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Communion Reflection for May 26, 2022

Entering the Rose Garden

Whatever their ways,

they are all in love with you,

Each comes, by a path, to the Rose Garden

Niyazi Misri

For seven days in mid-August, 2020, I spent time in an ancient Rose Garden, an imaginal space engineered by ZOOM, offered by Ubiquity University, peopled by scholars and dancers, archaeologists of the soul, storytellers, musicians, poets and mystics whose great task is recovering and offering to those who hunger, the knowledge and awareness of the Divine Feminine. Over one hundred participants joined in from countries across the planet, a blessed side effect of COVID which had forced the Cancellation of Ubiquity’s fourteen-year tradition of a summer program in the Chartres Cathedral of France. The program was called “Madonna Rising.” Its central image was the Mystical Rose, a title honouring the Sacred Feminine in ancient cultures, such as Egypt and Sumeria. Later, it was a title given to Mary, Mother of Jesus.

On Day One, Banafsheh Sayyad greeted us from her home in California. Over the following days, Banafsheh would lead us in sacred dance, inviting us to open our lives to the Divine Feminine Presence. Banafsheh introduced the theme of "Madonna Rising" by quoting a Prophecy from the Cherokee Nation: The bird of humanity has two great wings - a masculine wing and a feminine wing. The masculine wing has been fully extended for centuries, fully expressed, while the feminine wing in all of us has been truncated, not yet fully expressed - half extended. 
 So the masculine wing in all of us has become over- muscular and over-developed and in fact violent and the bird of humanity has been flying in circles for hundreds and hundreds of years, held up only fully by the masculine wing that became over- muscular and violent. In the 21st century, however, something remarkable will happen. The feminine wing in all of us will fully extend and find its way to express and the masculine wing will relax in all of us and the bird of humanity will soar.

From her desk, Banafsheh lifted a rose. It appeared to move off- screen to be received by Anne Baring, seated in her home in England. In the first of her trilogy of presentations, Anne would begin to tell the tale of how the bird of humanity lost the power of gracious flight in its feminine wing.

Author of Dream of the Cosmos (Archive Publishing, Dorset, England, 2013) as well as The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, (1992) Anne delves for light in history, following paths not yet made, seeking the story that came before the story in pursuit of clarity about so much that has been lost to us.


Was there a story that preceded the 6th c. BCE Creation Story in the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible? And if so, how was it lost? Here is what Anne’s research found:


I loved her more than health or beauty,

preferred her to the light,

since her radiance never sleeps.

(The Book of Wisdom, 7:10 Jerusalem Bible)

Solomon, to whom the Book of Wisdom is ascribed, built the First Temple in Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. In the time of the First Temple, Israel had an ancient, shamanic, visionary tradition. Divine Wisdom was worshipped in this First Temple as the Goddess Asherah, the consort of Yahweh, co-creator of the world with him. In this tradition the Tree of life was associated with Wisdom, Queen of Heaven.


Anne then told us how all this changed:


In 621 BC, in the reign of King Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the Temple…. The Deuteronomists had the statue of the Goddess Asherah and the great Serpent, image of her power to regenerate life, removed from the Temple and destroyed. Her Sacred Groves were cut down. All images of her were broken. The ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the Queen of Heaven as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit were banished, replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law. The vital communion with the inner dimensions of reality was lost; the making of images was forbidden.


(As I listened to this, I felt something inside me twist in pain. More even than the destruction of her images, the cutting down of the trees sacred to the Goddess wrenched my heart.)


Anne spoke of the long-lasting effects of this rupture:


"This is the crucially important time when I think it is possible to say that the whole foundation of Jewish and later Christian civilization became unbalanced. The Deuteronomists ensured that Yahweh was the sole Creator God. The Feminine co-creator, the Goddess Asherah, was eliminated. The Divine Feminine aspect of the god-head was banished from orthodox Judaism. The Deuteronomists went further: they demoted the Queen of Heaven – Mother of All Living – into the human figure of Eve, bestowing this title upon her. They created the Myth of the Fall in the Book of Genesis (2 & 3), with its message of sin, guilt and banishment from the Garden of Eden, severing the Tree of Life from its ancient association with the Queen of Heaven. "


