Day 33 of the End to End fell on the Feast Day for Julian of Norwich. Most days fall on a day to remember someone or another but I’ve had a particular love of Julian of Norwich for forty years or so. It was a welcome revelation to me that a woman might have lived alone in the fourteenth century and written a book. Of course, our lives are very different, but in my own life, it is her and other women like her who have held the light for me as I’ve taken my own path.
It didn’t surprise me that she might have some visions and try to make sense of them. It didn’t surprise me that she should think of God as Mother or see God in the smallest things. But it did help me. My own protestant upbringing had not been severe or austere but there had been few people with whom I could discuss spiritual things. Meeting Julian helped me to know there were other women like me.
Day 33 of the walk followed the path that Hannah had taken in 2012. Walking in my daughter’s footsteps was important to me. We had both visited Odda’s Chapel on the Severn Way, a small Anglo-Saxon building (built in 1056), not far from the banks of the river or from the flood gates that protect the village of Deerhurst. The path goes through the Severn Meadows so loved by Ivor Gurney (his memorial was in Gloucester Cathedral).
I walked onto Tewkesbury Abbey, which was a Benedictine Foundation. I had visited it with my Dad in 2012 on a very hot day. But in 2019 it was a wet one. At the beginning of 2020 Tewkesbury and much of the Severn Meadows was flooded again and it would not have been able to walk on the Severn Way anywhere between here and Ironbridge. As it was in 2019, it was like swimming through tall wet grass much of the way to Upton on Severn.
It is said that Julian of Norwich survived the Black Death that had had such a devastating effect of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century. Of course the diseases and our response are not the same seven centuries later. But her message of ‘All shall be well’ is both comfort and challenge in all times including ours. I like to think she might have said ‘Have you got a light, boy?’ After all, she was from Norwich.
From the remembered Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving book written by a woman in English:
‘I held a hazelnut in the palm of my hand and I saw that it was all that is made, and that God made it and loved it’.
Nut-making One, beautiful are all your works and wonderful to behold.
Nut-loving One, we too are held in the palm of your hand.
Nut-nurturing One, may we too grow to be sheltering and fruitful.
May all be well: may all things be well.
JAL: 08.05.2020 in Longdendale.
