Truth as Gift and Vocation: New Perspectives on Revelation

Revelation as Personal Gift and Vocation

The opening paragraphs of Dei Verbum set the stage for a personalist account of divine revelation. Before being objective content, fact or testimony, revelation is an event directly impacting human life and history. The Christian God is a God who relates and interacts with creation and human beings, in particular. This God is a God of close and active presence who wishes to disclose Godself in full to humankind and ultimately does so in the form of humankind. Jesus Christ is the human in and through whom the transcendence of divinity is conveyed under the figure of immanence, and whose words and deeds reflect and confirm his distinctive personhood and mission.

The pattern of this revelation unfolds through deeds and words bound together by an inner dynamism, in such a way that God’s works, effected during the course of the history of salvation, show forth and confirm the doctrine and the realities signified by the words, while the words in turn proclaim the works and throw light on the meaning hidden in them. By this revelation the truth, both about God and about the salvation of humankind, inwardly dawns on us in Christ, who is in himself both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation. ⁸

In the being and existence of Jesus, the inner life of God is at work and made present in undeniable fashion.

In his person, words and actions, God’s boundless love for humankind becomes so palpable that it definitively alters human nature and existence. Christ’s assumption and suffering of the human nature in life, death, and resurrection, unveil the divine mystery and purpose. Jesus’ person and existence embody revelation as unfolding history finding in him ultimate expression. Jesus was sent and came to express and fulfil in definitive fashion humanity’s absolute need and longing for God, without whom there can be no meaningful existence.

After God had spoken in many and various ways by the prophets . . . He sent his Son, the eternal Word who enlightens all humankind, to live among them and to tell them about the inner life of God. Thus it is that Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, sent as a human being among humans, ‘speaks the words of God’ and accomplishes the work of salvation which the Father gave him to do. . . . He did this by the total reality of his presence and self-manifestation—by his words and works, his symbolic acts and miracles, but above all by his death and his glorious resurrection from the dead, crowned by his sending the Spirit of truth. His message is that God is with us, to deliver us from the darkness of sin and death, and to raise us up to eternal life. ⁹

God’s personal revelation in Jesus evokes in and opens for the human person new engagement and life. Faith thus forms a necessary condition and prerequisite for the transmission of revelation in and as history. In faith, the Apostles were entrusted with the mission to share their encounter with and experience of the truth revealed in, through and as Jesus. The church—the community of those who profess to believe in and follow Jesus—draws life from and finds purpose in this most fundamental act of receiving (retrieving) and handing on revelation.

The apostles handed on, by their own preaching and examples and by their dispositions, whatever they had received from Christ’s lips, his way of life or his works, or had learned by the prompting of the Holy Spirit; secondly, some apostles, with others of the apostolic age, under the interior guidance of the same Spirit, committed the message of salvation to writing. . . . The expression ‘what has been handed down from the apostles’ includes everything that helps the people of God to live a holy life and to grow in faith. In this way the church, in its teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to every generation all that it is and all that it believes. This tradition which comes from the apostles progresses in the church under the assistance of the Holy Spirit. ¹⁰

The historical nature of revelation demands a historical mode of transmission. Faith, as sacramental (supernatural) mode of life is the proper medium for the expression and transmission of revelation. The written testimony of Scripture comes to life in and with the celebrating community, which forms its necessary context of interpretation. Scripture is the normative mediation of revelation insofar as it conveys and infuses divine meaning to and in the life of concrete communities. Since a historically focused understanding of revelation implies that the provision (the gift and/or self-manifestation) of revelation be progressive—it occurs as and through a sequence of incremental stages reaching a definite ending— the reception of revelation must also be conceived in terms of an ongoing process. Revelation is a gift whose full meaning and significance only become manifest and come to fruition over time, by means of the formation and growth of the believing community. For revelation to make history, history must be turned into revelation.

There is growth in understanding of what is handed on, both the words and the realities they signify. This comes about through contemplation and study by believers, who ‘ponder these things in their hearts’; through the intimate understanding of spiritual things which they experience; and through the preaching of those who, on succeeding to the office of bishop, receive the sure charism of truth. Thus, as the centuries advance, the church constantly holds its course towards the fullness of God’s truth, until the day when the words of God reach their fulfilment in the church. ¹¹

In and with the incarnation, human history has been fully revealed as history of salvation, that is, as salvation in the making, a process in which human beings are summoned to take active part. The followers of Christ must face the challenge of embodying the revelation taking place in and through him.

