Home with us

“And then our Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the midst of my heart. I saw my soul as large as an endless world…and an honorable city. In the midst of that city sits our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Revelations, Chapter 67)

Our heart is a supremely important muscle and requires all the respect due to something so central. Likewise, we must concern ourselves with the goodness of what we think and do in order to respect what goes into our feeling “heart” and, at the same time, to be concerned for what will come out of it.

And God is in our heart, though we may rarely sense his presence. He is happy to be “at home” with us, and we are always invited to dwell in his company. "For whether we are filthy or pure, we are always the same in His love. For well or for woe, He wills that we never flee from Him." (Chapter 76)

In various places, but especially in Chapter 77 Julian says God positively desires that we be familiar and “homely” with him. While we rejoice in this comforting joy, our part, as she notes, is to cultivate a courteous humility that preserves us from presumption, and the “keeping of our hearts”—the practice of awareness of what we set our hearts on and why, and the deliberate choice to choose what is best. Anything that opposes this courteous humility and this practice of attentiveness, she writes, is “from the enemy and not from God.”

In Julian’s vision of the heart of Christ, she saw a place “large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and love.” While we carry within us, with each other, the pains and sorrows of hearts in pain, we are carried within a love greater than all possible pain, “the endless love that was without beginning, and is, and shall be always.”

“With this our Good Lord said most blissfully, ‘Lo, how I love thee.’”