The Thirst of God: Contemplating God's Love with Three Women Mystics

Introduction

I once was enclosed in the serfdom of prison. … Now divine light has delivered me from prison and joined me by gentleness to the divine will of Love, where the Trinity gives me the delight of his love.¹

Marguerite Porete concluded her magnificent book with this song of freedom. Soon afterward, she was enclosed in a physical prison from which she was led away to be burned as a relapsed heretic. The primary goal of this book is to reintroduce Marguerite, together with Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich, to readers who may never have heard of them. I feel compelled to do this because in this moment of history we are desperate to reawaken the good news that God is love.

These women portray with singular vividness the longing of the divine Love for humanity. Like them, we might believe that it was because of the longing of God for humanity—all of humanity—that divine reality clothed itself in human nature. As Christians we recognize this in Jesus Christ but, confident that divine Love never leaves her children bereft, we also recognize it in the wisdom of all of the spiritual traditions of the world. Love comes to humanity to reincorporate this broken body back into the divine life. In one sense, we have never left it. But in our brokenness and misery, our cruelties and deceptions, we have forgotten who we are and who it is that holds us in the infinitely tender, eternal, and unchanging power of love.

I have watched my older children turn away from the church in disgust and boredom—a church that nurtured me, rooted my parents and sister in patterns of love and courage, and whose congregations still feed the hungry, protest injustice, and comfort those who grieve. My younger daughter is mocked for her Christian faith on the assumption that she hates gays and lesbians and believes everyone is going to hell. (The irony of mocking the daughter of two mothers for her assumed homophobia is lost on her accusers.) I talk with women who have left the faith, scarred and battered by it. I meet women who feel nurtured by the church but want to know how to deepen their faith. I meet young men who are torn between the ways their childhood faith has wounded them and their passion to serve God. I meet converts to Buddhism who are mystified to discover there is a contemplative strand within Christianity. The wisdom of these ancient women is much needed.

As a child I learned that they will know we are Christians by our love. I believe my own frustration with the church is rooted in the utter confidence in this love, which I learned from my parents and grandmothers. The women I write about in this book are far from being solitary witnesses to this love, but they are exceptionally clear and bright ones. Adding them to the cloud of witnesses in our tradition can only refresh and expand our awareness of the depth of this love that encompasses all of creation and dwells in the cavern of every human heart.

But No One Would Tell Me the Truth about Him

The theological canon that I learned in graduate school and have been teaching for nearly thirty years did not teach me much about divine love. The recitals of my sinfulness in the liturgies of my progressive churches did not awaken my mind to the great beauty and dignity of the human soul or who dwells there or how precious it is.² There is much to love in the tradition, but who was this appalling deity that the brilliant minds of Augustine and Aquinas, Calvin and Luther, described as a god whose chief principles of creation included the predestination of arbitrary portions of humanity to hell as a sign of his justice? Was it a good use of his intellect for Augustine to assure us that God’s omnipotence would be sufficient to hold an otherwise finite body over a pit of fire forever?

Working for Amnesty International and living with a mother whose daily work brought her in contact with nightmarish lives of abused children, I wanted to hear more than a story of fall, punishment, and forgiveness. Even as a child, I knew that if God is love, it would be impossible for the people of the world, whose beauty and fragilities were like the flowers of the earth, to be cast into hell. And yet I do not remember encountering any canonical theological text that did not assume that non-Christians, or insufficiently good Christians, or Christians whose doctrine was not sound, or simply people arbitrarily chosen as vessels of wrath would suffer that fate. My professors—love and admiration for whom still inspires me—did not believe this. Their own brilliant, compassionate, and courageous writings testify to a different deity. And yet these early fathers constituted the core of my theological education.

I am a constructive theologian as well as a student and teacher of contemplative practices. I do not usually write books like this one. I have spent several years working on this book because when I discovered these amazing women, I realized that my own spiritual and theological hungers did not separate me from the Christian tradition. To the contrary, I was part of a tradition as old as Christianity itself—as old as Wisdom without whom nothing was made. I was part of the ancient, if mostly invisible, community of women and men in love with the Beloved but who have felt undernourished by the institutional church.

