The Church claimed it was fighting heresy. What it really feared was a community built on compassion, equality, and inner freedom. The Cathars lived a love that couldn’t be controlled, and the empire made war on it. Their memory still cracks the foundations of fear-based religion today.
PS to my comment: why was i not proud of my gut reaction? Because it was angry, stupid & hateful. Dripping with hypocrisy. Behaving just like those i was criticizing & thus the cycle continues. Until we just LOVE like the Cathers & it stops.
"Every time love pushes against fear, institutions panic." - This is what keeps breaking us open. The panic creates cracks and spreads the love farther and deeper. If they didn't panic, fewer people would know they can actually be free. We must keep pushing, as the midwives say. Until all are truly born again, remembering their original belovedness.
Beautifully said, Elizabeth. The panic is the labor pain of awakening. Every institution that tries to contain love ends up becoming its delivery room. The cracks aren’t the failure, they’re the birth canal.
Brother Virge, your amazing insights bring all the missing pieces to the puzzle of Christianity, so that it finally makes sense. Christianity had become so degraded by the empire, & now again by MAGA. 🌹But Mary Magdalene & the Cathars lived the true Christianity that it was meant to be.🙏 Your writings have helped restore the genuine teachings of Jesus & Mary Magdalene — the true heart of Christianity.❤️ Many thanks!
As a Southern Baptist who didn’t attend a traditional Christian-centric seminary, so the Cathars mostly missed me. I love the rich history of Christianity that offers the layers that chose other paths instead of patriarchy and greed.
Mike, the tricky part is that “Jesus is love” and “the institutional Church protects its own power” have never been the same thing. The early followers carried a living current of presence and mutual care. What came later was a hierarchy that needed control to survive.
Love liberates people. Institutions manage people. Those two impulses have been wrestling since the first century.
When I say the Church made war on love, I’m pointing to the moments in history when the hierarchy felt threatened by the kind of love that doesn’t need permission, intermediaries, or gatekeepers. The love Jesus taught doesn’t rely on a chain of command. And that’s exactly why it scared the people who built one.
Yes this makes sense, thank you. To me, church institutions should provide a sense of community and structure, but not control, gatekeeping, fear and guilt.
If your reading list already looks like the Library of Alexandria teetering on a matchstick, start with The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea. It’s the clearest doorway into the Cathar story. Fast pace, strong narrative, and enough historical backbone to trust it without feeling like homework.
If you get hooked and want the inner world and spiritual texture, then Guirdham is next. Markale is the poetic, mythic lens, great once you’ve got the ground under your feet.
I’ve looked at the Therapeutae, but they seem to represent the more ascetic wing of early mysticism, devoted but focused on withdrawal and purity. Their lineage feels closer to the roots of later monasticism than to the living heart of Mary’s circle.
If you follow the fruit of what Jesus and Mary practiced, the embodied love and union through the heart, you find it reflected more clearly in the Sufi tradition. Not as a direct line of descent, but as the same current of divine intimacy appearing in a new form. The mystics of Islam drank from that same well of love and had the courage to let it overflow.
I had a thought today as I was taking a slow walk (your meditations on detachment, slowness, rhythmic cadence have been encouraging): there are so many ways to be (what the Ebyonim tradition names) Dispossessed. It is much more than neat economic "poverty", dispossession takes on many forms - some named often across many scriptural traditions: the poor, yes, the orphan, the widow/er, the ill and infirm, the wounded and recovering, the abused - especially those abused in contexts which should be sanctuaries (homes, schools, teams/troops, houses of worship). Several of those vectors of dispossession affected Yehoshua with textual clarity.
My thought was more with regard to the centrality of Miryam ha-Magdelah (the Sanctuary Watchtower). It has been suggested and published that Miryam was a central (and early, perhaps first) financier/supporter/booster of Yehoshua's campaign. My musing was that perhaps Miryam's pre-Yehoshua life was marked by this kind of generosity toward the Dispossessed who found her, as he was? Perhaps it was a "habit" of hers to open her home and provide shelter to all those dispossessed: the broke, broken hearted, unhoused and homeless, marginalized, outcast, scandalized, abused and discarded. Perhaps this is what made her "the Tower" in his eyes?
