Author Archives: JessicaHoff

How unbelievable?

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith

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They are at it again, I thought, when I read (and thank you C451) the Rev Marcus Walker’s stirring piece in The Critic on the Church of England. Not, I hasten to add, the good Reverend himself, who is a candle in the darkness, but the usual suspects.

After more than forty years presiding over a decline in parishes across the country, the Rev David John Keighley has come up with a cunning plan to reverse the decline – intensify the causes of it! I jest not, you can read it all here, though it would take a heart of stone not to alternate weeping and laughter. What does he want to do? There may be a familiar ring to it, so apologies to those suffering from PTSD on this: sell off many of the churches for housing (erm, I thought we’d been quietly doing that?); get rid of outdated doctrine and historic prejudices; (by which he seems to mean the idea of the bodily resurrection of Christ and the Virgin birth, and the miracles (erm, we’ve had forty years of doing that too – just saying); and he is convinced that:

the idea of God as some kindly, bearded patriarch sitting on high in Heaven, while the Devil resides below in Hell, is ill-suited to the modern, critical mind.

Golly, how original! Well it was back in the nineteenth century or so!

The good Rev appears to think that junking all of this will bring young people into the Church. Well I guess I am no longer “young” being in my late thirties, but this sort of stuff almost drove me out of the church when I was, and I can’t imagine it would bring anyone over the age of 70 into it!

The best antidote to this stuff is to read what Marcus Walker writes. It hits home. He rightly points out that:

If you find a priest crossing his fingers during the creed or wincing at the mention of the Virgin Birth it is likely he was ordained many decades ago and is now floating around the edge of retirement. It is also very likely that he is a he, as at the height of the modernist movement only men could be ordained in the Church of England.

That has certainly been my experience, and may well be part of why the Roman Catholic Church, which is full of such old men (including the Pope) has the same problem. What he writes next cheers me up and certainly reflects my own lived experience (as they say):

Younger priests just don’t have this affliction. They may be dripping wet, they may preach about Brexit or refugees, they may not know their way around the Prayer Book, but you really can’t say they don’t believe. The vision of the Church of England as primarily a social organisation is one which, while still live in the public imagination, simply does not match reality.

That is my experience. It boils down, as he says, to the fact that where, once upon a time there was a social cachet to being a member of the Church of England, that has quite vanished:

It has never been cool to go to church, but now it isn’t even really respectable. There is simply no market for a church which doesn’t really believe in God. If you’re going to take the social hit of admitting to being a Christian, you might as well actually be a Christian. 

Quite so. It has been our younger priests who have been at the forefront of further efforts by the old men to go further down the modernist route – which is, as C451 once put it to me “a one way line to perdition”. More than not, it is often younger priests who oppose a continuation of the bankrupt policies of the past few decades:

And of the younger priests, it’s the gay ones who are often at the forefront of the battle to defend the creeds and Christian orthodoxy (if my more traditional readers can park, for a moment, their disbelief in the separation of questions of sexuality from orthodoxy). A study by the Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary showed that, across the American church, “our LGBT seminarians are not interested in a vacuous liberal theology that has no authority, no God, no Christ, and no sacraments”.

As Marcus Walker puts it:

Once again we see that if you’re going to embarrass yourself in front of your peers by being a Christian, you might as well actually find God in the process 

This certainly matches my experience. The American “culture wars” is American, and I can’t speak for those experiencing it, but what I can testify to is that in the Church of England, not least among priests of my generation and younger, there is a real commitment to the Creeds. We don’t cross our fingers when reciting it, neither do we think that “science” has disproved God. I can’t quite get my head around a charitable explanation as to why a retired priest who believes that

the teachings of Jesus provides just one of many ways to experience ‘God’, and that progressive Christianity is focused on creating a community that is inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual identity and even if they are “questioning sceptics or agnostics”

stays in the Church. He imagines that the “product” behind the Church remains “woefully out of date”. I have bad news for him and those of his generation who think likewise – it is they who are out of date. Those of my readers who are of that generation are not, I know, of his persuasion, so take heart, the cause for which you have fought is alive and well and prospering, It may be that on some matters we look to you “unorthodox”, but when it comes to the Creeds and belief, we are Christians because we are. We stand here and can do no other because whatever the Rev David John might believe, we believe in God, the Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son … and all the rest of it.

