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Thursday, April 8th, 2021

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Fourteen: All Will Be Well

A Wisdom for Our Time

I believe it is a loss to our Christian heritage that Julian’s mystical teachings have not received more widespread hearing. Matthew Fox points out that she was in many ways ahead of her time. Her voice and writings were sidelined by a patriarchal church and culture unable to hear her nondual message of “oneing” and her celebration of embodiment as an extension of the Incarnation itself. Perhaps we are finally ready to hear Julian’s wisdom today. Matthew Fox writes:

We learn about ourselves, our history and society by asking questions that expose the shadows in which we still live. To me it is obvious why [Julian’s] work was ignored, and in naming the obvious we name the shadows we have inherited from our ancestors.

First, she was ignored because she was a woman. . . . Julian found her voice—and wrote the first book in English by a woman. She speaks out about womanhood and about mothering and about the Divine Mother. She insists on the feminine side of God as imbuing not only God the Creator, but God the Liberator, and God the Spirit. . . .

She bakes into her entire book the constant theme of nondualism and of “oneing.” Sensuality and substance are one thing. . . . She talks of the “glorious mingling” of body and soul, matter and spirit. She insists on the marriage of nature and God, on panentheism [God in all things and all things in God] as the very meaning of faith, and on the marriage of God and the human (for we, too, are part of nature): “between God and the human there is no between.”. . .

We were not ready for her. We were too engrossed with the masculine projects of empire building and “discovery” doctrines of raiding and destroying indigenous cultures of “mother love”; we were too busy chasing knowledge, at the expense of wisdom, for the power it brings to buttress our empires through science and technology, too preoccupied with creating capitalist behemoths that demanded we extract whatever goods we could from Mother Earth without asking any questions about paying Mother Earth—or future generations—back. . . . Julian’s feminism did not fit the patriarchal agenda at hand . . . and she stands up to patriarchy (including the institutional church) in many instances. But subtly so—as a lover, not as a prosecutor.

The second principal reason Julian has been ignored for so many centuries, and why we were not ready for her, is that she is so thoroughly creation-centered in her theology that people did not understand her insistence that “God is in nature,” that nature and grace are one, and that goodness is everywhere but “first of all in nature.” When the agenda is to exploit nature for all the profits it can deliver, who wants to hear about the sacredness of nature?

Matthew Fox, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic—and Beyond (iUniverse: 2020), 110–111.

Image credit: Belinda Rain, Nevada — South Lake Tahoe, California (detail), 1972 photograph, public domain, National Archives.

Image inspiration: A butterfly alights on a flower after rain—a hopeful parallel to the delicate, sometimes hesitant, unfolding of the human soul after storms of life.

Prayer For Our Community

Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen.
Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.

Story From Our Community

As a queer person, finding love is fraught with danger, uncertainty, and risk. Reading these meditations, though, I realized that I can put my energy into fostering love with God. The idea that I can find this love with God first and foremost is terrifying, as I know it will call on me to let go of what I think I need and want in this world. However, I also believe God will show me deeper riches than I ever could have imagined. I, like Julian, might just encounter divine love if I make myself vulnerable to it.
—Jimmy H.
Share your own story with us.

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News from the CAC

Join CAC Faculty for Spiritual Directors International Online Conference

Often a sacred companion, like a spiritual director, can guide our journey, reflecting back to us God’s presence in our lives and the world. CAC often partners with Spiritual Directors International (SDI), a global learning community connecting seekers with spiritual directors. We invite you to learn more about spiritual companionship and SDI, and also discover contemplative and practical wisdom from teachers like Richard Rohr, Barbara Holmes, Mirabai Starr, Sr. Joan Chittister, Roshi Joan Halifax, and more at their Renaissance 2021 online conference, held April 21-25, 2021.

Read Messages of Hope in The Call to Unite

“Our best response is to end our fight with reality, stop pushing it away. We benefit from anything that approaches a welcoming prayer—but before we can get there, we have to offer reality a deep “Yes.’” Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren and Barbara Holmes join diverse teachers such as Mirabai Starr, TD Jakes, Eckhart Tolle, Oprah, Jacqui Lewis, and Byron Katie, in the new book The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening. Based on the 2020 virtual event, this book offers solace, guidance, and a hopeful vision of a new unified future.

Explore Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations archive at cac.org.

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