Mary of Magdala, Easter & the Resurrection of Ancestral Healing Traditions

Author's Note: If my writings inspire you to write or research more about questions or topics I raise, thank you in advance for giving attribution to my work, as I try to do to others.

¹What wisdom do Mary of Magdala and the Easter story offer towards decolonizing Christianity - and the dominant culture shaped by institutionalized Christianity? And what inspiration for healing from colonization do Vodou - and other embodied ancestral spiritual traditions which have persisted in spite of historical and contemporary persecution - offer those of us whose embodied ancestral spiritual traditions await resurrection?

I found myself pondering answers to these questions during and ever since last week’s Sunday service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charlottesville (UUCC) on the Christian holy day of Easter². Rev. Tim Temerson and Rev. Leia Durland - playing the role of Mary of Magdala a.k.a Mary Magdalene - delivered a thought-provoking (and amusing) performance to the gathered during which Rev. Tim interviewed ‘Mary’ about her relationship with Jesus and what she saw at Jesus’ tomb. According to the Bible, Mary Magdalene was the first woman to find the stone rolled away from Jesus’ tomb, and subsequently carried forth what has come to be known as ‘good news’ of his resurrection. 

I usually take notes when I am listening to Rev. Tim’s messages on Sunday mornings because, well, I’m a Wellesley woman and that’s just sort of what we do (learning mode all the time ;-)), but also because his messages are often thought-provoking. More often than not, I find myself making some connection - or contrasting analysis - to the other spiritual and religious communities to which I am connected: Vodou and Sosyete Nago, and; the Presbyterian churches my minister mother led and took me and my siblings to as children in Japan and New Jersey, and those in Jamaica, Cameroun and ultimately Boston which I visited or belonged to as a teen and young mother, respectively. 

Logically, these reflections also run along the lines of decolonizing Christianity, and approaching Unitarian Universalism with a similar lens, given how deeply it is influenced by the Judeo-Christian world - and therefore also by a history, cultural heritage and present rife with colonization. 

You might be wondering what I mean by ‘colonized Christianity’ or, contrastingly, ‘decolonizing Christianity’. While I hope to write more about this topic in the future, for now, think about it as the version of Christianity that was employed by the Roman Catholic Church and later Protestants to rationalize witch hunts in Europe, the colonization of most of the rest of the world by Western European nations and their delegates, and enslavement of millions of Afrikans. Colonized Christianity continues to be employed by many American politicians as a rationalization for the USA’s violent military domination of much of the rest of the world. (I mean, really, people: you think the man who preached ‘turn the other cheek’ to his fellow Palestinian Jews living under the weight of Roman colonization would cosign for a global bully’s rampant bombings and invasions of geopolitically and economically weaker nations? Especially half a decade after former Republican President and five-star Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his presidential farewell address, warned the American public of the danger of the rise of a ‘military-industrial complex’ in the USA?!) On the other hand, I consider the following to be some examples of decolonized or decolonizing Christianity: Jesus’ original messages - including those that were found in the Nag Hammadi in Egypt’s Nile River Valley in the 1940s which have not been included in the Bible; Black Liberation Theology; etc.³ 

A recurring theme in my thoughts about Vodou and Christianity and Unitarian Universalism are how these seemingly disparate communities can be brought together in a way which yields learning, healing and symbiotic yet equitable relationships. And last Sunday was no different, as Rev. Leia’s and Rev. Tim’s *award-winning* performances, and his related message afterwards, inspired in me deep hope for the decolonization of Christianity. 

One clear take-away from the service was the irony of Mary Magdalene’s relative neglect in Christian doctrine, given her primary role in spreading ‘the good news’, and the wider pattern of neglect of women - and feminine divinity - in both the Bible and Christianity, generally. In glaring contrast to mainstream, colonized Christianity, women and feminine deities play a central role in Vodou as well as in other African Traditional Religions (ATRs) and embodied ancestral spiritual traditions with which I am familiar. Unlike Christian sects which only recently included women clergy or still exclude them, women and men - as well as people whose genders fall outside of the binary - are and have always been high level initiates and leaders of Vodou sosyete⁴ (societies). Finally, colonized Christianity is characterized by the oddly imbalanced masculine trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (or Spirit) and - with the exception of Catholic saints - feminine deities are non-existent or - as with women - generally relegated to footnotes⁵. On the other hand, Vodou is full of feminine divinity: many of the lwa⁶, such as Ezili (Erzulie), are feminine, and these female lwa range in age, appearance and temperament. 

