Episode 74: Grace Hamman - A Medieval Mystic’s Vision of God’s Love
In this week’s episode of Faith for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with writer and scholar Grace Hamman about Julian of Norwich, her mystical visions, and her radically intimate understanding of God’s love. They explore Julian’s depiction of Jesus as a mother, her approach to suffering and hope in the aftermath of the Black Death, and her insistence that “all shall be well” is not a simplistic promise that everything will turn out fine, but a hard-won hope in the midst of suffering. They also consider what Julian’s example can teach those navigating deconstruction, questions of authority, and the tension between personal spiritual experience and institutional tradition, inviting listeners to embrace a more nuanced way of engaging faith, Scripture, and the wisdom of the past.
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Jared: [00:00:00] You're listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.
Pete: I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
For centuries, the story of Eve has been used to say something about women, that they are more easily deceived, less trustworthy, or even responsible for humanity's downfall. But is that really what the story says?
Pete: Well, in our September class, taught by friend of the podcast Ciarra Jones, we're going to talk about Eve.
What does the Bible actually say, and how have interpretations of Eve shaped the way women have been understood and treated over the centuries?
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Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about Julian of Norwich with Grace Hamman.
Jared: And Grace is a writer and independent scholar of late medieval poetry and contemplative writing.
Pete: And she's the author of Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, and also another book, Jesus Through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, [00:02:00] and Theologians of the Middle Ages. I've read the first book, and it's amazing, and I can't wait to get into this discussion with her.
Jared: Yeah, if you've never heard of Julian of Norwich, don't worry. It is interesting. Yeah. It's very good.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Jared: All right, let's dive in.
Grace: You have to keep your wits about you as you, as you read the past and, and let it challenge you and let it kind of blow that clean sea breeze through all your assumptions about, well, the church has always said this.
Well, mm, are you sure? Uh, people like Julian open up different ways to us where you go, "Oh, this was in the 14th century, guys. Like, there were different things going on."
Pete: Hello, Grace. Welcome to our podcast.
Grace: Hello. I'm so excited to be here.
Pete: Well, we're glad to have you here, and, uh, you know, we're gonna talk about Julian of Norwich. And, um, I've just- my experience here, I don't know if you share this, but I just, a, a lot of people have been making [00:03:00] the trek from, I guess evangelicalism or fundamentalism to older ways of thinking, and I think that's why this is just a good representative example of that, and I'm really excited about it.
So, um, who is she? Uh, talk to us. Like, we don't know anything about her, and our listeners might not either, so tell us what you know about, uh... Well, not everything 'cause we'd be here for hours, but give us the gist-
Jared: I know. I was gonna say you’re asking a scholar to, like, say everything.
Pete: Say everything. You have unlimited time. Go. Yeah.
Jared: Yeah. But maybe with the life. Like, what do we know about her life?
Grace: Yeah. We don't know very much about her life is the really funny thing. Um, for somebody who is so beloved and, and has become this spiritual writer who so many people love, we don't know very much.
So she was born in about 1343, so that's the 14th century. And if you can kinda cast your mind back to your [00:04:00] history lessons, you'll recall that when she was a child, the Black Death hit and completely decimated the population in England and all over Europe, and so she lived in a very, very, tumultuous time period.
Um, later on in her life, there would be a king deposed and a new king put in. I mean, nothing in her life was stable, in the outside world, in the outer world. So Julian, when she was about 30 years old, she was very ill. She thought she was dying, and, on what she thought was her deathbed, experienced a series of what she called showings, which was a Middle English word for visions, for revelations.
And she experienced these showings, which were sights and sounds and words from God, and she thought, [00:05:00] "This is not just for me. I have to share this. I have to write this down." So she wrote down, in a shorter version, what she had experienced, and then she spent the next, uh, about 20 years praying over these and thinking about them- Hmm
and discerning, uh, the meaning of them. They were mysterious to her. She tells us some of this was full misty, is her, her word choice, mysterious to me. And then she wrote them down again in a longer version that showed kind of her process of prayer and interpretation, and that became this longer version of a Revelation of Love or The Showings.
