I can’t believe it is nearly seven years since I sat in Norwich Cathedral, passing the statue of Mother Julian (the photograph forms the picture above) in order to listen to Rowan Williams lecture on her. That lecture can now be found in a collection of his essays, here. One point which struck me then, and does now as I read the Lent book, The Way of Julian of Norwich, is his comment that Mother Julian has, for some, become a a ‘cuddly’ symbol of a God of easy Grace. One can see why this has been so when we take this from chapter 46:
I saw truly that our Lord God was never angry, not ever shall be, for he is God. He is goodness, life, truth and peace. His love and his wholeness cannot allow him to be angry. For I saw truly that it is against the nature of his strength to be angry, and against the nature of his goodness. God is the goodness that knows no anger, for he is nothing but goodness. Our sole in joined to him – unchangeable goodness – and there is neither anger nor forgiveness between our soul and God in his sight.
The Way of Julian p. 41
How nice, one might say. Super, fine, then “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”. No wonder a time like ours should choose to read Mother Julian superfically. But it is a superficial reading
One of the themes we shall be considering in the Lent readings is the unpopular one of judgment. I can’t recall the last time (or perhaps even the first time) I heard a sermon on the subject. It’s unpopular for obvious reasons, but also for less obvious ones. The obvious ones are the facts we don’t like talking about judging in this society, it makes us uneasy, and we shy away from it. From the point of view of a priest I could see that it might also make God look like a grumpy old killjoy who, the moment we seem to be enjoying ourselves, steps and and says no – a kind of celestial Ian Paisley! But what we see from Mother Julian’s “showings” is something far beyond that, deeper and more profound.
God’s “anger” is the longing of a father and mother that their child should wake up from the stupor of sin and selfishness which lead only to ashes and dust – whatever they seem to promise at the beginning. It is the longing of the father to see the Prodigal returning to where he will be received with love.
Christ rejoices in our happiness. He wants to know that we are made happy by His sufferings. He is human and he is divine. He suffers because we make him suffer, and yet as God he does it because of his love for us. He is not trying to settle some great legal debt which we owe him, he is trying to overcome our pride and the contrariness which makes us divide ourselves from Him. We cannot begin to imagine, or exhaust, God’s love. As my beloved Mar Isaac put it:
In love did God bring the world into existence; in love is God going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of the one who has preformed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.
We are called to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. We are called to repent and reform. How natural that, in our pride, when we fall, we should, like the Prodigal, wallow in the mud of our sin and suppose that the best we can hope for is to be the spiritual equivalent of a swineherd. But the message of God’s love is there if our stubborn, hard hearts will receive it. Oh but how stony that soil is sometimes – and no wonder that at times our hearts need to break before they can receive it.
It is not fear of God which draws us, it is love
One of the key texts in the Revelations of Divine Love is this:
Then said our good Lord Jesus Christ to me: “Are you well satisfied with my suffering for you?” And I said: “Yes, good Lord, in your mercy. Yes, good Lord, may you be blessed for ever!” Then said Jesus, our kind Lord: “If you are satisfied, I am satisfied. It is a joy, a bliss and an endless delight to me that I suffered my passion for you. And if it were needful or possible that I should suffer more, I would suffer more.”
What Christ did he did for love. Have we the humility to respond?
It is easy to see why for many years Mother Julian’s book was not published, and why even when it was, churchmen had their doubts about it. But it raises such important questions for us, that it will make the ideal Lent Book.
I think that we can see God as the light who invites us to come in from the darkness. An invitation we can only accept once we have taken a conscious decision to forsake the darkness out of love for the light. Which is to say, we have to be fully aware of both darkness and light in order for us to make a deliberate act of the will in relation to them. The cosy approach invites us to consider a cosmos that is all light and always has been all light, because then we don’t have to forsake, to denounce even, anything to which we have become deeply attached. But that is certainly not the way of Dame Julian.
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Thank you Steve 🙂
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It is many more years since I last stood in Norwich Cathedral, which I visited as teenager on my cathedral tour of the country.
I have preached on the Day of the LORD before. I may still have a copy of my sermon notes saved somewhere.
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Oooh I’d love to read if you still have it – it would make a good post xx
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This section from an Orthodox article I was reading today seems relevant. The whole article is worth considering.
The image of an angry, vengeful God haunts the West where a basic insecurity and guilt seem to exist. Many appear to hold that sickness, suffering and death are God’s will. Why? I suspect one reason is that down deep the belief persists that God is still angry and must be appeased. Yes, sickness, suffering and death come and when they do God’s grace is able to transform them into life-bearing trials, but are they God’s will? Does God punish us when the mood strikes, when our behavior displeases Him or for no reason at all? Are the ills that afflict creation on account of God? For example, could the loving Father really be said to enjoy the sufferings of His Son or of the damned in hell (Yannaras, 1984)? Freud rebelled against these ideas calling the God inherent in them the sadistic Father (Yannaras, 1984, p. 153). Could it be as Yannaras, Clement and Kalomiris propose that modern atheism is a healthy rebellion against a terrorist deity (Clement, 2000)? Kalomiris (1980) writes that there are no atheists, just people who hate the God in whom they have been taught to believe. https://www.stmaryorthodoxchurch.org/orthodoxy/articles/ancestral_versus_original_sin?fbclid=IwAR0OGKuVFIEp8YaHPRTLnFdXQPfm0KHl0crSFrp33qcRn6Eek9KYgpefSOg
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Oh Rob, I sooooo love this – thank youxx
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Rob – I looked at your link. At first I thought that this was sraw-mannism, but there is something in what you are saying – particularly what is contained in the link by the Orthodox writer.
