Table Talk: Saints Rescue

This group of Artist Trading Cards are inspired by the shape of a bird's egg, one of the symbols associated with Saint Mary Magdalene who figures into this week's meditation on the body. Artistically the set was part of a larger group that comprised a study in contrast rather than making an illustration for Easter or an interpretation of a saint. I think I need to buy a better camera!

Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main

concern, and includes and is the soul;

Leaves of Grass, W. Whitman

     Growing up, I had never known saints religiously. I had never knelt at one’s shrine or addressed a saint to pray on my behalf. I had only known them as names of churches and towns: Saint “X” Catholic church and school in our city, the village St. Mary on the road to Topeka, and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church where our neighbors attended. Of course, I ran into more saints as I matured. In mid-life, I even told a few saint stories to children and used saint images in collages. I came to see the saints as icons of holiness. As such, the saints intrigued me.

     I started reading more about saints, wondering what perspectives they could lend my life and interests. I wanted saints to make statements that could bring together spirit and flesh, sacred and secular, and other pairs of contrasting values and experiences related to the human body and sexuality. I used (or misused, as one friend accused) saints in collage icons, showing advertising models as holy figures. I wanted to rescue saints from what, to my liberal Protestant self, seemed to be superstitious practices, and at the same time, to make symbolic statements that would communicate my own values.

     But I discovered saints don’t need rescuing. To my surprise, I found out that their lives, works, and legends could support life and work in the opening decades of a new millennium. Perhaps that’s too grandiose. What I needed to figure out was how they could guide, enrich, and, somehow, rescue me.

     For a while I had the notion that I might rescue Mary Magdalene by making her the patron saint of massage therapy. She got a bum rap over the course of both Catholic and Protestant centuries. She symbolized repentant sinners, not a bad thing in itself, but surely her patronage of them reflects the questionable assumption that she reformed after years of demon possession and prostitution, that her conversion into a follower of Jesus transformed her from a sex-focused individual to a spirit-filled person who didn’t need or want sex. The selling of sexual services has long been perceived, in Christian parlance, as one of the worst of sins, and Mary was saved from this awful life.

     I was surprised to discover that another long-standing tradition declared her to be patron of contemplatives. She supposedly became a mystic and a hermit, and if she did not really do so as a person, she did it as a saint, perhaps fulfilling some kind of Third or Fourth Century penance for having focused so much on the body in a prior lifestyle. To make her patron of massage therapists, I reasoned, might somehow rescue her by giving a positive slant on her body-centered activities and make a helpful statement about her continuing and important interest in Jesus’ body. The new assignment could honor Jesus’ words about this anointing female who for eons would be remembered for doing a beautiful thing.

     Whether or not Mary Magdalene was the anointer of this particular story, John’s gospel did picture her hurrying to the tomb to reverence Jesus’ dead body by anointing it. Neat switch. She, the corrupt turned clean, was to anoint the clean tragically turned corrupt. Mary was amazed to find that God had already rescued the corrupt body with the anointing of a new physical spiritual life. Still, her own work did not go unrecognized, and in John’s gospel, Mary became not only a rescued individual and an anointer of bodies, but also the first announcer of the good news of Christ’s resurrection.

     Since Mary was who she was and has come to symbolize both repentant sinners and contemplatives, my efforts really ought to aim at rescuing massage therapy and therapists, including myself. The saints represent holy values and have often rescued under-valued human experience. They show us how house cleaning, printing, hair dressing, carpentry, studying, and basket making are, in fact, sacred. Surely this is my present task. I want to help rescue massage therapy from its being equated by some with hired sex. I want to encourage people to see this work as communicating love, hope, and enthusiasm for life. I want to interpret massage therapists as caregivers to the holiness of the human body. 

Mary, dear Mary, as we give massages, may we honor you and ourselves with the same love Jesus showed you. In so doing, may we become bearers of the glad tidings of the body’s beauty, worth, and healing. Teach us not to fear touching the profane and the sacred in the human body. Help us anoint the lively and the dying with equal love and concern. Rescue us by becoming our symbol of acceptance, wholeness, and love. 

In the name of the lover of all humankind. 

Amen.