Julian of Norwich: The Loving Motherhood of God -- By: Anne Clift Boris

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 22:1 (Winter 2008)
Article: Julian of Norwich: The Loving Motherhood of God
Author: Anne Clift Boris


Julian of Norwich: The Loving Motherhood of God

Anne Clift Boris

ANNE CLIFT BORIS, Ph.D., is Senior Program Officer for Recruitment at the Council for International Exchange of Scholars in Washington, D.C. She has taught at universities in the Czech Republic, Belarus, and the United States, and has offered numerous talks to church groups on church history and religious imagery.

One of my spiritual mentors is a woman who lived six hundred years ago: Julian of Norwich. I admire her for the clarity of her descriptions of spiritual experience, her balanced and orthodox presentation of God as mother, and the divine comfort of her vision of our sin and redemption.

Very little is known of Julian of Norwich’s life. She lived in late fourteenth-century England. At the age of thirty, she fell seriously ill. As she lay dying in the presence of her mother and the priest who had given her the last rites, she had a lengthy vision of Christ’s suffering on the cross and his redeeming love. She recovered and became an anchoress, walled into a small apartment, with one window into a church and one window onto the world. This extreme enclosure, so foreign to modern sensibility, did not prevent her from having an active ministry. She is known to have provided spiritual advice to many over several decades and was still living in 1416.1

Julian recorded her visions and her reflections on them in a book she called Showings, which survives in an early short version and a later, longer form.2 Mystical experiences arouse deep emotions and are by their nature difficult to communicate; it is not surprising that many medieval spiritual writers’ turgid prose and emphasis on extreme ascetic practices seem uncongenial to contemporary taste. Julian of Norwich’s writing is different. Her experiences and reflections are clearly, almost unemotionally, described. While her vision begins with Jesus’ bloody crucifixion, she did not remain weeping at the foot of the cross over Christ’s pains and her own in the usual late medieval style, but found in the crucifixion a comforting vision of Christ’s redeeming love. The complexity of Julian’s thought cannot be encompassed in a short article; her language is simple, but her theology is not. However, three aspects of her writing in particular have been important to me as a Christian.

The most striking aspect of Julian’s writing is her description of God as Mother: “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother” (296). It is for this that Julian is best known in feminist circles, and justly so. She was by no means the first or the only spiritual writer of the Middle Ages to u...

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