First of all there was the reading aloud that was active and affective.\u00a0 Then there was a period of meditation in which what was read is secured in the memory by again calling on the emotions, using the imagination, seeing, hearing, feeling, whatever was required to make vivid the reading and secure it in the memory.\u00a0 Then that moved to a phase of prayer, of petition, and desire for God.\u00a0 And that desire you\u2019ll hear repeated again and again in Julian.\u00a0 And then finally contemplation, which is the fruits of that desire coming through the power of imagination, through art, through the visual.\u00a0 And Julian\u2019s visions are right at that transition, at the point of death when she\u2019s returned to life, she is gazing on the crucifix, which is presented to her as part of the last rites, and that vision of the crucifix suddenly becomes alive for her.\u00a0 And she watches the body on the crucifix change as it moves through death, and begins to experience affectively and emotively what that means.<\/p>\n
And so she has, in this very short period of time, 14 visions.\u00a0 And six of them are focused on the passion, on the crucifixion.\u00a0 And she writes her visions down, and the others are on spiritual teachings.\u00a0 She then reflects, she reads, this becomes like a sacred text, she reads, meditates on these visions for the next 30 years.\u00a0 And then writes again, expanding them, commenting on them, and elaborating them.\u00a0 And that\u2019s what we have in the book of Showings.<\/i><\/p>\nJulian’s Theology<\/h3>\n
Now what I want to do is to unpack Julian\u2019s theology.\u00a0 And I think my favorite way to introduce Julian is with a simple line where she says,<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd God rejoices that he is our father, and God rejoices that he is our mother.\u00a0 And God rejoices that he is our savior.\u00a0 And Christ rejoices that he is our spouse.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And these are the five high joys.\u00a0 What\u2019s so distinctive about Julian here, is that she is not talking about our joy in God, or that pleasure that we have in God.<\/p>\n
She is talking about God\u2019s pleasure in us.<\/p>\n
About God\u2019s delight in us.<\/p>\n
About the joy that we bring to God.<\/p>\n
About how we bless God.<\/p>\n
How much fun we are for God (laughter.)<\/p>\n
You see, as we move into this kind of language, this is different.\u00a0 So we\u2019ll explore more what she means by the motherhood of Jesus.<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cJesus is our mother in nature, and our mother in grace, because he wanted altogether to become our mother in all things, made the foundation of his work most humbly and most mildly in the mother\u2019s womb, and he revealed that in the first revelation.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nAnd she\u2019s talking about the first revelation that she saw of Mary.\u00a0 \u201cOur mother in nature,\u201d she talks about it also as \u201cour mother in kind is the substantial unity of what we have with God.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 And what she means by that is that as we talked about the divine wisdom, Sophia, being present at creation, and being through whom creation flows, what Julian does, is she makes that a maternal image.\u00a0 That is, of all creation flowing from Christ as mother, that is that work of cosmic creation.\u00a0 That is a work of motherhood<\/strong>.\u00a0 That is a mothering role. And why she uses the mothering metaphor is because understanding that role in creation, that role of Jesus in creation means that through the mothering metaphor is that the bonds between what is created and the creator are the bonds of motherhood.\u00a0 And the language that she uses continually for the divine relationship is the language of bonding.\u00a0 What we would in psychology call bonding.<\/p>\nKnitting and wanting are the ways that she said it in 14th<\/sup> century English.\u00a0 So Jesus is our mother in kind, mother of our substance, and is the mother of mercy, is the mother of our sensuality.\u00a0 And this is the word that she uses for embodiment, for the incarnation, for our embodiment is our sensuality.<\/strong>\u00a0 And Jesus gave birth to us in our sensuality, joined to us in our sensuality in the incarnation.\u00a0 So, that creative work of our embodiment comes from our mother Jesus who bore us in our embodied state, our mother Jesus who also has given us our life through the original creation, the life of our souls. \u00a0The motherhood of Jesus is her metaphor because in speaking of this theological work of creation and incarnation, the mother service is nearest, readiest and surest.\u00a0 Nearest because it is most natural.\u00a0 Readiest because it is most loving, and surest because it is truest.\u00a0 No one ever might, or ever could perform this office fully, except only him.<\/p>\n\u201cWe know that all our mothers bear us for pain and death.\u00a0 O, what is that but our true mother Jesus.\u00a0 He alone bears us for joy and for endless life.\u00a0 Blessed may he be.\u00a0 So he carries us within him in travail and love until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and the cruel pains that ever were and will be, and at the last he died.