Um, medieval people didn't really title their work, so these are all just, you know, random titles picked by 20th century people for what we now know as Julian of Norwich's Showings or Revelation of Love. And, uh, and honestly, that's kind of all we know about her. We know that she became, after her [00:06:00] showings, an anchorite, which is a crazy, religious vocation of the Middle Ages where you were vowed to remain in a cell, usually attached to a church for the rest of your life, and your vocation was to be sort of a, um, almost like a spiritual mentor of your community and a professional prayer for your community. Um, so she, in a little cell in Norwich, England, spent the rest of her life praying for people, counseling people, and writing and revising her showings.
Mm-hmm. And that's, that's what we know about her. She died sometime after 1416.
Pete: Can you tell us maybe a few theological ideas that she's known for, something that she sort of hung her hat on?
Grace: Yes. So she, first of all, she's the first known woman writer in English. Mm-hmm. So she [00:07:00] holds a pretty significant spot as a woman theologian, as a woman thinker early on in sort of, this developing, "Oh, it's okay to write theology in English."
Um, so that's a big deal on its own.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Grace: But, um, she herself wrote beautifully, wonderfully on the character of God, and specifically his love.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Grace: So that was what she felt like... She calls her showings a lesson of love, and she uses all of these really interesting, beautiful, and odd metaphors and images to talk about what the love of God is like, how we can understand who God is through the character and the quality of his love, and then how we are called to live and love in sort of a broader sense out of knowing that about God and who he is. So she's very [00:08:00] famous for writing about God as a mother, specifically Jesus as a mother.
And how there is a maternal quality to how he loves us, to the unconditional nature of his love, to how he sees us when we mess up, when we sin, when we fall. Um, that it is not in the character of a stern and distant and demanding God, but actually in the character of a mother, whose heart breaks when her children fall, who is attentive to their needs, who loves to raise them and be with them.
And then who does let them fail when they need to learn the jagged contours of their limitations.
Jared: Mm. Was this idea pretty common, or would this have been a little bit shocking or unique as people were, you know, starting to pick it up and saying, "Oh, Jesus is mother or this maternal figure"?
How, how strange would that have [00:09:00] been in her world?
Grace: This actually was not too radical of an idea in her era, which is always surprising to us in modernity because it's an unfamiliar idea to us for the most part. Really what happened was that monastic writers and, um, theologians in,
Jared: Can you just say what that means? Monastic?
Grace: So monastic means, uh, monks.
Jared: Okay.
Grace: Belonging to monks, uh, people in monasteries. And so, monks like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who was a very, very famous and influential theologian, started drawing on themes in scripture, specifically about what did Jesus, what was he meaning when he compared himself to a mother hen when he was weeping over Jerusalem and over the religious hypocrisy of the leadership? What did it mean when he was doing these [00:10:00] more feminine-coded acts like washing his disciples' feet? Um, Paul directly compares himself to a mother, and they were drawing on these threads of: What does it mean to lead like a mother when you are an abbot, when you are the head of your monastery? What kind of leadership is compassionate and attentive, and how is that like Jesus? Um, so there's this tradition developed of Jesus is like a mother to us, and his love out of these themes in scripture that they were drawing together. And, uh, and then people like Julian or like a slightly earlier writer, Marguerite of Roye, who was also a visionary like Julian, started writing about this in relation to bodies too.
So not saying that Jesus had a maternal body, but that his death and his passion was like the suffering of a mother in labor.
Pete: Hmm.
Grace: Um, so you see this in [00:11:00] medieval art in a very, very strange and fascinating, uh, illustrated Bible that was used to teach French royalty. And you have an image of Christ on the cross, and out of his side wound, there's a little tiny figure coming out of it with a little crown on it, like a little baby church because Christ gives birth to the church on the cross 'cause he is the mother of the church.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Grace: Um, and his passion is like labor because it's not suffering that ends in nothingness. It is a suffering that gives life to the fullest. So this idea became, uh, a different way to think about the character of his love, how his love actually is with us, um, his closeness, the intimacy of his love, and, and what it does to us.
