"There is No Other Doer but He"

 

As journals, blogs are like life: open-ended. You finish one piece, you've no idea what the next will say, or whether there'll be a next one. 

After ending my last with a quote from Julian of Norwich, to round the thing off as I thought, I never expected to encounter her again so soon. A few days later I dropped in at our local Oxfam on the off-chance of something interesting. They have a small shelf of oddments they label "collectible", meaning obscure and old. It's been a cornucopia of serendipity on various occasions mentioned in these posts. To my surprise they had a well-worn, much underlined edition of the Revelations of Divine Love. To my mind it may be the best available anywhere, being published in soon after additional manuscripts had come to light in 1909 and 1910. Mine cost less than a dollar, but there are Kindle versions with the same text for little more. And as I delve in to the content, I'd like nothing more than to share the content with a reader—one or more—for serious study*. There's no need to introduce this classic of Christian mysticism, since there is so much information online. But I never thought to read it myself, until it arrived in this fashion, an astonishing gift, one of those you never realize you want or need till it's there in front of you. 

For in my last I'd pondered some questions: 

this “I” wants to be the doer and not the instrument, despite knowing better; and doesn’t seem to learn . . . [my] impetus for writing has always been related to ecstatic experience . . . And the constant difficulty . . .  is to know how to put it in words. . . . finding the words there, firmly ensconced in the world’s literature, is a great relief. 

 

And then there are the perennial problems of evil or random suffering, which appear incompatible with any notion of God. Henry Thomas Hamblin and Psalm 91 offer the comfort of a safe haven, but it seems to be a preserve of the privileged: 

There can be no evil in your life if you dwell in the secret place of the Most High. 

Julian offers me answers. 

I've never yet called myself a Christian, but this short book by an anonymous anchoress 600 years ago comes closer than any other to bringing me to understand and respect the religion its author was born into, surrounded by her "even-Christians†" of Norwich, England. The narrative of her "Shewings" strikes me as utterly convincing: a night of visions occasioned by a crucifix offered to her by a priest, preparing her for imminent death. They are visions of the most intimate encounter with a loving God who approaches her with the still-bleeding body of his Passion, one-to-one, I-Thou. Her language is astonishingly versatile and vivid. 

from Chapter II: 

These Revelations were shewed to a simple creature unlettered, the year of our Lord 1373, the eighth day of May. Which creature had afore desired three gifts of God. The First was mind of His Passion; the Second was bodily sickness in youth, at thirty years of age; the Third was to have of God's gift three wounds. . . the second freely desiring sickness so hard as to death . . . for I would have no manner of comfort of earthly life . . . and this I meant for that I would be purged, by the mercy of God because of that sickness. And that for the more furthering in my death: for I desired to be soon with my God.

 from Chapter III:

 My Curate was sent for to be at my ending, and by that time when he came I had set my eyes and could not speak. He set the Cross before my face and said: I have brought thee the Image of thy Maker and Saviour: look thereupon and comfort thee therewith. from Chapter VI: For He hath no despite of that He hath made, nor hath He any disdain to serve us at the simplest office that to our body belongeth in nature, for love of the soul that He hath made in his own likeness. For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the goodness of God, and enclosed. Yea, and more homely: for all these may waste and wear away, but the goodness of God is ever whole; and more near to us, without any likeness . . .

 from Chapter XI: 

All thing that is done, it is well done: for our Lord God doeth all. Sin is no deed. . . . for I saw truly that God doeth all-thing, be it never so little. And I saw truly that nothing is done by hap or by adventure, but all things by the foreseeing wisdom of God: if it be hap or adventure in the sight of man, our blindness and our unforesightedness is the cause. And all this He shewed me full blissfully, signifying thus: See! I am God: see! I am in all thing: see! I do all thing: see! I lift never mine hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end: see! 

I lead all thing to the end I ordained it to from without beginning, by the same Might, Wisdom and Love whereby I made it. How should anything be amiss?

I think it must have been for answers to this question ("Can He be the Doer, the only Doer?") that I have often mentioned Etty Hillesum, working with Jewish prisoners in the Westerbork transit camp and on her final journey to Auschwitz (with family in the next truck), knowing only too well the fate they would all share; and that in my last I referred to Henry Thomas Hamblin & Psalm 91. 

We may conclude that such things depend on faith, not fact. But if this is faith, how foolish to reject it! And I have asked the question in many forms and contexts, taking into account Evolution, in Darwin's terms, and all of science since; whether it should let us conclude that anything at all occurs "by hap or adventure". 

from Chapter XXXI: 

Then He, without voice and opening of lips, formed in my soul these words: Here is the Fiend overcome. These words said our Lord, meaning his blessed Passion as he shewed it afore. To which we shall return, because it is essential to Julian's  vision. But now I want to go back to Chapter XI, for the immediacy and the intimacy of the Shewing, in which God is no abstraction: The Revelations that came to her as Shewings are predominantly aspects of the Passion, expanded in later chapters to a gruesome level of detail, which she paradoxically presents as the most intimate encounter possible with God, full of bliss: from Chapter I: the First is of His precious crowning with thorns . . . with many fair shewings of endless wisdom and teachings of love: in which all the Shewings that follow be grounded and oned. . . . The Fourth is the scourging of His tender body, with plenteous shedding of His blood . . . the Eighth is of the last pains of Christ, and his cruel dying [Chapters XVI to XXI]