In the Spirit of Julian

Oxford, England

July 2005

Meditation 1

Introduction

Historians point out to us that all times have been stressful times. And yet there are particular and new challenges to be faced by humanity at this point in our collective journey.  Coming from America, I live in the most affluent country the world has ever known, and I cannot say that I suffer anything comparable to the tragedies that our brothers and sisters in the two-thirds world suffer. And yet, in spite of that, there are spiritual stresses in the first world of untold power. These tensions grow exponentially as we become aware of the global crisis that humanity faces on almost every level: financial, ecological, certainly spiritual. Even as we hear more news about melting icecaps and belligerent politicians, we also hear news of the global network of our Church being torn in two over the recent controversies. Western culture, many say, came apart at the seams in World War I, and has never recovered from World War II. We are waiting to see what will arise out of the ashes.

The question I want to explore in this affiliates retreat is, What does it mean for us to live in the spirit of Julian in this kind of world, a world that Henry O’Driscoll many years ago called apocalyptic? What particular gifts has the Order of Julian been given for the sake of this world now at this point in history? We want to live as true daughters and sons of Julian. We want to live in her spirit, and according to her wisdom. We want to share what God revealed through Julian with the whole world. The Order of Julian comes into its own when its Members Regular and Affiliates incarnate Julian’s Lesson of Love in our world, when we ourselves become Revelations of Divine Love. We are not called merely to be good monks or sublime contemplatives in the world, or to be zealous Church-people, but we have a very special calling to bring Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love alive again in our world, through the quality and manner of our lives. What I am after is a sense of what a life looks like when it has this needed quality and manner. What happens, what does it look like, when we become revelations of divine love in the Spirit of Julian?

It is tempting to reach in to Julian’s Revelations and to start pulling all kinds of texts out of her showings, saying that “Yes, this is what we must do: we must trust God, or rejoice with God, or be contrite for our sins but not lose hope.” I would like however to take a different tack, one that I think is more responsible and actually goes deeper, but which delays our looking at the actual content of her theology or pastoral counsel until near the end. In this approach, we will reflect first on Julian’s experience of God as she relates this in Showings Eight and Nine of her Revelations. Here we find traces of the core experience of God that opened Julian’s spiritual life to a whole new depth of being. In our second meditation, I would like to look at Julian’s response to this experience of God in choosing the anchoritic life. Finally, in our last meditation, I would like to reflect on the core of what Julian teaches in her Showings about the spiritual life. We will thus begin with the essence of Julian’s mystical experience, as this is shared in her Revelations, and then reflect on Julian’s response to this experience, and then the core teachings that emerged out of her life as a whole.  My hope is that we will be able to identify how we, in our lives, already know something of Julian’s own experience of God, how we also have chosen to follow Julian in responding to this by creating some kind of spiritual anchorhold for ourselves in the Order of Julian, and finally how we are able to live in the world in a different way because of our experience and our spiritual anchorhold.

Eckhart Tolle

Recently an aspirant to life in our Order shared with me her appreciation of a book called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Being familiar with the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, Bede Griffiss, Anthony de Mello, and Jean Pierre de Caussade, I had an idea of what the book would say: familiar instructions about mindfulness, awareness and inner freedom, going beyond discursive thought, and so forth. The book does cover all these things, but it has a remarkable edge and clarity, even if Tolle writes from an almost transreligious standpoint. He is not a Christian or anything else. He writes from a direct personal experience that completely unmade his life, similar to Saint Paul. Recognizing fully any hesitations you may have about this kind of unaffiliates spiritual writing, I would still like to read Tolle’s account of his experience because I believe it is a contemporary experience, in non-Christian prose, of what Julian herself experienced.  This is what Tolle wrote:

One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train — everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence…

I cannot live with myself any longer.’ This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ’Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the “I” and the “self” and “I” cannot live with.’ ’Maybe,’ I thought, ’only one of them is real.’

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. it was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear.

Tolle tells us that eventually the fear left him and he let himself fall into the void completely, and he lost consciousness. When he woke up in the morning, the world was completely transformed, and he began to experience existence on an entirely different plane, that he had before called a void and yet which he found filled with what he calls ’indescribable bliss and sacredness.’ Later in the book he describes it as a state of immediate one-ness with being. So revolutionary was this experience that eventually he lost everything he owned on a physical plane, and like Saint Francis lived in absolute poverty, a mendicant. For two years he sat on a park bench in Cambridge, England. Working for years through the experience, he has only recently begun to assume the mantle of a spiritual teacher.

