The Greening (9 page)

The Julian Centre was a small space crammed with packed bookshelves. In a corner, a table and chairs had been provided for visitors. I received a warm smile and an offer of help from the administrator, along with tea and biscuits. I was surprised to see how much had been written about Julian. There were several hundred books, as well as historical documents and doctoral theses.

I felt the familiar sensation of curiosity and excitement that precedes a period of research into an historical character, with
the promise of being led through unexpected twists and turns on a journey of adventure and discovery. It’s always thrilling to track the elusive fragments of a personality that has touched and changed people or a place.

What secrets lay hidden, awaiting discovery? Who was Julian? Would I meet her and know her today? I indulged in the pleasure of surrounding myself with books, documents and papers. I anticipated sifting through them all for glints of gold: a seemingly insignificant fact, a line from a poem, a reported conversation – a detail that catches the imagination, an insight that reveals a truth, a scrap of information that captures the essence of a person. I believe the essence of each of us is in everything we say and do, but it takes practised perceptiveness, perhaps a kind of clairvoyance even, to see and to interpret. The great playwrights reveal the character’s DNA in every line. How closely they must observe and how well they must understand. I long to do the same.

These clues, these hints of the individual’s essence, are scattered, it seems, throughout our lives, but sometimes they are shy of the sunlight, like primroses sheltering in cool, dark undergrowth, waiting, in secret, to be discovered – an image from my childhood. As a child, I loved to go alone to the little park near my home. I loved the pale transparent yellows of the spring’s first primroses, the soft fragility that declined to show its perfection because it bruised so easily in a thoughtless, hurrying world. I would lift aside gently the heavy, fringed leaves and steal my secret moments with the delicate little flowers; then carefully allow the leaves to fall back into place, feeling glad that the primroses were safe, where no one could hurt them, because no one knew they were there.

And as I remember, it makes me feel so sad. To even say that you cannot bear the light and the noise is to draw attention to yourself and to lose your place in the comforting shadows. By being anything more than motionless you attract life to you, and then you must deal with the pain it inevitably brings.

The pain is a constricting band around the throat, a tightness in the jaw, a dull aching in the ears – and tears are the only release. But the tears bring pain of their own and the memory of another pain that overwhelms and lays me low in fields of sorrow… Where is he, the friend who can lead me to the still waters? Where was he then? If I only knew the way I would go there quickly now.

Pain, exposure, vulnerability, release… I seek a connection but do not know why.

Yellow flowers. Why do I associate yellow flowers with Julian? Yellow is the colour of spring, birth, new life, new beginnings, the colour of hope. I selected and gathered together a heap of books and papers, including a copy of Julian’s own book, and settled down to read.

As I read, a picture of Julian’s world began to emerge. Julian was born into an age of turbulence and fear. Edward III was King and England was at war with France. Norwich was a prosperous, bustling city, England’s second largest, with a population of six thousand. Its strategic position on the east coast had brought it wealth and status, through trade with the Continent.

How did Julian come to have her visions? What in her life led up to that moment? What made her seek the solitary life of an anchoress? I want to know Julian’s character and personality as closely as I can. But there seems to be virtually no personal information about her.

Apart from her book, the only primary sources of information are a third-party account of a conversation with her and wills in which she was made bequests. Even her real name is not known. She took her name, as was customary, from the church where she was anchoress. These are meagre scraps. Can I learn enough to make her the central character of a play?

Some experts suggest she may have been a member of the well-to-do Erpingham family, whose head, Sir Thomas, fought at Agincourt. Some think she may have been married and lost a child to the plague.

As a young girl she asked God for three things. The first was to have the experience of witnessing the crucifixion, so as to be touched by it in the way God intended. She also asked for a serious illness that would heighten her spirituality. The third request was for “three wounds” – of “true contrition”, “natural compassion” and “wish-filled yearning”.

What could she have meant by the three wounds? Might the wound of natural compassion be some deeply hurtful experience that would teach her to empathize and feel for others who endured similar suffering? Julian says she forgot about the first and second requests but that the third, for the three wounds, was always on her mind.

Her requests seemed strange and even suggestive of instability, but apparently they were not unusual for a devout young woman of her time. They were the starting point of her journey, so I needed to try to understand their meaning and relevance.

As I made my way through the papers and books about Julian and extracts from her own work, my suspicions about instability melted away. There emerged a down-to-earth personality who would have had no time for self-indulgent fantasies. What happened to Julian was real and profound.

In a world of privation and suffering, a young woman received a message so important that it has been preserved for six hundred years, a message that is believed to have great relevance for us today. What might have been working within her, during those difficult and dangerous times, to prepare her for what lay ahead?

When Julian was thirty, her forgotten second request was granted. She became severely ill. She endured three days and nights of excruciating pain. Her mother and the others at her bedside believed she was at the point of death, and on the fourth night she received the last rites. But she clung to life for two further days and nights, coming close to death several times during the third night.

Then, on the morning of the 8 May 1373, she says, “I had no feeling from the waist downwards. I was helped to sit upright, to be better prepared for death. My curate was sent for; by the time he arrived I had lost the power of speech. The curate placed the cross in front of my face, to comfort me. As I looked at it, my sight began to fail and the room grew dark – but the cross alone remained lit, as though by natural light. Then I felt as if the upper part of my body was beginning to die; I became short of breath and felt my life ebbing away, and thought that death was imminent.

