Julian of Norwich’s writings have special significance to Anglicans, therefore, I received welcome response to the last post. Dr. Sylvia Barnard was the first to write. Sylvia was born into the Anglican communion over eighty years ago. She is currently teaching Greek and Latin at Doane Stuart School which is named after the first bishop of Albany, William Croswell Doane, who built our cathedral and the original school. Here is a bio and pictures of Sylvia on her eightieth birthday .
Sylvia has visited Norwich and she sets the scene of this second post on Julian:
Norwich, England, is a short train journey north of Cambridge and an ideal day trip from there. In the Middle Ages it was one of the largest and richest cities in England due to the wool trade. In the late 14th century, a woman called Julian became an anchoress in St. Julian's Church by the river, a church probably dedicated to St. Julian the Hospitaller, patron of ferrymen, and probably built in the 11th century. It was bombed in WWII but has been carefully reconstructed.
An anchoress was a woman who walled herself into a cell on the side of a church. She could look into the church and watch the Mass from one side of her cell and talk to people in the street outside from her other window. Julian of Norwich is known to have dispensed advice and consolation to local people from this vantage point. Everything in Norwich is closed right now, of course, because of the coronavirus, but in normal times you can visit the church and the book and gift shop next door known as the Julian Centre. The Friends of Julian of Norwich are an ecumenical and international group of people who run the Julian Centre and promote Julian's message in whatever ways they can.
If you would like to see Julian’s home, Canterbury Cathedral is currently posting a series of lectures on Julian. The first three are about her life and the next one is promised to go into her writing. You can find them HERE.
Another friend who responded to the last post wondered if the widespread rise of Marian veneration in the 12th and 13th centuries came from a longing to embrace a not yet articulated feminine aspect of God. To this I would say that, while in the centuries before and in Julian’s time women were not educated, there were circumstances that contributed to envisioning God as feminine.
There were the scriptures in which God makes a man and woman together as God’s image (Gen 1:27) and carries Israel in God’s womb (Isaiah 46:3-4), Jesus wishes to gather the children of Jerusalem as a hen gathers her chicks (Luke 13:34), wisdom is personified as a woman in the Book of Proverbs and as Jesus Christ in the New Testament (1 Cor 1:30), as well as trinitarian implications of various images of God. In addition to feminine images of God in scripture, medieval scientific understanding of milk as reprocessed blood led to association of Christ’s wounds with feeding by which Jesus was known as motherly.
An example of a medieval envisioning of Christ as a mother is in the Lady Chapel of our Gothic-inspired cathedral. A pelican sits atop the ambry where the Eucharist is kept. In medieval times it was believed that the bird pecked her side and fed her chicks with her own blood. Dean Harding will show our ambry and its birds in a short YouTube video coming soon.
Revelations of Divine Love is Julian’s exposition on the Trinity. It is ours too—Julian believed that her visions were meant for everyone. The years of work between the Short Text written after she had her visions and the Long Text were for unpacking their meaning for all. Yet despite her devotion to her calling Julian wrote, “Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God?”
A woman today can look into these words like a mirror and feel that Julian wrote them to protect herself. But her choice to eliminate details of her personal life from the Short Text was to also, if not only, serve the understanding of the Trinity she built in the Long Text. An example of this is the presence of Julian’s mother at her death bed in the Short Text contrasted with Jesus imaged as our mother in the Long Text.
Julian’s writing contains multiple triads that depict the essence and roles of the persons of the Trinity and indicate a knowledge of scripture and theological inquiry. In chapter 58 of the Long Text Julian declares: “The great power of the Trinity is our father, and the great wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our lord.” We will never know what Julian learned as an anchorite, but her work evidences authority similar to that of others who received a revelation of God leading to a lifetime of teaching.
Also in chapter 58, Julian calls Christ is our “mother in mercy” because he took on our sensory being and in the power of his Passion and rising united us with our essential being “which is our higher part, which we have in our Father, God Almighty”…..“And our essential being is our Father, God Almighty, and it is our Mother, God all wise, and it is our Lord Holy Ghost, God all goodness; for our essential being is whole in each person of the Trinity, which is one God.”
