Moreover, Julian while guided by Reason is _led_ by the "Mind" of her
soul--pioneer of the path through the wood of darkness though Reason
is ready to disentangle the lower hindrances of the way; and where
her instructed soul "finds rest," those things that are hid from the
wisdom and prudence of Reason only are to its simplicity of obedience
revealed. Even as her Way is Christ-Jesus, and her walk by "longing
and desire" is of faith and effort, so the End and the Rest that she
seeks is the _fulness_ of God, in measure as the soul can enter upon
His fulness here and in that heavenly "oneing" with Him which shall
be by grace the "fulfilling" and "overpassing" of "Mankind." "The
Mid-Person willed to be Ground and Head of this fair End," "out of
Whom we ben al cum, in Whom we be all inclosid, into Whom we shall all
wyndyn, in Him fynding our full Hevyn in everlestand joye" (liii.).[4]
The soul that participates in God cannot be lost in God, the soul
that wends into oneness with God finds there at last its Self. Words
of the Spirit-nature fail to describe to man, as he is, this fulness
of personal life, and Julian falls back in one effort, daring in its
infantine concreteness of language, on acts of all the five senses to
symbolise the perfection of spiritual life that is in oneness with God
(xliii.).
It may be noted that in these "Revelations" there is absolutely no
regarding of Christ as the "Bridegroom" of the individual soul: once
or twice Julian in passing uses the symbol of "the Spouse," "the Fair
Maiden," "His loved Wife," but this she applies only to the Church. In
her usual speech Christ when unnamed is our "Good" or our "Courteous"
Lord, or sometimes simply "God," and when she seeks to express
pictorially His union with men and His work for men, then the soul is
the Child and Christ is the Mother. In this symbolic language the love
of the Christian soul is the love of the Child to its Mother and to
each of the other children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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