I wanted to speak of him because no one would tell me about him when I would have listened gladly [until] Lady Love told me the truth about him.³ Like Marguerite, I longed for news of divine love. When I discovered other pockets of the tradition—Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, Schleiermacher, Tillich, and many others—I knew there was a place for me in Christian theology. But when I discovered these women, I knew I was home. I heard with unparalleled intensity the praises of Lady Love, the sweetness of the dark abyss, and the beauty of the soul made and redeemed for intimacy with this spacious goodness. They are not scholastically trained, and this continues to exclude them from the theological canon. But their lack of scholastic training is their great strength. They write immediately and candidly rather than through the mediations and constraints of lines of authority and academic niceties. Like Marguerite, I want to share their exquisite theology and spirituality with others. I want others to know that this, too, is Christianity, and it is theology. I want others to know the truth about … the one who is all love.⁴

Theologies of Love

Who are these women and why are they gathered here? I tell something of this story in later chapters. But a few words here may orient my readers. Mechthild, Marguerite, and Julian are gathered together in this book as witnesses to the spaciousness and graciousness of the Christian path. There are many others that could be here, but, I admit, I love and admire the writings of these women. For a brief and beautiful moment, women believed they would be allowed to write of their experience and their theology. Mechthild of Magdeburg lived from 1207–1282/94. She was a beguine (a lay contemplative—more about that later) who took up writing at the request of her Dominican confessor. By the end of her life, it seems that certain members of the church were becoming hostile to the beguine way of life. In any case, as an old women she retired to a Cistercian convent in Helfta. Marguerite Porete died in 1310. She seems to have begun her life in the heyday of the beguine movement, surrounded by fellow contemplatives, monastics, and theologians. She was swept up by larger politics that were putting in place the mechanisms of inquisition. Her death extinguished the light of this creative period of women’s theology and spirituality. She is both the apex and demise of beguine theology. Julian of Norwich was born in 1342 and disappears sometime after 1429. As an anchoress, Julian resided in a tiny cell, about ten by twelve. Though she was invisible to the world, her writings shone a brilliant light.

The arc of these three women transverses a period of hope and energy, through intense and deadly persecution, to a light that refuses to be entirely extinguished. They are themselves participants in a much longer lineage: Perpetua and Felicity, Macrina, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Clare of Assisi, Hadewijch, Teresa of Avila, Margaret Fell, Jarena Lee, and all the named and unnamed women whose lives and work testify to the refusal of the Holy Spirit to color within the lines of patriarchal institutions.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe was aglow with religious renewal. This took many, sometimes contradictory, forms. What interests us here is the women who were energized by religious devotion and wanted to find ways of life that did not restrict them to convents or motherhood. One such movement was the beguines; but to call it a movement implies an organization and structure that it did not have. There is no founder, no creed, no vows. The beguines were women who gathered for prayer, study, charitable works, and meditation. They chose lives of voluntary poverty and chastity to strengthen these activities. While continuing to participate in the sacramental life of the church, they also renewed their spiritual lives through contemplative practices.

Mechthild, Marguerite, and Julian were among the many women who experimented with spiritual practices outside the Benedictine or Cistercian convents that were available to wealthy women with large dowries. Like all women who lived before the nineteenth century, an academic education was forbidden to them. (Women were first admitted to a British university in 1878. Nonetheless they were theologians whose contemplative practice opened to them the book of divine love. Each is unique but they share theological common ground in the pride of place they give to divine Love. Mechthild uses the feminine inflected German word Minne—translated Lady Love—as one of her main images for God. Marguerite personifies the divine voice who leads the soul to unity with God as Amour or Dame Amour. For Julian, Mother Christ infuses the Trinity with love that creates, restores, and nurtures humanity. God is beyond all images and words. But the feminine bespeaks the divine powerfully and evocatively.

