Mother’s Day 2020: Evolutionary Leap with Julian of Norwich

Today is the one year anniversary of our Daily Meditations.  Happy Anniversary to all our helpers and to all our readers and meditators! 

We consciously launched our DM series on Mothers Day because we had Mother Earth and her goodness and her sufferings very much in our hearts and minds.  The Climate Change emergency dictates such spiritual attention and awakening.  So too does the current coronavirus pandemic which is, not incidentally, very much related to the  climate emergency.  Hopefully these meditations are nourishing us to resist both plagues with strength and imagination.

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?

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We are marking a very special occasion today – not only Mother’s Day, but also the one-year anniversary of the Daily Meditations.

We invite you to look back over the Meditations you have received, and if they have spoken to your heart and soul, or supported your spiritual journey, we invite you to contribute your support.

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If you cannot, we understand that also. Please spread the news of our daily meditations and visit our bookstore.

Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers, grandmothers, & to Gaia herself!

*Brendan Doyle, Meditations with Julian of Norwich, p. 61.

Banner Image: Mother and child covered in glitter. Photo by ketan rajput on Unsplash.

Queries for Contemplation

Which of these proposals of “evolutionary leaps” found in Julian do you find most pressing for our planet and Mother Earth today?  What other leaps do you sense in Julian’s work that are appropriate for our times?

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