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Now showing: Julian of Norwich

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich. She's a favorite English saint who experienced visions of Christ during a severe illness. Many believe her written account of these 'showings' to be the first book written by a woman in the English language.

While she's famous for her "all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well," Julian also offers profound articulations of the meaning of human suffering, the life of the trinity, and the reach of salvation. She has beautiful language describing Jesus as mother which the Episcopal Church includes as two of the canticles contained in Enriching Our Worship. Below is the text of the Song of our True Nature; singing it is one of the things I still miss from evensong at GTS:

Christ revealed our frailty and our falling, *

our trespasses and our humiliations.

Christ also revealed his blessed power, *

his blessed wisdom and love.

He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly when we are in greatest need; *

he raises us in spirit

and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.

God is the ground and the substance, the very essence of nature; *

God is the true father and mother of natures.

We are all bound to God by nature, *

and we are all bound to God by grace.

And this grace is for all the world, *

because it is our precious mother, Christ.

For this fair nature was prepared by Christ

for the honor and nobility of all, *

and for the joy and bliss of salvation.

Thinking about her reminds me of the 'religious views' on the facebook page of one of the students in my campus ministry: there was love, there is love, there will always be love. Maybe he's been reading Julian...

Ask The Priest post on the Feast of Julian

He ascended into heaven.

While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God. Luke 24:51-53

From the Painted Prayerbook on Ascension Day:

In depicting Jesus’ ascension, medieval artists often painted Jesus with only his feet showing (one can almost see his toes wiggling), just barely visible as he departs, as in this thirteenth-century German Psalter or the St Albans Psalter. They wanted to emphasize his bodily departure from the earth. Yet, as Gail Ramshaw points out in Treasures Old and New, such a depiction does not suggest that “Christ has gone away from the church. The church fathers,” she goes on to write, “taught just the opposite: that as Christ went to God, his body became available to all the church.” And not only available to the church, but also enfleshed within it and by it, a point these same medieval artists emphasize by their attention to those who remain as Jesus leaves. Though Jesus’ departure poses the risk of profound disruption among his followers, his ascension becomes an opportunity for the community not only to reorganize and refashion itself but to become the very body of Christ in the world.

It's part of an interesting reflection on the meaning of the Ascension for communities dealing with loss.

I usually read the Ascension through my ecumenical lens--'Ascensiontide' as a time of preparation for when the followers of Christ will be gathered to re-member the body of Christ at Pentecost. A time for us to prepare to enflesh God's power so that we might be co-operators in the mission of reconciliaiton. Sadly, we are not there yet. As one blogger pointed out, we can't even agree on a time for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (in the southern hemisphere, it's this week; in the north, it falls in January). Certainly, my own communion is not currently able to gather joyfully with each other under the Lordship of Christ. Yet, Christ's promise is given to us, his Body made available to us. We continue to try to gather in the midst of his blessing and staring up at his dangling feet. God continually and mysteriously sends the Holy Spirit to unite us as Christ's body in the world. We beg for it in the Eucharist, but do we really mean it?