These women also share the optimism that human beings can fully participate in this love. Mechthild relies primarily on the erotic and bridal imagery of the Song of Songs and troubadour poetry to portray the union of the soul with God. Marguerite Porete occasionally uses bridal imagery but more often describes union in terms of the soul’s disappearance into divine reality. Her word, adnientie, is translated in various ways: reduced to nothing, annihilated, or stripped. She does not mean that personhood becomes nothing; rather, she means that those elements of egocentric desire that separate us from God are reduced to nothing. In this joyous nothingness, we are opened to the spacious goodness of God. Julian of Norwich describes God as thirst: It is the thirst of God to have all of humanity drawn within Godself.⁵ Like her beguine sisters, she gives us a taste of the radical goodness of God, depicting God’s longing for us and our longing for God.

These three women are among the apostles of the gospel truth that when we abide in love we abide in God, for God is love. They understand this abiding to be rooted in the transformation of the human soul into love, a transformation that allows belief and action to radiate this goodness to the world. They not only believed that God is love but also believed Lady Love enables her followers and lovers to become that love. God became human so that humans can become divine, as Athanasius (the energetic defender of the Nicene Creed) put it centuries before.⁶ For these contemplatives, desire is the wound of love that draws us to our divine Beloved and our Beloved to us. In this mutual desire, our deepest selves become available to intimacy with divine reality.

Women Theologians and the Church

Although these women wrote in order to participate in a conversation about theology and practice, their relationship with the church was not an easy one. In this, they may prove interesting sisters to contemporary people whose relationship with the church is also uneasy. Mechthild reports that clerics threatened to burn her book. Marguerite was herself burned; though once her book was separated from her name, it enjoyed a vital afterlife. Julian seemed to have enjoyed some local respect, but her writing voice did not emerge from obscurity for some five hundred years.

All three women understood themselves to be Christian and did not identify with the overt dissent of outspoken critics of the church. They seem to have several strikes against them, nonetheless. They were innovators in writing theology in vernacular (local spoken) languages instead of Latin.⁷ As time went on, the vernacular was associated with nonclerical writing, therefore with heresy, and fell under suspicion. In England, the Lollards (followers of John Wycliffe and his criticisms of the church) advocated translating the Bible into English. The resounding silence surrounding Julian’s text may be related to the association of vernacular writing with the Lollard heresy.

A second problem is that they unabashedly defined God in terms of love and used feminine metaphors to express the sweetness, intimacy, and reliability of this love. It is not heretical to think of God as love, but to use it to redefine Christian faith produces troubling consequences. Origen’s argument that if God is powerful and good, the long arc of endless time would be sufficient to save all humanity, was declared anathema. John Scotus Eriugena was condemned for rejecting the doctrine that God eternally predestines part of humanity for hell and part of humanity for salvation. Anselm seems to find eternal punishment inconsistent with divine mercy but did not have the wherewithal to openly reject it.

It seems strange, but throughout the history of Christianity those who have a particularly clear focus on love have been condemned, silenced, or marginalized. These three women were not condemned for their emphasis on Lady Love and Mother Christ. But the readers they attempted to create through their writing—readers able to embody the depth and goodness of divine love—could not appear. The consistently enacted logic of love could only be an affront to a church whose allegiance was to imperial models of divine and human power.

More damning, they were women.⁸ Since many contemporary Christian denominations, including the largest, do not ordain women, it perhaps will not shock us that women have not been accepted as interpreters of Christian thought. Even so, women now contribute a great deal to spiritual and theological writing, retreats, and workshops. Some of our most wonderful ministers are women. Even those denominations that continue to exclude women from leadership have no power to criminalize their writings. But the official silencing of Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson reminds us that the church’s ability to keep women invisible and inaudible is not a thing entirely of the past.

Although contemporary theology is written in vernacular languages, theologies of love and justice are commonplace, and while women are no longer complete strangers to preaching, teaching, or theology, medieval women still tend to bear the stigma imposed by harsher times. They are rarely included in classes on historical or systematic theology.⁹ Mechthild has achieved minor historical interest, but the main translator of her work finds in her writings nothing original.¹⁰ Julian is contained in a cocoon of orthodox and sometimes sentimental piety. Marguerite is still a heretic, and Philip the Fair remains a loyal defender of the faith.¹¹ Churches and seminaries continue to accept it as natural that the feminine body of Christ, figuratively and literally, has had its tongue cut out.¹²

Just Who Is Orthodox Here?

