[A sermon delivered at St. Clement of Rome Episcopal Church on November 17, 2019]
In the name of the Holy Trinity, who made us, who loves us, and who cares for us. Amen.
In the calendar of our church the day assigned to Julian of Norwich is May 8, the date she gives for having most of her visions. She also says she was 30 1/2 years old, which would make her birthday about now. For that reason I offered to give a program on Julian last weekend at St. Placid Priory in Lacey, and why Fr. Kevin asked me to speak today.
So this woman who became known as Julian – we’re not sure about her real name – had a terrible illness in May of 1373, was given the last rites, and on the seventh morning her priest set a crucifix before her to contemplate before she made her end. She could hardly move, but looking straight ahead at the Cross her upper body started to revive, and the room darkened except an “ordinary” light on the crucifix. She suddenly began to see, as she writes, “the red blood trickling down from under the crown of thorns, hot and fresh, plentiful and lifelike, just as though it were the moment in his Passion when the crown of thorns was pressed on to his blessed head, he who was both God and man, the same who suffered for me in this way.” [1]
Beginning with this and other visions of Christ’s Passion, she went on to see sixteen visions, or as she called them, “showings,” which after her recovery she wrote down in a book. She continued to examine her mystic experiences, which gave her great joy and serenity, but were also baffling, because they seemed to expand on the teachings of Holy Church. After twenty years she produced a longer text – six times longer – which fused her visions with searching theological inquiry. Her long and short texts are today called the Revelations of Divine Love. They are the earliest known book in English by a woman writer.
Sometime during these twenty years she became an anchoress, a female recluse living in a small room built alongside a church named after Julian, a 2nd-century saint. The church was less than a mile south of Norwich Cathedral, several blocks from the river in an area busy with activity. Less than a half mile to the south was Carrow Priory, a monastery of Benedictine nuns that had charge over the selection of the anchoress, and where Julian likely was educated as a child.
Julian probably took her name from the church where she was cloistered. Once an anchoress took her vows, she was literally a prisoner in her cell, with a maid to tend to her necessities. Julian had a small window open to the church where she could see the services, and also a window to the outside. In her time, people would come to an anchoress for spiritual counsel, and the anchoress was highly regarded by the surrounding community as an example of holiness.
I’m now going to tell about three ideas from Julian’s many Revelations. But first, let’s take a look at what was going on in fourteenth-century England, so we can see her writings against that background.
Remember all the horrible things in today’s Gospel? [Luke 20:27-38] : “wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, portents, and persecution.” Julian’s fourteenth century was extremely turbulent – it had all of those things save earthquakes. To list a few: the Hundred Years’ War; the Black Plague, a gale that blew down the cathedral spire, and years of bad harvests. The society was in strict classes, with kings and aristocrats speaking French; Oxford-trained theologians who spoke or wrote in Latin, and the common people who spoke English. When the first wave of the plague hit Norfolk in 1349 it killed 1/3 of the population, and 1/2 of the priests when they gave the Last Rites. Many people died “unshriven,” which left those left behind without assurance they would see their loved ones again in heaven. John Wyclif had translated the Latin Bible into English, and his followers, called Lollards, were burned at the stake just for having such a book. The chaos that came from all these things caused a Peasant’s Revolt in 1381.
Our time is vastly different than Julien’s, but we still have a lot of chaos-producing things, like endless war, disease, the melting of the ice caps, death through drugs and guns, pollution, discrimination, poverty, and economic inequity. I don’t know which time had the most chaos; Let’s call it a tie.
The first of Julian’s ideas concerns the Passion of Christ, shown very directly to her by a Jesus that is present to her in what she calls a “homely” way – that is, personal, intimate, and friendly. She writes, concerning the first showing:
“At the same time as I saw this vision of the head bleeding, our Lord showed me spiritually in a vision how intimately he loves us. I saw that he is to us everything that is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing that out of love enwraps us and enfolds us, embraces us and wholly encloses us, surrounding us for tender love, so that he can never leave us. And so in this vision I saw that he is everything that is good, as I understand it.” Julian goes on to state that in all her visions, it was the Trinity that was showing them to her.
