Meditation Thirty-nine: Evolutionary Motherhood and Compassion through Julian of Norwich (5/11/2020)
Pastor's Letter
Meditation Thirty-nine: Evolutionary Motherhood and Compassion through Julian of Norwich (5/11/2020)
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Dear Friends,
We pray you are safe and well. In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that in God’s economy of abundance, when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
Today’s meditation is a meditation on the possible evolution of compassion—possible if we make it happen. It comes to us through the thinking of Julian of Norwich as distilled and further developed and integrated by Matthew Fox in his daily meditation blog. May it nourish your contemplative-active hearts!
We hope and pray that you and your loved ones experience genuine peace of mind and heart, and remain in good health during this challenging time.
May the Easter Season be a time of peace, of healing and hope, of the resurrection of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron & Jean
Meditation Thirty-Nine: Julian of Norwich and Evolutionary Motherhood
Recently we have been meditating on Julian’s extended teachings on the Motherhood of God, God as Mother (and not just Father). What are the fuller meanings for our times on this emphasis so deeply developed by Julian during her own times of a pandemic?Julian, in emphasizing the motherhood of God (and calling the Trinity “Mother” and also Jesus “Mother”), is bringing back gender balance to self and culture.
She is calling for a Yin/Yang energy, a Feminine/sacred masculine energy, to balance self and culture. Culturally speaking, would it be a revolution to bring feminine values into the very structures of what we call education, politics, economics, art, and religion?
Julian is inviting the mammal brain to stand up and be counted and to resist an exclusively dominant reptilian brain (“I win, you lose"). Wouldn’t the return of the mammal brain of compassion and kinship constitute a revolution? She is calling us to a still untried future that could take root after the current COVID-19 crisis moves on.
When we finally face the foundational ideology that denies climate change and derives from a deep animus against mother earth, we can, with her guidance, move beyond the patriarchal pessimism and control addictions that were truly flourishing in her century as a misbegotten response to the Black Death plague. Then authoritarianism took precedence over community and despair reigned. It all echoes what Adrienne Rich observed, a “fatalistic self-hatred” accompanies patriarchy wherever it goes.
Julian is calling us to that great evolutionary leap called…Compassion. Not unlike the call of the Dali Lama: “we can do away with all religion but not with compassion. Compassion is my religion." Or Meister Eckhart: “The soul is where God is working compassion.” Or Jesus: “Be you compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate.” But “compassion means justice” as Eckhart and the prophets of Israel taught. And Julian recognizes that also: “God is Justice. God creates Justice in all who will be liberated through goodness. God wants to be known and loved through Justice and Compassion now and forever.”*
Julian calls us beyond mere knowledge to Wisdom. Now wouldn’t that be a revolution in education were we to follow her lead? For hundreds of years, during the modern era, education has been in pursuit of knowledge and not wisdom. Indeed, wisdom was shelved precisely because wisdom is feminine and patriarchy had no place for it and because wisdom is cosmic, not human centered. Education as a pursuit of wisdom was “pre-modern” and not modern. In the Bible wisdom is feminine and in most languages and cultures around the world. But the modern world banished her. Not so, Julian and the pre-modern consciousness.
By calling us to wisdom (as well as knowledge) Julian and Mother’s Day are calling us to a revolution in consciousness, a life of caring and interdependence. Does all this begin to name the next leap in our evolutionary journey?
