil under her nails
the rhizome gospel under her tongue
green and feral and determined to grow
she’s coming back
to reclaim every woman called ruin
for daring to know spirit
by touch and tenderness
she’s here to walk the crooked path again
the one where myth and marrow meet
she is not looking for apology
she is looking for fire
in the eyes of humans
who remember
that holiness can wear hips
that sacredness is not silence
and that sometimes the most faithful thing you can do
is stand tall
a tower of truth
a sentinel at the beginning of a new story
rooted in love that outlasts hatred
a tower of belonging that outshines fear”

Magdalene’s Tower by Angi Sullins

Artwork by Lars Doerwald

“All of us are connected by Conscience, which unites us as human beings. If you lose your conscience, your humanity is lost.”

Yusuf Islam (stage name Cat Stevens), singer-songwriter, born on this day in 1948, speaking at the National March For Palestine 2024

International Moon Day

“Here I work in the hollow of God’s hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
I sense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.

And all I ask is this – and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish –
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it’s done.”

Alice Oswald

“ “As Plato said, every soul is deprived of truth against its will. The same holds true for justice, self-control, goodwill to others, and every similar virtue. It’s essential to constantly keep this in your mind, for it will make you more gentle to all.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.63

As he wound his way up Via Dolorosa to the top of Calvary Hill, Jesus (or Christus as he would have been known to Seneca and other Roman contemporaries) had suffered immensely. He’d been beaten, flogged, stabbed, forced to bear his own cross, and was set to be crucified on it next to two common criminals. There he watched the soldiers roll dice to see who would get to keep his clothes, listened as the people sneered and taunted him.

Whatever your religious inclinations, the words that Jesus spoke next – considering they came as he was subjected to unimaginable human suffering – send chills down your spine. Jesus looked upward and said simply, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

That is the same truth that Plato spoke centuries earlier and that Marcus spoke almost two centuries after Jesus; other Christians must have spoken this truth as they were cruelly executed by the Romans under Marcus’s reign: Forgive them; they are deprived of truth. They wouldn’t do this if they weren’t.

Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.”

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

“My wish is that South Africans never give up on the belief in goodness, that they cherish that faith in human beings as a cornerstone of our democracy. The first value mentioned under the founding principles of our Constitution is that of human dignity. We accord persons dignity by assuming that they are good, that they share the human qualities we ascribe to ourselves. Historical enemies succeeded in negotiating a peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy exactly because we were prepared to accept the inherent capacity for goodness in the other…

In a cynical world we have become an inspiration to many. We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.”

From his address during a joint sitting of Parliament to mark 10 years of democracy in South Africa, Cape Town, 10 May 2004, by Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013), born on this day

“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the singing bird will come.”

Lois Lowry, writer

“Recent research has shown that the smell of humus exerts a physiological effect on humans. Breathing in the scent of Mother Earth stimulates the release of the hormone oxytocin, the same chemical that promotes bonding between mother and child, between lovers. Held in loving arms, no wonder we sing in response.”

From Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“I find that quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In quakerism you’re expected to develop your own understanding of god from your experience in the world. There isn’t a creed, there isn’t a dogma. There’s an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that’s very like what goes on in “the scientific method.” You have a model, of a star, its an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you’re expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally.”

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist, born on this day in 1943 – pictured at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly, 2006

“I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.

And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.”

Woody Guthrie (1912 – 1967), folk singer-songwriter, born on this day

“Willa Cather’s poem, “I Sought the Wood in Summer,” tells of its protagonist despairing during the hot months. The trees tremble beautifully in the light, the daffodils glisten, yet every breath Beauty “gives the vagrant summer but swifter woos her death.” It’s not until the poet returns to the wood in winter that she sees the power of beauty, its ability to renew itself continually.

Amid the season’s heat and light, it’s easy sometimes to forget there has ever been or will be anything else. But we cannot judge a thing by the climate of one day, or even one month. It’s not until you spend years in a place that you know its true strengths and weaknesses, the range of miracles.”

From Earth Bound: Daily Meditations For All Seasons by Brian Nelson