Bright Dark Madonna

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  “‘Maeve, we are lovers.’

  “‘You are lovers,’” Dwynwyn said. “‘But not just of each other. You are the lovers of the world.’

  ‘We can’t love if we’re apart,’ he said to me.

  ‘We can’t love unless we part,’ I told him, and then I called on his god, ‘Yeshua Ben Miriam in the name of the unnamable one, the god of your forefathers, the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I command you to go.”

  Oh,” one woman wept. “Oh. He had to go then. He had no choice, poor lamb.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “He had to go. And it was many years before either of us understood what Dwynwyn said to us about being the lovers of the world. I still don’t know if I understand.”

  “Well, I do,” spoke up one of the seediest looking whores; I’d seen many women like her during my career, past their youth but still on the street, bad skin covered over with make-up, and my healer’s sense told me she might be sick as well. I wondered if she’d let me have a look at her later. “I understand. It means he’s our lover, too. He’s the lover, you know, the one we dream about, that one who looks at you and doesn’t see what everyone else sees. He knows you from the inside.”

  “Oh, come on, Gert, they all know you from the inside,” snorted her friend.

  We were so intent on the story that we hadn’t paid attention to the evening shadows falling across the courtyard, nor did we notice the men coming home and standing in the gloaming at the edge of our circle.

  “I’m not talking about the inside of a cunt, you old cunt, and you know it. I’m…I’m talking about…what am I talking about?” she appealed to me.

  “I don’t know if I can say any better than you just did,” I said. “That Jesus is the lover, who knows us from the inside out—and isn’t that what lovemaking is? I mean, really? You can talk about god as a father or a lord or a goddess as mother or a queen. You can call your god the maker of all things or the ruler or the judge. What if god is also our lover, our secret, passionate lover? What if that’s who Jesus is, who the Christ is—now that he has suffered the god-making death? And if he is our lover, then we—”

  “That is enough.”

  We all startled and looked up to see Peter, James, Matthew, John, Mary B, and others standing over us.

  “Mary of Magdala, you are not authorized to teach.” Peter challenged me.

  “She has as much a right to teach as anyone,” Mary B was right on his case.

  “Has she repented? Has she been baptized in Jesus’s name?” Peter countered.

  “Was I dipped, do you mean?”

  Peter and the others hadn’t been there when John the Baptizer tried to drown, exorcise, or baptize me all at once. I had tried to drown him back, so perhaps it didn’t count. In any case, Peter ignored me.

  “And where was she the day the Spirit descended and gave us the gift of tongues so that we could bring the Word to the people?”

  “Peter, excuse me, if I may be so bold as to suggest unto you,” James interrupted, and yes I am exaggerating and poking fun at him, “that this grave matter of who has authority to teach the flock, as it were, and who has not, is best discussed amongst the few of those unto whom our Lord—and my brother—has appeared to give instruction, so to speak…”

  “All right, all right,” said Peter, rather ungraciously. “I see your point. We will speak at council tonight.”

  And he turned to walk off.

  “Do we get to come to the supper?” one of the whores called after him, rightly guessing that Peter was a bit more “equal” than others. “Word on the street is that you Jesus Jews set a generous table.”

  Peter turned, rather wearily and warily. He’d had a long day, and the press of the multitudes can be exhausting.

  “All Jews who repent of their sins and receive baptism in Jesus’s name are welcome at his table.”

  And before there could be further discussion, Peter and the other men stalked off.

  “What does that mean, Dove?” Gert called me by my most recent streetwalker name. (In Rome I’d been known as Red.)

  “It means sure thing,” I said.

  “Mary,” said Mary B. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”

  The two whores came to help me up, clucking over me and patting my belly, and I realized how much I longed to have time just to marvel at my body, to sit and watch the little heels and elbows swimming by, and to have women who loved me make a fuss over me. How I missed Dido, Berta, and Reginus and everyone at Temple Magdalen. I was grateful for this visit from Gert and her friend and resolved to bring them with me to supper if I had to baptize them myself.

