Mary Magdalene and the Mystical Path of the Heart

A 10-Week On-line Class led by Marilyn Strong

Wednesday Evenings, 7:00pm - 9:00pm

February 5th through April 9th, 2025

We will read together The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, by Cynthia Bourgeault

Chanting, meditation, invocation, poetry, breaking into breakout groups for sharing, and small ceremonies will also be woven into the course to help us integrate the intellectual material into our daily lives in a soulful way. We will begin with the sharing of our personal stories in relation to our our experience of the Divine Feminine. The course will be limited to a maximum of 9 women, so although we will be meeting virtually, we will have a chance to really get to know one another, as though we were sitting together in the same room.

From her bio on the Center for Action and Contemplation website: "Cynthia  Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer and internationally known retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude at her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths." She is also core faculty at the Center for Action and Contemplation, founded by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, teacher and writer.

In The Meaning of Mary Magdalene Cynthia does a wonderful job of looking at Mary Magdalene initially from the canonical gospels, then brings in the recently recovered ancient gospels that were deemed “heretical” by the patriarchy, which round out the portrait of the Magdalene in significant ways and gives them equal footing.

From the Preface to her book:

Her first goal is to "repair the damage caused by a heavy-handedly patriarchal (and at times flat-out misogynistic) ecclesiastical tradition and reclaim Mary Magdalene's legitimate role as a teacher and apostle." She says that she comes at the topic not as a feminist, but from "the perspective of wisdom Christianity, with its emphasis on those perennial spiritual practices of transformation and inner awakening."

Her second goal is to open the emotionally charged question of a possible love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and her conclusion is that such a relationship most likely did exist and is in fact at the heart of the Christian transformational path. But the kind of relationship she has in mind is not "the sentimentalized melodrama our culture commonly holds up as love, but a spiritual love so refined and luminous as to be virtually unknown in the West today." She says she is entering this territory precisely for the sake of this love: “because its healing and generative energy is desperately needed right now to heal the deep psychic wounds of Christianity." And I would add that it is needed to heal the deep psychic wounds of Western culture, generally.

Her third goal is to look at how this healing has unfolded and continues to unfold through the largely unacknowledged infusions of Mary Magdalene's presence as an archetype of the divine feminine wisdom. She is coming not from a Jungian perspective but from traditional wisdom teachings on the human soul as a bridge between the visible and invisible realms. "The 'inter-cosmic' fluidity attested to in these texts is the real legacy of the love between Jesus and Mary Magdalene ... As with all lovers who have lived to the full the wager that love is stronger than death, the faithfulness of their two hearts resonating across time and space forms a particular kind of energy channel through which divine compassion pours itself forth as wisdom and creativity."

Marilyn will also draw on other sources such as The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart by Cynthia Bourgeault, The Gospel of Mary by Jaques LeLoup, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala by Karen L. King, and Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life As Sacred Ground, by Mirabai Starr

To Register, email Marilyn Strong at lapis@whidbey.com and mail a check made out to

Pomegranate Seed Productions, 6365 S. Fox Hill Lane, Clinton, WA 98236-2100

Questions? call 360-661-4658