Prayers from Revelations of Divine Love

THIS is a Revelation of Love that Jesus Christ, our endless bliss, made in Sixteen Shewings, The Fourteenth is that our Lord is the Ground of our Prayer.
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This "fastening" is all that in Julian's book represents that needful process wherein the truth of asceticism has a part. It is not essentially a process of detaching the thought from created things of time—still less one of detaching the heart from created beings of eternity—but a process of more and more allowing and presenting the man to be fastened closely to God by means of the original longing of the soul, the influence of the Holy Ghost, and the discipline of life with its natural tribulations, which by their purifying serve to strengthen the affections that remaining pass through them.

And Julian, notwithstanding her enclosure as a recluse, is one of those that, happy in nature and not too much hindered by conditions of life, possess for large use by the way the mystical peace of fulfilled possession through virtue of freedom from bondage to self. For it is by means of the tyranny of the "self," regarding chiefly itself in its claims and enjoyments, that creature things can be intruded between the soul and God; and always, in some way, the meek inherit the earth.

Selections from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich | the pocket scroll

The life of a recluse demanded, no doubt, as other lives do, a daily self-denial as well as an initiatory self-devotion, and from Julian's silence as to "bodily exercises " it cannot of course be assumed that she did not give them, even beyond the incumbent rule of the Church, though not in excess of her usual moderation, some part in her Christian striving for mastery over self.

Nor could this silence in itself be taken as a proof that ascetic practices had not in her view a preparatory function such as has by many of the Mystics been assigned to them during a process of self-training in the earlier stages of the soul's ascent to aptitude for mystical vision. It is, however, to be noted that neither in regard to herself nor others do we hear from Julian anything about an undertaking of this kind. To her the "special Shewing" came as a gift, unearned, and unexpected: According to Julian the "special Shewing" is a gift of comfort for all, sent by God in a time to some soul that is chosen in order that it may have, and so may minister, the comfort needed by itself and by others ix.

In her experience this Revelation, soon closed, is renewed by influence and enlightenment in the more ordinary grace of its giver, the Holy Ghost. But a still fuller sight of God shall be given, she rejoices to think, in Heaven, to all that shall reach that Fulfilment of blessed life—the only mount of the soul set forth in this book. Thither, by the high-road of Christ, all souls may go, making the steep ascent through "longing and desire,"—longing that embodies itself in desire towards God, that is, in Prayer.

Nothing is said by Julian as to successive stages of Prayer, though she speaks of different kinds of prayer as the natural action of the soul under different experiences or in different states of feeling or "dryness. And in all these ways "Prayer oneth the soul to God. To Julian's understanding the only Shewing of God that could ever be, the highest and lowest, the first and the last, was the Vision of Him as Love.

But thou shalt never knowen ne witten other thing without end. Thus was I lerid that Love was our Lord's menyng" lxxxvi. Alien to the "simple creature" was that desert region where some of the lovers of God have endeavoured to find Him,—desiring an extreme penetration of thought human thought, after all, since for men there is none beyond it or an utmost reach of worship worship from fire and ice in proclaiming the Absolute One not only as All that is , but as All that is not.

Therefore she follows only the upward way of the light attempered by grace, not turning back to the Via Negativa , that downward road that starting from a conception of the Infinite "as the antithesis of the finite," [2] rather than as including and transcending the finite, leads man to deny to his words of God all qualities known or had by human, finite beings.

Jullian keeps on the way that is natural to her spirit and to all her habits of thought as these may have been directed by reading and conversation: Hers was not one of those souls that would, and must, go silent and alone and strenuous through strange places: Julian's mystical sight was not a negation of human modes of thought: This seer of the littleness of all that is made saw the Divine as containing, not as engulfing, all things that truly are, so that in some way "all things that are made" because of His love last ever. Certainly she passes sometimes beyond the language of earth, seeing a love and a Goodness "more than tongue can tell," but she is never inarticulate in any painful, struggling way—when words are not to be found that can tell all the truth revealed, she leaves her Lord's "meaning" to be taken directly from Him by the understanding of each desirous soul.

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So is it with the Shewing of God as the Goodness of everything that is good: Certainly Julian looks both downward and upward, sees Love in the lowest depth, far below sin, below even Mercy; sees Love as the highest that can be, rising higher and higher far above sight, in skies that as yet she is not called to enter: All shall be well. Moreover, Julian while guided by Reason is led by the "Mind" of her soul—pioneer of the path through the wood of darkness though Reason is ready to disentangle the lower hindrances of the way; and where her instructed soul "finds rest," those things that are hid from the wisdom and prudence of Reason only, are to its simplicity of obedience revealed.