  “Will you tell us more of the story tomorrow?”

  Mary B shook her head at me and scowled.

  “As soon as I can,” I said as Mary B dragged me by the wrist out back of the busy kitchens to a small yard where a few chickens scratched in the dirt.

  “What is the matter now?” I took the offensive. “You act as if someone just shoved a roasting spit up your butt. Are you constipated again?”

  You get to know a lot about people’s digestive problems when you’ve been on the road with them, and I had been witness to Mary B’s occasional distress, and had helped to ease her with abdominal massage and dietary advice.

  “Must you be so crude all the time? Don’t answer that,” she cut me off before I could say, predictably, yes, I must. “You are living in a house of prayer. We are trying something here that has never been tried before, and you are undermining our cause.”

  “Which is?” I asked when she paused for breath.

  “Living and working as a community of believers, men and women together serving as equals. ”

  “Mary,” I said gently, pausing for a moment to consider how to respond. I was sorry I had been flip with her. She was so earnest and passionate—and vulnerable. “You say such a community has never existed before. But isn’t that how we lived when we traveled with Jesus?”

  “You are missing the point.” She didn’t say “as usual.” She didn’t need to; I could hear it.

  “What is the point then?”

  “Listen, Jesus was—is—our teacher, our guide. He showed us the Way. He is the Way. But now it is up to us to follow the Way. When he was here, it was easy. Remember how he called himself the Bridegroom? I know. I know he married you, but that is not what he meant when he called himself the Bridegroom. He was—he is—the Bridegroom of Israel. While he was here, we were all at the wedding feast. Now the marriage begins. It takes work; it takes discipline. Following the Way is not going to happen by itself. When your teacher leaves you, you have to become the teacher.”

  “You’ve always been an excellent teacher, Mary,” I said, still conciliatory.

  “Thank you, Mary,” she said gruffly. “But again that’s not the point.”

  I wavered between feeling stupid and exasperated and chose to compromise.

  “Your points are sometimes very hard to grasp. Come on, give it to me straight.”

  “All right, the point is, are you a good teacher? No, the point is will women continue to be recognized as teachers? Jesus defended our right to be disciples, but some of the men question even that much. When they hear you trading rude remarks with common whores it doesn’t help.”

  Now my Irish was up, so to speak, or the Celt, or the street fighting whore. Take your pick.

  “If you want to be like your teacher, Mary, don’t you dare be contemptuous of whores. He never was. As to what I was teaching, if you must to call it that, it wasn’t much different from what you just said to me. You called him the Bridegroom of Israel; I called him the Lover of the World.”

  It was downright dark in the back yard now. The chickens had gone into a huddle in the corner, their heads tucked under their wings. The aroma of fresh bread was wafting from the kitchen, the sharpness of onion sliced the air.

  “I think it’s time to eat, Mary,” I changed tack.

  “Not yet.” She took hold of my arm again. “You
need to understand something. What you said to those women was very different from what I mean. You spoke as if Jesus was some kind of pagan god who would make love to them in some supernatural way. I am not talking about some vain idea of a love affair between a god and a mortal. I am talking about the Bridegroom of the people Israel. The people, the ecclesia, not individuals. The other is just sentimental nonsense.”

  The baby did a somersault, and I felt dizzy and tired.

  “Can we talk about this over supper? And speaking of supper, what about those women? Do we really have to baptize them before they can eat?”

  “You can’t baptize them. And besides, I suspect the whores are gentiles.”

  “Why can’t I baptize them? I thought men and women were equal here. And so what if they are gentiles?”

  “Mary, how can I make you understand?” I took hold of her wrist now and she followed, so intent on what she was saying that she offered no resistance. “When Jesus was alive, everyone had to accept you, whether they liked it or understood it or not. They’ll care for you for his sake—but the Way is for Israel. Or at least there is no agreement about changing that. That’s what’s so different, so precarious now. We apostles have to make decisions together, based on the scriptures and his teachings. Right now I am included in everything.”

