Trusting her experience

Daring and passionate thought is not the province of modern writers alone. Jane William introduces Julian of Norwich, Britain’s first female author.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A statue of a Medieval women wearing a headscarf, and holding a book inscribed: revelation of divine love.o

Julian of Norwich, sculpted by David Holgate, Norwich Cathedral.

Poliphilo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Julian of Norwich doesn’t seem to tick many boxes as an ‘influencer’, but her (yes her!) quietly revolutionary theology has had an impact that would probably startle her considerably. For example, TS Eliot quotes her in Little Gidding as he explores the delicate and unexpected grounds of hope. Julian’s striking mixture of confidence and hiddenness lend themselves well to Eliot’s meditative poem.

Her anonymity is part of what draws us to her now. She opens a window into a world where women were largely unheard and uncelebrated.

It’s unusual to claim authority for someone whose name we don’t even know. She is almost certainly named after the church of St Julian in Norwich, in which she spent years, walled up so that she could see into church, and talk to people through a little window, but never leave. But her anonymity is part of what draws us to her now. She opens a window into a world where women were largely unheard and uncelebrated. We hear so few women’s voices from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – or indeed, for several centuries before and after. Julian tells us that she was ‘uneducated’, by which she probably meant that she didn’t read or write Latin, which was the cultured language of the day. Instead, she wrote what is probably the first book by a woman in English.

Her modesty about her educational background also gives her the freedom to write about God without having to worry about being theologically correct. She describes a series of visions that she received from God. She makes no claim for the doctrinal purity of what she understood, so she never got into trouble, despite the fact that she describes God’s attitude to us in ways that would not have met with approval by the Church authorities of her day. From what God showed her in her visions, although human sin and failure is real, it is not final, and God does not judge us for it, because it is already overcome through Jesus’ identification with us.

‘Sin is necessary, but all shall be well and all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’,

she writes. This is not blind optimism, but based on her experience of the character of God that she sees in Jesus. As far as Julian can see, Jesus doesn’t blame us for our sin. She isn’t necessarily assuming that everyone will be saved, but she is sure that God doesn’t seek to judge us.

She lived through the Black Death. Like so many of us now, she must have suffered bereavement; indeed, the visions she describes were shown to her while she lay on what everyone assumed was her own death bed. Some experts think she may have been widowed and lost children, because of the way in which she writes about Jesus’ maternal qualities. Her message of the invincible, trustworthy love of God is even more challenging against the background of fear, loss and death, and it springs from her encounter with the crucified Jesus. She tells us that as she lay dying, a priest held a crucifix before her eyes, and she saw the figure on the cross as real and in agony. But she also saw that Jesus hangs on the cross out of his own free will, so that no one can doubt the love of God. This act of suffering identification with us is the source of hope, Julian says, because both Jesus’ suffering and his victory over death are real.

She spent the rest of her life pondering what she had experienced, interrogating it for meaning, going back to God to ask for further clarification.

Julian also has a lot to teach us about what to do with our experience of God. On first reading, it seems that she is wholly experiential in her approach, but then we discover that she spent the rest of her life pondering what she had experienced, interrogating it for meaning, going back to God to ask for further clarification. The longer version of her manuscript was probably written twenty years after she first received the visions. She trusted her experience, but she also thought she needed to work at it and be patient with it and dig more deeply into what it meant.

What I really want to do now is quote all my favourite bits of her book, The Revelations of Divine Love, but that would be a spoiler. Read her for yourself, but don’t be lulled by her gentle, narrative voice into missing her theological daring and passion.

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”