My personal relationship with Julian of Norwich

For all and sundry

Gentle reader,

I was a 22 year old student when we first met. Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich was assigned reading in the church history curriculum, and I didn’t think much of her.

I was trying to perform my excellence at being a seminary student, and all the signals were obvious: I was supposed to care about Really Important Theologians like Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas.¹

I got it. Serious people, shining stars, did not get serious about weird women who talk a lot about love.

My assignment was to write about how Julian stood in continuity or discontinuity with the Christian tradition that came before her, and I wrote a sophomoric little paper about how she was too much about experience and not enough about sin.

Ah, well.²

Over the years, I’ve grown in my love for Julian, and I’ve come to understand some of the complicated feelings about gender that were at work in my heart when I first met Julian.

The people we categorize as “mystics” rather than as “theologians” are often those we don’t know what to do with. And we often don’t know what to do with them because they don’t fit our categories. Julian, of course, is a category breaker, because she is a woman.

In his book Julian of Norwich, Theologian, Denys Turner has shown that Julian is every bit the substantial doctrinal thinker that Aquinas was. I wish I had written that book.

Well into my teaching career, I took a seminar about mentoring, and I chose Julian as my mentor to focus on throughout the year. And, oh, did I learn from her. I asked her right into my heart.

Julian speaks to us across the centuries about a Christological refusal of sinful misuse of power. It matters that Julian speaks from a position of restricted worldly power to begin with. She is of little count in her society because of her gender, and her writings were ignored in her lifetime, surviving for us not because her contemporaries acknowledged her, but because of providence.³

Julian protests that what she has to offer is not her own but Christ’s. And yet, she lovingly makes the offering. She does not consider hoarding the visions she received. She writes them for the church. She writes for love:

I know well this is what I say—I have it on the showing of him who is a sovereign Teacher—and true charity urgeth me to tell you of it, for I would that God were known and my fellow-Christians helped (as I would be myself), to the more hating of sin and loving of God. Because I am a woman should I therefore believe that I ought not to tell you about the goodness of God since I saw at the same time that it is his will that it be known?⁴

Julian is profligate in choosing her mentees. I read her here as a kind of proto-Protestant, rejecting hierarchies and clericalism and instead seeing that access to Christ must be free and unmediated for all, including the lowest and least.⁵ She tells us she “was greatly moved with love” for her “fellow Christians, that they might know and see” what she saw. Her visions, her love, her offering of her person as mentor is “for all and sundry.”⁶

I have learned much from Julian about what it means to become able to attend to whole persons by attending first to the incarnate Jesus. She connects the physical and the spiritual when she pays attention to Christ’s physical suffering, and she comprehends, in that very physicality, the intimacy of God’s love.

She says, “the Lord showed me spiritually how intimately he loves us.”⁷

Her talk of Christ is deeply relational. She shows us a Jesus who wills “that we should know him” and who takes pleasure in our “rest in him.”⁸ By grace, we “cling to” this Jesus in “real understanding and unshakeable love…in his goodness is included all one can want, without exception.”⁹

This language of intimate love and knowledge is deeply embodied. It draws on emotion, desire, and gut feelings, and it shows us how to want Jesus.

It also promises us embodied transformation as the result of this love. Julian sees the Christian life as one in which “we, soul and body” are “clothed from head to foot in the goodness of God.”¹⁰

Julian’s attention is rapt. She pours it out to Jesus, who is pouring his attention on her in bodily imagery. In a medieval context in which laypeople did not receive the cup in the Eucharist and access to the sacrament as the body of Christ was controlled, mediated, clericalized, and meted out according to hierarchies of worldly power, Julian shows us a Jesus whose blood flows profligately over us all:

Great drops of blood rolled down from the garland like beads, seemingly from the veins; and they came down a brownish red colour—for the blood was thick—and as they spread out they became bright red...They were as fresh and living as though they were real: their abundance like the drops of water that fall from the eaves after a heavy shower, falling so thickly that no one can possibly count them; their roundness as they spread out on his forehead were like the scales of herring. I was reminded of three things at the time: round beads as the blood flowed, round herring scales as it spread out, and raindrops from the eaves for their abundance. This revelation was real and lifelike, horrifying and  dreadful, sweet and lovely. The greatest comfort I received from it was to know that our God and Lord, so holy and aweful, is so unpretentious and considerate. This filled me with comfort and assurance.¹¹

And Julian, after the example of this Jesus, gives herself profligately to us in her writing. As an example of Christological use of power, of love for community, of a holistic, embodied desire to glorify God, Julian shines.

Now, we sit and talk, the two of us. She didn’t even need to forgive me for being so silly when I was 22, for she already loved me and knew the truth about me and about all of us: that we were made for the love of God.

An icon of St. Julian of Norwich. I’ve imagined her around age 22, not yet ready to share what God will show her, but the window is a sign of her future as an Anchor for the church, through whom we have seen God’s grace. I gave her a cup of English tea and a hazelnut torte to enjoy. The gold cracks on her face reference the healing and transforming power of the God who made us and loves us. The crucifix and scales reference her visions of the free flowing blood of Jesus, pouring out for “all and sundry.”

St. Julian imagined as the patron saint of she who needs a room of her own. Julian both fulfills and subverts the famous hope of Virginia Woolf. As an Anchoress, she took a room of her own, very literally, when she was installed in the church at Norwich. She found the space and time to do writing that would matter. But she is not isolated. The three windows in the image refer to the literal windows that would have been in Julian’s anchor-hold: a window to the street (lit from the bottom), so that she could offer prayer and counsel to those outside, a window (lit from the side) to a space from which servants could provide her necessary care (women’s work has to be done by somebody, and that should never be invisible when we look for rooms of our own, nor should we insulate ourselves from our need and dependence), and a window to the church (lit from above) from which she could join the congregation and receive the eucharist. Julian’s cat can go between her room and the world. Symbolically, we all need these windows in the rooms of our homes and of our hearts.

St. Julian imagined as the patron saint of cat ladies. It is thought that those, like Julian, who took the office of anchor in the church might have kept cats. The cats would keep their space free of mice and would provide warm blooded companionship. This image is a feminist reclamation of the denigrating title “cat lady;” it acknowledges the goodness of human need for companionship and the goodness of the creatures of our God and King. God loves those the world derides.

Feel free to download and share these images. Hi-res images, without the watermark, are available at my Redbubble shop.

Grace & peace,
BFJ

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1. It was also acceptable to care about John Howard Yoder, which really is weird, since he is not a Really Important Theologian unless you happened to be right there, right then. This, of course, is how Really Importantness is judged: that is, contextually.

2. Yes, that “well,” is a reference to Julian’s “all manner of thing shall be…” in Revelations of Divine Love.

3. “Few of her contemporaries seem to have valued her writings, they survive almost by chance,” from Andrew Louth’s helpful chapter “Medieval Anchorism and Julian of Norwich” in The Wilderness of God (Abingdon, 1997), 74.

4. From chapter 6 of the shorter text, quoted in Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love trans. Clifton Wolters (Penguin, 1966), 27.

5. My reading of Julian as a proto-Protestant is heavily influenced by Amy Frykholm’s Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography (Paraclete, 2012).

6. Julian, chapter 8, 74.

7. 5.67.

8. 5.68

9. 6.69

10. 6.70

11. 7.72