A mother's view of God's love
(continued)

Julian's legacy to the church is contained in two volumes, one short and one longer, recalling her visions and expounding the ideas that arose from those experiences. Fortunately, though the English of her time is obscure to modern readers, her works have been preserved and translated and are available to us as "Revelations of Divine Love". Clifton Wolters, another of her translators, says that her language can be difficult to translate; but the job he has done results in a readable book that brings Mother Julian to life and makes her message ring true for our times. "Mother" Julian - that is another of her nicknames and effectively conveys her delightful care, her humanity and her motherly warmth. Perhaps she had been a mother? Certainly, when she entered her cell she was already old enough (in the practise of those days) to have married, borne and lost a child, and suffered widowhood. This is just speculation, but it is a testament to the tenderness of her writing that we should feel such warmth from an author about whom who we know so little.

"Revelations of Divine Love" spans the breadth and depths of God's love through a series of visions and Julian's reflective analysis. Her background was so alien to my nonconformist experience that I approached the book with suspicion at first reading. But she was not the product of an institutional mould and made me feel at home in her personal world. Always outwardly true to the church, she nevertheless creates an individual theology that owes everything to personal revelation and maintains a light hold on traditional dogma. Her unique originality produced the vision of "Christ our mother", an emotion-rich concept that cuts across orthodox teachings but brings the personality of Jesus into fresh and comforting light.

//Continued