Sermon for the Diocese of Georgia for the Feast of Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich_DioGA Evening Prayer May 6, 2020 I first met Dame Julian of Norwich, whose feast we commemorate today, when I was a junior in college. I was an English major, and I was taking a class titled Medieval Visionary Literature. We had just slogged our way through Dante’s Inferno, when we finally began the refreshingly weird and wonderful unit on Medieval Women mystics. Julian of Norwich was born in 1342, placing her childhood in the middle of the Black Death/Bubonic Plague and its recurrences; her adolescence, in the midst of the Peasants’ Revolts; and her adulthood, witnessing the violent and bloody suppression of religious dissenters. It is believed that approximately one-third of the population of England may have succumbed to the plague, and in Norwich, the death toll may have been as high as one-half of the city’s 13,000 inhabitants. Towards her thirtieth birthday, Julian fell gravely ill and neared death. In her illness and subsequent miraculous recovery, she experienced the ‘Showings’ or visions of the Passion of Christ and of his mother, Mary. She recovered from the illness and wrote down this experience, which was also the first book written in English by a woman. She wrote two versions of this account, the shorter one soon after her recovery, and a longer version after a number of years had passed. Between the two, she requested to live adjacent to the Church of St. Julian as an anchorite – a person set apart for prayer in seclusion and contemplation. But we do know that she continued to offer spiritual direction and counsel to those who sought her out in her isolation. You can find quotes of Julian’s all over the internet, the most famous one being: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” But what really captured my imagination when I first encountered Julian of Norwich is how she referred to Jesus as our mother. In fact some scholars suggest that Julian is best known to us for her teachings on the motherhood of Christ. While the idea of the feminine face of the divine is not completely new to Julian (we can see it in the Isaiah passage for today and in other writings of the church), Julian takes the image beyond the usual stereotypes of the female or mother as “generative…and sacrificial,” “loving and tender,” and “nurturing”i I can remember being electrified as I read Julian’s words where she writes about Jesus as mother and how he cares for us daily: “In our spiritual birthing, he shows tenderness and care beyond any other mother in so much as our soul is of more value in his eyes. He kindles our understanding, he directs our ways, he eases our consciences, he comforts our soul, he lightens our heart and gives us, in part, knowledge and love of his blessed Godhead… If we fall, hastily he picks us up in his lovely embrace and touches us graciously… A mother may allow her child to fall sometimes and feel distress in various ways to be a lesson, but she will never, out of love, allow any kind of danger to come to her child. And though it is possible for our earthly mother to allow her child to perish, our heavenly mother Jesus will not allow us who are his children to die.”ii So, in this strange season, what does this mean for us to think about Jesus as our mother? How might that image feed and nurture us and give us hope? Even though not all of us have had the opportunity to be a mother, and some of us have not had the benefit of witnessing healthy mothering from our own birth mothers, I suspect that everyone can identify at least a few aspects of healthy motherhood. For me, motherhood means feeding people—my mother and my grandmother cooking for us or me cooking for my family. It means the way that the good mothers among us, both within the church and without, can help create a sense of belonging and offer nurture and care. It means delighting in the mystery of the other, in discovering hidden dimensions and talents. There is a demanding physicality to motherhood: whether it is in pregnancy and childbirth and nursing or in being climbed on like a jungle gym by a rambunctious toddler. Maternal love can be fiercely protective, and it acts as a tether to connect a mother to her children across time and space and even into and beyond death. What might it mean for you to think about Jesus as mother this week? Does it make you feel safe, uncomfortable? Think about what you need right now? What kind of nurture can Jesus offer you? Do you need to be fed? Do you need to find a safe place to rest? Do you need to belong? Do you need to have the space to test boundaries, to realize your potential, to fail or fall and be picked up again? Do you need to feel tethered, anchored to one who is greater than yourself, grounded and rooted in unconditional love? I’d like to close with Julian’s own words in the conclusion of her longer work, after which she has had 15 years to ponder the vision given to her by our Lord in her illness. May her vision be a gift and a comfort to us all during these trying days: “It was more than 15 years ago that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else-ever!’ So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting….”iii i.From Caroline Bynum Jesus as Mother (Berkley and Los Angeles: U of California Press, 1982) p 131 ii.Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 61 iii.Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 86