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anchorholdMost holy God, the ground of our beseeching,
who through your servant Julian
revealed the wonders of your love:
grant that as we are created in your nature
and restored by your grace,
our wills may be so made one with yours
that we may come to see you face to face
and gaze on you for ever;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Another collect where the liturgist has been having fun and/ or showing off...
May I speak in the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Tonight, as you will have gathered from the collect, we’re celebrating Julian of Norwich, mystic and writer, though her commemoration is actually tomorrow. Who was Julian? We do know slightly more about her than we do about, for example, Saints Philip and James, but that’s not saying much.
I can give you the facts quite quickly. She was born around 1342; she was still alive in 1416, because someone left her money, but after that the record falls silent. She was, it seems, at first a nun; later she became an anchoress, which is a form of the religious life which I suppose you might call ‘urban hermits’. Anchoress were women who had taken religious vows, and who were enclosed in little rooms at the side of churches, which they then never left; they usually had a little window into the church, with a good view of the altar, so they could see the elevation of the Host and take communion, and another window on to the wider world. Because although in one sense the anchoresses were totally isolated from the world, in another, they were deeply involved in it; not just through their prayers for the community, though those were deeply respected by those around them, but because they were sought after as advisers in spiritual matters. We know Julian did fulfil this role, because the “Book of Margery Kempe”, the rather strange autobiography of a brewer and pilgrim from King’s Lynn contains an account of Margery seeking out Julian’s advice. And she wrote a book, which describes a series of powerful visions of God, received during a near fatal illness, and her reflections on them, the product of quite a long period of thought.
Still: this isn’t a lecture on Middle English literature or late fourteenth century religious history, fascinating though both these subjects are, and you may well be wondering, what has that to do with us, with how we experience the world and how we experience God – or don’t?
The answer, of course, is to be found in Julian’s writings, which are extraordinary: profound, clear-eyed, full of love of God and of other people, and deep reflection on the nature of God and on God’s love and justice, which can sound surprisingly contemporary – though that’s more a reflection on our own arrogance towards people of the past than anything else.
There’s so much I could say about Julian’s theology that it’s hard to know where to begin. Probably the most important element of her thought is the emphasis she places on the love of God, as manifested in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ, and her hopefulness. Everything follows from this.
But perhaps a good point to begin with is that arresting phrase from the collect, that God is ‘the ground of our beseeching.’ ‘Ground’ here means more than just ‘the reason why we ask for things’, though that is implied too. Even to paraphrase it as ‘the basis of our longing’ makes it too distant; ‘ground’ here means what we are rooted in, what our desire is rooted in. It’s not just that we naturally need and long for God; it’s that this very longing is the result of our confused awareness that God is with us, though our fear and doubt and sin blinds us to him. Julian insists that “God is closer to us than our own soul” – because, she reasons, we could not exist, even for a fraction of a second, if God’s creative love did not give us that existence.
It’s for this reason that Julian makes such striking use of the image of God as mother: she writes “As truly as God is our father, God is our mother also”. It’s a misconception to think that the use of feminine imagery for God is an invention of modern liberal feminists; Julian is not being weird or eccentric. The idea of God or, in particular, Jesus as our mother is a perfectly respectable part of the mediaeval tradition, particularly in monastic literature – indeed, it occurs in some authors who are actually quite misogynist. There’s a long tradition behind this, relating in part to the interpretation of the Old Testament Wisdom literature, but that’s too complicated to explain now.
Julian, at any rate, is not adopting the imagery of motherhood because she thinks the imagery of fatherhood is bad; it’s just inadequate – as all images of God must be, on their own. There’s a risk, if we think of God purely as father, that we make him too distant; motherhood is much more intimate, more involved. Not because women are nicer than men, but because a mother by definition carries her child in her body during pregnancy. Julian’s thinking of a child being carried and brought to birth, brought to life in labour, in pain and sweat and blood – and in a joy in the child that makes the arduous process worthwhile. This is how Julian sees the Incarnation and Crucifixion, sees Christ’s redeeming work and in us.
She’s thinking, too, of how mothers, in breast-feeding their infants, feed them with themselves – as Christ feeds us with himself in the Eucharist.
This is, I think, a real and helpful insight of Julian’s; it draws attention to the fact that there is nothing grudging or reluctant about God’s love for us, about his wish that we be reconciled to him. Julian goes as far as to say that God does not blame us for our sins; he only wishes to heal us and cleanse us from them. There is, she says, no wrath in God.
Julian says she was disturbed by the fact that in her ‘showings’, she saw nothing of sin, or of God condemning the wicked. She concluded, ultimately, that this is because in the end sin itself has no reality – how can it be a real thing, since it is opposed to God – only the pain it causes, whether to others, or to the sinner himself is real. But God, who bears our pain can turn anything, even the worst anguish, to good, so that it becomes a source of joy. Thus, for Julian, the thing which we must most guard against is despair, the despair that won’t believe itself forgivable, that hides in terror of a wrathful God, and cannot see the hand which is outstretched in love and healing.