Anne Baring suggests that the “heritage seeds’’ of the First Temple’s teaching were somehow preserved in the Jewish traditions of Kabbalism:


"It seems highly significant that one of the most important images of Kabbalism is the Tree of Life, which is a clear and wonderful concept describing the web of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the fabric of life in this world. At the innermost level or dimension of reality is the unmanifest, unknowable Divine Ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature, body and matter. Linking the two is the archetypal template of the Tree of Life— an inverted tree— whose branches grow from its roots in the divine ground and extend through many invisible worlds or dimensions until they reach this one. "


Anne describes this cosmology as one where


"Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interconnected and interwoven with every other aspect. All is one life, one cosmic symphony, one integrated whole. We participate, at this material level of creation, in the divine life which informs all these myriad levels of reality. Our human lives are therefore inseparable from the inner life of the Cosmos."


The Kabbalistic tradition is “vitally important” Anne says, "because it celebrates…the indissoluble relationship and union between the feminine and masculine aspects of the god-head— a sacred union which the three Patriarchal religions have ignored or deliberately rejected.


I will end this excerpt from Anne Baring’s first talk with a statement she makes that is both stark and striking in its clarity:


"If we want to understand the deep roots of our present environmental and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit, the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and shamanic experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspect of the God-head and the Divine Ground. Each of these was an intrinsic aspect of the lost traditions and practices of the First Temple."


(to be continued)

Communion Reflection for May 19, 2022

“How should anything be amiss?”

The winter had been long, dark, frigid, lifeless. I drove to the Galilee Retreat Centre on that late February morning in 2002 through fog that veiled the frozen Ottawa River on my left as well as the road ahead of me. As it slowly lifted, it revealed trees on either side in their winter nakedness. Suddenly I was aware of beauty: each delicate twig encased in ice, a crystal carapace that caught the rays of the morning sun, sparkling like cut glass, throwing joy through the air, across the soft roseate sky. Inside, I felt a surge of joy as my inner winter melted, as new, previously unimagined possibilities for travel, for poetry, for a fuller life danced within me.

I reached Galilee in a state of expectant joy. Yet what awaited me there was word of the overnight death of our beloved co-worker, Wendy McNamara. Her husband and two young adult sons, all of us who loved her, had walked the journey with her for over two years of cancer treatment, certain she would recover. She must get well. Any other outcome was unthinkable.

Yet the unthinkable is what happened.

Wendy had called her husband the previous morning from the hospital where she was having routine tests. She was crying, upset, so unlike our brave Wendy! “The coffee here is awful!” she told Mike. “Come, and bring me some Tim Horton’s coffee.” So he came, and spent the day with her. That night, Wendy died.

I moved through the days that followed in a state of blank incomprehension. I felt betrayed by my own trust that she would recover. I felt, as Tennyson wrote, that “someone had blunder’d”. There was no time to grieve as I was preparing to offer the Julian play to some two hundred women in Ottawa. All my time and energy was needed to rehearse. Moving through the familiar lines of James Janda’s script, I was stopped short by the words Jesus spoke to Julian:

I lead all to the end I ordained it to be from without beginning, by the same Might, Wisdom, and Love whereby I made it. How should anything be amiss?

Suddenly, I got it! This was not an error, not a blunder. It was part of the guiding love that began with Wendy’s conception, and continued to her death. The grief, the loss would not be assuaged by this, but the sense of betrayal was obliterated.

James Janda had told me that the quotations he used in his script came from a 1927 edition of Revelations of Divine Love by Dom Roger Huddleston (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne). He'd found the book in the New York Public Library. Later, as I read newer translations of Julian’s writings, I realized I had misinterpreted the word “end”. It was not, as I had thought on that February day, a reference to death (for death does not end our love relationships). Rather it means something more like “purpose”.

Brendan Doyle in Meditations with Julian of Norwich writes the passage this way: I lead everything

Toward the purpose I ordained it to

from without beginning,

By the same Power, Wisdom and Love

by which I created it.

How could anything be amiss? (p.39)

Marion Glasscoe's almost-Middle English translation reads this way:

I lede althing to the end I ordeynd it to fro withoute beginning

be the same might, wisdam and love that I made it.

