We have been moving slowly on our British literature around here. We’re only just now finishing up the medieval period, moving on to the Renaissance next week.
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve focused on Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe – moving on this week to the mystery plays and Everyman.
Worth a read, if you’ve never encountered either woman before. Not only for their insights, but also for the reminders they provide about the past. As in – don’t caricature the past. The past was as complex and as varied as the present is, and human nature doesn’t change.
Most particularly, what I’m thinking about – as per usual – is the dig on the past that before, you know, that electric moment of the mid-60’s, Catholics were just super into rules, mostly oppressed, and didn’t know about love.
Reading spiritual writers quickly corrects that mistaken impression, including of course, Julian and Margery. The writings and experiences of both women, while quite different, each are expressive of what we call the “affective piety” of the period – the spirituality centered on the reality and the experience of the love of God.
Julian’s most well-known analogy embodies this:
“And in this [sight], he showed a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand as it seemed to me, and it was as round as any ball. I looked therein with the eye of my understanding, and thought: “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus: “It is all that is made.” I marveled how it might last, for it seemed to me it might suddenly have fallen into nought for its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: “It lasteth and ever shall, because God loveth it. And so hath all things being by the love of God.”
And, as Margery relates in her own work, she and Dame Julian met. The Clerk of Oxford blog takes up the story:
Some time around the year 1413, a few years before the likely date of Julian’s death, Margery Kempe came to pay her a visit in her cell in Norwich (on which, see this post). To give you some sense of their relative ages, Margery Kempe was born around the same year (1373) that Julian had her first revelations at the age of thirty. Though both deeply devout women, their lives could hardly have been more different. Margery was married, the mother of fourteen children, a businesswoman, a widely travelled pilgrim who had been to Jerusalem and Rome; she composed an extraordinarily frank and vivid book about her life, telling of her struggles, her journeys, her visions, her failures, her many clashes with those who would not accept her own particular take on the religious life she wanted to live. Julian, by contrast, tells us almost nothing about herself, and all we know of her life is bounded by the limits of one tiny cell in Norwich. But her mind, and her desire to understand the deepest questions of existence, knew no limits. Hers was a hidden life of prayer and thought, entirely devoted to reasoning out the meaning of a series of revelations from God which she received that one day when she was thirty. ‘Love was his meaning’, she concluded at last, a meaning that encompassed many other truths; and that has been her legacy.
In her advice to Margery Kempe (at least as Kempe reports it) Julian gives counsel on some of the subjects which occur again and again in Kempe’s account of her life. As a laywoman struggling to find validation for her own form of intense religion devotion, Margery wanted to be exactly told what Julian tells her here: the importance of trusting to personal inspiration, the value of chastity, and the holiness of devout tears (Margery Kempe was notorious for bursting into noisy tears during Mass, much to the annoyance of her neighbours). It’s reassuring and affirming counsel, and so Margery clearly received it.
The anchoress, hearing the marvellous goodness of our Lord, highly thanked God with all her heart for his visiting, counselling this creature [Kempe] to be obedient to the will of our Lord God and fulfil with all her might whatever he put in her soul, as long as it was not contrary to the worship of God and the benefit of her fellow-Christians; for, if it was, then it was not the inspiration of a good spirit but of an evil spirit. The Holy Ghost never inspires anything which is contrary to charity; if he did, he would contradict his very self, for he is all charity. Also he inspires a soul to all chastity, for people who live chastely are called the temple of the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost makes a soul stable and steadfast in the true faith and the true belief. And a man who is duplicitous in soul is ever unstable and unsteadfast in all his ways. He who is always doubting is like the flood of the sea, which is moved and borne about with the wind, and that man is not likely to receive the gifts of God.
Charity and chastity.
No matter where we are in life, no matter what station, that, Julian is indicating, is going to be the movement of the Spirit-driven life. For what do “charity” and “chastity” mean? Love of neighbor and love of God above all.
As I say – to you and myself – all the time – anyone, living at any time in Christian history, must be acutely aware of the relationship between the flesh and the spirit in one’s own life and in the world. In short: as much as we are called to find God in all things, as powerfully true it is that Creation is God’s work, within which he has become incarnate, as much as our spiritual growth thrives in engagement with all God has made and the opportunities and obligations to love – for can “charity” be lived in isolation? Apart from the world? Of course not.
In spite of all of that, the great spiritual teachers and examples invariable point in the same direction:
To reject the temptation to baptize any aspect of life in this world: cultural, social, political or even personal, and to always remember Who we were created by and for and that the journey, as Julian and Margery both show, is all about less and more.
The question is, though –
less of what?
and more of…what?
“
Charlotte was Both 