The Spiritual Senses
Prayer: A Journey of Desire
and obedient. However, we cannot make God "suppul" or compliant to us. For God is changeless in love of humanity. When, by special grace rather than by the activity of prayer, we "plainly beholde him," seeing no other reality or "medes" (necessity), we necessarily follow God. God's abundant goodness satisfies all the powers of our soul ("all our mightes").
God's continual working is done so "divinely" that it transcends all that we can think or imagine. Then, all we can do is contemplate, enjoying
God and with a great desire to be "oned" with God. In our "meke, continual prayer" we are drawn more and more into union with God in the midst of this life "by many secret touchings of sweet spiritual sights and feelings" to the degree that we can bear it. However, this "presence" to God is never more than intermittent. Until we die we shall always continue to long and to desire.
And so we shall by his sweet grace in our own meek continual prayer come into him now in this life by many secret touchings of sweet spiritual sights and feelings measured out to us as our simplicity may bear it. And this is done and will be done by the grace of the Holy Spirit, until the day that we die, still longing for love.
In a clearly eschatological reference Julian states that after "the day that we die" we shall transcend the limitations of what we can bear in this life.
"For so can no man see God and live afterwards, that is to say in this mortal life." However, there are moments even here when God may choose to show the divine self. In such contemplation God gives the person "more than its own strength." In this sense, a contemplative immediacy of presence to God is a gift rather than the result of prolonged spiritual practice or of any particular method of prayer. God "measures the revelation according to his own will, and it is profitable for that time."
The Spiritual Senses Julian concludes her chapter 43 with an apparent reference to what are classically known as the "spiritual senses."
And then we shall all come into our Lord, knowing ourselves clearly and wholly possessing God and we shall all be endlessly hidden in God, truly seeing and wholly feeling, and hearing him spiritually and delectably smelling him and sweetly tasting him.
As far as I can detect, among the scholarly editions of Julian's texts only Colledge and Walsh make an explicit reference to Julian's apparent