So it wasn't, um... [00:12:00] She was writing about it in very creative ways, but it wasn't, none of it was new or even all that controversial which is interesting.
Pete: Well, that is interesting, especially given, you know, the climate and, I have to restrict myself to the Western American Church here.
And, women don't do that kind of stuff. You know, they're not supposed to do that. They're not supposed to be theologians or write and things like that, and I can understand why people would be very attracted to her, who are looking for different ways of participating in the Christian tradition, especially women.
I imagine, I don't know this for a fact, but I imagine, she might be a favorite of feminist theologians, who are trying to, who are anchoring, and I think rightly anchoring more progressive views of women in the history of the church itself, and not to think that the church has always been doing what the Southern Baptists are doing today.
Grace: Exactly, yeah. I think she's very appealing, because she just reminds us [00:13:00] that, hey, a lot of our gender roles and ways of thinking about gender in the 21st century haven't been consistent... But some of it is and some of it isn't. Mm. And you kind of have to keep your wits about you.
As you read the past and let it challenge you and let it kind of blow that clean sea breeze through all your assumptions about, "Well, the church has always said this." Well, mm, are you sure? Mm. Uh, people like Julian open up different ways to us, and where you go, "This was in the 14th century, guys." There were different things going on.
Jared: Mm. Well, within that, um, can you say more about that context? Because I would think that would shape her understanding of things, I mean, around the Black Plague and around this idea of suffering. Like, whenever she's thinking about and has these revelations about God [00:14:00] and about God's love, how is that shaped or intertwined with this idea of suffering?
And would we be surprised about how she thought about suffering, or do we see a through line from some of her thinking and the thinking of this time to today? I mean, you even mentioning that, uh, when we have these depictions of Christ, suffering had a, had a goal. There was this suffering that brought life.
So even that's an interesting take. But did she have a take on suffering, in particular, given her context and kinda what she was living through?
Grace: So this is something actually that Julian is very interested in, and she is a woman of her time in her interest in it. The whole medieval church was very caught up in the question of suffering and what to do about it, and, you know, whether this was something that maybe we should even seek out.
Um, you hear all these stories about extreme fasting, um, saints who are self-flagellating, uh, who are whipping themselves or torturing their, their bodies in some sense, um, because they're so [00:15:00] fixated on this idea of the imitation of Christ. Um, should we actually be bodily imitating His suffering, His passion, 'cause that is valuable in and of itself?
Um, so these very, to us, culturally foreign questions about suffering, and Julian, um, is pushing back against some of these things. She says, uh, "You shouldn't actively seek out harsh penance because life itself is a cleansing penance." Um, and so she is not, um, in agreement always with a lot of very strong voices in the church, but this question was very fraught, and there were a lot of different opinions on it.
Because, I mean, half of Europe had just died within recent memory. Uh, this was not an abstract question in any sense. Uh, death was so present in people's lives. They weren't dying in nursing homes or hospitals. They were [00:16:00] dying in your own home. And so this idea of physical pain, of the affective pain of being around suffering, of being around people who are dying or of dying yourself, all of that was very, very present and very important to people in the Middle Ages.
Um, and so one of the ways in which Julian was thinking so much about suffering was her interest in the Passion itself. Um, when you pick up her showings and read her showings- She'll tell you for pages on how Christ's blood looked when he was on the cross. It was like the scales of a herring. It was so numerous that it was like water coming off the eaves of a house in a thunderstorm.
Hmm. I mean, and, and for us, we're like, "Why is she spending all this time with the suffering of the body? What is going on here?" Uh, it feels a little morbid sometimes. But [00:17:00] she's using it to open up this, both the immense and absolutely wild scale of God's love in that that is what he underwent to reveal his love and to reveal it in a way, where it was absolutely non-negotiable.
Um, there was no ambiguity around that level of love. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So that's one piece of this suffering. And then the other piece is that, um, is this then hope that none of it will be in the end in vain. Um, and so she, like her culture itself, believed that there was nothing so horrible that God himself didn't enter into it and would resurrect it in the end.
