Next month — May 2023 — marks the 650th anniversary of the visionary “showings” of the great 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich! To make the occasion, for the patrons of this blog I’m currently leading a course on the contemplative study of Julian of Norwich. Twice a month I publish PDF documents in which I offer my commentary on her writings, curate my favorite quotations of hers, and offer a spiritual exercise based on her wisdom. I also host a Zoom call, what I affectionately call a “contemplative salon” where patrons join me for some time devoted to silent prayer and then shared reflection on conversation on Julian’s Wisdom.
Last month, for one of the Zoom calls, I shared a list of some of my favorite books about Julian, along with a few I hadn’t read yet but that looked really promising. I promised the participants of that call that I would post the list of books online… so here it is. The first book in this list is the translation of Julian that we are currently reading (by Mirabai Starr). All the others are books that can help you to grow deeper in your own knowledge of, and appreciation for, this great but reclusive medieval mystic (if you don’t mind shopping at Amazon, the links take you to each book’s page there).
Julian of Norwich, The Showings(translated by Mirabai Starr)
A few disclaimers. I have not read some of these books, but the ones I haven’t read are either by authors I respect or they have been well reviewed online. A couple of the books (specifically Julian’s Gospel and Extant Texts and Translations) feature scholarly theories about Julian that may not be universally accepted among academics. I read Julian as a contemplative, not as an academic, and so I tend to prefer books about Julian that I find support my prayer life. But I encourage you to use your own common sense and discernment when choosing these or any books to read. Scholarship can really make an ancient text come alive, but it can also be its own little labyrinth of competing theories and speculation. Just something to keep in mind.
Finally, if you are interested in taking a closer look at what I have to say about Julian (both in written form and in recorded Zoom meetings), then I hope you will consider becoming a patron of this blog by joining Patreon. When I finish the Julian course, I’ll move on to another mystic to explore, but all my previous courses will remain available to patrons.
Friends, it is holy week, and I cannot think of a better guide to this most sacred week of the Christian liturgical year than Julian of Norwich.
Julian’s book of visionary writing, The Showings, is remarkable on multiple levels. Written about the same time as Geoffrey Chaucer was composing The Canterbury Tales, Julian has the distinction of being the first known woman to write a book in the English language (on any topic). Thankfully, her command of Middle English is lyrical and sensual, so her book flows with a graced rhythm and a decided earthy spirituality. She is considered one of the great mystics not only of medieval England, but of all time.
At first glance, Julian’s book can be challenging to 21st century readers. Conforming to the spirituality of her time, she is focused on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the supreme saving act of divine love — but far from being coy about the trauma surrounding the cross, Julian writes about it in explicit, almost gory detail. She goes into gruesome detail not for its own sake, but always in service of her theology and spirituality, which is grounded in love: so the death of Christ has meaning because it is an expression of God’s infinite love.
Fast forward to today; here we are in Holy Week, when Christians remember the events in the final days of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, culminating in his horrific death on Good Friday (leading, of course, to the ultimate plot twist: the resurrection on Easter Sunday. But the gravitas of Good Friday is that no one at the time would have known that Jesus’s messy, painful death would lead to a triumph over death, “on the third day”). It has been customary for centuries for Christians to commemorate Jesus’s slow progression from his trial, where we was condemned to die, walking through the bustling streets of Jerusalem (now known as the via dolorosa, “the way of sorrows”) burdened by having to carry the very cross to which he would soon be nailed. After several falls and moments of comfort, eventually he and the soldiers tasked with executing him make their way to the hill just outside the city walls where he was crucified, culminating in his death and burial. The devotion recounting this traumatic process is known as the Stations of the Cross, so named because Catholic and catholic-friendly churches around the world contain fourteen plaques known as the “stations” each one marking another critical moment in the final hours of Jesus’s life.
Over the years, many people, including many saints, have written devotions to be prayed at the stations. Other Stations of the Cross devotionals have been created from the writings of great saints and mystics — including this beautiful devotional booklet that draws from the writings of Mother Julian: Stations of the Cross with Julian of Norwich.
Sheila Upjohn, a well-known authority on Julian, posted this video of Julian’s stations last year, and recently one of the patrons of this blog brought it to my attention. Here it is for your devotional use:
A regular reader of this blog wrote to me and asked if I could recommend a good biography on Hildegard of Bingen. As I thought about what book to recommend, several noteworthy biographies — and autobiographies — of the renowned Christian mystics came to mind. So I figured to write an entire blog post about it, and here we are.
Hildegard of Bingen
Since the reader asked about Hildegard of Bingen, we’ll start with her. Because of her music, Hildegard is enough of a medieval “celebrity” that a variety of books, from scholarly studies to more accessible works for the general reader, continue to be published about her. I would suggest starting with Fiona Maddocks’ Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age. Maddocks is a journalist, so this is a book that is readable and balanced in its presentation of one of the Christianity’s most colorful saints and mystics. After that, if you want to get a bit more academic, look for Barbara Newman’s Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Meanwhile, to begin to dig into Hildegard’s own words, check out Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader (which also includes a brief biography).
So, now let’s look at some other books about the mystics and their life stories. The following list includes both autobiographies (written or dictated by the mystics themselves) and biographies, written by scholars, historians or journalists.
Thomas Merton
First, if you are like me — a white, college educated, middle-class American Christian — one of the ways you may have discovered Christian mysticism is through Thomas Merton’s celebrated autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s certainly a book worth reading, although it has its flaws. On the positive side, it’s a relatively modern (published seventy-five years ago) insight into intentional contemplative/monastic spirituality; it’s beautifully written, and documents at least one beautiful mystical experience (that occurred while Merton attended a Sunday Mass in Havana, see “Magnetic North” in part three). But Merton was only 33 when the book was published, a perilously young age to be writing one’s memoir, and it shows: the book is by turns arrogant and smug, dismissive of non-Catholic religion, and too uncritically accepting of the kind of reward/punishment theology that was so prevalent before Vatican II (and unfortunately still is prevalent in some circles). Still, despite its flaws The Seven Storey Mountain is well worth reading — but it’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, when it comes to mystical biographies and autobiographies.
I myself first encountered Merton through Monica Furlong’s accessible Merton: A Biography. But probably the most famous (or infamous) biography of Merton is Michael Mott’s The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, controversial when it was published because of how frankly it treated Merton’s affair with a young nurse that took place just a few years before he died.
Howard Thurman
I have previously praised Howard Thurman’s beautifully written memoir, With Head and Heart — so for now I’ll just reiterate that I think it is every bit as good and well-written and important as Merton’s more famous autobiography. In the long run, I think Howard Thurman will get the acclaim that he so richly deserves; not only was he a significant figure in the American Civil Rights Movement and deserves acclaim as a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., but his writings so richly reveal that he was a great mystic on top of everything else. For this reason, I also recommend Lerita Coleman Brown’s new book, What Makes You Come Alive— which is more of a spiritual reflection on Thurman’s teachings than just a straight biography, but it does tell his life story and presents it in the light of his rich and deep wisdom.