“Suddenly, all the pain was taken from me and I was completely well, especially in the upper part of my body. Then I remembered my request to be filled with the memory and feeling of Christ’s passion…” There followed a series of visions of Jesus suffering and dying on the cross. Julian says, “I saw everything as if I were there. I suddenly saw the red blood trickling down from under the crown of thorns, hot, freshly, plentifully and vividly.” Julian says she saw Our Lady, as a simple, humble young girl, little more than a child, as she was when Jesus was conceived.

Two years later, Julian was walled up in her cell, where she remained for more than forty years. Nobody knows if she was already enclosed when she had the visions, but experts believe she must have been out in the world because her parish priest and her mother were at her bedside during her illness.

If so, it would have been natural for her to join an enclosed order – but why choose the solitary life of an anchoress? Was it merely to reflect upon the meaning of the visions, or was there a more urgent reason? Julian’s message of a God who is never angry with us, who has never accused us and does not want us to feel guilty – indeed, our self-recrimination is painful to him – would have been seriously at odds with the teachings of the Church.

Did the revolutionary nature of the divine message impel Julian to seek a place of refuge, where she could pursue, unrestricted, a faithful interpretation of the mystery that had been revealed to her?

I need to know the detail of her life, how she lived from day to day. Julian’s cell was a few hundred yards from the main road that linked the centre of Norwich with nearby Conisford, where trading vessels docked at a bend in the River Wensum. Carts loaded with goods and provisions rumbled by, drunks and prostitutes passed under her window. How did she manage to meditate, contemplate and write?

She would have lived according to the dictates of the Anchoresses’ Rule, which sets out a strict routine, including saying specific prayers at set hours. I mined the shelves and found a modern translation of the Rule.

It told me that Julian would have had three windows in her cell. One, covered by a curtain, looked out onto the world. Another, also covered by a cloth, gave onto an adjoining room, where a servant cooked for her. A third window gave her a view of the altar and allowed her to join in prayers and take communion. A wood-burning stove would have kept the cell cosy, and she was permitted to keep a cat – “but no other beast”.

Was Julian an educated woman? She has the common touch, using simple domestic similes; she said the drops of blood falling from Jesus’ brow were like raindrops falling from the eaves of a house, and that they spread like the scales of a herring. She describes herself as “unlettered” at the time of receiving her visions, but this could merely have meant that she did not read and write Latin, which was still being used for theological works. Chaucer, two years her senior, referred to himself in the same way.

There is speculation that she was educated at Carrow Priory, a Benedictine convent close to St Julian’s Church, and even that she was a member of their order. But as an anchoress she could just as easily have lived independently of a religious order. That, I imagine, would have been her desire.

Julian wrote a short version of her book, comprising twenty-five chapters. Then, for a further twenty years, she
prayed and pondered the meaning of the visions before writing the longer text, of eighty-six chapters.

During those early years, while she worked on the short text, she would have looked out onto a world of appalling suffering and social unrest. Henry Despencer, the Bishop of Norwich, was a merciless ruler. When the people’s frustration and anger exploded in the Peasants’ Revolt, he set an example to other regional authorities by suppressing the insurgency with armed force. He restored order in Cambridge and Norwich, gave the ringleaders absolution, in his capacity as priest, and then had them hanged. When sheriffs were granted powers to arrest and imprison heretics, in Julian’s fifty-ninth year, he was among the first in England to raise the charge.

Throughout the years of civil unrest after Henry IV deposed his cousin, Richard II, Julian remained in her cell. As the new King fought the Welsh, the Scots and, inevitably, the French, Julian was working on the second, longer version of her book.

Julian would have seen the smoke and smelt the burning flesh of heretics, who were put to death at the stake in a pit at Mousehold Heath, on the outskirts of the city. She knew that her book would be considered heretical; and yet, there she was, in the heart of Despencer country, writing her revolutionary theology.

It may be that some people did have access to Julian’s work in her time, but if so they would have been a trusted few. Is there a power we do not comprehend in the unseen written word?

Julian outlived her powerful contemporaries – the two Henrys and Despencer. The last recorded mention of her is in a will dated 1416, when she would have been seventy-three. Details from another will suggest that she may still have been alive at the great age, for those days, of seventy-eight.

I have unearthed the bare bones of Julian’s life. I have more questions than when I began. But a picture is forming of a fascinating woman – a highly intelligent, perceptive, loving, brave, practical woman – who belonged to and yet stood apart
from the age in which she lived; timelessly hovering over the centuries, fresh and vivid, she seems so alive.

I am getting a sense of someone who was clever enough to hide her cleverness. Like Mary, spirited away to Egypt after the birth of Jesus, she was somehow protected from the insecurities of powerful men.

Julian quietly survived an age when all dissent, religious or political, was crushed. In a disintegrating world, she articulated her best-known words: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

One fact is clear: Julian’s deepest concern was for ordinary people, her “even-Christens”. In Julian’s England, most people would have claimed to be Christian, so I suppose her dedication to interpreting and communicating the divine message was for the benefit of ordinary people, people like me.

Why has her book suddenly emerged in the past few years, with a proliferation of new editions? Was her message preserved through the centuries to come to light in our day? Are those of us who are alive today the ones for whom the message is especially intended? Has Julian been waiting quietly all this time for humanity to reach a place where we are at last ready to receive and understand its meaning? Into my mind comes a familiar image of a battered copy of a book being read by a prisoner in some forgotten gulag. For some reason it moves me to tears. Bringing messages from places that are difficult to reach to places that are hard to find… this was Julian’s mission. No medieval knight could have embarked upon a more urgent or holier quest.

The afternoon was almost over. The brilliant sun captured me briefly in its dazzling light as it hung above the horizon in its final fleeting moments.