Penitential Practices
Penitential Practices
expression of gratitude common to everyone when "we are all brought up above" into the presence of God where the mystery of reality will finally be revealed.
We shall all say with one voice: Lord, blessed may you be, because it is so, it is well; and now we see truly that everything is done as it was ordained by you before anything was made.
(Chapter 85) In this sense, Julian's texts reveal that her relationship with God regularly embraced the practice of prayer‐as‐conversation. This conversation was not one‐sided but mutual. In other words, Julian's spiritual experiences were not simply ones of "hearing" or interiorly experiencing God or Jesus on the cross addressing her or offering some important insight and teaching. Often what Julian experienced was in the form of a question or series of questions from God that required responses from her. A good example is the Eleventh Revelation in chapter 25. Here Jesus on the cross asks Julian whether she wishes to see "my blessed mother;" that is, "our
Lady St Mary." "Do you wish to see her? I answered and said: Yes, good Lord, great thanks, yes, good Lord, if it be your will." Equally, however,
Julian feels free to question God. The whole of chapter 50 is an anguished question addressed to God about the clash between the fact that Julian knows that "we sin grievously all day and are very blameworthy" and yet that "I saw our Lord God showing no more blame to us than if we were as pure and as holy as the angels are in heaven." The chapter ends with Julian crying out with all her might: "Ah, Lord Jesus, king of bliss, how shall I be comforted, who will tell me and teach me what I need to know, if I cannot at this time see it in you?" As I discussed in Chapter 3, the answer God gives to Julian's anguished questioning is contained in the exemplum of a Lord and a Servant.
Penitential Practices How does Julian deal with penance and asceticism, two other common features of medieval spiritual practice alongside prayer? We have already explored in Chapter 5 Julian's understanding of human identity. Here it is important to underline yet again that Julian does not have a negative view of the body. Julian's chapter 6, in its image of God's providence manifested in the image of the body as a purse and in the process of defecation, graphically underlines the positive role of the human body against traditional images of the body as base, sinful, and "carnal." Julian is silent about leading a life of chastity versus an active sexual life nor does she