How should anything be amysse? (Chapter Eleven, p. 19)

What is so heartening here is the assurance of guidance towards our purpose, for many of us today the Holy Grail. We set forth on countless quests, seeking teachers, guides, seminars, webinars, books, programs, asking, asking, asking always: “Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?”

Even our poets put that question to us. Mary Oliver writes: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Rilke reminds us that … all living things in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves at any cost and despite all opposition.

Julian teaches us that the Love that embraces us also guides us towards that purpose. We need to find, in the midst of our searching outside ourselves, time each day for quiet listening to the inner voice, the Beloved of our Soul. In sacred space, in stillness, we ask, “What is the purpose to which you are guiding me?”

We might in that quiet time also look, as Jean Houston teaches, at the recurring patterns, the fractals, to which our life returns in each new endeavour. Is it healing? writing? leadership? exploring new ideas? creating community? guiding youth? conflict resolution? peace-making? cross-cultural reconciliation? Our purpose may be written in our footsteps in the sands of our lives.

For Julian, the recurring fractal was teaching. It is what led her to devote twenty years to write for us her Revelations of Divine Love, finding ever fresh ways to express what had been revealed to her in her night of visions, continuing to reflect, to deepen her understanding so she could teach us to trust in love. Seated at her window, which opened out to one of the busiest streets in Norwich, she was listener, teacher, to those who came to her.

In my friend Wendy, I see now a similar fractal of teaching about the Love in which we are held. Wendy had at times been invited to give the homily at St. Joseph’s Parish in Ottawa. In her last talk, she had spoken with her unique infusion of gentle courage and power: “There is NOTHING you can do that will make God love you more than you are now loved!” That was the one message Wendy wanted to leave with us for always. I shall never forget her words. I know now that she was guided to fulfill the purpose ordained for her from without beginning. The joy that surged through me after her death was a parting gift.

How should anything be amysse?

Communion Reflection for May 12, 2022

image of Julian by Jane Joyner Julian's Words on Mutual Longing As I write to you today, summer has come to Calabogie. Morning coffee has become a time of bliss. On the deck, above the lake, I watch the shimmer of silver on water while soft winds play with tendrils of my hair, cooling me in the sun’s sudden fire.

We had a long cold spring. Days of rain interspersed with days when dark clouds hovered as though wondering whether to rain or not. Scarcely visible buds sat in stillness on the tall deciduous trees around my home. Yesterday they burst into leafy green abundance.

These fluctuations make me think of Julian who writes of a time of prayer when in swift succession consolation was followed by desolation, then consolation, then desolation, thirty three times! “It was a marvellous mix-up!” she comments.

Perhaps the fact of Julian is as important as her teachings in Revelations of Divine Love. That such a woman lived on this planet, experienced its rain and wind, the beauty of its flowers and trees, the song of its birds... that she experienced bliss and sorrow, seeking as we do to know God, to understand the meaning of life, to love more deeply: that’s the gift.

Julian loved us, whom she would never know, writing her book for us, longing to share with us all she had learned of Love that we might share her joy. She writes:

Everything that I say about me I mean to apply to all my fellow Christians, for I am taught that this is what our Lord intends in this spiritual revelation. And therefore I pray you all for God’s sake, and I counsel you for your own profit, that you disregard the wretch to whom it was shown, and that mightily, wisely, and meekly you contemplate upon God, who out of his courteous love and his endless goodness was willing to show it generally to the comfort of us all. For it is God’s will that you accept it with great joy and delight, as Jesus has shown it to you. (Showings Chapter Eight, 191, editors Colledge and Walsh, Paulist Press, New York, Toronto, 1978)

Today I’m choosing a few passages from Showings that speak of the way that all of life is held in love, passages that reveal how we especially are longed for and loved by the One whom Julian knew so intimately.

To any soul who sees the Creator of all things, all that is created seems very little…he who created it created everything for love, and by that same love it is preserved, and always will be without end…God is everything which is good, as I see, and the goodness which everything has is God. (Showings Chapter Eight, 190)

Julian reveals both her own longing and that of the One she seeks: I saw him and sought him, for we are now so blind and so foolish that we can never seek God until the time when he in his goodness shows himself to us. And when by grace we see something of him then we are moved by the same grace to seek with great desire to see him for our greater joy. So I saw him and sought him, and I had him and lacked him; and this is and should be our ordinary undertaking in this life, as I see it.