Beyond the issue of the role of women and female deities, the UUCC Easter service helped me clarify my understanding of the contrasting roles of the Dead in various religious and spiritual traditions. In fact, these contrasting roles can, in a way, be summarized by the most common references used in the corresponding epistemologies: colonized Christianity and the dominant culture it has shaped are more likely to refer to ‘the Dead’ - separate and alien from the living - whereas Afrocentric cultures identify with those who preceded them and whom they will one day join: ‘Ancestors’, or ‘zanset yo’ in kreyòl. While colonized Christianity and the dominant culture it has shaped have - perhaps out of fear and discomfort - shunned and ghettoized the dead and dying to limited times and out-of-the-way spaces, Ancestors literally walk, speak and dance among the living in the Vodou tradition and others like it. In ceremony, the lwa - as ancestral Spirits - are brought into the realm of the living through elaborate rituals which induce them to mount the bodies of their serviteur: descendants of the elevated ancestor, devoted who have undergone initiation, and sometimes even the curious who just happened to show up. Lwa, ancestors, the dead: they are held close and intermingle with the living. And from them, the living derive great inspiration, strength, healing - even amusement.

Before I return to the dead / Ancestors: there is a lot of debate among different branches of Christianity about literal and figurative interpretations of the Bible and the stories it contains. Personally, as someone who believes in and has experienced the unseen and unseeable, it is easier for me to go with a figurative interpretation simply because it’s hard to imagine any written or spoken language being sufficient to convey the Divine, the magical, the totality of Creation. Notably, during the UUCC service, when pressed about what she saw that day at Jesus’ tomb, ‘Mary of Magdala’ replied that it was not so much what she saw, but what she felt: the same faith and hope that Jesus had originally inspired in her when she became familiar with him and his teachings of love (and teaching of inner resistance to outer oppression, I would add). So when I imagined this devoted woman walking up to the grave of her beloved teacher and finding the stone rolled away, I could imagine - could feel - the faith, the hope, surging in my body. 

This feeling - of faith and hope in the body - is not an imaginary or theoretical one for me. In the Vodou ceremonies in which I participate - and, I suppose, in ancestrally-rooted embodied spiritual practices, more generally - there is no shortage of feeling: the feeling of the resonance of drums; the call & response of the samba⁷ and assembled vibrating in the air; the movement of the body in rhythm with the music; of sweat; of other bodies in close proximity; asson⁸ or candle or water in hand; spraying rum; more often than not, the healing sensation of tears streaming down cheeks, chest heaving with sobs or screams released from deep within; and always, the expansive feeling of awe when Spirit moves through another person, and the tingling energy in the back of my neck when Spirit begins to move through me.

Amidst the frenetic energy of every Vodou ceremony I attend there are also piercing moments when the miracle of it all sinks in, and the intensity of sound and sight and movement is subsumed by a swell of intense and humbling gratitude. Gratitude for the survival of this community and tradition, in spite of centuries of likely the most brutal and ongoing oppression in history. Gratitude for the deep honor of being allowed to participate in such a tradition, and for the realization of long-awaited transformations it has yielded in my life. Gratitude to Bondye - God, the Creator, or creation itself - the Ancestors, and the lwa for giving me life, and placing on my path the people who led me to these awe-inspiring moments in healing spaces. Gratitude for gathering with those Frantz Fanon would have categorized broadly as the ‘wretched of the earth’ and Howard Thurman referred to as ‘the disinherited’, and learning from them that I should take nothing for granted, that gratitude and deep joy can be eked out of the most challenging circumstances.

Feeling, healing, connection, gratitude: every human needs these, but not every human gets them. Some of us have been chasing after them for so long that we have forgotten what we are looking for. Depression, anxiety, all manner of illness besieges us those who have forgotten. Some drink, smoke, drug, gamble, etc. to numb what is missing: to dull the ache of phantom limbs in our family tree. 

Relatedly, I wonder how often - or how many - other people of European descent know or think about the ancient traditions of our European ancestors: the dances and songs and healing ceremonies that were lost when the Romans co-opted Christianity as a tool of colonization, and the Roman Catholic Church launched Inquisitions, and their collaborators carried out witch hunts; the ancestral knowledge and embodied practices that tied our very Ancestors to land and to each other - living and departed - and which now await resurrection as more and more of us inhabit a wasteland of aching numbness which resembles neither the thrill of living nor the relief of death. 

In the wake of one more mass shooting⁹ and all the public discussion that follows - including the topic of ‘mental health’ - I can’t help but wonder: if these troubled young men - most of whom are of European descent¹⁰ - had a consistent, communal place to be held in liberating themselves from the terror, trauma and violence in their own lives, would they have ended up wreaking so much more terror, trauma and violence upon others? Or put more simply, if these young men were culturally and spiritually supported in relating to their Ancestors - ‘the Dead’ -  might they be less callous about causing death?

