The Universe in Your Soul

With a title like “The Universe in Your Soul” you might think I’ve gone New Age or motivational, but this idea came to me while reading the medieval Christian recluse Julian of Norwich, whose “Showings” or “Revelations” (the first book written in English by a woman) I’ve been contemplating for several months during my morning prayers. She writes: 

And then our Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the midst of my inner self. I saw my soul as large as if it were an endless world… 

Translator Father John-Julian, OJN offers other versions and translations of her Middle English as possibilities for “endless world,” but concludes that “Julian is trying to convey the idea of limitless space within her soul.” Julian views the soul as both body and spirit, much as the ancient Hebrews and first Christians did, and that God is “the means by which our sensuality and our essence are held together.”

When she speaks of her soul, she means our souls as well. That captures my imagination. It occurs to me that our souls are the progeny of a universe expanding not only beyond itself, but also within ourselves—not only outwardly, but inwardly.

Being, life itself, is how the universe is reaching beyond matter and gasses, energy and dark matter, to comprehend itself, to communicate, and to contemplate the wonder of it all. (Scientific contemplation is helping us also understand how “lively” matter is, even before life emerges.)

For Julian, this is not just humanity, but all living things. And, she observes, it’s in this “being” that God is to be found, making me think of Paul Tillich’s notion of God as “the Ground of Being.”

She has a high view of human beings, in sharp contrast to “the typical medieval stance (or the Puritan and Calvinist attitudes),” to quote her translator. She observes: 

For I saw in the same showing that if the blessed Trinity could have made [humanity’s] soul any better, any more beautiful, any nobler than it was made, [God] would not have been wholly pleased with the creation of [the human] soul. 

And that’s why God chooses to dwell in our souls. I flash on Etty Hillesum’s understanding of God as her “deepest and richest” self—in the words of 12-Step, our “higher power.”

For Julian, “the Fall” is a human stumbling into a hole, requiring compassion and help getting out. As I’ve written in a previous post, she doesn’t believe that God blames us for sin, but feels empathy for the trouble and suffering it causes us. Sin is “nothing” and “unnatural” for us, making me think of Karl Barth’s notion of sin as “the impossible possibility.”

And she embraces the “felix culpa,” the “fortunate sin” that makes possible the Incarnation as well as our individual realizations of vulnerability, though I prefer Hildegard of Bingen’s notion that the Incarnation was intended from the beginning; indeed, I would say the Incarnation is a teaching moment to reveal God’s incarnation in all life.

And our “dearworthy Mother” Jesus, “if we fall, quickly…raises us by [a] loving embracing and merciful touching.”

God knows we could all use more “merciful touching”! Julian writes: 

As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother. 

And what [God] showed in all the showings… particularly in those sweet words where [God] says: … 

“I am the supreme goodness of all manner of things.

I am what causes thee to love.

I am what cause thee to yearn.

It is I: the endless fulfilling of all true desires.”

We do not invite so much as observe the presence of God, Jesus, and the Spirit in our souls, central to our interior “endless world and…blessed kingdom.”

And, as if all of this were not enough, Julian asserts: 

It is God’s will that I see myself just as much bound to [God] in love as if [God] had done all that [God] has done just for me. 

And thus should every soul think in regard to [God’s] Love: that is to say, the love of God creates in us such a unity that when it is truly understood, no [one] can separate [oneself] from any other. 

As I contemplate this insight of an “endless world,” this universe inside me, I am struck with awe and a sense of tremendous responsibility. A recent study indicates that awe is directly related to an ability to care for others. A current book, The Spiritual Child by Lisa Miller, argues “that spiritual awareness is innate and that it is an important component in human development,” in the words of columnist David Brooks.

This further insight from Julian I find transforming the more I consider it: 

And thus I understand truly that our soul can never have rest in things that are beneath itself. 

Reminiscent, as John-Julian observes, of Augustine’s famous saying that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, O God.” It makes me consider all the things with which I occupy my life that are “beneath” my soul. 

And the soul that thus contemplates [this delightful sight] makes itself to be like [God] who is contemplated, and ones itself in rest and peace by [God’s] grace. 

Even for those who may not believe in God, contemplating the universe within that is the culmination of a billions-year-old universe may inspire awe and make us sensible to the value of our lives and the lives of others. 

Click here for other posts about Julian of Norwich.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

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Art Mystic

A couple of weeks ago I read about an artist whose work, in my view, parallels the mystical experience. Wil S. Hylton writes of one of James Turrell’s creations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 

The room was devoid of boundaries, just an eternity of inky blackness, with the outline of a huge lavender rectangle floating in the distance, and beyond it, the tall plane of green light stretching toward an invisible horizon, where it dissolved into a crimson stripe. … The shapes and contours I saw were made entirely of light. 

It reminded me of the first laser light program I saw in the days before laser light shows became commercial and often tacky. It was truly a work of art on the interior “canvas” of the Los Angeles Planetarium dome, accompanied by music, ranging from classical to jazz. The colors were so intense, I cried.

The only other time I remember crying at the intensity of colors was on a visit to Petra, an ancient and abandoned city in Jordan carved in stone whose mineral composition reveals intense striations of colors. (You will remember its stone temple from the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.) I felt so sorry for one of my trip mates who was too sick to leave the bus, unable to join us being led on donkeys through a very long and winding few-feet-wide passageway between sheer stone cliffs to Petra.

Having that experience, I could understand why Zorba would wire the narrator of Zorba the Greek to come see a beautiful green stone he had discovered. Zorba, based on an actual acquaintance of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, angers the narrator by his seeming obliviousness to the great famine he and his world are enduring on the eve of even greater disasters to come.

“To hell with beauty!” he writes, “She has no heart and does not care a jot for human suffering.” But then his anger dissipated, and he felt drawn to Zorba’s request: “Some wild bird in me was beating its wings and asking me to go. Yet I did not go. … I listened to the moderating, cold, human voice of logic.” In response, Zorba wrote, “You too could have seen a beautiful green stone at least once in your life, you poor soul, and you didn’t see it,” and the bad choice convinces Zorba there is a hell.

Hylton writes: 

The joke among Turrell’s friends is that, to see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost. … Not everyone enjoys the Turrell experience. It requires a degree of surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous. 

Notably, his work is yet wheelchair accessible.

This could describe a mystical experience—becoming hopelessly lost, surrendering, having comfort and certainty stripped away, rapturous, distressing, dangerous. And yet “wheelchair accessible,” which I suggest as a metaphor for available to all.

As with the mystical experience, “a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe his work” is needed, like “thingness of light” and “alpha state of mind.” “Without these terms it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work,” Hylton observes.  So too with mystical experiences, for example: “thin places,” “dark night of the soul,” “interior castle,” “showings,” “mindfulness,” “oneness,” “nirvana,” “kingdom of God,”  “in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all.”

Related posts:

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

In the Company of Birds

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