Julian's Mary

In the Christian Calendar, we are in the season of Advent—a season that’s to prepare us for Jesus’ coming. Advent, I’ve found, is a time for Mary. Her preparation, after all, is what made a way for the rest of us.  She serves as a model for the preparations that we need to make to bear Jesus into our own lives, to bring God to our own world today.

Julian of Norwich is one of the great Marian theologians in the world.  Julian was a woman of prayer and solitude in the 14^th century—a time of plague and war, famine and injustice.  She prayed and attended to God in the midst of suffering that most of us can barely imagine—and in response to her prayer God revealed to her a series of visions of great compassion and intimacy that offered comfort and hope to this suffering.  The substance of these visions concerned Jesus---that’s why I’ve titled my someday to be written book on Julian, Julian’s Jesus: The Compassion and Intimacy of God.  But though Julian focused in her writing on Jesus, she was a woman formed by Scripture and so she could not but imagine Mary into her story.  Mary was a model for Julian’s proper response to Jesus, and so I want to spend a bit of time with Julian’s Mary.

Julian offers us three primary images of Mary in her visions, and although the third one—what I’ll call the Advent Mary—although the third Mary plays the role most proper to Mary and to us, I want to dwell on all three images this morning.  Julian’s first Mary is the Mary of the cross.  She’s the compassionate Mary.  Julian’s visions begin with a desire to develop within herself a deep compassion for Jesus in his suffering.  Julian saw herself as Jesus’ lover, and she wished nothing other than to share all of his suffering, so that she might stand in solidarity with him—or even in communion with him.  So God revealed to her the depth of Christ’s suffering on the cross, and she was overcome. During these visions, she saw Mary, as well, standing before the cross of her son—her heart broken with compassion—yet Mary didn’t turn away.  The love of her compassion for her son overcame the pain, so that she could stand with him as he died, offering her support.  Mary, thought Julian, calls us to this same compassion.

But this compassion wasn’t properly Mary’s office to Julian---for as soon as she saw Mary’s deep compassion for the suffering of the one that she loved, she saw that Jesus, in turn, from the cross, looked on Mary’s pain, on Julian’s pain, on your pain and my pain—on the pain of those suffering round the world, in Haiti and Pakistan and Indonesia---Jesus looked on all of our pain, and bore it with compassion---there on the cross in solidarity with us in our suffering---he offered himself there as a token of his love.  We are called to Mary’s compassion, but only as we find our selves supported first by the compassion of Jesus.

Julian’s second Mary is the Christmas Mary—the Mother Mary.  Julian is acutely aware that Mary, by bearing Jesus, made a way for our entrance into life from death.  So she claims that Mary is the mother of us all. Mary, whose compassion betokened her great love, through that love made a way for us into life.  But Julian’s imagination immediately leapt with the realization of Mary’s motherhood to a place that surprises many---for she realizes that more than Mary, Jesus bore us into life with his labor on the cross---that Jesus feeds us from his breast every Sunday, as we gather at the table to partake his body and blood.  Mary is mother, for Julian, but only as a token of Jesus’ motherhood, the motherhood of God whose compassion bears and nurtures us—who allows us to make new beginnings in the midst of the endings that fill our days.

So, finally, it’s the third Mary---the advent Mary that I want us to consider in Julian.  The Mary of prayer and vulnerability.  From Julian’s perspective, the source of our greatest suffering is not the manifold ways that we injure one another and our selves through our selfishness. No, the source of our greatest suffering is the alienation that we feel from God in the midst of our brokenness.  That we feel cut off from God through our shame, so that we dare not approach God or imagine that God could love us or even draw near to us.  We become people unable to bear God in the world because we are unable to bear God within ourselves, so great is our shame and darkness at the sin we bring into the world.

What we have to grasp, says Julian, is God’s familiarity towards us---that although God is a great King—to use Julian’s fourteenth century language—God would draw near to us—treat us like friends, or more than friends---that God would be intimate with us.  This is what Mary taught her.  Mary, in her humility, was willing to accept God’s intimacy---that God would make a lowly one God’s handmaiden---that the Creator of the universe would be born into the world by her, by you, by each of us.

Advent is a time to prepare ourselves, and so it is a time for prayer---the prayer that Julian teaches us is the prayer of the advent Mary---the prayer of one open to God’s intimacy—the prayer of one who does not protect themselves from that intimacy out of shame.  Julian writes that God seeks one who does not try to adorn themselves with their accomplishments or their possessions or their good deeds to prove themselves worthy of God.  Rather, God is pleased with the soul that comes naked and familiarly before God—that says, by the touch of the Spirit, “God, you are enough.”