From Our Archives

Michael Fitzpatrick, God in 3-D (2022); Debie Thomas, The Trinity: So What (2019) and Deeper than Darkness (2016); and Dan Clendenin, Lo Cotidiano: “The Daily Thing” (2013), and "I have much more to say to you": Lessons from a Love Story (2010).

This Week’s Essay

Proverbs 8:30–31: “Then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

In order to write her book of visionary theology, A Revelation of Love, 14th century theologian Julian of Norwich had to devise a robust vocabulary of delight. If love was the most important theme of this expansive work — the first written by a woman in the English language — then delight was a strong second. To convey her message, she needed not only words like pleasure, rejoicing, enjoying, joy, and honor, but she also needed “delectable” and “sweet.” She needed to draw on all the senses. She used the word “bliss” so often, it almost feels that she tired of trying to express delight beyond human words.

You wouldn’t necessarily study the details of the life of Julian of Norwich and conclude that she would become the primary Christian theologian of delight. When I was writing my biography of her, I called it a "contemplative biography" because I felt that I had to construct her life meditatively out of the few known facts. But all of those facts suggest pain and struggle. When Julian was a child, the plague spread through Norwich and killed about 75% of inhabitants. When she was of childbearing age, another wave of the plague swept through and killed 75% of children, sparing many of the remaining adults. Julian herself may have lost children in this plague, and even if she didn’t, she was part of a community that experienced enormous suffering and loss.

When she was 30, Julian became so ill that she thought she would die, and she confessed that many times in her short life she had wished to die. But instead, she received the revelation of God’s love that she would spend the rest of her life meditating on. Eventually she moved into an anchorage on the property of a church located between a slaughterhouse and a hospital for the mentally ill.

There she served as an anchoress — an office that compelled her to become dead to the world and spend her life praying for the people of the parish. She lived there for more than 40 years, and we know that many people visited to ask for her advice or prayers or simply to bring her a basket of apples or hazelnuts. Before she died, her book was passed out of the window of the anchorage and into the hands of people who loved it, copied it, and shared it, which is the only reason that we have it to delight us today.

Like the personified Wisdom of Proverbs, Julian turned the whole heavy world of religious obligation — all of its shoulds and have-tos, musts and or-elses — on its head. She wrote, for example, “Our soul must perform two duties.” When I first read this passage, my whole striving Protestant self geared up to add them to my already extensive spiritual to-do list.

What were these two duties? “The one,” she writes, “is we must reverently wonder and be surprised.”  Wonder and surprise are duties of the soul? “The other is we must gently let go and let be, always delighting in God” (Chapter 47). Do I add “let go and delight” to my list?

During the pandemic my little church in Leadville, Colorado opened an ambitiously large food pantry in the unused sanctuary. Working with community partners, we strategized how to obtain funds, and we stocked the pantry week to week with hundreds of pounds of potatoes, cans of beans, and eventually, as we got the system down, meat, milk, eggs, and fresh produce. It was (and remains) a challenging operation, and I am not saying that we've always done it with wonder and great delight, but a friend and I made a pact as the pantry started to grow of its own accord: we would only do those things that gave us joy. If something about the pantry became a heavy burden, we’d step back and let someone else take it or not do it at all. This wasn’t our food pantry: it was the Spirit’s.

Trinity Stained Glass (St. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother in Avondale, PA).

We likened this discipline to crossing a mountain stream: In trying something of this magnitude, we were constantly in danger of falling into resentment, overwork, fatigue, and eventually coming to dislike our neighbors instead of learning to love them. To cross a mountain stream, you must seek those few rocks that will remain firmly in place, that are flat enough to afford a foothold. We likened our development of the food pantry to looking for these “joy” rocks. What can we do with enough joy, enough letting go, enough delight that we can stay steady while we cross this stream? If we saw ourselves falling into obligation, we’d ask, “Is this a joy rock?” If the answer was no, then we looked for another route.

Julian is right: delight, surprise, and wonder are spiritual disciplines. I once interviewed the poet Ross Gay and asked him, “What do you mean when you say joy is a discipline?” “I mean it’s something that needs to be practiced, like foul shots and grafting,” he said, drawing on two of his favorite disciplines: basketball and gardening.

It is from this expansive sense of delight that we find Julian’s delicate and nuanced understanding of the Trinity. Three, in Julian’s understanding, is the most alive of the numbers. Not so solitary as one, not so dualistic as two, or as square as four, three is dynamic and ever-changing. In the Trinity, three is continually resolving itself into one and returning again to three. According to Julian, this isn’t just a pattern in and of God: it’s also a pattern of the whole created world and us. Three into one into three into one is for her the very foundation of the Incarnation and of the idea that we are made in God’s image. We are three in one, just as God is three in one.

Julian explains it one way in Chapter 55:

            Our whole life is in three:
            First there is the being.
            Then the becoming,
            finally the fulfilling.

Dame Julian of Norwich Stained Glass (St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Quincy, MA), photo by A K M Adam.

First there is being: the goodness, love, and divine inspiration of our very existence and the existence of all living things. This is the part that Julian associates with God the Creator, and to which she refers in her famous passage about the hazelnut, “All things being because of the love of God” (Chapter 5).

Then there is the goodness, love, and even difficulty of our journey, our travel through this life. She calls this traveling our “becoming” and associates it with God the Son, the Incarnate Word, who walks with us as “our mother, brother, and savior” (Chapter 58).

Finally, there is our fulfilling, the work that is done in us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who is “faithful to complete it” (Phil. 1:6). And the Holy Spirit, especially of all three persons of the Trinity, is the one who, like Wisdom in Proverbs, delights.

Carrying this delight into our daily lives is the challenge of honoring the image of God in ourselves and in each other.

Weekly Prayer

Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – after 1416)

God’s Love for Us

The love of God most High for our soul
is so wonderful that it surpasses all
knowledge. No created being can fully know
the greatness, the sweetness, the
tenderness, of the love that our Maker has
for us. By his Grace and help therefore let
us in spirit stand in awe and gaze, eternally
marvelling at the supreme, surpassing,
single-minded, incalculable love that God,
Who is all goodness, has for us.

From A Revelation of Love

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Marginalia; Los Angeles Review of Books; (2) Blogspot.com; and (3) Seeker: Reflections on life and Christian faith..