January 23
Beloved of Good Shepherd Church,
Grace to you and peace in Jesus Christ our Lord!
There is an awful lot of pain in this world. From fires in the west to ice in the east and all manner of unease in between, all the pain makes my head spin when I think about it. Lately as I’ve taken in all the headline-making suffering, despair, and acrimony, I’ve thought of Julian. Julian of Norwich was a 14th century English mystic. Her masterpiece, The Divine Revelations, is the oldest surviving written work by a woman in the English language. Julian was a follower of Jesus in a painful season of history. She was a little girl when a plague commonly referred to as the Black Death came to her area. It would eventually kill as much as 50 percent of the population of Europe. Half the people she loved died of the disease. The church and the state were a hot mess in many ways in her day. Julian was well acquainted with pain. To make her acquaintance even more intimate she had a vision of the crucifixion of Jesus in which she experienced his death as if she were there watching when it actually happened. Do you know what she saw? Love. All that Julian could see when she looked out at the world suffering around her was God’s bottomless love pouring out in all directions in full solidarity with the suffering of the world. When she gazed on Jesus on the cross, all she could see was His love poured out for all of us. She didn’t see wrath or guilt or sin or friction of any sort, all she saw was love, and her vision of love caused her vision of her neighbors to change. When she looked at her neighbors all she saw was how much God loved them.
She gives this wonderful counsel about our neighbors. “When the sins of others come to mind, the soul that wants peace should flee from such thoughts as she would run from the pains of hell. She should seek within God for the remedy to help her resist the impulse to judge, for when we pay attention to the faults of others, a thick mist descends over the eyes of the soul, and for the time being we cannot see the beauty of the Divine.”
Can you believe how beautiful and practical that is?! Julian inspires this thought in me that I am going to work on for the next week: A Chrisian is one who looks for the friend hidden in every stranger. Do you have any strangers in your life? Maybe some you disagree with? Maybe some you don’t like? Look again, there is a friend hidden in that stranger. How can you draw her out? Love and friendship are the balm for all pain, and they last forever. Isn’t that tremendous?
Remember this always - God loves you, and I love you too!
Love is all,
Hendree+