God, the jealous lover?

Today's gospel reading (Matthew 10:37-42) starts with one of those really challenging passages that priests and deacons must dread having to preach on. Actually, Matthew's version is not nearly as tough as the parallel in Luke, who requires us to go so far as to hate father and mother, spouse and children, brother and sister, and even our own life, if we want to be counted as true disciples. Matthew just says we mustn't prefer them to Him.  Still ... where is Jesus coming from with this? It's pretty strong stuff. 

Earliest monastic tradition certainly took it seriously. Monks and nuns were meant to renounce their family relationships along with their property and position. Why, what's the point? I mean, I (with the agreement of my spiritual director) explicitly refuse to do that, as a hermit, among other reasons because family relationships go both ways. I can't deprive myself of my family without depriving my family of me, and I don't feel that I have the right to do that. I honor my father and mother, sisters and brothers, nephews and nieces, and I'm not about to cut myself off from them. Granted, I live at least an hour away from them all, and even before the pandemic, we never got together more than a few times a year. Still, the principle remains -- but what is the principle, then, behind the ancient monastic tradition? 

There's something in John Cassian's Conferences of the Desert Fathers (late 4th-early 5th century, about 100 years before St. Benedict and a major influence on his thought and Rule). He and his fellow monk Germanus, who have travelled from their home monastery in Palestine to learn from the famous desert fathers in Egypt, start to think that maybe they should return to live with their families. They think, with their families' support they could devote themselves to spiritual study and holy living, and in return they would surely be a good influence on their relatives.... Fortunately, they have grown enough in humility and wisdom by then to run their idea by one of the elders, who shoots it down. Why would their families want to support them as idle monks, and what makes them think their families would be grateful for their wise teaching? I think there is something about the way families and land are connected in agrarian economies (just about every economy, ever, except our modern post-industrial ones) that means family ties come along with real, concrete rights and responsibilities that might not be obvious in our modern capitalist system.

OK, then, but there is still, I think, an important value in today's gospel reading, and it has to do with what we call "tough love." It has to do with a homily I heard about 30 years ago, preached by the late Cardinal Hickey. The parish church was packed with mostly Central American war refugees, among whom domestic violence was epidemic. Cardinal Hickey read his homily in Spanish, and it was obvious that he must have spent hours and hours rehearsing. It was obvious that he really cared about what he was saying, and what he said was this: "you men, never for one minute think that because you are married in the Church, the Church is going to tell your wives to stay with you if you beat them. If you beat your wives, sacrament or no, the Church is going to tell them to leave you!" Disgracefully, that has not been the Church's universal message. But it is the message of today's gospel. 

Today's gospel says, you must do the right thing, choose God, even if it means breaking the most intimate family ties. Even if it means pressing charges against your (temporarily, if sincerely) contrite husband or lover for beating you or your children. Even if it means evicting and/or testifying against your own beloved child for dealing drugs. Even if it means participating in having your sister or brother involuntarily committed to a psych ward when they're having a psychotic episode and, lacking insight as a symptom of the illness itself, rage against you for locking them up. Or just tolerating a terrible two-year-old's tantrums without letting yourself be manipulated by them.

You know, there is only one God, and my God is your God, too, and also the God of the abuser and the drug addict, and of every one of us whose thinking and behavior is at times slightly or massively distorted, manipulative, dishonest, wrong, unacceptable. It is not up to me to try to figure out what is the best thing I can do for you. It is up to me to maintain my own prayer life and my own integrity, to examine my own conscience frequently and rigorously, and to make amends whenever I start to go wrong. If I do that, if I do what God leads me to do, it cannot possibly be good for me and bad for you. We have one God, who loves me and you and all of us together, equally. Some choices may seem selfish to us, we may feel guilty for saying "no" or walking away from someone close to us, but if I'm really following God, He cannot possibly lead me to take care of myself at your expense. 

Tough love is not just self-love, it's a more effective way to love its object. Enabling, the opposite of tough love, is crippling. We, and those we sometimes have to be very brave to say "no" to, cannot grow strong and healthy without some struggle on our own behalf. Letting someone get away with bad behavior, even rewarding bad behavior, prevents the person behaving badly from the harder work of confronting their own demons and growing into goodness. Nor does tough love guarantee healing and redemption, but that's not my job. God loves you, and God loves your manipulative child or spouse, but you are not your relative's God. You, I, must learn to "listen with the ear of the heart," and then trust in God to take care of us and of one another, in His own way. 

