Tag Archives: Revelations Of Divine Love

June 4th 1989

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Incense

Tian An Men Square, June 4th 1989.

‘How could all be well, given the great harm that has been done to humankind by sin?’         – Chapter 29, Revelations Of Divine Love

Twenty-four years ago, the pro-democracy movement in China was brought to a violent and bloody end. How many died? No one knows. Hundreds? Thousands? I remember them today, I remember their optimism, their sacrifice. A generation who hoped things could change, who had something to say, even if it was only half thought-out and naive.

I pray that we can all have such optimism. I pray that we can all have the courage to speak truth to power.

I pray for all the people who lost someone they loved that day. For the hearts that ache and the minds that still spin trying to make sense of what happened, because someone is missing, for the ones who were lost who have no grave, no full stop at the end of the sentence describing their life.

I pray for the next generation, and the next, and the next. I believe in the people of China, in their love for their country and for each other, in their shared history.

I believe that it shall be well, it shall all be well.

Having a corner on Julian

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Japanese rock garden

I went to Morning Prayer this morning. It was a lovely way to start the week.

After the service, a conversation reminded me of a piece our previous rector submitted to a ‘Peace Book’ we put together in 2007. It was called ‘Having a corner on God’ by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and his point was that there are holy people in every religion, and that there many things that people of different faiths can learn from each other.

So I started to think about Julian, and how many ways there are to appreciate her writing.

For Lent this year, I felt it was right to re-read Revelations Of Divine Love, but this time to read it aloud. It turned out to be a wonderful thing to do, so I don’t think I can claim credit for it. It simply seemed to be the right thing to do. It was a powerful and deeply moving experience. I felt like I could hear Julian speaking, and of course, a scribe actually wrote the book as she dictated it (according to the scribe’s own postscript) so from the beginning it was spoken words.

Julian’s words have always spoken to me, but by the time I finished the book I felt that I had connected with her on a deeper level, that I had felt her personality , that at times she was funny, indignant, sharp-witted; she sounded like someone I’d like to know, someone I’d like to turn to for advice, a big sister. This is the relationship I have with her voice.

Other people have different relationships; it may be an inspiration to contemplative prayer, it may be the comfort of some of the famous quotes. The scribe’s postscript warns against this kind of cherry-picking, but really, I would say, anyone who only takes a few snippets is missing out on much more. It’s easy to do with Julian, though, there are so many wonderful sentences, so many words to treasure.

What I want to remind myself by writing this, though, is that there are many ways to come to Julian, many ways to interpret her words, many ways to carry her message in our hearts. Like a Japanese rock garden, it depends where you stand, you will never see it all from only one place.

Seek, suffer and trust

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Seek, suffer and trust

I have two blogs. I started the first one last year because I wanted to archive the e-mails I had sent to family and friends after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and also to continue writing about Japan. I started this blog recently, because I wanted to explore different topics, and specifically to write about Julian of Norwich. Her Revelations Of Divine Love have been part of my life for many years and are always close to my heart.

I have just spent some time writing about suicide in Japan, and posted it on my other blog; now I find myself pulled here, to bring some light to the darkness I have explored this evening.

I was clinically depressed at university for two years. It was a dark time in my life, and I remember very little from that time, but what I do know is, the person I am, the person I was meant to be, came out of that time. It was during that time that my faith finally struggled through. Somehow I managed to attend confirmation classes through the autumn on 1987 and was confirmed on Advent Sunday that year.

I wanted to find a quote from Julian as the title of this post, and when I opened the edition of Revelations Of Divine Love that I’m reading at the moment (Penguin Classic, translated by Elizabeth Spearing) I saw on page 57, ‘the soul can do no more than seek, suffer and trust’. Although I am over twenty years free of depression, and am incredibly thankful that it has never come back, I can still remember more clearly than I care to just how hard that period of my life was. For those two years I really did ‘seek, suffer and trust’. I had no energy for anything else. Sometimes that’s all you can do.

There are many things that make me thankful that God didn’t give up on me, that He kept trying to get through until I finally listened. Looking back on my teenage years I can see now that my faith was trying to get through, but that the depression  was also on its way. There was only one way through and it was tough, but I needed to go through it. It opened my heart to the concerns of the world, it taught me empathy, it showed me how to live.

There have been times in my life since then that have left me praying only for resilience to keep going until God’s plan reveals itself. Times when I have been unable to imagine how everything could possibly be sorted out. Of course, when I saw how everything fell into place I could look back and think, yes of course, I see why that had to happen. The seeking, the suffering can be a challenge, the trust is sometimes the only thing left, but as a formula to keep going through difficult times it speaks to me.

Seek. Suffer. Trust. Then be thankful that there is light.