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A rose petal on a walking path feels small until you realize it’s a practice of witness. We start with a Mary Magdalene feast day ritual, praying names into petals, anointing with oil, and letting ordinary beauty become a sign that love is still alive and moving through our days. From that grounded place, we ask a destabilizing question: what if the story we inherited left out more than we knew?

We talk about Elizabeth Schrader’s textual criticism research on the Gospel of John, including the claim that a scribe may have scratched out Mary’s name in John 11 and inserted Martha. That single manuscript detail opens up big conversations about biblical translation, authority, and the long history of women being minimized in Christian tradition. Holy imagination becomes our tool for truth telling, not as make-believe, but as a spiritual practice that helps us see the people pushed to the margins and imagine a more honest, more generous gospel.

From there, we widen into the divine feminine, the power of language, and the work of decolonizing scripture so it becomes good news for all people. We keep coming back to a practical takeaway: the kingdom of God is not just coming someday, it’s here right now, and the measure of our theology is whether it expands us into compassion, justice, and real belonging.

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Mary Magdalene doesn’t feel like a footnote when you finally let her stand where the text and the tradition say she belongs. We’re counting down to her feast day by talking about what it means to celebrate her in public and in practice, especially for those of us who grew up with only a small handful of church holidays and a much smaller view of women’s spiritual authority.

We explore Mary as an invitation to embodied faith, the kind of knowing that comes from within and stays with you through grief, joy, and change. That leads us straight to communion and the Eucharist: bread and cup as a living mystery of belonging, abundance, and belovedness. We share why we can’t stop thinking about the image of a long, unruly banqueting table where nobody earns their seat and nobody gets left out.

We also dig into why scholarship matters for real life. Newer research associated with Elizabeth Schrader raises serious questions about scribal edits in John and a Christological confession that may have originally been attributed to Mary Magdalene, not Martha. For us, that isn’t trivia, it’s a restoration of memory that reshapes how we see the early church, the “apostle to the apostles,” and the pattern of witness we’re invited to follow: stay, see, and then go tell.

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Prayer can feel hollow or difficult when our lives get real. When grief lingers, desire stays unmet, or the words you used to say no longer ring true, you can start to wonder whether you’ve lost your way spiritually. We sit down with Colette Lafia, a creative and spiritual writer, retreat leader, and longtime school librarian, to offer another path: poetry as prayer, and prayer as a way of living from the inside of your own story.

Colette shares how her book Leaving the Shore emerged from falling back in love with poetry and discovering it as a “threshold portal” into divine presence. We talk through her contemplative approach to Lectio Divina, a sacred reading practice that invites you to slow down, notice the word or image that tugs at you, and let it move through your body and heart. You’ll hear poems read aloud and experience how a single line can become an honest conversation with God, mystery, and the holy without forcing a neat conclusion.

We also explore the spirituality of ordinary life: the dining table as an altar, the sacred traces held in daily objects, and the way longing can become a holy teacher. Colette reflects on infertility, accompaniment through illness, and why spiritual direction matters for people who sense “the more” but need a safe place to speak about it, including mystical experience. We close with a simple embodied invitation to begin with breath and trust an indwelling presence that is already here.

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