You are Julian of Norwich! It's all about God, to
you. You're convinced that the world has a
happy ending. Everyone else is convinced that
you're a closet hippie, but you love them
anyway.
Which Saint Are You?
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Which is cool. Except, generally, it is all about me. ;)
Julian of Norwich is just about my favourite female mystic, anyway. If you click on the link you'll find a brief biography and a few snips of her writings. One in particular that always moved me is:
Because of the great,
infinite love which God has for all humankind,
he makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ
and the lowliest of the souls that are to be saved . . .
We should highly rejoice that God dwells in our soul
and still more highly should we rejoice that our soul dwells in God.
Our soul is made to be God's dwelling place,
and the dwelling place of our soul
is God who was never made.
Also, there is a little song about Julian's message that always makes me smile.
Loud are the bells of Norwich and the people come and go
Here by the Tower of Julian I tell them what I know.
Ring out! Bells of Norwich, and let the winter come and go.
All shall be well again, I know.
Ring for the yellow daffodil, the flower in the snow.
Ring for the yellow daffodil, and tell them what I know.
Ring out! Bells of Norwich, and let the winter come and go.
All shall be well again, I know.
Love, like the yellow daffodil, is coming through the snow.
Love, like the yellow daffodil, is Lord of all I know.
Ring out! Bells of Norwich, and let the winter come and go.
All shall be well again, I know.
It's interesting to be reminded of her today. I was just thinking of posting a little something about the ways I try to escape the worst feelings and moods of my depression, when they come. There was something fuzzy there that I couldn't quite explain, but it boiled down to a little Zen-and-Christ-and-Daisy stew which sounds a lot like Julian's idea that nothing has any true existence but God's love, and that gosh darn it,
All shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of things shall be well.
Sometimes to me, faith, and the requirement to be like a little child manifests in a strange way, almost a stubbornness of optimisim, a pig-headed refusal to "face facts" about the world being a great big mess. Instead, a simple-minded "it'll all be okay" goes a long way.
I don't mean being an ostritch exactly, but something else. Oh, bah, this is not making sense. I mean, in a spasm of unhappiness or grief, sometimes you just need to cover your head with God's blanket. There's a disclaimer I should paste in here somewhere about this not being the only way or even a very good idea most of the time and that yes we've all got chances to pull up our bootstraps and do what needs doing, indeed, and we'd better do it soon.
But other times what's right is to close our eyes for a minute and think about daffodils. I remind myself that this wave of bad emotion is entirely unreal and has no substance when compared to the love and power of God.
And later I will roll up my sleeves and pull up my bootstraps and go about making sure that all of this unhappiness and pain is even less real.
5 comments:
Once in Meeting for Worship, a year or so after the U.S. began bombing Iraq, a Friend stood and sang a song that expressed his sorrow for the war, for the Iraqi people. He could not see a way out or through to the other side.
In that next moment, I was overcome with a sense that "all shall be well," and I found I could not quiet myself, my soul. And I believed it, I felt it, that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, though there was evidence everywhere of some other outcome.
The song that came through me that morning, the one you lift up in this post, rang out in a way that surprised me, filled me, and shook me to my core. I recall sitting when the message was spent, shaking and sobbing.
For me, just as there are times to "cover my head with God's blanket," there are also times when God says to me, inwardly and in a way for which I need no convincing,
We shall overcome. We shall make it. I am with you.
Blessings,
Liz, The Good Raised Up
How beautiful, Liz. Thank you very, very much.
okay, this is my response to the silly part of the post
I GET TO BE SAINT FRANCIS! WOO HOOOO!
Hey, I'm Saint Francis too! Wait 'til I tell mom.
Amanda, your post brought to mind a long-ago lecture by one of my favorite religious studies professors. He was talking about Kierkegaard's concept of the "leap of faith," about how reason and intellect only take us so far, but at a certain point we have to jump out into the dark chasm without knowing whether God will catch us. He went on to talk about faith as something that shouldn't be easy for us, that it should be something that we do anyway, regardless of what we "know" to be true.
There's a real difference, I think, between that type of faith and faith of the blinkered, head-in-the-sand variety. I know plenty of people who use faith as an excuse to turn a blind eye to suffering, their own and others. What I hear you describing in your post is a faith that is open to suffering, that acknowledges the reality of unhappiness and grief, that sees clearly all of the badness that happens on the individual and societal levels, and yet in the face of all that says: "It's all right. We will be healed. We will be made whole."
Pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps all the time becomes exhausting. It's a gift and a blessing to be able, in the midst of our darkest times, to draw God over us like a blanket and rest for a spell.
Thank you for your thought-provoking post.
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