What Jesus Revealed to Julian of Norwich About a Hazelnut

Michie

Well-Known Member
Supporter
Feb 5, 2002
165,519
55,217
Woods
✟4,586,097.00
Country
United States
Faith
Catholic
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Julian came to see in that tiny little hazelnut the crystallization of three truths on which everything depends.


Imagine you’re having an encounter with someone really quite special. Not an avatar, for heaven sake, whose existence is entirely unreal even as you create one after another amid the sad solipsisms of cyberspace. But an actual human being, a someone with whom real presence is possible. A person, in fact, so captivating and close that nothing can get in the way to block the perfect unity of the experience. “I to my beloved, my beloved unto me.” It doesn’t get much better than that. An ideal intimacy, in short, for which nothing in this world can match the joy and the harmony it brings. And not because the two of you are identifiably the same. But because neither of you is expected to replicate the other, thus reducing real unity to a state of dull uniform sameness. In other words, it’s not about self-love, which is unfulfilling, but love of the other as other.

A husband and wife, for example. Or a mother and her child. Or, at the loftiest possible level, the love of God for every blooming creature he has brought into being. Beings quite literally lifted out of nothingness, whom he will not let go of, will not suffer to fall back into nothingness. That’s because, in a relationship determined by love, and not by use, the other is loved and respected precisely in his or her otherness. Isn’t this how God loves us? His attentions constantly paid to us are never exploitative or instrumental, but always aim to promote the highest good of those whom he loves.

This was the great discovery, by the way, that the Lady Julian of Norwich came to back in the 14th century, in a series of shattering revelations from Jesus himself — shewings, she calls them — that took possession of her life, her very soul. She was an English mystic, who lived the life of a recluse, or a solitary, in order to pursue the life of holiness in a wholly undistracted way. And she wrote it all down, faithfully transcribing all that Jesus had spoken to her; in fact, she was the first woman to do so in her own language, much like Dante in writing the Divine Comedy in his native Italian.

What Jesus Revealed to Julian of Norwich About a Hazelnut