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SPIRITUAL CLASSICS
Mother Julian of Norwich and "The Revelations of Divine Love"
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
I am beginning with these, the opening lines from the opening poem of T S Eliot's Four Quartets for two reasons. The first is that it was in the closing lines of the closing poem of that sequence that I first met Mother Julian of Norwich. I met her in words perhaps familiar to many of us and as such her most famous,
All shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
The second reason is because one of the real joys of this course has been the meeting of time and the timeless. We have needed to explore time when we've visited the distant lives of the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing and St Teresa of Avila. Lives lived in Medieval England and Later Medieval Spain; each distinct periods with their own special contexts, ideas, places and events.
We have though also been offered a window on the timeless in the journeys the writer of the Cloud and St Teresa have shown us. Journeys to the heart of our faith, sharing the treasures of the interior life and the often very intimate truths that still call across the centuries to us today. For, by choosing to write down their insights, these men and women let what might have been hidden glimpses lost to us, register and resound in the unimaginable future of this place now.
And so in this context we meet Mother Julian of Norwich who, on the 8th May 1373, received a series of visions, revelations or, to use her word, "showings", which she felt compelled to write down. In the course of the evening I hope we will learn a little of what she saw and a little too of that compulsion she had to share what she saw with us. We do not in fact know very much about the woman Julian herself. (That clearly was no part of her intention in writing.) Such that we do know has been the work of careful and loving historical detection. For much that follows I am indebted to that detective, Sheila Upjohn and her book In Search of Julian of Norwich.
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To start in time then: Norwich 1373. Not a quiet little East Anglian backwater but the second city of England after London . It is a time of plague, of war with France and of religious dissent and retribution. It is also the time of Chaucer, of English's timid debut as the language of choice for works other than laundry lists. It is a time of numerous religious communities and individual religious men and women living lives as anchorites, praying alone in cells attached to parish or monastic institutions.
We know quite a lot about such people from the Ancrene Riwle written around this time. This was a manual explaining the rules for such a lifestyle, including rather charmingly, the instruction "My dear sisters, you should keep no beast but a cat". Sound advice.
So, it is this Norwich and in this life of an anchoress that we meet Julian. She is in a small cell attached to a smallish church. She is in her early thirties and she is busy writing. We can only see her because there is a window in her cell that looks out onto the street. What we can't see from here is that her small cell has two other windows. The first gives onto the church where Julian may hear the mass and receive the sacrament. The second looks into another chamber where a maidservant, (the Martha figure Mark referred to in his talk), makes Julian's meals and washes her clothes. This good woman is paid for by bequests from wealthy parishioners, keen that Julian continues to pray for their souls after their deaths.
And this is what Julian does when she is not so busy writing. She spends her days in prayer and in what we would today call counselling. We know about this because one of the people she counselled wrote about it. This person was Margery Kempe who penned one of the first vernacular autobiographies, the simply styled Booke of Margery Kempe . Margery came to see Julian because she had what she felt was a divine gift and what her priest thought was a confounded nuisance. Margery had the "Gift of Tears". This manifested itself in loud, frequent and prolonged outbursts of uncontrollable weeping. Margery claimed it was a response to Christ's passion but as there seemed to be no discernable benefit in all this grief to any who witnessed it, this was disputed. Margery does not tell us what Julian said but we do know she spent many hours with Margery, perhaps gently probing the true source of her tears.
Back to Julian busy in her cell. She is writing, writing as though there were no tomorrow. She is writing because something has just happened to her that changed her whole world. Put simply, on that day in May 1373 Julian suffered such literally excruciating pain that she felt convinced she was indeed sharing what she had prayed for, a full experience of the pain of the crucifixion. As she lost all bodily sensation she received certain revelations "showings" she believed to have been sent from God himself. As she recovered "words formed in my understanding" which she began to write down. She wrote not only to record them but also to attempt an active interpretation of what they might mean.
