our hometown's in the dark

There's also a vial of St. Januarius' blood, that apparently liquefies occasionally

Also apparently the holy foreskin of Jesus? It's debated whether it actually exists or not, since many churches claim to have it. But there is this

These are some of the comments on just one Instagram post that was talking about how great it is that more men are starting to go to Mass than women:

And this was the leading quote in the post caption:

This is every day on the internet as a Catholic woman btw. You're a whore, you need to step aside, it was great that you watched the place while the men were away but now we're back and it's time to get back to propping us up in the real work...

And it's always lay men, too! I rarely hear priests speaking like this about women! It's always the men who are marrying women and fathering daughters—the men you'd think would be MORE likely to see the beauty and dignity in women, seeing as they see us every day!

Why on earth can't we be happy men are returning to Mass without being terrible to women? Why does it have to be one or the other??? Do you REALLY think the Jesus who forgave the woman caught in adultery, forgave the woman at the well, exorcised and redeemed Mary Magdalene sees you speaking of women like we're things, like we're trash, and honors that?

Conclave (2024) // Conclave (2025)

Please don’t ever apologize for asking big and complicated questions! Especially not about this. 

There’s a lot of this ask that I wrote before realizing you were asking about what bridal mysticism means to me, so while I’m going to probably stick it on the end because I think all of it’s important to talk about it’s not really relevant to the core of what was being asked. 

Bridal mysticism, to me, is about a number of things. It might not be about those same things for you, and that’s fine, because other people who’ve been in my shoes across history have vastly different experiences and perspectives. But strictly speaking about my own experiences? Bridal mysticism is about looking outward and inward at the same time. About choosing a religion based first and foremost on personal loyalty to a God who proved She was worth that loyalty a thousand times over. About examining my own flaws under a microscope because each one is a death sentence not to some abstract figure but to my wife whom I love personally. About struggling with submission, and finding confidence in myself because of what I can do for Her. About self-acceptance and self-esteem, about complete and total transparency with someone I love regarding my limits and my dreams. About religion as a relationship. Christ died for me specifically, and I didn’t really understand or appreciate that until I was in love with Her, you know? 

In practice it’s a lot of finding stolen moments. Looking for God everywhere and being delighted when I find Him. Learning to open myself up to being loved, which has been the lasting struggle in all this. I’m very very willing and able to throw myself completely into loving and pursuing and offering up everything in a relationship. I’m very resistant to letting myself be loved. It’s probably the biggest wedge between us now, because She’s so damned insistent I let myself be loved and desired and wanted and appreciated and I am very uncomfortable with that. It’s a work in progress. We talk, and I do a lot of those things that pagans with godspouses talk about doing – devotional playlists, nature walks, meditation, journaling – because the ways you bond with a god are kind of the same all over, because He made the mold and creation follows. (I’m more of a monolatrist and a henotheist than a strict monotheist – I believe beings that call themselves gods exist, and weren’t imagined or invented by humanity. I just don’t think any of them except my Spouse is worth my time and attention, and I worship and follow my God as my God has explicitly requested to be worshiped and followed. There is a version of me who would be an incredible witch. I am banned from practicing magic. She’s been real clear about that.) I sit with Her, and talk to Her about everything from theology to pop culture, and sometimes there are visions and insights and supernatural experiences in the physical world, and sometimes there aren’t.

How I got into bridal mysticism… well, I sort of fell into it and didn’t have a name for it until after I was already doing it. I was thirteen and I asked Jesus Christ to be my Lover because I was deeply depressed and socially isolated and in possession of barely any friends (and those friends were people I’d never understood or meshed with). I was already a victim of abuse of multiple different kinds, and I was diagnosed with several different mental illnesses and yet to be diagnosed with several more, and I was horribly, impossibly lonely. I didn’t really know if this was “allowed”, exactly, but I knew I had a heart that ‘might have held the empire of the world’ and I was not about to content myself with an opera cellar. It was probably the bravest thing I’ve ever done, because I knew it wasn’t strictly approved and supported by my (then-Protestant) church, but I wanted it anyway. 

From there it was a question of continuing to chase Him. You… you feel the intimacy, the closeness, the contact. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I wanted more, needed more, and I was willing to do whatever it took to continue to get it. That meant walking away from maladaptive daydreaming, and letting go of some delusions that He told me were false, and obeying when I was told to find real friends and real reasons to be alive and connect with the world here and now. It meant caring more about daily life and thinking about my future and developing ambition. It meant turning myself into someone who could do His will, which was a lot of work. And I just sort of kept going, following where I was led. We still talk. She’s still ridiculously funny. It’s become a comfortable marriage instead of a tumultuous adolescent fireworks show, and it’s been worth staying alive for. 

