Julian and Me 2 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

My life keeps cycling though the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. Or perhaps she keeps cycling through my life.

I don’t remember what first called her to my attention in the 1980s. But my copy of the Paulist Press version of Julian’s writings, published in 1978 as Showings (in The Classics of Western Spirituality series) is heavily annotated with my penciled marginalia.

Newly baptized at the time, I needed Julian’s vision of God’s overwhelming love for us, a love so powerful that it utterly redeems our human sinfulness. I needed, too, in those early years of the Women’s Movement, Julian’s vision of the motherhood of God and of Christ. Meditating on the Trinity, she writes, “God almighty is our loving Father, and God all wisdom is our loving Mother, with the love and the goodness of the Holy Spirit.” And Christ “is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall ever come.”

After I’d pondered every word of Julian’s visions, I tucked her away on my bookshelf. But about twenty years later, I was brought back to her by the poet Denise Levertov, someone else who cycles through my life periodically.

On that particular cycle, I was re-reading Levertov’s poetry chronologically. Soon after her conversion to Christianity (which came in the 1980s, coincidentally about the same time as mine), she turned to Julian as a mentor for her newly found faith: because Julian spoke about what had moved Levertov to Christianity—how God enters into the world’s suffering.

In Breathing the Water, Levertov’s 1987 collection, she includes a sequence of six poems on Julian called “The Showings.” They drew me back to Julian’s desire (which had puzzled me uneasily) to share in Christ’s Passion. Levertov’s reflection on this desire, so foreign to our modern sensibility, I found striking and helpful. “To desire wounds,” writes Levertov,

is audacity, not five centuries early, neurosis;
it’s the desire to enact metaphor, for flesh to make known
to intellect (as uttered song
                makes known to voice,
                as image to eye)
make known in bone and breath
(and not die) God’s agony.

And now Amy Frykholm’s remarkable “contemplative biography,” Julian of Norwich, just published by Paraclete Press, brings me back to Julian afresh. I first met Amy at a Glen Workshop a few years ago. Because I’ve followed her multi-faceted reporting for Christian Century ever since, I eagerly bought her book as soon as it appeared. And reading it has returned me to Julian yet again, this time in a newly transformative way.

Writing a biography of Julian poses special challenges, as few facts are available about Julian’s life. It is known that her visions came to her in May, 1373, when she was thirty years old, during a near-fatal illness, and that some time later she chose to seclude herself as an anchorite in the town of Norwich, England, until her death around 1416.

Copies of the two versions of Julian’s written meditations on her visions have come down to us. These meditations are rich in imagery and theological depth—but also full of mystery. How did an ordinary medieval woman acquire this theological learning (at a time when the Church was suspicious of women’s learning and against their writing)? How did she manage to learn to write at all, let alone in English (at a time when Latin was the written language in England)? How did she develop her insights into God’s foundational and unconditional love—at a time when the Church focused on human sinfulness and God’s wrath?

To answer questions like these, Frykholm takes a dual approach: research into daily life in fourteenth century Norwich, and imaginative entry into Julian’s inner life. With her reporter’s eye and ear and nose for the details of sight, sound, and smell, Frykholm paints vivid pictures of the streets that Julian would have walked through, the bustle outside her childhood home and later her anchorite’s cell:

Waking early to a morning mist, Julian would have heard the Angelus bell that signaled the end of the night watch. In the gray light, she heard the chatter of the first women on their way to draw water from the city wells, and the rattle and clang as butchers and blacksmiths welcomed first customers.... The noisy snuffles of pigs and lowing of cows filled the streets as children released animals from their pens and drove them out through the city gates to pasture (10).

From historical material like this, Frykholm takes imaginative leaps into how Julian might have spent her days, developed her yearnings, gained her knowledge. But these are not leaps in the dark; they are leaps in the light of a deep meditation on Julian’s own written meditations. With her empathic imagination, Frykholm re-creates a persuasive possibility for how Julian’s inner life felt and grew.

I, at least, am more than persuaded by it. I’m filled with gratitude for a new closeness to Julian’s extraordinary vision of “how sweetly and tenderly our Maker loveth us.”

Frykholm’s portrait of Julian will be controversial. Some scholars are sure that Julian was a nun (Frykholm thinks not). Frkykholm posits a husband and children and loss of them all in the plague; though not in the historical record, this would explain much about Julian’s preoccupations and imagery.

Frykholm’s biography is triply contemplative. Her subject, Julian, dedicated her life to contemplating the mysteries of the initial visions that God gave her on her sickbed. Frykholm then deeply contemplated Julian’s contemplations in order to enter into her spirit. And the biography invites a contemplative reading: scholarship is placed in the endnotes, leaving a text that is short and lusciously accessible, luring the reader into meditative pauses on every page.