iMonk Book Club: Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography

Editor’s note: Today we jump in to the next book in the InternetMonk book club. The discussion this week will be led by Damaris Zehner and Martha of Ireland. I’ve really been looking forward to what they have to say about a woman we know very little of other than her quote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” We start today with a look at the book by Martha. Tomorrow Damaris will take us deeper and pose some questions that we will look at throughout the week. Martha will be back with us on Tuesday. Remember, this is a group activity. Join us in this conversation.  JD

The first thing to say is that this is a very handsome edition.  As a reader, I appreciate when care and effort is taken, especially with a hardback (too many publishers nowadays seem to take the “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap” approach) and this book is a delightful specimen of a published object, with a lovely layout and carefully chosen illustrations and artwork.

Next, the author is Amy Frykholm, whom the dustjacket author’s bio tells us “is a Special Correspondent for The Christian Century” and has previously authored a book entitled “Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America”.  Those of you more familiar with “The Christian Century” than I am will be better placed to appreciate or identify any biases Ms. Frykholm may bring to the subject.  She perhaps over-emphasises Julian as a rara avis, a unique voice that comes out of no tradition before her, but Julian was indeed an unusual and in many ways unique woman.

So who was this mystic and contemplative?  Julian of Norwich was an Englishwoman living in or around Norwich, the capital city of Norfolk, a county on the east of England and an important trading port and the second largest city after London.  She was born around 1342, had a severe illness which led to significant spiritual experiences in 1373, became a solitary religious and wrote a longer and more detailed account of her visions in 1393, and died in 1416 at 74 years of age.  That is all we know about her.  We don’t know if she was married, widowed, single, a nun, a laywoman, what her station in life was, even if the name by which we know her was her baptismal name or the name in religion by which she was known.  We don’t know how she came to write her book, who her spiritual directors or influences were, or how the book was preserved and passed on up to the 17th century when an English Benedictine monk who was chaplain to a convent of English Benedictine nuns in Paris edited the first printed edition of “The Revelations of Divine Love”.

This lack of information means that we can construct as many theories around Dame Julian’s life as have been done for Shakespeare, and Frykholm engages in an imaginative, but sympathetic, evocation of who this woman was and what her circumstances were – we are invited to construct in our imaginations a picture of Julian’s everyday life as a woman running her household in much the same fashion as the people of the 13th and 14th centuries were encouraged to construct imaginative tableaux of the lives of Christ and the saints in order to enter into a relationship with them.

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Sunday Morning Meditation: Think On These Things

This week Damaris Zehner and Martha of Ireland will be helping us to walk with Dame Julian of Norwich. Two years ago I had the privilege to visit Norwich and sit in the cell (small room attached to small church) Julian called “home” for many years. The presence of God was overwhelming. I’m really excited for what Damaris and Martha will share with us this week.

To get us started, and to give us something to consider as we prepare for worship this morning, here is a meditation from Dame Julian.

We must take God’s promises and energy as much as our capabilities allow. This is God’s will. We must also take our trials and dis-eases as lightly as we can. For the more lightly we take them and the less price we set on them, for love, the less pain we will have in feeling them and the more thanks and refreshment we will have for them.

Saturday Ramblings 11.24.12

It’s been a slow news week here at the InternetMonk World Headquarters. Chaplain Mike is still on sabbatical. Our other writers were dishing up tasty treats for Thanksgiving. (By the way, just what is a “giblet” anyway? And why did I get a set of rubber gloves to pull it out of the turkey?) I couldn’t find the Synonymous Rambler with a search warrant. Still can’t. (Ask a question or two, and the SR disappears like Houdini.) So I have pulled together some leftovers for our Saturday morning. I won’t keep you long. I know you have more shopping to do just before you settle in to watch Football! Football! Football! Now, are you ready to Ramble? Ramble? Ramble?

I really hoped to get to this story this last week, but ran out of time. Somehow, seeing these two megachurch pastors in their “humanness” helps me appreciate what they have done and are doing all the more. Neither are perfect. If I lived in Atlanta, I doubt I would go to either of their churches. But I do appreciate their willingness to pull back the curtains even a little to show us who they are when the light is not shining on them. They are who they are.

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Screwtape Gives Thanks

[With profound thanks to my spiritual and literary hero, Clive Staples Lewis.]

