Recently, I asked Rev Jo to share the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene with our erotic practitioner community in the way that only she can tell it. If you have been around for a while, you must know Rev Jo. I consider her a guardian angel and deep, deep friend. I did Bible study with Rev Jo every Tuesday for two and a half years, and I think I cried on every occasion. One of the things that came alive in our Bible study was the notion that Jesus loved women. As an Italian girl who went to a Catholic church and later attended many Christian churches, I heard the same New Testament stories again and again, and in them, Jesus loved everybody. The stories were never told, though, from the viewpoint that Jesus had a special heart toward women or the feminine, and this was a lens through which I could see things very differently.
A new way of seeing
I asked Rev Jo to share Mary Magdalene’s story so she could offer others this new way of seeing, too, because one of the things that I notice in the culture lately, as I look on Instagram, is that the concept of forgiveness is challenging for people to glean. There is a notion that not forgiving someone, that punishing someone, is power. People will say, “It is my right to hold a grudge,” like, “You can’t take from me.” And what I want to say is, “No, I want to take your suffering away.” For the most part, the other person doesn’t care whether we have forgiven them or not, other than in the case of families or maybe close friends. But they don’t care as much as the person who is being eaten alive for being unforgiving.
Rev Jo restores Mary Magdalene, whom she describes as a woman who would be unrecognizable to herself after being lost in translation over the last 2000 years. She has not just been mistranslated from Aramaic and Hebrew, but she has also been appropriated by Western culture and molded into the modern stereotype of a woman.
Pregnant and unmarried, Mary Magdalene has been dragged out of her home to be stoned as an adulteress. The stoning, says Rev Jo, is a trick for the itinerant Rabbi, Jesus, “who’s not trained in the right churches, in the right synagogues.” They want to put her before Jesus to see if he will keep the law.
Creativity transforms
Rev Jo describes a period in time in which creativity was utterly absent. There is one action. The action is that she’s an adulteress, and there is only one response to that action. There is no alternate response. There is only stoning her to death. This is what the time of no creativity looks like. One action, one response.
This is Jesus’s test. Stoning her to death would be the “right” response, and he would have the honor of throwing the first stone. However, says Rev Jo, although he employs “the custom and the culture,” he transforms it, using his power as one of the most respected there to open a new possibility. A possibility that ultimately makes transformation, through forgiveness, available to everyone, especially the woman judged and denigrated by the people.
In the story Rev Jo tells, Jesus stirs the dynamic feminine. He enlivens creativity to see a different solution where there was only one before. There was an immutable cause and condition: ‘You’re born, you die.’ He was here to alter that immutable, unbreakable, fixed reality.
The grace of ultimate forgiveness
According to Rev Jo, Jesus sat on the ground before answering the crowd and swirled his fingers through the sand. He waited for inspiration. When he got it, he stood, and it was in the form of an inquiry. The one who has never made a mistake can throw the first rock. Essentially, “Who among you has never made a mistake?” People begin to drop their stones and walk away in answering that for themselves.
It was a new thought: “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” The idea is that we get to punish whoever we want to punish on one condition— that we have never made a mistake ourselves. This speaks to an invisible Dharma, an invisible, universal law that is always undeviating. If we don’t know that law, if we don’t respond to that law, we may still punish others, but we’re the ones who are harmed.
The story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is about receiving the grace of the ultimate forgiveness. Forgiveness to me is very similar to inspiration, to that moment of feeling free. In this scenario, it’s Jesus. I love Jesus, but the same could be said of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
Letting go is the best remediation
Non-forgiveness is the mind that chatters, blames, and criticizes. It criticizes you. It criticizes me. The moment we break out of that mindset, even for a second, we get the reprieve of the freedom that comes with forgiveness. We experience this freedom the minute we operate according to the universal dharmic law, in this case that we only punish provided we have never made a mistake ourselves.
To ‘live forgiven’ is synonymous with ‘live forgiving,’ and this can be one of the most challenging concepts to grasp. It’s as if we’re the ones holding our own leash and not letting ourselves move from the antipathy of this one false notion that not forgiving, not letting go, is the best remediation that we can get. The best remediation we can get is letting go of all of it, but for that, we need profound faith.
Rev Jo describes faith as trust, the willingness to put “that one stake in the ground and the full weight of [our] life into the emptiness.” It’s trusting that something is there even when we can’t see it.
The human condition is not unique
If I could dispel one thing for people, it would be that anyone’s pain is unique. There is an idea that somewhere, at some point, there was someone without the regular condition of insufficiency and discomfort, that is, the human condition. Suffering comes from not acknowledging that we all carry this burden and looking for a diagnosis for it.
We may all have experienced stepping out and feeling that no bridge appeared beneath our feet. What is the answer to the heartache that says, “I will never step again. I will never. I have been hurt. I will not step out again”? The pain makes you take your faith away from your human experience. But the taking away of the faith creates the feeling of falling down. It’s the removal of faith and trust that has you fall. Then you say, “I can’t trust because I fell.” You fell because you lost trust.
You can trust the fall
According to Rev Jo, however, it’s not actually possible to fall. It’s only possible to think you are falling when you believe the voice in your head that tells you that you are not enough and never will be enough—believing that voice when it tells you you are not enough cuts off access to the bridge that materializes through faith. If there is a devil, says Rev Jo, he would be the one behind the voice that separates you from your faith and the perfection of your human experience. It is only possible to fall upwards, says Rev Jo. Even when you think you are falling down, she says, you can trust the fall.
So, the antidote to the removal of faith is to know that you are enough. And you are enough because “you’re the self-portrait of God.” According to Rev Jo, it’s not just God’s image either, but also his likeness. What we are is indestructible. “We can trust that whatever is happening,” she says, “that the Christ of consciousness is standing right there preventing your stoning. You got to make sure you don’t pick up a rock and hit your own head.”
It’s time to forgive ourselves
The crux of forgiveness then lies in forgiving ourselves. In the same way that Jesus did not judge Mary Magdalene, we, too, are not judged unless judging ourselves. When we forgive ourselves, it becomes easy to forgive others. It’s almost like we are more afraid to be forgiven (to let ourselves off the hook) than we are to forgive, like it’s a protection. But really, it’s the last holdout with God. “I cannot forgive myself because if I do, I will be too bad even for God.” That’s the final thing to give up, that place. It has to become “No longer am I going to hold out. I will give it to you, and you finish this, God.”