Evelyn Underhill
To my way of seeing, Merton and Thurman are two of the three greatest English-speaking mystics of the twentieth century: the other being Evelyn Underhill (yes, Bede Griffiths, Ruth Burrows, Richard Rohr and Caryll Houselander are all amazing as well, but I remain persuaded that the top three at least in the English language are Merton, Thurman and Underhill). Underhill, born in 1875 and dying in 1941, was the earliest of these three, and the only one not to write her own memoirs, so her story has had to be pieced together through her other writings (thankfully, we have many letters) and the memories of her friends and acquaintances. Fortunately, several biographies have been published over the years, but I would say the best is clearly Dana Greene’s Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Interior Life. But if you want to go further, Margaret Cropper (who knew Underhill) and Christopher Armstrong also documented her life story.
Simone Weil
Before we leave the twentieth century, let’s take a look at two important French-speaking mystics. First up is Simone Weil, the radical Jewish philosopher who had mystical experiences of Christ and now is something of a patron saint of “religious outsiders” (it’s a matter of debate whether Weil was ever even baptized; if she was, it never got officially documented in a church). Two books to get to know this enigmatic but essential figure: Maria Clara Bingemer’s Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassionand Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. Perhaps reading both of these together would be helpful, as sometimes when philosophers are mystics (and vice versa), biographers don’t always manage offer a well-rounded appraisal — so reading one biography that emphasizes the mystical dimension, and other that zeroes in on the ideas of the philosopher, probably makes for a fuller appreciation of the genius being celebrated (in this case, Simone Weil).
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin is the other great French mystic of the twentieth century, and perhaps is the twentieth century Christian mystic mostly likely to be remembered a thousand years from now (although Thurman and perhaps Merton will probably have staying power as well). As Weil was a mystic-philosopher, so was de Chardin, although we could also rightly call him a mystic-scientist. Once again, I would recommend two studies of his life: Ursula King’s Spirit of Fire: The Life of Vision of Teilhard de Chardin and Kathleen Duffy’s Teilhard’s Mysticism: Seeing the Inner Face of Evolution (more recently, John Haught has authored The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin which I haven’t read yet, and I believe it’s more of a study than a biography, but it looks pretty good so I’m giving it a mention).
Thérèse of Lisieux
Books by and about twentieth century mystics are pretty easy to come by, but let’s not lose sight of the some of the great figures of previous centuries. Since I’ve been talking about French mystics, we should acknowledge the Little Flower, the young Carmelite nun whose autobiography, The Story of a Soul, took the Catholic world by storm when they were published shortly after her premature death in 1897. If you want some other perspectives on this nineteenth century saint, check out Joseph Schmidt’s Everything is Grace: The Life and Way of Thérèse of Lisieuxand Thomas Keating’s St. Thérèse of Lisieux: A Transformation in Christ.
John of the Cross
The Little Flower was a Carmelite nun, so let’s turn our attention to the two greatest of Carmelite mystics: first, John of the Cross. John was a poet rather than a memoirist, so we don’t have an autobiography, but if you can find a copy of Silvano Giordano’s God Speaks in the Night: The Life, Times and Teaching of St. John of the Cross, grab it. It’s a lavishly illustrated, coffee-table sized book that makes John (and his rather challenging mystical doctrine) truly come alive.
Teresa of Ávila
Teresa of Ávila, John’s mentor and a world-class mystic as well, did write her own memoir, published under several slightly different titles (I recommend the Mirabai Starr translation, published as The Book of My Life). Teresa is brilliant but very right-brained, so her writing is not always that easy to follow, so I would recommend supplementing her memoir with one or two good biographies: check out Shirley Du Boulay’s Teresa of Ávila: An Extraordinary Lifeand Cathleen Medwick’s Teresa of Ávila: The Progress of a Soul.
There’s More!
I don’t want to over-do this blog post, so I’ll just list a few more biographies that I think are worth checking out…
Julian of Norwich — check out Amy Frykholm’s charming Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography. Although it has its minor errors (in the fourteenth century Julian would not have been a tea drinker!), it does a lovely job of telling Julian’s story in a narrative way.
Margery Kempe — a contemporary of Julian’s, Margery is famous in her own right but especially loved in the contemplative world because she recounts going to Julian of Norwich for spiritual direction! The Book of Margery Kempeis her colorful and freewheeling biography, and while her spirituality is certainly more idiosyncratic than what we might think of as “mystical” today, it’s well worth reading; and if you can find a copy of Martin Thornton’s Margery Kempe, that’s worth picking up as well.
John Ruysbroeck — this gets an honorable mention because it’s one mystic writing about another: Evelyn Underhill’s short but insightful biography of the great Flemish mystic, titled simply Ruysbroeck, was published in 1915.
There are many other worthy biographies and autobiographies of mystics and contemplatives, from Augustine of Hippo to Bede Griffiths, but I’ll finish with one final book that I think anyone interested in Christian mysticism ought to read, and that’s Joel F. Harrington’s excellent biography of Meister Eckhart, Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the GodWithin. Eckhart is another philosopher-mystic whose ideas can be frustratingly dense, but Harrington does an amazing job at making his work accessible even for the non-specialist reader. Don’t miss this one.
Well, that’s probably more reading material than you bargained for — but even if you find just one or two new books to check out here, then my work is done. Happy exploring!
Yesterday I received an advance copy of a wonderful book coming out this fall, that tells a simple children’s story about grief and loss, while using the wisdom of Julian of Norwich to underscore the message that “all shall be well.”
Excerpt from “All Will Be Well” by Borgo and Evans.
All Will Be Well: Learning to Trust God’s Love by Lacy Finn Borgo, illustrated by Rebecca Evans, will be published in October, so you can get a copy for all the children on your Christmas list. It’s appropriate for ages 4-8, although this 60-something reviewer sure enjoyed it, so I suppose we could say “for children of all ages.” It tells the story of a little girl named Julian, who is struggling with the illness, and eventual passing, of her beloved grandmother. But the grandmother invites little Julian to meet this loss with faith and trust in the love of God, and invokes Julian’s namesake, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, to emphasize that we are all held in God’s love, and in that love all truly shall be well.
While Julian of Norwich is not the center of the story, the book does a lovely job introducing Julian’s life and wisdom for young children. Yes, both hazelnuts and cats feature prominently! I love how the book is built around a real challenge that all children face sooner or later — the loss of a loved one — and how Julian of Norwich’s ringing proclamation of God’s infinite and unconditional love is such an important message for children (of all ages) who are facing such a loss.
It’s a delightful book, with lovely colorful illustrations. I highly recommend it. Be sure to order an extra copy for yourself, you’ll want to keep this one in your library. Click here to order your copy of All Will Be Well.
As I thought about featuring this book on my blog today, it reminded me of several other books, written and illustrated for children, that explore mystical or contemplative themes. Here are two that I enjoy, and I suspect you will too.
Illustrator Fiona French has created a dazzlingly beautiful book to illustrate one of the most beloved of mystical poems, the Canticle of the Sunby Saint Francis of Assisi. Weaving together the splendor of nature (“Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon,” etc.) with a heartfelt sense of God’s presence in creation, the canticle has inspired generations of contemplatives, and truly encapsulates the ecological heart of the poor one from Assisi. In this book, Fiona French draws inspiration from mosaics and Byzantine art to create twelve colorful illustrations that bring the Canticle to life. Beauty is so essential to the spiritual life, and this is truly a beautiful book, the sparkling, dazzling illustrations fostering a sense of prayerful reverence to help the words jump off the page — and into our hearts.
