Now it was Mary Magdalene,
Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. (Luke 24:1)
All around me are signs of other days. Coffee mug acquired in Cornwall. Globe given when my mother was healthy. Pensive photograph from a grateful parishioner. Watercolor commissioned to remember the family farm in New Hampshire. Books, artwork and trinkets from days that made me what I am.
I also glimpse the future--projects, opportunities, dreams, challenges.
What would happen if a chunk of this treasure were cast aside? Not just lost, as mementoes tend to get lost, but rejected, treated as never having happened? Not just reconsidered, in the way we revisit memories and see more in them, but erased from memory?
How could I ever know myself? How could I remain connected to my parents, and through them to my grandparents, and through them to my heritage as a citizen? How could I know the heartache, adventures, family suppers, walks, love, dreams, learning and worrying that shaped my character and my faith? What kind of future could I build on selective blankness?
Such a tragedy happened in the early years of the Christian movement when women were cast aside. A few names were remembered, but the tradition-shattering way that Jesus treated women was erased, rejected, as if it never happened.
Mary of Magdala, apparently a woman of means and close friend of Jesus, was recast as a harlot. Mary the mother of Jesus, apparently a sturdy leader, was recast as a marble virgin, to be venerated in ways that would become increasingly maudlin. Women were evicted from the inner circle, shoved into an invisibility that presages the Taliban.
Jesus wasn't like that. His circle included men and women on equal footing. They traveled together, learned together, served together. Just as Jesus looked beyond artificial barriers separating Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean, so he moved beyond the historic chasm separating male and female.
We don't know why the early Church reinstated that chasm. Guesses abound, some backed by scholarship, some expressed in imagining. But it seems clear that a primary thrust of Jesus' being was deliberately cast aside.
We have spent the past forty years arguing about women's roles in organized religion. We have fought over every detail, every rule, every word of liturgy, every hiring practice. We have worn ourselves out debating who gets stature. Then Southern Baptists revisit the 1930s and Mel Gibson trots out the legend of Mary Magdalene as harlot.
A reader asks for information about Mary Magdalene and other women. I wish we had some. Not just for reasons of justice, but because our faith is impoverished. How can we know God if an entire dimension of God's being is denied? How can we know the full meaning of creation, exodus, covenants and promises unless we see God weeping over Jerusalem, loving in that fullness which comes when both parents love the child?
This isn't a contest to see who gets the prizes. This is about the very foundation of our faith. If we insist on God as male, disciples as male and authority as male, we make God too small and our faith too narrow.
I remember the day Henri Nouwen told an assembly of prosperous church folk about viewing Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal." Nouwen had been broken. Now he studied a broken son kneeling before a forgiving father. The father laid hands on his shoulders.
One hand, Nouwen saw, was the gnarled hand of a workingman. "The other was the tapered hand of a woman."
Nouwen paused, and the audience gasped. For that, we suddenly realized, is the God before whom we all kneel.
"On a Journey" meditations are part of an ongoing ministry and are e-mailed six days a week to interested readers. They may be accessed at www.onajourney.org or by emailing tehrich@earthlink.net