I think that this is what Jesus meant -- or at least, it's one way of understanding His hard statements in Matthew, and even harder in Luke, about placing God before family. We have to put God, and that still, small voice with which He speaks to us in the depth of our conscience, ahead of absolutely everything and everyone else. It's for our good and for our loved ones' good, too, because the God who speaks lovingly to my heart loves them just as much. We don't have competing Gods, or duelling guardian angels ... we have one God. Trust!

Incarnation

Today is the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi -- the Body of Christ. I was lucky enough to be able to go to Mass. This feast celebrates the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is that the bread and wine at Mass actually become, literally, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, with only the external appearance of bread and wine remaining. It looks like bread and wine, and it tastes like bread and wine (actually, the bread doesn't taste like anything much), the wine smells like wine, but on a mystical level, in its inmost reality, it IS God incarnate. I can't really come up with a metaphor for this ... the closest that occurs to me is what happens sometimes in a dream, when someone looks and talks and acts like your Aunt Mabel, but you know, somehow, that it's really your late husband. You know? 

Anyway, I wanted to riff on something from my last blog post a few days ago, and I'm going to keep this quick and try to post it before Compline tonight. I said something like, "seen with the eyes of faith and love, this world is my home." I mean my heavenly home. I mean, seen with the eyes of faith, not only is Jesus in "the least of these my brethren," and not only do I see all the power and glory and grace and divinity and love of God in the tasteless little wafer at Communion, but God is all around me. The Rule of St. Benedict says that we should treat all the tools and property of the monastery as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar. What would it be to treat the work of our hands, the work we do with those sacred tools, as if it were all sacramental? What if God incarnates every day, every moment, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in all "the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands," as the priest says it at the altar? 

What if He were speaking to you, right now? Can you be quiet long enough to hear? The priest this morning said that when he was an 11-year-old altar boy, he heard his name spoken from the tabernacle behind the altar in church one morning, "Jimmy ... Jimmy ...." Do I believe it? Yeah, I do. I've heard too many similar crazy stories, and I have my own. Listen. See. Feel. Wait. Invite God in, and wait for Him to come. Make time and room enough for Him to move you. And the world will open up, this world will become magical, divine, glorious. It's so real, more real than the world we're used to seeing with our everyday vision. Open the eyes of faith, and rejoice!

Peace be with you.

At Home in the World

There's a gospel hymn that says "this world is not my home," and indeed it's a familiar theme. We're pilgrims in this world, just passing through, with our eyes and our hearts on Heaven. But I want to turn that around, and say that unless we make our home in this world, we can't reach the eternal home later on. I don't mean to contradict that other sentiment, just to point out what it really means and where it falls apart if misinterpreted or taken too far.

So what does it mean, properly, to say that "this world is not my home?" I think it means that we shouldn't get too hung up on worldly prosperity, security, or status. We should be willing to sacrifice everything for our conscience's sake, confident that there are consequences beyond what we can see in front of us. But where it can fall apart is in a tendency to spiritual selfishness. We want to climb the mountain and then stay there. We want to live the ideal holy life, and we want to "keep ourselves unstained by the world," as St. James put it (Ja.1:27).

But this world IS our home, and we can't get to Heaven by cutting ourselves off from it. I think that both the monastic vow of "stability" and the marriage vow of "for better or for worse" are meant to push back against the tendency to blame other people and circumstances for our own shortcomings. Once that vow is taken, we're stuck with each other, and that is where spiritual growth has to take place, not in some imaginary ideal world with imaginary ideal people. There are no shortcuts to Heaven. Jesus isn't going to beam me up.

In Matthew 25, Jesus talks about what is right behavior: "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." He means, of course, that "whatever you did for one of these least brothers or sisters of mine, you did for me." I'm going to extrapolate a little, and add, "I was annoying and you were patient with me, weird and you didn't make fun of me, weak and you accommodated me, wrong and you didn't gloat." 

And, of course, I'm not walking on water, either. I am no perfect specimen of humanity. I have to put up with myself, too, and love myself just as I am, even as I try to become better. Every time I sit down to write in this blog, I seem to come back to the same thing: the need to 1) see myself as I really am, here and now, in order to 2) love myself as I really am, in order to 3) become more like I want to be. Again, there are no shortcuts.