The theologies of Karl Rahner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer help us articulate concrete anthropological dimensions and implications of this challenge. ¹² On the question of the nature of authentic discipleship, the distinct perspectives of these two contemporary theologians nicely complement one another. Karl Rahner’s theology provides an overarching structure which can be fleshed out with the help of the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, focused on the complexity and particularities of the concrete. Setting his discussion in a cosmological context and opting for a transcendental approach to revelation, Karl Rahner conceives of Jesus Christ as the ultimate saviour. For him, the goal of natural evolution and human history resides in the hypostatic union, that is, the perfect union (without confusion) of the divine and the human. The incarnation of God in Jesus is the culmination of history and opens a new era, in which God’s self-communication and invitation to union with Godself has taken a definitive and compelling form. In and with Jesus, human beings are explicitly and definitively invited to commit themselves (their whole existence) and get involved in a life-changing relationship with God. ‘Human experience,’ argues Rahner, ‘is nothing else but a challenge to entrust oneself to the development of one’s own Christian existence in patience, openness and fidelity, and to do this until slowly, and perhaps painfully and with failures, this life unfolds and develops into the experience of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ.’ ¹³ The quest for self and truth in God, embodied as personal history in each human being, is lived out and fulfilled in and with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ completes God’s self-communication to humankind, because in him the fullness of divinity meets with the fullness of humanity: the complete answer can only be offered to and through exhaustive questioning. A fully assumed humanity is most revelatory of God. ¹⁴ The more involved with Christ the human person becomes, the greater her sense of the mysterious and unfathomable character of both human existence and God and the more she feels compelled to entrust herself to the infinite love of God. Amidst the necessities and contrarieties of life, God’s loving and powerful presence paves a way for the expression of human freedom in God.

For us who were born without being asked, and who have received a quite definite realm of existence without being asked, a realm which ultimately cannot be exchanged, there is no immediate freedom in the sense of an absence of any and every force which co-determines our existence. But a Christian believes that there is a path to freedom which lies in going through this imprisonment. We do not seize it by force, but rather it is given to us by God insofar as he gives himself to us throughout all of the imprisonments of our existence. ¹⁵

Opting for God entails being open to a life and destiny which can never feel comfortable and safe, because it is never reducible to predictable patterns or determinisms. Life in, from, and for God is absolutely free in the sense that it involves ‘an openness to everything, to everything without exception: openness to absolute truth, to absolute love, and to the absolute infinity of human life in its immediacy to the very reality which we call God.’ ¹⁶ The human person who fully assumes her condition allows God to be the main principle and purpose of her existence and actions. The constraints and obligations pertaining to human life are thereby endowed with a completely different signification, when they are freely coped with and assumed in God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric theology focuses on the redeeming character of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Bonhoeffer understands salvation as being effected by means of the conversion and recreation of the human person in conformity with Christ. Bonhoeffer’s perspective complements Rahner’s by providing a more developed understanding of discipleship as following of Jesus in and through suffering, death, and resurrection. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Christ thus enriches and deepens Rahner’s account of the incarnation, while Rahner’s cosmological, evolutionary, and transcendental framework provides a more comprehensive context to Bonhoeffer’s account (expanding it beyond human knowledge and history to include the whole of creation). In Bonhoeffer’s view, Christ himself becomes the content and purpose of each and every action to be accomplished. Christ so informs the thoughts and desires of the disciple that he actually alters the structure of her personal identity. Christian formation, the life of faith, is actually the process by which Christ takes form within the heart and soul of the disciple. Discipleship means and entails becoming Christ like, because Christ himself is at work, moulding the disciple after his own image.

It is not we who change ourselves into the image of God. Rather, it is the very image of God, the form of Christ, which seeks to take shape within us. It is Christ’s own form which seeks to manifest itself in us. Christ does not cease working in us until he has changed us into Christ’s own image. Our goal is to be shaped into the entire form of the incarnate, the crucified, and the risen one. ¹⁷

To allow Christ to take shape in her, to reshape her in accordance to him, is for the disciple no easy mandate; it represents the greatest challenge: the challenge of being fully and only human.

