As I left the cathedral, I picked up a leaflet, perhaps identical to the one Anna had taken on her visit there, which had begun first her journey and then mine. A map on the leaflet showed me the route to St Julian’s Church.
I walked from the cathedral and headed towards King Street. I passed the shabby buildings that Anna had described, and found the little narrow alleyway, St Julian’s Alley, that would lead me through to the church and the little complex that contained the Julian Centre and All Hallows Convent. I passed St Julian’s Church, which I was saving till later. I walked on, and turned left at the top of the alleyway and into the Julian Centre.
The administrator greeted me cheerily. I told her what I was hoping to find. Within a few minutes I had been supplied with a cup of tea and biscuits, followed shortly afterwards by books and documents. I was there for some three hours – and several cups of tea.
I made copious notes and felt I was filling in the gaps in my knowledge – but I was still dissatisfied. Where were the answers to my questions? It seemed as though I were being driven by some part of me that was empty and desired to be filled. I was no longer sure what I was searching for. I only knew that I needed to find it. I bought copies of several of the Julian lectures. I also bought two more books, including a new translation of both the short and long texts. I had done my work and now I could visit the church and Julian’s chapel.
The church was small and unexceptional. It felt to me in no way special. I walked across to the little chapel and entered. The atmosphere was peaceful and calm. There was the table covered by a white cloth, with two candlesticks containing heavy white candles. There was the little window looking out onto the garden. A plaque was set into the wall, commemorating Julian’s sojourn. Before it were some dozen votive candles in red glass containers, their tiny flames flickering. I had been by no means the only pilgrim in search of Julian that day. I lit a candle and placed it with the others.
There, too, was the crucifix. To me, the sense of vulnerability lay more in its simplicity than in Jesus’ expression or the way his head was inclined.
I thought: It is such a simple thing. A young man was put to death by crucifixion two thousand years ago. We still remember it. The symbol of the man on the cross is imbued with such meaning. Did he open wide the gates of heaven? I felt a sense of welcoming quiet, but no ready-made answers to my questions. The chapel was snug and warm, but outside the day was rough and blustery. I imagined, way beyond the church walls, the seascape described by Anna, of wildness, wind and weather.
I was glad to return to the comforting warmth of St Etheldreda’s. Sister Eleanor greeted me and invited me to join her for tea in her studio. I told her about my day and my curiosity about Julian, her fascination for me. My head was buzzing with ideas and impressions. My curiosity had for a while displaced my sadness, and suddenly I wanted answers. Most of all, I wanted an answer about Julian’s loving God who did not condemn me and was never angry.
Sister Eleanor handed me my teacup and said, “Before I met Julian, I used to believe in the wrath of God and the mercy of God. I believed that we repented and then God forgave us. But Julian’s version is that God’s forgiveness is there the whole time and we’ve only got to accept it.”
“Then – why does the Church preach repentance and forgiveness? Why doesn’t it preach Julian’s version?”
“Julian’s message is revolutionary, and most of us don’t much like change, do we? The truth is indeed shocking – God can’t forgive our sins. He can’t forgive us because he has already done so. There’s no doubt about Julian’s meaning. She says no fewer than ten times that God doesn’t blame us for our sins. She says, ‘Between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in his sight.’ It’s we who create an angry God, by projecting onto him the anger that’s in us, which we haven’t allowed God’s compassionate love to quench. But you’re right, this isn’t an acceptable theology to some people and I doubt if it’s often preached in our pulpits.”
“Why is it that the Old Testament focuses so much on God’s anger?”
“Well, I think we have to see it as expressing a relative truth, something that serves us well until we’re ready to move on to something more absolute. Do you remember the hymn about heaven being above the bright blue sky? When I was a child that was enough to be going on with but it wouldn’t satisfy me now. I believe we must hold ourselves open to be taken on in God’s time to the more absolute truth which Julian offers. And by the way, Jesus never said God was angry. When I came to Julian’s truth it was a great liberation for me. It gave me a new vision of God.”
“But theologians have known about Julian. Why has the Church ignored her message?”
“Why indeed? One small voice is easy to ignore. But things are beginning to change. The Church is coming to see that Julian, perhaps more than anyone, has the undistorted image of God. She’s on target. She recognizes that the way we treat one another depends upon our vision of God. If we think of God as angry and judgemental, that’s how we’ll behave towards others.
“Many dictators have been religious men. Their tyranny has been a reflection of what they saw in God. Saul of Tarsus, when he was persecuting the Church, was a deeply religious man acting consistently with his distorted image of God. If we see God as a tyrant, we’ll become tyrants – not, for most of us, on the world scene, but in the family, the church, the school, the hospital, wherever we are.”
I said, “That’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s what’s happening. This awful self-righteous arrogance, this certainty of being right and everyone else being wrong causes so much trouble in the world. It’s what’s put me off religion.”
“And many others. I think it may be much better to be an atheist than to be a religious person with a seriously distorted image of the one we worship. Though, of course, atheists can be tyrants. It’s from seeing ourselves as lovable that all growth begins. And love is a response. If parents love their children, it evokes love from the child. If we can enter into the reality that God loves us, our own love is evoked. Then our relationship with God is not a duty but natural and a joy.”
