This reflection grows out of the same stream as Real Will Isn’t Willpower and Presence Changes the Room: Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, read through Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence, with that stubborn little Sufi-Christian insistence that attention is not just something we “pay” when life gets interesting. Attention is energy. Attention is freedom. Attention is how we stop being dragged around by every shiny object, old wound, private fantasy, and imaginary argument with someone named Gary who has never met a comment section he could not spiritually pollute.

Most of us have been taught to romanticize the wandering mind. Daydreaming gets treated like the sacred birthplace of creativity, as if every time we mentally leave the room, a muse appears with a clipboard and a publishing contract. But this chapter makes a sharper distinction. The mind drifting into fantasy is not the same as the heart opening into the imaginal. One is often escape dressed up as inspiration. The other comes through presence, through voluntary attention, through being awake enough to receive what is actually trying to arrive. Fantasy lets us leave life. The imaginal asks us to enter it more deeply.

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We have made daydreaming sound much holier than it is.

Somewhere along the way, zoning out got rebranded as creativity. Staring into space became “letting the mind wander.” Losing fifteen minutes to an imaginary argument with someone who annoyed us in 2018 became “processing.” Mentally redecorating our life while ignoring the actual life in front of us became “visioning.”

Very impressive. The ego got a Canva account and called itself a muse.

Now, to be fair, not every wandering thought is useless. The mind does have a hidden life. Images rise. Connections form. Problems sometimes solve themselves after we stop trying to strangle them with our forehead. Anyone who has written, painted, preached, taught, gardened, parented, or survived a committee meeting with Episcopalians knows that insight often arrives sideways.

But the inner tradition makes a sharp distinction that our culture mostly blurs: spacing out is not the same as inspiration.

Daydreaming is not the same as the imaginal.

One is psychic leakage. The other is a doorway.

And the difference is presence.

The Cult of the Wandering Mind

Modern culture loves the wandering mind because modern culture is exhausted.

We are overloaded, over-notified, over-managed, over-caffeinated, and under-present. So when the mind finally floats away from the spreadsheet, the sermon, the inbox, or the comment thread, we mistake that escape hatch for freedom.

Of course daydreaming feels good. It asks almost nothing of us. It lets us leave the room without the inconvenience of actually moving our body. It gives us a private Netflix series starring ourselves as the misunderstood genius, the devastatingly articulate comeback artist, the beloved mystic, the successful author, the person whose enemies finally realize they were wrong and send a formal apology basket.

And honestly, who among us has not enjoyed a little fantasy litigation in the courthouse of the mind?

But most daydreaming is not creative. It is reactive.

It is attention that got grabbed and then wandered into the basement wearing socks on a wet floor.

The chapter’s teaching is blunt about this. Attention can be caught by something that attracts or repulses us. A like. A dislike. A desire. A fear. A little wound with Wi-Fi. Once attention is caught, it often slides into commentary, fantasy, identification, and daydreaming. That is not the awakened self creating. That is the ego burning incense in front of its own slideshow.

Sensitive Energy Is Not Consciousness

Here is where the teaching gets useful.

There is a kind of attention that becomes intensely absorbed in an object. You are playing music, writing, scrolling, fantasizing, flirting, building your imaginary TED Talk, or mentally winning an argument with Pastor Chad from the Church of Lightly Baptized Rage. You are absorbed. You may even feel energized.

But absorbed does not always mean awake.

This is what the teaching calls bound attention. The object has captured you. You are “in it,” but you are not free in it. There is no spacious awareness. No watcher. No deep “I am here.” The attention has been consumed by the thing it notices.

That can happen in beautiful ways. A pianist lost in Beethoven. A gardener lost in roses. A writer lost in a sentence.

It can also happen in ridiculous ways. A grown adult losing twenty minutes imagining the perfect reply to a Facebook comment written by someone named Gary who thinks “research” means watching a man yell in his truck.

Either way, the issue is the same. The attention has been bound.

And the inner path is not trying to make us more absorbed. It is trying to make us more present.

The Imaginal Is Not Fantasy With Better Lighting

This is the distinction that matters.

Fantasy is usually built from the ego’s leftovers. It rearranges old fears, desires, wounds, ambitions, grudges, and cravings into little mental movies. It may look creative, but often it is just the nervous system wearing a director’s beret.

The imaginal is different.

The imaginal is not escapism. It is a deeper mode of perception. It rises from presence, not avoidance. It comes when the mind is not rigidly forcing an answer, but also not wandering off into psychic fog. It comes when attention is gathered enough to be receptive.

That is why meditation, contemplative prayer, dhikr, chanting, walking prayer, and deep silence often produce better insight than daydreaming. Not because the ego finally “figured it out,” but because the ego stopped hogging the microphone.

You sit. You return. You breathe. You notice the thought, release the thought, come back to presence. You stop trying to milk the universe like a content cow. Then, half an hour later, while making tea or staring at the wall or opening the laptop, the sentence comes. The answer comes. The image comes. Not because you went out to lunch, but because you came home.

The imaginal does not require unconsciousness.

It requires availability.

Presence Is Not Trying Harder

This is where people get nervous.

Because once we say daydreaming is not the same as inspiration, someone immediately hears, “Great, so I’m supposed to clench my mind like a spiritual accountant and never relax.”

No.

That is not presence. That is the ego wearing a tight little meditation helmet.

Presence is not grim concentration. It is not staring at your toothbrush like it owes you money. It is not turning every ordinary task into a Navy SEAL operation for mindfulness. “I will now brush tooth number fourteen with pure nondual awareness.” Congratulations, Brother Plaque Removal, you have made enlightenment unbearable.

The teaching points to something subtler: double awareness.

You are aware of the object and the subject. The ship and the river. The task and the one doing the task. The sentence and the spaciousness from which the sentence appears.

You are not lost in the piano. You are here, playing the piano.

You are not lost in the thought. You are here, noticing thought.

You are not lost in the fantasy. You are here, seeing the fantasy arise, perform its tiny community theater production, and dissolve.

That small shift changes everything.

Creativity Needs a Vessel

The modern creative myth says, “Let yourself wander and see what happens.”

The inner tradition says, “Become present enough to receive what is real.”

That second path is less glamorous because it does not flatter the ego. It does not treat every mental squiggle as genius. It does not call every distraction a download.

Some thoughts are not downloads. Some are just pop-ups from the basement.

True inspiration needs a vessel. Presence is the vessel.

A scattered mind may produce cleverness. A restless mind may produce novelty. A wounded mind may produce intensity. But presence gives creativity depth. It lets the image come from somewhere truer than personal anxiety. It allows the work to carry being, not just noise.

This is why some writing feels technically polished but spiritually empty. The sentences are dressed nicely, but no one is home. Meanwhile, another piece may be simple, even plain, but it has weight. It has silence inside it. It came through someone who was actually there.

The imaginal is not just “making stuff up.”

It is seeing from the heart.

Don’t Beat Yourself Up. Just Wake Up.

Of course you will daydream.

You are human. Your mind has been trained by a civilization that makes billions of dollars by stealing attention, scattering it, and selling it back to you as lifestyle optimization. So yes, sometimes your mind is going to wander off and build a beach house in the astral suburbs.

Do not turn that into shame.

Shame is just another form of identification. Now instead of daydreaming, you are daydreaming about being a bad spiritual practitioner. Very advanced. The monastery of self-criticism has excellent acoustics and terrible snacks.

The practice is simpler.

Notice.

Where did attention go?

What grabbed it?

Was it fear? Desire? Boredom? Resentment? The need to be seen? The need to be right? The hope that one day your enemies will gather in a circle and chant, “You were correct, O luminous one”?

Just notice.

That noticing is already the beginning of freedom.

A Small Practice for the Imaginal

Try this before writing, creating, praying, or making any decision that matters.

Sit for five minutes. No drama. No incense required, though incense does help if your room smells like laundry regret.

Feel your body.

Let the breath come and go.

When thoughts arise, do not chase them and do not fight them. Notice them. Release them. Return.

Then ask inwardly: What wants to come through that is not just my anxiety talking?

Do not force an answer.

Stay present.

Then write, draw, speak, pray, or move.

The goal is not to empty the mind into a sterile waiting room. The goal is to become available to a deeper intelligence than the one that makes grocery lists and rehearses imaginary arguments in the shower.

The imaginal does not shout over the noise.

It waits beneath it.

The Real Muse Is Presence

Daydreaming may give you material. Presence gives you meaning.

Daydreaming may entertain the ego. Presence opens the heart.

Daydreaming may produce a clever idea. Presence can bring forth something that carries life.

So yes, let the mind rest. Let it soften. Let it stop grinding like a Protestant work ethic with a ring light. But do not confuse psychic drift with sacred imagination.

The real muse does not usually arrive when we are spacing out.

She arrives when we are finally here.

May your fantasies lose their management position.

May your attention come home without filing a complaint.

May the imaginal rise from the heart like a candle in a quiet room.

And may your next good idea not come from escaping your life, but from entering it more deeply.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In that series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is restored to her rightful place at the foot of the cross, the meaning of crucifixion shifts decisively. What had long been framed as cosmic bookkeeping is revealed instead as love demonstrating its own inner logic to the end.

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When Love Becomes Larger Than Two People

Some relationships feel bigger than the two people inside them.

Not bigger in the dramatic sense. Not bigger because they are obsessive, cinematic, or emotionally chaotic. Bigger because something alive begins to form between the two people. A shared field. A third presence. A kind of interior architecture neither person fully owns, but both participate in.

Most people recognize this intuitively before they ever have language for it.

You see it in couples who have been together for decades and somehow radiate a strange steadiness around them. You see it in friendships where silence itself becomes intimate. You see it when someone dies physically and yet remains mysteriously present in the inner life of the beloved. You see it when two people become accountable not merely to each other’s emotions, but to each other’s becoming.

The Third Presence Between Beloveds

This is what the mystical tradition points toward with the idea of the “abler soul.”

Drawing from the poet John Donne, Bourgeault describes the abler soul as the third reality created when love “interinanimates two souls.” It is neither one partner nor the other, but the shared consciousness that emerges when two people surrender into a deeper field of love together.

That distinction matters because the modern world is deeply suspicious of surrender.

We are trained to hear surrender as weakness, dependency, loss of boundaries, emotional fusion, or self-erasure. We have become so psychologically alert to unhealthy attachment that we often lack categories for sacred attachment. If someone remains inwardly connected to a beloved after death, modern culture tends to interpret that as inability to “move on.” If two people profoundly shape one another’s souls, we immediately worry about codependency.

This Is Not Codependency

But the abler soul is not codependency.

Codependency collapses personhood. The abler soul deepens it.

Codependency says:
“I need you in order to survive.”

The abler soul says:
“We are becoming more fully ourselves together inside something larger than either of us.”

One contracts consciousness. The other expands it.

Bourgeault makes an important clarification in the transcript. The abler soul is not created through two weaknesses clinging to each other. It forms through a shared surrender into the “highest possibility” for both people. In conscious love, beloveds begin holding the image of each other’s sacred becoming.

That is why certain relationships feel so transformative.

The beloved sees something in you that you cannot fully see yourself.

Not your performance.
Not your defenses.
Not your carefully managed persona.

Something deeper.

And when someone sees you at that level, something in you begins trying to become worthy of what has been seen.

Mary Magdalene and the Love That Sees Clearly

This is why Bourgeault connects the abler soul so closely with Mary Magdalene and Jesus. She suggests that whatever the exact historical nature of their relationship, the tradition itself continues testifying to a unique intimacy between them. Not merely emotional intimacy, but the intimacy of mutual recognition. “The capacity to look at one another and see the real person.”

That line cuts deeper than modern romantic mythology.

Most relationships are built around projection. We fall in love with the role someone plays in our emotional ecosystem. We love how they stabilize us, validate us, mirror us, distract us, rescue us, or desire us. But conscious love moves differently. It is concerned not merely with emotional gratification, but with spiritual transfiguration.

This is why Mary Magdalene standing at the cross matters so much in Bourgeault’s interpretation. She is not portrayed as collapsing into hysteria or possessive panic. Something steadier is operating there. Something capable of remaining present in the fire of loss without abandoning love.

Staying Present When Love Hurts

And this becomes one of the central teachings of the entire transcript: the ability to stay present.

Again and again, Bourgeault returns to this theme. The spiritual task is not to avoid pain, but to remain conscious within it. To sit inside longing, grief, shame, yearning, fear, and heartbreak without immediately fleeing into reaction, distraction, or defense.

That staying power is what allows love to deepen beyond personality.

Most of us spend enormous energy trying to avoid the primordial ache at the center of human existence. We armor ourselves against vulnerability. We manage intimacy carefully. We turn relationships into negotiations of safety and control.

The Ache Beneath the Ache

But beneath all those strategies is what Bourgeault calls “the naked yearning.” The ache to know and be known. The longing that cannot be completely satisfied even by the deepest human intimacy because, as she says, “it’s yearning all the way down.”

That phrase changes the entire conversation.

The ache is not evidence that love has failed.

The ache belongs to the structure of reality itself.

Drawing from the Islamic mystical tradition, Bourgeault quotes the saying: “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known.” In this understanding, creation itself emerges from divine longing, from the movement toward self-disclosure through love. Human yearning is not separate from God’s yearning. It is participation in it.

And suddenly relationships become more than emotional arrangements.

They become places where eternity presses into time.

Love That Refuses to Die

This is why the abler soul transcends death.

One of the most radical sections of the transcript challenges modern grief culture directly. Bourgeault speaks about widows and widowers becoming “dual citizens,” bridging realms through love. She argues that deep love fashions “a castle of immortality” in which beloveds continue to meet even after physical death.

Modern psychology often treats ongoing connection with the dead as something to outgrow. Closure becomes the goal. Severance becomes the marker of health.

But the contemplative tradition sees another possibility.

If love participates in eternity, why would death erase it?

Bourgeault tells story after story of elderly people quietly admitting that their beloved continued visiting them inwardly for decades after death. Not as hallucination. Not as denial. But as continuity of love across realms.

The abler soul is “trans-realmic by nature,” she says.

That phrase alone deserves contemplation.

Because it means conscious love is not merely psychological.

It is ontological.