Speaking of the heart, the third book I want to highlight is all about the heart as the location where we prayerfully consent to God’s action in our lives. Journey to the Heart: Centering Prayer for Childrenby Frank X. Jelenek, illustrated by Ann Boyajian, introduces young children (the book is aimed at ages 3-8) to the gentle practice of silent prayer. The nature-centric illustrations are gorgeous, and the rhyming text offers a doorway into the method of Centering Prayer that is age appropriate (and appropriate for all ages). “In every heart there is God’s kingdom, a holy place to pray. Your soul is the home of God inside you, each and every day.” How I wish I had received this message when I was a child! But like the saying goes, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood” — which means it’s never too late to nurture the child within with a hopeful message of God’s love and an invitation to silently consent to that love’s healing presence within us. So get this book for the children in your life; it will bless them — but be sure to let it bless yourself as well.
I hope you enjoy these books — and I hope the children you love will enjoy them too!
Recently a reader of this blog wrote the following to me:
I am just starting out on this journey and feel drawn to the mystical/contemplative side of Christianity. To this end, I am using your book “Answering the Contemplative Call” and also “Growing into God” by John Mabry as my guides. I do not have a spiritual director as yet but am trying to find one near where I live in the UK. In the meantime, I am using the 2 books mentioned above and finding them very useful. By the way, I love Julian of Norwich but find St. John of the Cross beyond me!
My difficulty is that I am confused between the God of the mystical tradition and some aspects of the God of the Bible (particularly the Old Testament). The God who “doesn’t hold anything against us and never has” seems at odds with the God who does show anger against evil and injustice in the bible. As maybe He should, given that so much suffering is caused by cruelty, greed, injustice etc. So where does this idea that there is no wrath in God and that He doesn’t hold anything against us come from? Is it just wishful thinking?
This is such a great question. Thanks for asking it! I am actually currently at work on a new book about reading the Bible in the light of the wisdom of the mystics (God willing, it will be published in 2024), so your question is very apropos!
For readers who may not be knowledgeable about Julian of Norwich, she was a medieval visionary who experienced sixteen revelations or “showings” during a serious illness she experienced as a young woman, in May 1373. These visions were theologically rich and filled with insight, particularly in terms of God’s love. Indeed, Julian’s book of theological, contemplative reflections on her showings is often published under the title Revelations of Divine Love.
Among other things, Julian remarks that her visions gave her a new perspective on an idea about God — an idea that probably was quite common in her 14th century experience of Christianity: the notion of “the wrath of God.” Julian writes,
I saw no kind of wrath in God, neither for a short time nor for long. (For truly, as I see it, if God were to be angry even a hint, we would never have life nor place nor being.) As truly as we have our being from the endless Power of God and from the endless Wisdom, and from the endless Goodness, just as truly we have our protection in the endless Power of God, in the endless Wisdom, and in the endless Goodness.
Elsewhere in her writing Julian notes, “I saw no wrath except on man’s part, and that He forgives in us. For wrath is nothing else but a rebellion from and an opposition to peace and to love, and either it comes from the failure of power or from the failure of wisdom, or from the failure of goodness (which failure is not in God but it is on our part).” These quotations are from The Complete Julian of Norwich.
Wow. It’s a compelling argument. There’s no such thing as wrath in God! And furthermore, when human beings have thought we saw wrath in God, Julian is basically saying that we are projecting our own human anger on to God, for God is perfect power, wisdom, and goodness, and anger stems from a “failure” of power, wisdom or goodness in human hearts.
The problem, as my reader points out, is that the Bible offers images of God that seem quite wrathful indeed:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. (Romans 1:18)
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19)
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly… on account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. (Colossians 3:5-6)
They will also drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and they will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. (Revelation 14:10)
There are many others, I just chose a few. And I made a point of choosing examples from the New Testament, to avoid the subtly anti-semitic notion that God is only depicted as wrathful in the Old Testament, before Jesus came along to clear things up. Alas, images of God-as-wrathful are found throughout the Bible — just as images of God as merciful and forgiving can be found in the Jewish scriptures as well as in the New Testament.
So what are we to make of Julian’s assertion? Was she simply wrong? Or, if we agree with her, does that mean we are rejecting the authority of the Bible? This is a tough nut to crack!
Julian of Norwich: Mystic, Visionary… and Interpreter of Scripture
The Bottomless Well of Meaning
This question is ultimately a question about how we read the Bible — and interpret it for our time. For many Christians, the Bible is seen almost like a technical manual, or a legal code: it contains very precise language, with clear-cut meaning that must be understood and applied in the one acceptable way.
But not everyone sees the Bible that way. To begin to illustrate this idea, let me recount a story I just heard the other day. Last week I participated in an interview with Brian D. McLaren, and at one point he told us about a conversation he had with a rabbi a few years back. The rabbi asked Brian why Christians are so focused on finding the one correct meaning of each and every verse in the Bible. She saw that as foreign to the way many Jews read the Bible.
“The Bible is a bottomless well of meaning,” remarked the rabbi. “Why would you want to stop its meaning with one interpretation?”
This reminded me of a conversation I had with my wife, just a few days earlier. “I think many people see the Bible as speaking with one voice,” I pointed out. “But actually, there are many voices in the Bible, offering different — and at times conflicting — ideas about God, about humanity, about theology and spirituality and ethics. The Bible is more like a lively conversation than a monologue.”
If we take the rabbi who spoke to Brian McLaren seriously, it invites us into what, for Christians, represents a radically new way to think about the Bible. It is a record of centuries of religious imagination, reflection and discernment rather than a single, definitive statement about God that cannot be questioned in any way.
Many Christians have been taught to view the Bible as the inerrant word of God. It’s a hermeneutical principle which insists that there is no error in scripture. (Hermeneutics refers to the principles by which a text is interpreted). But not all expressions of Christianity include a requirement to believe the Bible is inerrant. While pretty much all mainstream forms of Christianity see the Bible as authoritative and as an expression of the word of God, it is possible to hold those beliefs while also accepting the Bible as written by human beings (even if inspired by God) and therefore subject to human limitations and blind spots.
The problem I see with the belief that every single verse in the Bible must be inerrant is that it does not address the many problems and disparities that even a casual reading of the Bible can reveal. Even within scripture itself, there are clearly statements that most people would acknowledge are contradictory to other statements within the Biblical text. Let’s look at a few of the more obvious inconsistencies:
In Genesis 32, Jacob proclaims “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” But by the time of Moses, God is saying “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). Jesus, however, seems to opt for Jacob’s perspective, since he taught “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8)
Jesus promises us that “With God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26), but the author Judges apparently never got the memo, for he comments that God could not even defeat chariots made of iron: “The Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.” (Judges 1:19)
Regarding God’s wrath, consider this harsh statement found in Exodus 20:5, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me.” By the time of the prophet Ezekiel, a more balanced perspective emerges: “A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own.” (Ezekiel 18:20)
Likewise, there are other examples of how later Biblical texts will, in essence, override an earlier principle, such as Jesus’s famous reversal of the Old Testament “eye for an eye”:
“If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life,eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” (Exodus 21:23-25)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” (Matthew 5:38-39)
There are many other examples of this kind of Biblical discontinuity (a tip of the hat to the American Atheists website for their List of Biblical Contradictions page!)
So can you see the face of God and live? Or not? Will God punish children for the sins of their parents — or not? I don’t see how anyone can honestly consider tensions like these without accepting that at least some of them represent errors, or at least obsolete ideas.