Before I go any further, I want to emphasize that I am not a fan of the people who place great value on esoteric spiritual experiences. I prefer a solid faithfulness and humility to flamboyant experience. I don’t go in for New Age wildness. However, on reading the rest of his book, I see all kinds of parallels with Julian in how he has come to understand the human person, and our salvation, God, and the process of the spiritual life. He does not use the language of medieval Christianity or of our own Blessed Cranmer, but I have become convinced that he and Julian experienced something very similar. Moreover, because I have felt a personal resonance with Julian’s description of this more true reality, I felt that Tolle was talking about things very very close to my own heart. I share Tolle’s experience because it may help us to claim the radicality of Julian’s own experience with new clarity and depth.

Julian’s Experience of God

Julian’s Revelations is a tapestry of mystical experience, theological reflection, and poetic word and image-play. We can find traces of direct experience of God all through the Revelations. The experience that begins the whole series of Showings, namely Showing One, is itself a beautiful two-layered experience of the suffering humanity of Jesus and the indescribably blissful, eternal life of the Trinity, a life that is happening here and now and always. Julian sees Jesus’ blood coming down over his face from the crown of thorns, but on a spiritual level she sees the unconditioned joy of God in all things and doing all things. The showings run on from there into passages of indescribable beauty and depth, and I wish we had time simply to examine the divine perspectives opened up by Julian.

By jumping on ahead however, to the end of Showing Eight, I think we come to the place where Julian experiences an opening of consciousness to a reality very similar to what Tolle came to from a very different route.

In Showing 8, Julian is being led very deeply and graphically into an experience of Christ’s suffering and death. Moreover, her own body is being afflicted with the pains that she is seeing in Christ. This becomes so dreadful to her that she wishes she had never wanted to be so united with Christ in his Passion —originally one of her deepest desires. She writes,

And in all this time of Christ’s pains I felt no pain except for Christ’s pains. Then I thought, “I knew but little what pain it was that I asked for“, and like a wretch I repented me, thinking that if I had known what it would be, I would have been loath to have prayed for it, for it seemed to me that my pains went beyond any bodily death. [LESSON OF LOVE. 17]

Julian experiences in herself what she later calls the grouching of the flesh, a simple revulsion at suffering. This in turn causes her to draw back, wishing that she could be not quite so one with Christ.  This is one half of her experience — suffering so greatly with the crucified Christ that she draws back from this union. Yet two chapters on, something else happens that forces Julian into a whole new depth of awareness. She describes it this way:

Then I had a proposal in my reason (as if it were like a friend) which said to me, ’Look up to heaven to His Father.’ And I saw well with the Faith that there was nothing between the cross and heaven that could have distressed me. Either it was appropriate for me to look up, or else to answer. I answered inwardly with all the powers of my soul and said, “No, I cannot, for Thou art my heaven…

So was I taught to choose Jesus for my heaven, whom I saw only in pain at that time. I delighted in no other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss when I come there. [LESSON OF LOVE. 19]

Julian thus reverses her first desire to not be so own with Jesus in his suffering. We would be mistaken to read this, as it is tempting to do, merely as an edifying victory of pious devotion over suffering.  But it is not just that. It is not just a wave of pious feeling that carries Julian over the hump, but something much more significant: an opening of her soul to a whole new depth of reality in herself, in Jesus, in every human being. It is only much later in the Revelations, in Chapter 55, that Julian tells us that what enabled her to choose Jesus as her heaven in well was a new awareness, a revelation of a whole new depth of reality in Christ and in herself, characterized by joy, peace, and bliss, even amid the crucifixion. She calls her experience of suffering the ‘outward part’ of her soul even as she is made aware of an ‘inner part’ that is exalted and in heaven. She writes,

