"We didn't know whether to laugh or cry," Starbird remembers. "It was like my words had taken flesh in her bathroom."

Convinced now that this was her life's mission, Starbird enrolled in the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, where she devoted herself to answering four questions: could Jesus have been so human as to be married; if so, when; "how did we lose (Mary Magdalene); and how do we get her back."

Starbird says her research unearthed "mountains of evidence for the sacred union." To those who call her work heresy, she says, "We're not changing the gospel. We're just throwing new light on it. . . . I teach what the church taught in the beginning and then forgot."

Now living in the Seattle area, Starbird devotes her time to traveling around the country spreading the word and to continuing her research. A new book, "Mary Magdalene: Bride in Exile" will be published in November.

The importance of uncovering Mary Magdalene's role as Christ's wife, Starbird says, is that both Christianity and Christians need the "sacred feminine" that Mary provides.

"What we lost when we lost Mary Magdalene," she told her Sunstone audience, "was ecstasy, passion, a relationship with the body and with one another. We are earthen vessels filled with God."

Acknowledging Christ's marriage and Mary Magdalene's role as both a wife and disciple is a way of acknowledging the need for the feminine in both men and women, and in the church itself. "The feminine is a way of knowing and being," whereas the masculine is about "going and doing," she says. "That's why the self is a marriage of both."

---

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com