Reflecting and Responding
Julian of Norwich
Enfolded in the Goodness of God
As the body is clad in clothes, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we clothed, body and soul, in the goodness of God and enfolded in it.
SHOWINGS
JULIAN OF NORWICH (1342-1416) WAS BORN shortly before the black plague ravished England, eventually killing nearly half of its population. Historians tell us of the enormous instability that accompanied the “Black Death,” while Julian speaks of a greater longing to know and love God. She was an anchoress, a woman who lived in a one-room apartment attached to a church. In the late Middle Ages Norwich was a commercial hub and vibrant cultural center. An anchoress in such a setting spent her days praying, reflecting on God and providing spiritual guidance for those who sought her counsel.
Julian is the first woman openly identified as such to write a spiritual classic in English. Other women had no doubt written devotional literature before she did, but always anonymously or under an assumed name. Julian is especially provocative because she combines a wide range of theological knowledge with deep spiritual insight. Her words are especially riveting when we consider how she helps us make sense of our experiences of God. Earlier in the same century, a profound renaissance of interest in the role of religious experiences had swept the church. One after the other, a number of original works appeared to help us know how to interpret our experiences of God.
Beginning in the twelfth century, a shift was under way that focused increasing attention on the earthly existence of Jesus. As life with God migrated beyond the cloistered community of monks, the “new devotion” became more Christocentric and more affective than many earlier expressions of Christianity. The emphasis was on the emotional side of life with God, and many women who were inclined this way began to write about their experiences. But most women were not allowed to be educated or write, so many of their earliest works were ascribed to the men who helped produce these manuscripts and place them into circulation.
Julian’s Experiences of God
In the midst of this renaissance but without any knowledge of it, Julian wrote a book based on her sixteen religious experiences that began on May 8, 1372. The work would turn out to be a classic. “Of these sixteen revelations,” she recounts, “the first began early in the morning, about the hour of four, and it lasted, revealing them in a determined order, most lovely and calm, each following the other, until it was three o’clock in the afternoon or later.” She recorded these experiences first in a short version and then, after years of reflection, in a longer text, both of which survive today.
These texts reveal a brilliant and able mind grappling with the reality of God. Each “showing” takes Julian into a deeper understanding of God and of the truth that can be known through our experiences of him. As we read her visions it is important to remember that we are not evaluating the reliability of her claims. We are simply seeking to understand how she understood these experiences and how they stimulated a deeper life with God.
Julian’s Sixteen Showings
Julian explains each vision by following a set pattern. First, she shows how the vision helps her understand why she is to be contrite. Then the vision helps her understand to whom she is to show compassion. Finally, the vision helps her express a particular aspect of earnest longing for God. This pattern reflects an internal state, external awareness and eternal longing. The first showing ushers us into the presence of God and demonstrates the role of Christ and the importance of Mary. These three personalities play a key role in every aspect of Julian’s understanding. Using the “spiritual imagination,” a faculty she first identified, she synthesizes bodily sight, the words formed in response to our bodily sight, and spiritual perception.
This is one of the most innovative processes ever contributed to help us understand our spiritual life, particularly when it comes to knowing the role of spiritual experiences in our life with God. What Julian shows us is how we must move from physical experience to conceptual understanding to spiritual insight. To a certain extent it is a reality we experience every day, but Julian adds a unique twist. Here is a basic example to illustrate this point.
When we drive a car, we see a red light, a yellow light and a green light. Our sensory experience reports this data. This sensory data in and of itself is not enough to motivate behavior. Likewise, through our conceptual understanding, we have ideas of stopping, slowing down and accelerating. But, again, this conceptual understanding is not enough to motivate our actions. It is only when we combine sensory data and conceptual understanding that we realize a red light means stop, a yellow light means slow down and a green light means accelerate. This third step, in which perceptions and conceptions are combined through interpretation, is what Julian means when she speaks of spiritual insight. Thus, every divine showing she describes includes sensory experiences, conceptual understandings and spiritual insight.
Interpreting Julian’s Visions
The first showing, the image of blood trickling down from the crown of thorns, returns us to the scene of Christ’s Passion and the principal players involved in that drama: the Holy Trinity, Christ himself and Mary. She tells us what these images mean to her, but she cannot make them mean the same thing to us. She can only accent their reality and then leave it up to our own longing for God to reconcile these perceptions and conceptions in a way that reaches the same spiritual insight.
