Writer Meg Greenfield on why she chose St. Mary Magdelene as her patron saint

Amici,

A most excellent and expressive – not to mention a very personal, indeed – essay by a first-rate writer on St. Mary Magdelene, and why the author chose her as her patron saint. This article was published a year ago at OnePeterFive. Just perfecto.

(Of course, some holier-than-though types take offence, if you read the Comments. Such will always be with us.)

An excerpt (but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing):

You loved Him for it, this man; the man you loved after all other men, the man you loved before all other men. You loved Him for telling you to stop surrendering to it all. You loved the man who would never be your lover more than you had ever loved any other man, and He saved you for it. You loved him all the more.

Christ gave you the gift of His divine grace and completely transformed you. He gave the generations to follow, sinners like me, the gift of your example. He gave us the story of you, the woman with all the demons, to teach us of His infinite mercy. To show us that no matter how wicked we are, we can be saved through Him, and with Him, and in Him.

To be totally honest with you, I get a little jealous of that. I wish that Christ would let my life be the lesson sometimes. That I could teach a little more and learn a little less.

I get jealous because I keep doing it again, Mary Magdalene, and you didn’t. I might bear your name, in spirit, as an alter Magdalene, but I am not worthy of this name, so beautiful and triumphant. I know that you went and sinned no more; you did penance and amended your life. But I keep doing it again, even though he commands me not to. I am contrite, and I am full of sorrow for offending our God. But our God didn’t give you this German soul of fire and this Irish spirit of gasoline. Talk about a hypostatic union.

Sometimes, I think that maybe if I didn’t have these kids, as you didn’t, and I didn’t have this mortgage and this Mormon husband, as you didn’t, and if I didn’t have these two coonhounds and these student loans, completely unlike you, that maybe when He judged me, maybe I could be a saint, too. Maybe even I could be a saint if all I had to do was to sit and listen to Jesus all day.

You listened to Him, and you learned from Him, and you followed Him. You wept for your Lord because you knew of His horrifying destiny. You washed His holy feet with your tears, with so many tears. You wiped those holy feet with your hair, with all that hair. You anointed those holy feet with that perfume, with all of that expensive perfume. You showed Him great love, and your sins were forgiven. For the love of God, the forgiveness of sins. By the love of God, the forgiveness of sins.