Román Leão

Tag: jesus

  • Philosophical Musings: On Mary Magdalene, Pt. 1

    Who was Mary Magdalene? What most people know about her comes from the four canonical Gospels. What those accounts do not say is as telling as what they do. Nowhere in the gospels is Magdalene labeled as a prostitute. This seems to originate much later, in a sermon given by Pope Gregory I in 591. Mark, Matthew, and Luke, all list her as a witness and supporter of Jesus’ ministry.

    In much the same way that the gospels represent a developing conceptual take of the wider implications of the teachings of Jesus, culminating in the proclamation of him as divine in the Book of John, the story of Mary Magdalene develops over time from a case of her watching the crucifixion from afar and later finding the tomb open and empty, to her meeting the risen Christ in a garden, mistaking him for the gardener, and going on to proclaim, “I have seen the Lord!”

    If Mary Magdalene was merely a hanger-on, why would she be in the position of first encountering the risen Christ? Was it because she alone had the spiritual understanding to receive such a miracle, or simply because she had the guts to stick around? In the 4th Century, St. Augustine did name her an apostola, or female apostle, because of this critical role she played.

    The first gospel, Mark, written between 65–70 A.D., already places Magdalene in a very important position in the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. She, along with a group of women—the apostles for the most part having legged it out of there—watch Jesus being put to death and track where the body is taken.

    On Sunday morning, she and Mary, the mother of apostle James the younger, and Salome, the mother of apostles James and John go to the tomb to anoint the body, only to find the stone rolled away and a strange younger man dressed in a white robe that tells them that Jesus is not there but has gone on ahead to Galilee where they would see him.

    Originally, the women were understandably freaked out and didn’t tell anyone what they saw. This was later amended, adding in the detail of Mary going to tell the apostles, but they don’t believe her. Here she is introduced as Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons, which may or may not have affected their tendency to listen to her.

    I think that this is a good place to consider the bravery and devotion of the women that stuck around to witness the execution of their teacher and to attend to his body. Growing up, I thought the women remained close as they were not in danger of being crucified themselves. At least four of the apostles ended up meeting the same fate (most of the others eventually being killed in other grisly ways). Historians now contend that the Romans held no compunction about killing anyone, man, woman, or child, that pissed them off, and being a known associate of someone they felt was a threat to the Empire certainly would have fit the bill.

    Both of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke—written 75–85 A.D. and 80-90 A.D. respectively—borrow heavily from Mark, but rely on bespoke stories and traditions when it comes to the story of the resurrection. Matthew changes the narrative the most dramatically, having Magdalene and, “the other Mary,” witnessing an earthquake as an angel comes down and opens the empty tomb, sending them to go tell the rest what has happened. The two Marys meet Jesus on the road back to Galilee, once again being the first to see the risen Christ. Tellingly, Matthew does not mention anything about seven demons or prostitution.

    Luke, in introducing The Parables of the Sower, names Mary as one of several women “who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases” that were following Jesus and the apostles as they traveled around teaching. Here, Mary is mentioned as one from whom seven demons had come out, and, along with the other women, were helping to support them out of their own means. This is telling, as one has to wonder how many women, at this time and place, had independent means at all, let alone the freedom to go following a group of radicals throughout the countryside.

    It is within the Gospel of John that Mary truly earns the title of Apostle to the Apostles. She alone discovers the empty tomb and runs off to tell the others. After the group returns and sees that Jesus was really gone, they take off, leaving Mary crying at the tomb. Distraught, she looks over and sees two angels just chillin’ where the body had been laid. Almost as if angels had a sense of humor, they ask her why she was crying. It’s the perfect set up, for as she turns around, she sees the risen Christ, although doesn’t make the connection right away. Picking up on the bit, Jesus also asks her why she was crying. When he calls her by name, it all finally clicks. As Jesus sends her to go tell the others what she has seen, a new religion is born.

    A fragmentary Gospel According to Mary, written in the second century, and discovered in the late 19th, calls the woman who followed Jesus as Mary of Magdala, seemingly putting the conflation controversy that she and Mary of Bethany were the same person to rest. Granted, they seemed to be short on given names back in the day. It’s almost like going to a Portuguese Festa and calling out Frank or Manuel; you would get a confusing amount of answers, but to conflate any of them is a mistake.

    The Gospel According to Mary differs from the canonical stories by naming her as an important apostle in her own right, one that received secret teachings from Jesus. These claims put her in conflict with Andrew and Peter who doubt the veracity of her ideas and the fact that a woman was claiming to have a special connection with Jesus. Peter asks the other apostles, “Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us?”

