The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Newcomers here often ask how we- Mary and the others and I- could have been so stupid, so confused that morning in the garden by the tomb, on the first day of the week. I admit it is a bit surprising, although I see that the stories which others, men, told are not much more coherent   No one should expect them to be our experience went well beyond the ordinary evidence of the senses. It was, for me as for others, just a gesture or a tone of voice, the way he breathed; not something one could explain in words that made us recognize Him.
That didn’t mean that we had to lose our senses. We certainly ran away terrified and at first, in our fear, told no one.
But panic was not our only reaction- or at least not mine. There was something else which I didn’t, then, want to admit. Perhaps I had a closer relationship with Him that the others. He had, as they said then, cast out seven devils from me. Seven devils, who, one after another, had plunged me into deadly depression, who destroyed every glimmer of life, love and joy in me pushing me into blackness and despair. He brought me out of that; all it took was to touch me and say my name and I knew all my light and life were restored to me.
I laugh when I see some of the pictures men have painted of me. I don’t mind the ones of me in the Garden; it’s the ones of me penitent that are so silly. I should be flattered- one can allow oneself a little vanity even up here. I’m pleased they thought me so well endowed, albeit, mostly covered by my luxuriantly long hair (they do get that right). But I’m sorry to disappoint you chaps, actually I wasn’t a tart and didn’t spend rest of my life in a state of undress repenting my past. Those pictures tell you more about the masculine psyche, than about me. Why would I spend the rest of my life penitent? No; I was grateful, not sorry, more grateful than words could express. I devoted my life to following him and helping him and his disciples. We women had witnessed his death (which most of the men did not) and intended to minister to his corpse too.
It was John who persuaded me to say what actually happened that morning. John was an old man by then, and I was no younger, but remembered it all very clearly; much more clearly than I’d felt able to tell the others. It was John’s strange way of speaking, the incantatory effect of his repetitions and his abstractions that somehow caught what Jesus had said and the way he understood Jesus made me want to tell him about my experience.
The story is familiar now; how I mistook him for a gardener but recognised him as he called me by name; how he told me to let go him- I had hugged him- telling me how he had to ascend to his father, his God and my God. People think the hugging bit was just to demonstrate that he was solid, not just a ghost. Maybe. Part too was not wanting to lose him again. You have to remember that even to touch, let alone hug, a man who was not your husband, was most unusual, even taboo; that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps that’s why too, His words are so often mistranslated; He said “Let go of me”. Not, “Don’t touch me” He meant that I had to let go of him as man; life went beyond the physical now.
I told John, because it mattered, because it brought back so vividly my memory of how he had healed me, how he had thrown out my seven deadly demons and given me back my life. Then too he called me by my name and touched me. He had recognised me and acknowledged that I was, crazy girl that I was, a true person, someone of consequence to him, someone with a name and an identity, someone who- as I learned later on that momentous early morning, was like him, the daughter of the same heavenly father; his God and my God. Casting out my demons he had given me back human life, the life of this material world.
On that morning I understood so much more; that he could not just restore human life as it should be, but take it much further giving it an importance that transcended pain, decay, and death itself. It took John to make me tell all this; I wanted to keep it myself-not just through embarrassment, but because at first it seemed private to me.  John put it all into context and I could see I had to tell it all as it wasn’t just about me; what He’d done for me He would do for anyone who let Him. And I suppose that is why I’m a saint; I’m not so very special, but if what happened to me can tell others about what He can do, then I’ll put up with it; I’ll even put up with living forever with the martyrs- and those kinky artists. Amen.