Julian of Norwich (1342-1417)
Presented on: Tuesday, August 9, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
The date is August the ninth, 1983. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on the mystic century, tonight's lecture is entitled Julian of Norwich who lived 1342 to 14, 17 revelations of divine love mr. Herrera, we'll start in just a minute or two.
We come tonight to Julian of Norwich, and it's interesting, probably we're one of the few groups in the last several hundred years who have patiently thought their way and felt their way along, a very, uh, unused and precarious path and human sensibility. And we have, uh, just about completed, uh, a journey of perspective that will bring us suddenly into a recognizable terrain. One, which has ever since it was, uh, delivered Ben considered one of the high points of the experience in the world. And that familiar terrain is the great genius and work of Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, especially in the Canterbury tales, but very unlike almost all of the approaches to Chaucer's genius, we've come along the back way. We've come along. The very steep precipices of that mountain range of sensibility, which is the true backdrop of Chaucer for those who approach him as a subject in an English literature education, he simply a grand collection of assignments and readings.
And after years, one gets a reluctant respect for him, but I think you will have a treat in store for you next week. When we come upon Chaucer from the angle, from which we have come, and as we began to rise with Walter Hilton into an elevated perspective, and with the cloud of unknown knowing we came to a share Baron peak of perspective that allowed us to see over the whole range. We now come to the compliment of Walter Hilton and just as one would expect in real cosmic, homeless is whenever you have a very great man, there's also a very great woman nearby.
And usually the women are not visible in terms of the record of history. They are there. The laws of wholeness lead us to expect them to be there. But the nature of woman is very often a self-sacrificing giving us and does not record as a phenomenal trace. But in this event, in this case, we have one of the great women of all time, a woman whose intellectual capacities are of the highest order whose writing skills have often been compared by those few who have actually gone into her work with Chaucer himself, the great master, and because she refers to herself in one place as unlettered at the time that she had her 16 revelations, this is simply a self-effacing way in all humility to say that compared to what I know and have seen I am, but unlettered in terms of what I could tell you and expressed to you so that the proverbial designation of Julian, of Norwich as an illiterate woman of the 14th century is so far off the Mark is to be completely dismissible.
I need to bring to your attention, the fact that we're dealing with a barbell of possibilities, we're dealing with the individual and we're dealing with society. And we're discovering that the social forms of history are inextricably wound up with the spiritual experience of individuals and that the changes in what we would call history, the social forms of history, the political expressions of history are actually the shadow play of an interior drama lived by individuals. And so, conversely, whenever you find individuals have a very high attainment in terms of their exfoliate wholeness, you find they're the key angles from which one can view subsequent developments of history with great intelligence. And one of the hidden keys of the 20th century is the fact that the roots of social structure go back to the 14th century, whatever beginnings were there before were transformed and given a different tone, it was a harmony song and a different pitch after the 14th century. And the best illustration of this is that early in the 15th century, we notice a structural phenomenon in human history known as the Renaissance beginning to come about.
And the perception of the Renaissance in terms of the immediate visible possibilities in the 19th century were so astounding that Jacob Burkhart and William Del thigh, those scholars who turned the event of Renaissance saying that it was a rebirth of classical antiquity out of the dark ages, meant that from their perspective, all that they could see on Koran and European history at the time was a dark blue or extension of the middle ages, the dark ages. It wasn't until the highly differentiated middle of the 20th century, that intelligence beat began to be able to have enough of a multidimensional interdisciplinary approach to be able to actually observe the scintillating opalescent light qualities of the 14th century, which produced the Renaissance.
The Renaissance did not spring out of dark ages. And those who have been attending the PRS series realized that there was a tremendous intellectual ferment from the 1160s on through the 1320s, really. And then after that they whole pitch and tone of human capacity became transcendental. It literally had reached a point where it was seeing them the tips of it's toes and realized that one could no longer strain positioned as one word. I was on a earth bound frame of reference, and that man would have to learn to fly in his visionary capacity. And thus, he had to leave the earth and climb the ladder of perfection. He had to adventure into the cloud of unknowing and there at the top of the ladder of perfection in the cloud of unknowing humankind through the good graces of a woman of genius had a revelation. And we are to understand in the largest sense that Julian of Norwich is the female compliment to st. John of Patmos who wrote the apocalypse and that the revelations of divine love are a feminine rejoinder and compliment to the apocalypse of st. John and the book of revelations of Saint John and the revelations of Julian of Norwich go together and a vast harmonizing, but the difficulty is for us. But the critical literature on Julian of Norwich is almost nil. The first book written about her with any kind of comprehension was 1958.
