The
approach of the first anniversary of last summer's riots has been marked by the
completion of the tallest building in Europe. It is a considerable irony that
one year after events which testified powerfully to the fractures which
disfigure our splintered city we have unveiled a mighty tower whose very name
is synonymous with fractures and splinters.
There
is a lazy way of preaching history traditionally favoured by High Churchmen
which treats the Reformation as the first great splintering of English life and
which treats everything which precedes it as a fracture-free, unified, and
harmonious whole. Yet the quickest glance at the late fourteenth century
exposes the shortcomings of this ideal. In those fifty years the Black Death
and the successive pandemics of plague that it spawned killed up to one half of
the population of this scepter'd isle. Fearful of the economic power that the
consequent shortage of labour handed to the rural poor the landowning barons
clamped down on their tenants' new aspirations, and clamped down hard. In
response the peasants marched on London. Their target was not trainers and
iPods but visible symbols of oppression and authority. The Savoy Palace was
burned, the Tower of London was attacked, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was
murdered.
Such
was the splintered world which gave birth to a golden age for English
mysticism. Death and unrest stalked the realm, but Margery Kempe and Richard
Rolle recorded their visions of God and their direct experience of the divine
in the newly-confident English tongue. So too did a woman who lived in an East
Anglian town grown prosperous through the wool trade. This woman was not
ordained; she belonged to no religious order; and she has never been declared a
saint; yet her book, the first to be written in English by a woman, has
informed the theology and prayer of the Church for six hundred years.
She
was an anchoress. She lived, bricked into a small cell built onto the wall of
the parish church. She is unnamed. Margery Kempe visited her and calls her the
Lady Julian, but Julian was the saint to which the parish church was dedicated.
Her identity has become indistinguishable from his. She suffered grave ill
health. It was while she believed she was dying that she received the visions
that were to determine the course of her life. She gave herself to prayer,
contemplation and spiritual counsel for over forty years. In response to the
fractures of her age she gave her life to her God; she surrendered her
identity; she experienced ill health as a point of visionary departure; and she
was faithful for decade after decade. Those scant biographical facts might
themselves be instructive for a generation that is manifestly confused by the
contemporary spectacle of societal splintering.
Julian's
visions are of the Passion of Jesus Christ, described with a gory frankness
that is quite shocking to modern readers. Yet these visions, soaked as they are
in Christ's blood, reveal for Julian not God's judgement or God's victory, but
only God's love. In a famous passage she is shown something as tiny as a
hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. 'This
is all that is made' God tells her, and she discerns that all that is made
has three properties: 'First, God had
made it: second, God loves it; and third, God keeps it'. This discernment,
that God has made all things, and that God loves all things, is the foundation
of her convictions.
She
sees clearly that there is no anger in God. 'It is utterly impossible that God should be wroth' she writes 'For wrath and friendship are two opposites.
He who wastes and destroys our wrath, making us meek and mild, must accordingly
ever be in the same love, meek and mild, which is contrary to wrath. For I saw
very clearly that where our Lord appears, there peace is established so that
wrath has no more place'.
And
these observations lead her to a very particular view of human sin. 'It has neither manner of substance nor part
of being' she writes 'and it would
not even be known save for the pain it causes'. Sin is not a foe to be vanquished
and driven from the world. Its reality consists only in its effects, perceived
by Julian as human pain. Sin has a purpose. It is not to catch human beings
out, trip them up or condemn them everlastingly. Sin hurts us, and these hurts
purge us and heal us. They make us know ourselves. And they are the cause of
the compassion Christ lavishes upon us, a compassion so overwhelming that
Julian is obliged to write of its origin in Christ our Mother. 'Our Saviour
is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born, yet we will never come out
of him'.
It
is this image of an eternally hospitable God that is Julian's gift to her
readers. It is perhaps no wonder that CS Lewis described her book as 'dangerous'. 'I'm glad I didn't read it much earlier' he wrote to his former
pupil Bede Griffith. If God is not to be compared to a double-crossing earthly
monarch such as Richard II, who betrayed his promises to Wat Tyler; if human
beings facing God are not in the same dire straits as human beings facing the
bubonic plague; then can any person can ever be safe from the divine love
revealed to Julian? The scandal of universal salvation beckons. It is this
theme that TS Eliot picks up as he quotes her best-remembered words:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
God
'the ground of our beseeching'.
London's newest landmark points proudly heavenwards from the ground on which it
is built. Julian reminds us that the ground upon which we are built is the
eternal love of God. That is a vision that may yet draw together even a
generation that clusters in the shadow of a Shard. Amen.
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