This world may not be my home, ultimately, but it's the only way home. Lift up your eyes to Heaven, by all means, but then bring them back down to earth again. Jesus said, "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." St. Benedict said, "receive all guests as Christ." St. Teresa of Calcutta saw Jesus not only "in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor," but also in the distressing disguise of an unfair or incompetent mother superior. We are made in the image of God, we are temples of the Holy Spirit, and as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."

The problems and shortcomings of this world and its people are not impediments, they are exactly what we need in order to reach that happy home. Seen with the eyes of love and faith, this world IS my home.

Staying enclosed : guidance from professionals

I found this great video this morning, from some cloistered nuns in France. It's actually really great advice for anyone finding themselves suddenly "cloistered" by the coronavirus. Enjoy!

The Law and the Rule

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, in which he said, "the sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law."  I want to dive a little deeper into that second clause: "the strength of sin is the law," by talking about what is for me the essential difference between morality and asceticism; that is, the "moral law" vs. the "monastic rule." Basically, I experience "moral law" as a standard of judgment, a yes-or-no question, right or wrong, guilty or innocent. The "monastic rule", or asceticism, on the other hand, is for me a way to grow toward holiness; it is not a yes-or-no question, but a process, a continuum, a striving for excellence.

I'm not enough of a Scripture scholar to have much confidence in interpreting Paul's thinking on the Law, but I will suggest a way of looking at it that resonates with me. The trouble with Law, as I experience it, is that it becomes an unhealthy form of perfectionism. It sets up an unattainable standard, and then says that if you fail to measure up you are bad, wicked, a sinner, and condemned to eternal punishment.... We do have a remedy, in the form of the sacrament of reconciliation, a.k.a. confession to and absolution by a priest. But what is lacking there, for me, is any real support for my desire to do better next time. The standard is impossibly high -- not only "thou shalt not commit adultery", but "everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." In legalism, I feel like the grace of God comes in mostly after the fall, in the sacrament of confession. And I really appreciate having access to that sacrament, because the fall is going to come, and (along with making direct amends, when possible, when I've hurt someone else), it feels kind of like a "reset" button that makes it easier to pick myself up and start over. But avoiding the fall is all on us, and we are all guilty because will power is weak, we all fail, we all need the grace of forgiveness all the time.

Moreover, somehow it seems to me that external checklists of sins tend to encourage judging others by those standards as well, and then comparing their visible conduct against our own internal impulses. I know that I have looked at someone with lust, I am guilty. But I don't know if my buttoned-up, publicly virtuous co-worker stays up late watching porn, or molests his stepdaughter at home. I know that I'm guilty of snapping at people for interrupting when I'm trying to concentrate, but I don't know if the sweet, friendly lady down the street slaps her kids around when she's had too much to drink. Or the other way around: I judge another person harshly for their public sin, without having any idea what the private provocation or circumstances might have been.

Asceticism, on the other hand, says "yes, yes, we're all sinners, that's a given -- now what can we do about it?" Asceticism accepts right up front that perfection is unattainable. In fact, if you ever start to get puffed up with how much progress you're making in virtue, asceticism is bound to shoot you down with warnings about the deadly dangers of pride, vanity, and complacency. But this emphasis on humility, to me, seems very qualitatively different from the shame and guilt that I feel is bred by moral legalism. Humility is productive, shame is destructive.

Asceticism is fundamentally practical. It looks really hard at why we do the stupid, self-defeating, destructive things we do, and how we can gradually grow, and help others to grow, into healthier and holier ways of life. The monastic tradition picks apart the psyche, and although it gives the name "demons" to some of what it finds there, it still goes on to give us really useful tools for disarming the demons and arming our better angels.

The three primary tools of asceticism are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Prayer permeates the monastic life, from the formal communal liturgical prayers, to reflective reading of sacred texts, to private wordless contemplation. Prayer in all its forms acknowledges the insufficiency of our willpower and our dependence on God's grace, asks for help, lays us open to receive it, gives credit and thanks for it. Fasting stands for all the basic, ongoing work of self-discipline and taming what I called in my Rule of Life "the tyranny of capricious impulse." Almsgiving encompasses all the ways we get outside of ourselves and focus with compassion and empathy on other people, from overt acts of service, to patience with each other's weaknesses, to prayer on behalf of those whose suffering is outside of our reach.