These two parts were seen and experienced in the eighth showing, in which my body was filled with the experience and memory of Christ’s passion and His death — and furthermore, with this was an ethereal feeling and secret inward vision of the high part that I was shown at that same time [when I could not on account of the intermediary’s suggestion look up into heaven], and that was because of the powerful vision of the inner life, and this inner life is that exalted essence, that precious soul, which is endlessly rejoicing in the Godhead.“ [LESSON OF LOVE. 55]

Julian thus experiences in herself as in Christ two different layers of selfhood: one of which suffers in history, but the other of which is timeless, deathless, changeless, and held in bliss, joy, and love. This timeless self she later calls the soul’s substance, and she describes it as knit from the moment of creation and forever to God in mutual love and blissful contemplation. This sets up a whole series of two-layered perceptions of the reality, and while Julian does not deny the reality of the outward level, she says that the inward, substantial, inner realm is the more true one, and that we should give our allegiance to that one.

I would like to try to put this in my own words. I think what Tolle and Julian and what I believe have both touched on (and what I believe Jesus lived constantly) is a dimension of human experience and consciousness that is not in time, that is not defined by own minds or ego-plans. This dimension is always in us and around us, in all things and all doings. It is Being itself. It is unconditioned affirmation, what we might call bliss, love, or express in the simple word “Yes!“ It is an endless “Yes“ that is the true reality of everything. It is what is. And the whole point of the spiritual life is allowing our outward lives, which are often fractious, angry and suffering, to be made one with the inner truth of our union with God that is already there. When we are one with ourselves, Julian says, suddenly we are one’d to God.  When we are one with ourselves, with our depths that are everlastingly knit to God in love, we discover what we never guessed: that we have always already been one with God.

Julian’s experience of God in the showings involves not the replacement of historical, suffering reality with a better, heavenly experience, but the unfolding of a whole new eternal depth of being in which Julian finds it very hard to perceive any distinction between herself and God. [Lesson of Love. Ch. 54]. This she calls our inward part, our substantial life, and she describes this as a state of everlasting, timeless, and inviolate union with God that is not affected by what happens in history. The historical reality remains true, but it is revealed in the context of a deeper, truer reality, and while Julian bids us always to keep both dimensions, she also bids us to settle our hearts in the eternal one.

Our own experience of God.

My hunch is that most of us are involved in the spiritual life precisely because at some point in our lives, however inchoately, our souls have been opened to this eternal depth, this substantial life of union with God, and we are trying to find a way that in some way responds to what we have know for ourselves.

Such an experience is probably not as dramatic as what we find in Julian, or in Tolle — it can be as simple as a sudden perception of pure timelessness, and beauty, and an infinite joy, a perception that flashes forth and passes away without explanation in the midst of a busy working day.

Bruce Davis, a retreat leader whose home is in Assisi, offers a description of this kind of experience in his book, Monastery Without Walls.  For Davis, the term “silence” function like the word “holy” indicating God and the transcendent. He writes,

Life’s peak moments: alone in nature, in the arms of a lover, immersed in a project, on vacation or spiritual retreat could all be seen as moments of intimate silence. Each day is more complete when the moment of silence comes. Suddenly all our sense are pulled to the present, to the silent perfection within us and around us. This perfection, this instant of beauty, occupies more than our minds and touches more than our feelings. In some inexplicable way we are reminded that we have a soul and we are loved…The monk of mystic inside us knows there is holiness in solitude that gives meaning to all activity. [Monastery Without Walls. iii]

This seems a long way from Julian’s Showings, but bringing many writers together we can see that Julian and Davis, Tolle and John of the Cross, and countless others all describe a similar experience, in varying intensities; that of being profoundly drawn into the absolute present, the eternal now, and of encountering a perfection in things, a beauty, a joy, a light-fullness permeating all things. For the mystics, this is a razor sharp experience, usually articulated in the images of their religious culture. For most of us, the experience is softer, less shattering, more diffused. But fundamentally the opening of our consciousness to something beyond history  underlies our Christian practice, our meditation, our liturgical piety, our lectio divina, our dedication to serving the poor in Christ. This something beyond history we call the life of God, or Silence, or Holy Mystery, the Source from which all comes and into which all goes.

