Episode 32 - Mary the Tower with Andrew Harvey

Today, we celebrate the love, courage, devotion, and glory of Mary Magdalene. Anni is accompanied by world-renowned teacher, mystic, and sacred activist Andrew Harvey and together they explore the treasure trove of his new book, The Magdalene Revolution.

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Transcript

Okay, welcome back to season three of Barely Christian, Fully Christian. I'm Anni Ponder, and I'm super grateful to have the gift of your attention and time.

This season, we're diving further into conversations about what it means to love Jesus, to call Christianity to be better than it is and a whole lot more like Jesus, and to embrace the feminine aspects of God. I'm so glad you're here.

If you happen to be tuning in for the first time to Barely Christian, Fully Christian, may I suggest you actually go back and start with episode zero.

There's a lot of information in there that will help lay the foundation for the conversations currently ongoing. Not saying you have to go back and listen to all the episodes in between, but that would be a really great place to start.

My dears, whoa, I'm about to share a conversation with you that I'm not sure I can add. Let me happily sum up. My guest, Andrew Harvey, is at once ecstatic and grounded, delirious and sober, and absolutely and in all ways a delight.

Though I'm sure you'll note traces of a lingering flu in my voice, this conversation simply could not wait. We recorded it today as followers of Jesus and Mary the Tower, the world over, are commemorating the Last Supper.

And I simply have to put it out to the world right this minute. Come feast in joy and bask with us in the luminous love of Mary Magdalene.

It is hard to know how to begin a conversation like this, other than to say my heart is so full of joy and gratitude to be sharing this space today with my guest, Andrew Harvey, a voice of none other than Mary Magdalene, The Tower, the consort of

Jesus himself, and the one who invites us to know how to birth life into the world, along with her and Jesus of Nazareth. Welcome, Andrew. Thank you for being here. I am so delighted to be with you.

I don't know if I deserve any of those words, but I'm doing my best to feel this vast love force and try and communicate something a bit in my own way.

That's all we can do, but it's enough, it seems.

It is enough. It is enough. I'm so pleased to have an opportunity to speak with you face to face.

I have wanted to meet you for so long.

As I first came upon your work, and now I am privileged to sit with you in the glow of the book you have just birthed, The Magdalene Revolution, and discuss the wild mysteries buried in its pages, and now a flame in my own heart, as I'm sure you

understand. And I just wondered if you and I had not known who one another was, but we were traveling on a train, and I happened to sit next to you, and I saw a copy of the book in your lap. Maybe you were signing it for someone.

And I said, is that a book about Mary Magdalene? I love her. How would you explain to me who you are and how you have come to write this book?

Oh, what a beautiful question.

That's such a sweet question.

Thank you for welcoming me, and thank you for being you, and thank you for that wonderful background, which makes me feel so joyful with your red and gold, my favorite colors of the mother, the joy colors, the yes colors.

Yes.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

I think I fell in love with her when I was very young.

I was about four or five or six, and I was just discovering I had a treble voice, and I loved to sing. It was ecstatic.

I sang in different choirs, and I sang solo sometimes, and I always found myself singing to Jesus and her in the resurrection garden.

Two of them looked so unbelievably beautiful and holy and sweet and so in love and so totally communing with everything around them and so utterly, utterly one with each other that I felt I was singing to them.

And I've always, since that time, had her imprinted beyond thought in the depths of my heart as the symbol of bliss, the symbol of openness, the symbol of rapture, the symbol of total holy abandon of your whole self in love, for love, as love.

And I think all my work is caught up with that first love.

How could it not be?

Yes, it's all about first love.

It is.

It is, yes.

And she was my first love. She was the incarnation of my own feminine soul. She is the incarnation, I think, for every man's, potentially every man's feminine soul.

Yes.

Because she is so completely herself, and she is so fearless, and she's incorporated and understood, and yielded to and wielded her own masculine side.

She's got everything in mysterious, powerful balance. It's so extraordinary as you come close with all the different, you know, it's a book about scholarship and opening things up and mysteries.

But it's much, much more than that.

It's for me, it's a book about discovering her pulsing under all of this, and feeling more and more of this great love. This love that incorporates everything, humanizes everything, sexuality, the body, old age.