For those who are Christian, Jesus is savior, Messiah, Christ, son of God the Father. Beyond Christianity, Jesus is regarded as a valuable teacher in other religions, and as a prophet in the last of the Abrahamic faiths - Islam. But from the widest lens - and one that includes all of humanity, when it comes to spiritual practices shared by all Indigenous traditions worldwide which have distinguished us humans from our other animal relations - Jesus could also be understood as an elevated Ancestor. One worthy of reverence. One who inspires faith, hope, love, courage. One worthy of being called upon and called down to those who serve him. 

When I was young it was popular for young Christians to wear a WWJD bracelet, meaning “what would Jesus do?” I assume the creators of these bracelets were hoping to discourage young Christians from premarital sex and drug use, but I wonder now about those who have allowed themselves to be seduced into following a tragically colonized version of Jesus’ teachings. This is a version which has rationalized and been used to rationalize violent oppression and marginalization of an intersecting variety of humans: women and others classified as not-men; Black, Indigenous and other people of color and their traditional cultures, lands and customs; practitioners of embodied Ancestral spiritual traditions, from the pagan traditions of Europe to Vodou in Ayiti. 

In other words, as my Wellesley Racial Justice Initiative elder, Sarah Marter, put it when we were discussing this essay last night: “Christian church leaders effectively disembodied Christianity in order to control the spirit. [And in so doing] they conquered the physical world through colonization, and they also conquered the religious or spiritual world.”

Yes. And…

The truth is, nothing is permanent. Not a spirit’s journey in living body, not the state of being conquered, or the state of conqueror. What has happened as a result of Greco-Roman and the Roman Catholic Church’s colonization of Europe, the rise of the ‘nation-state’ as the dominant political format, and with it the violent oppression of millions upon millions within Europe and then throughout Afrika, Asia, the Americas and beyond up until this present day, hour, moment: all of this is impermanent, a phase like the days of despair between Jesus’ crucifixion and the moment when Mary of Magdala - a Palestinian Jewish woman living under both Roman colonization and the double patriarchy of her own culture and their colonizers - arrived at his tomb, saw the stone rolled away and felt, once again, the faith and hope in her body that the teachings of Jesus had first instilled in her. 

Somewhere along the way, along with some of the realest stuff Jesus ever said¹¹, his Spirit - that Spirit of faith, hope, courage and love which Mary felt - also seems to have been lost among the many who claim to believe in him. Is that because they rely too heavily on the ‘written word’¹² of an old book missing pages¹³, too afraid of those who lay beyond the realm of the visible¹⁴ to call down Jesus into their midst? Or is it because they have been so thoroughly alienated from the practices of embodied spirituality from which the historic Christian church violently and forcefully separated their Ancestors? 

According to first-hand accounts in the Bible, Jesus gathered with women, the poor, lepers and outcasts. He overturned tables of powerful money lenders who defiled the temples. He preached to his fellow Palestinian Jewish brethren and sistren a unique brand of spiritual resistance to Roman colonization. 

Knowing that, what would Jesus do today? Wouldn’t he lift up Mary Magdalene and other women, whose stories have been pushed aside and minimized, and whose well-being and rights have been relegated to an afterthought in colonized Christian institutions and the dominant culture which they so heavily influenced? What might he think of the feminine Gnostic Christian deity, Sofia? And wouldn’t he want more than the passive ‘thoughts & prayers’ dispensed by too many self-proclaimed Christians in the wake of the now innumerable mass shooting tragedies? 

And, but, even if we want to do more to stem the current tsunami of domestic and global violence, to wake up, to call Jesus’ true Spirit down, and/or to resurrect the healing embodied ancestral spiritual traditions so many of us have lost or forgotten, how do we do it? 

That will have to be the subject of another essay, but we have many historic - that is to say, ancestral - and contemporary examples of embodied spiritual practice being harnessed to resist unthinkable violence: the Vodou ceremony Bò kay Iman (a.k.a. Bwa Kayiman or Bois Caiman) launching the most active and successful phase of the Haitian Revolution; African-American spiritual practices sustaining life, escape and revolts during enslavement all the way through the perilous marches and sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement to current movements, be they the Movement for Black Lives or virtual international maroon communities, like Knubia; Canbomblé undergirding both the powerful maroon quilombos during the long period of slavery in Brazil and still today in Afro-Brazilian efforts to resist state-sanctioned anti-Black violence; countless examples - such as the 1812 Pan-Indian Movement in the Ohio Valley led by Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh - of Indigenous spiritual practices on Turtle Island and beyond deployed to resist genocide by settler-colonizer governments, such as the USA.