To me, moral legalism is demoralizing: I will always fall short of its ideal, so it's always a fail. Monastic asceticism is encouraging: the ideal is the same, but it's about progress rather than perfection, and even sliding a step back doesn't discourage me from taking two forward. St. Benedict wrote in his Rule (chapter 64) that a good leader should push the monks hard, but with enough care and flexibility "that the strong may have something to strive after, and the weak may not fall back in dismay." In the prologue to the Rule, he calls the monastery a "school for the Lord's service," says he hopes nothing about it will be "harsh and burdensome," but also encourages us not to give up too easily when it does get hard, by saying that "as we advance in the religious life and in faith, our hearts expand and we run the way of God's commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love." 

So what I think St. Paul is saying is that if you are ruled by a moral Law, then you are approved or condemned by God based on your compliance with that Law; but since no one can possibly live up to it all the time, in all its particulars, no matter how good your intentions, everyone is condemned. But what God did in the Incarnation, becoming human, joining Himself to ourselves, accepting human condemnation and execution, was to break that compact and set us free from condemnation under the moral Law. We sinners are approved, we are accepted and loved. Christ died not for the righteous (by the absolute standards of the Law, no one is righteous) but for sinners like us.

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One last thought, to tie this all back in with what's going on in the world today. Today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, and I have been thinking of all those people whose work has been declared "non-essential." So many of us define ourselves and our worth by our work, and I wonder whether many of those left idle by this pandemic feel as if they themselves have been declared superfluous, as if the work they do has no essential value, as if they are no real use to anyone. But our worth is not defined by what we do. We are intrinsically good, loved, and counted worthy by God.

Catholic tradition distinguishes two kinds of religious life, the "active" and the "contemplative." The archetypal models for the two are the sisters Martha and Mary of Bethany, particularly in the story of Jesus's visit to their home in Luke 10:38-42. Martha bustles around serving Jesus and his disciples, but Mary just sits and listens to Him talk. Martha welcomes Him with her service, and Mary with her mere presence. Martha complains, but Jesus says that Mary has chosen the better part and it shall not be taken from her. Martha represents the religious orders who are out in the world serving the poor, feeding the hungry, teaching and nursing and all the rest of those essential works of mercy. Mary represents the cloistered monks and nuns (and hermits), who leave everything behind and whose primary work is simply to pray and to listen to God in their own hearts. We contemplatives are useless by the world's standards, but in Jesus's affirmation to Mary we know that we, too, are approved.

None of us has to earn God's love. Our worth is not dependent on any standard either of morality or of usefulness. God loves you! And I invite you to treat this time as an ascetic retreat. Think how you might apply the three pillars right now. Prayer: meditate, spend some time in nature, start a journal, draw. Fasting: think about what habits are dragging you down and make some changes, always keeping in mind "progress, not perfection." Almsgiving: look through your contacts list for people who might be having a hard time with the isolation right now and reach out with a phone call, ask an elderly neighbor if they need any help with outside chores or errands, or think of someone each day you can thank or compliment for something. And remember, sometimes the best "alms" you can give to someone else is the chance to help you! If you're struggling, give a friend or neighbor, or a hotline volunteer, the gift of your vulnerability, the gift of your trust, of your willingness to be in their debt.

Peace be with you!

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Sister Stress and Brother Blues

Are you a wildcat or an antelope? That is, in times of stress, are you more likely to react with fight or with flight? I can get feisty and I can walk out ... but I think, in general, I'm more of a rabbit: I freeze. I play dead, like an opossum. I'm like an ostrich, burying my head in the sand of endless rounds of computer solitaire. When I get really anxious, I tend to get paralyzed. I procrastinate. My good habits start to slide. I'm less careful about what I eat, and I don't want to exercise. I can't focus on reading, my prayer life feels sterile, and sleep is less restful.

I'm very much aware of my prevailing reaction to stress, these days, because, you know, there's this pandemic going on. I stay away from social media and keep my consumption of the news to a minimum, but I'm not totally isolated, and the anxiety does reach into the hermitage. Add an extra special ingredient, like the spectacular demise of my 34-year-old stove (it's OK!  the cabinets didn't catch on fire, and the new stove was delivered this morning), as well as the less dramatic mixture of everyday challenges, and let's just say I've been thinking more than usual about coping with stress.