Something real is born between people when they love deeply enough. Something that belongs not merely to time, but also to eternity.

Presence as the Practice

And this has enormous implications for spiritual practice.

Bourgeault repeatedly insists that our task is not to force spiritual advancement, optimize ourselves, or climb some imaginary ladder toward God. We already begin from the center. We are already flowing from source. The real work is learning how to remain present.

Yielded.
Curious.
Available.

Not squandering the present moment trying to perfect a future one.

This is where conscious love becomes a path of awakening.

Not because relationships magically solve loneliness. Not because beloveds complete each other like sentimental mythology claims. But because conscious love teaches people how to remain open to reality without collapsing into fear.

The abler soul forms whenever two people become committed to that deeper field together.

It forms through honesty.
Through presence.
Through surrender.
Through learning to bear the ache without fleeing it.

The Hidden Life Between Two Souls

And perhaps this is why some relationships carry such unusual gravity.

They are no longer functioning only on the horizontal axis of personality, chemistry, and social roles. They have become windows into eternity itself.

Not perfect.
Not painless.
Not free from heartbreak.

But permeated by a deeper life.

A third presence breathing quietly between two souls.

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If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

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Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.

Attention Is Not Just Personal

This reflection grows out of the same stream as Real Will Isn’t Willpower: Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence, Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, read through Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence, with that stubborn little Sufi-Christian insistence that attention is not just a private spiritual trick we perform inside our skulls. Attention is energetic. Presence has weight. Being fully here does not merely change how we feel about a situation. It can change the situation itself. Which sounds a little mystical until you have been in a room where one grounded person walks in and suddenly the emotional furniture stops flying.

Most of us think presence is personal. I am present. I am calm. I am centered. I am having a spiritual moment while everyone else is out here acting like raccoons trapped in a church basement. But the deeper teaching is more unsettling and more beautiful than that. Presence is not a decorative inner mood. It is not the scented candle version of consciousness. It is a field.

And fields affect things.

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Every Room Has Weather

We already know this in ordinary life. Walk into a room where everyone is anxious, and your body knows it before your mind starts taking notes. The shoulders tighten. The breath rises. The room has a weather system. No one has to announce, “Welcome to today’s group panic spiral.” You just feel the psychic humidity and begin sweating through your soul.

The same thing happens in reverse. Someone deeply present enters, and the room begins to remember itself. Not because they dominate it. Not because they perform holiness. Not because they start using that calm therapist voice that makes you want to commit light vandalism. Something in them is simply not scattered. Their attention is gathered. Their being is not leaking into every passing irritation, preference, fear, and performance cue. They are here.

And here is contagious.

Presence Is Not Control

That is the hidden power in this teaching on voluntary attention. Attention is not merely the ability to stare really hard at one object like a monk trying to win a staring contest with a carrot. Attention, when joined to surrender, becomes a way of being available to reality without being eaten by it. You can be aware of what is happening outside you and aware of the one inside you who is seeing. You can hold both the river and the ships passing over it. That is the beginning of freedom.

It is also the beginning of a different kind of power.

Not power over people. God save us from one more spiritual person who discovers “energy” and immediately becomes a tiny cult leader with essential oils and boundary issues. This is not domination. This is not psychic control. This is not walking into Thanksgiving dinner and silently commanding Uncle Gary to stop explaining economics he learned from a meme. Though honestly, we understand the temptation.

This power is quieter than that. It is the power of non-reactive being. The power of not joining the room’s unconscious agreement to become frantic. The power of not feeding the fire just because everyone else is tossing in furniture and calling it authenticity.

The Airport Becomes a Chapel

One of the examples from the teaching is almost absurdly ordinary. A person is sitting in an airport, waiting for a flight. A pilot is on the phone. A couple of men are nearby. Nothing dramatic is happening. No choir descends from the ceiling. No stained glass appears in Terminal B. But suddenly there is stillness. A felt sense of connection. The person sitting there experiences that the stillness is not merely inside them. It is between them. It is being sustained in the room, or the waiting area, or whatever sacred architectural wonder airport designers created after apparently losing a bet with fluorescent lighting.

That is presence changing the room.

And notice where it happens. Not in a monastery. Not during an ordination. Not at the perfect retreat center where everyone is wearing linen and pretending they don’t judge the coffee. It happens in an airport. The modern temple of delay, irritation, boarding group hierarchy, and overpriced sandwiches. If presence can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

Sacred Space Is Made by Being

This matters because most people are still carrying around a childish idea of sacred space. We think sacred space is something already prepared for us. A chapel. A shrine. A retreat center. A candlelit room. A place with cushions and a person named River who tells you where to put your shoes. And yes, spaces can be prepared. Beauty helps. Silence helps. Ritual helps. But sacred space is not finally created by objects. It is created by quality of being.

The room becomes sacred when someone is actually there.

The Toilet Brush as Spiritual Director

This is why the priest cleaning toilets matters so much.

In the teaching, there is an example of an Anglican priest cleaning toilets at Glen Airley and coming out radiant. Not because toilets are glamorous. Let us not spiritually gaslight the plumbing. Cleaning toilets is cleaning toilets. It is not secretly a luxury spa treatment for the soul. But she discovered something that most of us miss because we are too busy dragging our precious identity behind us like a designer suitcase full of grievances. She realized this task did not demean her priesthood. It gave her a place to put her attention completely in the present.

That is the whole sermon right there.

The ego says, “This is beneath me.” Presence says, “This is what is here.”

The ego says, “I should be doing something more important.” Presence says, “Importance is often just vanity wearing a nicer jacket.”

The ego says, “I am a priest, a teacher, a writer, a professional, a person with a LinkedIn profile and carefully curated suffering.” Presence says, “Yes, beloved, and the toilet is still dirty.”

There is something wonderfully humiliating about real spiritual practice. It keeps refusing to respect the hierarchy our ego built to protect itself. We want our transformation to happen through meaningful conversations, powerful visions, perfect liturgy, deep books, and maybe a dramatic tear rolling down one cheek while Rumi is quoted responsibly for once. But then the path hands us a toilet brush.

Not as punishment. As mercy.

Because the toilet brush reveals the truth. Can you be here when no one is impressed? Can you give yourself fully to the task that does not flatter your identity? Can you bring attention to the thing your personality would rather outsource to someone less spiritually significant?

This is where sacred space begins. Not with incense. With undivided attention.

One Present Person Gives the Room Another Option

And this is also where group dynamics begin to shift. A group is not just a collection of opinions. A group is an energetic system. If one person is frantic, that franticness recruits others. If one person is offended, the room starts looking for teams. If one person is performing intelligence, suddenly half the room is tightening its vocabulary and pretending to understand words it plans to Google later.

But if one person is present, genuinely present, not frozen, not detached in that dead-eyed “I have transcended you peasants” way, but alive, spacious, awake, something else becomes possible. The room has another option.

This is why sustained attention matters. A flash of presence is beautiful, but sustained attention becomes shelter. It gives the group a center of gravity that is not built from fear. It allows people to stop being yanked around by every like and dislike, every emotional gust, every little ego mosquito whining, “What about me? What about me? What about me?”

Stop Donating Your Unconsciousness to the Room

Presence does not erase conflict. It does not turn difficult people into forest animals who gather peacefully around your aura. Some people will remain committed to being difficult with the devotion of medieval monks copying manuscripts. But presence changes your participation in the conflict. You stop donating your unconsciousness to the group account.

That alone matters.

Scattered Attention Drains the Soul

The teaching makes a strong claim: when our attention is dissipated, part of us is already in the past or future, and that drains us. Anyone who has survived a day of meetings knows this in the bones. You are in one conversation while rehearsing the next one, resenting the previous one, silently editing the email you should have sent, and wondering whether the person across from you has always chewed that loudly or whether God is testing your commitment to compassion.

By the end of the day, you are exhausted, not because you did so much, but because you were divided through all of it.

Presence gathers the scattered pieces.

Presence Makes Action Cleaner

This does not mean you become slow, precious, or useless. Presence is not spiritual molasses. It is not whispering while the building burns. In fact, real presence often makes action cleaner and quicker because you are not dragging your entire psychological junk drawer into the moment. You see more. You react less. You respond from a deeper place.

A present person can act firmly without adding violence to the atmosphere. A present person can speak truth without needing the ego dessert of superiority. A present person can clean the toilet, sit in the airport, lead the meeting, hold the grief, walk into the tense room, and quietly refuse to feed the collective possession.

This is sacred work.

Not flashy. Not marketable. Hard to put on a conference banner. “Come learn how to stand still inside yourself while everyone else emotionally cannonballs into the kiddie pool.” Probably not selling out the arena. But it might save your soul. And on a good day, it might save the room.

The hidden power of being fully here is that reality recognizes itself through us. When we are scattered, the world becomes more scattered through us. When we are reactive, the world becomes more reactive through us. When we are present, even briefly, even clumsily, even while holding a toilet brush or waiting for a delayed flight next to a man loudly explaining speakerphone technology to the entire airport, something else enters the field.

A little more space.

A little more mercy.

A little more room for God to breathe.

The Practice Is Not to Make the Room Worse

And maybe that is enough for one day’s practice. Not to become impressive. Not to radiate saintly vibes like a spiritual space heater. Just to enter one ordinary room today and not make it worse. To bring one gathered breath. One unscattered glance. One moment of attention that is not for sale to every passing irritation.

May we become the kind of people whose presence gives the room permission to remember its own soul.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

Share the Scrolls

Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.

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Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.

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Tip with a coffee

A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥

Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

Psalms For The Unraveling

Psalm 22 is the scream before the resurrection. It begins with the most honest prayer in scripture: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is not tidy faith. This is the body panicking, the soul collapsing, the heart asking whether Love has left the building. But the psalm does not stay in despair. It moves through humiliation, exhaustion, memory, terror, and finally into praise. Not fake praise. Not praise that skips the wound. Praise that rises from the wound because something in us still knows the Holy is nearer than the silence suggests.

1
My God, my God
why does it feel like You left?

I cry out
and the sky gives me nothing

No answer
No comfort
No holy customer service representative
available at this time

2
I call by day
and still feel unheard

I call by night
and still cannot rest

3
And yet
somewhere deeper than panic
I remember

You are still Holy
even when my nervous system
cannot feel You

4
Our ancestors trusted You
They leaned into the dark
and were not swallowed

5
They cried
and something opened

They trusted
and were not ashamed

6
But I feel less than human
mocked by mouths
that have never had to survive me

7
They look at me and sneer

Let Love save him
if Love likes him so much

Bless their little theology of cruelty

8
They think suffering proves abandonment
as if pain is a receipt
for divine rejection

9
But You were there
before I had language

You held me
when I was only breath
and need

10
From the womb
I was thrown into Mystery

Before I knew Your name
I was already inside You

11
Do not be far from me now
Trouble is close
and my strength is not

12
The bulls surround me
all muscle
all threat
all appetite

13
They open their mouths
like lions
as if my fear
is their feast

14
I am poured out like water

My bones feel scattered
My heart melts
like wax in the heat
of too much

15
My mouth is dry
My tongue sticks
to the roof of my grief

I feel lowered
into dust

16
The pack circles

Hands and feet wounded
body exposed
dignity stripped

17
I can count my bones
and they stare
like suffering is a show

18
They divide what is left of me
They gamble over my coverings
as if humiliation
were just another game

19
But You
O Love
do not stay distant

Come close
Be my strength
before I forget
I have any

20
Deliver my life
from the blade

Save my only heart
from the teeth
of despair

21
Pull me from the lion’s mouth
from the horns of everything
that thinks fear gets the final word

22
Then I will speak Your name
among the broken

I will praise You
not above them
but beside them

23
You who ache
praise Love

You who tremble
honor the Presence
that trembles with you

24
For Love has not despised
the suffering one

Love did not turn away
from the afflicted

Love heard
even when the answer
took longer than the wound wanted

25
My praise rises
from the place
I thought would kill me

I will keep my vows
not because I am strong
but because I was carried

26
The poor shall eat
and be satisfied

The ones who seek Love
shall find their hearts
still beating

27
All the ends of the earth
will remember

Not convert
Not perform
Remember

28
For the kingdom belongs to Love
not empire
not ego
not the loudest men
with the biggest banners

29
The proud and the starving
the dust-bound and the powerful
all return
to the same Breath

30
A people yet unborn
will hear the story

They will be told
that Love was present
even there

31
They will come and say
to a generation not yet breathing

This was not the end

Love did not leave

And somehow
we lived

—Virgin Monk Boy
(who once thought forsakenness was proof God was gone
but now knows even the scream can become scripture)

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Acting From the Center Instead of the Script

This reflection grows out of Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence, read through Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence, and that whole stubborn Sufi insistence that attention is not just something the mind does when it behaves itself. Attention is the hinge between compulsion and freedom. It is the small inner faculty by which a human being begins to stop being dragged around by every impulse, wound, preference, fantasy, irritation, and shiny little emotional object waving from the side of the road.

That matters because most of us confuse will with force. We think we have strong will because we can push harder, clench tighter, work longer, argue louder, resist better, and keep performing our favorite identity even when it is clearly smoking from the engine. But in this tradition, real will is not the same thing as willpower. Willpower can still belong entirely to the ego. Real will begins when attention becomes free enough to choose from the center instead of reacting from the script.

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The Script Wearing Your Face

Every person has a script. Some of it came from family. Some came from religion. Some came from culture, trauma, school, shame, praise, disappointment, survival, and that one adult who probably should not have been allowed within twenty feet of a developing nervous system.

The script tells us what kind of person we are supposed to be. The responsible one. The rebel. The fixer. The helper. The impressive one. The victim. The genius nobody understands. The spiritual person who is very detached except when someone loads the dishwasher incorrectly, at which point the entire monastery becomes unsafe.

The problem is not that these scripts exist. The problem is that we mistake them for ourselves.

A script can be useful. A personality can help us function in the world. Somebody has to answer the email, pay the electric bill, make dinner, and act like a grown-up at the DMV even when the soul is quietly composing a lamentation. The ego has its place. The personality has its place. The script can even get us through some very difficult rooms.

But the script is not the center.