Christians sometimes try to resolve some of the Bible’s apparent inconsistencies by arguing that the New Testament represents a “new and improved” revision of Old Testament theology. Jesus, especially, trumps anything in the Old Testament, so his comments about turning the other cheek are seen basically as an acceptable revision of an old, but no longer valid, way of thinking about God. But even this has its problems: what do you do when you run into tensions in the New Testament; for example, Jesus and Paul have clearly different understandings of the function of the Jewish law — see Matthew 5:17-18 and Romans 6:14?
All of these apparent contradictions, disparities, tensions, differing or opposing viewpoints are only a problem if we insist in reading the Bible as a unified document declaring only one correct way of understanding God. But if we join the rabbi quoted above, and are willing to view the Bible as an “endless well of meaning,” we can begin to consider the idea that many verses can be interpreted in multiple ways, and even the most glaring contradictions might actually be invitations for us to reflect on how our understanding of God, and truth, and spirituality grew and evolved over the centuries in which the Bible was written — and continue to evolve to this day.
So rather than getting caught up on what is absolutely the “one correct way” of reading the Bible, we can approach the Bible as a “work in progress” — as the word of God that is still being spoken. Like any good story, we can expect character development — only in the Bible, it’s not so much that God is “developing” but rather that the human understanding of God is growing and evolving. So some images of God in the Bible are, obviously enough, going to be more helpful than others — some might be more obsolete, more culturally conditioned, more shaped by outdated ideas where God is seen as terrifying, angry, patriarchal, wrathful — compared to other images (found within the Bible) that stress God as loving, merciful, kind and radically forgiving.
Enter Julian of Norwich
“I call them like I see them.”
One of the most loved of American sports is baseball, a game which is moderated by an impartial umpire, who makes on-the-fly decisions whether a runner is safe or out, whether a missed pitch is a strike or a ball, and so forth (if you don’t know baseball jargon, it just means the umpire is the one who makes final decisions about how the game is progressing, decisions that can be controversial and that affect who wins the game). A legendary story holds that an umpire, challenged by the accuracy of his decision, simply states “I call them like I see them.”
I think about that when I think about Julian of Norwich and the wrath of God. When it comes to her vision of God, I believe she called it like she saw it.
She very simply states “I saw no wrath in God” and also “I saw no wrath except on man’s part.” I think we need to hold both of these statements together to understand what Julian is saying. And I believe this: Julian is interpreting the Bible, based on her own visionary experience of God. She is challenging us to re-think what the very concept of “the wrath of God” as found in the Bible means.
There’s plenty of language in the Bible about God’s wrath. But there’s also plenty of language in the Bible stressing God’s love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness. Are we to assume that God is moody — angry some of the time, but understanding and forgiving the rest of the time? That sure sounds like projecting a human quality (the changeable nature of our emotions) unto God!
Julian offers a different interpretation. She boldly suggests that “the wrath of God” is essentially a mirror of human wrath, projected onto God. We human beings — including Biblical writers — are prone to assuming that God is basically a mirror image of ourselves. Since human beings get angry and wrathful, therefore God must too. And Biblical writers inserted this into their way of speaking about God. But Julian, based on the authority of her own experience of God, isn’t having it. She calls us to a new way of seeing God.
Julian reasonably argues “if God were to be angry even a hint, we would never have life nor place nor being.” In other words, the wrath of God would simply annihilate all existence. We are held in existence by God’s creativity, God’s love and God’s sustenance (see Julian’s “hazelnut vision” for more on this). Her point: if God really got angry, we would be completely and utterly annihilated by the terrible force of that wrath.
Therefore, God may judge us, God may hold us accountable for our sins, and God may expect us to take responsibility for our actions. But all of this emerges out of God’s love and justice, not God’s wrath.
I understand that not everyone will be comfortable with this kind of radical re-visioning of how we as Christians can read the Bible. But I am convinced that the Jewish idea of the Bible as a well of endless meaning simply makes more sense than a more brittle idea that the Bible can only have one correct meaning. No wonder there is so much division in Christianity: we’re all arguing over the correct way to read the Bible, and it’s a zero sum game if we believe there’s only one correct reading. Only one interpretation can be correct, all the others must be wrong: erroneous if not heretical.
But if we are willing to entertain the idea that the Bible is meant to guide us in our relationship with God, but not to suppress us into submission to just “one correct” way of reading it, then we are free to let the Bible be in conversation with itself, and to allow other inspiring and learned commentators (like Julian of Norwich and many of the other mystics) offer us insight into how to read the Bible as well. Of course, Julian — like anyone else — may have made mistakes, gotten some things wrong. We are not required to slavishly obey everything she (or anyone else) says about the text.
Our job may seem daunting: we need to bring critical thinking and adult discernment to bear when we read the Bible (or for that matter, when we read Biblical scholars, commentators and interpreters). We can be assured that we will not always agree with the experts, or each other (and we have to be humble enough to admit that we ourselves don’t always get it right either).
Back to my image that the Bible is more like a conversation than a monologue: we who read the Bible here in the third millennium are invited to join in an ongoing conversation, that has already been continuing for centuries and will carry on long after we are gone. We need to do so humbly, acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers. But when a writer says something that rings true, it’s worth taking it on, at least as a hypothesis.
For me, Julian’s declaration that there’s no wrath in God absolutely rings true. When I hear Christians talk about the wrath of God, I assume that they are telling me more about themselves and their beliefs and image of God, then offering me anything new about the God who is vast, limitless love and compassion.
“Wishful Thinking” — or Mystical Insight?
So does Julian of Norwich represent just “wishful thinking” when it comes to her commentary on the wrath of God — or is she offering us a kind of mystical insight into a new way of approaching God (and the Bible)?
Everyone who reads this blog post will have to answer that question for yourself. What rings most true for you? The idea that God must be wrathful because some ancient Biblical passages speak of God’s anger, or the idea that Julian’s insight into scripture can offer us a deeper appreciation of God’s love, even though it may mean interpreting the Bible in a different way than we are used to?
For what it’s worth, here’s my perspective; I don’t think Julian’s words represent just “wishful thinking” at all, but rather an important and profound theological statement. Julian is calling us to a more consistent and hopeful understanding of God as infinitely loving, infinitely compassionate, infinitely merciful. To do this, we have to learn new ways of interpreting the Bible (maybe more like our Jewish friends, and less like fundamentalist Christians). But the good news is, we can continue to read the Bible as an inspiring text, while also taking into consideration the wisdom of all the ages in learning how to interpret it most consistently (and most lovingly).
One final point: my reader speculates that it may be necessary to believe that God is wrathful because God naturally is opposed to evil and injustice. That’s a good point, but then I am reminded of Jesus’s teaching to “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). Certainly Jesus would not command us to do something that is not already present in the heart of God! We are to love our “enemies” because God loves everyone, even those who are responsible for evil and injustice and suffering.
God’s love does not mitigate God’s justice. A God of infinite and unalloyed love will still demand that we mortals take responsibility for repairing all the ways that we have caused suffering (for others, or even for ourselves). God remains the God of justice, of siding with the vulnerable and the oppressed, with opting for the poor and the downtrodden. But God does all of this out of love. Even how God deals with those cause harm, who oppress or who are unjust — it will all emerge out of infinite love. I, for one, think it’s a far more humbling thought to have to hold up my sins and imperfections to love, than to anger!
But as humbling as that thought may be, I’m also comforted by knowing that there is no limit to God’s mercy, and that God is with me every step of the way: from my admission that by myself I am ultimately incapable of righting my wrongs, to my feeble efforts to make amends when and where I can, to my ultimate giving of myself entirely to God’s clemency and mercy.
