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

Post-Theoretical “creative–critical” research recently emerged in the discipline of Creative Writing as a collapse of the binaries between practice and Theory. This article shows that using this interdisciplinary methodology in the study of mysticism is a natural fit, illustrating its efficacy in a case study with the reflexive writing of the medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. As a creative–critical writer and researcher, I explored the junctures where Julian’s poetics intersect with trauma-informed theology. Writing through these intersections formed a literary trauma-informed framework for the holding and processing of loss and grief through Julian’s nuanced modelling of mystical union with God. This case study shows how the framework came together critically and its application to contemporary ecological grief in the writing of a performative long poem, Blue: a lament for the sea. The “theopoetic” making process with two images from Julian’s texts, Christ’s “wounds” and “one-ing”, developed new language for liminal and spiritual experience. Insights from creative–critical research can be shared in artistic performance and publication in the academy and beyond in public impact. Bringing the whole self through theopoetics to the scholarly research of mysticism has the potential to form fresh insights, revealing new dimensions.

1. Introduction

“To be a theologian, one has to be a non-theologian” (Holland 1997). This quote by Paul Tillich suggests that theology can benefit from methodologies and research that intersect with other disciplines in the academy. This article aims to show that interdisciplinary “creative–critical” practice research can bring a new direction to the study of mysticism in the context of practical theology, generating insights that may otherwise remain “overlooked or undiscovered by more conventional research methodologies” (Crewe 2021). Furthermore, creative literary forms can naturally provide channels for research to achieve public impact through their publication and performance, bridging the academic–public gap. Through such channels, practice-led research can embody public impact, as defined by the UK Research Excellence Framework (Crewe 2021).

In this case, creative–critical practice research involved applying both critical logical and creative associative thinking to Julian of Norwich, a medieval contemplative anchoress, as part of a larger doctoral project. My “theopoetic” writing process with Julian’s texts in Middle English illuminated a small trail of academic meeting points of her theology with trauma-informed theology. I found that writing through these intersections formed a trauma-informed cognitive framework for the sensitive holding and processing of loss and grief through Julian’s nuanced modelling of mystical union with God. The theopoetic process generated new language in the writing of a free verse narrative, Blue: a lament for the sea1, which applies the framework to the specific context of contemporary ecological grief.

Recent research carried out in Finland on the phenomena of ecological grief shows that difficulty in engaging with the complex reality of climate and ecological breakdown is causing stasis for individuals, cultures and systems when there is an urgent need for climate action. Stasis and denial are as political as they are personal. Blue: a lament for the sea shows that poetry can subtly articulate this trauma-informed academic framework using Julian’s theology for holding complex reality, loss and grief and may help by disrupting the “paralyzing” and “silencing” effects of unprocessed eco-anxiety (Pihkala 2018). The reader or audience can travel along with the narrator and share in voicing their ecological grief through the tonal shifts and narrative. By journeying along with the narrative, the reader or audience is invited to share in the complexity of bearing witness to ecological harm and its impacts while being complicit in its destruction; a mystical one-ing of divine love with suffering; and the concluding contemplative action of thinking with our hearts and acting with our hearts.

Performing Blue: a lament for the sea at academic conferences, together with presenting critical papers on its development, brought these research insights into knowledge exchange with peers at the Mystical Theology Network 2024, International Medieval Congress 2024 and Yale Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology 2023. In 2022, I performed the first version at a public arts festival, Hidden Door, in Edinburgh, UK. In 2025, its publication as a pamphlet by a traditional poetry press will give the research insights wider public impact. I have already been invited by organisations such as the Iona Community in 2025 to perform the poem and lead discussions and writing workshops, increasing its impact.

This project encompasses adjacent disciplines and may be of interest to diverse audiences with overlapping interest: scholars of theology and practical theology, psychology and medieval literature, as well as literary fiction readers. Section 2 of this article outlines my methodology: creative–critical research and the relevance of poetry to mysticism. Section 3 offers a critical understanding of Julian of Norwich’s paradoxical engagement with the body and the “wound”, trauma-informed theology and ecological grief. Section 4 explores how Blue: a lament for the sea was written through the “wound” and “one-ing”: the theopoetics process.