It is only in the last 20 years that we've had even two decent translations into a basic English, which we could follow a basic English that has enough of the nuance of the original to allow us even to consider an excursion into, uh, an adventure of the quality of Julian, of Norwich. So it's very difficult to present her in strong enough terms because she is so unknown. So that if I say to you that behind the genius of Charleston, there is this incredible spiritual Inscape out Walter Hilton, the cloud of unknowing and Julian of Norwich against which there could never have been the rising of the genius of spiritual expression that we will find in Chaucer and yet, and yet Chaucer essentially is humane. Let her Arie humane. Whereas Julian of Norwich is utterly divine. She is thus to a literary person abstract in the highest, but we who are schooled to temper our literary imagination by the virtues of psychological insight will recognize that she is above all cosmically symbolic, and that she presents Mondalez of wholeness that could never have been understood from a literary mind whose limitations are the manipulation of imagination for Julian transcends imagination by as much distance as Einstein's theory of relativity, she out distances the capacities of the mundane mind to imagine what she's talking about in terms of metaphor, because she has all the time steering away, relationally increasingly from any kind of metaphorical basis whatsoever.
And thus, she says immediately that what she is writing about is revelation. She says, it is not me.
This is an experience of the divine given to me through grace and mercy, which I deliver to you. And I dare not change an aspect or change a word in this. We must understand that there was a social repercussion. There was a recurrent wave of, uh, political, uh, theorizing and import that came into the scene and was so important that I must technically begin with it tonight. Before we can come back to Julian. The theme is this. You have a church structure, increasingly authoritative and strong making its way through various vicissitudes, helped by structures like the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans and so on. And with that great energy, you had increasingly individuals who did not belong to any orders and whose basic religious experience forbade them of participating in an authoritarians structure. That is to say individual aspiration found itself opposed to structural authority and where aspiration and authority come into opposition.
You have there, the primordial arena around which human life has had its merry-go-round for quite some thousands of years, but it reached a pinnacle in the 14th century because it came down as Julian will say to a perception of single pointedness of God and came down to a fall crumb of one basic issue for the opposition and that opposition styled itself, most poignantly in the life of a contemporary of Julian, a contemporary of Walter Hilton, a contemporary of that anonymous genius whose ecstatic vision is there. The cloud of unknowing, a contemporary of Chaucer and his name was why cliff, why cliff? And if you come to the 11th edition to the Britannica, they give you several spellings of John Y cliff. And they tell you that he lived from 1320 to 1384.
Where have we heard about why cliff? Well, my goodness, when William Penn was having his great visions of the place of the individual and his conscience in the development of world history, he went back to the whole idea of why cliff setting up the possibility that man alone might end the privacy of his own soul, have a true vision of God. And we'll see that with mother Julian, she and great elegance and care makes the case that there couldn't be any other place for a man to have a vision of God. Then in his individual cell. And that to protect the integrity of that vision, the structural position of the soul and the human being is in the middle of the heart. So that the entire fabrications of the mental landscape are, but metaphorical decoration and that the feeling toned wholeness of oneself is the only area where the single pointed focus of the divine could ever have manifested itself was certainty.
And that point never exists in a phenomenal institution. It is never in any hierarchy of authority. They never do have a right to command us and manipulate us in terms of the basic plug of their authority that they have the tie line. They do not, and cannot structurally. They never will have that. All external form is a ritualistic per ambulation permitting the individual to come to terms with himself all the sooner, but is in no way, a surrogate or a, um, mainstay in his endeavor. Now why cliff late in his life delivered a fundamental attack upon the ability of the church to have property. He said, the church may not have property because the only basis of property actually is the ultimate founding of man's capacity to be mobile in this world, in terms of God's grace and only individual souls may have that opportunity. Institutions do not have therefore the church in all spiritual honesty must defer to civil authority where property is concerned and to the individual where a spiritual experience is had. And this made him, they use the term at that time, not persona non grata, but persona in grata. In other words, we know you're there. We just don't like you.
Here's what happened. This is a few sentences from the encyclopedia Britannica. This puts you right into the center of the perception of, of what happened, the choice of secular priests to be his itinerant. Preachers was significant of another change of attitude on why, why clubs, part secular priests who were to wander around and see the idea of the individual's freedom in terms of spiritual possibility, significant of another change of attitude on why cliffs part Heather too, we'd been on good terms with the friars who's ideal of poverty appeal to him as already mentioned for doctors of the mendicant order had appeared with him at his trial in 1377, but he had come to recognize that all organized societies within the church sex, as he called them, were liable to the same corruption, which he objected fundamentally to the principle, which had established a special standard of morality for the religious.
On the other hand, why, uh, why cliffs, itinerate preachers were not necessarily intended to work as rivals to the benefits clergy, the idea that underlay their mission was rather analogous to that, which animated Westley for centuries later. In fact, the whole was a recognition and a Renaissance of what happened in the 14th century. And just as there was a Renaissance that was a Renaissance of something before the reformation was a Renaissance of the resolution of that previous Renaissance, the 12th century and the 13th century were the Renaissance of classical antiquity. That's when classical learning moved from the Byzantine fall crumb back to Western Europe. And after that came the 14th century where man, we say mystically, and we should mean it. Mystically understood what he had done in the Renaissance. There was a rebirth of the 12th and 13th century culture, and they brought more scholars from the then tottering and toppling Byzantine empire, which fell in 1453.
