What is it about Julian that speaks to us today? Why are her fourteenth-century Revelations of Divine Love so relevant to us in the twenty-first century? What is Julian telling us that we desperately need to hear in our violent, suffering world? . . .
 
A Voice for Our Time
Perhaps the best answer to the question “Why Julian now?” is that in our age of uncertainty, inconceivable suffering, and seemingly perpetual violence and war (not unlike fourteenth-century Europe), Julian shows us the way toward contemplative peace. In a time of rampant prejudice and religious persecution, Julian inspires us to non-judgmental acceptance and universal compassion. In a world of deadly diseases and ecological disasters, Julian teaches us how to endure pain in patience and trust that Christ is working to transform every cross into resurrected glory. In a generation of doubt, cynicism, and disbelief, Julian offers a radiant vision of faith and hope—not in ourselves, but in the Lord who created us, loves us, and will never, ever abandon us.
 
Moreover, across six centuries, Julian’s voice speaks to us about love. She communicates personally, as if she were very much with us here and now. Even more than theological explanations, we all hunger for love. Our hearts yearn for someone we can trust absolutely—divine love that can never fail. Julian reveals this love because, like Mary Magdalene, she experienced it firsthand. Julian tells us about her mystical visions of Christ’s love on the cross and how that love totally transformed her life. Unlike other medieval mystics (who may appear sometimes too extreme, too ascetic, or too intellectual for our postmodern taste), Julian comes across as a flesh and blood woman, thoroughly sympathetic to our human condition. And in heartfelt terms she expresses her profound awareness of God who became human like us, suffered, died, and was transformed into glory.
 
Why is Julian so appealing today?
I think because she is totally vulnerable and transparently honest, without any guile. She is “homely”; in medieval terms, that means down-to-earth, familiar, and easily accessible. She is keenly aware of her spiritual brokenness and longs to be healed. So do we. She experiences great suffering of body, mind, and soul. So do we. She has moments of doubt. So do we. She seeks answers to age-old questions. So do we. Then, at a critical turning point in her revelations, she is overwhelmed by joy and “gramercy” (great thanks) for the graces she is receiving. We, too, are suddenly granted graces and filled to overflowing with gratitude. Sometimes, we even experience our own divine revelations.
 
Again and again, Julian reassures each one of us that we are loved by God, unconditionally. In her writings, we hear Christ telling us, just as he told Julian: “I love you and you love me, and our love shall never be separated in two.” Indeed, Julian’s teachings have greatly endeared her to Christians and non-Christians alike. Everyone can relate to her as a spiritual mentor because we sense that, even though she lived and wrote six hundred years ago, Julian the mystic, the seeker, and the theologian is very much “a woman for all seasons.” Julian’s voice of prophetic hope, speaking to us from the fourteenth century, is one that we in the twenty-first century desperately need to hear.
PLEASE NOTE: The excerpts above are from the just-published An Explorer’s Guide to Julian of Norwich (InterVarsity Academic Press, June, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Veronica Mary Rolf. All rights reserved. This article may not be copied or reprinted without the express permission of the author.

