Continuing from a previous post “The Crucible of Doubt.”
Julian spent the next twenty years in voluntary seclusion, continuing to ponder and reflect upon the outpouring of light she had experienced in order to determine its full meaning. As she struggled to reconcile her visions with the religious tradition in which she had been raised, a few questions in particular came into urgent focus. For sake of clarity and inner resolution, she asked God (1) to show her hell and purgatory and (2) to explain the nature of sin. Isolated from all distractions, she spent her days in fasting and study and prayer. Months became years and still no illumination came. After two decades, the light at last broke through the darkness. Twenty years it took her to escape the confines of her preconceptions and realize the answers were delayed because her questions were wrong.
Raised a severe Catholic, Julian had been taught that sin was a cosmic catastrophe and a damnable defect in each human heart. Hell, she had learned, was the fitting fate of the depraved sinner, and purgatory a nether world of punishment in which the penitent anxiously awaited their redemption. But that was a view totally out of keeping with the nature of the God who had manifested Himself in her visions. This God now revealed to her that the hell and purgatory expounded in her faith tradition did not exist. As for sin, she learned that there is “no harder hell than sin.”1 Hell was not a fixed place of retribution, but the experience of our own alienation from God. In other words, hell is the condition of suffering that results from sin.
Here, too, Julian was schooled in the radical reconstructions of her assumptions. “I thought if sin had not been,” she wrote, “we should all have been clean and like unto the Lord as He made us.” He could have, He should have prevented our sinning, she reasoned. “For then, I thought, all should have been well.” To her surprise, she learned through the parable of the Lord and His servant (in Revelation 14) that “sin is behovely,” or necessary.2 God’s mercy and Christ’s Atonement can make sin a “profytable” learning rather than “dyspeyer.”
In the Latter-day Saint culture, many stumble over the declarative tone of “Be ye therefore perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Two considerations soften the command: First, the wording in 3 Nephi 12:48 is different—and in an important way. “I would that ye should be perfect,” Christ implores in what sounds like gentle beckoning to join Him rather than a daunting order across infinite distance. Second, Joseph Smith loved Luther’s translation of the Bible, in which the word usually rendered perfect (teleioi) is rendered as vollkommen, that is complete, whole, entire. The Atonement is not a backup plan in case we happen to fall short in the process; it is the ordained means whereby we gradually become complete and whole, in a sin-strewn process of sanctification through which our Father patiently guides us.
Humans courageously venture into mortality, Julian was taught, and as they experience sin and error they learn to cleave to the virtuous and holy (“they taste the bitter, that they know to prize the good”).4 From God’s perspective, sin is a vital, necessary component of the learning process of life that He, as master gardener, will prune and forgive. It is not a damnable malice on our part that elicits God’s anger. Sin, along with the pain it entails, is the great educator. Mortality is the school in which we learn to eschew evil and to inculcate the attributes of the Divine. It is instructive, in this regard, that it was after Eve Adam had eaten the fruit in the garden that God said, “Behold, [they have] become as one of us, to know good and evil.”5
What we learn from Julian’s experience is that charity and enlightenment often require that we first relinquish our paradigms, no matter how dearly held. Julian’s twenty-year quest to see the lakes of fire and brimstone and fathom the mystery of human depravity could unfold no faster than she was willing to let go of her premises. That can be a wrenching process, requiring much time—and much humility.~Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014), p.4-6
1. Julian of Norwich, Showings, ed. Denise N. Baker (New York: Norton 2005), XIII.40, p.55 They modernize some spellings and occasional syntax.
2. Julian, Showings, XIII.27, p. 39.
3. Julian, Showings, XVI.78, p. 117.
