promising son, the Black Prince. Edward III was followed by his grandson, Richard II, who was broken against the misfortunes of his times despite his efforts to resolve England’s problems. Deposed, Richard II died in prison. Throughout this period England was enduring an incredibly cruel and draining war with France, which we know as the Hundred Years War.
It is in this world that Julian spoke with a certain calm. “Our life is founded,” she said, “on faith with hope and love.” The basis of her faith was the Christ, who described himself to her as “the ground of her beseeching.” Julian was no foolish optimist. She had a deep awareness of our sin, yet believed that God has allowed us to fall that he might raise us up that much higher. “Sin is necessary,” she says; but immediately adds in her best known words, “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”
What kind of world does Julian see which allows her such confidence in a time of confusion and despair? It begins, first, with sensibility. I use the word “sensibility” in an unfamiliar meaning. It is the ability to apprehend or incorporate into our awareness the totality of an experience in all depth and breadth. Sensibility refers to the capacity to be sensitive and to accept what our senses tell us, even when that is not what fits into our neat categories. It implies an openness to experience, even when the meaning of that experience is ambiguous, incongruous and obscure.
Julian’s sensibility is seen in her insistence that God lets us rebel against him in order that he might raise us up even higher, which is a profound paradox. She said that there are five activities that arise in her at the same time: rejoicing, mourning, desire, fear and true hope, meaning that we know Jesus in both consolation and desolation. We are repelled by God and drawn to him at the same moment. There is an ambiguity to our awareness that reflects a consciousness of the experience that is not neatly drawn. Life is like that when perceived in its fullness, light and darkness, with shades of gray in between.
Secondly, Julian is aware that the extraordinary love of God is to be found within the ordinary. The vision of a hazelnut comes to mind, from which Julian learns three things: that God made, loves and preserves his creation. What could be more ordinary than a little hazelnut? Julian had a gift for perceiving what another Englishman, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) called the inscape or inner reality of things. This takes a way of seeing beyond the common sense reductions of the cynic, who can only see the outer appearance.
This gift for the extraordinary sometimes works in another direction. The commonplace ideas of the culture can be elevated to illumine the meaning of God in a new way. Julian takes the dying ideal of feudal chivalry, with its notion of the courteous knight, and applies it to God. “For God sees one way and man sees another way,” said Julian. “For it is for man to meekly accuse himself, and it is for our Lord God’s own goodness courteously to excuse man.” The word “courteous” carries all the meaning of mercy, gentleness and compassion. God is seen in a startling new, but recognizable light. He becomes almost human in his goodness.
Thirdly, Julian attributes to God the consciousness of a mother. She is, in fact, placing upon God that awareness which is characteristic of herself and her English church. “Jesus is our true Mother,” she said, “and he is our Mother of mercy in taking our sensuality.” This is a remarkable statement, which, while not original with Julian, has been made most evident in her writings, that Christ thinks as a woman is one way of translating what she is saying. What could she mean? God is caring, intuitive, receptive and open. As Christ was incarnate he knew what it was to live in a body, and like a pregnant woman to sense in the body the joy of new life.
Perhaps Julian could be criticized for not revealing the dark side of that motherly or feminine consciousness, which through the ages humankind has associated with death, the unpredictable and the ominous. The awareness at one and the same time of good and evil, so characteristic of a feminine mode of consciousness, is dread. Dread is a property of that sensibility of what we have already written. It is the knowledge that in nature where there is life there is death, where there is joy there is pain, and where there is knowledge there is ignorance; but ultimately, Julian tells us, there is also true hope.
Julian provides a prototype of Anglican consciousness. In order to explain how this is so I need to describe a theory — perhaps we could call it a model which challenges us to look further — of human consciousness. It is that our thinking falls into one of two patterns or modes. Traditionally these modes have been called “thinking with the right hand” and “thinking with the left hand.” Right hand thinking is analytical, logical, requiring one-to-one unambiguous representations, and is characteristic of computers. Left hand thinking is intuitive, analogical, metaphorical, symbolic and characteristic of poetry, art and music. If our primary goal in thinking is to be as clear as possible with no loose ends, and the experience related to a system, we think with the right hand. This is the consciousness of science, but it only describes things as they appear to be. If our intention in thinking is to draw together as much of an experience as possible, with items unresolved and with large, nagging questions in the middle of what we have described, then we are thinking with the left hand.
Fantasy literature is an example of thinking with the left hand. The English are rather good at this kind of writing. The Inklings, a literary group that met in Oxford during World War II to criticize one another’s work, produced some remarkable fantasies. They included Dorothy Sayers, who wrote mystery novels; C. S. Lewis, who wrote the Narnia chronicles and three science fiction novels; Charles Williams, who wrote novels dealing with the occult; and J. R. R. Tolkien, who is famous for the stories of the Hobbits. I would claim that there is a relationship between the gift for writing fantasy literature found among the English and that thinking with the left hand which is characteristic of Anglicanism.
We Anglicans are not given to writing great theology. There are notable exceptions, but they are difficult to remember; but when Anglicanism is at its best its liturgy, its poetry, its music and its life can create a world of wonder in which it is very easy to fall in love with God. We are much more adept at the left hand than at the right.
In this spirit the three points we made about Julian of Norwich are to be understood as characteristic of our particular way of constructing reality.
First, there is the Anglican proclivity to sensibility, the taking into account the whole of an experience — ambiguity and all. Sensibility is a difficult quality. T. S. Eliot suggested that English literature has failed to capture it since John Milton. The antidote to sensibility is common sense and if we wish to avoid living in a perpetual paradox, we insist that everything is simply a matter of common sense. Anglicanism can appear this way; but we are at our best when we acknowledge the penultimate nature of our answers to the character of God and his will for us. This modesty is often expressed as a “yes, but.” “Yes, Jesus is my personal Savior, but this does not mean he is a white, upper middle class American. Yes, I believe that God has a purpose for me after death, but I am skeptical of the accounts of people who claim to have died and lived again. Yes, I believe that Christ is present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, but this does not mean that for a particle to fall on the floor is tantamount to sacrilege.”
Sensibility requires a willingness to face the darkness of chaos without romanticism. One of the reasons that Anglicanism sometimes appears merely cynical or sentimental is that we do not have the courage of our best instincts. We refuse to enter the darkness. Obscure essays from the pulpit, a fascination with the past and a fondness for empty, polite chatter are among the ways we defend ourselves from our birthright.
Sensibility is a recognition that the inexpressible nature of God can never be reduced to our categories or our simplistic notions of the divine will. This leads us to acknowledge the metaphorical nature of all religious conversion and theological discourse. For Anglicanism this recognition is coupled with the fact that God is the creator of everything that is, and that the knowledge of God requires only that we look at his handiwork. This is the second point. It is why British empiricism and its ally, American pragmatism, are very much a part of the Anglican way of