So cheer yourself up by reading Marcus Walker!

How not to disagree

28 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith, Persecution

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We have had much discussion here lately about the tensions between the ideas of God as Love and eternal damnation. It has been a good, well-mannered discussion which I hope has helped those of us reading it; it has helped me. Disagreement is a fact of Christian (as of other) life, and how we express that disagreement is a matter of great importance. How we disagree is also a witness to the faith that is within us.

With that in mind, and after biting my tongue and bridling my internet pen for a day of so, I want simply to say that the statement recently issued by the Anglican primate of Nigeria on “gays” is one of the most digraceful and shameful I have read from a Christian leader. Lest you think this is Jess getting all hyperbolic, let me quote:

 A Gay is a Gay, they cannot be rightly described otherwise. In the same vein, we cannot describe people as ‘Christian Murderer’, ‘Christian Adulterer’ and ‘Christian terrorist’; neither should we even have ‘Gay Christian’ or ‘Gay Anglican’. “Without Holiness, no man shall see God” (Hebrews 12 :14).

It might be that the Archbishop might ponder that quotation from Hebrews next time he looks into a mirror. To imply that to be “gay” is to be in the same category as a murderer or a terrorist is simply disgraceful. But, in case that does not quite insult “gays” (really, does anyone still use that language?), he gets his JCB digger and goes deeper:

The deadly ‘virus’ of homosexuality has infiltrated ACNA. This is likened to a Yeast that should be urgently and radically expunged and excised lest it affects the whole dough (Luke 13:20-21; Gal. 5:9).

I make bread every third day at the moment, or did before I got ill again, and it maybe this is a woman/man thing, but I am charitably assuming that the Archbishop does not know that without yeast bread will not rise? But, how DARE the man liken other human beings to a “virus”! Chalcedon, historian that he is, always warns against likening anything to the unique evil of the Nazis, but here the parallel is striking:

 “Today,” Hitler proclaimed in 1943, “international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus.” Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.

‘Less Than Human’: The Psychology Of Cruelty

Given the recent history of ISIS-inspired atrocities against Christians in Nigeria, one might have expected better of the Archbishop. When you live in a gunpowder arsenal, lighting naked matches seems, to put it mildly, unwise.

Same-sex attraction, same-sex marriages, sexuality in general remain hot issues in the Church, despite Our Lord saying rather little about them, and it is understandable that they do, but however strongly one feels, I cannot for the life of me see the justification for writing about other human beings in such terms. The “gays” love someone of their own gender, that is neither “murder” nor is it “terrorism”, and quite often it isn’t “adultery” either. We can, and do, disagree, but this is a prime example of how not to do it. Is anyone going to feel as though this sort of thing is going to change anyone’s mind? Of course not, it is a power-play, designed to say “I am in charge and this is how it ought to be”.

I will pray for the Archbishop as I am told to pray for those who “hate”, but more than that, I shall pray for all those whose “crime” is to love someone of their own gender. When an Archbishop equates love with crime in inflammable and hateful language, one does not have to enquire about the form of witness given. One can only pray for him and those who think that way – and pray for comfort for faithful Christians wounded by such words.

There have been calls for Archbishop Justin to disinvite the Archbishop from the Lambeth conference. That would be a bad way of responding. He should come, and should be open to a dialogue where he can explain how he thought he was helping the Church, and perhaps listen to those who think he was shooting himself in both feet.

A Journey through Lent: Universalism & Julian of Norwich

23 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Book Club, Faith, Julian of Norwich, St. Isaac, Trinity

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“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 performed all these things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.“

St Isaac the Syrian Discourses II.38.1-2

Holy Church teaches me to believe that all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell. And given all of this I thought it impossible that all manner of things should be well, as Our Lord revealed at the this time. And I receioved no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: “what is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well.”

