Mary

Of all the saints Julian mentions in her Revelations, Mary is the one she encounters and holds forth on the most. Our Lady enters Julian’s very first Shewing. The startling and vivid revelation of Christ’s suffering is interrupted by Julian’s “ghostly sight” of Mary “in bodily likeness”. Mary’s appearance here is almost like a sketch, just a chance to spell out the Angelus in a bit more detail.

Julian becomes more expansive in Ch. 6, reflecting that our prayers to Mary may well produce help but that “all the help we have from her is of His goodness. The beholding and the loving of the Creator makes the soul seem less in its own sight … fills it with reverent fear and true humility — and for this reason Mary was filled full of grace and of all kinds of virtues”. At His Passion, “in as much as Our Lady grieved for His pains, just so much He suffered grief for her sorrow.” After His countenance changed to mirth and joy, in her spiritual understanding Julian sees Mary likewise “highly rejoicing”, and Jesus urges Julian to see in his Mother how Julian herself — and so each of her “even cristens” — is loved. Mary is “the Mother in whom we are all enclosed and out of her we are born in Christ — but our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and never shall come to birth out of Him”.

And if the reader turns to Chapter 44, there the icon of Mary is spelled out in magnificent prose: “God showed again and again in all the revelations that man works his will and worships him for ever and unceasingly … and this was supported by a wonderful example in the working of the soul of our blessed Lady Saint Mary.” The human soul mirrors in created form what is uncreated in God: “it sees God, it contemplates God and it loves God. And the brightness and purity of truth and wisdom make him see and recognize that he is made for love, in which God holds him forever.”