God, Time, and Place
God, Time, and Place
God, Time, and Place A fundamental aspect of Julian's parable of a Lord and a Servant is that there are four "fallings" that become one in her inner understanding.
First, there is the surface narrative of the servant who falls into a ditch.
Then, Julian comes to see that this story represents Adam's Fall as portrayed in the Book of Genesis. Third, because Julian understands Adam to represent all of humanity, the Fall of Adam expresses the human situation of continually falling into sin. Finally, the fourth "fall" is that of the Son of God. The Son "falls" into "the womb of the maiden," meaning
Mary. The Son of God enters into the human condition in the Incarnation which therefore becomes the medium of human redemption. Thus, beyond the four "fallings" there is effectively a collapsing of the sense of time and historical sequence in the "sight" (that is, in the understanding) of human beings into a single eternal event "in God's sight." The Bible, across both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, portrays a sequential narrative of creation, fall and sinfulness, salvation, and then an ultimate eternal destiny with God. This supposed sequence is shown to Julian to be a single moment, a single act, a single willing, and a single
"sight" from the perspective of God. In this singleness Julian's parable is shown at the end to be an eschatological narrative in which the Son finally stands before the Father "with a rich and precious crown upon his head." It was then revealed that "we are his crown." Equally, the lord, God as Father, no longer sits "on the ground in the wilderness" of fallen human existence. Rather the Father now sits "in his rich and noblest seat" in his own city which we have already come to understand from earlier in chapter 51, reinforced in later chapters, is the human soul.
There can be no more striking image of God's courtesy and familiarity than to see the Lord and King dwelling in the humble state of the human soul. That is what Julian does. God's home, God's place, God's heaven is imaged as being within the human soul, understanding "soul" as the core of human identity.
For I saw very surely that our substance is in God, and I also saw that God is in our sensuality, for in the same instant and place in which our soul is made sensual, in that same instant and place exists the city of God, ordained for him from without beginning.
He comes into this city and will never depart from it, for God is never out of the soul, in which he will dwell blessedly without end.
(Chapter 55) As already noted from her chapter 68, Julian sees her soul "as wide as if it were an endless citadel, and also as if it were a blessed kingdom" in which
Parable of a Lord and a Servant
sits "Our Lord Jesus, true God and true man." Here, the Lord Jesus in the human soul rules heaven and earth.
There is a tension within Julian between her sense that God is "in place" within created reality and a sense that her experience drew her beyond the limits of physical, time‐bound, contingent space. Her "place" was with an eternal transcendent God. God was within her soul and God was within the created world. Yet, at the same time, God transcends the limits of the physical and material. Therefore, Christians must not believe that contingent reality can satisfy human desires. This tension is perhaps most sharply expressed in chapter 5. The image of all created reality as "something small, no bigger than a hazelnut'" affirms God's creation in love and continual preservation of all things. Yet Julian goes on in the same chapter to suggest that human beings should "despise as nothing everything created." In the full context of Julian's teaching the word
"despise" is not a rejection of created reality but an affirmation that human beings will not ultimately be satisfied if they mistakenly think that the created order is the ultimate reality. The overall theme of creation will also be explored more extensively in Chapter 5.
In her First Revelation, Julian indicated that she was astonished that God could be "at home" (or "familiar") with a sinful creature.11 She initially interpreted the great joy that she was given as a form of temporary spiritual consolation because "our Lord Jesus wanted, out of his courteous love, to show me comfort before my temptations began" (chapter 4).
In a way it was true that God desired to comfort her. However, she came to see that this revelation also revealed a teaching about the "humility" of God‐in‐Christ. This insight echoes the sentiments of Paul's Letter to the Philippians 2, 6–8, regarding Christ Jesus:
Who, though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Because God is "humble," Julian's perfectly conventional desire to be immediately with God in heaven (chapter 19) was converted. This was a defining moment in the teaching she received and then sought to communicate to others. Julian found that she did not need to go to a heaven elsewhere to be with God. For God was already "at home" in the flesh of Jesus Christ and therefore with us in this life. God's "homeliness" towards us is an extension of "being at home" in material creation. The divine love was revealed to Julian not simply as willing to suffer on the cross but also as at home in the human condition.