Dame Julian

I'm a day late here, but better late than never. Yesterday was the day when the Episcopal Church remembered the life and witness of Dame Julian of Norwich. I thought about her all day, and quoted her a couple of times. But the day was full and I did not have time to sit down and write. Even so, here goes, because I think her life has something to say to us right now.

Did you know that she has not been canonized in the Roman Catholic tradition? I am sure I knew this once and then forgot it. We don't have such a formal process of naming holy women and holy men to be commemorated in the Episcopal Church. We are used to singing a song of the saints of God and using this term to refer to all the baptized, even as we hold up those who were lights in their generation and seek to emulate their faith. But for my money, Julian belongs in the upper echelon of that great cloud of witnesses.

Julian was an English Anchoress who had a rough personal story. At thirty she went though a terrible illness and almost died, to the point that she was given last rites. But more interesting even than that, to me, is the larger social and political in which she lived. Between 1348 and 1350, in those formative years when Julian was a little girl at Norwich Elementary School, the plague killed between 75 million and 200 million people. It reduced the world population by like 20%. Just think about that for a moment: one in five dead from a horrible disease.

As I write these words 275,000 people have died globally from COVID-19. In the United States, that number is about 75,000. In Massachusetts it is nearly 5000. This is stunning and frightening and so very sad, and we know there will be more death. All of us will be impacted and find ourselves one or two degrees from those who have lost their lives. 

Just over a century ago, the 1918 Flu Pandemic took the lives of 50 million people globally, and about 675,000 Americans. My grandmother lost family members to that disease, as I blogged about here back in March. Julian of Norwich was on my mind then as well, as she was yesterday. 

I am reasonably confident that one in five Americans will not die from this pandemic, and also that it will not be as bad in the end as 1918. That puts it into some perspective for me. But it's pretty awful. Yesterday I met with my spiritual director on Zoom - words I never thought I'd utter - he in the same small room at the Monastery where we always meet and me in my kitchen. Strange, but I'll save that for another time. We talked for a while about how "we" (meaning the Church) have been here before but that "we" who are living today have never seen anything like this before. No one wants to hear from the drunk uncle who "walked to school uphill both ways" when our kids can't even go to school today. 

We are - yes, I'll say it again - in uncharted territory. At lease we who are among the privileged. My head hurts some days and I get to the end of a long day and I'm just wiped. And I'm male. I'm white. I live in an upper-middle class neighborhood. I have my job and so does my spouse. We are doing fine. And it's still hard. My spiritual director shared with me that he is reading Howard Thurman right now and he said that was intentional, that he needs to hear the voices of people who have more experience in navigating almost insurmountable odds to find hope in these days. He's right, of course. He almost always is. 

We are experiencing grief and fear and terror and confusion and the end of a world that was comfortable for some of us but also unsafe for a 25 year old black man to go for a run in. The world is coming apart at the seams, it seems. And while that may be frightening and it may go on for some time, I am trying to take the long view. 

This brings me back to Dame Julian. As terrible as all of this is for us, I cannot even now begin to imagine what it was like to live through the Black Death. Or even 1918. Think about the impact on families and social institutions facing that much loss. The aftermath of the plague led to religious, social and economic upheavals that it took Europe 150 years to recover from. Now that is a slow recovery! 

And yet it was in the midst of all of that, that Dame Julian knew and rediscovered that God is love, and that God’s love is all embracing, and that in the death and resurrection of Jesus we know that God is with us no matter what. To her, Christ was “our courteous Lord.” 

How English! How lovely! 

In the midst of all of that, she wrote these words, given to her in a vision by Christ:

I can make all things well;
I will make all things well;
I shall make all things well;
and thou canst see for thyself that all manner of things shall be well.

May it be so for us. May we know and trust "our courteous Lord" as this Easter season continues to unfold, trusting that all manner of things shall be well.

Postscript:

After reading this post, a friend sent me this lovely folk song, which I commend to you.