2. Methodology: Poetry as a Way of Knowing

Writing as a researcher, the poetic, even the theopoetic, enables new insights to coalesce and form. My creative–critical methodology eschews the binary often perceived between critical and creative thought and embraces the poetic for its ability to express reason, thought and emotion.

Creative–critical research emerged as a Post-Theoretical collapse of the binaries between Creative Practice and Critical Theory in Creative Writing (Smith 2022). In this way, Creative Writing is an “exemplary discipline of the post-Theory Academy” with the capacity to challenge hegemonies and build critical awareness of social contexts (Dawson 2022).

The Nigerian British poet, essayist and hybrid writer Ben Okri (2018) asserts that, of all the literary forms, poetry can disrupt perceptions and be the “arrow that sends the shaft of the political into the heart”. By “revealing other realities… awakening an unease about the world”, poetry can reconstitute “humanity into the possibility of grace”. Okri goes further and explicitly aligns poetry with mysticism. Poetry “sings to the sublimity of what appears not to be us but which also appears to be us in unknown ways. Poetry is primarily mystical in that sense”.

Just as light can seem both dawn and dusk, poetry can invoke liminal, in-between space in the reader or listener. There is a natural affinity between poetry and contemplative faith. In the refusal of separations, dualisms and oppositions, both can frame complex realities and help us bear witness to that complexity, expand our sense of the possible and strengthen our capacity to live with paradox. Taking the cognitivist assumption that art can give us philosophical knowledge (Gaut 2013), the poem, as with mystical contemplative thought, can provide a generative place for holding uncertainty with curiosity. Uncertainty, understood as the ability to let in more of reality and hold open possible meanings or conclusions, enables cognitive reframing, innovation and change (Crewe 2021); this is the process through which Blue: a lament for the sea may support people to process their ecological grief, letting go of a previous posture and opening to a new possibility. Poetry’s holding of uncertainty, with an undefended openness to liminality, can also open us to the divine (Fosse et al. 2024).

The “theopoetics” movement is firmly located in Post-Theory, embracing the understanding that no writing or reading is ideologically innocent2. Developing at the site of the divide between the sacred and secular, theopoetics is a form of political resistance (Walton 2019). Associated with process theology and liberation theology, by bearing witness to injustice, it is concerned with bringing about social justice in the world. Theopoetics attends to embodiment and the aesthetic and cognitive uncertainties of language in making meaning (L. Callid Keefe-Perry et al. 2014, p. 111). It is an invitation to work with God as poet of the world (Faber 2008), helping new possibilities come into being as we write new endings and fresh starts, using our imagination to expand our collective semantic space.

Poetry and theopoetics, therefore, naturally support a constructive theological response to oppressive hegemonic structures, such as those operating around climate denial. If I may amplify Mark’s Gospel 16.17, perhaps the desire to dismantle the evil of injustice is why we seek new language; it is why we speak in new tongues. This is true even more so when the voiceless are not just the marginalised and vulnerable in human society but voiceless non-human nature.

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).

For Julian of Norwich, it was during a traumatic near-death experience in May 1373 that she experienced a series of “showings”, when she was “thirty years and a half”. The cause of her illness is unknown; it is thought that she may have contracted the black plague or suffered a miscarriage. As Julian came close to death, the priest administered the last rites and affixed a crucifix to the foot of her bed when showings of the crucified Christ commenced. Julian recovered and went on to write A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (henceforth, A Vision), became an anchoress, adopting the male saint’s name of the church adjoining her anchorage, and wrote the longer text, A Revelation of Love (henceforth, A Revelation). She died sometime after 1416.