Revelation of Divine Love, Chapter 32

The best known of all Mother Julian’s sayings is that “all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well”. But we see here how conflicted she was after the “showings”. The Church taught one thing, the experience of God seemed to teach her another. Her anxiety is clear in chapters 32 and chapter 50. In the latter she wrote:

My good Lord, I see that you are truth itself and I know for certain that we sin every day and deserve to be bitterly blamed; and I can neither give up the knowledge of this truth, nor can I see that you show us any kind of blame. How can this be?

Revelation, Chapter 50

She could not find in any of the “showings” that the omniscient and omnipotent God was “angry” with his finite creation. Indeed for her, our very existence proved that God was not angry, not least since he could simply have annihilated all of us at a stroke:

It seems to me that if God could be even slightly angry we could never have any life, or place, or being

Revelation Chapter 49

If God is, as we are told, “love” then how can he also be angry and want to exact vengeance on us?

The image of God as vengeful father is one at odds with the image of him as a loving mother. Speaking personally, I have always had a problem with the idea of an angry God, and the first time I read Mother Julian, as with the first time I read St Issac the Syrian (whom I quote above) it made me crystallise my discomfort. Like Mother Julian I can do nothing with it, but what she taught me was that I don’t need to do anything with it.

This is where the fact that she was an “unlettered” woman helps. A Schoolman would have wanted to come to a resolution of the difficulty and would have ended by agreeing with the condemnation of Origen’s (supposed) teaching at the second council of Constantinople in 553, that we cannot believe in “universal salvation”. Mother Julian, not confined by the rules of debate, could. according to taste, do what mothers often do when it comes to their children and discipline, which is exercise what (to some men) looks like muddled thinking, or what (to others) is a sensible acknowledgement of limitations. She could not, and did not, go outside what the Church taught, any more than I could or would.

But what she could do was to express what she was shown, which is the God of love who fits St Paul’s definition of love:

4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not [a]puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, [b]thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Cor, 13-4-7

If this is “love” then St Paul omits to mention that the God who is love is “angry’, and will wreak vengeance on those who fail him. That was as far as Mother Julian could go. But without ever having heard of St Isaac, she found herself in the same place in terms of how the God who is love would bring creation to a place where it would be true that “all shall be well”:

there is a deed which the Holy Trinity shall do on the last day, and when that deed shall be done and how it shall be done in unknown to all creatures under Christ and shall be until it has been done … This is the great deed ordained by our Lord God from eternity, treasured up and hidden in his blessed breast, only known to himself, and by this deed he shall make all things well; for just as the Holy Trinity made all things from nothing, so the Holy Trinity make all well that is not well.

Revelation, Chapter 32

Just as God made everything at the beginning of the world, like a mother birthing a child, so at the end of things he will match that with another motherly action. We do not know what it will be, and anyone who claims they do claims too much, but we know it will make “all things well.” And after all, when it comes to seeking comfort, it is, perhaps, more usual for a child to go to her mother for that than to go to her father.

Mother Julian goes no further than St Isaac. But both mystics did not see God as an angry father whom we should obey because of fear of punishment. That idea might, of course, pose a problem for some, and as Mother Julian was the first to acknowledge, cannot be squared with the official teaching of the Church. But I, for one, come to God because I can do no other than to respond to the love he has shown me. A God who would behave in a manner which, in an earthly father, would have him banged up for child abuse (“if you don’t behave you will burn forever”) is one who is too frail and human to die upon a Cross for me. That he did, that he did it because he loves me is why I love him; I can do no other.

As for hell, for sure, we have Scriptural authority for knowing it exists, but what is it? Here I quote St Isaac again:

As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful.

That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse. But love inebriates the souls of the sons and daughters of heaven by its delectability.

 St Isaac the Syrian, Ascetic Treatises, 84

What could be worse than cutting yourself off from love by closing your heart to it?

Mother Julian and St Isaac have a lot in common, and I just wish I had the time and the ability to compare and contrast, but for our purposes this Lent, perhaps this will suffice? To some I shall be thought to have said too much, to others I shall be held to have been too cautious. In these matters the latter is perhaps the better charge.

#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!

