Amy Frykholm

When Rowena was with us, when we saw her everyday before school for breakfast and after school until we closed, she wore clothes dug out of the bins at the St. Vincent De Paul store.  She wore stretch pants and oversized flannel shirts that smelled of wood smoke, must and infrequent washings. Even at eight years old, Rowena was almost as big as her mother. Rowena was big for her age and Sally was small, and they shared the same clothes.  She had skin the color of very milky tea, but one patch was not like the rest. This was a stretch of pinkish-white skin that spread from her right eyebrow onto the corners of her wide cheek.  A patch of slowly spreading bleach, a birthmark in reverse. 

Rowena’s mother, Sally, wore dream catcher earrings and had a faint blue tattoo on the inside of her wrist with markings I never deciphered.  She laughed easily and with grit, but she also withheld from everyone she met the most crucial part of herself.  Where Rowena was fleshy, even doughy in the face and heavy around the middle, Sally was bone—slight and lithe.  Rowena’s face was something like the surface of the moon; it had an ancient cast.  But Sally, even with the lines deepening around her eyes, had a child’s innocence.  Rowena often told her mother when it was time to go home; for breakfast, she spread jelly on her mother’s Wonder Bread.  She watched over her mother with otherworldly patience.  Once I saw her pat Sally’s hand and say, “It’s OK, Mom. We’ll make it.”

Rowena followed her mother through missions and trailer parks, dirty apartments in crumbling buildings and $100 a month boarding rooms. Once they lived briefly in an apartment that the previous tenant had abandoned because of credit card debt.  Sally met the building owner at a bar and slept with him a few times before he took them into the apartment to stay. Everything was exactly as the mysteriously disappeared woman had left it.  Clean, new furniture in pink and floral, figurines carefully placed on shelves, a glimmering new television with a screen bigger than Rowena had ever imagined possible, shiny metal on the kitchen table’s molded legs.  Rowena drew me a picture of this place in which the tiny apartment became a castle and around it a soft pink glow.  They stayed there only a few weeks.

In between these begged and borrowed shelters, they lived in Sally’s 1979 Oldsmobile with its velour seats that irritated bare skin and seemed to sweat in the summer all of their own accord.  It was a long car with a pale blue interior and panels that had rusted from sand and salt on winter roads.  Under the driver’s seat was a patch that had worn through completely, the ground visible beneath the gaping hole.  One of Sally’s boyfriends had covered it with plastic wrap and duct tape, but the air found its way in, and the car was almost always damp.  It smelled perpetually sour and decaying.

Rowena made her bed in the back with two faded sheets tacked together to make a sack, a pillowcase stuffed with sweatshirts and dusty blankets thrown on top.  Sally made her own bed in the front, fitting easily beneath the steering wheel.  In the trunk, they kept their few belongings: a garbage sack of clothes, Rowena’s drawing pencils, and a few plastic dishes.

They ate together in soup kitchens—white bread and hot dogs, spaghetti, Jell-O salads studded with canned pineapple, bags of expired vending machine potato chips.  In the mornings, they went to the day shelter first thing for donuts, and if the right person was working, Rowena got a little carton of milk.  A lunch or two might come directly out of a cereal box.  When Sally’s check came, they went to Sunshine Market and strolled the aisles making random choices—a package of hamburger buns, fruit leather, a can of pork and beans, a package of American cheese slices. 

Or on the day a tribal check came, Sally cashed it quickly and tucked the wad of bills into her jeans.  At Dillon’s she bought Rowena a hamburger, French fries, and ice cream.  Then while Rowena swiped at the ketchup on her plate with her finger and tried to see if she could spin herself all the way around on the stool, Sally went into the back of the shop and plunked quarters into the poker machines.  Sally and Rowena sometimes lived a few days in a row on the cheap lunch specials of gambling rooms.  When Sally disappeared into the back, she seemed to forget Rowena’s existence altogether, as though the underlit rooms, the flashing lights, the whir of the machine handles, cleansed her of her past.  The face of the screen became her own face; the pulse of the machine her own life-blood; the clink of the money was the sound of her own mechanical self in a propelled universe.

