Wounds and One-Ing: How a “Creative–Critical” Methodology Formed Fresh Insights in the Study of Julian of Norwich, Voicing Her Christian Mysticism Today
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Methodology: Poetry as a Way of Knowing
3. Key Strands of Critical Research
3.1. One-Ing Material Reality with Divine Love
“For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the fleshe in the skinne, and the bones in the flesh, and the harte in the bowke, so ar we, soule and body, cladde and enclosedde in the goodnes of God”.(Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love 6.35–37, Ed by Watson and Jenkins 2006).
“And this ranne so plenteouslye to my sight/that methought, if it hadde bene so in kinde for that time, it shulde hafe made the/bedde alle on blode, and hafe passede on aboute”.(A Vision, 8.22–24).
3.2. Trauma-Informed Theology: Bearing Witness to the Wound
“They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,saying, ‘Peace, peace,’when there is no peace.”(Jeremiah, 6.14 New Revised Standard Catholic Edition)
3.3. Entwining the Strands with the Ecological Crisis
4. Theopoetics: Blue: A Lament for the Sea
4.1. Bearing Witness
“when the hurting followed,bearing heart-wounds few can see,the harper plucked the airwith a tune so sad, birds shut their beaksand fish in the sea stopped to listen”
“Let the wounds surface, she crieslet the wounds be seenit is the only way to stop the breaking...when will we see what we do?”
“How will it be when the great deep falls quiet,the oceans poisoned,the seabed—a catacomb of coral,the birthing place—a rattletrap boneyard,beaches swept into memorythe last bird with tired wings shrieking a lonely cry across empty waves,an echo of all the birdsong that ever stitched the air”
“Tears splash into water: salt tearsswell the seasand now they arise at so much loss… for we cast our brokenness into the seasand now they floodwith endless winter sorrow”
“our grief changes nothingbut sorrow may bring a seeing, a turning”
“something I cannot namesomething I cannot grasp”
4.2. One-Ing—A Mystical Dream Vision
“all the soules that shalle be saved in heven without ende be knit in this knot, and oned in this oning”.(A Revelation 53:52)
“thus in Crist oure two kindes be oned”.(A Revelation 57.16)
“If any such liver be in erth which is continually kepte fro falling, I know it not, for it was not shewde me. But this was shewde: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kepte in one love”.(A Revelation 82.22–24)
“The One unmade who makeswith a down-lying crying-out painkeens, suffering has no refuge from Love…”
“Suffering has no refuge from Love…Her words magnify, bloom luminous through the cloud of blue before me…… Her words dilate through gorgeous swarms of trilling krill… Her words presence the whole blueLove seeing, touching, holdingin a knowinga one-ing…”
5. Conclusions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
1 | Blue: a lament for the sea by Liz MacWhirter will be published as a pamphlet by the poetry press, Stewed Rhubarb, in October 2025. www.stewedrhubarb.org. |
2 | |
3 | Medieval literary scholar Elizabeth Robertson has published widely on the relationships between gender, vernacular theology and poetics. In her pivotal work on medieval medical views and female spirituality, Robertson shows that medieval theological commentaries were saturated in Aristotelean—not Platonic—thought, and that this belief in women’s earthbound souls conditioned representations of female spirituality and restricted a woman’s relationship to her own spirituality. Women were cast as incomplete and deficient in reason, physiologically wet and cold, and therefore in a constant state of desiring the completing and balancing effect of male heat in sexual union and the purgation of excess moisture. To the medieval mind, bodily fluids such as blood, tears and sperm were transmutable. Moreover, contemporary works focused on an association between Christ’s humanity and feminine flesh, in contrast to the association of divinity with masculinity and reason. Robertson argues that the impossibility for a woman to transcend her own femininity was thought to have constrained even her conceptualising of God. See, Robertson (1993). |
4 | The abjection of Julian’s body in her near-death illness was linked to her “hypostatic sense-experience of dying revelation” which generated “unfettered” theological creativity. See, Gillespie (2017, p. 129). |
5 | The paradoxical theme of Julian’s abject state as she generatively bore witness to Christ’s wounds is explored in my larger creative–critical doctoral project. |
6 | The idea of Christ’s wounds in heaven denoting suffering in empathy with all those still hurting in creation was suggested in conversation by Dr. Sli Thabede, whose work focuses on the epidemic of gender violence in South Africa. |
7 | Free verse is defined by the Poetry Foundation as nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. |
8 | The multi-media performance of Blue: a lament for the sea achieves a surreal quality through the poetic language and by a ‘live’ backdrop: an underwater maritime film by digital artist and theologian Jonathan Kearney. |
9 | I explore the subtlety of this holding as an ontological experience in my doctoral project. |
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MacWhirter, L. Wounds and One-Ing: How a “Creative–Critical” Methodology Formed Fresh Insights in the Study of Julian of Norwich, Voicing Her Christian Mysticism Today. Religions 2025, 16, 384. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030384
MacWhirter L. Wounds and One-Ing: How a “Creative–Critical” Methodology Formed Fresh Insights in the Study of Julian of Norwich, Voicing Her Christian Mysticism Today. Religions. 2025; 16(3):384. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030384
Chicago/Turabian StyleMacWhirter, Liz. 2025. "Wounds and One-Ing: How a “Creative–Critical” Methodology Formed Fresh Insights in the Study of Julian of Norwich, Voicing Her Christian Mysticism Today" Religions 16, no. 3: 384. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030384
APA StyleMacWhirter, L. (2025). Wounds and One-Ing: How a “Creative–Critical” Methodology Formed Fresh Insights in the Study of Julian of Norwich, Voicing Her Christian Mysticism Today. Religions, 16(3), 384. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030384