My mud, the conqueror finally kicked down the believable walls of Byzantium. I forget just what month it was in 1453 by 29th of May. If I don't know, we have some people who do this is an important point though, because our history is a conundrum handed to us from the reformation, the whole development of the scientific mind, the whole perception of the universe in terms of experiment and religiosity, all of these issues were last held in one hand at the pinnacle of the reformation and got lost in the psychological chef wall. And we've got to be able to go back and hold them up again and look at them again in the same terms that produced the wholeness of Rembrandt. We have to go back and be able to experience life in the fullness of Rembrandt before we can have the right to go on from here to wherever we think we'd like to go on. And the only way to do that is to go back to the underpinning, which was lost and that fabulous 14th century.
And the key to that 14th century was the English development of the eccentricity so called of the individual. But we actually see that it was the forthrightness of the individual to have his own spiritual experience. And it was called eccentric by authorities who wanted to style this as something unusual instead of something structurally essential and necessary. Julianne says there is no spiritual geometry until one finds God and a single point, your own experience, uncomplicated unity and perfection because there's a mystery involved in that because the quality of the human soul in the middle of the human heart is the only place that God has a home in the universe. There's no heaven up, down side or anywhere else then there. And if we don't make him at home, he's not at home.
So that the final fall crumb of realization and action are simultaneous. We may not do anything with certainty. We may not realize anything with purity until we come to that median specific gravity of our own experience in the middle of our heart and our own soul and realize that it is a home for the divinity and that the recognition of that requires our being able to accept grace and mercy in all true humility and that there never is any metaphorical imagination, any authoritarians law, any philosophical refinement that can produce a surrogate heaven elsewhere. All of that is the worst vanity in the world. And it is in the revelations of Julian of Norwich. This impeccably fine woman who grasped all of the significance of this. In two days, she was 31 and a half years old.
And at four o'clock in the morning, May 9th, 1373. She began having visions of the quality, which you said they were revelations. And from four in the morning, until past nine in the morning, she had a series of 15 revelations just throwing at her the way that the apocalypse was written. One unbelievable conundrum of images after another, just thrust upon her experience, indelibly until exhausted. She fell asleep. And then the next night she had a 16th revelation that tied it all together. And she says later in her book that it took her 20 years to be able to let it all settle into herself before she could understand what had happened. And when she did in 1393, she was about 52 years of age. She left the world. She lived on until she was nearly 80, but after she understood what had happened, she turned away from the world. I never went back to it.
Now this needs a little explication because when we get to it, we won't have time to draw it in, in the 14th century with all of its turmoil, there was still a sophistication of the inner life that allowed for individuals to die to the world, to become hermits like Richard role or to become, uh, ascetics like the author of the cloud of unknowing or to become Anchorage, ACEs, like Julian of Norwich. And what essentially what happened is that inside of a cathedral, they would portion off a part of the church with breaking up and stoning up walls and make a sell for these individuals to go into. And they would have a great ritual, a ceremony, a mass, a high mass of the death of this person. And they would enter in and never leave that cell for the rest of their lives. And we're not to understand that this was a cruel ascetic tone practice.
It was penance raised to a transcendental level of refinement. Sometimes there were several suites of rooms. They were allowed servants. If, uh, that was a part of the situation. They were allowed to see friends. They were allowed to read. There were allowed to write. There were all kinds of imaginations, but generally the tone was that ostensibly, they were dying to the world because they were leaving this whole phenomenal time-space realm. They were going elsewhere. Other times they were leaving the human worlds of things and they were entering into the divine world, the divine realm of the universal in this Anchorage purgatory. And that's the image of purgatory really is this kind of Anchorage, a possibility. One had to be led out by spiritual experience. You could be led in by the refinement of saints in the world, just like Dante was led through the Inferno and into purgatory by Virgil, but Virgil could not lead him out of purgatorial into paradise that had to be done by the figure of BIA treats.
You Beatrice had to do it. She had to come down from heaven to lead him out. And just so in the aunt crus, Julian of Norwich, she was led into this life by these visions that she had as a human being, but she could not leave this world until she had understood them. In terms of the divine fullness. I'm the only person that could come to lead her out. Was Jesus, not the image of Jesus, not the thought or the idea, or even the experience of Jesus, but the actuality, whatever that might be. And she says that three months shy of 20 years, she finally understood what had happened. So she wrote this book and never published it. And when the book was finished, she left this world, even though she was physically around, she was inside that cell. She was no longer approachable as a human being.
She had left. She had gone beyond, she lived on until about 14, 17, 14, 18 Cosmo Domenici was already a going concern, but she never published her work. It existed. In fact, in a short manuscript that she wrote right away in 1373, and then a long manuscript, which he wrote in 1393. And there was only one time where a large excerpt selection was put together. And that was in 1500. What was happening in 1500, the monumental intelligence of [inaudible] was putting together the mystical chronologic. And he didn't miss a beat. Somebody of that caliber sees it all known or unknown because these quality of expressions have a resonance. And there are persons who can detect this. The sound of integrity, it is said is heard world round for all time. Even if one has an utter to sound, it has an integrity wholeness. Doesn't dribble out its effect, particle by particle.