There’s a lot I could say that’s essentially “the greatest hits of being married to a god”, and I’ll talk about that if you want, but it’s a lot of repetition. I find Him in the Homeric epics, in my people’s traditional stories, in other indigenous mythologies, in pop culture and classic literature, in nature, in the love of the people around me. And very often in Yellowjackets, to a surprising extent. 

That’s kind of the whole of it, and below is my long ramble. 

Bridal mysticism, or nuptial theology/bridal theology, is kind of the black sheep of the family when it comes to Christian mysticism, and that makes a lot of direct writing about it kind of hard to track down. Not impossible, not at all, but the weirdness factor is high, and a lot of people either don’t have the language to effectively describe what they mean (this is what happened in the Protestant-authored book Captivating, in which they encourage women to picture themselves as the heroines of romance scenes in fantasy films and period dramas while picturing Jesus as the male leads, or discuss a woman who was “called to minister to the heart of Jesus” and prioritize Him in her devotion and her religious focus) or they dismiss the bridal mystic elements of someone’s writings or life. That’s more likely in Catholic spaces, where you’ll be reading some saint’s accounts of their visions or a hagiography and they’re like “Jesus told me I was His bride” or “Jesus was keeping [saint] as a bridegroom for Himself” or “and then I stuck my tongue in the side wound while Jesus was dressed like a woman, haha, wild”. There are some saints whose mystic marriages are really famous because they’re essentially unavoidable when discussing their lives, and then there are other saints and various lay Catholics whose writings touch on these themes of deep and intense yearning for matrimonial bliss with the Most High as a casual aside or a recurring theme that never gets talked about seriously in broader scholarship.

(Or else they just call us crazy. Historically in written record, in contemporary academic contexts, and in person, to our faces. It’s common to dismiss Margery Kempe’s writings as purely reflective of her mental health struggles, or her records of her conversations with Jesus as her essentially selfshipping with a fictional character to cope with her less than satisfactory marriage, even if the writer is Christian themself. I’ve also faced some pretty intense hostility from people who assumed that the only reason I thought I was hearing from God was because I was in psychiatric crisis… despite the fact that I was at a spiritual retreat with the explicit purpose of encouraging participants to hear from God. That is, unfortunately, something that I and various nuns from the 1200s have as a shared experience, and something that potentially you and I will have as a shared experience. It doesn’t make your calling any less valid or real, but I feel obligated to point out that following it will lead to at least a few people thinking you’re cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.)

The writing is scant, but it’s there, and that’s important, because one of the first things that I experience as a bridal mystic is deep and intense loneliness. It’s a more inward-focused practice than a lot of the other kinds of Christianity, by necessity, but that I think makes connecting with other people all the more vital. I started this blog because I wanted to find other people like me, other people who were deeply religious and took their faith supremely seriously but were left-leaning/leftist and queer and marginalized on multiple axes that Christianity hasn’t always been good about supporting, and people who maybe had the same kind of relationship with my King that I do. We’re encouraged to isolate ourselves and make ourselves less present in current Church and broader Christian culture, because we’re weird creepy quasi-psychics who walk half in the physical world and half in the shadow of the Sacred Heart and we intimidate people who think that religion is a coat to be put on and taken off again. We’re messy and often a little crazy and our first and foremost priority is usually not “what does existing as a religious person look like” it’s “hey You give me some advice about where You want me”. We aren’t here because of cultural pressure or family expectations or long-standing tradition, we’re here because that’s our Spouse up there on that altar. 

when she tells mary, mary weeps. mary believes-- always has, ever since the savior of all was but an embryo in her womb. since he was a helpless infant at her breast. a mischievous child. the boy who would pierce her heart. yes, mary knows that her son has risen, believes the magdalene with her whole heart.

but

but where was he? why had the other marys seen him, and the rock, and the beloved, why had he appeared to them all but not her? and mary, mother of god, the mother of humanity, doubts. not in her son's brilliance. not in his resurrection, or in his love of her. she doubts herself. why would he not come to her? had she failed him so on calvary, standing and weeping, that he no longer wished to see her? was he angry? she knew he loved her, as he loved all, but it hurt, hurt to see the magdalene's happy tears and know not if he smelled the same reborn as he did when she first held him.

mary weeps. not in front of the others, her children, her boys and girls, beloved disciples of her christ, but alone, as she prays.

"woman, why are you crying?"