To Julian, all material reality is precious and upheld in love, contrary to the tradition of her time which considered the flesh to be innately corrupting. Julian directs her medieval reader to perceive the bodily senses as places of somatic encounter with God. She holds a little thing like a hazelnut in her palm, symbolizing all of creation (A Revelation, 5:7). Great drops of Christ’s blood are likened to “pellotes” (A Revelation, 7.11), evoking stones, cannonballs or chunks of meat. The drops of blood are re-imagined as raindrops from the eaves of a roof after a great shower of rain and as shining herring scales spreading across Christ’s forehead (A Revelation, 7.17–23). Her language is rooted in “homely”, everyday images of material reality.

Medieval female mystics engaged with the divine through a corporeal framework, enabled by a God who was corporeally incarnated in Christ (Robertson 2008)3. Julian’s low status as an abject4 medieval woman bearing witness to Christ’s wounds from the Passion engenders a paradoxical healing of her own “wounds” of trauma, in a mystical one-ing with God’s love5. Although the extent of Julian’s gender essentialism is debated, there is academic consensus regarding Julian’s paradoxical interlacing of previously abject material with the mystical. Julian’s “positive body theology” reclaims the body, intersecting with the apophatic, using deliberately paradoxical and open-ended language, transforming homely images to “gateways into the apophatic” (Greenaway-Clarke 2021). The cataphatic–apophatic pulse in Julian’s theology creates a porosity through which the reader can bring the whole self to her text and encounter God.

The precise points of access to the divine in Julian’s theology are Christ’s wounds. His wounds are portrayed as dynamic and almost sentient. For example, the “woundes waxid wide” (A Revelation, 17.8), as “the blessed woundes of oure saviour be open and enjoye to hele us” (A Revelation, 61.54). His wounds bleed copiously throughout Julian’s texts.

“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).

Blood in the Middle Ages was believed to be a transmutable substance that could change into another entity. Throughout Julian’s writing, Christ’s blood and wounds are agents of change.

3.2. Trauma-Informed Theology: Bearing Witness to the Wound

The word trauma is derived from the Greek word for “wound”, τραῦμα. Using the wound as metaphor for visible and invisible traumatic harm is an ancient tradition. As the prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures laments,

“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)

Significantly, neurobiological research shows that trauma remains stored in the body and is not mentally processed like other forms of suffering (Van der Kolk 2014). In the original traumatic event, one cannot protect oneself from a terrifying “axial moment”; the self is annihilated and is indistinct from the trauma (Finley 2015). In this moment of nervous system overwhelm, the body unconsciously instantly enters a state of freeze, flight, fight or fawn (Haines and Standing 2015). Thereafter, held in the body, trauma becomes the unseen, untended wound that without intervention cannot close and can be physiologically reactivated in a horrifying eternal present of recurrence (Rambo 2021). Yet, contemporary embodied therapies in multiple studies are shown to mitigate the impact of trauma, enabling the healthy integration of the past (Haines and Standing 2015). This is not recovery as in recovering a previous innocence but as in a healing transfiguration. There is a qualitative difference; we are changed by the events of life.

As part of this healing, in a reversal of the annihilation of the self, the survivor may need others in their community to sensitively bear witness to their wounds of trauma. Yet, this is often problematic, for a variety of reasons. Some faith communities with triumphal redemption narratives can elide trauma and its recurring effects. Such cultures disallow complexity and can reinforce the shaming annihilation that the victim has already experienced. A person can stay consciously or unconsciously trapped in their wounded self. The compounding of trauma in faith communities is a form of spiritual abuse, even religious trauma (Ramler 2023) (O’Donnell and Cross 2022). By contrast, trauma-informed theologies fully engage with trauma research and lived experience. Trauma theologies work with complex suffering and loss to support healthy integration within the self. Significantly for the argument of this article, at a community level, trauma theologies support healthy engagement with trauma survivors in bearing witness to their wounds. Bearing witness is costly work: others need to be willing to be changed by this encounter. People may resist this for numerous reasons. Commonly, the victim or survivor’s life experiences may threaten another person’s understanding of God. Without a willingness to be affected by another’s suffering, let alone bring about change, the circumstances or system that caused the original event can and often do recur. This is where trauma-informed theology supports the whole community to safely engage with suffering and be changed by it. When love meets suffering it changes into mercy, and mercy becomes action.

