During my formative years we moved a great deal owing to my father’s volatility, every two or so years pulling up stakes and heading elsewhere. Each new place had a small evangelical church where I was taken three times a week. Once Wednesday evenings for suppers and sermons and twice on Sundays, mornings and evenings, a punitive deity began to patrol within my soul seven days a week, eyes watching for transgressions. Like my wanting to have a life larger than the one prescribed for women. Like my persisting in wishing for a denied bikini as a teenager. Like my wanting to speak my truth but being relegated to nursery duty and dirty diapers. This inculcation wounded me deeply. I am still healing.
I still don’t quite know how. But I trust my practice. Maybe because of how much time I spent and spend in Nature listening to Silence. Maybe because of my mother’s consistent gentleness. Maybe because of kind teachers K-12 and beyond. Somehow I developed a different, my own idea what a Christian was, which didn’t match what was shouted angrily from the pulpit. A Christian was kind, listening, and open to healing and growing. A person who saw life as it was. Someone you’d feel safe around. Someone whose notion of a Deity was one of kindness, inclusivity, compassion for self and others, and a goodness that opened into Mystery.
I had to sort through a lot of misinformation growing up. I’m reminded of my charming and sober-eyed Cuban immigrant granddaddy who knelt a lot before others during his career of fitting women’s feet into high-heeled pointy-toed shoes at Rich’s. He didn’t like it when someone tried to take home a pair of shoes that mixed two sizes, a 7.5 for the buyer’s slightly smaller left foot, an 8.0 for the right foot. He learned to recognize such. He called this sagacity in English: “knowing shit from Shinola.” Shinola being a popular brand of shoe polish in the 1940s. My granddaddy’s colloquialism seems like something an early Church father like Paul might say, if he’d been alive during World War II when everyone knew of or had used Shinola polish. For Paul’s, see Philippians 3:8: σκύβαλα or skubala.
We’ve gotten away from seeing things as they are. Collective delusions rise. One way I root myself in reality is through mindfulness. Simply being attentive to What Is/what-is. This is not a left-brain activity. Mindfulness involves my mind, heart, soul, self, body, others, nature, and daily events. This “What Is/what-is” Reality/reality reminds me that the 6th-century C.E. philosopher and theologian (Pseudo-)Dionysius called God ὅ τι ποτέ ἐστιν or “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming.”
This “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming” fluid name for Divinity has a wonder-full openness to it inviting us to keep our eyes open. Too, the painter Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made art that convinces me to look more deeply at everything. We see the fruits of her re-looking here online: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/exhibitions/rooted-in-place/, and we hear her philosophy in words: “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”
Centuries earlier, another who took her time to see is the 14th-century plague-survivor, writer, theologian, spiritual companion/director, anchoress, and Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Using different words, she reminds us of the same truth: Looking is everything. How we see is crucial. Julian writes in Middle English in her Revelations of Divine Love: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule.” Said easily: “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh.” “God is nearer to us than our own soul.” Often translated as “God is closer to us than our own soul.”
Julian’s use of “God” is not small-minded nor male-dominated. It belongs in the lineage of Augustine’s pronoun “It” for Divinity, Dionysius’s “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming,” and Hildegard’s evergreen Viriditas for the rejuvenating Spirit in Nature. Though alive at the same time as Chaucer and the Cloud of Unknowing‘s Anonymous, the anchoress also has a gender fluid view of Divinity.
Julian’s eyes-wide-open, steady, gentle, fiercely wise, joyful emphasis on God as Love in a world of “health or happiness and suffering” (“well and woe”) has over the centuries softened her own God-language into what is Best for those who read her. As one laboring in the bureaucratic, phrenic discourse community of “higher education,” and having also experienced diminishment via Church language, I find God-language not the most helpful for dialogue with my soul, Self, interior parts, or the diverse world. Julian’s wisdom and inclusivity draw me in to see that her “God” is one of Mystery, not dogma.
Whether calling God Whatever-It-Is, Whatever-It-Is-Becoming, It—or Love, True Self, Presence, Self, Christ, Higher Power, Ultimate Reality, Yahweh, Ground of Being, Divine, Spirit, or any other, or none, I am habitually looking in all places and in all ways and on every day how to be kind, listening, self-compassionate, compassionate to others, and open to growing and seeing life as it is. Someone others feel safe with.