My Dear Wormwood,

It is that time once again when your patient, along with all those living in his country, set aside a day to give thanks. It is a deplorable idea, this “giving thanks,” and one that a team assembled by Our Father Below has been working diligently for some years to neutralize. Great strides are being made, and we have hope that one day soon we will turn this “day of thanksgiving” into just another excuse for fulfilling of selfish pleasures and of coveting what one does not already possess or need. Until that day, it is your responsibility, as it is for all junior tempters, to keep your patient from truly having a thankful heart. Fortunately, recent research has turned up methods which appear promising on this front.

The very act of being thankful is reprehensible to those who followed Our Father Below from the depths of the Enemy’s territory into the glorious realm where we now abide. By giving thanks, one is admitting a need for someone or something. And that admission of need leads to no longer being self-sufficient. It was on this point that the Enemy pressed Our Father, leading to the glorious march into Hell where we none of us needs be thankful to anyone. If I am thankful, it is not because I have been given anything. It is because I have found the power to take what I want when and where I desire.

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The Grace Of The Feast

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and if I may be honest, it is perhaps my favorite holiday. It is devoid of the busy-ness of Christmas and the debauchery of New Year’s and the noise and sweat and plastic patriotism of July 4. I enjoy the time with family and friends and food without the trappings of gifts and the endless running from house to house.

“Ah!” but you say. “What about all of the work preparing the food?” That, for me, is one of the greatest parts of the day.

When I was but a wee iMonk living in Ohio, I would go to my aunt and uncle’s farm for Thanksgiving. I remember seeing my uncle and cousin sitting on the back porch, cleaning rabbits they had just shot and that would be, in a few hours, part of our meal. It was one of the first times I can recall that I connected what I was eating to where it came from. I was too young then to help in the kitchen, but I did get to help set up sawhorses and long planks of wood that served as tables. My cousin and I would then scour the farmhouse for every moveable chair and put them around the very long table we had just built. We would carry bowl after bowl of food from the kitchen down the stairs to where we would eat. And when the family was all seated, there would be a mild argument prior to saying grace as to how we would all pray the Lord’s Prayer that year—would we say “forgive us our trespasses” or “forgive us our debts”? And then we would eat and eat and eat. It was the most joyful meal of the year.

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Chapter With Your Abbot

I wanted to take a break from my stomach-stretching exercises ahead of Thursday’s feast (pumpkin or pecan pie? The only correct answer is YES.) to update you on a few iMonk items. In a Benedictine monastery, the business meetings are called Chapter. Here at the iMonastery, we call such meetings … Chapter. (Putting the letter “i” in front of everything that has to do with the internet annoys me …)

First of all, we are going to have to postpone this week’s entry in our book club. Craig Bubeck is up against deadlines in his job and won’t be able to lead the discussion this week as planned. But we will be back on track next week, looking at the life of Julian of Norwich, with Damaris Zehner and Martha of Ireland leading the way.

Chaplain Mike is still on sabbatical. Word is he is working on developing his curveball in advance of a tryout with the Cubs. Hey, why not?

If you are new to InternetMonk, you might wonder how we do it. Well, we wonder the same thing. I would love to be paid for what we do here. So would Chaplain Mike. I’d love to pay our writers. But right now, we can only pay to keep the lights on. Our costs are about $150 a month. Where does that come from? Some comes from you, our faithful readers. If you are not already doing so, perhaps you’d be willing to donate to iMonk. I’d love to give something as a Christmas gift to Chap for his hard work. And still be able to pay the hosting bill monthly.

Some of our money comes from the few advertisers we take on. We are very selective as to who gets to talk to you. We will never take money from someone in exchange for them writing a post. (And I get requests for that all of the time.) We could make a lot of money if we aligned with Google AdSense, but then we would have no control over what is displayed on this site. I am considering a new advertiser with excellent products I think you would enjoy. We will know soon if that can be worked out.

I worked in advertising for a long time. The way this is supposed to work is we provide content that will bring a lot of eyeballs to our site, then we sell access to those eyeballs for as much as we can get. But I can’t do that here. (I can’t do that anywhere any longer, which is why I now work at a grocery store in Jenks, Oklahoma, and not in mass media.) I cannot sell access to you like that. To me, that would be like putting ads on the back of pews in church. Or having Hymn 423 on the left page, and an advertisement for Roy’s Rib Joint with all-you-can-eat brisket on Sundays on the right page. To me, InternetMonk is a matter of trust, not opportunity. I’ve been told we should be making $10,000 a month with this site. Most months we don’t make $100. I’d rather sell my stuff to pay for this site than to violate your trust. Just sayin’.

