HOW WELL DO YOUR FRIENDS KNOW YOU?

I had an email from an old friend recently who had just heard about the publication of “The Touch of the Magdalene”.  Her response was interesting. “I never thought,” she wrote, “that in a million years you would ever write a book on a Christian theme like this!”   I was almost as astonished to read her comments as she had been to hear of my book.  She knew I was a Christian and a church-goer but even so she never thought of me in that way. I just didn’t fit the image. “You are far too worldly for religion,” she had told me once years ago and, as far as she was concerned, that settled the matter once and for all.

It’s strange how you friends can see you.  Maybe the way we see ourselves is just as peculiar.  Certainly, her comments made me think about why I had written the book, challenging all her expectations!  Perhaps when she has read it, she will change her mind.  The way people see us can deeply affect how we see ourselves.  Mary Magdalene fascinated me precisely because the church has always been uneasy about her role in the gospel stories and because of this her image has been a very fractured one.  From what we know of her from biblical research she was an unlikely Christian heroine and I wanted to capture that otherness.  It was deeper than gender, deeper even than race though it was related to both of them.

We’ve just experienced the furore about that other MM, Meghan Markle and her attempt to rebuild her image after some erratic and desperate behaviour. Meghan wants to control how she is seen: as a nice person who has been badly treated.  In writing about Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, I wanted to explore the complications of human identity, what Henry James called “the terrible algebra of the self”.  However much we may wish to be, we are not just pretty pictures.  There is a lot more to us than that and Mary Magdalene embodies it all.

 

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