A Journey through Lent: God as Mother & Julian of Norwich

22 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by in Book Club, Faith, Julian of Norwich, Lent

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My thanks, as ever, to Chalcedon, who has stepped in when illness has, once more, prevented my writing. But on the road to recovery (I hope) I have not only had time to read his excellent opening post, but to collect some of my own thoughts. I want to come at this from a female perspective, not out of some feminist desire to claim Mother Julian as one of us (she wasn’t), but because I think (along with many far better qualified to comment) that her femininity brought a different perspective to our thinking on Christ. It is not one that our Lent Book gives too much space to, but it’s one worth exploring in the context of our reading of it all the same.

Women in the Middle Ages were not part of the formal academic/theological space. They were neither invited to contribute to theological conversations, not expected so to do. As Mother Julian says of herself:

God forbid that you should say or assume I am a teacher, for that is not what I mean, nor did I ever mean in; for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail. But I know well that I have received what I say from him who is a supreme teacher … Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?

Revelations of Divine Love, Short Text, Chapter 6

She had internalised what St Paul had said about it not being a woman’s place to teach. But she knew what she had seen, and she knew she had to tell others.

Here the fact that she was by the standard of the day “unlettered”, helped. “Unlettered” did not mean illiterate, but it did mean that she was not educated in scholastic methods of debate and of writing. From our point of view this was a bonus. Scholars, and others, still read Aquinas and some of the medieval schoolmen, but it can be a wearisome task. There were set methods of writing and debating, and it makes for dry reading. With Mother Julian we get the woman herself. Whether she wrote herself, or dictated it, we hear her cadences. She does not use Latin, neither does she employ technical terminology or cite authorities. No, what we get here is a woman’s voice – and one which speaks of God as mother.

Unless you happened to be a very important aristocratic woman, women in the Middle Ages seldom strayed outside the domestic sphere. Their space was the domestic space. We see this in the language and images Mother Julian uses. She describes the drops of Christ’s blood dripping down from the crown of thorns as pills, compares them to herring scales or raindrops falling from the eaves of a house. The dead body on the cross resembles a “sagging cloth” left out to dry. Mother Julian’s Christ is one who fits into that domestic sphere, who is one of us. She stresses God’s “homeliness” with us – that is his familiarity, his intimacy, his love – he is, she says in chapter 5, “everything we find good and comforting”.

One interesting development which follows from this is that Mother Julian sees Christ as

“our true mother in whom we are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed”

chapter 57

“God all wisdom is our mother by nature”, she wrote in chapter 58, and:

“The great power of the Trinity is our father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord.”

Chapter 58

Jesus was “our true mother by nature” both because he created us, and then “by grace” for redeeming us. The crucifixion itself, she likened to the travails of child-birth, because through his agonies he opened to us the possibility of heavenly bliss. She sees the sacraments as his feeding us, as a mother does her child – and as the medievals believed that milk was reprocessed blood, the parallel with the consecrated wine and a mother’s milk would have been very real to Mother Julian.

This is a Christ who becomes motherly, welcoming, initimate with us as a mother is with her children – and that image extends to his dealings with us as sinners:

But often when our falling and our wretched sin is shown to us, we are so terrified and so very ashamed that we hardly know where to put ourselves. But then our kind mother does not want us to run from him, there is nothing he wants less. But he wants us to behave like a child; for when it is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother as fast as it can: and he wants us to do the same, like a humble child saying, ‘My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my dearest Mother, take pity on me. I have made myself dirty and unlike you, and I neither may nor can remedy this without your special help and grace.’

Chapter 61

As Our Lord said, we must become like little children to receive him, and here Mother Julian brings a mother’s insight to that saying. In this, she follows Our Lord himself who likens himself to a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings (Matthew 23:37) as well as Isaiah (49:15). What is absent from her revelation is the usual, male, image of God as the angry father.

“God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for he is nothing but goodness.”

This, of course, presented her, as a good Catholic who believed in hell and purgatory, with a problem, and it is to that I shall, God willing return.

#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!

Candlemas thoughts

02 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Faith

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Christmas ends today!

