A Song of Our True Nature (Canticle S)

Christ revealed our frailty and our falling, * 

    our trespasses and our humiliations.
Christ also revealed his blessed power, *
    his blessed wisdom and love.
He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly 

when we are in greatest need; *
    he raises us in spirit
    and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.
God is the ground and the substance, 

the very essence of nature; *
    God is the true father and mother of natures.
We are all bound to God by nature, *
    and we are all bound to God by grace.
And this grace is for all the world, *
    because it is our precious mother, Christ.
For this fair nature was prepared by Christ
for the honor and nobility of all, *
    and for the joy and bliss of salvation.

--Dame Julian of Norwich (1343-ca 1416), English mystic, visionary, and anchorite

Canticle: A Song of Our True Nature

Christ revealed our frailty and our falling,
our trespasses and our humiliations.
Christ also revealed his blessed power,
his blessed wisdom and love.
He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly when we are in greatest need; 
he raises us in spirit
and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.
God is the ground and the substance, the very essence of nature;
God is the true father and mother of natures.
We are all bound to God by nature,
and we are all bound to God by grace.
And this grace is for all the world,
because it is our precious mother, Christ.
For this fair nature was prepared by Christ for the honor and nobility of all,
and for the joy and bliss of salvation.

-- Dame Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), English anchoress, mystic, and spiritual writer

Prayer in honor of Dame Julian of Norwich

Holy One, your love makes all things new:
creation lifts its voice in praise,
and we rise to give you thanks: alleluia!
In tenderness and sweetness You have created us, O God:
may we live gladly this day to bring You honor.

O God, let us know well your meaning, your perfect wisdom incarnate,
that Christ is love, and we are in Christ.
May we trust in God forever,
assured that we will never be overcome,
though tempests rage about us and travails ensnare us.
For we begin and end in the love in which You bore us, Lord Christ:
as our Mother you bear us for joy and life unending.

Holy Spirit, confirm us in love and hope
as we pray for mercy and compassion
to guide us this day,
and grant us peace.

Amen.

--Prayer by Leslie Scoopmire, 2017

On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes –
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack –
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.
But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”

The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies –
sands of the sea, of the desert –
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.


--Denise Levertov (1923-1997), English/American poet, from Oblique Prayers, 1984
Based on Julian's eighth vision.



Photo: Golgotha, from the Passion side of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

Little Gidding: III (on the feast day of Nicholas Ferrar)

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives - unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as an attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude, 
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of not immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed 
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.












--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) from Four Quartets, 1943

Photos: Detail of statue of Dame Julian on the facade of Norwich Cathedral; icon of Dame Julian by Brother Robert Lenz

Little Gidding: V (on the feast day of Nicholas Ferrar)

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river 
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) from Four Quartets, 1943

Photos: from Friends of Little Gidding, Cherry Tree in Springtime, and epitaph marking Dame Julians anchorage site at St. Julian's in Norwich from pinterest

A prayer of Dame Julian of Norwich

In you, Father all-mighty, we have
     our preservation and our bliss.
In you, Christ, we have our restoring and our saving.
You are our mother, brother, and Saviour.
In you, our Lord the Holy Spirit,
     is marvellous and plenteous grace.
You are our clothing; for love you wrap us
     and embrace us.
You are our maker, our lover, our keeper.
Teach us to believe that by your grace
     all shall be well,
     and all shall be well,
     and all manner of thing shall be well.
AMEN.

-- Dame Julian of Norwich (1342-1416)

Be a Gardener- Dame Julian of Norwich

Be a Gardener.
Dig a ditch. Toil and sweat.
And turn the earth upside down.
And seek the deepness.
And water plants in time.
Continue this labor.
And make sweet floods to run,
and noble and abundant fruits to spring.
Take this food and drink,
and carry it to God as your true worship.

--Julian of Norwich, whose feast day is today, ca. 1430

Song of True Motherhood (Canticle R, Enriching Our Worship 1)

God chose to be our mother in all things
and so made the foundation of his work,
most humbly and most pure, in the Virgin's womb.
God, the perfect wisdom of all,
arrayed himself in this humble place.
Christ came in our poor flesh
to share a mother's care.
Our mothers bear us for pain and for death;
our true mother, Jesus bears us for joy and endless life.
Christ carried us within him in love and travail,
until the full time of his passion.
And when all was completed and he had carried us so for joy,
still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love.
All that we owe is redeemed in truly loving God,
for the love of Christ works in us,
Christ is the one whom we love.

-- Dame Julian of Norwich, Shewings, 1395