Conclusion: Context and Julian's Teachings
Julian in Context
solitary's attention away from other things that might encourage idleness.
The day is largely silent. The emphasis is on the weakness of an anchoress – essentially sinful and thus committed to the solitary life as if it were imprisonment. There is no sense of an anchoress being able to offer spiritual insight to others; rather, such people are unworthy of fellowship.
Self‐disgust is a spiritual value. There should be meditation on the vileness of the body. This approach contrasts strongly with Julian's positive imagery of embodiment in Long Text, chapter 6, where the process of defecation underlines God's loving providence! The text of the Ancrene
Wisse manifests a strain of deep anxiety and its language is that of frailty plus the just anger of God.39
Conclusion: Context and Julian's Teachings Julian makes no direct reference to any of the social, political, or religious problems of her troubled times. However, there seem to be echoes of these problems in both the tone and the content of her teachings. In the context of such a difficult world, Julian's assertion that "all shall be well" must have raised as many questions as it offered comfort. Indeed, Julian's visions focus on the bleeding, suffering Christ on the cross as God's response to sin and suffering. Thus Julian's own human instinct is to ask how all shall end up well when such harm is done by human sin. In that sense, her eventual acceptance of God's message is born of deep interior struggle. "All shall be well" is not offered as a cheap and easy response to the troubles of the world and of her fellow Christians. To ask her fellow
Christians to believe that, as the final chapter of the Long Text affirms, love was God's meaning would have been deeply challenging.
The first sentence of the chapter suggests that "this boke" was begun by God's grace but is not yet "performed"; that is, fully perfected. Perhaps this does refer in part to the imperfection of Julian's own understanding of God's revelations, and therefore to the incompleteness of her teaching in the written text. However, Julian adds: "For charity, let us all join with God's working in prayer, thanking, trusting, rejoicing." In the end what has been taught on the basis of what was revealed to Julian must be performed by all her fellow Christians in some way in the midst of the imperfections of everyday living in a fractured world. Humans are called to participate as best they can in God's working and "performance" and not simply be passive recipients.
There are some hints about what is demanded by this human sharing in God's "performing." In at least one way, it seems to me that this speaks radically to the conditions of Julian's times, characterized by war, human enmity, rebellion, accusations of heresy, and rejections of "otherness," for