Once my understanding was let down into the bottom of the sea, and there I saw green hills and valleys, with the appearance of moss strewn with seaweed and gravel. Then I understood in this way: that if a man or woman were there under the wide waters, if s/he could see God, as God is continually with (us), s/he would be safe in soul and body, and come to no harm. And furthermore, s/he would have more consolation and strength than all this world can tell. For it is God’s will that we believe that we see him continually, though it seems to us that the sight be only partial; and through this belief he makes us always to gain more grace, for God wishes to be seen, and he wishes to be sought, and he wishes to be expected, and he wishes to be trusted. (Showings Chapter Ten, 193-4)

I feel drawn to take a risk today. We know that, for Julian, the Love “that moves the sun and all the other stars” (as Dante writes) was contained in the person of Jesus. I trust that Julian would allow me to rephrase her references to “God” in the way I now understand the Presence of Love in its feminine form as Sophia, the one who tells us:

Yahweh created me, when his purpose first unfolded;

before the oldest of his works….

The deep was not, when I was born;

there were no springs to gush with water….

(excerpts from Proverbs 8 in The Jerusalem Bible)

Kathleen Duffy writes that Sophia seeks to capture our attention as she peers out from behind the stars, overwhelms us with the glorious radiance of a sunset, and caresses us with a gentle breeze.

I rephrase Julian’s words to say that (Sophia) wishes to be seen, and She wishes to be sought, and She wishes to be expected, and She wishes to be trusted.

May we respond to her wishes. Communion Reflection for May 5, 2022

inside the reconstructed anchorhold in Norwich All Your Living is Prayer in My Sight


Early February, thirty years ago. I’m standing before a carved oak door beside the sanctuary in St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England. I press my thumb down on the iron latch. When the door swings inwards, I enter the reconstructed anchorhold where Julian lived for the last forty years of her life.

The sense of her presence is so powerful that I have to sit down on the wooden bench beneath the mullioned window. I commune with this wise and kindly woman. Only later do I take in other aspects of the room. On the wall just inside the door, there is a small white card on which someone has printed in careful calligraphy Julian’s words: prayer oneth the soul to God.

What did Julian understand about prayer? What was revealed to her in the sacred intimacy of her night of “Showings”? Julian writes a great deal about prayer in the Longer Text of her Revelations of Divine Love. She writes for us, to us, that we might know the confidence and joy that she knew.

For many years, I found Julian’s writing difficult to read. I felt as though I were being spun around in circles. Until the invention of moveable type by Johann Gutenberg in 1450 (thirty years after Julian’s death), the compression of thought we associate with the written text was undeveloped. People wrote as they spoke, expressing an idea, repeating it, underscoring it to be sure it was understood. Julian was writing at a time when the English language was just coming to birth. Her words and expressions are fresh, sometimes invented for her purposes.

I was slow to read and appreciate the full richness of her thought. In reparation, I offer Julian’s own words on prayer. From among the several different translations of Julian’s Showings, I choose Not for the Wise (Darton, Longman and Todd, London 1994), by Ritamary Bradley, Professor Emerita at St. Ambrose University in Iowa. This translation is based on Marion Glasscoe’s Middle English edition of A Revelation of Love. Julian leads into the theme of Prayer by assuring us that we are greatly loved:

Then I understood truly that all manner of thing is made ready for us

- by the great goodness of God

To the degree that whenever we are ourselves in peace and love

-we are, in fact, saved.

But since we may not have this in fullness while we are here

it behooves us always to live

- in sweet prayer

-in lovely longing,

with our Lord Jesus.

For he longs to bring us to fullness of joy…

God is love and teaches us to do as he does.

He wants us to be like him

-in wholeness of endless love

- for ourselves- and for our even-Christians.

Just as God’s love for us is never broken because of our sins,

In the same way God wills that our love

- for ourselves

- and for our even-Christians

should never be broken.

This word that God said is an endless comfort:

“I keep you securely.”

(Chapter Forty: Fourteenth Showing)

After this, our Lord showed me about prayer.

In this showing I saw there are two conditions our Lord intends for it:

- one is that we pray aright;

-the other is that we have unwavering trust.

But oftentimes we do not trust completely,

for we are not sure that God hears us, as we think

- either because we are unworthy

- or because we feel absolutely nothing.