See? No wrath necessary. God is love. Love will handle everything.
I first “met” Julian of Norwich through reading Evelyn Underhill’s magisterial book Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Underhill’s book changed my life, for a number of reasons: it gave me a language and a context for making sense of my spiritual experience, it helped me to see that there is a place for an intellectually honest, interfaith-friendly expression of Christian spirituality, and — perhaps most important of all — Underhill introduced me to the grand tradition of Christian mystical and contemplative spirituality, which means that through her book I was introduced to St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, St. Catherine of Genoa, among many others… including the “Lady Julian,” as Underhill described her.
A Kindle search reveals that Julian is mentioned almost forty times in Underhill’s book — not as frequently as St. Teresa of Ávila (over 200 times) or even Meister Eckhart (nearly 90), but often enough for me to notice. Underhill described Julian as “a seer, a lover, and a poet” … “whose unique personality closes and crowns the history of English mediæval mysticism.” Julian’s book, The Revelations of Divine Love, Underhill declared to be “the most beautiful of all English mystical works.” When Paulist Press published a modern-English edition of Julian’s writings in 1978 (the first volume of their legendary “Classics of Western Spirituality” series), I purchased a copy — only to find that her allusive, deeply poetic style of writing was challenging for me to read. I did not realize this when I was in my early 20s, but Julian, like all the mystics, wrote from a place of visionary union with God, which means that she (like all the mystics) is best approached from a place of prayer, meditation and reflection. Like the Bible, Julian most readily yields her secrets when a reader brings a spirit of lectio divina to her text: which is to say, a way of reading and reflecting on her mystical words that is grounded in prayer.
Julian of Norwich Stained Glass, Norwich Cathedral. Photo by Ian-S, used by permission.
In May 1984 I attended a Quiet Day (a one-day retreat) sponsored by the Shalem Institute in Washington DC; the theme was Julian of Norwich. This was my first communal contemplative experience; needless to say, it made a profound impact on me as I discovered I was not alone in my heartfelt yearning for a deeply silent encounter with God. But at that Quiet Day I also learned that a group of Episcopalians had formed a new religious community called the Order of Julian of Norwich; not sure if I had it in me to become a monk, I nevertheless felt compelled to write to the community’s superior, Fr. John-Julian, and he and I exchanged a couple of letters. In one of them I complained about how my own spiritual journey had led me to a place of confusion and anger, thanks to the spiritual abuse I encountered from a charismatic community I encountered while still in high school. I complained that I could no longer make sense of a religious world-view that was centered on reward and punishment, heaven and hell, judgment and damnation.
Fr. John-Julian replied and said that I needed to read Julian more seriously. I’ve long since lost the letter he wrote to me so I can’t quote him verbatim, but the gist of what he wrote was that if I wanted to get healed from the scars of an abusive theology, Julian’s hope and optimism was the best possible therapy for me.
In his book How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan quotes Rick Doblin as saying “Mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism.” Doblin is speaking about the mysticism of psychedelic drugs, but thanks to Julian I can attest that the old-fashioned mysticism works just as well. Some thirty-five years have passed since I received that letter from Fr. John-Julian, and I am still learning how to plumb the depths of Julian’s richly nuanced poetry of heaven. But if my unhappy experience with charismatic Christianity introduced me to a god who judges, a god of anger and division who is barely talked out of destroying us all by the Christ who has to die to make his point — then Julian, by contrast, introduced me to the God who loves, the God of compassion and celebration who eagerly and joyfully goes to unending lengths to demonstrate how much delight God finds in each and every human soul, no matter how lost, corrupt or reprobate we might be. When I first had an unexpected, mind-expanding, embodied encounter with God (a story I most recently told in chapter two of Unteachable Lessons), my overall sense of this God (who I now believe resides in every human heart) is that God is unconditional, lavish, Love-with-a-capital-L. Much of my distress in dealing with the charismatics and other variations of Christian fundamentalists arose from a simple sense of cognitive dissonance: while they paid lip service to “God is love,” their attitudes and perspectives all seemed to point to a god who demands submissive obedience — or else. If the charismatic/fundamentalist god is a god of love, it is truly a conditional, probationary love: a love that is not easily earned but can all too easily be lost. This is what fundamentalism promised me, and what I could not accept because of what I knew in my bones to be true.
Julian validated what I knew in my bones. She invited me into her intimate relationship with a God who dances with joy, a God of delight and desire, a God who cherishes God’s own creation and seeks any way possible to heal and redeem all those who suffer therein. Julian is best known for optimism (“All shall be well”) and her anticipatory feminism (“As truly as God is our father, so is God our mother”). But her book is not called the “Revelations of Divine Optimism” or the “Revelations of the Divine Feminine.” Love is the heart of her theology, her image of God, and her experience of God. Everything we say or thing or visualize about God must be understood only in the context of lavish, vast, unconditional love. If this sounds “too good to be true” — it is that good, and it is true.
Of course, I’ve learned that the Bible, and the writings of so many of the great saints and mystics throughout Christian history, are gloriously messy and inconsistent: they often serve up images of God-the-Judge and the God-who-is-unconditional-Love in rapid succession. I once heard a talk by Brian McLaren where he proclaimed, in regard to Biblical interpretation, that “the things we focus on determine what we miss.” In other words, we cannot simply read the Bible at face value, we must interpret it, and if not consciously then we will do so unconsciously, catering to our hidden, unspoken assumptions about life and reality. For far too long, mainstream Christianity — from Augustine to Calvin to John Piper — has focused on God’s judgment and tried to explain away God’s love as a kind of benefit that the elect only have access to. But I don’t think that vision of God squares with what Jesus had to say, and it doesn’t line up with Julian’s theology or my own experience. When we focus on God’s limitless, unconditional love, then we can see all the “judgment talk” in the Bible and elsewhere as efforts to make sense of a world where bad things happen, not as a threat to the ordinary person seeking to find their own way.
Julian offers us a way to find that radical, Love-with-a-capital-L understanding of theology, of grace, of what it means to follow Christ. When we see the Gospel through her eyes, it comes alive as a source of unending joy. That’s certainly been my experience, and I know I am not alone. Thanks to Julian, the heart of my spirituality is joy — which only makes sense, for Julian, after all, said “the fullness of joy is to behold God in all.”
Featured photo (Carl in front of St. Julian’s, Norwich) by Fran McColman.
Julian of Norwich was a 14th century mystic and author who, even in her own lifetime, was renowned as a visionary and spiritual director. She was the first woman to write a book in the English language, and her reflections on the Motherhood of God continue to inspire us today. This virtual retreat will weave together Julian’s joyful, optimistic spirituality with contemplative prayer practices inspired by her teachings and by the wisdom of The Cloud of Unknowing.
This retreat will take place on Zoom, so you may enjoy it from the safety and comfort of your own home. It is sponsored by the Franciscan Spirituality Center of LaCrosse, Wisconsin. For more information and/or to register, follow this link: All Shall Be Well: Joyful Prayer with Julian of Norwich
Here’s a meditation I developed a few months ago for a retreat I led for an Episcopal Church. It’s based on Julian of Norwich’s vision of the hazelnut. Before you listen to the meditation, take a moment to find a small object (like a hazelnut, a shell, or a rock) that you can hold in your hand while you meditate. It doesn’t have to be a natural object — a ring or a key could work as well. If you simply don’t have a small object handy, then feel free to “hold the object” in your imagination as you practice the meditation.