  “So what you’re saying is—”

  “Don’t screw it up for me,” she concluded with admirable brevity.

  “Will you baptize them, then?”

  “Yes, if they are Jews.”

  “I’m sure they are.” I didn’t bother to tell Mary that if they weren’t before, they certainly would be now at the prospect of a good meal. “So let’s go get some water. Because I know one thing for sure, Jesus would be seriously pissed off if we turned anyone away hungry. He had a thing about that. Remember? ‘In as much as you have done it unto one of these the least of my sistren…’”

  “Brethren, I believe he said. Sistren is not a word, Mary. But yes, you’re right. When we fed that huge crowd in Galilee no one cared who was Jewish and who wasn’t or who had been baptized by John or by Jesus. Sometimes you actually make sense, Mary. And of course you knew him, well, intimately.”

  I could feel her blush, and I wondered if she was still a virgin or if perhaps she and Philip (her only intellectual equal) might have tangled over something other than interpretation of obscure passages in Leviticus.

  “That’s why I wish you could be at the meetings. They, we, need to hear what you have to say.”

  “All right, I will come if you want me to, Mary. It’s just that I get tired so early these days, and the meetings do tend to go on and on.”

  “You didn’t understand me, Mary.” She paused and turned to face me. “You missed so much when you were in Bethany. Now you can’t come to the meetings, not any more, not unless you convert and accept baptism. The men are immovable on that point. I wish you would become a Jew. For my sake, for the Christ’s sake.”

  I wish she wouldn’t have put it that way. For Jesus’s sake. How could I refuse him?

  “I’ll think about it, Mary.”

  “Good.” She handed me a basin, and began to draw water from the house cistern, for only pure rainwater would do for ritual purifications. “Let’s go baptize some whores.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TRUE CONFESSIONS

  IN THOSE EARLY DAYS before the word Christian came into use, following the Way was not for the faint of heart. There were no confessionals with doors and screens to cover the sinner’s shamed face. There was no general mumbled apology with the priest blithely absolving the whole congregation with a few ritual words and the sign of the cross in the air with a wave of his hand in the dim, musty air of ecclesia. Instead, every week before Shabbat eve feast, the whole ecclesia gathered to air its sins in public.

  Not a bad idea in theory; at Temple Magdalen people who had a grievance against each other were invited to sing their conflicts, impromptu operettas which usually resulted in everyone, especially the aggrieved, rolling in the aisles. But at Temple Magdalen conflict was conflict; we liked to resolve it if we could, but we were practical rather than moral. We did not expect people to perfect themselves, just to get over themselves and get on with the business at hand, whatever it was. And at our Shabbats the business was pleasure. Eat, drink, tell stories, dance till you couldn’t remember why you were mad at anyone anyway.

  The public confessions at the ecclesia were much more somber. Everyone gathered, lining three walls of the courtyard. The apostles assembled together on the fourth side, not exactly a judge and jury, more like elders, or as they called themselves, deacons—the literal meaning of which is servant, though personally I would rather have a servant soak my feet than extract a confession. Whatever you want to call them, they presided over the gathering, though they also participated, confessing in minutiae, perhaps to set an example, things I really didn’t think I needed to know. Too Much Information, so to speak. They were also skilled at the sort of confession that is really a scantily veiled accusation.

  “I confess that I committed the sin of anger in my heart, which our Master said was as bad as murder, when the other night brother so and so helped himself to more bread without offering it to anyone else first, and he really ate pretty much the whole loaf, except the heel, which he put back on the table and no one wanted it by then, and I might add he drinks rather more wine that he should, which is also a sin, isn’t it, although of course it is not my sin, and I am not here to accuse anyone….”

  To make matters worse for the pregnant (which is to say me) these longwinded confessions, repentances (lots of prostrating, the origin perhaps of punitive pushups), and absolutions had to be completed before we could eat, because then as now you are supposed to be in love and charity with your neighbor when you approach the Lord’s Table. I do want to ask an important theological question here: Does it never occur to anyone that it is easier to love your neighbor when your blood sugar is not low as the Dead Sea?

