Welcome, neighbor! Week by week, I’m posting excerpts from some new writing I’m calling “Confessions: a spiritual autobiography.” The first post in this series went up last week, so if you haven’t read it yet, go back and start there, then continue here, before readying today’s post.
Also: you might want a cup of tea to enjoy with this one.
~l.d.w.
Lord Jesus, You saw, you knew: the crack at the heart of me went deep, down into the foundation of the house, like a root feeling its way down past the cement into the brown mud. Then deeper, winding around stones and layers of earth. And no matter what I tried to use to fill it--sand, gravel, foam, cement— it grew.
The rest of the house looked just fine. So I kept on living in it, keeping up appearances. I put on a smile and dressed in cute vintage clothes from my parents closet and from the local Goodwill. I went away to college at a Christian university and kept up the work of an honor student on track to marry by the end of her senior year and live happily ever after as a Christian wife and defender of the nation. But at the heart of me—the crack.
One day I was sitting alone in the library of this house when I heard a knock at the front door. I had been reading, distractedly, for my Survey of British Literature Class, and daydreaming. Who knows, maybe I dreamt the whole thing.
I peeked through the window and saw a tall woman, stout and strong, her face regally wrinkled and still in the evening light, her long dress made of simple brown cloth and her hair tucked back in a weird white hat and scarf thingy, with a flair on top as though her head was growing wings. My mind searched for the right word to describe it. Her face was turned away from the door and the wind caught her robes, as she looked over the windswept fields outside.
She turned to me, her grey eyes shining with uncanny cheerfulness as I cracked open the door.
“Hello, Laura,” she said with a serene smile and smooth voice. “My name is Julian.”
“Uh, hi. I don’t think we’ve met before,” I said, my brow wrinkled. I held the door open only a crack and leaned on it.
“No, I got your address from a friend.”
“Are you a nun? I don’t really know any Catholics.” I was confused. Was it a habit? No that’s the dress.
“May I come in for a moment?” she asked.
I couldn’t see what that would hurt. My house seemed kind of an absurd place to host a nun, but what harm could she do?
“What a lovely, comfortable home,” she said looking at me as I showed her back to the library. I stood awkwardly as she looked around at the floor to ceiling shelves and up to the second story skylight . “How old did you say you were?” she asked, touching a book on the shelf.
“I’m nineteen.” A veil? No, it’s more specific.
“It’s a very lovely house for nineteen. And so big! But maybe most houses are big these days. I do envy you all these books. But I’m hardly an expert on houses, I don’t often leave my own small room. I am not a nun but an anchoress, I lived all my life anchored in one humble room in a church in Norwich, in England. I had a special invitation to visit you today.”
“Invitation? I didn’t send any invitation.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Julian said with a wave of her hand. “It’s a wimple, by the way, my headdress.” She paused as I looked at her, eyes wide. “Listen, I’d like to tell you a story, you could call it my… testimony.” She leaned forward toward me.
“Your testimony?”
“But first, would you like something warm to drink?”
I blinked. Her hand went into the wide slit pocket of her wool habit up to the elbow and I heard a sound like glass clinking. She drew out an earthenware mug and handed it to me. Then she pulled out a second. I blinked again, mug held out still in front of me.
She carefully pulled out a thermos full of tea next, and poured steaming, milky tea into each of our mugs, setting the teapot on a side table.
“Ahh, that’s better.” She said settling into a highjack chair a bit and taking a sip. “You know, they have these mugs at the church now where my cell was. They’re really quite handy. And we didn’t have tea in England in my day, oh no. But isn’t it a revelation?” Her skirt began to twitch.
“Oh! And that will be Herring…” She pulled a full sized gray tabby cat out of her skirt next. It sniffed around the couch before curling up beside her, purring. I took a sip from the mug. It was a revelation, the sugary, milky tea spread its warmth through me as though a cat had curled up on my heart. I sat primly on the ottoman of a large blue reading chair and looked at her. She was gently stroking the cat.
“Oh! I almost forgot! Biscuits?”
I looked at her in utter confusion as she dug a folded cloth from her pocket, and opened it to reveal some rather crumbly brown cookies. I took one obediently. The cloth rested on her lap and she munched as she spoke.
“Now… where was I? Oh yes, testimony. You see when I was thirty years old—thirty and a half, to be precise—in the year 1373,”1
“Wait did you just say 1373, that’s like 600 years ago! Wait, how—“
Julian let out a laugh gentle and bracing as a cold mountain stream, “Yes, 1373. That must seem so strange to you.
“In that year, God sent me a bodily sickness, in which I lay for three days and three nights; and on the fourth night I took all my rites of holy church”
“Rites of holy church?”