Everything makes everything sacred, and allows you to vibrate at its frequency, at a time when it's trying to embody itself more and more deeply in us, as us to help us birth a new kind of being.

Yes.

Isn't that how you feed it?

So many people feed that, don't they?

It is. And I love, I just love that when you were a young boy, you understood this divine union and love and beauty, and that that has set your life on a trajectory of light and bringing this to the world through your own voice.

I had a similar encounter when I was three years old, and I've always said, no matter what environment I've been in. So the story is, Jesus came into my bedroom when I was three and hugged me and invited me to come to him.

And since that time, I have never been able to be fooled by false love, ultimately, because I know what it is to feel completely, wholly loved, and there is no counterfeit.

And so how beautiful that you in your youth as well experienced something very similar.

Oh, it's totally the same.

And I love what you say because for me, that love goes far beyond any religion, any Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or anything. It seems to me that it's a primal love. It's an unconditional, naked, original, primal, primitive love.

It's been here a long time before religion.

It belongs to our belonging to each other in the spirit, in this naked spirit that we are in flesh.

Yes, it is our essence.

Yes.

And when we get to that sort of miracle or grace or great love affair or deep devotion or mystical teaching, then we see that, oh my god, what we could be is in body and divine and human all at once.

To gather in a new kind of joy.

Yes.

And that would be the new world beginning and re-birthing together with this new humble royalty of knowing ourselves ragged and human and knowing ourselves also authentic and divine.

As sublime and noble, as you would say.

As sublime and noble.

Yes.

Thank you for reading my book. That's so sweet because sublime and noble are words that come up a lot, and they are beautiful words.

Do you love those two words?

I feel, when I think of them, I feel this effervescence because they are truly a linguistic attempt at the eternal truth of who we are, of who we have always been.

And it brings into focus the light that so many mystics throughout, as you observe so many mystics from different traditions, doesn't matter the religion that they got their start in, because when they get to that mystical understanding, they all see

We are made of love.

We are made of light.

All is well in this sense that is hard to name with human language.

As we look at the, as you call it, the triple darkness of the world today, we can see through the mist and see the essence of all of us is truly divine, and that that is made possible by this love that exists between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

It's so exciting, Andrew. I could just go on all day long.

It's so beautiful. Well, you said it's so beautiful.

I hope everybody was listening to how beautiful and what a transmission that was from your heart, from their heart in you, your own inner masculine and feminine. You're also being born of love.

Yes.

It claims no hierarchy but has authority, because love is authority. It doesn't have to be, it doesn't.

It's presence, matter of fact.

The old grandmother in the Sicilian village comes out in her old black dress and everybody falls silent because she's come in.

She is life itself, right?

Yes.

That's what we need to cultivate in the name of sublimity and nobility. The sublime and the noble are the ones who are completely themselves without apology and without needing to prove or claim anything.

Right.

Nothing to prove, simply authentic self to be.

Right.

Yes.

And to be together, that's much more fun.

I'm having much more fun than I would have this time or this afternoon if you were in my afternoon. I so hope that you live in this, you are.

That we both fell in love with the sacred feminine soul very young at the time.

Yes.

And I did not know it was sacred feminine and masculine together until Mary Magdalene shone through a book that you mentioned, Megan Waterson's Mary Magdalene Reveals.

Yes.

A few years ago, I found that on a bookshelf. And I know I can say this to you, it was illumined.

Yeah.

The book was illumined on the shelf in the store. I picked it up, took it home, and my life changed. And Mary Magdalene has been guiding me ever since, till this very moment, where I'm speaking with you.

And how do you feel her guidance?

How is it she comes to you? Because I think she's coming to all of us in related but unique ways, and we will need to know each other's ways, in case they might be parts of our own.

What a beautiful question. Thank you. I feel her rising in me in many ways, and it's almost always, well, I won't say that, it's often in conversation with another human or one of my dogs, because as you know, as you wrote so beautifully about Jade.

You said the most wonderful thing, I get it.

I told you that I spent 17 and a half years with the most sublime noble cat on the face of this universe. So we know, and everybody who knows out there knows.

That's right.

Animals are direct masters of total being.

They are. Oh, that's well said.

Yes.

So my encounters with the Tower often happen in conversation when themes arise in conversation that I had been thinking of, but not speaking of. And I hear, I almost hear a bell. Oh, that's what that's about.

