Does it always have to hurt?
On the mystic Julian of Norwich, awakening in times of suffering, and not just squeezing the cactus
These days, the divine is a feeling I carry in my chest. My higher power is a vibration that hums in me throughout the day. The success of a day is a matter of how attuned I am to that vibration.
I’m as surprised as anyone else to find myself saying this, but the feeling is, in fact, pleasure. The vibration is bright and warm and alive. It feels great. No—better than that. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt.
This is a surprise, since my connection to my higher power was hard-won. I got here through pain. I didn’t feel spirit at all until my life started to fall apart, through addiction and the slow, hard process of recovery; through divorce and bodily failures and breakdowns. It took getting broken open, painfully and repeatedly, for me to begin to feel this thing that hums away in my chest and connects me to the living, humming things around me.
Lately, I’ve been wondering, is this always the way? Does it always have to hurt? Is pain the only path to awakening?
For the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring this question.
Whole libraries full of books have been written on this subject, so I can’t hope to be exhaustive. I’m sure I’ll barely scratch the surface. I’m going to dig in anyway. And since the people who speak to me most are the great female mystics, this investigation will use them as guides.
We’ll begin with…
Julian of Norwich
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Julian was not only a mystic who had startlingly vivid experiences of the divine, but also an anchorite, meaning that for most of her life she voluntarily lived in a cell attached to St Julian’s Church in Norwich (from which she takes her name—we don’t know what she was actually called).
If I’m honest, Julian has always kinda rubbed me the wrong way, because as a woman I find it hard to read her commitment to bodily and soul suffering as the path to god—especially since I know she lived in a time that was already so punitive towards women and their bodies.
Here’s what that commitment to suffering looked like in Julian’s case: as a young woman, she prayed for three things—“vivid perception of Christ’s Passion”; “bodily sickness”—and not just any sickness but a sickness “to the death”; and “for God to give [her] three wounds”, namely “the wound of contrition, the wound of compassion, and the wound of an earnest longing for God”.
Then, when she was thirty years old, she was lucky (?) enough to receive these gifts. She became deathly ill, and while she was on her deathbed she received the vivid divine visitations that she would write about for the rest of her life. If you’ve heard of any of these, it might be her vision of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, with blood pouring copiously from his wounds, or of a hazelnut placed by God in the palm of her own hand, which she soon senses contains “all that is made”.
None of this would have happened without her deathly illness. There’s no doubt that for Julian, pain was the path to awakening, and not even accidentally. She prayed for it to unfold that way. She chose this path.
And of course, the particular flavour of this commitment to pain has a lot to do with her Christianity, and with the medieval church’s focus on sin and redemption; on Christ’s own suffering. What’s interesting is that this suffering actually ended up delivering her to a less punitive place than her (mostly male) devout peers. It helped her to develop a theology of divine love, while so many around her remained focused on punishment.
It’s helpful to look at the context here. Julian was born in 1342, about five years before the Black Death arrived in England—and of course, the plague wasn’t a one-and-done. It would recur in waves for years, centuries, and certainly throughout Julian’s lifetime. In its early outbreaks alone, it’s estimated to have killed up to 50% of the population of Europe.
Some commentators have speculated that before she became an anchorite, Julian was married and had a child, and that her family died in one of these outbreaks of plague, leaving her to live on alone. Certainly, this would make sense of the fervour of her longing to be brought close to death.
It also gives us a key to understanding the core of mysticism. If the divine (however you conceive of it) is truth, then the quest for mystic experience is ultimately a quest for truth. And the truth in Julian’s time, and certainly in ours too, is that life on the earthly plane was painful. It involved excruciating suffering, for most people.
No matter when you’re born, you can’t be human, you can’t have a body, without someday experiencing pain and grief and, ultimately, your own death. But some eras seem to bring these painful realities in greater abundance. Julian lived in such a time. And looking around today, in particular at so many children being starved and bombed, and at ecological collapse, it’s hard not to feel that we do too.
Julian’s path suggests that at a time like hers and indeed a time like ours and perhaps at any time, you can’t know truth, which means you can’t know the divine, unless you’re prepared to experience something of this pain.
The real question is what happens next. If you accept pain, if you open to it deeply and fully, does it linger? Do you get stuck there? Or does it deliver you to something else?
For Julian, it delivered her to something else. Like so many profound revelations, her ultimate insight can feel a little banal when you put it into words, though in practice it’s anything but. After the visions she received on the path of pain, Julian felt a lifelong, bone-deep sense that god is love; that divine love is the animating force of the universe and the deepest truth of all things. For Julian, this was the fruit of embracing pain and suffering. This is where she ended up when she consciously accepted difficulty.
And it’s a particularly striking outcome when you remember what else was going on in her day. To many of her contemporaries, the Black Death seemed like a punishment from God for their sins, and in response, they devoted themselves to self-flagellation. To the unceasing abuse of their own bodies, as penitence. That was a kind of pain that didn’t offer resolution or movement. It was the kind of pointless suffering that modern-day mystic Cynthia Bourgeault describes as “squeezing the cactus.”
So there’s the crucial piece. Pain is not only inevitable but a critical part of opening to truth and so to the divine. But we can’t simply squeeze the cactus or flagellate ourselves and expect to meet our higher power or be transformed into our higher selves. The kind of suffering we must seek out, says Bourgeault, is “conscious, clear, and impartial.” It’s intentional:
Intentional suffering goes head-to-head with that well-habituated pattern […] to move toward pleasure and away from pain. It invites us to step up to the plate and willingly carry a piece of that universal suffering, which seems to be our lot as sentient beings in a very dense and dark corner of the universe. The size of the piece does not matter.
I’ll be honest, I still struggle a little when I read Julian longing for a sickness unto death. I can’t help but think of our earliest forebears in the paleolithic, and of their worship practices, which seem to have been shamanic and ritualistic and shapeshifting and sure, probably, at times, brutal and sacrificial—but nonetheless altogether more alive and vibrant than a woman who’s already suffered so much asking to suffer more, because worship has been equated with punishment and suffering.
But different times hold different truths and so call for different methods of inhabiting truth. By Julian’s time, there was so much trapped pain in the world, and it had to be felt.
It still has to be felt now.
I’m not suggesting that we all wish for a sickness unto death, or start wearing hair shirts. But may we all truly feel what’s going on in the world right now, in a way that is conscious and clear and impartial.
May we all be deeply present with the pain of this dense and dark corner of the universe.
May we feel it until we are transformed by it into the bright beings we are, at our core, and which the world needs us so badly to be.
Love,
xx Ellie
PS. Apologies for the abrupt change of pace, but if you responded to express your interest in regular life-admin Zooms for life-admin phobes, I’ll be sending out an email this week. If you didn’t respond but want to join, please drop me a message or a comment and include your email address.
To your opening paragraphs: same! I’m enjoying being tuned into the hum. I have periods when I’m close to it and others when I can’t hear it much. I didn’t think there was rhyme or reason to it but broadly speaking it DOES seem to be easier when I’m fractured a little with the pain of [the world, and my life].
I really didn’t realize a friend had written this until I saw the “xx Ellie” at the bottom. Brilliant piece, how cool to read your writing totally anew when I didn’t know it was you! (Brain glitch)
I think about this a lot. And it comes up all the time in my work with others. I don’t think it does always have to hurt, however, to have it not hurt, requires a form of commitment to the divine and sacred that breaks apart the systems which restrain us tightly. It remakes our lives completely and makes it complicated to remain within any form of ossified structure.