Pius X College – Mothers’ Day Mass – 7 May 2025
Some time ago, I had the delight of coming across a wonderful essay by Marianne Dorman reflecting on an aspect of our Christian spiritual tradition which has particular significance for what we are celebrating today.[1]
As Dorman relates, at the time of the Black Death sweeping England in 1373, an unknown woman, aged about 30, wrote one of the most remarkable essays in the tradition of Christian spirituality. The text was known as the Shewings of Divine Love.
The woman writing this little book lived in a small room attached to the church of St Julian, Norwich, which belonged to the Benedictine community at Carrow. Subsequently, she has been remembered by posterity as Julian, or even Lady Julian, of Norwich. Very little is known about her. Perhaps she had been a Benedictine nun at Carrow or she may even had been a widow. However, Julian of Norwich is one of the key figures in what we now refer to as the English School of Spirituality of the 14th century.
As Dorman points out, the key to Julian’s writings is her understanding of God as love. As Julian wrote,
From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was Our Lord’s meaning. It was more than fifteen years after that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing! Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else ever!’
So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting. Our beginning was when we were made, but the love in which he made us never had beginning. In it we have our beginning (Ch.86).
So for Julian everything is an expression of Love. Against this background of her spiritual concern, Julian uses adjectives to describe God which are unusual for her day – and indeed still unusual for us even in our own time. God is described as “courteous”, “our courteous Mother”, “my kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my beloved Mother”. She addresses our Lord as “Our heavenly Mother Jesus”, “our true Mother in nature”, “our true Mother in grace”, and the Trinitarian God in making us is “our loving Mother” (Ch. 58-9, 61). These are not images that we normally associate with God.
However, the image of motherhood is very important to Julian in her relationship with God. God broods over all creation, and to extend the meaning of this thought, she writes:
Lord God, I understand three ways of contemplating your motherhood. The first is the foundation of our nature’s creation; the second is your taking of our nature, where your motherhood of grace begins; the third is your motherhood at work.
And in that, by your grace, everything is penetrated, in length and in breadth, in height and in depth, without end; and it is all one love (Ch.59).
In other words, God is eternally in the act of birthing, and we, each of us, are being birthed in this extraordinary mystery of love. It is a powerful image. God is the eternal act by which creation is brought to birth, and God’s love is bringing each of us into being – not simply in a past way, but always in a current way.
Julian’s wonderful contribution to our spiritual tradition was to see in the experience of mothering a reflection of God’s relationship with us. In other words, the experiencing of mothering is sacramental of God’s very being and life.
Each year we honour our mothers, and rightly so. But might we learn from what we celebrate in our mothers something of the very nature of God? What Julian of Norwich teaches us is that the presence and example of our mothers reflect to us something essential about God.
May the voice of that unknown woman in a cell in Norwich nearly 700 years ago, gift us with a fresh insight this Mothers’ Day about a possibility often hidden in that relationship we have with the source of all life who is God.
[1] This homily is taken largely from Marianne Dorman, “Julian of Norwich,” http://mariannedorman.homestead.com/JulianofNorwich.html, accessed 8 May 2014.
