Trusting her experience

Daring and passionate thought is not the province of modern writers alone. Jane William introduces Julian of Norwich, Britain’s first female author.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A statue of a Medieval women wearing a headscarf, and holding a book inscribed: revelation of divine love.o

Julian of Norwich, sculpted by David Holgate, Norwich Cathedral.

Poliphilo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Julian of Norwich doesn’t seem to tick many boxes as an ‘influencer’, but her (yes her!) quietly revolutionary theology has had an impact that would probably startle her considerably. For example, TS Eliot quotes her in Little Gidding as he explores the delicate and unexpected grounds of hope. Julian’s striking mixture of confidence and hiddenness lend themselves well to Eliot’s meditative poem.

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.

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.

She spent the rest of her life pondering what she had experienced, interrogating it for meaning, going back to God to ask for further clarification.

Julian also has a lot to teach us about what to do with our experience of God. On first reading, it seems that she is wholly experiential in her approach, but then we discover that she spent the rest of her life pondering what she had experienced, interrogating it for meaning, going back to God to ask for further clarification. The longer version of her manuscript was probably written twenty years after she first received the visions. She trusted her experience, but she also thought she needed to work at it and be patient with it and dig more deeply into what it meant.

What I really want to do now is quote all my favourite bits of her book, The Revelations of Divine Love, but that would be a spoiler. Read her for yourself, but don’t be lulled by her gentle, narrative voice into missing her theological daring and passion.

Worry: bug or feature of our lives?

The ancient root of common or garden worrying.

Andy Hood

Andy is a vicar-in-training in Durham.

A woman rubs her face in worry, while siting at a screen.

Vasilis Caravitis on Unsplash.

Climate change, smartphones, a loss of social cohesion: these are just some of the potential culprits for an oft-discussed, much worried about, anxiety epidemic. But what if our worries can’t be fully explained by any particular feature of the modern age? What if worry is in fact an ancient problem that afflicted the first century no less than the twenty-first? What would that mean for how we should respond?

I’m not a psychologist, or a social scientist, but I am a common or garden worrier. And worry worms its way into my life through the gap between responsibility and control.

I first encountered this at work. As someone who organised events, I felt responsible (and would be held responsible) for how many people signed up. But I soon came to the painful realisation that I didn’t control how many people signed up. I had responsibility but not control - and worry wormed its way in through that gap. And that didn’t seem fair to me - it seemed like a “bug” that should be fixed. Maybe my bosses just needed to relax a bit. That way my responsibility would shrink to match my control. Or maybe I needed better comms, better marketing - some way of making sure people came. That way my control would expand to match my responsibility. Either way, the gap between responsibility and control should be eliminated somehow.

And then I had kids - three of them. As a dad I am responsible for my children. But I am not in control of them - sometimes I can barely get them to eat their tea. And so worry worms its way in - through that gap between responsibility and control. But I began to realise that when it comes to my kids, I just can’t close the gap and I shouldn’t even try. To abdicate responsibility or to seek control are just two different flavours of failure. The gap between them isn’t a bug in the code of life, it’s a feature. It’s part of being human, and so human flourishing means learning to live well with, even in, that gap. But how?

In the earliest record we have of Christians trying to explain themselves, a book of the Bible called (confusingly) Acts, we follow Paul, convert to Christianity, to Athens, the cultural capital of the ancient world. And there he meets people different from us in almost every way… except that like us they are worriers. And they are worried because they feel responsible for something they can’t control. Paul finds an altar with this inscription “to an unknown god”. What makes people erect an altar to an unknown god? The worry that worms its way in between responsibility and control. We’re not sure if we know about all the gods - we’re not in control. But that god we don’t know about might hold us responsible. So let’s try to close the gap by erecting an altar to a god we don’t even know.

Paul offers a better solution - to them and to us. He’s invited to give a speech to the leaders figures of Athens, but he doesn’t present his audience with a more sophisticated technique for closing the gap between responsibility and control. Rather, he introduces them to his God, to the truth that allows us to flourish in that gap. This God, Paul says, marks out the appointed times and places of all people: that is, he is in control of all things. This God, Paul says, wants everyone to seek him and find him: that is, he wants the best for all people. This God, Paul says, doesn’t need anything from us: that is, our responsibility is his invitation to be part of what he’s doing in the world. Know this God, trust this God, Paul says, and you can see the gap between responsibility and control as a feature of life and not a bug. You can flourish in and not worry about the gap.

But how does that work in the midst of tea-time tantrums and the day-to-day worries of life? Well for me, on a good day, it works a bit like this. When I’m confronted with the reality of quite how much is beyond my control, I’m not faced with chaos. I’m just faced with the fact that I’m not God, but God is - and nothing is beyond his control. And the God who is in control when I’m not loves my kids more than I do, better than I do. And he doesn’t need me. He’s not delegated responsibility for my kids to me because he’s too busy to look after them himself. I’ve been given the responsibility of being their dad so I get to share in the joy of watching them grow into all they were made to be. The gap is still there - I’m really responsible and I’m really not in control. But maybe I’m ok with that.

There may well be certain features of the modern age that heighten our anxiety. But the people of first century Athens didn’t have smartphones or face climate change and they still worried. Because they felt responsible for something they didn’t control, just like we do. It’s an ancient problem, a feature not just of our culture, but of being human. And what if an ancient problem needs an ancient solution?

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