Too cosy? I don’t think so. Julian was well aware of the evil which we do to others, and to ourselves, and she was aware, too, of the way we can be trapped by the fallen, unjust world around us into being complicit with evil, almost without noticing it. And she was aware that redemption hurts – it hurt Christ, and the process of being redeemed can hurt us. Coming back to life is always painful. But Julian had a strong, robust faith in God’s love, and hope in his ability to restore, to reconcile justice with love.
It’s in this context that Julian makes the statement for which she’s most famous: you may well know it in the form that it’s often quoted, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ Out cold, it perhaps sounds a little banal. In context, it’s very powerful. Julian has been wrestling with the problem of sin – why does God allow injustice, why does he allow us to turn away from him, why does he allow us to hurt other people? It’s pointed out to her that sin, that falling, making mistakes, allows greater things to happen than would otherwise have been the case. And this is true, hard though it is to make sense of it: Oh happy fall, as is said of humanity’s fall into sin in the Exultet, the traditional Easter proclamation, oh happy fall that merited such a redemption. Because humanity, on its own, is broken, God heals us by becoming one of us.
And we can see it in our own lives: often it is through the mistakes, the things we’re not proud of, that we learn things about ourselves, and it’s only by perceiving the truth about ourselves – even if we don’t like it – that we can be freed to go forward with God.
But experience, in the cliché, is an expensive teacher, and the worst of it is, it’s often other people who pay for our mistakes. That’s true on a corporate level, too: how much of our privileges are based on the exploitation of other people’s misery? Julian, though she is hopeful, is not naïve; she knows there’s a price to be paid, and is baffled by how the sums can be made to add up, even in the divine economy.
So when she is told, and when she relays her message: ‘Sin is behovely – that is, necessary – but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’ it’s not suggesting that it doesn’t matter what we do; it’s acknowledging that we will fail – and, if we have faith, repent and do better. It’s an act of faith, of hope, of trust in the ability of God who brought life out of death in Christ to bring life out of death in the emotional, spiritual and physical wastelands of our lives, our church, our society.
It’s also a faith which cannot leave our lives unaffected. It was the faith which led Julian to her strange position in her cell, half marginal, half at the centre of things, and to write this book, which has had a success she couldn’t have imagined. One thing the lives of the saints and the history of the church does teach very clearly is that God brings things to fruit in strange and unexpected ways, which the person who began them may never see in their lifetime.
Which leaves one big question: where, if we dare to share that hope in the redeeming love of God, might it lead us?
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
who through your servant Julian
revealed the wonders of your love:
grant that as we are created in your nature
and restored by your grace,
our wills may be so made one with yours
that we may come to see you face to face
and gaze on you for ever;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Another collect where the liturgist has been having fun and/ or showing off...
May I speak in the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Tonight, as you will have gathered from the collect, we’re celebrating Julian of Norwich, mystic and writer, though her commemoration is actually tomorrow. Who was Julian? We do know slightly more about her than we do about, for example, Saints Philip and James, but that’s not saying much.
I can give you the facts quite quickly. She was born around 1342; she was still alive in 1416, because someone left her money, but after that the record falls silent. She was, it seems, at first a nun; later she became an anchoress, which is a form of the religious life which I suppose you might call ‘urban hermits’. Anchoress were women who had taken religious vows, and who were enclosed in little rooms at the side of churches, which they then never left; they usually had a little window into the church, with a good view of the altar, so they could see the elevation of the Host and take communion, and another window on to the wider world. Because although in one sense the anchoresses were totally isolated from the world, in another, they were deeply involved in it; not just through their prayers for the community, though those were deeply respected by those around them, but because they were sought after as advisers in spiritual matters. We know Julian did fulfil this role, because the “Book of Margery Kempe”, the rather strange autobiography of a brewer and pilgrim from King’s Lynn contains an account of Margery seeking out Julian’s advice. And she wrote a book, which describes a series of powerful visions of God, received during a near fatal illness, and her reflections on them, the product of quite a long period of thought.
Still: this isn’t a lecture on Middle English literature or late fourteenth century religious history, fascinating though both these subjects are, and you may well be wondering, what has that to do with us, with how we experience the world and how we experience God – or don’t?
The answer, of course, is to be found in Julian’s writings, which are extraordinary: profound, clear-eyed, full of love of God and of other people, and deep reflection on the nature of God and on God’s love and justice, which can sound surprisingly contemporary – though that’s more a reflection on our own arrogance towards people of the past than anything else.
There’s so much I could say about Julian’s theology that it’s hard to know where to begin. Probably the most important element of her thought is the emphasis she places on the love of God, as manifested in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ, and her hopefulness. Everything follows from this.
But perhaps a good point to begin with is that arresting phrase from the collect, that God is ‘the ground of our beseeching.’ ‘Ground’ here means more than just ‘the reason why we ask for things’, though that is implied too. Even to paraphrase it as ‘the basis of our longing’ makes it too distant; ‘ground’ here means what we are rooted in, what our desire is rooted in. It’s not just that we naturally need and long for God; it’s that this very longing is the result of our confused awareness that God is with us, though our fear and doubt and sin blinds us to him. Julian insists that “God is closer to us than our own soul” – because, she reasons, we could not exist, even for a fraction of a second, if God’s creative love did not give us that existence.