And so perhaps not in this life, but her very, very famous quote, "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well," the [00:18:00] beginning of that quote that nobody includes when they do it is, "Sin is behoovely, but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."
And behoovely is this word basically for befitting or inevitable.
Jared: Hmm.
Grace: Where all this stuff is going to happen. It's going to be bad. It's not going to be, uh... You don't feel good about it. You don't, you don't want it to happen. Um, and yet this continued hope– all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.
So, for her, so much of our, um, catastrophic choices and the things that we do come from our running away from suffering, from our intense fear of suffering- Hmm ... um, when actually, uh, the suffering itself, while horrible, um, is something that [00:19:00] we're not going to be able to avoid. So, and I'm oversimplifying.
Suffering and sin are not the same thing. But, uh, they're often connected to one another.
Pete: That's fascinating. Um, so all, you know, all will be well or all shall be well, however it says it. It's acknowledging the suffering. It's, it's not trying to, it's not real.
It's not saying, "Don't worry about it." It says, "No, this is, this is the context we live in." And within that, there is, um, I, I don't want to put words in her mouth or yours, but a sense of peace, and maybe a sense of serenity- ... a sense of centeredness that comes from not minimizing the suffering or the sin.
Grace: Yes.
Pete: Right? But of actually... 'Cause you have to. When half the population has died within recent memory, you can't have a [00:20:00] Pollyanna view of- No ... "Oh, everything's fine." You know, that kind of thing. And I sometimes hear it that way where people say, they say, "Everything's gonna be fine. Don't worry about it.
Everything's fine." Well, I am worried, and I think I have every right to worry about what's happening in the world, but even so, all will be well.
Grace: That's right. Yeah. Uh, I think something that feels really beautiful about reading that passage in context, 'cause people can use it as kind of like a Hallmark card moment-
Jared: Yeah
Grace: ight, where it's like, "Everything's gonna turn out okay." Mm-hmm. You know, things will fix themselves. Um, and that's not at all what she means. She is almost saying it in this agonized, like, belief of, of like, "Lord, this is what you are telling me, and I have trouble believing you because things are so horrible in this state right now."
And yet, this is the promise of resurrection. Mm-hmm. This is the promise of the passion itself-
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Grace: that Christ on the cross is looking at you [00:21:00] and saying, "I love you. This is my love for you." Um, and so it's her, it's actually a statement of her, um, wrestling with the reality of suffering and the reality of bodily suffering and the reality of sin, and then reaching for this, "And yet you tell me all shall be well."
Pete: Mm-hmm,
Grace: And it's so much better than the Hallmark card so much, you know, so much more complicated too. But, yeah.
Pete: Well, it's not very neat. It's not very black and white.
Grace: It’s not, no.
Pete: It's realistic.
I mean, I'm just fascinated by these showings. Uh, you just described one. Are there any other themes that you can just, before we move on to other things, anything else you can talk about with sort of the themes that have come up in those showings? Uh, how many, were there 19, did I hear right? Or, um- [00:22:00]
Grace: Yes.
Pete: Okay.
Grace: Yeah, there were kind of a first, uh, grouping. So this, this lasted for three days where she was kind of in this in and out thinking she was gonna die And she had a bunch of them in a row, and then like a day later had a final one. Okay. So this was over that time, and they are, um, you know, some of them people are more likely to have heard of, so she has a very famous one.
And she also distinguishes, by the way, between what she calls bodily showings and ghostly showings or spiritual showings. Mm-hmm. So some of these she's seeing, like, as if, like, with her physical... Like, Christ on the cross bleeding, she's seeing the drops of blood, like, in front of her, you know? Yeah. But the spiritual showing, she sees it in her understanding, as she says.
Oh, okay. So she's not seeing it-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
in front of her, but she's seeing it as a companion to the bodily showing. Mm-hmm. So she's... It's, it's really interesting reading her 'cause she's extremely precise and very careful about [00:23:00] exactly what she wants to tell you, which is one of the joys of reading her, and one of the, the ways I find her very trustworthy as I read her is that she is not... She's so careful about, "I don't wanna..." And so she'll say, "I interpret it this way, and I'm not sure if that's a great summation of it." So she's always thinking about, um-
Pete: Yeah ...
