LOVE IS THE MESSAGE: JULIAN OF NORWICH’S REVELATIONS AND WHY IT MATTERS THAT GOD IS LOVE
Public domain.
“It’s almost predictable at this point,” my friend Robert said over his shoulder as we sweated our way back down the trail.
Despite having started early, the Tennessee humidity was making a full showing as we wound our way through the cedar groves along the shore of the lake.
I’d been explaining my upbringing, and mentioned that I’d gone to the church of a prominent evangelical who loved to preach on the “sin” of homosexuality, only to be caught with male sex workers some years later.
It’s almost a trope now: the pastor who preaches on adultery runs off with someone in the church who’s not their spouse. The pastor calling down fire and brimstone on gay people is closeted themselves. Perhaps they are preaching what they think they should, or trying to convince themselves of something.
As I went through my own deconstruction process in which I began to question all the things I’d been taught were core to the faith, I began to wonder sometime in my mid to late twenties if we were focused on the wrong thing. I’d been raised to believe that “same-sex relationships” (the ultimate reduction of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow) were sinful, but one day I thought, “I don’t want to believe this any more. What happens if I just stop?”
At no other time in my life have I had an experience where I felt like the “burden of sin” rolled away. The preachers of my upbringing glorify those moments. The fan-favorite Pilgrim’s Progress actually novelized them. But only on that day–when I decided to stop believing same-sex marriage was wrong–I felt as though a burden was lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t have the theological reasoning yet. I just decided if I was going to be wrong, I’d err on the side of love.
This summer I had the opportunity to visit the shrine at St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England. I walked into the cool of the church from the hot, humid day outside, down the few steps off the nave and into the room where Julian spent at least half her life, and I was nearly overcome. I sat on the bench that runs along two walls, near tears. Weeks later, I can’t really explain it. But some things don’t need to be explained.
I’d come with the idea that I wanted to get a copy of her Revelations because I’d never read them in full, and I took all the downtime at our AirBnB that week and read them through. Reading through tears that returned over and over, I wished that younger me had been able to access her words.
Julian had a series of revelations–or showings, as she originally called them–and in them she found a God of love.
The profoundness of this revelation cannot be understated. We go around saying, “oh, God is love,” but so much of the teaching of the church in Julian’s time, and the teaching of much of American Christianity today, doesn’t really believe that. When Julian received her showings in 1373, she had lived through at least three rounds of the black death, (1) a sickness so severe it killed up to half the population in England. There was no cure. Someone could wake up healthy, develop symptoms and be dead by nightfall, or the day after. And the church helpfully preached that it was judgment from God for sin. No loving God in that message. Julian, on the other hand, saw Jesus counting his sufferings as no account in comparison to his great love for us -: seeing a God who suffers alongside us in whatever we are going through, pandemic and black death alike, hearing Jesus say to her, “How could it then be that I should not do all I could for the love of you?” (2)
And then there’s William of Norwich. William was probably a real boy, found murdered in the forest. His murder was unsolved as there were no witnesses. But evidently his uncle was a priest and decided that his nephew had been murdered by Jewish people. Evidence was then manufactured, with a whole story (3) being written about how he’d been crucified and, on the testimony of one monk who was a convert from Judaism, (4) it was declared that this was a practice among Jewish people to sacrifice a Christian child at Passover. It was 1144, and the church was preaching that “they” are coming for your children. In 1144 it was “the Jews.” In 2023, it’s librarians who stock books with LGBTQIA+ characters, the drag queens at story hour, the ever morphing “gay agenda,” or calling people who want to provide age-appropriate sex-ed “groomers.”
William’s body was exhumed and moved to the cathedral, and became a focal point for pilgrimages which further underscored the escalating anti-semitic rhetoric, attempting to enshrine it in the heart of the faith. This incident is also of note because it’s the first case where the idea of “blood libel” (5) was used, and this belief was used to carry out pogroms against the Jewish people. The bodies of men, women, and children were discovered inside one of the medieval walls in Norwich, and these pogroms were carried out until the 13th century when every person of Jewish descent had been killed or removed from England. That didn’t stop the notion of blood libel (6) though, as that accusation and supposed rationale for persecution was echoed all the way up to the Nazis in the mid twentieth century. (7) As soon as people become convinced that “they” are coming for your children, all manner of atrocities are sanctioned.