This will come as a shock to the secular world, which started doing Christmas about October and finished it long ago. This is an illustration of how far our society is from its Christian roots. Although, until relatively recently, we kept the twelve days of Christmas, that is from 25 December until 6 January, which the Church still does before moving into Epiphany, that season prolonged the celebrations until now – and there was a good reason for it. Not only did it keep up peoples’s spirits in the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere, it allowed for Candlemas to be the hinge – because it is a celebration of light and hope.

It is so, literally, marking as it does the presentation of the Christ child in the Temple, but it does so literally in another sense. The evenings have just started to get lighter – and as illustrated above, the first snowdrops are showing their pretty white heads – Candlemas bells as they were known of old. On my lunch-time walk there was actually some warmth in the sunshine for a while, and amidst the fields sodden with far too much water, you could see things beginning to grow. It was a sign that the world turns and spring is on its way.

Never, in my short lifetime have we needed that hope more.

As we celebrate the Purification of the Blessed Virgin (Jewish law provided for the ritual purification of new mothers forty days after birth – I know, don’t go there, and don’t get me started) and Christ’s presentation in the Temple, we say in our service today with especial passion the worderful words of Symeon in the “Nunc Dimittis”

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace :

according to thy word.

2    For mine eyes have seen :

thy salvation;

3    Which thou hast prepared :

before the face of all people;

4    To be a light to lighten the Gentiles :

and to be the glory of thy people Israel

As the old man sees the “consolation of Israel” hope is renewed in him – and in us.

In the English-speaking world the celebration of candlemas goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, at least that’s our first record of it. It refers to the custom of bringing candles to church to have them blessed, and then processing back home – again, literally, light in the dark times. Our faith moves most wonderfully with the rhythmns of the year, and if we keep to the seasons of the Church caldendar, then we find ourselves wonderfully in tune with the light that came into the world only forty days previously.

I am not qualified to say anything about the American custom of Groundhog day – though I know those who are, but I will leave you with an old rhyme – and my best wishes for a holy and happy Candlemas.

If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,

Winter will have another flight;

If on Candlemas Day it be shower and rain,

Winter is gone and will not come again.

Our anger

29 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by in Book Club, Julian of Norwich

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To reassure Graham Heartland (he of the wonderful Advent book club posts and organiser of the Lent book) and C451, no, I am not intending to exhaust Mother Julian before Lent even gets underway, but I do want to raise a few themes. If the Advent experience is anything to go by, the posts will be read and appreciated, but not much commented upon – which is perhaps natural with poetry. I am not sure how the Lent book thing is going to work, but suspect that because Mother Julian is more discursive, it might go better. Anyway, Graham’s choice of Sheila Upjohn’s book is a wonderful one, and I don’t want to spoil it. But (yes, Neo and C451 would have been expecting that “but”) I do want to get the theme that I brough up yesterday off my chest.

Why do we have such difficulty with the notion that “God is love”? I can see exactly why some atheists have a problem with the God they seem to have encountered in their interaction with Christians (though I do rather wonder whether some of them go out of their way to find such Christians). An omnipotent being who created all things getting in a peeve with us and punishing us until we are good – what’s that about then? It sound like one of those ghastly Church run “homes” for “wayward girls” in Ireland and elsewhere. I can totally get why, if that’s how you see God, or have been taught to see him, you’d think the best thing to do with young girls who got pregnant outside of marriage would be to punish them (and I can also totally see how in a patriachal society the men who made them pregnant would suffer no consequences). It’s easy, too, to see in the way Christians leap to judgment on each other – “that church is not the true church / my church is the true church / the Vatican II sect is the anti-Christ” – and so on and so forth – why for many outside the Faith we all get tarred with the same brush and are thought to be more than a little mad. There is something weird about believing that an omniscient God takes out his vengeance on we lesser beings – talk about punching down!