We all fail. But what a worthy intention to have. To return all throughout one’s life to “How can I be Love?” so when a final breath comes, I exhale a last time in peace.
We have so much healthy psychology now around “True Self.” We also have an expanding interior galaxy that we can look at up close through the wiser lens of the beyond-the-monomind paradigm, as Internal Family Systems’ Richard Schwartz practices. We no longer need to posit a True Self against a single “False Self,” with all the negative baggage coming with the word “False” and any artificial binary approach. Rather we can see our various interior parts as what we have not in ourselves yet fully recognized, embraced, dialogued with, brought in from lonely exile, reassured of our love, listened to again and again, unburdened, befriended, healed, and invited to be Self-guided. This process introduces us to the ongoing unfolding nature of Divinity or Love in ourselves, in others, in Nature, and in what we experience as time. Philosopher Ilia Delio explores this Reality/reality and calls It/it the “Not-Yet God.” This “not-yet” Divinity takes us back to Dionsyius’s loving “Whatever-It-Is-Becoming” Reality.
Whatever a person’s choice, faith, wisdom tradition, or other kind path, perennial wisdom lives on in diverse forms, and when we listen, we discover what we can best hear given our experiences, and at this time what most honors our own life and journey, helping us best live the questions. As Rilke reminds.
Experiencing that Ultimate Reality is Kindness is more important to me than what to call It. I suffer from severe anxiety, and Kindness is more significant to my well-being than words can say. When I become anxious filling in more forms and spending infinite hours calling Anthem’s Accolade and Delta Dental lines, talking with other human beings who are trying to help me find ways I can access the labyrinth of ever more expensive healthcare and dental insurance, even as I am painfully aware of present and former students, friends, family, and millions of others in the U.S. who unfairly do not have the basic human rights of healthcare or dental insurance, and as I hold all that in tension with my gratitude for having insurance at all, I find myself in my anxiety returning to fellow seekers like Georgia O’Keeffe and Julian of Norwich for nourishment to keep looking.
I eat their words. I steep in them. I write them in permanent black ink on cards and carry them with me or put them on my desk for daily seeing and reseeing.
They remind me that repetition is my friend. Just as my wounded mind-heart-soul-body-self can repeat fearful stressful thoughts loop after loop, I can steep my thought-loops in O’Keefe’s and Julian’s well-earned truths about seeing and reading deeply and attentively, returning to What-Is/what-is:
“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.” ~Georgia O’Keeffe
And
“God is nearer to us than our own soul.” ~Julian of Norwich
Sometimes I carry Julian around with me on a 4”x6” card, so I can hear her saying in the original: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule,” “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh,” “God is closer to us than our own soul.”
To be human is to be forgetful. Keys, papers, files, someone’s name, a car somewhere in large parking lot. Sometimes we forget this forgetfulness. To forget our forgetfulness is to become somehow less human. When we forget that we forget, we may skim the surface of our lives for hours, days, months, years, and even decades.
I’m grateful for those who remind us not to forget the simplest things—like looking two or three times or more at a flower. How remarkable a flower becomes even if we only give it a seconds-long second glance.
We also forget looking isn’t time-consuming. We’re likely to put off attentiveness, as if it will cramp our style, keep us from making our way down our to-do list. But as we are reminded by the Anonymous monk who wrote the many brief letters of Cloud of Unknowing to a 24-year-old woman spiritual directee/companion, contemplation takes no time at all.
Contrary to what we may think, contemplation is as quick as an atom, the Cloud’s Anonymous says. The same is true of a painter’s countless glances at an iris, a lover’s many glimpses of the beloved. There are never too many looks. Who says to their lover, I’d look at your beauty and exquisite youness more, but truly I just don’t have the time. Instead we can’t get enough. You just don’t grow weary of looking and re-looking, each time seeing something new.
That’s why respect and love seem synonyms. Both root in the act of reseeing. Respect linguistically sprouts from reseeing. Its spect is in the spect-acles through which we “see,” and re– simply means “again.” Re-spect is we see again and again.
It reminds me of translating. You look again and again at a word and at a passage you love, and you return to it again and again. You revise—you re-vision—you re-see it all, until you see it, truly see it. Then you look again. By looking you are loving through seeing. Another reason we do this is that the world and all creatures in it are becoming, changing, and need re-seeing to see what newness is there.
As Benedict says, “Always we begin again.” To paraphrase, “Always we see again.”
