Som nyligen utlovat kommer här ett gästinlägg om den medeltida mystikern Julian av Norwich.

Välkomna, alla, att reflektera över texten och ställa frågor till författaren som är expert på henne.

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You're very welcome as a guest writer on this blog, John-Julian OJN!

A short presentation of you should include saying that you are the founder of the Order of Julian of Norwich, and that you also translated her writings: A lesson of Love, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich.

I hope we may have an interesting discussion of the ideas of Julian in this posting...!

Feel free, everyone, to pose questions and to reflect on her view on the feminine aspects of God, sin, prayer, etc, after reading the posting about her below!

Here you may also read a poem (edited for a prayer book) by "Mother" Julian, also called "Lady" Julian.

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In 2006, when Katharine Jefferts Schorri, the newly elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached her first sermon in her new position, she included this passage:“…Colossians calls Jesus the firstborn of all creation, the firstborn from the dead. That sweaty, bloody, tear-stained labor of the cross bears new life. Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation -- and you and I are His children…”

As one might have anticipated, there was a great brouhaha about her use of the phrase “…Our mother Jesus…”. She was accused of heresy, of radical feminism, of showing dishonor to the Gospel and the Lord. I, on the other hand, wrote to congratulate her on the use of that phrase – taken, as it was, from the writings of the great 14th century anchorite and mystic Julian of Norwich whose work I had translated from its original Middle English, and who had become the patroness of the monastic Order of Julian of Norwich founded in 1985. Those who criticized Bishop Katharine had only demonstrated their own ignorance of the venerable mystical traditions of the Christian Church.

So, who was this Julian of Norwich?

We know little for certain. She was a devout English woman (probably of the gentry or nobility) born in 1342, who, at the age of 30, was thought to be on her deathbed and was granted a series of sixteen visions of the crucified Lord. But she recovered and spent the last years of her life in a single cell attached to a parish church in England’s Norwich. That is, she became an anchorite, an enclosed hermit, a solitary recluse – considered then to be the highest and holiest life possible in medieval England. And, after twenty years of prayer and reflection, she wrote a book to describe and explicate her visions – the first book ever written by a woman in English – generally known as “The Revelations of Divine Love”.

Perhaps the very writing of that book was as radical a thing as any of the insights and ideas contained in it. Julian lived in the late Middle Ages when women were expected to be silent and submissive. Further, she presumed to write in the ordinary Middle English vernacular (which made her writing available to many literate but “uneducated” common people) at a time when all church writing was in Latin, and all other business in England was conducted in Norman French. Two later (16th century) complete manuscript copies of her book survive, along with several other fragments and an early (1670) printed version.

Julian’s first principle derived from the insights she received in her visions was the unqualified, endless, and absolute love of God for every human being – a love which by its very nature denied the existence of any wrath in God, and concluded that even the worst sin on a human’s part did not diminish that divine love. Sin, for Julian, “hath no subtaunce”. It is already forgiven by God -- even before it is committed. Her common metaphor for sin is “blindness” – the inability of the sinner to “see” the love, grace, and forgiveness offered by God. In a medieval church and culture that directed most of its attention to sin and the fear of divine punishment, this seemed a radical insight (although it was certainly not new with Julian). It still presents a challenge to much current religious thought which sees God primarily as a stern and uncompromising judge.

Julian’s metaphor which described Jesus/God as “mother” may be the most controversial aspect of her teaching, but she not only defends this by drawing extensive parallels between the actions of a mother and those of Jesus: birthing, nurturing, training, comforting, protecting. Julian certainly never saw Jesus as “female” (she always uses the masculine pronoun when referring to him!) but recognized that God and Jesus transcend the merely masculine or paternal. In fact, Julian suggests that what we call “mother love” originated in God and Jesus and is only imitated by our earthly mothers.

For Julian prayer is almost more a state-of-being than an activity. True prayer for Julian is usually and predictably “barren and dry” and seldom has any emotional component. It is mainly a “true, gracious, lasting intention of the soul” to be united to God and one with God’s will, and is to be undertaken with no eye on its earthly “benefits” or “results”. “Failure” in prayer for Julian is attributed to “our feeling, our foolishness”.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty for Julian is the apparent paradox between a perfectly loving God, on the one hand, and the existence and consequences of sin, on the other. She recognizes the tension between the insights granted in her visions and the strict and formal teachings of the Church on sin, purgatory, and hell, but Julian was willing to live with that unresolved tension – a quality which Thomas Merton claimed made her one of the two greatest English theologians Newman being the other).