When the script is running the show, life becomes reactive. We are no longer responding to what is actually happening. We are responding to what the moment resembles. Someone says something with a certain tone, and suddenly we are not in the present conversation. We are twelve years old again, or twenty-five, or back in some argument from 2014 where we finally know what we should have said.

Bless the little time-traveling ego. It has never met a present moment it could not contaminate with archival footage.

Willfulness Loves a Costume

Willfulness is sneaky because it often dresses itself as strength. It says, “I know what I want.” It says, “I am standing my ground.” It says, “This is just who I am.” Sometimes it even says, “God told me,” which is usually the moment everyone should hide the matches.

Willfulness is the ego’s attempt to control reality from the outside. It tries to force an outcome, defend an identity, protect an old wound, or impose an inner preference on the situation in front of it. It may look disciplined. It may look passionate. It may look morally serious. But underneath, it is usually tied to like and dislike, praise and blame, approval and disapproval.

That is the giveaway.

If something in us is being yanked around by whether we are admired, agreed with, validated, obeyed, understood, liked, respected, feared, or proven right, then we are probably not operating from real will. We are operating from the script, even if the script has a spiritual vocabulary and owns linen.

This is why Helminski’s teaching on attention gets so uncomfortable. He does not let us pretend that every strong inner movement is freedom. Much of what we call choice is simply compulsion with a better publicist.

The ego says, “I chose this.”

The deeper work asks, “Did you choose it, or did your conditioning choose it before you even arrived?”

Rude question. Necessary question.

Real Will Begins With Seeing

Real will does not begin by forcing ourselves to be better. It begins by seeing more clearly.

That is less glamorous than the ego prefers. The ego would like transformation to involve thunder, initiation, a robe, maybe a raven, possibly a secret name whispered by a suspiciously attractive desert elder. But the work usually begins in a much smaller place.

You notice the impulse.

That is it.

You notice the urge to interrupt. You notice the need to win. You notice the collapse when someone criticizes you. You notice the inflation when someone praises you. You notice the body tightening before the mind has built its case. You notice the familiar inner lawyer rolling up with exhibits, expert witnesses, and a PowerPoint titled “Why I Am Absolutely Correct and Everyone Else Needs Inner Work.”

That noticing is not nothing. It is the first movement of freedom.

Because until you notice the impulse, you are the impulse. Until you notice the script, you are inside the script. Until you see the machinery, you keep calling the machinery “me.”

Voluntary attention is the act of turning toward what is happening without immediately being swallowed by it. It allows something in us to stand half an inch back from the reaction. Not above it in some superior spiritual balcony. Just slightly free of it.

That half inch is where real will is born.

The Pause Is Not Passive

There is a moment between being triggered and obeying the trigger. It may be very small. At first, it may be so small that you only notice it three hours later while eating crackers over the sink and replaying the entire incident with the emotional restraint of a cable news panel.

Still counts.

Eventually, with practice, you begin to catch it sooner. Maybe twenty minutes later. Then five minutes later. Then in the middle of the reaction. Then, once in a while, right at the edge, before the old thing takes the wheel.

That pause is not passivity. It is not weakness. It is not becoming a spiritual doormat with a scented candle. It is the gathering of attention before action.

Sometimes the centered response is silence. Sometimes it is a clear no. Sometimes it is leaving the room. Sometimes it is speaking with more force than the personality would have dared, but without the inner violence that usually comes along for the ride.

Presence does not make us limp. It makes us less hijackable.

Jesus flipping tables is not the same thing as someone having a tantrum because the church coffee was weak. Force can come from clarity. Anger can also come from egoic possession. The outer shape may look similar for a second, but the inner source is completely different.

One acts from the center.

The other acts from the wound and then asks theology to notarize it.

Willpower Tries to Win. Real Will Tries to Serve.

Willpower is often concerned with victory. It wants to overcome the obstacle, conquer the desire, defeat the weakness, master the habit, dominate the room, and prove the self. There can be usefulness in that at a certain level. Sometimes we do need effort. Sometimes we do need discipline. Sometimes the laundry does not care about our mystical process and would simply like to be moved from the washer before it becomes a swamp relic.

But real will serves something deeper than self-conquest.

Real will asks, “What is needed here?”

Not, “What do I prefer?”

Not, “What protects my image?”

Not, “What lets me keep telling the same story about myself?”

What is needed here?

That question changes the inner atmosphere. It moves us from reaction to participation. It places us under something larger than the ego’s immediate weather system. The center does not ask how to preserve the script. It asks how to align with reality.

And reality is often deeply annoying.

Reality may ask us to apologize when the ego had a whole courtroom drama prepared. Reality may ask us to speak when the script prefers hiding. Reality may ask us to rest when willpower wants another medal for self-abandonment. Reality may ask us to stop helping because our “help” has become control wearing a cardigan.

Real will has a flexibility that willfulness does not have. It can move. It can wait. It can act. It can yield. It can say yes without grasping and no without hatred.

The script cannot do that. The script only knows its lines.

Freedom Is Not Doing Whatever You Want

Modern culture has trained us to think freedom means unlimited preference. Choose your brand. Choose your identity. Choose your aesthetic. Choose your outrage package. Customize the cage until it looks like self-expression.

But the inner traditions are deeply suspicious of this kind of freedom. They know that most of what we call “what I want” is just conditioning with a microphone.

The person who cannot resist an impulse is not free. The person who must respond to every insult is not free. The person who needs constant approval is not free. The person who has to be seen as good, wise, correct, edgy, spiritual, persecuted, enlightened, or right on schedule with their healing journey is not free.

Freedom begins when attention is no longer automatically captured by attraction and aversion.

This does not mean preferences disappear. You can still prefer coffee over tea, silence over noise, good bread over whatever that communion wafer situation is trying to be. The point is not to become blank. The point is to stop letting preference rule the soul.

You may dislike the task and still give yourself to it.

You may feel irritation and still not become irritation.

You may want to flee and still remain present.

That is not repression. That is the beginning of inner strength.

The Center Is Quieter Than the Script

The script is usually dramatic. It explains itself constantly. It has reasons, grievances, slogans, costumes, and a full emotional soundtrack.

The center is quieter.

It does not need to announce itself as much because it is not trying to become real through performance. It is already rooted somewhere deeper than approval or defense. When we act from the center, there is often a sense of right proportion. The action may be small or large, gentle or fierce, but it does not have the same frantic taste.

That taste matters.

This is one of the practical gifts of inner work. Over time, we begin to recognize the flavor of our own states. We know what it tastes like to be reactive. We know what it tastes like to be hooked. We know what it tastes like when the ego is pretending to be discernment but is really just wearing judge robes over a panic attack.

And we begin to know, even if only for brief moments, what it tastes like to be present.

More spacious. More grounded. Less sticky. Less performative. Less desperate to secure the self through the next sentence.

This is not perfection. This is orientation.

The center becomes easier to find because we have visited it before.

The Practice Is Right Here

The training ground for real will is not somewhere else. It is not waiting for retreat conditions, better candles, more silence, or a personality transplant.

It is in the next ordinary moment.

When the phone buzzes, pause before reaching.

When irritation rises, feel it before speaking.

When praise lands, notice the little inflation balloon.

When criticism lands, notice the collapse, the defense, the counterattack forming in the basement.

When you are halfway through brushing your teeth and realize you have mentally left the room to rehearse a speech no one asked for, come back.

Not with violence. Not with shame. Not with the spiritual hall monitor blowing a whistle.

Just return.

Every return strengthens the faculty that can choose. Every return weakens the automatic script. Every return gives real will a little more room to breathe.

And eventually, something in us starts to understand that freedom is not a mood. It is not a personality trait. It is not the ability to force life into submission.

Freedom is the capacity to remain inwardly available enough to respond from the center.

Blessed be the pause that interrupts the old performance.

Blessed be the breath before the reaction.

Blessed be the moment when the ego reaches for the steering wheel and something deeper says, “Not this time, little chaos goblin.”

And blessed be real will, quiet and steady, rising from the center, teaching us that we were never meant to live as puppets of our own conditioning.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

The Word That Makes the Empire Twitch

The word submission has become one of those words Christian Nationalists only understand when they are accusing someone else of it. Say the word near them and suddenly the room fills with panic about Islam, Sharia, foreign control, and the end of Western civilization as foretold by a man recording from his truck. But the reaction is revealing, because what they fear in Islam is often the very thing their own tradition has been quietly begging them to recover.

Submission is not kneeling. That is the cheap cartoon version. Submission is not groveling before a tyrant, obeying some cleric without conscience, or becoming less human so another man can become more powerful. Real spiritual submission is the surrender of the false self. It is the ego stepping down from a throne it never had the right to occupy. It is the soul admitting that God is not a brand, not a party mascot, not a national symbol, and not a projection screen for our fears.

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The Ego Does Not Want to Be Saved. It Wants a Flag.

That is the theological wound underneath all of this. Christian Nationalism cannot talk about submission because it has replaced surrender with dominance. It does not want the self to yield to God. It wants culture, law, schools, libraries, women, immigrants, Muslims, queer people, teachers, and apparently zoning boards to yield to its version of God. Very convenient, of course. The god of Christian Nationalism never asks the ego to die. He mostly asks everyone else to behave.

Islam becomes a useful contrast here, not because Muslims are magically free from hypocrisy or because Islamic societies have always lived up to their highest ideals. Humans can ruin anything. Give us revelation and within twenty minutes we will have formed a committee, invented a purity test, and started arguing about parking. The point is not perfection. The point is that Islam kept surrender right in the center of its religious imagination. The word itself carries the meaning of submission, surrender, and peace through yielding to God.

That does not make Islam an “ad.” It makes it an uncomfortable mirror.

The Discipline Christian Nationalism Forgot

The daily rhythm of Islamic prayer says something without needing a press conference. The day is interrupted. The body is washed. The appetite is disciplined. The ego is reminded that it is not the sun around which all things orbit. The point is not the physical act by itself. The point is the training of the whole person toward remembrance. The body, the schedule, the mind, and the heart are all told, again and again, “You are not ultimate.”

That is precisely the spiritual muscle Christian Nationalism has lost.

Christian Nationalism talks endlessly about God, but very little about surrendering to God. It talks about defending Christianity, protecting Christianity, restoring Christianity, saving Christianity, legislating Christianity, and making sure Christianity gets the good microphone at public meetings. But the actual inner work of Christianity, the part where the ego is crucified rather than politically empowered, tends to disappear like a Bible verse at a donor luncheon.

Jesus Did Not Teach Domination

Jesus did not teach domination. He did not tell his followers to seize the machinery of the state so they could make the out-group nervous. He did not build a movement around grievance, suspicion, cultural ownership, and the sacred right to be offended by everyone else’s existence. The Jesus of the Gospels teaches surrender so radically that modern Christian Nationalism has to practically look away from him to keep the brand alive.

In Gethsemane, Jesus does not say, “Not their will, but my movement be done.” He says, “Not my will, but yours.” That is not weakness. That is the spiritual center of the Christian path. The human will opens itself to the divine will. The false self stops clutching. The soul consents to God even when the ego is terrified. That is surrender. That is submission in the deepest sense.

Christian theology even has the language for this. Kenosis means self-emptying. Christ empties himself. He does not inflate himself into a mascot for empire. He does not confuse spiritual authority with social control. He does not teach his disciples that victory means making the world afraid of them. He reveals power through self-offering, through mercy, through love that does not need to dominate in order to be real.

The Mirror They Keep Calling a Threat

And this is where the contrast becomes almost painfully obvious. Islam kept the language of surrender. Jesus lived the posture of surrender. Christian Nationalism replaced surrender with control and then called the result faith.

That is why the panic over Islam often feels so performative. They are not simply reacting to another religion. They are reacting to a visible reminder of something their own tradition once knew. A Muslim stopping to pray is not just “religion in public.” It is a reminder that devotion can structure a life. It is a reminder that prayer can be embodied, disciplined, daily, and inconvenient. It is a reminder that God is not something you invoke only when you want political power. God is the One before whom the self is reordered.

Christian Nationalism cannot bear that kind of reminder because its own prayer life has often been reduced to territorial performance. Prayer becomes less about being changed and more about making a claim. Flags enter sanctuaries. Guns become icons. Public prayer becomes a dominance ritual. The cross, once a symbol of self-emptying love, gets turned into a campaign prop for people who seem personally offended by the Beatitudes.

When the Cross Becomes a Campaign Prop

The whole thing becomes absurd. A movement built around the crucified Christ now acts like the highest form of faith is never being asked to surrender anything. Not comfort. Not prejudice. Not privilege. Not the fantasy that America is the new Israel and suburban grievance is the voice of prophecy. The ego remains untouched, well-fed, well-armed, and absolutely convinced it is being persecuted because someone else got permission to exist nearby.

The saints did not live like this. The martyrs did not die for this. Mary did not say, “Let it be unto me, as long as my religious tribe controls the school board.” Jesus did not say, “Take up your cross, unless you can turn it into a voting bloc.” The early Christian path was not built around cultural domination. It was built around transformation. It asked people to surrender vengeance, surrender status, surrender the need to be first, surrender the illusion that holiness looks like power over others.

The Forbidden Word

That is the part Christian Nationalism cannot say out loud. If surrender is central to Jesus, then domination is not faithfulness. If self-emptying is central to Christ, then the politics of control are not Christian courage. If the ego must die, then maybe the whole project of Christian Nationalism is not defending Christianity at all. Maybe it is protecting the ego from the gospel.

And that is why submission is the forbidden word.

Not because it belongs only to Islam.

Not because Christians do not have their own language for it.

But because the moment you say it honestly, the whole performance begins to crack.

Jesus taught surrender. Islam preserved a visible discipline of surrender. Christian Nationalism replaced surrender with flags, firearms, suspicion, and control.

Then it looked at the world and called everyone else dangerous.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

Share the Scrolls

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Recommended Reading

(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. These recommendations support the scrolls at no extra cost to you.)

• Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self A clear articulation of presence as lived remembrance, not abstraction. Essential for understanding how practice forms consciousness before belief catches up.

• The Knowing Heart Explores how the heart, not the ego, is trained through disciplined spiritual practice. Resonates deeply with embodied traditions.

• Purification of the Heart A classical Islamic manual on disciplining the ego, translated into accessible language without modern spectacle.

