Magazine letter November 2023
I write this on 19th October, given the need for submission deadlines it has to be rather ahead of publication date. Usually such a lead time would be no difficulty, none of our three parish magazines is designed to convey national, let alone international news – and certainly not the Rector’s letter. Yet as the world stands at the moment I can’t help thinking that the context of all our thoughts is desperately subject to change in disturbing ways.
A couple of weeks ago the news was all about the Political Party conferences, global warming and Ukraine’s fight for survival. Now the war and atrocities in Israel and Gaza fill our papers and news broadcasts, I hate to think what the news will be when you come to read this. So how do we cope with such a troubled and troubling world? How do we reassure our children that they can sleep peacefully in their beds? In a world blighted by human greed and hatred what security can we find?
At such times of insecurity, when one’s moorings do not feel as certain as they once did, I always turn to the thoughts of a woman who lived at a time of plague, when life was short and tenuous. She lived a mostly solitary life, and having survived a near fatal fever in her thirties spent much of the rest of her life meditating on the visions she had when under the effects of the fever. She dated her visions to 8th May 1373. But her thoughts went beyond those visions, she took seriously the world as she knew it and the character of the God she believed in.
She was one of the few people, in my opinion, to ever fully attempt to understand what it would mean for God to be the God as defined by Jesus and his life, death and resurrection. She tried to understood both the implications for the cosmos and for every being in it to have a God who would care deeply, and yet be able to see such suffering and hurt. In her work she had to stay within the straitjacket of the dogma of the mediaeval church, but she stretched it as far she dared to be true to her experience and understanding.
Her name is not known, we know her just by the church in which she was granted a room to pray, eat, sleep, write, receive visitors and live in for the rest of her life. She is known as Mother Julian of Norwich. Her work, the first by a woman to be written in English, is called ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. In it I find words of profound wisdom which always inspire and calm me. Here is no easy ‘it is all part of God’s plan’, she had seen too much to be so trite, but she understood that ultimately nothing will separate us from the love of God. The Revelations finish with these words:
‘Thus did I learn that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw full surely that ere God made us he loved us; which love has never slackened nor ever shall. And in this love he hath done all his works; and in this love he hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein he made us was in him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this we shall see in God, without end.’
William