The Magdalene Mystique - The Path Inward

Written in the early part of the second century in the framework of an ancient world, the Gospel of Mary is a Gospel of our deepest roots, filled with fresh insights for us today. It offers a Jesus who teaches that nature is good and that our true nature is rooted in the Good, a Jesus who greets his disciples with his peace and boldly instructs his disciples to “acquire my peace within yourselves.”

It’s this teaching to turn inward into peace that is so remarkable. It’s a call to come home to our shared humanity and divinity. Grounded in our original Good, we can develop the peace by starting with ourselves. All of this is within our reach. We can become whole in soul, body, mind, and spirit. We may choose to do this. This peace begins within and spreads out into harmonious relationships and to connections beyond our ordinary ones. Moving from the inside out, we can become the shared peace.

Jacob Neddleman in his The American Soul [pages 194ff] speaks of peace as understood by the American Indian. Neddleman says: “Of all the features that characterize the Indian’s vision of nature and reality, perhaps none is more mysterious and frequently overlooked or set apart than the emphasis he puts on what we translate by the word ‘peace.’ ”

And Neddleman continues, “Speaking from my own past experience, which I am sure is quite common, I was never able to grasp the importance of that word, neither as a boy enthralled by the Indian’s way of living, nor as I grew older and became a student of philosophy and the world’s religions. I remember looking at pictures of Indians: the dark, stone-strong face of a chief or warrior, his body dynamic and still, his costume intricately and mystically wild, his eyes direct and unwavering. This was a man: why should he desire “peace.”? Surely, it was power that he represented, the power of the storm and sky; and wisdom, the secrets of the animal and the forest; and freedom - from all the social artifice; and solitude, his mysterious capacity to be with himself and with the powers of the wild; and courage, his capacity to withstand pain and suffering; and silent force, the power to move through nature without making a mark, to disappear into the forest beyond all discovery; and cunning, and fighting skill and physical prowess that could often defeat the heavy-handed genius of the white man. What could “peace” mean to such a man?”

Neddleman answers his boyhood question when he explains to us in some detail what peace means for the American Indian. According to Neddleman, peace for the American Indian goes way beyond what we think when we say that peace is a kind of stasis, a rest or a safety. For the American Indian, peace is dynamic and includes the forces of life in the natural world and in the human world. It even includes what we usually call “evil” and “struggle” and “suffering and sorrow;” it includes the whole range of error and foolishness, passion, tenderness, anger and defeat. And, strangely sounding, Needleman suggests that it also includes war. How can all these opposites come under the term peace we want to ask?

Neddleman continues:

“For the American Indian — and this idea lies at the hidden root of every great spiritual teaching of the world — to be at peace means to be at peace with one’s conscience. And to be at peace within the community or to live in peace with other nations is to submit to a rule of law that is the communal expression of conscience and that provides conditions within which an individual is free to listen for that voice within himself. The establishment of such conditions, the establishment of such law, requires an intelligence of a very high order — what is called “the intelligence of the heart.” And to find such intelligence requires, in turn, an effort of exceptional people working together to respect each individual’s fragment of truth until an objective, all-inclusive truth descends into the commmunity from “above,” that is from the Great Spirit. Such an objective moral truth may be linked with the word “justice.”

We need to think deeply about these words from Neddleman and the heritage that our American Indian brothers and sisters have given us. I am interested in thinking more deeply about the possibility of living in a state in which I am at peace with my own conscience. What would that peace feel like, for example? Perhaps we could speak of this peace as living according to our own truth. And of course the question arises, do we really live according to our own truth? When, and how often, and under what circumstances?

And then as we become used to what that peace feels like to consider if the conditions are such in our own communities so that every individual is allowed that same freedom — is every individual free to listen for that voice within him/herself? to live according to his/her own conscience and to his/her own truth. So there is something communal about following the peace: this is not just an individualistic process but one with an active component relative to forming a better world. Living in this peace involves, as I understand Neddleman, an effort of working together with other peoples and nations to respect each individual’s fragment of truth until an objective and all-inclusive truth arises from the group (or descends from above into the group.) If we arrive at this all-inclusive truth, we have arrived at a just truth. This would be living in peace and justice.

Neddleman goes on to state another aspect of the thinking we derive from the American Indian, and from a host of other religious and ethical traditions about the interconnectedness of good and evil. This is a teaching that says that what is objectively good is the wholeness of reality and what is objectively evil is that which holds the elements of life apart from one another. In other works, the opposite of peace and justice is that which divides and separates parts of reality and keeps these parts away from each other. Wow! This is a very profound point. Think on this.

Many of us in the Magdalene Community are seekers. Some of us have found in our seeking what we call the “shared peace” within. Just what that means is a matter of much discussion in our Sunday morning conversations. (You may remember the central message that Jesus gives to the disciples in the Gospel of Mary. To paraphrase, Jesus says, Find the peace within - don’t look over here or over there but look within. If you seek the peace within, you will find it. If you find it, you will follow it.)

We understand that peace is not just a matter of bliss or rest but a peace that has an active impulse with it - an impulse to look out into the world and to pray and actively work for a better world. One could say that a justice impulse is inextricably tied to the peace within.

This is a peace that we all want. It takes time to process that this peace resides within us and that we can find it, if we seek it. It takes time to understand what this peace might mean to each of us on an everyday basis and what it might mean if all of us followed the peace we can find that resides within us.

I have been reading Jacob Neddleman’s The American Soul recently. His thoughts on the American Indian are helpful in sorting out what we want to say about peace. I selected some readings from his section on the American Indian to present for conversation in our Magdalene Community for this morning. I thought you might want to read some of Neddleman with us and enter into conversation as though you had been with us this morning at 10:00 am at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.

I will begin with the meditation we started out with this morning. The words are those of Jacob Neddleman. I don’t know that he meant them as a meditation but we used them as such this morning as we opened our hearts to conversation.

From Chapter Six of The American Soul:

“Will we ever know who [s/he] is? And can we ever feel what was done to [her/him]? Can we feel it in a way that goes deeper than guilt?

We can begin by looking more closely, albeit from outside, at the culture of the American Indian.

Inevitably, the first thing that strikes us is the American Indian’s relationship to nature. We know now that there was nothing “primitive” about it; we are beginning to be aware of the subtlety and sophistication of American Indian religion, its symbolism, ritual and mythology which altogether embody a vision of the universal world as profound as anything offered by the Judeo-Christian tradition. And, with this awareness, we are all the more struck by the fact that this religion is immersed in the realities of the natual world. For us in modern society it is only in special moments that we directly sense meaning in nature. Experientially and psychologically, nature, virgin nature, is only part of our world. For the Indian, nature is the world. How is it that a people who lived directly in nature also exhibited extraordinary qualities of wisdom, generosity and deep social intelligence?

…We do not understand the Indian’s relationship to nature, perhaps because — even with all the knowledge that science brings us –we simply do not understand nature itself. Perhaps it is from the Indian that we can confront the fact that we do not understand the earth — and what the earth really needs from us.”

Think on these things and drop a comment if you feel so inspired. This is the beginning of what I hope will be a continuing series of the thoughts of Jacob Neddleman that seem particularly relevant to our community that takes its inspiration from The Gospel of Mary, where Jesus encourages the assembled community to find the divine nature within.

More on peace from Neddleman later.