• The Vision of Islam A non-polemical presentation of Islam’s intellectual, ethical, and spiritual architecture. Especially useful for understanding why Islam resists fragmentation.

• The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup - A Magdalene-centered vision of spiritual authority rooted in presence, fidelity, and interior transformation rather than hierarchy.

• The Meaning of Mary Magdalene by Cynthia Bourgeault - Frames Mary Magdalene as a witness of embodied wisdom rather than doctrinal control, aligning naturally with the WWMS lens.

Share the image below with your favorite Christian Nationalist and watch their head explode

This reflection is inspired by the metaphysical stream flowing through René Guénon, deepened by Frithjof Schuon, and embodied in the writings of Martin Lings. Within that lineage, religion is not primarily about belief or moral structure, but about realization — the stripping away of illusion until only the Real remains.

Through the Sufi lens of ma‘rifa, Mary Magdalene does not stand at the tomb as someone trying to arrive at faith. She stands there as someone for whom belief has already burned away. What remains is recognition.

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The Problem With Belief (That Nobody Wants to Admit)

Belief is what you reach for when you can’t see.

That’s not an insult. It’s just how it works.

Belief stitches together fragments. It builds a bridge across a gap. It says, “This must be true,” because something in you senses it, but you’re still standing at a distance from it.

The problem is not belief itself. The problem is when belief gets promoted to the finish line.

Because belief can stabilize you… while still keeping you separate from what you claim is true.

That’s the quiet tension most people never name.

Ma‘rifa Doesn’t Bridge Distance. It Ends It.

In Sufi language, ma‘rifa is not stronger belief. It’s not “extra convinced.”

It’s what happens when the gap disappears.

Not because you solved it.
Not because you proved it.
Because the separation that required belief in the first place is no longer operating the same way.

You don’t stand over here trying to figure out something over there.

You’re in it.

That kind of knowing doesn’t feel like certainty you defend. It feels like something that doesn’t need defending.

The Tomb Is Where Belief Breaks Down

Everyone else shows up and immediately does what we all do.

They start trying to make sense of it.

Where is the body?
What happened?
How do we explain this?

Nothing wrong with that. It’s just the mind doing its job.

Magdalene doesn’t rush into that.

She stays in the place where the story has already collapsed.

And that’s not weakness. That’s the beginning of something far more dangerous.

Because if you don’t rush to explain… you leave space for something else to show up.

She Stayed When the Narrative Failed

The tomb is empty. The form is gone. The one she loves is not where he is supposed to be.

This is the moment most people abandon presence and run back to interpretation.

She doesn’t.

She remains in the absence without trying to fill it.

That is not confusion. That is discipline of a very different kind.

Most people call it grief.

Mystics recognize it as the doorway.

“Mary” — And the Whole Game Ends

When he speaks her name, there is no internal debate.

No “wait… could this be?”
No theological processing.
No need to line this up with what she was taught.

She recognizes.

Instantly.

Because recognition does not arrive at conclusions. It reveals what is already known at a deeper level than thought.

If this were belief, she would hesitate.

She doesn’t hesitate.

She turns.

And in that turning, the entire distance collapses.

Love Did This Long Before the Tomb

This is the part people skip.

They treat that moment like it came out of nowhere.

It didn’t.

Recognition like that doesn’t happen because you got lucky at the right moment. It happens because something in you has already been reshaped.

Magdalene didn’t just love him. She learned how to be present without needing to control, define, or secure what she loved.

That changes perception.

While others were learning teachings, she was losing herself in presence.

By the time the form disappears… she’s not depending on the form anymore.

That’s why she can see.

Why the Others Needed Belief

The others aren’t fools. They’re just still operating in a different mode.

They need:
structure
confirmation
something they can hold onto

Because their way of knowing still depends on form staying intact.

Magdalene has already been stripped of that.

That’s the difference.

Not intelligence. Not devotion.

Depth of surrender.

Recognition Comes Through Loss, Not Accumulation

You don’t arrive at ma‘rifa by stacking better ideas.

You arrive there when the ideas stop working.

When the explanations collapse.
When the identity you built around knowing starts to crack.
When you can’t stabilize yourself through belief anymore.

That’s not failure.

That’s the beginning of real knowing.

Magdalene doesn’t leave that space.

And because she stays, something else becomes visible.

Why This Makes Institutions Nervous

Belief can be organized.

You can build systems around it. Teach it. Protect it. Enforce it.

Recognition?

That doesn’t ask permission.

You can’t hand it to someone. You can’t standardize it. You can’t fully control what it produces in a person.

Once someone recognizes, they don’t need you to tell them what’s real.

That’s where things get uncomfortable.

Magdalene Wasn’t Guessing

This wasn’t a hopeful moment.

She wasn’t saying, “I think this might be him.”

She knew.

The same way you know a voice you’ve heard a thousand times. The same way you know presence when it fills the room.

That’s not belief trying to be strong.

That’s recognition doing what it does.

What This Actually Asks of You

If this is about belief, the question is easy:

Do you accept it?

If this is about recognition, the question is much harder:

What in you is still clinging to distance?

What in you needs explanation to feel safe?

What in you is still trying to manage reality instead of being undone by it?

Because recognition doesn’t come to reinforce you.

It comes when you’re no longer holding yourself together the same way.

What Remains When the Gap Is Gone

Mary Magdalene does not stand at the tomb as the first believer.

She stands there as the first to recognize what cannot be reduced to belief.

She doesn’t carry a doctrine out of that moment.

She carries a knowing that doesn’t need one.

And once you’ve tasted that kind of knowing, belief doesn’t disappear…

It just quietly steps out of the way.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

Share the Scrolls

Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.

Share

Become a Supporting Member

Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.

Get 20% Off Forever!

Tip with a coffee

A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥

Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.

This reflection is inspired by the metaphysical stream flowing through René Guénon, deepened by Frithjof Schuon, and embodied in the writings of Martin Lings. Within that lineage, religion is not primarily about belief or moral structure, but about realization — the stripping away of illusion until only the Real remains. Through that lens, Mary Magdalene is not merely a devoted follower at the edge of the story, but a figure who stands at the threshold where the self dissolves and recognition begins.

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The One Who Didn’t Leave

Everyone else had a reason.

Fear. Confusion. Survival.

Peter had theology to protect.
The others had futures to consider.

Mary Magdalene had none of that left.

She stayed.

Not because she was brave.
Not because she understood.

She stayed because something in her had already died.

Fana: The Disappearance of the Self

In Sufi language, there is a word for this:

fana
The annihilation of the self in the presence of the Divine.

Not moral improvement.
Not becoming a better version of yourself.

The end of the one who needs to survive.

The Sufis say:

“Die before you die.”

Mary Magdalene did not wait for the tomb to learn this.

She entered it at the cross.

Love That Refuses to Collapse

Most people think love fails when it loses its object.

The beloved dies.
The relationship ends.
The presence disappears.

So the mind says:
“Withdraw. Protect. Survive.”

But Magdalene doesn’t do that.

She doesn’t numb the love.
She doesn’t redirect it.
She doesn’t turn it into memory.

She lets it burn.

This is the same movement described in the mystical tradition of The Cloud of Unknowing, where the seeker is told to “hang up” their longing in the unknown rather than resolve it through thought or emotion.

She hangs her love in the dark.

No answers.
No closure.
No guarantee it means anything.

Just fire.

And that fire does something terrifying.

It begins to consume the one who is loving.

The Alchemy of Love

What you shared from the transcript hits this directly:

Love has a trajectory.
It begins as desire… and transforms itself.

Not by suppressing desire.
But by passing through it completely.

The tradition says:
Eros becomes agape
Not by removal
But by transfiguration

The Sufis would say:
The lover disappears
Only the Beloved remains

Same movement. Different language.

Magdalene at the Cross: Fana in Real Time

Look at the scene again.

She is not:

• trying to understand

• trying to fix

• trying to preserve identity

She is standing in the collapse of everything that made her “herself.”

No teacher
No future
No role
No certainty

And she does not step back.

This is fana.

Not in a cave.
Not in meditation.

In public.
In grief.
In full exposure.

Why She Recognizes Him

Now the resurrection scene makes sense.

Everyone else is confused.

They debate.
They analyze.
They question.

Mary sees.

Why?

Because there is no longer a “self” in her filtering reality.

The one who needed proof is gone.
The one who needed certainty is gone.

What remains is pure recognition.

In Sufi terms:
When the self is annihilated
Only the Real can be seen

Or more bluntly:

You don’t recognize the Divine
until there’s no one left to misinterpret it

The Church Missed This

The institutional version of Christianity leaned hard into:

• sin

• debt

• repayment

• fear

But the mystics kept whispering something else:

This is about love completing itself

Even in the text you shared, Magdalene becomes the signal:

When she is present
everything softens toward love

When she is absent
everything hardens toward judgment

That’s not an accident.

That’s a diagnostic.

The Dangerous Truth

Here’s where this stops being theology and starts becoming practice:

Most people don’t want resurrection.

They want relief.

They want the pain to stop
without the self dissolving

But the path Magdalene walked doesn’t offer that deal.

Love will take everything.

Identity
Certainty
Control
Narrative

And it will not apologize.

The Woman Who Stayed

Magdalene is not just the one who loved.

She is the one who did not interrupt the trajectory of love.

She did not:

• retreat into memory

• collapse into despair

• rebuild a safer version of herself

She let love finish what it started.

And what it started was the end of her.

And What Remains?

Not emptiness.

Not loss.

Something far more unsettling:

A presence that no longer belongs to a separate self.

The Sufis call it baqa
Abiding in God after annihilation

The Gospel of Mary hints at it
The resurrection reveals it

Magdalene doesn’t “recover.”

She continues.

But now…

There is no longer a “her” in the way we think.

Final Word

Peter built a church.

Mary recognized God while everyone else was still explaining what happened.

One preserved the structure.

The other passed through the fire.

Blessed are those who do not rush to understand.
Blessed are those who let love take them past themselves.
Blessed are those who stay.

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This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In that series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is restored to her rightful place at the foot of the cross, the meaning of crucifixion shifts decisively. What had long been framed as cosmic bookkeeping starts to look more like love refusing to abandon itself, even when it costs everything.

And once you see that, the question people keep nervously whispering about Jesus and Mary Magdalene stops sounding outrageous.

It starts sounding like the wrong question asked in the wrong language.

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Why This Question Keeps Coming Back

Let’s be honest.

If the Church had done a clean job explaining Mary Magdalene, nobody would still be arguing about her.

But here we are. Centuries later. Still circling.

Not because people are obsessed with scandal, but because something doesn’t add up. You don’t get that kind of gravitational pull around a character who was just a footnote. You don’t get that kind of presence from someone who was merely “forgiven and sent on her way.”

She shows up too often. Too close. Too steady.

And instead of asking why, the tradition mostly tried to manage the discomfort. Rebrand her. Soften her. Reduce her to something explainable.

Because the alternative was admitting they were looking at a form of intimacy they didn’t have a category for.

Conscious Love Isn’t What You Think

The problem starts with the word love.

We’ve turned it into either romance or politeness. Either chemistry or charity. Either “I want you” or “I’ll be nice to you.”

Conscious love is neither of those.

It’s not needy. It’s not transactional. And it’s definitely not tame.

It’s voluntary. Fiercely voluntary. The kind of love that chooses to step into another person’s reality without being forced, without being owed, without needing a return. The kind of love that can carry weight simply because it refuses to walk away.

That’s not romance.

That’s fire with awareness.

And once you start looking through that lens, the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene stops looking like a rumor and starts looking like a revelation people didn’t know how to name.

The Real Intimacy: Being Seen Without Flinching

Here’s the part nobody says out loud.

The deepest form of intimacy is not touch.

It’s being seen without someone trying to fix you, manage you, or quietly downgrade you in their mind.

Mary Magdalene is remembered as someone who “loved much.” Not someone who behaved perfectly. Not someone who checked all the religious boxes. Someone who had range. Depth. History.

And somehow, in the presence of Jesus, that didn’t disqualify her.

It clarified her.

That kind of seeing doesn’t shrink a person. It ignites them. It calls something forward that was already there, waiting for permission to exist.

That’s intimacy.

Not ownership. Not control. Not even emotional closeness in the way we usually think about it.

Recognition.

Where Religion Panics

This is usually where things start to get uncomfortable.

Because once love stops being manageable, institutions get nervous.

It’s much easier to divide love into categories. Sacred vs human. Pure vs impure. Acceptable vs dangerous. Keep everything in its proper box so nobody gets confused.

But the mystics have always said the same thing.

That division is the confusion.

Love doesn’t split itself into neat theological compartments. It starts in desire, in longing, in raw human ache, and then… if you don’t choke it off… it transforms. Not by rejecting what it started as, but by passing through it.

That’s the trajectory.

And Mary Magdalene becomes the walking contradiction to every system that tries to sanitize that process.

The Third Thing Nobody Talks About

There’s an older idea that barely survived into modern conversation.

That when two people love in this deeper way, something else forms.

Not just a bond. Not just connection.

A third presence.

Call it an “abler soul.” A shared field. A living current between them that neither person controls but both participate in.

Not codependency. Not merging into a blur.

Something cleaner than that. Stronger than that.

A space where love itself becomes the center, instead of either individual trying to be the center.

Now read the Gospels again.

Not like a detective. Like someone paying attention.

And ask yourself if that’s what you’re seeing.

The Cross Changes Everything

Most people read the crucifixion as a tragedy to be mourned or a transaction to be explained.

Mary Magdalene doesn’t.

She stays.

Not because she’s overwhelmed. Not because she’s clinging. Not because she has nowhere else to go.

She stays because she can.

Because this kind of love doesn’t collapse under pressure. It doesn’t need the situation to improve in order to remain present.

That’s the part that gets missed.

Anyone can love when things are working.

Conscious love remains when everything falls apart and refuses to turn it into a personal crisis.

Standing at the cross is not emotional breakdown.

It’s spiritual capacity.

So What Does This Demand From Us?

This is where it stops being interesting and starts being inconvenient.

Because this kind of love isn’t something you admire from a safe distance.

It dismantles you.