It conveys the entirety of its integrity and one dynamic impress eternally. And that's detectable. It's understandable, Julian of Norwich and her revelations then Chronicles at the same time on the individual level, what was happening on a social level because the followers of why cliff were called LA lards low Lars, and why don't we turn to the 11th edition of the Britannica. And we look up LA lards, low, large, the name given to the English followers of John, why cliff, they were adherents of a religious movement, which was widespread in the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th century. And to some extent maintained itself onto the reformation. When the Lollard phenomenon became exponentially, the reformation, we quote Chaucer from the Canterbury tales, the shipments prologue, this Lawler here will preach in us somewhat. He will sell on some difficulty or spring, and Kako in our queen corn, but the most generally received explanation derives the words from Lalane or low one to sing softly.
The sweet inner voice in the chant of eternal prayer is when a landlord was, the organization must have been strong in numbers, but only those who were seized for heresy are known by name. And it is only from the indictments of their accusers that their opinions can be gathered. How often have we heard that the preachers were picker picture rest figures in long russet dress down to the heels who staff in hand preached in the mother tongue to the people in the churches and graveyards and squares streets and houses and gardens and pleasure grounds. They went everywhere to the people and then talk privately with those who had been impressed. The law literature was very widely circulated books by Wyclef, et cetera, tracks broadsides in spite of the mini edX, prescribing it prescribing means if you're caught, you're killed, that's what a prescription is.
And it goes on one of the basic documents and stances of the low arts was that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a faint miracle, feigned miracle and led people to idolatry. So one has to move with great assurity to come to a position in all of the vicissitudes of this time and the incredible nitpicking of this time to understand how Julian of Norwich in her revelations of divine love with great accuracy placed her outstretched hand of aspiration exactly on the point of contact that is fundamental and necessary. The starting point from which the geometry of meaning can generate itself and then gave and 16 revelations. They progressive symbolic transformational imagery that led to a replacement of the authoritarian doctrine of transubstantiation all the while like a great pioneer understanding, very well, what can happen and what could happen covering herself so well that her book was dismissed as mumbling sameness supporting the old church doctrines again and again, and only seen from time to time is one of those vibrating golden threads in human history that allow us to trace through this clue our way out of the mess.
Walter Hilton gives us the ladder of perfection and ways in which with great humor and dignity. We may climb forth and progress. The cloud of unknowing gives us brief glimpses of the vast hidden ranges, but it's mother Julian of Norwich up in Northern England. That gives us a chance experience by symbolic experience to form the Mandela of wholeness that allows us to reshape and recut our heart experience so that we may experience the presence of the soul and the center. And she says one of the great qualities and one of her last revelations was the fact that Jesus in her vision, the divine in her vision was seated and that there was some great assurity and comfort to her that this imagery was a seated imagery that it was founded internally. And so to begin, I know we haven't all that much time, but I'll go through this quickly for you.
She gave three petitions that the very beginning of the book she said, I want to be able to suffer. I want to be able to have the courage to suffer. I know I have to do this. I would like to be able to have a clear vision. If I can. I'd like to understand the complete passion of Jesus and I'm willing to suffer. And she says, I'm a young woman. I'm, I'm 30 years old. I'm I'm able to take this. And the third is I'd like to have as God's gift three wounds, and right away, we find ourselves in an inverted base. We're not talking about expressions of fullness, but we're talking about expressions of deprivation. Wounds are deprivation. So we're not going out into the phenomenal realm. We're going into the interior realm, where we experience substantiality as gaps as wounds. And we have to be willing to allow the gaps to occur. We have to be willing to let parts of our integrity egotistically be eclipsed and a raised by a transcendental experience reality. And this is where spiritual courage comes in to let that happen.
And of course it takes great courage. The more that it does happen, and you realize that all the structural lines that you think you need to exist, one by one have to be let go, and they vanish and you were left less and less of any recognizable structure of dependability in terms of the phenomenal world. And this is why the great virtue ultimately is not wisdom or love however important they are, but mercy, that's why it is the most important spiritual aspect. She then goes into the fact that these revelations came to her. And the first revelation that came to her has a crown of thorns upon the head of Christ. And when she looks at it, the crown of thorns has been thrust upon his head. And the image that is coming out to her is that the blood is dripping down and it comes down as far as the eyebrows and disappears. So that the crown, the cranium of the man is trans substantiated from bone to blood.
