by Terra McDaniel

Julian of Norwich’s Showings has been food for my soul. I have needed spiritual mothers in addition to spiritual fathers to guide me. I need to know what they thought, what they wondered, how they lived. I need to know that they lived. I wonder if you do, too.

She was odd in many ways, at least to modern eyes. I’m an introvert but can’t fathom living as an anchoress. That level of isolation is hard to imagine. I can’t imagine spending a lifetime looking at the same walls and (perhaps) the same small square of garden instead of walking for miles when I feel like it.

And I can’t imagine praying for illness. I’m not convinced it was good she did. But I need her perspective as someone who survived a deadly pandemic with her faith and sanity intact. I need the ways she is a woman of her times with its different questions and frameworks. And I’m thankful that even though she denied being a teacher, calling herself “a woman, ignorant, weak and frail,” she was confident the revelations she’d received were from God and that her only choice was pass on their wisdom.^[1]

God as Father and Mother

Julian favored maternal images for God though she is by no means the only one who uses such language. The unknown author of the Odes of Solomon, Pseudo-Macarius, and Hildegard used similar imagery. And, in the Bible, God is described in both masculine and feminine terms (e.g. Deuteronomy 32:18; Isaiah 66:13; Hosea 13:8; Matthew 23.37).

Julian maintained that Jesus demonstrates his identity as Divine Mother by creating the world in community with the Trinity; in taking on our nature through the incarnation; by laboring as in childbearing in his Passion; by feeding us as with milk with the bread and wine of the New Covenant; by loving us well when we are young and disciplining us to help us grow up all because of his great love for us.^[2]

That idea of God as loving Mother and Father is also enfolded within the Biblical good shepherd narrative. In the ancient world, men didn’t typically preside in the kitchen. (Shocking, I know. What would that even be like?) That’s why when Abraham received angelic visitors, he welcomed them, offered them water to wash the dust off their travel-worn feet and selected a calf, asking Sarah to bake bread and a servant to prepare the roasted meat (Genesis 18:1-8).

So, when the 23^rd Psalm declares, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows,” God is performing a feminine role (23:5). Kenneth Bailey contends, “This inclusion of both male and female components in the “good shepherd psalm” disappears for a thousand years and then dramatically reappears in Jesus’ matching parables of the good shepherd and the good woman” (Luke 15:3-10).^[3]

In David’s Psalm, God as good hostess has prepared not merely an adequate meal but a lavish one with a cup refilled so often, it’s overflowing. And God does so even though the community will disapprove of the extravagance. These are the enemies present at the table. David was well acquainted with the ill will of his brothers, King Saul, and his own children (I Samuel 17:8; 18:10-11; 19:10-11; II Samuel 15:13-14). He is celebrating that God “demonstrates costly love…irrespective of who is watching.”^[4] This experience of being at tables under the gaze of enemies is not unlike what Jesus practiced when he was criticized by religious leaders for eating with the marginalized and vulnerable.

Julian understood the bread and wine of communion as a way that Jesus continued preparing a table for us, writing, “…our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with Himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament [Eucharist], which is the precious food of true life…”^[5] And even as she embraces the idea of Jesus as Divine Mother, she also recognizes that the Holy transcends gender, also referring to Jesus as our “brother and saviour.”^[6] Julian emphasized the unity of purpose and Lordship of the Trinity, contending “…God almighty is our loving Father, and God all wisdom is our loving Mother, with the love and the goodness of the Holy Spirit, which is all one God, one Lord.”^[7]

Sickness and Suffering

The idea that Julian longed for illness and prayed for it as if it would be a gift is certainly off-putting at first glance and frankly at a second one as well. She describes a “desire of my will to have by God’s gift a bodily sickness, and I wished it to be so severe that it might seem mortal, so that I should in that sickness receive all the rites which the Holy Church had to give me, whilst I myself should believe that I was dying…”^[8] I am not at all sure that is the sort of thing Jesus intended in his invitation to die daily or Paul meant by filling up what was lacking in Jesus’s suffering.

But after living through the Covid-19 global pandemic, I have fresh perspective on her prayer. Julian was born in the days of the Black Death in which Bubonic plague caused the death of between 76 and 200 million people. Her formative years would have been marked by calamity. She was around five years old at the beginning of the peak years of the plague began and around eight when the illness began to wane in ubiquity while remaining a menacing presence. She was thirty and a half years old when she experienced a life-threatening illness and her Divine vision.^[9] It was highly unusual for a woman that age to be unmarried in her day. It’s possible Julian was a widow. She may have lost children to the plague. Or maybe the disease left her orphaned and without traditional prospects for marriage and family. Without doubt, she would have witnessed death up close and have had an idea of the scale of loss of life in the world around her.