To be conformed to the one who has become human—that is what being really human means. The human being should and may be human. All super-humanity, all efforts to outgrow one’s nature as human, all struggle to be heroic or a demigod, all fall away from a person here, because they are untrue. . . . [Human beings] cannot lift themselves above other people or establish themselves as models because they recognize themselves as the greatest of all sinners. . . . We live in the midst of death; we are righteous in the midst of sin; we are new in the midst of the old. . . . We live because Christ lives, and in Christ alone. ¹⁸

Following Christ entails being conformed to Christ’s life and ministry, that is, to allow Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection to reconfigure entirely human nature and existence. Following Christ means entering into Christ’s Passion, sharing in Christ’s vicarious suffering for and on behalf of humankind. Following Christ implies being ready to suffer forsakenness and death (physical and spiritual) in order to remain faithful to infinite love.

Just as Christ is only Christ as one who suffers and is rejected, so a disciple is a disciple only in suffering and being rejected, thereby participating in crucifixion. . . . It is by Christians’ being publicly disgraced, having to suffer and being put to death for the sake of Christ, that Christ himself attains visible form within his community. From baptism all the way to martyrdom, it is the same suffering and the same death. It is the new creation of the image of God through the crucified one. ¹⁹

Suffering is not redemptive per se, but only insofar as it becomes a locus for the expression of absolute love attempting to overcome evil once and for all. Infinite love loves infinitely, responding to sin with merciful forgiveness, giving itself without end.

In Christ the reconciliation of the world with God took place. The world will be overcome not by destruction but by reconciliation. . . . This love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the reality of the world at its worst. The world exhausts its rage on the body of Jesus Christ. But the martyred one forgives the world its sins. Thus reconciliation takes place. ²⁰

The disciple’s suffering becomes redemptive when Christ makes it his, that is, when Christ allows his disciple to have a share in his redeeming suffering.

Christ still suffers his Passion today in the person of his faithful disciples who thereby act as his vicarious representatives. Infinite love is not content with the passive suffering of evil and sin, infinite love takes evil and sin upon itself, to liberate others from their burden of guilt.

Love for real human beings leads into the solidarity of human guilt. . . . In vicariously taking responsibility for human beings and in his love for the real human being, Jesus becomes burdened with guilt; indeed, he becomes the one upon whom ultimately all human guilt falls. Jesus does not shirk it but bears it in humility and infinite love. . . . Because Jesus took the guilt of all human beings upon himself, everyone who acts responsibly becomes guilty. . . . Because of Jesus Christ, the essence of responsible action intrinsically involves the sinless becoming guilty. ²¹

Discipleship—the Christian way of life—therefore entails, on the part of the human person, the duty to so embody her humanity as to bring the latter to give way completely to Christ who—being, living, and acting in and through her—will free others from their burden of sin and guilt. The true disciple does not seek her own salvation (which she places into God’s hands), personal gratification in self-sacrifice (the worst form of pride) or personal illumination (revelation as private possession), but seeks in all things to bring and share the whole of Christ to and with others. ‘Vicarious representative action and therefore responsibility is possible only in completely devoting one’s own life to another person. Only those who are selfless live responsibly, which means that only selfless people truly live.’ ²²

Hence, revelation as vocation occurs when the human person fully embraces the invincible unfathomability and difficulty of her condition. Entrusting herself to God, she finds in the infinite mystery of love a new way of being human in this world (God’s way of being human) which empowers her to be and act as God’s representative to and for others, to be and act in Christ’s stead, here and now. This robust articulation of Christian discipleship gives further meaning and weight to the following words from Karl Rahner:

A Christian is always one who fails, one who falls short of his task, his responsibility and his real possibilities. . . . He is always moving beyond his refusals and pressing forward to what lies ahead. In the incomprehensibility of his own dark and obscure freedom he knows that he is always encompassed by God’s grace, and he knows that he must always take refuge in this grace of God. . . . The real and total and comprehensive task of a Christian as a Christian is to be a human being, a human being whose depths are divine. ²³