Still, I’d love to be able to give Chaplain Mike something more than a figurative pat-on-the-back. So if you can help us out, thank you. And if you can’t, that’s fine. We welcome all here.

We really do welcome all here. Not everyone agrees with everything I write. Even I don’t agree with everything I say—but that’s what therapists and drugs are for, right? If you are a silent reader, we encourage you to take part in the discussions every once in a while. And if you are a regular commenter, keep up the good work.

Ok. This Chapter is concluded. Time to get in one last pre-Thanksgiving practice nap before the real one is needed. Pass the Cool Whip, will ya?

Classic iMonk: Magic Books, Grocery Lists And Silent Messiahs: How Rightly Approaching The Bible Shapes The Entire Christian Life

Michael Spencer messed with my mind in many ways, but the most lasting was how he taught me to view Scripture. This essay is one of several he wrote that made me look at the Bible in an entirely different way. I hope you find it challenging and provoking as well. JD

A Pentecostal evangelist visited our chapel this week, and as I listened to his uh….sermon, I reviewed in my mind some of the things that I have come to believe about the Bible and how those things now influence my faith. So I don’t know if this will impress you, but I am going to start with a critique of how we read the Bible, then I am going to compare that to my own approach to the Gospel of Mark, and then I will draw some conclusions about how the Bible presents its message to us. It sounds confusing, but I think it will be helpful.

What will I have when this essay is all done? Hopefully, a way for you to see how the Bible and the Christian life flow together, and what exactly we take away from the Bible for our lives now. Listening to the way the Bible is used to present the truth about God, you will discover a lot about the presuppositions of anyone who calls himself a Christian. So let’s go exploring, and I hope you are open to thinking and reconsidering how you read, teach, preach and use the Bible.

Increasingly, my great passion is for the Bible to have its way in the Christian church. As I grow older, I have less confidence in Christians, but I have an increasing confidence in the Bible as an inspired text, and as a genuine message from the Creator to His creatures. While I do not subscribe to the language of inerrancy, I believe the Bible is true in the greatest sense of truth: that its various ways of speaking, through different authors and various genres, all amount to the presentation of a true Word in an increasingly relativizing world.

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Open Mic: How Should We View Israel?

As we get ready for the third installment of the iMonk book club (Paul Copan’s Is God A Moral Monster? You have read it, haven’t you?), I wanted to start us off with a question. A question that touches the deadly third rail for many evangelicals.

I was taught from the beginning of my Christian faith that the nation of Israel was, and still is to this day, the chosen people of God. That Jews have special favor with God. And that those who support Israel will be blessed by God. Inherent in this belief was the idea that Israel can do no wrong, and any nation that opposes Israel is at peril of being destroyed by God’s wrath. Today, many evangelical churches participate in “Support Israel” services, where speakers come and talk about how the tiny Middle Eastern David is being targeted by Middle Eastern Goliaths intent on taking over the land and eliminating all of the Jews. John Hagee, for example, has made a career of carrying the Israeli torch in the United States.

Over the weekend, Israel attacked Hamas in the Gaza strip in retaliation for what the Israeli government says are repeated attacks from the militant Islamic group operating in the West Bank. Many evangelicals have called for Israel to completely wipe out the Palestinians and retake their land. I’m sure this was the topic of sermons over the weekend in many churches.

So my question for you today is this. Should Christians offer a blanket support of Israel? Is that what God requires of his people? And I suppose a deeper question is, Is Israel as it stands today still God’s chosen nation?

I think as we will see in our discussion of Copan’s book, God does not operate in our ways or ideals. How do you think the Lord wants us to think, act and pray regarding the nation of Israel today?

Ok, iMonks, your thoughts?

Sunday Morning Meditation: Think On These Things

Our thought-starter as we prepare for worship this morning comes from the great United Methodist bishop and preacher, William H. Willimon and his book, Why Jesus?

Sometimes people say, “God? Oh can’t say anything definitive about God. God is large, nebulous, and vague.” We wish. By rendering God into an abstract idea, we can be assured that we’ll always be safe from God. By raising the crucified Jesus from the dead, it was as if God vindicated Jesus, as if God said, “You want to know what God looks like? You want to know what the Creator really wants from the creature and creation? Look at Jesus! There, that’s who I am.” At a definite point in time, at a particular place, in love, God allowed God’s self to be pinned down by us—on a cross. It’s a curious thing to say about Jesus, the wandering teacher of Galilee, that he is as much of God as we ever hope to see. Even more so, Jesus is a curious thing to say about God.