Julian of Norwich: Session 2

James Finley (0:00)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together, turning for guidance to the teachings of the Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich. In this session, I want to pick up where we left off in the previous session in Chapter 10 of the long text of her book, The Revelations of Divine Love. By noting a distinction she makes towards the end of the chapter, she's reflecting, as in each chapter, on her, the visions that she had near death of the crucified Christ, and finding in the meaning of the crucifixion the depth of God's love for us. And she says that we can speak of two activities which can be seen in this vision. One is seeking and the other is contemplating. Seeking is common to all and every soul can have through grace and not to have discretion in the teachings of the Holy Church.

And then in the midst of the seeking, there can be granted a contemplation which is the mystical experience. And so earlier in the chapter, in the previous session we were talking, is that she speaks of seeking as we might say the way God customarily works in our life, the way we customarily are graced with the experience of God, the understanding of God, and the ways we respond to God in our life. And saying that I saw him and I sought him and I had him and I lacked him. And this is and should be our ordinary understanding in this life as I see it. And so we were saying last time that I saw him at first, we can look back to our first awakening of this spiritual life. The very first time we were quickened with a sense where God's presence became personally meaningful to us. And then as that initial awakening dissipated, it left within us a longing to abide in the awareness of God's oneness with us, which is the impetus of the path. And so I sought him, having tasted God's oneness with myself. It moved me to seek to abide in the habitual experience of God's oneness with me in all things, God's oneness with all of us.

And in seeking him, I had him. That is, in the midst of the seeking, we're graced again with the touch of God. We're quickened within with the renewed sense of God's oneness with us that is always there. And then I lacked him. It dissipates again. And the lack only to set in motion renewed longing, knowing that our longing for God is an incarnate echo of God's longing for us. And so such is this path that we follow.

And so when we read these mystics, when we read Julian or with us, as we listen to her, to her teachings, we're trying to align our heart with hers. So our intention in reading her or listening to her is in concert with her intention of writing what she says to us. And her intention is to help us along this path, this path of discipleship, this path of seeking God's presence in our life. And I would say too, it seems to me, that we could say this devotional life, this daily quiet time, this re-grounding of ourself on God's presence, which then spills over into every aspect of our life, as an habitual underlying gratitude or respond to or understand each situation as Christ would with love and so forth. This happens in the good times and in the blessings of life. So if we're blessed with a happy marriage in the midst of one, it's incarnate in the gift of our marriage. If we have children, it's incarnate in the gift of our children. Whether our love relationship with our parents or our grandparents, with our friends, with the gift of our daily work, our service to the community, the midst of nature, the goodness of life in this world.

But Julian notes this path of God, in which we seek God in the good times, in our devotional sincerity. She says that the contemplation takes place in the mystical, in the sense in which this is where she uses this image of dropping down into the bottom of the ocean. That up on the surface where the winds blow about and caught up in this and that, in the circumstances of the day. But when we're having our daily rendezvous with God, we're in a state of quiet attentiveness, we can feel ourselves undergoing a kind of a descent. And in the descent, we feel ourselves dropping down into a deeper awareness of and oneness with deeper dimensions of God's oneness with us in this quiet descent. And this quiet descent can reach a point of the mystical contemplation where we drop down into the bottomless abyss of God's oceanic love for us, God. So here's this mystical sense of this, is that it isn't just that God's in us, it's also true that we're in God.