Living Wittily

Donald Mackinnon, Julian of Norwich and the seriousness of sin

One of the most terrifying two hours of my life was in 1986 when I delivered a paper to the Aberdeenshire Theological Club (the oldest such club in Scotland!). The paper was on Julian of Norwich, her view of Divine Love and human sin and whether in her theology these are adequately reconciled. The subject matter is intimidating enough, but sitting in the audience was Professor Donald MacKinnon. He was a large man - broad, tall, a craggy alp with a face that could be just as forbidding as any such North Face. He was also a large presence who when he laughed his shoulders resembled a kind of mirthful earthquake, and I found him to be a warm appreciative listener mainly, except when he gruffed out a 'yes' which was reassuring, or a harrumph which was worrying. The photo of a younger Mackinnon does no justice to the venerable, restless polymath ambling through Old Aberdeen with his brown leather message bag books and papers protruding, and stuffed with who knows what metaphysical speculations, and happy to stop and engage in conversation which could be gossip or gospel, metaphysics or meal times, German Romanticism or the state of the Harris Tweed industry.

I made quite a bit about Julians doctrine of sin appearing reductionist, and at times sitting light to the seriousness of sin as a radical negation of being, a pervasive and invasive power of evil that insinuates itself into the very structures of created being, so that only a redemption which reached into such profound depths of reality (the Cross of Christ as the Love of God ) could adequately negate that negation. The loud gravelly 'Yes', exploding into the sedate company, and the forward thrust of a leonine head were enough to keep me going forward with my paper, while hoping there would be nothing ahead that might provoke an equally strong 'No!'

At the end there were questions, observations, critique, appreciation and a feeling that the paper had, however marginally, passed. Then Professor Mackinnon came up, said kind things and said he would send me a book. He didn't - I think he meant he would send me a suggested book which he did. I bought it in the days before amazon the quick book getter existed. It was The Word of Reconciliation by H H Farmer,(London: Nisbet, 1966) a far too easily overlooked theologian whose philosophical theology remains worth our time and attention. I'll come back to HH Farmer. But in his book are these words, which capture in such lucid theological writing, the psychology and ontology of sin:

A great many people's concern about their sinful shortcomings springs in large measure from a disguised and subtle egotism and pride. They are, perhaps, particularly if they have had a Christian upbringing and take their Christian profession seriously, formed an image of themselves as displaying an exalted Christian character, and when they find, as they inevitably do, that they persistently fall short of this 'ego-ideal', they are cast down and depressed and harassed with guilt feelings. This they mistake for a true and deep repentance but it may be little more than a feeling of injured pride and self-esteem.

...

On the lips of the deeply penitent religious man therefore, the cry against thee, thee only, have I sinned', might almost seem to be an exactly and literally true statement. Some such awareness as this, however expressed, or perhaps not expressed or even expressible in terms at all, but only felt, some sense that because of one's sin the very foundation of one's being and life has been shaken (for what is God if not the very foundation of one's being and life?0, some consciousness that sin holds one suspended not over the shallows of time but over the abyss of eternity, the abyss of God, is an element in sincere and true penitence towards God; it is in fact this consciousness which in part constitutes it towards God.

Pages 65 and 67

New book on Julian of Norwich - "And all manner of thing shall be well"

There are now several substantial monographs on Julian of Norwich, indicating a healthy and deserved interest in one of the greatest theologians of the Church. Amongst my favourites are Grace Jantzen's careful and respectful account of Julian: Mystic and Theologian, a book that firmly places Julian within the brightest constellation of contemplative theologians.  Kerrie Hide's Gifted Origins to Graced Fulfilment is a beautifully written and lucid account of Julian's doctrine of salvation that shows the nuanced and sophisticated clarity of Julian's thinking, while at the same time giving a sympathetic reflection on the speculative humility of Julian's attempts to articulate the great mystery by which all shall be well.  Wisdom's Daughter by Joan Nuth is the best book on her spirituality that I know - and it too is written with considerable scholarship distilled and rendered accessible in a volume that I return to often. And there's more - I have at least four other serious studies of this remarkable woman whose one book gathers so much theological fruit from her own experience long pondered, and brought into conversation with the church tradition, and then written out of a profound and searching contemplative mind in love with the Crucified God. I know the phrase is an anachronism, but The Revelations of Divine Love is the medieval theological precursor to our current fascination with the suffering of God, the suffering of the world and the search for a healed creation through the Crucified Son of God.