  Well, let me not be guilty of the sin of ingratitude. At least the full confessional only happened once a week. One night when it was just looking as though people were starting to run aground on their sins (perhaps for lack of sustenance) Peter, who had confessed a few already, rose and addressed the assembled.

  “Brothers and sisters in the Lord, it grieves me more than I can express that there are terrible sins left unconfessed, the sin of stealing, and, worse still, the sin of lying to the Holy Spirit.”

  Oh, shit. The cookie jar.

  I glanced in Ma’s direction. Her eyes were closed. I might have thought she was asleep, except for the soft humming that no one else noticed. She seemed utterly lacking in any conviction of sin, secure, perhaps, in her foreknowledge that one day one of Peter’s successors would issue a papal bull declaring her to be without sin once and for all, light-fingered or not. I looked at Peter again, hoping the angels were advising him to drop the charges and save himself future embarrassment—and save me from feeling obliged to cover for her—when I saw that his attention was fixed elsewhere.

  “Ananias,” said Peter, “will you not come forward and confess your sins?”

  He was addressing the prosperous newcomer he had introduced to the community a few days ago. The man refused to budge, but I thought he looked scared. Well, Peter was scary these days. What had happened to the big, impulsive man who had once broken down (much to his dismay) and wept on my breast because he felt his ignorance brought shame to his beloved master? He had become so sure of himself, and with the certainty had come not arrogance, exactly, but hardness. He knew his cause was righteous. Nothing else mattered.

  “Come forward,” Peter said, a command this time.

  Ananais did as he was told, and stood before the elders, his knees beginning to wobble, one hand clutching the other to stop the trembling.

  “Ananais, how can Satan have possessed you that you should lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the price of the land?”

 
; Peter spoke softly but the room was so quiet, there was no difficulty in hearing him. Ananais’s nervous breathing and swallowing was painfully audible. Peter let the silence lengthen, but Ananais seemed incapable of speech.

  “While you still owned the land, wasn’t it yours to keep, and after you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with as you liked? Of your own free will, you pledged all the profit to the ecclesia. What possessed you to pocket part of the price in secret? What put this scheme into your mind?” Peter stood and pointed a finger at the exposed sinner. “Know this, Ananais: you have been lying not to men but to God.”

  I did not see anything, no lightning bolt flashing from Peter’s finger, no grade Z special effects. But I could sense it—that same fire that flowed into my hands when I touched someone who was ill or in pain, what I called the fire of the stars. Peter had the fire in his hands, too. I had been there when Jesus opened the disciples to receive it (as once, long ago, I had passed the fire to him). Peter had become a famous healer. People in Jerusalem had taken to sitting for hours waiting for Peter to pass, just to be touched by his shadow. I could feel that fire concentrated in Peter’s finger, shooting across the room to Ananais. Did he intend to blast Ananais clean of sin? Baptism by laser beam?

  Then, abruptly, Ananais dropped to the floor, and there was dead silence in the room. No one made a move. Everyone waited for Peter to do or say something, but he stood transfixed, staring at his finger. Finally I stood up and started for the crumpled heap in the middle of the floor.

  “Stop,” Peter commanded. I was prepared to ignore him; I was heartily sick of the proceedings, and as an unregenerate gentile, I considered that Peter had no authority over me. “Mary,” he appealed to me, and I turned to him and there, for an instant, was the old Peter. “Mary, I…I think he’s dead.”

  “Dead?” I turned from Peter to the body of Ananais, for so it was. I didn’t need to take his pulse to see that Peter was right.

  “I…I didn’t mean to,” he said to me. “It wasn’t me.”

  I looked back at Peter, who for a moment appeared as frightened as anyone in the room. I watched as he got hold of himself and remembered his role as the preeminent apostle. It wouldn’t do for the rock on which the ecclesia was founded to turn to jelly just because he had struck someone dead.