- for we are as sterile and dry oftentimes after our prayer as before.

And this, in our feeling and our folly, is the cause of our weakness.

At times I have felt this way myself.

Our Lord brought all of this (about trust)

suddenly to my mind, and said:

“I am the ground of your beseeching.

- first, it is my will that you should have it;

- and since I make you to want it

- and you do ask for it,

how should it then be that you should not have what you ask?”

….where he says: “And you do ask for it”,

he shows a very great pleasure,

and the endless reward he will give us for our petitioning.

And in the part where he says: “How should it then be that you should not have what you ask?” he is indicating that this is impossible.

For it is a most impossible thing that we should ask for

- mercy and grace

and not have it.

For all these things that our good Lord makes us to ask for, God has already ordained to give us from the beginning.

Glad and merry is Christ over our prayer.

He awaits it, and he wants it.

For with his grace

- he makes us like to himself

- in our hearts

-as we already are in our humanity.

This is his blessed will.

Here is what Christ says:

“Pray earnestly -though you have no taste for it, as you think.

"For it does you good

- though you do not feel that it does;

- though you see nothing;

- yes, even though you think you are powerless.

“For when you are dry and empty, sick and frail, then your prayer is most pleasing to me

-though there seems to you to be little pleasure in it.

And thus all your living is prayer in my sight.”

Thanking also belongs to prayer.

Thanking is a new, inward, knowing

Accompanied with great reverence and loving awe

- inclining us to do, with our whole strength, what the good Lord draws us towards;

- and inwardly

- to give thanks

- and to enjoy.

Sometimes, in its abundance, thanking breaks out into words, and we say:

“Good Lord, grant us mercy. Blessed may you be!”

(Chapter 41 Fourteenth Showing)


Thou art enough to me

Communion Reflection on Julian of Norwich

April 28, 2022

Julian’s words of guidance in her book Revelations of Divine Love (also called Showings) were written out of love for us, whom she considered her “even Christians”, or “kindred spirits”. Five of these words leapt out at me on that February day in 1992 when, entering the reconstructed anchorhold in the tiny Church of St. Julian in Norwich, I saw incised in a marble slab: Thou art enough to me.

Looking back to that moment now, I wonder that I did not immediately turn around and exit by the door through which I’d just entered. Those five words struck me to the heart, challenging me to make a complete turn-around in my life, to let go of what I had until that moment considered necessary. I had left a place, a ministry and a friendship that had been the threefold source of my life’s happiness. Now I faced a future without all three. There was no way that I could accept that Julian’s unseen “Thou” could be enough. I see now that I understood almost nothing of the One Julian addressed as “Thou” and even less of the meaning of “enough”. Later, as I prepared to offerJulian’s words to others through James Janda’s play, I found the context for those words:

For this is the loving yearning of the soul through the touch of the Holy Spirit, from the understanding which I have in this revelation: “God, of your goodness give me yourself, for you are enough for me, and I can ask for nothing which is less which can give you full worship. And if I ask anything which is less, always I am in want; but only in you do I have everything.” (Showings Colledge and Walsh, p. 184)

Look now at the same words in a different translation. Marion Glasscoe’s Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love is my personal favourite among the dozens of newer renderings of Julian’s “Showings” because it comes closest to the Middle English of Julian’s time (sending my spell-check into orbit): For this is the kinde yernings of the soule by the touching of the Holy Ghost, as be the understondyng that I have in this shewing: “ God, of thy goodnesse, give me thyselfe; for thou art enow to me and I may nothing aske that is less that may be full worshippe to thee. And if I aske anything that is lesse, ever me wantith, but only in thee I have all.” (Glasscoe pp.7-8)

Julian is not asking us to set aside our desires; she is not saying that to find God we must relinquish everything for which we long. Quite the opposite. Julian is saying that the deepest yearning of our souls will only be satisfied when we know the One who both made us to yearn and can alone fill that yearning. What Julian found for herself she wants us to know: Only in you (to whom we entrust our longings) do I have everything, or in the Glasscoe translation: only in thee I have all.

This is a startling revelation for Julian, for each of us. As Julian says in Janda's play: Some of us believe that God is Almighty

And may do all,

And that God is All-Wisdom,

And can do all,

But that God is All-Love and will do all…..

