Patronal Feast of St. Mary Magdalen July 20, 2025
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“Him whom my heart loves.” Who does your heart love? Last week, Jesus exhorted us to love God with our whole heart, mind, being, and strength. Now we hear this love poem from the bible. The Song of Songs is 8 chapters of lyrical verse about love. Traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, some Church Fathers read this poem as an allegory for the kind of love that should exist between God and the human soul with God as the groom and the soul as his bride.
In this section, the bride – our souls – describe God as “him who my heart loves.” But is that who God is to us? Do we fulfill that great commandment to love God with our whole heart? In contemplating this, St. Mary Magdalen – our patron saint – is an incomparable guide and inspiration. She lives out the poetic scene described in the song of songs. As she lay in her bed early on Easter Sunday morning, she grieves that Jesus is gone, murdered by the Judean leaders and the Romans. Not finding him… not finding peace in his absence, she rises and goes through the city, longing for him all the while. When she comes to the tomb, she finds he is still missing. After alerting the disciples, she encounters the angels – the “watchmen” mentioned in the poem.” When she turns to leave these watchmen, she finally finds him whom her heart loves. Only, her search does not end there. Neither should ours.
That ongoing search is, in part, how we can determine whether or not our heart truly loves God after all. In commanding us to love God with our whole heart, Jesus knows better than anyone that the human heart is complicated. Jeremiah the prophet calls the human heart “tortuous.” Some translations use the word “deceitful” or “corrupt.” So That command to love God with our whole heart is a real challenge. Prior to the fall of Adam and Eve, it was as simple as making the choice to love and our whole human nature harmoniously cooperated with that choice. But we live after that fall. Though we have been forgiven of Original Sin, there is no escaping it’s consequences in this life. This means trying to love with a tortuous and unreliable heart. This means that we ourselves don’t always know who it is that our hearts love.
Are we hopeless then? Can we just blame our infidelity, adultery, and inconsistency on our unreliable hearts and so be excused for our sins? No. Absolutely not. What God commands, he makes possible. St. Mary Magdalen is proof of this. She was freed by Jesus from seven demons – a sign that her life before Jesus wasn’t exactly neat and tidy – Mary Magdalen shows a loyalty unmatched by anyone other than Jesus’ own mother. The trial, the cross, the tomb. Mary was there for every step. How did such a wild heart become so reliable? By seeking.
One day at a time, Mary got up and chose to seek Christ even when he was hard to find. Ancient philosophers, artists, and poets have described love as a kind of madness… a mystical force that’s hard to predict and comes and goes as it wills. Philosophers, artists, and poets to this day still treat love as some kind of irrational compulsion. We speak of “falling” in love and “falling” out of love. We romanticize stories like Romeo and Juliet where characters do all sorts of destructive and evil things in the name of passion. We want to say that love is so powerful they can’t be blamed or that it’ll work out anyway. But these aren’t depictions of some cosmic force of love, they are depictions of obsession. Indeed, at least Shakespeare meant for his audience to see that the characters were wrong, not encourage people to follow their example. So many modern love stories, however, openly encourage this false idea of love as an irresistible and irrational force that justifies sin.
There is a half-truth in this idea of love as divine madness. God, who is love, is beyond our comprehension. His love can often be mysterious to us and the saints throughout history have sometimes seemed mad and foolish to worldly people. But there is a difference between a love that transcends reason and a love that is irrational. Mary Magdalen was not possessed by some unreliable passion. She did not “fall” in love with Jesus. It’s wasn’t luck that she never “fell” out of love with God. What she did was daily choose love by choosing to seek Jesus. This started with following him, listening to him, serving him. As with any human being, there were certainly days that she felt little or nothing. There were certainly days that, despite seeing him right in front of her, he seemed hard to reach. But she sought him anyway.
By the time Jesus was crucified, Mary’s habit of seeking Jesus was so established that she decided to keep doing it. Her heart loved him because her heart chose him again and again and again until that choice became part of who she is. That is why, within minutes of Mary finding Jesus, Jesus tells her to let him go. “Stop holding on to me.” Then he sends her on a mission, physically separating himself from her. “Go to my brothers.” Jesus was preparing Mary for a deeper relationship with God and clinging to past experience would get in the way.
Y’all, this is what the spiritual life looks like. Just as loving someone in marriage is not one continuous thrill of romance and passion, so loving Jesus is not one continuous experience of joy and warmth. The first experience of Jesus is often powerful, cathartic, or even overwhelming. But if you follow Jesus for more than 5 minutes, he will leave you. Not leave you as in abandon you, but you will sometimes feel distant from him. Prayer will seem drier and more difficult. One of his sayings in scripture or one of the Church’s teachings will strike you as difficult and unfair. Some trial will make you angry or doubtful. Exhaustion will rob you of motivation. It happens to us all.
Like Mary Magdalen waking up on Easter Sunday and remembering that Jesus was dead, we all have moments of waking up and wondering “where’d he go? Is he gone forever?” Go look for him anyway. Like Mary Magdalen, like the character in the love poem, say to yourself “I will seek Him whom my heart loves.”
Practically speaking, this means holding the line on the prayer commitments you’ve made. It means going to confession if necessary. It means following through on the ways you’ve volunteered to serve. It means keeping to the daily obligations of your state in life. But it also means actively leaning into that emptiness, that absence you feel. Ponder him and his words in that silence. Tell your heart to seek him, ask him the tough questions, go to the places you think he might be waiting. Can’t find him in the bed of your usual habits? Look for him in the city of life. Can’t find him in daily life? Ask those who are watchmen, the fellow believers and ministers who also love him. Look more closely at what you think you see for, often enough, you’ve just mistaken him for the gardener and a little more seeking will open your eyes.
Jesus is not hiding from us to be cruel. His absence is always a gateway to a greater presence: a call to conversion, an invitation to stronger virtue, a lens into a deeper perspective. Remember who he is – “him whom my heart loves” – and then choose to keep it that way the only way you can, by seeking him for the rest of your life. And every time you find him anew, tell others so they can find him too.