“Yes, you know, my last rites, the communion offered to the dying.”
“I… I’ve never heard of that. Is that a Catholic thing?” I knew almost nothing about Roman Catholicism except that everyone around me was pretty sure Catholics weren’t real Christians—especially the former Catholics. Salvation came though Christ alone, not church rites. Wouldn’t you still go to heaven if you didn’t have your last rites?
She smiled, amused. “Yes, it’s a Roman Catholic thing. And yes, you would still go to heaven without it, but it is a nice way to focus on God while you are dying. I believe that the Baptist church where you are a member has different traditions. But as I was saying… that night I took all my rites of the holy church and did not think I would live until day. And after this I lay two days and two nights; and on the third night I often thought I had died, and so did those who were with me.”
“That’s awful!” It was all I could think of.
She just smiled a sparkling smile that said, just you wait, I haven’t got to the good part yet.
“I had decided I didn’t want to die that night because I wanted to know God longer and love him better, thinking that I could love him and know him more when I reached the bliss of heaven.
“I had only lived a short time, but I asked God if my life no longer brought him glory. I didn’t seem to be getting any better, if anything my pains were getting worse, so with my whole heart, I longed for God’s will to be done.”
Where was her doctor? I wondered to myself as I listened skeptically, my brow clouded. Didn’t they have pain medication to help her? She just laid on a bed and waited to die? This was all pretty morbid for me. I barely even knew anyone who had died, and certainly not willingly at only 30 years old.
Her story grew more and more weird.
“My life lingered until finally it seemed to be the end. The local priest came and brought with him a crucifix, holding it before my eyes to meditate on Christ’s passion as I died. And as I looked at it, my sight began to fail, and everything else except the cross grew dark. The cross seemed lit from within.” Her eyes were big with wonder. “I felt my life slipping away from my body, death creeping like a shadow from my feet up toward my head.
“Then suddenly—poof!— my pain disappeared!” She looked right into me, “I thought I had died. But as I lay there, it slowly dawned on me that I was not dead, but by some miracle, my body was healed!” She leaned forward suddenly and held her open palms out to me.
I think I actually jumped back, horrified, as she said this, splashing hot tea on my soft navy t-shirt. Priests, crucifixes, and healings were tidings from way outside the comfortable walls of my home.
“Oh…gosh.” I lamely dabbed at the tea.
“Now in those days,” she went on, “spiritual contemplation often called for a reflection on Christ’s sufferings, imagining that you yourself were present at His death, or that the pains of your own life were a sharing in Christ’s pains on the cross, in order to suffer with him and have a deeper longing for God.”
I leaned in a little bit. “Um, that’s in Paul, isn’t it? In Philippians: ‘that I may know Christ and the power of his resurrection, becoming like him in his death and so somehow to attain to the resurrection of the dead.’ I’ve never been able to figure out what that means, but is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?”
“Yes!” The wooden rosary hanging from her belt click-clacked as she pointed to me with excitement. “that’s it exactly!” Our eyes met for an instant, then I looked down. She smoothed her skirts a moment then rested her hands in her lap with a stillness I had never seen before.
“Laura, as I looked up at that crucifix, healed, suddenly I saw it come alive, with bright red blood dripping down under the crown of thorns pressed into Jesus’s head. I conceived suddenly that the God and man who suffered for me, he showed me this vision of his suffering. And suddenly the Trinity filled my heart with joy.” She positively glowed.
“Joy?!” To see Jesus bleed? What in the world? I tensed in my seat as if she had hit me. There was no joy in the cross as I knew it, as I looked up at it and transferred the weight of my guilt to it.
Her bizarre story struck me like a slap to the face. My mind attempted to catch up. Everything in me was programmed to be suspicious of this woman. And everything about her disarmed me. Here was a woman who truly loved God. Just like me she longed to know God more and more, to serve Jesus with her whole life. And she knew God, she had visions of him, asked him impertinent questions and got answers. She had this confidence that she heard his voice, that God loved her, as though God’s love was the simple, soft brown cloth of her religious habit wrapped around her, keeping her warm, providing her with everything she needed.
It was everything that I had tried to accomplish with all my building up to the heavens, but could never quite manage.
I started to melt. I could feel tears tighten my throat.
“Julian,” I said almost in a whisper. “Joy? God filled you with Joy at the cross?”
“Yes, joy.” she said. “Laura, you are a precious coin in the treasure that God found hidden in a field and in his joy he gave up everything to buy that field and redeem his treasure.”
“I am?”
“You are.”
“I always thought I had to give up everything to buy the treasure of the kingdom.”
She reached into the pocket of her habit, her beads clinking again as she pulled out a small brown nut, “Do you see this hazelnut? How small it is? What God showed me in that first vision was that everything in this world he has created is as small to him as this little hazelnut.”