There we stop short.

The Presence of Love that we in the 21st Century are coming to know as permeating all of life in the metaverse, as well as in the depths of our own souls, our very being, may be differently imaged for us than it was for Julian. Yet our experience of that all-pervading Love within our lives is very like Julian’s. However we name that Love, however we call upon it, we can know ourselves held safe in its embrace. Our deepest yearnings are for Love, for knowing our life has meaning, that we matter to that Love, that our longings are not only understood, but even prompted by that same Love.

Our task then, is to journey within those longings to find how they are drawing us into the embrace of the One who can satisfy them, who can fill us with the kind of joy that might lead us one day to say with Julian: Thou art enough to me.

In that same passage, Julian goes on to say: And these words of the goodness of God are very dear to the soul, and very close to touching our Lord’s will, for his goodness fills all his creatures and all his blessed works full, and endlessly overflows in them. For he is everlastingness, and he made us only for himself, and restored us by his precious Passion and always preserves us in his blessed love; and all this of his goodness. (Colledge and Walsh, 184)

The Glasscoe text reads this way: And these words are full lovesome to the soule and full nere touchen the will of God and his goodness; for his goodness comprehendith all his creatures and all his blissid works and overpassith without end, for he is the endleshede. And he hath made us only to himselfe and restorid us be his blissid passion and kepith us in his blissid love. And all this is of his goodness. (Glasscoe, p. 8)

May we stay safely, joyfully within that "blissid love".

Communion Reflection for April 21, 2022


love was our lords mening (A Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich, trans. Marion Glasscoe) In the darkened room, the slides of the Hubble photographs radiate like jewels. There are perhaps a dozen or more, each dancing onto the large screen, then disappearing, each one stunning in its play of light on darkness, its brilliant colours, its unimagined beauty. One image imprints itself deeply on my memory, so strongly that now, years later, I recall it vividly. It is a segment of sky somewhere in the universe where the black darkness is pierced with uncountable rose-pink lights. “This photo shows an expanse of some trillions of miles in space,” the speaker tells us. “Look at the rosy colour that fills the darkness. This is the LOVE that fills the Universe.” Julian of Norwich would never have seen a photograph, could not have imagined deep space or the wonders that the Hubble telescope offers us for our enchantment. Yet she too knew from her mystical experience that it is love that pervades the universe. She knew this absolutely. She trusted it despite her own experience in Fourteenth Century England of intense suffering in a time of plague, endless war, religious persecution. Julian does not give us this news of the centrality of love lightly, as one might share a passing feeling, a response to a moment of spiritual bliss. This is Julian’s carefully considered understanding of what she learned from her dialogues with Jesus, the Presence of Love in her life. She tells us clearly that it took fifteen years of reflection for her to finally know that love is at the centre of all that has been revealed to her, that love is her lords mening. As Julian writes the final Chapter of her book, she seeks to summarize for us all that she understands from her visions over the two decades she spent reflecting on them. She asks (as each one of us does when we look at our life): “What does it all mean?” Here are the closing words in the Colledge and Walsh translation (Paulist Press 1978) of her Showings: This book is begun by God’s gift and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as I see it. For charity, let us all join with God’s working in prayer, thanking, trusting, rejoicing, for so will our good Lord be entreated, by the understanding which I took in all his own intention, and in the sweet words where he says most happily: "I am the foundation of your beseeching." For truly I saw and understood in our Lord’s meaning that he revealed it because he wants to have it better known than it is. In which knowledge he wants to give us grace to love him and to cleave to him, for he beholds his heavenly treasure with so great love on earth that he will give us more light and solace in heavenly joy, by drawing our hearts from the sorrow and the darkness which we are in. And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: "What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end." So I was taught that love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning. In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end. (Showings Chapter 86) In Anne Baring’s magnificent book, The Dream of the Cosmos :A Quest for the Soul (Archive Publishing, Dorset, England 2013) there is an account of a mystical experience. It gently weaves together Julian’s awareness of love at the heart of the Universe with our present day visual awareness of a Universe birthed and bathed in love. Baring offers Richard Bucke’s account of returning from a poetry reading and discussion with two friends on a night in 1872: My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. (Baring, p. 443) This experience, recorded six centuries after Julian wrote her Showings, echoes two of her great mystic teachings: “love is his meaning” and “all manner of thing shall be well.”