There’s a ton of excuses for it of course. As I pray the psalms daily it often comes to mind how the psalmists seem to see God as the Clint Eastwood character in “Pale Rider”, dealiong death and destruction to their enemies in due season. Reading Hosea at Morning Prayer all week is quite an experience. I kept wondering why Hosea was obsessed with “harlotry”? It didn’t seem quite healthy to me. Then I had St Paul of an evening telling me that while God was the head of man, the man was the head of woman. Golly, I thought, for a woman who is writing about not getting cross, I was getting jolly cross – my other half asked why I was so irritable and suggested stopping reading the Bible as that appeared to be the cause of my shortness of temper (well, combined with the sheer mind-numbing fatigue of this Covid year). But I am not having that. I love Christ, who is the antidote to it all.

Mother Julian saw with insight that if God were to feel what we call “anger” even for a moment, he would cease to be the creator and become the destoyer, and we should cease to exist. Anger is what happens inside us and we attribute it to God. We are, we say in some circumstances, “standing up for God”, as though he needs our anger; well it’a an excuse isn’t it? It was human anger which crucified Christ; it is our own anger which crucifies us. It holds us in an atmosphere of conflict and fear which keeps us from peace – and from atonement and repentance; I can’t repent when I am angry, maybe you can? If God’s vision of us were like our vision of others and the view we have of him as a vengeful God, how could it make sense to call him “love”? Our Heavenly Father would be the worst sort of abusive father – love me or suffer – love me because you have suffered – worship me or else something really horrible is going to happen to you. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want to know such a God – though I get how, scared to death – you might worship him very noisily.

In chapters 47 and 48, Mother Julian steers us towards some possible answers to the puzzle of what it means for God to turn away from his anger to forgiveness:

the only anger that I saw was man’s, and he forgives us for that; for anger is nothing but contrariness and antagonism to peace and love, and it comes from a lack of strentgth, or from lack of goodness – and it is not God who lacks these things but we who lack them; for through sin and vileness we have in us a vile and continual antagonism to peace and love

Revelation, chap. 48

The source of mercy, pity and compassion is love, and God will hold us safely in love. Mother Julian saw mercy through the eyes of motherhood, and grace as a property of good lordship – both going beyond any merit we could ever hope to have in our own eyes:

For I saw quite certainly that just as our contrariness brings us pain, shame and sorrow here on earth, so, on the contrary, grace brings us comfort, honour and bliss in heaven … and when I saw all this, I had toi admit that the effect of God’s mercy and forgiveness is to lessen and wear away our anger

chap. 48

As Rowan Williams put it we need to:

Stop thinking how God can solve the problem and focus instead on the problem that is your own ‘constrariousness’, your own unwillingness to be ‘apaide.’

Williams, holy living, p. 175

“Apaide” is the Anglo-Saxon word Mother Julian uses which we translate as “satisfied”. Our nature can be complete and wholer only in God.

There is a great deal more to be said on this theme, and during Lent I hope to say some of it – but I wanted just to point up what a wonderful guide Mother Julian is for us.

Mother Julian and Divine Love

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by in Book Club, Faith, Julian of Norwich

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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.

The Way of Julian of Norwich

27 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Book Club, Julian of Norwich, Lent

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The book chosen for Lent is Sheila Upjohn’s The Way of Julian of Norwich: a prayer journey through Lent

Mother Julian is a mystic close to my heart. When I lived in Norfolk I would go to St Julian’s Church and pray there. Her story is a remarkable one, and worth saying something about in advance of Lent and reading Sheila Upjohn’s book.

Mother Julian is the first writer in English whom we can securely identify as a woman. As much medieval writing is anonymous, there may have been others, but The Revelation of Divine Love is the the first one we can definitely attribute to a woman. She wrote in the later fourteenth century – 1373 was when she had her first vision. It was the era of Langland and Chaucer, that is the first great era of writing in English. What propmpted Mother Julian to write?

In her thirty-first year Julian was visited by a severe illness. Not uncommon in that era, barely thirty years since the Black Death had killed off up to a third of the population of the country. What was unusual was that she had prayed for the illness, desiring, as she says in chapter 2 of her work to be “purged by the mercy of God and afterwards to live more to God’s glory.” She was given the last Rites, and as the priest held the Cross before her, it seemed to her as though it was bleeding. She did not die. She did live afterwards to witness to God’s glory.

