From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, Rising (2022); Debie Thomas, I Have Seen the Lord (2019); Dan Clendenin, A Dead Man Named Jesus (2016); Dan Clendenin, Deeper Magic Before the Dawn of Time (2013); Kathryn Greene-McCreight, “They Have Taken Away My Lord and I Do Not Know Where They Have Laid Him” (2010); Dan Clendenin, Believing the Believers: “Public Evidence for a Mystery” (2007). 

This Week's Essay

A guest essay by Amy Frykholm, who will contribute six essays between now and June 30. Amy is an award-winning writer, Fulbright scholar, and journalist. For seventeen years she was a senior editor for The Christian Century magazine, and host of the podcast In Search Of. She received her PhD in Literature from Duke University, and has published eight books, most recently the novel High Hawk (2024), which has been long-listed for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel, and the spiritual guidebook Journey to the Wild Heart: Four Invitations to Contemplative Living (2025). Amy lives in Colorado, and is cofounder of Sage Mountain Institute, a spirituality and creativity center in the Rocky Mountains.

John 20:13 "Woman, why are you weeping?"

One of my first assignments in my early career as a journalist was to visit Thistle Farms in Nashville, Tennessee. This included a residential program, at the time called Magdalene House, for women who were exiting the cycle of drugs/prostitution/jail that had largely defined their lives. This was the closest I have ever come to feeling the awe and the power of resurrection. I saw in these women the resurrection of Christ, complete with the scars and the mystery. 

The program was started by an Episcopal priest, Becca Stevens, who wanted to give women a safe place to work out their own freedom. The program provides two years of free housing, medical care, food, and whatever other needs the women have. Even Diet Coke and fingernail polish. The women live together in the house where they counsel and care for each other. They work, play, laugh, argue, and try to tell their stories to each other. 

Telling their stories was, in many ways, the hardest part. One woman told me that when she first arrived at the house, she vowed not to tell her story to anyone. These women don’t need to know, she reasoned. And it was too painful to imagine recounting a history of slow soul death for which she largely blamed herself. 

But over time, as she observed the other women in the house, she noticed something: the women who told their stories and allowed the other women to be witnesses got better. And the ones who hid their stories for whatever reason often were not able to make the transition to a resurrected life. The path to healing evaded them. Even more gradually, as she began to tell her story, she understood that our stories, even our stories of healing, don’t belong to us. They belong to others. They belong in community. 

Three Women (Easter Sunday) by Romare Bearden (1912–1988).

As I observed and spent time with these women, many things reminded me of the story of Jesus’ resurrection recorded in the gospels. One thing was the literal scars. You could easily differentiate between women who were volunteering at the house but had no history of death and resurrection from those who'd had this experience. The experience was written on their faces and on their bodies. It wasn’t just the literal scars — although there were plenty of those — but something else, a little harder to describe, that said that these women had seen the inside of hell and returned to tell the story. 

Another thing was food. Food plays a crucial role in resurrection at Magdalene House, as it does in the story of Jesus’ resurrection. In Acts, Peter emphasizes this physical aspect of the resurrection. “We are witnesses,” he says. “Those of us who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead.” 

One of the most beautiful things about the house was the kitchen, where women nourished themselves and each other. One evening, I stood in the kitchen with a quiet woman who was using an electric pan to fry up steaks and make pan gravy. She was methodical, treating the food as a sacrament, ready to be shared.

These gestures said to me that resurrection is no instantaneous voila! moment. It’s a gradual rebuilding and sharing through ordinary means, as we see in the gospels. It takes time for the disciples to notice and to understand. There is a process involved. In Acts, Peter uses the wonderful phrase in some translations, “become visible,” as if the resurrection were a photograph gradually developing. Instead of “the resurrection,” maybe we should say “the resurrecting.” 

Who will roll away the stone, by Hanna Cheriyan Varghese, Malaysia.

That was an important part too: from darkness into light. From the invisibility of these women’s lives and stories to being seen and heard by witnesses. 

Mary Magdalene plays a key role in all of this. In John's gospel for this week, Mary Magdalene is named in the first sentence as if to signal to the reader that her presence is key (20:1). She isn’t carrying anything like spices to indicate her purpose in going to the tomb. She merely goes, without explanation, and finds the stone gone. Peter appears in the second verse with “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” (20:2). They are depicted as receiving her testimony without question. Then they each have their own, relatively individual, experiences of the mystery. Peter and the other disciple “behold” and even “believe” even if they don’t understand. 

But Mary’s experience is more direct. She beholds Jesus himself, although his identity is obscured from her. He gives her the first, post-resurrection commandments “Don’t cling to me” and “Go to my brethren.” When she goes to the disciples and says simply, “I have seen the Lord,” no one disputes her testimony. 

Mary Magdalene, the star of this passage, has perhaps one of the most convoluted and hidden histories in all of Christendom. In both Luke and Mark, she is noted for having had seven demons that Jesus exorcised. For many centuries, it was believed that she came from a town near the Galilean coast called “Magda,” but more recent archeological evidence disputes that there was such a town in the first century or that Mary Magdalene was associated with it. Magda means "tower" in Greek, so some scholars now wonder if perhaps, just as Jesus nicknamed Peter "the rock," he nicknamed Mary "the tower." 

We don't know what role Mary Magdalene played in the nascent church, and she is not mentioned in Acts, just as she is only offhandedly mentioned in Luke. 

Empty Tomb, by He Qi, China.

Mary’s reputation took a further turn in the sixth century when Pope Gregory conflated the story of Mary Magdalene with the “sinful” woman in Luke 7 who anointed Jesus’ feet with perfume. That woman is never named, but centuries of Christians after Gregory have believed that woman was Mary Magdalene and reduced her role to a penitent sinner. We will perhaps never fully know that story, covered over now by both intentional destruction and the passage of time.

But whoever your personal Mary Magdalene is, there is one role she undoubtedly plays: first witness to the resurrection and therefore the first apostle. And now I understand, the house was not called Magdalene House because of the familiar, but unbiblical story, of Mary Magdalene as a reformed prostitute. It was called Magdalene House because Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection. This work of resurrection is one we are all called to witness in each other. Resurrection is rough, gritty, painful work. It leaves scars. It takes time and truth. It deserves acknowledgement and awe. 

Weekly Prayer

W.S. Merwin

Gift

I have to trust what was given to me
if I am to trust anything
it led the stars over the shadowless mountain
what does it not remember in its night and silence
what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time

what did it not begin what will it not end
I have to hold it up in my hands as my ribs hold up my heart
I have to let it open its wings and fly among the gifts of the
    unknown
again in the mountain I have to turn
to the morning

I must be led by what was given to me
as streams are led by it
and braiding flights of birds
the gropings of veins the learning of plants
the thankful days
breath by breath

I call to it Nameless One O Invisible
Untouchable Free
I am nameless I am divided
I am invisible I am untouchable
and empty
nomad live with me
be my eyes
my tongue and my hands
my sleep and my rising
out of chaos
come and be given

From The Essential W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). The American poet William Stanley Merwin (1927-2019) published more than fifty volumes of poetry, prose, and translations.  His many awards included two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (1971 and 2009) and a National Book Award (2005). In 2010 he was named the United States' Poet Laureate.

 Amy Frykholm: afrykholm@gmail.com

Image credits: (1) Romare Bearden; (2) Hanna Cheriyan Varghese; and (3) He Qi.