Words of Light and Hope from Tony Foottit
Words of Light and Hope from Tony Foottit. Hazel – Mother Julian (8th May).
On 8th May in the year 1373 a young lady in Norwich had 16 visions. She had been taken seriously ill but recovered from her illness. We don’t know her original name but she became known as Mother Julian. She lived in times not so very different from our own, full of violence and dislocation. The Black Death was rampant in her childhood years. After her visions she felt God was calling her to be an anchoress. Anchorites and anchoresses were quite common in those days. They lived alone in a cell or room attached to a church. So Mother Julian began to live a solitary life as an anchoress. For over twenty years she meditated on those visions in her cell in St. Julian’s in Norwich. Then she wrote down the fruit of her thoughts in simple vigorous English. She has been called the first English woman of letters. She loved the natural world which she called the goodly land. She imagined God saying to her, Here, Julian, here in the palm of your hand is a hazelnut, a small thing, and round like a ball. It is all that is made; it is made by love. So for Julian the world was a unity, created by and secure in the love of God…… Sometimes people regard contemplation, the highest kind of prayer, as only for spiritual giants. But Mother Julian realised that it is perfectly possible for the simplest of souls, or even that it might be easier for them, to experience God. A good place to begin is with some natural object – a flower or a sunset, or indeed a hazelnut in the palm of your hand. Mother Julian realised that in the end, especially when life is hard and God seems absent, as she once so simply and yet profoundly said, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. She believed that everything will be made perfect in Christ…… From A Calendar if Wild Flowers (part).
Thanks be to God for Mother Julian. Amen.