Professor Willie James Jennings shows how bearing witness is modelled by Christ in body and behaviour in John’s Gospel, chapter 20, following the resurrection. Jesus appears to his disciples and invites them without shaming or condemnation to touch his still-present bodily wounds: the disciples encounter Christ’s and their own suffering and their failure to prevent his death or to stay present at the crucifixion (Jennings 2016). This models a healthy integration of the past with learning. In a response to Jennings, Professor Shelly Rambo (2021) at Boston University, the leading theologian working in trauma today, reinforces the model in John 20: Jesus shows us how to bear witness to all wounds, visible and invisible, and bearing witness can engender change. Jennings’ and Rambo’s reading of John 20 echoes Julian of Norwich’s approach to Christ’s wounds as the place of crossing to integration and wholeness. In this remarkable resonance, Julian’s theology intersects with trauma theology.

In further resonance, Rambo observes that Julian of Norwich’s portrayal of a compassionate God in her “Lord and Servant” parable (A Revelation, 51) does not blame or shame humans for their suffering, providing “a wedge between sin and suffering that is very helpful for those who experience trauma” (Rambo 2019, p. 24). For faith communities with trauma-informed theologies, engaging with a God of profound compassion, love and mercy who does not shame and blame releases people from the mechanisms that might impede contrition and cultural change.

As we have seen, blood in the Middle Ages was believed to be a transmutable substance that could change into another entity. Julian lingers on Christ’s blood and wounds as agents of change. When the moral order of wrongdoing is not negated, and when wounds are neither valorised nor elided, wounds can be transfigured, according to Jennings, Rambo and Julian of Norwich.

Today the bodily self that was made abject in trauma, and by storing trauma in the body thereafter, and made abject again in trauma recurrence, can be profoundly met by Julian’s positive body theology as it intersects with contemporary trauma-informed theology. Held in divine love, harm can lead to healing.

John’s Gospel, quoted above, is the only gospel to use the metaphor of Christ as a lamb. The book of Revelation, possibly by the same author, depicts the Lamb in heaven with open wounds as if Christ continues to hurt with the hurting in all creation. In deep time, in quantum entanglement, Christ’s wounds will not close until we all heal6, including suffering in nature: all is mirrored by Christ. This poetic theological thought subtly informs the narrative of Blue: a lament for the sea.

3.3. Entwining the Strands with the Ecological Crisis

Professor Panu Pihkala of the University of Helsinki, in his 2018 article, “Eco-Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope: Psychological and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change”, wrote that ecological grief is a “moral emotion”. Rarely clinical, it is a perfectly normal response to existential threat, both imminent and in the future. He found that when ecological anxiety is left unprocessed in the unconscious mind, it has a paralyzing effect on the person and on society. There is socially constructed silence about the climate emergency which is causing “severe and pervasive apathy”, stifling action in response. In addition, Pihkala reports on work between natural scientists and theologians in Finland to help people process their eco-anxiety.

I notice a similarity in my own faith communities between the denial and elision of the wounds of trauma and denial and elision of ecological suffering, where the suffering and complexity is too much, threatening their understanding of reality and disturbing an illusory communal sense of safety and protection. Denial and elision are tragic responses, even more tragic on a planetary scale, particularly given that denial of suffering is not the behaviour modelled by Jesus Christ in John 20.

Tim Middleton, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University, brings trauma theology together with eco-theology for the ecological realm, specifically the human failure to bear witness to suffering in the ecosphere. Middleton refers to Shelly Rambo’s work, claiming that Christ in the crucifixion refused to abandon the wounded world and exemplified bearing witness to and remaining with suffering. Middleton argues that perceiving ecological suffering through the lens of trauma brings the suffering to sight and that bearing witness “dignifies” past suffering in the hope of preventing future violence against nature. Humans bearing witness to ecological wounds engenders a communication that is not otherwise possible. The use of the language of trauma is not an attempt to portray nature as a conscious entity; rather, it is a deliberate anthropomorphising of nature with the structures of trauma to support human engagement and an integrated response (Middleton 2022).

