May 11, 2014
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Julian of Norwich
Mother’s Day always provides an opportunity to sing the hymn
“Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth.” This
lovely hymn (ELW 735) encourages us to consider images of God, Christ and
Spirit in the feminine form, or with the caring and nurturing aspects we
associate with mothers. Perhaps this is
fascinating to you, or perhaps it is discomforting. The poetry does challenge us to break away
from our conventional view of the Trinity and imagine something new. Creative challenge is not a bad thing in good
hymnody!
This hymn is found in the Creation section of Evangelical Lutheran Worship, and is evocative
of what we might consider “Mother Earth.”
Paul Westermeyer notes that “the images are richly earthy: gave me
birth, took my form, nurturing in patience to root, grow and flower.”[1]
The tune name for this hymn, NORWICH, is revealing. The hymn writer, Jean Janzen, based her text
on the writings of the fourteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich. Julian was an anchoress - a devout recluse
who vowed a life of spiritual contemplation by entering a small cell (attached
to a church) and remaining enclosed there for her remaining life. After receiving fifteen initial visions early
in her stay in the cell, she devoted the rest of her life to meditating and
writing about them. Her writings, the
first book known to have been written in English by a woman, explore the
mothering aspect of God. Westermeyer
writes that “these visions . . . yielded for her a theology of God’s love in
which God was viewed as a mother with mercy rather than wrath, and sin was seen
as necessary for learning but did not proceed from evil.”[2]
From Revelations of
Divine Love, Julian writes:
A mother’s is the most intimate, willing, and dependable of
all services, because it is the truest of all.
None has been able to fulfill it properly but Christ, and he alone
can. We know that our own mother’s
bearing of us was a bearing to pain and death, but what does Jesus, our true
Mother, do? Why, he, All-love, bears us
to joy and eternal life! Blessings on
him![3]
[1] Paul
Westermeyer, Hymnal Companion to
Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2010), 595.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine
Love, chap. 60, trans. Clifton Wolters (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), 169-70 in Philip Pfatteicher, New Book of Festivals and Commemorations (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2008), 211-212.
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