Or I have dreams where I understand. I have, you'll understand this. I have knowings that I haven't done research on.

I simply now know something that I didn't know before. Right?

And I feel her rising in so many ways, even as the darkness intensifies, as we see the triple darkness of, you said, the darkness of the human soul, the darkness of the environment, of the environment, and the death of democracy.

The death of democracy with the fuller and more post-corona, France and Iran.

Right. Yes.

We all know, never do.

Who's half of what it doesn't.

And yet, she rises in beauty, in creativity. She offers new solutions to things that we hadn't conceived of before. She offers ways to see the humanity in others that we would have previously thought of as enemies.

And we can now begin to wonder, how are we the same? And she offers all of this with no hubris, with no shaming, with simply invitation and grace and a little bit of humor. That's how I find her.

Quite a lot of humor because she's also kicking down all the old structures and burning all of our little such hearts.

She's out there.

She's Cardi as well as Mary.

She's doing both, isn't she?

Isn't that what she's up to?

She's rolling up her sleeves and toppling all the things that need toppling.

But with the same both if we brought to what we both said together, that was how she is.

Yes, because she's very fierce, but she's also very sweet.

She's very protective.

She'll give you every possible clue and key as to how to do the next passage. But if you don't obey clearly in the end, you will pay the price because you'll have to.

You have to learn yourself.

It's a robust motherhood, isn't it?

The real feminine, the real Magdalene, isn't she?

It is a robust motherhood.

That's so well said.

Yeah.

Yes. Yes. She's tender and fierce and not to be trifled with, but a whole lot of fun.

Oh, so much fun.

God almighty.

Yes.

Because the ecstasy, they must have known together.

We talked about spring.

We talked about spring in many ways before we talked officially whatever we're doing now.

And what Mary and Jesus experienced together in their cellular structure and the miracles that happened around them, when they made love unified with the father, mother, in the one, when they made love like that, the miracles that radiated from them,

Leading onward.

Yes, it is for every one of us, every human, every creature, the plants, the minerals, the whole thing.

It's for all.

Because where would the love stop?

Right.

Why?

Once it's unleashed, once the golden stopper has been taken out of the bottom of your belly, and there is body and soul and heart and mind and earth and heaven have been unified in you, once that's happened.

Yes.

Who would be excluded from love?

And why would love stop on any level?

Where would it ever stop reaching out to love more?

To love more. It never stops. Love never fails.

It couldn't.

Otherwise, if it did, it wouldn't be love.

It would be something playing at love, but not for itself.

Well, if it had limits, it wouldn't be truly love.

Why?

Do you know that Sufi story?

This is my favorite story.

Oh, tell me.

I love the Sufis.

I adore them.

Well, this one was something.

You loved him. He was a real wild one. And his name was Dool Noon.

And he was astounding and wrote many, many amazing works and attained very close to enlightenment, but came across this one question that wouldn't leave him.

And the question was, are the transformations in love infinite? It's a very intense and extraordinary question.

Indeed.

Because it implies everything you can think of. What does it mean to be a human being?

Yeah.

And he couldn't get to the answer of the question, although he went into tremendous retreat and stood on his head and did all the prayers.

And then after three years of getting absolutely nowhere, he took a book on the beach and he met this wild old woman, who was a gypsy woman.

Old and ragged, but laughing, and he knew that she knew the answer.

So he went up to her very, very respectfully and he asked her, please, in the name of Allah, reveal to me the truth.

Did the transformations in love ever end?

And the woman screamed with laughter, just wild laughter, which was the ultimate teaching, which she received and drank in every pour. And then she said, how could the transformations in love ever end?

Because love is infinite.

And when you're allowed by grace to let your mind explode in that knowledge, when that touches you just once in your lifetime, you are so blessed, because then you realize, how could there be any end to the evolutionary miracles created by a love

that created all of this and created their love in us? And we can, and the connection that we are increasingly, hundreds of thousands of us, millions of us, feeling with them quite nakedly in our own life, not inventing them, not playing at them, but

knowing they're real. Yes.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

It is extraordinary. And all we have to do is allow ourselves to believe that which we have always wanted to believe, but not given ourselves permission because it seems too good to be true, but oh, it is too good not to be true.