We forget to see. We forget to look. We forget to recognize Love is closer to us than our own soul. We forget Love is all we are and all there is and Love is before all that too. We love those who remind us of these simple human truths.
Looking up close at Julian’s work, going beyond her fame, we see Julian is not too well-known for saying: “God is nearer/closer to us than our own soul.” I hope this little blog might contribute to changing that, bringing it forward in our collective consciousness.
I hope we see within it Julian’s wrestling with larger themes. My favorite translator of Julian is the award-winning author, teacher, and translator Mirabai Starr, whose Revelations presents this truth beautifully as “God is closer to us than our own soul.”
Most readers who find Julian are attracted to this Christian mystic’s more well-known “All will be well” quote or one of its many variations. If we read through again and again, steeping in Mirabai Starr’s alive and accessible translation, looking for every time Julian’s “All will be well” wisdom comes, we see it resonates again and again with her lesser-known quote: “God is closer to us than our own soul.”
Returning again, reseeing Mirabai Starr’s translation of Julian’s Revelations, we first look at two passages with “God is closer to us than our own soul” as grounding:
- God is closer to us than our own soul. He is the foundation on which our soul stands. He is the energy that keeps the essence and the sensuality together so that they will never separate. In true rest our soul sits in God. In unshakable strength our soul abides in God. In endless love our soul is naturally rooted to God. And so if we yearn to know our soul, to have oneing and dialogue with it, we would be wise to seek our beloved God, in whom our soul is contained. Our essence can be rightly called our soul. Our sensuality, too, can be rightly called our soul. This is because they are one in God. Our sensuality is the glorious dwelling place in which our beloved Jesus is enclosed, and our natural essence is enclosed within him, while the blessed soul of Christ rests inside the Godhead. I clearly saw that it is necessary for us to experience longing and contrition until we have been led so deeply into God that we truly and completely know ourselves. I also saw that it is our Beloved himself who leads us into this depth, through the same love by which he created us and redeemed us, in mercy and grace. Still, we cannot come to a complete understanding of God unless we come to truly know ourselves. . . .
- It is also true that [Love] is closer to us than the heart can think and the tongue can tell.
These observations made by Julian are foundational for her most famous saying, “All will be well.” They remind us God is our “energy” and “essence” and human “sensuality” and “rest” and “unshakable strength” and “soul.” They evoke our soul’s true etymology with its roots in divine Love. Our part is to “seek our beloved God” and “truly know ourselves.”
If then we compare these truths with the passages where some variation of “All will be well” appears in Mirabai Starr’s translation, rereading, reseeing, and steeping in them, we see Julian’s famous “All will be well” not as the platitude we’ve accidentally made it out to be, but as a well-wrestled-to-and-experienced truth for the anchoress. I have carried these words around on cards, too, or had them nearby during my work day.
Mirabai focuses us on Julian’s experience by using Julian’s most famous words as title for her translation’s Part II: “Every Kind of Thing Shall Be Well,” as Chapter 27’s title: “All Will Be Well,” and as Chapter 31’s title: “I Have the Power to Make All Things Well.”
Here are a few passages below from the text itself, translated by Mirabai Starr. They show “All will be well” not as a static axiom from the anchoress but as an experiential truth for Julian, emerging from her ongoing, ever-evolving, full-of-questions dialogue, part of her practice, of her returning to Love in gratitude and in suffering, in “well and woe.”
We love Julian’s Revelations in part because she models engaging Presence by living the questions.
- “Oh, good Lord, how can all be well? The transgressions of your creatures have caused such harm!”
- There was not a single question or doubt I raised for which our good Lord did not have a reassuring response. “I have the power to make all things well,” he said, “I know how to make all things well, and I wish to make all things well.” Then he said, “I shall make all things well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.”
- Once our Beloved said, “Every kind of thing shall be well,” and on another occasion he said, “You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.” My soul recognized a number of teachings contained in these phrases. . . . When he says, “You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well,” he is referring to this level of care. He wants us to know that he will not forget the least little thing.
- And so I draw deep comfort from these words, “I have the power to make all things well,” and I know that our Beloved has many great blessings in store for us.
- It is enough to know that our Beloved intends to bestow a great blessing on us, which he has kept hidden and treasured in his holy breast since before time began. This is the deed, known only to him, that will make all things well. Just as the blessed Trinity created all things from nothing, so the blessed Trinity will make all things well that are not well.
