Meet Dame Julian
Julian of Norwich—not her given name—was born c. 1343. According to her own account, in May 1373, when she was “thirty and a half years old,” she became very sick. As she lay dying, she had a series of fifteen “showings” (“shewings”) or revelations about God, the Trinity, the crucified Jesus, and the life of the Christ-follower. These showings took place over a period of eleven hours, after which Julian recovered miraculously and completely. The following day she had a sixteenth and final showing.
After this experience, Julian became one of the most celebrated anchoresses of the medieval period. So she was devoted to a solitary life, but “anchored” in the world rather than living behind walls. Like the desert ascetics, anchoresses led lives of austerity, but they lived in cities rather than in the desert. Julian lived in an enclosed cell attached to St. Julian’s church, hence the name by which she was and is called. (Were you wondering why a female had a man’s name? Did you wonder why “Red” the name of the protagonist in my last novel, False Positive, was a nickname for Julian?)
Julian devoted herself to prayer, meditation, and offering spiritual counsel to anyone who sought it. And over a period that spanned twenty years, living in the square-mile walled city of Norwich, the second city in England at the time, Julian recorded two versions of her experiences. The first and shorter version she wrote shortly after it happened in 1373. The second, considerably longer, she wrote about twenty years later after years of thinking about her experiences. The complete record of her showings and their interpretations she titled, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393). And her tone throughout is optimistic, as can be seen in her most well-known statement, made famous by T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
That is some serious theology, if you think about it.
Counter-cultural when compared with prevailing views at the time (think plague), Julian’s belief was that suffering was not God’s punishment. Instead it was a means of drawing people closer to Himself. Despite such unconventional thinking, even in her own day, Julian was perhaps the most famous female teacher of the nature of the Trinity and Christ’s mediating role.
Julian’s Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, known today as Revelations of Divine Love, was the first English book known to be written by a woman. While such an accomplishment may seem of major significance in our time when English is an international trade language, in the fourteenth century such would not have been the case. In Julian’s day English was merely a local dialect. Latin was the language of the communicators, but women were disallowed from learning the language of trade.
Yet now, separated as we are by more than six hundred years and thousands of miles, Julian communicates to me this week. As I’m in the middle of a secular degree program on a secular campus writing an eat-my-lunch paper on T. S. Eliot, I’m amazed to find myself pondering deep Trinitarian theology.
All shall be well. “Even so...”