On Life and a Little Julian

I HAVE WRITTEN two posts in the last week, but decided at the last minute not to post either for a variety of reasons. The first was kind of a meditation on The Fourth of July, the interplay between Religion and politics, and that Independence Day is a Feast Day in the Prayerbook. The second was a re-telling of an expierence I had on Sunday while filling in for our Organist and the (what a friend of mine calls) performance amnesia that really was a special working of grace the more I think about it. They just didn't feel right: one because I said nothing and the second because it was perhaps too personal. I'm not comparing you, my most gracious readers, to swine but sometimes you just want to clutch those pearls and keep them close to your heart. However, I'm willing to post them if anyone is interested.

WORK STARTS NEXT Wednesday. The more I meditated on it, I decided to turn down the Telemarketing job. Something about the part-time position just feels right in my gut (and the other did not). They've already increased my hours by giving me another shift -- and I haven't even worked a day for them. I've followed this gut feeling for most of my life and it hasn't steered me wrong yet. I'd like to think its just discernment and the Holy Spirit. But, of course, you're welcome to call that feeling whatever you want.

MORE THAN ANYTHING, I'll be glad to have some structure back in my life. I write better and I operate better when my day is planned out with purpose. I'm enough of an extrovert to be mostly without self-discipline (with some lovely major exceptions). Discipline only come when it fits in the framework of outside forces and my response to those. I would make a terrible desert monk. 

I HAVE FINISHED re-reading Julian of Norwich and feel like I have truly read her for the first time. One thing that surprised me is how much her concept of sin lines up with CS Lewis' in The Great Divorce. Theirs is a lovely nuanced position that is different than the concept of sin I grew up with in an Evangelical setting. (Specifically, I'm thinking about that little image in The Four Spiritual Laws tract that teaches you how to get right with God and such.) But it is this lovely little nuance that means the difference between Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" with its analogy of a spider dangling above the flames and Julian's image of the entire universe sustained by love like something the size of a Hazelnut in the hand. It is beautiful and life-changing. I can't take credit for this, for it was all spurned upon me by my Confessor. And I am thankful for that.

HOW ABOUT A little quote from the Saint herself? Here is what she writes is the entire point of her visions, revelations and understandings:

"Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing?
Know it well: love was his meaning.
Who showed it to you? Love.
What did he show you? Love.
Wherefore did he show it you? For Love.
Hold yourself therein and you shall know and learn more in the same;
but you will never know nor learn another thing therein without end."

And here is a fantastic little video from the Episcopal Cafe that summarizes her major theological points. I do hope you'll watch it.