- And so how could it be that every kind of thing shall be well? In light of this teaching, it seems impossible! The only answer I could find in any of my showings was when our Beloved said, “What is impossible for you is not impossible for me. I will keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well.”
- For when I saw in a showing that God does all that needs to be done, I did not see any sin, and I saw that all is well. And then when God did reveal something to me about sin, he reassured me that “All will be well.”
- But then an answer came into my mind, as if offered by a friendly intermediary: “Accept this in a general way, and contemplate the grace of our Beloved as he reveals it to you,” the voice said. “For it is a far greater honor to God for you to glorify him in everything, everywhere and always, than in any one special thing.” I agreed. I realized that if I were to act wisely and follow this teaching, maybe nothing in itself would make me particularly happy, but I would also not become especially anxious or distraught about anything in particular, either. For “All will be well.” To behold God in all things is to live in complete joy.
- During our lives here on earth, we experience a wondrous mixture of well and woe. We hold inside us both the glory of the Risen Christ and the misery of the Fallen Adam. Christ protects us in our dying and, through his gracious touch, uplifts us and reassures us that all will be well.
- Yet often when our falling and our misery are revealed to us, we become overwhelmed by shame, and all we want to do is run away and hide. Our courteous Mother does not want us to flee. Nothing would distress her more. She wants us to behave as a child would when he is upset or afraid: rush with all our might into the arms of the Mother.
- I saw that there is no greater stature in this life than that of a child, who is naturally humble and free from the encumbrances of power and intelligence, until our Divine Mother brings us up to the bliss of our Divine Father. This is what Christ meant when he uttered these sweet words: All will be well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well. The bliss of our Motherhood in Christ will begin anew in the joy of our Father God, and this new beginning shall be ever renewed, without end. And so I saw that all her beloved children whom she birthed by nature return to her by grace.
- He did not say, you will not be tempted; you will not be troubled; you will not be distressed. What he said was, “You shall not be overcome.” God wants us to pay attention to these words and be strong in absolute trust, in both well and woe. Just as he loves and delights in us, it is his will that we love and delight in him, and fully trust in him, and all will be well.
- The more clearly the soul sees his blessed face by the grace of loving, the more it longs to see him in his totality. It is true that our Beloved dwells within us and is here with us, calling to us and enfolding us in his tender love and will never, ever leave us. It is also true that he is closer to us than the heart can think and the tongue can tell. There will be no lack of well-being there.
- This blessed friend is Christ. We need to bind ourselves to his will and guidance, and join ourselves ever more intimately with him, no matter what state we are in. For whether we are clean or unclean, we are always the same in his love. In well or in woe, he wants us to never run away from him.
- Then none of us will be moved in any way to say, Lord, if only things had been different, all would have been well. Instead, we shall all proclaim in one voice, Beloved One, may you be blessed, because it is so: all is well. We see now that everything happened in accordance with your divine will, ordained before the beginning of time.
- Throughout the time of my showings, I wished to know what our Beloved meant. More than fifteen years later, the answer came in a spiritual vision. This is what I heard. “Would you like to know our Lord’s meaning in all this? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same. You will never know anything but love, without end.” And so what I saw most clearly was that love is his meaning. God wants us to know that he loved us before he even made us, and this love has never diminished and never will. All his actions unfold from this love, and through this love he makes everything that happens of value to us, and in this love we find everlasting life. Our creation has a starting point, but the love in which he made us has no beginning, and this love is our true source. Thanks be to God!
To read these examples yourself of “All will be well,” discover them in Mirabai Starr’s stellar translation Julian of Norwich: The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love (Hampton Roads Publishing/Bookshop.org).
Repetition is our friend. We read again that Julian says, “God is closer to us than our own soul.” “God is nerer to us than our owen soule.” “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh.” “God is nearer to us than our own soul.”
I invite you to join me in steeping in these passages from Mirabai’s translation of Julian and in “God is closer to us than our own soul,” reading one or more again, slowly, perhaps alongside O’Keefe’s “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”
We were perhaps taught that reading fast and faster is best, but it’s simply not true for most of us. We are meant to read, we humans, as ruminants, reiteratively, recursively, again and again, digesting words. The deep repetition of unrushed reading is our friend.
Returning to words that can heal us reminds us of our essential humanity as we recognize and experience the truth of Love as the essence of our aliveness and rest.
Peace.