The author and scholar Claire Gilbert writes in Julian of Norwich and the Ecological Crisis: Restoring Porosity that Julian’s theology can help society in a change in consciousness. Gilbert does not refer to trauma theology but still finds enough evidence in Julian’s theology alone to support engagement with the ecological crisis. Culture needs an ecological consciousness born of porosity learned from Julian. Porosity here is defined as an undefended openness to pain, to contrition, to love and to joy. Modelling Julian’s porosity of consciousness would let us recover a renewed sense of the sacrality of nature, of which we are a part (Gilbert 2024).

An undefended openness to brokenness can lead to lament. Calling reality as it is, lament, is key to healing, writes Cole Arthur Riley in her New York Times bestseller This Here Flesh. We can journey into our deepest sorrows knowing that tragedy does not own us because lament insists that things need not be like this: another reality should be possible (Riley 2022). Significantly, Riley celebrates Julian of Norwich for not eliding the terror of her own illness and trauma which formed her theology. In her writing, Julian fully bears witness to suffering, her own and Christ’s.

4. Theopoetics: Blue: A Lament for the Sea

4.1. Bearing Witness

All the strands discussed in Section 3 come together through Blue: a lament for the sea, animating Julian’s theology at these points of intersection. We need to bear witness to a hugely complex reality. Bearing witness to the suffering caused by the ecological wounds we are complicit in causing supports us to care enough to make vital change in our behaviours and systems: this is the subtext of Blue: a lament for the sea. Critically understood, engaging with this trauma-informed theological framework may bring about a cognitive reframing—an imagining otherwise—that may lead to change.

The inspiration to write the long poem occurred while reading of a Scottish Gaelic medieval “prophecy” in the apocalyptic tradition about the sacred Isle of Iona, which foretells a devastating sea flood at the end of time above which Iona shall arise. Bringing this together with the rising seas of the Anthropocene formed the catalyst for the poem. Written in free verse7, Blue: a lament for the sea is one woman’s poetic vision of a journey through ecological grief as she steps into the waves around Iona and is almost swept away, while the audience or readers are immersed in a surreal flooding landscape8 that mystically responds to her lament.

All the critical understanding of trauma and bearing witness explored in the second section of this article is expressed simply through use of the “wound” metaphor. At first in the poem, the focus is on human wounds and the medieval tradition of pilgrimage to Iona in search of healing:

“when the hurting followed,

bearing heart-wounds few can see,

the harper plucked the air

with a tune so sad, birds shut their beaks

and fish in the sea  stopped  to listen”

As the 2300-word lament unfolds, the narrator mourns ecological breakdown in a visceral, personal way. The metaphor of the wound extends, growing into a call for the audience or reader to bear witness. Bearing witness to wounds as a moral imperative becomes the crossing point to transfiguration.

“Let the wounds surface, she cries

let the wounds be seen

it is the only way to stop the breaking...

when will we see what we do?”

Unsaid throughout is the understanding that most of us do not witness the ecological consequences of our individual and collective behaviour. Subtly, the narrator models a porous bearing witness to the suffering. With lament at its heart, the poem suggests that whatever good we may perform does not reverse the moral order: it does not mitigate the losses that have already occurred in the poly-crisis.

“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 memory

the last bird with tired wings shrieking a lonely cry across empty waves,

an echo of all the birdsong that ever stitched the air”

Following Cole Arthur Riley and Julian of Norwich, lament leads to contrition. Through the poetry, overflowing tears of sorrow are conflated with the rising oceans and with winter melt from the polar regions.