\u00a0 And when he had finished, and born us for his bliss, still all this could not satisfy his wonderful love.\u00a0 He revealed this in his words of great surpassing love \u2018if I could suffer more, I would suffer more.\u2019\u00a0 But he could not die anymore, but he did not want to seek working.\u00a0 Therefore, he must need nourish us for the precious love of motherhood has made him our debtor.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Let me unpack that a little bit.\u00a0 Julian says Jesus is our mother.\u00a0 Our own mothers gave us birth, and they gave us birth into a life of pain, and eventual death.\u00a0 But our mother Jesus gave us birth into a life that is endless without death, and into a life of bliss.\u00a0 And then she says, now watch what happens, she talks about the birth pains of mother Jesus, travailing, going into labor, the labor intensifies, the pain intensifies, reaching an ever and ever higher threshold.\u00a0 Now what she does is she superimposes them on the crucifix.\u00a0 Crucifixion, the suffering of the crucifixion are the labor pains of our mother Jesus as he travails, and suffers, and anguishes, and does it in order to give us birth.\u00a0 And we are birthed through that suffering on the cross, and we are birthed to endless life.<\/strong>\u00a0 And the joy of Jesus our mother giving us birth is so great that the labor pains of the crucifixion are nothing to the joy of having birthed us.\u00a0 In fact, if greater sufferings were required to have birthed us, he would have gladly suffered the more.\u00a0 And Jesus is our mother through this labor on the cross in such a way that that bonding has taken place.\u00a0 And that we are forever loved, and forever nurtured through that connectedness that only birth gives.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the source of our security, of our confidence, and sense of shelter.\u00a0 And the love of Jesus our mother is that we were birthed through her body.<\/p>\nNow, Julian carries this theme of the motherhood of Jesus, and she says,<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mother can give the child to suck of her milk, but our precious mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does most courteously, and most tenderly with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life.\u00a0 And with all the sacraments, he sustains us most mercifully and graciously, as he meant in these blessed words.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So the ministries of the Church are that nurture that comes from the breast of the mother Jesus.\u00a0 I think my favorite part of Julian\u2019s image of Jesus as mother, is her understanding of sin.\u00a0 And I might need to translate this for you, but let\u2019s see, \u201cBut often when our falling and our wretchedness are shown to us, we are so much afraid and so greatly ashamed of ourselves, that we scarcely know where we can put ourselves.\u201d<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 This is a scared child.\u00a0 \u201cBut then our courteous mother does not wish us to flee away.\u00a0 For nothing would be more pleasing to him, for he then wants us to behave like a child.\u00a0 When it is distressed and frightened, it runs quickly to its mother and if it can do no more, it calls to the mother for help with all its might.\u00a0 So he wants us to act like a meek child saying, \u2018my kind mother, my gracious mother, my beloved mother have mercy on me.\u00a0 I have made myself filthy and unlike you.\u00a0 And I may not, and can not make it right except with your help and grace.\u2019\u201d Julian\u2019s vision of sin is dirty diapers (laughter.)\u00a0 It\u2019s not a big deal.\u00a0 Just come, and mother Jesus will fix it.\u00a0 Now there, now there, don\u2019t you feel nice that you\u2019re all clean and dry? Sin is not a great crisis for mother Jesus, because she can take care of it, so we should not be afraid of our sinfulness and go running.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u201cWhen I first saw that God does everything which is done, I did not see sin.\u00a0 And then I saw that all was well.\u00a0 But when God did show me sin, it was then that he said \u2018all will be well.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Julian gives to us, I think, an image of Jesus as mother that connects us profoundly with the experience of embodiment, with being embodied and makes of that experience, of being in bodies, the central source for our understanding of the depth of the love and the connectedness and the potency of that bond between God and us that has taken place in a twofold way from creation and from redemption.\u00a0 She has drawn much of her understanding from medieval spirituality, from the imitation of Christ, and that equation between suffering, and love, and compassion: suffering as the measure for compassion, and as the source for it.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the legacy of the historical Jesus that we can draw from the medieval period, that in some ways can get us closer to the first century than even the second century Christians did with their proximity.<\/p>\n
MODERATOR:\u00a0 Thank you very much.\u00a0 We have about ten minutes for questions.\u00a0 We started a little late.\u00a0 I just wanted to say, the first time I ran into Julian was 1982 or 83 and it was wonderful to go back and visit her this morning.\u00a0 Jim?<\/p>\n
