Juliana's Christ

By Nathaniel Binzen, December 13, 1999

Revelation of Love is a narrative by the revered fourteenth-century English mystic Juliana of Norwich, recounting the sixteen "showings," or revelations she received during a bout of near-deadly illness. She presents a relationship with an intensely personal living Christ, marked by dramatic physicality, conversational intimacy, and burning mutual desire. Above all, she shows a relationship of love. My aim is to offer some vivid, strikingly original details of this relationship. First, we must take a brief detour through Juliana's justification of her own authority.
The authority that Juliana claims for her visions rests on their status as authentic direct revelations of God. The Lord has "secrets he will open and make known to us," for "it is his will that we know." She is anxious to point out that she relied on two ways of beholding the divine reality:

One was the endless and continual love…which is the whole meaning of this revelation; and the other was the common teaching of the holy Church, in which from birth I was informed and grounded….[I]n this showing I was never stirred or led away from the Church's teaching on any single point. On the contrary, I was taught in this to love and cherish it.

By her account, her revelation of love does not threaten, but rather strengthens, the authoritative vision of the church. I think Juliana's defense is sound, and it resonates with cognitive psychology's explanations of the interplay between an individual's experiences of ultimacy and the web of references provided by religious tradition to which she belongs.
I tried to isolate the figure of Christ in Juliana's portrait, and I found myself stymied: at times, she speaks of "God" as in God the Father, while in other instances "God" is used in direct reference to Christ. An example of the latter is seen in Chapter 6, in which she makes no reference to "Jesus" or "Christ," but speaks of how we are "wont to pray to God by his holy Flesh, by his Precious Blood…" She uses the name "Lord" in the same interchangeable way: at times "Lord" would seem to refer to the Father, while frequently "Lord" is the Son, as, for example, in the tenth showing, when the "Lord looked down at his side," inviting Juliana to ponder his wound. In any case, I'll classify this conflation not as a problem but as a positive ambiguity, an attribute of the Christ of her particular mystical vision. It makes perfect sense to her that on some levels Christ is utterly indistinguishable from the Godhead or from the full Trinity, while, on other levels, he is distinctly the Son. She makes this understanding plain in speaking of Lord Jesus on the cross, for whom "the unity with the Godhead gave strength to the manhood to suffer…" I would conclude that her entire Christ-Jesus-God complex is distinctively mixed.
One consequence of the above observations is that the reader must accept the peculiarity of the very personal terms in which the Lord is portrayed and the interpersonal relations that ensue. Such personal portrayals abound, as when the Lord asks her, "Are you pleased that I suffered for you?" Or, "full of mirth and joy," he directs Juliana's attention to his blessed Mother (Mary) and asks "Will you see her?" Later, Juliana fearfully asks the Lord a question, to which he answers "most meekly and with full lovely look." I find all these images extraordinarily incongruous - God may be seen as transcendent or immanent, but is rarely so chummy - but maybe I need to have my eyes opened. In connection with this mystery, however, it is worth noting that, interweaved within her reports of genuine revelation, there are many imaginative flights, invented utterances by the Lord that Juliana herself conceives to illustrate a point. She imagines God saying, "My darling, I am glad you are come to me. In all this woe I have ever been with you; now see at last my loving."
Juliana's vision of Christ is anything but typical, as she acknowledges in distinguishing her experience from the ordinary state of prayer. Such revelation is not something that one can simply hope for and receive. What it is is a full-blooded state of desire fulfilled, when "our courteous Lord shows himself by grace to our soul…" Juliana is driven to tell of her experience of God the Lover in these moments in erotic terms: we "come to him…by many secret touchings of sweet inner sights and feelings in the measure that our simple souls can bear…until we shall come to die in longing for love." Desire is the keynote here, "desire, longing and thirst," all driven by Christ himself: "I make you seek me." The goal is to be "oned in bliss" with Christ, as the sins are forgiven and the soul received with honor, thereafter to be "hidden in God without end."
Juliana's work bursts with a wealth of God-metaphors, showing a kind of bold experimentation that I in my ignorance thought was mainly a late-twentieth-century phenomenon: she offers God as Father, Mother, and Spouse; Christ as brother & Saviour. Most striking is her development, within the context of Trinity, of the theme of Christ as Mother. She lithely mixes feminine nouns and masculine pronouns throughout. "[O]ur Saviour is our true mother in whom we are endlessly born yet we will never come out of him." Because the "mother's task is nearest, readiest, and most sure…the most real truth", she is inspired to refer to him as of "Our own true Mother Jesus." Vividly developing the parallel, she explains that "The mother may suckle her children with her own milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself."
Revelation of Love is loaded with extraordinarily rich and creative images and ideas. I'd like to close with one that I found especially worthy of contemplation, for it highlights a crucial aspect of Juliana's conception of the Christ-human relationship, that "the human soul is made of God and in the same point is knit to God." Near the end of the book, Juliana lets loose a breathtaking image of connection and empowerment: the Lord "showed me my soul in the middle of my heart. I saw the soul as large as if it were an endless world and as if it were a blissful kingdom. And by the details therein, I understood it to be a glorious city." Wow!

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