Grace: herself as an intermediary and how difficult that makes things- when she's trying to get some kind of spiritual truth to you, which is always just...
I appreciate that so much. Um, but so she has these bodily sights, which mostly concern Christ on the cross, and Christ speaking to her, and visions of blood. And then she has spiritual sights, like the very famous one early on where she sees a vision of a small object, the quantity of a hazelnut, as she describes it, and it's so little that she fears that it will fall and be lost, um, [00:24:00] and t- and just be lost forever.
And, and God tells her, uh, "This is all that is created, and it will never be lost because I love it and I keep it."
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Grace: And, and so that was, this theme of God the keeper of tiny things is another big thing that you see a lot in her showings. She loves the mundane, the small, one of her favorite words is homely.
Um, so what is homey, what is familiar, what is intimate and well-known. Um, and, and Jesus is homely with her, and he shows her these homely things to help her understand. Um, and so th- that's another real big thread for her, is this intimacy and this closeness and this smallness and the delight that, that, uh, God takes in his creation. In those little limitations that, uh, it's not [00:25:00] the, the grandeur of it.
It's not the hugeness of it. It's actually about this, this littleness.
Jared: Hmm. I'm trying to kinda keep putting her in context and understand what was going on in the world. For some reason, that also makes me think of, I guess it's Brother Lawrence, um, and that sense of smallness and the mundane and things like that.
Would that have been common amongst the monastics, like the monks and things like that, that way of thinking? And is that opposed or contrasted to- I'm thinking, I mean, I don't think we're in the same necessarily timeframe, but I'm even thinking of Aquinas and, and some of the more, uh, it's like theologizing in these large scopes, like very big, very, uh, large in scope.
And would those have been kind of contrasted around this time, where you have people who are focusing on the every day, the mundane, the God in these small spaces, and then you have, you know, these other theologians who are sort of talking in these higher concepts of, uh, you know, [00:26:00] ranking the angels and demons and sort of putting these higher scholastic thoughts together?
Grace: Yeah. In one way, yes, and in another way, no. I know that's a dissatisfying answer, but I'll explain.
Jared: You know what? We interview scholars all the time, so we're used to getting, well, yes and no. Yes and no. But yeah, we get it, yeah. In some ways yes, in some ways no. We get it.
Grace: I know.
Jared: Go ahead.
Grace: Um, so- Julian, uh, yes, I think you're totally correct in pointing to this, monastic, this monkish kind of thread of like, hey, the Lord is found in tiny tasks. You know, you could be pulling weeds in the garden and you are part of this way of worship. You see this in medieval art all the time, where it's this attention to weird little details, um, because they believe nothing is [00:27:00] insignificant in the end. Um, that is absolutely that same tradition that Julian is writing out of. And, and part of that was that it was this belief that, um, you had to know yourself as little in that littleness in order to, um, participate fully in the sacrament of confession for instance, in knowing like, okay, it's important that I, that I say, I used cruel words with my kid the other day, because nothing is so little that it doesn't change your soul.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Grace: Good or bad. And so this, this medieval tradition of paying attention to the small, and actually, the no part is that Thomas Aquinas was very much part of that tradition by being so insanely, like, a part of, uh, no question should not go asked. Everything should be asked. Everything should be discussed.
Yeah. Um, [00:28:00] because it is all worthy of discussion in this sphere of creation. It can all point back to God. Um, all of it can. And so he also is part of that, even though it comes out in such a different-
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Grace: flavor and a different genre for us.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah, um, so my understanding is that Julian wasn't trying to start a movement or something, just a club, and she stayed within the tradition.
And I'm... This isn't, I don't mean this to sound like a leading question, but, um, I can't help but sort of connect with people today who are deconstructing. And, um, they want out as quickly as possible, and they have very good reasons to. I'm not saying that's wrong. Mm-hmm. But, can you maybe tie these two worlds together, and maybe what might people be able to learn or maybe see differently by looking at Julian's example?