Because it's only in that, that one may have the intellect, which is limited in case by bone baptized, not in a water ritual of metaphorical significance and ritual activity, but in the spiritual transformation of blood that we are baptized in blood and not in water. So the first revelation, and she didn't know what she had at first, she saw the crown of thorns upon the head of Jesus and the blood running down. It just came that far. And that was the image given to her. And then 10 or 15 minutes later, or less than half an hour. Cause there were 15 in a row. She had another revelation. These were just given to her, deliver to her. She in fact thought she was dying. She says, in her book, she said, I, I was so weak and I was paralyzed. She said, my legs were paralyzed from my hips down.
They came and gave me the last rights. I could feel myself going. She said, I knew I was dying. There was no question about it. And they brought the crucifix up to her and her eyes were frozen and paralyzed and she couldn't look up. So they put the crucifix down so she could look at it and at least, you know, make a motion to kiss it. And she was given the last rights and she says that this was a terrible moment for her thinking she was going to be dead. Then she says, my sight began to fail. And the room became dark about me as if it were night, except for the image of the cross. That, which was somehow light it up. But how was beyond my comprehension, apart from the cross, everything else seemed horrible as if occupied by things. Then the rest of my body began to die and I could hardly feel a thing as my breathing became shorter and shorter.
I knew for certain that I was passing away, suddenly all my pain was taken away and I was fit and well, as I had ever been, and this was especially true of the lower part of my body. I was amazed at this sudden change for, I thought it must have been a special miracle of God and not something natural. And though I felt so much more comfortable. I still did not think I was going to survive. Not that this experience had was any real comfort to me for, I was thinking I would much rather have been delivered from this world. Then it came suddenly to my mind that I should ask for the second wound of our Lord's gracious gift that I might in my own body, her own body fully experience and understand his blessing passion. I wanted his pain to be my pain, a true compassion, producing a longing for this willingness on a deep interior integrity to hold up oneself willingly to exchange all that one can be for another is a very secret mystical interchange. And her willingness to do this is what gave
It's what gave mother Julianne boots. Please turn the cassette now. And I'll commit to playing it down on the other side, after a brief pause.
END OF SIDE 1
It's what gave mother Julian, the opportunity to experience that interchange with the divine towards the end of her revelations, but it began in the immediate first revelation with a willingness to do this with whatever Jesus might be. She did not really know. Now the second revelation that came to her, she saw the face of Jesus and it was changing colors. She saw one half. Exactly that was all blood scabby and the other half was black. This is the very image of loggerhead polarity. A 50 50 split is the image of a, of a loggerhead of a psychic conundrum. All of the first quality in Tibet, the image of the Galpo, what we were called, the fool or the jester is someone painted black and white exactly in half. And what it is, it's an image of this stock frame of reference. Well, one can't go one way or the other. It's a perfect limbo. And that that force and energy has to be re distributed. Now it can be redistributed in a mechanical way.
And if one does it in a mechanical way, one gets a kind of metaphorical readout. But if one redistributes this and an organic way, one gets something like the Tai Chi, which is a loggerhead redistributed dynamically through an organic process of complimentarity so that the polarity becomes a complementarity. And it's like moving from the world of electricity, to the world of light. And when, when makes that jump, when realizes then as she will say later on in revelations of divine love that God could never have been experienced on the polarity realm could never have been seen in terms of the electrical metaphors, which phenomenal time-space offers up to us that only in the purity of full wholesomeness of life love and light in their pristine wholeness, could the aspect of the divine then perceived and entertained because the organ of perception is that singleness of eye, which is the heart and focus known as the soul, which isn't really there. It does not really exist, has no real eternal neurology until it is brought into focus. And then there is nothing else, but that, but she says, she saw the color changes in the face of Jesus. And that was the second revelation. And then all kinds of color changes. And she said she was watching in her spiritual experience, not understanding what it was. And then the third revelation, the revelation came that God is a single point in the soul.
And she goes on in this third revelation saying there was a great deal of difficulty on her part trying to position this. But the certainty was that God was a single point without dimension. And that if that is true, she says in great certainty of interior logic, she said, if that is true, only that single point could ever move and do anything. And therefore only God is the doer and the universe, no other door. There is no other doers and God in the universe whatsoever, which posed a lot of problems. And it was 20 years. The fourth revelation was the certainty that we are baptized by this blood of sacrifice, rather than by water, that the external ritual of water wasn't authoritarians metaphor. But the Ballade was an aspirant. A transubstantiation for the individual fifth revelation was a trance, a temptation by the fiend, which was overcome by her willingness to participate in the passion. Her willingness to exchange herself totally for the other was what overcame the theme. The phene came to her. And she said that this joy of wholeness makes evil powerless.
Not until one can do that. Evil seemingly has godlike power over a man, but in the joy of wholeness, it loses its affects. Your reality totally has no position whatsoever. And then the sixth revelation, she says that the Lord in heaven has no one place where he is, but lives in all of it. The wholeness of it, the totality of it. And when she saw that she was, she was trying to think, what is this that I'm seeing? He doesn't have any particular room in heaven. He inhabits the whole of it. That is to say that he has a flow of wholeness through the entirety of the structure. She had it in one of her revelations, a division of a Walnut sized sphere being held in a hand somewhere and beyond time space. And she asked mentally, what is it and was receiving mentally. This is the universe.