At the end of her junior year of college, Allison Rohan found herself at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and pelvic floor disorder. She had collapsed at a popular Wednesday night prayer service at her Christian liberal arts college. For several minutes, the people around her did not respond because they thought their very devout friend might be praying. The leader of the prayer service said, “Praise the Lord!” believing that she had been seized by the Holy Spirit. But then, when she didn’t move, someone shouted, “No, call an ambulance,” and Allison was rushed to the hospital. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic told her that if she didn’t change the way she was living, she would die.

For Allison, this was very confusing news. To the best of her ability, she had been doing everything she could to be good. She was pursuing a close relationship with God. She was maintaining her purity. She lived by the motto of a Christian folk group named Caedmon’s Call. She played their song, “This World,” over and over on her headphones: “This world has nothing for me...all I could want, but nothing that I need.” She was, in short, a good Christian girl. She followed all the rules and lived in this world, but was not of it. Her favorite word was “transcend.”

To get well, even in fact to live, Allison would have to start breaking the rules that she believed kept her safely in the arms of God. How could God want her to give in to her body’s desires? And if she gave in a little, what would prevent her from giving herself over completely to those desires? How could she remain pure, and isn’t purity what God demanded of her?

 While Allison was very sick, she was not exactly wrong. The circumstances that led from pursuing purity to anorexia nervosa were extreme in her case, but they are by no means unique or unusual. Allison’s illness was a direct outcome of her religious environment and a dire example of the toxic culture of religion and the body in which nearly every Protestant Christian in the United States lives. For the purposes of this book, it is a condition that I am calling “exile.”

The stories told in this book are of an extremely personal and private nature. I have changed all names and in some cases geographical and other details while adhering as strictly as possible to interview material. 

Picture Julian. She sits at a plain oaken table. In front of her is an upright writing desk with parchment attached to it by iron clips. She has brewed the ink with which she will write herself from crushed oak galls and rainwater, aged with an iron nail. It sits dark and murky in a horn fitted to the desk. The parchment is finely scraped animal skin.

For days, months, years, now even decades, she has been meditating on and crafting the words she will write on the parchment. Next to her, bound in leather, sits the first attempt that she made to tell her visions. She wrote it when her understanding was less full, when she had less courage, when her knowledge of words and their power and her trust in God’s love were not as strong. This first attempt isn’t wrong, but she has shaped its improvement through prayer, through long pacing across the reed-strewn floor. She has gained maturity and confidence in what God has shown her. Through his gift of unending love, she has shaped these words like a sculptor working over a body of clay, like perhaps God himself first formed humankind from the slime of the earth, giving his imagination form and then breath. That labor now behind her, she must shape the words on parchment without error.

I say “picture Julian,” but how? We don’t know what she looked like. We have several images from artists who drew on their imaginations: a stern and studious Julian who is carved into the entrance of Norwich Cathedral, standing across from St. Benedict with a book in her hand; the sweet, upturned face of Julian imagined by the creators of more than one stained glass window. We have an elderly, almost ghostly, Julian imagined by contemporary Australian painter, Adam Oldfield.  But as we read her 600 year-old words, each of us has a personal Julian that these images may not reach. And the problem is not with images: scholars engage in unending disagreement about her, who she was, what she wrote, if she wrote at all. Nearly all evidence has been lost.

I picture her at this writing desk. In one hand, she holds a goose quill pen, in the other a penknife that can quickly remove mistakes and sharpen her quill when it gets dull. Her first task is to record where and when her journey began, to say carefully something of the person she had been when the visions first came to her. She breathes deeply, checks the steadiness of her hand, focuses her mind just as she does for her hours of prayer and begins.

These revelations were shown to a simple creature that could no letter the year of our Lord 1373, the 8^th day of May.

This creature had once desired three gifts from God:

the first was minde of His passion;

the second was bodily sickness in youth;

the third was to have from God’s gift three wounds.