Magdalene House: A Place about Mercy

8. Healing Still

154 C h a p t e r 8 Healing Still I give them credit for saving my life—or, actually, giving me life. Because I didn’t really have a life, you know? Unless you consider walking up and down the streets, selling your body for your next hit “having a life.” But once I was willing to get some help, to do something different, and once I was able to forgive myself and other people, I was able to heal. I was able to stop holding all that resentment and that anger and that animosity. I was able to live. —Sherri, Magdalene House graduate w hen women compare their lives before Magdalene to their lives during and after, they draw stark contrasts that indicate the powerful change in both their circumstances and their notions of self. They talk about the transitions they experienced using phrases such as “going from darkness to light,” “fear to courage,” “bondage to freedom,” “scarcity to abundance,” and “death to life.” It is because of these kinds of transitions—and the power to be able to proclaim them in private rooms and public spaces alike—that Becca Stevens named the community “Magdalene”: according to all four gospels in the Christian Bible, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the risen Christ and to tell others about his resurrection from the dead. Community members say that Magdalene House is named after this iconic woman not because of her association with prostitution (which is more Healing Still 155 speculation and tradition than substantive claim; see Carroll 2009), but because she was the first preacher of the resurrection. Just as the resurrection is understood to be miraculous by those within the Christian faith, the changes that occur for women at Magdalene are understood to be the work of something divine. whether women describe the divine as “god,” “my higher power,” or any other name (e.g., “Love,” “grace,” “Truth”), it is evident that the hospitality and healing they experience within the Magdalene community marks Magdalene House as sacred space. Furthermore, according to the women at Magdalene, “Love” is both the method and the reason for healing—love for self, for their friends and families, for their children, and for each other—the kind of love that says, “You’re valuable and beautiful in your brokenness” and “I love you, come as you are.” I sat in on a writing class during which women from Magdalene worked with a local author to write poetry about their experiences. The women wrote about their families and the streets, as well as about their newfound home and the love they had found there. They described love as “open arms,” “the opposite of judgment,” “something that makes you whole,” “intense affection,” and “a yes.” They characterized it as unending and unconditional—something that saw goodness and potential in even the bleakest of stories. I know from listening to Becca that her vision of god and the world in which we live is that nothing is left to be condemned—that there is opportunity for wholeness, worth, and belonging for all things, and that love and mercy are the source and practice of being made whole. of the women I interviewed who had been through the Magdalene program, eleven of nineteen said, unprompted, that they had believed they would die on the streets, and credit Magdalene for their being alive today. kathleen had begged god to let her die or send her to jail (see Chapter 2), but “thanks to god and to Magdalene,” she got off the streets, got clean, and now helps other women recover from addiction . Describing how she began to talk to god, kathleen said: “I can remember looking at the crack pipe and telling myself, ‘I know what you’re all about.’ And I remember looking up at the sky, and saying , ‘ok, god, I’m fixin’ to step out on faith. I don’t have a clue where 156 Magdalene House | A Place about Mercy you’re going to take me, but I’m fixin’ to walk.’ So I got in that [police] car, put my head down, and asked them to drive off.” kathleen’s journey toward recovery started with a prayer, and when she tells her story, images of transformation encompass both the growing importance of god in her life and her own experiences of conquering addiction and escaping death on the...