From Eros to Agape: Magdalene as Model of Love’s Trajectory
Falling in love is not the destination. It is the practice yard.
Let’s get blunt. For centuries respectable men in tidy robes pretended desire was a scandal. If Jesus loved Mary Magdalene in a particular way they sniffed, then he somehow could not love everyone. That is cowardice wrapped in Latin. It is men terrified of mess saying mess is sinful.
Cynthia Bourgeault did not buy that cowardice. In Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene she says the intimacy was not a side show. It was the classroom. Eros taught them. Eros opened the door. Without it, agape remains a sermon, not a life.
Desire is the practice
One face. One voice. One laugh that makes your chest hollow. That’s eros. It is not tidy. It is not polite. It will not sit politely at the table while you lecture it on purity.
The Cloud of Unknowing has the line everyone who has ever been broken by longing knows. It is short. It is true.
“The more you love, the more you will long to love.”
That sentence is a wrecking ball to scarcity. Want less? Then be a miser with your heart. Want more? Let desire stretch you. Desire multiplies. It is hungry and then kinder.
Mary Magdalene learned that. She loved in particular. She did not clutch. She did not privatize the flame. She let it travel through her.
She stayed
When the others scattered she stayed. Not heroic for show. Not to earn points. She stayed because staying was the only honest thing to do. Her presence at the cross was not sentiment. It was training. Training in how to hold suffering without turning it into theology for the comfortable.
You hold someone and you learn to hold others. You bear a tiny human grief and it expands your capacity. That is how the particular becomes universal. That is how eros becomes agape.
Seeing what others miss
Jean-Yves Leloup, writing on the Gospel of Mary, says Mary did not see because she had VIP access. She saw because love had trained her eyes to notice presence where everyone else saw only the absence.
Where the others saw nothing, she perceived presence.
Think about that. It is not mysticism as club membership. It is eyesight grown wider by heartbreak and stubborn fidelity. You learn to recognize the voice of resurrection because you have waited through silence.
Tears are not failure
Her tears at the tomb are the textbook example. People who want tidy religion call them weakness. They are in the wrong business.
Tears are the Cloud’s “dart of longing.” They pierce the shell. They make room. They loosen the fist. They make your heart a vessel that can hold more than your small life.
We get taught to explain away the salt. To tidy our sorrow into a moral. Don’t do that. Stay messy. Stay open. Learn from the tearing. The tear is the instrument, not the accident.
Do not cling, go do this instead
Jesus tells Mary do not hold on to me. People read it and get sad. Read it another way. It is commissioning.
You loved. Now go. Take the love that taught you and carry it. Be apostle to the apostles. Go tell it. Love one person so conscientiously that it teaches you to love the neighbor you will never meet.
That is not a dilution. It is the transfiguration. The private flame becomes a torch.
The church got it backward
The old guardians treated particular love as a liability. If you loved one person strongly they feared you could not love all. That is arithmetic for the spiritually small. Love is not a pie with slices. Love is a field that grows when you water it.
Love is strong as death. Love has no measure. The Cloud said that. It was not being poetic. It was stating a fact. Love increases capacity. Not in theory. In practice. In the mundane stubbornness of caring for a sick parent, in the middle of a bad argument, when you keep showing up.
If your love demands the beloved be small so you can feel large, you are doing something else. You are not loving.
This lands in the grocery aisle
This is not high theory. It lands in the middle of awful days. You fight with someone you love until the words are raw. You hold a child through fever. You carry a neighbor’s grief home because someone has to. You get fired and your partner cooks soup and you realize how small you used to be.
Eros starts the work. Agape is what you look like after you have practiced long enough. It is not a halo. It is calloused hands and a steadier breath.
The scandal of expansion
This is the scandal. Not that Jesus loved Mary. The scandal is that love expands. It makes you dangerous to structures that keep the world rationed. People who run safe institutions prefer love that is neat and controlled. Magdalene’s love is not neat. That is why her voice got pushed to the side. Too messy. Too loud. Too alive.
I like mess. Virgin Monk Boy prefers the messy resurrection to the pristine corpse.
Practical rules of the road
If you want a little manual, here it is.
Love one person hard enough to learn your own limits.
Let your longing break you. Cry. Swear. Make bad coffee. Then go back. Keep showing up.
Refuse to possess. Practice putting the beloved before your ego.
Use the ache to expand. Let grief teach you how to recognize the voice of presence in strangers.
When somebody tells you not to be messy, check whether they are trying to keep power.
Do those things and the arc you read about in scripture starts to look suspiciously like your life.
Magdalene’s blessing
Her story is not invitation to tidy pieties. It is permission to be full. It is permission to be messy. It is permission to let the small love you have learned be the place where the world learns to be loved.
Blessing. Go love one person so hard that they teach you how to love everybody. Then go tell whoever will listen. Tell them you were wrong about scarcity. Tell them you were trained by flesh and grief into vision.
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I have always had a fear of falling. As a kid, I had repeated dreams/nightmares of falling out of the sky without knowing how I got into the sky in the first place. As an adult, I had repeated dreams/nightmares of falling into a hole in the ground. And sometimes I did fall and there was no bottom. I screamed for a long while until I realized there was no point in it, and then I surrendered. I learned that falling is a lot like flying, only easier. -Peace, Dwight Lee Wolter.
Having never really loved, I am still trying to learn to live.