Revelations of Divine Love - Julian of Norwich

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turns our eyes from looking on her to looking with her on the Revelation of Divine Love.

      Yet surely in her we have also “a shewing”—a shewing of the same. She tells us little of her own story, and little is told us of her by any one else, but all through her recording of the Revelation the simple creature to whom it was made unconsciously shews herself, so that soon we come to know her with a pleasure that surely she would not think too “special” in its regard. (For she herself in speaking of Love makes note that the general does not exclude the special). Perhaps we are helped in this friendly acquaintanceship by those endearingly characteristic little formulas of speech disavowing any claim to dogmatic authority in the statements of her views of truth: those modest parentheses “as to my sight,” “as to mine understanding.” “Wisdom and truth and love,” the dower that she saw in the Gracious soul, were surely in the soul of this meek woman; but enclosing these gifts of nature and grace are qualities special to Julian: depth of passion, with quietness, order, and moderation; loyalty in faith, with clearest candour—“I believe… but this was not shewed me”—(xxxiii., lxxvii., lxxx.) pitifulness and sympathy, with hope and a blithe serenity; sound good sense with a little sparkle upon it—as of delicate humour (that crowning virtue of saints); and beneath all, above all, an exquisite tenderness that turns her speech to music. “I will lay thy Stones with fair Colours.”

      “Thou hast the dews of thy youth.” Hundreds of years have gone since that early morning in May when Julian thought she was dying and was “partly troubled” for she felt she was yet in youth and would gladly have served God more on earth with the gift of her days—hundreds of years since the time that her heart would fain have been told by special Shewing that “a certain creature I loved should continue in good living”—but still we have “mind” of her as “a gentle neighbour and of our knowing.” For those that love in simplicity are always young; and those that have had with the larger Vision of Love the gift of love’s passionate speech, to God or man, in word or form or deed, as treasure held—live yet on the earth, untouched by time, though their light is shining elsewhere for other sight.

      “From that time that the Revelation was shewed I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years afterwards and more, I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn other thing without end.”

      And if we, with no special shewing, might ask and, in trust of “spiritual understanding,” might answer more—asking to whom, and for whom was the Revelation shewed, we might answer: To one that loved; for all that would learn in love.

      “Ecco chi crescerà li nostri amort”!{12}

      “Here is one who shall increase our love.”

      Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

      Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

      Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

      PART II. THE MANNER OF THE BOOK

      As an hert desirith to the wellis of watris:

      so thou God, my soule desirith to thee….

      The Lord sent his merci in the day:

      and his song in the nyght.

      Ps. ‘Quemadmodum’; from the Prymer.

      WITHOUT any special study of the literature of Mysticism for purposes of comparison, in reading Julian’s book one is struck by a few characteristics wherein it differs from many other Mystical writings as well as by qualities that belong to most or all of that general designation.

      The silence of this book both as to preliminary ascetic exercises and as to ultimate visions of the Absolute, might be attributed to Julian’s being wholly concerned with giving, for comfort to all, that special sight of truth that came to her as the answer to her own need. She sets out not to teach methods of any kind for the gradual drawing near of man to God, but to record and shew forth a Revelation, granted once, of God’s actual nearness to the soul, and for this Revelation she herself had been prepared by the “stirring” of her conscience, her love and her understanding, in a word of her faith, even as she was in short time to be left “neither sign nor token,” but only the Revelation to hold “in faith.” Moreover, the means that in general she looks to for realising God’s nearness, in whatever measure or manner the revelation of it may come to any soul, is the immediate one of faith as a gift of nature and a grace from the Holy Ghost: faith leading by prayer, and effort of obedience, and teachableness of spirit, into actual experience of oneness with God. The natural and common heritage of love and faith is a theme that is dear to Julian: in her view, longing toward God is grounded in the love to Him that is native to the human heart, and this longing (painful through sin) as it is stirred by the Holy Spirit, who comes with Christ, is, in each naturally developed Christian, spontaneous and increasing;—“for the nearer we be to our bliss, the more we long after it” (xlvi., lxxii., lxxxi.). “This is the kinde [the natural] yernings of the soule by the touching of the Holy Ghost: God of Thy goodness give me Thyself: for Thou art now to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worshippe to Thee.” God is the first as well as the last: the soul begins as well as ends with God: begins by Nature, begins again by Mercy, and ends—yet “without end”—by Grace. Certainly on the way—the way of these three, by falling, by succour, by upraising—to the more perfect knowing of God that is the soul’s Fulfilment in Heaven, there is a less immediate knowledge to be gained through experience: “And if I aske anything that is lesse, ever me wantith,” for “It needyth us to have knoweing of the littlehede of creatures and to nowtyn all thing that is made, for to love and have God that is onmade.” But this knowing of the littleness of creatures comes to Julian first of all in a sight of the Goodness of God; “For [to] a soule that seith the Maker of all, all that is made semith full litil.” By the further beholding, indeed, of God as Maker and Preserver, that which has been rightly “noughted” as of no account, is seen to be also truly of much account. For that which was seen by the soul as so little that it seemed to be about to fall to nothing for littleness, is seen by the understanding to have “three properties”:—God made it, God loveth it, God keepeth it. Thus it is known as “great and large, fair and good”; “it lasteth, and ever shall, for God loveth it.”—Yet again the soul breaks away to its own, with the natural flight of a bird from its Autumn nest at the call of an unseen Spring to the far-off land that is nearer still than its nest, because it is in its heart. “But what is to me sothly [in verity] the Maker, the Keper and the Lover,—I cannot tell, for till I am Substantially oned [deeply united] to Him, I may never have full rest ne very blisse; that is to sey, that I be so festined to Him, that there is right nowte that is made betwix my God and me” (v., viii.). This “fastening” is all that in Julian’s book represents that needful process wherein the truth of asceticism has a part. It is not essentially a process of detaching the thought from created things of time—still less one of detaching the heart from created beings of eternity—but a process of more and more allowing and presenting the man to be fastened closely to God by means of the original longing of the soul, the influence of the Holy Ghost, and the discipline of life with its natural tribulations, which by their purifying serve to strengthen the affections that remaining pass through them. “But only in Thee I have all.” On the way this discovery of the soul at peace must needs be sometimes a word for exclusion, in parting and pressing onward from things that are made: in the end it is the welcome, all-inclusive. And Julian, notwithstanding her enclosure as a recluse, is one of those that, happy in nature and not too much hindered by conditions of life, possess for large use by the way the mystical peace of fulfilled possession through virtue of freedom from bondage to self. For it is by means of the tyranny of the “self,” regarding chiefly itself in its claims and enjoyments, that creature things can be intruded between the soul and God; and always, in some way, the meek inherit the earth. “All things are yours; and ye are Christ’s.”

      The

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