This year in my study is going to be the year of Julian of Norwich. Every summer I choose a subject to focus on, and spend the year exploring and writing and taking time to listen to what I don't know, or, just as important, to hear again truth I've let slip and slide towards the periphery.
By regularly reading and thinking in company with significant literature there is time for words and ideas to seep into the soil of the mind and the heart. I'm not looking for someone to be an echo of what I already think, but to be a voice that interrupts my self-told narrative, and a friend who, for my own good, would rather speak truth I might not like than simply nod agreement with what I already think I know – and don't!
Previously I spent regular time over the span of a year reading and thinking and in conversation with such friends as: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Charles Wesley, George Herbert, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sister Joan Chittister, Psalms and Psalmists, John the Evangelist, Walter Brueggemann, Denise Levertov, R S Thomas and a number of others since I started doing this, which was yonks ago!
I first read Revelations of Divine Love in 1972, on a grey and wet October afternoon, sitting on the top deck, front seat of a double decker bus, crawling slowly up Gilmorehill, heading for a late afternoon tutorial on Moral Philosophy. I've read, studied, prayed, taught (In Hanover, New Hampshire), and written on her masterpiece over all these years. I have a number of editions, including that first one I read in 1972 edited by Clifton Wolters in the Penguin Classics.
That bus journey is still a vivid memory. Looking through the front window, the rain was pouring down, like tears steaming down the glass, distorting the reality outside, yet fluid lenses through which we look at the broken heart of the world, through our tears. What I was reading, written in Medieval Norwich, aimed at creating the same effect in the reader; a telling of the Passion of Jesus, narrated by a woman whose vision of the Crucified would leave stigmata on her heart for the rest of her life. That life would be relatively long, but she was not to know that. Those two days of her vision, experienced in a near death experience of a woman desperately ill in an age of primitive medicine, these two days were 48 hours of physical, psychological and emotional suffering which for Julian replicated in her own anguish, the utter love and tragic Passion of the crucified Christ, pouring out with his life blood, the love of God. What all that would come to mean, after over twenty years of reflection and risky theologising, is told in the book that now bears Julian's name, Revelations of Divine Love.
This time round, reading Julian's revelations deeply, I want to repeat an experiment I first tried several years ago. That year I was spending time with Paul the Apostle, and his letter to the Colossian Christians. Alongside the study of the Greek text, with regular slow reading through the letter over months, and working through the text using scholarly commentaries, I worked on a tapestry which was a visual representation of the heart of what Paul was writing. I had started with a blank canvas, read Colossians several times, and drew a tough but provisional sketch.
The new tapestry (photo above) is called "All manner of thing shall be well…" Not much beyond a sketch just now, but I hope it gradually takes on the colours of hopefulness, life, beauty and trust. Once again I want to make connections between reading a written text, and seeking to express the ideas it contains, and the inner responses it evokes, and provokes. The sketch is entirely provisional. From my previous knowledge of Julian and her book I have a sense of what I would like to attempt – but I'm open to whatever nascent ideas I might have at the moment, being revised and even supplanted by whatever arises from the experience of reading and listening to this wise woman whose book is such a rich gift to the Church. To interpret a text using colour, shape, image and texture is itself an art form common in the Medieval church. So, we'll see.
Leave a Reply