I am the bridge between heaven and earth.
I am fully human and fully divine.
Mary Magdalene represents the fierce, unwavering love that we all have access to within our own vulnerable hearts. It’s a love that renders all things sacred from the animals to the angels, from the poorest to the most powerful. It’s a love that sees the inherent worth of all things. And it’s a love that remains, even through the darkest times, even through death; her love is the one that resurrects.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene relates that Jesus came to unite us, to demonstrate to us a “true human being,” an anthropos, meaning a person who is both fully human and fully divine. This is what Mary became, and it’s why she was so beloved to Jesus. She didn’t seek to follow him; she sought instead to become her true self.
Mary Magdalene reminds us that we have the power to receive vision from within. We are worthy of such proximity to the divine because that’s what the other half of what it means to be truly human. She reminds us that there’s a bridge between heaven and earth, and that we are that bridge. And she wants us to remember that the truest church we can ever enter is in the heart. This is where our true power rests and where love never ends.
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I am my own guru.
I know the self that never changes.
There’s a passage in Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda that relates an encounter he had with Anandamayi Ma. He asks her why she is always so filled with joy, and can enter states of bliss instantly. She explains to him that she’s aware of her true self. She knows that before she came to earth, she was the same. As a little girl, and later when she grew into a woman, still she was the same. And now, sitting in front of Yogananda, she remains the same. And even after her death, she says, “though the dance of creation changes around me, I shall be the same.”
This is self-realization, merging with that aspect within us that never changes. It’s becoming conscious of the self that is eternal while within this brief mortal existence. Anandamayi Ma believed that the only true calling or purpose any of us have is to become realized. And so she believed that any action we take toward that goal is sacred.
There’s a deep calm, abiding joy that arrive when we can merge with the aspect of us that never changes. There is a bliss we get to experience every time we detach from the surface storms that cause chaos in our lives. If we can remember that we are the guru, that we are an aspect of the divine that remains the same no matter how much changes surrounds us, then we get to arrive at a joy that lives in the core of our being.
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I release all that doesn’t serve me.
It’s time to be the truth of who I am.
Kali is as subtle as a sledgehammer. She shows up to strip us of what no longer serves us. And that sounds good in theory. But in practice, it can feel as if the ground beneath us has turned to sand. All those illusions about ourselves, especially what we think we’re capable of, suddenly dissolve beneath us. When Kali sweeps in, we can easily slip into feeling like a victim; it can feel as though events are happening to us rather than for us.
Kali doesn’t want us to waste another precious second being someone we are not. She doesn’t want us to be with a partner who doesn’t treat us with the respect and love we need to do the light work we’ve come here to do. Kali wants to sever ties with our ego has made out of fear, or out of a false belief that we don’t deserve better or more. She wants us to get terrifyingly real. She wants us to reckon with the fact that we are not here to please others or to make them proud. We are here to listen to the singular call of our own soul.
Kali is the harbinger of having eternal kairos, soul time. And stripping the ego to reveal the soul can feel raw, and often heart-breaking. But ultimately, Kali has come out of fierce love for the truth of who we really are. She is giving us the opportunity to choose again, to start over, and this time from a place of tremendous wisdom and strength: our vulnerability. She lets us begin again from the bare-bones truth of who we are.
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