Georgia Ronan Crampton

These mystical revelations (or shewings = showings as the anchorite writes in Middle English) might be termed a near-death experience if they had occurred during the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries instead of May 8, 1373. They were shown or revealed to a woman living in England. Her name is lost to history; she’s known to posterity by the name of the church where she lived out the rest of her life in a cell: Saint Julian’s in Norwich. As a devout Christian she writes that she had previously prayed for three “gifts:” an active understanding of Jesus’s passion as if she were present at the crucifixion standing beside Mary Magdalen and his mother, a bodily sickness that would bring her to the point of death, but only if these two were in accordance with God’s will, and three “wounds” of “very contrition, the wound of kinde compassion, and the wound of willfull longing to God.” The first two she writes, passed from my mind, but the third dwelled with me continually. Chapter II lines 68-70 (page 40)

In the middle of her thirty-first year she began to receive all three of the “gifts” beginning with the second, three days and nights of a devastating illness. On the fourth night she received the last rites in preparation for her death. A crucifix was placed before her face, and the first gift began. She saw blood dripping down from the crown of thorns on Jesus’s head. She sees his mother. She sees a little round thing in her own hand, the size of hazel nut, and realizes that it is the entire creation. It’s revealed to her that it is everlasting because God loves it, “and so all thing hath the being be [by] the love of God.” Chapter V lines 153-154 (page 43)

Over the course of three Lents (2018-2020) I read this edition of the anchorite’s Long Text in Middle English as part of my Lenten discipline. I was struck by the visceral and gory vision of Christ’s blood eventually pouring over the creation and her vision of this outpouring seen as redemption and security. I was also reminded of her vision of the universe as a small hazel nut that God had created, loved, and would sustain, and how a longing for God is a part of human nature. And most importantly God’s assurance to her that in spite of sin, all will be well. “Al thing shal be wele, and thou shalt sen thiself that al manner thyng shal be wele.” Chapter LXIII lines 2655-2656 (page 129)… (mer)