Like a Lily Among Thorns — Celebrating St Mary Magdalen

With the rest of the Church, we in Appleton will be celebrating the feast-day of St Mary Magdalen on Wednesday 22 July – Eucharist at 10am! Magdalen College is patron of our parish, and has sent several of its fellows to be our rector over the centuries. I was also fortunate enough to be chaplain of Magdalen College School for seven years, and so I have particular cause to celebrate Mary Magdalen.

The school’s motto is one of my favourites. Sicut lilium (‘like a Lily’) is not one of Madonna’s abandoned early lyrics; not even, as it happens, a reference to the ‘lilies of the field’ made immortal by Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. Magdalen’s Lily, rather boldly, is from The Song of Songs, the how-very-dare-you erotic poem that somehow managed to mince demurely past the censors to take its proud and sultry place in the canon of biblical books, quietly squeezed in between Ecclesiastes and the prophet Isaiah.

Why Bishop Waynflete – 15th-century founder of Magdalen College and School – should have chosen this verse as the textual plot in which to plant his new foundation is obvious as soon as you read it. Mary Magdalen and the nameless young woman of the poem may be separated by a thousand years, but are entirely reminiscent of each other, a pair of absolute dead ringers. Each of them bears a pot of precious ointment so that she can anoint her king (Song 1.12, cf. Luke 7.37). Both have known suffering: for Mary, the psychological bombardment and social stigma of mental ill-health (what Luke 8.2 picturesquely diagnoses as ‘seven demons’); for the woman in the Song, it is the more concrete domestic abuse of angry brothers who put her to work on the land like a slave (Song 1.6), thus darkening her skin and, with the skewed calculation of those who prefer blondes, causing her to question her own intrinsic value. Thus each of the women takes on a contemporary urgency, the nameless woman (famously nigra sed formosa, ‘black but beautiful’ – Song 1.5) and Mary Magdalen inviting us to remember that #BlackLives and #MentalHealth Matter even in ancient texts.

By far the clearest similarity between the women is when, ravenous for a sighting of their beloved, they seek him relentlessly in town and county, clinging to him so tightly (Song 3.3f, John 20.17) that Mary earns the risen Jesus’ reproof, Noli me tangere (Do not touch me – particularly resonant during the Covid days of social distancing). But it is precisely through the healing power of her good Lord’s loving touch that each woman is healed and raised from her present difficulties to a new and happy wholeness. Like Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic, each of them is ‘saved in every way that it’s possible for a person to be saved.’ Their all-consuming longing for the beloved is what makes these women so worthy of note; it is why they stand out among other young women sicut lilium inter spinas, as a lily among the thorns, Song 2.2. Their longing for him is fulfilled in belonging to him — not as a slave belongs to an owner, but as a person belongs to a community of love, finding home and safe harbour, a space in the jigsaw most fittingly and fruitfully her own.

But our determination to enjoy the fragrance of the lily must never lead us to forget the thorns. In life as on land, thorns can take hold, and they yield only to the sweat, toil, tears, and possibly blood of Churchill’s promise and Adam’s condemnation (Genesis 3.17-19). For these young women, as for us all, thriving depends on the conquest of all that holds us back or limits us, whether that be the consequence of some moral weakness, or a running after riches and worldly success, which in turn cause the suffocation of an otherwise abundant fruitfulness (Matthew 13.22).

These two women teach us that the best way to deal with the thorns is through the pursuit of love, as longing turns to belonging, and individual struggles are borne and battled by the whole community. The object of that love will be different for all. For the woman in the poem, her beloved. For Mary Magdalen, her Christ. For the religious, love is the soul’s response to God and love of neighbour. For fools, it is the decreasing returns and inevitable decay of unlimited self-absorption.

We who belong to any community are inspired by shared values and energised in pursuit of common goals. As we commemorate St Mary Magdalen (with or without a final e) we might give ourselves afresh to this clearing of thorns, and to a cultivation of all that is beautiful, good and true.