I had never seen a hazelnut before. It rested small, hard, and brown in her palm, almost like a round acorn. “It is so small it could disappear, except that God loves it. Do you ever feel unrest in your heart and soul? We seek here rest in this thing that is so little, where there is no rest, and we do not know our God, Almighty, all wise and all good, for he is our very rest.”
She took my hand and rolled the little hazelnut into my palm. Her eyes bore into mine,
“You are angry with yourself because as hard as you try, yet you still sin. You wonder why there is sin or pain in the first place, why God cannot sweep it away once and for all. I wondered this too, but Jesus revealed to me that sin is necessary for a time, but all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. And God brought to my mind all the pain in all the world, showing me that his pain on the cross was worse than all of it together. And he showed me that it is true that sin is the cause of all this pain, but all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. God does not blame you for your sins, nor does he blame any who will be saved. Why God allows sin is a marvelous mystery hidden in God, but he does not blame us.”
It was all I could do to hold back tears. Her gentle gray eyes saw straight through to the secret blame in my heart that always drove me to do more, try harder, even though I believed rationally that I was forgiven in Christ. And they were filled with compassion. She had once felt the same way.
“I’m not a…my mistakes?”
“No, Laura, not even close. God the blessedful Trinity, everlasting, endless and without beginning, from eternity it was his plan to make human beings, just as humanity was first given to his own son, the second person of the Trinity. By the full agreement and power of the Trinity he made us all, and in our making he knit us and one-d us to himself, by which one-ing we are kept as clean and noble as we were made—in his very image.”
I tried to follow these simple words, laden with so much meaning.
“In this making, God almighty is our kindly father, and God all wisdom is our kindly mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Ghost, and all three are one God, one Lord. And in the knitting and the one-ing he is our very true spouse and we his loved wife and his fair maiden. For he says ‘I love you and you love me, and our love shall never part in two.’”6
I felt she had drawn me into the heights of heaven and was showing me around as if it were a simple, comfortable home, introducing me to a God I could see, hear, and touch in a human relationship. My head spun. I was beginning to feel totally lost.
I had built my comfortable soul-house to a certain height, but I could tell that was not at all what Julian had done, lying in her sickbed or waiting and praying in her cell. And yet here she was, friends with God, so comfortable in the heights of heaven. I felt a blow resonate through me, as though an ax had fallen at the base of one of the load-bearing walls of my house. The crack widened and stretched up the front of the house.
“I don’t know…” I said. “God is described as a Father in the Bible, but I don’t think the idea of Jesus as a mother is in there.”
“Oh Laura, at first I laughed at my visions, but my priest, he took them seriously. So I searched them for years, contemplating them over and over again in my cell,” Julian said with winning confidence, “God has confirmed them to me by conversation, Scripture and Holy Church. They are true.” The word struck like a bell in me. Tiny rocks and dust fell as the crack widened again.
“But it’s time for me to go soon,” She said, as though she heard the bell. She gathered her cat, her teapot, and her mug. I stared as they disappeared into her habit.
She rose and I rose a little dizzy. We walked to the door.
“I wrote all this down from my little cell, Laura,” Julian said handing me a small white book with a drawing of the Trinity on the cover, “Someday, you should pick it up and read the rest. When you’re ready.”
“Thank you. I will. I need a little time, but I will.” I opened the door for her.
“I will leave you then.” She said, touching the back of my free hand, which still clasped the hazelnut. She looked into my eyes again, “Farewell, love. God be with you.”
For a moment, as I looked into her eyes, it seemed as though the years melted away from her, as though her face grew young and beautiful again, glowing with the years she had spent in the presence of God. Then she turned away to look out over the fields, searching the horizon. The sun was setting, it cast an orange light on her face and she seemed to decide something as she looked at it. Looking back, her face was as I had seen it at first, well-wrinkled by the years. Perhaps it had only been the sun behind her.
“Goodbye!” I said.
“Goodbye!” she waved, lifted skirts, and started down the steps. The sun glinted in my eyes again, and she was gone. I returned to my library, where the mug still sat next to the white book.
O my God, what a mystery it was to make a friend in such an unexpected way. I lived with the crack, then, for two more years. It had grown. Leaves blew in. And rain. But I was beginning to grow a bit fond of the fresh air.
all text and images are original.
all opinions are my own and do not reflect the official positions of any organizations that I work for or am affiliated with.
Much of Julian’s dialogue from this point is drawn directly from the Edmund Colledge and James Walsh translation of the long text of her Showings, which I first encountered in the Norton Survey of British Literature Vol 1.
Dave Julian shows up!