Conclusion

As we begin our retreat, I urge you thus to welcome this weekend as a time when we can reconnect with the original wellspring of our whole Christian lives and our vocations as Julians, this elusive sense of a truer realm or dimension beyond the mere historical, a realm where Julian found that we are knit everlastingly to the bliss and peace of God, God’s joy, forever. My sense is that our ability to extend Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love into our world begins with our ability to reclaim this depth dimension of our lives, and to learn ways to make every more frequent and lasting contact with it.

.    .     .

Meditation Two

In our last meditation we reflected on Julian and our basic experience of God, an experience which involves touching on a depth of reality in ourselves which is timeless. Perhaps it is wiser to say that this depth touches us. Our awareness is opened to its and our full reality. This opening of awareness is the descent of the Holy Spirit upon us. And, as Julian would say, while our experience of the world of time is true, when we are made aware of reality on this eternal level, we are in touch with something far more true. We experience this is as wholeness, one-ness, and peace, as being able to say yes to what is.

For this meditation, I would like to reflect on Julian’s and our response to this experience, how we change our lives so as to be to live in a way resonant with this deeper and more true reality.

Julian’s Anchorhold as Limited Space: Rule of Life and Disciplined Prayer

We know very little about Julian, but we do know that part of her response to her experience of God in her showings was to adopt the life of an anchorite at St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, near King Street. For Julian, spending the rest of her life as an anchorite was the best possible way for her to live into the truth of what she had been opened to.

Other people have different charisms. Saint Francis of Assisi adopted the life of a mendicant after his experience, as did Eckhart Tolle, whom I quoted yesterday. The examples of Saint Teresa of Avila in her reform of her Order, or Saint Edith Stein in her contemplation and martyrdom, or of Mother Teresa at her work in Calcutta also all come to mind. But our patron responded to her sense of God by becoming an anchorite. There are a couple of points to this that I would like to draw out.

The first, most basic thing about an anchorhold is that it is a limited and protected space set apart from worldly activities, even good and holy worldly activity. To become an anchorite Julian withdrew from the life she had in the world and entered the limited and sacred space of the anchorhold, the meaning of which is not a loathing of the world, or despair, but an open heart seeking to attend in greater purity on the mystery of God. If we can take her Revelations as a guide, we can judge that for Julian entering the anchorhold was not done as penance, but in order to surrender herself more fully to God’s joy in our salvation. She sought to give herself away to the bliss of the Trinity that she had become strangely aware of.

Responding to our own experience of God we follow Julian, if not into a literal anchorhold, then into the metaphorical anchorhold of a religious life lived and limited by a spiritual rule.  Our spiritual rules of life, and especially the hours of prayer specified by them, are the metaphorical anchorholds that we withdraw into, just as Julian withdrew into her cell. Our metaphorical anchorholds protect and enclose us and allow us to give ourselves more freely to our desire for God. Our spiritual rule and hour of prayer signify our need, arising out of God’s action in us, to withdraw periodically from worldliness into a limited and protected space where we are able to turn our whole attention to the Mystery of God’s union with us.

For the monks and nuns of the Order of Julian, this adoption of a spiritual rule in terms of a monastic vocation means leaving one’s old life, renouncing the possibilities of a career and a family, and beginning life anew in one of our monastic houses. Our oblates and associates don’t do this, but find their anchorhold in the keeping of a spiritual rule of life that involves periodic  retreat from their worldly commitments for the sake of prayer. Whether we are in a monastery or not, all of us in OJN make it a practice to put down all our worldly engagements — all the things of time — at certain times of the day, to go into our inner closet and to pray to our Father in secret, and to whom we are already bound in a timeless knitting of joy. We pray morning and evening prayer, we sit in contemplative silence, we meditate on scripture with the God who is all. In the little anchorholds we make for ourselves by our disciplined living of a Rule, we attend on the God who has so wounded our hearts to the Mystery of What Is. This living by a spiritual rule and praying at certain hours every day is part of the core monastic  ethos of OJN, and corresponds directly to Julian’s choice to become an anchorite.  In Julian’s spirit, we respond to our experience of God by taking up a ruled life — that is, a bounded and limited life like life in an anchorhold — the point of which is neither escape nor despair, but presence to God.