Christ still is taking form in and as humanity, building bridges between individuals by enabling them to be truly human in him. The gift of revelation continuously unfolds in and as vocation, always in the making in the person of the disciple and of the believing community. ²⁴

Mystical Experience as Personal Revelation

Let us now consider this process at work and unfolding in the person, ministry, and writings of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic who was called to share the gift of revelation she had received from God by means of her dual vocation of theologian and spiritual mentor. The opening words of Julian of Norwich’s Showings (short text) are revealing: ‘Here is a vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman, and her name is Julian, who is a recluse at Norwich and still alive, A.D. 1413, in which vision are very many words of comfort, greatly moving for all those who desire to be Christ’s lovers.’ ²⁵ Julian speaks of mystical experience in terms of vision (sensible and intelligible sight) and speech (inner and outer word) that carry meaning whose usefulness and scope transcend those of the life of the individual experiencing them. She even intimates that mystical experience—her mystical experience—bears universal meaning, being significant and formative for all Christians. In other words, she claims her mystical experience to be revelation, that is, a gift she is called to share with her fellow Christians. So she claims: ‘Everything that I say about me I mean to apply to all my fellow Christians, for I am taught that this is what our Lord intends in this spiritual revelation.’ ²⁶ The opening words of the longer text leave no room for doubt, detailing the form and content of the revelation she received.

This is a revelation of love which Jesus Christ, our endless bliss, made in sixteen showings, of which the first is about his precious crowning of thorns; and in this was contained and specified the blessed Trinity, with the Incarnation and the union between God and man’s soul, with many fair revelations and teachings of endless wisdom and love, in which all the revelations which follow are founded and connected. ²⁷

In these few lines the extent of Julian’s hermeneutical work is already conveyed; her knowledge of Christian doctrine now informs the raw data of her mystical experience to reveal the latter’s inner structure and content. Jean Leclercq comments:

Julian presents us with a typical example of a theology based on mystical experience, which certainly does not exclude the activity of reason but which can in no way be reduced to the rational. . . . She translates her mystical experience into conceptual terms, as most mystics do, and she deduces the meaning from the experience; she makes explicit in rational terms what is in its very nature extra-rational. . . . The ‘revelation’ is never sufficient; it is a grace and God takes all the initiative, but there must be human effort. . . . Contemplative experience leads to and overflows into doctrinal teaching. ²⁸

If we take Julian’s words seriously, then in the few lines just cited, we find a systematically structured summary of the entire text of Showings. The content of Julian’s revelation is divine love, made in and as Jesus Christ, whose incarnation and passion involve the Trinity as a whole in view of the reunion of the human with God. Thus Julia A. Lamm argues that ‘this “revelation of love” permeates the entire Long Text, from the opening line of the Prologue through the extended narrations of the sixteen showings. In it may arguably be found an outline of her doctrine of revelation: the meaning, source, content, and purpose of divine revelation.’ ²⁹ The following words from the conclusion of the long text support this interpretation: ‘What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.’ ³⁰ The nature of divine love finding expression in Jesus Christ and his redeeming existence and ministry was revealed to her by means of 16 ‘showings.’ The unpacking and coherent articulation of the significance of these showings required many years of patient and prayerful work of analysis and creative interpretation. According to Grace M. Jantzen, ‘it was only in living by what she already understood that [Julian] could hope to come to understand more deeply.’ ³¹ To bring out and convey the full implications of her mystical experiences, Julian produced and made use of new language and analogies to describe God’s relationship to and involvement with humankind. ³²

These new language and analogies she developed in order to solve what, in the wake of her mystical experiences and ensuing interpretive work, had become for her an acute spiritual—not merely theological—problem: the integration of the contents and implications of her mystical experiences with those of the official teachings of the church. In her own life of faith, Julian feels the need for a theological interface between subjective and objective mediations and tenets of revelation. ³³ Here is how Julian herself states the problem:

