Julian of Norwich was a devout 14th century English woman whose experience of mysticism resulted from an unusual prayer in which she asked to see Christ’s Passion, to have a near-fatal illness, and to feel unending contrition for her sins—while also feeling endless compassion for others and longing for God.  During her thirty-third year, she fell deathly ill and at the apparent end, when a crucifix was set before her, she saw it come alive and bleed.  The crucifix spoke with her and gave her a series of sixteen revelations about God’s love for humankind.

A 20th century feminist seeking reconciliation with Catholicism might hardly think that Julian’s account of her visions would provide common ground for negotiations with the church.  Yet Julian’s Showings has attracted the attention of many feminist scholars because it so readily invites personal interactions with Christian doctrine in general and with women’s spiritual lives in specific.

This essay recounts one such personal interaction where Julian’s image of a feminine Christ offers a means for women to create a theology of integrity out of the memories of their own material suffering.  But beforehand, I will provide some brief theoretical and historical context.

In defining feminism generally, Andrea Nye warns against two extreme approaches.  The first invents a woman’s language for women to write and speak to each other in order to build confidence, strengthen community, and form new concepts about their experiences.  This approach does not directly engage or challenge the traditions of male logic as the universal method of reason in the discourses of law, programmed debate, theology, and science; it therefore renders women impotent in the arenas of public language (450).  Julian’s language, on the other hand, engages and challenges the logic of the Pauline injunction against women who teach or preach.  She says: “But for I am a woman, should I therefore believe that I should not tell you of the goodness of God, since that I saw in that same time that is his will, that it be known?  . . . forget me that am a wretch, and does so that I fail you not, and behold Jesus that is teacher of all” (LT 222).

The second extreme approach accepts Plato’s concession that women can enter the arenas of power if they master the “masculine” techniques of logic, where “there should be no answer possible” once a speaker has demonstrated her mastery of logical analysis over her opponent’s logical weaknesses (446). This approach puts women in the position of reifying hierarchical authority, silencing opposition, and eliding anyone who may be of a different cultural background, or at a social/economic disadvantage.  Julian, however, writes from a stance that levels unequal social relations, saying: “we be all one in love . . . .  For if I look singularly to myself, I am right naught; but in general I am, I hope, in oneness with all my fellow Christians” (LT 321-22), She tells her readers: “This book is begun by God’s gift and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight” (LT 731). Just so, she invites all of her readers to work prayerfully with God, so that they may perform the message of her visions in their own lives.

Julian thus shows that an alternative language—the language of her memory—can differ markedly from the language of logic to identify, validate, supplement, complicate, challenge, and compensate for the gaps that logic (with its reductive representations of human reality) imposes on the mind.  Yet her language of memory does not try to erase logic, but seeks to work at a parallel with it.  As such, Julian demonstrates how women may respond subtly to what Laurie Finke calls “the authoritative, monologic language of a powerful social institution,” indicating what a reconciliation between feminism and Catholicism might entail, and how a Catholic feminist might act (29).

Although Cheryl Glenn warns that it would be anachronistic to call Julian a feminist or even a “protofeminist,” she notes that Julian’s “theology of inclusion… extends specifically to women; it includes all women in the worship of and dialogue with God, as well as including a feminine representation in the Trinity” (99).  I hope the following account of one reader's personal interaction with the text will indicate how Julian’s Showings accordingly helps women and men develop “that steady subtle voice” that calls feminist readers in particular to reclaim our spiritual selves, to see our spiritual selves as we are, and to reveal our spiritual selves as participants in the community of Christian practice and belief (Nye 451).

When I once taught at a church-sponsored university in the southwest, a graduate student I will call Ana found out about my interest in Julian.  Ana asked if we could do an independent study on medieval women mystics.  She wanted to focus on Margery Kempe and Julian.  And so we did.  After an animated and enjoyable time reading Kempe and some useful secondary sources defining mysticism—e.g., Underhill’s Mysticism--we  moved on to Julian.  We got to know each other well in a short time.  Ana’s candor was wonderful and often disarming.

Once we got to the Showings, Ana very quickly noted that Julian’s tone and rhetorical stance revealed a woman who was canny and alert to those who might oppose her.  She pointed to one of Julian’s disclaimers: “I am not good because of the visions, but if I love God the better; and inasmuch as you love God the better, it is more to you than me.  I say not this to the wise, for they know it well” (LT 321).  Ana mused that this was the tone she should have used while attending a conservative Catholic university as an undergraduate.  Instead, she had taken a confrontational feminist approach.  “The professors and administrators practically kicked me out, so I finished my undergrad work at a state school,” she laughed.  But Ana’s keen interest in Christian women mystics revealed a profoundly enduring Catholic spirituality and an intense desire for reconciliation in theory, if not in practice.