Oh, that is such a beautiful thing to have said.

Too good to be true, but too good not to be true.

Yes.

Andrew, as today...

The moment in your life when you realize that those words are not a fantasy, they are true, that there's a force that is around you at every moment, that wants to guide you in ways that will make you immeasurably happier than anything you could ever

And all you have to do is to stay open to a continual relationship with that force.

Continue with the yes.

With miracle.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Continue with the yes.

Yeah.

Continue with the yes. But not denying the no, not reacting to the no, but not letting the no paralyze that center that is always saying yes.

Yes.

In you. That center of, oh my God, whatever this experience is, it is totally amazing and I must accept it, or without whining and opening completely to the next revelation.

Yes.

And we all have that voice inside us.

It's inside us.

Different people have it louder, but it's our human voice, isn't it?

It goes beyond identity.

It does. It is transcendent and imminent as you've pointed out. Oh, I have a question.

As we talked about before we hit record, it being Maundy Thursday right now, the day of the Last Supper.

I wonder if you would please tell us about what really happened in the upper room, and especially about the dancing, because I was so delighted to learn about that as someone who has been a dancer my whole life and only in the last few years

reconnected with the need to do that. It feels so good to hear that Jesus himself was a dancer. Can you tell us that story, please?

Oh, I love you.

Gosh, I wish I had you always on this wild tour. But now I have you at the last, the best wine at the last.

Oh, what a beautiful question. Could I instead tell something actually that's truly at the core of everything we're talking about? Would you mean if I just took a leap?

Because this is a part of this story, which is so amazing, and that's the beginning of the story.

And how it begins in all of us by a look as it began in them, and usually it could be a look between a child and a mother or a beloved and a beloved.

But in Magdalene and Jesus' case, it took place in this ordained, amazing way, that the potentially world-transforming meetings take place, the meeting between her and Romeo and her and Jesus.

So she was born about four years earlier than him, and she lived with a crazy father, who was greedy, but not very influential, who sold her into marital slavery with some Baghdadian millionaire.

And the caravan that was carrying her, much against her will, was sacked by pirates, and she was thrown into slavery.

And just let me pause there, and just imagine all of us who have had this massacre of the feminine within us.

Can you imagine what that woman went through in that terrifying time?

She was just thrown to the wolves of patriarchal violence, plus insane cruelty, while also being imbued with mystical gifts.

So utterly, utterly alone in on the edge of total annihilation of self.

And she had a dream, and in that dream the angel said to her, My God, don't do anything crazy, because the Anointed One is in Israel.

Go to where he is, you'll find your way there.

And that is where everything begins.

So she goes, she escapes, she goes to Israel, she gets to that room.

He comes into that room, and he doesn't do anything, he just looks at her.

And she looks back at him.

And she says, the text says, it says, she saw that he was all fire, all light, all truth. And then he beckons her to come to him, and they speak, and he takes her into the desert, and there they melt into each other, and they become one in the world.

And then they're married, actually at the marriage of Cana.

And I'm telling this story because it seems to me that if we had known that story and what it meant at the deepest level, all of us, we wouldn't have had to go on this terribly difficult journey of self-healing and self-acceptance.

We would all have to go on this journey, because if we had that story at the core of our lives, which is why I wrote the book, is to bring back that story.

If we had that since the beginning, how everything would have been so sanctified and different from that.

And so effortlessly more accessible to us.

I had just been asking myself today, why the 2,000 years since? What, to what purpose?

And I wonder, as only a mortal can wonder about such things, if we had been able to accept the Magdalene, if things would have gone very differently for the last 2,000 years.

Oh, everything would have been completely different.

It's inconceivable, because even in their own time, they both knew that she would pay an immense price for being who she was.

That's why he protected her. That's why she held back, because she understood the primal, terrible ennui's that she was stirring up, the kinds of breakings through that she represented.

And she had to hold all that majesty within the constraint of a very misogynistic culture with the very few Illumin women friends, and some of the more evolved of Jesus' own disciples.

But that's how she got through that one.

Terrible, very difficult.

But done with the customary radiance of how she did everything.

She just did it.

She didn't hold anything back until it was done.

And then she went into the cave, as you describe in the last years of her life, and grounded all of that for all of us to access. What does that mean?

