"God made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end." These words by Julian of Norwich distil into a sentence one of the most remarkable books ever written.
Written by a woman when women weren't encouraged to write; an essay in profoundest theology by someone who called herself 'unlettered'; an account of a near death experience and a vision of the passion of Jesus that she reflected on for the rest of her life; written in vernacular English in a world where serious writing was done only in Latin; and most remarkable of all, a book that envisions a universe in which eternal purposeful Love finds a way to redeem, renew and conserve a creation gone wrong.
I've read this book often, and deeply. It is theologically provocative, pastorally comforting, but above all a deeply personal account of an experience that touches those universals of human existence, love, death, meaning and purpose. Lately, in the aftermath of Aileen's death, I've gone back to Julian's Revelations of Divine Love. Part of the work of grief, and grief is very hard work, is to sift through the wreckage of life that is left when someone dies whose life was integral to our own life, and essential to our happiness.
Memories and regrets, hopes and fears, investments of time, energy, emotional commitment and love building over the years, are all parts of life that now seem broken beyond repair. It's a commonplace that grief is the cost and consequence of love. But true nevertheless. Our deepest loves are built towards a lifetime of trust, presence, sacrifice, commitment and the inherent promise always to be there for, and be there with and be there alongside each other. Death interrupts that, indeed death seems to contradict the very hopes that lead us to say such things in the first place.
Our human love cannot guarantee what it hopes for, indeed has no guaranteed outcome. Those prepositions of being there for, with, alongside seem erased by death. What Julian of Norwich brings to our attempts to understand the mystery of love and the power of death to shatter love's hopes, is an exposition of the Love that inspires and underlies and empowers our own capacity to take the risks of love, and to trust the God whose love is revealed finally and fully in Jesus, the eternal self giving love of God. "Inscribed upon the cross we see in shining letters God is love." That old Victorian hymn channels the truth Julian spent her life thinking and writing about. As Julian had already said, "God made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end."
Actually another very different voice comes from an Edwardian Scot, who spent most of his life as a preacher theologian in England, and who was born in Aberdeen. Peter Taylor Forsyth echoed much of Julian's vision of a God who finally, in the end, would bring things to their proper completion. I find his words deeply comforting, and shining with a generosity and hopefulness that finds clear echoes in my own heart:
The end of all is the grace unspeakable, the fullness of glory - all the old splendour fixed, with never one lost good;all the spent toil garnered, all the fragments gathered up, all the lost love found forever, all the lost purity transfigured in holiness, all the promises of the travailing soul now yea and amen, all sin turned to salvation. Eternal thanks be unto God who hath given us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord, and by his grace, the taste of live for every one.
(The photo was taken some years ago on the links at Banff)
Recent Comments