The Easter Mystery: Communion Reflection April 14, 2022

Through the cold, quiet nighttime of the grave underground,

The earth concentrated on him with complete longing

Until his sleep could recall the dark from beyond

To enfold memory lost in the requiem of mind.

The moon stirs a wave of brightening in the stone.

He rises clothed in the young colours of dawn.

(John O’Donohue “Resurrection”)


The Easter Mystery of life-death-life is at the heart of the universe, at the heart of life on our planet, in the deep heart of our own lives. From its birth out of the womb of a dying star, through its daily cycle of day/dusk/ night/dawn, its yearly cycle of summer/autumn/ winter/spring, the earth teaches us to live within the paschal mystery. Ancient peoples understood this mystery. Through their careful observations they constructed buildings such as the mound in Newgrange Ireland where a tiny lintel receives the first rays of dawn only on the winter solstice.


The ancients wove their understanding of life/death/life into their mythologies: the Egyptian story of Osiris, whose severed body was put together piece by piece by his wife Isis, then reawakened; the Sumerians tell of the great queen Inanna who descended to the underworld to visit her sister Erishkigal. There she was stripped of all her royal robes and insignia, and murdered by her sister who then hung her lifeless body on a hook. Three days later, Inanna was restored to life, all her honour returned to her.


The people of Jesus’ time would have known these and other great myths of the ancient Near East. What was so stunningly different in the Jesus story was that the mystery of life-death-life was incarnated in a historical person. The Resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote, “If Christ be not risen then our faith is in vain.”


In our lifetime, the illumination of new science shows us the life/death/mystery at the heart of the universe. Like the stars, whose explosive endings give birth to new planets, our lives are continuously being rebirthed into a deeper more joyous existence. By allowing the death within ourselves of old habits, old mindsets, narrow ideas of who or what we may be, we open ourselves to the possibility of new life being birthed within us. As Jesus told his friends, “You will do what I do. You will do even greater things”.


“Resurrection is about being pulsed into new patterns appropriate to our new time and place,” Jean Houston writes in Godseed. For this to happen, we need to open ourselves in our deep core to “the Heart of existence and the Love that knows no limits....to allow for the Glory of Love to have its way with us, to encounter and surrender to That which is forever seeking us, and from this to conceive the Godseed”.


“The need for resurrection has increased in our time,” Jean continues. “We are living at the very edge of history, at a time when the whole planet is heading toward a global passion play, a planetary crucifixion.” Yet “the longing with which we yearn for God is the same longing with which God yearns for us…. the strength of that mutual longing can give us the evolutionary passion to roll away the stone, the stumbling blocks that keep us sealed away and dead to the renewal of life”. (Godseed pp.129-130)


The yearly miracle of Spring awakens within us the confidence and joy that this same rebirth is ours to accept and to live. We know our call to green our lives, our times, our planet:


The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age (Dylan Thomas)

Where in my life do I most experience the need for a rebirth?

What old habits and beliefs would I have to let die in order for this new life to be born?

How does it change my life to know that my longing for God is the same longing with which God yearns for me?

What would a resurrected life look like, feel like, for me? for those with whom my life is woven? for our planet?

May Sophia, the feminine presence of Sacred Wisdom, guide us through the death of what no longer serves us into the joy of the rebirth for which our hearts yearn.


