These days I miss, but am also very aware of the continuing presence
of, my Spiritual Advisor. (She departed this physical frame about three years
ago at the age of 78.) She was a non-resident or external member (the technical
term is ‘oblate’) of a Benedictine monastic organization. Her monastic name was
Mary Magdalene. In what follows I will call her Madeleine.
Before her retirement,
in worldly life Madeleine had been active in the world of education as a
counselor, administratrix, and textbook editor. She was successful and well
known in that world. All this fitted in well with her brand of spirituality,
which I would say was of the Active Service rather than the Contemplative type.
(Since my own natural bent is incurably the opposite, we sometimes had to work
at translating our spiritual experiences into each other’s terms.)
She was tremendously critical of the
official Catholic hierarchy and was not afraid to confront even high ‘prelates’
face-to-face. On one occasion, she was talking to one of our notoriously
conservative Dutch bishops while both were looking at an Eastern Orthodox icon
of the Crucifixion. This type of icon shows the crucified Christ flanked by his
mother Mary and St. John
She once told me she
believed Jesus himself had been bisexual. She was proud of the legends associated
with her monastic namesake, the original Mary Magdalene, which say that she had
been a prostitute. In general, she took a bread-and-butter rather than an
exalted view of sexuality. I remember once when I ‘confessed’ to her that in my
own prayers I much more often addressed myself to Mary than to Jesus, she said:
‘Well that’s just natural, after all, you’re a man and Mary is a woman!’
But as far as I know,
this matter-of-factness never implied anything outside the straight-and-narrow
in Madeleine’s private life. She was a married woman and had vowed to interpret
the traditional monastic vow of chastity as commitment to a ‘special’
relationship with her own husband. I think she was one of those people who are
perceptively open to all manner of erotic potentials without falling into the
trap of thinking they must be put into physical practice at any cost.
Personally, I also thoroughly support both clauses of this traditional Pauline
attitude (1 Corinthians 6:12) that all things are allowable but not all are
expedient.
The same practicality
applied in her approach to etheric and mysterious and invisible things. She
believed in them, hoped for them (isn’t that really the same?), and had no
problem with her own role in making them actual. Regarding the human
personality’s survival of bodily death, she told me frankly that while out
driving her car, she often talked out loud to her long-deceased father. And as
for the existence of God, to me her classic statement was ‘I just plain want God to exist!’
Like many people in my
church, at home she was liable to pray while standing in front of an icon on
the wall. I can still see her (I never saw it objectively) getting up in the
morning, feeling as she put it ‘amazed to be still alive,’ pouring her first
cup from the automatic coffeemaker, stepping with that cup of coffee in her
hand right up to the nearest icon, and greeting the Presence at the beginning
of a new day.
--Lloyd Haft
October 2014
[1] The Bible passages used to support this association, whether or not
they are historically valid, are John 19:26, 20:2, 21:7 and 21:20.