The most important thing, I find, is to pull my ostrich head out of the sand and face my anxiety head on. I don't mean to trade "freeze" for "fight," though. For me, the best way is a sort of split awareness, dividing my mind between my "inner child" and my "inner mother." When my inner child is cowering under the covers, inner mother can take her by the hand, give her a hug, and help her to face the monsters. Sometimes, that just means shining a flashlight under the bed to show nothing's there, or fixing the curtains so they don't cast scary shadows in the moonlight. Some monsters are real, but even then, a closer look may show them to be more bark (roar?) than bite. Some are terrible but remote and improbable, some are imminent threats that if I were to look at bravely, I might find that I could make a plan to deal with easily. But even in the worst-case scenario, "inner mother" needs to respond both to the outward situation and to the emotional needs of her "inner child." 

I think I'm probably not the only one who tends to think that being a grown-up demands a hard-headed practicality, with no room for childish emotion. But we are all a mixture of heart and head, and really healthy functioning demands attention to both. Ignoring our uncomfortable feelings -- whether anxiety or grief or unrequited love or the overwhelming urge to go buy a pack of cigarettes (20+ years now, thank God) -- doesn't make them go away. Ignoring an unhappy child doesn't make her happy, it just makes her act out her emotions in some less appropriate way ... and the exact same thing is true of us grown-ups, when we try to shut up or shut out the clamor of our unwelcome feelings. Our feelings end up influencing our actions one way or another; better to acknowledge them and deal with them directly.

So for me, what does mothering my inner child look like?

First of all, if I find myself restless, jumpy, irritable, etc. (like a fussy kid), I need to stop and pay attention, and ask myself, gently, what's going on? There may be more than one thing going on, and the ones that come up first might turn out to be distractions from something bigger and harder ... take the time and compassion to look deep. 

Second, for me, especially if the stressor is too big or too outside of my control for me to take much effective action against, I need to spend more time on my knees in direct, personal, contemplative prayer. I spend plenty of time in formal, liturgical prayer, plenty of time in wordy prayer, but it takes a different kind of attention to feel myself basking in God's motherly warmth and wrapped in the shelter of God's wings. 

Third, soothe my senses: play some music, take extra care over meal preparation, get up and move and stretch, take a hot shower, pet the cat. Once I have acknowledged the bad feelings, and their source, it's OK to lighten the mood with undemanding literature or my collection of old Pogo comic books, or whatever.

Fourth, connect with nature. I'm very, very lucky to live in the woods, with a view of an ever-changing tidal river, next to a park with lots of hiking trails. But this counted even when I worked in downtown D.C., and used to take my lunch in one of the many tiny green spots carved out where the diagonal avenues cross the square grid of streets. Just to walk out the door, with a pair of binoculars and my phone with its collection of nature apps -- it's like magic.

Fifth, having paid enough compassionate attention to my inner child to calm her down some, I can face thinking through the specific stressors, identify best- and worst-case scenarios, brainstorm options and imagine alternate outcomes, and if possible, think of some little concrete step I can take to make the situation better. Then take it. 

Sixth, since a lot of stress has to do with feeling powerless over a situation, it can be surprisingly helpful to take positive action on something entirely unrelated, to restore my sense of competence and mastery. Yesterday, it was snake-proofing the chicken coop, since I finally came to the conclusion that that's why I have been getting fewer eggs lately. That job was particularly affirming to my sense of competence, but something as simple as folding and putting away a basketful of laundry that's been sitting there waiting for two days, or sorting through a messy tangle of chargers and cords that's been bugging me every time I look at it, can make more difference to my state of mind than I would expect.

The bottom line is really stress management, which sounds like an overused self-help catchphrase -- but what it really means is to manage my stress, instead of trying to avoid and ignore the discomfort. Different techniques may work for different people. Antelopes and wildcats might respond better to other approaches, but for this little rabbit, these are things that help me to unfreeze when life starts to get me down.

O Death, where is thy Sting?

When I was 18 years old, a friend of mine died. This was one of the most significant incidents in my life, before or since. Or rather, not his death itself, but the "parting of the veil" that I was given some three months later, when I returned home from my freshman year of college and found out about his death. I wish I could tell you how it was. I don't remember anything about it, really, other than the message. I'm sure it was not a sleeping dream, but a waking "vision", or rather a "knowing". And it was totally convincing, deeply moving, life-changing. And this was it, all of it: Wilson, my friend, was at peace. He understood everything, everything made sense, and everything was OK. Does "OK" sound underwhelming? But really, it's profound. EVERYTHING is OK. Everything makes sense, from the other side, and everything is fine.

