Julian of Norwich

Treasures in hidden places

Mike FarleyLeave a comment

At the center of reality is a deep, radical, painful, costly fissure that will, soon or later, break ever self-arranged pattern of well-being… It cannot be helped, and it cannot be avoided… 

This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial. Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncriticized form, teaches that with enough reason and resources brokenness can be avoided. And so Enlightenment rationality, in its frenzied commercial advertising, hucksters the good of denial and avoidance: denial of headaches and perspiration and loneliness, impotence and poverty and shame, embarrassment and, finally, death. In such ideology there are no genuinely broken people. When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must, it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt. The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this. When denial is transposed into guilt – into personal failure – the system of denial remains intact and uncriticized, in the way Job’s friends defended the system. 

The outcome for the isolated failure is that there can be no healing, for there has not been enough candor to permit it. In the end, such denial is not only a denial of certain specifics – it is the rejection of the entire drama of brokenness and healing, the denial that there is an incommensurate Power and Agent who comes in pathos into the brokenness, and who by coming there makes the brokenness a place of possibility. 

Walter Brueggemann, An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible

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Pain, struggle and suffering are an ordinary part of the human life cycle. The spiritual writer and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward: A spirituality for the two halves of life, suggests that there is a key time of suffering out of which we are transformed and change the direction of our lives. In the important process of building our life, establishing our identity, home and relationships, we journey through the first half of life. However, the journey to strive successfully is followed by a second journey, often in midlife, because some experience of falling down, brokenness or failure has us at a crisis point or crossroads. This time is the foundation for spiritual growth, a falling upwards where loss of control broadens our horizons and deepens our lives. 

Justine Allain-Chapman, The Resilient Disciple: A Lenten Journey from Adversity to Maturity 

The life of David in the Old Testament – poet, king, composer, sinner – was marked by repeated personal disasters, repeated brokenness, and yet God found him “a man after my own heart” (Acts 13.22) and Jesus himself acknowledged him as his forebear (Matthew 22.41ff).

Falling, brokenness, whether as a result of one’s own sin, as David’s with Bathsheba, for instance, or, like Job’s, as a result of misfortune or the ill-will of another, is not the end, or the point, of life in Christ, but it may well be essential to it. We cannot get to Easter morning except by way of Good Friday, and we cannot get there except by way of Ash Wednesday. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12.24)

Somehow, as Julian of Norwich suggested, sin may even be necessary for “all to be well”. Certainly the psalmist carries this sense into Psalm 119.67: “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.” Time and again I have found its reflection in my own life, when out of some of the bleakest times God has brought blessing, even “the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.” (Isaiah 45.3)

The mercy of Christ is without end, as though his blood were to fill a communion cup, and all the communicant could see, gazing down, was a crystal bottomless pool, the infinity of grace.

The Grace of Trust

Mike FarleyLeave a comment
Looking down 1900ft from the Cabo Girão skywalk, Madeira

There are times when we can do all that a fellow creature needs if only he will trust us. In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child’s finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can’t, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle may be their distrust. We are asking them to trust us in the teeth of their sense, their imagination, and their intelligence. We ask them to believe that what is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks dangerous is their only safety. We ask them to accept apparent impossibilities: that moving the paw farther back into the trap is the way to get it out – that hurting the finger very much more will stop the finger hurting – that water which is obviously permeable will resist and support the body – that holding onto the only support within reach is not the way to avoid sinking – that to go higher and onto a more exposed ledge is the way not to fall. To support all these incredibilia we can rely only on the other party’s confidence in us – a confidence certainly not based on demonstration, admittedly shot through with emotion, and perhaps, if we are strangers, resting on nothing but such assurance as the look of our face and the tone of our voice can supply, or even, for the dog, on our smell. Sometimes, because of their unbelief, we can do no mighty works. But if we succeed, we do so because they have maintained their faith in us against apparently contrary evidence. No one blames us for demanding such faith. No one blames them for giving it. 

CS Lewis The World’s Last Night

I have been struck recently by the truth of this passage for my own relationship with God. The times in my life when I have come through the most difficult circumstances have been those times when I have been most conscious of the infinite trustworthiness of God. Quite literally, if I had not trusted God’s grace and mercy, especially as Paul explains it in chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans, I couldn’t have come through to be sitting here writing this. And yet, of myself, I am not capable of that kind of trust, when all the evidence of sense and intellect points to the radical untrustworthiness of the whole situation. To trust God enough to walk out on what appears to be thin air is only possible through prayer; to trust God enough to pray rather than run is sheer grace, an act simply inaccessible to the unaided human will.

The priest, abolitionist and ex-sea captain and slave trader John Newton, who knew a thing or two about desperate situations, wrote sometime before 1779:

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
   That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
   Was blind, but now I see. 

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
   And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear
   The hour I first believ’d! 

Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares,
   I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
   And grace will lead me home…

All that is is gift. There is nothing else. The air we breathe, the slender band of temperatures in which we can survive, the earth beneath our feet, the steady beating of our hearts – we brought about none of this by our own will or intention, and we cannot sustain any of it by our own will or intention either. Whatever happens, we cannot fall out of God, who holds all time, all things, within the love that is his istigkeit, his own being:

I saw that [our Lord] is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand. 

And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand… 

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the creator and protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me.

Julian of Norwich, Showings, Ch. 5

[Originally published on The Mercy Blog, 5/1/2019]