Mistaking Mary Magdalene

Summary

Over the phone, Frykholm read aloud to me some of the passages that she had translated. “I am going to go up into one of those boats they have hired, and they will take care of me, even if they don’t want to,” the scribe reports Mary saying. “For I have this body that they will receive instead of passage.” The sexually explicit nature of the text startled me and provoked a laugh. After paying for her passage in sexual favors, Mary of Egypt arrived in Jerusalem. Yet when she attempted to accompany the pilgrims inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which sits on the storied site of Jesus’ Crucifixion and burial, she found herself barred from entering the church by a mysterious force. “She pushes and she shoves and she tries to get in, but she can’t,” Frykholm said. Then Mary of Egypt heard a voice calling her to cross the River Jordan into the desert. There, she lived as a hermit. Her clothes fell to shreds. Her flesh wasted away. Eventually, only her long locks covered her body, as, for forty-seven years, she prayed.“Tradition has her an icon of repentance, but to me it’s much more interesting to view her as an icon of desire,” Frykholm said. “For her, one desire leads to another desire, and then this leads her to God.” Finally, in the desert, a monk named Zosimas encountered her. Zosimas, in the throes of a spiritual crisis, was seeking a wise man to give him counsel; he met Mary of Egypt, instead. “The great moment of the story is he’s going in search of a desert father, and finds a mother,” Frykholm said.No one knows for sure what monastery Zosimas came from, but the monks of St. Gerasimos, which lies a few miles away, claim him as a spiritual father. This was why my father wanted to take me to St. Gerasimos, so that I could hear the story of Zosimas and Mary of Egypt directly from the monks. We never made it. My dad’s health continued to falter, and when he died, two years ago, I stopped sleuthing among the Marys. It had principally been a way to play with my ...