Most of this book is an exploration of beautiful and important theology. But to argue that these women’s books are important to our basic understanding of Christian thought requires that we rethink what is normative and what is marginal. I am not only suggesting that we expand our canon to include Mechthild, Marguerite, and Julian but also asking us to wonder who are the orthodox and who are the heretics in our story? I propose telling a piece of this story from a somewhat off-kilter point of view.

To entangle ourselves in the Sargasso Sea of thirteenth-century politics would take us far astray. But without understanding something of these events, the condemnation of Marguerite by Philip the Fair and the subsequent silence of theological women will be easy to misunderstand.

Philip was an ambitious king, dedicated to extending France’s borders and winning the tug of war with the pope about who would be in charge. In 1309, he managed to move the papacy from Rome to Avignon in order to install a French pope. But this bold political move was only a part of his strategy to monopolize wealth and power.

He engaged in long wars that contributed to the hemorrhaging of money from his treasury. Indebted to Jews, he found it expedient to arrest and then expel them from France in order to take over their property. The Knights Templar, who functioned as bankers for both the papacy and French royalty, held a massive debt against Philip. In 1307 he began a campaign to arrest and torture Templar monks. When some hundreds of Templars mounted a defense of their order, Philip responded by burning fifty-four in a field outside of Paris.¹³ The rift this caused with the pope did not change the fact that he had come into possession of their funds.

What has all of this to do with Marguerite? In one sense nothing. She was a contemplative and a theologian. This would seem to place her far from the radar of Philip’s machinations. The simplest way to describe the motivations for her execution would be to say that she proved a useful pawn whose death would shore up Philip’s much besieged reputation as a defender of the faith. Marguerite served this purpose because she was both more audacious and more vulnerable than other contemplative women. It seemed suspicious to have a woman wandering around, unsupervised by a husband or the regulations of a walled convent. She was a teacher and apparently a popular one. As Bernard McGinn points out, she was burned in part for failing to observe the limits imposed upon her.¹⁴ After the appalling scandal of the Templars, the show trial of an outspoken beguine would burnish Philip’s reputation as a champion of orthodoxy.

Julian of Norwich, born thirty-two years after Marguerite’s execution, was symbolically dead and buried in her anchor-hold, and her writings were never widely circulated. But Norwich was honored with its own energetic defender of Christianity in the person of its Bishop, Henry le Despenser (the Fighting Bishop).

The church was torn by the scandal of having a pope in Avignon and in Rome, a logical sequence from Philip the Fair’s removal of the papacy to France. Kingdoms and bishops lined up in support of one or another of the popes as their own interests dictated. Notwithstanding this transparently political agenda, the pope remained the visible sign of Christ on earth and a symbol of the unity of the church. To the extent that Christians took their faith seriously, a Christendom divided between two popes was a disaster.

Henry le Despenser would have been the bishop that gave Julian last rites as she entered the anchor-hold of St. Julian. In 1383 he received permission to initiate a crusade against France in retaliation for their support of the Avignon pope. English royalty supported the crusade as a part of their economic war on the European cloth trade. Soldiers were enticed with indulgences, assurances that their sins and those of their family would be wiped clean. The English were quickly routed, but even lost crusades must be funded by tithes and taxes. Peasants and serfs provided numerous, if impoverished, sources of money required for war, crusade, and extravagant lifestyles. When they rebelled, the brutality with which they were repressed, spear-headed by Norwich’s bishop, indicated the determination of church and state to maintain the status quo.

Upon their return to England, the savagery that served soldiers well in war was now directed at local citizens, who were terrorized by soldier-brigands. Citizens’ outrage of rampaging (but shriven) soldiers was coupled with anxiety over loved ones who died suddenly in plague, famine, or flood. These juxtapositions of arbitrary salvation and equally wanton condemnation made a mockery of the power of the church to forgive sins. Criticism of the church and repression of this criticism spiraled in a deadly dance.

In England, criticism was spearheaded by John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement. In 1396 Bishop Despenser was given permission to apply the death penalty against religious dissent. Heretics began to be burned in Norwich’s