Love and Julian of Norwich

What I find most profound about Julian of Norwich is that, for her, the Christian life is located in the body.  She speaks about the Passion of Christ with the greatest attention to his humanity--his wounds, his dried skin, and his bloodless body--and the boundless love that moved him to suffer.  However, she also speaks about her own body participating in being both wounded and overcome with love, even being wounded with love.  For Julian, divine love is a love that causes and transforms the suffering of our physical bodies.

Yet, how can I read these themes of love and suffering, desire and pain made evident in the physical body without being reminded of sexuality (or maybe I'm just perverted)?  Her writings reflect the experiences of sexual encounters and fantasizes, of sorrow and unrequited infatuations, and of torturous masochistic pleasures.  However, they also resonate with our experience of limitation and breaking down--that is, of illness and of disability.  For those of us who are acutely aware of our sexuality through being sexual minorities or of our bodies through disability or ailment, Julian is wonderfully affirming.  It's no easy task to embrace our diverse bodies in affirming love in a world that judges our bodies based on skin color, ability, weight, breast size, and form.  Moreover, in our culture, our bodies are often times ignored (consider the hours spent in cars, at our desk, and by the computer/TV) and feared (the fear of death, of aging, and of disability).  But, when I read Julian, I cannot help but be returned to my very mortal existence with all of its frailty, boundaries, and passions and, there, to find God's love at work.  In our grief, joy, pain, and wounds our very bodies are joined to Christ's body who's wounds are also the opening of an unending love.  And in being to joined to Christ's wounds--thereby embracing our own mortal lives--there is no greater heaven.

"With a kindly countenance our good Lord looked into his side, and he gazed with joy, and with his sweet regard he drew his creature's understanding into his side by the same wound; and there he revealed a fair and delectable place, large enough for all mankind that will be saved and will rest in peace and in love. And with that he brought to mind the dear and precious blood and water which he suffered to be shed for love. And in this sweet sight he showed his blessed heart split in two, and as he rejoiced he showed to my understanding a part of his blessed divinity, as much as was his will at that time, strengthening my poor soul to understand what can be said, that is the endless love which was without beginning and is and always shall be."

- Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long text), Twenty Fourth Chapter.