Posts Tagged ‘Julian’

Six hours, stretched in the sun, yes.

{ April 23, 2009 @ 9:22 pm } · { personal reflection, political }
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Tonight I was fortunate to encounter a poem that I think must be shared.  It is an excerpt of Denise Levertov’s poem, “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX.”

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,/ hot wood, the nails, blood trickling/into the eyes, yes—/ but the thieves on their neighbor crosses/ survived till after the soldiers/ had come to fracture their legs, or longer./ Why single out this agony? What’s/ a mere six hours?/ Torture then, torture now,/ the same, the pain’s the same,/ immemorial branding iron,/ electric prod.

Hasn’t a child/ dazed in the hospital ward they reserve/ for the most abused, known worse?/ This air we’re breathing,/ these very clouds, ephemeral billows/ languid upon the sky’s/ moody ocean, we share/ with women and men who’ve held out/ days and weeks on the rack—/ and in the ancient dust of the world/ what particles/ of the long tormented,/ what ashes.

I have been hearing and reading, over and over like a relentless beating of waves against a shoreline, the revelations about torture coming out in our headlines.  Torture isn’t new, and the story isn’t “hot” because people, men and boys we have been taught and learned too well to fear, are being hurt and killed in the name of our country… we know this happens and simply choose to ignore it.  But these names and faces, often blacked out or covered in hoods, chests naked, tension and terror evident in the rigid lines of their arms strung behind their backs… these names and faces keep emerging during my daily reflections.  Pictures of young, white American soldiers sitting cross-legged on the backs of Iraqi men straining under their weight against cold concrete floors, being dragged across rooms, bent over tables.  Torture then, torture now, the same, the pain’s the same. Levertov’s poem has made me ask, once again, “Who is it that is uniquely Jesus among us right now?”  It is these men.  It is these boys.  He is an Iraqi terror suspect.  He is in Gitmo.  He has been breathing that air, the rancid air of men and women holding out on the rack, in the water tank, naked on a box in a cell without access to an attorney or family, he has been.  And if we do not listen to his voice and use our ears to hear, he will continue.

For another reflection on art and torture, view this waterboard torture memo set to music.

Reading Julian, knowing all will be well.

{ April 23, 2009 @ 2:43 pm } · { personal reflection }
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dame-julian-of-norwich-21

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.

To listen to this half-hour podcast, click here or follow the link at the top of this post.

You’re not naked.

{ April 3, 2009 @ 8:23 am } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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Things come together.  They just do.  Yesterday morning, catching up on my feed reader, I was happy to see that one of my favorite blogs had posted #512: Thinking You’re Naked.  Oh, good title, I thought.  Then I read it (go ahead, you read it, then come back.  I’ll wait.)

And was thrown to the floor.  I needed to hear it, shared it with friends, found that they, too, desperately needed those words.  Who told you you’re naked?  So the day before, writing about sin and suffering for my Julian of Norwich class, I had read this passage from her Showings, “I saw that [God] is everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us.”  Who told you that you’re naked?  Who?

The last year or so has been one of learning about sin.  I’ve always been pretty good, as we all are perhaps, at noticing other people’s sin.  By sin, I mean the ways in which they are *obviously* not in alignment with who I think God wants them to be… right? Nah.  More likely, with who I think I want them to be.  But, writing this paper, exploring, diving, drowning in Julian’s words of comfort and courageous challenge, I came to some understanding of what I’ve struggled with this year.  A heart-knowledge, not a head one.  For the first time, I felt like I was really worth something despite my faults, my errors, my intentional mistakes and unintentional hurts.  My sins against myself and the damage I have inflicted on others.
I read this:  “And so, in all this contemplation it seemed to me that it was necessary to see and to know that we are sinners and commit many evil deeds which we ought to forsake, and leave many good deeds undone which we ought to do, so that we deserve pain, blame, and wrath.”  Um, yeah.  That’s about right, I thought.  I’m unworthy, I’ll never get there, I’m not enough… I’ve got to admit as much as I hate the word, I’m a sinner alright.  And don’t we, when we’re “bad” deserve to be punished?  Don’t people, doesn’t God, have full justification for being terribly angry with us when we’re wrong?
Except, I kept reading (always a mistake): “And despite all this, I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be.  Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry… God is that goodness which cannot be angry, for God is nothing but goodness.”
Uh, what?  I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t compute with… well, what I want to be true.  Is that weird, not to want God to be that good, that loving, that generous?  If God is, then I have to let go of some things, some stuff I’ve been carrying around that I’ve gotten pretty used to over time.  It’s gotten fitted to me, like an old coat or a familiar hat.  Except it seems that Julian, and God through her, are telling me that those aren’t the clothes I’m supposed to be wearing.  I’ve put on the wrong stuff.  Not only have I thought that I was naked, in seeing myself that way, I’ve tried to cover myself inappropriately.  Maybe I’ve been protecting myself from God’s anger, putting on what amounts to spiritual chainmail, when God wants me to wrap myself in God’s own warm, loving arms.  We all do it.  But whoever told you that you’re naked, and whatever you’ve done to try to hide it, know this: God is our clothing and our shelter, and will never desert us, no matter how naked we feel.

