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

Commonweal, Feb 27, 1998 by Frederick C. Bauerschmidt

Julian's view of this "marvelous mingling of both weal and woe" is a major contribution of her thought. Much recent spirituality has encouraged us, and rightly so, to have a more positive understanding of embodiment. Unlike some of her medieval fellows, Julian shuns the association of embodiment with sinfulness, but she sees clearly what we may well ignore: embodiment entails risk. With regard to pain, great advances in medical technology tend to shield us from the fact that, being bodies, we must suffer. We have now come to the point that if anything goes wrong with our bodies, we anticipate they can and should be repaired. The result is a kind of technologizing of the body, an objectification of it. A gap opens up between "me" and "my body." This gap carries over into our moral lives, such that 'q" cannot be identified with the body that indulges its passions. Despite our valorization of the body, we have a deeply ingrained instrumental approach to embodiment. Julian will accept no such gap. The thoroughly embodied self is subject not only to broken legs, gluttony, and cancer, but to roving eyes and death in childbirth.

But, as Julian notes, we still "have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen." Our embodied existence is redeemed' through the embodiment of God in Christ. Thus our bodies - ourselves - so subject to pain and temptation and sorely in need of redemption, are nonetheless saved in the rising of Jesus. Even with our bodily weakness, this is the source of hope for us.

It is a commonplace among wise Christian teachers that our life in this world remains one of weal and woe. But Julian is unusual in claiming that it is not simply that we live in an alternation between the two, but that our lives are always completely of woe and completely of weal. The two exist simultaneously. In the midst of suffering and sin, we are intimately united with Jesus who suffers the effects of sin. For Julian this means that one cannot speak of stages of spiritual progress or measure where one stands on the "ladder of perfection." What we can know is that even in the depths of sin and suffering, we are deeply enfolded in the love of God. Not unlike Therese of Lisieux, Julian teaches not a way of perfection but what Simon Tugwell has called a "way of imperfection."

This is radical therapy for a therapeutic age. Julian's point is not "every day I'm getting better and better," or that "I'm good enough and smart enough and, doggone it, people like me." Rather she says "it behoveth us verily to see that of ourselves we are right nought but sin and wretchedness." A gloomy truth indeed, but at the same time God, "of His courtesy will not shew it to us but by the light of His grace and mercy." In other words, it is important to see our nothingness so that we can see ourselves properly as beings constituted simply by the love of the God who created us from nothing and who has redeemed us from the nothingness of evil. Our human attempts at self-esteem - whether they come in the form of a program for self-improvement or in therapies of self-acceptance - end up as bars to the realization of our true glory as creatures of the God "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist" (Rom. 4:17).