“This is the part I find very difficult.”
“We all do, Joanna. It’s a hard road that you’ve chosen. The mental concept that God loves us is one thing. The absorption into the heart of the belief that God loves us and is not angry is something else. That’s why we need meditation and prayer – to go within, to reach the state of love, to contact God. In this way, our prayer life develops at the level of the unconscious and we become more loving.
“I’ve found that Julian’s undistorted image of God – all-compassionate and free of anger, whose forgiveness is always coming to meet us – develops characteristics of gentleness, forbearance, patience and understanding. Many people in discovering Julian feel, with me, that they have come home.”
“That’s what I want, so much – to feel I’ve come home. That’s my Holy Grail.”
“And it’s your birthright. Your home is there. Your place awaits you, a place where you will be received as an honoured guest, a place where you are so much loved.”
Tears came into my eyes. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I deserve it…”
“Then Julian would say you dishonour God.” Sister Eleanor placed her hand on my arm in a comforting gesture. “Julian says we’re blind as to the nature of love and in consequence make a mistaken response to God. Our horizons are limited by our poverty in love. We have to break through the barrier by faith, so that we may reach God’s perspective. Then we’ll see guilt and self-blame for what they are, indulgences that enable us to live within our sterile limitations, at the expense of honouring God.”
“But what about God’s justice?”
“In the logic of Julian’s thought, God’s justice has to go. God is unjust – if we measure justice by our ordinary, accepted standards. In Julian we find that justice is swallowed up in mercy.
“The prodigal son’s elder brother, how would y
ou picture him? I see him as a diligent, dutiful, hard-working young man, a fair overseer on the farm, a moral and upright person. And yet he was judged by his failure to respond to his father’s mercy. He couldn’t accept the compassionate, forgiving love of God shown to his brother, so he was excluded from the celebration. With the elder brother, God may not come into it, but with the younger brother God is there when he comes back to the father.
“The labourers in the vineyard – they, too, were judged by their incapacity to respond to the compassion of the owner of the vineyard. Of the two dying thieves at Calvary, one was judged purely on his response to God’s mercy. His companion couldn’t receive the promise of paradise because he was unable to respond to the mercy which was equally available to them both.
“This is how we change the world. Not by opposition, but by mercy and grace. We touch people with our forgiveness, as Jesus did on the cross, so that they open and become able to receive it. It’s only because one is forgiven, because one is loved, that one can begin to change; not the other way round. But we so often fail to take possession of the release God is offering us. We mistake our self-blame for humility and in doing so we deny the generosity of God’s love.”
“So – forgiveness is the key to everything?”
“Forgiveness is an unlocking of the door and a setting free. The primary meaning the Greek word aphesis is letting go. Let me give you an example of Julian’s work in mediating God’s love to people who are burdened by their sins. Several years ago, a blind man visited Julian’s cell. His blindness had been caused by the cruel treatment he had suffered as a wartime prisoner of the Japanese.
“As he knelt in the cell, Julian appeared. She brought with her the Japanese soldier who had caused the man’s suffering. The dead soldier had come to seek the forgiveness of his victim, who was still full of bitterness. The blind man’s companion heard him speak to his visitor in Japanese. During the conversation, the two enemies were at last reconciled. The blind man let go of his resentment and lapsed into an ecstasy of joy.
“He and his friend then went to All Hallows Convent guest house, next door, where they were given tea by one of the Sisters. In her presence, the vision was repeated – though no one else saw Julian or the soldier – and the blind man poured out his heart once more in Japanese. Imagine how he must have felt, to release the burden he had been carrying for so many years. That release and freedom is available to each of us.”
We talked for a while longer. As I was about to leave, Sister Eleanor said, “Wait. I wonder if you would like to borrow this little book? It’s by Robert Llewelyn. I think you would enjoy it.”
Later that evening, seated by the window in my little room, I took up the book. Its title was Love Bade Me Welcome. I opened it and found an inscription written by the author. It said “For Eleanor. It has been a joy meeting you and sharing Julian and a time of silence with you. I hope this book may bring a blessing. Pray for me. With love, Robert.”
I turned to the preface, and read that the book’s subject was the life of prayer. The methods outlined, it said, included a brief examination of a Zen practice. I read “It is a great advance that we live in a time in which openness to what is good in other traditions has been encouraged at the highest level by both the Roman Catholic and the Anglican Church.”
The book’s title was taken from a poem by George Herbert, a poem of deep tenderness and beauty. The reader’s attention is drawn to the surprise twist in the poem’s last few lines. “We are here reminded how our first impulse on accepting Love’s welcome is to look about for some form of service. Yet there follows at once a gentle rebuke. May it not be that Love wants to serve us, and, if so, are we too proud to submit!” Robert writes. “‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
“It is only as our love takes on the nature of God’s own love that we can offer to one another the nourishment which alone can satisfy. And while our love must be mainly expressed in daily living, its roots are discoverable in the depths of the prayer life. The feeding at God’s table precedes the command to go out in peace to love and serve the world.”
