I love school mottoes, their distillation of hope and history into a few syllables. Our own at MCS is a fine example: Sicut lilium: ‘like a Lily’. Not one of Madonna’s abandoned early lyrics; not even, as it happens, a reference to the ‘lilies of the field’ held up for inspection by Jesus in Matthew 6. Our Lily, rather boldly, is from The Song of Songs, that random racy love poem which somehow managed to mince demurely past the censors to take its proud sultry place in the biblical canon, quietly squeezed in between Ecclesiastes and the prophet Isaiah.
Why Bishop Waynflete our founder should have chosen this book as the textual grow-bag in which to plant his new foundation is obvious as soon as you pick it up and read it. Mary Magdalen and the nameless young woman of the poem (let’s call her Lily) may be separated by a thousand years, yet are entirely reminiscent of each other, a diptych of dead ringers. Both bear pots of precious ointment to anoint ‘the king on his couch’ (Song 1.12, Luke 7.37). Both have known suffering: for Mary, the psychological bombardment and social stigma of mental ill-health (what Luke 8.2 picturesquely diagnoses as ‘seven demons’); for Lily, the more concrete domestic abuse of angry brothers who put her to work on the land like a slave (Song 1.6), darkening her skin and, with the skewed calculation of those preferring paleness, causing her to question her own intrinsic value. Thus each of them takes on a contemporary urgency, Lily (famously nigra sed formosa, ‘black but beautiful’ – Song 1.5) and Mary respectively inviting us to remember that #BlackLives and #MentalHealth Matter even in ancient texts.
By far the clearest similarity between the women is when, ravenous for a sighting of their beloved, they seek him relentlessly in town and garden, clinging to him so tightly (Song 3.3f, John 20.17) that Mary earns the risen Jesus’ Covid-consistent reproof, Noli me tangere: Do not touch me. It is through the healing power of her good Lord’s loving touch, however (physical, verbal, metaphorical), that Lily/Magdalen is raised from her indifferent beginnings to a new and happy wholeness. Her all-consuming longing for another is the shining hallmark of her superiority: Sicut lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias. As a lily among the thorns, so is my beloved among the young women (Song 2.2). Her longing for him is fulfilled in belonging to him — not as a slave belongs to an owner[1], but as a person belongs to a community of love, finding home and harbour, a space in the jigsaw most fittingly and fruitfully her own.
But our determination to enjoy the fragrance of the towering[2] lily must not make of the thorns a facile comparator, easily ignored. In life as on land, thorns take hold, yielding only to the sweat, toil, tears, and possibly blood of Churchill’s promise and Adam’s condemnation (Genesis 3.17-19). For Lily/Magdalen, as for us all, our thriving will depend on the eradication or conquest of all that holds us back or limits us, whether that be the consequence of weakness; the sharp and painful crown of mortality; or a running after riches and worldly success, causing the suffocation of an otherwise hundredfold abundance (Matthew 13.22).
Our living with thorns is unavoidable: each rose has them; each lily too. It is the insight of our Lily/Magdalen that the best way to deal with them is through the pursuit of love, as longing turns to belonging, and individual struggles are borne and battled by the whole community.
The object of that love will be different for all. For Lily, her beloved. For Magdalen, her Christ. For the religious, the soul’s response to God. For scholars, learning and wisdom. For fools, the decreasing returns and inevitable decay of unlimited self-absorption.
We who belong to any community are inspired by shared values and energised in pursuit of common goals. As we commemorate St Mary Magdalen (in churches or institutions with or without a final e) we might give ourselves afresh to this clearing of thorns and cultivation of all that is beautiful, good and true. We are fortunate to belong where we have longed to be. Perhaps we can become agents of belonging for those not yet so richly anointed with so precious a blessing.
[1] A common misconstrual of love, recently seen on popular television in the confusion of Marianne Sheridan, co-protagonist in Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
[2] A laboured pun: ‘tower’ is the meaning of the Aramaic ‘magdal’ contained in the name ‘Magdalen’. Listen to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0717j1r at 14 minutes. Or consult Wikipedia.
Wealands Bell 