Mary Magdalene was utterly devoted to Jesus. The Gospel is laconic when it says, "out of her He cast 7 demons" (Luke 8). We tend to go on reading, skimming over the statement. But what if the names of the demons were "Hatred," "Depression," "Oppression," "Lust," "Opposition," "Dissension," "Anger"? And what if, after one of them had been cast out by Jesus, he roamed the world seeking another dwelling only to return to Mary with 7 others worse than himself?
One of the famous mystics, who was given the grace to see details of the lives of Jesus and Mary, said that when Jesus spoke his parable about the cast-out demon returning to the place he formerly inhabited, he was looking at Mary Magdalene. The place had been swept clean, but nature and human nature both abhor a vacuum. No life remains empty of worship. It doesn't help to know what we don't believe unless we know what we do believe. Emptiness invites something or someone to enter, "and the last state of the man may be worse than the first."
On the beginning of the Interior Life, Father Garrigou-Lagrange, a Dominican theologian, says this:
As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied, to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself...If he is fundamentally egotistical, his intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride. He converses with himself about the object of his cupidity, of his envy; finding therein sadness and death, he tries to flee from himself, to live outside of himself, to divert himself in order to forget the emptiness and the nothingness of his life. In this intimate conversation of the egoist with himself, there is a certain very inferior self-knowledge and a no less inferior self-love....
The egoist knows little about the spiritual part of his soul, that which is common to the angel and to man. Even if he believes in the spiriituality of the soul and of the highter faculties, intellect and will, he does not live in this spiritual order. He does not, so to speak, know experimentally this highter part of himself and does not love it sufficiently.
Something must occupy the interior life--the soul must converse with someone other than itself. So what if Mary's demons were driving her to destroy herself, to flee from herself, to try to escape the emptiness of her life, from which she was driving others away? And what if instead of depression, oppression, hatred, dissension, anger, etc, the Spirit of God began to fill her emptiness with love, peace, patience, joy, kindness, generosity, goodness, patience, and self-control (see Galatians 5). And what if she began to love what she saw and experienced within herself for the first time in her life? And what if she began to love others instead of driving them away?
Would not all of this explain her absolute devotedness to Jesus, the doorway through which she walked to a whole new and eternal life?
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