Even as her Way is Christ-Jesus, and her walk by "longing and desire" is of faith and effort, so the End and the Rest that she seeks is the fulness of God, in measure as the soul can enter upon His fulness here and in that heavenly "oneing" with Him which shall be by grace the "fulfilling" and "overpassing" of "Mankind. Words of the Spirit-nature fail to describe to man, as he is, this fulness of personal life, and Julian falls back in one effort, daring in its infantine concreteness of language, on acts of all the five senses to symbolise the perfection of spiritual life that is in oneness with God xliii.

It may be noted that in these "Revelations" there is absolutely no regarding of Christ as the "Bridegroom" of the individual soul: In her usual speech Christ when unnamed is our "Good" or our "Courteous" Lord, or sometimes simply "God," and when she seeks to express pictorially His union with men and His work for men, then the soul is the Child and Christ is the Mother. In this symbolic language the love of the Christian soul is the love of the Child to its Mother and to each of the other children. Julian's Mystical views seem in parts to be cognate with those of earlier and later systems based on Plato 's philosophy, and especially perhaps on his doctrine of Love as reaching through the beauties of created things higher and higher to union with the Absolute Beauty above, Which is God—schemes of thought developed before her and in her time by Plotinus , Clement , Augustine , Dionysius "the Areopagite," John the Scot , Eckhart , the Victorines, [5] Ruysbroeck , and others.

One does not know what her reading may have been, or with what people she may have conversed. The loss of blood and the pain within, the gale and the cold without, met together in his dear body. Between them the four two outside, two in with the passage of time dried up the flesh of Christ. The pain, sharp and bitter, lasted a very long time, and I could see it painfully drying up the natural vitality of his flesh.


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I saw his dear body gradually dry out, bit by bit, withering with dreadful suffering. And while there remained any natural vitality, so long he suffered pain. And it seemed to me, that with all this drawn-out pain, he had been a week in dying, dying and on the point of passing all that time he endured this final suffering.

The comfort of looking at the crucifix; physical desire is not sin if the soul does not assent as well; the body will suffer until united to Christ. For I knew that while I gazed on the cross I was safe and sound, and I was not willingly going to imperil my soul. Apart from the cross there was no assurance against the horror of fiends. I had either to look up or to reply. You are my heaven.

Selections from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

I would rather endure that suffering until the Day of Judgement than to come to heaven apart from him. I was quite clear that he who held me so closely bound could equally well release me when he pleased. Thus I was taught to choose Jesus for my heaven, whom I never at this time saw apart from his suffering. I wanted no other heaven than Jesus, who will be my joy when I do eventually get there.


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Ever since, this has been a great comfort to me that by his grace I chose Jesus for my heaven, and him in all his passion and grief. It taught me to choose only Jesus for my heaven, come what may. For, wretch that I was, I had already regretted having asked this favour. Had I known the sort of suffering it would involve, I should have thought twice about praying for it. But now I could recognize it for what it was: My soul was not protesting, nor was God blaming me. I was experiencing both regret and deliberate choice at one and the same time.

And this was due to the two sides of our nature, outward and inward. The outward side is our mortal physical nature, which will continue to suffer and grieve all the time it lives—as I knew only too well! It was this part of me that regretted it all.

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The inward side is exalted and joyful and vital, all peaceful and loving. And deep down I was experiencing this. It was this part of me that so strongly, sensibly, and deliberately chose Jesus for my heaven. In this way I saw the truth that the inward part is superior to, and governor of, the outward, and that it was neither responsible for its desires, nor should it heed them, for its own intention is deliberately and eternally set on being united to our Lord Jesus.

That the outward could draw the inward to conform to it was not shown me: I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, 'What may this be? And I was answered in my understanding: During her early life, the Black Death hit the city of Norwich three times. It is estimated that the plague killed about a third of England's population in one single epidemic. People died so quickly and in such numbers that "the dead could not receive proper burial and in the worst of times, lay stacked in carts like so much cordwood, or in hastily dug pits on the edge of town, or simply where they fell, in the streets".

Although she does not speak of the plague directly, her book shows a deep sensitivity to suffering and dying.

There are many resources both in Norwich, the UK and Worldwide. Julian's writings have been translated into many languages including modern English, French and Catalan. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


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