I hope you enjoy the meditation. Remember the three principles: “God made it, God loves it, God keeps it.” May you have a sense of God’s love for you, as your “maker, keeper and lover.”
Contemplative Outreach Atlanta has just finished their first online 5-Day Retreat. Historically this retreat took place each year at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit; I’ve been a participant on the retreat, and it’s been a wonderful experience. This year, with the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the retreat was moved to a Zoom format. The organizer of the retreat, Maggie Winfrey, asked me to lead three sessions of Centering Prayer over the course of the retreat and to provide a reading from one of the mystics to set the stage for the Centering Prayer practice.
Here are the readings I chose — one from the 20th century mystic Evelyn Underhill, one from the living contemplative writer Martin Laird, and one from the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich.
These readings are excerpted from books that, in my opinion, every aspiring contemplative should read. I’m posting this material here not only for your immediate pleasure, but also in the hopes that you will get copies of the books that they are from. Click on each book’s title to visit its page an Amazon or click here to see all three books (if you make a purchase, I get a small commission).
First, the subject of your meditation begins, as you surrender to its influence, to exhibit unsuspected meaning, beauty, power. A perpetual growth of significance keeps pace with the increase of attention which you bring to bear on it; that attention which is the one agent of all your apprehensions, physical and mental alike. It ceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it were into the deeps of it, rest in it, “unite” with it; and learn, in this still, intent communion, something of its depth and breadth and height, as we learn by direct intercourse to know our friends.
Moreover, as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend you from the perpetual assaults of the outer world. You will hear the busy hum of that world as a distant exterior melody, and know yourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it. You have set a ring of silence between you and it; and behold! within that silence you are free. You will look at the coloured scene, and it will seem to you thin and papery: only one amongst countless possible images of a deeper life as yet beyond your reach. And gradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a You, who can thus hold at arm’s length, be aware of, look at, an idea–a universe–other than itself. By this voluntary painful act of concentration, this first step upon the ladder which goes–as the mystics would say–from “multiplicity to unity,” you have to some extent withdrawn yourself from that union with unrealities, with notions and concepts, which has hitherto contented you; and at once all the values of existence are changed. “The road to a Yea lies through a Nay.” You, in this preliminary movement of recollection, are saying your first deliberate No to the claim which the world of appearance makes to a total possession of your consciousness: and are thus making possible some contact between that consciousness and the World of Reality.
Now turn this new purified and universalised gaze back upon yourself. Observe your own being in a fresh relation with things, and surrender yourself willingly to the moods of astonishment, humility, joy–perhaps of deep shame or sudden love–which invade your heart as you look. So doing patiently, day after day, constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that there is something within you–something behind the fractious, conflicting life of desire–which you can recollect, gather up, make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your own soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this real You is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on the stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; when you have achieved this power of withdrawing yourself, of making this first crude distinction between appearance and reality, the initial stage of the contemplative life has been won. It is not much more of an achievement than that first proud effort in which the baby stands upright for a moment and then relapses to the more natural and convenient crawl: but it holds within it the same earnest of future development.
Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word. This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves “so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.”
The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God (Jn 17:21). The marvelous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us, are all patterns of stunning weather on the holy mountain of God. But we are not the weather. We are the mountain. Weather is happening—delightful sunshine, dull sky, or destructive storm—this is undeniable. But if we think we are the weather happening on Mount Zion (and most of us do precisely this with our attention riveted to the video), then the fundamental truth of our union with God remains obscured and our sense of painful alienation heightened. When the mind is brought to stillness we see that we are the mountain and not the changing patterns of weather appearing on the mountain. We are the awareness in which thoughts and feelings (what we take to be ourselves) appear like so much weather on Mount Zion.
For a lifetime we have taken this weather—our thoughts and feelings—to be ourselves, taken ourselves to be this video to which the attention is riveted. Stillness reveals that we are the silent, vast awareness in which the video is playing. To glimpse this fundamental truth is to be liberated, to be set free from the fowler’s snare (Ps 123:7). “Who ever trusts in the Lord is like Mount Zion: Unshakeable, it stands forever” (Ps 125:1). “Mount Zion, true pole of the earth, the great King’s city” (Ps 48:2).
At the same time, our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting. He is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us, as I understand it.
In this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly have disappeared. And the answer in my mind was, ‘It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God cares for it. But what the maker, the carer and the lover really is to me, I cannot tell; for until I become one substance with him, I can never have complete rest or true happiness; that is to say, until I am so bound to him that there is no created thing between my God and me.
We need to know the littleness of all created beings and to set at nothing everything that is made in order to love and possess God who is unmade. This is the reason why we do not feel complete ease in our hearts and souls: we look here for satisfaction in things which are so trivial, where there is no rest to be found, and do not know our God who is almighty, all wise, all good; he is rest itself. God wishes to be known, and is pleased that we should rest in him; for all that is below him does nothing to satisfy us; and this is why, until all that is made seems as nothing, no soul can be at rest. When a soul sets all at nothing for love, to have him who is everything, then he is able to receive spiritual rest.
Our Lord God also showed that it gives him very great pleasure when a simple soul comes to him in a bare, plain and familiar way. For, as I understand this showing, it is the natural yearning of the soul touched by the Holy Ghost to say, ‘God, of your goodness, give me yourself; you are enough for me, and anything less that I could ask for would not do you full honour. And if I ask anything that is less, I shall always lack something, but in you alone I have everything.’ And such words are very dear to the soul and come very close to the will of God and his goodness; for his goodness includes all his creatures and all his blessed works, and surpasses everything endlessly, for he is what has no end. And he has made us only for himself and restored us by his blessed Passion and cares for us with his blessed love. And all this is out of his goodness.
Today I led a day of reflection for the Mary Brewster Committee of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Ridgfield, CT. This committee is tasked with creating a retreat each year for the purpose of supporting women’s spirituality in their community. When they approached me about the retreat we decided on the theme “Wisdom During Difficult Times” to acknowledge what a challenging year 2020 has been, and we selected the fourteenth century mystic Julian of Norwich and the 20th century mystic Evelyn Underhill as two women who could particularly speak to the challenges of our time, since both lived through pandemics of their own: the plague during Julian’s lifetime, and the Spanish Influenza pandemic during Underhill’s.
Here are the slides I created for the retreat, which took place virtually. I’m sharing the slides because I thought you might enjoy reading the many quotes from these two amazing women.
The retreat also included two meditations, based on the teachings of Underhill and Julian. In the morning, we had a “Recollection Meditation” based on the teachings of Underhill as found in her book Practical Mysticism. I also recommended that the participants read Underhill’s Letters.
In the afternoon our meditation was based on the “Hazelnut Vision” found in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.
I hope you enjoy the slides (and the meditations)!
A long-time reader of this blog emailed me recently with the following question about Julian of Norwich:
Lately I’ve been re-reading the Showings of Julian of Norwich and am struck by the number of times Julian implies that all will be saved. While one can infer from her revelations that she is indeed a universalist, she never comes right out and says so. I’m interested in hearing your opinion on this question of Julian’s universalism. Are there any books there that might shed some light on this matter or are there any other resources you might suggest?
