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Mountain Spirit

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Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 9, 2010
Acts 16: 9-15 * Psalm 67 * Revelation 21: 10, 22-22:5
* John14:23-29
David M. McNair

The famous psychoanalyst Alice Miller, who died last month, taught that for the early years of a child’s life, parents take on divine status. For the child, parents are gods, and when a child witnesses parents fighting, and worst, when they witness domestic violence, that child may be scarred and scared for the rest of her life. Fortunately, the opposite is true. Because the divine impression parents make on small children, healthy parental relationships can imprint good, true, and beautiful images that comfort and console us for all our lives and make us believe that we are wanted and welcome in the skins we inhabit.

The four gospels only record two moments when God speaks to Jesus: in his baptism and his transfiguration. At both times God says the same thing, “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” Was it this awareness and knowledge that got Jesus through all he had to face. Simply knowing that he was unconditionally loved by God?

As the fifty days of Easter draw to a close, the church invites us this day — which is Mother’s Day in many parts of the world — to reflect on the fact that a departing Jesus, will petition God to send an Advocate who will teach and remind disciples in every age, what Jesus taught.

What did he teach. The unconditional love of God who wants nothing more than the wholeness and blessing of all God’s children.
When Jesus described the Holy Spirit, he used the word parakletos, which translates as advocate, to capture the idea of intercessor and a spokesperson on behalf of another. For many people, this advocate – this one who teaches and reminds us about God’s self-sacrificing and unconditional nature — is a parent — our mother or father. Sadly, we all realize that not everyone has the experience of generous, loving, and affirming parenting from their mothers or fathers. This is a cause for unspeakable pain and sorrow.
Even in the most healthy situations and families, we all must acknowledge the frailty and brokenness in all mothers and fathers – and in all parenting.

Lynn gave me permission to tell you that a few years back, things got so challenging in her relationship with her mother that Lynn decided to give her up for Lent! Even when relationships are difficult, still, most of us can celebrate our mothers and also fathers — those who, even in their frailty, were, by God’s grace, Advocates of God to us in teaching, reminding, and interceding for us the love, grace, and goodness of God.  

Jesus fully revealed the perfect parent for us all, God whom he called Abba, daddy. Jesus was a radical liberator and used expansive language and images to speak of the Divine. Our Christian tradition has been swept up by — and blinded to the sin of patriarchy and has failed to live into the liberating vision held forth by Jesus -- a world where there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female.

Today, I would like us to turn our attention to one who has given us a fuller and broader image of God than the dominant Church tradition has embraced — God who is not only the perfect Father but also the perfect Mother. Yesterday was the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich who, through her visions and writings, informs us of the motherhood of God and challenges us to move deeper and further into the mystery of the Divine.

The great spiritual teacher Thomas Merton wrote this about Julian: “Julian is, without doubt, one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older, and whereas in the old days I use to be crazy about St. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. I think Julian of Norwich is, with Newman, the greatest English theologian.” (1)

We actually know very little about Julian – not even her true name. All we know for certain is that she spent a significant portion of her life as an anchorite, a recluse, at St. Julian’s Church in Norwich England (to be an anchorite meant that you were sealed in a cell attached to a church for life. They were given last rites and considered “dead to this world”). We also know that she was granted by God a series of sixteen visions or “showings” (as she called them) of the Crucified Christ, and that she was the first woman to write a book in English  — her Revelations of Divine Love – which recounts her visions. She actually wrote the same book twice with twenty years in between. During the twenty years she received what she called “inward instruction” on the meaning of the Showings.

Julian lived in a tumultuous time. A contemporary of Chaucer, the bubonic plague swept through her town twice in her life, killing half the population the first time (Monty Python spoofed this horrible tragedy in the movie The Holy Grail workers going around with carts to collect bodies and saying “bring out your dead). She lived during the 100 Years War, the Great Schism of the church with two popes both claiming the other was the anti-Christ. John Wycliff was executed for heresy not far from her cell — yet, Julian was able to say “And all shall be well, and every kind of thing shall be well.”  She regarded her visions as equivalent to Scripture as a source for truth.

Julian begins her account by describing how in 1373 (637 years ago yesterday), when she was 30 years old, she asked God for “three graces.”. The first grace she requested was a recollection of the passion of Christ — not to experience Christ’s own suffering but to experience the sufferings of those who witnessed his passion. Secondly, she wanted to experience an illness so severe that she and everyone around her would think that she was dying. She hoped that by living all the pains and terrors of death, she would live more to God’s glory afterwards. Her third desire was for three wounds – the wound of contrition, the wound of compassion, and the wound of longing with all her will for God.

Her request of God was then honored. She became deathly ill. Her priest came and administered last rights to her and he set a crucifix before her eyes. As she is looked at the crucifix she was caught up in a vision in which she saw blood coming from the crown on Christ’s head. She says “the vision was living and vivid and hideous and fearful and sweet and lovely.”

Though many of the mystics and theologians touch on the theme of the feminine aspects of God, Julian went further than any up to her time in speaking of God as mother and the motherhood of Christ. She wrote, “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.” When Julian speaks of the Trinity, she frequently speaks of “Our Mother” in the second position as designated for Christ. “ . . . Jesus is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly carried and out of whom we will never come.”

God the Father may well be the foundation of all things, but God the Mother – Christ – busies herself about our needs. Julian identifies the feminine aspect of God as more active. “The mother’s service is nearest, readiest, and surest.” She insisted that whatever our natural mother does for her child, Christ does for us. She insists that “this fair and lovely word ‘mother’ is so sweet and so kind in itself that it cannot truly be said of anyone or to anyone except of him and to him who is the true Mother of life.”

Fifteen years after Julian had her visions she was still grappling about their meaning and she was given another vision with this answer: “What. Do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing. Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you. Love. What did he reveal to you. Love. Why does he reveal it to you. For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end."                    

Julian’s visions were not a flight from reality into fantasy. Instead, they enabled her to see the world with the Spirit of God. Her visions showed her – and they show us — to look beyond our own limits, our own powers, and our own weaknesses to see that God’s possibilities are our realities. (2)  In closing, hear these words Julian wrote to speak of God:

This I am – the capability and goodness of the Fatherhood.
This I am – the wisdom of the Motherhood.
This I am – the light and the grace that is all love.
This I am – the Trinity.
This I am – the Unity.
I am the sovereign goodness of all things.
I am what makes you love.
I am what makes you long and desire.
This I am – the endless fulfilling of all desires. (3)