Her second showing involves seeing Christ’s face on the cross. Covered in dry blood and with anguish etching the contours of his face, Christ hangs before her in the shadowy darkness. Although she longs to see Christ more distinctly and clearly, Julian realizes through spiritual insight that God allows us to see only enough to continue for that moment in our life with him. We do not need to see more than he desires to reveal to us at any given time.
Her third showing is seeing God in everything. This showing opens up some of the earliest and most innovative theological speculation in the English-speaking world. Julian begins to ponder the wonder of God, the reality of sin and the future of humanity. She minimizes the enduring alienation from God that befalls the sinner. She realizes that God alone rules the world and everything in it. Additionally, all that happens occurs under God’s divine care.
The fourth showing is Christ’s blood running everywhere. Julian understands this scene to signify that Christ’s blood is for the whole world. As much as we need water to survive physically, it is even more important that we avail ourselves of Christ’s blood in order to thrive spiritually.
The fifth showing teaches us that God uses the Passion of Christ to overcome the devil. Not by any sense experience, but strictly by words formed in her mind Julian realizes this is the way to overcome the “fiend,” or Satan. As she recounts this insight she sees how Christ defeats the wicked ways of Satan and wants us to use his example to guide us in our own response.
The sixth showing helps us understand the importance of trials and suffering and the bliss we will enjoy in heaven. First, Julian recognizes that the Lord God experiences gratitude himself. Second, she sees that all of us who are in heaven find joy in recognizing the gratitude God feels when all suffering is finished. Finally, this bliss remains as eternally new and fresh as it did the first day we experienced it.
The seventh showing is key to experiencing the assurance of salvation we all desire. Here is how Julian renders it: “And our Lord’s next showing was a supreme spiritual pleasure in my soul. I was filled with eternal certainty. This feeling was so joyful to me and so full of goodness that I felt completely peaceful and at rest.”
Julian goes on to realize that the very purpose of these experiences is to convince us of our salvation. Again, here is how she expresses it in her own words: “I understand that it is necessary for everybody to have such experiences. God wishes us to know that he safely protects us and that we should pass beyond experiences of suffering and pain in order to remain in eternal joy, which is God almighty, who loves and protects us.”
The eighth showing focuses on Christ on the cross in the midst of his Passion and approaching death. In addition to all the pains he suffers with which we are to identify, Julian also identifies with Christ’s suffering as she tells us of her own mother keeping vigil by her bedside as she nears death. This association with Christ’s suffering is reminiscent of the medieval belief that our sufferings should approximate Christ’s sufferings if our glory is to approximate his.
The ninth showing is to realize how happy Christ is when we understand and appreciate his suffering and Passion. It is as if our gratitude and recognition is the only joy God needs in order to feel good about his ultimate sacrifice. This is an unusual thought. We often think of salvation only as a remission of sins to appease an angry God. What Julian is saying, however, is that we bring joy to God when we love and serve him simply because our love and joy demonstrate our understanding and appreciation for all God has done for us.
The tenth showing reveals the joy of Christ in suffering for our sake. When we are unable to think abstractly about God, Julian prompts us to think concretely about Jesus. It is in recognizing the purpose of the wounds in his side that we realize the joy Christ experiences in making the ultimate sacrifice.
The eleventh showing causes Julian to elevate Mary. Believing Christ prefers Mary to all earthly creatures, Julian calls us to venerate her as well. In this veneration we recognize the initial joy she experienced at the conception of Christ, the enormous grief she felt in his crucifixion and her eternal joy to be with him forever. She is the perfect example of how we are to anticipate and experience Christ.
The twelfth showing teaches us that every soul that longs for Christ and finds him must pass through Mary. She is the perfect example of the path we are to follow. During this showing, Julian realizes that although there are many earthly teachers provided by the church, there is only one ultimate teacher, Jesus Christ.
The thirteenth showing involves the redemption of sin and suffering. Here Julian comes to understand that no matter how little or big our sin and suffering are, God will redeem them for good. God’s goal is to help us embrace all of life, not just our particular interests or positive experiences. She introduces the concept of a lower animal nature that is vulnerable to sin and a higher godly nature that can think only of God. By taking comfort in God, we are able to see that despite sin and suffering, all will be well.
The fourteenth showing answers the question, Why pray? Often when we think of God’s providence, we wonder what good it will do to pray. If God wants to do something, he will do it whether or not we ask him to. What Julian realizes, however, is that prayer is not so much about getting God to hear our requests as helping us to change our perceptions. Prayer makes us pliable. Prayer restores elasticity to our soul. Prayer is God’s way of reorienting us to his will and helping us develop the spiritual insight to embrace it. Prayer is also the way we join with God in the fulfillment of his purposes for the world.
