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When I am awake in the wee hours, I can’t always think clearly. There’s not a lot of blood flowing to my neocortex. We have two dogs with food sensitivities, and a third dog who all too recently was housebroken: if something goes bump in the night, I don’t even have to look. I succumb to the grim conclusion that there’s a mess, somewhere in the house. (Even if there isn’t.)
But even when the dogs are sleeping in heavenly peace, often enough, before first light, I am vulnerable to dreadful thoughts and awful feelings. “I offended somebody yesterday!”, an inner demon will mutter in the shadows of my mind. “I didn’t finish a project!”, whispers another gremlin as it shuffles along another mental corridor. “I was foolish; they think I’m a fool; I am a fool.”
But there are still worse gremlins in my mind, in the pre-dawn hours. The climate-change gremlins tell me the world is ending (though even at noonday their argument is persuasive). A bridge fell down last week? Well of course it did. I try to go to my “happy place” – and of course you just know I have a happy place: I have given and received lots of therapy; I am couch trained, as they say in our psychotherapeutic culture – and sometimes I can just manage to get there.
My happy place is a serene, leafy, quiet glade near the top of a hill, where I sleep snug under a down comforter, with gentle breezes flowing over me. I try to go there in the early morning, when it is still dark, when my mind isn’t working properly – when I am out of my mind. But I don’t reliably find that place of serenity. Finally I give up, I get up, and I go downstairs to turn on the kettle. Then I take my hot instant coffee (with four sugars – yes, four, one for each evangelist, if you like), and I get comfortable under a blanket in the living room, hoping Dash, a most outstanding dog, will come downstairs to be with me. He always does.
Two mornings ago, by ancient Jewish reckoning the sixth day of the week, while it was still dark, I spent some time with an icon of Saint Mary Magdalene, whom I consider the patron of morning people, the patron of those with nocturnal anxiety disorder (if that’s a thing), the patron of early-morning feelers of feelings.
This particular icon reveals Mary before a dark background – it seems that even now, among the communion of saints, she is up in the night. And in this icon, she is a brown Palestinian woman. (I hope you can come up and see her, after the liturgy.) Her splendid red garment suggests that she is wealthy, and that tracks: we know that the first Christians gathered in households run and bankrolled by women. Her name is written at the base of the icon in Syriac, a dialect of the language spoken by Jesus and his friends.
In this icon, as in all icons, you are invited to pray with the guidance of the subject. And the subject – Mary of Magdala – stares directly into your eyes. She holds an egg, a familiar symbol of resurrection, but in her hands also a symbol of Mary’s status as the apostle to the apostles, the one who ran to them to tell them, “I have seen the Lord.”
When I pray with Mary while it is still dark, she teaches me a few things. I want to share them with you, if only because every single one of you was a sibling of Mary Magdalene, early this morning, on this the first day of the week. Against all reason and good sense, you rose in the middle of the night to come here. But you are in good company, when doing this odd thing.
Mary teaches us, first, to just get up. Are you laying in bed, helpless against the flood of wretched thoughts and feelings, certain that the world is forever corrupt, that your life will end in grief, that all is lost, or all is just pointless?
Get up. Get up and go downstairs and start the kettle. John the evangelist tells us that Mary doesn’t even bring spices or give herself anything to do, exactly. She just gets up and goes to the tomb of her friend, the grave of her teacher. (More than teacher: she calls him “Rabbouni!”, which doesn’t just mean ‘teacher.’ Rabbi means ‘teacher.’ Rabbouni is a caritative term. Rabbouni means teacher-I-love, teacher-I-adore.) Anyway, Mary just gets up and goes. That’s her whole mission.
Next, Mary teaches us to just feel our feelings. We’re going to feel them whether we want to or not, so why resist? Mary sees that the stone had been removed from the tomb, so she just runs to her friends and tells them – with no evidence – that someone had taken the body away.
Now, at this point in Mary’s story, a couple of men cause a distraction. They run to the tomb – they respect Mary enough to take her alarm seriously – and they enter the tomb, a bolder step than Mary had taken when she was lost in her early-morning fears. (It helps to be the second or third person to arrive at an upsetting scene, so they have Mary to thank for that.) They step into the tomb, one at a time, and see that the body is gone. But then they just ... go home. Clunk, they take no further action. Thanks, guys.
But Mary stays at the tomb, where she has more to teach us. She has already taught us to just get up already, and feel our feelings, even the hard ones. Now she teaches us to stay. Stay at the tomb: stay at the place where it hurts the most. Trust yourself that you will know what to do, and what not to do; and trust yourself that even if you do something foolish, you’ll be able to cope with the consequences. Mary stays at the worst place she can think of – the tomb of her friend – and she weeps openly, weeps freely, in that terrible garden.
Get up. Feel your feelings. Stay where it hurts. Weep freely. But here’s her ultimate teaching, the one thing we should all read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, from our first and bravest apostle, Mary Magdalene: In the depth of our grief, in the wasteland of our early-morning despair, in the worst muck of this world, the Risen One calls us by name.
The Risen One calls us by name, and this is not just an empty promise from a pollyanna: they said Mary had been “filled with demons,” probably an ancient way of saying she had been mentally and emotionally disturbed. This world-wise and world-weary saint has no illusions. Her greatest friend, her beloved teacher, was executed before her eyes, and even in resurrected life she can not hold on to him; she can not keep him to herself; she still loses him. She is the first of his followers, a brown Palestinian woman who sees the world as it truly is, and trusts even the wretched thoughts and feelings that haunt her in the awful hours before dawn. Mary knows. She won’t lie to you.
Accept her teaching: the Risen One calls you by name, calls you by name not out of the world, but into it, with power, and with purpose. Everything we do as followers of the Risen One, here on this block and across this city, day and night, week in and week out – everything we do is done with a clear understanding of how hard things are in this world. And yet we do good things, powerful things, life-sustaining things, resurrecting things. And we do them because the Risen One calls each of us by name.
We practice names, here at St. Paul’s. We practice names so that we can follow the Risen One, who knows each of our names. A little while ago we showered lovely baptismal water on everyone, the water that flows when each of us is named before God. If I do not know your name, or if I forget it in a moment of early-morning fatigue, you will still be known here. Always.In a little while I’ll personally be naming many neighbors of ours who are living outside, or used to live outside until they gained shelter, in a few cases with the help of this community. Names matter. And we followers of the Risen One, we remember names.
In the depth of our grief, in the wasteland of early-morning despair, in the worst muck of this world, the Risen One calls you by name. So get up, feel your feelings, stay where it hurts, and hear the Risen One calling your name.
And hear me now, dear friends, as I tell you this Good News:
I have seen the Lord.
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Preached at the Great Vigil of Easter (John’s Gospel), March 31, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
John 20:1-18