Dear Hazelnuts,
How is your experience of reading Julian so far? I hope and pray that you are seeing God’s love for you and for all things in a new way, with new clarity and depth.
At the last meeting we talked about part of Julian’s first vision, in which she sees all that has been created as a hazelnut in God’s hand. It is a vision of the transcendence of God. God is so huge that all of creation is a small thing in his hand. God created it, and he loves it, and he preserves it.
Hopefully you are reading chapters 1 to 14 of the book. In our next meeting, this Sunday morning, we’ll concentrate on the third revelation (chapter 11), in which Julian sees God in a point, and she perceives that God does everything that is done. And she is shocked. Our translation says that she “marveled at the sight with quiet awe” [Middle English: “reverent dread”], and she thought, “what is sin?”
I asked ChatGPT to come up with an illustration of this vision of God in a point. Here’s what it came up with:
Last time we also talked about Julian’s prayer to suffer with Christ. What does this third revelation have to do with suffering, if anything? Is there any connection between it and a meditation on suffering such as this one, by Angela of Foligno in Instruction VIII for her spiritual children, written a little before Julian’s book?
O my son, I desire with all my heart that you become a lover and disciple of suffering. I also desire with all that I am that you be deprived of every temporal and spiritual consolation. For such is the source of my consolation, and I ask you that it be yours. I do not intend to serve and love for any reward, but I intend to serve and to love because of the incomprehensible goodness of God. I desire that you grow anew and be reborn in this desire so that you are deprived of all consolation for the love of the God and man Jesus Christ who was likewise deprived. I am not sending you any other greeting than this one, namely, that you always grow in divine union, and that you always be in a state of tribulation, hunger, and thirst, for as long as you live.
(That’s quite a “greeting”!)
Image by ChatGPT 4o. Angela quote from Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, tr. Paul Lachance.
