Julian (1)

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Will everything really be OK?: the spirituality of Julian of Norwich

Commonweal, Feb 27, 1998 by Frederick C. Bauerschmidt

Certain of Julian's characteristic themes - her understanding of Christ as mother, her constant reaffirmation that "all shall be well," her understanding of sin as a kind of sickness that afflicts us - seem a natural fit for modern therapeutic spirituality. But the therapy Julian offers is a radical one that challenges conventional therapeutic pieties of holiness as wholeness and salvation as self-actualization.

Julian's claim that "all shall be well" clearly has a ready appeal for an age of anxiety like our own. And her notion of Christ as mother would seem to speak not only to feminist understandings of God but more broadly of a God who seeks our welfare. God makes all things well because God has a tender, feminine side. Beyond this, we discover in Julian a notion with great cultural resonance: sin understood not as a matter of deliberate fault, but as a sickness. What we are in need of is not so much forgiveness but healing. In particular, we need to be healed of the idea that God is angry with us, and that we need somehow to obtain his forgiveness. Julian recognizes that this understanding of sin is at odds with the teachings of the church as she had learned them, but she stubbornly refuses to abandon it.

Viewed in this way, Julian seems to be a prophetic model of our culture's own approach to spirituality. The God who promises that "all shall be well" is seen as an avuncular figure who exists to supply our spiritual needs, a God who would never condemn someone to eternal punishment. Jesus our Mother is both an archetype of the Great Mother (thus valorizing women's spirituality) and an icon of nonjudgmental, unconditional acceptance. Sin, from God's perspective, is no big deal; from our perspective it is a big deal, but only inasmuch as we have not yet learned the art of self-forgiveness. Finally, religious institutions, while valuable as sources of symbol and ritual, tend to be retrograde and overly concerned with sin, perhaps as a ploy to gain power. Read in this way, Julian appears a perfect saint for our times which aspire to be therapeutic, anti-institutional, and postpatriarchal.

This perspective on Julian may account for some of her current popularity. But I would argue that that is not what attracts many modern people to Julian's writings. For Julian's Christ is not without his cross. Her visions, for the most part, are closely associated with a physical crucifix that stands before her face. She sees the crucified body bleed copious amounts of blood, sees his face discolored by death, the skin of his corpse "small-rimpled [i.e., shriveled] with a tanned color, like a dry board." In short, Julian sees Jesus transformed from a person into a lifeless thing. And seeing this, she is filled with pain.

The Jesus of Julian's revelation is not the Jesus of feel-good religiosity. It is Jesus the Lord of creation brought low to share in the suffering of creatures. The promise that "all shall be well" is not a promise that God is planning to relieve us of pain in this life. It is the paradoxical promise that the union of our sufferings with the suffering of Christ will somehow prove redemptive. This "all shall be well" is not a promise of "recovery" but of survival. "He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be...afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome." The crucified Jesus thus remains the central icon of Julian's revelation, and even when she receives revelations about the Resurrection or the triune godhead or the bliss of heaven, these never supplant the image of the Cross. Julian's own prayer is inextricably bound to the historical humanity of Jesus. She seeks no love except the love of Jesus, a love that led him - and promises to lead her - to the Cross. Thus, Julian's seemingly comforting message that "all shall be well" turns out to be the disturbing message that we are called to share in the compassion-unto-death of Jesus. And this is good news, since it grows out of the understanding that God views us, and our sinful condition, in the mirror of Jesus and his loving obedience. Our identity, both as individuals and as the human race, are literally "knit" into the saving person of Jesus.

What Julian offers is nothing less than a radical therapy for our damaged selves. Whereas the presumption of modern therapeutic spirituality is that we will "get better," that our goal is "wellness," Julian's presumption is that we will never get "better" until we enter into the bliss of heaven. And yet, paradoxically, everything is already "better." Dorothy Day summarized Julian's teachings by saying "the worst has happened and been repaired," meaning that the true tragedy of the human race is not this or that fall of mine but the primal falling of Adam, which has already been restored in Christ. Julian depicts God speaking to us and saying, "For since I have made well the most harm, then it is my will that thou know thereby that I shall make well all that is less." Yet this restoration does not nullify the real pain and sin into which we fall. Julian writes, "we have in us, for the time of this life, a marvelous mingling both of weal and woe: we have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen, [and] we have in us the wretchedness and the mischief of Adam's falling, dying."