JIM: I was wondering did she actually disagree with Augustine\u2019s original sin, and how did she address that?\u00a0 Did she actually address it or not?\u00a0 I\u2019m really curious.<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: She works out- let me step back a little bit.\u00a0 Augustine\u2019s doctrine of original sin is a struggle to address the whole question of the human condition, so it\u2019s one distinctive theological interpretation of it.\u00a0 And it\u2019s late, it\u2019s fifth century.\u00a0 So we don\u2019t have that understanding of sin earlier than Augustine.\u00a0 Nor does it develop at all in Greek Christianity.\u00a0 Now, Julian was very aware of those doctrines, and so she\u2019s working as a way of trying to understand how to integrate her clear vision of the work of Christ with those doctrines.\u00a0 And where she comes out is her vision of love swallows up the dilemma of original sin.\u00a0 In other words, it eclipses it.\u00a0 The love is so potent, the bonding so intense that the original sin can be there, that its potency is much, much weakened.\u00a0<\/em> She is very much a faithful daughter of the Church.\u00a0 She existed during the period of the inquisition, so she existed during the period of the inquisition meaning theological care has consequences (laughter.)\u00a0 And, her teachings were never challenged by the Church.\u00a0 Her orthodoxy was never challenged.\u00a0 And so one of the things that\u2019s wonderful about Julian is to have a woman theologian who is in a way pushing the boundaries so much, who still is in complete harmony with the Church.\u00a0 Now what she does continually in her revelations is she reaffirms her loyalty to the Church and the teachings of the Church.\u00a0 She clearly positions herself fully under the authority of the teachers of the Church.\u00a0 At the same time, she subverts it by, she has this independent authority that comes from her revelations, which medieval spirituality granted- this independent authority, this direct revelation that she appeals to.\u00a0 But she always appeals it is by saying \u2018that poor ignorant woman that I am.\u2019\u00a0 And then she goes on to say, \u2018well, I shouldn\u2019t really be teaching, of course I\u2019m not a teacher because I\u2019m not a male.\u00a0 But it is so important that everyone understand this revelation that\u2019s clearly for more than me, so perhaps I\u2019ll just write it. And then share it as widely as I can, but it wouldn\u2019t be teaching.\u2019 (laughter.)<\/p>\nQUESTION: Julian works really hard to cultivate this relationship with God through all this love and suffering and everything.\u00a0 And yesterday you talked about this fellow who thought that by the virtue of baptism, we all have access to divine wisdom.\u00a0 Well, was this hard work too, or it just kind of happens if you\u2019re there?<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: Well, yeah, I\u2019m not sure. Julian\u2019s suffering was like four days.\u00a0 And she\u2019d actually forgotten that she\u2019d prayed for this terminal illness.\u00a0 So the language of her revelations is of joy and delight, and of discovery and profound connectedness and relatedness.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t breath at all with that sense of labor, or burden or suffering.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that\u2019s how she would describe her work, or the work of theologizing.<\/p>\n
QUESTION (difficult to hear): If sin was not a big deal, why is it that Julian has a radical renunciation of life by embracing poverty?\u00a0 She seemed to radically renounce the life that was around her and be a radically different Christian when she comes to. And it seems to me that they would see that as the life that was around them and she would be kind of cynical and react against it, and yet she doesn\u2019t see it as a big deal.<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: There\u2019s, well, some of the monastic traditions really focused on penitence as the basis for the monastic life- so fasting, vigils, reading the penitential psalms were all disciplines focused specifically on sinfulness and on eradicating it.\u00a0 I mean, that\u2019s where Luther comes from.\u00a0 He comes from that Augustinian monastic tradition.\u00a0 The kind of, and Francis is this way too.\u00a0 Francis talks a lot about joy, and the penitential dimension is simply not present in Francis\u2019 work either as in Julian\u2019s.\u00a0 And the renunciation of the world, is not, in the way in which these individuals see it in their traditions, the renunciation of the world is not because the world is wicked or evil, it is that it just gets in the way.\u00a0 It\u2019s superfluous.\u00a0 It\u2019s unnecessary.\u00a0 I mean, there\u2019s a whole variety of spiritualities around renunciations, so these only represent two.<\/p>\n