Grace: This is a great [00:29:00] question, and I do think it actually... I, I don't think that you are reading into something there. I think this is a legitimate thread in Julian, which is- She is seeing things, particularly things around, um, how God sees us in our sin that are different than what is preached at an institutional level typically.
Not always, not universally. We always forget that the medieval church was all particular.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Grace: In the absence of mass media, this was a particular world. There were very few things that were totally universal, so we can't overgeneralize. But to then overgeneralize. Often you're preaching about sin and how much God, like, hates you and is sending you to hell or whatever, right?
So Julian goes, "Well, I don't think that's, uh, that's how God sees us in our sin." [00:30:00] But then she also makes a point again and again throughout The Showings, and this is why anybody who tries to set her up as rebelling against the church is gonna hit a brick wall if they're reading her seriously, because she doesn't want to.
She's actually not interested in that. Um, she says again and again, "I'm a daughter of Holy Church. I consider myself under their umbrella." Um, and she actually starts talking about, and this is complicated, but I, I think it's super interesting about an idea of two truths and how both can be true and necessary and needed, but they are from different perspectives.
So she is describing what she sees as the vision of God looking at us, which is like the child who has fallen down and hurt themselves, and God, Jesus, the mother, looking at us with so much love, [00:31:00] cradle- wanting to cradle us in his arms. And also the lesser doom is what she calls it, the lesser truth or the lesser judgment, um, that what we do to one another in our sin is absolutely vile and worthy of us being cast out.
What we have done to each other is sick and wrong. She calls it, um, the vilest thing that anyone could have possibly thought of or done. Um, and yet she says the church isn't preaching it quite right. Uh, that's not how God sees us. Mm-hmm. So both things can be true, but one is truer than the other because it is God himself.
Pete: Right.
Grace: Um, and so I think that what she's doing is really interesting 'cause it gives space to this sense of what is the pastoral conversation that does need to be had, which is what are we doing to each other? This is heinous. And also, let's not project that onto God's, God's self and God's way of being towards us.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Grace: Um, and it, and she's actually doing s- like Augustine does this quite a bit when he has a discussion of wrath in City of God where he's saying, "Yeah, we use that word. It's right in one sense. It's really not right in another sense." Um, she's drawing on this tradition, but I think she can be so wonderful and clarifying for people deconstructing and reconstructing-
because of that sense of this could have truth in it and be something real, and also the way that it was communicated and the way that it was, um, set down from on high was not the full truth, and there was a higher truth that I can then seek and that can then transform me as well.
Jared: Mm-hmm. [00:33:00] I wanna think, go back for a second on- Because of this tension, right?
Of, like, the church maybe isn't quite getting it right on this front. And, I wanna maybe talk about the Bible in this perspective. And I'm curious, with the rise of kind of mysticism and people having direct experiences with the divine that I feel like we, I hear about more and more for people, do you get a sense from any writings around this time particularly related to Julian, is she coming to these conclusions because of the showings?
Mm. Is it the showings revealing these things to her? Are the showings a consequence of her thought that sort of get manifest in this way? Does that make sense? Is this a road to Damascus moment where the scales fall off? Or is this a manifestation of the trajectory that she was on?
Grace: I think it was both, if I'm being... I think there was, so she [00:34:00] begins the showings with a description of how in her youth, and I think this is another thing that people can relate to, in her youth, she had asked for these three, like, very culturally specific medieval Christianity things that then she kind of departs from.
Uh, that she kind of is like, "I don't know if these were great things to ask for." And she doesn't say that quite as directly. That's kinda what she's saying. Um, and the Lord gives them to her, but they are transformed in the giving. And she's not quite part of that tradition anymore that she had in, had positioned herself within, um, initially.
And so she has already been a very, very, very serious Christian. She is not, um, this is not quite a road to Damascus moment in the sense that she's making a 180-degree change. But, the seeds are already in the ground for this kind of thing.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Grace: Um, [00:35:00] but what happens is that I think she is always harmonizing what she has seen with what she has heard in the liturgy and in scripture.
