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.

Heading Home: a pilgrimage that breaks out beauty along the way

We can learn a new language together as we travel.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A shaft of light from an opening in a dome lights a cross on a pedestal.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Kieran Dodds.

This film, this pilgrimage, this story begins in Jerusalem in the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its Aedicule, a small chapel, containing the tomb from which Jesus rose.

Jesus' resurrection was revolutionary because it is the first fruits of a wider resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth, the new Jerusalem, where all that is harmful on earth is transformed into eternal glory and beauty.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre holds that vision within its walls, a vision that was then transported throughout the world through pilgrimage and creatively replicated in other locations so that all who entered their local church or cathedral would be transported through art and architecture to the New Jerusalem.

US philanthropist and author Roberta Ahmanson thinks that American Protestants, in particular, have neglected this story because of the Reformation's preference for word over image. As a result, in 2022, she gathered an eclectic group of Christian college presidents, church pastors, and Christian creatives taking them on a pilgrimage from Jerusalem to London via Italy and Aachen while filming their responses to the visual history of the New Jerusalem as found in the churches they visit. In their two-week journey, the group cover almost 2,000 years of church art and architecture.

Ahmanson explains that this search for the reality of the Kingdom of God as it is to be realised in the New Jerusalem at the end of time did not mean that pilgrims were to abandon the world. On the contrary, she says, "their job was to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home where their ultimate citizenship lay." That remains the aim of this art and architecture as:

“By studying the nature of that promised place, as artists and architects and writers of the past have sought to express it, we are schooled to live lives of wholeness and beauty right here on earth. The longing for beauty is ultimately a longing to be Home, to be in the place where we are whole.”

The beauty of the churches visited on this pilgrimage provided a vision of the New Jerusalem to those who entered in order that they took that vision into their everyday lives when they left. Along the way, the pilgrims on this trip learnt how artists, architects and theologians worked in parallel for many centuries – from Saint Augustine’s vision of a New Jerusalem to Dante’s admonitions about the Last Judgment.

The film combines scenes of beautiful interiors with explanations of their significance from Ahmanson and others, plus it shows the reactions of various of the pilgrims as they allow their sense of wonder and understanding of Church history to be expanded. David and Joy Bailey, founders of Arrabon which cultivates Christian communities to pursue healing and reconciliation in a racially divided world, are two of those to have spoken about the impact the trip had on the group of pilgrims.

Joy said: “Everybody was very literate coming from these strong traditions of faith being either oral or written but to see it so visually impacting, it was breaking us all open and trying to find language for that took the entire trip.” David suggested that: “What the trip was helping you to see was this deeper rootedness, this long tradition that, I think, could actually be very helpful for us today because some of the things that were there were the understanding of humanity as plain on the outside and beauty on the inside, the glory that comes with the inward journey that reflects on Heaven as it is on Earth.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience

As we travel further from Jerusalem in the film, we are surprised to find that the template of the Holy Sepulchre continues to inspire and shape the experience of pilgrims. Ahmanson explains that: “In churches across the old Roman Empire, from Africa and Palestine to the furthest reaches of Britain, liturgy was created to tell the story and to bring the spaces alive in the telling. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and later to Rome and then to the tomb of Saint James in Spain became a kind of geographic liturgy. When the trip became too long or … too dangerous, believers found alternative destinations. Across the continent, from Magdeburg in Germany and Constance in Switzerland, to Bologna and Pisa in Italy and London and Cambridge in England, round churches or smaller models replicating the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became pilgrim destinations.”

Re-enacting, revisiting and reinhabiting Christ's journey to the cross and the meaning of his resurrection remains central to Christian experience, particularly during Lent and Holy Week. Walking labyrinths, Palm Sunday processions and Passion dramas, praying the Stations of the Cross, washing feet on Maundy Thursday, sharing a Passover meal, the Good Friday three-hour devotional, and the Dawn Eucharist on Easter Day are among the many ways Christians continue to follow in the footsteps of Jesus while remaining where they are during this most special season.

Many of these practices provide the opportunity to go on pilgrimage while remaining at home. Just as with images of the New Jerusalem brought from Jerusalem to the churches of Europe, so with, for example, the practice of praying the Stations of the Cross which originated in medieval Europe when pilgrims were unable to visit the Holy Land, so instead “visited” the Holy places through prayer.

The film, and other creative off-shoots including exhibitions of photographs from the pilgrimage taken by Kieran Dodds and performances by spoken word poet Street Hymns (one of the pilgrims), with his fellow poets Hanna Watson, Jasmine Sims, and Lo Alaman, in response to images of the New Jerusalem, provide viewers with a similar opportunity to experience, reflect and pray. The aim of all these initiatives is, as Ahmanson explains, what has always been the aim; “to serve this world to make it more like the heavenly home” where our ultimate citizenship lies, and to do so by “creating beauty in buildings and art and music and serving the suffering and those in all kinds of need”.

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