2 Corinthians 1: 2-4

Blessed be the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, a gentle Father, the Mother of mercies and the God of all consolation, who comforts us in all our sorrows and affliction, so that we can offer others, in their sorrows and affliction, the consolation that we have received from God ourselves.

In 1373 Julian’s mother tended her daughter’s fevers and chills, aches and pains, called the priest for last rights, was sick and stayed by her daughter’s side. We know this because Julian survived to write about the vivid, multi-sensory experiences of God as she faces death.

“These revelations were shown to a simple, uneducated creature in the year of our Lord 1373, on the eighth day of May (42).”

She is 30 and a half years old to be exact, and she lives in a medieval Spiritual Landscape of devotion that centers Christ’s suffering and struggle. The Black Death has been ravaging Europe, the structures of feudalism and economic disparity abound and the patriarchal culture of the continent is even stronger in England. So we can imagine a people, making sense of their suffering, leaning into a suffering savior. But doing that in a way that doesn't glorify or justify “man-made” suffering is tricky.

This is the context where Julian’s voice will sing out a unique love song.

Norwich is a busy, big city. A center for trade and thus learning, spiritual reflection and profit. And economic powerhouse means fecundity in spiritual growth, which is probably an over the top way to say, they had a ton of churches. The language of commerce will influence the language Julian uses to understand her showings and she will spend her life working to understand what she saw.

She does this work as an Anchorite. This feature of medieval devotion may surprise us today as we try to imagine entering a cell or an enclosed space for a life of solitude, prayer and devotion to God. Julian’s cell had a view into the church. Julian enters this spiritual vocation and commitment after her visionary experience. She will spend her life grappling with the right words to express her visions, listening to worship, guiding the community that may approach her cell for help, mentoring other spiritual seekers and guessing from all of the images we have, loving cats.

She says she is uneducated, which could mean she is illiterate. It’s possible, teaching girls to read was frowned on in her day. But she and other women find a way to offer their unique voices into the spiritual landscape. Theological writing is done in Latin, the educated clergy and government officials do their work in Latin. It connects the educated across Europe, and while the everyday folks may be literate, it's not in Latin.

It’s clear to scholars that she isn’t literate in Latin or trained in the halls of academia because she doesn't sound like anyone else writing about God in the 1300’s. She isn’t trying to make theology an argument to win or impress anyone with her eloquence. She is humble and earnestly trying to understand and show people what she experienced in her visions because of a deep belief that it matters.

It matters because she reminded people then and now that the small and insignificant matter.

“In this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came to me. ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly have disappeared. And the answer in my mind was. ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties: first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God cares for it” (p 47).

Julian points to God’s love and sustaining presence through the small and ordinary, not the towering tree or vast sky with its far flung stars. She points to the love of the small through something from the ordinary kitchen. And reminds us all, past and present that if God loves a hazelnut, God loves us too.

While you snack on some Nutella and consider the sacred in the hazelnut, Julian’s roots in the medieval home frame the way she understands God. She names the divine in feminine terms. Which has always been a way to get in trouble or worse but Julian will use the M word, Mother. But she doesn't do it the most obvious way. She names Jesus, the most embodied member of the Christian trinity as Mother.

“I saw life in three parts, first we exist, second we grow and third we are completed. The first is nature, the second is mercy, the third is grace. As for the first I saw and understood that the great power of the Trinity is our father, and deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother and the great love of the Trinity is our lord, and we have all this by nature and in our essential being…And so our Mother, in whom our parts are kept unparted, works in us in various ways; for in our Mother, Christ, we profit and grow, in mercy he reforms and restores us, and through the power of his passion and his death and rising again, he united us to our essential being. This is how our Mother mercifully acts to all his children who are submissive and obedient to him” (p 138).

Julian names Christ as mother because she knows the world and work of mothers in her own context. Her own mother nursed her back to health, fed and nourished, cleaned and cared for her. She knows the struggle and suffering of motherhood and the ways mothers struggle alongside us in our suffering. Suffering is a path to identifying with Jesus in his suffering and struggle. In the introduction to Julian’s writings, A.C. Spearing writes “The medieval home was the place of birth and death, and the scene of an unending struggle against squalor and confusion; women’s tasks of feeding and cleansing and comforting demanded incessant labor and courage, demands from which men were shielded by the supposedly larger responsibilities of the pubic world” p xx).

Juilian will remind us all of what we already know, that the mother is the one you go to in pain and sadness. She will name that the mother suffers alongside you, hoping the best for you and when she talks about Christ crucified it will not be as a warrior martyr for an angry Father, but as an ordinary dish rag hung up to dry. She will call us to understand communion as Christ the mother feeding and nourishing us, how could this not be a fitting way to understand Christ?

Julian’s theology, though the medieval world didn’t permit her writing to be “theology,” is a Good God, a loving God. And this good loving God is summed up in what is possibly her most famous phrase. “All shall be well.” It may relate to the daily struggles and anxieties. But it is also Julian’s brilliant, simple way of saying I just don’t think a loving God would permit eternal damnation. “All shall be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well. And then the bliss of our motherhood in Christ will begin again in the joys of our God; a new beginning which will last without end, always beginning again. So I understood that all his blessed children who come from him by nature shall be brought back into him by grace” (p 147).

May Julian invite us to explore the beauty of the hazelnut, the love of the ones who struggle alongside us, the nourishment of the table and a love that makes all things well.

May it be so. Amen.

Ideas for reflection:

• Look at a hazelnut or any nut for that matter and ponder Julian’s words. (Maybe get some nutella while you do, I like it with a pretzel.)

• Look at pictures of someone who has mothered you (that does not have to be a biological mother, and mother does not have to be gendered), where do you see expressions of love. Write down the attributes that inspire you.

• “All shall be well.” What does that mean to you today in your own life? What does that mean to you when you think about it in the context of a theology and the notion of ‘damnation for some.”

I used Penguin Classics text, Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love Translated by Elizabeth Spearing with Introduction and notes by A. C. Spearing. However, there is a newer translation by Mirabai Starr you may want to consider if you want to read more.