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The first recorded plague in Britannia was the 600s and it coincided with a solar eclipse and maybe even an earthquake. I’m certain that it must have felt like the end of the world. And in a world that is only mystery, anything that is unexplainable and only brings uncertainty, must be the work of God.
Of course there’s a precedent for such things. Book of Exodus talks of the plagues in Egypt with the intent of forcing the hand of pharaoh to set the Israelites free. And there was illness like leprosy as punishment for Israel. The Israelites rebellion in Exodus healings were often seen as God’s favor.
One of the developments of Christianity as it grew and its connection with the Empire s. Of the world beginning with Rome and increasing from there was a focus on God as sovereign or King focused on God’s power and vengeance and jealousy and anger. Well, much of the Old testament wars were fought to see whose God was more powerful. The Middle ages would become a time when wars were fought to see whose side God was on and who got to control everything.
God’s opinion of you was based on your health, wealth, power, victory, and social standing revealed in the ones who win or the ones who lose the ones who were in authority and the ones who followed the ones with wealth and the ones without you. And if you were unhealthy, poor, powerless without social standing, you were clearly the problem. If the problem wasn’t you, God would give you health and wealth and power. So clearly you are the problem. You’ve committed sin and evil and have brought down the wrath of God. They had brought it on themselves either. Whether it was by death by plague or at the end of a sword.
Black plague which swept through Europe off and on from the years 1348 to 1400 killed anywhere between 30 and 60% of the population of Europe. And like other times in history, the plague was declared punishment a wrath of God by the people who claim to have God’s ear.
And I have to assume that it is for all of these reasons and no doubt several more. That’s several of our great reformers couple centuries in the future, will describe humans as totally depraved, a rubbish bin, and a slave to Satan.
But before they said all of that the world was given Julian, Born about 1343 and died sometime after 1416 her whole life. She saw these plagues.
Little is known of Julian, full name Julian of Norwich. And we can’t even be what her name was at all for. Saint Julian was the name of the church she affiliated with, found in the second largest city in Great Britain at the time, Norwich.
What we do know of her comes from her own writings. At the age of 30. She was sick and to the point of death. The priest came and presided over last rights. He brought with him a crucifix on a stick that was held at the end of Julian’s bed and as she gazed upon the suffering Christ, she had 16 showings or visions of God, of Christ, of the spirit. She wrote these down perhaps as an application to become an anchorite in the church of St. Julian.
To be an ink right? It was to die to the world. The ceremony or the rights, the order liturgy for entering into the cell was similar to a funeral mass. And then the approved anchorite would be walled into a small room containing three windows for the rest of their life. Which is why approval is so important because we have learned that isolation and solitary can drive a person mad.
The three windows in the cell that Julian and other anchorites would be in allowed access to receive mass to be cared for, receive food from their maids and then one to the exterior world.
Depending on the anchorite on their renown and on their spiritual knowledge and vocation people would travel to sit to receive spiritual counseling advice from the anchorite. Some suggest that the anchorite was anchoring the church but I wonder if Julian wasn’t more of an anchor for the community and anchor for their spiritual knowledge and growth and becoming.
For the first 20 years of Julian’s time in her cell she reflected on the that she received and she was 30 and then wrote a long version of the visions filled with spiritual reflection and contemplation and deep theology, visions and reflections she understood were not just for her, but for everyone, all of humanity and all of creation.
One of her visions involves this parable where a man having received his call and mission from God goes forth into the world and promptly falls in a ditch. And given the Theology of the time and the voices of the powerful one might expect and assume that God would see the fall and punish the man for falling into the ditch, clearly the man who fell into the ditch as if he did it on purpose. But as Julian sought to understand this story and she looked to God, she did not see anger or wrath rather compassion and love. She understood the man as a representative of Adam of all of mankind the fall into the ditch like the fall and Genesis three, and yet there was no anger. There was no wrath. There was no punishment. There was only compassion and love.
Someone I read suggested that if the works of Julian hadn’t gone underground missing, maybe there would have never been a Reformation. The works of Julian had become part of the Theology and ethos of the church. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a need for the Reformation.
And I would like to think we have moved past a time where we are needing a reminder of the primacy of the love of God over wrath, vengeance, power, blame, however, the initial HIV and AIDS crisis pandemic. There were those who hauled it a plague from God as punishment to the gay community. And as it continues in communities of poverty and in Africa, there are those who see it as a punishment for not being appropriately pure. Hurricane Katrina was called a punishment for the depravity of New Orleans. Covid was even called a punishment from God because of abortion? Or taking prayer out of school?
And those are people claiming God. There’s a whole other line of thinking that includes just blaming somebody for the actions of another. And what was she wearing? Well maybe if you hadn’t maybe if you’d have stayed pure or you wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. And the hundreds of ways we blame the poor and the unhoused and the unemployed for their own plight. And then punish them.
We might understand germ theory but in a lot of ways we are not that far away from medieval Europe. And a hundred different ways. We tell people we let it be known that their actions have made them unlovable by the Divine and any difficulty or negative results are the consequences of their own actions of being unlovable. It’s the well that’s what you get.
That was not the God revealed to Julian. That is not the god she shared to the world through her writings and through that window.
She writes of another vision:
And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has been through the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the Creator and the protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.
To see in even the smallest things of nature, the reality of the God who loves and preserves and sustains each of us all of creation, even the hazelnut.
She made up this word: oneing. That we are made with God, with a triune God who is one. That is the work of our spiritual life, to grow ever closer to God to be ever more oneed with God, through our prayer, through our actions, through our love and there is nothing that separates us from that love of God. Because as the letter writer of John wrote, God is love.
“I desired often to know what our Lord’s meaning was. And fifteen years and more afterward I was answered in my spiritual understanding, thus: ‘Would you know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Keep yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.’
“Thus I was taught that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw quite clearly in this and in all, that before God made us, he loved us, which love was never slaked nor ever shall be. And in this love he has done all his work, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us. And in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had a beginning. But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end.”
God is love and Love is the meaning of everything. It is the beginning and the end it is through all that is created and all that is.
And I think Julian the prophet and Julian the mystic is just as important today as she was in the 1300s to remind us when others try to make God a punisher or point to us and say that’s just what you get. Julian still reminds each of us that you are enough that you are loved by The God Who is love and carries no wrath or anger whose love knows no bounds and no end. And even in our time that is a holy dis