Julian probably would not have thought of herself as a universalist, but that’s because the idea of universal salvation doesn’t really show up, at least in the English language, until the 1600s. But I suspect anyone with the depth of understanding of God-as-Radical-Love that Julian clearly enjoyed, would have been at the very least vexed by this question, as she described it (in chapter 32 of her long text):
And I wondered a great deal about this revelation and reflected on our faith, wondering in this way: our faith is founded on God’s word, and it is part of our faith that we believe that God’s word will be kept in all things. And one article of our faith is that many will be damned… condemned eternally to hell, as Holy Church teaches me to believe. And considering all this, it seemed impossible to me that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord revealed at this time. And to this I received no other answer by way of revelation from our Lord God except this: ‘What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well.’
What a logical, sensible question. Julian is essentially saying:
Part of being a person of faith is accepting the teachings of the Church;
The Church teaches that not everyone will be saved, some will be damned;
How can “all things be well” when some people are excluded from heaven?
I wonder how many people in our generation gave up on church when they asked questions like this, at age 10 or 12, only to have the nun or Sunday School teacher tell them to be quiet. (If I’m describing you, please remember: the church is more than its ignorance).
So was Julian universalist? My hunch is that she intuitively reacted against the idea that God “damns” people to hell. While she is not willing to explicitly reject or even criticize church doctrine in her book (considering she lived in an age when heretics were burned at the stake, can you blame her?), I take her at her word, and believe she really wanted not just to reject dogma, but to understand how her experience of God as limitless Love-with-a-capital-L fits in with the teachings of the church she loved so much.
For what it’s worth, I rather suspect that Julian of Norwich, if she were alive today, would probably be very comfortable with the prevailing idea in Catholic eschatology in our time — that hell represents not so much a punishment meted down on those who anger God with their non-compliance, but rather signifies an existential reality for those who freely choose to reject Love.
In this way of seeing things, in death we are given a choice that, in absolute freedom — beyond the limitations placed on us by the conditioning of our family history, upbringing, life circumstances etc. — we can consciously and freely choose to accept or reject union with God. To accept it is salvation, to reject it is hell.
If you’d like to read a fascinating book that explores this trend in contemporary theology, check out Laudislas Boros’ The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life, the latest edition of which features a wonderful introduction by Cynthia Bourgeault.
Julian, compassionately troubled by the idea that some people could wind up in hell (for whatever reason), bluntly asks, how call all things be well if some people are damned? But it does seem that she accepts the idea that some people do become eternally separated from Divine Love. At one point she bluntly says this about the people she writes about, “I speak of those who will be saved, for at this time God showed me no others.” We can deduce two points from this: one, that she understands (and perhaps accepts) the prevailing idea in medieval Christianity (and often still too prevalent even today) that God is only going to save some people. But then she offers that sly qualifier: “…at this time God showed me no others.” You could almost hear Julian’s thoughts as she wrote this: perhaps God’s love and grace does extend beyond just those whom the church deems ‘worthy.’
Regardless of how Julian does (or doesn’t) assent to the salvation theology of her day, it’s clear she struggles with the limitation as she understands it. “Considering all this, it seemed impossible to me that all manner of things should be well.” Admitting that she is not a scholar or a theologian, (she describes herself as “unlettered,” meaning not that she was illiterate but that she did not have academic training) Julian does not attempt to suss out a doctrinal or theological explanation of this conundrum. Instead, she basically has Jesus say “Trust me on this one.”
And to this I received no other answer by way of revelation from our Lord God except this: ‘What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well.’
“The Deed”
Earlier in this same chapter, she makes this interesting observation:
There is a deed which the blessed Trinity will do on the last day, as it seems to me, and when the deed will be, and how it will be done, is unknown to all creatures under Christ, and will be until it is done. The goodness and the love of our Lord God wishes us to know that it will be; and his power and wisdom, through the same love, wishes to conceal and hide from us what it will be and how it will be done.
This “deed,” which remains mysterious and not described in detail, is mentioned to Julian because Christ wants us to trust him.
And the reason he wants us to know is because he wants us to be the more at ease in our souls and at peace in love, rejoicing in him and disregarding all the stormy tumults that might keep us from the truth. This is the great deed ordained by our Lord God from without beginning, treasured and hidden in his blessed breast, known only to himself, and through this deed he will make all things well.
She ends with an interesting theological statement, linking the “deed” to the beauty and felicity of creation itself.
For just as the blessed Trinity made all things from nothing, so the same blessed Trinity will make all well that is not well.
“The Deed” is a secret, that will not be revealed until judgment day, but when that secret is revealed, then truly all will see and recognize that all shall be well. Since Christ never spills the beans on what this secret deed actually will be, Julian (and by extension, her readers) are left to wonder.
Is the secret some hidden way that we can reconcile the experience of God as all-loving with the reality that not all of God’s creations accept God’s love?
That we can find felicity and beatitude in this, even if someone we love dearly is among those who choose differently than we do?
These are great questions, but Julian doesn’t answer, and seems to say that it’s a waste of time to speculate like this. Simply trust that God is Love, that we are free to accept or reject God’s love, and that even in this, we can trust that in the end, all shall be well.
Is Julian a universalist? Probably not in the sense we would use the term: as someone who would flat out deny the existence of hell, leaving no possible fate for all human beings but heaven.
The problem, of course, is that universalism has its own philosophical conundrum. On the one hand, universalism appeals to anyone who cannot reconcile a God who is all-forgiving, all-compassionate, and all-loving, with the existence of hell, especially as classically understood as a “lake of fire,” a place of eternal conscious torment and punishment.
But the problem with simply rejecting hell is that it strips us away of our fundamental dignity as human beings: the freedom to say no. C. S. Lewis describes this succinctly in The Great Divorce:
Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.’
True love will never force itself on someone who is unwilling to receive it. If God will only provide us with one possible way of embodying eternity, then God is not so much “Love” as “Power.” Hell is God’s vulnerability: God’s willingness to say “I will never force myself on you.”
Never Separated from the Love of God
As I have mentioned previously on this blog, no one expresses this more eloquently than the 7th century mystic St. Isaac the Syrian. In the 28th of his Ascetical Homilies, he muses on the question of heaven and hell.
It would be improper…to think that sinners in Gehenna are deprived of the love of God. Love is the offspring of knowledge of the truth which, as is commonly confessed, is given to all. The power of love works in two ways: it torments those who have played the fool…but it becomes a source of joy for those who have observed its duties.
Growing up in a liberal Protestant Church, my Sunday School teachers downplayed the idea that hell was a place of fire, or torment. Instead, they said, “Hell is separation from God.” But St. Isaac doesn’t see it that way. No one is ever “deprived” of God’s love. But we have a choice of whether we accept love or not. If we accept the freely given, unconditional, but never forced-upon-us Divine Love, what we will experience in eternity is transfiguring light. But if we turn away from it, the exact same love will be experienced as a scourging fire.
For those who find any idea related to “hell” to be obscene or objectionable, St. Isaac’s ideas may not be acceptable. But if God is pure love, and it’s the nature of true love never to force itself on anyone, then there must be room in eternity for the dignity to say no. Maybe it won’t burn, like St. Isaac thought it would. Maybe it would just be some neutral experience. But I can’t help but think that an eternity built on rejecting love would be an eternity devoid of joy as well.