Julian’s Anchorhold as Liminal Space: the Sacrament of the Present Moment

The anchorhold, as well as being a well-defined space of withdrawal from the world is also a liminal space. The term ’liminal’ in its origin refers to a doorway or threshold and signifies the transitional space between two rooms or places.  It can also mean being on both sides of a boundary at once. It has become common to express this same idea in terms of the Celtic idea of the thin place, a place or personality in which the barrier between earth and heaven has been rubbed so thin by prayer and love that the light of heaven already shines through the earthly reality like sunlight in a windowpane. The anchorhold and the anchorite had just this kind of liminal quality — they were characterized by a peculiar holiness and presence. 

Some years ago the Bishop of Norwich, Bishop Graham James, spoke at our annual JulianFest, and he reminded our community that part of the rite of the enclosure of an anchorite in her cell involved a full Requiem Mass being celebrated over her — while she is still alive. Perhaps this strikes us as morbid. It most certainly would be a very interesting experience. But interesting or morbid, the rite is saying that the anchorite, while still alive, has already died and is present to heavenly reality. Nothing could be more profound.

Julian herself would not have found this strange at all. Remember that her Revelations begin with a near-death illness and that the whole course of the showings happens while Julian has drifted up into that strange realm between this life and the next. When I was 12 my father became ill with terminal cancer, and I spent everyday his last summer with him at his Hospice unit, where I made friends with the other patients. That whole summer I was bathed in what I call ’hospice light.’ This is the odd light that shines through liminal places and persons who have drifted half out of this world and are already in some way in the next. The whole of Julian’s Revelations radiates, for me, this hospice light.  Julian herself offers thoughts that directly convey the shimmering and strange beauty of this kind of experience. She writes, “Notwithstanding all our feeling, woe or well, God wills that we understand and believe that we exist more truly in heaven than on earth.“ [LESSON OF LOVE.. 55] A few chapters later she writes, “God wills that while the soul is in the body, it seems to itself that it is always at the moment of being taken.“ [LESSON OF LOVE.. 64]

All through this life we feel ourselves in some strange, hidden way to be always just at the moment of being taken, always on the edge of slipping out of time into eternity, out of our usual worldly preoccupations into the joy that God has in us. An anchorhold is an outward structure and a social position perfect for a person who sees and feels in this way. It is a space that is already have taken up into God.

As non-anchorites, we can ask ourselves how we live into this aspect of Julian’s response to God. How do we make it our own? To this I can only offer a very personal answer, but one which has a great deal of power for many people.

All through religious traditions and sapiential literature the world over, I find a single refrain, and that is the counsel to be present to the present moment. Be here now.  Julian expresses something of this in her discussion of prayer, when she says, oddly enough, that “… we ought to pray with gratitude for the deed that is now being done — and that is to pray that He rule us and guide us to His honor in this life, and bring us to His bliss —and for that He has done everything. What He intends is this: that we understand that He does everything, and that we pray for that.“ [Lesson of Love. 42] What God intends is that we understand that He does everything, and that we pray for that.!

God is in all things, and doing all things, and we are to pray for that. This is really a Christian way of talking about being present to the present moment as an occasion of union with God. Jean Pierre de Caussade called this famously the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Every moment is a sacrament, a gift of God.  It is baptism and eucharist, marriage, ordination, and absolution.  In being present to the Now, we are present to all of reality as it is. The French spiritual school of the 17th century was very keen on this idea, and we find traces of it in almost every saint’s life. We find it as well among the Buddhists and Sufis and our Hindu sisters and brothers.

For us to become liminal people with Mother Julian, thin people through whose lives the light of heaven wonderful shines, does not mean for us to be preoccupied with future state. Rather, we realize this by being here and now in the present moment as our deepest act of devotion and love and prayer and surrender to the God who is all.

The Present Moment is, in other words, the thinnest of thin places. It is, like Julian’s anchorhold, uniquely open to the timeless life of God. If the terminally ill radiate hospice light, it is only because the dying process has drawn them into a place of having nothing except the present moment. The Present Moment is our anchorhold. Not the future nor the past, but the absolute zero hour of the now is where eternity intersects time.