However, Julian witnesses the crucifixion in her showings, and notes “But I did not see indicated so particularly the Jews who put him to death.” (8) She sees something that goes against the teaching of the church. She notes it almost hesitantly, but notes it all the same. In doing so, she was taking a great risk given her context, especially as a woman, so this line is not only significant, it validates her revelations of a God that is always moving towards inclusion.
Later she describes the resurrected Lord, with particular attention to his physical appearance. She writes, “The blue of his clothing betokens his steadfastness. The brown of his handsome face, with the pleasing darkness of the eyes, was most appropriate to signal his holy gravity.” (9)
In a time when Jesus was nearly universally depicted as fair-skinned and often blue-eyed, I thought it was striking that she saw a resurrected and restored brown man with dark eyes, and called him handsome.
Over and over in her text, Julian emphasizes that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was about love. Jesus did it for the love of us, and the delight of us. She sees humanity as Jesus’ reward. (10) We are restored because of him and given to him as his crown and thus one with him for eternity. And then she becomes troubled because she’s not sure where sin fits into this. She is shown the extravagant love of God, and sin is nowhere to be seen. (11)
This leads her to conclude that sin has no “substance” - in other words, it is not an independently existing thing in the way that a tree or person is. (12) It is only seen in its effects, and she sees a God that is not angry with us, for how could God be angry when we stumble when trying to follow God’s instructions? (13)
She repeats for her own and our benefit, “Love was the message.” And I wished again as I closed the volume that I could have benefited from this earlier, for the God I originally met was an angry one, one that loved me in spite of me, not because of who I was.
Once, also in my twenties as I deconstructed, I remember thinking I wasn’t terribly aware of being in sin. I wondered if this was a terrible oversight on my part, I wasn’t focusing on my own sin enough, or I was so prideful as to think I didn’t really have any. But what I’ve concluded from Julian is that this focus is wrong. We should focus instead on God and the love between us and God. For if that is our focus, it will naturally lead us away from doing things that harm ourselves, our fellow humans, and the rest of the natural world. If we focus on living in love, learning all that means, we are led to promote the mutual thriving of everyone beloved by God–which is everyone, period. Julian recognized sin as what harms us or harms others, and also that sin is as inevitable as when I occasionally trip over something hiking. What do we do? Same thing as I do when I’m hiking. You right yourself, stand up, brush off, and keep going: making amends where possible and necessary. (14)
If Love is the message, then God is with us in the plague, not causing the plague to punish us. If Love is the message, then God is with us when we seek the good of everyone, with us when we love, and express our love of each other. If Love is the message, and sin has no substance, then we do ourselves and our world great harm when we focus on the sin instead of living in the Love.
Love is the message, but it is not a passive state. Living into God’s Love, having that be the focus of all we do, is a call to work in the world until all can live as God intended: safe in the love that has no beginning, and will have no end. Because everything “lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.” (15)
Bubonic Plague, though in England, it is likely there was a combination of three different plagues including the Bubonic Plague, hence the colloquial term “black death” in reference to what it did to people’s bodies.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Translated by Barry Windeatt, (London: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68-69.
Paul Halsell, “Thomas of Monmouth: The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, 1173,” Fordam University Medieval Sourcebook, October 1997, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/1173williamnorwich.asp accessed 7/29/23
Gillian Bennett, “Toward a Reevaluation of ‘Saint’ William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend,” Folklore (Vol. 116 Issue 2), August 2005, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A135815528&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=588306e6 accessed 7/29/23
Blood libel stemmed from the church’s teaching that Jews bore responsibility for Christ’s death, then a huge jump was made based on hearsay to claim they practiced rituals using the blood of Christian children. See linked articles in other notes for a more complete history and explanation.
Jon Sweeney, “From Hateful Murmurs to Blood Libel,” The Christian Century, March 2023, https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/hateful-murmurs-blood-libel accessed 7/29/23
“Blood Libel,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, July 28, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/blood-libel#ref1265146 accessed 7/29/23
Revelations, Oxford, 82.
Revelations, Oxford, 110.
Revelations, Oxford, 69.
Revelations, Oxford, 56.
Revelations, Oxford, 75.
Revelations, Oxford, 106-110.
Revelations, Oxford, 117.
Revelations, Oxford, 45.
