Julian of Norwich: Session 3

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, turning for guidance to the teachings of the Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich. In this session, I'm inviting you to join me in exploring Chapter 5 of the long text, in which he guides us or helps us to cultivate an experiential understanding of God's presence in our lives. I think the significance of this for us is so clear to me though, when I was living in the monastery, that every detail of daily life in the monastery, the silence, the chanting of the Psalms, the simple vegetarian diet, the long period set aside for prayer, were all intended to foster a spiritual worldview or an underlying experiential understanding of God's oneness with us in each detail of each passing moment of our life. But for us living out here in a fast moving secular world, we have to cultivate this. We have to cultivate a contemplative culture in our heart, an underlying habitual sense of God's presence in the intimate details of daily living and to experience the sense of inner peace or the inner clarity that this brings into our lives.

And so what Julian does here is, throughout the whole book really, here in Chapter 5, is she bears witness to how in her years of solitude and prayer, in the anchor hold there, the little cell there, the Church of Norwich, she kept reflecting on the mystical awakening that was granted to her at the edge of death when she had the showings of the mystery of Christ crucified, revealing God's loving familiarity with us. And as she kept reflecting on it over the years, she would often speak what she calls spiritual sight, or a spiritual understanding that is a certain kind of inner clarity of the pervasive oneness of God's presence with us in our breath and our heart beaten, which she calls a familiar love, a bitchily familiar love. And so it is in this sense, then, that she begins this chapter. At the same time as I saw the sight of the head bleeding, that is the head of Christ, in this mystical vision that she had of the crucifixion, our good Lord showed me a spiritual sight of his familiar love. I saw that he is everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing who wraps and unfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us and surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good as I understand.

To reflect on this, I want to share with you a moment in my life where I hope to see this kind of concretely. And as I share this moment with you, it might help you to pause and think also of moments in your life where you can get the sense of what he is inviting us to experience in the intimacy of very simple moments as we go through our day. The incident that comes to my mind here so recently, it's just a few days ago, I got up early to write the notes for this session with you actually, Chapter 5 And I live right here at the ocean. And I got my cup of coffee and I sat out on the porch and during the night a very heavy fog had rolled in. And the fog was so thick that you couldn't even see the sand on the beach even though it was just less than a minute away right there in the place. And clearly then I couldn't see the ocean. I could hear it. I could hear the waves crashing on the beach. And I was delighting in the chill of it, that damp, chill feeling. It was so refreshing here along the ocean, especially in the summer months where it can be so hot here in California. So I had a shawl wrapped around my shoulders to keep the chill off. And I would say that Julian is inviting me to realize that since God is everything that is good, that God is somehow concretely present in the shawl that somehow concretizes God enveloping me in God's love for me in that moment as I sat there on the porch. We might also say in this sense that the fabric of the shawl is like the fabric of Veronica's veil and that God is somehow that close or that near and comforting us. Not somewhere far off, but surprisingly near and such a simple thing as being clothed in God's love incarnate in the clothes that clothe us and cover us.