So of course it occurred to her. She isn't monumental human being. If I am seeing the universe, thus, where am I? What am I, what capacity have I to thus see it all this way? So the seventh revelation was that she had the experience and sort of a fast alternating, current of pain and comfort. She says about 20 times this interchange where she would have this blissful steak and she would just be filling in and floating in it. And all of a sudden it would be a painful anxiety ridden. She uses the term a lot, which we translate as dread, dread joy and dread, and that they seem to alternate. And she got the idea that the heavenly vision was not in the joy alone, but was in the juxtaposition of joy and dread together, no willingness to let both alternate and be together. But that wasn't indelible part of the wholeness of heaven of God's realm, wherever that is that joy and dread must be left to be together.
So she sees Sy like a pendulum between joy and dreads. She says at least 20 times, maybe more. And she was becoming, um, just sparingly ill and then ecstatically happy. And then just during the El and she was going back and forth and the eighth revelation came to her and she saw the body of Christ shriveled up, does sophisticated, like a dry leaf, completely evaporated of all fluid. You see that he was willing to do that, to that extent, to on Hurley, to that extent. And since she had committed herself to that experience, she let go, she would do it. And what came with the ninth revelation?
She says, and I have to read this. It's a little astounding. Sometimes you'll have to read mother Julian. Can't miss this one. She says here in the ninth revelation, when she committed herself, that she would let go and become desensitized. Does this vacated like this dried shell leaf of Christ's body, the ninth revelation came to her that there are three heavens that they're not in a hierarchy or in an order, but that they exist as a wholeness all together, three heavens equal working together, but there are three. So she says here, she says for though the dear human humanity of Christ could only suffer once his goodness would always make him willing to do so every day, if need be, that is, he had a kind of a spiritual courage at that. That's what she was learning. She was being attended to spiritual courage that no matter what it required, even if it required this to be done, infinitely one would do it. That there was no Lange gap, breadth of suffering activity of sacrifice. That would be shirt, whatever it was, it would be done. If he were to say that for love of me, he would make a new heaven and a new earth.
This would be a comparatively simple matter. She says something he could do every day. If he wanted, this is not good. Mother, Julian is not, not good. Getting closer into it now, but for a love of me to be willing, to die times without number beyond human capacity to compute is to my mind, the greatest gesture our Lord, God could make to the soul of man. This is his meaning. How could I not do this? I'll I'll love I have for you do all I can for you. This would not be difficult since for love of you. I'm ready to die often, regardless of the suffering. Why, why? Because only the willing entertainment of this perception gives one, the underside, the shadow, as it were of true mercy, only the willingness to see infinite suffering as a possibility, quite real, put someone then turn to the fullness of actuality and see what true universal mercy would be.
That one would not have the ability to even perceive of that grand elegant dignity that universality of God's mercy until one had already entertained this other endless suffering and the willingness to subject oneself to it, to open oneself totally to it times without number gives one, then the horizon to see that in God's mercy, there were three heavens, not one and three, not in the hierarchy, but in the complimentarity, there was a heaven which was called the father. She said, and you guessed it. There was a heaven called the sun. And there was a heaven called the Holy ghost, all three of them, all three of them. But in order for Julian in the 14th century to say this, Julian splits up the three heavens with great delicacy. In one chapter, she tells us that there was a heaven called the father, and she goes on about that. And then discretely, she ends that chapter. And then she comes back in chapter 23 and she says, and these three words, joy, happiness, and eternal delight. I was shown the three heavens by joy. I understood the pleasure experienced by the father, happiness, the work of the son, eternal delight. The Holy spirit. The father is pleased. The son is worshiped. The Holy spirit is delighted.
Very, very subtly elegantly, but great. Almost one would say strategic eye, full delicacy. She is say that the procedures of human sacrifice are appropriate at certain levels. And they are brought to a focus with the son, but that there is another heaven other than this, where sacrifice doesn't participate at all, where delight and joy are the realm and the way. So she's saying in her revelation, remember, this is a compliment to st. John's apocalypse. She is saying in 1373, I saw that we had moved Pauly to a point where we could sum up the experience of Jesus and move to another realm around with the Holy ghost, around with the Holy spirit, which is exactly exactly what Joachim do for Yara and st. Francis of Assisi and all the great mystics were moving toward and they were all masculine. They were all male, and it took a woman Julian of Norwich to perceive this in its fullness, because she goes on to 16 revelations and that 10th revelation. Then she has the vision of Jesus' heart ribbon into ribbon, into polarized.