Well, let's get very practical.

And this is as practical as I can get.

Imagine that you are standing in a garden, and there you are gazing at your beloved Resurrective, who you've seen being crucified, nearly tortured to death. Is there standing in the glory of a Resurrected body?

At that moment, you are irradiated by the light of a new creation, a light that you yourself, you know, you helped give birth to in him, because you grounded his light in your embodied redics.

You grounded him as no one else could have grounded him.

And you know that one relationship is over, but another is beginning, something beyond anything that you yet can know, but which will unfold itself, and that will unfold itself in your own transfiguration, which becomes more and more intense after he

And you assume completely your true female Christ self.

And with that self, you write your gospel, the Gospel of the Beloved Companion, which is now published, thank God.

And you wrote and preached and did miracles, and you ended your life doing the ultimate task that you've been sent, which is to knit together that light that had irradiated and so transformed you in that God, to every part of you more and more and

more in silence, so you could become more and more cosmic and universal and become someone who alters the DNA of every human being by the intensity of their love and of their dedication, of their evolutionary truth. And that's what you were doing in

that cave in silence, you were in silence in adoration, one with your beloved in heart and mind and soul and body, and you were melting yourself into the one in your mind and heart and soul and body, and you were melting everything in the creation

Because, and this is what is so amazing, this is the great amazement, because the resurrection itself is three resurrections.

In one, it's the resurrection of you yourself, it's the resurrection that's offered through your resurrection, to every other human being.

Because if it comes to you, why wouldn't it come to everyone else? There is a way through you. You can help people get to it, if they want.

And the resurrection of matter itself, the whole universe, is made new in that act.

And many great Christian mystics have suggested the universe will end in one vast explosion of love meeting itself, of divine love, as Jesus, as Christ, loving himself, the whole universe returned, all of matter returned in ecstasy to its source.

The restoration of all things.

Of all things.

And I believe this, I've experienced this, I know this is the ultimate reality for me. And I really, and I feel that it's the most extraordinarily encouraging and astoundingly empowering.

Yes, you can imagine.

And it's all the more astounding and empowering because it doesn't shirk away from any of the horrors or the difficulties or the ordeals. It just says, you can get through it all because this is what you truly are.

This is what you are.

It's very unlike me not to have any words or new questions, but I just want to let that sit. It's so glorious and it's so real.

Thank you so much.

It's you who brings all this out. We dance together.

It's so lovely.

We dance together.

Yes. I hope you're dancing with us who are listening, because you are invited.

You are invited. It is for everyone. That is the beautiful mystery.

No, it's very practical.

It's very down-home.

You just have to stay in tune through adoring the mysteries through your heart.

Say the name of God.

Love God.

And God will teach you everything.

Yes.

It is so simple. It is so simple and so beautiful. It reminds me of something I have here on the shelf I want to show you.

I don't usually put out videos, so I'll explain this for our listeners. I have this beautiful tulip that opens every morning and closes every night and shares its radiant heart.

Are you able to see that very well on your camera, Andrew?

Oh, yes. It's so beautiful.

Yes.

The burnt heart of the lover.

Yes. The intricate mystery is ever unfolding and offering itself over and over and over without end. And although this flower will meet its end in this form, the love of Mary Magdalene, of Jesus, of God will never end.

And we are so blessed to partake in this. Is there anything you would like to add in closing? Any last story?

No, that's so perfect, it's lovely.

I think it was wonderful. I hope you loved it as much as I did.

This has been such a delight to meet you finally. And to get to feast in your presence a while as a foretaste to the, what did you call it when you said Jesus calls it the kingdom of heaven?

Can you call it the garden of the resurrection?

The garden of the resurrection.

Yes.

So until we meet in bodily form in the garden of the resurrection, this is foretaste.

I love you, sweetheart. Thank you so, so much for making my day and making this. You really are the last one in this wild campaign.

And you've been such a primal delight. I wish it had been from the beginning to the end, but that would have been, I've been spoiled.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my friend.

Thank you so much for listening.

Let's connect. I'm always happy to hear from my listeners and readers. You can find me at Barely Christian, Fully christian.com.

And now for more of my favorite song by Wynn Doran and Paul Craig. Please enjoy Banks of Massachusetts.