It’s unusual to claim authority for someone whose name we don’t even know. She is almost certainly named after the church of St Julian in Norwich, in which she spent years, walled up so that she could see into church, and talk to people through a little window, but never leave. But her anonymity is part of what draws us to her now. She opens a window into a world where women were largely unheard and uncelebrated. We hear so few women’s voices from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – or indeed, for several centuries before and after. Julian tells us that she was ‘uneducated’, by which she probably meant that she didn’t read or write Latin, which was the cultured language of the day. Instead, she wrote what is probably the first book by a woman in English.
Her modesty about her educational background also gives her the freedom to write about God without having to worry about being theologically correct. She describes a series of visions that she received from God. She makes no claim for the doctrinal purity of what she understood, so she never got into trouble, despite the fact that she describes God’s attitude to us in ways that would not have met with approval by the Church authorities of her day. From what God showed her in her visions, although human sin and failure is real, it is not final, and God does not judge us for it, because it is already overcome through Jesus’ identification with us.
‘Sin is necessary, but all shall be well and all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’,
she writes. This is not blind optimism, but based on her experience of the character of God that she sees in Jesus. As far as Julian can see, Jesus doesn’t blame us for our sin. She isn’t necessarily assuming that everyone will be saved, but she is sure that God doesn’t seek to judge us.
She lived through the Black Death. Like so many of us now, she must have suffered bereavement; indeed, the visions she describes were shown to her while she lay on what everyone assumed was her own death bed. Some experts think she may have been widowed and lost children, because of the way in which she writes about Jesus’ maternal qualities. Her message of the invincible, trustworthy love of God is even more challenging against the background of fear, loss and death, and it springs from her encounter with the crucified Jesus. She tells us that as she lay dying, a priest held a crucifix before her eyes, and she saw the figure on the cross as real and in agony. But she also saw that Jesus hangs on the cross out of his own free will, so that no one can doubt the love of God. This act of suffering identification with us is the source of hope, Julian says, because both Jesus’ suffering and his victory over death are real.