Conclusion

     Men’s curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

the point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

     For most of us there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight

Or the waterfall, or the music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. …

        “These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”

[The Four Quartets. Dry Salvages, §5]

T.S. Eliot wrote those beautiful lines, and they summarize well what I have been reflecting on in this meditation. Julian responded to her new awareness of God by withdrawing from worldly preoccupations to take up an enclosed and limited life, directed to God, and a liminal place in her society. She lived always at the intersection of the timeless and the time, the occupation of the saint. She lived at the moment of being taken. For us, we have our hints and guesses, and our spiritual rules, our prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

As Julian’s spiritual daughters and sons, I invite you to take some time this afternoon to reflect on your Rule of Life, what your experience of it is, good or bad, and how you might approach it less as an obligation and more as a freedom to be who who know you already are. Also, reflect on your presence to the present moment. Are you lost in the future and the past? Are you lost in time? Might a reading and practice of the Sacrament of the Present Moment be what you are called to? Can you see how this presence to the Now would enable you to occupy that liminal or thin place of a person who is already half in touch with heaven, always at the moment of being taken, seeing that God does everything, and praying for that.

Blessed may God be, now and forever, amen.

.    .    .

Meditation Three

Introduction

Sisters and brothers, it is Saturday Evening, July 17th, 2005 and we are here at Begbroke Abbey in England.

In our last meditation we reflected on Julian’s response to her experience of God in terms of her taking up the life of an anchorite. I suggested that we live in Julian’s spirit when we respond to God by finding for ourselves metaphorical anchorholds in our spiritual rules of life and in our practice of the presence of God here and now.  Our lives are thus defined and directed towards God and are also a celebration of God in the present moment, the intersection of the timeless with time. The eternal Now is the only reality we have.

In her anchorhold, Julian wrote her Revelations of Divine Love in a process that spanned decades. We can only be grateful for the wonderful gift of her book. But even as we treasure her book, we are challenged by Julian herself to go beyond mere study of her Revelations. In the last chapter of the Revelations, she writes, “This book is begun by God’s gift and His grace, but it is not yet completed, as I see it. For the sake of love let us all pray together with God’s working — thanking, trusting, rejoicing, for thus would our good Lord be prayed to…Truly I saw and understood in our Lord’s meaning that He showed it because He wished to have it known more than it is, and in this knowledge He will give us grace to love Him and cleave to Him.“ [LESSON OF LOVE.. 86]

Julian understood her Revelations as given to all human beings so that we might know God’s love more and so love him and cleave to him more than we do. Moreover, in her understanding, her writing of the text is only the beginning of the book, only the beginning of the revelation that has yet to be completed.

The Order of Julian is a part, we are a part, of this action of completing. God began a work in Julian that lay mostly dormant for centuries, that was reborn to the world by the rediscovery of her book, that took on new life in the last half of the previous century, and which God is now extending through us into our Church and world. We are part of the completing of God’s revelation of divine love through Julian. We have been drawn into that divine script, that divine work, that beautiful grace and joy.

The affiliate program in the Order of Julian is not a mere add-on to our life, as if the Order of Julian were complete with its monks and nuns and we nicely condescended to allow people to affiliate with us. The affiliate program is essential to OJN. Without it, without you, we could not be OJN, we could not  complete the work that God has asked us to do. Yes, the Members Regular live very particular and defined lives at Julian and Llewelyn House, lives that seem somewhat strange in our world. But the Order is not just about the strange life that happens in our monastic houses. It is about God’s extension of Julian’s Revelations into our Church and world through the affiliate community, anchored in our monastic houses.

I began this weekend by listing off the many troubles that apparently face our Church. Us Episcopalians never quite know if we are still Anglican. The world is gripped in a kind of apocalyptic persecution of power and greed and a broad dehumanizing of life. We live in the midst of this. We are to be Julian’s Revelation of Divine Love in the midst of this. What might this look like, in everyday life?

The Challenge of the Present Moment

In her recounting of the third revelation, Julian tells us that she saw ’God in a point, ’ which is to say God in all things and doing all that is done. This is an extension and intensification of Julian’s vision of God creating, loving, and keeping of all things in her original vision of the creation as the size of a hazelnut.  Julian sees God in all things, doing all that is done, and suffusing all things with an unconditioned joy, an unconditioned ’yes.’ She writes, 

It is easy to understand that the best deed is well done, but just as well as the best and most exalted deed is done, so well is the least deed done…For there is no doer but He. I saw full certainly that He never changes His purpose in anything, nor ever shall, without end… He made everything in fullness of goodness, and therefore the Blessed Trinity is always completely pleased with all His works.

