Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message
St. Julian of Norwich, Anchoress and
Mystic
Today is the feast day of Lady
Julian, author of the Showings (or Revelations) of Divine Love, a
classic of Western Spirituality that was written in Middle English, not
Latin.
Born at the time of the Black Death,
a series of Bubonic Plague infections that ultimately killed perhaps 2 out of
three Europeans, and of the Papal Schism (where competing popes ruled the
Church from Avignon and Rome), Julian based her spirituality in a desire to
share in our Lord’s sufferings. A series of visions she had after receiving
the last rites of the church when she herself was about to die from a fevered
illness was the basis of the Showings. She saw in
vision Jesus holding in his hand a hazelnut, fragile and easily broken, that
she soon recognized was the created universe. A voice repeated, “God made
it, God loves it, God keeps it.” Also, “All shall be well, and all shall
be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Other famous sayings of Lady Julian
include: “And from the time that [the vision] was shown, I desired often to
know what our Lord's meaning was. And fifteen years and more afterward I was
answered in my spiritual understanding, thus: 'Would you know your Lord's
meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to
you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Keep
yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you
shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.'
“Thus I was taught that love was our
Lord's meaning. And I saw quite clearly in this and in all, that before God
made us, he loved us, which love was never slaked nor ever shall be. And in
this love he has done all his work, and in this love he has made all things
profitable to us. And in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we
had a beginning. But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning.
And all this shall be seen in God without end ...”
“[God] said not 'Thou shalt not be
tempest-tossed, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased'; but
rather, [God] said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome.”
“The greatest honor we can give
Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”
“Our Savior is our true Mother in
whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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