Goodness

Toward the end of Chapter 5 in the Revelations we find Julian’s prayer “God of your goodness, give me yourself” — a very familiar prayer, but one full of depth.

Then follows Chapter 6, “the goodness chapter”. There are nineteen repetitions of the word “goodness” in it, but Julian writes so skillfully that one doesn’t feel banged over the head with the word. The word is “lovely to the soul, for God’s goodness fills all His creatures and all His blessed works, and surpasses them without end.” He made us and restored us — and keeps us by means of this goodness.

So we should pray to God directly and cleave to Him directly as well. Our belief and steadfastness in this project of praying delights Him as well as honors Him. Through all our Lord’s human nature (from the Incarnation through the Passion), He gives us endless life from His goodness. And God’s goodness comes down even to our lowest need, because we, both soul and body, are “clad in the goodness of God”; so that “our soul should cleave to Him with all its might and that we evermore cleave to His goodness, for of all things that heart can think, this pleases God most and soonest succeeds.” After all, “our natural wish is to have God and the good wish of God is to have us.”

Why then, with all this goodness on ready tap, do we make such problems for ourselves in living and praying?