On 8 May 1373 she experienced fifteen “showings” as she called them. They began “early in the morning at about four o’clock” and continued until well past midday. A sixteenth came to her the following night, sandwiched between two dreams of diabolic temptation. The “showings” came in three forms: by inward sight; by outward sight; and by visions formed in her mind. As she confesses in chapter 9, “I neither can nor may show the spiritual vision as openly or as fully as I should like to”. They were so compelling that she felt the need to record them, knowing that their message was not one just for her, but for all Christians. She was, however, conflicted. As she writes in chapter 46:

Now during all this time, from beginning to end, I had two different kinds of understanding. One was the endless continuing love, with its assurance of safekeeping and salvation – for this was the message of all the Showings. The other was the day-to-day teaching of holy church, in which I had been taught and grounded beforehand, and which I understood and practised with all my heart.

Introduction, p. 2 citing chapter 46

She could not abandon what she called the “higher judgement” which she found, at times, to be in conflict with the “lower judgement” – the teaching of the Church:

And I still stand in longing, and shall until I die, to understand – by grace – these two judgements as I ought

In many ways, this makes Mother Julian the perfect guide for our Lenten journey. A theme to which I shall return tomorrow.

Faith examined: some comments

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Epiphany, Faith

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Nicholas’ post here ttps://jessicahof.blog/2021/01/25/faith-examined/ is a fascinating one, but maybe I am not just speaking for myself if I say that as a non-philosopher, I found some of the terms rebarabative. I am so grateful to Nicholas for explaining them so well, and wasn’t, as it were, to riff off them to say something about faith.

In the first place by definition for me, faith is about a belief in something you can’t prove. It’s not like gravity. If you say you don’t believe in gravity, jump out of an upstairs window to check it!

I have believed in God longer than my conscious memory can recall. When I went to Sunday school as a small child it all just made sense if things. I’d always known I was not alone, even though I was an only child. Even though I had no mother, I felt there was a maternal love that was gifted me from someone. So when the Sunday school teacher explained about Jesus loving me, I knew who that someone was. It resonated with what I knew by intuition.

Was I indoctrinated? All I can say is that if so, it was a poor programme, as few of those who went to that class stayed with the Faith. I saw the other day that the head of the Humanist organisation in the UK, Professor Alice Roberts wrote about indoctrination in Church schools. That actually made me giggle. I can only assume that the professor has never been taught in one? Still, as she also likened the UK to Iran, and thought that the Bishops who sit in the Lords were part of the “goverment” maybe we should not take her too seriously? For sure, none of the Church schools I attended did much by way of indoctrination.

I actually loved school assemblies, but was one of the few girls who did. I also loved early morning chapel when I was a boarder, but again, was one of the few who did. In other words, while there was nothing in my environment growing up (other than my atheist father and a secular society, so nothing major then!) which militated against my believing, there was certainly nothing in the way of indoctrination. Indeed “Religious Studies” lessons were often more about other religions than they were my own.

It may be that I am just unusually suggestible. I loved my Confirmation classes and found them helpful. I love going to church. Communion, which I am denied at the moment, is so important to my well-being that it feels like the hardest and most prolonged Lent ever.

So, when atheists and others start up with the old routine of “where’s the evidence?” apart from their bad faith, as we all know there is nothing by way of an answer that could ever satisfy their sad reductionist idea of what evidence is, the thing that strikes me is the irrelevance of the question. The evidence is inside me. It is the love I know God has for me which draws my love out to Him.

The Creeds give me all the framework I need. I like my Church precisely for the reasons others don’t. It takes a very broad approach to membership. It often seems illogical and a bit vague on some issues, usually those where logic and precision might harm individuals. It gives a lot of voice to the laity, and it refuses (any longer) to torture itself over the place of women in the ministry, and in the absence of a Pope, we don’t get too worried about the obiter dicta of our chief Bishop. It still sees itself as a place where all who live here can go, and it allows you to come and go as you wish without too much in the way of expectations.