And all this He showed most blessedly, meaning this: “See, I am God. See, I am in everything. See, I do everything. See, I never lift my hands from my works, nor ever shall, without end. See, I lead everything to the end I ordained for it from without beginning by the same Power, Wisdom, and Love with which I made it.  How would anything be amiss?“ [Lesson of Love. 11]

Although she is expressing her insight in terms of the idea of providential ordering, I believe that what Julian is experiencing here is a sense, completely beyond human reason, of the joy of God suffusing all things, the blissful being of God as the being of all things. She notes in the course of this Showing that this is not the way human beings normally see or judge things. To us things seem quite amiss. But God presses home insistently this revelation from beyond human reason and perception, and Julian ends the showing with the words, “Thus powerfully, wisely, and lovingly was the soul tested in this vision.“

Julian is tested in this vision, wisely and lovingly, because it goes against what she herself can understand — this contradiction of human understanding in an invitation to divine joy being a major leitmotif of the Revelations as a whole. And she concludes, the she “saw truthfully that it was appropriate that I needs must assent with great reverence, rejoicing in God.“ She had to leave her human judgment behind in order to remain with God where God was.

Again and again through the Revelations Julian presents us with this theme: that God is rejoicing in all that is and especially in the redemption of humanity, and God is inviting us into this joy here and now. Indeed, in the second to last Chapter Julian describes heaven as precisely the state of being able to join God in the clarity and simplicity of this joy. She says:

I marveled greatly at this vision, for notwithstanding our stupid living and our blindness here, yet endlessly our gracious Lord looks upon us in this struggle, rejoicing. And of all things, we can please Him best by wisely and truly believing that, and rejoicing with Him and in Him. For as truly as we shall be in the bliss of God without end, praising Him and thanking Him, just as truly we have been in the foresight of God loved and known in His endless purpose from without beginning.

Therefore when the judgement is given and we are all brought up above, then shall we clearly see in God the secrets which are now hidden from us. Then shall none of us be moved to say in any way: “Lord, if it had been thus-and-so, then it would have been all well“; but we shall say all in one voice: “Lord, blessed mayest Thou be! Because it is as it is; it is well. [Lesson of Love. 85]

To be a part of God’s work in extending Julian’s Revelations through our world, means to live with a two-fold vision. This is not a splitting of normal human vision into two parts, but the emergence of a whole new level of human perception and experience, an emergence that Julian herself describes in her Revelations and which grace can bring about in our lives. On one level, what Julian calls ’human deem,’ we live in the world with its evils and failings. We do not blind ourselves to this in any way. We see what is here. But transcending this normal perception of good and bad, little and big, we also share in God’s deem, God’s vision and judgment and joy that runs through all and in all. Thus while I am present to what is there in front of me, which may be a tragic situation, I am also present, indeed more present to the gift and judgment and presence of God in all things.

It is I think impossible to explain rationally how this can be so. We can’t think our way to, “Because it is as it is, it is well!” or use human judgment to arrive at God’s way of seeing. We can’t argue or deduce a way to this kind of affirmation, and it is futile to try. The more we do, Julian suggests pointedly, the farther we slip from the truth. She tells us that God “has pity and compassion on us because some creatures make themselves so busy about His secrets; and I am certain if we were aware of how much we would please Him and ease ourselves by abandoning that, we would.” [Lesson of Love. 30]

The more I have lived with this part of Julian, which is at the heart of her Revelations, the more I believe that it involves an intentional suspension of our habitual mental world, our habit of making judgments about things. This suspension of our judging faculty allows us to be present to what is here and now in the present moment. To talk again of the present moment returns a little to the last meditation, but I am hard pressed to think of a more important demand in the spiritual life. God is present to us not in our mental world of past memory’s or future expectations, but only in the present Now.  Eternity intersects our lives in the present moment, not in the inner, imaginary worlds we make of old experiences or future hopes. The idea is to be present to eternity which is being present to the Now. For Julian, this means being able to accept and enter into God’s joy in our creation and redemption in Jesus, a joy which is eternal reality.  Julian invites us to a way of life where we are to walk in present moment as a sacrament, as filled with the bliss of God’s creative and redeeming action. To do this, however, we have to learn how to silence our busy judging, thinking, and desiring faculties so as to be actually here with what is happening in our lives. Yes, we have our human judging and seeing and thinking, but beyond that we also live directly present in God’s reality.

