It is full merry in heaven!

Oh my.

I have spent the day, after writing other blog posts, thinking about how a week ago today I was in Utah, making pork poblano stew, reading Margery Kempe and about Margery Kempe.

A marvelous, shimmering, strange, almost riotous antidote to the world of noir I’ve immersed myself in over the past few days.

I had read a bit of Margery Kempe here and there and read about her, but not much. That changed over the past couple of weeks as she became part of the curriculum, and then I decided I wanted to know more.

I’m not going to take a blog post educating you on who Magery Kempe was at length.

In short:

She was a medieval Englishwoman, married and the mother of fourteen children who experienced deep spiritual experiences of the affective sort (tears were her means of spiritual expression) , pursued her spirituality, came up against a great deal of opposition from laity and clergy – and just as much support – got her husband to eventually swear to a life of chastity – in exchange for her eating a normal meal with him on Fridays instead of fasting – and went on pilgrimage as far as the Holy Land. Late-ish in life, she dictated her spiritual and earthly biography. It was kept, it is thought, by Carthusians, but largely unknown from the medieval period to the 20th century when it was rediscovered.

What a marvelous, marvelous story. Fraught, as these lives are A little mad, as these lives are.

No, she’s not a “saint,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from her, and learn from her life and therefore gain a little more perspective on our lives and the Church in our day.

My primary takeaways today – from a day spent, in part, reading this book in its entirety, which is a lovely, balanced, informative look at Margery – are fourfold:

First of all, her boldness and forthrightness with all, including the highest levels of clergy, aka the Archbishop of York, who wished she would just go away, but admired her nonetheless and would not consign her to the fate of the Lollards. She had deep confidence in her relationship with the Lord – she knew what she had experienced and she knew what was authentic because she willingly subjected it to the judgment and discernment of the Church – and so she could speak boldly to anyone with questions:

When her crying was passed, she came before the Archbishop and fell down on her knees, the Archbishop saying very roughly to her, “Why do you weep so, woman?”
   She answering said, “Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.”

Secondly, the honesty of her book is astonishing, extending from her admission of temptation to adultery (which ends with the fellow going…er…I don’t think so) to her conflicts with her fellow pilgrims abroad, include a jerk of a priest.

  When it was time to make their beds, they locked up her clothes, and a priest, who was in their company, took away a sheet from the creature, and said it was his. She took God to witness that it was her sheet. Then the priest swore a great oath, by the book in his hand, that she was as false as she might be, and despised her and strongly blamed her.

Third, as we are deep into discussions and conflicts about spirituality and the liturgy and pre- and post- this and that – ….can we just read the stories of women like Margery Kempe, engage with the vividness and depth of their spiritual lives and the profundity of their love for the Lord and how imaginatively it is expressed, and acknowledge….well….Margery lived and worshipped in those bad old days of non-vernacular Mass and the Old Old Church ….too bad she felt so distant from Christ. Not.

Finally, I really don’t understand why no one has yet written a book about Margery Kempe called It is fully merry in heaven

On a night, as this creature lay in her bed with her husband, she heard a sound of melody so sweet and delectable, that she thought she had been in Paradise, and therewith she started out of her bed and said: “Alas, that ever I did sin! It is full merry in Heaven.”