JULIAN OF NORWICH, the 14th-century anchoress and mystic in England, prayed for an embodied understanding of suffering. As she wrote in Revelations of Divine Love, she desired “three graces” from God: “to relive Christ’s Passion”; “bodily sickness”; and the wounds of “contrition,” “kind compassion,” and “purposeful longing for God.” At age 30, on what she presumed to be her deathbed, Julian received a series of divine visions — equally euphoric and terrifying — that taught her about the all-encompassing nature and nearness of God’s love. In one vision, Julian saw Christ’s head bleeding profusely from the crown of thorns.
But these images did not bring her a message of despair. Julian wrote, “This is our Lord’s will: that we yearn and believe, rejoice and delight, take comfort and console ourselves as much as we can, with his help and his grace, until the time when we can see it truly for ourselves.” Through pain and contemplation, she developed a deeply embodied faith. Reading her work healed years of spiritual pain for me. In the Catholic context of my upbringing, shame led to disembodiment and antagonism toward my body. Julian, by contrast, envisioned human wholeness — in mind, body, and soul.
In The Wisdom of Your Body, Hillary L. McBride, a psychotherapist, writes, “We did not find our way to a disembodied existence on our own: We had millennia of help.” She traces the intellectual history — from Western philosophy and Gnosticism to Plato and Descartes to the Christian Reformation — of dualism: the split between the mind/soul and the inferior body. The total and lasting effects, she argues, “put the body in a straitjacket.” Epistemologies that view the body as matter to be subdued and controlled have undergirded systems of oppression throughout human history — colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Embodied healing, then, is wrapped up in the work of justice, in birthing new ways of relating to the land and each other.
For Julian, just as the body is not separate from the soul, God is not separate from us. She wrote, “God is nearer to us than our own soul; for he is the foundation on which our soul stands, and he is the means that keeps the substance and the sensory being together, so that they will never separate.” McBride writes similarly of this divine “immanence”: “The Divine is right here, in this moment, moving between us, through us, and within us as bodies.”
Body-based practices can help us cultivate peace in the body, while sensing the mystery of God’s presence. In the “Body Prayer,” created by the Order of Julian of Norwich, a series of movements correspond to four words drawn from Julian’s teachings: “await,” “allow,” “accept,” “attend.” To practice, follow the steps below with a contemplative stance.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Bring your hands in a cupped position at your waist (await). Sweep your hands overhead, looking up (allow). Lower your hands to cup them over your heart, bowing your head (accept). Stretch your arms before you (attend). With steady breath, sense what arises.
In light of Julian’s wisdom, embracing embodiment means remembering that we are loved, that we are whole, that God is here, that our bodies are good. What a relief.
Sarah James, a biracial Indian American woman of color, is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and founder of Clerestory Magazine.
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