The fifteenth showing teaches us how to develop patience and endure suffering. Julian is clearly at the height of her own physical suffering when she realizes that patient endurance has helped her understand how God comes to us in suffering. In this way, suffering is not a barrier to our belief in God but a passageway.
After the fifteenth showing, Julian begins to recover from her illness. She realizes she is going to live. After recovering her sense of life she enjoys rest, and her confidence and peace of mind return.
The sixteenth showing, which comes a day later, teaches us to have confidence in our salvation. This final, confirming vision helps Julian believe in the reality and validity of all she has experienced. She writes, “In all eternity Jesus will never leave the position which he takes in our soul; for sitting in us is his most familiar home. This was a ravishing and restful sight, for the sight of this sitting gave me certainty that he dwells there eternally.”
The Culminating Effect
The culminating effect of the sixteen showings is to help us learn how to resist the devil in order to draw close to God. Through the process of these sixteen experiences, Julian undergoes a spiritual and perceptual reorientation that helps her see God and understand what is real. She concludes her comments on the showings by confronting other human responses that keep us from God. Ultimately, Julian’s hope is that we will hate sin, love God and do his will.
Because of her remarkable insight and her sensitivity to the movements of God’s Spirit, Julian elevates vernacular theology to a new level. With its focus on the legitimacy of spiritual experience, vernacular theology does not dismiss formal and doctrinal theology but shifts its emphasis to show how reason and theology must serve God’s greater purposes in order to bring us into a deeper understanding of him. Although her writings include long, interactive considerations of several major Christian doctrines (creation, human nature, the role of reason, the incarnation, the passion, sin, the church, eschatology and so on), her greater concern is to help us experience God and understand our experiences of him.
One final note will help us put Julian’s experiences in context. There is little doubt that individual readers either really like her or really don’t. There seems to be little middle ground in how people respond to her. Part of this can be attributed to the unique emphasis of fourteenth-century English spirituality and its recovery of interest in the validity of religious experience. Another and perhaps greater factor may be her graphic descriptions of her own encounters with God.
The Motivating Insight
When I first read about Julian’s experiences, I must admit I had mixed emotions. At one level, they riveted my attention and made me think long and glorious thoughts about God. At another level, they seemed so unusual. No matter how we respond, though, these accounts help us realize that God is revealed to us over time and through a variety of circumstances and experiences. Julian’s revelations illustrate that God breaks in on our life in distinct and powerful ways. And these encounters rarely if ever happen early or instantaneously in our spiritual life but are a result of a long and arduous process of drawing near to God. The process of spiritual formation has as its goal a deep and abiding life with God. Julian’s experiences remind us of this goal and encourage us along the way.
In fact, all four of the individuals examined in this chapter reflect a pattern prominent in the history of the church: each of their individual experiences of God was the result of years and years of meditation, prayer, study and effort. The value of spiritual experiences generally, and visions and revelations specifically, is to confirm the presence of God in long expanses of a life joined with him. This is not a works/righteousness approach, but a reflection of our understanding that God expects each one of us to make a tangible response to him through how we live and express our life.
Nevertheless, Julian’s approach to God is unprecedented and distinct. From physical perception to reasonable conception to spiritual interpretation, Julian demonstrates how we come to a full knowledge of God and enjoy eternal contemplation and rest with him.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
I first encountered Julian when I was teaching a college course on the devotional classics. We had studied Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley and more. For one particular session I assigned Julian’s Showings, thinking it was appropriate for us to read this first book written by a woman in English. When we gathered the next week, however, I found my students in an uproar. We had discussed many great writings with intelligence, reason, even good humor. But this was different. No one sat back in proper academic detachment. Everyone was speaking, debating, even shouting. Some loved the book, others hated it, but all were passionately engaged.
As I tried to referee the discussion, I searched for a reason for this turn of events. How could a book whose only concern is the love of God cause such intense controversy? As I listened to my students I soon realized that the heart of the problem centered on her passionate love language. Now, these students were quite familiar with such language—movies, books, television and the Internet abound with it. What they were unfamiliar with was using this kind of language in Christian devotion. Julian writes, “For truly our lover desires the soul to adhere to him with all its power, and us always to adhere to his goodness.” She did not approach the crucifixion with endless theories of the atonement. Oh, no. She drew near to see “the body bleeding copiously . . . the fair skin . . . deeply broken into the tender flesh through the vicious blows delivered all over the lovely body. The hot blood ran out so plentifully that neither skin nor wounds could be seen, but everything seemed to be blood.” In speaking of the Trinity Julian made no attempt to parse the mystery. Rather, she declared, simply and profoundly, “The Trinity is our everlasting lover.”
