The year was 1373, the place, the English cathedral city of Norwich. There, on Sunday, May 8, a thirty-year-old woman lay near death. All feeling was gone from her waist down. Her sight was failing. Two days before, she had received the last rites of the Church. We do not know the woman's baptismal name or the name of her family. What we do know is that she did not die. Instead, according to her later testimony, she had a series of fifteen visions during the next eleven hours which gave her new and deep understandings about God, the Trinity, the crucified Lord, and the life of Christians. Her full recovery was almost immediate. The following evening she was granted one final vision.

Not long after her restoration to health, the woman wrote down a brief account of the visions or "showings," as she called them. She then dedicated her life to meditation, prayer, and service, becoming an anchoress (i.e., hermitess). She lived out the rest of her life in a small cell attached to the little parish church of St. Julian in Norwich. As was the custom for an anchoress, she took as her own the name of the patron saint of the church, becoming known as Dame Julian of Norwich.

Two or three decades after her mystical experience, Julian wrote out an expanded version of her visions entitled, The Revelations of Divine Love . A scholar has called that work "one of the most remarkable documents of medieval religious experience" and goes on to state that "the clarity and depth of her perception, the precision and accuracy of her theological presentation, and the sincerity and beauty of her expression reveal a mind and personality of exceptional strength and charm." Julian is recognized today as one of the greatest of the English mystics of the late medieval period. Her insights and those of other mystics continue to inspire Christians in our own time.

Julian's Revelations of Divine Love probes the most profound mysteries of the Christian faith, including predestination, the foreknowledge of God, and the existence of evil. The author displays a complete optimism in her God and offers a different perspective on the purpose of repentance.

This morning, I want to call our attention to two words and their derivatives which appear over and over in the Revelations. They are courtesy and homeliness. These terms express key concepts in Julian's experience of God. I believe that they can enhance our understanding of the divine as well.

Courtesy is a word whose ramifications and overtones embrace the social, moral, and literary history of Western Europe from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. It was a time when, among the ruling nobility of society, courtesy governed, at least in theory, the whole pattern of social intercourse between men and women and between men and men. The term, of course, is closely associated with chivalry, the code of conduct of the ideal knight. Courtesy included the virtues of hospitality, openheartedness, generosity, tactfulness, gentleness, and service.

Julian's use of the term with respect to God includes all of these connotations. To her, God, the all-powerful Lord, is also the glad giver who, with supreme tact, "ever taketh but little heed of the thing that he giveth." He is the knight par excellence who "of his great courtesy . . . doeth away all our blame, and beholdeth us, with . . . [compassion] and pity, as children innocent and loveable." He is a "courteous Lord" who "sheweth himself to the soul cheerfully with glad countenance, [and] with a friendly welcome." His grace "worketh with mercy, . . . endlessly surpassing all that our loving and travail deserveth, spreading abroad and making plain the high abundance and largesse of God's royal Lordship in his marvelous courtesy."

In one passage, Julian wrote, "Our Lord . . . sheweth us our sin and our feebleness, by the sweet gracious light of himself. For our sin is so foul and horrible that he, of his courtesy, willeth not to show it us except by the light of his mercy." She tied this concept to what she considered the most important characteristic of God. "Also, our courteous Lord, in that same time, shewed full sweetly and full mightily the endlessness and immutability of his love."

This courteous Lord, was, to Dame Julian, also a homely one. She did not use the term in the modern sense of "plain" or "simple." In the Middle Ages, the usual meaning of homely was "familiar" or "intimate." Julian wrote that Jesus makes of our soul "his homeliest home and his endless dwelling." She knew that to speak of God in both aristocratic and familiar terms was a paradox, but one in which she delighted. In one passage Julian wrote, "For truly, it is the greatest joy that could be, as I see it, that he who is noblest and worthiest, is the lowest and meekest, homeliest and most courteous."

Julian's vision of God's homeliness implied the closeness, warmth and tenderness of the loving mother whose service is always "nearest, readiest, and surest." "We all know," she wrote, " that all our mothers bear us to pain and dying[,] . . . but our true Mother, Jesus, he alone beareth us to joy and to endless living." In another passage we find, "And I understand that there is no higher stature in this life than childhood--in the feebleness and failing of might and understanding--until the time that our gracious Mother hath brought us up to our Father's bliss. And there shall truly be made known to us his meaning, in the sweet words where he saith, 'All shall be well . . . .'"

It is refreshing to see in this document the concept of God as both courteous and homely. We see God as the all-powerful Lord of the universe, yes, but also as all courtesy, that is to say, all welcoming, all giving, all gentle. Also, that same God is a loving parent (both Father and Mother), homely, in other words, at home in our very beings every day, a God, who, to revise slightly the words of the gospel song, "walks with us, and talks with us, and tells us we are his own." That is very good news for us all!

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