Mother Julian
May is the month in which the Anglican Church commemorates Mother Julian of Norwich and her book The Revelations of Divine Love, often called The Showings as well.
For a work written in the fourteenth century in Chaucerian English by a female recluse about whom we know next to nothing, the Showings enjoys a remarkable world-wide influence in the twentieth century - an influence all the more remarkable when you realise that very few had even heard of the work or its author until a generation or so ago.
The Showings is not exactly an easy read, even when translated into modern English, but nevertheless the work is just full of the insights and wisdom for which so many are looking at the present day - including the Vicar of Caversham! Thomas Merton, one of the greatest spiritual masters of our age (and the son of a Christchurch artist living in Europe) described Mother Julian as one of the two greatest English theologians (the other being Cardinal Newman - a strange lapse of judgment on Merton’s part, but you can’t win them all).
The Showings conveys a number of key ideas which modern readers have found particularly helpful. Ideas such as that Christ is our true Mother; that there is no wrath in God; that in each of us there is a godly will that never consents to what is bad; that God never blames us when we sin, but feels sorry for us instead - and so on.
But to me reading (and re-reading) the Showings in recent months, Mother Julian’s teaching on prayer has been the most helpful of all. Only last Sunday the Gospel at the Sung Eucharist had the words If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. It sounds to me all too much like the rather acid remark of the man who said he didn’t believe in a God who found parking places for Pentecostals but left Ethiopia to starve!
According the Mother Julian the Lord said to her I am the ground of your praying. First, it is my will that you should have this. Then I make it your will, too. Then I make you ask for it, and you ask. How then should you not have what you pray for? Julian herself goes on to remark For everything our good Lord makes us pray for, he has ordained that we should have since before time began...By this we can see that God’s goodness is not caused by our praying.
According to Julian’s account, prayer is the way in which we become one with God, rather than the way by which we persuade God to do something other than that which he originally intended. She says Our prayer makes God glad and happy. He wants it and waits for it so that, by his grace, he can make us like him in condition as we are by creation. God goes on to assure Julian (and us) by saying Pray inwardly, even though you feel no joy in it. For it does good, even though you feel nothing, see nothing - yes, even thou you think you cannot pray. When you are dry and empty, sick and weak, your prayers please me - though there is little enough to please you. All believing prayer is precious to me. Julian says that Because of the reward and endless thanks he longs to give us in return, he is avid for our prayers continually.
According to The Showings God wants us to see the good work he is always doing, and to pray that it will be done, because he wants to make us his partner in good deeds. In fact, the whole purpose of prayer is to learn to love and trust our Maker and to seek his help in conforming our wills to his, so that we can become one with him and share his life and joy for all eternity. Prayer joins the soul to God says Mother Julian, and I for one find that helps me make sense of last Sunday’s Gospel. For if I am joined to God, part of the true Vine Jesus Christ, then what I ask will be in accordance with his will, and I will be taking my part in the fulfilment of God’s loving purposes for small things as much as great ones.
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