This is not the year when you need a newsletter with a list of articles I wrote. This is not the year when you need a list of my favorite books, TV shows, movies, pairs of sweatpants, recommendations for hand sanitizer, or anything else. We are staggering and dragging ourselves toward the finish line of 2020 with one hand raising a middle finger and the other one scrolling the internet. It’s bad. Here in California, there is so much Covid that the state ran out of body bags. The entire Bay Area, where I live, is shut down indefinitely, because our hospitals can’t accommodate any more people. You don’t need me to tell you any of that. You’re well aware, I am sure. But I begin with this note to let you know two things: one, this newsletter will not be a list of things I wrote because you can Google those if you’d like, and, two, there are role models for surviving times like this. And I’ve been thinking a lot about one of them.
A couple of years back I got asked to write the introduction to a new edition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, primarily because an article I wrote about visionary women of the Medieval era and contemporary women in midlife went a little bit viral. I had never really read much of Julian’s work up until that point, and knew very little about her. My colleague Carmen Acevedo Butcher, who has translated another prominent Medieval woman, Hildegard Von Bingen, suggested a few books about Julian, and I spent a month or two making my way through Julian’s Revelations and writing the introduction. It’s actually a pretty compact book, but it is wild: vivid and strange and fascinating. And disturbing. Julian lived through several cycles of the plague, and her life as a solitary was both an escape from disease and a way to provide a spiritual service for people suffering from it. It might seem insignificant compared to the heroic efforts of frontline workers we’re seeing right now, but there’s some scientific evidence for the efficacy of prayer, at least psychologically, and that’s what solitaries, monastics, and mystics do: the hold the sick, the dying, and those who work with them in prayer.
I’ve also been thinking a lot this year about solitude and women, and what it means to turn away from the traditional roles of nurturing and caretaking and instead choose what might be the most countercultural thing of all: being alone. And in a time when we are all, even the most introverted among us, far more alone than we’ve ever been, what are we learning about ourselves, and about our web of relationships? Here, again, Julian provides a model. She was never truly alone in the anchorhold, the small room where she was walled in, attached to the side of a church, because one of its windows faced the village square. And people would come to Julian’s window seeking wisdom, and advice, and spiritual direction, and companionship. Zoom isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s not that different, either.
I wrote about Julian and the pandemic and what mysticism means today for America magazine, and it was just published yesterday, so that is the only article I’ll share. It’s also going to re-appear in my forthcoming book, so you can certainly wait for that if you’d prefer. And in a difficult year, I hope you have found time for creation. Self-creation, creativity, survival: these are all of a piece. “That, too, is mysticism, the idea that time is elastic, that we are creating things not knowing how they will be received or who will receive them, that creating is itself the time of encounter with grace.”