Ana especially yearned to find evidence of a Catholic response to the material conditions of women’s lives.  Julian’s representation of Christ’s suffering on the cross disturbed Ana a great deal, for instance, but it opened inroads for her.  When discussing Julian’s extensive use of colores—“I beheld the body bleeding plenteously . . . .  The fair skin was broken deeply into the tender flesh, with sharp blows all about the sweet body . . . .  The sweet body was so discolored, so dry, so shriveled, so deathly, and so piteous that he seemed to have been . . . continually dying” (LT 342; 358)—Ana was moved to comment that the image reminded her of an abused woman and made her even more mindful of Christ’s humanity.   “I wonder if Julian is code-switching or signifying or using some other kind of medieval rhetorical device,” she said, “because a woman who’s experienced what I’ve been through can see that Julian’s empathy for Christ might also be an empathy for women who have been knocked around.”  Ana told me about her former marriage to a violent man.  She had met him after she left the Catholic university and, rather symbolically, got involved in the Sanctuary Movement.  When they married, her husband abandoned the movement and turned to drug dealing.  He changed into an utterly different, enraged person who turned that rage on her.

Accordingly, Ana was also attracted to Julian’s image of a wrathless God.  She liked Julian’s reasoning in the brief passage: “Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his might, his wisdom, his charity, and his unity suffers him not to be wrathful” (LT 493).  Wrath, she observed, had been a powerful force of disunity in her life.  Her mother, whenever she had physically disciplined Ana, told her that God turned his wrath on rebellious daughters.  Ana became alienated from her mother as a result.  Her university experience reinforced the idea, and she became alienated from the Catholic church.  Her husband continued the pattern, and she became alienated from him.  Only after she became pregnant did she make an effort to distance herself from recurrences of wrath and alienation in her life.  At that time, her husband committed a murder and was jailed.  A period followed when Ana appeared before court every six months to testify that if her husband were paroled, he would attempt to murder her and his daughter as well.  Eventually, she took her daughter and fled.

The most empowering passages that Ana found in the Showings had to do, predictably, with the motherhood similitude.   She dwelt on the way Julian conjoined the suffering of the crucifixion with the suffering of childbearing: “our true mother Jesus, he alone bears us to joy . . . .  Thus he sustains us within him in love and travail, into the full time that he would suffer the sharpest thorns and most grievous pains . . . . Wherefore it behooves him to find us, for . . . our precious mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself . . . with the blessed sacrament . . . .  The mother may suffer the child to fall sometimes and be distressed in diverse manners, for its profit, but she may never suffer that any manner of peril come to her child for love . . . ” (LT 595-97).

Ana thought it was stunning that Julian perceived the crucified Jesus as a mother and thus sought to turn her readers’ transformative, femininizing gaze on a dying male body.   The motherhood similitude gave Ana a positive, life-giving image with which she identified.  “A female Christ is a gestalt that encourages women to become Christ,” she declared, “But not Christ the victim.  I’m talking about a resurrected female Christ, so transformed by her suffering that no damn man could ever nail her down!”

Based on Ana’s reactions to Julian’s Showings—here only briefly sketched—it is obvious that a Catholic feminism must work toward a spiritual and material healing of the pain that a patriarchal world imposes on people.  A Catholic feminist would thus have a material answer to the question of what the church must provide when women find themselves in situations such as Ana’s, and they would—as members of the body of Christ—help provide it: food, clothing, and shelter; child care; financial support; access to job training and education; legal counsel; friendship.  Julian underscores as much, saying: “I saw that two opposites ought not to be together in one place . . . the highest bliss and the deepest pain” (LT 659).  The highest bliss is the integrity that comes from living the life-giving ministry of Christ and the deepest pain is anything that interferes with it.  In a postmodern world that jubilantly proclaims the self to be as diverse as its different social functions, a Catholic feminist would therefore work toward a more foundational concept of the self, one which theologizes a feminine expression of God as the source of agency for women who struggle to pull together their lives as daughters, members of the church, wives, students, activists, mothers, citizens, and professionals.

Nye, Andrea. “Words of Power and the Power of Words,” Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Ed. William A. Covino and David A. Jolliffe. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 441-51.

Julian of Norwich, The Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, Vols. 1 & 2. Ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978.

Finke, Laurie. “Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Visions,” Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics. Ed. Ulrike Weithaus. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993.

Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.

Evelyn Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. NY: Meridian, 1974.

This excerpt adapted from Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? Personal Reflections on Tradition and Change, ed. Sally Barr Ebest and Ron Ebest, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 177-89.