We, my students and I, were learning a valuable lesson that day. Contemporary culture had conditioned us to think of passionate love exclusively in erotic and sexual terms. Julian’s dramatic language was freeing us to look at God’s love for us and our response of love with new eyes. That day we began allowing for a deeper range of emotion in our relationship with the divine Center. Tenderness, intimacy, passion, yearning—all these and more became legitimate ways of responding to divine love. It was a kairos moment, that day in the classroom.
The mystical revelations in Julian’s book Showings revolve around the passion of Christ, and perhaps the key take-home value for me is that they remind me to approach the cross of Christ with all my heart. I might find the various theories of the atonement a useful intellectual exercise: ransom theory, substitutionary theory, moral influence theory and others. But Julian reminds me to come to the experience of Christ on the cross with passion, with affection, with empathy, with soul. Am I able to feel the nail holes in hands and feet, touch the rough-hewn cross, mourn the dying of the king of heaven?
This is all deeply emotive language, and the experience of full-hearted emotion does not come easily to many of us. So how do we begin? Where do we begin? Well, we begin with a broken and contrite heart. We begin with inward godly sorrow. Abba Anthony observed, “Whoever wishes to advance in building up virtue will do so through weeping and tears.”
I once received a special grace of the soft rain of tears. I had been meditating on the ancient teaching of the church on “compunction”—heart sorrow. As I did this, God graciously helped me enter into a holy mourning on behalf of the sins of the people of God and a deep tear-filled thanksgiving at his patience, love and mercy toward us. This heart weeping lasted only a few days. I wished for more. Julian is our teacher in this more emotive side of worship and adoration.
I am especially glad for the fourteenth revelation to Julian about prayer. The observation in this chapter that Julian’s approach to prayer “restores elasticity to our soul” is so descriptive of her experience. I love her prayer, “Lord, you know what I want if it be your will that I have it, and if it be not your will, good Lord, do not be displeased, for I want nothing which you do not want.” I long for more of this spirit in my own experience of prayer.
Julian, of course, could pray in this way because she had an abiding confidence in the goodness of God. God, she knew, was after her to do her good always. She could trust God’s will utterly, for the will of God would be the very best for her. Always. This was her confidence.
At one point she writes, “This revelation was given to my understanding to teach our souls wisely to adhere to the goodness of God. . . . For the highest form of prayer is to the goodness of God. . . . For truly our lover desires the soul to adhere to him with all its power, and us always to adhere to his goodness.” Julian reveals a spirit and a confidence in the goodness of God that I long to imitate.
I find Julian to be at her best when she is sharing insights into prayer. She is a rich gold mine in which we can dig and explore to our heart’s content. In times of dryness and barrenness Julian tells us that God is speaking over us, saying, “Pray wholeheartedly though you may feel nothing, though you may see nothing, yes, though you think that you could not, for in dryness and in barrenness, in sickness and in weakness, then is your prayer most pleasing to me, though you think it almost tasteless to you. And so is all your living prayer in my sight.”
Perhaps Julian’s most famous line about prayer comes at a time when she despaired whether God ever heard her prayers. It was then that she heard the Lord saying to her, “I am the ground of your beseeching. First, it is my will that you should have it, and then I make you to wish it, and then I make you to beseech it. If you beseech it, how could it be that you would not have what you beseech?” From this perspective prayer is like a reflex action to God’s prior initiation on the heart. The experience of the years could cause Julian to announce confidently, “Prayer unites the soul to God.”
Some of the showings I find problematic. The eleventh showing, with its veneration of Mary, and her fifteenth showing, which idealizes suffering, seem to reflect more medieval underpinnings than is warranted by Scripture. These, however, are small objections to a work that calls us to a passionate, head-over-heels love affair with the great God of the universe.
Perhaps it would be good to close with the most well-known of Julian’s words, words that speak to the ultimate restoration of all things: “But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Our Savior and our Friend, Julian had the most wonderful transcendent mystical experiences. Our experience seems rather petty by comparison. The focus of our attention seems to be the mundane stuff of life. We worry about stretching our finances through to the end of the month, and how to help our children do well in math and reading. We mow lawns and wash the clothes. Yet, we are learning to do these things with you, Lord. We thank you for caring about all our petty daily cares.
Perhaps a time will come when the idea of transcendent mystical experiences will be higher on our priority list. We look forward to that time. In the meantime we will do our best to be faithful in the common ventures of life. Amen.