This is something that we can each of us discover for ourselves. If we learn the discipline of laying aside our thinking and judging minds and inner cravings so as to be totally present to what is — and what else is this but contemplative prayer — we discover that the present moment does in a strange way contain all things, heaven as well as earth.

As I prepared for this talk, I began to wonder if my affiliates were going to think me a little beyond the pale for airing these thoughts. But I took heart when I remembered that my discovery of these ideas in Julian matches up with other great spiritual masters like Jean Pierre de Caussade or  Madame Guyon, but especially with John of the Cross. What is the basic meaning of John of the Cross’ Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night except that we actively learn and passively suffer a silencing of all our faculties so that we can learn how to be with God in God’s limitless and blissful Now? How the moment we think we are seeing something intelligible or grasping something, we have lost God? John writes about the bliss of the spiritual freedom that Julian calls us to so eloquently in his Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love.  

The Place of Jesus

For us as Christians, Jesus is central to this whole process of our spiritual. What I understand from Julian is that what keeps us out of the present moment is our wrathfulness, which is to say our habit of hurling negative judgments at ourselves, at others, at reality, and at God. God is peace and love, but we are not. God is all yes, but we are a mixture of yes and no. The spiritual life for Julian is largely a movement of having our inner wrathfulness slaked by God, by mercy, so that we can in fact be all yes, be present in the present moment and be with God where God is, rather than withdrawing ourselves into a isolated chamber of negation.

I saw full certainly that all our endless friendship, our place, our life, and our being is in God, because that same endless goodness that keeps us that we perish not when we sin, that same endless goodness continually negotiates in us a peace against our wrath and our contrary falling, and with a true fear makes us see our need strongly to seek unto God in order to have forgiveness with a grace-filled desire for our salvation. We may not be blissfully saved until we are truly in peace and in love, for that is our salvation…”

But we are not blissfully safe in possessing our endless joy until we are wholly in peace and in love — that is to say, fully gratified with God and with all His works and with all His judgements, and loving and peaceable with ourselves and with our fellow Christians and with all that God loves, as love pleases. And this God’s goodness carries out in us. Thus I saw that God is our true peace and He is our sure keeper when we are ourselves unpeaceful, and He continually works to bring us into endless peace. [Lesson of Love. 49]

Jesus is central to this process because in the life of Jesus and his presence in the Church we discover the outward symbols and teachings that effectively create peace in us, by making us aware of our wrath, our vengefulness, and so able to offer these to God. The person of Jesus, meditated to us through story, image, liturgy, and metaphor presents us with the historical gift of absolute love and humility. This alone has the power to slake our resentment and to bring us to peace, to cure us of our instinctive grasping for violence. The inward gift of the Holy Spirit and the outward revelation of God in Jesus enable us to let go of our wrathfulness, our negative spirit and enter reborn into the Kingdom of God, the present moment.

Conclusion

To conclude, I imagine that a Julian in our world could walk in the midst of chaos and conflict and suffering and not herself be made chaotic or conflicted. Even her suffering would be made part of her appreciation of union with God in the present. A Julian would be able to walk into any situation knowing that God’s redemptive joy is suffused through that situation, as every moment of time is intersected by Eternity. Moreover, the actions of this Julian would not primarily flow from her own thinking or judging or desiring, but from the gift of God in the present. Her presence would open the dimension of the eternal in what people experience only as the oppressive burden and distracting chaos of trying to get what you want through time.

Julian wrote so beautifully of love, and we are part of the completion of what she wrote. This is what God wants us to be. Just as she was challenged by God, so we are challenged by her constant invitation that what pleases God most, the most delightful thing for God, is for us to be able to join him in his joy in us and all that is, in the resounding, blissful, eternal ’yes’ that God is.  And, I would add, we have no way of doing this except through Jesus healing our wrath by his witness to love, and by the gift of the Spirit, here and now, opening us to the full depth of the present moment.

(c) 2005 The Order of Julian of Norwich.