    Levi—or Matthew as he is called after leaving his job as a tax collector—comes to her defense, saying, “Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why He loved her more than us.”

    Perhaps it was just a matter of who stuck around.

  • Philosophical Musings: On Mary of Nazareth

    When I think of Mary, mother of Jesus, I think of my grandmother and her sister saying their rosaries at night. This was the first example of any extended meditation that I ever saw. The repetition of the Hail Mary prayer underscoring their contemplation on day-specific mysteries seemed to put them in an engaged trance. We knew better to bother them when in reflection, which was probably a good enough reason on its face to undergo it.

    Rather than view the figure of Mary as indicative of a paternalistic scheme to keep women subservient within the community of the church, and—by example—expected to take a secondary role in society, I see her as a faithful interlocutor; one of us who is willing to put in a good word with the Big Guy. I like the idea of a mediatrix, a go-between, channeling ordinary human wants and cares upstairs, so to speak.

    The current Defense Secretary of the United States, who likes to go around calling himself the Secretary of War, invited a self-described Christian nationalist pastor to lead a service at the Pentagon this last February. Before speaking at the seat of military power in the United States, Pastor Doug Wilson offered his view of a “Christian Nation™” in an interview with John Papola, host of the Dad Saves America podcast. Under Wilson’s idea of a Protestant Nationalist state, Catholic parades in honor of Mary would be banned, along with public displays of Marian statues and icons. This raises the punk rock spirit in me which has resulted in giving deep, reflective thought toward the Virgin for the first time in years. Mysterious ways indeed.

    In many ways, the veneration of the Marys, both the mother of Jesus and Magdalene, brings a female face back into the story, albeit, briefly considered on both accounts. Revisiting the Synoptic Gospels, I was kind of shocked at how little Jesus’s mother was actually mentioned. Mary of Magdala is treated historically worse, culminating in being branded a prostitute by Pope Gregory I in 591, mixing her story with an unnamed sinner in Luke, and the sister of Lazarus, both who anointed Jesus’s feet. In this way, the church, either purposefully, or carelessly, created the dichotomy of Virgin/Whore that has helped to strengthen a patriarchal “dominator mentality” outlined by writers like Riane Eisler (explicitly in The Chalice and the Blade) and Marina Warner (obliquely in Alone of All Her Sex).

    It never dawned on me as a child growing up in the Catholic Church that an argument existed that the Virgin Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to her son, i.e., the tenant of Perpetual Virginity outlined by Augustine in 411. I must have skipped that day in catechism. It seems to me that taking the real-life miracle of childbirth from her disrespects the experience of all mothers and does promote the patriarchy.

    The painful, yet necessary act of childbirth was disregarded as far back as the Book of Genesis, where women were supposedly saddled with it as a punishment for causing the banishment from Eden. I think the early church missed a chance to redeem the experience by acknowledging a true nativity and by doing so, elevating, not only Mary, but all women to their rightful place as bringers of life.

  • Philosophical Musings: On Truth

    Before I stumbled into graphic design—and later, as a novelist, learned to fabulate as a vocation—I was trained as a journalist. I was taught how to get the story and to how confirm the facts through interviews and research to get to the “truth” of the matter. I remember when it dawned on me the weight the of responsibility to get things right, or as right as humanly possible before deadline. I was sitting through a town hall meeting in a small community in Humboldt County, watching the buxom model’s swimsuit appear and disappear within the barrel of the floaty pen* I was using to take notes.

    What should have been an obvious revelation struck me: whatever I wrote down would become the truth of what happened there, for better or worse. In the murky future, anyone looking up what was decided one torrentially rainy evening, would, with any luck, find a clipping from a defunct small paper relating events as I understood them, maybe not one hundred percent as they were, but damned close. Like Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker at the close of Amazing Fantasy #15 way back in 1962, “With great power comes great responsibility;” or, in my case, “With a nickel a word and the backing of likewise exhausted and impoverished cohorts comes… well, we can always print a retraction.”

    In the middle of the COVID pandemic, I watched the scientific process become a scapegoat for those unfamiliar with how it works. Official recommendations shifted as more information was received, opening the door to recriminations of malfeasance. The flames of mistrust were fanned by an overheated television media environment and accusations of purposefully misleading the public were ultimately flung in the wrong direction. Science demands that researchers test and retest their theories, and if new conclusions are made after new data is accumulated, the “truth” shifts. Does this make earlier conclusions any less true for the time they were made? The truth is something to be worked toward, it very rarely falls unbidden into one’s lap.

