WHO: Mary Magdalene WHEN: February - November WHERE: New Mexico and New York WHAT: Wilderness treks, small town churches, and returning home. WARNINGS: nine months of plot/character building stuff shoved into one scene!
When Mary Magdalene came back to life, body stiff and sore and already too warm, it was upon the shores of the Jordan.
That is, the shores of slow moving Jordan Creek, New Mexico.
The coincidence of the name was unknown to Mary, but if she had found out she wouldn't have been surprised. She had, after all, come to this mountain range wilderness because of its own name: The Magdalena Mountains.
In her quest to get out of the city and far away from everyone, she had sought out these mountains, a place she had gone before to pray and meditate, a place with 35,000 acres of roadless wilderness and nothing but the beasts of the forests to keep her company.
By day she walked almost constantly, her body toning and losing all unnecessary softness. She ate from the trees and shrubs she knew when that was an option, and caught rabbits and birds when she could manage it and even once a deer. (Most of the deer she left behind for the mountain lions and the bears, unable to take it with her.)
She held conversations with God and Jesus as she moved, and although they never replied it still comforted her and brought her peace and clarity.
By night the mountain forests lost the sometimes intolerable heat of day and Mary slipped into her sleeping bag, sometimes lighting a fire but mostly leaving herself in the darkness of the trees, the barking-yapping-howl of the coyotes as her lullaby.
Three months moving through the forest and it was breaking her leg that did Mary in. She'd slipped on loose rocks and it had sent her tumbling down a ravine, crashing at the very bottom into the rock-split trunk of an alligator juniper. Her hiking pack at the top of the ravine and Mary at the bottom with a piece of bone jutting out of her thigh.
There wasn't much else for Mary to do but keep praying. But even prayer wasn't making it possible for her to put any weight at all on the leg, and Mary had no idea how far along she would have to walk to even find a way back up to her things. (She had bandages in her bag she could use to make a splint, as well as painkillers and antiseptic.)
Three days later she'd managed to painfully drag herself some way east and that was when she met the mother bear and her three cubs.
If it was an act of God, then Mary didn't know if she was all that impressed with it. He could have given those bears one more day to find her, couldn't He? Wait until she was at least dead!
And so the time that passed between dragging herself into the open mouth of a hungry bear and waking up somewhere beside a river was unknown. Probably, from memory, it was a week or so. It usually was. Mary was too well known, too well prayed to, for her to disappear for very long.
Healed, clothed, and reborn, Mary began to follow the river down the mountain and, eventually, out onto the flat grasslands with a proper paved road. In the heat of summer, mirage waves hovered lazily above the tarmac. After taking a look down both directions and deciding they both looked like they equally led absolutely nowhere, she picked one at random.
More walking and Mary was glad broken bones didn't pass from one life to the next.
She didn't feel she'd been walking for more than an hour when a car came from behind an pulled up beside her, a man leaning his head out the window and frowning at her. "You okay out here? Need a ride?"
"Actually, yes," Mary said, and then cleared her throat. It had been almost a month since she'd spoken.
"Where you headin'?"
"I don't know anymore," Mary admitted, coming around the passenger side. "I've been hitchhiking but the last person who picked me up, I didn't much like him so I got out of there." She shrugged. "He kept my bags though."
The man looked slightly suspicious, which Mary could hardly blame. "You illegal?" he asked carefully. "Most times someone's walking around out here, means they just crossed the border."
Mary shook her head. "I've never even been to Mexico."
Maybe it was because she was so very white, or maybe it was because she had her saint aura working for her, or maybe it was just because she was pretty, but the man - very clearly hispanic himself - just nodded as though he accepted that. "Magdalena is about twenty minutes from here, I can give you a ride."
Mary beamed and thanked him as she climbed into the pick up. She introduced herself - in a round about way - and Nathan - two kids, divorced, lived in Nevada - mostly talked to her about mining in the area. By the time they reached the small township of Magdalena, Mary knew more about zinc mining that she had any need to know. Nathan dropped her at the post office and carried on through town.
There was a hot wind biting at her, and everything felt dusty and oppressive because of it.
It was July 22nd, the feast day of Mary Magdalene.
✞ ✞ ✞
It used to be that the church was the center of any community in America. It was the place where people gathered, not just for comfort but for anything that involved the whole town. It was a place of celebration, of mourning, of support.