My wife used to be Catholic, but reacted violently against it and left. We have the occasional conversation where I try to suggest that perhaps Catholicism isn’t all bad. She gets angry and corrects me, to which I respond `my apologies – I didn’t really know what I was talking about – yes, I accept I was wrong, yes, it is all bad.’
We had such a conversation only a few days ago – where I charitably and mistakenly imagined that the Catholic idea of confession and the pastoral role of the priest might follow along the lines described by your Orthodox writer, where the penitent and priest engage in a helpful pastoral discussion, accepting the starting point of where the penitent is in his or her Spiritual life and trying to bring the penitent forward from there.
No – I was told that it was not like that – apparently when you go to confession, you simply give the priest an account of all the naughty things you have been up to that week, the priest tells that in order to receive absolution you have to go to the mass on Wednesday at 7am, he does his spectacles, etc … routine and that’s it.
My wife was particularly annoyed one evening recently (before Christmas) when her mother returned from confession and said that the priest had told her that, to receive absolution, she had to attend three 7 am masses the following week. Given that there is a serious risk of COVID, we considered that to be utterly irresponsible (we’d also be interested to know what naughty things she had been up to, which necessitated these masses).
I have never used a pastor in the capacity of a pastor; I have never presented difficulties of life before a pastor and asked for pastoral help. I would say, though, that it is never clear to me whether or not my behaviour is sinful. For example, with my son, was I wrong to overlook certain things (with the danger that he might grow up to be a spoilt brat), or was I too hard at other times? Was I short-tempered in a way that perhaps wasn’t appropriate, when (for example) something may not have been going so well at work, etc …? I don’t really see any point in bringing such matters before a pastor; certainly, there is nothing there that would be appropriate to bring up in any confession. With most of us, we’re doing our best, we try to live well, we may be perpetrating sins even when we’re trying not to.
As far as your post goes – there are many aspects to the Christian faith; it is important not to neglect one aspect and over-emphasise the others.
If there is too much of the angry vengeful God, it is because an element of the angry and vengeful God is clearly and plainly there in Scripture. The fact that I am a sinner, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that the wages of sin is death; the gift of God is eternal life, is absolutely central to the faith of anybody who has any right at all to call themselves a Christian. That Christ died for my sins and in his resurrection I see the forgiveness of my sins is central.
At the same time, Jurgen Moltmann is absolutely correct when he draws attention to the words of the Negro spiritual `Were you there when they crucified my Lord’ and the response `Yes, we the black slaves were there participating in his suffering and shame’. (Moltmann – The Crucified God). There is nothing about the personal fallen nature of each and every one of us in that response.
I get the impression on this thread that there is far too much emphasis on self. If we look at the Lord’s prayer, the first petitions are `Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ This comes *before* we start praying for ourselves, our daily bread, forgiveness for sins, being led not into temptation. If we are `in Him’, the problem of self should (barring some details) already be more or less sorted out.
I think of various analogies of the crucifixion. Right now, Julian Assange is banged up in Belmarsh for the crime of doing some very good journalism and of exposing some hideous war crimes perpetrated by the US Army. He is there in my place, in the sense that I fully approve of this aspect of what he was doing and would have done it myself if I had known how to get the information and if I had had the time.
Also, if the problem of `self’ really has been more-or-less sorted out and we are now supposed to be concentrated first and foremost on His name, His kingdom, His will, then why don’t we see more Christian participation and why do issues such that the one that Julian Assange is currently serving time for seem to the the prerogative of atheists, or at least, people who, if they are Christians, never seem to mention it.
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A reminder that the hardest thing of all is to repent and seek absolution, which is why so few actually do it. Easy grace is such a tempting sin, isn’t it? But I’m reminded that Mother Julian told us:
” He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.’
Nor did He say it was easy, He did say it was necessary, even for us stiff-necked people who claim to be of God.
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That, dearest friend, is so apposite xx
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We try.
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I think that Michael Voris makes a good point here of who is in most need of repentance:
https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-church-america-last
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I find it hard to agree. We are all in most need. I doubt God operates that sort of judgement scale.
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So you don’t think that those who are to be our leaders in faith have have more to answer to? They have been given great grace and very many have neglected it. Just my thought. I pray for them all the time. I also thought it interesting that the Catholic Church, for all the good men who have fought against abortion, has not once in 50 years raised money throughout the Church to fight that abomination. We have drives for the poor every year and yet in utero children happen to be the poorest of the poor . . . and nada.
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I can see that point of view, but we are all sinners and God alone judges. I leave it to him, he’s omniscient and I am a klutz!
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Me too. But then I remember the verse that to those whom much is given, much is expected. And I think that all of us and all of your readers are pretty much in that cadre when we look at those who are poor, have no education and little to no exposure to Christianity. We will have more to answer to in my mind even if we are a bunch of klutzes.
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Yes, we must give much, but I trust God, who alone knows the depth of our sinfulness and of our repentance. Truly it is harder for those of us with riches, which by the standard of much of the world, is most of those of us here. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
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Indeed, Jess.
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