Julian's view of this "marvelous mingling of both weal and woe" is a major contribution of her thought. Much recent spirituality has encouraged us, and rightly so, to have a more positive understanding of embodiment. Unlike some of her medieval fellows, Julian shuns the association of embodiment with sinfulness, but she sees clearly what we may well ignore: embodiment entails risk. With regard to pain, great advances in medical technology tend to shield us from the fact that, being bodies, we must suffer. We have now come to the point that if anything goes wrong with our bodies, we anticipate they can and should be repaired. The result is a kind of technologizing of the body, an objectification of it. A gap opens up between "me" and "my body." This gap carries over into our moral lives, such that 'q" cannot be identified with the body that indulges its passions. Despite our valorization of the body, we have a deeply ingrained instrumental approach to embodiment. Julian will accept no such gap. The thoroughly embodied self is subject not only to broken legs, gluttony, and cancer, but to roving eyes and death in childbirth.

But, as Julian notes, we still "have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen." Our embodied existence is redeemed' through the embodiment of God in Christ. Thus our bodies - ourselves - so subject to pain and temptation and sorely in need of redemption, are nonetheless saved in the rising of Jesus. Even with our bodily weakness, this is the source of hope for us.

It is a commonplace among wise Christian teachers that our life in this world remains one of weal and woe. But Julian is unusual in claiming that it is not simply that we live in an alternation between the two, but that our lives are always completely of woe and completely of weal. The two exist simultaneously. In the midst of suffering and sin, we are intimately united with Jesus who suffers the effects of sin. For Julian this means that one cannot speak of stages of spiritual progress or measure where one stands on the "ladder of perfection." What we can know is that even in the depths of sin and suffering, we are deeply enfolded in the love of God. Not unlike Therese of Lisieux, Julian teaches not a way of perfection but what Simon Tugwell has called a "way of imperfection."

This is radical therapy for a therapeutic age. Julian's point is not "every day I'm getting better and better," or that "I'm good enough and smart enough and, doggone it, people like me." Rather she says "it behoveth us verily to see that of ourselves we are right nought but sin and wretchedness." A gloomy truth indeed, but at the same time God, "of His courtesy will not shew it to us but by the light of His grace and mercy." In other words, it is important to see our nothingness so that we can see ourselves properly as beings constituted simply by the love of the God who created us from nothing and who has redeemed us from the nothingness of evil. Our human attempts at self-esteem - whether they come in the form of a program for self-improvement or in therapies of self-acceptance - end up as bars to the realization of our true glory as creatures of the God "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Rom. 4:17).

Julian's therapy consists in what she calls "noughting" - a term that encompasses both suffering and sin, but also the stripping and purification of our desires, desiring nothing but God. Noughting is the path of discipleship, by which we follow Jesus who was "noughted" on the cross: "We shall be noughted following our Master, Jesus, till we be full purged." Yet this noughting is never simply the acceptance of woe. It is also, for those "with eyes to see and ears to hear," the acceptance of weal. For it unites us with God by stripping us of our desires for those things that, while good and beautiful in themselves, we deform by preferring them to God who is their source. Noughting is a therapy for our restless souls. It does not involve hatred of God's creatures, but simply a recognition of their littleness, and of our own, so as to love appropriately.

This therapy is not something that we must go far afield to find. Julian thinks that life itself will strip us if we let it, that our fragile, embodied existence brings with it its own penances. She recounts God telling her that "all thy living is penance-profitable." Our penance is to be found in the dimishments of everyday life: disappointments and failures, minor irritations and major betrayals, sickness, aging, and death. These things happen; they do not need to be sought out. Yet in these woes is also found our weal, in this sickness is found our cure, "and in the remedy He willeth that we rejoice."

As life strips us of all the things to which we have fastened our affections, we can come to see that "the remedy is that our Lord is with us, keeping and leading into the fulness of joy." On the cross, God too is stripped. He sees his offer of fullness of life in the kingdom rejected; God is betrayed by his friends, suffers excruciating pain, and dies. Even in our deepest noughting - especially in our deepest noughting - when everything is taken from us, God is still there. And just as God brings creation out of nothingness, so too God transforms nothingness into the fullness of joy.

Rather than seeing in Julian's current popularity another example of the trivialization of the Christian tradition by those who comb the world's religions for agreeable bits of spirituality, I believe Julian attracts because she teaches us things modern culture would have us deny. She teaches that life is painful, but can be borne with grace. She teaches that we will never find rest in the things of this world - whether material goods, goals, friends, or family - but that we can love them and love God through them if we can see them with God's own eyes. Finally, Julian teaches that even if we never achieve "wellness" in this life, still "all shall be well." We are drawn to her because we are drawn to the truth about ourselves, our world, and God.

Frederick C. Bauerschmidt teaches theology at Loyola College in Maryland.

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