Tag Archives: St Isaac the Syrian

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!

There Is Something About Mary

24 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Faith, Marian devotion

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In her first post here, Jessica said this:

Our Lord Jesus Christ (OLJC) told the Apostles that men would know His followers by their love for each other, and He counselled them to be united; knowing us as He does, He can’t have been all that surprised that we’ve fallen away from those ideals. Perhaps if we were better at them there would be less for the polemicists to reproach us with? Great crimes have been committed in the name of Christianity, that is true, as it is of any great cause entrusted to fallen mankind. It is in our fallen nature to pervert whatever good things we have from God. In our folly we use the consequences of our own sinful state to reject the opportunity to reach out for God’s love; and in our pride erect a superstructure of Pharisaism on OLJC’s words, before proceeding to live in it rather than the love of Christ.

How very true that is we demonstrate each and every day. Yet there are things that we revere that bring us closer together. Today our Catholic brethren will celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham. That dream of Richeeldis de Faverches, A Saxon noblewoman who founded the shrine in 1061. It prospered all through medieval times visited by every King of England from William the Conqueror to Henry VIII. It was destroyed in the second round of the Dissolution of the Monasteries with its renowned statue of Mary being taken to London to be burnt, either in Chelsea or at Smithfield along with many other statues from the monasteries. or was it?

In an article on his blog, Dr. Francis Young summarizes an article he and Fr Michael Rear wrote for the Catholic Herald a year or so ago, on the circumstantial evidence they have found that a statue of the Virgin and child (apparently 13th century) referred to as the Langham Madonna, (pictured above) now at the Victoria and Albert Museum may, in fact, be the statue that once adorned the Holy House at Walsingham. He really doesn’t go into enough detail for me to have an opinion in his blog post, and the Catholic Herald article comes up 404. But he makes a pretty good case for it. Apparently, it was a common form at that time and this is the only one that survived. It’s worth your time to read and wonder. Walsingham has always had something of the miraculous about it, as you’ll know if you’ve read our various posts about it.

It started with Jessica’s Pilgrimage there in 2012 only a couple months after starting this blog, which she detailed here, here, and here. She gives a very good outline history of the shrine in the course of these posts, and in a personal note, she did indeed light candles for her readers, and at that almost precise time, I felt a great peace go through me, and that is when our friendship became deep and unshakable.

The shrine is also connected with us in other ways, including her miraculous cure from cancer.

The Shrine which has been so central to this blog (if you search for ‘Walsingham” you will find many articles, from Jessica, from Chalcedon, and from me dealing with it. But the main thing bout it seems to me to be a unifying force for Christians of all types and places.

There is a Catholic Shrine at the Slipper Chapel which is historically connected with it, there is an orthodox Shrine and Methodist and (I think) even Coptic chapels. And that is also what we for eight years have attempted to do here, to be ecumenical without being syncretic. In the main, we have succeeded.

In a post on Our Lady Day in Harvest, in 2017 A Clerk of Oxford gave us a very good reading as to what Mary meant to our forbearers.

Though they contain plenty of miracles and marvels and angels, they’re somehow very human and ordinary. At the heart of them is a woman, loving and much loved, whose life is traced from the first wonder of her conception to her peaceful death. In a sequence like that at Chalgrove, or in Ely’s Lady Chapel, or in the Book of Hours or the plays, Mary’s life is mapped out through domestic, everyday scenes: parents rejoicing in the birth of a longed-for baby; a little girl learning to read with her mother, or climbing the steps to the temple like a child on her first day at school; a teenage Mary with her female friends, happy with her baby, at her churching, or in the last days of her life. These were familiar rituals of childhood and motherhood which resonated with medieval audiences – with women especially, but not only women. They are completely relatable, not only for mothers like Margery Kempe but for anyone who has ever had a mother, ever been a child, and there’s something beautiful about elevating such ordinary family relationships to the dignity of high art. In these scenes Mary is not an unapproachably distant figure but a woman imagined in relationship to others: a daughter, wife, mother, friend. In particular, the story of her passing is full of other people and their love for her – the apostles and her friends gathering around her bedside, Christ cradling her soul in his arms like a child. She is unique, but never alone.

Personally, I always like to end these posts with these words from St Isaac the Syrian

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.