Good Lord, I see in you that you are very truth, and I know truly that we sin grievously all day and are very blameworthy; and I can neither reject my knowledge of this truth, nor see that any kind of blame is shown to us. How can this be? For I know by the ordinary teaching of Holy Church and by my own feeling that the blame of our sins continually hangs upon us, from the first man until the time that we come up into heaven. This, then, was my astonishment, that I saw our Lord God showing no more blame to us than if we were as pure and as holy as the angels in heaven. And between these two oppositions my reason was greatly afflicted by my blindness, and I could have no rest for fear that his blessed presence would pass from my sight, and I should be left in ignorance of how he may look on us in our sin. ³⁴

The problem is for her most real and important, because she feels and knows on the basis of her own spiritual experience that both the teaching of the church—before God all human beings are sinners deserving of judgement—and the teaching of God’s intimate self-manifestation to her in mystical experience—God is boundless merciful love—are true and vindicated in Jesus Christ.

The legitimacy and authority of her mystical experiences cannot be put in doubt, for the simple reason that these experiences had Jesus Christ himself and his passion as cause and content, and involved no other mediations than a representation of Christ (crucifix) and her own suffering body. ³⁵ Interestingly, this unmediated experience of the Lord affects and involves Julian’s whole person: body, mind, and spirit. The 16 showings were conveyed to her in three forms: sensible visions, words (audible to the inner ear), purely spiritual experience (no sensible component). ³⁶ More significantly, the true medium for her mystical experiences, which she aptly describes as ‘teaching,’ using language attesting her vocation to share the gift received, is acute suffering. Julian wishes to convey her discovery of what may be designated as organic knowledge, that is, spiritual learning involving the body as medium, subject, and content. Maria R. Lichtmann explains:

Julian sees her body as the locus of spiritual enlightenment . . . Julian seeks to move from faith to experience, from mere belief to vision, and from a doctrinal, second-hand knowing to her own inner authority. And the passage from an intellectual, non-integral faith to a thoroughly grounded experience is through bodiliness, both the bodiliness of the visions and her own bodily experience, her suffering, of them and with them. ³⁷

Julian’s life of prayer and spirituality were marked with asceticism. She entered religious life early, dedicating herself entirely to contemplation. Eventually, she adopted a way of life stricter than life under monastic rule, choosing to live in solitary enclosure. ³⁸ The experience of acute suffering which served as medium for her mystical experiences is an experience to which, for years—in her prayers—she asked to be subjected. In the second chapter of Showings (long text), Julian thus says: ‘This revelation was made to a simple, unlettered creature, living in this mortal flesh, the year of our Lord one thousand, three hundred and seventy-three, on the thirteenth day of May; and before this the creature had desired three graces by the gift of God. The first was recollection of the Passion. The second was bodily sickness. The third was to have, of God’s gift, three wounds.’ ³⁹ Julian wished to be granted the opportunity to share in the suffering of the close companions of Christ as he suffered death by crucifixion. ⁴⁰

The grace of bodily sickness turned out to be a precondition for the reception of the grace of recollection of the Passion, these two graces themselves identifying with the first two of three wounds Julian wished to receive: ‘the wound of true contrition, the wound of loving compassion and the wound of longing with my will for God.’ ⁴¹ Domenico Pezzini eloquently spells out the revelatory character and power of the inflicted wound. ‘A wound,’ he argues, ‘implies both pain and opening. The first is best evident in the image of contrition, which literally means breaking a heart that has become hardened by sins, that is, the fruit of a perverted desire. The opening is evoked by compassion, by which a softened heart opens its gates to other people’s suffering, sharing with them all they have and all they are.’ ⁴² In her 30th year, Julian suffered from a serious illness, which led her to the brink of death, where she remained several days. As she was preparing to hand her spirit over to God, the Lord, upon the presentation of a crucifix by the priest tending to her, deigned to show himself to her in 16 ‘revelations.’ The grave physical illness induced contrition in her heart (first wound), the experience of contrition over her own condition led her to desire to share in Christ’s suffering on her behalf (second wound), which itself supposed and aroused in her heart a still greater longing for her Lord and saviour (third wound). ⁴³ For Julian, not only does revelation occur in the element of pain, but pain itself is revelation, because the most perfect revelation of God’s love lies in and with Jesus’ Passion. ⁴⁴ To have a share in Jesus’ redeeming pain is to have a share in the essence of God. The pain of love—that is, the loving pain—is the greatest form of suffering that can be experienced in this life. ⁴⁵

