I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Rachel M. Srubas’ reflection and poems “Anchorheld: A Trinity (after Julian of Norwich).”
One spring day in 2023, feeling bereft and spiritually adrift, I turned to Julian of Norwich. Her fourteenth-century book, Revelations of Divine Love, had sat on my shelf, largely unread for years. At age thirty, near death, Julian experienced the sixteen mystical revelations that the book recounts and boldly interprets; it is the first known to be written by a woman in English. Little by little, morning by morning, I took in the words that Julian had written while living as an anchorite enclosed in a cell adjacent to a parish church in Norwich, England. As strange and imprisoning as such seclusion may sound, the anchoritic life was considered a viable vocation in Julian’s medieval Christian world. Anchorites dedicated themselves to perpetual prayer. They were sustained by the sacrament of Holy Communion, which they received through a window to the church. They offered spiritual counsel to neighbors through a window open to the outside community. On the morning of May 8, 2023, I read Julian’s words: “These revelations were shown to a simple, uneducated creature in the year of our Lord 1373, on the eighth day of May.” Sunlight pulsated around me. The membrane separating one long-ago century from another dropped away. Perennial insight and encouragement penetrated the present. Six hundred fifty years to the day after she experienced her visions, I found myself aligned with their divine source. Julian’s revelatory, healing story prompted me to write this tripartite poem. She continues to inspire me to practice my calling as a mundane monk and contemplative writer whose anchorhold is her own heart.
Anchorheld: a Trinity (after Julian)
Small and All
In the woodland understory, gray-barked hazel trees grew.
Pendulous catkins, fuzzy, yellow, promised later leaves.
Pollen, windblown, turned the trees’ red florets toward a fruitful summer.
Clustered, ripened leaf-cupped nuts dropped their husks once the weather cooled.
Resourceful dormice foraged all the fallen offerings they could.
A girl in the woods bent and pocketed a hazelnut.
An interval of bleak, necessary dormancy deferred all possibilities
until one warming day, the eighth of May.
She beheld—what is this?—the made, beloved, safekept mystery of all things.
Hidden
How could teenaged Julian, taking in Cecilia’s hagiography, resist aspiring
to so holy a mortality? Cecilia sat singing silent songs to Christ when she wedded Valerian.
Romans of respected lineage, her parents had arranged for her to marry this young man
whose name meant strong and healthy. Think of the progeny! A fortress of familial nobility.
Cecilia’s name meant hidden, blind. She foresaw a heaven concealed
beyond the nuptial future. A deeper drive than procreation gave rise in her
to hymns of such devotion even her frustrated husband came to sing along
in their unconsummated bed. These two fools for outlawed faith soon were overheard.
A sword thrice thrust to Cecilia’s lovely neck nearly severed her head.
Somehow she remained intact, intractably devout, bleeding for a triduum
until at last she entered eternity, a martyred virgin saint.
Young Julian, too, wanted sacred wounds,
not the pestilent indignities ravaging her city, annihilating half its souls.
She prayed her dangerous desires: for contrition, for compassion, for God.
The first two slipped her mind. But holy longing had her by the heart.
It made such a mystic of her the bishop bricked her in.
Dead to the world, hidden away, risen with the Lord in her two-windowed anchorhold,
Julian of Norwich wrote the book of love.
To See and Know
Crucifixes everywhere—suspended from church ceiling beams, painted on screens,
plastered into chapel walls, swinging from grim clerics’ necks, clutched
in the withering hands of the mortally ill. Perpetually impassioned, the replicated Christ
gave gory hope to a plague-ravaged world. Neighbors she’d recently greeted at market
collapsed, their last days a terrible tenebrae. Corpses heaped. Unceremonious pyres. Smoke
snaked, rose, and vanished into the night sky.
Julian wished to witness one death that could salvage all others.
No matter how lurid the paint, how gaunt and appalled the Lord’s whittled face,
no rood could satisfy her gaze. She needed to perceive
her Lord’s actual suffering, to see and know, feel and endure.
Despite the ecclesial lie—Christ bore the punishment you deserve—
she cherished her mistaken church. Even deadly theologies and rites wrongly administered
ushered her closer to Christ—so potent was his love, so total his mercy.
Rachel M. Srubas has written several books on spiritual life. She is a Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor serving a congregation in Tucson, Arizona, where she also taught for 20 years at the Hesychia School of Spiritual Direction. Rachel is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and Benedictine oblate.
