I wonder – how did Miriam pray? It’s an unanswerable question – butI imagine she would have been soaking up the teaching on prayer that her rabbinic master Yeshua was offering . I imagine that in his company she was diving deep with him into the depths of meaning of the pithy petitions of what we now name ‘The Lords Prayer.’
A Franciscan mystic, Francisco de Osuna, uses a word picture to describe the impactof a true spiritual master on his pupil – an eagle spiralling upwards with a younger bird protected under his wingspan who is being drawn up higher and higher into the heavens. For me this is a beautiful description of how the living presence of an enlightened master protects and raises the consciousness of others . This is my way of imagining how Miriam might have been schooled in prayer - her soul protected from the overwhelming heat of divine light until she was ready and yet simultaneously being drawn into the updraft. In the presence of Yeshua her mind and heart was being ‘raised’ in love.
I also wonder, in that raising – how is Miriam of Magdala still ‘at prayer’ ? Perhaps we have intimations of her uplifting presence in our own meditation and dreams. Perhaps we recognise a palpable quality of what we could call Magdalenic energy. Again and again it seems that this powerful feminine Magdalenic energy seems to arouse and carry me forwards - particularly when I make my own journeys into the Lords Prayer.
For me, Miriam of Magdala embodies the rising of the sacred feminine that once again is showing up, rousing us from a our narrow self-shackled vision of ourselves , from our institution-shackled understanding of religion and our dogma-shackled notions of God. I believe and trust that this rising can help us us to remember and recreate a metaphysic and practice of love for a new generation of lovers of truth and wisdom.
So in the light of that huge vision how do I dare to pray ‘The Lords Prayer’? Very hesitantly, I willd escribe ways that this very distilled teaching on prayer has gradually changed from being a formula of petitions to a living process and a means of making transforming soul journeys.
With Miriam I breathe his prayer
with her, each petition
is a portal that opens
is a proposal of love
is a rite of the heart
is a little death
is a shackle dropped
and a tender perfuming
of my anointed self.