“Attachment to matter gave birth to passion without measure. Then trouble arises in the whole body.”
— The Gospel of Mary
There is a kind of longing that exhausts us.
It is the longing that believes peace will arrive when life finally unfolds according to our plans. When the relationship heals. When the diagnosis changes. When our creations are birthed. When we manifest abundance. When the answer comes. When certainty finally settles into our hands.
We become attached—not because matter is wrong, but because we mistake the visible for the source of life.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene offers us a profound revelation. It does not ask us to reject the body, nor the beauty of the world. Mary herself was deeply embodied. She knew the scent of nard poured over weary feet, the warmth of bread broken among friends, the tears that streamed down her face in the garden on the morning of the Resurrection.
The body is not the obstacle.
Attachment is.
Attachment is the moment we begin asking the world to give us what only the soul can remember.
We cling to outcomes because we fear the spaciousness of not knowing. We hold tightly to identities because we are afraid of who we might become without them. We grasp at certainty because silence feels too vast.
And yet…
The desert has never hurried anyone.
The desert does not answer our questions immediately. It does something infinitely more compassionate.
It transforms the one who is asking.
This is why the mystics entered the wilderness. Not to escape the world, but to become spacious enough to hear the voice beneath the noise. Beneath the striving. Beneath the endless conversations of the mind.
There is another music playing beneath the noise of our lives. It is quieter than our fears and older than our stories. It does not force itself upon us or compete with the voices that demand our attention. It waits with infinite patience, like a spring hidden beneath the desert sand, singing long before we remember how to listen. It is the song the soul knew before it learned to grasp, before it believed it had to strive, achieve, or become in order to be loved.
Perhaps this is the deepest invitation of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Not to eliminate longing, but to sanctify it. To remain with the ache long enough that it is transformed from a place of absence into a place of encounter. We spend so much of our lives trying to escape what feels unfinished, yet the soul knows that the places we most want to flee are often the very places where Love is waiting to reveal itself.
The wound slowly becomes a window.
The silence becomes a sanctuary.
The waiting becomes prayer.
What we once called emptiness begins to disclose another face. We discover that what appeared to be absence was, in truth, Presence arriving in a language we had not yet learned to hear. The Beloved was never withholding. It was our way of listening that was still being born.
How often do we rush to fill the empty spaces? We reach for explanations before mystery has had the chance to unfold. We seek certainty before trust has taken root. We gather teachings, books, conversations, achievements, hoping that if we collect enough pieces, we will finally feel whole. Yet wisdom has never entered the human heart through accumulation. It enters through surrender.
The soul is not nourished by what it possesses.
It awakens through what it remembers.
There comes a moment—so quiet that we could easily overlook it—when we stop asking life to remove the ache and begin allowing the ache to become our teacher. We cease demanding that every question be answered before we can rest. We stop bargaining with God for another outcome. Something within us gently loosens, and without even noticing when it happened, the heart ceases its struggle against the present moment.
Then we hear it.
The Voice.
Simply unmistakable.
The Voice that has been whispering our name since before we took our first breath. The Voice that called, “Mary,” in the garden, and with a single word restored an entire world. Nothing changed in that moment except her seeing. Death gave way to Life because Love spoke her true name, and in hearing it, she remembered who she had always been.
Perhaps this is the miracle of every authentic spiritual path. We imagine that awakening means becoming someone new, when in reality it is the gentle unveiling of who we have always been beneath the layers of fear, striving, and forgetting. Nothing around us may have changed. The unanswered questions may still remain. The circumstances of our lives may appear exactly as they were before.
Yet everything is different.
Because the place from which we are living has changed.
The ache has become a doorway. The longing has become communion. The silence has become a place of intimate conversation with the Beloved. What once felt like exile slowly reveals itself as the road home.
Perhaps this is what Mary Magdalene discovered.
That home is not somewhere we arrive after a lifetime of searching. Home is the place within us where Love has been waiting all along, patiently, tenderly, without ever turning away. And when we become still enough to listen, when we stop reaching for what can never satisfy the deepest hunger of the soul, we discover that the Voice has never stopped calling us home.
Upcoming Events:
The Aramaic Path of the Rose Online Accredited Training. CLICK HERE
Mary Magdalene and the 13 Petalled Rose (Only offered in the month of Elul – Virgo). CLICK HERE
Please feel free to comment your reflections below. The more we share of ourselves, the more light we generate.
Sending my blessings and love to all of you.
Ahava,
Ana Otero
