Prayer and Spiritual Practices
Prayer and Spiritual Practices
the spiritual life, nor does she describe the spiritual life in terms of a ladder of ascent away from the everyday material world to encounter
God "above" – for example, as outlined by her contemporary Walter Hilton in his The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection. The nearest Julian comes to a sense of rising above the everyday is her affirmation in chapter 5 that while the littleness of "everything which is made" is created, loved, and preserved by God nevertheless "our hearts and souls are not in perfect ease" if we rest in this littleness rather than in God "who is everything."
While Julian does not portray a detailed spiritual itinerary her teaching is that nevertheless prayer is a journey, but a journey from God to God as we have already noted. Julian has clear teachings about the spiritual journey. In her Second Revelation, chapter 10, it is clear that our "sight" or "beholding" of God is inevitably always partial. "By grace we see something of him" and this provokes a desire for more. "And when by grace we see something of him, then we are moved by the same grace to seek with great desire to see him for our greater joy." This incompleteness of our
"beholding" of God in this life is expressed by Julian in the same chapter as "so I saw him and sought him, and I had him and lacked him." As Julian asserts, this is inevitably how things are "in this life."
Prayer and Spiritual Practices I have already noted that Julian teaches nothing directly about methods of personal prayer and meditation. However, what she writes does offer indirect evidence of, or references to, prayer‐as‐practice. For example, in her chapter 6, Julian notes that alongside her fundamental understanding that we need to "adhere to the goodness of God" what she refers to as "our habits of prayer" were brought to her mind. In particular Julian writes of our use of "intermediaries" – for example, conventional devotion to "his holy Passion" (the cross), to "the sweet mother who bore him"
(the Virgin Mary), or to "the help that we have from particular saints." At first, Julian seems to suggest that it is better if we pray simply and directly to God rather than employ all these intermediaries because "this is too little." Yet, she goes on to say that such intermediaries are good because they have been provided by God to help us precisely as expressions of the love and goodness of God. At the same time Julian underlines that when seeking God through intermediaries we must nevertheless understand clearly that it is God who is the goodness of everything. Thus, "the highest form of prayer is to the goodness of God, which comes down to us to our humblest needs." Later in the same chapter, as already noted, Julian illustrates this point that God's providence is present in "our humblest needs" by referring to the process of defecation.9