If we are to enter into Mother Julian’s understanding of prayer as part of Sheila Upjohn’s invitation to discuss prayer in our Lent Book, The Way of Julian of Norwich then it might help to reflect on what that would have meant for her and her contemporaries. That, in turn, invites us back to a way of praying – and worshipping – which we lost at the Reformation, and which latterly practices such as Lectio Divina have revived.
Mother Julian’s world was not one where lay people read the Scriptures, it was one where they listened to them. Julian was literate, but it is unlikely that she had a copy of the Bible or read it herself. Her engagement with prayer would have come through her experience of church. A rood-screen such as the one illustrated above, from the Norfolk church of St Mary the Virgin at Tunstead, would have provided a rich source for prayer, illuminated as it was with pictures of the Saints. Above it would have hung a cross with the crucified Christ upon it – just the sort of crucific which her curate would have shown to her on what all assumed was her death-bed. It is the first thing which catches your eye if you enter a church which has one.
It is there because it was at the centre of the devotional life of the ordinary church goer in fourteenth century England. Christ was the “man of sorrows” who took upon Himself the burden of our sins. In contemplating the Cross, which usually had upon it an image of the suffering Christ, the church goer was invited to enter into His suffering. The medieval Church, prompted by St Anselm and others, counselled people to think upon the Passion of Christ as a means of evoking His love and, thereby, contemplating how we might respond to a love that great. The Franciscan St Bonaventure, and the Cistercian, St Bernard of Clairvaux, both understood from personal experience the intense feelings which could be inspired by the contemplation of Christ’s suffering upon the Cross. By this process our sinful nature could be moved to a more fitting spiritual state where we could more readily see ourselves as recipients of Divine Love. There was an encouragement to meditate on the words of Scripture by concentration on the Holy Rood. This, it was held, would encourage each of us to enter into an emotional engagement with Christ. The imagery in the church was an aid to meditation. Much was lost when a churchmanship which took words to be the be all and end all, destroyed such images
If we know this, we can see Julian’s “showings” not as some strange vision, but rather as part of what was then a devotional norm. She would have been used to meditating on the sufferings of the Lord. She herself tells us that as a girl she had wanted to receive the “three gifts” of Christ, namely: to have the “mind of his passion”; to have:
“bodily sickness in my youth at 30 years of age”; and to “have God’s gift of three wounds”. She had wanted “a bodily sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pains of our saviour and of the compassion of our lady and of all his true lovers who saw him in his pains, for I wanted to be one of them and suffer with them.”
In this, she would have been at one with many pious lay people. She sought no special vision, just to enter into the “true mind” of the Passion. This her near-death experience gave her.
But instead of her “true mind” coming from contemplation of the Rood and its Screen, it came in the form of a mediation on the crucifix shown her by her priest. Viewed in that context, we can see Julian’s “showings” as themselves the finest example of late medieval contemplative prayer. The whole of her book is a prayer.
As we enter into Lent, we shall explore how we can make use of Mother Julian’s prayers to enrich our own.
#lentbookclub is on Twitter as #LentBookClub, Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/groups/LentBookClub, and is using The Way of Julian of Norwich by Sheila Upjohn which can be bought here rather than Amazon. It runs from Ash Wednesday 20210219 to Easter Sunday-ish 20210404 and we are doing a chapter a week, roughly. Folk who are blogging about this are Graham, at https://grahart.wordpress.com/, Andrew at https://www.shutlingsloe.co.uk/, Eric at https://sundrytimes2.wordpress.com/, Soobie at https://soobie64.medium.com/, Ruth at https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/. Come join the pilgrimage with Julian to Norwich!
All Along the Watchtower 
Outstanding, C. I’m glad you wrote this.
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Thank you, Nicholas. I am going to take this slowly, so I am glad it worked
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Chalcedon – well, I regret having to post anything negative, but I clicked on the link to `Lectio Divina’ and I found it rather alarming.
This looks like precisely the self-centred approach to prayer which is very dangerous for people of a weak psychology. They may (in the best case) experience a nice cosy feeling in the immediate aftermath of such a prayer session, but it maximally designed to concentrate the individual on his or her own personal problems, thus ultimately exacerbating any neurosis that the person might have.
There are two contributors to this blog for whom I’d say it really is to be strenuously avoided.
I dispute your claim that this is somehow very new, or somehow non-`protestant’, since it has a vague whiff of something I remember from the Christian Union at Edinburgh University back in the 1980’s – now (almost) 40 years ago. They had something called `prayer triples’ where somehow corporate prayer was supposed to work better if you did it in threes – and it was filled with the touchy-feely approach that I saw in the `Lectio Divina’ p.d.f..
I innocently went along to the C.U. shortly after starting my studies at Edinburgh, but made a sharp exit very shortly after that when I saw the sort of seance that they offered up in the name of prayer. There was something creepy about it.
I don’t see much justification for this way of praying or reading Scripture from Scripture. I look at David’s prayers in (for example) Psalm 22 (for an example where he is in despair) and Psalm 23 (a psalm of comfort) – and I cannot connect it to anything in the `Lectio Divina’ p.d.f.. I look at the tax collector of Luke 18 – I don’t see how this prayer fits into the `Lectio Divina’ pattern.