The most recent study has just been dispatched to me from Amazon. Denys Turner has written widely and deeply on mysticism, apophatic theology and the often contested relationship between faith and reason. I hope not to be disappointed then, when I read him on Julian the Theologian. I have long been an admiring advocate of Julian's crucicentric vision of the universe and her insistence against all comers that the love of God is the ultimate assurance for the future of all that is. Indeed I'm convinced that the current controversies about divine love and judgement, heaven, hell and universalism, come back to the fundamental question of the God we believe in and the definition of love that colours all our theological assumptions and psychological hesitations. And those who dismiss love as sentimental, and recoil from a "soft" theology, haven't really begun to appreciate a theology that was born out of the black death, in a feudal society, and mediated through the near death experience of a woman who took twenty plus years to guage the depth of that abyss she calls the Divine Love.

Sentimental she is not - compassionate, speculative, a thinker unafraid of the affections, each of these she is. But the theological vision of her book has a rigour and robustness that is rooted in the ultimacy of the Divine Love, and nourished by a faith that takes the cross and the Christ with utmost seriousness - and paradoxically, that seriousness is expressed in the hilarity and joyfulness of one who believes she has discovered the secret of the universe, that elusive formula that Stephen hawking is after, the explanation of all things...."All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." It isn't a knock-down argument - it's a credal cry of the heart, an adoring reiteration of quiet if mystified confidence in God, both a prayer and a promise, and the final premise on which she rests her hope for God's broken but deep-loved world.

The image above is from the Book of Kells - included here because I like it, and maybe Julian knew of it?

 

In the beginning was the Word - and then there was the Hubble

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made....and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The mystery of vastness, the perplexing notion of infinity, the "cerebral inconveniences" of impossible mathematics, the loveliness and terror of images that reduce human significance to the omega point. That's what my new book is about - or at least that is what it's about if you can combine rational processing of data with aestheric responsiveness and an educated but not too loopy imagination.

A multi-tasking exegesis of John's Prologue might include simultaneous listening to Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001 Space odyssey), looking at these Hubble space images, saying by heart the text about the Word printed above, and asking the question with bewildered humility, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?'

Not all theology is verbal. And not all pictures are theological. But as a human being capable of reflection and self-consciousness, I contemplate these images of the universe, and wonder, and trust, and hope, that "all indeed shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well". Julian's image of the hazelnut is more manageable -

"In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it
was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and
thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is
made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have
sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my
understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."

A vast universe that exists because it is loved presupposes a God of love beyond telling. Stands to reason.

"And all manner of thing shall be well" - the applause of God's creation

Just received from Amazon the beautifully produced translation of Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love. The type font, the page layout, the paper quality, and the overall production makes it a treat to read and handle. The translation by Julia Holloway is somewhere between medieval and modern in the range of vocabulary and sentence structure. It reads smoothly, and with a care for the cadences and stylistic oddities of one of the finest writers in early vernacular English. It's a sign of high quality translation when a text you know well, reads with freshness and an absence of deliberate novelty, the translator content to let the voice of the text be heard without literary amplification and sound effects. I've read the Penguin translation by Clifton Wolters, and the Paulist Press one by James Walsh, and they still have their place for Julian enthusiasts - the Walsh one remains the definitive modern version.

But this lovely edition (now in protective plastic cover courtesy of a friendly member of UWS library staff) will accompany me through Lent - because Julian is my chosen read this year. Time to enjoy a classic statement of theology that is both radical and orthodox, that was the fruit of twenty years of contemplative prayer, and that speaks with profound relevance to a world that needs as never before, to hear the love of God redemptively defying all that makes for diminishment, futility and waste:

"And thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably, "I may make all things well, I can make all things well, and I will  make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and you shall see your self that all manner of thing shall be well."

Julian, more than any other theologian except Traherne, celebrates the wise, good love of God by seeing beyond the immediate and transient to a time when all of creation will applaud the Creator.

For now, I decided to write a Fibonacci in honour of Julian the theologian of the love of God.

Fibonacci on Julian Of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Look!

Love!

Behold!

Crucified!

Divine Love Revealed!

All manner of thing shall be well.

I saw a little thing the size of a hazelnut!

It represents all that is made, and it exists and ever shall, because God loves it!

Would you know your Lord's meaning in this? Know it well, Love was his meaning. Hold yourself therein, and you shall understand and know more of the same.

