Saint Mary Magdelene was a recipient of a miracle of Christ.
I have been thinking about love.
Our world and our culture seem to indicate that the only sort of love that anyone should really care about is romantic love for a romantic partner. This is not a historic thing. Historically, very little value was placed on romantic love between romantic partners. Instead, communities and their associations with each other per prioritised. And what this looked like was that children were “married off” to people with whom their families could form alliances. And these alliances – whether for money or social standing or some other reason – were designed to bring comfort to the maximum number of people possible.
And I have been thinking about that today. You see, today we consider love from a very individual perspective. We consider that for love to be real we have to be one on one with another person. We must devote all of our energies into the romantic love that could exist between us. And this idea gets all caught up in everything. For example, some fictional narratives of Christ and His life imply that Saint Mary Magdelene was romantically involved with Him.
What nonsense?
Saint Mary Magdelene was a recipient of a miracle of Christ. He cast out seven devils from her and told the elders not to cast a stone against her to kill her. How could she ever consider her God in a Romantic way? How could she ever feel the right to some intimate physical connection to God Himself – for that is surely how she knew and understood Him… Rather, Saint Mary Magdelene would have considered Christ a Holy Man. He would have been too Holy for a physical relationship. He would have been too Holy for a mere romantic attachment. Instead, for her Christ would have been so much more than that single connection – He would have been in EVERY connection!
You see, the love that is more important and more true and more pivotal than romantic love is the love of one’s neighbour…
After love for God, the love of one’s neighbour is by far the most important kind of love and the kind of love that influences everything! And Christ told us this. And He explained this to us because He knew that God is inside each of His creatures, so until each of us can love each other without worrying about the romance of it all – and without worrying about whether we have a special connection with one person or another – then we cannot possibly know real love.
Because romantic love is lovely, but it does not really replace the love for everyone. Because it is only when we love everyone – our friend, our enemy, even the stranger on the street, that we will really be able to be Children of God. For we are made in God’s Image and Likeness, and that means that we were made to be great!
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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