God 101: back to school with Julian of Norwich

Christian Century, August 28, 2002 by Roberta Bondi

FIND THE RETURN to school every fall very exciting. I like the start-up rituals. I still have to have new stuff--pens, notebooks, calendars, and of course new shoes. I am glad to see the faces of my friends and colleagues again and to hear what they have been doing since I saw them last. I love to see former students again and meet new students. I'm eager for classes to start. I haven't yet gotten behind on my paperwork and phone calls.

At the same time, there is always a certain amount of anxiety at this time of year. I worry about how I am going to allocate my time so that I can get everything done without killing myself. And I worry about whether, in the crush of the year's activities, I can preserve my soul. I know I am not the only one who feels such ambivalence about the start of a new year, or who wonders how to get through the year without losing one's soul, or one's faith, or one's intellectual integrity.

I have spent many months recently with Julian of Norwich, so let me relate what advice. I think she would give us. She would tell us first of all that what we need is God.

God? That may seem a vague and simple-minded answer. But even if we accept it, we still have to know what actual resources we need, and what to do with those resources in order to seek and find God.

Julian would assure us that these resources are ones we do not have to go out of our way to acquire. In fact, we have had them all along. They are the capacities which belong to the image of God in us. She calls these capacitiestruth, wisdom and delight, and each corresponds to one of the persons of the Trinity. The capacity for truth "sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and of these two comes the third, and that is a marvelous delight in God, which is love....

   For God is endless supreme truth, endless supreme wisdom, endless love
   uncreated; and [our] soul is a creature in God which has the same
   properties ... And always it does what it was created for; it sees God and
   it contemplates God and it loves God.... [And] the brightness and clearness
   of truth and wisdom make [us] see and know that [we are] made for love, in
   which love God endlessly protects [us].

According to Julian, then, as beloved human beings created in the image of the Trinity, we already, right now, at this moment, have our resources for the year ahead: the capacities truly to see God who is the truth, to con-template God who is wisdom, and to delight in God who is love.

As for how we are to use these resources for seeking and finding God, I imagine Julian saying something like this: Get firmly in your mind that each of these three really does correspond to one of the three persons of the Trinity--truth, to God the Father; wisdom, the ancient Sophia, to the second person, who is God our Mother; and love to the Holy Spirit. This means that none of these three human capacities can operate independently from the others and remain what it is meant to be. None can ultimately be opposed to the other two, or be separated from them, or be subordinate or superior to them any more than we could ever encounter one member of the Trinity without the other two.

Having insisted on the unity of our capacities, Julian would, I imagine, go on to talk about how we can exercise them specifically for seeking, finding and loving God: Your first capacity, for seeing the truth, gives you the ability to encounter God directly, to come face to face with God, she might say. And I would add, you need to exercise it continually so that you don't forget that when you talk about God, you are talking about the one who is most fundamentally and deeply real. God is not a construct of the human mind any more than we are, and so cannot be reduced to anything we say about God.

Furthermore, unless you put yourself in the way of being encountered by the living God, rather than just thinking about God, or talking about God, or stating God's position with respect to various moral issues, your work will be in vain.

I think Julian would go on to admonish us in something like these terms: If you intend to encounter God who is the truth, you cannot do so without the daily practice of prayer, no matter how truncated or inadequate it may seem to you to be. If you don't already have such a practice, and you need help getting started, find help. If you do have one, let it evolve as it needs to evolve, but don't give it up. Don't forget, either, that Jesus said, "Where two or three are gathered, there I will be in the midst of them." Go to chapel regularly; participate in the sacraments. In regular worship you can certainly expect to encounter God who is truth.

But don't practice your prayer and worship as though they are somehow more sacred than or set apart from "ordinary life." God who is truth is the Creator who is truly present in all that is created, and in all people as their truest selves. Be quite certain, therefore, that when you truly encounter another human being and look with the eyes of wisdom and love you are not only seeing them in truth, you are truly seeing and meeting God in them. So pay attention, and never scorn or dismiss anybody as unimportant or unworthy of you.