It asks you to drop the performance.
It asks you to stop negotiating every interaction for safety and control.
It asks you to remain present when leaving would be easier and more socially acceptable.

And worst of all, it asks you to let love change form inside your own life instead of freezing it at the stage where it feels comfortable.

Most people don’t want that.

They want love that feels good. Predictable. Contained.

Mary Magdalene stands as the opposite of that.

Not as a scandal. Not as a symbol to argue about.

As proof.

That love can start in the human, pass through the fire, and come out the other side as something the mind can’t categorize but the heart immediately recognizes.

And that’s the part the Church couldn’t explain.

Not because it wasn’t there.

But because it can’t be explained without asking people to actually live it.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

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A Muslim community in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma spent years raising money, bought land, and followed the process to build a mosque and a small retail center.

City staff reviewed it. Approved.
Planning commission reviewed it. Approved.

Then the public showed up like it was opening night for FearFest 2026.

Over 1,000 people packed a four-hour meeting. The result? Denied, 4–1.

Because nothing says “efficient local government” like ignoring your own experts after a crowd watches three Facebook videos and feels something.

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When Zoning Turned Into a Netflix Thriller

At first, we had the classics. Traffic. Water flow. Business access.

Then the plot twist hit.

Suddenly, the mosque was going to:

• Harbor terrorists

• Launch an “incursion of Islam”

• Violate noise ordinances with calls to prayer

• Lower property values

• And, my personal favorite, lead to beheadings

Ah yes. The slippery slope.

First it’s a parking lot… next thing you know, medieval execution scenes in suburban Oklahoma.

Totally linear progression. Happens all the time.

“Islam Doesn’t Play Well With Others”

One gentleman offered this gem:

“Islam doesn’t play well with others… I oppose a mosque anywhere in America.”

Strong take.

Even stronger considering he delivered it at a meeting where 1,000 people gathered specifically to prevent their neighbors from building a place to worship.

That’s like setting a house on fire and yelling, “These people have no respect for property!”

Monk voice, now with raised eyebrow:

Projection. It’s not just a psychological defense. It’s a community activity.

This Is Definitely Not Islamophobia

Officials reassured everyone:

“This decision is not based on racism or Islamophobia.”

Of course not.

It’s based on:

• Widespread fear of terrorism

• Claims of cultural takeover

• Social media panic

• An investigation launched right on cue during political season

But Islamophobia? No no. That would be rude.

Virgin Monk Boy adjusts his invisible glasses:

“Blessed are those who smell smoke and insist the fire is just ‘concern.’”

Meanwhile, Back in Reality

Muslim residents showed up too.

Doctors. Business owners. Families.

One man shared his ancestor fought in the Revolutionary War. Others talked about contributing to their community and simply needing space to pray.

Which, last time I checked, is still allowed under that little document everyone keeps quoting when it’s convenient.

You know the one.

The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

If this were a church, this meeting would’ve been over before someone finished saying “potluck.”

But change one word to “mosque,” and suddenly:

• Everyone becomes a counterterrorism expert

• Zoning becomes national defense

• And prayer becomes a suspicious activity

It’s amazing how fast freedom gets rebranded when it has an accent.

Final Word from the Monastery (Now With Studio Audience Applause)

Fear doesn’t walk in and say, “Hello, I’m fear.”

It walks in wearing a blazer and says, “I just have some concerns.”

And then it votes.

Virgin Monk Boy closes the scroll:

“Blessed are those who defend religious liberty… right up until it belongs to someone else.”

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Recommended Reading

(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. These recommendations support the scrolls at no extra cost to you.)

• Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self A clear articulation of presence as lived remembrance, not abstraction. Essential for understanding how practice forms consciousness before belief catches up.

• The Knowing Heart Explores how the heart, not the ego, is trained through disciplined spiritual practice. Resonates deeply with embodied traditions.

• Purification of the Heart A classical Islamic manual on disciplining the ego, translated into accessible language without modern spectacle.

• The Vision of Islam A non-polemical presentation of Islam’s intellectual, ethical, and spiritual architecture. Especially useful for understanding why Islam resists fragmentation.

• The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup - A Magdalene-centered vision of spiritual authority rooted in presence, fidelity, and interior transformation rather than hierarchy.

• The Meaning of Mary Magdalene by Cynthia Bourgeault - Frames Mary Magdalene as a witness of embodied wisdom rather than doctrinal control, aligning naturally with the WWMS lens.

Share the image below with your favorite Christian Nationalist and watch their head explode

⚠️ FOREIGN SYSTEM DETECTED: “SHARIA LAW” ⚠️
Early reports indicate this system may impose the following dangerous conditions:

• Regular daily prayer (unverified claims of people voluntarily stopping to remember God)

• Fasting periods (citizens temporarily refusing snacks… deeply unsettling)

• Mandatory charity (wealth redistribution via… compassion??)

• Restraint around excess (authorities concerned this may impact influencer culture)

Analysts warn prolonged exposure could result in increased self-discipline, reduced ego inflation, and awareness of divine accountability.

We repeat: awareness of divine accountability.

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🛡️ DOMESTIC PROTECTION PROTOCOLS NOW ACTIVE 🛡️
To safeguard freedom, the following measures are being implemented under approved “Christian values”:

• Expanded surveillance of personal decisions (holiness requires oversight)

• Loyalty verification systems (belief must now be documented and auditable)

• Curriculum purification (books removed for containing empathy, nuance, or history)

• Legal enforcement of morality (grace has been successfully replaced with penalties)

• Increased interest in controlling other people’s bodies (for spiritual reasons, obviously)

Officials assure the public this is not authoritarianism.
It is “faith with teeth.”

🧾 COMPARATIVE THREAT ANALYSIS

System A:
Pray. Fast. Give. Restrain yourself. Remember God.

System B:
Report. Enforce. Ban. Control others. Remember who’s in charge.

🧘‍♂️ FIELD NOTE FROM A SLIGHTLY CONCERNED MONK

Curious phenomenon observed:

The system requiring you to discipline your own soul is labeled “tyranny.”
The system requiring you to discipline everyone else is labeled “freedom.”

Further study required. Preferably in silence.

📿 FINAL WARNING

If your version of religion gets louder the less it asks of you personally…
and stronger the more it controls others…

you may not be witnessing a revival.

You may be watching authoritarian cosplay in a Sunday outfit.

Stay alert.
Stay reflective.
And if possible… try praying without needing to regulate your neighbor.

📡 DISCLAIMER 📡

This has been a test.
A satirical test of the National Spiritual Emergency Broadcast System.

If your pulse quickened, your outrage flared, or you briefly felt the urge to fact-check a joke… the system is working.

No actual emergency was detected.
Only reflections, projections, and a mild case of selective panic.

Normal programming will now resume.
You may return to judging others… or, for advanced users, quietly examining yourself.

Thank you for your participation.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

Share the Scrolls

Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.

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This reflection grows out of the same stream as You Don’t Have to Like It to Pay Attention: Cynthia Bourgeault’s work with Practicing Living Presence, read through Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence, and that whole stubborn Sufi insistence that attention is not just a mental function but a spiritual hinge. One of the things that becomes painfully obvious once you begin trying to practice this in ordinary life is that most of us do not lose presence in grand moral crises. We lose it in the bathroom, in the grocery store, in the car, in the ten seconds between one task and the next. The soul does not usually leak out through some dramatic wound. It slips quietly out the back door while we are brushing our teeth and thinking about revenge.

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The Small Vanishings

What makes this hard to catch is that the disappearance is rarely dramatic. You are standing at the sink, doing the most unimpressive task in human history, and then suddenly you are no longer there. The hand is still moving. The toothbrush is still doing its little prison scrub. But inwardly you are in a courtroom, or an old conversation, or a fantasy where everyone finally understands your brilliance and regrets their previous stupidity. Attention has been hijacked, and because this happens all day long, the mind treats it as normal.

That is part of the problem. We think wandering is harmless because it is common. We think because everyone lives like a haunted Roomba, bumping from task to task while mentally elsewhere, that this must simply be what a human mind does. But the deeper traditions have always said no. This is not freedom. This is sleep with errands.

How Attention Gets Stolen

Helminski’s point is not merely that attention wanders. It is that attention gets captured by what attracts or repels us, and the ego then mistakes this reactivity for choice. That means the issue is not just distraction in the generic sense. The issue is that our attention is usually moved by appetite, irritation, fantasy, fear, vanity, and unfinished inner theater. Something in us is always ready to lunge.

You see this in embarrassingly ordinary places. You are running errands and somebody cuts you off in the parking lot. Now the body is in one place, but inwardly you are writing a thesis on the collapse of civilization. Or you are folding laundry and suddenly remembering an insult from three years ago with the emotional freshness of a live broadcast. Or you are brushing your teeth and by the fourth tooth you are no longer in the bathroom at all. You are in some imaginary future where you have finally explained yourself correctly.

The mind is a talented escape artist. Give it a sink and it will build a portal.

The Witness Does Not Scream

The good news is that the inner witness does not need to arrive as some heroic spiritual personality. It does not need robes. It does not need incense. It does not need a soundtrack that sounds like monks mating with synthesizers. It begins much more quietly than that.

It begins the moment you notice.

That is all.

Not fixing. Not scolding. Not launching a self-improvement campaign because you have once again failed to remain luminously present while buying toothpaste. Just noticing. “Ah. I’m gone.” That moment matters because the instant you see the wandering, you are no longer completely fused with it. Something in you has stepped half an inch back. That half inch is sacred territory.

Why Gentleness Matters

Most people ruin the practice right there by turning the witness into a hall monitor. They notice they are gone and immediately begin the familiar inner sermon. “Why am I like this? Why can’t I stay present? I should be better at this by now.” Which is just another form of leaving. Now you are no longer lost in fantasy or irritation. You are lost in self-judgment. Same building. Different room.

The witness is not a critic. It is a simple, steady seeing. It does not panic when attention slips. It does not make your wandering into evidence for the prosecution. It just notices, and then invites a return. Very gently. The whole movement is closer to turning your face back toward the moment than it is to beating yourself into compliance.

That matters because harshness is still ego. It still believes force is the answer. Presence usually grows better in honesty than in violence.

Ordinary Life Is the Training Ground

This is why the real practice does not happen only in formally spiritual moments. It happens while brushing your teeth, yes, but also while walking into the post office, waiting at a red light, listening to somebody tell a long story when your personality would strongly prefer to flee the country, and standing in line while every cell in your body demands stimulation.

These ordinary moments are not a distraction from the work. They are the work.

The kitchen is where you find out whether attention can stay put without being bribed. The grocery store is where you discover whether your peace depends on no one being annoying. The commute is where you learn whether your interior life belongs to presence or to grievance. The little vanishings of the day are not proof that you are failing. They are where the mechanism becomes visible.

And once it becomes visible, it can no longer run the whole monastery unchecked.

Catching Yourself in the Act

What starts to change over time is not that you never disappear. It is that you begin to catch the movement sooner. At first, you notice three minutes later that you have been lost in some fantasy argument while loading the dishwasher. Then maybe thirty seconds later. Then in the middle of the spiral itself. Then, once in a while, right at the moment attention starts to slip toward the back door.

That is not a small thing. That is the strengthening of inner life.

Because the point is not to create some rigid state where you never drift, never react, never lose the thread. The point is to build familiarity with the one in you that can notice without collapsing. The one that can return. The one that can remain a little more stable while the rest of you performs its usual vaudeville.

Coming Back Without Romance

There is nothing glamorous about this. Nobody gets to post a mystical selfie because they returned to the present while standing in line at Walgreens. This is deeply unsexy work. Which is probably one reason it is real.

But over time, this simple practice of noticing and returning begins to do something substantial. It weakens the automatic trance. It gives the witness more substance. It teaches attention that it does not have to obey every impulse, every irritation, every fantasy with a megaphone. It lets you inhabit the ordinary without constantly fleeing it.

And then once in a while, in the middle of something completely unimpressive, you are just there. Really there. Not performing presence. Not narrating it. Not being pleased with yourself for having achieved it.

Just there.

Which turns out to be a far greater miracle than most of us were trained to look for.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

Share the Scrolls

Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.

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Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.

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Tip with a coffee

A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥

Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.

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Recommended Reading

(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. These recommendations support the scrolls at no extra cost to you.)

Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

This reflection grows out of the same stream as Surrender and Attention: The Cosmic Breath: Cynthia Bourgeault’s work with Practicing Living Presence, read through Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence and that whole Sufi insistence that the problem is not simply what we feel, but what keeps organizing our attention beneath the feeling. One of the things that starts to become obvious, slowly and then all at once, is that most of us do not actually place attention. We follow preference. We move toward what pleases us, brace against what irritates us, and call that being a person. But preference is a terrible spiritual director. It keeps the soul shallow while convincing us we are being honest.

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Where Preference Hides

Preference rarely shows up looking dramatic. It usually appears in much softer clothing. It sounds like discernment. It sounds like taste. It sounds like, “This just doesn’t resonate,” or “I’m not in the right space for this today.” Sometimes that is true. A lot of the time it is just the ego refusing to stay anywhere that does not immediately reward it. The problem is not that we have likes and dislikes. The problem is that we have made them the gatekeepers of attention. Nothing gets our full presence unless the personality approves.

The Attention That Gets Captured

Once you begin to watch this in real time, the mechanism is almost embarrassingly easy to see. Attention moves along until it hits something attractive or irritating, and then it sticks. It is pulled by praise, snagged by insult, seduced by stimulation, repelled by discomfort. The ego calls this freedom because it got to react first. But reaction is not freedom. Reaction is just bondage with better branding. If your attention can only stay where it feels rewarded, then your inner life is still being governed by appetite.

What We Mistake for Authenticity

Modern spirituality has made this worse by teaching people to trust every internal weather pattern as if it were revelation. If you feel open, it must be aligned. If you feel resistance, it must be wrong. If you feel bored, surely the soul is not meant for this. But boredom is often just wounded preference with nothing to feed on. Resistance is often vanity being denied its usual snacks. And alignment, at least in the deeper sense, does not always feel pleasant. Sometimes it feels like staying in the room when nothing in you is getting applause.