Julian’s association of our essential being with God’s wholeness in the three persons of the Trinity bears a resemblance to Eastern understanding of the Trinity as shown in the Rublev icon which depicts the visitation of three angels to Abraham at the Oak of Mamre (Genesis 18:1–8). Painted about a century after Julian wrote, some think it may have originally had a mirror attached to the rectangle at the bottom. In approaching the image of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at a table, the viewer would see herself being brought into the divine community.
But Julian’s point of entry into the Trinity is always Jesus Christ, joined to her through suffering and compassion. From our last post, we remember that Julian wrote of herself in the third person of the gifts she requested:
“The first was vivid perception of his Passion, the second was bodily sickness in youth at thirty years of age, the third was for God to give her three wounds.”
The wounds were “true contrition,” “the wound of kind compassion.” and the “wound of an earnest longing for God.”
The priest has been called and Julian is near death when it occurs to her to ask for the second wound. The crucifix on which she has fixed her gaze becomes real with fresh blood pouring from Jesus as if to soak her bed. Julian feels the pains of Christ. She realizes that she loves Christ more than she loves herself, and wishes to live to remain there with Christ, while she feels that bodily death to escape Christ’s pain would be a relief.
I suppose it is a combination of my place in history, my faith in the power of imagery, and my own mystical experience that make me find the vision of the crucifix less alarming than what Julian chose to do with her reason when it returned to her.
At the end of chapter 10 of the Short Text, as she still fixated on the crucifix, Julian writes that “a suggestion came from my reason, as though a friendly voice had spoken, ‘Look up to his Father in heaven.’ Then I saw clearly with the faith I felt…..either I must look up or I must answer. I answered and said, ‘No, I cannot, for you are my heaven.’ I said this because I did not wish to look up, for I would have rather suffered until Judgement Day than have come to heaven otherwise than by him….”
What follows for Julian is so dense and beautiful that I am not prepared to write about it yet.
I remain arrested by an account of a person who suffered so miserably that her mind was utterly consumed by it—however spiritual an experience it might have been—and who, when offered relief by looking up to the Father in heaven, chose instead to remain with the suffering of Christ in the body with no assurance of when the suffering would end.
This reminds me of an interview I recently heard with Dr. James Halpern from the Red Cross about counseling available for those who have lost someone to Covid 19, with special regard to spiritual needs. He spoke of the particular way the pandemic is hard for healthcare professionals, those who cannot be with their dying loved ones, and for those who are vulnerable to illness--it is that no end to the suffering is in sight. Dr. Halpern feels that even horrific events are easier to deal with than the pandemic in that they end, as death ends with family visits and funerals, and past traumas are remembered and forgotten.
Julian choosing to remain with Jesus in his suffering also reminds me of Jesus’ description of judgement as the Lord in Glory asking us when we fed and clothed and visited him in the form of people in need (Matt 25). As with those who serve Jesus by serving those in need, Julian’s choice to align her suffering with Christ’s suffering was a decision to align her life’s work with his life’s work.
Julian’s choice to remain with Christ also reminds me of reading The Imitation of Christ by Thomas À Kempis while I was persistently ill. I was brought from feeling mystified by what seemed a medieval fascination with pain to knowing that I was being presented with the choice of preferring the “Giver” over the “gift” of healing. When I began to desire Christ more than I wanted to be cured, I began to see my desire as health.
Julian’s trinitarian theology shows that companionship within God comes through aligning one’s suffering with that of Jesus Christ, seeking no escape but what he offers. It seems to me that, as a pious woman in the Church of her time who had already faced death, Julian’s greatest fear was impiety and hell. When she refused the Father in heaven for remaining with Christ in suffering, she chose Christ over what she thought she knew about God.
It was after choosing to remain with Jesus in his suffering that Julian saw Christ’s joy and then the joy and compassion of the entire Godhead as she was caught up into it. She lost her fixation on sickness and fear of hell and gained a freedom that she spent the rest of her life trying to share with others.
I wrote this before our nation saw George Floyd killed and all that has transpired since then. Even more now I wonder how Julian can teach us to be present to suffering and know that Christ and the entire Godhead are suffering in loving the entire human family, suffering more and loving each one of us more than we ever could understand unless, perhaps, we ask to understand.