See back to that basic conundrum only instead of it just being the face. It is now the heart. When this spiritual insight of the Rosa Crucian hermetic geniuses had a Mandela image of what the universe was, the four points where the two hands and the two feet and at the center of the Mandela was the heart of Jesus. And in the heart was a flame, the eternal flame, that was the soul. And that was the only place that God lives, not out there, not in here, but there in the center and the presence of that experience, which can only be manifested if we cooperate ourselves and make it be, and the structure that community that allowed for that message to be given to the people they were called, the friends of God, the friends of God, the Lords who sing softly about a different kind of transubstantiation that isn't in the authority, it's in the individual and their willingness to entertain this.
And it's because of mother Julian, that all of this was given the fullness of the revelation. This is the apocalypse of the Holy ghost. This is the great counselor. So the 10th revelation then was Jesus' heart ribbon and two, and the 11th revelation then was of course the context within which the ribbon in into could happen, and it would not fly apart or fall apart. And what is that context? It was the mother. And for the first time, anywhere Julian says, we might have to get used to the idea of God, the mother, we just might have to God, the mother.
So she goes on, I have to skip over because of time in the 12th revelation, there came to her an impress of the being of all that. There is, it was an impress. The being of all that is, which was, of course, they flowing compliment to some mother, God, the mother, you see how the wholeness of mother Julian, the integrity of her psychological symbolism that she wants to say for every, this there's a bat and she penetrates through a veil of this. And there's the context of that. And she penetrates through that. And there's avail of this, the alternation, the equalization, the wholeness, absolute integrity, absolute integrity, then came the 13th revelation that creation itself has a noble nature. All of this has a noble nature. It isn't despicable. This is from a woman who had died to the world, was ready to die to the world. But she is saying, I am dying to the world because of the integrity of the path, which I've taken. But I want you to know that there's a noble dignity to creation all the things that are are not to be thrown away. They are not junk.
They're not junk. They're the furniture in the house of the Lord. So we make the earth VOD and fall because it is so important. And because it has such a primordial noble nature. And of course the idea of the new Jerusalem was just lurking there to be understood that if man has any purpose in this universe, it's to make it as beautiful as he can for the presence of the divine. What else would he do with a 1 billion gallons? He sure can't just sell it all the time. Then came the 14th revelation. She says, she goes on in a long digression about the nature of prayer. She says, we cannot, even with all of this capacity to understand, we cannot pray for mercy. That has to be given to us. There isn't any sophisticated way or combination of ways. She gives you lots of it. She lets, you know, as he is a master of prayer, she is a spiritual master of the first order of prayer. She says there is no way to pray for mercy, that, that presence, that quality must be given. And the only thing you can do is to be ready to receive it.
We cannot pray for mercy. And then she says, when we do this, when we are ready for it, when we stretch ourselves through prayer to have mercy in this way, with this knowledge, there is no way that we can not have it. That is precise. That is like a scientific law. If you want that in this spirit, there is no way to pray for mercy and not having with that paradoxical understanding. She brings then the whole notion of how prayer unites the soul with God, not just unites, but makes the congruence actual. And that mercy is like the seal of the wholeness of that fact of that occurrence. It's like the seal mercy God's mercy is the seal of his indelible affinity with the soul of Madden centers as hard hermetically seal. That's what that means. Friends and medically.
She says, then our life becomes grounded in this grace, that mercy, that grace becomes the ground for life. Not the life that we thought we had, but for life as a universal whole phenomenon, which operates not on the electrical polarity energy scheme, but on the light homeless scheme. And then we're ready. She says finally to understand, she said that it took me, she said, it took me 20 years to understand then what sin would be only then could she see what sin would be? And sin of course is not letting God manifest in me. How could it be anything else? So it is a not technically, but it's a real bind phenomenally.
And that there's no way to work your way out of it. And Teligent lead cleverly because there they are. Without a fact, they have no effect at all. You're trying to get off stage and there isn't any pattern of steps on the stage. That's going to take you off the stage. So you have to see that. So she says finally at sank him, finally, it sank in to her. And she says here in the revelations of divine, love that. Finally, she began to understand a parable. It was a parable from that. Isaiah used to use all the time about a Lord and his servant, and you can read it for yourself. The servant goes off. He loves serving the Lord, but he falls. He breaks himself and he's in pain. And she says, don't you think that the Lord of that servant is going to take really good care of him?
Well, she says that fall happened to Adam and that the spiritual impress of that, and Adam is what we come to realize in the experience of the passion of Jesus. And she says it this way because she's walking on thin eggs in terms of the authoritarian structures of the time. But she's walking on great certainty in terms of what she may express. She is wonderful. She says in the servant has represented the second person of the Trinity and then the servant again, Adam, or in other words, every man, when I speak of the son, I am thinking of the Godhead, which is equal to the fathers. And when I say the servant, I have Christ's nature in mind. He is the true Adam.