Today, May 8th, is Julian’s Feast Day in the Anglican and Lutheran Churches. In the Catholic Church, Julian is celebrated on May 13th. In Julian’s honor, let us consider these words from the Revelations of Divine Love that appear near the very end of her book and, no doubt, her long life:
​Our faith is a light, naturally coming from our endless day that is our father, God; in which light our mother, Christ, and our good lord, the Holy Ghost, lead us in this mortal life . . . And at the end of woe, suddenly our eye shall be opened, and in clearness of sight our light shall be full . . . Thus I saw and understood that our faith is our light in our night, which light is God, our endless day.
Faith, Hope, and Love
Julian extols faith as the light that shines in our darkness, amidst our fears, within our sadness, and through all our joys. It is the presence of the blessed Trinity within us that keeps us hope-filled even when we see no way out of our predicament or the sufferings of the world. She further identifies the source of our light as none other than “charity” or spiritual love. This charity keeps us in faith and in hope, and faith and hope lead us ever more deeply into charity. Like St. Paul, Julian is convinced that, at the end “alle shalle be charity.”
Julian was also shown three ways of understanding this light of charity: uncreated charity (which is God’s love), created charity (which is the soul within God’s love), and charity given (which is the virtue of love). This gift of love that is bequeathed to us through the working of grace enables us to “love God for himself, and our self in God, and all that God loves, for the sake of God.” Julian marveled greatly at this virtue of charity because she realized that even though we live foolishly and blindly here on earth, yet God always beholds our efforts to lead lives of love. Furthermore, Julian assures us that God takes great joy in our good deeds. In fact, she reiterates that the best way we can please God is by wisely and truly believing that we please him, and “to rejoice with him and in him.”
For as truly as we shall be in the bliss of God without end, praising and thanking him, as truly have we been in the foresight of God, loved and known in his endless purpose from without beginning, in which unbegun love he created us. In the same love he keeps us, and never suffers us to be hurt by which our bliss might be lessened. And therefore when the final judgment is given, and we are all brought up above, then shall we clearly see in God the privities which now are hidden from us.

On her Feast Day, may Julian’s words reassure us that faith, hope, and charity are living realities and powerful gifts, flowing from the very life of the Trinity within us. Let us rejoice that the Lord is always “pleased” with our efforts to live by the power of these three virtues. And may we experience some measure of Julian’s own joy this day—not because of specific circumstances, but because we are loved by our Creator from “without beginning” and will be loved through all eternity. Happy Julian’s Day!
PLEASE NOTE: The quotations above are from Julian's Gospel: Illuminating the Life & Revelations of Julian of Norwich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), Copyright ©2013 by Veronica Mary Rolf. All rights reserved. This article may not be copied or reprinted without the written permission of the author.

Near the beginning of her Revelations, Julian tells us that in her youth, she had “some measure of feeling for the passion of Christ.” Yet she was convinced that her ability to enter into the Lord’s sufferings on Calvary did not go deep enough. She wanted to feel more, to suffer more, in order to have a truer understanding of what Christ underwent to save the world from sin. She hoped that if she received a vision, the reality of Christ’s “bodily pains” would become so physical, so visceral, so immediate that she could experience them as fully as if she had been standing in front of Christ on the cross, next to Mary, his Mother, and Magdalene, and the “others who were Christ’s lovers.” She wanted to be a living figure in the scene of the crucifixion.
       Her prayer was granted. After first seeing Christ come alive on the crucifix that hung before her, she was given a bodily sight of part of his passion. The gruesome experience became so intense that Julian admitted she could not describe the many impressions it had on her. She simply attested that she saw this sight of the passion “bodily, sorrowfully, and obscurely.”

Deep Drying and Deep Dying
“I saw the sweet face as it were dry and bloodless with pale dying; and afterward more deadly pale, languishing; and then it turned more deadly into blue; and afterward more brown blue, as the flesh turned more deeply dead. For his passion showed to me most explicitly in his blessed face, and especially in his lips, there I saw these four colors—those lips that were before fresh and ruddy, lively and pleasing to my sight. This was a terrible change, to see this deep dying. And also the nose withered together and dried, to my sight, and the sweet body waxed brown and black, all changed and turned out from the fair, fresh, and lively color of himself into dry dying.”
       Julian watches Christ suffer and expire in front of her, as she had watched loved ones die in wave after wave of the Great Pestilence. She knows the shriveling of the nose, of the whole body, the progression of color from the blue of deep bruising to brown and thence to black, as the bodily fluids dried up, the blood clotted and ceased to flow. There is more, much more:
“For in that same time that our blessed savior died upon the rood [cross], it was a dry, bitter wind, wondrous cold as to my sight. And at the time all the precious blood was bled out of the sweet body that might pass therefrom, yet there dwelled a moisture in the sweet flesh of Christ, as it was shown. Bloodlessness and pain dried from within, and the blowing of the wind and cold coming from without, met together in the sweet body of Christ. And these four, two without and two within, dried the flesh of Christ over the course of time. And though this pain was bitter and sharp, yet it was very long-lasting, as to my sight. And the pain dried up all the lively spirits of Christ’s flesh.”
       In Julian’s vivid personal experience of the crucifixion, she felt the wind blow frigid, as if blasting from the North Sea, across the broad waters and into Norwich. Julian knew the biting saltiness and searing coldness of that unrelenting wind, and it seemed to be howling that day on Calvary. The wind and the bitter cold are nowhere documented in the gospels, nor are there any details of the endless bleeding and descriptions of Christ’s great pains. In fact, the four gospel accounts do not describe his sufferings at all. This is Julian’s own gospel, told with great attention to the drying up of Christ’s face, lips, and all the life-elements of his body. She is finally and truly “there,” in the midst of the passion, as she had longed to be. And it is more dreadful than she ever could have imagined.