A wonderful recognition on which to meditate. I have also identified Sufi traditions as bearing many fruits of the Commonwealth teachings, traditions, and praxes [social technologies]. In zakat, in Allah, "the one who is closer to the human being than its own jugular vein", in salama, the root of Islam; there is edible, sustaining fruit.
There are so many others, of course - the Cathars clearly appearing to be another radiant and luminous beacon.
The project on which I am engaging, The Golden Thread of Tzedek, attempts to recover these braided histories, these traditions intersecting, orbiting, flowing into and out of one another, in parahistorical form. I ask about the Therapeutae because they pre-existed the historical life-time of Miryam, whereas the Sufis are historically linked to a time (ca 725 CE) in between Miryam and the Cathars of southern France.
The Therapeutae, as part of the "Damascus Document"-federated Separatist polities, occupied a unique space in the theological-social landscape from ca. 150 BCE to ca. 150 CE., which would have provided a historical community, closely linked to the Zadokites of Qumran (Essenes), the Carmelite-Netsarim of Galilea, and the Nasoreans of Yohanan ha-Matbil in Perea, all drew from similar wells of social practice, interpretive hermeneutics, commitments and values, visions of justice in human relations, and a redefined understanding of the divine as working in and among human beings as they move through the world. To me, these commonalities suggest overlapping and compatible projects.
As someone who writes so eloquently on the traditions associated with Miryam ha-Magdelah, the Commissioner of the Ambassadors (the Twelve), the First Witness, the Tower of Sanctuary which sat upon the Foundation Stone of Kefin communities, I would be thrilled to engage your scholarship through proper citation.
I'm grateful for all of your scholarship, meditations, musings, and engagement.
I am not proud of my gut reaction but here it is: why & how are people (yes, i know, i’m one of them) STILL SO STUPID & HATEFUL?
I don’t even have the energy to reply to my own question. But I’ll ignore that of course & just say the Beatles were right. Just play the song “All You Need is Love” a million times & maybe it will help.
Or reread this post. Pretty much says the same thing with more history, explanations & details that I very much appreciate knowing..
PS to my comment: why was i not proud of my gut reaction? Because it was angry, stupid & hateful. Dripping with hypocrisy. Behaving just like those i was criticizing & thus the cycle continues. Until we just LOVE like the Cathers & it stops.
"Every time love pushes against fear, institutions panic." - This is what keeps breaking us open. The panic creates cracks and spreads the love farther and deeper. If they didn't panic, fewer people would know they can actually be free. We must keep pushing, as the midwives say. Until all are truly born again, remembering their original belovedness.
Beautifully said, Elizabeth. The panic is the labor pain of awakening. Every institution that tries to contain love ends up becoming its delivery room. The cracks aren’t the failure, they’re the birth canal.
Brother Virge, your amazing insights bring all the missing pieces to the puzzle of Christianity, so that it finally makes sense. Christianity had become so degraded by the empire, & now again by MAGA. 🌹But Mary Magdalene & the Cathars lived the true Christianity that it was meant to be.🙏 Your writings have helped restore the genuine teachings of Jesus & Mary Magdalene — the true heart of Christianity.❤️ Many thanks!
As a Southern Baptist who didn’t attend a traditional Christian-centric seminary, so the Cathars mostly missed me. I love the rich history of Christianity that offers the layers that chose other paths instead of patriarchy and greed.
Unfortunately they usually got snuffed out.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this:
"The Church made war on love because love made the Church unnecessary."
I've always understood that Jesus is love, and the true Christian church teaches love as it's foundation?
Mike, the tricky part is that “Jesus is love” and “the institutional Church protects its own power” have never been the same thing. The early followers carried a living current of presence and mutual care. What came later was a hierarchy that needed control to survive.
Love liberates people. Institutions manage people. Those two impulses have been wrestling since the first century.
When I say the Church made war on love, I’m pointing to the moments in history when the hierarchy felt threatened by the kind of love that doesn’t need permission, intermediaries, or gatekeepers. The love Jesus taught doesn’t rely on a chain of command. And that’s exactly why it scared the people who built one.
Yes this makes sense, thank you. To me, church institutions should provide a sense of community and structure, but not control, gatekeeping, fear and guilt.
I was wondering of the books you listed on the Cathers, which one would you most recommend? I have a reading list a mile high!