The Practice of Showing Up Anyway

This is where attention stops being a mood and becomes a practice. Not a clenched practice. Not a performative one. Just the simple act of remaining. You do not have to pretend to like the moment. You do not have to decorate it with spiritual language. You do not have to say the traffic jam is a blessing or the tedious conversation is secretly your guru. You only have to stop outsourcing your presence to preference. You stay. You notice. You let attention rest where it is instead of constantly asking whether the personality is having a good time.

What Changes When You Stay

At first, this feels almost disappointing. There is no instant glow. No soundtrack. No angelic fog machine. What appears instead is much quieter. The moment becomes more textured. The thing you wanted to escape begins to reveal details. A task that felt dead has its own rhythm. A person you were resisting becomes less flat. Even your own irritation becomes more interesting when you stop feeding it and start watching it. Preference had been reducing the world to a yes-or-no button. Attention, when it is freed from that reflex, starts giving reality back its depth.

Beyond Like and Dislike

This is also where a different kind of aliveness begins to show up. Not happiness exactly. Not pleasure. Something steadier than that. A vitality that comes from contact rather than approval. You begin to sense that being fully here has its own nourishment. The moment does not need to be improved before it can be inhabited. And this is where a lot of spiritual vanity dies, because the self that wanted to curate every experience starts to realize it is not actually the center of the room.

The Soul Gets Built Here

If attention only goes where the ego is pleased, then the soul never develops much strength. It remains dependent, reactive, and easily bought. But every time you stay present without demanding immediate emotional payment, something in you gets less flimsy. The inner witness grows. The tyranny of preference weakens. You stop being dragged so easily by attraction and aversion. This is not glamorous work, which is probably why it is real. A soul is not built through constant self-confirmation. It is built through contact, honesty, and the slow liberation of attention from the need to be flattered.

What This Looks Like in Ordinary Life

It usually starts in embarrassingly unromantic places. Brushing your teeth without wandering off into fantasy by the fourth tooth. Listening to someone without spending the whole time building your rebuttal. Folding laundry without needing a podcast, a mood, a sign from God, and a small miracle to get through it. Paying attention while annoyed. Paying attention while bored. Paying attention while unseen. This is where preference starts to lose its throne. Not in the Himalayas. Not in a branded retreat center. In the kitchen. In the car. In the line you did not want to stand in.

The Freedom on the Other Side

What begins to emerge from this is not passivity. It is not numbness. It is not becoming the kind of person who smiles beatifically while spiritually bypassing the whole human condition. It is something far more useful. You become less coerced. Less hijackable. Less easy to manipulate through praise, outrage, novelty, or discomfort. And because of that, attention becomes available for something deeper than reaction. It can begin to serve presence itself.

Returning Without Romance

Eventually it becomes obvious that the issue was never whether you liked the moment. The issue was whether you could stay conscious inside it. Preference had made attention conditional. It turned presence into a customer loyalty program. But the deeper work keeps cutting through that arrangement. You do not have to like it to pay attention. You do not have to enjoy it to be changed by it. You do not have to feel spiritually special for the moment to become real.

And that is where the whole thing starts to open.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

This reflection grows out of Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In that work, Holy Week stops being a courtroom drama about sin and payment and starts looking more like an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is placed back where she belongs, at the cross, the whole thing shifts. The story is no longer about balancing accounts with God. It becomes about watching love go all the way, without pulling back.

The Wrong Kind of Death

When most people hear “death,” they think of the body shutting down. That’s not wrong, it’s just not the interesting part.

The deeper traditions are pointing at something that happens long before that. The death that actually matters is the one that takes out the center of control. The version of you that’s constantly narrating, fixing, remembering, trying to stay intact no matter what.

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That’s the one that doesn’t go quietly.

And if we’re being honest, that’s the one we spend our whole lives protecting.

You can get people to talk about heaven, reincarnation, afterlife theories all day long. But the moment the conversation turns toward letting go of the identity that’s running the show right now, everything tightens up. Because that feels like real loss.

Mary Doesn’t Flinch

This is where Mary Magdalene stops being a background character and starts looking like the only one in the story who actually understands what’s happening.

She stays at the cross.

That gets said so often it almost sounds sentimental, but it’s not. There is nothing soft about that position. Everything that gave her life structure is collapsing in real time. The teacher she oriented around is dying. Whatever future she imagined is gone. The meaning of everything she just lived through is breaking apart in front of her.

And she doesn’t reach for a quick explanation.

She doesn’t try to clean it up into something manageable. She doesn’t retreat into “this must all be part of a plan” so she can feel better.

She stays in it.

That’s not devotion as emotion. That’s stability at a level most people never touch.

The Part Nobody Wants

People like to jump from cross to resurrection as fast as possible. That middle space is where things get uncomfortable.

Nothing is working there.

Your thinking doesn’t help. Your emotions don’t stabilize anything. Even your spiritual framework starts to wobble because it was built on a version of reality that just cracked open.

The contemplatives have a name for that territory. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing describes it as a place where your usual faculties can’t carry you anymore. You can’t think your way through it. You can’t feel your way out of it.

So what do you do?

Most people go backward. They rebuild something familiar. They grab a tighter belief system. They numb out. They reinterpret what happened so they can get their footing back.

Mary doesn’t do that.

She lets the ground stay gone.

When Love Stops Paying You Back

There’s a shift that happens here that’s easy to miss.

At first, love feels like something that comes with reinforcement. You feel it. You recognize it. It shows up in ways your body and your mind can track.

Take those away and things get strange fast.

Now you’re left with something that doesn’t give you the same feedback. No emotional high. No clear sense of connection. No confirmation that what you’re giving is being received.

That’s usually where people shut it down.

They call it wisdom. Or boundaries. Or “moving on.”

Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But sometimes it’s just the ego refusing to operate without a reward system.

Mary stays in love past that point.

Not in a dramatic way. Not clinging. Not trying to get something back.

Just not withdrawing when the return disappears.

That’s where something starts to change.

The Death That Actually Happens

This is where “die before you die” stops sounding poetic and starts sounding practical.

What dies is not your capacity to love. It’s the version of you that needs love to come back in a certain form in order to feel real.

What starts to loosen is the identity built out of your history. The story you keep referencing to know who you are. The emotional loops that confirm it.

You begin to notice that those things aren’t as solid as they felt.

That can feel like you’re losing yourself.

What’s actually happening is you’re losing a very specific arrangement of yourself.

And something quieter starts to come online.

Not dramatic. Not impressive. But stable in a way the old structure never was.

Why Mary Recognizes Him

When the resurrection shows up, Mary is the one who recognizes Jesus.

That’s not because she’s more emotional. It’s because she’s less dependent on the old filters.

The others are still trying to make sense of what they’re seeing. They’re comparing it to what they knew before. They’re trying to fit it into a category that makes sense.

Mary isn’t doing that.

She’s already passed through the collapse of those categories.

So when something new appears, she doesn’t need to force it into the old framework. She can meet it directly.

That’s what recognition looks like here.

Not figuring it out. Not proving it. Just seeing.

Living From the Other Side Without Going Anywhere

There’s a line in the contemplative tradition that keeps coming back around. Find the place in you that already lives beyond death, and start living from there now.

That sounds abstract until you hit one of these moments where your normal way of holding yourself together stops working.

Then it becomes very concrete.

You either scramble to rebuild the same structure, or you let something else hold you.

Mary doesn’t rebuild.

She lets herself be carried by something she can’t define.

That’s the part that doesn’t translate well into clean spiritual language. It’s not neat. It doesn’t give you a quick sense of progress. It can feel like you’re doing nothing at all.

But something is shifting underneath that.

Holy Week, Without the Spin

If you take Mary seriously, Holy Week stops being about satisfying divine requirements and starts looking like a pattern you can actually walk.

The cross is where control fails.

The tomb is where the old identity can’t hold itself together anymore.

And resurrection is not a reward for belief. It’s what becomes visible when you’re no longer locked into the old way of seeing.

Mary Magdalene doesn’t explain any of that.

She just shows what it looks like to stay when everything in you would rather resolve the tension and move on.

And somewhere in that staying, something in you begins to live from a place that isn’t threatened by endings in the same way anymore.

Not because you figured it out.

Because something in you no longer needs to.

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There are many ways to practice faith in America. You can pray quietly. You can serve your community. You can even, in a radical move, mind your own business.

Or… you can fly to Plano, Texas, find a group of Muslims praying, and decide the situation requires immediate narration.

Jake Lang has chosen the fourth option.

And I have to say, it’s a bold theological stance. Because traditionally, prayer is a moment where the individual steps back and God steps forward. Jake has flipped that model completely. In his version, God is apparently waiting for commentary. Preferably loud, preferably on camera, and ideally timed right as someone else is bowing.

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Let Me Understand This…

Now let’s walk through the logic, because I want to understand this correctly.

A group of people gathers to pray. No stage. No microphones. No attempt to recruit anyone walking by. They are, inconveniently, minding their own business.

So naturally, the appropriate response is to approach them and make sure the moment becomes about you.

Because nothing protects religious freedom quite like interrupting someone else’s religion.

I believe that’s in the Constitution somewhere, right after the part about life, liberty, and livestreaming.

Pattern or Coincidence?

What makes the Plano situation especially fascinating is that it keeps happening in the same rhythm. It’s not a one-off misunderstanding. It’s not a spontaneous moment of concern.

It’s a pattern.

Show up where Muslims are gathered. Insert yourself into the scene. Raise the volume. Frame it as a defense of America.

Repeat.

At some point, you have to ask, is he confronting a threat… or scheduling content?

Because there’s a difference.

Two Postures, Same God

And that’s where the contrast becomes almost unfair.

On one side, you have people bowing, aligned, focused, not engaging, not escalating.

On the other side, you have a man circling the moment like a commentator who just discovered a new sport called “Other People’s Prayer.”

Same country. Same freedoms. Completely different interpretations of what those freedoms are for.

One side uses them to practice their religion.

The other uses them to interrupt it.

Selective Reverence

Now, to be clear, Jake does understand reverence.

We’ve seen him in Jerusalem, kissing the Western Wall, participating in a moment that demands quiet respect. And in that setting, he knows exactly what to do. He lowers his voice. He slows down. He becomes part of something larger than himself.

So the issue is not that he doesn’t recognize sacred space.

The issue is that he only recognizes it when it looks familiar to him.

Because when the setting shifts from ancient stone to a parking lot in Plano, and the people praying don’t share his identity, the entire definition of “sacred” changes.

Suddenly it’s not something to respect.

It’s something to challenge.

The Microphone Theology

If prayer is sacred, then it’s sacred.

If reverence matters, then it matters.

But if it only applies when it’s your version, in your setting, with your people, then it’s not really reverence.

It’s branding.

And branding requires visibility.

Which brings us back to the microphone.

Because the microphone is not just a tool here. It’s a philosophy. It says, “This moment is not complete until I am the loudest part of it.”

When the Script Fails

And the tragedy, if we can call it that, is that the people he’s trying to provoke keep refusing to cooperate with the script.

They don’t engage.

They don’t escalate.

They don’t turn it into the dramatic showdown the video needs.

They just keep praying.

Which is incredibly rude, if you think about it.

Completely ignoring the main character.

Manufacturing the Threat

So the performance has to work harder.

Louder voice. Bigger claims. More urgency.

Because if the reaction doesn’t come naturally, you have to manufacture it.

And eventually, everything starts to look like a threat.

A prayer becomes a takeover.

A gathering becomes an invasion.

A quiet moment becomes a crisis.

The Real Sermon

This isn’t about religion anymore.

It’s about narrative control.

Who gets to define what’s happening in the frame.

The people praying… or the person filming them.

And right now, Jake Lang has decided the answer is obvious.

It’s the guy holding the microphone.

So yes, he is preaching.

But not about faith, and not about freedom.

He’s preaching a much simpler gospel.

If you want to be important, find a moment that isn’t about you… and make it about you.

Preferably loudly.

Especially in Plano.

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A Rhythm Hidden in Plain Sight

This reflection grows out of continued work with Cynthia Bourgeault’s Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, which itself draws deeply from Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence and the Sufi understanding of the inner life as a movement of energy rather than a set of isolated techniques. One of the things that begins to surface, not all at once but gradually, is that attention and surrender are not really two separate practices that need to be balanced like competing priorities. They behave more like a single movement that we tend to split apart. When that movement is working, there is a kind of coherence that is hard to describe but easy to recognize. When it isn’t, the problem usually doesn’t show up as failure. It shows up as something slightly off that you can feel but don’t immediately question.

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Where Attention Begins

Most people come into this work through attention because it is easier to recognize. You can see where your mind goes. You can watch how quickly it gets pulled into something and how long it stays there without you noticing. And at some point you realize that returning attention changes the situation in a way that feels almost disproportionate to how simple the action is. A thought loses some of its grip. An emotion doesn’t build in quite the same way. It becomes obvious that attention is not just observing experience, it is participating in it, whether you intend it to or not.

But even here, something subtle begins to happen if you stay with it long enough. The return of attention can start to feel like something you are responsible for maintaining. It is no longer just noticing and coming back. There is a slight pressure to keep it there, to not lose it again, and that pressure doesn’t always announce itself as tension. It can feel like you are doing the practice correctly. It can even feel like progress.

When Attention Becomes Effort

If you watch that closely, the quality of attention changes. It starts to feel held. The mind begins to keep track of itself, almost like it is checking whether it is still present. And the strange part is that nothing looks obviously wrong from the outside. You are still aware. You are still returning. But the whole thing carries a different tone. There is a kind of effort running underneath it that wasn’t there at the beginning, and over time that effort starts to accumulate.

This is usually where people double down without realizing it. They try to stabilize attention more firmly, thinking that the instability is the problem. But the instability is not the problem. The tightening is. Attention, when it is working the way it naturally does, doesn’t need to be forced into place. When it starts to feel like something you have to hold together, it has already shifted into something else.

The Releasing Movement of Surrender

This is where surrender enters, although it usually doesn’t enter in a way that feels dramatic. It shows up more as a small release than as a big shift. Where attention gathers, surrender lets go of the grip that forms around what has been gathered. It doesn’t remove awareness. It removes the need to control what awareness is resting on. That distinction is easy to miss, because from the outside both can look like “being present.”