I saw little of Sister Eleanor during the following few days. Some of her work was being sold for a local charity and she had two canvases to finish, though she made it clear that she would most gladly give me time if I wanted to talk. However, it was a relief to have an excuse not to delve into my feelings.
I returned home from Norfolk feeling more at peace. But the feeling did not last. I was quickly thrown back onto the treadmill of work, with the familiar tension and stress – though the pressure that caused the stress was self-imposed. I did not need to work so hard. I was driven by my anger about all the injustice in the world. In my heart, I felt restless. Sister Eleanor continued to send me her beautiful hand-painted cards. I meant to visit St Etheldreda’s again, but I had found a way of managing my sadness and preferred not to reopen old wounds.
The seasons changed one into another and after three years of supplying a steady stream of stories, I persuaded the Editor of my old paper to appoint me as human rights correspondent. There had never been such a post on the paper and it felt like a worthwhile achievement. Paul would have been proud of me.
I wondered occasionally what had become of Anna. My enquiries and those of my colleague in the reference library had drawn a blank and been abandoned long ago. But at the back of my mind there remained the knowledge that I had begun a piece of work – my quest for Anna and Julian – and left it unfinished.
It was the summer of 1999, almost eight years since I had picked up Anna’s journal in the antiquarian bookshop. Ismene and I had been in touch a great deal in recent weeks. The people of East Timor, after their many years of struggle and suffering, were at last about to have the opportunity to vote for independence.
However, supporters of the East Timorese were very worried. In the weeks leading up to the referendum, Indonesia’s brutality was intensifying. We were hearing terrible stories about the increasing violence and savagery of the government-backed militia. The Indonesian military resented bitterly the prospect of giving up the territory, which it saw as its fiefdom, and was determined to sabotage the referendum. Ismene was among those who had warned the United Nations of the risk it ran by failing to put in place adequate security measures.
It was Saturday morning. I awoke at seven. I had checked the agency reports the previous evening, and the situation was clearly deteriorating. As I poured my first cup of tea, I heard the phone ringing. I lifted the receiver. It was Ismene.
“All hell has broken loose in East Timor,” she said. Her contacts in the underground had been emailing her for the past few hours, with details of horrific attacks on civilians by the military. “I’m afraid we’re facing a bloodbath.”
As the hours passed, Ismene emailed me with information as soon as she received it. I passed it to a friend, a politician who was known for her support of human rights. I wrote articles for my paper and provided backup research for leader comment. By this time, though, our foreign correspondents out in the field were hard at work, risking their lives to provide on-the-spot cover. Again, I felt inadequate. Why was I not out there, following the story, as Paul would have been?
As one o’clock approached I switched on the television for the news. Horrific, shocking images flooded across the screen. Engraved for ever on my mind was the sight of two toddlers, sobbing and terrified, trying to clamber across rubble to safety, and not an adult in sight to scoop them up, comfort them and save them. It had been shot from a distance, so there was no certainty that the person filming the event had been able to help.
I saw children hanging from razor-sharp barbed wire around the United Nations compound. Their desperate parents, who knew that they were bound to die, had tried to save their children by flinging them over the wire. One little girl hung, screaming, from the wire – too far for away anyone in the compound to reach across and save her. I imagined how her parents must have felt.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were being slaughtered and no one was trying to save them. The pity of it. The shame of it. If I could have run across to where the child hung from the wire, I believed I would have risked the bullets to do so. Was this just easy, brave thinking from a distance? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But why did God not save her? It would have been so easy for him. Why did he allow an innocent little child to suffer and die?
I telephoned Gregorio, who was now a lecturer at a university in the north of England. He asked, “Did you see the images on television?” He sounded broken-hearted. We talked for a while. I tried to comfort him. His sister was missing. There seemed so little that I could say. I said, “I’m so sorry,” and repeated it, feeling the inadequacy of my words. Shortly after, I spoke to Claire, his girlfriend.
She said, “He’s distraught. He’s been so brave all these years; I’ve never seen him so upset. He’s up in the early hours, watching the news. I come downstairs each morning and find him in floods of tears.”
The following day the news was worse… children slaughtered, along with the nuns who were trying to protect them. A young priest had gone out to meet the soldiers, police and militia – those terrible forces of violence and destruction that terrorized a people who had been brave enough to vote for freedom. He had pleaded with them to spare the people sheltering in his church. Mercilessly, they had hacked him to death, and then slaughtered every man, woman and child to whom he had given sanctuary.
I imagined the young priest going forward with such courage and no doubt such fear in his heart. Another image from the television footage came into my mind, of another young priest, the sacred purple of his office around his shoulders, walking swiftly and quietly among a group of terrified East Timorese, carrying a cross. He displayed such dignity, despite his evident fear. What had brought this tender young man to such a fate? Had he been able to make sense of the horror visited upon him and his people? Had he survived? If so, had he kept his faith?
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