The process of grace in Julian of Norwich’s experience of prayer and contemplation

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to engage Julian of Norwich’s texts as a spiritual text and to explore its meaning in Julian’s intention. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological framework provides for the hermeneutics of Julian’s interpretation and her uncovering God’s revelation of love, as Julian is devoted by the grace to that gift of love, as love reveals itself. Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) and St. John of the Cross provide other lenses. Within Julian’s spiritual texts, the revelation experience is the manifestation of grace. Our human nature and divine grace are united in God’s mercy through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, as God’s remedy for sin. Yet, Julian’s needful nature was prepared for the gift of grace by the grace of prayer. Prayer is the continuous process for her transformation; and the substance of God in her soul is her grace. Grace, although it is full, develops over time in interaction with experience, knowledge, and faith; and this process is concordant with our human nature, freedom, and the gift of reason. But in the mystery of revelation, all knowledge beyond the region of our negative certainty is grace and faith. Julian is spiritually betrothed to God in the Trinity: in which her being fastened to the cross and to the love of God are both one in the same. So then, after 600 years, Julian’s contemporary gift to us reveals God’s meaning of love for her and for all of us, her “even-Cristen”: how to walk in the light of God’s mercy and grace; in the light of faith and in the light of charity; through the darkness of our natural lives.