Most of all, it is a Church which recognises we are all sinners and which refuses, as a Church, to throw stones. There is a Judgement. But it will be God who judges, and if we are wise and humble, we will not attempt to anticipate it.

I believe because quite literally, I can do no other. There have been, and there are, times when God seems more remote, but I know why that is. He is where he has always been, it is me who has wandered off. But he’s there when I come back. There I have found praying the daily offices of the Church a real help. Even at the times I feel remote, I feel the connection tighten. Like any relationship, you get out what you put in.

As we approach Lent, it is a time to ask ourselves what we do put in? I am going to be running a Lent Book series, but more about that tomorrow. What we can all do at this time of pestilence and fear, is to be kind to each other, and loving, and examine what our Faith tells us about how we come through to better times. I am not sure that keep on keeping on is a philosophy, but it sounds awfully Anglican, so I will go with it.

Saturday Jess

23 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by in Epiphany, Faith

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First, apologies for the long silence. As some of you already know, I have been rather unwell these last weeks, culminating in what was a really bad week-end and an even worse first few days of this one. The good news is that I appear to have shaken it off and am back (well I hope it’s good news that I am back!).

No, it wasn’t Covid, so far, thank goodness, we have escaped it, but the number of people we know who have had it this time round has now reached double figures; back in lockdown 1 we knew of people who knew people who had it. We are told this variant is more infectious – which matches our experience. Is it more deadly? Again, it is starting to look that way. The vaccine is a way off for those of us in our thirties, though those, like me, with underlying health issues, may not wait quite so long.

Our church here, like so many in the diocese, remain closed, not by decree, but through common sense. The infection rate here remains high, and so Zoom church it is. We are getting used to it again, though of course, for those of us who believe the the Lord is truly present in the consecrated elements, there remains the huge sadness of the deprivation of that sacrament. It feels as though Lent started just after Christmas and will continue into Easter, if not longer. We are still, here, digesting the new instructions about how to do Ash Wednesday and Easter preparation, though confirmations look as though they will have to wait. It’s the little details which wear one down; or is that just me?

One thing which is certainly true is that for some, like my other half, who usually commute to London or to other urban centres, the locality which usually operates like a dormitory, is becoming more important. When the first lockdown ended, the first place we went out to dinner was a local pub which we’d always “meant to try”, but never quite managed to. Local shops, when open, have also received more of our patronage, and one of my hopes is that when this ordeal ends, we will find that the local community will be re-energised, not least by those former commuters who will stay doing more of their work from home. My other half is clear that working from here will become a new norm. From the personal point of view, that’s an utter delight.

I was reading something yesterday saying that on-line dating and the divorce rate are both going up during this prolonged period of crisis; the reasons are not far to seek.

I am well aware, despite my own delight at having my other half here, that for some the experience has been less fruitful. For those who, like us, had constructed an existence where the days would be spent at work with us regrouping in the evening, interspersed with socials and the like, the experience of being always in the same spaces, and with no social life or anything to leaven the experience, the enforced intimacy has posed an examination. Those annoying little habits can become something more than irritating, not least when the prolonged stress takes its toll on everyone’s nerves. I am glad we have become even closer, and I pray for those differently situated.

For those who are single and dating, the on-line world has become vital, though quite how they cope with the advice about social distancing, I can’t quite imagine.

Someone on the radio commented that we were “all in this together”. I am not sure that, beyond the banal truth that Covid could hot any of us, that is true. Those who lack outdoor spaces, or live in cramped conditions, those who are home-schooling children while juggling the demands of work, work which may in some cases now be in danger, are having a much worse time than those of us facing none of those challenges. Our work here with the foodbank is even more critical. The demands on us are rising.

I would like to think that when this comes to an end, that we will reflect on what we have learned. If the Church can help us change direction, that would be good. The world has been sold the belief that economic growth and prosperity are the same as a good life. They may be means to that end, but they are not that end, and the cost of the former is already clear. Our Christian faith tells us that the Good Life is not to be found apart from Christ. As we approach Lent, which comes remarkably soon, the experiences through which we have passed and are passing, remind us that, as St Paul almost put it, somethings that are lawful may not be desirable.

God bless!