QUESTION: God has a lot of anger in the Bible.\u00a0 Does she really not refer to God in this way at all?<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: It\u2019s interesting.\u00a0 She\u2019s clearly, her whole tradition. I was thinking about the way Professor Wright was working with the whole teachings, tradition of Jesus that were quote \u2018apocalyptic,\u2019 it was really to say, it was a counter polemic against the idea of revolt.\u00a0 So his whole message was a message directed against the theme of revolt, and advocating peaceful, non-violent resistance.\u00a0 Well Julian\u2019s does not address God\u2019s anger directly in that sense, but her entire revelation is directed toward the view that God is angry.\u00a0 In other words, her whole treatise addresses God\u2019s anger.\u00a0 In a society that is primarily seeing God as angry, and interpreting their lives as God\u2019s judgment, so it\u2019s a major polemic against the prevailing view.\u00a0 That\u2019s how I would see her work, that that really is her major intent, to undermine that worldview.<\/strong><\/p>\nQUESTION: (not all decipherable.) Jesus, despite the fact that medieval Christianity\u2026how would you compare modern Jesus with modern Mary? (?)<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: It\u2019s very interesting because for Julian, Mary is the second most important figure.\u00a0 And there\u2019s a real parallel there.\u00a0 Because in her opening, not only does she want to know the sufferings of Jesus, but she wants to know what it feels like to be Mary, to be Mary at the foot of the cross.\u00a0 To know Mary\u2019s suffering as she watches her son die, and that her entry into Mary\u2019s suffering is her entry into Mary\u2019s love.\u00a0 And by entering into Mary\u2019s love, then that gives her access to enter into the love of mother Jesus.\u00a0 So Mary\u2019s a real bridge to the maternal Jesus.<\/p>\n
QUESTION: Hi.\u00a0 This totality of body, I wanted to go back and ask, was Julian reflective about who supported and cared for her body?\u00a0 I mean, I think her energy says\u2026She was a recluse, who was cleaning up for her? Does she ever give any thought to the communities that supported her?<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: There\u2019s of course, with Julian, all we have is her visions, and her elaborations of her visions.\u00a0 I mean, we have just nothing about her life, who she was.\u00a0 I mean, hardly any biographical data at all.\u00a0 So we really don\u2019t even have any way of answering that question.\u00a0 Now, I think it\u2019 a really interesting question, because of course there\u2019s a class question here that probably, if you think of Julian\u2019s education, it\u2019s likely then that she comes from a propertied class and had those who served her as well.\u00a0 And in the language, in the way that she uses the courtly imagery too, there\u2019s a kind of world that she seems to move in an feel very comfortable in with that kind of imagery.\u00a0 I have a student who did a really absolutely fascinating paper on Julian, and if I\u2019d thought of it, I would\u2019ve gotten permission to use it from her.\u00a0 But the black plague swept through southern England three times during Julian\u2019s lifetime.\u00a0 And as you know, three days from healthy to rotting corpse with the black plague.\u00a0 And she, this student, has interpreted Julian\u2019s theology as a form of pastoral counseling, as a way of helping people deal with the loss of death, as a way to find joy in the face of death.\u00a0 And she wanted to make Julian really a central guide to pastoral counseling in the context of AIDS.\u00a0 And that medical setting for Julian I think would be very very fruitful.<\/p>\n
QUESTION: I\u2019m struck by her prayer for the three wounds.\u00a0 And the first one was contrition.\u00a0 And what did she mean by that?<\/p>\n
KAREN JO TORJESEN: It\u2019s really interesting- I keep saying that don\u2019t I?\u00a0 I\u2019ll have to get a better lead in.\u00a0 Contrition is a central part of medieval spirituality.\u00a0 And in its normal context is an awareness of sinfulness.\u00a0 What sinfulness turns out to be in Julian, and especially around contrition, is incominteretness (?).\u00a0 Meaning, that the ontological distance between us and God is so great, not that I\u2019m so wicked, but that I\u2019m so little.\u00a0 And it goes back to the notion of that child, you know the baby sense of incominteretness with the adult.<\/em><\/p>\nMODERATOR: I thank you very much.<\/p>\n
(APPLAUSE)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Karen Jo Torjesen 1\/28\/1997 Bangor Theological Seminary Convocation- Pond Lectures \u201cJesus as Mother: Crossroads Between Christology, Anthropology and Gender.\u201d This morning I didn\u2019t think I woke up in the same state I went to sleep in (laughter.)\u00a0 It\u2019s beautiful, I\u2019m sorry you had to drive in it, but what a joy to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7986,"featured_media":0,"parent":318,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7986"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2672"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2685,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2672\/revisions\/2685"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/shaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>Today, a lot of time has passed since we talked yesterday.\u00a0 About 12 centuries, and we are now in the medieval world, and I am going to introduce you to, and I hope enchant you with Julian of Norwich.\u00a0 And you will probably gather easily from my presentation that I love her dearly, and always come back again and again to sit at her feet.<\/p>\n