And in another showing she sees an abundance of blood which “overflows the whole earth and is ready to wash from sin all who are, have been, and shall be of good will.”
The important aspects of Jesus’s Passion are, first, that our suffering is joined to Jesus’s suffering, and, second, that in Julian’s language, we are “kinned,” become one, in this blood which is given over and over again, “without reserve.” In Julian’s time, this idea of all members of society being “kinned” by Christ’s blood, would have been extremely radical. And in our day, not everyone is ready to be fully inclusive.
In the final showing concerning the Passion, Jesus asks Julian “Are you well pleased that I suffered for you?” This question turns the tables on the concept called by fourteenth-century and modern theologians as the “Satisfaction Theory of Atonement” – that the sin of Adam ripped apart the order of the universe, and Jesus pays the price for all humanity. In this case Jesus asks us, “Are you satisfied?”
The second idea that we receive from Julian is first shown in the picture of the hazelnut from our first reading today. This little thing, which is so fragile it could easily disappear, is “everything that is made.” All matter, all time is compressed into something that God loves into being without beginning or end. And Julian also has just before this a vision of the Virgin Mary as a young girl at the time of the Annunciation. Greatness from littleness – “he that is mighty has magnified me.”
Julian also sees God in what she calls a poynte: “and by seeing this I saw that he is in everything. I looked attentively, seeing and recognizing in that vision that he does everything that is done.I marvelled at that sight with quiet awe, and thought, ‘What is sin?…Therefore I had to grant that every-thing which is done is well done… and I was sure that he does no sin. And here I saw truly that sin is no kind of deed, for sin was not shown me in all this.”
It is what the author Amy Laura Hall calls an “antitrajectory point of view;” it is not our normal view of progressing toward a goal. She writes that “hope is not an affirmation that all shall be well, incrementally.” [2] Washed by Jesus blood, we become sanguine, full of hopeful confidence.
The third idea realized by Julian was that God was “never angry, nor ever shall be, for he is God: he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity, and his unity do not permit him to be angry…for truly, as it seems to me, if God could be angry even for an instant we should never have life, nor place, nor being.”
This contradicts references to God’s anger in the church of Julian’s time, or in the modern era – I think of the 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards’s “sinners in the hands of an angry God” or some evangelists – I think it was Pat Robertson – speaking of God punishing America for its sins by the destruction of 9/11. [3] We need to be more vigilant today about those who would use fear, just like it was in Julian’s day, as a way to divide, manipulate, and control us.
There is much that I’ve left out from Julian’s writings – such as her showing how Jesus is our true mother – but one more of her showings has to be mentioned, since it has the phrase we probably most remember. It came as she once again contemplated the nature of sin. The Trinity’s answer came as “sin is befitting, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Julian understood that there were two parts to this: one, that we contemplate both God’s endless love and salvation, but knowing our sinful nature we pray for mercy and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and also love each other and act accordingly. The other part of “all shall be well” is to leave to God the making well of all manner of things, both great and small. How God will do this is not ours to know.
At the end of her visions God told Julian to accept, believe, hold to, comfort in and trust what she had seen – and not be overcome. And Julian wrote, “He did not say, ‘You shall not be perturbed, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be distressed’, but he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’ God wants us to pay attention to these words … he wishes us to love him, and be pleased with him, and strongly trust in him; and all shall be well…
Several weeks ago, the Compline Choir that I sing with premiered a new composition that we commissioned from American composer Alice Parker, and I’d like to close with those lines. I think Julian would completely agree:
Let us love the Creator,
Let us love the Creation,
Let us love one another,
For God is Love.
In the name of the Holy Trinity, who made us, who loves us, and who cares for us. Amen.