Those who desire to be faithful to Christ do not elude suffering, they rather wish for the suffering they endure to be graciously transmuted into Christ’s own redeeming suffering. When the faithful experience themselves to be dying with Christ, their hearts are filled with joy, because in grace they come to understand that nothing can separate them from God. God’s love for them, expressed and embodied in Jesus Christ, is both boundless and invincible. ⁴⁶ There is a joy which cannot be dampened, a joy which can take hold of the human heart despite and amidst relentless physical suffering and spiritual desolation, it is the joy of being intimate with Christ, of experiencing Christ’s redeeming power at work effectively transforming one’s whole person, the joy of being loved over and against one’s total unworthiness and sinfulness. Since God is eternal limitless forgiving love, human hearts and souls can, in the present life, feel, express, and share absolute joy, and this, independently from their particular living conditions and circumstances. ⁴⁷ The gift of divine joy does not eliminate human suffering and desolation, it rather relativizes (i.e., de-absolutizes) and infuses them with everlasting meaning, as it grounds the whole of human existence into God’s infinite mercy.

Once again, Christ’s own experience and behaviour is the criterion and measure. Julian recalls and interprets a vision in which Christ tells her that the more one loves, the more one is ready to suffer for those one loves. Infinite love for others entails readiness to endure infinite suffering on behalf of those one loves. ⁴⁸ The three wounds she received from God as graces, which form the core of her mystical experiences, Julian therefore identifies with her ongoing personal spiritual transformation. The gift of revelation received in and as mystical experience is unpacked and unfolded in and through faithful discipleship. This life-changing revelation, Julian believes to be endowed with universal validity and applicability. ‘By contrition we are made clean, by compassion we are made ready, and by true longing for God we are made worthy. These are the means, as I understand, through which all souls come to heaven, those, that is to say, who have been sinners on earth and will be saved.’ ⁴⁹ To bring her transformative experience to expression in and through her person, action and words therefore constitutes, for Julian, an integral component of revelation. In the words of Julia A. Lamm:

It is not information that is being imparted but our very redemption. If the process of exteriorizing makes what was internal external, and that which is exteriorized is God’s very self, then what is exposed are spiritual nutrients and fluids that bring and nurture new life. . . . In Julian’s theology, the revelation continues to be enacted through the act of exposition. To narrate, write, and revise is to continue to participate in the revelation. ⁵⁰

The saving wounds graciously received as experience of the suffering of Christ correspond to the nature and quality of human sinning. The wound is triple, because sin is triple. Sin is embodied in failure, fall, and death. The human heart and soul are guilty of failing to love, falling from grace, and dying to themselves and God. ⁵¹ God’s mercy renews the human ability to love, elevates the human heart and soul to God, and overcomes death by turning it into an access to eternal life in God. For Julian, the quintessence of sin is found in complete self-enclosure (empty self-sufficiency), because human life—in fact, all spiritual life—is relational, being lived as involvement with and dedication to others, especially the Other (God). Whether they are aware of it or not, human beings are always involved in a relationship with God, because God never ceases to be involved with each and every one of them. The greatest sin therefore resides in the individual’s inability and unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of this relationship and its antecedence over the relationship she entertains with her own self. For, as Julian argues, ‘in falling and in rising we are always preciously protected in one love. We do not fall in the sight of God, and we do not stand in our own sight; and both of these are true, as I see it, but the contemplating of our Lord God is the higher truth.’ ⁵² God’s loving mercy prevails over deserved judgement, because in and for human existence God comes first. God is the sole good human beings absolutely need. Only God can and does fulfil the human heart and soul. The human person is faithful to God when she asks for no less than God, when she longs and finds satisfaction only for and in God. ⁵³ Julian even argues—on the basis of her mystical experiences—that in God there can be no such thing as vindictive anger. If there were even the tiniest trace, so frail and fallen creatures as human beings could and would not exist. ⁵⁴ God’s union to human beings (which coincides with but is not identical to human beings’ union with God) is complete and unmediated. From God’s standpoint, there is no distance between Godself and the human person. ⁵⁵

