I preached this sermon today, the feast day of the English mystic Julian of Norwich, at All Saints Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA. The Gospel text cited is John 4:23-26.
When my mom was pregnant with me, she and my dad went about the usual business of considering baby names and preparing a nursery (mine was full-on Beatrix Potter characters). And in the early 1980’s, ultrasound predictions of an infant’s sex were not as common as they are today, so it was, for them, a matter of speculation whether I would be a boy or a girl. My mom was convinced that I was going to be a girl, and my name was going to be Ashley.
My parents had an artist friend around this same time who gave them an oil painting as a baby shower gift. It features a pastoral landscape with small human figures here and there: my dad carrying a fishing pole, and my mom standing by a bassinet with a little blond baby under a pink blanket.
After my birth (surprise! It’s a boy!) their friend changed the painting—brown hair, blue blanket. Now, in retrospect,could they could have kept it pink, and I’d have been perfectly happy with that! But I love that when I look closely at the painting now—it’s hanging in my room—you can still see little traces of the blond and the pink peeking through, the shadow of a different existence–a different, unrealized identity.
And I wonder about that other child who is not me—the Ashley who never arrived—and what her life would have been like, shaped by the expectations that are assigned to certain types of bodies. I am sure it would have been very, very different, and perhaps much harder in ways that I’ll never fully understand as a man.
And yet, in a way that I can’t fully explain, I still feel like I a carry a piece of Ashley inside of me; the part of my identity that doesn’t conform to some of the gender expectations that came along with that last-minute painting revision. Who we are is never quite as simple as appearances might indicate.
I tell you this story because it reminds me of the constructed nature of our identities, and especially of the ways in which our bodies and our genders and our culturally-mediated self-understandings are always engaged in a process of becoming, from the moment we take our first breath, all the way up to our very last. Whatever labels have been assigned to us, rightly or wrongly, and whatever identities we claim for ourselves, their meanings and significance can and will develop, both by the unfurling of our interior self-knowledge and by the changeable nature of our changing contexts. Who we are as social beings is always contingent, always being revealed ever more in its fullness. It is the journey of a lifetime, one that is never finished.
And that, I think, is as it must be, because the fullness of ourselves, the maximum horizon of our complex, nuanced personhood, is located in the heart of the God who draws us across time and space to a place as yet only partially revealed to us, as we are now, sitting here this morning. Today we might understand ourselves primarily as a seminary student, as a gay man, as a person of color, as a professor or a priest or spouse or child, or, in the case of our Gospel passage, as a Samaritan woman kneeling beside a well. And in our present contingency we know that we are also other things, other identities… some that we want to forget, and some that we yearn to become.
But Jesus tells each of us today that the hour is coming, and is now here, when the “true worshippers” will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. In other words, the hour is coming and is now here when we will understand that God loves the fullness of who we are —this is God’s truth; AND the hour is coming and is now here when we will understand that God’s loves the fullness of every other identity too, especially those that the world has called suspect or worthless—this is the work of the Spirit. And in this confluence of truth and Spirt, we will know perhaps for the very first time how SPACIOUS God truly is. How FREE God truly is. How the love of God includes all of us, as we are now, and as we are becoming.
Julian of Norwich, the deep lover of Christ, the medieval mystic, the earliest known woman author in the English language, the person whom the Church honors today, was intimately acquainted with the spaciousness of God’s identity. Her text, Revelations of Divine Love, which describes her ecstatic visions of Jesus’ passion and the Holy Trinity’s deep yearning for the salvation of all creation, is one of the most beautiful accounts of Christian wisdom ever recorded. It is also a text, written in the late 14th century, whose treatment of God’s gender and identity is so fluid and liberating that it challenges any notion that the language of patriarchy is the only appropriate way of speaking about God. She writes:
“So Jesus Christ…is our real Mother. We owe our being to him—and this is the essence of motherhood! God is as really our Mother as he is our Father. He showed this throughout, and particularly when he said that sweet word, ‘It is I.’ In other words, ‘It is I who am the strength and goodness of Fatherhood; I who am the wisdom of Motherhood; I who am light and grace and blessed love; I who am Trinity; I who am Unity; I who am the sovereign goodness of every single thing; I who enable you to love; I who enable you to long. It is I, the eternal satisfaction of every genuine desire.” (Revelations of Divine Love, 167).
I say take some of that and put it in the Book of Common Prayer revision.
What Julian saw, and what she blessed us with in recording her visions for posterity, was the capacity of God to take on multiple identities, each in its precious specificity, and in so doing, to show us that all such identities—every last one—are holy in themselves.
And so, no matter how we continue to grow in self-understanding through our lives and relationships—whether we end up claiming for ourselves a pink blanket or a blue blanket or perhaps we decide we don’t want to be confined by any color blanket at all, thank you very much—whatever our becoming looks like, God holds it. God loves it. God IS it.
God is our Mother and our Father and our Spouse and our Sibling. And God is Spirit and Truth, and God flows through our fluid identities, bolstering their unfolding current with Christ’s life-giving waters, as we travel together with Jesus towards something beautiful and vast and mysterious, something in which all of who we are, all of the ways we name ourselves, ALL OF IT is revealed in its magnificence—in a place where we will indeed and at last be “true worshippers” in the fullness of our hard-won, fully embodied truth.
I pray for that day. I long for it. I hope I’m courageous enough when I leave seminary in a few weeks to keep working towards it alongside each of you.
Julian is perhaps most famous for one particular quote from her text: “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but there’s an important clarification that must be made: these are not Julian’s own words. It is not a speculation on her part, or a vague, facile hope for the future. No, these are the words that Jesus speaks TO Julian in her vision, to assure her about the destiny of all creation.
And so Jesus says, to her and to us: All shall be well. ALL shall be well. All manner of thing—every person, every searching heart, every identity we name and encounter, every single thing—shall be well, in the fullness of what it is because it is OF GOD. It is OF SPIRIT AND TRUTH. That is our shared identity, commingled with all of those others we are carrying and discovering and painting in new layers over the landscapes of our lives. Pink, blue, something else—it doesn’t matter. God is in all the colors. God is in every possibility.
All shall be well.
By Another Road 