I promise to post separately, soon, a short account of my history of depression, PTSD, healing and faith. I'll come back and edit this with a link to that post. Meanwhile, I'll just say that at age 18, I was a complete basket case. And while I was not close to Wilson, I felt a kinship with him. I felt that he, too, was crazy.  Unhappily crazy. Confused, like me. Nothing made sense to me, or to Wilson. And Wilson died drunk, breaking the law. He and a friend (I wish I knew what became of Tomás) got drunk one night and climbed the locked fence to a local swimming pool. Wilson drowned. Was he in a state of grace? Man, how could he have been, by any kind of conventional understanding of that phrase? He was drunk, totally trashed, not even in any state to think, to discern ... how could a young man in that state of mind make any kind of a meaningful act of faith or contrition?

How little we understand! How little we understand about sin, and grace, and what drives us to sin, and how to heal. How little we understand about why people sin against us, and even less do we understand random natural disasters like this coronavirus plague. I don't know Wilson's story. I have some understanding -- much more than I did back then -- about why I was so miserable myself, but I don't know what drove Wilson to self-destruction. But what I know, with rock-solid, unshakable conviction, is that everything makes sense (from somewhere, from the other side), and everything is OK.

Death is not a problem. Pain is not bad. Suffering is not wrong. Christ Himself suffered, and died, on the cross, so how can it be wrong? This is a paradox, and I cannot begin to explain it, but I feel it deeply to be true. I don't like pain and fear and suffering, I don't want it, and I will duck if you take a swing at me ... but suffering and death are not, somehow, somewhere deep within the mystery, inherently wrong. I hesitate even to post this, because it's one thing to say that my own suffering has been redemptive, but how many people will feel that I am dismissing their pain? But it's not even what I mean. I don't mean, "I'm stronger where I was broken." I don't mean, as the Easter Vigil liturgy says, "oh happy fault of Adam, that merited such a wonderful Redeemer." I mean that pain, death, and even sin, are not flaws in God's world -- the world of our totally loving God -- at all.

I just don't have the words. Far more eloquent was the 14th-century anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote in her Revelations of Divine Love, that God told her: "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Her world was outwardly even less well than our COVID-shocked world of 2020. In her lifetime, Norwich lost perhaps 1/3 of its population to the Black Death, and on top of that were repeated severe famines. Julian's series of visions, or "shewings", came when she herself lay on what she and everyone around her believed would be her own deathbed. England was at a Hundred Years' War with France, with all the killing, and all the crippling taxation and conscription, that that suggests. There were two feuding Popes. Still one Church -- no Martin Luther yet, and no John Calvin, but people were burned at the stake for reading the Bible in English, or for cross-dressing (not cross-gender - or not only - but cross-social class). And yet, the dependence of the populace on the Church was shaken, and not only by its inability to influence God to halt the disasters. Since priests attended the dying, they died in even greater proportions than the general population, and so increasing numbers of people died unshriven; i.e., without the last religious rites that would ease the way into Heaven. That was terrible to a 14th-century mind in a way that we moderns, again plague-deprived of the sacraments, cannot easily imagine. The rich could pay for Masses and prayers to ease their sinful souls through Purgatory, but there was no such hope for the common people. The foundations of religious and secular authority alike were rocked. The Plague had so decimated the population, in Norwich and all across Europe, that the whole dysfunctional system of feudalism and serfdom was thrown into chaos. Peasant uprisings challenged, and were violently put down by, the equally shaken upper classes. There was no such thing as "germ theory," of course, but never a shortage of conspiracy theories, fueling another whole subset of violence, especially against Jewish people. It was a terrible, terrible, terrible time.

And yet..........

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

This is the paradox, the paradox of the Incarnation and of the Crucifixion and of the Resurrection. Julian saw paradox, that sin is terrible, and yet that sin is not a thing. This is not a faith of "if you behave yourselves like good little boys and girls, you will get into Heaven, but if you mess up you're going to Hell!" Listen to what St. Paul says to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:55-57): "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Do I need to unpack that? "The sting of death is sin" -- nothing too unusual here ... but then, "and the strength of sin is the law."  And what does that mean? No, I'm not going to turn this blog post into a book-length manuscript ... I'm just going to invite you to meditate on these verses, slowly, as if you had never heard them before. "But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."  The Lord of Love.

And to frame this, a final quote from Mother Julian:

Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord's meaning.

Amen.