As I stated here before (a couple of threads ago), the idea of corporate prayer is to pray for the mission at home and the mission abroad. Part of this is finding out what the mission at home and the mission abroad actually is. This sort of corporate prayer is does have good models from Scripture. It can also be very helpful for those of a neurotic disposition – when they come to understand and – especially – when they absorb themselves in prayer for – the mission at home and abroad, it helps them concentrate on things completely different from self – thus going some way to help. Anything that causes a neurotic person to concentrate on themselves is bad; anything that helps them take their mind off self and concentrate on something else is good – particularly if it is the work of the Lord.
There are some very serious issues with Julian of Norwich anyway – as outlined here and in previous posts – she actually welcomed a very serious illness. I seem to remember that when Paul had a `thorn in the flesh’ he prayed earnestly that God might take it away. He humbly accepted the situation when God indicated that he wouldn’t and said `my grace is sufficient’. But disease (and death) is a blasphemy – there is something weird about a masochist who actually welcomes it.
I’m not so keen on writing negative things – but this post required it. The style of prayer advocated here is something that those of a neurotic disposition need like they need a hole in the head.
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Thanks Jock, and please, everyone must feel free to post reactions, positive or otherwise.
People “of a weak psychology” may well not be the ideal recipients of lectio divina, but they may not be the ideal recipients of a number of things from which the more robust might benefit.
It is an ancient practice and from what we can discern one which was pretty obviously useful to an unlettered society where images and other visual aids to worship were more common than books. A book-centred approach to worship is, across two millennia, a relatively late-comer, and one which, as our old “friend” Bosco showed, also fraught with danger, not least his habit of claiming personal insight into what the words of Scripture mean.
I fear that as an historian, I tend to think that anything in the last century or two is recent, so certainly would not dispute what you say about what happened in Edinburgh in your time. It was not, traditionally, been something the more Protestant tradition has taken up generally, perhaps for the reasons you have doubt about it?
I think with Julian you do have to read it not in our context, but in hers. It was very common in her time, not least because of the impact of the Black Death, for worshippers to focus on the sufferings of Christ because it was widely held that to do so was to emphasise his humanity, this in contrast to the usual tradition in the West of emphasising his role as Judge and Lord. In that sense, as I think Jessica is pointing out, Julian was part of a wider trend.
On a personal note, I have tried lectio divina and all I can say is that it “did not take”. What I have found useful is following the lectionary, something I recommended to Jessica who has also found it useful. It is a reminder that we are part of a community of prayer, and it does focus on something rather wider than oneself.
One problem, not least given all that has occurred in terms of self-isolating this last year, is that the focus on oneself can become overwhelming and ultimately separates one from God rather than doing the opposite.
I hope that helps?
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Chalcedon – what we may be seeing in the `Lectio Divina’ is something that could well have influence from ancient good and godly traditions – but which have then been mucked about by the modern church. The idea of praying for the person on your right looks strange. More importantly, I cannot reconcile this part of the `Lectio Divina’ procedure advocated in the pdf you linked to with anything that I read e.g. from Thomas a Kempis.
You say – politely and kindly – that when you tried the `lectio divina’ it `did not take’; I’d suggest that you analyse why it did not take – and you may conclude that there is a problem and it lies with `lectio divina’ and not with you (which may be connected with the modern interpretation of what the ancients were trying to do rather than with what the ancients were trying to do).
I’d agree with much of what you say here about concentrating and contemplating small pieces of Scripture – and these should perhaps be well-chosen pieces of Scripture (for example, say Psalm 22) and passages of the size that someone can get it into their head after a single reading, read aloud (bearing in mind that most people back then were illiterate).
So much of what you describe of Julian seems OK (there are some serious problems, though – the main one, for me, being the way in which she seemed to enthusiastically embrace her illness). So where it probably goes wrong for me is not so much Julian – but more the `modern’ take on it, the `lectio divina’ which seems to be a modern Anglican invention, which is trying to turn prayer into some sort of a seance.
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There is much in that Jock. Julian herself, read in context, offers a fascinating insight into medieval piety and worship. The modern tendency to read our own preoccupations into her I find, well, shall we say less helpful.
What she has to say about prayer is interesting. Jessica says she will write further, and I have a few ideas too.
I hope your Lent is going as well as it can in the circumstances. The entire year seems like a prolonged and very penitential Lent.
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Chalcedon – thanks for yours. The lock-down business is getting somewhat monotonous, but I feel a level of guilt. Where I am, very few people have been vaccinated, but I’ll get the needle tomorrow on account of being a university teacher, so it feels like queue jumping – especially since our rektor has decreed that the coming semester (which starts on 1st March and goes through to June) will be on-line, so I won’t be in front of a `live’ class again and breathing in their germs until October. I’m the beneficiary of this policy, but it seems hardly fair when there are so many others (e.g. shop keepers) who should probably get done long before me.
Other than that – yes – I solidly agree with you – this last year has felt like one very long Lent.
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