A fine and private place

After sailing on a ship with over 2000 passengers, taking a train to noisy London and north from there, I am settled in the All Hallows Guesthouse adjacent to St. Julian's church where Julian of Norwich spent the last 40-some years of her life. 

I embarked on this journey to find a home when the place I thought was home failed me. Making a pilgrimage to St. Julian's is one of the few stops I had actually planned in advance. 

I've been studying the times in which Julian lived for the past five years, trying to understand why she made the drastic choice to become an anchorite--walled into a small cell on the side of the church and no way out. She was educated--she wrote the earliest surviving English-language works attributed to a woman--and apparently had the wealth and independence to make such a choice. Granted, she was driven by visions that came to her during an apparent near-death experience, but there are other choices she might have made. 

Anchorites or anchoresses were not uncommon in medieval Europe. Like hermits, they devoted their lives to prayer and lived in solitude, but they were attached, literally, to one place and, importantly, they had two windows: one which opened onto the church and the other out to the world. Unlike hermits, they had contact, but they also had a social purpose: they were available to counsel and comfort anyone who approached their cell. 

Julian lived in horrific times. When she was a child, the black plague swept through Norwich.  Out of a population of approximately 25,000 in 1348, as few as 6,000 survived. This was followed by the Peasants Rebellion, which was put down ruthlessly by Henry le Despenser, the bishop of Norwich, and public executions were rife. Le Despenser was also an avid persecutor of Lollards, heretics who, in addition to other "crimes," wanted the Bible to be translated to English and available to all Christians rather than the educated few who could read Latin. Perhaps this is among the reasons that Julian became a recluse and wrote her Revelations of Divine Love in secret. It was not published until its discovery in 1670 at a convent in France, possibly smuggled out of England at the time of the Reformation. (For more information, this BBC documentary, The Search for the Lost Manuscript of Julian of Norwich, is excellent.) 

Julian's book could not have been written except in seclusion. She needed time and a place to write. Women's lives in the medieval world did not afford this kind of luxury. She also needed safety, not only to avoid persecution as a heretic but also for the manuscript itself. Julian's visions changed her forever and presented her with the task of sharing what she had experienced with the world, if not during her lifetime when it would certainly have been destroyed, then in the future.

Aside from being a religious work written in English, what made Julian's book so dangerous? It was not the descriptions of the visions themselves,16 vivid revelations of Jesus' crucifixion, but her interpretation of what they revealed. Flying in the face of the Church's teaching on sin, the wrath of God, penitence, the value of suffering, Julian saw only love. 

Julian writes:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind's eye and I thought,

'What can this be?'

 

And the answer came, 'It is all that is made'. I marvelled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small.

 

And the answer came into my mind, 'It lasts and ever shall because God loves it'. And all things have being through the love of God.

Again,

I desired many times to know of the Lord's meaning. And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said:

What, do wish to know our Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it and know it well, Love was his meaning.

Who revealed it to you? Love.

What did he reveal to you? Love.

Why does he reveal it to you? Love.

So I was taught that Love is our Lord's meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us, he loves us, which love was never abated and never shall be.

I am not a religious person, but If I've learned anything from Julian, it's that we have a duty to live a loving life. Is that possible when constantly confronted with the moral atrocities that hourly spew from Washington? It's easy enough to love in the abstract, but the daily particulars are difficult. I don't want to live in a rage.