Tag Archives: Julian of Norwich

A Journey through Lent: Universalism & Julian of Norwich

23 Tuesday Feb 2021

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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!

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.

Few but Good

13 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Salvation

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Reformation and Counter Reformation in Europe....

Reformation and Counter Reformation in Europe. Protestant lands in blue, Catholic in olive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s nice to be a public blog again, and breathe free, isn’t it? I’ll try not to get us in too much trouble! A new start for us all, as we continue the mission.  I also note, with sadness, that Jess will not be rejoining us, but I, like the rest of you, pray for her and her vocation. I also concur completely with what Chalcedon said here, we have developed into a type of lay apostolate, devoted to our mission on earth.

The other day Chalcedon on his excellent post The Line Between Truth and Error, which if you missed it, you really should read, made the comment:

Anglo-Saxons have a habit of writing few but good laws and sticking to them. Latins have the opposite habit. They write too many and end up deciding which to enforce and obey. This is confusing to us – so us our keenness to obey every law to them.

There is a lot packed into that statement, both in our churches and in our political systems as well. He is of course using Anglo-Saxons in the European sense to refer to those of us that speak English and were brought with the Common Law as part of our heritage.

That becomes more evident as we prepare to celebrate the 800th anniversary of what we Americans call the first of “The Charters of Freedom”: Magna Charta, where for nearly the first time in history, in the world’s oldest nation-state, England, it was made clear that the monarch was not above the law, but was subject to it just as any other freeman.

We remember that mostly in its political context, but it, like Wycliffe, the Lollards, and yes, Julian of Norwich, can easily be seen as harbingers of the Reformation as well. We should not forget that the leader of the barons at Runnymede was none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephan Langton, and that the conflict between church and state was old news then, as it was when Becket was murdered.

In some ways, the Reformation can be seen as an originalist movement, and part of that was the emphasis on the 10 Commandments. Imagine that, a world built on merely ten prohibitions! One could nearly call it a libertarian religion, for its prohibitions are all of the most commonsensical sort. We believe that the New Covenant, stated above in our title bar supersedes the Old Covenant, with its myriad rules covering nearly everything. We can see the founding of Christianity, before the split from the temple as an attempted reformation, even as it followed the same pattern as Luther’s.

Attempt to reform from within, until expelled, and then begin to build anew, going back to the basics, and doing it inclusively. Thus the Great Commission and all that flows from it.

We also see the difference between the Anglo-Saxon world, and the Latin world. In our world, one of the quickest ways to raise a tempest is for the executive (either religious or secular) to go beyond (or fall below) his mandate. In the secular world it even has a name, albeit a sordid one, ‘The King’s Prerogative’. It was the cause of the ruckus at Runnymede, and it is the cause of many of the current controversies in Washington (and Westminster) as well.

When we say, “The law is the law” we do not mean that it cannot be changed, it can. We mean that it must not be ignored, and that has been a loud bone of contention for centuries simply because men with power over others, are still fallible men, who must be bound by the the law.

And this is where we come to the difference between us and the rest of the world. In most of the world, one can do anything the law specifically allows. Many of us see this pattern in the Roman church as well. It hearkens back to the law imposed (and often ignored) by the emperor.

In contrast the Common Law was built one case at a time up from the people (the basics are of course based on the Ten Commandments (or similar rules which were not uncommon amongst our northern European ancestors). It’s often said that in our society one can do anything that is not prohibited.

That is not a mandate or a license to do whatever we want, it is the freedom to act in our interest (religious or political) while observing the rules, and in that is found liberty, along with responsibility.

And in this understanding that we are responsible for our actions, and that the law will be enforced, is the basis of the many studies which have shown that protestant northern Europe, and especially the Anglo-Saxon countries have a much lower rate of corruption than mostly, or formerly, (pick one or both) Catholic central and southern Europe.

And remember that responsibility extends to our salvation as much as it does to our political life.

As Tacitus reminds us:

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

The anger of God

10 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in Faith, Julian of Norwich

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Julian

Why do we imagine God, the infinite and omniscient is angry with us? Is it because we are actually angry with ourselves and project that onto God? Do we really imagine God, who has created us to love Him, actually hates us? If He does/did, then the consequences for us would be much worse than we can imagine. Sin is the hard work we put in to avoid facing up to the fact that God loves us and His love is available to us if we conform ourselves to the pattern of His will for us. These are the main themes I took away from a lecture by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, which I was fortunate enough to attend today.

He was speaking on Julian of Norwich, and one of his complaints was that some people have turned her into a ‘cuddly’ symbol of a God of easy Grace. That God loves us is not, he said, an easy option, because it requires something of us we find it hard to give; that, he explained, was why we are angry we with God. The key text from lady Julian’s revelation 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.”

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, Rowan Williams suggested, 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, he said, begin to imagine, or exhaust, God’s love.

I wish I there had been a recording available, and hope there will be, as Lord Williams’ thought is not easily captured, but so much of what he was saying chimed with my beloved St Isaac the Syrian. This God lady Julian encountered is the one St Isaac described thus:

“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.”

The idea that love is in some sense ‘easy’, or the bringer of easy Grace, is part of how our sinful and fallen nature reacts to the immensity of His love; it must, says sin, be complicated and hard, and we must suffer much; that drives us away and closes our hearts; we might be saved, but few others. Our pride divides us from each other and from God’s love. As Julian of Norwich concludes:

I was taught that Love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us he loved us . . . which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning. In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end 

Those, like lady Julian and St Isaac who have experience of the Divine showing know this, know its awful simplicity; we might, Rowan Williams suggested, humble ourselves and cease from mental strife for a moment to glimpse this miracle.