Christ’s Thirst
“And in this drying was brought to my mind this word that Christ said: ‘I thirst.’ For I saw in Christ a double thirst: one bodily, and another ghostly [spiritual]. This word was shown for bodily thirst, and for the ghostly thirst was shown as I shall say after. And I understood by the bodily thirst that the body had lack of moisture, for the blessed flesh and bones were left all alone without blood and moisture.”
      Julian becomes fixated on the “drying” of Christ’s body. It reminds her of, and partially explains, the words spoken by Christ and recorded by John the Evangelist, “I am thirsty” (Jn 19:28). At this moment in Julian’s vision, as on Calvary, all the fluids in Christ’s body have dried up. He is parched, with a terrible human thirst. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth, his lips are swollen, cracked and bleeding. What a pitiful cry Julian hears from the Son of God, who is himself the “fountain of living water” (Jer 2:13), the Savior who Isaiah wrote would “pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground” (Is 44:3). This is the same Lord who told the Samaritan woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (Jn 4:10). And this is the Teacher who had cried out, saying, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink” (Jn 7:37–38). Now, he was like the psalmist, David, in the wilderness of Judah, crying out: “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Ps 63:1)
       Julian does not spare us any aspects of what she saw in her vision. This is perhaps the most graphic account of the crucifixion in medieval literature. It is filled with details that remained indelibly imprinted in Julian’s memory as a result of her keen observation. In addition to the inexorable “drying” of the body, she describes the enlarging of the wounds in the hands due to the great sagging of the body, with hair clinging to the flesh and thorns, and the thorns mingled with flesh and hair, all caked with dried blood. She also tries to convey the drying and browning of Christ’s torn and sagging pieces of skin as “small rumpelde” (that is, slightly rumpled or wrinkled). His matted hair, his dark brown face, his body caked with dried blood, all take on the color of “a dried board when it is aged,” like the wood of the cross itself.
      Julian confesses that she was at a loss to say what it was actually like to watch Christ die. She can write only that, “The showing of Christ’s pains filled me full of pains.” She knows that Christ suffered “once for all” (Heb 10:10), but she also believes Christ showed it to her “as if” she had been there, so that he could “fill me with mind [of the passion], as I had before desired.” In her Revelations, Julian experienced Christ’s agony in her own body, with true compassion for Christ on the cross. She literally suffered with him.
      As we approach Holy Week, might we, like Julian, also seek the “mind of the passion”? Might we dare to "go deeper" into the reality of Good Friday? We have only to take time each day to meditate on Julian’s descriptions of the sufferings of Christ on the cross. In contemplative silence, we may stand at the foot of the cross next to Mary, his Mother, and Magdalene, and the “others who were Christ’s lovers.” With them, we may watch, and wait, and breathe in deep compassion with Christ . . . uniting all the sufferings of our tortured world and our own personal lives to his own. Thus, like Julian, we may help quench the Savior’s thirst for souls by giving him to drink from the depths of our own love.

PLEASE NOTE: The quotations above are from Julian's Gospel: Illuminating the Life & Revelations of Julian of Norwich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), Copyright ©2013 by Veronica Mary Rolf. All rights reserved. This article may not be copied or reprinted without the written permission of the author.