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So, what was she shown? Why did she write it down? What can it all mean for us? The answer to the first question is less easy than it sounds. She was shown lots of things - eighty-six chapters of rather dense prose's worth. One early chapter though captures the essence of what Julian was shown. In her own words:
In this same time our lord shewed to me a ghostly sight of his homely loveing. I saw that he is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us and all becloseyth us for tender love..Also in this he shewed a littil thing, the quantitye of an hesil nutt in the palme of my hand; and it was round as a balle. I lokid thereupon .and thowte 'What may this be?' And it was generally answered this: 'It is all that is made.' I marvelled how it might lesten, for methowte it might suddenly have fallen to nowte for littil. And I was answered in my understondyng: 'It lesteth and ever shall, for God loveth it; and so allthing hath the being be the love of God. In this littil thing I saw iii properties: the first is God made it, the second is God loveth it, the iiid, that God kepith it. (Middle English text of The Revelations of Divine Love )
No bigger than a hazelnut, this fragile, vulnerable, tiny thing is all creation. It lasts only because God made, loves and keeps it forever. Julian receives in other words complete reassurance of God's unconditional love for all he has made.
Why did she write it down? Julian felt she had been given an insight not merely for her own comfort but one she needed to explore and share. I believe she felt this because her cell had real windows as well as those to the soul. Through those real windows she saw and heard things which directly contradicted what she had been shown and this both puzzled and challenged her.
From the window to the street Julian saw creation and mankind sadly mired in sin, disease and unwonted misery. From the window to the church she heard of judgement, purgatory and damnation. And yet she heard God's voice speak only of his commitment to love. Julian takes hold of the paradox and prays for further insight.
Now during all this time I had two different kinds of understanding. One was the endless, continuing love, with its assurance of safe-keeping and joyful salvation - for this was the message of all the showings. The other was the day-to-day teaching of Holy Church .. [I pray by] the help of our Lord and his grace, I might grow and rise through it to more heavenly knowledge and higher loving.
(Sheila Upjohn's translation)
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Through prayer she begins to understand more clearly the nature of sin itself. She begins by questioning why God should allow sin at all. She quickly realises that this is a false trail when Jesus answers her, 'Sin is behovely - it had to be - but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well". She receives the threefold assurance that in spite of, or yes, because of sin we are drawn closer to God in love and, "all shall be well".
Looking so closely at the nature of God and his relationship with his creation stretches Julian's language. Not only her rather repetitive and convoluted English but also the very imagery she finds herself needing to use. This is seen most clearly when she writes about her understanding of the motherhood of God.
And so I saw that God rejoices that he is our father and God rejoices that he is our mother.. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father - for he made us and keeps us safe within him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, in whom we are all enfolded. The high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, in whom we are enfolded and he in us. (Translation as before)
She sees the Trinity as an expression of relationship, father, mother, children and the relationship is love. The insight is clear even in the showing of the hazelnut. The hazelnut rests remember, in the palm of a woman's hand. Julian was shown that God's investment in his creation is for all time. When he made all that was made God did not make a thing he made a relationship. Julian in her true understanding understands this as a message not for her alone but for her whole time and the time to come.
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What can all this mean for us now? In her own time people came to Julian for guidance in prayer and for spiritual direction so we follow a well-trodden path when we ask how what she wrote can help us now. Her writings aren't really though either a guide to prayer or life, in that they are concerned with something bigger than both. If we seek specific guidance she always responds in terms of our relationship with God. For example that it is God who puts the prayers we need to pray into our minds.
He looks on us with love and wants to make us his partner in good deeds. And so he leads us to pray for what it is his pleasure to do. And he will reward us and give us endless recompense for these prayers and our goodwill - which are his gifts to us.. [And so because of this God says] 'Pray inwardly, even though you find no joy in it. For it does good, even though you feel nothing, see nothing, yes, even though you think you cannot pray. When you are dry and empty, sick and weak, your prayers please me, though there may be little enough to please you. All believing prayer is precious to me.
(Translation as before)
It is because of this understanding that Julian can write, 'The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God, knowing that that goodness can reach right down to the lowest depths of our needs'.
The bigger picture, the true showing, is always that same; that we should have the confidence that we are beloved of God and will not cease to be beloved. For me personally I see Julian's extraordinary experiences in Norwich in 1373 as a tangible expression of what a very different person, in a different time and place meant when he wrote,
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come. Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8 vv. 38 and 39)
"All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well".
We are grateful to Julian not only for sharing what she was shown but also for the integrity and the rigour with which she investigated her "showings." It is because of this that I believe the voice calling to us across the centuries, "all shall be well" is not Julian's but indeed Christ's. Time past, present and future. Yesterday, today and forever.
(I have quoted from Sheila Upjohn's book, In Search of Julian of Norwich with the kind permission of her publishers Darton, Longman and Todd.)
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Mrs Susan Peatfield
© St Peter's Church, Ealing, 2006 -------------------------------------
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