Pete: Okay.
Grace: And so you see this, um, really interestingly in the threads that she's pulling on that then when you turn to say, like-
John, um, you can begin to see how she has taken images out of the Gospel of John or out of John's letters, who I think, uh, you know, John being a seer himself was always extremely influential and probably the most popular gospel in general in the Middle Ages anyway. Um, she's taking these images, and she is interpreting them and reinterpreting them and [00:36:00] thinking really hard and harmonizing them with the gospel or with the letters.
Mm-hmm. Um, she's not interested in presenting a new, like, addendum. Like, you see this with mystics sometimes where they're saying, "Well, this is further revelation- Yeah ... and it changes what we've known before, and it, you know, this should be kind of a new book of the Bible," so to speak, and she is profoundly uninterested in that form.
She doesn't quote scripture, directly often, which is normal. A lot of medieval writers didn't do that 'cause it was more about you hear the words again and again and again, and you're in a not very literate culture, you're not necessarily, interested in the exact form, right?
Mm-hmm. The exact form of the sentence, but you're taking all of it and internalizing it, um, so deeply, and that is, is what she is doing here. And so her, she has a sort of [00:37:00] re- an interesting vision that is adjacent to the fall in Genesis, and it is sort of a riff on, on Genesis, and it's also something else.
But you can see her thinking really deeply about how the relationship between what she has seen and how she can kind of, um consider it really seriously in light of what she has been taught, in Genesis. And so it's just, it's fascinating. It's a really different way for us about thinking about engaging the Bible.
Pete: Well, I mean, I can see, um, from what you just described, um, certain people in today's world saying, "Boy, that sounds really subjective and wishy-washy and not objective." And, um, I imagine Julia wouldn't even have language maybe to even engage a criticism like that, or maybe she does and she would know what to say.
Grace: I don't think medieval people had that, like, dichotomy in terms of their reading. So you can see this, for instance, modern people, us today with medieval art, if you go visit like, a museum in Europe and you look at medieval art, pre-Renaissance art, a lot of it you're like, "Why does baby Jesus look like an old man?"
Yeah. Like, no baby ever looked like that. Yeah. Uh, what were they think- had they ever seen a baby before? Like, what in the world is happening? Yeah. This is actually a perfect moment to show that they were not, they were not trying to realistically depict a baby. They were saying something about the God who came down as a baby, and like, whoa, how are you supposed to draw that?
That's crazy. How can you get at a deeper truth when you depict that? So they're thinking not in terms of objective and subjective, it just wasn't a question, you know?
Pete: [00:39:00] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Like, depth. I mean, the inadequacy maybe of words or of art to depict what we're talking about, and they're doing their best.
We j- you have to leave the literalism, I guess, maybe to explore, well, the imagination. Maybe that's the best way to put it. And, um-
Jared: Yeah ...
Pete: I'm all for that, for the record, so
Grace: Yeah. That's been such a gift to me in the medieval church is this sense of like, hey, you don't have to... Like, the literal still matters very much.
You could still believe in literal events and happenings and take them seriously that way, and also there's a bunch of other ways to read this that is truthful-
Jared: Mm-hmm,
Grace: It might not be factual in the same way that a literal event is factual but it is equally truthful and can speak with that equal truth.
And so they were just so much more comfortable with metaphor, for instance- as like, hey, this is actually, we [00:40:00] can't really get at this directly. You have to talk about it in metaphor. Um, whereas we go, "No, get rid of the metaphor. Tell me what it means." It’s such a different way.
Jared: I think we're coming to the end of our time, but I wanted to maybe draw attention to, you know, earlier Pete talked about kind of feminist theology. But I wanna talk for a minute and see if there's a word for people today, because I think a lot of people are struggling between where does authority lie in the church, where I'm sort of listening to other people tell me what I should believe and how I should think about Jesus and how I should think about God, and then my own, like, embodied experience. And I think what I'm... This whole time I keep thinking about this embodied experience that she has. That is hers.
