Amy Frykholm

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.