On Saturday, May 14, 2022, I will be presenting one of the “Zoom” series of programs offered through the Spirituality Center at St. Placid Priory in Lacey, Washington. Called “Julian of Norwich: Wisdom for our Time.”
This is the third program I have presented on Julian at the Priory, where I am a Benedictine Oblate. The first was an all-day retreat on November 2019: “A Musical Journey in Faith with Julian of Norwich” back in the halcyon days before Zoom (BZ?). Then I gave “Julian of Norwich and the Passion of Christ” in Lent of 2021, in which I read many of the passages in Middle English (with a translation juxtaposed), and this was so well received that I will be employing the same technique in “Julian: Wisdom for our Time.” Please use the link above to register for the program – the Priory, whose primary means of support is through their spirituality offerings, will be grateful!
And how did my passion for Julian begin? Read on, if you like…
I was in Tacoma, Washington in January of 2018. I had stopped by the University of Puget Sound, where I was an undergraduate umteen years ago. When my book, Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline came out in 2013, I had given the UPS library a copy, and went there to see if the book had been cataloged. It was in the catalog, and so I went hunting for it. Much to my astonishment I found the book was keeping some exalted company…
Just to the right was Watson and Jenkins, eds., The Writings of Julian of Norwich (2006). And four to the left was Matthew Fox’s Meditations with Meister Eckhart, and further left was a book on the writings of Thomas Traherne. I was awestruck for my book to be in the same category as these writings of fourteenth- or seventeenth-century mystics.
But mostly I was intrigued about Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342 – after 1416), because I had not read either her short or long texts, which are generally known as the Revelations of Divine Love. I only remembered some of her popular quotes, even though I had been to Norwich with the Compline Choir in 2000, and had seen the Church of St. Julian where she had lived as an anchorite (a female recluse living in an enclosed portion of a church, from which she took her name).
I ordered the book, a scholarly edition by medievalists Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, of Julian’s texts in their original Middle English. Julian has the distinction of being “the earliest known woman writer in English” (Watkins and Jenkins’s Preface), and she was almost an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343 – 1400). But she was a mystic, theologian, and thinker whose writings were revolutionary, not only in her use of the common tongue, but in her message that we are all – rich and poor, commoner and aristocrat, male and female, “kinned” in the absolute love of God for the totality of creation beyond all time.
Not being able to plunge into the Middle English right away, I began reading some books on Julian, notably Robert Fruehwirth’s The Drawing of this Love: Growing in Faith with Julian of Norwich (2016) and Amy Laura Hall’s Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (2018). These got me thinking about sharing Julian’s thoughts in a format that would also bring in my own spiritual discoveries, mainly through a life of music; if you will, a kind of “Prayer as Night Falls meets Revelations of Divine Love.” I had some insight into the spiritual climate of Julian’s time, since I had done my master’s thesis on two composers whose lives spanned the late fourteenth- to the mid-fifteenth-centuries. And having in 2019 reached my 55th anniversary since I first sang in the Compline Choir, I had a great number of modern works I could draw on, especially the music of my mentor and confessed “lover of the numinous,” Peter R. Hallock (1924-2014). So music and images from then and now accompanied Julian’s vision in my program.
Sister Lucy, my Oblate Director at St. Placid Priory, had suggested I add the “musical” adjective to the title of that first program, but it was mainly a serious examination of Julian’s spirituality, covering all sixteen “Showings,” or visions, that she had during a near-death experience at the age of 30 1/2, in 1373. She said in her Long Text that this experience was around May 8, and that is why the Episcopal Church keeps that as her saint’s day.
Amazingly enough, May 8, 2023 will be the 650th anniversary of Julian’s revelations.