    Which brings us back to the Gospels. Are we to take the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—whomever they were written by, or when—as the truth? I think that you do have to work with what you have. If new writings from the time of Jesus were discovered, and stranger things have happened, we should be willing to take them under proper consideration. Would any newly discovered Judean field reports make the existing books any less true? That is an interesting question. At this point, these testimonies, however collected, have something beyond mere truth, they have true power.

    Scientist, biomedical-inventor, and mystic, Itzhak Bentov, wrote about consciousness as a field of energy and how the psychic focus of the faithful has a way of imbuing both the animate and inanimate with what—and I’m throwing this in here—Polynesian cultures refer to as “mana,” a supernatural force that permeates the entire universe. Many of the Indigenous tribes of the American continent likewise believe in an invisible force that pervades everything.

    

Imagine how much mana the Gospels—or the Torah, or the Quran, or any number of teachings with uncountable adherents—have accumulated throughout the millennia. Does this make them The Truth, capital Ts? It certainly does to their various believers, but more generally it makes them all a force to be reckoned with, bending reality toward themselves like leather-bound neutron stars. There can be more than one truth in our many-faceted diamond matrix of reality. It all depends on where you are coming from.

    *Floaty pens were fun, but they wrote like crap.

  • Philosophical Musings: When the Saints Come Marching In

    Taking a break from the news and the eternal doomscroll really does a mind and body good. If it wasn’t for the mysterious bug that had cut down myself and my co-workers like summer wheat, I would have had a better chance to feel rejuvenated by our road trip. At least being stuck in low gear helped ensure that I wasn’t running from pillar to post with the missus like a rainforest version of The Amazing Race. I love her to death, but the woman doesn’t not know how to sit still.

    One thing I did have time for, and have been meaning to do for a long time, was to sign up for a course with ULC, the “non-denominational religious organization,” that ordained me back in the ’90s. All of the recent talk about Christian Nationalism, and the Dominionism preached by our Secretary of Defense’s pastor Doug Wilson, has found my thoughts toward faith and the teachings of Jesus become better defined in my mind. Maybe that’s these clowns’ purpose all along, but I am positive that they don’t think it is.

    Rushing down the Embarcadero to catch my boat home one evening a couple of months ago, I was confronted by a young, overeager evangelical who fell in quickstep with me, asking if I was a Christian. I was stopped in my tracks by the question, which is not conducive to making the ferry. I had to admit, that, “No, I do not consider myself a “Christian.” He proceeded to tell me that Christ died for my sins, and the usual litany of, well… litany.

    I had to stop him, and said, “Hold on, don’t get me wrong, I dig the rabbi. I try to follow his advice on the daily. It is these people that call themselves Christians and do not listen to a single thing the dude said that piss me off.”

    My candor stopped the young man, as suddenly as his question had stooped me. I continued on my desperate attempt to catch the ferry, but upon settling in my seat, I was kind of surprised by my own declaration. I was raised Catholic, your grandma’s weird, old country version of Christianity, which, don’t get me wrong, is one of the things I think it has going for it. I always loved the statues and the pageantry, which I strangely feel protective toward all of a sudden.

    Later that week, my sister and I were at a planning meeting at the Portuguese Hall, an old school immigrant society function if there ever was. If it wasn’t for half of the group Zooming in from parts unknown, it could have been a scene from 50 or 100 years ago. After bimonthly business was finished, the conversation drifted to whatever crazy thing the administration had said or done that day. As a joke, I asked, “What are we going to do when they make carrying the flag of Portugal in our procession illegal?” Ha ha.

    Wilson has called for one better. In his vision of a Christian nation, he would outlaw “public displays of idolatry,” meaning the very Catholic statues and parades that fascinated me as a youngster. This is the same pastor that was invited to preach at Hegseth’s Pentagon.

    One of the reasons the founders of this nation inserted an Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was to avoid the type of religious infighting that tore Europe apart for generations. We now have a fundamentalist preacher, close to the levers of power, champing at the bit to start some shit.

    At the same time, TFG* has been beefing with the first American pope for doing what popes are supposed to do, i.e., advocating for the downtrodden, the immigrant, the peace makers. I admit that it had been years since I really paid much attention to what the various popes were up to, now all of a sudden, I’m seriously rooting for Chicago’s own Leo XIV.

    We unlikely theologians have got to stick together.

    *This Fucking Guy