In Magdalena, population 600, those days remained and the First Baptist Church welcomed all to its door, holding less to the Baptist part of its name these days. They were the only church within an hour's drive, in the only still-standing town among long abandoned mining ghost towns; they couldn't be too picky with their denominations if they wanted people to hear the Good News.
On Saturday night, the sound of crickets loud outside, Mary was in the church setting out bibles on the seats with María Elena, as Pastor Adán stood at the pulpit and practised the next morning's sermon. She found herself smiling up at him, still so new to this job and still unsure.
'But where are your things?' María Elena had asked her on the first day they met.
'I only have the clothes on my back.'
'But why have you come here?'
'I'm following the will of God.'
Mary discovered that the will of God was strong in this area, that the mountains were named by men who had seen a vision of her face appear upon them. And so Mary was happy to just be one among many people guided by the Lord.
('Mary, were you named for the Virgin?'
'No. I'm far more the repentant sinner than the holy mother.'
'Well, we're all of us sinners repenting and he forgives us, every one of us.')
She slept in Pastor Adán and María Elena's home, doing whatever the church needed and volunteering to help around the town. They fed her and didn't ask her too many questions. Mary thought they seemed to have pasts of their own they had a desire to move beyond, so perhaps that was why they were so willing to care for someone who seemed to be working on her own.
It was late one night in November, with rain streaking down outside and turning the dirt church yard to mud, when Mary felt the undeniable presence of God.
Mary couldn't remember the last time she'd felt such a thing and her knees gave out beneath her, sending her falling down in front of the altar in the dark church. She praised His name in a whispered frenzy, hands grasping at the altarcloth and tears blurring the vision of Jesus, hanging in the shadows on His cross.
I have done you right, she wanted to say. I am doing your work.
But even as she thought the words she knew they weren't entirely true, that there were things she was doing that were not glorifying God and that He would not approve of. It wasn't the things that humanity had made of her, because even He would understand that. No, it was the choices she had made over the past few years. The ways she had looked the other way when she shouldn't have. The things she had ignored and denied because she wanted to ignore and deny them.
Mary slept worse that night than she had in months.
The next day she almost got hit by a truck crossing the street, so distracted she was by her own thoughts.
It was a four days after that that María Elena found her curled around the toilet ball, emptying her stomach, too wracked with guilt and nerves and uncertainty to keep anything down. María Elena brushed Mary's hair back off her face and stroked her back.
Mary looked at the pastor's wife and said, "I have to go home now."
María Elena just nodded as though she had been expecting this. "I know."
✞ ✞ ✞
New York City was cold and it beat through Mary's bones the minute she got off the bus. She let it tingle in her fingers, such a change from New Mexico, and made her way straight for the home-that-wasn't-her-home, the home of the warriors and the Aztec she loved.
And that was where she ended it with the Aztec she loved, the one she had ignored all that God asked of her for, the one that she knew she would kill for if he asked it of her. Which was exactly why she couldn't stay with him, couldn't remain the Mary that Jesus had loved and respected when she so surrounded by death that she just allowed.
It felt like ripping out her own heart and setting it aflame and Mary could only remember one other time in her whole immortal life that she had felt such loss and suffering.
But this time she was the spear, the whip, the nails. This time she ended her world with just words.
✞ ✞ ✞
She was glad that people in New York completely ignored each other. It meant they all tried really hard not to see Mary sitting on a park bench and crying in her hoodie, wiping her nose on her sleeve.
She managed to get herself far enough away from the Aztec hunting grounds, the area she had just promised herself (and him) that she would never set foot in again. It meant she could just sob in peace and ignore everything else.
When Mary stopped it was because she'd worn herself out. Her eyes felt puffy and fat, her throat scratchy, her chest tight. She stood up and took a few proper deep breaths, the kind one took to convince themselves they were Fine, and then she turned directions and headed for her own home above Fusion Blues.
What Mary needed, she thought, was a nice hot bath. A hot bath, a big meal, and a long sleep. Probably in that order, but she was honestly willing to accept any order they came to her.
The streets got more and more familiar as she got closer and eventually she stood in front of the club.
"Well... fuck," Mary said with feeling, staring at the boarded up windows and black smoke stains that now marked the walls of the place that had previously been her apartment.
There were no lights on inside and Mary now just stood staring at the abandoned building as pedestrians passed by, pointedly stepping around her when she stood in the middle of the sidewalk.