"Put yourself into a relation of indebtedness to some of the great thinkers of the past." So the Free Church of Scotland patriarch, Alexander Whyte, in a commencement lecture to students at New College, Edinburgh in the early years of the 20th Century. He himself was a lifelong student of the Puritan Thomas Goodwin; not only a student but an enthusiast, an apologist for Goodwin as one whose depth and penetration of the theology of grace, Whyte believed, was without a serious rival.
Sixty years later the Christian philosopher Nels S Ferre advised those who wanted to grow an authentic spirituality and an intellectually honest and resilient faith to choose and master one thinker till they knew that person's thought thoroughly. From then on everything else that is read will be measured against that authority; the person whose thought you have taken time to think through, understand, critique and apply becomes a criterion by which to measure the quality of other writers and thinkers.
My own experience has been something of a combination of Whyte and Ferre. There are several writers to whom I now return to read and read again; and there are thinkers whose thoughts have kept me thinking, and continue to generate questions and insights; and there are books that will be a permanent presence on the shelves because they are now permanent companions on the way.
Amongst those few thinkers and writers to whom I have "a relation of indebtedness", and whose theology, worldview and ideas give my own judgement critical ballast, is Julian of Norwich. Her one book has been a source and resource to which I have returned several times in my life since I discovered her in 1974.
The Revelations of Divine Love is a spiritual classic, a devotional masterpiece; but it is also a theologically radical exploration of the Christian understanding of God. That God is love, eternally, definitively, essentially Love, is for Julian no mere Christian truism to be qualified by a safety net of dogmatic constraints on what love can and cannot mean. Her anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology are themselves shaped and constrained within the most generous trustfulness and extravagant hopefulness about what God purposes for the entire creation. Julian's view of God walks the tight, high wire between the official teaching of the Church, and what God revealed to her through her vision of the Passion, and her subsequent decades of prayer, contemplation and revision of thought.
In the past few months, following the death of our daughter Aileen, I have gone back to reading Julian daily, applying her slow and patient thoughtfulness about the love of God to my own heart and mind. When I read those famous outrageously hopeful words, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", they read differently through the tears. Grief and hope are two utterly different and essentially human dispositions; grief is present suffering which is backward looking to inexplicable and irreplaceable loss. Hope requires a present trustfulness that looks forward, not negating the suffering of grief, but neither allowing such concentrated sadness to claim an ultimate priority over the meaning and purpose of each human life.
Grief by its very nature forces an examination of your life's foundations. If tragedy happens despite all your prayers, what good is praying? If God loves every person as if they were the only one, what about that one who was dearest to us? If all shall be well, what good is that future tense hopefulness to a heart broken right now in the present and for the foreseeable future, and struggling to find any point in whatever further away future is promised? If each human being is precious, unique and created, why do so many of those treasured human masterpieces of God's image,fall outside of that great plan God is supposed to have for all God has made? And especially, why allow the death of that one whose loss we now mourn to the depth of our love for them?
Reading Julian doesn't answer all these questions; at least not at the level of rational persuasion, or logical argument. Amongst Julian's greatest gifts to those who read and pay attention to her, is the voice of a counsellor who speaks with the wisdom of decades long contemplation on just such questions. That voice is tempered by humility in the face of such desperate questioning; she understands, because she has lived these questions herself. As Rilke advised, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves." Patience is exactly what Julian models, both in her long contemplation of God's revelations to her, and in her willingness to accept that there is much she does not and cannot know. And that is the point at which questions reach the limit of their reach. Grief can co-exist with questions. It is faith and love and hope that enables life to go on without the answers; not because there are no answers, but because the eternal love in which we exist and subsist, historically demonstrated in the passion of Christ, the love of God is revealed as ultimately, finally and completely redemptive.
And from the time that it was shown, I desired oftentimes to know what was our lord’s meaning And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus: “What would'st thou know thy lord’s meaning in this thing [the whole revelation]? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to thee? Love. What showed he to thee? Love. Wherefore showed he it to thee? For love. Hold thee therein, thou shalt know more of the same. But thou shalt never know therein other without end.” Thus was I taught that love is our lord’s meaning.
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