In the Sufi language, this is described as a shift in where the center of the self is operating from. Not in a conceptual way, but in a very practical one. Experience is still happening, but it is not being organized as quickly around preference, resistance, or identity. There is a little more space between what is happening and how it is being taken personally.

When Surrender Loses Its Center

But surrender, taken on its own, doesn’t solve the problem either. It creates a different one. Without attention, surrender becomes difficult to distinguish from drifting. Things are allowed, but they are not actually being seen. The mind moves, and instead of noticing that movement, it gets carried by it. It feels softer than effort, which is why it can be convincing, but something is missing. There is no real center holding the experience together.

You can usually feel this as a kind of vagueness. Nothing is particularly wrong, but nothing is particularly clear either. And because there is no obvious tension, it can take longer to recognize that awareness has thinned out rather than deepened.

The Breath as a Map of the Inner Life

The metaphor that shows up repeatedly in this teaching is breath, and it is not just poetic. Attention behaves like an inhale. It draws awareness inward and gathers what has been scattered. Surrender behaves like an exhale. It releases the contraction that naturally forms when something is gathered. If you exaggerate either side, the system starts to feel off almost immediately. Too much inhale, and everything tightens. Too much exhale, and everything loses structure.

What is interesting is that no one needs to be taught how to breathe in the first place. The problem is not the absence of the rhythm. It is the interference with it. We emphasize one side, then try to correct by emphasizing the other, and miss the fact that the movement only works as a whole.

The Felt Sense of Imbalance

Once you start paying attention to this, the imbalance becomes easier to notice. When attention is overemphasized, there is a kind of subtle strain behind awareness. It feels like something is being maintained. When surrender is overemphasized, there is a different feeling. Awareness is there, but it is not anchored. It moves too easily, and because of that, it doesn’t deepen.

Neither state looks dramatic, which is why they are easy to stay in. But over time, both create a kind of fatigue. One from holding too much. The other from not holding anything at all.

When the Two Movements Meet

When attention and surrender begin to function together, the change is not dramatic, but it is noticeable. Awareness is present, but it is not being held in place. Experience is allowed, but it is not pulling attention away with it. There is a sense of participation that doesn’t rely on effort and doesn’t collapse into passivity. It feels more like something settling into alignment than something being achieved.

And this is usually where people try to grab it, which immediately disrupts it again.

Working With the Rhythm Directly

The practical side of this is almost too simple, which is part of why it gets complicated. You notice where attention has gone, and you allow it to return. But in that return, you also allow something to release. You don’t try to secure the moment. You don’t try to make it stable. You let it be what it is, even if what it is isn’t particularly calm or clear.

Then attention moves again, and you notice that too. Over time, it becomes more obvious that attention doesn’t really behave like a steady beam. It comes and goes in smaller movements, and the more you stop trying to force it into continuity, the more naturally it stabilizes on its own.

Beyond Reaction and Passivity

At a certain point, this also changes how you understand what is usually called attention and surrender. What we normally call attention is often just reactivity being held in place. What we call surrender is often just disengagement. When both begin to align with something deeper, they don’t feel like opposites anymore. They feel like different aspects of the same intelligence working through awareness.

The Quiet Reorganization

The effects of this are gradual. There isn’t a dramatic shift so much as a reorganization that becomes noticeable over time. Attention is less scattered, not because you are forcing it to stay, but because it is not being pulled as easily. Reactions still happen, but they don’t build as quickly. There is more space in the experience, and that space changes how everything else behaves.

Returning to the Breath

Eventually, it becomes clear that this rhythm was never something that needed to be constructed. It was already functioning. The problem was the way it was being interrupted. And the work, if it can be called that, is less about doing something new and more about noticing where that interruption happens and letting it settle.

And when it does, even briefly, there is a sense that awareness is no longer trying to manage itself. It is simply here, moving the way it already knows how to move.

Keep the Scrolls Unrolling

The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

This reflection grows out of my continued work with Cynthia Bourgeault’s Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within. Bourgeault’s teaching in that course is itself a sustained engagement with Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence, which explores the inner mechanics of attention within the Sufi contemplative tradition. One of the insights that gradually surfaces in that stream of teaching is disarmingly simple: attention is not just a mental function. It is an energetic act. Where we place it quietly shapes the quality of our awareness and, over time, the formation of the soul itself.

Noticing Where the Mind Actually Goes

Most people imagine attention as something passive. Life happens, thoughts appear, emotions flare up, and the mind simply reacts. Attention follows whatever happens to be loudest in the moment.

But if you begin watching the movement of attention carefully, the situation looks different.

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Attention is not merely following experience. It is feeding it.

Where attention settles, something begins to grow. The thought becomes more vivid. The emotion gains strength. The story we are telling ourselves acquires weight and gravity. A passing irritation can turn into a long internal argument. A small worry can become a loop the mind returns to again and again.

It is tempting to assume the thought itself is the cause of the emotional state. But often the real cause is simpler: attention kept returning to it.

What attention repeatedly touches begins to take root.

The Economy of Distraction

In earlier centuries spiritual teachers warned about “the wandering mind.” Today wandering attention has become an entire economic model.

Phones vibrate. Notifications appear. Headlines compete with videos, comments compete with headlines, and algorithms quietly refine their ability to keep the mind moving from one stimulus to the next. None of these moments feel dramatic on their own, yet the cumulative effect is surprisingly powerful.

Attention becomes scattered.

By the end of the day the mind may feel overstimulated while the inner life feels oddly thin. Many people experience this as fatigue without quite understanding the cause.

It is not always that we have done too much.

Often it is that our attention has been pulled in too many directions.

Energy follows attention. When attention fragments, the energy of awareness fragments with it.

A Small Experiment

The effect becomes obvious once you try a simple experiment.

Spend twenty minutes scrolling through arguments online. Watch the mind react to opinions, headlines, sarcasm, outrage. Notice what happens inside the body while this is happening.

Then stop.

Put the device down and sit quietly for a few minutes. Let attention rest on the movement of the breath. Nothing complicated. Just the simple rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

Most people notice the shift almost immediately.

The nervous system begins to soften. Thoughts slow down. A quiet sense of steadiness returns that was not present a few minutes earlier.

Nothing in the external world changed.

Only the direction of attention.

That small shift reveals something important about the mechanics of consciousness. Attention is not neutral. It directs the flow of energy within the psyche.

Where attention rests, vitality gathers.

The Seeds That Receive Water

A helpful way to understand attention is to think of the inner life as a garden.

Within every human being there are many seeds: fear, curiosity, anger, patience, compassion, resentment, generosity. All of them exist in potential. But not all of them grow equally.

The seeds that receive water and sunlight are the ones that flourish.

Attention functions very much like water in this metaphor. Whatever repeatedly receives our attention becomes stronger within the landscape of the personality. If attention continually circles around grievance, grievance becomes familiar territory. If attention repeatedly feeds anxiety, the nervous system begins expecting anxiety as its default condition.

But attention can nourish other qualities as well.

It can strengthen patience. It can deepen perception. It can quietly cultivate compassion by allowing the heart to remain present long enough to actually feel another person’s reality.

The garden grows according to what receives water.

The Practice of Recollection

For centuries contemplative traditions have understood this dynamic. In Christian mystical teaching the process of gathering scattered attention is often called recollection. The word itself carries a gentle wisdom: to recollect is simply to collect again what has been dispersed.

Recollection does not require withdrawing from the world. It does not demand heroic spiritual effort. It is simply the repeated act of bringing attention back to the immediacy of the present moment.

At first the effect appears small.

The breath becomes more noticeable. The body releases a little tension. Thoughts continue to move through the mind, but they lose some of their urgency. Instead of pulling awareness in every direction, they begin appearing more like passing weather.

The mind is still active.

But it no longer occupies the entire sky.

The Gathering of Energy

Something interesting begins happening when attention stabilizes even slightly.

Energy gathers.

Awareness begins feeling more coherent. Emotional reactions soften because they are no longer instantly fueled by attention. The mind becomes capable of observing its own activity without being completely swept away by it.

This does not require mystical fireworks. It is a subtle shift in the way awareness functions.

Instead of constantly scattering outward, attention begins resting more deeply in the present moment. When that happens, another quality of consciousness becomes noticeable beneath the surface movement of thoughts.

Many contemplative traditions describe this as presence.

It is quiet. It is steady. And it was there the entire time, waiting for attention to stop running in every direction.

Becoming What We Attend To

Over long periods of time attention shapes character in ways that are rarely obvious at first. Human beings gradually become what they habitually attend to.

If attention continually feeds distraction, agitation becomes the atmosphere of the mind. If attention remains trapped in resentment or worry, those emotional states slowly organize the psyche around themselves.

But when attention repeatedly returns to presence, something different begins unfolding.

The inner life gains stability. Insight appears more easily. Emotional storms pass more quickly because they are no longer receiving constant reinforcement.

Little by little the center of gravity within awareness shifts.

And it all begins with something very small: noticing where attention has gone.

The Shape of the Soul

The practice itself is almost embarrassingly simple.

Notice where attention is resting.

When it has wandered into agitation or endless mental commentary, gently return it to the living moment in front of you. Not with force, not with frustration, but with the quiet patience of someone tending a garden.

Each return gathers a little energy.

Each moment of recollection strengthens the capacity for presence.

Over time the inner life becomes less scattered and more whole.

And slowly, almost invisibly, the soul begins taking the shape of what it continually beholds.

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• Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

Spend a few minutes in the comment sections arguing about Islam and women and you will hear a very confident story repeated over and over again. According to the internet version of history, women in early Islam were silent, powerless, and invisible.

The problem with that story is simple.

The historical sources refuse to cooperate.

When you actually read the early record, something inconvenient appears almost immediately: some of the most important intellectual authorities in early Islam were women.

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The clearest example is Aisha bint Abi Bakr, remembered by Muslims as Mother of the Believers.

That title alone has inspired novels and historical retellings. One particularly vivid example is Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam by Kamran Pasha, which imagines Aisha narrating the dramatic years surrounding the birth of the Muslim community and the death of the Prophet.

But the historical Aisha does not need embellishment to be remarkable.

When Muhammad died, Aisha did not fade politely into the background as a symbolic widow. She became one of the most important scholarly voices in the early Muslim community. Over the course of her life she transmitted more than 2,000 hadith, reports describing the sayings and daily practices of the Prophet. Later jurists and theologians leaned heavily on those reports as they tried to understand how Muhammad actually lived and how Muslims were supposed to follow his example.

This was not honorary respect.

People came to her because she knew things they didn’t.

Aisha had lived inside the Prophet’s household. She had seen the ordinary rhythms of his life, the quiet moments that never make it into speeches. When questions arose about how the Prophet prayed, fasted, spoke, or treated the people around him, Aisha often had the most direct knowledge available.

In very practical terms, one of the people responsible for preserving the intellectual memory of Islam was a woman.

When Aisha Corrected the Men

Aisha also had another habit that modern commentators tend to forget.

She argued.

Early Islamic sources preserve several moments where she openly challenged interpretations offered by other companions. One example involves Abu Hurayra. When he reported that someone who woke in a state of ritual impurity could not continue a fast, Aisha pushed back. She explained that the Prophet himself had sometimes awakened in that condition and still completed the fast.

Her correction mattered because she knew the reality of the Prophet’s household life firsthand.

Another dispute involved a report repeated by Ibn Umar claiming that the dead are punished because their relatives weep for them. Aisha rejected the interpretation. The Qur’an, she reminded them, clearly teaches that no soul bears the burden of another. According to her explanation, the Prophet had been referring to a particular funeral he witnessed rather than establishing some sweeping theological rule.

She was just as blunt in another famous exchange. Some companions had begun repeating a report claiming that women, dogs, and donkeys interrupt a man’s prayer if they pass in front of him. Aisha’s response was not subtle. She reminded them that she herself had often been lying in front of the Prophet while he prayed and that her presence had never interrupted anything.

These moments tell us something important.

Aisha was not merely passing along traditions like a recorder.

She was interpreting them, debating them, and occasionally correcting the conclusions of the men around her.

Women Teaching the Tradition

And Aisha was not some strange exception.

Women participated actively in the transmission of knowledge during the early centuries of Islam. They taught hadith, hosted study circles, and passed chains of learning to later generations. Male scholars traveled to study with them. Some of the most respected jurists and historians in the Islamic world received their certification to transmit hadith through female teachers.

The historical record preserves the names of hundreds of these women.

Their classes took place in mosques, in homes, and in informal gatherings where students sat cross-legged and copied notes. Their students included some of the most influential scholars of the medieval Muslim world.

In other words, the intellectual life of Islam was never as exclusively male as modern polemics like to pretend.

Legal Changes in Seventh-Century Arabia

To understand why this happened, you have to remember the world Muhammad was operating in.

Seventh-century Arabia was a tribal society where inheritance usually flowed through male lines and women’s legal standing was often precarious. The Qur’an altered that landscape in several important ways. Women were granted defined shares of inheritance. They could own property in their own name. Their marriage dowry belonged to them rather than to their families. Marriage itself was framed as a contract that required the woman’s consent.

Did this instantly create a modern egalitarian society?

Of course not.

History doesn’t move that way.

But within the context of Late Antiquity, these reforms represented a significant shift in women’s legal standing.

Muhammad’s personal behavior reinforced the same pattern. Early sources record him consulting his wives on matters affecting the community. During the tense negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, his wife Umm Salama offered advice on how to calm a moment of crisis among his followers. Muhammad followed her suggestion, and the situation settled.

Aisha and the Storm After Uthman

History rarely unfolds like a clean lecture.

More often it looks like a family argument that spilled into the street.

In the year 656, the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, was assassinated after months of political unrest. His death sent shockwaves through the Muslim world and left the community scrambling to restore order. Soon afterward Ali ibn Abi Talib was recognized as the new caliph.

Everyone agreed on one thing: Uthman’s murder demanded justice.

What divided people was the question of timing.

Some companions believed the killers had to be punished immediately. Among those voices were Aisha and two respected companions of the Prophet, Talha ibn Ubaydullah and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam.

Ali faced a very different problem. The political situation was volatile, and the factions involved in the uprising were still active. Moving too quickly risked tearing the fragile unity of the young Muslim state apart.