The spiritual transformation of the person accomplished in the three wounds must therefore result in a renewed explicit relationship with God defining and undergirding the integrality of human existence. That Julian understands radical longing for God as the foundation of human existence and the source of absolute joy is made plain in her theology of prayer. According to Domenico Pezzini, Julian so insists on the ‘importance of desire precisely because it is God in us.’ ⁵⁶ Her words speak for themselves: ‘Prayer is a right understanding of that fullness of joy which is to come, with true longing and trust. The savouring or seeing of our bliss, to which we are ordained, by nature makes us to long; true understanding and love, with a sweet recollection in our saviour, by grace makes us to trust.’ ⁵⁷ Prayer is grace from beginning to end: God so moves the human person to pray that God can communicate Godself to her. The more God communicates Godself, the more the human person longs for God. The more the human person longs for God, the more God communicates Godself. ⁵⁸ Longing for God is prayer and prayer is longing for God. When Julian is praying for the wound of longing (the third and last wound completing spiritual transformation), she is asking God for true prayer. True prayer is the culmination and the embodiment of revelation, because in and through it, God discloses Godself to the human person without mediation. Prayer also is, at the same time, the expression of authentic faith, for faith is the basic trust that empowers the human person to persevere in her search for God, enabling the human heart to wait for God to reveal Godself when and as God wills. ⁵⁹ God is always at work, whether we receive the grace of being aware of it or not, for God also and most often ‘works in secret.’ ⁶⁰

Prayer also is the condition for authentic self-knowledge, because knowledge of God is the necessary prerequisite to self-knowledge. God is better known to human beings than they are to themselves, because God is closer to them than they are to themselves. The relationship to God is the condition of possibility for relationship to any human being, including oneself. ⁶¹ God so created human beings as to be able to live in them, dwelling at the core of the human heart and soul, the absolute foundation and fulfilment of an infinite desire, the desire for the infinite. In this sense, by being Godself God is infinitely more human than humans can be, because God as God is the perfect fulfilment of human nature and existence. Just as Christ’s humanity fully lives in God and God fully indwells Christ’s humanity, so the humanity of those who have died and risen in and with Christ lives in God and God lives in the humanity of those who have died and risen in and with him. True humanity is fully transparent to God who completely inhabits it. Julian speaks of the relationship of the human soul to God in terms highly reminiscent of Meister Eckhart.

It is a great understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our Creator, dwells in our soul, and it is a far greater understanding to see and know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God in substance, of which substance, through God, we are what we are. I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. ⁶²

In Christ Jesus, human beings find the definitive expression of God’s eternal love for them. The Lord is with, in, and for the human. Nothing can estrange from the Lord the human heart which places its trust in the Lord. The Lord is its home and will always take care of it as the infinitely loving mother that he is. ⁶³ Living and acting on the basis of this certitude, human beings look for and find God in all things, even and especially (as previously demonstrated) in suffering. For no matter where they are, where they go, and what they do, God is there with them, guiding them to Godself. The challenge of this life, when it is responsibly confronted and faithfully assumed, morphs into a unique mediation for the redeeming presence and activity of God. John Noffsinger similarly comments that in Julian’s understanding of the divine–human interaction, ‘humans provide the locus for the continual coming-into-being of God.’ ⁶⁴ Human discipleship is revelation.

This place is prison, this life is penance, and he wants us to rejoice in the remedy. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, protecting us and leading us into the fullness of joy; for our Lord intends this to be an endless joy, that he who will be our bliss when we are there is our protector whilst we are here, our way and our heaven in true love and faithful trust. ⁶⁵

Conclusion

The previous reflections lead us to perceive in Julian of Norwich’s Showings the concrete embodiment and enacting of the teaching that would centuries later be made explicit by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council and the work of theologians such as Karl Rahner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Julian experienced and received the gift of personal revelation in the form of mystical experiences. Responding to her intense prayer, the Lord provided her with unique insight into the mystery of his Passion and also, therefore, the mystery of the divine essence. In and through the medium of acute suffering, Julian was allowed to experience the infinite, invincible, and eternal love of God in privileged fashion. This life-changing experience set her on a journey where her understanding and practice of faith were profoundly challenged and transformed. The integration of the new knowledge of God gained by means of mystical experience with the knowledge she already possessed and had received from church and tradition required the adoption of altogether new epistemological and interpretive frameworks.

