My first call after graduate school was to serve as a high school educator. As part of my role, I helped coordinate and lead national and international immersion trips. During a trip to Honduras in 2018, I rang the dinner bell one evening to round up my students. Before dinner prayer I counted heads and realized we were one student short. I left the cafeteria and checked the sleeping quarters, the bathrooms, and wandered the grounds. Eventually I found her behind one of the bunk houses. Her back was against the wall, arms slouched over her knees…and she was crying. I ran over, wondering if she had been hurt, or maybe homesick. But when I asked her what was going on, I wasn’t prepared for her answer. She told me that she was just so moved by the hospitality, the generosity, and the love freely given by the children in the community we were visiting. She couldn’t believe how willingly they accepted her…so much so that it brought her to tears. As a baby minister, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, and so I reverted back to an Ignatian prayer imprinted on my mind from at that point six years of Jesuit education. I quoted a prayer by Joseph Welan, most often associated with Pedro Arrupe. The last lines are: Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. My student was right: the love that our hosts shared with us during that short week was overwhelming. It was overflowing. So I suggested to my student that she bottle some of it up for herself. That she allow herself to let their love transform her, that like matches set aflame she leave that place on fire with the love that was sparked in her.

Today is the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene. The Apostle to the Apostles, the patron saint of women, the first to see the Resurrected Jesus. The beginning of the church. The Gospel of John tells us that after Mary encountered the Risen Christ– after she expected to find the body of Jesus but instead found an empty tomb and Love Incarnate– went to the disciples. She just couldn’t contain a love that was overflowing. “I have seen the Teacher!” she announced. And she went on to share all that the Savior had said to her.

In this one verse, John chapter 20, verse 18, we have an encapsulation of our Gospel call. When we meet the Teacher, when we are taught a lesson so big it overflows, we are charged with letting it spill over into our lives. It’s just too good, it’s just too much, it’s just too life-giving not to share. Mary Magdalene earned the title Apostle to the Apostles not just by spreading the message that Jesus was alive, but by being the first to let the love of the Risen Christ consume her so much that the only thing left to do was to go transform the world. Because that’s what the love of God can do. That’s what the love of God does. It spills over. It’s too big to be contained.

So as people of the Way, as descendents of the Magdala, we have this same overflowing love from and for the Teacher in our bones. We’ve inherited it. So what will we do? Will we– like Mary– be courageous enough to let it change everything? Will we let that love pour out on friend and neighbor, on power and privilege, on the marginalized, on the forgotten? Will we choose to proclaim through our words and deeds, that we have seen Love, we’ve become Love, and we are forever changed?

May this day, this Feast of Mary Magdalene, be an opportunity to re-commit to transforming the world. To encountering and becoming the Love of God that the world so desperately needs. May we do it for our grandmothers, and our granddaughters, too. Like our ancestor Mary of Magdala, may we fall in love. May we stay in love. And may we let it decide everything.