..............................

Thankfulness as a Theological Choice.

Who then is God that we must speak of him?

God is he whom we must thank.

To be more precise:

God is he whom we cannot thank enough. (E Jungel)

.................................

For all that has been,

Thank you -

For all that is to come,

Yes -                                                    (Dag Hammarskjold)

..................................

Thou hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, - a grateful heart;

Not thankful when it pleaseth me,

As if Thy blessings had spare days,

But such a heart whose pulse may be Thy praise.  (George Herbert).

........................

Been a hard week so far, for reasons nobody could foresee or forestall. One of the most important theological choices we make is whether we complain or give thanks, fuel resentment or nurture gratefulness, whether we see God in all things or only in those cherry picked experiences we call blessings. Life itself is the blessing, and the daily gift of the God whose gift is life. I'm wondering if inner climate determines our disposition towards complaint or gratitude, or if we determine our inner climate by  whether a theological choice towards gratitude is an intentional act of faith that changes our inner climate by "tracing the rainbow through the rain"?

My theologian of 'thankfulness as choice' is Julian of Norwich. When much else fails to persuade, I find her quiet insistent trustfulness, and thus her patient thankfulness, a good antidote to those more enjoyably disruptive attitudes of complaint, unsettlement and soul sulking. More than most theologians, she grounds gratitude in the foundation of a love at once eternal and personal, universal and particular.   

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 ...

.....................

Quite so!

Julian of Norwich and our devotional canon

I learned that love was our Lord's meaning.
And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere,
that before ever he made us, God loved us;
and that his love has never slackened,
nor ever shall.

In this love all his works have been done,
and in this love he has made everything serve us;
and in this love our life is everlasting.
Our beginning was when we were made,
but the love in which he made us
never had beginning.
In it we have our beginning.
All this we shall see in God forever.
May Jesus grant this.

(Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.  (1342-c.1416)

Julian's Revelations of Divine Love is amongst the half dozen or so classic texts of Christian Spirituality that I've read and pondered regularly for years. Call it my devotional canon. Such reading isn't informational but formational and transformational; these texts, along with Scripture, nourish the theological imagination, sustain spiritual passion, recall dissipated affections to a new focus, touch us in those deep recesses of love and hopefulness about ourselves, that only grace can galvanise and organise.

Sometimes folk ask how I get the time to do all the reading I do. Here's part of the answer. How we love God and follow faithfully after our Lord will be different for each of us, as different as we are from each other. Not everyone finds reading brings them closer to God - though I think more could. But I am persuaded (I love the AV rendering of Paul's certainties!) - that good pastoral care includes amongst its goals enabling and encouraging a community to think, reflect, read and learn together of the wisdom to live for Christ faithfully and well. Many don't read deeply and slowly because no one has ever helped them make the connection between such reading and the way they view the world, their faith and the essential connections between our understanding of the world, our knowledge of God, our prayers, and the quality of our Christian faithfulness.

Time for reading, time for work, time for the people at the heart of our lives, time for sleep, time for serving others, time for music, exercise, eating, TV, surfing - but in the end much of what we do with time comes down to choices, preferences, priorities and life circumstances. Some of the great Christian spiritual teachers had a fixed habit of 15 minutes a day for slow reading of classic spiritual texts. Forget The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Purpose Driven Life. I've often enough disparaged such culturally determined life management books - at times unfairly. They do what they do. But when it comes to the necessary deepening of our relationship to God, a surer less partial grasp of our faith, a more reflectively compassionate looking out on the world, a more cherishing attitude to the Body of Christ, a more penetrating analysis of our time and place in the purposes of God in a world like ours - when it comes to all that, such books don't do what needs to be done.

These Christian spiritual teachers approached their reading of classic texts with a 'give us this day our daily bread' urgency. They knew they needed nourishment, strength, energy, and they felt and befriended their hunger as a necessary inner reminder that they are not self-sustaining, or self-propelled or capable of growth without food. Food for the heart, the imagination, the conscience, the mind - food for thought, food for energy, food for strength, and thus, food to live. And for a quarter of an hour a day, week on week, month on month, year on year, they made time to slow down and wait in the company of Christ, learning from the cloud of witnesses what it is to be loved by God and to love God. And in that Love to understand more what it meant for them to be called to be part of God's mission to redeem and renew, to reconcile and restore a fallen but God-loved creation.

So, Julian again:

"In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."