In and through mystical experience, revelation had become personal, in the sense that it was specifically addressed and given to her, and in the further sense that she was called to live out what she had received as a lifelong spiritual transformation and teaching vocation. In her continuing attempt to make sense of and to weave this graciously offered encounter with the Lord into the fabric of her concrete existence, the gift of revelation became in and for Julian personal history, the history of Christ taking form among, within, and as humanity. In and through human insufficiency, unworthiness, and misery, she could now perceive the continuing presence and efficient action of divine love powerfully protecting, sustaining, and uplifting body, soul, and spirit. She could place her trust wholly in this God who had revealed Godself to her and was now making Godself present to others in and through her.

If, as Vatican II’s Dei Verbum adamantly proclaims, God has been fully revealed in and as Jesus Christ, then revelation is a gift bestowed and received in and as history, the history of the divine giver (Jesus himself), and the history of the human recipients (Jesus’ disciples, the community of their followers, humanity at large). The history of the gift includes the history of its reception. The divine gift of revelation turns history into revelation. This conclusion leads Karl Rahner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to argue that Christian life itself, if and when it is conceived as transformation of the human in Christ—that is, as the formation and operation of Christ within the human—is revelation unfolding, in the making as personal history. Hence, in her Showings, Julian of Norwich is seen unveiling and consecrating, to and for herself and for all her readers, the revelatory character of Christian discipleship. For the gift of revelation inevitably entrusts its recipients with the duty to become, in their own turn, living manifestations of the truth. Christian discipleship forms and enacts the vocation entrusted in and by Jesus Christ to all human beings: to embody revelation.

The implications of understanding revelation as gift unfolding in and as history in the context of 21st-century global and secularized society are significant. Revelation is not a self-contained gift but rather one that entrusts and unfolds as personal vocation. Julian of Norwich’s mystical experiences and ensuing lifelong theological discernment and spiritual journey have been invoked as a paradigmatic case where the combination of gift and vocation is clear and can be analyzed. Julian’s mystical experiences operate as private revelation which requires and translates into a quest for meaning and ongoing personal transformation (conversion) reflecting the experience of God’s self-disclosure in life-changing fashion. The kataphatic character of Julian’s mystical experiences enabled the demonstration of the existence of a causal relationship between her mystical experiences and ensuing theological vocation, spiritual journey, and faithful discipleship.

Divine revelation can thus be construed as form of life and vocation open to and informed by the transcendent. Discipleship, understood as faithful living and service, can thus bespeak of God and help individuals and communities retrieve the foundational encounters with God which set them on an ongoing challenging journey for concrete historical self-definition and expression. The careful consideration of the life narratives of individuals and communities can therefore enable the perception of the active presence and manifestation of God which, in turn, reveals that these life narratives are grounded in a particular form or mode of mystical experience (latent, apophatic or negative), as their incipient foundation and source, affecting the lives of all faithful disciples.

In the currently prevailing secular context, characterized by a widespread search for meaning and authentic existence, intensified by the overwhelming presence and depth of evil and suffering, it is thus possible to invoke the multiple concrete forms that the lived experience of faithful individuals and communities take to retrieve and unwrap the gift of divine revelation imparted to them. These faithful ways of living and experiences may be found both within and outside the church, enabling the latter to find Christ in the secular world and the secular world to discover that it is called to be part of the body of Christ, the church. Following Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘religionless Christianity’ and Karl Rahner’s ‘implicit (anonymous) Christianity,’ a fully developed historical understanding of divine revelation invites 21st-century Westerners to discover and explore the concrete implications of their ‘implicit mysticism,’ for as Rahner famously quipped, ‘the devout Christian of the future will either be a “mystic,” one who has experienced “something,” or he will cease to be anything at all.’ ⁶⁶ The postmodern search for meaning and authentic existence in the face of evil and suffering reveals an invincible desire for and latent communion with God. Hence, Julian of Norwich’s life, testimony, and theology can, now perhaps more than ever, act as spiritual guides for the disciples of today as they attempt to give expression to their own personal encounter with the God of Jesus Christ.