Most courteously and most tenderly.

{ March 20, 2009 @ 2:08 pm } · { Eucharist, personal reflection, spirituality }
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I’ve been submersed during the last month or so  in the writings of the 14th century English mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich as part of a class I’m taking about her life and spirituality.  Every week as part of class, our professor opens a half hour for us to meditate through art on a passage related to our learning.  A few weeks ago, armed with my sketchbook and some borrowed crayons, I showed up to this late evening class feeling raw and open-nerved after a fourteen hour day, an emotionally difficult weekend, and heaviness in my heart.  I rolled my eyes and felt a sinking pit in my stomach when I read the two prompts for meditation: one was about Julian’s vision of the bleeding Christ on the cross and the other was about mothers.  I was unprepared on all levels to think about either my suffering Lord or his relationship to mothering, parenting, provision.  In a word, I was feeling oppositional.

But, I had to choose one, or sit in my uncomfortable chair with my arms crossed for the duration.  So I picked the second one, hoping that some sort of lovely feminist vision would come to me, edging into my consciousness and having nothing at all to do with my recent struggles to understand myself within a larger matrix of the story of my own parents.

So, I read and reread Julian’s gentle words, “The mother can give of her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly…”  I thought about communion, and Jesus feeding us out of his own body.  I thought about the powerful experiences, at some times of total emptiness and at others of absolute peace and assurance, I’ve found eating at that table.  Finding sustenance there, despite my anger or doubt or conviction.  Then I read the rest of the meditation… “With what do you need Christ to feed you right now?”  Oh, no.  I very desperately didn’t want to reflect on that question.   But, actually, I didn’t have to.  I just began to color.  I need to engage some full disclosure here.  I have no artistic ability whatsoever.  None.  I appreciate beautiful things but don’t create them.  Especially with Crayola crayons.  But, keeping those words in my mind, “our precious Mother Jesus… feed you…,” here’s what came out:

Julian, Christ as Mother

I sat and watched myself draw this stunning, living woman, these gorgeous heavy breasts and tummy, this open posture and radiance.  And had no idea what the hell it meant.  But in order to honor Julian, you’ve got to sit with something for a while.  I mean, the woman had a vision of the Christ on the cross and meditated on it for twenty years before she wrote about it again.

My mother is not this image.  I don’t know this mother.  I know I want her to be mine.  What do I need Christ to feed me now?  This image tells me my heart is crying for comfort.  I want warm, luscious fullness.  Plenitude.  Her arms aren’t showing in the picture, but in my mind they’re plump and warm and full, and they’d probably fit right around me while I cry.  She’s peaceful, and that peace simply oozes out into the rest of the picture.  Christ is this woman.  He’s my mother.  I need one, right about now in my life, and this is the one I want.  Open, vulnerable, strong, and comforting.  Available, compassionate, and unafraid.  Thing is, I think I’ve got what I’ve been looking for.  It’s been there, in my heart, all along, just waiting for me to drop my defenses and pick up my yellow crayons.  I hope you find what Christ wants to feed you, too.  Amen.

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