It’s for this reason that Julian makes such striking use of the image of God as mother: she writes “As truly as God is our father, God is our mother also”. It’s a misconception to think that the use of feminine imagery for God is an invention of modern liberal feminists; Julian is not being weird or eccentric. The idea of God or, in particular, Jesus as our mother is a perfectly respectable part of the mediaeval tradition, particularly in monastic literature – indeed, it occurs in some authors who are actually quite misogynist. There’s a long tradition behind this, relating in part to the interpretation of the Old Testament Wisdom literature, but that’s too complicated to explain now.
Julian, at any rate, is not adopting the imagery of motherhood because she thinks the imagery of fatherhood is bad; it’s just inadequate – as all images of God must be, on their own. There’s a risk, if we think of God purely as father, that we make him too distant; motherhood is much more intimate, more involved. Not because women are nicer than men, but because a mother by definition carries her child in her body during pregnancy. Julian’s thinking of a child being carried and brought to birth, brought to life in labour, in pain and sweat and blood – and in a joy in the child that makes the arduous process worthwhile. This is how Julian sees the Incarnation and Crucifixion, sees Christ’s redeeming work and in us.
She’s thinking, too, of how mothers, in breast-feeding their infants, feed them with themselves – as Christ feeds us with himself in the Eucharist.
This is, I think, a real and helpful insight of Julian’s; it draws attention to the fact that there is nothing grudging or reluctant about God’s love for us, about his wish that we be reconciled to him. Julian goes as far as to say that God does not blame us for our sins; he only wishes to heal us and cleanse us from them. There is, she says, no wrath in God.
Julian says she was disturbed by the fact that in her ‘showings’, she saw nothing of sin, or of God condemning the wicked. She concluded, ultimately, that this is because in the end sin itself has no reality – how can it be a real thing, since it is opposed to God – only the pain it causes, whether to others, or to the sinner himself is real. But God, who bears our pain can turn anything, even the worst anguish, to good, so that it becomes a source of joy. Thus, for Julian, the thing which we must most guard against is despair, the despair that won’t believe itself forgivable, that hides in terror of a wrathful God, and cannot see the hand which is outstretched in love and healing.
Too cosy? I don’t think so. Julian was well aware of the evil which we do to others, and to ourselves, and she was aware, too, of the way we can be trapped by the fallen, unjust world around us into being complicit with evil, almost without noticing it. And she was aware that redemption hurts – it hurt Christ, and the process of being redeemed can hurt us. Coming back to life is always painful. But Julian had a strong, robust faith in God’s love, and hope in his ability to restore, to reconcile justice with love.
It’s in this context that Julian makes the statement for which she’s most famous: you may well know it in the form that it’s often quoted, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ Out cold, it perhaps sounds a little banal. In context, it’s very powerful. Julian has been wrestling with the problem of sin – why does God allow injustice, why does he allow us to turn away from him, why does he allow us to hurt other people? It’s pointed out to her that sin, that falling, making mistakes, allows greater things to happen than would otherwise have been the case. And this is true, hard though it is to make sense of it: Oh happy fall, as is said of humanity’s fall into sin in the Exultet, the traditional Easter proclamation, oh happy fall that merited such a redemption. Because humanity, on its own, is broken, God heals us by becoming one of us.
And we can see it in our own lives: often it is through the mistakes, the things we’re not proud of, that we learn things about ourselves, and it’s only by perceiving the truth about ourselves – even if we don’t like it – that we can be freed to go forward with God.
But experience, in the cliché, is an expensive teacher, and the worst of it is, it’s often other people who pay for our mistakes. That’s true on a corporate level, too: how much of our privileges are based on the exploitation of other people’s misery? Julian, though she is hopeful, is not naïve; she knows there’s a price to be paid, and is baffled by how the sums can be made to add up, even in the divine economy.
So when she is told, and when she relays her message: ‘Sin is behovely – that is, necessary – but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’ it’s not suggesting that it doesn’t matter what we do; it’s acknowledging that we will fail – and, if we have faith, repent and do better. It’s an act of faith, of hope, of trust in the ability of God who brought life out of death in Christ to bring life out of death in the emotional, spiritual and physical wastelands of our lives, our church, our society.
It’s also a faith which cannot leave our lives unaffected. It was the faith which led Julian to her strange position in her cell, half marginal, half at the centre of things, and to write this book, which has had a success she couldn’t have imagined. One thing the lives of the saints and the history of the church does teach very clearly is that God brings things to fruit in strange and unexpected ways, which the person who began them may never see in their lifetime.
Which leaves one big question: where, if we dare to share that hope in the redeeming love of God, might it lead us?
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-25 10:04 pm (UTC)This entire sermon is lovely, moving and thought-provoking, but this passage in particular prompted me to think about God and about Christ's sacrifice in a way I never had before. Thank you for giving me a new perspective!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-25 11:35 pm (UTC)