Drafted on 8th May 2017, edited for attempted clarity on 9th 2026
I’ve stayed uncomfortably silent lately, called it “not-doing”. Not that I have been obedient to that adage from the Tao te Ching emblazoned above as an epigraph: “Practise not-doing, and everything will fall into place”. What is it supposed to mean, anyway? My few readers are too polite to ask.
Vaguely—vagueness being the all-purpose get-out in New Age culture—I have imagined that “not-doing” is made possible by there being some other Doer than our active willing and acting. “Newagery” or Woo” has erupted like teenage acne in my recent posts; making me want to hide my face from public embarrassment, and never read them again. For example I’ve celebrated as “serendipity” certain coincidences which appeared to validate the direction I was going; as if to call them “heaven-sent” or “meant to be”. My “not-doing” meant to do exactly as I pleased while assuming there was some kind of overriding guidance involved.
Before my confession sounds too abject, I should add that for homo sapiens, a generous portion of prejudice and superstition is normal and indispensable for coping in daily life. In other words, our capacity for self-delusion expands to fill the need perceived by our instinctive selves. Not that I’m in a position to say what’s what. Nor am I in any position to implicate others. I shall take this opportunity and tell how I let myself be deluded.
I ended my last post with the best-known quote from a 14th century English woman that we know as Julian of Norwich. We don’t know much else, not even her real name; only her book, Revelations of Divine Love.
A few days later, I discovered an important edition of this book for £1.50 at Oxfam, it struck me as significant, a gift reserved especially for me. I blush at the memory, but I started a laudatory post almost straight away, linking it with aspects of a spiritual quest expressed in my last, e.g. praising the author’s ability to express spiritual states in words. She records sixteen Shewings” as noted from a night of visions when she lay apparently dying, having received her last rites, with experiences I’ve had (“moments”, “angel-whisperings” etc), while setting her way above in terms of the intensity of hers. I wanted to say how much her visionary encounters with Christ in various stages of the Passion moved me, by their bizarre combination of gruesome detail with intimate one-to-one love for a single Christian soul. At the same time I wanted to make clear that I have never been a Christian and never will be; except that the brilliance of her writing helped me grasp for the first time what the Passion may mean to a Christian .
So I copied and scanned bits of the book to support my enthusiasm for its style & content. I wasn’t sure who’d be interested but the Web’s a place which makes it possible for fellow nerds to beat a path to your door. Then I thought I should take time to read the whole book first; especially as its complex internal structure is directed at justifying the well-known
It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’
Julian, writing 600 years ago, distances herself from Newagery long before its invention. She declares herself obedient in all points to the mother Church, i.e. the Church of Rome, including its every doctrine, such as Hell for the unredeemed sinner—and the Jews. Alarm bells, already jangling in the background, made me start when I read this:
So the Revelations convey a contradictory message: the personal encounters with her Redeemer, with all the blood & defacements involved in the stages of his Passion; grotesquely contrasted yet welded to the bliss of this one-to-one intimacy with Him, as if she is somehow the chosen one.
The story of her Shewings hangs together to the extent that they occur when she was deemed mortally ill, to the point where a Curate was called to administer the last rites according to the Church, and he held close to her face a crucifix, which perhaps in her fever triggered a series of hallucinations. Whatever kind of visions they were, the overriding impression she conveys is of unconditional love and comfort received.
For one who describes herself as “unlettered” she has an extraordinary command of the English of her time. Thus she can make fine distinctions: her own joys and sufferings are not to be confused theological notions. In my state of seeing the book as an oracle answering spiritual questions raised in my last post, there was much to confirm, less to put my critical faculties on full alert.
But when, in the latter part of the book she comes time and again back to age-old issue of how can an Almighty God countenance the suffering in the world, I saw how she was over-protesting her orthodoxy. Her Revelations never fit properly to the Church’s teachings. In her Shewings, evil has no power, “sin is not a deed”, whatever that means. There is some Fiend roaming abroad who doesn’t understand that this is God’s world, but actually everything that happens is ordained and “all will be well”. She states it baldly: “There is no other doer but He”. Of course, people do suffer, appalling things do happen, she doesn’t gloss over that, even though she’s privileged as an anchoress living with people who attend on her, unaffected by the Black Death which ravaged Norwich three times*.
The comfort she offers, in her later interpretations of the Shewings, which form the bulk of the book, is that God (as Christ) chose and chooses to suffer with us, and to take away our suffering through his. To the extent that people do still suffer, it’s to increase their love etc etc; it’s one of those things which we are not to understand, because God keeps things hidden from us (a nasty habit, one might say, which has infected his Church too); because he is like our feudal Lord and we merely wait on him, at least till we get to heaven; so of course the servant doesn’t demand to know all his Lord’s business.
It was somewhere at this point that I started to feel that the comfort she describes comes substantially from her privileged state. She’s comfortable with a world where God is the only doer, so she need not feel guilty that the non-privileged suffer the horrors of that place, that century. But all Christians should feel guilty for sin, for not obeying the Church, for Adam’s Fall . . . So I saw that the medicine (Christian obedience) was not only ineffective, but worse than the illness. What had happened to the innocent hedonism of the Greeks?
An attentive reader may notice that this is not a critique of Julian, or her Revelations, but a narrative of my own state of mind. And it so happens that Karleen and I were sharing another book: Call the Midwife, by Jennifer Worth: true tales of London’s dockland areas in the 1950s, where wartime bomb sites still lay festering, and life was very hard. One of these tells of an Irish girl Mary, escaping a drunken mother and abusive stepfather, not knowing a soul in England till a handsome young man starts to look after her. He turns out to be a pimp. Even when she has been forced on the streets and appallingly treated, she still remains infatuated with him, forever seeking signs that he favours her above the other girls.
Seduction, whether into religion or prostitution, is made possible by awakening wide-eyed trust in a vulnerable heart starved of love and care. And that’s when a slogan came into my head, like one of those sound-bites which politicians use to denigrate one another:
Julian was a pimp for Jesus!
It’s one thing to have a fevered vision of a crucifix which comes to life and says “I love you, Julian, I don’t mind if you see me at my worst. After all I did it all for you.” It’s quite another when Christ of the Passion, of the Epiphany, ingratiates himself in Julian’s Shewings, which she felt compelled to share with us—or wide-eyed bookworms like me.
To which the correct response, I suggest would be, “Who cares? That was 600 years ago.
* “There was also rampant poverty, unemployment, high taxes, bad harvests, political unrest, war with France, religious division and persecution. (Just half a mile from Julian`s Church, the early followers of the Protestant John Wycliff, The Lollards, were being martyred in the Lollards pit).” (From this site.)