WHO IS JULIAN OF NORWICH?
Julian of Norwich, Stephen Reid, 1912. Public domain.
To read Julian of Norwich is to dive into the depths of divine love. Her theology is timeless. It is one woman’s lifetime of prayerful listening and attentive devotion to God. Her theology is not about God. Her theology is communion with God and her fellow Christians.
All Shall Be Well
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Chapter 27)
This famous line from Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love speaks a healing word to us in the midst of upheaval, conflict, and injustice. Fourteenth-century England was not a safe, secure place. Political and social conflict simmered and boiled, and diseases like the plague and deprivation were always lurking at the door. (1) Julian was an anchoress (someone who was walled-in next to the parish church to pray and offer counsel) yet was deeply connected to the suffering of the world. Her theology is not naïve optimism but faith-filled hope grounded in God.
Julian had a mystical experience at age 30 that became her life’s work. In her youth, she asked God for three gifts: a deeper understanding of Christ’s passion; a bodily sickness that would draw her to death’s door; and three wounds (“the wound of true contrition, the wound of kind compassion, and the wound of wish-filled yearning for God”). (2) On May 8th, 1373 she was plunged into a powerful sickness and had a series of mystical visions that she would turn over in her heart for years to come. Shortly after her experience, Julian wrote the first version of her Revelations (called the Short Text), and over the years she meditated on the meaning of these showings and wrote an expanded version (the Long Text). (3)
The Lord’s Meaning: Love
What did God show Julian? What was God’s meaning? Love. Years after her mystical visions, Julian kept praying to know God’s meaning, and she was answered:
I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus: ‘Wouldst thou know thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Be well aware: love was His meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed He thee? Love. Why did He show it thee? For love.
Love is God’s meaning. Ages before Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God,” Julian was writing that Love is our creation, our foundation, our eternity.
Julian’s prayer for three wounds (true contrition, kind compassion, and yearning for God) offer a glimpse into the theology underlying the Revelations of Divine Love.
The First Wound: True Contrition
In Chapter 52 of the Long Text, Julian lays out a familiar scene: in a moment of spiritual uplift and closeness, we would do gladly what God asks of us, but as soon as that feeling departs, we sink back into old habits. We have the best of intentions but inevitably fail. What are we to do?
The insight Julian gives is practical and grounded in God:
Neither on the one hand fall overly low, inclining to despair, nor on the other hand be over reckless as if we gave no heed, but humbly acknowledging our weakness, aware that we cannot stand even a twinkling of an eye except by the protection of grace, and reverently cleaving to God, trusting in Him alone. (5)
Contrition, for Julian, involves a gentle self-accusation that brings our awareness to our sins and leads us to trust that God loves us deeply and everlastingly.
This love is rooted firmly in the cross. Julian’s visions include Christ’s passion with gory details about the quantity and thickness of his blood, the drying of his flesh, and his agony, but Julian also sees Christ dying for us out of joyful, loving solidarity. (6) Christ eagerly chooses the cross out of love. This is not heroic self-sacrifice but motherly love. Julian writes:
Our true Mother Jesus, He – all love – gives us birth to joy and to endless life. … Thus He carries us within Himself in love, and labors until full term so that He could suffer the sharpest throes and the hardest birth pains that ever were or ever shall be, and die at the last. And when He had finished, and so given us birth to bliss, not even all this could satisfy His wondrous love. (7)
In this genderfluid depiction of Christ, we see that the cross is creative love. Our heavenly Mother Christ gives us birth, watches us grow and try new things, stumble and fall, letting us mature as beloved children.
The Second Wound: Kind Compassion
The intimacy of Julian’s theology includes the individual but expands outwards into the cosmos. In Chapter 37 of the Long Text, she writes: “What can make me love my fellow Christians more than to see in God that He loves all that shall be saved as if they were all one soul?” We are each beloved as individuals and in community, in communion; therefore, we ought also to love one another. Love of God and love of neighbor are entwined.
Julian writes, “Then I saw that each kind compassion that man has toward his fellow Christian with love, it is Christ in him.” (8) The love of God, the love that is God is shown to one another. God beholds our suffering and burns with compassion, and it is this very same compassion that animates our love for one another.
Julian asks a question we all wonder about salvation: how can God be both just (holding people accountable for their injustices) and also merciful (as befits God who is love)? (9) God answers Julian with a response that is reminiscent of God’s unsatisfying response to Job: God says that there will be a Great Deed that will set all things right but refuses any details other than it will be “honorable and marvelous and fruitful.” (10) Like Julian, we are left curious as to what this Great Deed will be, but God has the desire and the design to make everything right. This Great Deed remains a mystery, but it undergirds our hope that all things shall be well indeed.
Our response is to trust in God’s love for us and for all. Julian’s theology holds in tension what she knows from Church teaching about justice and these revelations of love. (11) God will bring both justice and love to fulfillment; will we join in the work?
The Third Wound: Longing for God
In another vision Julian sees a hazelnut in the palm of her hand and hears, “It is all that is made.” (12) Creation is small, almost nothing, yet God loves it endlessly. God made it, God loves it, and God keeps it. Julian wonders about its significance, and she proclaims:
…until I am in essence one-ed to Him, I can never have full rest nor true joy (that is to say, until I am made so fast to Him that there is absolutely nothing that is created separating my God and myself). (13)
Beloved creatures are made to rest and rejoice in God, and we will never reach complete satisfaction until we are one with God. We are called to be aware of our smallness and to “set at naught everything that is created, in order to love and have God who is uncreated.” (14) Our souls cannot be satisfied with anything less than God, and God is delighted and honored to satisfy this need. Inspired by the Spirit and guided by her understanding, Julian gives this prayerful summary of the soul’s true desire:
God, of your goodness give me yourself; for you are enough to me, and I can ask nothing that is less that can be full honor to you. And if I ask anything that is less, I shall always be in want, for only in you have I all. (15)
God wants us to desire God with our whole selves, and desiring God gives us everything. Julian’s desire for God led her to contemplate these showings her entire life and led her to share these revelations with us that we may know, love, and yearn for God in our own way, too.
As God says to Julian:
It is I – that is to say
It is I: the Power and the Goodness of the Fatherhood.
It is I: the Wisdom of the Motherhood.
It is I: the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love.
It is I: the Trinity.
It is I: the Unity.
I am the supreme goodness of all manner of things.
I am what causes thee to love.
I am what causes thee to yearn.
It is I: the endless fulfilling of all true desires. (16)
Conclusion
There is much, much more that can be said about Julian’s theology. Her parable of the Lord and the Servant, her intricate and mystical doctrine of the Trinity, and her own struggles with the revelations further show the profound yet accessible depths of her theology; nevertheless, the goal of theology is not to get us to shape our thinking about God but to bring us to communion with God and others.
May we rejoice in God just as God rejoices in us, and may we hold fast to the Lord’s meaning: love.
Veronica Mary Rolf, Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich. 15
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ch 2. (While Julian of Norwich wrote in Middle English, this essay will generally quote from John-Julian’s translation)
Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian. 9
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 86.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 52.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 21.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 60.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 28.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 35, 36.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 36.
Veronica Mary Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 410.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 5.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 5.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 5.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 5. This version comes from the liturgy of the Order of Julian of Norwich.
Revelations of Divine Love, ch 59.