Maybe she thought a lot about Jesus as mother because it was a role she longed for. Perhaps it had to do with missing her own mother. Maybe she pondered illness because she was trying to make sense of the carnage around her. And there is no question that just as we carry the painful and disruptive experiences of our pandemic in our bodies and souls, she carried the weight of loss in hers. Trauma therapist Aundi Kolber counters the cliché ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ with the understanding that “What doesn’t kill us can actually make us isolated, traumatized, and deeply harmed if we don’t receive the support we need as we go through it.”^[10]

She explains that our nervous systems “highly prioritizes show over tell—or, to put it another way, lived stories over statements of fact” and that while words matter profoundly “if they are not grounded in something that feels true in our bodies, they won’t stick.”^[11] Maybe her wish for illness and the decades after her recovery spent pondering her vision were about the kind of holy restoration in body, soul, and spirit that can only come on the other side of honoring the depth of suffering and harm.

Whatever the case, her prayer is certainly a check on a tendency to paint life with God as being about health, wealth, or more and better consumption. Her desire was born of a deep love for Jesus and a desire to more fully identify with him. She prayed for a temporary sickness to more fully identify with his crucifixion. But she wasn’t a sadist. She didn’t enjoy pain, nor did she desire to always be sick. And afterward, she realized that God “…wants us to accept our tarrying and our suffering as lightly as we are able, and to count them as nothing” not because pain doesn’t matter but because we can trust God will deliver us in due time.^[12]

Love and Patience

I am merely beginning to delve into the depths of God’s love and grace that Julian plumbed. She pictured all creation as something as tiny as a hazelnut in God’s hand, sustained only because “…God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”^[13] She understood love as God’s central motive. She celebrated this but wondered about how suffering and sin fit into that framework.  And God revealed that because of great love, through grace, and by Jesus’ sacrifice, brokenness is somehow transformed into honor^[14] God answered her doubts by declaring, “I will make all things well, I shall make all things well, I may make all things well and I can make all things well; and you will see that yourself, that all things will be well.”^[15] That sounds like a God I want to know better. It sounds like the God I’ve met in the stories of the Bible and whose Spirit comforts me.

I have much more to learn from Julian and the Lord she knew (knows!?) so well. Meanwhile, I am relieved that God seems to be patient with distracted or slow students: “…I did not at once pay attention to this revelation. And our Lord very courteously waited until I was ready to attend…”^[16] Of all the riches of the wisdom of Mother Jesus, I continue to be most moved by patience and kindness like that. The kind that makes real and sustained wholeness possible. Kindness and trust that all will indeed be well someday sparks the only type of change that goes all the way down to our bones. In his paraphrase of Romans, Eugene Peterson said it this way: “God is kind, but he’s not soft. In kindness he takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life-change” (Romans 2:4, the Message).

If you want to continue savoring Julian’s wisdom, consider meditating on her words above about how all will be well. You could also spend a few moments on what she wrote about Jesus as loving Parent through creation, incarnation, and in making all things new, noticing what is for you today in her words. What aspects of divine parenting are you most drawn to? Which feel more distant?

“I understand three ways of contemplating motherhood in God. The first is the foundation of our nature’s creation; the second is His taking of our nature, where the motherhood of grace begins; the third is the motherhood at work. And in that, by the same grace, everything is penetrated, in length and in breadth, in height and in depth without end…”^[17]

Perhaps you’d like to consider how a spiritual director might be a trusted guide who could accompany you on your journey of faith. If you’d like to have a conversation with us to explore what this might look like, please contact us and we will follow up with you. Contact us here: Soul of the Shepherd.

^[1] Julian of Norwich, Showings (trans. Edmund Colledge, OSA and James Walsh, SJ), (Mahwah: Paulist Press (1978)), 135.

^[2] Ibid, 298-301.

^[3] Bailey, Kenneth, The Good Shepherd: A Thousand Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014), 57.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Julian of Norwich, in Invitation to Christian Spirituality, John R. Tyson, ed, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 195.

^[6] Ibid, 293.

^[7] Ibid, 293.

^[8] Ibid, 126.

^[9] Ibid, 177, 179.

^[10] Kolber, Audi, Strong Like Water (Carol Stream, Tyndale (2023), 5.

^[11] Ibid, 49, emphasis in original.

^[12] Julian of Norwich, in Invitation to Christian Spirituality, John R. Tyson, ed, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 161.

^[13] Ibid, 130.

^[14] Ibid, 154.

^[15] Ibid, 151.

^[16] Ibid, 153.

^[17] Julian of Norwich, in Invitation to Christian Spirituality, John R. Tyson, ed, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 194.