The long slow-down has begun, inside of me as well as around me. I know I keep talking about this, imagining a slow pace will eventually find me amidst my habits of overwork and distraction. The fact that I’m most the way through a work of fiction is fruit of actual slowdown, however stilted. However jagged. The long slow-down has blessedly begun.
I’m re-reading the Kathleen McGowan Magdalen trilogy I read years ago, beginning with The Expected One, now into the second volume, The Book of Love. It has everything to enliven the feminist-mystic drawn to the Magdalen Mysteries, and everything to irritate the church- and institutional-historical-critical folks in my life. Bonus.
Full confession: I did choose it because my classroom teaching brought back awareness of the labyrinth (Chartres pattern). I had vague recollection that the labyrinth and forgiveness were themes within the second volume. Both of these things are connected to future writing…but the fictional romp has been fun. As today is the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene, these strands converge…slowly…
A sung-prayer in the book touches me today:
I have loved you before
I love you today
And I will love you again
The time returns.
In the plotlines, these words speak a covenantal vow between beloveds who have the experience of recognition, followed by a deepening passion into sacred union (hieros-gamos, “a union of trust and consciousness”): Solomon and Sheba, Jesus and Maria Magdalena, Matilda and Gregory, and by the end of the series, Maureen and Berenger. The whole trilogy is a weave of love-stories and the theological tensions between the radical teachings of Jesus/Maria Magdalena and the ecclesial institutions (which always fall short). I’m enjoying it for all these reasons, finding the tensions instructive for building communities that actually can or will tradition love. Is it even possible? I find myself wondering…
In the vein of slowdown, however, I’m simply enjoying a fictional romp through the sensation of recognition I’ve been blessed to know in my own life, abundant with spirit-friendships that know a shared passion over time. My experiences/blessings are not all love-stories as this storyline describes in beautiful detail. Some have been. Most are simply a charged sense of we’ve been here before, together somehow, and a blessed, enlivening alignment of passions and sacred work.
I’m thankful for all I’ve been blessed to receive and offer, in this flow of sacred things. I’m regularly hungry for the experience of recognition and whoosh into sacred work I know can follow. I’m just as regularly (now) cautious, even weary inside, to let myself recognize or be recognized before a whoosh into shared sacred work together. In a surrendered life, this illusion of choosing to be recognized is just that, an illusion. But…the ego persists anyway…
All in all, I’m smiling into the illusion, breathing in hope for whatever is to come.
I have loved you before
I love you today
And I will love you again
The time returns.
More ready for you every day, I am.