The disagreement eventually led to a confrontation near Basra that history remembers as the Battle of the Camel.

Aisha addressed supporters from a howdah mounted on a camel in the center of the battlefield. Fighters rallied around the animal because it symbolized the leadership of her side.

When the camel was finally brought down, the battle ended.

What happened next matters just as much as the battle itself.

Ali did not treat Aisha as an enemy to be humiliated. Instead he treated her with respect, arranged for her safe escort, and sent her back to Medina under protection. There she returned to what she had always done best: teaching, answering legal questions, and transmitting the hadith that would shape generations of Islamic scholarship.

A Surprising Historical Comparison

When historians zoom out and compare civilizations, another detail appears that tends to surprise modern readers.

Scholars such as Karen Armstrong have pointed out that women living under early Islamic law often possessed clearer property rights than many women in medieval Christian Europe. In large parts of Europe, a married woman’s property was absorbed into the legal authority of her husband.

Under Islamic law, a woman retained ownership of her property and her dowry.

That doesn’t mean any historical society was perfect. It simply puts the timeline of legal rights back into its proper order.

A Different Model in the Teachings of Jesus

For comparison, Jesus elevated women primarily through spiritual inclusion rather than legal reform.

The Gospels show him teaching women openly, defending them against public humiliation, and welcoming them among his followers. Mary Magdalene appears in the resurrection narratives as the first witness to the risen Christ and the one entrusted with announcing the news to the other disciples.

Jesus was not establishing a governing society or writing legal codes.

Muhammad, by contrast, was leading a rapidly expanding community that required law, governance, and institutions. In that setting the reforms associated with his leadership produced a scholarly culture in which figures like Aisha could emerge as major authorities.

The Quiet Truth the Memes Ignore

Which brings us back to a historical reality that tends to ruin modern talking points.

The intellectual foundations of Islam were not built by men alone.

They were preserved, interpreted, debated, and taught by women.

One of the most important voices in that process was Aisha, who transmitted thousands of reports about the life of the Prophet and helped shape how generations of Muslims understood his example. Many of the teachings Muslims know about the Prophet’s daily life and character come through her scholarship.

That fact sits awkwardly beside some modern narratives.

Over the last century, ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam, particularly those promoted and funded by Saudi Arabia, have often pushed a far narrower vision of women’s public and intellectual roles. In many places that ideology overshadowed the much older history of female scholarship that existed in the classical Islamic world.

The irony is hard to miss.

A civilization whose early centuries included women teaching hadith to leading scholars is now often described as if women never held intellectual authority at all.

But the early record refuses to disappear.

Long before modern culture wars, Aisha was debating legal questions, correcting male scholars, transmitting thousands of prophetic traditions, and shaping the intellectual foundations of Islam itself.

And once you see that clearly, the memes start to look very small.

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The Religious Trick the Ego Loves Most

The ego is perfectly capable of surviving inside religion. In fact, religion can become one of its favorite hiding places.

If the ego cannot inflate itself through pride, it will often learn to inflate itself through guilt. A person begins reviewing their sins, analyzing their failures, and carefully measuring their spiritual progress. The practice feels serious and devout, but the attention never leaves the same central character. The mind stays absorbed in the story of the self.

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For centuries many Christians assumed this was humility.

The contemplative tradition quietly disagreed.

Long before modern psychology existed, a medieval mystic writing The Cloud of Unknowing recognized that constant self-examination can become a spiritual trap. The mind that endlessly reviews its sins may believe it is practicing humility, but it is often practicing something else entirely: a refined form of ego fixation.

Mary Magdalene appears in this teaching as the person who moves beyond that trap.

Imperfect Humility and the Autobiography of Sin

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing describes the beginning of humility as a necessary stage he calls imperfect humility. It begins when a person honestly confronts their own disorder and recognizes their need for God. For someone accustomed to pride or self-deception, this realization can be an important turning point.

But the text quickly warns that this method cannot carry a person very far into the contemplative life.

When reflection on sin becomes habitual, the mind remains tied to the autobiography of the ego. Spiritual life turns into a continual review of personal history: my failures, my repentance, my struggles, my growth. The attention that might have moved toward God instead keeps circling the self.

The anonymous monk writing The Cloud is unusually blunt about the danger. Searching through one’s sins one by one, he says, is like digging through a foul heap. A person could spend their entire life there and still never arrive at love.

The point is not that repentance is unnecessary. The point is that attention matters. If attention remains trapped in the narrative of the ego, the ego remains alive.

Mary Magdalene’s transformation begins when her attention moves somewhere else.

Magdalene’s Sorrow Was About Love

The author of The Cloud makes a striking observation about Magdalene’s repentance. He does not deny that she felt sorrow for her past. She understood the disorder of her life and experienced the pain that recognition brings.

But the deepest movement in her heart was not guilt.

It was love.

The text says that she “languished more for lack of love than for remembrance of her sins.”

With that sentence the entire psychology of repentance changes. Magdalene’s attention was no longer trapped in moral self-analysis. Her heart had already been pulled toward something larger than the story of her failures.

Longing replaces self-review.

Once longing appears, the direction of the soul changes. Guilt keeps the mind circling the past. Longing draws the mind toward the beloved. The past slowly loses its authority because love has become more compelling than memory.

Magdalene’s healing begins the moment love becomes stronger than the narrative she carried about herself.

Perfect Humility and the Scale of Love

This movement leads to what the author calls perfect humility. Perfect humility does not arise from rehearsing one’s failures or cultivating self-contempt. It arises from perceiving reality accurately.

When a person encounters the immensity of divine love, the scale of things becomes clear. The ego does not need to be attacked or humiliated in order to shrink. It simply stops pretending to be the center of the universe.

Humility, in this sense, is clarity.

Mary Magdalene embodies this clarity. Instead of endlessly revisiting the past, her attention becomes absorbed in love itself. The story that once defined her life begins to loosen its grip because something greater has appeared in her awareness.

For the contemplative tradition this marks the real beginning of spiritual life.

Ironically, much of organized religion ended up emphasizing the earlier stage. Entire spiritual cultures were built around managing guilt, cataloging sins, and maintaining a constant awareness of personal failure. The intention was often sincere, but the result frequently left people circling the same psychological territory the mystics were trying to move beyond.

Magdalene points in another direction.

The Cloud of Unknowing

The author describes Magdalene’s movement using the image that gives his book its title: the Cloud of Unknowing. Instead of trying to control her spiritual life through analysis or emotional drama, Magdalene entrusts her longing to this cloud. She hangs her love there and allows it to remain within a mystery that cannot be grasped by thought or stabilized by emotion.

The cloud represents the threshold where the usual tools of the ego stop working. Memory cannot organize it. Reason cannot define it. Emotional intensity eventually exhausts itself. What remains is a simple movement of love that continues without needing to possess what it seeks.

Magdalene does not stop loving. She simply stops trying to manage love with the machinery of the self.

In that surrender something subtle happens. The ego loses the constant reinforcement it receives from self-inspection. The center of the person shifts from the narrative self toward the deeper life of the heart.

Why Scrupulosity Keeps the Ego Alive

Seen from this perspective, scrupulosity becomes easier to understand. Endless examination of one’s sins may appear spiritually serious, but it often keeps the ego firmly in control. The mind remains fascinated with its own moral history, revisiting it again and again in the hope that careful inspection will somehow produce transformation.

But transformation rarely comes from staring at the self.

It comes when attention is captured by something larger than the self.

Mary Magdalene’s humility did not emerge because she became better at remembering her sins. It emerged because she encountered a love vast enough to displace the ego from the center of her world. Once the heart discovers that scale, the spiritual life stops revolving around the endless management of the self and begins to revolve around love itself.

That movement—from moral bookkeeping to the gravity of love—is what the contemplative tradition calls perfect humility.

And Mary Magdalene saw it long before most of the Church knew how to describe it.

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This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In that series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is restored to her rightful place at the foot of the cross, the meaning of crucifixion shifts decisively. What had long been framed as cosmic bookkeeping is revealed instead as love demonstrating its own inner logic to the end.

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A Medieval Witness

When we turn to The Cloud of Unknowing, we discover that this shift is not modern. It is medieval. The anonymous 14th century monk who wrote the Cloud does not build his contemplative method around Peter’s authority or Paul’s theology. He quietly builds it around Mary Magdalene. Over the course of several chapters, he returns to her again and again, not as a symbol of shame, but as the living example of how love transforms.

Imperfect and Perfect Humility

The Cloud begins its treatment of her in the middle of a discussion about humility. The author distinguishes between what he calls imperfect humility and perfect humility. Imperfect humility is rooted in reviewing your sins. You remember your failures. You examine your conscience. You rehearse your story of falling short. This kind of humility has value. It can break pride. It can soften arrogance. But it keeps the center of gravity in your narrative self. You remain the main character in an ongoing drama of failure and repair. Even repentance becomes a subtle way of reinforcing the small self.

The Cloud sees the danger in this. The author argues that constant review of your sins can become counterproductive because it keeps dragging you back into story. You become attached to your past, even if that attachment is negative. You define yourself by what you have done wrong. The ego remains intact, only now it is a guilty ego. Mary’s transformation, the Cloud insists, did not happen because she mastered self-examination. It happened because she loved. When Christ forgave her, it was “not only because of her great sorrow, nor because of her remembering her sins,” but because “she loved much.”

Languishing for Lack of Love

The text goes further and makes an astonishing psychological observation. It says that Mary “languished more for lack of love than for any remembrance of her sins.”

In other words, her deepest anguish was not self-hatred. It was frustrated desire. The wound was not simply that she had broken moral law, but that her capacity to love had been blocked, misdirected, or divided. Her sorrow came from the sense that love was not flowing freely. That is a different interior map from the one most of us were handed.

The Dunghill and the Cloud

The Cloud then describes what she did not do. She did not descend into what the author calls the “foul, stinking dunghill” of her sins, searching them out one by one.

She did not spend her life dissecting her past. She did not attempt to purify herself through endless moral accounting. The author is blunt. Had she done so, she would have strengthened the very patterns she was trying to escape. What you obsess over, you energize. Fixation on sin does not necessarily produce freedom from sin. It can produce deeper entanglement.

Instead, the Cloud says that she “hung up her love and her longing desire in this cloud of unknowing.”

That phrase is not decorative. It is the core of the contemplative path. Mary does not suppress desire. She does not numb it. She does not analyze it to death. She does not dramatize it into spiritual theater. She entrusts it. She releases it into what the author calls the cloud, which is the space where God cannot be grasped by thought or contained by feeling.

The Limits of the Faculties

The cloud represents the limit of the faculties. The author is clear that memory, reason, and even intense emotional sweetness are too small to carry infinite love.

Memory will collapse into nostalgia. Reason will collapse into control. Emotion will collapse into self-reference. None of them can bear the weight of divine intimacy. So Mary allows her longing to pass beyond them. She continues to love, but she stops trying to manage love with her mind or stabilize it with her emotions.

From Narrative to Presence

This is the decisive shift from narrative repentance to direct presence. Narrative repentance lives in the past. It asks, “What did I do? How bad was it? How do I fix it?” Direct presence asks something else. It asks, “Can I remain in love when I cannot understand, control, or feel my way forward?” Mary becomes the model contemplative because she remains at the level of love when her story can no longer save her.

The Cloud even suggests that she sometimes “hardly had any special remembrance of whether she had been a sinner or not.”

That is not amnesia. It is relocation of identity. Her center of gravity is no longer her past. It is no longer the moral drama of her history. It is the act of loving in the present. She has not denied her story. She has allowed it to be absorbed into something larger.

Two Streams of Christianity

The author ties this to a broader critique of atonement theology. He notes that Christianity has always contained two streams: one rooted in judgment, debt, and appeasement, and another rooted in forgiveness, reconciliation, and the fullness of love.

When the second stream dominates, the Paschal Mystery is seen not as payment to an angry God, but as love following its own trajectory. Christ’s death is not forced by cosmic balance sheets. It is the voluntary movement of love through kenosis, through self-giving. The Cloud’s treatment of Mary fits squarely in that second stream. Her transformation is not fear-based. It is love-based.

Surmounting Love by Love

This is why the earlier tradition, including figures like John Climacus, could say that she “surmounted love by love.”

Eros was not amputated. It was transfigured. The energy that once attached itself to passing objects was not destroyed. It was surrendered and carried through. The Cloud preserves this logic. Love does not become holy by being extinguished. It becomes holy by being offered into the unknown without clinging.

The Heart Where It Loves

The author of the Cloud also makes a bold claim about the heart. He writes that “the heart is as truly there where its love is, as it is in the body.”

That line reframes everything. The heart is not confined to autobiography. It is not confined to physical proximity. It exists where it loves. This is why the contemplative path can survive grief, distance, and even death. If love is released from the need to control outcomes through thought or emotion, it discovers a deeper mode of knowing.

Mary at the foot of the cross embodies this. She cannot fix the outcome. She cannot argue theology. She cannot force resurrection. What she can do is remain. She stands in a place where meaning collapses and hangs her love in the cloud. She does not withdraw her heart to protect it. She does not retreat into self-analysis. She remains present in surrendered longing.

Learning to See in the Dark

The Cloud insists that this surrender feels at first like sailing into fog. The ego panics because its usual tools are suspended. But if you remain, something else begins to operate. The author compares it to learning to see in the dark. At first you reach for a flashlight, which is like reason or emotional drama. But if you allow your eyes to adjust, another form of perception emerges.

That deeper perception is not built on story. It is built on presence.

Mary Magdalene becomes the hidden teacher of this way. She shows that perfect humility is not endless self-dissection. It is accurate scale. It is knowing yourself in relation to the vastness of love. She shows that transformation does not arise from fear. It arises from desire that has been surrendered. She shows that the contemplative path is not the rejection of eros but its passage through kenosis into something wider and freer.

The contemplative path has been in the Christian tradition all along. It is not a new technique. It is not a modern recovery project. It is embedded in medieval mysticism, and at its center stands a woman who loved much. The Cloud of Unknowing does not reduce her to a moral lesson. It presents her as the one who crossed from story into silence, from self-obsession into surrendered love. The path is hidden in plain sight because we keep reading her as a sinner when the tradition has already named her as a contemplative.

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