Will everything really be OK?: the spirituality of Julian of Norwich

Commonweal, Feb 27, 1998 by Frederick C. Bauerschmidt

Certain of Julian's characteristic themes - her understanding of Christ as mother, her constant reaffirmation that "all shall be well," her understanding of sin as a kind of sickness that afflicts us - seem a natural fit for modern therapeutic spirituality. But the therapy Julian offers is a radical one that challenges conventional therapeutic pieties of holiness as wholeness and salvation as self-actualization.

Julian's claim that "all shall be well" clearly has a ready appeal for an age of anxiety like our own. And her notion of Christ as mother would seem to speak not only to feminist understandings of God but more broadly of a God who seeks our welfare. God makes all things well because God has a tender, feminine side. Beyond this, we discover in Julian a notion with great cultural resonance: sin understood not as a matter of deliberate fault, but as a sickness. What we are in need of is not so much forgiveness but healing. In particular, we need to be healed of the idea that God is angry with us, and that we need somehow to obtain his forgiveness. Julian recognizes that this understanding of sin is at odds with the teachings of the church as she had learned them, but she stubbornly refuses to abandon it.

Viewed in this way, Julian seems to be a prophetic model of our culture's own approach to spirituality. The God who promises that "all shall be well" is seen as an avuncular figure who exists to supply our spiritual needs, a God who would never condemn someone to eternal punishment. Jesus our Mother is both an archetype of the Great Mother (thus valorizing women's spirituality) and an icon of nonjudgmental, unconditional acceptance. Sin, from God's perspective, is no big deal; from our perspective it is a big deal, but only inasmuch as we have not yet learned the art of self-forgiveness. Finally, religious institutions, while valuable as sources of symbol and ritual, tend to be retrograde and overly concerned with sin, perhaps as a ploy to gain power. Read in this way, Julian appears a perfect saint for our times which aspire to be therapeutic, anti-institutional, and postpatriarchal.

This perspective on Julian may account for some of her current popularity. But I would argue that that is not what attracts many modern people to Julian's writings. For Julian's Christ is not without his cross. Her visions, for the most part, are closely associated with a physical crucifix that stands before her face. She sees the crucified body bleed copious amounts of blood, sees his face discolored by death, the skin of his corpse "small-rimpled [i.e., shriveled] with a tanned color, like a dry board." In short, Julian sees Jesus transformed from a person into a lifeless thing. And seeing this, she is filled with pain.

The Jesus of Julian's revelation is not the Jesus of feel-good religiosity. It is Jesus the Lord of creation brought low to share in the suffering of creatures. The promise that "all shall be well" is not a promise that God is planning to relieve us of pain in this life. It is the paradoxical promise that the union of our sufferings with the suffering of Christ will somehow prove redemptive. This "all shall be well" is not a promise of "recovery" but of survival. "He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be...afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome." The crucified Jesus thus remains the central icon of Julian's revelation, and even when she receives revelations about the Resurrection or the triune godhead or the bliss of heaven, these never supplant the image of the Cross. Julian's own prayer is inextricably bound to the historical humanity of Jesus. She seeks no love except the love of Jesus, a love that led him - and promises to lead her - to the Cross. Thus, Julian's seemingly comforting message that "all shall be well" turns out to be the disturbing message that we are called to share in the compassion-unto-death of Jesus. And this is good news, since it grows out of the understanding that God views us, and our sinful condition, in the mirror of Jesus and his loving obedience. Our identity, both as individuals and as the human race, are literally "knit" into the saving person of Jesus.

What Julian offers is nothing less than a radical therapy for our damaged selves. Whereas the presumption of modern therapeutic spirituality is that we will "get better," that our goal is "wellness," Julian's presumption is that we will never get "better" until we enter into the bliss of heaven. And yet, paradoxically, everything is already "better." Dorothy Day summarized Julian's teachings by saying "the worst has happened and been repaired," meaning that the true tragedy of the human race is not this or that fall of mine but the primal falling of Adam, which has already been restored in Christ. Julian depicts God speaking to us and saying, "For since I have made well the most harm, then it is my will that thou know thereby that I shall make well all that is less." Yet this restoration does not nullify the real pain and sin into which we fall. Julian writes, "we have in us, for the time of this life, a marvelous mingling both of weal and woe: we have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen, [and] we have in us the wretchedness and the mischief of Adam's falling, dying."