Something mysterious happens when I read Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Somehow, despite more than six hundred years and an ocean separating us, I hear her voice. Her visions, those vivid, living, sense- and image-drenched encounters with Jesus Christ, have a body of their own, and it finds its breath through Julian. Her voice, speaking them into existence at God’s urging, permeates the text. Sitting with her words, they reverberate through me as though she sits nearby, hand on my cheek, speaking directly to my life. That is one of the powers of Julian’s words: they are at once available to every person and personally transformative.
Because of this sense of Julian’s real presence in these texts, I wondered what it would be like to hear them read aloud. I imagined the way breath, time, and the rhythm of the human voice, a woman’s voice, would change the meaning and influence of the words. Indeed, it seemed to me that the Showings are only truly accessible when lined out into a less prosaic form, allowing Julian’s own pauses and inflections to bubble to the surface. Her text is musical, and so I have also set it to music, hoping that the setting will bring forward new meanings and opportunities for new meditation. As the first female writer in the English language, the fact and being of Julian’s language itself seems intrinsic to its meaning and purpose, and to ignore this significant fact misses some important aspect Julian’s reflections. They are, after all, not simply a sharing of unalloyed words from God, but filtered through twenty years of personal reflection from a very particular cultural and personal context. Julian as an individual, as a woman in 14th century Norwich, as an anchoress, as a survivor of a difficult political, economic, and social reality, as a representative of the Church, as a mystic… all of these parts of her personality influence the meaning of her words. They are personal, and meant for persons.
So many of these words focus on sin and salvation that I chose, in the spirit of Julian’s own concern with the very immediate pastoral dilemma of how we are to have hope in this world of obvious brokenness, to explore and choose texts for the reading that will guide us, her listeners, through a wandering in the wilderness toward the other side, to where all is well. We begin with sin, with pain and suffering. We end with the mystery of all being well, with God’s comfort, with not only the possibility of but the guarantee of God’s love, of healing and wholeness. Human beings find love in relationship. It is my hope that in hearing Julian’s words rather than merely reading them, we will be in relationship with her and feel the love she had for her “even Christians,” her fellows on the journey. More than that, I hope that through Julian’s words, set to music and read to us as a story, as though we were her children, we will know ourselves once again to be children of God, looking to our Mother Christ for comfort under Julian’s guidance.
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This morning after the dawn Ash Wednesday service, I looked around and saw this small group of people with whom I’d worshipped… I attended a local Episcopal church rather than my own because my schedule today doesn’t allow for going to an evening service, and honestly, I needed the heavy purple ritual, incense and dark wood, the early morning crispness, and the sense of being out of place. So, Lenten ashes and Eucharist in a new community. One of the things that I love about church is that, after years of finding myself drawn there and yet feeling entirely foreign to it, I am now at peace with the fact that actually no one feels totally comfortable anywhere. And we’re all just sort of wandering around hoping for a moment that makes sense and is beautiful and feels whole, is connected to something. So, I looked around and saw all of these strangers, people from my neighborhood who I had never met before, and seeing the dark smear of ashes on their foreheads, felt a surprising sense of home. The rector, a sweet-voiced woman who reminded me of someone I can’t quite place, talked about ashes and bread. The ashes remind us that we are human, she said. They tell us who we are. That we’re breakable. That we’re fragile. That we’re not God. But on Ash Wednesday, you can’t revel in the ashes. Rolling around in them, rending your garments, confessing your sin, these are all necessary and important, essential to recognizing yourself and your place in the human family. But it can not end there, even at the beginning of the Lenten season. The sharing of the Great Banquet in community with God and other people must follow. Crucifixion is meaningless without resurrection. Knowing who you are as a human being is nothing if you don’t know who God is. The bread and wine (and yes, I can say “wine” today, because it really was), they are evidence of who God is, has been, and will be. Knowing we’re broken doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if we don’t have hope for healing. This Lent, this forty days in the wilderness, it’s an opportunity for recognition… of our own failings, the things we do and leave undone… but I can’t forget that it leads somewhere, and that place is the other side of pain. God will show us the path through the desert, and guide us along it. When we fall down, it will be with God’s grace holding our elbows and lifting us up, pointing us back in the right direction. Because we’re humans, and not God, and that’s grace. You don’t have to do it alone, and it doesn’t have to look perfect. Even tomorrow, when the ashes have washed away, I’ll still be fragile. God will help me remember that, and remind me that God loves fragility because it allows space for God’s strength and gives me a reason to continue to search for home.