It really is hers alone, and that she spent 20 years, did you say? Like, thinking about and [00:41:00] reflecting on it and centering on this experience that she had. No one else had this experience. So what can that teach us about how we're thinking today in this, I feel like, a climate where it's like we don't know where to trust, who to trust with these institutions.
And I think especially for women who've been taught their whole life, like, "Well, don't trust your own visions. Don't trust your own instincts. Don't trust your own feelings." And, I see in Julian someone who took that very seriously. So can you speak more to that as something that could speak to us today on what we can learn about the fact that she had this vision and spent so much time, believed in it so much, and felt like it's something worth sharing?
Grace: I think something... Again, we love a dichotomy today, right? Like, we love to set things against one another, and we do, and now we resist that also, but that's just something that we're used to, like, especially post-Enlightenment thinking. Mm-hmm. The [00:42:00] body versus the soul, blah, blah, blah. The institution versus the individual.
And something that is super interesting about Julian is that she sorta wakes up, so to speak, from her showings, from her experience, and she says to her parish priest, who is by her bed, has been by her bed, "I think I've been raving all night long." And he goes, "Well, tell me about it." And she tells him about it, and he goes, "No, you weren't."
And I think she walks that. She doesn't fall prey to these like we think we have to do it, no, it's this versus this. But in reality it can be both, but we just have to work at that, you know? Like, that's, that's... Nobody can be God unto themselves and say this is what it is. So she, over her years of prayer, is in conversation with [00:43:00] other people discerning, thinking, going, "I think this is what was said to me. I think this is what I'm supposed to do with this." And then she, uh, in the first version of The Showings, she writes this extensive apology for like, "You should believe me even though I'm a woman. Like, I know it's really hard 'cause I'm a woman and I'm not a teacher.
Please don't think I'm a teacher. Oh, gosh, no." You know? And then by the long version, she cuts all of that. Yeah. There's nothing left of that.
Pete: Yeah. Good for her.
Grace: And this is this effect of years of prayer and discernment- Mm-hmm ... and, um, pursuing other things, too. She's now an anchorite. She's now a spiritual advisor in her own community.
Um, and I just love it that she then is like, "I'm not gonna protest against being a teacher 'cause I am a teacher. That's just the reality of what has happened and what has been given to me in this experience." "And I'm gonna, and I'm gonna be testing what I have experienced against other people, and seeking counsel, and learning, and [00:44:00] praying.
Um, and I'm just not gonna be... I'm not gonna throw it out on a whim-
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Grace: and not trust what I, what I've seen." And I think that middle way is so hard because it's so much easier to either be, like, fully team individual or fully team institution, right? Mm-hmm. It's so much easier. You just meet so much less resistance um, when you're like, "I don't wanna listen to anybody or, or receive counsel or... I just wanna do this thing by myself," or when you're like, "I'm just following ... like an automaton what has been handed down to me... and I'm not questioning it," 'cause that creates trouble.
Pete: Yeah.
Grace: Um, and I love how she walks that middle path. I love that.
Jared: That's perfect.
Pete: Yeah. I love how- The medieval period's pretty smart. Maybe smarter than we are, right? So I mean, that's, that's what keeps coming back. Right.
Jared: Definitely smarter than we often give them credit for.
Pete: Yeah, definitely. For sure.
Grace: Certainly that.
Jared: Yeah. Well, thanks so much for jumping on and, and bringing us so [00:45:00] much life through Julian and, and what she was about.
Grace: Thank you. It was a joy talking to you guys.
Jared: So every time we do an episode like this one, we hear from our listeners. Believe it or not, we read every one of those messages, and something we've noticed is that so many of you are saying the same things and asking the same questions.
Pete: Which is honestly what the society is for.
We are realizing that more and more people are asking the same questions and wanting to have the same conversation.
Jared: So come join the community and the conversation. Unlike the podcast, it's not just Pete and Jared talking at you, or a class, although you'll find those there, too. It's people like you talking to each other about the stuff that we talk about on the show.
Pete: So find your people in the Society of Normal People. The link is in the show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