He is the true Adam. The narrowness of the servant has to do with the sun. And the standing on the left side refers to Adam. The Lord is God. The father, the servant is the son. Jesus Christ. The Holy spirit is the love. That is common to them. Both when Adam fell God's son fell. Now that would have crisp everything. Joe said that in the 14th century, that the original sin was that Christ fell because of the true unity, which had been decreed in heaven. God's son could not be dissociated from Adam. Now she's talking about the associated in the term, which June would talk about to association that that image was an image of wholeness. There was no way to dissociate it. There was no way theologically to say that, well, this is over here and this is over here. We've got Adam and then we've got Christ. There's no way that that could have been associated with that was a whole image and has been from eternity. So there's no way to chop that out.
And this is why that revelation in the series of revelations was a cumulatively penetrating her so much because there were all revelations to do with the dismemberment of Jesus, with the dismemberment of the son, with his blood, with his scars, with all of that. And she was, as we would say, psychologically, subconsciously trying to come to terms with, how does God get so scarred up if he is home? And the answer is, is because he is hall. He accepts the scarring and doesn't shirk it. And so must we, this is very, very difficult. She says, so all of these revelations that she had done ended up with a realization that God and man's soul entered, dwell with each other. That was the only way in which this can all be in which the wholeness could possibly have been manifest that God and the soul entered dwell. And when they do enter dwell, they both are, they have their fullness, they have their, what we would call reality. And then the 15th revelation came to her that the absence of this is what is sin pain, the absence of this at least motion towards this, of this happening of this being viable of us, willing to let this whole process happen is what sin is. Then she was exhausted for over five hours. She had been besieged by these images that just shook her.
And then the next night she had the 16th revelation in the morning. And she says, here, if you got a minute, the following night, our Lord, God showed me the 16th revelation, as I shall be telling. And this 16th concluded and confirmed all the previous 15, let say she had been given a matrix of spiritual images, held in a series succession, but that the wholeness, the import of what that matrix was vectoring towards was not understood until she was able to go outside of the expression and add an exponential element. The recapitulation, they, what the pathetic Koreans would call the retrospective angle to the wholeness of it and make it whole, make it a set so that the 16th revelation was outside of the series of the 15 and was like an exponential multiplication of its meaning into eternity, into infinity.
She says, but first of all, I must tell you about my weakness, wretchedness and blindness. I said at the beginning, suddenly all my pain was taken from me. And in fact, I had no pain to trouble or distressed me while all the 15 revelations lasted, but at the end, everything closed up and I saw no more. At one moment I was feeling I was going to survive and that the next my sickness had returned first in my head, which began to throb. And then suddenly my whole body felt as ill as it had ever been. I was as stupid and bereft as if I had not agreed with comfort left wretch, that I was, I moaned and cried as I became aware of my bodily pains and lack of comfort, both spiritual and physical then came a religious person to me and asked me how I was doing.
I said, I had raved today and he laughed loud and Harley. And I said, the cross that stood before my face. I thought it was bleeding freely at this, the person I was speaking to became quite serious and surprised. And I felt very ashamed and amazed at my thoughtlessness. And I thought the man takes my least words seriously. So I said no more about it. When I saw how seriously he took it. And with what respect, I went feeling much ashamed. I should have liked to have received AB solution, but it was no time for talking to a priest about it. Four. I thought to myself, why should a priest believe me? I am not believing our Lord guns yet. I had truly believed all the while I had seen him. And in intention I am meant to do so forever, but fool that I was, I let it slip from my mind what a wretch I am a great Senate was.
And most unkind that because of the foolishness of a little pain, I should be so stupid as to lose temporarily. All the comfort that this bless had revelation from God had brought you see what sort of person I am, but our Lord ever courteous did not leave me. And so I lay quietly til nighttime trusting in his mercy. Then I fell asleep. And in my sleep at the beginning, I thought the scene had me by the throat, putting his face, varying your mind. It was like a young man's face and long and extraordinarily lean. I never saw the light. The color was the red of a tile stone, newly fired. And there were black spots like freckles dirtier than the tile stone. His hair was dust red chipped in front with sidewalks hanging over his cheeks. He grinned at me with slide grimaced, thereby revealing white teeth, which made it, I thought all the more horrible there was no proper shape to his body or hands. But with his paws, he held me by the throat and would've strangled me if he could. This ugly revelation was made while I was asleep, unlike any of the others. But all the time I went on trusting, I would be saved and kept by the mercy of God and our Lord. And his courtesy gave me the grace to wake up.
It was barely alive. She says. And then she says, then after she woke up physically, then the Lord opened my spiritual eyes and showed me the soul in the middle of my heart. The soul was as large as if it were an eternal world and a blessing kingdom as well. That's conditioned to be a most glorious city. New Jerusalem is hidden away where a man can only find it. If he is together and himself in the universe, in his heart, that was the 16th revelation. And as she works through this, she comes finally to the realization that only by delivering the testimony of her process, intact, exact as she had had it, could she then leave the world? Because it had become the shell of the love experience that she felt for humanity. And so she wrote the book to be the rack card of the completeness. And when she finished it, she walked through the center of it and left all this happened in the lifetime of Geoffrey Chaucer, who we'll see next week, who understood in the humane
Landscape. What all of this [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible].
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