The celebrated Catholic theologian and Cardinal, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, wrote a book with the optimistic title, Dare We Hope That All Shall Be Saved? Frankly, I think it would be obscene not to hope that! The Catholic Church, when it declares somebody to be blessed or a saint, is in effect saying “We believe this person is in heaven.” But in over 2000 years, the church has never officially declared someone to be in hell — not Judas Iscariot, not Adolf Hitler, not Josef Stalin. Jesus told us, “do not judge” and I take that to mean, among other things, never to assume anyone has ultimately rejected grace and love. If Divine Love’s respect for free will means that God would allow a person to choose hell for all eternity, still we can hope that, in the end, everyone would find it in their hearts to say “yes” to grace and to love; and hell will just be the emptiest room in eternity.
Maybe that’s the “deed” that Julian is alluding to. Because, then, all truly would be well.
Finally — my reader asked, “Are there any books there that might shed some light on this matter or are there any other resources you might suggest?” Three come to mind; I’m not sure these authors would necessarily agree with my take on things, but I bet they would have some interesting insights into how Julian struggled with the theology of salvation.
Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian — Turner, himself a respected theologian, argues that Julian’s contribution to theology deserves to be seen on a par with that of her male contemporaries like Bernard and Aquinas.
Nota bene: I’ve been asked to write a short reflection on why Julian of Norwich matters to me. Here it is.
I first “met” Julian of Norwich through reading Evelyn Underhill’s magisterial book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Underhill’s book changed my life, for a number of reasons: it gave me a language and a context for making sense of my spiritual experience, it helped me to see that there is a place for an intellectually honest, interfaith-friendly expression of Christian spirituality, and — perhaps most important of all — Underhill introduced me to the grand tradition of Christian mystical and contemplative spirituality, which means that through her book I was introduced to St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, St. Catherine of Genoa, among many others… including the “Lady Julian,” as Underhill described her.
A Kindle search reveals that Julian is mentioned almost forty times in Underhill’s book — not as frequently as St. Teresa of Ávila (over 200 times) or even Meister Eckhart (nearly 90), but often enough for me to notice. Underhill described Julian as “a seer, a lover, and a poet” … “whose unique personality closes and crowns the history of English mediæval mysticism.” Julian’s book, Revelations of Divine Love, Underhill declared to be “the most beautiful of all English mystical works.” When Paulist Press published a modern-English edition of Julian’s writings in 1978 (the first volume of their legendary “Classics of Western Spirituality” series), I purchased a copy — only to find that her allusive, deeply poetic style of writing was challenging for me to read. I did not realize this when I was in my early 20s, but Julian, like all the mystics, wrote from a place of visionary union with God, which means that she (like all the mystics) is best approached from a place of prayer, meditation and reflection. Like the Bible, Julian most readily yields her secrets when a reader brings a spirit of lectio divina to her text: which is to say, a way of reading and reflecting on her mystical words that is grounded in prayer.
In May 1984 I attended a Quiet Day (a one-day retreat) sponsored by the Shalem Institute in Washington DC; the theme was Julian of Norwich. This was my first communal contemplative experience; needless to say, it made a profound impact on me as I discovered I was not alone in my heartfelt yearning for a deeply silent encounter with God. But at that Quiet Day I also learned that a group of Episcopalians had formed a new religious community called the Order of Julian of Norwich; not sure if I had it in me to become a monk, I nevertheless felt compelled to write to the community’s superior, Fr. John-Julian, and he and I exchanged a couple of letters. In one of them I complained about how my own spiritual journey had led me to a place of confusion and anger, thanks to the spiritual abuse I encountered from a charismatic community I encountered while still in high school. I complained that I could no longer make sense of a religious world-view that was centered on reward and punishment, heaven and hell, judgment and damnation.
Fr. John-Julian replied and said that I needed to read Julian more seriously. I’ve long since lost the letter he wrote to me so I can’t quote him verbatim, but the gist of what he wrote was that if I wanted to get healed from the scars of an abusive theology, Julian’s hope and optimism was the best possible therapy for me.
In his book How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan quotes Rick Doblin as saying “Mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism.” Doblin is speaking about the mysticism of psychedelic drugs, but thanks to Julian I can attest that the old-fashioned mysticism works just as well. Some thirty-five years have passed since I received that letter from Fr. John-Julian, and I am still learning how to plumb the depths of Julian’s richly nuanced poetry of heaven. But if my unhappy experience with charismatic Christianity introduced me to a god who judges, a god of anger and division who is barely talked out of destroying us all by the Christ who has to die to make his point — then Julian, by contrast, introduced me to the God who loves, the God of compassion and celebration who eagerly and joyfully goes to unending lengths to demonstrate how much delight God finds in each and every human soul, no matter how lost, corrupt or reprobate we might be.
When I first had an unexpected, mind-expanding, embodied encounter with God (a story I most recently told in chapter two of Unteachable Lessons), my overall sense of this God (who I now believe resides in every human heart) is that God is unconditional, lavish, Love-with-a-capital-L. Much of my distress in dealing with the charismatics and other variations of Christian fundamentalists arose from a simple sense of cognitive dissonance: while they paid lip service to “God is love,” their attitudes and perspectives all seemed to point to a god who demands submissive obedience — or else. If the charismatic/fundamentalist god is a god of love, it is truly a conditional, probationary love: a love that is not easily earned but can all too easily be lost. This is what fundamentalism promised me, and what I could not accept because of what I knew in my bones to be true.
Julian of Norwich: just one of the many contemplative treasures in the Catholic tradition.
Julian validated what I knew in my bones. She invited me into her intimate relationship with a God who dances with joy, a God of delight and desire, a God who cherishes God’s own creation and seeks any way possible to heal and redeem all those who suffer therein. Julian is best known for optimism (“All shall be well”) and her anticipatory feminism (“As truly as God is our father, so is God our mother”). But her book is not called the “Revelations of Divine Optimism” or the “Revelations of the Divine Feminine.” Love is the heart of her theology, her image of God, and her experience of God. Everything we say or thing or visualize about God must be understood only in the context of lavish, vast, unconditional love. If this sounds “too good to be true” — it is that good, and it is true.
Of course, I’ve learned that the Bible, and the writings of so many of the great saints and mystics throughout Christian history, are gloriously messy and inconsistent: they often serve up images of God-the-Judge and the God-who-is-unconditional-Love in rapid succession. I once heard a talk by Brian McLaren where he proclaimed, in regard to Biblical interpretation, that “the things we focus on determine what we miss.” In other words, we cannot simply read the Bible at face value, we must interpret it, and if not consciously then we will do so unconsciously, catering to our hidden, unspoken assumptions about life and reality. For far too long, mainstream Christianity — from Augustine to Calvin to John Piper — has focused on God’s judgment and tried to explain away God’s love as a kind of benefit that only “the elect” have access to. But I don’t think that vision of God squares with what Jesus had to say, and it doesn’t line up with Julian’s theology or my own experience. When we focus on God’s limitless, unconditional love, then we can see all the “judgment talk” in the Bible and elsewhere as efforts to make sense of a world where bad things happen, not as a threat to the ordinary person seeking to find their own way.
Julian offers us a way to find that radical, Love-with-a-capital-L understanding of theology, of grace, of what it means to follow Christ. When we see the Gospel through her eyes, it comes alive as a source of unending joy. That’s certainly been my experience, and I know I am not alone. Thanks to Julian, the heart of my spirituality is joy — which only makes sense, for Julian, after all, said “the fullness of joy is to behold God in all.”
Featured image: Julian’s Shrine, Norwich, England. Photo by Carl McColman