“Tears splash into water: salt tears

swell the seas

and now they arise at so much loss

… for we cast our brokenness into the seas

and now they flood

with endless winter sorrow”

The lamenting process in the poem involves grieving reality as it is seen and experienced, with hope conveyed not as a positive feeling but through the possibility of change.

“our grief changes nothing

but sorrow may bring a seeing, a turning”

Blue: a lament for the sea models Julian’s engagement with Christ’s suffering through an overwhelming love for creaturely life as homely material reality. An undefended porous consciousness becomes animated through the narrative in the poem; yet, what happens is, and must be, shrouded in uncertainty.

“something I cannot name

something I cannot grasp”

The narrative of the poem turns in response to bearing witness, uniting the wounds with Julian’s metaphor of one-ing.

4.2. One-Ing—A Mystical Dream Vision

Julian of Norwich develops her concept of one-ing with great complexity in A Revelation of Love. Her metaphor of one-ing, “alle is one love” (A Revelation 59.37), is a mystical union with the nuanced quality of the perichoretic distinction of the Trinity, as the following examples show:

“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)

Following this sense of distinction within unity with God’s love is the concept of Julian’s sense of “sekirness” in God, of being held in a sense of security in God’s love. Yet, this is a nuanced point: she underlines her belief that this security does not mean the prevention or avoidance of suffering. This is key to the way in which Julian’s theology fits with the reality of trauma. So, of greatest significance to Blue: a lament for the sea is the following quotation from close to the end of A Revelation.

“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)

Julian of Norwich states clearly that it was not shown to her that any lover of God on earth is kept from suffering or falling; but, it was shown to her that in all our falling and rising we are held preciously in “one love”, God’s love9. Blue: a lament for the sea embodies the theological paradox in the narrative. The poem brings the axial moment of trauma together with its equal and opposite, the depth dimension of divine love (Finley 2015): there is no refuge from suffering, but suffering has no refuge from love.

“The One unmade who makes

with a down-lying crying-out pain

keens, suffering has no refuge from Love…”

In the poem, words of divine love literally suffuse the seascape and landscape. Divine love comes to uphold all of material reality.

“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 blue

Love seeing, touching, holding

in a knowing

a one-ing…”

The alterity of poetry invites the audience or readers to imagine differently. The poetry is not didactic; it is empathic. The reader and audience can choose to journey along with the narrator in discovery. The poem ends with an exhortation, following Julian, to think and act with our hearts, in contemplative action: what newness may we birth?

The hope is that the reader or audience may participate in a cognitive reframing that can help overcome the socially constructed silence and apathy of ecological grief.

5. Conclusions

A theopoetic making process with texts of the mystics such as with Julian of Norwich can configure new frameworks of meaning and, through the ambiguity of poetry, let the texts breathe and communicate further. The expressive richness of poetry as the most intense of literary forms can redress the imbalances in traditional scholarship towards the seemingly purely rational and logical (Bowen 2016).

In this case, the theopoetic process illuminates intersections with trauma-informed theology underpinned by critical rigour with the weight to hold traumatic suffering. A poetic holding of uncertainty allows for greater information to be gathered; it allows for greater possibilities to unfold. To Julian of Norwich, all material reality, even the homely and abject, is upheld in God’s one love. In the subtle quality of porous, undefended bearing witness to suffering without negating the moral order, the wound can undergo a transfiguring in a one-ing with God’s love.

Mapping Julian’s theology at the intersection with trauma theology with the ecological crisis can support engagement with these difficult and urgent issues. Blue: a lament for the sea enacts the intersections through poetry as we journey along with the narrator. The long poem holds the audience and readers as the narrator gives voice to eco-anxiety, guilt and grief. Through new language, we can participate in a cognitive reframing that may help overcome the socially constructed silence and apathy of ecological grief. The poem becomes visionary, a showing, to borrow Julian’s word. Being loving in action is needed in response to the climate emergency. The creative–critical method leads to a deepening of intersectional research insights that, through creative forms, naturally provides channels for public impact.