Earth from the Moon 1972 Julian ThreeCommunion Reflection for April 7, 2022
God showed me in my palmA little thing round as a ballAbout the size of a hazelnut.I looked at it with the eye of myunderstanding and asked myself:“What is this thing?”And I was answered: “It is everything that is created.”I wondered how it would survive sinceIt seemed so little it could suddenly disintegrate into nothing.The answer came: “It endures and ever will endure, because God loves it.”And so everything has beingbecause of God’s love.(Meditations with Julian of Norwich: A Centering Book, Brendan Doyle, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1983) What Julian saw in “the eye of (her) understanding”, the astronaut Edgar Mitchell saw with his own eyes as he travelled back from the moon to the earth in 1971. He later said, “My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.” As we enter the Sacred Week of the Paschal Mystery, reliving the life/death/resurrection of Jesus, our Planet Earth, our Mother, is enduring her own passion. The vibrant blue green planet that Edgar Mitchell saw from space is in agony, her land desertified, her rainforests being destroyed for profit, many of her life forms disappearing, her waters polluted. What then are we to make of the promise Julian heard, “It endures and shall endure because God loves it”? Other words that Julian heard echo in us with the familiarity of a loved song. Al shal be wele, and al shal be wele,And all manner of thyng shal be wele.(Marion Glasscoe translation)We speak them to others, we say them to ourselves, words of comfort in times of fear or loss, anxiety or sadness. What do these words mean? What is the context in which Julian heard them? They appear in the thirteenth revelation or “showing” that Julian received during her night of visions after a near-death experience. Julian became an anchoress and recorded her showings soon afterwards in what we know as the “Shorter Text”. She would spend the next twenty years in meditation and prayer, reflecting on what she experienced in that single night, writing the "Longer Text”. Julian writes of being troubled by the suffering she sees and experiences (troubled as we are in this year of 2022, as wave after wave of Covid washes over us, as horrific suffering is inflicted on people in a brutal war in Ukraine…). In Julian’s mind, the cause of suffering is sin. This leads her to question why God allowed sin to happen when it might have been prevented, allowing us to live as Jesus lived. The why of suffering still haunts us today in the 21st century. What has changed since Julian’s time is our perception of God. The horrors of the twentieth Century, especially the Holocaust, led to a re-conception of God, seen no longer as an all-powerful being, one who can prevent the pain caused by human choice, by our blindness, our fear, our inability to love as we wish to love. Instead we have come to know a Presence of Love that is vulnerable, feeling our pain, One who will never let us go, never give up on us. Etty Hillesum expressed this best, writing in Auschwitz shortly before her death in 1943:I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that you cannot help us, that we must help you to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days, also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of you, God, in ourselves. And in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much you yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us but we must help you and defend your dwelling place inside us to the end. Like Etty, Julian entered into a reflective dialogue pondering God’s role in allowing suffering and sin. What I find alluring is Julian’s freedom as she explores these questions. She is confident in the love she experiences from God. She does not view sin (a word that for her embraces whatever causes suffering), either her own sin or that of others, with shame or fear or guilt. Here is Julian’s reflection from the Longer Text: …Our Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had for him…and I saw that nothing hindered me but sin, and I saw that this is true of us all in general, and it seemed to me that if there had been no sin, we should all have been pure and as like our Lord as created us. And so in my folly before this time I often wondered why, through the great prescient wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented. For then it seemed to me that all should have been well. The impulse to think this was greatly to be shunned; and nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed on this account unreasonably, lacking discretion. But Jesus, who in this vision informed me about everything needful to me, answered with these words and said: “Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” In this naked word “sin”, our Lord brought generally to my mind all which is not good, and the shameful contempt and the direst tribulation which he endured for us in this life, and his death and all his pains, and the passions, spiritual and bodily of all his creatures. For we are all in part troubled, and we shall be troubled, following our master Jesus until we are fully purged of our mortal flesh and all our inward affections which are not very good. And with the beholding of this, with all the pains that ever were or ever will be, I understood Christ's Passion for the greatest and surpassing pain. And yet this was shown to me in an instant and quickly turned into consolation. For our good Lord would not have the soul frightened by this ugly sight. But I did not see sin, for I believe that it has no kind of substance, no share in being, nor can it be recognized except by the pain caused by it. And it seems to me that this pain is something for a time, or it purges and makes us know ourselves and ask for mercy; for the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and that is his blessed will. And because of the tender love which our good Lord has for all who will be saved, he comforts us readily and sweetly, meaning this: it is true that sin is the cause of all this pain, but all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well. These words were revealed most tenderly, showing no kind of blame to me or to anyone who will be saved. So it would be most unkind of me to blame God or marvel at him on account of my sins, since he does not blame me for sin.And in these same words I saw hidden in God an exalted and wonderful mystery, which he will make plain and we shall know in heaven. In this knowledge we shall truly see the cause why he allowed sin to come, and in this sight we shall rejoice forever. (Showings The Thirteenth Revelation, 224-226 trans. Colledge & Walsh, Paulist Press, New York, Toronto, 1978)

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