Healing this violence and our brokenness starts with remembering that we are part of the ‘interconnected web of life’, as the UUs remind us; it progresses by getting back in our bodies and getting back in touch with the mighty power our Ancestors offer; it will resolve when, finally, we unlock the unfathomable power of over half of the population: women, Black, Indigenous, and others who are marginalized in what bell hooks referred to as the ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’. And healing from violence and brokenness will continue with all of ‘us’ - broadly defined - being empowered to be our whole selves: on the planetary level; the human level; the individual level. 

Being our whole, human selves - spiritual, physical, social, political beings - need not be a painful process. In Ayiti, the Vodou tradition of Rara overlaps with the Lenten and Easter period. On the surface, Rara - with its brightly colored costumes, masks and decorations, and streets full of singing, dancing, music-making crowds - resembles sensual and ostentatious Kanaval/Carnival or Mardi Gras parades. But ever since the days of slavery in Ayiti, Rara has also been a means of political mobilization and even protest against the status quo; it is, after all, a literal movement of the people. And rooting all of that, as Oungan Marseille Jean of Sosyete Nago confirmed for me when we spoke about Rara a few days ago, is Vodou ritual: calling down the lwa - the Ancestors - in all their power to walk, speak and dance among the living. 

1. I try to give attribution in my writing and life to those who have influenced my thinking, learning and healing. In fact, given that my deepest knowledge lies in intersectional topics, like Africana Studies and antiracism, and my analytical strength lies in my intersectional thinking - rather than expertise in some of the fields I address - I would be honored to inspire those who are ‘experts’ to dig deeper into some of the questions &/or hypotheses raised here. Shout-out Dr. Carr and Prof. Karen Hunter, co-founders of In Class with Carr and Knarrative.com - the world’s ‘largest online Africana Studies learning community’ - for creating an inspiring example of a collaborative learning community. To learn more about ‘honoring the value of collaborative and collective knowledge’ and other ways to live into values of collective liberation - and, conversely, the white supremacy culture values that organizations and institutions tend to reproduce in the absence of intentional reflection - read “White Supremacy - Still Here”.

2. Easter, as observed in the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, which will be the primary focus of this essay when I refer to Christianity.

3. Not sure how to qualify the historic or present-day Gnostics; I need to do more research. Anyway, the ‘etc’ implies the list is not conclusive, so it isn’t ;-)

4. To learn about the key role that elder Haitian women manbo (Vodou priestesses) played in organizing and advising key spiritual and military leaders of the Haitian Revolution, look out for research from Èzili Dantò of HLLN, #FreeHaiti.

5. Read more about Gnostic Christianity and the feminine divinity, Sophia, at https://gnosticismexplained.org/sophia/.

6. I tricked you! Maybe you thought I was going to offer an explanation of ‘lwa’; I’m not! Why? I didn’t find a satisfying explanation in English for a concept which defies easy translation, and not everything is meant to be experienced through the written word. 😜 If you really wanna learn more about ‘lwa’, let me know in the comments!

7.  A high-level initiate in Vodou who leads the ‘call’ in ritual songs during ceremonies. 

8.  A sacred instrument used by manbo (priestess) or oungan (priest) during ceremonies. 

9.  At the time I was writing this sentence - April 15th - I was referring to the shooting in the Louisville, KY bank. In the two days since then, there have been nine more mass shootings in the USA, according to https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting.

10.  Barring those who live in US-government sanctioned war zones within the confines of the United States. Locales such as Newark, NJ, New Orleans, LA, and Chicago, IL which are fraught with high levels of gun violence in their Black communities have also historically been areas of great resistance against the various manifestations of state-sanctioned white supremacy, from slavery to police brutality through organizations such as the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, etc. This resistance has been met with well-documented tax-payer funded counterinsurgency efforts against these organizations by the FBI, CoIntelPro and other branches of the US government, including assassination of leaders, such as Fred Hampton (Black Panthers). Likewise, these locales are disproportionately disrupted by policies propping up the prison-industrial complex and other policies which function to disrupt families and communities. Arguably, the high levels of violence in these locales should be understood as a by-product of active and passive warfare by the US government…. And this should not be a footnote; this is an attempt to hold space for an extremely important facet of the overarching topic, but which I did not have time to properly develop in this essay. The state-sanctioned violence towards - and division of - racialized communities in the USA could *never* be a footnote.  

11.  Which have been excluded from the Bible - see the Nag Hammadi footnote.

12.  Read more about ‘worship of the written word’ in “White Supremacy - Still Here”.

13.  See previous comments and footnotes about the Nag Hammadi.

14.  I suppose here I could write “living” rather than “visible”, but then I would have to interrogate the deeper meaning of “living” given that, arguably, there are many in the realm of the “visible” who move through their days in an artificially induced drug-&/or-alcohol-clouded stupor -- a mere approximation of being alive.