Today, May 8, the Church remembers a most remarkable woman. We know her as Mother Julian ”” or the Lady Julian ”” of Norwich. Born in 1342 she lived in Norwich, where she died in the 1420s. From about 1375 she lived as an “anchorite”, withdrawn from the world and living a solitary life of prayer in a cell attached to St Julian’s Church, which today is a shrine and place of pilgrimage. …
In her vision of the crucified Christ crowned with thorns and bleeding, she discovered the God whose very being is love: “Suddenly the Trinity filled my heart with the utmost joy.” In one of her most celebrated images she tells us that God showed her “a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, which seemed to lie in the palm of my hand”. She asks what it is, and is given the reply: “It is all that is made” and she knows that that making comes from the overflowing love of God. All is held in being by the Divine Love, and that Divine Love is seen in the sacrifice and self-emptying of the crucified Christ, and it is that same longing love ”” compassion, a suffering with which Julian longs to share. She learns that Christ is the ground of her beseeching, the foundation of her praying. Intercession becomes adoration. Like her nameless contemporary who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing she smites on the dark cloud with the dart of her longing love, and finds an answering love. It is the joy of that love which brings her to her great affirmation of hope, “that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” because indeed she learnt “that love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw full surely in this, and in all, that before God made us, He loved us. Which love was never slaked, nor ever shall be.”
“that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,â€
Echoes of the PB’s, “all is well”?
Odd this post has not drawn commentary by the usual suspects.
It’s both a frustrating and interesting post. Interesting because Bishop Rowell shows that the Atonement is at the center of Julian’s vision. Frustrating, because it’s almost as if he shows that in spite of himself, that it is not really where his interest lies. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the piece is an exercise in the “aesthetic”. We are so embedded in a superficial and experiential “mysticism” that we can only hear Julian “sharing her experience” and then latch on to the reassurance that her “experience” gives us. We completely ignore her sturdy structure of teaching, practice, and commitment.
Thanks J…for the comment…
Superficial and experiential “mysticism” indeed. To quote Julian in such a short-hand sort of way(“all is well”) as though some have entered into the depth of the “”vision” and are at one with the message and its author, is to my mind presumptuous in the extreme. It is even more egregious as the reality of the Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection are called into question or denied. Jesus has called a number of his saints to very precious and sacrificially intimate relationships nothing less than white martyrdom. Forgive me if I assert unless and until the Lord so calls one to this extreme wilderness we have no right to hijack the fruit of such a journey as though it was our own and apply it to public ministry. I wish I could say this better.
Christus Rex
Timothy.