Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Magdalene
In “Illness and Metaphor (1978)”, Susan Sontag wrote of health and sickness: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
About healing, Wendell Berry reminds his readers that “the body is restored to itself. It begins to live again by its own powers and instincts, to the extent that it can do so.” Mr. Berry continues, comparing efficiency and the nature of love:
In the world of love, things that have been separated by efficiency and specialization strive to come back together. And yet love must confront death, and accept it, and learn from it. Only in confronting death can earthly love learn its true extent, its immortality. Any definition of health that is not silly must include death. The world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it. The world of efficiency is defeated by death; at death, all its instruments and procedures stop. The world of love continues, and of this grief is the proof.
In today’s second reading, Paul conflates life and death, alongside Christ’s death and our death, and Christ’s life and our life:
The love of Christ impels us,
once we have come to the conviction that one died for all;
therefore, all have died …
So whoever is in Christ is a new creation:
the old things have passed away;
behold, new things have come.
I think sustaining this “new creation” is what we strive for, even when we know it is something only the Holy Spirit can, finally, complete. I remember loving Margaret and wanting to be so close to her I was constantly stepping on her shoes. This magnetic compulsion (love) kept me awake at night and got me moving in the morning. As the heroine of the Song of Solomon remembers her own longings …
On my bed at night I sought him
whom my heart loves–
I sought him but I did not find him.
I will rise then and go about the city;
in the streets and crossings I will seek
Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him.
The watchmen came upon me,
as they made their rounds of the city:
Have you seen him whom my heart loves?
Her God does not disappoint:
I had hardly left them
when I found him whom my heart loves.
Christ’s new creation in Mary Magdalene radiates from the words of John in chapter 8. Her body rescued from savage hate-filled stones, she stands alone, feeling naked, waiting. She thinks she knows herself but does not yet know Jesus. At last he looks up, straight into her eyes.  His words and hers restore her in a baptismal instant to life in the kingdom of God. Small wonder that she weeps. As do I, recognizing myself in Mary. And I’m sure, as do you.
So as today wears on into evening, as my body tires and my mind longs for sleep, the beauty of life might not feel like a new creation. But this weaving of my body and mind with God’s spirit … begs to differ.
Joy in the Body
The cells in your body love what they do.
Nerve synapses adore each other, holding hands,
sharing secrets all the time.
Your glands, twinkle in their eye, distribute their gifts.
Your muscles don’t move from duty, but joy.
Your lungs, even when troubled, love the air
and love passing on its riches.
White blood cells sweep the streets
because they love everyone who lives there.
Ligaments and tendons hang on
and when severed long for each other.
See when you’re cut how skin reaches for skin,
tissues embrace like lovers.
The members of the body care for one another.
They gather at each other’s sickbeds.
When the village is not well all its citizens pitch in,
each doing their best for the whole,
because they love each other.
Beat by beat your heart speaks in you
—let it be your life—
                                  Oh Yes. Oh Yes. Oh Yes…. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes
 (Song of Songs 3, 2 Corinthians 5, Psalm 63, John 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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