If your reading list already looks like the Library of Alexandria teetering on a matchstick, start with The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea. It’s the clearest doorway into the Cathar story. Fast pace, strong narrative, and enough historical backbone to trust it without feeling like homework.
If you get hooked and want the inner world and spiritual texture, then Guirdham is next. Markale is the poetic, mythic lens, great once you’ve got the ground under your feet.
Thanks for the great advice
“The Church made war on love because love made the Church unnecessary” Amen.
I wonder if you have traced Miryam’s spiritual and theological backwards in history to the Therapeutae of Lake Mareotis?
I’ve looked at the Therapeutae, but they seem to represent the more ascetic wing of early mysticism, devoted but focused on withdrawal and purity. Their lineage feels closer to the roots of later monasticism than to the living heart of Mary’s circle.
If you follow the fruit of what Jesus and Mary practiced, the embodied love and union through the heart, you find it reflected more clearly in the Sufi tradition. Not as a direct line of descent, but as the same current of divine intimacy appearing in a new form. The mystics of Islam drank from that same well of love and had the courage to let it overflow.
I had a thought today as I was taking a slow walk (your meditations on detachment, slowness, rhythmic cadence have been encouraging): there are so many ways to be (what the Ebyonim tradition names) Dispossessed. It is much more than neat economic "poverty", dispossession takes on many forms - some named often across many scriptural traditions: the poor, yes, the orphan, the widow/er, the ill and infirm, the wounded and recovering, the abused - especially those abused in contexts which should be sanctuaries (homes, schools, teams/troops, houses of worship). Several of those vectors of dispossession affected Yehoshua with textual clarity.
My thought was more with regard to the centrality of Miryam ha-Magdelah (the Sanctuary Watchtower). It has been suggested and published that Miryam was a central (and early, perhaps first) financier/supporter/booster of Yehoshua's campaign. My musing was that perhaps Miryam's pre-Yehoshua life was marked by this kind of generosity toward the Dispossessed who found her, as he was? Perhaps it was a "habit" of hers to open her home and provide shelter to all those dispossessed: the broke, broken hearted, unhoused and homeless, marginalized, outcast, scandalized, abused and discarded. Perhaps this is what made her "the Tower" in his eyes?
A wonderful recognition on which to meditate. I have also identified Sufi traditions as bearing many fruits of the Commonwealth teachings, traditions, and praxes [social technologies]. In zakat, in Allah, "the one who is closer to the human being than its own jugular vein", in salama, the root of Islam; there is edible, sustaining fruit.
There are so many others, of course - the Cathars clearly appearing to be another radiant and luminous beacon.
The project on which I am engaging, The Golden Thread of Tzedek, attempts to recover these braided histories, these traditions intersecting, orbiting, flowing into and out of one another, in parahistorical form. I ask about the Therapeutae because they pre-existed the historical life-time of Miryam, whereas the Sufis are historically linked to a time (ca 725 CE) in between Miryam and the Cathars of southern France.
The Therapeutae, as part of the "Damascus Document"-federated Separatist polities, occupied a unique space in the theological-social landscape from ca. 150 BCE to ca. 150 CE., which would have provided a historical community, closely linked to the Zadokites of Qumran (Essenes), the Carmelite-Netsarim of Galilea, and the Nasoreans of Yohanan ha-Matbil in Perea, all drew from similar wells of social practice, interpretive hermeneutics, commitments and values, visions of justice in human relations, and a redefined understanding of the divine as working in and among human beings as they move through the world. To me, these commonalities suggest overlapping and compatible projects.
As someone who writes so eloquently on the traditions associated with Miryam ha-Magdelah, the Commissioner of the Ambassadors (the Twelve), the First Witness, the Tower of Sanctuary which sat upon the Foundation Stone of Kefin communities, I would be thrilled to engage your scholarship through proper citation.
I'm grateful for all of your scholarship, meditations, musings, and engagement.
I am not proud of my gut reaction but here it is: why & how are people (yes, i know, i’m one of them) STILL SO STUPID & HATEFUL?
I don’t even have the energy to reply to my own question. But I’ll ignore that of course & just say the Beatles were right. Just play the song “All You Need is Love” a million times & maybe it will help.
Or reread this post. Pretty much says the same thing with more history, explanations & details that I very much appreciate knowing..
Yes! 🙌
Love IS Liberation! 💕💕✨