New interest, scholarship, writing, and artwork about Mary Magdalene have revitalized the teachings of Jesus in recent years. The Beloved Companion: The Complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene, translated by Jehanne De Quillan, was published in 2010 and is considered to be part of the “Gnostic” tradition of newly discovered gospels. These “secret” teachings of Jesus are about self-transformation and highlight the inner heart-knowing too often left out of the institutional church for the last 2,000 years. This breathtakingly beautiful newly published gospel features Mary Magdalene as teacher as well as the beloved companion and partner of Jesus. God is not seen exclusively as male and is most often named Spirit. Jesus calls Mary Magdalene a tower of strength. She is presented as the most spiritually advanced of the disciples and the one Jesus appoints as his successor:
“When all have abandoned me, only she shall stand beside me like a tower. A tower built on a high hill and fortified cannot fall, nor can it be hidden. From this day forth, she shall be known as Migdalah, for she shall be as a tower to my flock, and the time will soon come when her tower shall stand alone by mine.”
Mary Magdalene, the beloved companion of Jesus, gifts us with a revisionist history and a story of radical spiritual maturity. Jesus and Mary offer us a partnership model that we desperately need at this historic time.
“Don’t look outside yourself,” Jesus says, “…rather the Kingdom of God is within you and it is outside you…when you know yourself you will be known.” Jesus repeats many times that our spiritual practice is to tell the truth: “The Kingdom of God is within you, and outside you, as well as spread upon the earth, but too many do not see it.” We are encouraged to trust our direct experience of the divine, not to be dependent on a priest, teacher, or intermediary, but on the truth of our heart. Spirit is found in the natural world, and “the Kingdom is spread upon the earth and people do not see it.” This is our practice at Church for Our Common Home.
Church for Our Common Home began with the name Church of Mary Magdalene. She is the hidden one often called the Black Madonna, and it is not an accident that there are 450 Black Madonnas in the same region of the south of France where Mary Magdalene lived and taught for twenty years. We honor her memory and Spirit in 2025 by naming our retreat center after her. With our name change, we hope to help make the cosmic connection between Mary Magdalene’s experience and the experience of the earth and the divine feminine in all religious traditions and patriarchal cultures.
This has been done to both men and women, for we all have a divine feminine and divine masculine within. What we have done to women’s bodies and souls we have done to Mary Magdalene, and we have done to the earth. We left her out, forgot about her, and abused her—either raping her and leaving her for dead or acting as if she were not there and that she did not matter—or both, neglect and abuse simultaneously. It is time to honor the divine feminine, to look at her, to bear witness to her suffering, and to learn about her suffering within us and among us. She will not heal until we make room for her suffering.
The world needs mothering now more than ever. Many of us have been guided by Mother Mary and the Divine Holy Mother. She teaches us how to be mothers to our own children, to our wounded inner child, and how “to do unto the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) as Jesus taught. Mary Magdalene calls us to be the divine Sophia, the divine bride of Christ, to be Jesus’s wife, partner, and co-minister. She is a teacher to adults, not only children, encouraging exploration of the imaginal spiritual realms of death, eternal life, and miraculous healing—in partnership with the divine masculine—as we offer grandmotherly, motherly, wifely, and teacherly love to all.
It is time for us as a human family to grow up, take responsibility, and dedicate our lives to mature love and compassion for ourselves and all life forms.
Mary Magdalene is appearing now in many forms. She is not only a mother; she is a teacher, the most advanced of all Jesus’ students, his spiritual soul mate. Perhaps she is a wife, a co-minister, a lover, a daughter-in-law, a grandmother, a friend—and she represents the divine feminine stream that loves and interconnects with the masculine divine stream of Jesus. We must look behind the new stories that are emerging to see the grander truth of her presence at this historic time. She embodies the message of Jesus, teaching us that love is more powerful than suffering, torture, and death.
Not only was she the first to see the resurrected Christ, she is resurrecting now for us as the newly found gospels have emerged after being hidden under the sands of Egypt and the Mediterranean for thousands of years. She comes now, here, in our ecological crisis—which is a spiritual crisis—to teach us about the spiritual realms.
The Divine Feminine is, of course, much more ancient than Mary Magdalene, who is only one of the major faces of the divine feminine in Western civilization and religion. She is the earth, all life forms, the ancient goddess of the Black Madonna. She is found in all world religions and wisdom traditions. She comes in our dreams and through our hearts as we feel with all those who are suffering—all life forms—as we wake up to what is being annihilated during the current sixth mass extinction of life on earth.
She assures us that she will remain. She is with us as our human family is waking up to the reality that, unlike other mass extinctions of life on earth, this mass extinction has been created by us humans. She will be with us in our awakening, in our grief, in our bearing witness to others’ suffering, and in the miraculous life cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
In Jack Angelo’s book, The Healing Wisdom of Mary Magdalene, he shares his vision of Mary Magdalene in St. Baume Cave in France, where legend has it she lived and taught until her death. Pain is the way in which she came to Jack Angelo. He thought he was having a heart attack—the pain was so great—and then she said:
“You are all Christs, or Christs in the making. It is only your clouded vision that prevents you from seeing that you are all beings of light. It does not matter if no one believes what you say, but I want you to tell the others that Jesus, the Master, is walking among you right now…The pain you feel is my pain. I cannot let you feel all of the pain because you could not bear it. It is my signal to you that it is Mary Magdalene whom you sense…You can call on me any time to help you, and I will use this signal to assure you that I am close. It cannot hurt you; it is just my signal.”
She then gave him her blessing.