Love as God's Meaning
Love as God's Meaning
revelations were "shown" in three parts – bodily vision, words formed in her understanding, and spiritual vision. Towards the end of chapter 10,
Julian affirms that God desires that we receive three gifts: that we should seek joyfully and happily, that we wait for God steadfastly, and, third, that we have great trust. In chapter 13 after being shown how the fiend [the devil] is overcome by the Passion, Julian says to her companions around her sickbed that in this process she sees three things: sport and scorn and seriousness. In chapter 14 God shows Julian the "three degrees of bliss" which every soul will have in heaven: honor and thanks from God, that this honor will be revealed to everyone else in heaven, and joy that will last for evermore. In chapter 39 Julian affirms that all souls will come to heaven by three means: by contrition in which they are made clean, by compassion by which they are made ready, and finally by true longing for God in which they are made worthy. Finally, in chapter 58 Julian explicitly links her theology of the Trinity to human existence. "For all our life consists of three: In the first we have our being, and in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilment. The first is nature, the second is mercy, the third is grace."
Love as God's Meaning The third vital key to the heart of Julian's theology appears at several points in her Long Text, for example in chapter 6, but most clearly in the final chapter 86. On one level these references indicate that after many years of struggle and questioning, she was given the spiritual understanding that "our Lord's meaning is love," and only love. For Julian, theologically speaking, everything is subordinated to the nature of God as love, the nature of human beings as irrevocably loved and just as irrevocably united to God in their essential substance. In particular, as we shall see in later chapters, Julian's insights into sin, salvation (soteriology), and eschatology are predicated on this fundamental vision of a God of love. Having said this, Julian is clear that this message of love is not easy to grasp. In chapter 73, she notes that God wants us "in all things to have our contemplation and our delight in love." However, "it is about this knowledge that we are most blind, for some of us believe that God is almighty and may do everything, and that he is all wisdom and can do everything, but that he is all love and wishes to do everything, there we fail." Running through Julian's theological reflections is a deep sense of reassurance. This pervades the whole of the Thirteenth Revelation and is further reinforced in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Revelations. As chapter 1 of the Long Text summarises the matter, "Here [that is, in the Thirteenth Revelation] he says: Behold and see, for by the same power, wisdom and goodness that